Quarterly Journal, no. 17: Comedy Issue by lareviewofbooks

1 COMEDY ISSUE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS NO . 17 QUARTERLY JOURNAL

2 3 stanfordpress.typepad.comsup.org Living Emergency Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank Yael Berda BRICS or Bust? Escaping Middle-Incomethe Trap Hartmut Elsenhans Salvatoreand Babones Te Limits of Whiteness Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race Neda Maghbouleh ArabAmerica’sRefugees Vulnerability and Health on the Margins Marcia C. Inhorn 125 YEARS OF PUBLISHING STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Stanfordbriefs Anchor Babies and the Challenge of Birthright Citizenship Leo R. Chavez What Is a Border? Manlio Graziano From Seagull Books Taste Giorgio Agamben Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and with Taste he turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetic practice. Cloth $20.00 DrillingHardthroughBoards 133 Political Stories Alexander Kluge Kluge unspools more than one hundred stories, through which it becomes clear that the political is more often than not personal. Not just his newest fiction, Drilling through Hard Boards is a masterpiece of political thought. Cloth $30.00 Lions Hans Blumenberg Lions collects thirty-two of Blumenberg’s philosophical vignettes to reveal that the figure of the lion unites two of his other great preoccupations: metaphors and anecdotes as non-philo sophical forms of knowledge. Cloth $27.50 Collected Poems Thomas Bernhard “This unprecedented (in the English language) collection of Bernhard’s poetic output now offers an entirely new vantage on what made Bernhard such a classic writer. A major book, and a long awaited one, this should not be missed.”—LitHub Cloth $40.00 Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

EXECUTIVE EDITOR: BORIS DRALYUK MANAGING EDITOR: MEDAYA OCHER

CHAD HARBACH , author of The Art of Fielding “It is always shocking to read something this good. . .Lisa Halliday is an amazing writer. Just open this thing, start at the beginning.”

CHARLES BOCK , author of Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver “A beautiful reflection of life and art.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Also available as an ebook and an audiobook. SimonandSchuster.com

—LOUISE ERDRICH , National Book Award–winning author of The Round House “Lisa Halliday’s debut novel starts like a story you’ve heard, only to become a book unlike any you’ve read. . . Asymmetry is a profoundly necessary political novel about the place for art in an unjust world.”

MANAGING DIRECTOR: JESSICA KUBINEC AD SALES: BILL HARPER BOARD OF DIRECTORS: ALBERT LITEWKA (CHAIR), REZA ASLAN, BILL BENENSON, LEO BRAUDY, BERT DEIXLER, MATT GALSOR, ANNE GERMANACOS, SETH GREENLAND, GERARD GUILLEMOT, DARRYL HOLTER, STEVEN LAVINE, ERIC LAX, TOM LUTZ, SUSAN MORSE, CAROL POLAKOFF, MARY SWEENEY, MATTHEW WEINER, JON WIENER, JAMIE WOLF COVER ART: MARTIN KERSELS front: TOSSING A FRIEND (MELINDA 3) , 1996, C-PRINT, 26 1/2 X 39 1/2 INCHES ©MARTIN KERSELS /

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: TOM LUTZ

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY Te Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501(c)(3) nonproft organization. Te LARB Quarterly Journal is published quarterly by the Los Angeles Review of Books, 6671 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1521, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Submissions for the Journal can be emailed to editorial@lareviewofbooks org. © Los Angeles Review of Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Visit our website at www lareviewofbooks org

Te LARB Quarterly Journal is a premium of the LARB Membership Program. Annual subscriptions are available. Go to www lareviewofbooks org/membership for more information or email membership@lareviewofbooks org Distribution through Publishers Group West. If you are a retailer and would like to order the LARB Quarterly Journal call 800-788-3123 or email orderentry@perseusbooks.com. To place an ad in the LARB Quarterly Journal, email adsales@lareviewofbooks org QUARTERLY JOURNAL : COMEDY ISSUE

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS NO . 17 NEW FROM THE WHITING AWARD WINNING AUTHOR “Asymmetry is a novel of deceptive lightness and a sort of melancholy joy. Lisa Halliday writes with tender laugh-aloud wit, but under her formidable, reckoning gaze a world of compelling characters emerges.”

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY; back: TOSSING A FRIEND (MELINDA 2), 1996, C-PRINT, 26 1/2 X 39 1/2 INCHES ©MARTIN KERSELS /

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: CELESTE BALLARD, SARAH LABRIE, ELIZABETH METZGER, MEGAN NEURINGER, ERIKA RECORDON, JANICE RHOSHALLE LITTLEJOHN, ALEX SCORDELIS, MELISSA SELEY, LISA TEASLEY ART DIRECTOR: MEGAN COTTS DESIGN DIRECTOR: LAUREN HEMMING ART CONTRIBUTORS: MEL BOCHNER, JOHN DIVOLA, MARTIN KERSELS, ALI PROSCH, AMANDA ROSS-HO, CASSIDY ROUTH, MAUREEN SELWOOD, STEPHANIE WASHBURN PRODUCTION AND COPY DESK CHIEF: CORD BROOKS

7 ESSAYS 17 THE FALL OF THE CINEMATIC MUSE by Ryan Perez 32 YET ANOTHER LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME by Jonathan Ames 46 TOWARDS A HUMOR POSITIVE FEMINISM: LESSONS FROM THE SEX WARS by Danielle Bobker 74 THE MAGIC — FLOATING — MOUNTAIN by Karan Mahajan 86 DICK GREGORY...IRREGARDLESS by Peter J. Harris 100 WOULD DIE TO PLAY HARVARD by Kristina Wong 112 IRONY AND THE NEW WHITE SUPREMACY by Sarah LaBrie 125 BINGESPEAK by Alexander Stern FICTION 34 WELCOME TO MY STUNNING AIRBNB! by Mitra Jouhari 40 HOW FINALLY LEARNED SELF LOVE IN A POST NUCLEAR WORLD by Broti Gupta 59 ARCHES AND LAND BRIDGES AND PILES OF ROCK by Lydia Conklin 80 JOKE BETWEEN SOLDIERS by Carmiel Banasky 90 DREAM HOUSE by Demi Adejuyigbe 104 THE PARTICULARS OF BEING JIM by Amy Silverberg POETRY 28 TWO POEMS by E.J. Koh 43 TWO POEMS by Marc Vincenz 68 TWO POEMS by Mary-Alice Daniel 82 SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT by Megan Amram 92 TWO POEMS by Paige Lewis 108 TWO POEMS by Ruth Madievsky 120 THREE POEMS by Sharon Olds 137 TWO POEMS by Timothy Donnelly OBSESSIONS 31 GET IN BED by Danielle Henderson 73 A GOOD FEEL by Amy Aniobi 85 HEARTTHROBS by Zan Romanoff 96 BREAKFAST by Fred Armisen 98 SHAKE SHACK by Kara Brown 110 QUIET CAR JUSTICE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP by David Litt 134 SHELFISHNESS by Todd Strauss-Schulson COMICS by Lydia Conklin, Liana Finck, Charlie Hankin, and Jason Adam Katzenstein NO 17 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : COMEDY ISSUE CONTENTS

8 9 See why The New York Times calls Ploughshares “THEMINNOWS”AMONGTRITON Subscribe today! PSHARES.ORG Get a one year subscription for $35. C OLLEGE OF L IBERAL A RTS AND S C IEN C ES P ROGRAM H IG H LIG H TS Complete the 30-unit program at your own pace and earn your master’s degree in two years or fewer. Benefit from a comprehensive curriculum that explores everything from literature to composition studies to literary criticism to creative writing. Enjoy a versatile graduate program, designed to enrich students’ lives, solidify their passions, and prepare them for career opportunities. Access opportunities for editorial experience with Christianity & Literature the flagship journal housed within APU’s Department of English. P ROGRAM UNITS 30 A VERAGE C OM P LETION TIME 1 ½ –2 years L O C ATION Azusa, CA A PP LY BY J UNE 15 AND S TART T H IS F ALL ! apu.edu/english 21838 Engage Literary Culture from a Christian Perspective Azusa Pacific University’s M ASTER OF A RTS IN E NGLIS H equips graduate students with advanced knowledge in the field of literary studies. Emerging from an active dialogue between Christianity and literature, graduates are prepared as scholars, writers, and teachers for cultural engagement through the lens of faith. C ULTIVATING D IFFEREN C E M AKERS S IN C E 1899

FROM THE EDITOR

“A satisfying book and a way for readers to understand how performance and confession got from there to here.” —Popmatters.com

1011 Dear Reader, We went back and forth about whether this should be the “Comedy” or the “Humor” issue and eventually, as you can see, landed on the former. Comedy, after all, has connotations that humor doesn’t have. It implies a certain professionalism — it can of course, be a job and a big job at that; it also has an implicit goal. Comedy is meant to be funny or entertaining. Comedy also evokes its opposite — tragedy — and, in that evocation, lets its audience hope for a happy ending. It goes beyond something as amorphous as a sense. A sense of humor is certainly a good thing to have, more people should consider acquiring one, but right now the concrete seems more interesting. If humor is tragedy plus time, then comedy is humor plus politics, plus current events, plus social and economic circumstances. Comedy is humor plus the business of the world.

The range of pieces in this issue of the Los Angeles Review Of Books Quarterly Journal demonstrates the diversity of implications in that word. Here, we’ve included many short, funny stories as well as two different critical takes on the current state of irony. Jonathan Ames considers his inappropriate love for his dog, Fezzik, while a number of comedians and comedy writers consider their own obsessions. You will also find pieces here that are not very funny. Comedy and tragedy go hand in hand, no sense in ignoring that. But don’t worry about those yet because this issue also has comics, which you won’t find in any other edition of the LARB Quarterly Journal. You should, as is the custom, flip through and read those first.

something for every readerreader

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LETTERMedayaYours,

Coming soon! Avidly Reads: a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. NYU Press + Avidly nyupress.org/series | avidly.lareviewofbooks.org @nyupress nyupress.org

How the internet has transformed television, allowing for more diverse storytelling from voices like Issa Rae and other independent producers Intertwined stories of a famous map and its curious maker, offering new insights into the creation of empire in North America Poems that reveal a plucky, headstrong, yet intensely socially committed figure who infuses his verse with proverbs, maxims, and words of wisdom “A well-researched argument that offers a vivid perspective on a literary giant."

The Hatred of Literature William Marx TRANSLATED BY NICHOLAS ELLIOTT “[Marx] turns poets and novelists into eternal resistance f ighters defending from the margins an art without faith or law, a practice that has no stable de f inition or real place in society...It is thus a secret war that Marx describes, with humor and erudition worthy of Umberto Eco.” Marianne Belknap Press | $29.95

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12 13

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14 15 A Library of Laughs TO LEARN MORE: WWW.UCPRESS.EDU A landmark publication in American literature. The bestselling Autobiography of Mark Twain is an essential addition to the shelf of his works and a crucial document for our understanding of the great humorist’s life and times. “It feels like a form of time travel. One moment you’re on horseback in the Hawaiian islands—or recovering from saddle boils with a cigar in your mouth—and the next moment you’re meeting the Viennese maid he called, in a private joke, ‘Wuthering Heights.’” —New York Times “Twain is incapable of going more than a few paragraphs without making you laugh or think hard. Don’t loan this book out: you’ll never see it again.”—Bloomberg Pursuits ofAutobiographyMarkTwain Volumes 1–3 Editors of The Mark Twain Hardcover,Project $45 each Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy Kathryn H. FullerPaperback,Seeley $34.95 Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture Rob Paperback,King $34.95 Also available as a free Open Access ebook Mock Classicism Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960 Nilo Paperback,Couret$34.95 Funnybooks The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books Michael Paperback,Barrier$34.95 Read Tidalectics. Buy at mitpress.mit.edu/larobUnboundbyLand-BasedModesTheoceanscovertwo-thirdsoftheplanet,shapinghumanhistoryandculture,hometocountlessspecies.Yetwe,asmostlyland-dwellinghumans,oftenfailtograsptheimportanceofthesevastbodiesofwater.Climatechangedestabilizesnotionsofland-basedembedded-ness,collapsestropesoftimeandspace,andturnsourfuturemoreoceanic. Tidalectics imagines an oceanic worldview, with essays, research, and artists’ projects that present a different way of engaging with our hydrosphere. Unbound by land-based modes of thinking and living, the essays and research in Tidalectics reflect the rhythmic fluidity of water. Edited by Stefanie Hessler Foreword by Markus Reymann

17 www.nupress.northwestern.edu “A new benchmark in Marx scholarship.” Four of the MusketeersThree The Marx Brothers on Stage Robert Bader Los Angeles Times Only a Joke Can Save Us A Theory Comedyof Todd McGowan “...a master class in comedy.”amasqueradingpsychoanalysisasmasterclassin—AnnaKornbluh STEPHANIE WASHBURN, CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’VE MADE A WONDERFUL DECISION (GRAPEFRUIT), 2017, ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT, 16 X 22 INCHES

This scene is of course from James Cameron’s Titanic , and it crystallizes a certain romantic ideal: a strong-willed woman has been won over and she is finally revealing her most vulnerable (i.e., fully naked) self to the scrappy artist, inspiring a work that transcends the impending chaos. In the film, the scene takes place in 1912 around the inception of filmmaking itself, but it evokes a truly ancient dynamic: the artist and his muse. The artist may not always be so boyish, but he is almost certainly male. The muse is inevitably a woman and also an object of sexual attraction. Oh, which reminds me, this scene is soon followed by that other iconic scene: minutes after Jack draws Rose, the two lovebirds fuck in a car.

ALI PROSCH, BOXING MYSELF, 2010, LARGE-SCALE VIDEO PROJECTIONS, WITH SOUND, DIMENSIONS VARIABLE

The charcoal-based foreplay in Titanic is now 20 years old, but it has aged exponentially in the wake of the news around Weinstein, Toback, Haggis, Lasseter, Afﬂeck, Afﬂeck, Franco, Ansari, C.K., et al. If girls posing for boys once evoked the distant stench of skeeviness, it now outright reeks of it. “The history of cinema is boys photographing girls. The history of history is boys burning girls at the stake,” said Jean-Luc Godard, seemingly unaware that the cinema has as many burning stakes as history does, the worst of which is being the director’s muse. Finally however, it seems like the director-muse dynamic is not just

THE FALL OF THE CINEMATIC MUSE RYAN PEREZ

The scene is familiar, approaching iconic: “I want you to draw me like one of your French girls,” says the young woman. She reclines nude on a sofa. A delicate man-boy eyes her body, sheepishly requests a few adjustments to her pose and begins to sketch her. At ﬁrst he draws slowly, then rather vigorously, all set to a tender musical score. When he reveals his achingly tasteful work, the woman and the audience are meant to swoon. As is written in the screenplay’s action line: “Rose gazes at the drawing. He has X-rayed her soul.”

Never mind the difficulty of navigating years of rejection, the Movie Actress must also clutch to their original passion for the craft through a Sea of Pervy Gatekeepers. Participation in Hollywood also implies a lust for money and fame, and so we tacitly accept this abuse as punishment for the terrible crime of wanting to be in pictures. We treat women auditioning for movies as if they were mercenaries smuggling nitroglycerine across the jungle: in the likely event of an explosion, they were warned it was a dangerous job. Before an actress even steps foot on her first professional set, the stage has been set for her abuse. Director and former actress Sarah Polley wrote one of the steeliest accounts of on-set harassment in her invaluable New York Times piece “The Men You Meet Making Movies,” observing the first wave of change in the industry with a keen wariness. Polley noted: “The only thing that shocked most people in the film industry about the Harvey Weinstein story was that suddenly, for some reason, people seemed to care.”

20 21 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

need not descend to the Ninth Layer of Hacks, where the likes of Victor Salva and Brett Ratner wander, to see the muse grift in action. The upper ranks of cinema history have seen all manner of cruel manipulation. Tippi Hedren long ago revealed the full spectrum of Alfred Hitchcock’s sexual obsession with her, from handsiness to outright assault (the abuse was well-corroborated by Hedren’s co-stars in both The Birds and Marnie). Bernardo Bertolucci outright admitted to tricking Maria Schneider into a non-consensual sex scene on the set of Last Tango in Paris for the sake of his own pretension. Schneider later said the experience left her feeling “a little raped.” Roman Polanski’s statutory rape began as a “photo shoot.” Even further back, Hollywood’s Golden Age has innumerable accounts of sexual intimidation, though much of it is still hidden in euphemism. In 1945, however, Maureen O’Hara gave an interview to The Mirror in which she stated, with an Irish kick: “Because I don’t let the producer and director kiss me every morning or let them paw me, they have spread word around town that I am not a woman — that I am a cold piece of marble statuary.”

If nothing else, Seduced & Abandoned shows how utterly full of shit most of these directors are. It’s enough to make you want to purge cinema history of all its shrimp-chomping ogres and expel the muse mythos once and for all. Yet the muse mythos persists precisely because it is perpetuated from within cinema itself.

For me, there’s one film that captures the skeeziness of directorial entitlement better than any other and it is, not surprisingly, a documentary James Toback made about himself. If you were unfortunate enough to catch 2013’s Seduced and Abandoned before HBO locked it in their vaults, you’ll recall the phantasmagoria of Toback lumbering around the French Riviera, rubbing elbows with fellow creeps at the Cannes Film Festival. With a gassy Alec Baldwin by his side, Toback interviews Bertolucci, Ratner, and Polanski, who laments that his movies are harder to finance these days (Hm, wonder why?). Toback and Baldwin are ostensibly there to pitch an ill-conceived remake of Last Tango in Paris to leathery tycoons, but they spend much of the movie extolling the virtues of Woody Allen and inhaling yacht buffets. Spoiler alert: Their horrible idea never gets financed and its proposed lead, Toback’s “muse” Neve Campbell, is thankfully spared having to be in another James Toback movie.

The common term for a female actor is of course, actress, a quirk of the English language that sets her apart and ever so slightly beneath her male peer. Though we’re often encouraged to take ﬁlm seriously as an art form, the Movie Actress is rarely to be taken seriously as an artist. We even ﬁnd the belittlement of her ambition funny. Even the most abused and exploited woman is said to be “eager to advance her career” or “get the part.” We’ve also long used the nauseating idiom “the casting couch” to suggest a business-minded exchange between producer and performer, an arrangement more like prostitution and less like rape.

Why is this mysterious art form so dependent on complete adoration and sexual submission to the artist? Though victims and perpetrators can be of any gender or job position, there is clearly a mindset that enables male ﬁlmmakers — especially the “complicated” or “troubled” ones — to abuse female collaborators.

patina, the remaining boundaries are crossed with minimum force. But it’s for my art, you Onesee.

There is simply no question more fascinating to the ﬁlmmaker than What inspires my creative genius? (Answer: A naked woman.) It’s a romantic theme at the heart of some masterpieces, like Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Godard’s Contempt . It also lurks in both self-aware Woody Allen ( Sweet and Lowdown) and no-insight Woody Allen ( Manhattan ). But it also stubbornly persists to this day in movies like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Edge of Seventeen , both millennial bildungsromans in which teenage girls revere their male classmate’s mediocre ﬁlmmaking. In just the last six months, we’ve seen multiple tales of women-as-inspiration, from Angela Robinson’s P rofessor Marston and the Wonder Women , Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread , Louie C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy (gulp), to the most obvious of all, Darren Aronofsky’s mother!

Even as we decry abuses of power, we limply accept that abuse is part and parcel of the system, the result of craven careerism in an ultra-competitive ﬁeld. In that acceptance, we diminish the humanity of the artistic professional who aspires to a means of self-expression.

And lo, by order of Essay Law, I must discuss mother! just because I’ve mentioned it and aso because I want to. Aronofsky’s movie was a lot of things: a blunt-edged eco-thriller, a totally sick diss of organized religion, and ultimately, the set where Darren Aronofsky RYAN PEREZ going through a rough patch; it is being upended completely. Just as 2008 brought the collapse of the housing market, perhaps 2018 will be remembered as the year the bubble around the Hollywood male ego had to burst. Perhaps we are finally witnessing the Fall of the Cinematic Muse. As a male writer (a cherished rarity to behold) with tangential links to The Industry (impressive of me), I’m privy to the scuttlebutt that indicates seismic shifts in systemic sexism. Even the most banal meeting now opens with five minutes of jittery persiflage about which powerful man will be the next to “go bye-bye.” But after months of meditating on conveniently vague notions of “industry culture” and “power dynamics” that enable sexual abuse, it seems like high time to specifically question the creative muse mythos in cinema.

Though Weinsteinian methods of sexual violence are obviously rampant, the preferred method of domination in the Age of Violence, as Jean Renoir once wrote, has been “to conquer by persuasion.” For those of the vaguely creative stripe (including the in-nameonly “creative executive”), the “muse” is a convenient trope. The woman in your crosshairs becomes “inspiration” rather than prey. Being a muse offers women greatness via association. It carries the divine, poetic connotation of Greek myth and allows men a direct link to the role of Artistic God. He is Pygmalion: art is a woman’s body, ownership of that body is a form of artistic practice. Once the pretense of sex-as-inspiration has an antique, European

22 23 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS RYAN PEREZ found a girlfriend. Mostly it is a corny-as-hell allegory where the auteur is elevated to the role of God and his much younger muse, played by Jennifer Lawrence, is denigrated to the status of a horror movie victim. The resulting spectacle is admittedly, supremely skillful, but stubbornly rooted in the traditional male perspective of women and art. The weird assumption at the center of mother! is that the sexual essence of a woman can be transmuted into a perfect artwork and that sexual and artistic potency are in lockstep. Observe the truly cringe-worthy scene in which Javier Bardem’s character impregnates his wife and then runs naked into his workspace inspired to create! mother! eventually resorts to grotesquery to get its point across (the film was hailed as “punk rock” by the likes of Aronofsky himself), but its view of artist and muse is just the same shit, different day. Are we supposed to give Aronofsky credit for realizing that women get abused in the artistic process? Okay, but any woman in Hollywood could have told you that, given the chance. In coincidental (but nothing is coincidental) fashion, it’s worth noting that Harvey Weinstein’s last public statement before his humiliation metastasized was a full-throated exaltation of mother! in serious film criticism journal Deadline.com . Weinstein spent his last breath defending a movie where a woman is betrayed, brutally pummeled, and replaced so that her abuse may be repeated on another female body. Is it possible that the helplessness and disposability of Lawrence’s character somehow fell in line with how Weinstein views the role of women on a film set and in his life at large? I am not a psychologist…but yes, definitely. The muse is a dying breed and not just because fighting creeps have become a cause célèbre. As female filmmakers find increased opportunity, a Muse Gender Gap has become painfully apparent. If muses are so important, why don’t female artists require a supple male body to drive their work? Who are the hunks that keep the Nicole Holofcener Inspiration Factory chugging along? Where are Jane Campion’s boy toys? Who has Tina Fey blocked the door and masturbated in front of? As of press time, none of these women appear to thrive on abusing their power. If there is such a thing as a Female Toback, we have not yet met her. Meanwhile, Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig has managed to crawl out of her Baumbachmuse pigeonhole to become one of the year’s most celebrated creative forces. “I did not love being called a muse,” said Gerwig in a recent Vulture interview, evoking the tone of a recently freed convict. The spiraling economics of the industry have also caused a natural erosion of the male filmmaker’s rock star status, greatly endangering his sense of entitlement to multiple muses. Director, producer: these were once the venerated titles of Important Men We Are Trusting With Millions of Dollars. They are now claimed by the entire Vimeo Generation. Film crews are the new garage bands: there is less money at stake, less power to wield, and, fortunately, less to lose by speaking out against abuse. Filmmakers, far from being invincible, are becoming expendable. The once-mysterious alchemy of cinema is bound to lose some of its sexual luster when crew lunch is Baja Fresh. As movies inch into the dainty realm of the fine arts, the muse mythos might follow — but with the same lack of authority it currently wields in sculpture, poetry, and (shivers) live comedy. (I should note here that the music industry cesspool remains relatively unstirred; R. Kelly is still enjoying a busy touring schedule and his victims — mostly women of color — are, not coincidentally, ignored for another year.)

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RYAN PEREZ

Of all film genres, Noir ages best because futility never goes out of style. So naturally the most fatalistic warning against the old muse-artist dynamic can be found in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place . The story is based on a hard-boiled novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, one of the genre’s most successful female writers. Humphrey Bogart plays one of cinema’s great losers, a down-on-his-luck writer named Dixon Steele. Steele meets the love of his life, Laurel Gray, played by Gloria Grahame, on the same night he comes under suspicion for murder. Their ensuing relationship lasts long enough for him to crawl out of his alcoholic stupor and finish a script, but not long enough for the movie to find a happy ending. (It’s worth looking up the real-life marriage between Grahame and Ray, which was equally Bogart’sdoomed.)long-broken hack is momentarily mended by the love of a patient woman. For an instant, he can write. But she can’t keep him writing forever, partly because she never could in the first place. The muse is a mirage that vanishes when real life takes hold. In the throes of love, Steele writes a line of dialogue that doubles as the film’s crushing refrain: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” On the timeline of cinema, the few weeks are over. Death is underway.

Lest my pessimistic attitude help incite an industry-wide Gender War — a fate I’d like to avoid because I fear dying in it — let’s imagine a brighter future both off and onscreen. If cinema is to survive, it might very well be on a new kind of playing field, where professionals act professional out of pure survival instinct. Or, more fancifully, maybe even “tough” and “temperamental” artists can evolve away from a patriarchal muse dynamic to one where inspiration goes to and from every which way. There are, after all, precedents for it. One particularly heartening example is the professional and personal relationship between the brilliant Gena Rowlands and her spouse, John Cassavetes. Cassavetes was no woke bae by 2018 standards, but nonetheless, he directed his wife with respect. Part of their secret was to work outside the Hollywood studio system where Cassavetes was able to follow Rowlands from ingénue to middle-age, their work growing richer through the years. Similarly, Paul Newman directed his wife Joanne Woodward in four films from 1968 to 1987, the best of which was their first, Rachel, Rachel . Newman and Woodward were enormous movie stars with actual creative muscle and intellect (an unfathomable combination today). Both of these filmmaking partnerships were forged in the comfort of long marriages, but they exemplify a messy creative volatility that simply has no time for abuse. These were not sober, sexless ascetics. They were as challenged by love, lust, and fame as any of their contemporaries, and of course, their work reflected that. The heritage of cinema is theirs too. If we look back far enough, we can see the movies themselves warning us about the eventual demise of the muse. Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons, the first part of the 1989 triptych New York Stories, is loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler . It tells the story of a painter named Lionel Dobie, played by Nick Nolte, who is feeding off an angsty, mostly sexless relationship with his protégé and former lover, Paulette, played by Rosanna Arquette. She’s frustrated by his temperamental elusiveness but even more so by his gutless equivocation that her paintings are “nice.” Eager to know if she’s being strung along, she asks, “Can you just tell me if you think I’m any good?” Scorsese allows for Dobie to be a genuine talent, but also thirsty, manipulative, and far more trouble than he’s worth. Paulette is no wilting flower, but every bit as mercurial as her mentor. Once she drops him, Dobie cycles to a new muse. Life Lessons is impressive considering Scorsese distills these themes into a brisk, understated 45 minutes, exploring with greater honesty the same themes mother! needs over twice as long and 500 more day players to explore. In recent years, the showbiz partnership story I most often revisit is A Star Is Born . There are three versions of it already (and we face the eminent threat of a new one starring Bradley Cooper and Stefani Germanotta a.k.a. Lady Gaga) but it’s the 1954 George Cukor version that stands the test of time. Aging star Norman Maine, played by James Mason, discovers promising singer Esther Blodgett, played of course, by Judy Garland, and endeavors to make her a film star. As the years pass, her career skyrockets, while his founders. Their genuine chemistry is offset by a toxic jealousy that creeps into the film like poison gas. Cukor’s A Star Is Born is perhaps a better film about show business partnership, Hollywood power dynamics, and substance abuse than practically anything in movie history. It shows the need of a powerful man to lay claim to a woman’s brilliance, while also showing that a woman’s brilliance operates independent of a man and his needs or desires. It points to a tragic risk inherent in all artist and muse dynamics (or any “I can fix you!” relationship) — the muse might just take on a life of her own. Or, the artist might discover, to his chagrin, that she’s always had a life of her own.

A little about me: your host. I’m Katrina! I’m blonde, I don’t know what oceans are, and I have a million dollars physically on my person at all times. Since nothing bad has ever happened to me, I’ve devoted my life to various foundations and charities. Most recently, I sponsored a multi-billion dollar effort to turn all the little M&Ms at the Times Square store into the big M&Ms that can walk and talk! It didn’t work but I assure you, I’ve pulled scientists off of cancer research so they can work around the clock to figure out how to bring M&Ms to life. Currently, I’m on a three-month-long mission trip where I’m learning how to make blood diamonds. Every day, my shaman puts a bunch of loose blood in my asshole and I squeeze as hard as I can all day, every day. Pretty soon the pressure will turn it into a diamond! Someone call the police, because I’m smart! Architecture buffs, buckle up! This house is amazing. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Left, not to be confused with Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Left was trying to design an Arby’s but then they rejected his concept and now I live here! So if you’re wondering why the place is filled with the oppressive stench of roast beef, that’s why. The house is “minimalist” which is why it is so small and has no furniture. If you’re looking for the lightbulbs, there are two of them but you have to find them. Fun!

My name is Katrina, and if you’re reading this letter, it means you’re staying inside of my stunning AirBnB, located at the heart of an Urban Outﬁtters in Williamsburg. For the low, low price of $8,000 dollars a second, you too, can soak in the sights of Brooklyn as I, a white woman with absolutely no struggles behind me or ahead of me, experience it! But before you settle into my gorgeous chateau, please give this letter a scan for some ground rules, charges, and hot tips you can use along the way as you experience MY Brooklyn!

2627 MITRA JOUHARI

WELCOME TO MY STUNNING AIRBNB! MITRA JOUHARI with illustrations by Cassidy Routh

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Some quick house rules — I hate to be “that guy” but you know the deal! First of all, no talking in my apartment. I consider my house to be a sentient being and based on her reaction to me practicing my scat-singing as loud as I can for four hours a day, she is scared of human voices and particularly hates mine. If you feel the need to speak, please do so only in the bathroom with the shower running so my house feels safe. It costs $15 to open a window and $40 to close it. Coffee is free unless you drink it! I’ve hidden a bullet inside of one of my Keurig pouches, so if you ﬁnd that, please head over to the police station and turn yourself in for the murder that I committed.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, time for The Fun! If you’re in the mood to laugh, my poisonous Caucasian boyfriend’s improv team is performing every single night in different basements around the city! His team is incredible — it’s him, 25 tall men who look exactly like him, and one terrified, silent woman. He is SO talented and absolutely hates me. I know he’s going to make it big because he yells his standup jokes at me and I find them funny sometimes. If you’re feeling artsy, take a class on ME! My close, personal friend Rachel Dolezal will treat you to a painting lesson where you’ll learn colors the way she sees them: black is black and white is black! She’s incredible! And finally, if you’re feeling indoorsy, set my apartment on fire and wind down with my self-made candles. They all smell like spaghetti and will ruin your life. Oh crap, also! Before I forget — I told my college friend Brenton that he could come shoot his student film in my apartment at night while you’re sleeping. This is non-negotiable. He is doing a modern twist on the movie Whiplash (2014) where instead of hitting drums, the main character wants to get really good at henna tattooing. Everything else is exactly the same as Whiplash , except for they also added nine sex scenes and they will all be loud and graphic and MUST be filmed at my apartment while you are there trying to sleep.

MITRA JOUHARI

That being said, your deposit of $10,000 is non-refundable and I will give your deposit to ISIS under your name if you are not there for the entire night while they ﬁlm. SO New Okay,York! I think that about wraps it up. If you have any questions, please feel free to never contact me. I will not help because I don’t want to. If you live through the night, you will get a personalized text message from one of the Real Housewives of Akron, Ohio! You’re KatrinaBest,welcome!!

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TODAY HAPPENEDNEVER E.J. KOH I’m getting my imagination’s tubes tied in Cancun. I’ve wanted to since 2008. No more sentences like: a school of stingrays dry out on the line; washed shoes grieve in the sink; my ovaries are meteorites turning, eventually they do explode; or girls talk in Technicolor at a circus in Jeju and they say, We’re not people, we’re sheeple. Before marry the whale-like quiet and pave over all obligation. Before I avoid murderous self murder, I leave you brown baby daschunds and a fact: if you’re near a crematorium and smell fresh-baked cake, it’s not cake.

RESIDENCE E.J. KOH The Denver museum shows a drinking bowl— peach-shaped porcelain, mother-of-pearl linework, glazed white ribbons—from the Joseon Dynasty of Korea’s ash-dry land roamed by bleary-eyed logs called grandmothers who search for their dead thirsty sons and the missing gourd and the drinking bowl. Water, they say, please. Why take residence here? The glass case has been cleaned. The light is fluorescent. On a card stand, it reads: Donated by Mr. America.

People love to say that you should not work in bed. Those people are my immediate enemies. Anything I’ve ever written that’s worth a damn was done horizontally, ﬂuffy pillows at my back, laptop propped awkwardly on my chest and typing like a goblin while the heat of the hard drive threatens to burn a hole in my breastplate.

MARTIN KERSELS, FLOTSAM (TABLES SKELETON), 2010, COLORED PENCIL ON PAPER, 30 X 22 INCHES ©MARTIN KERSELS /COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY

My therapist would tell you that the longest relationship you’ll ever have is the one you have with yourself. She’s wrong. The longest relationship you’ll have is with your bed.

I have a nattering obsession with my bed. It took me three years to ﬁnd the perfect comfort combination. This, for the record, is a separate pillow topper, electric mattress warmer, the best linen sheets you can afford at any given moment, a king-sized duvet on a queen-sized bed. When the time came to buy a new one, I put more effort into researching mattresses than I did my graduate thesis. I’m now so cozy it takes me three hours to get up every day, which my cat roundly protests by breakdancing on my face until I ﬁnally feed him. He always runs back and curls his little body right in the center of the soft comforter, though; even he knows it’s the best seat in the house.

As a child, I was forced out of my slumber every day by my grandmother. A slave to school schedules and cultural propriety, she ﬂipped on the overhead light and bellowed: “Time to get up! Don’t make me come in here again.” Her methods were harsh, which only made me relish the time I spent in bed even more. I used to dream of scenarios that would allow me to stay in bed all day, but they all seemed to involve prolonged illness. The four-person bed in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is my ﬁrst memory of obsessing over beds. The grandparents just lived there, all day? Of course, in the movie this was meant to be convey abject poverty but to my young mind, it seemed like an impossible dream. I was actually sad when Grandpa Joe hopped up and joined Charlie in his adventure. Which would you rather do, if given the choice? Staying in bed and complaining with your best friends all day, or whirling around an acid-fueled sugar-coated nightmare town? I would choose staying in bed every single time.

OBSESSIONS: GET IN BED DANIELLE HENDERSON

My sex life is the biggest joke I’ve ever told, and my bed has been there through it all. Marriage, divorce, dating women for the ﬁrst time, that unfortunate mustard incident — my bed was there to soak up the all the fun, the tears, and the Gulden’s.

Full disclosure: I should say I was asked to write something comedic for this comedy issue.

Full disclosure: What happened was this: Fezzik and I had been separated for hours, which is hard on both of us. Often, when I am gone for long stretches, I wonder why I haven’t heard from him. I look at my phone expecting there to be a text. Then I catch myself: “You idiot, he can’t possibly text you!” And yet I’m hurt and bewildered that he hasn’t. So on the night in question, I came home, eager to be reunited, and Fezzik raced about, stufﬁng toys in his mouth, which is what he does at his happiest. It’s like he can’t contain himself, his joy, his need, so he has to load up his mouth, which I understand quite well. My mother breast-fed me for only two months and I’m still upset about it. Anyway, after Fezzik exhausted himself dashing about, he hopped onto our bed, I mean my bed, and he lay on his back, put his paws in the air, and exposed his belly for a soothing rub. This is usually phase two of his welcome home to me. I looked into his eyes, which are quite beautiful, and I’m not the only one to think so. A Lyft driver, who was ferrying Fezzik and me from a friend’s house in Santa Monica, commented on their loveliness. He said, “It’s like they’re ringed with mascara.” I had never considered this, but it was an excellent and astute observation.

So I lowered my hand to rub Fezzik’s belly, but because I was staring moonily into his eyes, my hand went too low and lit upon his little furpouch, the tiny speed-bump that encases his p***s.

Full disclosure: I should say I have thought of touching him again. But I think I want to touch it only to do something bad and taboo, and then be forced to tell my analyst about it. So it isn’t so much that I’m compelled to touch it again because I want to touch it again, but, rather, I want to get in trouble. I want to be punished. I’m looking to create a drama for myself. My punitive super-ego hasn’t had much to work with lately. I’m sort of old and well-behaved at the moment.

Full disclosure: But I’m a little out of practice writing prose and to just sort of snap your ﬁngers and write something “funny” isn’t that easy. I’m not regretting saying yes, but yesterday I was. I thought, “Oh, shit, I’m going to have to tell them I couldn’t come up with anything.”

Full disclosure: But I’m not sure if my ﬁlter is operating properly, which is perhaps one of the reasons — of the myriad — I’m in analysis four times a week for over three years. You see, I had to go for the oldAMES YET ANOTHER LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

3435 touch his genitals. And that one time was almost accidental. Emphasis on almost.

I knew immediately that a mistake had been made, but I let him my hand linger there one second too long, felt risqué and louche and outré, all things French, and then stroked his belly. But that one second makes all the difference in the world. It’s the membrane between heaven and hell, between sin and virtue.

Full disclosure: Surprising myself, I said “yes” immediately. I was in one of those moods where you think it’s good to say “yes” to things.

Full disclosure: What I thought I might write about — yesterday — is that sometimes I have feelings for my dog, Fezzik, that verge on the erotic. But that’s not really accurate. It’s more romantic than erotic. But one time — in a moment of great admiration and affection for his person and his cute little body — I did brush my hand against his tiny, fur-covered p***s, and I wondered if I would need to bring it up in my analysis. And would I also have to tell my analyst that more than once when Fezzik has yawned in my face I have wanted, ﬂeetingly, to put my tongue in his mouth?

Full disclosure: I was told to write something comedic for this comedy issue.

Full disclosure: So that’s what I thought about writing yesterday, but I didn’t think there was enough there. Not enough story. I love my dog, and one time, and only one time did I with illustrations by Maureen Selwood

JONATHAN AMES

JONATHAN

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In the morning, he emerges from beneath the blankets and kisses my face and cleans my eyes. Then I make coffee for us — well, for me — and we go to the backyard, and I read Pema Chödrön, whose books I love, and I think about things, like how the path is the goal, my ugliness is my beauty, and that pain is the great teacher.

JONATHAN AMES

And let’s not forget that sometimes this all goes in the other direction. For example, when I was a young boy, maybe six years old, my uncle’s very large and very hairy English sheep dog, Oliver, in a moment of lust and insanity, pinned me violently to the ground — this was in Pennsylvania — and mounted me, missionary style. I was wearing shorts, it was summer, and he rubbed his horrifying, slick pink thing — one of nature’s mistakes — between my bare legs, like a piston, bathed my face in hot dogbreath, and bit my shoulder, without breaking the skin. He was a rough lover, but good about the biting, and I sensed intuitively, despite my youth, that something sexual was happening, and I was terriﬁed and screamed for help. My uncle came running, grabbed Oliver by the scruff of his neck, cursed at him viciously, and threw him off me. After that, the memory goes blank, until about my sophomore year in college.

fashioned cure to try to change myself before it was too late. But maybe because of a leaky ﬁlter, which still hasn’t been ﬁxed, what I’ve touched on here — literally and otherwise — is most likely illegal, and I should have kept my mouth shut! Yet I also suspect I am not alone with having inappropriate thoughts about my dog. I mean I’m not saying other people are having inappropriate thoughts about Fezzik, though I could see why they would, like the Lyft driver, but what I meant was that I’m sure there are others out there who have strong feelings for their dogs.

Meanwhile, Fezzik sniffs the ground for raccoon urine, buries his bones in the dirt, and sometimes sits in my lap, like a sentinel, turning his head to the left and the right, smelling the breeze. It’s a soft and delicious existence, and I’m a soft citizen in a troubled time, but in these moments with Fezzik, when I quiet myself, I sense the expansiveness of life beyond the conﬁnes of my pinched and noisy mind, and I am not without hope.

Full disclosure: Yesterday, when it seemed that I couldn’t write this piece about Fezzik, I was rooting around in some ancient files on my laptop, looking to find something I could repurpose, and I came across an essay I had written 12 years ago, but never published. In this essay, I had included a journal entry from 1993. I was struck by the entry as something that the LA Review of Books might like because it’s primarily about writers and literary figures, and so I’m going to add it here. I know it’s a bit odd to pair it with my Fezzik love story, but what the hell? Why not experiment? It’s sort of like saying “yes,” which is how I got into this mess in the first place, a mess which is probably going to lead to my being arrested by the ASPCA or even the Audubon Society, though their concern is primarily for birds. But I imagine they would want to come to Fezzik’s aid if they get wind of this essay.

Full disclosure: Here’s some background to this diary entry: it was written one night while I worked the door at the old Fez (not short for Fezzik, sadly) night club on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. I was 28 and had published one novel, but had gone back to school, to Columbia, to get a degree so that I could teach.

Full disclosure: But about Fezzik. I’ve had him for six months. He’s a rescue. Maybe two years old. He was abandoned, left chained to a fence. He seems to be a mix of beagle, Chihuahua, and basenji. He has floppy ears, a tan body and a white neck, and his firm, little tail is always up and curled, revealing a discreet and fastidious anus. He weighs about 20 pounds and his fur is soft and lush. He’s loving and kind, introspective and silly, soulful and good. Naturally, we sleep together every night. I get into bed with a book, and he burrows under the blankets and goes down by my feet, though sometimes in the middle of the night, I find him curled against my lower back for warmth, and I feel lucky not to be alone in the world.

“No, they loved each other. It wasn’t a homosexual love. It was a love of souls. Man to man. You see, Jack loved Neal because Neal was a great cocksman and Jack was shy, a gentleman, he was like . . . like Victor Hugo and Neal was Rimbaud . . . and Jack gave Neal life, made him immortal.”

Saturday night I ran film at Madison Square Garden for Reuters and the Washington Post at the heavyweight championship fight; it was great. Backstage there were dogs in cages for the dog show the next day, and in the arena there were movie stars, sports stars, gangsters. Fans chanted “bullshit” after the quick knockout. Riddick Bowe was amazing: his long beautiful jab tipped at the end with muscle-like curled bright red glove. Bell tolled ten times for Arthur Ashe. Child star Macaulay Culkin came backstage to see the dogs in their cages. His hair coiffed, skin pale, very tiny, had private limo, looked at the dogs and smiled like a little boy. His father had a Hollywood ponytail. When they got in the car Macaulay sat up front and his parents in back, it was an odd reversal.

“What about Kerouac?”

“Him and Elvis in the bathroom. Is it true that Kerouac screwed Neal over?”

I got that job because my girlfriend back then, referred to as H. below, was a photographer for Reuters. I remember being with her when the ﬁrst attack on the World Trade Center happened, about two weeks after this entry was written. We had been out all night and then slept very late, past noon, in her dark, cave-like apartment. It was February and cold, very little sun, and in overheated New York apartments you could almost sleep through a whole winter. Then her boss called, waking us. They needed her to rush down to Wall Street — someone had attempted to blow up the Twin Towers. Well, here’s the entry: February 10, 1993 I was hung-over all day, but rallied in the afternoon. Philip Roth lectured at Columbia today. I asked him, “Why are we ashamed to be Jews and how can we get over it?” He didn’t answer, just laughed. But I was serious. He said that he was excited by three cities: Newark, Prague, and Jerusalem. He said that he was intimidated by people with conviction. Me too. I don’t have conviction. He said, “Be ruthless, serve the writing, not the life . . .”

JONATHAN AMES

Last weekend: Friday night I was the bartender and waiter at a private party in Turtle Bay for the former ambassador to England. Mayor Koch was there, gave me a penetrating look, like he wanted to make love to me. I heard someone talking about Koch at the party: “He’s a terrible man, dividing the city, I listen to him on the radio still going on about Dinkins abandoning the Jews.” Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was there for some reason. He wanted a whiskey, “One ice cube, mild.” He still had a thin moustache, his face was jowly but he looked dignified. I could almost recognize in him the young man he once was; I kept comparing him to the black and white vision of him in my mind from “Gunga Din” . . .

Well, that’s all to report. Look forward to being with H. tonight if she still wants to see me. I’ll bring a bottle of wine.

Being a student, I was always low on money and had many little jobs. In this entry, I talk about “running film” at a boxing match in Madison Square Garden. This was before cameras were digital, and so I was employed by a news service to run the film, between rounds, from the ringside photographers to a make-shift dark room in the bowels of the Garden. The idea was for them to start developing the images right away, but I only had to run one time since it was a first-round knock-out.

“Too good for words. He lived to write. Not for fame and money, just to write, he died in his bathroom and wrote his last poem in his blood.”

He was happy to talk, drunk, launched into a little monologue, “It was like the sun came into him and gave him energy. You don’t see that kind of energy any more, his arms, the biceps, the triceps, they were beautiful, strong, his belly was flat, and smiling, he was always smiling, always on, took the energy right from the sun . . . “

He didn’t want anything, and then this middle-aged reporter started talking to me, and he gave me the same look that Mayor Koch gave me, and he said that young gay men were not as frightened about AIDS, and then he added, “Sex is back in, you know,” and I said, “I never knew it completely went out.” I was quick with the oneliners that night. Kept sneaking drinks for myself.

Full disclosure: So many little things I could mention regarding that entry. Like the time I met Allen Ginsberg in 1986, on Avenue A in the East Village, late at night, and he told me to go to the Naropa Institute to study writing, and so I did, driving some guy’s VW van from New York to Denver, and then taking a bus to Boulder, Colorado, only to discover that the Naropa Institute was really expensive and I couldn’t afford any of the classes. This was before the internet, when you did things like drive cross-country to a school because Allen Ginsberg told you to, not knowing that you couldn’t afford it.

Michael Dokes, the loser, glowering out of the corners of his eyes, in body-length fur coat, leaned on his old handler and went into a limo after Macaulay. Went to press conference and watched Bowe with the circus of TV reporters. Saw MC Hammer and Joe Frazier – not walking too well; old boxers all damaged, their brains and balance loosened in their heads. Then Sunday I worked the door here at the Fez for the Neal Cassady memorial radio broadcast, a pathetic sort of tribute with old men trying to recreate lost youth and madness for stylish dead Nineties youth submissive in the audience. Snuck down a few times. Ginsberg was up on stage, trim, looking like a reformed congregation rabbi in his blue blazer and flowered tie and grey beard and wise kindly bald dome, reading his poetry about young boys’ hairless chests and buttocks; then Ginsberg’s old lover, drunken Peter Orlovsky showed up, fat, looking like an Archie Bunker crony, baseball hat, blazer, pocket bulging with pens. “I am a famous international poet,” he said to me, so that I wouldn’t ask him for the cover charge. His name wasn’t on the comp list. I said, “I know who you are. Don’t worry about the money. But for admission can you tell me about Neal Cassady?”

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When I brought him the drink, he said, “Thank you, you’re too kind,” with great dramatic emphasis, like I had saved his life, and then he said, “I’ll put you in my will.” I said, “I’ll give you my name at the end of the party.” He smiled at me, his eyes twinkled.WhenIwent up to Mayor Koch to see what he wanted to drink, he extended his hand, he thought I was somebody at the party, I was wearing my blue blazer, but like a good servant I didn’t extend my hand to meet his and said, “Would you like something to drink, Mr. Mayor?”

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And how years later, I would see Peter Orlovsky, sitting in doorways, in all sorts of weather, always near University Place, and he had completely lost his mind and was quasi-homeless, but somehow, he lived a long time after Ginsberg died. And how at that same party where I served Mayor Koch and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., I also served Kurt Vonnegut, and I told him that he was the first writer I had ever loved, and he said it was kind of me to say that. But for some reason, I didn’t put that in the diary entry. And how the people who threw the party took me under their wing and gave me a spare bedroom in their house to use as an office so that I could work on my second novel, since the room I rented, where I lived, was too small for a desk. And how I would look out the window from my “office” and I’d see Vonnegut, who lived across the street, sitting on his stoop smoking, since his wife wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, and how on that same street was this mysterious high-end brothel, which 20 years later sparked the idea for my most recent book, a thriller where a young girl is saved from such a place. Well, I guess that’s about it. I’m running out of steam. Been writing for a few hours. And if you were here with me in my little house in Los Angeles, you would have heard me call just now for Fezzik, and you would have seen him come trotting into the room, where he is now sitting by my feet. A little yelp of some sort came out of him and he is looking up at me with his quizzical, beautiful eyes. It’s time to take him for a walk.

BROTI GUPTA

A love of self leads to a love of others, which leads us to stop using names like “Ugly,” “Stupid,” or “Little Rocket Man,” which will inevitably lead to a violent third world war with weaponry like we’ve never seen before. But just as important as how we see ourselves on the outside is how we treat our bodies — how we end up feeling on the inside. It’s fun to indulge in an ice cream cone or whatever’s left of the bag of ﬂour in the freezer every now and then, but it’s also fun to test the radioactivity of the Farmers Market remains and get those natural nutrients ﬂowing through our bodies. We have to get our bodies moving, so we can feel our blood circulate. Instead of just walking, we can jog…away from another nuclear target, which will help minimize radiation exposure. So, that’s the kind of woman I want to be from now on. I want to be able to do things for myself, and take care of myself. I want to go to the Ground Zero Spa, or the Ground Zero Acupuncturist, or this one Dave & Buster’s that survived everything. And, while Kim Jongun keeps launching his ICBMs, I’ll be launching my own ICBM campaign: I Care ’Bout Myself.

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HOW I FINALLY LEARNED SELF LOVE IN A POST NUCLEAR WORLD BROTI GUPTA

In this vapid world of Facebook, Instagram, and the pretty big nuclear explosion like an hour ago, it’s been hard for me to take the time to love myself. Like so many women, my inability to care about myself started when I was a teenager and my self-image was as weak as the level of nuclear warfare we were in at the time. One of these started to grow, and not the one I’d hoped. Every time I looked in the mirror, I judged myself. Are my pants ﬁtting weird? Are my braces the wrong color? Is the Fire and Fury™ Protection Oxygen Mask my parents gave me making my forehead look big? Today, I dragged myself out of the rubble and to my mirror where I noticed small details on my face I hadn’t noticed before. My sharp, distinct jawline, my eyes that tell a thousand stories, my hair scorched from the explosion we never thought would happen. And I ﬁnally realized — there’s so much to love. Other people saw this in me before I saw it in myself (before all of our retinas burned out of our eyeballs and none of us could see more than just “relative shapes”). In fact, during those teenage years, my friends and I would sit by what were then known as “trees” but now known as “used to be where trees were, before North Korea aimed right,” and just call each other beautiful and amazing, but ourselves ugly and unworthy. Maybe if we could have treated ourselves like we treat our friends, we could have learned to be less critical of ourselves. And maybe through loving ourselves, we could inspire the country to love itself and stop instigating nuclear bombs over social media.

JOHN DIVOLA, 74V03, 1974, GELATIN SILVER PRINT COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALLERY LUISOTTI

You wanted taste. Long stretching lines that held a voice you could hear in your head, the timbre with a resonance of wit or the sufficiency of time. Something like that clock chiming beneath the stairs, or a soft, languid, wet voice that tickles the earbones. You wanted to reach in, to feel as the voice, to smell the herbaceous green on the sill, the clandestine weight of passion or, better yet, the perfume of Paris in autumn— yet, yet, something held you back. Your reason was a faithful dog whirring in circles around a single tree, snapping at imaginary birds. The line you sought, heavy from all that laundry of words, the sink filling up with swirling punctuation. And what of the in-between, where there are no words, where there is only space and silence to tell the story.

ODE TO AN POSTMODERNISTAGING MARC VINCENZ

THEopened.LAST OF THE ZEN POETS

JOHN DIVOLA, 74V02, 1974, GELATIN SILVER PRINT COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALLERY LUISOTTI —for M. Last night I was blinded by a sharp ray of light. Strange. In my dream was trying to catch a squall. And when awoke, feeling this urge to dance, I followed the leaves shaken loose along the riverbank. As the river pierced the valley with a booming rush, I found the moon in a fast contented sleep. It was a perfect moment to let my mind become still— for when I reached the coast I wrapped myself oyster-tight in the ocean calm and MARC VINCENZ

DANIELLE BOBKER “Laughs exude from all our mouths.” Hélène Cixous “Comedy, you broke my heart.” Lindy West In a bit about sexual violence in his 2010 concert ﬁlm Hilarious (recorded in 2009), the nowinfamous Louis C.K. says: “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone. Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” I was delighted when I ﬁrst encountered this joke on Jezebel in July 2012 in a post called “How to Make a Rape Joke.” Lindy West was responding to the social media controversy surrounding American comedian Daniel Tosh, who had recently taunted a female heckler with gang rape. West’s insightful essay later led to a 2013 TV debate with comedian Jim Norton as well as her best-selling memoir, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, where she describes the fallout of becoming one of the United States’s best-known feminist comedy commentators, including her subsequent, painful decision to stop going to comedy shows. In “How to Make a Rape Joke,” West wondered whether it is ever okay to approach sexual violence with humor. She wrote that she understood and respected those, like the woman who called out Tosh, for whom it wasn’t, categorically. The sexual assault of women poses a special problem for comedy, she reasoned, because it is an expression of structural discrimination against women. That is, unlike misfortunes such as cancer and dead babies known to befall people at random, if you’re a woman, not only do you face a one in three chance of becoming a target of sexual violence, but you will also likely be held at least partly responsible for it. To illustrate the inappropriateness of jokes about this kind of a situation, she drew a comic analogy between

Sex-positive feminists actively chose not to contribute to this climate of moral panic, focusing instead on unearthing the deeply embedded mainstream prejudices around sexual practices and fantasies. Instead of turning away, they faced sexuality head on, acknowledging debts to the small minority of people — sexologists, fetishists, queers, sex workers, erotic performers, and indeed pornographers — who had already begun exploring human sexuality in all its complexity, often with little socioeconomic support and at the risk of criminal charges. By many accounts, it was this unabashed approach to sex that led to the development and popularization of safe-sex protocols and consent education later in the 1980s.

TOWARD A HUMOR POSITIVE FEMINISM: LESSONS FROM THE SEX WARS

4849 patriarchal society and a place where people are regularly mangled by defective threshing machines and then blamed for their own deaths: “If you care […] about humans not getting threshed to death, then wouldn’t you rather just stick with, I don’t know, your new material on barley chaff (hey, learn to drive, barley chaff!)?” Compassion about a culturally loaded form of suffering would seem, automatically and intuitively, to preclude humor about it. Yet West’s own humorous reframing demonstrated what she ultimately decided: that you could be funny about sexual violence if you “DO NOT MAKE RAPE VICTIMS THE BUTT OF THE JOKE.”

In particular, Louis C.K.’s rape joke then earned West’s stamp of approval because, in her words: [It] is making fun of rapists — speciﬁcally the absurd and horriﬁc sense of entitlement that accompanies taking over someone else’s body like you’re hungry and it’s a delicious hoagie. The point is, only a fucking psychopath would think like that, and the simplicity of the joke lays that bare.

Though her recent New York Times piece “Why Men Aren’t Funny” makes it clear that West now regards her defense of Louis C.K. as a relic, her sharp distinction between acceptable and unacceptable jokes in “How to Make a Rape Joke” set the standard for mainstream feminist discussions of comedy for a good five years. While I find West compelling, in my own efforts to navigate the contemporary feminist ethics of humor throughout this period, I’ve been resisting the impulse to draw limits. Instead, I’ve been looking back to the debates over sexuality that were central to North American feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During the so-called sex wars, feminists agreed that sexuality had always been held in a patriarchal stranglehold but disagreed about what to do about it. The Women Against Pornography saw explicit sexual representations as the very basest mechanisms of female sexual oppression and so focused their energy on educating the public about their harms and prosecuting pornographers. By contrast, sex-positive feminists, as they came to be known, claimed that trying to shut down or cordon off unacceptable expressions of sexuality only exacerbated the problem. They argued that the history of criminalization and widespread fear of any sex but the reproductive, romantic, married kind had not only led to the marginalization of sex workers, lesbians, gay men, trans people, and many other so-called sexual deviants, but also cast sexuality as such into the shadows. Targeting pornography was therefore counterproductive. As Susie Bright, vocal defender of the sex-positivity movement and founder of the first women-run erotic magazine, put it: porn [can be] sexist. So are all commercial media. [Singling out porn for criticism is] like tasting several glasses of salt water and insisting only one of them is salty. The difference with porn is that it is people fucking, and we live in a world that cannot tolerate that image in public.

DANIELLE BOBKER

One of the major contributions of sex-positive feminism to our current understanding of sexuality was the recognition of seemingly counterintuitive forms of agency from below. Sexpositive feminists showed us the through line between the patriarchal suspicion of sexuality and certain feminist critiques of sexual exploitation. Though the fear of sex was originally and widely promulgated in medical, religious, and legal discourses, some of the alternative schemas of anti-porn feminists heightened the idea that most sex is inherently terrifying. For instance, Catharine MacKinnon’s view that “the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual — in fact, is sex” — while it helpfully exposes sexual violence as a structural problem — also makes it impossible to distinguish consensual heterosexuality from rape. Sex-positive feminists turned to the less moralistic disciplinary frameworks of sexology, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired in part by the subversive theories of power of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, they insisted that saying yes or no to sexual contact, including sexual domination, was a fundamental

50 51 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS correct” and, once the lines are drawn, “[o]nly sex acts on the good side […] are accorded moral complexity.” Wary of simply rerouting sexual shame, sex-positive feminists instead actively cultivated a nonjudgmental stance. This might seem the worst possible moment to advocate for an equivalent form of humor positivity, let alone with reference to a joke about sexual violence by Louis C.K. In the wake of the public exposure of numerous celebrity serial sexual abusers such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, the viral #MeToo campaign has uncovered thousands of male harassers and abusers, and pointed to millions of others as yet unnamed. Since C.K. confirmed reports of his nonconsensual exhibitionism, some of the feminist anger and despair that was already rippling across popular and social media is being directed specifically at the industry that gave him his power. Many mainstream feminists, not least West herself, feel more prepared now than ever to throw the bathwater of comedy out along with the many baby-men who have been cavorting in it. Yet, as I see it, it is precisely in the context of our well-justified outrage that humor positivity is most needed. Humor is a vital, elusive, and continually evolving aspect of human experience. Like sex, it has repeatedly served oppressive ends, but it is no more essentially or necessarily discriminatory an impulse than sexuality is. It is undoubtedly important that we probe and resist the misogynist culture of mainstream comedy. At the same time I propose a change in the way we personally and collectively engage with the material this industry trades in — that is, the jokes themselves. How might we ensure compatibility between the jokes we hear or make and the tools and concepts that shape our responses to them? How can we prevent our resistance to certain jokes from reproducing the (historically patriarchal) marginalization and stigmatization of the desire to laugh? If we get used to approaching jokes with trepidation, expecting offense, how might that wariness affect our political movements? In the current feminist conversation, these questions have begun to be raised in, for instance, Cynthia Willett, Julie Willett, and Yael D. Sherman’s “The Seriously Erotic Politics of Feminist Laughter,” Jack Halberstam’s “You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma,” Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s “Comedy Has Issues,” and Berlant’s “The Predator and the Jokester.” My sense is that what we especially need now are some clear and concrete principles and practices for humor-positive feminism. Here are three lines of inquiry that I hope may help us to develop a richer set of responses to comedy going forward. Can we develop a more complex and flexible view of humor’s power dynamics?

There are of course, limits to the comparison of sex and humor, especially given that the impact of hetero-patriarchy on sex is much more immediately visible. Nevertheless, I would suggest that sexuality and humor are not merely analogous, but are in fact overlapping categories of feminist experience. Both are understood to be culturally coded but with powerful bases in the body. Like sex, laughter has historically been considered an unruly instinct, even by the very philosophers who have most rigorously examined it. As scholars like Anca Parvulescu, John Morreall, and Linda Mizejewski have variously shown, the stigma of humor, like that of sex, has been intricately interwoven with its designation as an irrational impulse and with gendered and racialized notions of embodiment. Moreover, there is a shared double standard regarding both laughter and sex: both have been imagined, paradoxically, as things that men have to cajole “respectable” (implicitly white, cisgendered, pretty, heterosexual) women to do and, at the same time, as things that transgressive women instinctively want to do, in excess. The dangers of both sex and humor have been encapsulated in the figure of a woman open-mouthed and out of control. In the early ’80s, the influential sexuality scholar Gayle Rubin observed that the most common symptom of our culture’s general fear of sex, or “sex negativity” as she called it, is the very impulse “to draw and maintain an imaginary line between good and bad sex.” That is, while various mainstream discourses of sex differ from one another in terms of the value systems they deploy and their level of overt misogyny, their views of sex are, ultimately, remarkably uniform: “Most of the discourses on sex, be they religious, psychiatric, popular, or political, delimit a very small portion of human sexual capacity as sanctifiable, safe, healthy, mature, legal, or politically

In recent years, I’ve often been surprised to hear irony or ambiguity denounced in feminist humor criticism, as though it would be possible, if people would just say what they really mean, to be assured of a perfectly direct transmission of ideas or a fully inclusive joke. For example, in her study of the dangers of rape jokes, Lara Cox reiterates the superiority theory view that the pleasure of irony depends on “the idea that there is someone out there who won’t ‘get’ the nonliteral nature of the utterance” — and these dupes are “the joke’s ‘butts’ or ‘targets.’” In his study of race humor, Simon Weaver distinguishes between polysemous jokes, which inadvertently reinforce racism, and clear jokes, whose antiracist message cannot be mistaken. I worry that such arguments seem to disavow the fundamental slipperiness of language. Contributing in their own way to North American sex positivity, French poststructuralist feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous underscored that words have never been equipped for transparent representation. While many jokes do depend on linguistic play, comedians are not responsible for the essential arbitrariness of their medium. Words will always interact and impinge on one another; signiﬁcation will always be subjectively, historically, and politically inﬂected, by both speakers and listeners, in myriad ways. Reminding ourselves of the basic wildness of language — and the range of meanings and identities that this wildness makes imaginable, especially in jokes — can temper our anxiety about the inevitability of misinterpretation.

Can we develop a more thoroughgoing and ﬂexible view of the rhetorical and performative aspects of humor?

Of course, jokes can be hurtful, sometimes intentionally so. However, taking cues from sexpositive feminists, we might want to stop simply assuming that they are. Just as consensual sexual relations of domination and submission may look like abuse to those who don’t understand the rules, so might some apparently mean jokes. Think of insult comedy or a roast, where the target welcomes the jokes that really sting. But the larger and more important point is that, more than any other factor, our theories of humor will determine our perception of any joke. Keeping our minds open to the possibility that surprise or relief rather than aggression may be the primary affect or intention will better equip us to see the various, potentially contradictory, facets of any comic provocation. Mainstream feminist critics have speciﬁc reasons for rejecting jokes about

DANIELLE BOBKER form of sexual participation. Moreover, they saw that the patterns of giving, taking, and sharing power through sex are much more various and unpredictable than — and sometimes run counter to — the arrangements delimited by basic socioeconomic and patriarchal paradigms. A first step for developing a similarly nuanced take on the power relations entailed in humor could be examining and loosening up our often-unconscious obsession with the cruelty of laughter. In the philosophy of humor there are at least three ways of characterizing laughter, which can help to parse the differences between various jokes, as well as modes of delivery and reception. Today humor philosophers are most convinced by the idea, first fully elaborated in the 18th century, that laughter is a response to incongruity: something familiar suddenly looks strange, and the resulting sense of surprise pleases us. Another branch of humor theory draws on psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious. Relief theorists, most famously Freud, have emphasized the way that jokes, like dreams, trick us into considering ideas that we normally repress: laughter specifically manifests the giddiness of released inhibitions. These two modern theories of humor are largely compatible. In them, amusement does not necessarily degrade its objects but may imaginatively reframe or transform them, circulating power between tellers, laughers, and their objects in any number of ways.

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sexual violence: for some survivors suffering from post-traumatic stress, the power dynamics of humor and of assault can sometimes feel so painfully intertwined that certain jokes are experienced as violations akin to the initial trauma. Yet it is precisely because the very perception of aggression can recharge past suffering that it seems important to remember humor’s other impulses. Recently, artists like Emma Cooper, Heather Jordan Ross, Adrienne Truscott, and Vanessa Place have been turning to humor expressly in an effort to destigmatize the experiences of sexual assault survivors and change the tone of our conversation. How might a more general focus on humor as incongruity or relief also help to reduce the frequency or intensity of ﬁghtor-ﬂight responses and open up new aesthetic, therapeutic, and political prospects?

The oldest and still most popular notion of humor, however, is one that presupposes and depends on hierarchical and unidirectional power relations. Superiority theory perceives laughter as the expression of unexpected pleasure at discovering our own excellence relative to the things we laugh at. In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, “Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the inﬁrmity of others.” Superiority theory initially emerged alongside and is consistent with explicitly elitist political ideologies. It may be the only theory of humor children instinctively grasp: even at an early age, the phrase “That’s not funny!” is understood to mean not what it literally implies — “What you’ve said is not amusing to me and could never amuse anyone” — but rather “That hurts my feelings.” For kids, joking about the wrong thing is an ethical violation; it simply moots the possibility of laughing. These days, distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable jokes seem to put a modern, grown-up face on superiority theory. But jokes labeled as “offensive” or “inappropriate” are determined to be “not funny” in more or less the same way that kids mean it. The tropes that oppose “punching up” to “punching down,” coined in the early 1990s by the feminist satirist Molly Ivins, have been crucial in the popularization and liberalization of superiority theory. Those phrases also put a deceptively simple spatial spin on the relative socioeconomic power of laughers and objects. Reinforcing a David and Goliath moral code, the tropes imply that jokes are crucially aggressive in form, but that in some cases violence is justiﬁed. It’s okay — heroic even — to take on a bigger meaner guy, but undoubtedly a bad thing to pick on someone littler and weaker than you.

At the same time, let’s attend more carefully to the theatricality of humor, including the jokes and quips that bubble up spontaneously as part of ordinary conversation. In particular, stand-up comedians are in character even when they speak as themselves, and many comedians regularly adopt multiple personas, some of whom channel views that they ﬁnd especially awful or absurd. Very often these views are already in the air, and the comedian, by giving voice to popular perceptions, hopes to draw fresh attention to them. Moreover, comedians tend not to put on and take off these various personas like so many hats, but rather to alternate and layer them, turning some up and others down, as if each one was a different translucent projection on a dimmer switch. These uneven ampliﬁcations of characterization actually generate the dialogic structure of comic performance, as stand-up scholar Ian Brodie explains: “The audience is expected to try to determine what is true [that is, closest to what the comedian generally thinks] and what is play. The comedian[’s] […] aim is […] to deliver whatever will pay off with laughter.” Staying conscious of these shifts will help us to recognize that the most challenging moments — those moments when we don’t know quite where to locate a comedian’s values and commitments — are not incidental but central to the interpersonal dynamics of stand-up comedy.

Our most definitive and intense experiences of laughter tend to be in groups of three or more. For most of us, sex and humor are different in this respect. And humor theorists have written very engagingly about the feelings of communion potentially generated through laughter. Ted Cohen writes, for example, that laughing together “is the satisfaction of a deep human longing, the realization of a desperate hope. It is the hope that we are enough like one another to sense one another, to be able to live together.” However, as Robert Provine and others argue, we have so much more to learn about humor’s social aspirations, from the vantage of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and many other disciplines besides. Feminists will have a lot to contribute to this inquiry, not least because we know to be skeptical of any account of collective social experience that neglects to factor in the uneven distribution of socioeconomic resources and respect and because we are acutely aware of the likelihood of exclusion and humiliation within any diverse group, and the likelihood that these bad feelings will remain invisible to the most entitled people in the room. As we help to flesh out our understanding of the social benefits and costs of humor, however, I hope we will get better at waiting for the initial wash of feeling to pass before assigning political positions and moral values to jokes, their tellers, and our own and others’ responses. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, some pro-porn feminists have recently been exploring the consumers’ prerogative in shaping their reception of any sexual representation, regardless of its intended public. In an essay called “Queer Feminist Pigs: A Spectator’s Manifesta,” Jane Ward contemplates her taste for mainstream porn and proposes that, We need […] a means of “queering” porn that doesn’t rely on filmmakers to deliver to us imagery already stamped with the queer seal of approval, and that doesn’t automatically equate queer viewers with queer viewing. […] Can we watch sexist porn and still have feminist orgasms? Many of the most successful comedians purposely write material that can reach very different audiences. What if we were to recognize that as listeners or consumers of jokes we have a comparable level of freedom in determining a joke’s meaning, of finding a place from which the joke can be funny to us? Adapting Ward’s question, we might consider: “Can we have a feminist laugh at a discriminatory joke?” Especially given the current state of US and world politics, some humor researchers have been perturbed to discover that certain satires appeal to both progressive and conservative viewers alike. But if humor, like sex, can make strange bedfellows, that capacity to bring people together may be something not — or not only — to fear, but also something to maximize strategically and even celebrate. Even when we’re laughing for different reasons, couldn’t the fact that we’re doing so across too-familiar divides be invigorating in unpredictable ways? To consider how humor-positive feminism might differ from the censuring approach that is dominant now, let’s return to C.K.’s 2009 joke. It starts with a basic prohibition — “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone” — then follows with a rationalization of nonconsensual sex that completely overrides that prohibition: “Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” The statements contradict one another and the speaker’s casual diction suggests that he has made a habit of justifying acts of criminal violence. In 2012, West’s superiority theory of humor dictated that her central critical task was to work out who was most hurt by this crazy illogic and determine whether or not that hurt was

DANIELLE BOBKER

How can we expand our theories of laughter’s social conditions and effects?

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When West was writing “How to Make a Rape Joke” in 2012, C.K. was appreciated by feminists for regularly raising difﬁcult questions about white heterosexual male privilege. This status provided an important touchstone for West’s feeling that his rape joke, unlike many others, was critical of rape culture: “Louis CK has spent 20 years making it very publicly clear that he is on the side of making things better.” Already by the time she was writing her memoir, however, West had stopped actively defending this joke — “I should have been harder on Louis CK, whom I basically let off on a technicality.” In recent weeks, C.K. has been made a symbol of one of the most insidiously misogynist formal features of confessional stand-up comedy: the way the whole audience is made to share in the comedian’s personal shame. According to this revised binary feminist view, everyone who ever laughed at this joke bears some responsibility for pain it may have caused to assault survivors and for contributing to rape culture.

deserved. She implicitly centered the shift in C.K.’s delivery from one statement to the next, reading these lines as a joke that mocked the perpetrator-persona’s twisted thinking. Feminists had permission to laugh, and in fact wanted to laugh, she argued then, because we felt confident that all of us, including C.K. himself, were not just much nicer but also much smarter than the asshole he was briefly inhabiting on stage. However, C.K.’s recent confirmed sexual misconduct has thoroughly destroyed this version of the joke by eroding the distinction between C.K.’s own voice and that of his perpetrator-persona. As playful distance has given way to painful alignment, the liberal superiority theory must seek a new target. From this vantage, the 2009 joke — insofar as it can still be construed as an utterance capable of eliciting laughter — has to be recognized for what it actually always was: a trivialization of rape.

A humor-positive frame also allows us to turn C.K.’s lines into a dark feminist superiority joke that, instead of stressing our own pain and disappointment, capitalizes on the situational irony here. This once-celebrated self-exposer has been exposed as yet another man with a consent problem. That is, since his accusers bravely went public and Louis C.K. affirmed their reports, the coyness of the original lines may be unraveled through a revenge joke: like a deranged wooden puppet, the comedian punches up at himself much harder than he intends. Feminist humorist Jill Gutowitz effectively put this metajoke into circulation when she posted links to C.K. telling a variety of rape jokes over the years, including the one discussed here, below the Tweet: “Surprised about Louis CK? Here’s every time he told us, to our faces, that he was a creep.” Because righteousness isn’t my favorite flavor, I don’t find this new version of the joke as funny as the one I thought that C.K. was telling in 2009. But I do like knowing that it’s going around.

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DANIELLE BOBKER

But is it necessary — or advisable — to turn against our desire to laugh, even as we shift our attention away from C.K. himself? A humor-positive feminist frame invites us to remember the other laughs that we have lost now that C.K. and his perpetrator-persona are not fully distinguishable. We can see that the “never rape anyone” line was previously available as a relief joke that provocatively illustrated the kind of exceptionalism to which we are all capable of falling prey. And as an explicitly anti-sexist incongruity joke, about the tendency of oft-repeated prohibitions to become empty slogans, especially where endemic, shame-inducing patterns of sexual violence are concerned. Paradoxically, though C.K.’s long history of abuse has destroyed his credibility as a critic of the ineffectiveness of liberal platitudes, it also proves the urgent necessity of the kind of critique he was trying to offer.

JOHN DIVOLA, RUN SEQUENCE D06, 1996-1998, ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALLERY LUISOTTI

ARCHES AND LAND BRIDGES AND PILES OF ROCK

Ruth takes a taxi from LAX to Playa Del Rey to meet her girlfriend. Casey is a wildland ﬁreﬁghter and stored her truck here at a cousin’s through the winter, but since she isn’t returning to Lytle Creek to hammer trenches and spray sparks in the Sierras for another season, they’re going to drive the monstrosity back to Brooklyn. Even though Ruth thought of her relationship with Casey as more of a casual, fun type of situation and less of a traveling-across-the-countryin-a-Bronco type of situation, she can’t say no to adventure. Especially since she’s supposed to be a Ruthjournalist.arrives at Casey’s cousin’s house, its face sheltered by jasmine, its back set against the blue rip of mountains. Casey’s truck has hogged the driveway long enough. In a few minutes, it will scoot off into the desert. “How’s the truck?” Ruth asks, feeling a pang as Casey’s glowing face emerges from between boxes and spilled clothing in the truck bed.

The Bronco, a square, heavy bear, is a 1986, three years younger than Ruth. If it’s dead, as Casey feared, that won’t be the end of the world. Ruth would prefer to hang around the beach and then ﬂy home like normal people. That’s more Ruth and Casey’s style. The cross-country drive could take two weeks, more time than they’ve ever spent together. Ruth is only freelance and so has no excuse to get back to Brooklyn, but still, the time, all that camping, scares her. “It runs,” Casey says. “But the tires are bracing in. I could replace them, but it might happen again. It’s really an axle problem.”

LYDIA CONKLIN JOHN DIVOLA, D06F10, 1996-98, GELATIN SILVER PRINT COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALLERY LUISOTTI

Ruth ducks her head under the belly of the truck. The tires are pigeon-toed. “I’ll replace them in New Mexico, where there’s less tax.” That’s just like Casey to consider safety second. More likely, third or fifth or not at all. When she’s firefighting she carries a plastic pouch in her pocket that she’s supposed to crawl inside if she gets stuck in a blaze. “It doesn’t really save you, though,” she says, but she still does the job, season after season, carrying that silver bag as though it could do anything against

The next four sites are full, including White Tank. “Shit.” Casey hammers the steering wheel. The vibration travels through the plastic and foam, buzzing Ruth in her seat. She feels guilty that she’s not being helpful. She takes out the pamphlet, reviews the list of sites. “There’s one more.” “Are we coming up on it?” Relative to the whole park they’re still startlingly close to the main entrance. She ﬁnds Cottonwood Spring in the southeast corner.

The ﬁrst campsite is called Hidden Valley. A white hand points into an empty expanse. “That one’s decent,” says Casey. “It’s only four sites.”

“Does White Tank have room?” asks Casey. “That’s where I stay when I’m climbing.”

“It’s bad on this road. In case you didn’t notice, we’re going 20 miles an hour. That could take all night.” Her voice is tight. Ruth pictures her commanding her crew at the foot of a blaze, her face lit yellow.

CONKLIN

“Except a natural arch did collapse this year, in Utah. The ranger came in the morning and there was a crust on the ground.”

Ruth doesn’t bother trying to recall the cluttered map. “Let’s just drive.”

The desert is already starting to purple as they drive through Lost Horse Valley, an open plain littered with Joshua trees. The trees are an endemic species, which only grow here. Ruth tries to be impressed about this. She tries to absorb the look of the trees, because she will probably never see them again. They are scrubby and stuck with needles, fanned at the top like hands. Some have fallen over, mummiﬁed in the sand. She wonders out loud if anyone ever steals the carcasses, a genuine souvenir. “They wouldn’t last,” Casey says. “But they look as good fallen as standing.” Ruth taps her window at a specimen that could be alive if it weren’t horizontal. “Drag one of those suckers into any other climate and it wouldn’t last a day.”

They pull the Bronco through the turnstile at the head of the park. The road is rough, and the truck hops along. “I forgot how bad the shocks are.”

“Let’s see.” Ruth pinches her ﬁngers against the scale key, inching them across the paper park. “It looks like it’s about 35 miles from here. That’s not bad.”

LYDIA a thousand-degree flame. Sometimes Ruth worries that she’s not more worried about Casey fighting fires out there. Maybe, if she were in love, she’d be glad Casey canceled the season, instead of disappointed. Ruth and Casey met at the end of December at an event in northern Greenpoint, nearly Queens. Ruth was pursuing a girl named Natalia. Fresh from Bard, Natalia had half-baked breasts and noodle arms, hair rolled on her head in tawny bundles. She touched Ruth’s wrist whenever they talked, which was not often. This particular event — one in a series, as Ruth tailed Natalia — was a showcase of genderqueer DJs. DJ Lezz B Friends was spinning Whitney Houston, Bonnie Tyler, and Stevie Nicks into a cacophony of heartbreak. Ruth passed the time with a short, rugged girl in back. Ruth was used to beautiful, flakey girls, getting them for a night here and there, a month at best. She liked the chase, didn’t need the relationship. Casey was squat on the ground with ash-caused blackheads studding her neck and ears. When Natalia absconded with Lezz B Friends, Ruth settled. Then the thing with Casey just kept going. She’d never had an easier relationship, and she had a fondness for Casey that was deep, though sometimes hard to find. When Casey decided not to firefight again, Ruth was stumped. Their three months together, with Casey unemployed and Ruth avoiding her assignments, were a vacation. But it couldn’t go on. Ruth had to start hustling pieces, get her focus back. The road trip would be a transition into whatever was next. Ruth saw herself gazing out the Bronco’s window, coming to conclusions. She might be ready now to settle into something. She just needed time to decide. “Don’t be mad,” Casey says. “But the cab is a mess.”

“Let’s not stop yet,” says Ruth. “There are a million more.” She’s not ready to get out of the car, cool and cozy with Casey and all her stuff. She ﬂops across the center console, letting her hand drift between Casey’s legs. The sun is setting and the light’s gone hazy, so, as they drive, they can only see features that cross the horizon. Every so often there’s a pile of rocks that looks like someone’s collection left in a jumble. Casey says they were placed by volcanic activity at the beginning of time. No matter how precarious they look they will never fall.

“Didn’t you clean it? I thought that’s why you came out early.” “I didn’t have time.” Casey, though unemployed since October, never has time. In her sublet on Nostrand, balled-up clothes build on unpacked cartons. Plates teeter on greasy silverware next to the sink, because the sink is full of soaking bathing suits. Ruth tries not to frown. Casey laughs. “It’s nice to see you, too, beautiful.” In the truck, the seats are as soft as sofa cushions. UPS packages, socks, and a pair of rubberized overalls crowd Ruth. There’s a beat-up cardboard box marked Grade A Air Rifle! jammed in the cab behind them and a carton of clay pigeons under her feet. These are the props of Casey’s other life. Distant across the center console, the Bronco dwarfs Casey. The steering wheel is wider than her torso, and she has to angle her arm up to reach the gearshift. “Prepare for takeoff.” Casey turns the key. They head down Interstate 10. When Casey was in LA, Ruth tried to touch herself, but couldn’t see it through. She wanted to prove she could fulfill herself alone, but she realized in those few days that she was happier with Casey, ate more and laughed more and felt like a kid. She was nicer, too, less snarky in her writing. She tried to work on pitches in cafes where it was less lonely. But her attention lingered on empty air, drifting from her notes on local rice pudding and unambitious subway gropers. She pictured the wide expanse of country, this truck, Casey’s body on top of her. A life beyond this trip, with a reliable girlfriend for the first time ever. She reaches across the center console and rests her hand on Casey’s thigh. But the stretch is too far. The tendons in her forearm ache. After a while, she draws away.

Ruth imagines all the arches and land bridges and rock piles of the world fainting, one after another, as they grow too weak or dry to support themselves. The dust will fade eventually, and the land everywhere will be ﬂat.

They arrive in Joshua Tree in early evening, passing through the roadside town of Twentynine Palms and turning into the park. Casey idles in the truck while Ruth visits the rangerThestation.ranger ﬂips his hand at a board crowded with Christmas tree icons, denoting which campsites are free. Ruth takes a pamphlet and returns to the car.

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Ruth had forgotten that man doing dishes. She shivers as she realizes there’s only a piece of mesh to protect them. She weasels into Casey’s armpit and they look at the stars.

Ruth wouldn’t want to imagine any of the rations tasting worse than this. She gets down as much as she can. They pack the backpack with a few liters of water, peanut butter sandwiches, health bars, and a wax sack of peanuts. Casey throws in the toilet paper and some hats. To add weight for more of a workout, she includes Ruth’s novels and rocks from the ﬁre pit. She packs other stuff too, that Ruth doesn’t see. The skin of the bag bulges by the time she’s done. They apply sunscreen. It’s barely eight in the morning and they’re ready to go. As they set off, Ruth realizes how exhausted she is. They must have gone to bed later than she thought. Plus she’s not in the best shape. Casey always wants to run with her but Ruth looks skinnier when she doesn’t exercise. When she used to bike her jeans stretched like sausage casing.Eventually they come upon a faded sign that reads, Lost Palms Oasis 4.2 miles.

“We could go back to Hidden Valley.” Ruth doesn’t feel like turning around. That feels depressing, against the point. Casey shakes her curls into her face. “There’s no way it’s still open. You know, we could get all the way to Cotton whatever and have it be full like everywhere else.”

Casey carries a plastic prism, a can of propane, a knife, and a tin of children’s ravioli to the table. She opens the prism and removes a spidery wire tripod. She screws it on the propane valve and opens the tin with the knife. Then she sets the can on the wire tripod and turns a key. A blue ring of flame grabs the bottom of the can. Until the final step it looked like nonsense. If Casey weren’t here, Ruth would starve. They share a plastic fork to eat the ravioli. Ruth hasn’t eaten since the plane. The food is delicious, though she’s sure if there were any light she’d see the beef inside the pasta shells is gray and powdery, like it’s been through years of treatment since it was last part of a cow. They pee by the truck, not bothering to find the washhouse in the dark. Casey says that when you brush your teeth, you should spin your head as you spit the paste. “So it doesn’t concentrate in one area and, like, kill plants.”

LYDIA CONKLIN

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Casey downshifts over a bump. “What’s that?” Ruth checks the map. “Some hike.” “They always exaggerate on those things. It always says ‘strenuous’ when it’s like a footpath for babies.” Casey laughs like this is an inside joke among hikers of the world. Ruth locates the hike, wanting to push this discovery of hers, get back in Casey’s favor. The trail is just a squiggle going off, not too imposing. “Doesn’t look bad.” “Good,” says Casey. “It’s going to be hot as shit.” Ruth wakes to the truck easing down a decline. The headlights illuminate the sign for Cottonwood Spring. They troll around the first loop, finding just a single RV. In the flash of their headlights, a middle-heavy older man dips a plate into one of several bins lined up on a picnic table. His skin is reptilian, glowing in the sudden brightness. Loop B is empty. They choose a site where the road turns, because there’s leftover firewood and room for the Bronco. It’s only when they get out that Ruth realizes how well the air conditioner in the Bronco works. Even though the sun’s been down for some time, the heat eats her skin. “I thought it was cold in the desert at night.” “This is cold.” Casey puts on a headlamp and pitches the tent on a piece of flat earth. She throws her boulder pad and sleeping bags inside. Ruth bumps into a pointed palm and a tiny square on her arm fills with blood. She’s surprised at how tears spring into her eyes, because it doesn’t even hurt. She wonders if she’s feeling emotional at seeing Casey again, or if it’s just the old feeling of being a kid in the big dark wilderness.

Ruth turns to the flank of the tent. This isn’t how she pictured this discussion happening. She needs more time to think, to figure out if this relationship is right. From Casey’s breathing, Ruth can tell she’s trying not to get upset. They both pretend they’re asleep. When the moon rises, it’s as bright as day. In the morning, Ruth’s skin is welded with sweat to Casey and the nylon weave of the boulder pad. The sun blazes through the mesh, a sunburn is already spreading on her naked legs. She wrenches free and flees into the air. Outside, it feels like noon, though the sun dawdles at the horizon. Ruth unlocks the back of the truck and digs for breakfast. All she can find is tinned fish. Heaps of it stacked in silver bricks.Casey appears and pulls a brown package out of the mess, marked with the letters MRE “This is what we ate on fire.” Casey rips the packet open. Inside are slim cardboard boxes. She opens the thickest one and puts the packet with water in a plastic bag. Steam pours out. She rips open the bag and passes it to Ruth with the grubby ravioli fork. Inside is a yellowish substance, tough as baked sap. “This is supposedly the worst ration,” Casey says. “Vegetable omelet. But they all taste the same. It was stupid how people argued over them.”

CaseyTheylaughs.put on clean T-shirts and zip into the tent. The walls are made of mesh so you can see the stars. Immediately Casey gets on top of Ruth and works at her between the legs until Ruth relaxes. When she comes she can’t help yelling. Her shout cuts the desert and she slaps a hand over her mouth. “Don’t worry,” says Casey. “I’m sure that old guy likes it.”

Ruth doesn’t know what the big deal is with camping. She thought they’d slap down the tent any old place, eat, fuck, wake up, walk around in the sand, and get on with it.

The Joshua trees thin and disappear until all that’s left are low shrubs and sticks on the ground. The radio signal cuts out so they play Neil Young. He’s searching for a heart of gold. Ruth reads the summary of Cottonwood Spring. Maybe she can make it lively enough to cheer Casey.“Featuring semi-sanitary chemical toilets, Joshua Tree’s southern-most campground is okay. Although it sits at a low elevation and does not harbor the park’s signature trees, it has many other features. The most isolated campground, you may view a moderate variety of wildlife. For intrepid explorers, venture to Lost Palms Oasis.”

Casey says. “I know I’m not effusive. But I love this.”

Ruth whips her head from side to side, foam squirting like a rapid-ﬁre sprinkler system.

Casey halts, letting sand pool over her sneakers. “I thought you said it was short.”

“I love having you around,” says Casey. The words rest in the air caught between their faces and the sky. Casey has never said anything like this before. The words frighten her, even though she doesn’t want to lose Casey, doesn’t want to be alone like she was for those few days. Alone with her shitty self. She doesn’t say anything.“Really,”

“Four miles is short.” In Brooklyn, Ruth walks a mile, which is 20 blocks, in 15 minutes. “It’ll be Ruthfine.”continues down the trail. She feels light and easy in the sand, likes the feeling of being more hardcore than Casey for at least a minute. Maybe she can make up for her silence last night.Forthe first half-mile they cross a broad, sandy valley. Rocky shores rise on either side, peppered by yellow flowers and palm fans with muscular leaves surging directly out of the ground. There’s a distant hill with so much scrub and cactus that it looks like a pile of washedout toys. Lizards scatter wherever they walk and finally they see the king: an overgrown, tarcolored toy with a rusty belly. He smiles, his arrow-shaped head rising. As they traipse along, the sun floats to the top of the sky. Even with a hat and sunglasses, nylon shorts and a tank top, Ruth is starting to feel the heat. “Can I have more water?” Casey passes her a warning look with the re-appropriated coke bottle. Her CamelBak and Klean Kanteen are both already used up. “How many miles have we gone?” Ruth“One.”can’t visualize eight times the hike they’ve just completed. They make their way over a hill. There are skinny red bushes with hummingbirds sucking them. There’s a family of mule deer with comically shocked expressions. “I love the off-season,” says Casey. “No one’s afraid out here.” They pass an antique mine, a pile of wood planks so fresh it could have been dumped yesterday. They see cottontails and a jackrabbit. Ruth pauses to rest every half hour, even though she’s not carrying anything. There’s no shade and she has to squat in low shadows. Sometimes shade is painted on the ground but isn’t there, really. They walk for what seems like hours, though they don’t have a way to track the time. If Ruth goes more than a few minutes without taking a slug of water she’s dizzy and disheartened, can’t keep her path straight. But whenever she asks for more she tries Casey’s patience. “Just a little farther,” says Casey. “You can do it.” Ruth pees alarmingly often. At first she ducks behind boulders and cactuses in case they run into another group. But eventually she starts going right on the trail, barely bothering to squat, leaving puddles steaming behind them. “If we draw this out,” Casey says, “we’ll run out of water.”

“I thought you brought enough,” says Ruth. Casey sets her jaw. “I did. For a reasonable pace.”

Casey stops short and Ruth almost shaves her heel with the tip of her hiking boot. “Held out forShewhat?”means for Natalia. There’s a picture online that she looks at occasionally, even now, of Natalia and Lezz B Friends at a table in a dark restaurant. Probably it’s no place special — Natalia never had cash — but the winking colors in the background make it seem more magical than any restaurant Ruth’s ever been to. Natalia wears a high-necked blouse, red with gold

LYDIA CONKLIN

Ruth takes the edge of Casey’s waistband, tugs her close. Casey’s poof of curls only hits her chin.“Okay. Fine.” Casey bows away. “But I would never do this if we weren’t low on water.” They walk straight down the ridge. It’s only 15 feet to the valley, but the ledge is sheer. Ruth’s feet move faster than her body — too fast to foresee stones and dips in the dirt. They reach the bottom in seconds. In the basin of the wash, the vegetation is denser than it looked. Prickles lodge in Ruth’s ankles and she removes the thicker ones as they go. The distraction is good. Ruth forgets she’s thirsty, tired, burned.

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“It’s just a bunch of kindling. It’s not like we’re in the forest.” She imagines a sweaty bear popping out of nowhere, lazily chewing the air.

embroidery. Lezz B Friends has crashed in her lap, mid-laugh, like a goofy little boy. But it’s Natalia’s hand in Lezz B Friends’s hair that gets Ruth. Those slim ﬁngers just barely resting, so that Lezz B Friends might never have known, were it not for the picture, that she’d been touched.“You know what I mean,” Ruth says. Once she starts she can’t help it. “Like a girl girl.”

The distance across the crater is far shorter than the perimeter. She doesn’t know why she didn’t think of that before. “It’s too steep,” Casey says. “And wild.”

“Good thing you have all those rocks. Maybe we can squeeze some water out of those.” Ruth is used to talking like this at literary parties in New York, but not to Casey. With Casey, she tones it down. Casey just tightens the straps on her pack. Ruth doesn’t know why Casey always has to be so dour. She can’t even admit she’s offended, that’s how stoic she is. There’s something about her that’s so self-satisﬁed, with all her willful rugged-ness. The way she’s tramping ahead, lifting her feet high on the air, her shoulders clenched. Ruth can feel the words bubbling out before she’s even formed them in her mind. “I probably should have held out.”

Ruth watches Casey trying to separate her words into boast, threat, passive aggression. She shakes her curls like a horse, marches on. They scale a rocky outcrop and move across an area with the mystical name of Fried Liver Wash. Then they come upon a ridge that’s part of a crater. Across the valley, on the matching ridge, is a palm stand. That must be the oasis, but it looks like a median strip in LA. They work their way along the long ridge of crater. When they ﬁnally arrive, the trek makes sense. Lost Palms Oasis is a whole different habitat, sandy and full of shade. Slabs of rock lie under palms that are stories tall, leathery and ﬁre-scarred. Ruth cools instantly. They set up lunch on a rock slab. Casey lays out the food, and the liter and a half of water they have left. Ruth eats her sandwich, the bar, and several handfuls of nuts. Casey doesn’t talk. She only wants half her sandwich and none of her bar, so Ruth eats that, too. Casey allows small sips of the remaining water. After eating, Casey lies in the sand. Once her eyes are closed, Ruth can’t stop herself from reaching for the last bottle. She tells herself it’s okay; she’ll just have a little. But once the neck’s in her mouth she can’t help swallowing in great heaving gulps, dragging the liquid into her throat.She feels much better. She lies down, allowing her face to stick in the sun. When they wake, it’s time to go. The minute they cross out of the shade, Ruth’s sweating again, burns prickling around the borders of her sunscreen. Somehow it’s even hotter. Within minutes she’s asking for water, weak on her feet. Casey takes the bottle from the bag, holds it up to the “Jesussun.Christ,” she says. “There’s some left,” says Ruth. A patty of water stirs at the bottom, mostly spit. “Ruth. Do you realize this is actually a dangerous situation?” “Fine. I won’t have any, then.” Casey storms ahead. Ruth’s throat feels like a length of dry rubber pipe. “Wait. Casey. Why don’t we cut across the valley?”

At the campground Ruth touches Casey’s arm, but Casey pushes past and disassembles the tent. Ruth covers the hole in her arm from the cactus prick, which is deeper than she would’ve thought possible. She tries not to watch Casey’s muscular back, rolling the skin of the rain ﬂy. They leave the park by the southern entrance and return to LA via faster, uglier roads. Ruth is on a standby ﬂight a few hours later, on her way to Brooklyn via Tucson, Cincinnati, and Newark, the best she could do. In the airport, Ruth hugs Casey. They say they’ll give it a chance when they’re back in New York, on even ground, but they won’t. Ruth will go back to typing at cafes, trying not to masturbate, actually alone this time instead of pretend alone. She might have to face herself, then, without protection.

Halfway through the crossing, the valley explodes with an atonal blast of sound. Ruth thinks it’s a cougar coming down from the hills, tongue vibrating in its teeth. Or maybe that bear is here, heartier than she pictured. There’s a gunshot and a dead snake leaks on the desert ﬂoor. She follows the carcass up the barrel of the gun, which Casey is still aiming straight at it. Then, though Ruth can’t be sure if she’s imagining it or not, the barrel levels upward, higher by the millimeter, until the holes in the tubes face Ruth as perfect circles, Casey’s pupil centered in theThesight.snake snaps its rattle once more. Casey drops the weapon to her hip. The walk back to the tent is easy. Ruth can’t believe they ever worried about water or the heat with everything else out there. She tries not to think about how she insisted on the overlong hike. How she drank all the water and led them through a ditch full of poisonous snakes. She was an idiot to be worried about Casey out there with the ﬁreproof pouch. Casey didn’t even drop the extra rocks she was carrying, and she only got about a quarter of the water. Ruth is the incompetent one. She can’t see herself facing the dangers ahead. The broken-down Bronco, the thousands of miles of highway, more camping, her shaky relationship. If she were a better journalist, she’d go for the story, whip up some emotionally laden and geographically diverse stinger. She’s a chicken, probably, but she can’t face it.

LYDIA CONKLIN

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DIABOLIQUE MARY-ALICE DANIEL

Aftershocks of The Great Mexico City Earthquake rocked me asleep in utero: As a statuette of Mary nodded YES , seizing against the wall before falling, my mother predicted I would bring fortune. (80% of divination starts with shit falling to the ground.)

After a childhood watching Skeletor, not really understanding the Will to Power: I miracled into this city, breezing past Death Valley, Devil’s Slide, Mount Diablo—figuring with eyelashes harvested from unanswered letters. (Every gift unrepaid harbors a curse within itself.)

The letters I’d sent to my favorite actress—curiously, opened and then returned: …I’m sorry for predicting your exit—to prophesize death is to wish for it: the up-lighting and the whimper. Only because was tired of watching you escape fate as if you alone were born under a lucky star... Personally, I suppose can quarrel with all applicable gods— (I hold death in my pouch: I can not die.)

ALI PROSCH, HUMPING CHAIR, 2007, GRAPHITE ON PAPER, 6 X 9 INCHES

7273 Suffer the frustration of photographing something amazing knowing thousands of similar photos already exist Wherever& die, name that place after me— something loosely translating to: “death trundling along in a ramshackle purple line, out to Fukushima-tainted waters” Please publicize how joked with the dead through dance. How wrote obsessively about bodies as if they are objects of death study. Memorialize me using cinemagraphs: otherwise-still photos in which a minor, repeated movement occurs: (tiny (Tantalusian)(endlessmovement)loop) In a single frame: (me playing with a rose in my teeth) (welcoming you into the machine of light) Meaningful graffiti in the background: <3 sky flowers up in heaven <3 DEATH WILL BE YOUR SANTA ADIOSLA.COMCLAUS MARY-ALICE DANIEL

Oh,Fear.is that you? Of course it is ha. Always with me, always within me, ﬁlling me up like a blooming rose or a good dick — lol, my stomach is in knots because you. What if every moment in life becomes triggering? I sense you kissing my neck, curling over my mind, when I walk home alone on a dark street, or when I sleep in my warm bed, in my locked apartment, in my once-safe neighborhood that now has a “break-in problem” — a woman was raped two doors down — I need a new lock on my door, but when do I get the lock, and what kind of lock and ugghhh, there you are, you’re back. Like sex with a stranger, I know you. The quiet anxiety, the threat of today’s America keeping my spine arched and tense. L.A. is a city, America is a melting pot, and I’m scared no one wants me here, melting. I’m also scared I mentioned “good dick” — like, what if my parents read this? What if their new priest reads this? Oh god, what if you’re always here, feeding me, crushing me? What if you never get off me?

OBSESSIONS: A GOOD FEEL AMY ANIOBI

AMANDA ROSS HO, BLACK RAGS (I HATE FRIDAYS), 2013, DYED JERSEY AND RIB, THREAD, 83 X 44 INCHES © AMANDA ROSS-HO / COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY.

You’veCookies.been with me since I could chew. Happiness is a warm nest of chocolate chips melting into slick gold on the bed of my tongue, relaxing into a bitter river of darkness that burns its sweet path around every taste bud. Because yes, I ate you hot, right out the oven. A sliver of salt atop a pillow of dough, puckering and crunching for my teeth, for my joy. You were baked, for me, by me. Take a seat on my lips, because I need you. Social media. From airports to bathrooms to dark clubs and awkward parties, to the evening hours right before I drift toward Sleeptown, you massage my brain, you keep me relevant, you keep me warm. The light of the love from you, saying, “I like you because you liked me,” is the simplest form of self-adulation, and sweet Insta, am I ready to be adored. I refresh you as I fall asleep, I wake you up when I wake up. In fact — what have I missed, you’ve been up all night? Aww baby, you’re watching over me? We’ve reached hashtag goals, together. I feel sad with you yet unsafe without you and fuuuck, how I missed you when I was in Cuba.

Boarding a cruise ship is a horriﬁc process. You are packed into a warehouse that looks like a cleaner cousin of what one imagines Ellis Island was like and slowly propelled toward the US customs booth, where, if you have our luck, you will run into a frat-boy customs agent who cracks jokes as he stamps your passport. America! It begins with wisecracks.

7677

THE MAGIC — FLOATING — MOUNTAIN: NOTES ON AN ALASKAN CRUISE

The Alaskan cruise from Vancouver to Skagway and back covers 3,000 kilometers. To undertake this brave journey, my family traversed some 20,000 kilometers — my parents coming from Delhi, my brother from San Francisco, my girlfriend and I from Austin. We, as a family, are perfect candidates for a cruise. Far-ﬂung, restless, bullying, strongwilled, we can rarely make decisions without devolving into arguments and shouting. Taking a weeklong cruise was a way of neutralizing our tempers by making one big decision upfront and letting the cruise ship, with its copious overfull buffets and set itinerary, do the rest. We arrived in Vancouver in shifts, on a gloriously cloudy Saturday afternoon — glorious, because the clouds in Vancouver play the same role they do over the Dal Lake in Srinagar, adding a dash of white boiling unreality to an already-perfect scene, giving the blue deep crystal waters of the mountain-ringed harbor something to reﬂect. We were stunned by Vancouver’s effortless San Francisco–like prettiness. Swatches of sunlight revealed picturesque houses on the hillsides, and the harbor was animated with seagulls and lifting seaplanes, which, from a distance, with their silent smooth takeoffs, looked like seagulls themselves. We were almost disappointed to give up on the city and board the ship, the Zuiderdam, at noon.

The Zuiderdam, a stately black and white vessel, holds 1,900 people. It is owned by the Holland America Line, which once transported hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Netherlands to the New World. Like the other cruise ships, we could see the Zuiderdam from the window of our hotel, one of a cluster of ﬂoating buildings pressing up against downtown with its glassy Hong Kong–like emerald skyscrapers (Vancouver, for a Western city, has a distinctively South East Asian city feel — this may have something to do with the city’s huge Asian population which, in turn, has attracted a lot of investment from China and Taiwan).

KARAN

The ship immediately impressed us with its gaudiness: gold railings, red carpeting, elevators with glass doors imprinted with purple ﬂowers — what the ship’s brochures called a “Venetian theme.” “It looks like a ﬂoating casino,” my girlfriend Francesca said. The premise of a cruise is that it will cost less than booking a hotel and paying for meals and that, in a sense, planning will be taken care of. “But they charge a lot for booze,” friends warned us. “Try smuggling some in if you can.”

Our first surprise on the cruise was how cheap everything was — cocktails for $6.95 (with a second free for $1 at happy hour) and $10 per head to eat a three-course Italian meal at the Canaletto, one of four restaurants on the ship. Our next surprise was how cheap everything looked, despite the initial impression. A cruise ship advertises luxury, but it does not appear luxurious. There is something scruffy and used-looking about it. Francesca’s first impression was of a casino; mine, in the dining hall, with its shuffling old people, the obsessive instructions about sanitizing one’s hands, the food sequestered behind buffet screens, was of a hospital cafeteria. As for the general decor, it reminded me of what you may find beneath a tent at a Punjabi wedding. There was a flimsiness to the fixtures, a dank depression of reds, golds, and maroons. Our barely functional room was done up in dull browns. But this didn’t matter because our balcony gave us a view along the very front of the ship. The swift gliding movement of the ship — which only entered truly choppy water on two or three occasions — was relaxing. Vancouver and British Columbia, with its pine-covered hills, soon gave way to open sea.

KARAN MAHAJAN

The rest of the day — as it was to be on the days to come — was a haze of eating and drinking. We tucked away a big lunch; we sipped cocktails; we regrouped for dinner, attired in formalwear, as per the fussy rules of the ship; we loaded our plates with second helpings of cake. We were happy and satisﬁed. But then, as the days piled on, I began to feel, amid the rich plates of trout and the groups of cackling septuagenarian travelers from Australia, that I was on The Magic Mountain — narcotized by food as I drifted toward old age and Indeath.Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel about … um … death, a young man goes up to a sanatorium in Davos for two weeks to visit his cousin, who is recovering from tuberculosis, and ends MAHAJAN

On our ﬁrst full day on the ship — Alaska still a distant dream of whales and eagles — my father and I met for breakfast in the main restaurant, one of the more formal dining options. We waited an hour for our omelets to show up, and then, giving up, took an elevator up to the dining hall, where you can drink all the coffee you want and dictate your omelet from behind a buffet counter. An Indonesian staffer dipped a spoon into the largest pot of yellow egg ooze I have ever seen. In keeping with the colonial past of cruising, the staff is all “ethnic.”

Alaska, dislocated like a shoulder from the United States, is America’s largest and least dense state. It dramatically brings together sea, pine forests, snow mountains, topaz glaciers, and waterfalls. The ship makes three stops in Alaska: Juneau, the capital, a port of 30,000 people; then Skagway, an old gold rush town, at the top of a fjord known as “Glacier Bay”;

Our whale watching guides dropped us off at the Mendenhall Glacier, which, as it comes up to the water, depositing chunks of itself into the sea, is blue, the color of the minerals in the ice. A waterfall — Nugget Falls — pounds the beach near the mouth of the glacier. We stood in the spray, taking pictures. It was hard to admit that these things — waterfalls, the glacier moving back — were signs of global warming. In Alaska, it just made things prettier, more dynamic. Skagway, our next stop, was more immediately digestible — a small town, with a high school class of four (“the prom is really awkward,” one of the tour guides said) and a single drag of old timber houses turned into shops and museums. It is the sort of tourist town where you are told a few foundational myths (it was hammered together during the Gold Rush, a sort of minor-league Deadwood), supplied lots of information to compensate for its boringness, shown the cemetery where a few unimportant people are buried, and are then quickly shunted off to the true highlight, which lies about 15 thousand feet above, in Canada, at the end of narrow railway tracks. A tourist toy train takes you through country in which miners climbed with backpacks, perishing by the thousands as they sought more gold. This train, outﬁtted with gold-colored Rexine seats, was tidy, cozy, and pleasant to ride after the other fussy forms of transport we had endured to get to Alaska. We ate sandwiches and chips and pies as the small black braid of metal coiled around a mountain before slipping into an open, cold country of glaciers, snow mountains, and aquamarine rivers. Another luxurious ride through hard country.

KARAN MAHAJAN

I wanted to be thrown off. What saves you — from the ship, the drinking oldies, the sense of being trapped in an Indian colonial club — is Alaska.

and then, on the way back down, near Vancouver, at the scenic island of Ketchikan. Each stop, when you get past its tourist trappings, is a wonder of open country, reminding you how much power the United States derives from an abundance of space. In Juneau, we walked around the Alpine-tinged downtown, eating crab rolls and crab cakes at Tracy’s King Crab Shack. King crabs are alarming creatures — growing to the size of dogs — and native to Alaska. From downtown, we took a bus to the harbor, and for a hundred dollars a head, were taken on a boating expedition to see humpbacks, back in Alaska after feeding in Hawaii. Every few minutes, the black whales frolicked to the surface, revealing themselves with puffs of water that hung in the air like smoke and with great tails that rose up before they dove beneath the surface. You never saw these behemoths in their entirety.

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A calf followed our boat for 30 minutes out of curiosity and even raised its head out of the water to look at us. It ignored its mother’s puffs and entreaties to come back to her. This was my favorite part of the trip — shivering on a small boat as ﬁsh the size of school buses plunged around us. Such a trip, where you pay a tour-operator, is known, in the parlance of the ship, as an “excursion.” It is best to book them on your own. This way, you get to escape your fellow cruise-inmates and also save money. Excursions are 15 to 20 dollars more expensive when booked through the ship, which makes sense: the economy of the ship, which subsidizes alcohol and food, is buoyed by these packages.

The cruise captain, a chipper young African American man, often came on the PA system to describe entertainment options and offer sinister 1984 -style comments. “All those who refuse to cooperate will be thrown off the ship,” he said at one point. He concluded all his comments with a cry of “woo-hoo!” which, by the end, was being imitated and mocked by everyone, spreading in the population the way only something egregious done by a person in power can. By my fourth day on the ship, knocked out by seasickness and depressed by the meaninglessness of all the luxury, tired too by family, I was sleeping for 14 hours a day.

Toy trains can be dicey propositions — tricks to cough up money — but it was rousing to be on this one in May, the air thinning, the rail-line a carpet of pine needles, the people crowding near the front and clicking pictures at snow that exploded with sleek reﬂections. up staying, seduced by the food and his own mounting hypochondria, for seven years. I felt a similar thing could happen to me on the ship. Even as the ship raced forward, it sought to erase time, to wrap the sameness of the days in pointless events (shopping, trivia nights, free podiatric tests) and luxury (lectures on why you should buy paintings from Thomas Kinkade, “The Painter of Light,” who conveniently had a shop aboard the boat).

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Afterward, tired and hungry, we returned to the bosom of the ship, eager to do justice to it one last time. My father came back with many plates from the buffet. We were all content, before our time on The Magic Mountain ended, and we returned, cured, to Vancouver.

KARAN MAHAJAN

worked as a medic in Afghanistan, assisting women whose perinea had been torn by sexual assault and rape. “I believe we should help people,” he said, justifying US intervention abroad. He had one eye. He had lost the other when a tree he was chopping fell down on him. His one good eye had cried involuntarily for a while and he had no peripheral vision, but he assured us that he had developed tricks to deal with this handicap. Of course he only mentioned it midway through the ride. We stopped brieﬂy to look down at a rushing stream which, later in the summer, ﬁlls with dead pink salmon. “The whole place stinks,” our driver told us, with that casual attitude toward beauty that Alaskans sometime develop.

Then, finally, one morning, on the ship, we were upon Glacier Bay. The ship lay wrapped in fog and rain; there was a commotion near our bedroom door as people stampeded through the hallways. The front deck of the ship had been opened! Guests walked on the wet deck, breathing white steam as the servers, now wearing coats and carrying umbrellas, served cocktails and cocoa with gloved hands. Above, hidden in the crow’s nest, the park ranger described each of the glaciers. They had split off from one mega-glacier 200 years before. Now they formed a gigantic national park that people sometimes traveled to by kayak, camping in the cold in the company of bears and foxes. The glaciers were receding due to global warming, but like Nugget Falls, it was impossible not to feel the health and vitality of these pieces of ice, shocked into alien shapes by the winds. The Johns Hopkins Glacier was like thousands of gigantic pieces of blue chalk huddled together. Chunks came off the way they might if the chalk was held too aggressively to a blackboard — the blackboard here being the eternal white air. We stood on the railing of the ship, wet, pressing our sneakers into the prow. My cell phone came on, receiving an unwelcome torrent of text messages. The internet, my phone — these were all things that did not work on the ship and I had not missed them (the internet package was a bit too exorbitant for my menial tasks, and we had no reception). One of the last benefits of the cruise might be that it cuts you off from civilization. How long this will actually last, one can’t say. Shorter than it will take the glaciers to go. By the time of our final stop, at Ketchikan, we were weary of tourist trappings and spent very little time in the town. By now we knew that the towns were owned by the cruise companies; they were continuations of the cruise; the shopping ambassador was like a doctor prescribing a drug from a pharma company that employs him. So we went on another self-booked excursion. As if flying, cruising, boating, rail-riding, and busing had not been enough, we now took a floatplane over the Misty Fjords National Monument, which, as it turned out, was not misty at all. Everyone kept telling us how lucky we were. “It receives rainfall every day,” our taxi driver later said. Instead it was burning bright. Below, the reflection of the floatplane pierced the beaches and the blue water, and the brown shades beneath the water. We soared above lakes, mountains, islands, and volcanic plugs. There was not a single human dwelling around save for one US customs post Kurtz-like in the middle of a forest. The landscape was so gorgeous it was almost wasteful. Freshwater lakes pooled on tiny islands surrounded by saltwater sea. One lake on a plateau melted into a bright waterfall, like a gash on the top of a glass that never empties. The pilot made turns toward a snow mountain and then touched down in the water. He unbuckled as soon as we landed. The middle-aged British man sitting next to us was drenched beneath his sweater — though it was not hot. We got off on a jetty and looked around at the massed, hushed greenery. There was silence: no one in sight. All this land and no one to use it. It was eerie. It was the first time I was eager to be back on the ship. But not so fast. We first had to make the return flight, which was short and not very scary — kind of like being in a bus, with the propeller coming on slowly, and the pilot carrying us with the gliding confidence of people who fly every day. Alaska has the highest number of licensed pilots in the United States; flying is the only way to get to many places in the state. On dry land, we took a tour of Ketchikan’s totem poles. Our taxi driver, a veteran, had

There is a joke told by soldiers, which my son repeated to me in a letter: Why is a kiss like a rumor? Because it goes from mouth to mouth. When the soldier pulled away from me, he looked down at me with such pity I could have spat in his face. But he was already gone.

A JOKE BETWEEN SOLDIERS

Alone, our tea, undrunk, grown cold, I tended to myself in a way I had never tended. I felt I was chiseling out of me the old kernel that makes me a person. My son’s idle shoes rested near the chair. I feared I would die of the shame of that kiss, that desire roused by news of death, my damnation

I asked only that my son appear in the photograph beside me and that he be wearing something other than his maddeningly blue livery. I said this to myself, my lips moving but no sound escaping, half-prayer, half-request to Mr. Mumler, the photographer. He must have thought me mad, crazed by grief. But I was not. I know my son is in a better place, and that there he is re-embodied, or if the case be that one does not need a body in heaven, in the Summerland, he is at the very least not disembodied as the young soldier at our doorstep told me that bright, cloudless day. A piece of his uniform survived, pinned with a paper notice through which he communicated from the next realm his rank and unit and home address so that I might be informed. The young soldier handed me a letter from the soldier who had fought next to my son. I read it on the doorstep — it described how my son had been found in a state of tranquil repose, and there was no sign of a frown upon his lips, which signified, the letter said, that he had accepted his fate and felt at peace with God. I looked past the young soldier in front of me, who had chipped teeth, and I said, Won’t you sit with me for a while? Come in for tea. The young soldier peered at me and said, Your boy died defending all that is just. I said, Yes but there is still tea to be drunk. He came in and stayed three hours or more while my husband was out. I was very affected. At that time, I do admit I was insane with something more than grief, which started in my toes and my head and met at the midpoint. I tried to ignore the sensation and made him sit in silence with me for a long while. He tapped his knees with his fingertips, anxious rhythms. His knees and fingers, up and down, up and down. I could do nothing to stop the sensation. I was possessed by it. I told him I had a headache and would he please come closer to feel my forehead. He said he was not a doctor, but that if I wished, he would have a look. There was gravel in my stomach. I felt I might be sick if I did not do something to make it better. He said, Is your husband not home to tend to you? And I said, Have you been in battle with my son and where? He said, I did not know your son except in spirit and common love. He knelt down, his face quite close, and he put his palm upon my forehead. Then I put my mouth on his. I put my hand on the back of his head, and held him to me.

Excerpt from The Spirit Artist CARMIEL BANASKY

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Ofsealed.course I did not say any of this to Mr. Mumler, who was a very odd-looking man and had he been the soldier to tell me of my son, perhaps I would not have done what I had. But Mr. Mumler took me in a different way. He captured me, in the form of a photograph, and on it, too, was my son who I knew immediately by the length of his ears. My son! I could see in his likeness that he blamed me not for my transgression: his face was the image of forgiveness, and I said goodbye to that ﬁgure in the picture. I told Mr. Mumler I would give him all the money I had for this gift, more than the asking price. For it was money I would have spent to have his body embalmed and sent back home, had I not had this picture. But Mumler declined, and said the asking price would do if it was alright by me. I cried then, and could have kept weeping in that room until the day I died, had he not shuttled me out for their next customer, who I knew by the name of Mr. Stunner.

CARMIEL BANASKY

As close my eyes, I hear the whir of the pulse, of the beating heart, of Schrödinger’s Cat fluttering back and forth between the poles of life

8485 alive or dead, and all a twinkling everything until one pawed god flicks the latch and peers inside and botches the flicker of the world. My nurse, a polyglot wizard, this woman who speaks English and ultrasound, is done. Jolly jelly-mistress, grinning from ER to ER, she leaves me and my vacancy be. Forgetting the monitor, she’s left my body swimming before me like a rerun.

Between the poles of my hospital bed, my IV tower, they’ve spawned a trauma-fauna menagerie: butterfly needle, snake tube, CAT Scan, ultrasound of catgut twang. A nurse frosts my belly like a cruller (nurse and chef) and, with the wand, rebel, deft, like a cruel or choral conductor in some treble clef, starts mining for trouble, blind and deaf. look at this miraculous black-on-white, chess-spackled, night-checked, stark lack of a daughter or son, packed in the rafters in front of my back. Looks like water and sun. Black-milk. Shadow-light. This is a satellite transmission from the depths of my space, north of the fibula nebula, south of the mouth. Water on Mars and no sign of life. I have never been a less-faked naked. My nature adores a vacuum. An avid void. I am not expecting That this is the last time I’ll ultra-hear within myself, ultra-see, dotted like an umlaut, the ultra-specks of spacious vacancy. My belly empty as a pre-jellied donut. My mind as empty, sure. A fluttering fact catching in its empty net: Erwin Schrödinger, Physicist, Austrian, father, had two children: Ruth Georgie Erica and “Schrödinger’s Cat.” His lithe elegant Ruth and her more elegant sister. See, a cat in a box is alive and dead until it’s opened, and that is science. There are infinite possibilities for Schrödinger’s Cat, infinite ways she could be

SCHRÖDINGER’S

CAT MEGAN AMRAM

The ultrasound is singing like a mourner And I am truly feeling how much Schrödinger would have given anything for his cat to just be alive or dead, anything to stop the shimmer of infinity. To know what it’s like to know. Hey, you can touch a dead cat.

The nurse has left the ultrasound on and it quavers with white like a highway flare. The side light foreshadowing the wreck. You can touch road kill. It buzzes the erotic white of an motel’s neon [NO] VACANCY sign. Off the interstate. won’t flick it off.

Now I’m 31, and Taylor is a 34-year-old father of ﬁve. His oldest, Ezra, just turned 15, and when he pops up in his dad’s Instagrams I can barely look at him, because he looks so much like his father at the precise moment I fell in love with him. My horrible brain doesn’t understand that I’m too old for this: it sees him and automatically looks for a ponytail, for errant wisps. Even though Ezra isn’t blonde, he’s a ginger. Also, he doesn’t even have a ponytail! Stop looking at a teenager’s neck my god, what am even I doing!!!

Ezra’s very existence breaks the part of my heart that will always be 10 years old. He reminds me of what it felt like to fall in love without care, or the possibility of consequence: to memorize someone as a set of adjectives and not a series of actual qualities. It’s also a reminder that if you train yourself to be a creep as a child, you will never totally grow out of the habit. That’s probably why I write books: so that I can use the time I spent training myself to watch, to learn someone’s face, and put it into words, to some kind of sane, normal, productive, and, ultimately, grown-up use.

OBSESSIONS: HEARTTHROBS ZAN ROMANOFF

It was Taylor Hanson who ﬁrst taught me what it meant to be obsessed with someone. I was 10 and he was 14, and I had never seen a human being with a perfect face before. He was hard to meet — he was a pop star — so in order to spend time with him, I read a lot of fan ﬁction.

MEL BOCHNER, AMAZING!, 2011, INK AND CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 10.875 X 9 INCHES © MEL BOCHNER/ COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MARC SELWYN FINE ART

Fan ﬁction taught me that his hair was cornsilk and his eyes were crystalline but also, if you looked very, very closely, you could see tiny chocolate-colored freckles dotting them: imperfections that, like his too-prominent incisors, only made him more devastating. He was too perfect to actually be perfect, which would have actually been boring. He had a rat tail. At the time, neither that phrase nor the dangling thing itself grossed me out.

What could we say? On any given Sunday, or Thanksgiving, or family reunion, or church

revival, tables groaned from the weight of platters ﬁlled with the delicious grub he was indicting.

Listening to Gregory on a campus known as “the Capstone,” I was absorbing a lasting lesson. There was magic and value in a critical voice that could so magniﬁcently blend R&B, the blues, improvisation, and the plain shit-talk of grown ass men and women. If I were skilled enough, I could learn to convert my version of that cultural voice into erudition that reﬂected reverence

“Before I get started, I’d like to welcome the CIA agent assigned to follow me around!”

Y’all crazy! And oh my God, you know what happens on such a diet? You can never fully empty your bowels and you best bet that every one of y’all sitting out there got a impacted large intestine and everyone of y’all sitting out there need to have y’alls colons ﬂushed out with a ﬁre hose!

Resolving his thundering jeremiad, Gregory condemned how livestock were raised and slaughtered on factory farms —and this was some ﬁve years before PETA. Their imprisonmentfor-proﬁt, he insisted, was a form of slavery.

But then he went all in on the dangers of eating meat — period: Did you know it takes eight hours for your body to digest that steak you just ate, and you up here listening to these USDA fools telling you to eat meat three times a day! Then you wash it down with cow’s milk — you might as well be drinking mucous.

DICK GREGORY… IRREGARDLESS PETER J. HARRIS

Damn you, Dick Gregory! I simultaneously craved my Aunt Anna’s apple cobbler and despised the dinner I had to eat before I could savor any dessert. Oh my God! After coming home from Gregory’s speech, I stopped eating meat so, ahem, cold-turkey, that my father thought I’d joined a cult. In fact, since 1974, I’ve been a vegetarian. It would be an understatement to say that Dick Gregory, plain-spoken oracle, blew me away at the dawn of my intellectual life. His speech did more than change the way I eat. It resonated across the next two decades. Gregory became one of my models for black male public discourse. I could have told you that before he died in the summer of 2017. Gregory embodied what my homies once shouted: I’m free, black, and over 21! He afﬁrmed a freedom to trust the cultural work that moved me, regardless of how counterintuitive it seemed, or how much it clashed against the backdrop and priorities of the contemporary public conversation. For example: Exploring black manhood and happiness

After welcoming his CIA agent, Gregory held court on several subjects. Some were expected in 1974, six years after MLK and RFK were killed. He dissed as cover-ups the ofﬁcial narratives about those assassinations, and the 1963 killing of JFK. Other topics were just plain weird to me. He warned us, for example, to stop wearing sunglasses, because behind the shades our pupils widened only to be damaged by the sun’s ultraviolet rays. I had no idea what he was talking about but look, years later, even the 99 Cents Store sells sunglasses boasting UV protection. Then he straight castigated “black folk” about our diet, calling out soul food with the fervor of a vegetarian who’d converted after a lifetime of fried foods, mac-and-cheese, sugary Kool-Aid, alcohol, and chain smoking. He linked that diet to slavery, obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks.

That’s the ﬁrst thing I remember hearing out Dick Gregory’s mouth! It was in 1974, the beginning of my sophomore year in college, and my 19-year-old WTF!? was the falsetto in the collective gasp exhaled by the electriﬁed capacity crowd buzzing in Cramton Auditorium at Howard University in Washington, DC. Witnessing Gregory call out the CIA from the stage was a Big Bang in my cultural and intellectual life. Gregory’s speech that night — well, it wasn’t actually a speech by today’s standards, what with TED Talks now forming a template in my grown-up mind. Imagine a summer storm. It was an unleashing, a stream of consciousness, delivered with the timing and expertise honed by years as a master stand-up comic, earthy raconteur, and griot slinging his truth. Audience expectations be damned!

Also, Gregory sounded like me — like the young men with whom I was studying at Howard, with whom I gathered on The Yard (H.U.’s central campus). We spoke like we were from somewhere, you know. The scholars call it African-American vernacular, but in my ear it echoed the wise, sublime music of so many older black men in my Southeast DC briar patch. Speaking from Cramton’s stage, Gregory could have been Mr. Scotty, my godfather, whose stock of pennies kept my pockets stuffed with candy; or Mr. Fox, the crane operator who’d suddenly rock his comic impression of Daffy Duck; or Mr. Richard, who each day read the entire Washington Post before he’d even let me glimpse the sports page.

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We could see the effects in our overweight aunties and uncles, their insulin shots, and how breathless they were after the simplest exercise.

PETER J. HARRIS

These days my Moms must turn over in her grave, when I go off on Sir Trump D’Voidoffunk, or the vile hypocrisy of his pitch to those folk who’d still rather be white than American in their defense of clichéd, lame, corny PR-speak about greatness, patriotism, the ﬂag, or the USA as home of the brave. If only she had sat beside me at Cramton Auditorium that evening when Gregory made me take off my sunglasses. She’d give me dap after my rants. I’m with my two older brothers at Howard’s homecoming in October 2017. Ahh … Cramton Auditorium. I get chills. I actually only met Dick Gregory once, when I interviewed him in

PETER J. HARRIS for learning, yet rang with the overtones of folklore, mythology, and hard-earned insights into right That’sliving.whyI loved Dick Gregory’s uncensored voice. He wasn’t scared. Sounded black. Wielded humor as weapon, as flashlight. He was political. Entrepreneurial. He would just as soon scold you as shake your hand. Steadfast. Risky. He was also exasperating. Even as a second-year journalism student, learning the value of credible sources in my classes, earning bylines as staff reporter on our campus newspaper, The Hilltop, I wanted Gregory to offer road maps, books to research, and other scaffolding to help us grapple with his incendiary testimony. I’m not sentimental about his voice, either. I do not consider Dick Gregory my mentor, nor any kind of father figure. I don’t consider myself an uncritical choir member. I groaned listening to him in one interview on YouTube, responding to the Cosby sexual assault vortex. “I don’t know what happened; that’s a police matter,” Gregory said; he then pivoted, asserting that “they” didn’t want Cosby to buy NBC. I can sure understand how difficult it must have been for Gregory to publicly criticize Cosby, who was his peer in many ways. But I’m a father engaged in an active “call and response” dialogue with my own daughter, who was abused as an adolescent by her black step-father. I have no patience for worries about protocol, when it comes to a dude on record as drugging women’s drinks as part of his foreplay. Then again, frankly, even as a teenager, I was temperamentally a loner who gravitated more to a good idea than an actual role Ultimately,model. even in disagreement, I was imprinted by Gregory’s consistent bravery. He engaged fully in the life of his society, from the 1950s until his death. He walked the front lines during the Civil Rights era. He ran as a long-shot presidential candidate. He traveled to Iran as a citizen-ambassador. He called us out and put his body on the line in fasts and personal protest walk-a-thons. Gregory spoke up and spoke out. A contrarian, he never sounded generic; he delighted in going against the grain, and flexed the punch line as a direct route to what he considered the bottom line. Dick Gregory emboldened me to trust myself, my imagination, my sense of the needs of my community, my cultural voice(s) — irregardless of the protocol of the moment. I’m laughing now, because the first protocol I had to transcend was my mother’s. Ooooohhh oooooohhhh! My mother was death on words like irregardless and conversating and she’d always assert that only folks without vocabulary used profanity. (Not even mom’s strictures could dampen my evolving aha that the richest communications skill was actually virtuosity — a vital ability to synthesize vocabulary, ideas, and tradition into a distinctive solo voice.)

Pausing to take a photo of Cramton’s facade, 43 years melt away. Dick Gregory strides across a stage. He crystalizes the true DNA of my “pursuit of happiness” — my journey into and beyond the United States’s hypocritical contradictions and racial double-standards. Gregory channeled Benjamin Banneker chastising Thomas Jefferson in a 1791 letter for “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression [which] you professedly detested in others.” Gregory anticipated Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 21stcentury schooling of Trump’s chief “grown-up” John Kelly, who got a Twitter history lesson after he misrepresented the national “compromises” regarding slavery and the Civil War. From 1974 until this moment, Dick Gregory frees me to step with history as my homeboy and connect with epic reasons for living. Only time will tell if I am destined to speak across the years to posterity. Irregardless, I lift my voice and sing. I spiral along the genealogy bequeathed by the voices of black men of integrity. Men like Dick Gregory. Yeah, men like Dick Gregory.

1980 upon his return from Iran. By then I was a reporter at the Wilmington News Journal and we spoke at a hotel outside Delaware’s largest city. No entourage. No bodyguards. He traveled with one dude, Rock Newman, with whom I’d played baseball at Howard, and who’d go on to manage Riddick Bowe to the heavyweight boxing championship. A call to Rock led to my short interview (not to mention some super tasty Iranian pistachios), and I wrote a nondescript article that ran in August 1980. No big bang in this experience, but I was satisﬁed that I could get access to Gregory and do my job without any whiff of hero worship.

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DEMI

DREAM

DEMI ADEJUYIGBE

Reader, today I found the house of my dreams. My husband Roger and I were driving around after Waze took us down the wrong road, and there it was — a large, black, two-story Victorian house, all alone on a large plot of land with nothing around but twisting sinewy trees and a FOR SALE sign, scrawled on a piece of wood in some sort of dripping red marker. A real fixer upper, just like I’d always wanted. Roger was nervous to park because Waze didn’t recognize our location and our phones immediately lost service upon arriving — he’s such a worrywart sometimes! As we walked to the front door we noticed a gaggle of schoolchildren watching us, playing on swings and singing nursery rhymes very, very slowly. How perfect! A community of kids for our own incoming baby boy! Roger let his paranoia get to him, as always. He wondered out loud where the kids came from if there were no other houses around. Reader, I love this man, but sometimes he acts like he’s never heard of a bus before! I’ve never wanted to live somewhere surrounded by nature, but as I walked up and saw a murder of crows gawking at us from a dying tree in the front yard, I knew I’d found my paradise. I’ve always loved birds, and I instantly felt a kinship with these crows. They truly spoke to me — at first in a figurative sense, but Roger swears that he heard one whisper “Leave this land or perish” in Latin. Great joke, Roger — you don’t even know Latin. The house looked old, but looks are deceiving. In fact, all of the doors had been rigged with sensors to open and shut whenever we came near! The front door swung open just as I was going to knock on it, and slammed shut as soon as Roger followed me inside. (While complaining and insisting that we leave, I might add. He never lets me do anything!) Reader, it was just as gorgeous inside, and maybe even bigger than I thought! There was a dining room with crystal chandeliers and a series of large ornate paintings of people who must have been the previous owners. There was even a player piano in the living room that cycled HOUSE ADEJUYIGBE

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between two notes over and over with increasing speed! I presume it was battery operated, because it continued playing even afer Roger tripped over the cord. What a klutz! He even tried to play it off by claiming he was spooked by the paintings blinking at him. I found the nice groundskeeper just outside of a door with 20 locks on it. He was a tiny, tiredlooking old man who went by the name of Vlad. He said his “true name” is unpronounceable by the human tongue. I didn’t even try, I’m SO bad with foreign names. He led me on a short tour of the upstairs, taking me through the master bedroom and the nursery, each of which was decorated by a lovely assortment of Victorian dolls. How quaint! I asked if the dolls belonged to the previous owner, to which he said “the previous owners belong to the dolls.” I didn’t ask him to clarify — no need to embarrass the man for misspeaking in his second language! I was in love with the place, and told Vlad as much. He said the only requirements he had for the next owners was that they not be priests or allow any priests onto the grounds. Not a problem for me, the only priest I know is Roger’s father, and he passed away 10 years ago (this very night, I believe). Vlad told me the house would treat me with the respect I gave it, and spouted off a very confusing saying about the “blood and bones of the home.” I promised him that Roger and I would come back and make a proper offer once we’d gotten to talk about it, but I knew then and there that this would be the house I wanted to grow old in. I had such a nice time I took a celebratory selfie with Vlad, but I should’ve checked the settings beforehand because Vlad didn’t show up in the photo at all. (Note to self: upgrade your dang phone already, AfterRosemary!)afew minutes with Vlad, I walked down the staircase to find Roger, his shirt torn and caked in sweat. He screamed “Where were you?!” which for me, was the final straw. I knew he was having a rough time since he accidentally broke an ancient Native American artifact in an old woman’s antique store the previous night, but taking it out on me? Ugh, men! I calmly explained to him that Vlad had led me on a tour of the second floor, but he continued to yell things like “I’ve been trapped in the attic for seven hours” and “Who the hell is Vlad?” I calmly walked past him and got back into the car. I didn’t want to tarnish the first memories of our future home with an argument. As we drove home, our bitter silence was broken by the feeling of our baby’s first kick. Suddenly, our problems seemed so trivial. To hold any grudges against Roger would be petty. We loved each other, and the proof of our love was slowly growing inside of me. I smiled at him, and grabbed his hand to put it over my stomach. He felt the baby’s kick and smiled back. All at once, I saw our future together. Me and Roger, watching our little boy ride his tricycle around in our beautiful Victorian yard, feeling nothing but bliss. I looked back at the house as we drove away and it faded into a thick layer of summer fog. I couldn’t wait to come back and make a future in that home — for me, for Roger, and for little baby Damien.

A prison sentence for anyone caught explaining magic. You be me, and I’ll be the man standing at your fence, expecting compliments on my new haircut. Now, be you and take this personality quiz. Do you scrape your fork against your teeth? Results are in: You’re the kind of person who has to stop doing that. You be you, and I’ll be racing across the yard, trying to catch robins to prove how tender am with tender things. I’ll be Glenn Gould, hunched and humming at your piano until it suddenly springs a leak—the notes too full to hold themselves together. I’ll be me again when I open the windows to keep our apartment from flooding. Don’t be the woman on the sidewalk below, drenched and furious. Instead, take a turn as Gould. An older Gould—wear gloves indoors, tell me you can’t have lovers for fear of harming your elegant hands, clamber about the bed for an hour being the man who always almost touches me. Then become the man who does.

PAIGE LEWIS chewing five sticks of Juicy Fruit, turning my jaw into a clicking, painpricked mess and reaching for another pack because hard work is defined by a body’s wreckage, and want you to know I’m hard at work writing my presidential acceptance speech: A dartboard in every garage!

YOU BE YOU, AND I’LL BE BUSY

©MARTIN KERSELS /COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY

MARTIN KERSELS, FLOTSAM (ARMS SCAPULA),2010, PENCIL ON PAPER, 22 BY 30 INCHES

NO ONE CARES UNTIL YOU’RE THE LAST OF SOMETHING PAIGE LEWIS

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Instead I’m here, listening to the demands of birdwatchers—they want post cards and t-shirts, they want me to build an avian-themed carousel in the middle of my living room. need them to leave. At midnight, I turn off the porch light, and they swear they can still see inside his nest.

Someone asks Doesn’t he look happy? Yes , they all agree. Don’t you think he sounds like Fred Astaire with his tap-tap-tapping? Of course! Dresses like him, too. I don’t know if it’s the hunger, the heat, or the hours of not blinking that turns them cultish, but I go with it. ask Shouldn’t he have a break from your surveillance? Yes, a break . I’m giddy at the thought of being alone. I say It’s time to go home and rest

They remove their shoes and lie down on countertops, in closets, and underneath my staircase. Wherever there’s space, they fill it—body against tired body— pressed close as feathers.

Someone squealed about the ivory-billed woodpecker nesting on my back porch, and now there’s a line of binoculared men holding buckets of mealworms and pushing their way into my home. I let them in because I’d rather be host than hostage, though really, how could these lovers of red-headed grub-slurpers be bad when they sport such splendid hiking shorts? They press their noses against my sliding glass door and ask for the woodpecker’s name. didn’t give him one—worried that if I named him, he’d never leave, and honestly, haven’t been a fan since watched him raid a blue jay’s nest for breakfast. Well, didn’t fully watch—most of what see, see through the gaps of my fingers. This sort of looking has turned me boring—even the sun’s been sighing Not you again when it sees me. And sure, there’s probably an alternate universe where my gaze is unwavering, where I’m paid to name the newest nail polish colors—Fiddlehead Green, Feral Red, Geothermal Glitter—where I don’t hate documentarians for letting nature be its gruesome self.

OBSESSIONS: BREAKFAST

When I am away from home, I have some reliable options, as substitutes for Grape-Nuts and blueberries. Oatmeal is always a good one. Starbucks usually has a simple little container of that. Toast with peanut butter is pretty ﬁlling. I’ve had to do a wheat bagel at various airports. And breakfast tacos! I put an exclamation after that because isn’t that what it’s like? Breakfast tacos! And of course, always the strongest coffee. That’s never a problem to ﬁnd. That’s one of my favorite things about seeing the world move into the future. Even convenience stores are putting some effort into offering a version of specialty coffee. If I’m shopping for coffee by the pound, I really am a sucker for that D.I.Y. packaging. Where it’s made to look like a paper bag that someone stamped the label on by hand. Even if it’s fake, that’s what I reach for. They really know their customers.

I wrote most of this in the morning, after I had my breakfast. That’s when my brain works best. I am not kidding when I say this: I just washed blueberries in a little strainer and put them in the refrigerator for tomorrow.

FRED ARMISEN I am obsessed with breakfast. I don’t mean the history or art of breakfast cuisine in general. I mean the timing and the content of my own breakfast. Sometimes I think it’s all I ever want in life. For me, it’s ideally this: Grape-Nuts cereal with almond milk and blueberries, and two cups of strong coffee. I think about my breakfast the night before. Do I have enough blueberries in the refrigerator? Did I grind enough coffee? How much time will I have in the morning? I need at least an hour. My preference is to get up really early and have that time to myself. It gives me a moment to think. Once I’ve accomplished this part of the morning, I feel like I’ve already won the day. I’ve never understood work-related breakfast meetings. I don’t like the idea of being distracted from getting that food and coffee down. I also think I’m a little self-conscious about what I look like when I eat. Eyes down, focused. I have often made sure to eat before a breakfast meeting. I see the world through the eyes of breakfast. That is the most exotic part of traveling, to me. If someone is telling me a travel story, urging me to visit, let’s say, Serbia, the ﬁrst thing I picture is me having coffee in a hotel restaurant in Belgrade. I imagine wearing a little jacket because it’s so early that it’s still chilly. Breakfast is when I feel the most like I’m in a foreign country. Even after landing and going through customs and checking in, it’s only the next day, in front of my breakfast, that I’ve said (quietly, out loud), “Wow. I’m in Iceland.”

FRED ARMISEN

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Sometimes it’s not as easy to find the right kind of place, destination-wise. I have become wary of balmy, tropical resorts. The kind of place where everything is centered on relaxation and spas. They always seem to have long, winding pathways to get from one villa to another. That’s a warning sign to me. I think these places put so much work into their dinners and nightlife that breakfast is an afterthought to them. They assume that everyone is going to want to sleep late. I resent having to walk so far to find the building with the restaurant, and there have been many times where I was met in the morning with “we’re not open yet.” Nothing makes me angrier than those words. I resent it. That’s when I understand wanting to be a dictator. That would be one of my first enacted laws. All food-service establishments will be open at 5:00 a.m. Five. Just as a buffer for people arriving at six. “We’re not open yet” will no longer exist.

2,450: Approximate calories I consumed when, after suffering through a terrible, terrible day, I walked to the Shake Shack on Santa Monica Boulevard — to offset the calories, you see — and ate a ShackBurger, a Chick’n Shack sandwich, cheese fries, and a milkshake in one sitting.

1: The number of complete strangers who have invited me out to Shake Shack because I make my absolute thirst and devotion to this restaurant so publicly known. If I’m being honest with myself, even one person making this offer sort of seems like too many — but in an equally very real way, not nearly enough.

KARA BROWN

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7/9/11: The most important day of my life until I give birth to someone. (And even then, we’ll have to wait to see how they turn out.) The ﬁrst time I delighted in the culinary miracle that is Shake Shack was a blistering summer day in Madison Square Park with some friends from out of town. On my own, I likely wouldn’t have waited in the extremely long line because obviously lines are stupid. But when the energy of the Earth combines with the unyielding pull of fate, powerful things happen. I was changed. I was anew. I was Shake Shack.

183: The page in the ofﬁcial Shake Shack cookbook where you will ﬁnd a blurry version of me standing in the background at one of their Friends and Family events. We are forever connected, Shake Shack and I. They literally can’t do anything about it.

5: Friends and Family events I’ve attended after scamming my way onto the Shake Shack press list. Though, to be fair, I was a legitimate member of the media at the time, so it was less of a scam and more of persistent pursuance coupled with the Paul Ryan–white lie that I covered “food and culture.”

OBSESSIONS: SHAKE SHACK IN NUMBERS KARA BROWN

8: The number of flights I’ve booked specifically through Terminal 4 at JFK Airport because Terminal 4 at JFK airport has a Shake Shack. When I moved to Los Angeles, my vitamin D levels soared, but my soul ached without the essential nourishment that is Shake Shack. From then on, anytime I returned to New York City I flew through Terminal 4 at JFK Airport because that meant I could grab Shack Shack right after I landed and enjoy one last burger before takeoff. Were there perhaps better, cheaper flights to New York that did not fly through Terminal 4 at JFK Airport? Perhaps. Did they have Shake Shack? They did not.

WONG

Last March, I was invited to perform my one-woman theater show “The Wong Street Journal” at Harvard. Well, it was more like I was scheduled to perform my one-woman show. Actually, let me put it this way. If playing Harvard was Isaac Mizrahi, me playing Harvard was Isaac Mizrahi for Target. Usually when I perform at a school, I have a fee, accommodation standards, a contract. I won’t get on an airplane if these basic standards of decency aren’t met. Except if it’s Harvard, in which case I readily become the thirsty side chick crawling on scraped kneecaps at the first flash of Harvard’s 2am “You Up?” text. Unlike previous Harvard guests like Rhianna and Hillary Clinton, I actually strong armed my “invitation.” I had been begging my friend, Professor Terry Park, who had been adjuncting there, to hook me up with a show for months. Finally, just before he was supposed to leave, he registered my performance as a campus event. He had found a window to get me in but Harvard wasn’t going to make it so easy: they would only pay a tiny fraction of my performance fee — I was essentially volunteering. Doing this show would mean hours of unpaid labor, using airline miles, and sleeping on Terry’s couch. Still, it was Harvard! I would do it. Now, like Terry, I could forever namedrop Harvard University on my resume. Then, two days before the show, I received a death threat via Facebook: I’m gonna kill you one day. Count on it. You fucking piece of shit. For harassing the President constantly! I’m also going to terminate your twitter account. YOU ARE FINISHED. March 6th. Coming for you. It had been only three months since the election — you know, the one where the possibility of Armageddon and getting deported to a concentration camp in our lifetime became very real? I grieved the election results by tweeting at Trump and his family hourly. I gained 20k new Twitter followers in three months. It was like I was becoming someone who was actually invited by Harvard to play Harvard! I made many enemies via Twitter but this was my first death threat. Unlike other murderers, who generally prefer anonymity, Brian Martin’s face and identity was made plain. His profile said he I WOULD DIE TO PLAY HARVARD KRISTINA WONG

Sargeant Parker thought this death threat could be a hoax but should be taken seriously. He recommended that I tell my neighborhood police station. For my show, he recommended an armed plain clothes officer escort me to campus and watch from the audience, an armed officer patrol the box office area, and to be extra safe, a third officer scan every audience member for weapons.“Haaarvard Police Depaahtment doesn’t pay for this. Your depaaahment does.They’ll have a billing code we invoice.” But we didn’t even have a real bed for me to sleep in. This was an Isaac Mizrahi for Target backdoor gig at Harvard, remember? “So, how much of your fee are you willing to sacrifice for security?” Terry asked me that Inight.wasalready doing this show at a loss and now I had to ask myself: Exactly how much was it worth for me to prevent a potential massacre at Harvard but also say that I played Harvard? How much was it worth to save the lives of the smartest, most potentially useful Americans in this country? And if I cut any corners on security, could I live with myself if someone got hurt? Before going to the Koreatown police station that night, I googled Brian Martin’s Facebook page and found him on “Encyclopedia Dramatica” — a wiki site that documents internet trolls. Apparently, Brian and his twin brother Kevin notoriously harassed people across the internet. They even once threatened the National Weather Service and posted a video of them clowning the FBI at their house. This website offered up their address.

“Ofﬁcer, can we bust them? Can you go to this guy’s house and arrest him?”

KRISTINA

ﬂight 36 hours away, I called Terry. He got us on the phone with the Police. “This is Saaaahgeant Paaahker of the Haaahvaaard Police Depaaaahrtment.”

“Terry we can’t turn the smartest men of color in the country into our bouncers!”

102103 lived in Southern California. Was Brian Martin actually going to ﬂy across the country — with weapons — to kill me at my March 6th Harvard show when, with much less effort, he could just drive to Koreatown and kill me in my own home? And that’s when I realized how big I sounded. Brian Martin didn’t want to kill me in Koreatown. Anybody can get killed in Koreatown. Brian Martin also wanted to put Harvard on his Becauseresume.thiswas a potentially life-threatening situation, my ﬁrst instinct was to tell Facebook. I soon realized that that was a bad idea: nothing deters an audience from attending a one woman show more than the possibility being killed (...and the fact that it’s a one woman show). If Brian Martin saw me panic online, it would give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d won. I’d have to remain silent, as if I never saw the death threat. I would have to proceed as if I had never been Withdeterred.my

“A detective will look at this and get back to you in a few days.” “Will they call me before I leave for Boston?”

Terry called at midnight my time. He had been thinking up Death Threat DIY Security ideas: “I have found two professors, one is a professor in African American studies. The other is Latino. They are willing to act as our security.”

“How about this? We do a fundraiser! From your Boston friends coming to the show!”

“Hey, I’m so glad you are coming, can you chip in $5 so we don’t die in a massacre?!”

Luckily, a man named Lateif happened to email me right then. Lateif was a friend of a friend who owned a gun range in New Jersey . He had added me to his email list about the monthly “gun basics” classes he offered in Jersey City. Naturally, I wrote Lateif about what was happening. “Tell me where and when your show is. Send me everything you have on this guy. I will bring my students and make this a project for them. It will be my pleasure to protect you.”

STEPHANIE WASHBURN, CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’VE MADE A WONDERFUL DECISION (FLOUR), 2017, ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT, 10 X 8 INCHES

This was the same Provost who couldn’t cough up the cash for a decent honorarium or ﬂight for my visit. Apparently, they had found the money to prevent a massacre, but this still didn’t make any sense. They had money for security but not the person security was there to protect. We were relieved of course, but Terry had one last request: “Can you please can go silent on Twitter? Just until the show is over? Then you can go inciting all the death threats you want.”

I made him no promises. I refused to let Brian Martin think he won. On the day of the show, I had not heard back from anyone at the Koreatown Police Department (I wouldn’t hear from them until three months later). As I entered Harvard’s Agassiz theater, I barely recognized what a big deal I looked like. An officer with a shiny gun in a holster patrolled the hallways. Another officer in a yellow safety vest with a metal detector wand pat down every audience member. The undercover officer packing heat was unmistakably the big white guy hunched over in the back of the theater. I scanned the audience for Brian Martin; I only saw hundreds of Asian faces looked back at me. Then I started the show. The audience loved it; even the plainclothes officer cracked a smile. When I took my final bow, I wasn’t greeted with a hail of bullets, but a standing ovation. It took me two months to get paid by Harvard. They paid me even less than what Terry helped negotiate, and they somehow docked my check for the cost of the bag check officer. It was, by any measure, the toughest gig ever. But hey, at least I can say that I played Harvard.

We googled the cost of shirts that read “SECURITY” to put on the student ushers. Only $10 with one day shipping on Amazon Prime! And cop costumes were only $22. And bonus: they featured ripaway pants and user reviews like “Great for a wannabe Magic Mike!”

And that’s when I realized how big I sounded. Lateif also wanted to add Harvard to his resume, so he can forever namedrop that he once stopped a massacre at Harvard. It was a feverish sleep that night. How was it that doing an engagement at the most wellendowed university in the country would mean putting professors in sexy cop uniforms, crowdfunding for security, and bringing in my own armed militia? In the morning, Terry called me. “I talked to the Provost and explained the situation. They’re going to pay for all the security detail. They take this very seriously and said it wouldn’t be an issue.”

Would Lateif really bring an armed militia ﬁve hours away from New Jersey to protect me?

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I could relate. It was hard to navigate the world in your 30s. He was a sensitive guy, more than you’d think by the way he told jokes. When he spoke to me that night, it was in a calm, serious tone — like the voice of a recovered addict, of having been through something and survived. He wanted to know about my parents and my brother. He wanted to know because I kept hinting at it, wanting to be asked, the way you want to rub a canker sore with your tongue. The fact that he had a bad reputation made it easier. And he had stories he wanted to tell too. He told me everything — how he gained the weight and why. It’s a funny thing about people, how much they’re covering up. He told the story of his life in the same deadpan delivery he’d used on stage and I said, “That’s it Jim. That’s your stand-up act.” I wasn’t wearing any clothes and we had sex again, this time standing up against the doorway. It was the sort of sex you’d be interested to see yourself having — the kind that rarely looks as good as it feels. After that, we wrapped ourselves in blankets on the cold, tile floor of his kitchen, and I asked what was the worst thing that ever happened to him, and for some reason he told me. I won’t repeat Jim’s story here, but it was the kind of thing that broke your heart even while you were laughing, only you didn’t feel the break until much later. It had to do with a woman. I felt it that morning during my cab ride home, in the orange wash of dawn, looking into the windows of other people’s cars. The driver wore multicolored beads in his hair and every time he turned to check his blind spot, the beads clicked together. Jim and I kept sleeping together. We sort of fell into a relationship, the way you slip into warm water. Neither of us seemed to notice how it happened. He often made me this pasta dish. It was nothing special — garlicky red sauce, penne — but he always went to the trouble of carefully grating tiny curls of Parmesan, the same-sized heap on each of our pasta piles. That stuck with me. Still, it didn’t last. Sleeping with a comedian is not the same as dating one. It was strange to hear a long, terrible fight shrink into one of Jim’s punch lines. Or worse, to hear my own bad qualities — the way I chopped vegetables so loudly that the cutting board rattled, or the highpitched turn my voice took on whenever my father called — tossed off at a bar. “Don’t worry,” Jim said, when I protested. “The world is full of people having the wrong impression of us,” as though he didn’t have anything to do with it. After our relationship ended, we became friends, which isn’t something I normally do with people I’ve seen naked. But I’d confided so much in Jim, the confessions felt like entering a series of doors I couldn’t return through. It seemed like there could be nothing worse than letting him loose in the world, suddenly just a stranger filled with my secrets. Plus I assumed he was a still hung up on me. I was still hung up on him, and occasionally I’d walk into a room and smell the same peppery scent of his cologne and that would be enough to unhinge me. It’s strange, when the smell of dinner seasoning is enough to unhinge you.

This was my friend Tina who can be a real ball-buster. Really, she just talks out of turn but so much so that men need a special name for it. For a few years, she worked as a flight attendant and a lot of men really liked her. She’s a redhead too, which seemed to help. She could tell you stories about those years that would make you never want to leave the house. Or, I guess, they might excite you. It depends. Anyway, when I met Jim that first night, I was sitting under the rotating globe watching red triangles and green trapezoids float over my hands. He walked over to me and said he’d like to take me home. He had the posture of a man uncomfortable with his weight, maybe with his whole body, his hands placed delicately over his stomach as though to hide it. I knew the posture because I’d recently gone through my own kind of transformation. Was this part of his trick for taking women to bed? Approaching them with a kind of humility he never showed on stage? It worked. Whatever it was, it worked.

For a while, I was sleeping with a man I’d met through a friend. He had a bad reputation for sleeping with women and never calling them again. He wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and though I’d heard jokes like his before, he had a deliberate way of delivering them that tricked you into thinking they were something new. It had to do with timing. Especially when he was up on a stage and the audience was drunk and susceptible — everybody laughed. That’s how I met him. I was listening to him tell jokes at a dive bar called Pete’s that had a rotating globe with multicolored shapes, and my friend said, “Do you wanna meet him? I’ll introduce you.”

106107 entertained the thought of staying too long and being buried. What I remember most about that night was that fucking Jim was pretty similar to fucking anybody. Nude, I didn’t notice his extra weight — he was like anybody else, an arrangement of skin and body. He moved like an athletic person and he smelled like green chewing gum. It was only afterward when he pulled the covers up to his chin that I remembered the way he looked in clothes, how uncomfortable.

I went home with Jim that night, telling myself we’d just talk, but there was a corner of my mind — like a light on in the top ﬂoor of a dark building — knowing that maybe I’d let him get away with something. He lived in a basement apartment. Through the window, there was only a dirty horizon line, as though the building were sinking into the street. For a moment, I BEING JIM AMY SILVERBERG

THE PARTICULARS OF

AMY SILVERBERG

A few months later, I went to another one of Jim’s shows and I brought Tina with me.

I was sure Tina had sent him. She was trying to help. My parents were separating and I was working as an accountant. I’m in my 30s, so their separating shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. I couldn’t explain it. My younger brother wasn’t doing well, mental-health-wise, so there was that too. I spent a lot of time napping and looking at old photo albums. I had this one leather-bound album my parents had given me for my high school graduation, and I studied each photograph as though I were preparing for a test. One in particular, in which my brother had a parrot on his shoulder, and their heads were bent together, as though conspiring.

108 109 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS of the pasta, of the tiny Parmesan curls. But it was a different love story than the one I had in mind. It was a story about a woman back home, in Nebraska, who had wanted Jim to marry her. “We’d been together a long time,” he said, “before I moved out here. I tried to meet somebody else. I tried to forget about her; I tried to lose myself in other people.” He told jokes about her, about their relationship, but it wasn’t like the jokes he’d told about me. There was a new tenderness in his voice, even the way he said her name, as though the name alone was not just a name, but a feeling.

Tina kept doing it to me, looking at me with her mouth wide open like a cornhusk doll in which all of the features are exaggerated. In my ear, she whispered, “This is the best he’s ever been.”

“Well I thought, why not announce it here? We’re getting married,” he said, and whole room erupted in applause, like a studio audience prompted by a cue card. I remembered what Jim said about the world being ﬁlled with wrong impressions, and I couldn’t decide just then if his bad reputation was wrong, or exactly right. Maybe he’d simply always been loyal to another kind of happiness. It had not occurred to me that he had also been looking for a temporary salve, for a little pain relief in the form of an arrangement of skin and bones, of another body. Tina and I looked at each other. When I managed to look up at the stage at Jim, his face was grim. I felt Tina’s small hand grip mine. Tina knew my family too, she’d come to the hospital for people with emotional problems to visit my brother, and she was capable of staying on the phone for a long time just listening to me breathe. We knew each other from high school time, which now felt like a few lives ago. “He’s always been a fucking asshole,” she whispered.

Jim took a sip of water and scanned the audience. I could see the shine of sweat on his forehead, slick in the overhead light. He placed his hands over his stomach, the unconscious gesture he made in between thoughts. I felt him pause over me and I wondered if the rest of the audience saw it too — if they knew we’d been in love. Jim wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “I’m gonna tell you all something I hadn’t planned on saying.”

I didn’t wait for anything else. I stood up and walked slowly toward the door, past rows of sitting people, knocking against their knees, feeling everybody’s eyes on me. It was cold outside. Though I couldn’t feel it, I saw my breath as I hailed a cab. The redfaced driver asked me where I wanted to go. A pigeon careened drunkenly passed the window, and I thought about the parrot my brother used to own. In those last days, it survived eating stale cheerios out of a box it had found wedged beneath the kitchen pantry. It was strange what you could get used to. Inside the damp smelling taxi, a laminated photo of a smiling woman hung from the rear view“Tellmirror.me a joke about your ugly wife,” I said. The driver turned to look at me over the seat, and I saw my own face in the rearview mirror, waiting for my insult, to receive whatever I deserved. He shifted the car into drive. He said, “Just repeat the address please.”

I hoped he would launch into the story he told me, the one about his sister falling into a lake and almost drowning when he was 12, and that night, he’d been so stressed he’d eaten all of the junk food his mother had brought for the trip, until he had to vomit because there was nowhere else for the food to go. Ever since then, he had trouble with eating — a conundrum, he called it. It wasn’t funny the way I said it, but Jim had a way of slanting it differently, you couldn’t help but laugh. I was glad I hadn’t ever repeated the story, especially to Tina, who I’d been tempted to tell. I would have butchered it. “I want to tell you guys a love story,” Jim began. I felt my pulse quicken. I thought suddenly

Tina jutted her elbow into my ribs.

AMY SILVERBERG

When we arrived, people were waiting in line, stomping out the weather on the sidewalk and exhaling puffs of white breath. People were paying for tickets. When Jim and I had ﬁrst met, he’d been lucky to get an actual stage, let alone get paid for it. I told the bouncer my name and he waved us in. Tina and I sat in the front row. As soon as Jim began, I knew his act was worth the money people paid. It wasn’t just his delivery or his timing. He was saying things no one had heard before, the particulars of being Jim. I saw it in the audience’s reaction, which was what Jim had taught me to look for — the way they looked at each other in surprise, as though they couldn’t believe what was happening, being made to laugh this way, like it was being pried from their mouths against their control.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT VELVET?

RUTH MADIEVSKY I want to slip inside the tree that faces my bedroom window, to wear its branches like sleeves and to be the tree’s blood, the tree’s liver and throat, to hold photosynthesis on my tongue, the xylem and phloem of it slow-dripping like molasses, dark beer from a tap that started flowing 385 million years earlier, before the dinosaurs, before the first mother held her young to her breast.

RUTH MADIEVSKY that makes me feel like every hair on my body is running away? This is my least favorite genre of friction, worse even than the screech of tires across pavement or the sound of a knife fucking a plate. What I am trying to say is, the key is widowed without the lock. Sometimes I think revulsion is the only way to know I’m really here. Not everything that moves is alive— not viruses, not wind, not this feeling creeping through me that should have been left in the womb longer. I shouldn’t have led with the velvet. What I mean is, sometimes little things like touching a pillow the wrong way send me into the wordless, chrome place where my insides are safety pins. At least in there it’s quiet. At least for now the pins are closed.

I want to sleep in the tree’s pocket and have epiphanies about my sexuality. want to look at literally anything the way my neighborhood raccoons look at each other, the ferocity of their love enough to power a casino, to light all the lamps in all the slot machines the way rods and cones light the eye. Humans have the most boring hearts of any animal. Ours can’t turn popsicle in winter like the wood frog’s, or propel our blood six feet skyward like the giraffe’s. We’re lucky if they can survive our hot dogs and cigarettes, if they can keep the lights on in our brains and kidneys. feel bad when the banana cream pie I shared with a friend gloops through my arteries like an omen. I feel worse when it doesn’t.

BORING HEART

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OBSESSIONS: QUIET CAR JUSTICE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP DAVID LITT

This brings me to my real obsession: quiet car justice. Because sometimes — once every two trips, say — the sanctity of this mobile oasis is violated. Preening ﬁnance bros. Drunk Phillies fans. Someone (gasp, shudder, heaven forbid) who decides to take a call.

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A few months after the election, I dispensed quiet car justice myself for the very ﬁrst time. Nestling in my seat afterward, I felt as if my skin were aglow. Yes, some of it was the returning silence, so rare in the outside world. But it was more than that. The quiet car is a place where norms are upheld. Where popular will is respected, and the whims of selﬁsh egomaniacs are not.

Over the last year, I’ve frequently found myself taking the train from New York (home to media and publishing) to Washington (home, these days, to corruption, incompetence, and my apartment). In other countries, European countries, I imagine train travel means chic surroundings and ﬂirtatious glances at godlike Swedes. In the United States, train travel means the inevitability of delay, the possibility of derailment, and seats that smell faintly but unmistakably of misspent time. And yet I love it. I look forward to it. The reason? The quiet car. The uninitiated might assume the quiet car is the railroad equivalent of noise-cancelling headphones. But there’s no soundprooﬁng. No streamlining. The only thing setting it apart from the rest of the train is the sign politely reminding passengers that talking must be kept to a whisper. Without any technology to disrupt the system or bouncer to keep order, the quiet car is quiet only by agreement. It’s a miracle of civilization, not design.

DAVID LITT

For a few brief hours after leaving New York City, the world is fair. The people are good. In the quiet car, justice prevails. And when the train pulls into Washington, I ﬁnd it just a little bit easier to live in 2018.

In that moment, a hush falls upon the quiet car. Every eye rolls in the direction of the offender. A wave of excitement mixed with dread runs through each of us, as though we’re 18th-century Londoners about to witness a public hanging. We hold our breath. Who will step forward? And then a self-appointed executioner rises. Stepping toward the loudmouth — or, more likely, craning over the seat — they prepare to deliver the fatal blow. “Yeah, hi, excuse me. This is, um, the quiet car?” The tone is a perfect blend of righteous condescension, a cross between the Ten Commandments and NPR.

Here’s the thing. It always works. Every time. The talker goes silent. The phone is hung up, the discussion moved to the cafe area. The oasis is blissful and peaceful once again. I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone refused to obey the sign, insisted that they would keep talking and by the way screw you for butting in. But I’ve never found out. I’m not sure I ever will.

SARAH LABRIE

The man’s name was Thomas. He was a law student at the University of Houston and he was 35. When he was younger, he’d been a student of art history in France at the Sorbonne and then gone on to study film. He’d spent five years trying to become a director and now, he told his French-speaking acquaintance, he regretted those years bitterly. He’d been naïve. He’d had his head in the clouds. Now he had his feet planted firmly on the ground. He felt bad about wasting his youth. It was the biggest regret of his life.

Listening in, I wondered: Had he always been a white supremacist or had he discovered this latent interest after failing to become a filmmaker? If he’d managed to make it in the field of art history or film, would his future have turned out differently? I couldn’t help thinking of Hitler and his two-time rejection from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. I thought about what it means that the all-consuming desire to create can warp itself, in certain people, into the desire to Thendestroy.there were the parts of their conversation I didn’t understand, French words that slipped past me under the pounding beat of the disco music playing over Black Hole’s speakers. Why, for example, did the person Thomas was talking to, suddenly, out of nowhere, reference the flight of the Jews across the desert? Why did he make a point of noting that someone he’d spoken to about a job recently was “part Indian”? And why were they both speaking about the German language and about the Netherlands? Was his friend a neo-Nazi too?

I texted my boyfriend who told me to leave. I texted Ellen who also told me to leave, but not before I complimented the man on his shoes. I decided to stay. I’d never seen a white supremacist in the wild before — or at least not one so eager to be identified — and I didn’t think I would again. I had questions. But before I could walk over to his table, a friend of his arrived at the cafe and greeted him in French. The man in the red New Balances magnified a browser window, blocking his desktop screen. The two continued their conversation, loudly enough for me to overhear, in French, a language I speak fluently, which is not something they could have known.

Last December, I ﬂew from Los Angeles to Houston, my hometown, on a work trip for a choral piece commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale. On the trip also were the piece’s composer, Ellen Reid, and our researcher, Sayd Randle, an anthropologist based in New Haven. One night, after a full day of work, we met up to debrief at Black Hole, a coffee shop in the city’s arts district. We each had a glass of wine. It was late, the cafe was half empty and we weren’t paying as much attention as we should have been, perhaps, to the people around us, listening to us talk.

IRONY AND THE NEW WHITE SUPREMACY

At some point, I looked up and caught the man sitting one table over from us Googling Confederate flags. I dismissed it — the cafe sat between two local universities and I figured he was working on a project for class. Later, I looked up again and saw that that he’d made the flag his desktop background, angling his screen ever so slightly to face me, as if to make sure I saw.

I realized that my brain was working overtime to justify what I was looking at. Earlier I’d made eye contact with the man and smiled as he sat down near us and he had not smiled back. I’d spent the past few months reading about the rise of white nationalist groups buoyed by Donald Trump’s election. For some reason, it had not occurred to me that their members might frequent the same coffee shops I did.

After Sayd and Ellen left for the night, I stayed behind to work. I saw then that the man was wearing a pair of red New Balances that looked recently purchased, weeks after New Balance had been declared the ofﬁcial shoe of the so-called alt-right.

The choral piece was a research-based project whose text I’d been hired to build from archival material and recorded interviews. After the three of us consolidated our data and discussed our plans for the following day, our conversation turned, as it often did, to what it felt like for each of us to navigate our respective male-dominated ﬁelds. At one point, I mentioned how exhausting it was to feel as if others thought the progress I’d made as a writer was the result of pity on the part of white gatekeepers, when really, I’d been working hard for years, clawing my way forward across an unforgiving landscape in which it often felt impossible to make any headway.

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After Thomas’s friend left, I left as well. It was after midnight and I was tired. More than that, I felt wrung out and empty and mad. Nothing about the experience seemed funny or intriguing anymore. I’d been tacitly threatened and made to feel scared in my own neighborhood, near the street where I’d grown up, in a city I loved. I knew people from other parts of the country expected this kind of thing from Texas, but I didn’t.

SARAH LABRIE

Houston boasts one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the country, and is one of the only major American cities that is not majority white. The city has a black mayor who followed on the heels of a two-term mayor who was, at the time, the only openly lesbian mayor in the country. Though my friends from the East Coast tend to assume the South is a backward bastion of racism and ignorance, the ﬁrst time I’d ever felt blatantly discriminated against was in my 20s

Some groups espouse anti-Semitic and racist views, while others favor anti-feminist or antiIslam platforms instead. Figuring out who adheres to which aspect of the movement — or who is taking it seriously at all — can be difﬁcult because so much of it depends on ironic posturing.

It’s important not to underestimate how much this combination of irony, internet culture, and far-right politics appeals to reporters. In an interview for Vice News conducted at a conference hosted by the National Policy Institute, Spencer’s nonprofit, reporter Elle Reeve calls Spencer out as a fraud, accusing him of having accomplished nothing more than “[figuring] out how to manipulate journalists’ fixation on Twitter.” Spencer doesn’t disagree. “We understand PR,” he answers, after pointing out the fact that she’s interviewing him at that moment. “We understand how to manipulate journalists.” Even journalists who dislike writing about people like Spencer and Anglin have done so because not writing about them means not talking about the problems they represent — yet another irony of the movement, and further evidence of the ways in which they’ve deployed social media’s predilection for ironic reversals to their advantage.

Irony, Jonathan Lear writes in his book of lectures on the subject, A Case for Irony, is “a form of denial with the purpose to minimize the importance of the object.” Sarcasm, meanwhile, “is a form of aggressive discharge.” Neither works as a weapon against an enemy that doesn’t care whether its opposition is trying to minimize it or not. The left’s sardonic criticism of Trump’s buffoonery only strengthened old-guard conservatives’ faith in his ability to lead. It’s impossible to ﬁght an enemy you don’t know, and Democrats and Republicans didn’t seem to be speaking, even remotely, the same language. The day I visited the Civil Rights museum also happened to be the day Trump won, and I remember feeling shocked when all my latent suspicions appeared suddenly to have been justiﬁed.

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Movement leader Richard Spencer popularized the phrase “alt-right” to make his ideals more palatable to mainstream journalists, but the term itself actually comprises several disparate groups. In a study of the far right’s manipulation of the media, Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis describe both “an aggressive trolling culture […] that loathes establishment liberalism and conservatism, embraces irony and in-jokes, and uses extreme speech to provoke anger in others,” and “a loosely afﬁliated aggregation of blogs, forums, podcasts, and Twitter personalities united by a hatred of liberalism, feminism, and multiculturalism.”

The problem wasn’t just that the left was deploying irony as a failed weapon. It was that the deployment of that same weapon by the far right had, at the same time, turned out to be wildly successful. In forums and on social media, white nationalist rabble-rousers deployed comic cynicism and sarcasm to turn people dabbling with white supremacist ideas into full-blown devotees of the neo-Nazi movement.

Determining whether a person is sarcastic or sincere online can often be impossible without some sort of referent. Adherents to the movement gleefully exploit the confusion engendered by this phenomenon “to spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture,” Marwick and Lewis write.

The Daily Stormer, which The Atlantic called “arguably the leading hate site on the internet,” featured text that mimicked the caustic tone of gossip sites like Gawker. Its founder, Andrew Anglin according to reporter Luke O’Brien, drew inspiration both from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. (“One Alinsky rule in particular stuck with Anglin,” O’Brien writes, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”) When GoDaddy stopped hosting the site, Anglin reportedly wrote that he’d been joking all along. His was an “[i]ronic Nazism disguised as real Nazism disguised as Ironic Nazism.”

But then, in the months that followed, I discovered I’d been wrong.

SARAH LABRIE

when I moved to New York for graduate school, and encountered wealthy Manhattanites who appeared never to have met a black person before in their lives. I’d spent that week at home showing the city as I knew it off to my creative team: my school, my favorite bookstore, my childhood home. But in the days following the incident at the cafe, I would catch myself doing a double take every time I sat down next to a white person at a restaurant. Each time someone in front of me didn’t hold a door open or failed to make eye contact, I would wonder: Did every white person harbor secret neo-Nazi tendencies? I’d had black and white friends my whole life, and had learned to move more or less seamlessly between both worlds. Now, I could tell, that no longer mattered. The rules had changed and the game was no longer one I felt equipped to play. In truth, I’d started to feel this way the month before, in October 2016, on an earlier research trip we’d taken to Memphis, where I’d visited the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel. Next to well-known resistance figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, exhibits highlighted the work of Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, and Claudette Colvin, less famous activists who nearly gave their lives to change racist laws. The museum was full of oral histories and life-sized recreations of landmark events in the Civil Rights movement. Hearing the Freedom Fighters’ voices and seeing what they’d been up against brought home to me the extraordinary value and difficulty of their achievements. Back then, the nation was still at the height of the frenzy that surrounded Trump’s presidential campaign. I moved, most of the time, in a cloud of cynicism and frustration. I remember wondering if the generation of activists that had risen to take the place of people like Hamer and Nash would achieve what its forebears had. Was it still possible to effect change in the real world? More and more it seemed that the answer was no, that the people who tried wound up speaking in echo chambers on Twitter and Facebook to those who already agreed with them, while protests became sensationalist stories feeding the news cycle. I also suspected that I was part of the problem: as a prep school student in Houston, and later as a student at Brown, I’d learned to validate everyone’s feelings, to ask questions instead of making demands, to make sure everyone around me felt safe and secure enough to voice their opinions. When I wanted to express displeasure or disdain, I couched it in sarcasm or irony, using coded attempts at shaming my opposition rather than outright argument. It was this same irony I heard every day in the voices of political pundits on MSNBC and in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. I’d been indoctrinated so deeply in this mode of communication that I no longer knew how to fight back any other way. The same went, it sometimes seemed, inexcusably, for our chosen leaders on the left.

While I watched, men in hard hats and construction uniforms used paint rollers to erase the word and make the wall white again. Even after the wall got its ﬁnal coat of paint, I still thought about the message whenever I passed that particular stretch of the 101, imagining the work it must have taken an amateur grafﬁti artist to put the letters there in the dark. I bet the

I took a brochure from a stack on a table near the door and sat down on a bench outside to read. Past visitors to the Chapel included Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchú, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama. The structure itself had been constructed to serve as an environment in which those who fought against injustice could be recognized and rewarded. For years, the Óscar Romero awards, honoring heroic human rights activity, had been presented there. It occurred to me that with his paintings, Rothko managed to say something without words, that was, nevertheless, universally understood. His art existed outside language, functioning as a wordless inciting force for change.

I wondered if it wasn’t this conversation Thomas had been retaliating against, if his antagonism hadn’t been a direct response to the story we were trying to tell. While it was true that Thomas was out there in the streets, spreading his message, it was also true that we were fighting back against him and his kind with what tools we had. I imagined the Los Angeles Master Chorale singing louder and louder, making their voices heard over the din of people like him. Our research trip ended. We all left Houston and went back to our respective homes. In February 2017, I started volunteering with students at a high school in South Los Angeles, mostly first-generation Americans whose parents were Mexican and Latin American immigrants. I constantly worried about what would happen to my students and their families under the Trump regime. One afternoon, I was driving home from class, stuck on the 101 freeway, when I looked up. Someone had painted IMPEACH in 10-foot-high black letters on a white wall looking out over the traffic. The letters were clumsy, poorly drawn but legible, the black paint bleeding into the white cinderblock wall. In their ugliness, they overtook the landscape, and became, for a few minutes, the only thing I could see.

In her book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Angela Nagle points to Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo who was shot and killed after a boy fell into his habitat. The event sparked widespread outrage on social media, which then became the object of derision and mockery among critics who accused the outraged of virtue signaling. Ultimately, the far right co-opted pictures of Harambe to troll liberals and left-leaning celebrities, until the famous dead gorilla transformed, somehow, into a symbol of white “Givennationalism.theHarambe meme became a favorite of alt-right abusers,” Nagle writes, was it then just old-fashioned racism dressed up as Internet-savvy satire, as it appealed most to those seeking to mock liberal sensitivities? Or was it a clever parody of the inane hysteria and faux-politics of liberal Internet-culture? Do those involved in such memes any longer know what motivated them and if they themselves are being ironic or not? Is it possible that they are both ironic parodists and earnest actors in a media phenomenon at the same time? This is another way in which the white nationalist movement weaponizes irony — by tangling its critics up so hopelessly in language that it sometimes seems as if words aren’t up to the task of describing it at all. In an article about internet-speak for The Baffler in 2013, Evgeny Morozov wrote, “Old trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything else these days, has been hacked.” The far right picked up on the ways in which language can be warped, distorted, and rendered free of meaning on the internet through irony, and, rather than writing a think piece about it, exploited this weakness merrily to its benefit. Back in Houston, the morning after the Confederate flag incident, I went back to Black Hole. There was Thomas, standing in front of me in line. He ordered a coffee from the girl behind the counter and I planted myself squarely in his path. I met his eyes and kept my gaze neutral. He tossed me an expression I can only describe as a smirk and headed through the glass doors of the cafe, toward the Infiniti SUV he’d double-parked in the coffee shop’s cramped lot. The cashier waved as he left, and told him to have a nice day. Once he was gone, I fantasized about outing him to her, just like I’d fantasized about confronting him the night before. Instead, I paid for my coffee, left the cafe, and walked down Montrose Boulevard toward the city’s museum district, which was less than a mile away. The Rothko Chapel, situated alone on a grassy block near Houston’s Menil Collection, has eight concrete walls and a polished concrete floor. What light does get in comes through a partially covered skylight set into the pointed ceiling. On each wall is a triptych of Rothko canvases, each painted black, each panel painted differently. Some of them feature wild, hurried brushstrokes, and others look solid, as if the layer of black paint was applied all at once. The paintings absorb all light and sound, and the silence inside the chapel when it is empty is not like any I have ever known. Set in the center of the room are comfortable wooden pews and the effect of sitting on them, depending on one’s mood, can feel like looking through rows of windows into deep space or like sitting in an empty space bordered on all sides by locked doors.

The choral piece I had come to Houston to research was called dreams of the new world. It follows the course of the western frontier from Memphis to Houston to Los Angeles, stretching from a period just after the Civil War to today. The night before, while Thomas listened, my team and I had been discussing Robert Church, a freed slave who became a millionaire in Memphis during the Reconstruction era. A respected entrepreneur, Church helped Memphis become a hub of black artistic and commercial activity, and his granddaughter, Sara Roberta Church, had been the ﬁrst black woman in Memphis elected to public ofﬁce. The Church family was also instrumental in helping African-American people get and keep the right to vote.

Inside the chapel, my breathing slowed. I sat on one of the pews and thought about Thomas driving his Inﬁniti SUV around the city, double-parking in tiny cafe parking lots, going to classes at the University of Houston, still wishing he’d become a ﬁlmmaker, and, when no one was watching, terrorizing people who didn’t look like him. Meanwhile, in the weeks since Trump’s election, I’d called my Congress people, donated to the ACLU, and protested in the streets, and still, I’d never felt so powerless, so certain that nothing I could ever do would begin to be enough.

SARAH LABRIE

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thousands of people who take that freeway to work each day do too. What it came to represent for me is not just a statement of revolution and resistance, but a hope and a knowledge and an understanding, a continuation of what I’d started to ﬁgure out in the Rothko Chapel.

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If a group’s only MO is destruction, it stands to reason that eventually it will destroy itself. What

works of art, huge, un-Instagrammable protest murals, new classical music performances, and other work viewers have to engage with sincerely and in real life to experience — that we need most right now. In that same vein, what might it mean to gaze clear-eyed at the far-right agenda, admit that we are both frightened by it and ashamed of the role liberal complacency played in its rise, and start by building our weapons from there? Rather than denying what can’t be denied and minimizing what can’t be minimized, thus forfeiting the fight altogether? I’m not suggesting the left abandon cynicism, only that we stop affording it a weight it can’t carry under the current administration. Leaving kneejerk irony and the rewards it offers behind might be difficult at first. But it might also be worth it, if it means we get to take back the actual world, and build in it something new.

The New York Times calls the “alt-right” isn’t a monolith, but a swarm of tribes with different agendas, some of which radically oppose one another. Ultimately, it’s not difficult to imagine them all simply tearing each other apart as the entire movement implodes. Until that point, I wonder if we shouldn’t broaden our perspective. We should not only work on undermining the white supremacist agenda, but also the cultural environment that helped it thrive and grow in the first place. Irony was an integral part of that cultural environment. I wonder then if sincerity is the last radical act left. Perhaps it is time to say what we mean. This may be difficult in a conversation that so often takes place online. The left has, historically, held up social media as a catalyst for change, but, by this point, the right has caught on to that potential and run with it, with the president himself taking Twitter as his primary vehicle of communication. While social media platforms have served as a galvanizing force for women of color and others whose voices the mainstream media tends to ignore, they also tend to reward extremes, making political movements easy to derail by those who know how to game them (something Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election more than proves). The primary goal of Google, Facebook and Twitter is to capture users’ attention for the longest possible amount of time; how that attention gets captured — whether through hate speech, racist memes, far right propaganda, or progressive discourse — has, for years, been none of their Andconcern.yet, once upon a time, social media was supposed to save us. In Kill All Normies, for example, Nagle recounts Twitter’s placement of itself at the center of the “Arab Spring” when activists in Africa and the Middle East reportedly used the platform to organize collectively and bring down oppressive regimes. By the time those revolutions gave way to civil war, widespread violence, and, in some cases, the return to power of the same military dictatorships that had been overthrown, Twitter had removed itself from the conversation. Nagle lists the fawning paeans published about social media over the course of the movement, including Heather Brooke’s The Revolution Will be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War and Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere. She cites a similar example in Occupy. Twitter and Facebook have unquestionably failed the left. The conviction that these companies are supposed to operate in the service of some ultimate humanitarian good reminds me now of the way certain techies fetishize Elon Musk’s plan to save humanity by moving to Mars. There, rather than succumbing to the planet’s toxic atmosphere and lack of natural resources, humans will somehow build a lasting, utopian society where we don’t repeat any of the same mistakes we’ve made here. It also calls to mind the reverence of futurist Ray Kurzweil, and his theory of an eventual human merger with machines that may make us all knowing and immortal. This future, which he calls the Singularity, is (much like the Rapture) always approaching but never quite here. I wonder if rather than looking to technology to fix us at some point in the future, it might not make sense to look at where it has brought us. I also wonder whether it might not be the work unlikely to make any kind of splash online — odd non-denominational chapels featuring priceless

SARAH LABRIE

EARLY PASTORAL

THEME PSALM

SHARON OLDS

I did not push my baby brother in, when he fell into the swimming pool in the woods at our father’s parents’, was not even near by, he was talking to the baby on the surface of the water, who was talking to him when he tipped over and went in, as if back into the sky from which he had descended on the last day that was my mother’s baby. They say he went straight to the bottom of the handmade clay pool, and when my mother got to the edge he was lying near the drain, smiling. She dove in, in her clothes, like a bird in its feathers, wish had seen that, Olympus moment in my mom’s life, she brought him and his smile up into the air again. Sometimes that pool was dry, like a pit a child might be put in, like the one Joseph was put in, when they took from him his coat of many colors, the most beautiful thing in the world, like being your mother’s baby -- you were magic, then, and not again. And something took him and threw him back where he had come from, and she dove from heaven into the deep to recover her heart’s desire. Then the pool was drained, no more guppying about, like a tailless boy, a pole-less tad, but just the mountain sun, around the baked and cracking rim, with clay ducks hissing with dryness, and if you were invited you could go into the bush of thorns and find a massive blackberry and put it in your mouth and slowly crush it, all for yourself, your solitary voluptuous mouth.

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There were corn-cob salt and pepper shakers, and corn-cob napkin racks, and corn-cob tea cosies, and picture frames -the cabin where my father’s parents lived was chowdered with knickknacks in the shape of ears of corn, because their name was Cobb. Part of me, the Cobb part, liked it, there was a theme to things, we were linked to a real vegetable, an archaic being like an ancestor, a totem of golden nourishment, we were kin to a pattern, a grid, a lovely mounded and depressed order -and part of me had seen my mother’s lip curl, when she saw the cornsome bric-a-brac. The kernels of his genes seemed to displease her -- think she saw them in me, my DNA a maize half hers, half wrong. But I loved to run my thumb over the abacus glaze of chromosomal grains -- to know I was my father, in a way my mother was not, she was a Cobb in name only. And it was a sight to see my mother say my father’s sister’s name, to see her hold herself above such folly, she pronounced it like a sentence on Cobbs: Cornelia.

STEPHANIE WASHBURN, HERE ABOUT 3, 2013, FOUND PHOTOGRAPH AND SCRUB BRUSH, 5.5 X 7.5 INCHES

PASADENA ODE SHARON OLDS (for my mother) When I drove into your home town, for the first time, a big pine-cone hurtled down in front of the hood! I parked and retrieved it, the stomen tip green and wet. An hour later, I realized that you had never once thrown anything at me. And, as days passed, the Ponderosa oval opened, its bracts stretched apart, and their pairs of wings on top dried and lifted. Thank you for every spoon, and fork, and knife, and saucer, and cup.

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Thank you for keeping the air between us kempt, empty, aeolian. Never a stick, or a perfume bottle, or pinking shears -- as if you were saving an inheritance of untainted objects to pass down to me. You know why I’m still writing you, don’t you. I miss you unspeakably, as I have since nine months after I was born, when you first threw something at me while keeping hold of it -- then threw it again, and again and again -- when you can throw the same thing over and over, it’s as if you have a magic power, an always replenishable instrument. Of course if you had let go of the big beaver-tail hairbrush -if it had been aimed at my head -- would have had it! I’m letting you have it, here, casting a line out, to catch you, then coming back, then casting one out, to bind you to me, flinging this flurry of make-a-wish milkweed.

BINGESPEAK ALEXANDER STERN

MARTIN KERSELS, FAT IGGY 1 , 2008, BLACK AND WHITE C-PRINT, 13 X 19 INCHES ©MARTIN KERSELS / COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY

In a little-watched 1947 comedy, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, directed by Preston Sturges, the title character, an accountant, takes shelter against the bureaucratic drudgery of his existence with a literal wall of clichés. Diddlebock covers every inch of the space next to his desk with wooden tiles engraved with cautious slogans like “Success is just around the corner” and “Look before you leap.” Head down, green visor shielding him from the light, he passes the years under the aegis of cliché, until one day he’s ﬁred, forced to pry the clichés off his wall one by one, and face the world — that is, Sturges’s screwball world — as it is.

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The French word “cliché,” as Sturges must have known, originally referred to a metal cast from which engravings could be made. Diddlebock’s tiles point to one of the primary virtues of cliché: it is reliable, readymade language to calm our nerves and get us through the day. Clichés assure us that this has all happened before — in fact, it’s happened so often that there’s a word, phrase, or saying for it. This points to one of the less remarked upon uses of language: the way it can, rather than interpret the world or make it available, cover it up. As George Orwell and Hannah Arendt recognized, this can be socially and politically dangerous. Arendt’s Eichmann spoke almost exclusively in clichés, which, she wrote, “have the socially recognizable function of protecting us against reality.” And, referring to go-to political phrases like “free peoples of the world” and “stand shoulder to shoulder,” Orwell wrote: A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words

As words age, we tend to forget the work they did to wrench open a door into the world in the ﬁrst place. In certain cases, this means the door effectively closes, sealing off the reality behind the word, even as it names it. for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

Orwell’s critique of political language was grounded in a belief that thinking and language are intertwined. Words, in his view, are not just vehicles for thoughts but make them possible, condition them, and can therefore distort them. Where words stagnate thought does too. Thus, ultimate control in 1984 is control over the dictionary. “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

all language, the word is doomed to fall short of the individual cases. It will ﬁt some instances better than others, and, applied too broadly, it will run the risk of distortion. Like pop stars and pop songs, words tend to devolve, at varying speeds, from breakthrough to banality, from innovative truth to insipid generalization we can scarcely bare to listen to.

Orwell worried not just about the insipid thinking conditioned and expressed by cliché, but also the damaging policies justified by euphemism and inflated, bureaucratic language in both totalitarian and democratic countries. “Such phraseology,” he wrote — as “pacification” or “transfer of population” — “is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

The problem is not that these phrases are meaningless or can’t be useful, but, like Diddlebock’s desperate clichés, they direct our thinking along a predetermined track that avoids unpleasant details. They take us away from the concrete and into their own abstracted realities, where policies can be contemplated and justified without reference to their real consequences. Even when we set out to challenge these policies, as soon as we adopt their prefab language we channel our thoughts into streams of recognizable opinion. The “existing dialect,” as Orwell puts it, “come[s] rushing in” to “do the job for you.” Language, in these cases, “speaks us,” to borrow a phrase from Heidegger. Our ideas sink under the weight of their own vocabulary into a swamp of jargon and cant. Of course politics is far from the only domain where language can serve to protect us from reality. There are many unsightly truths we screen with chatter. But how exactly is language capable of this? How do words come to forestall thought? TheI. tendency of abstracted and clichéd political language to hide the phenomena to which it refers is not unique. All language is reductive, at least to a degree. In order to say anything at all of reality, language must distill and thereby deform the world’s infinite complexity into finite words. Our names bring objects into view, but never fully and always at a price.

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Before the term “mansplaining,” for example, the frustration a woman felt before a yammering male egotist might have remained vague, isolated, impossible to articulate, unnameable (and all the more frustrating therefore). With the term, the egotist can be classed under a broader phenomenon, which can then be further articulated, explained, argued over, denied, et cetera. The word opens up a part, however small, of the world. (This domain, unconscious micro-behavior and its power dynamics, has received concentrated semantic attention of late: “microaggression,” “manspreading,” “power poses,” “implicit

But,bias”.)like

In our democracies words may not mask mass murder or mass theft, but they do become a means of skirting or skewing difﬁcult issues. Instead of talking about the newest scheme to pay fewer workers less money, “job creators” talk about “disruption.” Instead of talking about the end of fairly compensated and digniﬁed manual labor, politicians and journalists talk about the “challenges of the global economy.” Instead of talking about a campaign of secret assassinations that kill innocent civilians, military leaders talk about the “drone program” and its “collateral damage.”

These metaphors are dying since we use them without seeing them. We don’t see, except under special conditions, the line to be toed, the unhatched chickens we should resist counting, the dead horse we may have been flogging. We may even use these phrases without understanding the metaphor behind them. Thus, Orwell points out, we often find the phrase spelled “tow the line.” But they haven’t become ordinary words, like the river’s “mouth.” We’re much more aware of their metaphorical character and they are much more easily brought back to life. They remain metaphorical even if their metaphors usually lie dormant. This gives them the peculiar ability to express thoughts that haven’t, strictly speaking, been thought. We don’t so much use this kind of language as submit to it. This in-between character is what leaves cliché susceptible to the uses of ideology and selfdeception. We come to use cliché like it’s ordinary language with obvious, unproblematic meanings, but in reality, the language remains a particular and often skewed or softened interpretation of the phenomena. In politics and marketing, spin-doctors invent zombie language like this in a relatively transparent way — phrases that present themselves as names when they really serve to pre-interpret an issue. “Entitlement programs.” “A more connected world.” These phrases answer a question before it is asked; they try to forestall alternative ways of looking at what is referred to. Cliché is the bane of journalism not just for stylistic reasons, but also because it can betray a news story’s pretense of objectivity — its tendency to insinuate its own view into the Euphemisticreader.clichés are particularly good at preventing us from thinking about what they designate. Sometimes this is harmless: we go from “deadborn” to “stillborn.” Sometimes it isn’t. We go, as George Carlin documented, from “shell shock” to “battle fatigue” to “posttraumatic stress disorder,” to simply “PTSD.” By the time we’re done, the horrors of war have been replaced by the jargon of a car manual, and a social pathology is made into an individual one. To awaken the death and mutilation beneath the phrase takes an effort most users of the phrase won’t make. This is how a stylistic failure can pass into an ethical one. Language stands in the way of a clear view into an object. The particular gets buried beneath its name. We might broaden the definition of cliché here to include not just particular overused, unoriginal phrases and words, but a tendency in language in general to get stuck in this coma between life and death. Cliché is neither useful, “dead” literal language that we use unthinkingly to get us through the day, nor vibrant, living language meant to name

rather than some hard and fast distinction between the literal and the figurative. The oral “mouth” was once figurative too; it has just been dead longer. Clichés, as Orwell writes of them, are one step closer to life than river “mouths.” They are “dying,” he says. Not quite dead since they still function as metaphor, neither are they quite alive since they are far from a vibrant figurative characterizations of an object. Orwell’s examples include “toe the line,” “fishing in troubled waters,” “hotbed,” “swan song.”

When a word is new, the reality it opens up is too, and it remains ﬂuid to us. We can still experience the poetry of the word — we can see the reality as the coiner of the word might have. We can also see how the word approaches its object, and for that matter that it does approach the object from a certain perspective. But over time, the door can close and leave us only with a word, one that was never capable of completely capturing the thing to begin Nietzsche,with.

for example, rejected the notion that the German word for snake, Schlange , could live up to its object, since it “refers only to its winding [ schlingen means “to wind”] movements and could just as easily refer to a worm.” The idea that a medium evolving in such a partial, anthropocentric, and haphazard manner might be able to speak truth about the world, when it could only ever take a sliver of its objects into account, struck him as laughable. He famously wrote: What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms — in short a sum of human relations, which are poetically and rhetorically intensified, passed down, and embellished and which, after long use, strike a people as firm, canonical, and binding. Language is made up of countless corrupted, abused, misused, retooled, coopted, and eroded figures of speech. It is a museum of disfigured insights (arrayed alongside trendy innovations) that eventually congeal into the kind of insipid prattle we consider suitable for stating facts about the world. Still, we may not want to go as far as Nietzsche in denying language its pretension to objective truth simply because of its unseemly evolution. Language, in a certain sense, needs to be disfigured. In order to function at all, it must be disengaged and its origins forgotten. If using words constantly required the kind of poetic awareness and insight with which Adam named the animals — or anything approaching it — we’d be in perpetual thrall to the singularity of creation. We might have that kind of truth, but not the useful facts we need to manage our calendars and pay our bills. If the word for snake really did measure up to its object, it would be no less unique than an individual snake — more like a work of art than a word — and conceptually useless. Poetry, like nature, must die so we can put it to use. TakeII. the phrase the “mouth of the river” — an example Elizabeth Barry discusses in a book on Samuel Beckett’s use of cliché. We certainly don’t have an anatomical mouth in mind anymore when we use that phrase. The analogy that gave the river its mouth is, in this sense, no longer active, it has died and, in death, become an unremarkable, unconscious, and useful part of our language. This kind of metaphor death is typical of, perhaps even central to the history of language. As Nietzsche’s remarks on the word “snake” suggest, our sense that when we use “mouth” to refer to the cavity between our lips we are speaking more literally than when we use the phrase “mouth of a river” is something of an illusion. It is a product of time and amnesia,

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IIII.want to suggest now that in popular language today irony has become clichéd. Consider “binge-watching.” The phrase might seem too new to really qualify as a cliché. But, in our ever-accelerating culture a clever tweet can become a hackneyed phrase with a single heave of the internet. In “binge-watching” what has become clichéd is not a metaphor, but a particular tone — irony.

According to the OED, our sense of “binge” comes from a word originally meaning “to soak.” It has been used as slang to refer to getting drunk (“soaked”) since the 19th century. A Glossary of Northamptonshire words and phrases from 1854 helpfully reports that “a man goes to the alehouse to get a good binge, or to binge himself.” In the early 20th century the word was extended to cover any kind of spree, and even briefly, as a verb, to mean “pep up” as in “be encouraging to the others and binge them up.” Like most everything else, binging started to become medicalized in the 1950s. “Binge” was used in clinical contexts as a prefix to “eating” and “drinking,” and both concepts underwent diagnostic refinement in the second half of the century. Binge-eating first appeared in the DSM in 1987. Binge drinking is now defined by the NIH as five drinks for men and four for women in a two-hour period.

By the time “binge-watch” was coined and popularized ( Collins Dictionary ’s 2015 word of the year), the phrase “binge-drinking” had moved from the emergency room to the dorm room. The binge-drinkers themselves now refer to binge-drinking as “binge-drinking” while they’re binge-drinking. In a way, they’re taking the word back to its slang origins, but, in the meantime, it has accumulated some serious baggage.

It elevates the user above the concept of binge-drinking. If I actually had a problem with binge-drinking, the writer suggests, would I be talking about it like this? By ironically calling binge-drinking “binge-drinking,” binge-drinkers deﬂect anxiety that they might have a problem with binge-drinking. They preempt criticism or concern by seeming to confess everything up front.

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“Binge-watching” is of course formed on the model of “binge-drinking” and “binge-eating.”

The phenomenon is part of a larger incursion of the language of pathology into everyday life, where it has, in many contexts, replaced the language of morality. Disease is no longer just for sick people. Where we might have once worried about doing wrong, we now worry about being ill. One result is that a wealth of clinical language enters our everyday lexicon. These words are often not said with the clinical definition in mind. “I’m addicted to Breaking Bad/donuts/Zumba.” “I’m so OCD/ADD/anorexic.” “I’m such an alcoholic/a hoarder.” “I was stalking you on Facebook and I noticed…” They are uttered half-ironically to assure you that the utterer is aware that his or her behavior lies on a pathological continuum. But that very awareness is marshaled here as evidence that the problem is under control. It would only really be a problem if I didn’t recognize it, if I were in denial. This is a kind of automatic version of the talking cure. If I’m not embarrassed to call my binge-drinking “binge-drinking,” it must mean it’s not a problem. In effect, we hide these problems in plain sight, admitting to them so readily, with just the right dose of irony, that something new or interpret something old in a new way. This latter type of language figures or articulates its object, translating something in the world into words, modeling reality in language and making it available to us in a way it wasn’t before. The former, “dead” language need only point to its object. The trouble with cliché is that it plays dead. We use it as dead language, simply pointing at the world, when it is really figuring it in a particular way. It is language that has ceased to seem figurative without ceasing to figure, and it is this that accounts for its enormous usefulness in covering up the truth or reinforcing ideology. In cliché, blatant distortions wear the guise of mundane realities. In the process, it is not just language that is deadened, but experience itself.

The usage is ironic, since when the binge-drinkers call binge-drinking “binge-drinking,” they don’t mean it literally, the way the nurse does in the hospital the next morning. Take this example from Twitter. “I’m so blessed to formally announce that I will continue my career of binge drinking and self loathing at Louisiana state university!” The tweet is a familiar kind of self-deprecating irony that aims, most of all, to express self-awareness.

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remarkable and terrifying things about a bureaucracy — perhaps about our culture as a whole — that everyone in it seems to know better.

Diddlebock’s self-delusion looks naïve, but our protective clichés — not imprinted on woodblocks that hang above our heads, but integrated into our everyday speech — are just as damning. We deliver a series of pre-packaged postures and ready-made ironies on cue to keep the realities of our culture from making their repeated, compulsive appearance in full force. They serve the same purpose as Diddlebock’s tiles: to ensure us that what we’re doing is all right — what else can we do? — and to keep us from seeing things as they are. This refuge quickly becomes a prison. we don’t have to confront them. This self-awareness of the compulsive character of much of our behavior becomes in essence a way to cover it up. “Binge-watching” accomplishes this move even more effectively, since it beats the clinic to the punch. It doesn’t ironize an extant clinical term, but instills irony in the very name of the activity — watching an obscene amount of television to block out the existence of the outside world. It can’t even be referred to without the term. Irony is thus built in to any discussion of the activity. “Binge-watching” neutralizes critique. Taking it seriously is made reactionary and moralizing by the term itself. Irony, in effect, becomes clichéd here. In the same way as cliché, the irony in the phrase “binge-watching” hovers comatose between life and death. Just as the dead horse in the cliché stops being really experienced as a metaphor, “binge-watching” stops being experienced as irony. The irony that animated the initial use of the term fades away and it is used as a simple name for an activity. But the irony doesn’t disappear completely. It still serves to automatically undercut the possibility of critique through the ironic admission of a compulsion. We no longer really experience the irony when we use the term, but it insinuates itself into our expressions and becomes thereby all the more effective. This means that we get the benefits of irony — its feeling of distance and superiority — without having done any of the work of critical negation. Actual literal engagement with the activity gets covered over by a clichéd irony. When this pseudo-confessional irony is embedded in the name for the thing itself, we prevent it from really being seen. The name conceals the named. We cease to see people sitting in front of a screen for hours at a time, unable to tear themselves away, infantilized, stupefied by cheap cliffhangers and next episode autoplay, some rendered so impatient they feel compelled to consume the content on fast forward. Instead, they are simply “binge-watching” — engaged in a socially sanctioned activity with a cute name. ThisIV. clichéing of irony undercuts its social significance. The Greek eironeia meant “feigned ignorance.” Socrates was ironic because he affected not to know when he questioned accepted wisdom. It was a way of undermining thoughtlessly held beliefs. Irony has come (“ironically”) to mean almost the opposite. We now engage in clichéd mass irony in order to feign awareness of things we really aren’t aware of. We pay lip service to critique in order not to confront it head-on. Irony props up thoughtlessly held beliefs — clichés that we stamp on experiences before we have a chance to really experience them. There is an ongoing complaint, periodically renewed by a spate of books or think-pieces, that sees us plagued by ironic language, attitudes, dress, et cetera. These are taken as signs of cynicism, alienation, disaffection. But, in reality, irony has become a coping mechanism, built-in critique that is not cynical, alienated, or disaffected enough. Half-sensing that something is wrong, we gesture toward critique, toward an external, alienated view of our circumstances, so we don’t have to take it up. The pseudo-awareness that this engenders comes to conceal not just personal failings, but also the moral compromises extracted by modern bureaucracies. Indeed it is one of the

It’s a profound question actually: Hefe or Valencia. Hefe to give the followers what they want.

IPost.Hefe.layon the hammock, under the hazel moon, and eat that delicious langana as I watch those likes roll in.

Let’sSnap.jack up that yin yang sun thing at the top of the screen to around 67 percent. Add a bit of Structure … maybe, oh I dunno, 30 percent or 35 percent? No, 30. Looks crunchy, but not dirty. Warm it up a touch. Maybe a lil more. Like how Rachey Ray makes food look. Oh that’s nice, that’s Saturation?delicious.Hmmm, I’ll give it a shot … no, nope, no thank you, this looks like a Lisa Frank trapper keeper now. No saturation. Moving right along to … Vignette, just a taste, just a tasty taste taste. 25? 45? 72? 57? Sold. 57! Sharpennnnn. Just subtle, seven percent, no one will even know, just a lil extra sizzle to it, you gotta let it sizzle. Ok. Now. Clarenon? Errrr … Gingham … too indie … Lark … eh, that green tint? Pertetua? Who even uses this piece of shit flter? Valencia? Oh that’s pretty. Tat’s a beautiful one. Mayfair no, X-Pro 11 … I always wanna say maybeeeeee but no.

But Valencia … I think Valencia has my heart. Lemme close my eyes, reset the palate. And takeeee aaaaa looook againnnnn and … yeah, I like Valencia. And Hefe? Closing the eyes aaaaaand … Shit, that’s good too. What do I do?

OBSESSIONS: SHELFISHNESS

TODD STRAUSS-SCHULSON I’m in Mexico, staying at a luxury resort where the food is expensive and gooey. I don’t love it. I take a walk down to the beach where some locals are bbq’ing lobsters right out of the ocean. It smells delicious — currents of bay laurel and lemon balm mixed with the smoke wafting of the coal. I wander over, access a well of charm that resides somewhere inside me and ask for a beautiful “laguna.” Tey laugh in my face and call me gafas but then give me a langosta I wander away and sit on a hammock, under the bright hazel light of the Mexican moon. As much as I want to shovel this food into my mouth, my frst real instinct is to snap a hot pic and throw it up on the gram so everyone can share this moment with me.

TODD STRAUSS-SCHULSON Hefe? Hefe’s always a winner. But Valencia? Kinda artsy? Kinda interesting, got that tint, got that fade. But Hefe. Can’t go wrong, always a layup. Always a lotta likes with a Hefe post …

Warm, sunkissed, welcoming color. Or Valencia: a bit of fade, a bit of teal, it looks old but modern, timeless really. Are these posts for me? Or gifts for my followers? Are artists in the service industry? Or in the self-expression business? Do you make something personal and hope people like it? Or do you eliminate yourself from the process and give them some Hefe? I want those likes … I do … but, what about my personal taste? Where does that go? I am Valencia … they want Hefe … maybe, I mean … maybe you just have to change what you care about. Te outcome, not the creation? Maybe self-expression is shellfsh. Deep breath.

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STEPHANIE WASHBURN, HERE ABOUT 7, 2014, FOUND PHOTOGRAPH, TENNIS BALL AND DRAWING, 5.5 X 8 INCHES

There’s a sort of meteorologist Jeremy Joshua Jeffrey Jagger Josh that likes to make a show of his sensitivity in the hopes of winning the favor of strong female onlookers, particularly those who resemble his primary care physician, and watching it all play out on screen my friends, it is like watching Storm Spencer Pomponius Vince an anthropomorphized pistachio ice cream cone incrementally baring its pale ass to a category five hurricane, which is not to comment on the conduct of meteorologists categorically or to compare them all to cartoon food or strong women to dangerous weather, it’s just that increasingly there are all these sensitive meteorologists Connor Conover Constantine Wolf

DEATH OF PRINT CULTURE TIMOTHY DONNELLY

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JOHN DIVOLA, D29F06, 1996-98, GELATIN SILVER PRINT COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALLERY LUISOTTI peering through their tears to notice the anchor tilting her head noticeably as if to measure a previously undetected depth when in truth she is remembering a rapidly bitten-into falafel sandwich falling apart all over our nation’s leading news periodical dampening gloss pages as she wonders if she should just throw it into the trash or else surreptitiously return it to the stack of other periodicals compromised by happenstance in the network kitchenette, wash hands with rose geranium foaming hand soap and call it a day but not once does she ever consider taking it home with her.

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

One warmish Good Friday after having fasted I rode my bike to Benny’s Home & Auto 2.4 miles away with David Simoneau for what I can’t remember, a good deal further than ever before, much less on a rumbling holy empty stomach, and the day’s air turned impatient with me, palpable, and the new tire smell of small business blurred my vision in from the edges as walked automatic to the sliding door but missed, banging pins and needles of my face against the plate glass window, dying in public the first time ever backwards a minute on the rutted welcome mat till flights of angels did around me sing I must be high on drugs but all I was was Catholic. As for drugs, another thirteen years later for all could tell was dead again on Scott and Kathy’s bathroom tile with a stonecold paralysis I still access on occasion as I wish, only this time I was shall we say

142143 eager to be revived, and then the green foil cylindrical canister of Comet scouring powder told me to muster all my strength and hurl it down the hall in an arc like the celestial object from which the product drew its name, whereupon rescue would come the way the magi came to the Christ child guided by a star. Lynn was dead too but probably remembers it differently than I. It might be for a time wavered between the Comet and Kathy’s heirloom marquetry jewelry box which would have come to harm if thrown so it pleases me to know I chose the cleanser instead, not that marquetry with all its obvious involvement and dizzy human handiwork isn’t almost always borderline repulsive, at least to someone whose most vivid if not earliest association with hands is about which probably the less said the better, but in between these deaths I did die again on the regular, over and over, albeit in the iffy safety of a home, where the dead in time mistook me for one of them, or to put it accurately came to know and stand around the bed of, intending then, thought, to terrorize me more but since the art of what went down was left mine to decipher, say what they did was keep part of me alive, wrapping it in the plastic of cloud architecture, for some other world than this.

TIMOTHY DONNELLY

Zan Romanoff is the author of two novels, A Song to Take the World Apart and Grace and the Fever. Her work has been published in print and online at Elle, GQ, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Republic, among other outlets. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Demi Adejuyigbe is a writer, performer, and humorist living in Los Angeles. He was a digital producer on Comedy Central’s @midnight, and has written for The New Yorker, the Guardian, Pitchfork, MTV, The Good Place and an upcoming 2018 TV series. Jonathan Ames is the author of the novels Wake Up, Sir!, The Extra Man, and I Pass Like Night; a graphic novel, The Alcoholic (with artwork by Dean Haspiel), and the essay collections I Love You More Than You Know, My Less Than Secret Life and What’s Not to Love? He is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a former columnist for New York Press. He is also creator of the TV shows Blunt Talk and Bored to Death His new book is You Were Never Really Here

Jason Adam Katzenstein is a cartoonist and writer for print and television. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and MAD Magazine, and on Cartoon Network. He is the illustrator of the graphic novel Camp Midnight for Image Comics, with writer Steven T. Seagle. He was a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, and he is an accomplished writer of four-sentence autobiographies.

David Litt is a former White House speechwriter. He is the author of the bestselling memoir Thanks, Obama, published in September 2017.

E. J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, recipient of the Pleiades Editors Prize and ﬁnalist for the National Poetry Series. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Review, World Literature Today, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing Poetry and Literary Translation in Korean and Japanese. She is completing her PhD at the University of Washington for English Language and Literature in Seattle, Washington.

Ruth Madievsky is a poet, ﬁction writer, and essayist living in Los Angeles. Her debut poetry collection, Emergency Brake, was published by Tavern Books as their 2015 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in Tin House, The American Poetry Review The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. When she is not writing, she works as a pharmacist.

Ryan Perez is a writer and director who has written for UCB, Funny or Die, Saturday Night Live, and Comedy Central’s Moonbeam City He also co-wrote Adult Swim’s Live at the Necropolis: The Lords of Synth and wrote and directed the Steve Jobs biopic, iSteve.

Amy Silverberg is a writer and stand-up comedian based in Los Angeles. She’s currently a doctoral fellow in Fiction at the University of Southern California, where she teaches. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, The Collagist, Hobart, Joyland, The Ofﬁng, The Tin House Open Bar, and elsewhere. She’s now at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Marc Vincenz is British-Swiss and is the author of 11 books of poetry; his latest are Becoming the Sound of Bees, Sibylline, The Syndicate of Water & Light, and Leaning into the Inﬁnite (Dos Madres Press, 2018). His novella, Three Taos of T’ao, or How to Catch a White Elephant is published by Spuyten Duyvil. He is also the translator of many German-, French-, and Romanian-language poets. His latest book of translations is Unexpected Development by Swiss novelist and poet, Klaus Merz. His own recent publications include The Nation Ploughshares The Common, Solstice, Raritan, Notre Dame Review, New American Writing, and World Literature Today. He is co-editor of Fulcrum, international editor of Plume, as well as publisher and editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions.

Karan Mahajan is the author of Family Planning, a ﬁnalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Association of Small Bombs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Awards, won the 2017 NYPL Young Lions Award, and was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s “Ten Best Books of 2016.” In 2017, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker online, n+1, and other venues.

Kristina Wong is a performance artist, comedian, and writer who has appeared on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show She is also the writer and performer of her one woman show, “The Wong Street Journal”. She is currently planning her run for public ofﬁce. She has been blocked by Trump, his three kids from his ﬁrst wife, Anthony Scaramucci, and Sebastian Gorka on Twitter.

Danielle Bobker is associate professor in the English Department at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is also co-organizer of a working group on Feminism and Controversial Humor. Kara Brown lives in Los Angeles and is a writer on Freeform’s Black-ish spinoff, Grown-ish. Previously, she was a senior writer for Jezebel Lydia Conklin was the 2015–2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory. Her fiction has appeared in a compilation of the best of the last 25 years of the Pushcart Prize and in Tin House The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere. She has drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, The Florida Review, and the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.

Sarah LaBrie is a writer and librettist. Her ﬁction appears or is forthcoming in Guernica, Lucky Peach, The Literary Review Epoch, Taste, and Encyclopedia Journal, among other publications. Her work for the Industry Opera’s Hopscotch was featured in The New Yorker, Wired, and on NPR. dreams of the new world, a choral piece commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and developed with composer Ellen Reid will premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall in spring 2018. Paige Lewis is the author of the chapbook Reasons to Wake You (Tupelo Press, 2018). Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review Best New Poets 2017, and elsewhere.

Mary-Alice Daniel was born in northern Nigeria and raised in London and Nashville. After attending Yale University, she received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan as a Rackham Merit Fellow. Her poems have been nominated three times for Pushcart Prizes and have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review Hayden’s Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, Callaloo, and several anthologies, including Best New Poets 2017 Her adopted home is Los Angeles, where she is completing her debut, fulllength poetry collection and earning a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing as an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California.

Broti Gupta is a comedy writer for Friends from College on Netﬂix and “Shouts and Murmurs” in The New Yorker

Sharon Olds is a poet and writer. Her most recent books are Stag’s Leap, recipient of the T. S. Eliot Prize (U.K) and the Pulitzer Prize, and Odes. She teaches in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at New York University where she helped found the original outreach program at Goldwater Hospital, a 900-bed state hospital for the physically challenged. These programs at NYU now include a writing workshop for Veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. She lives in New York City.

Peter J. Harris is the author of The Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right’, which won the American Book Award in 2015. Writing from Los Angeles, Harris is founder of The Black Man of Happiness Project, a creative, intellectual, and artistic exploration prompted by one elemental question: What is a happy Black man?

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. His chapbook Hymn to Life was published by Factory Hollow Press and with John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O’Brien he is co-author of Three Poets published by Minus A Press. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has been poetry editor at Boston Review since 1996 and is on the faculty of the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

CONTRIBUTORS

Carmiel Banasky is a writer, editor, and teacher from Portland, Oregon. Her ﬁrst novel, The Suicide of Claire Bishop, is published with Dzanc Books. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, PEN America American Short Fiction, Slice, Guernica, The Rumpus, and on NPR, among other places.

Danielle Henderson is a TV writer and an utter delight. Mitra Jouhari is a writer and comedian who has written for Miracle Workers on TBS, The President Show on Comedy Central, and prior to that was a staffer at Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS. TV/ﬁlm credits

Charlie Hankin is a cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker as well as Private Eye and Narrative Magazine. As one half of the comedy duo Good Cop Great Cop along with Matt Porter, he has performed internationally and developed shows for Comedy Central and TBS. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Liana Finck’s cartoons appear regularly in The New Yorker The Awl, and Catapult, and on her Instagram feed. Her ﬁrst book, A Bintel Brief, was published by Ecco Press. Her second, Light and Shadow, is forthcoming from Random House.

144145 include: The Big Sick, Broad City, Friends from College, Full Frontal, as well as videos for The New Yorker, IFC, Comedy Central, Above Average, Reﬁnery29’s RIOT, and more. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Reductress Flaunt Magazine Reality Beach, Splitsider and Rookie. She is a member of the sketch groups Three Busy Debras and is obsessed with being from Ohio.

Alexander Stern is a postdoctoral fellow at the GoetheUniversity in Frankfurt, where he is working on a book on the philosophy of language.

Megan Amram is a comedy television writer, having written for shows like The Good Place, The Simpsons, Parks & Recreation, Silicon Valley and Transparent. She is the author of the humor book Science…For Her! and a contributor to The New Yorker. Her poetry has been featured in The Awl Amy Aniobi is a writer and producer on HBO’s hit comedy series Insecure Fred Armisen is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and musician.

Todd Strauss-Schulson writes and directs movies and TV shows. He made a cult classic no one really knows about called The Final Girls a pilot that didn’t get picked up, and is currently working on the movie Isn’t It Romantic starring Rebel Wilson, Liam Hemsworth, Adam Devine, and Priyanka Chopra for Warner Bros. and Newline.

—Sibelan SwarthmoreForrester,College

City Folk and Country Folk SOFIAKHVOSHCHINSKAYA

Translated by Josh Billings Strolls with Pushkin ANDREI SINYAVSKY Translated by Catharine Teimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

Amanda Ross-Ho’s work brings together seemingly oppositional languages and spaces: personal imagery and autobiographical artifacts are mined for formal qualities; traces and residues from studio practices are meticulously recreated as deliberate gestures; boundaries between private work and public display are collapsed. She revisits images and forms in multiple iterations, creating scale shifts, moving among different media, or using positive and negative structures. Amanda RossHo was born in Chicago in 1975. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Presented and translated by Peter France “Poets and general readers should appreciate this volume as much as teachers and scholars . it treats an essential Russian poet, and it shows a master translator at the height of his powers.”

Stephanie Washburn lives and works in Ojai, California. Washburn received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Recent exhibitions include MCA Santa Barbara, ACME Gallery, and Claremont University. Her work has been published in Harper’s Magazine and is in various collections, including MCA San Diego, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Agnes Gund Foundation.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Sisters of the Cross ALEXEI REMIZOV Translated by Roger Keys and Brian Murphy “Dark and beguiling; Remizov is a writer worth knowing about.” Kirkus Reviews Found Life Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview

Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov “This consistently delightful satire will introduce readers to a funnier, more femalecentric slant on Russian literature than they may have previously encountered.”

—Boris Poplavsky

Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays

FEATURED ARTISTS

Martin Kersels’s performative practice spans sculpture, photography, installation, and action. He is best known for his laughter-inducing works that consider the dichotomies of humor and pathos within the human condition. Interested in pushing themes of scale, tension, and the effects of gravity into more conceptual directions, Kersels injects a playfulness in his work to reveal the awkwardness associated with not belonging. Documentation of performances through photography and video, which shows the artist experimenting within his own body in a series of simple actions — tossing, falling, hugging, smacking, tripping, and whirling — and his performative objects and installations uncover the darker absurdities of the body, space, and movement. Born in 1960 in Los Angeles, Kersels currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. He received from UCLA both his BA in 1984 and MFA in 1995. Ali Prosch is a Los Angeles–based artist. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2009 and her BFA from New World School of the Arts in Miami, FL. Her work examines the modes and historical contexts of female representation in popular culture. Prosch is a feminist artist interested in the tropes of motherhood and domesticity, sexuality, bodily excess, dark humor, the grotesque, and the archetype of woman as witch. Most recently, she has been creating photographs, film, and sculpture that take a cue from the depiction of women in film with an emphasis on the trope of the monstrous feminine. She is also involved with collaborative projects, such as the artist collective D3: Deliver, Document, Destroy. Her work is in public and private collections including the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), World Class Boxing the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, MOCA, North Miami, among others. Exhibitions include: Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, MOCA Geffen, REDCAT, The Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami), Glendale College Art Gallery, Machine Project, Public Fiction, Elephant Art Space (LA), UC Santa Barbara, New Jersey City University, University of Texas, Georgia State University, Locust Projects, Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami), Sheffield University (UK), Tomio Koyama Gallery (Tokyo), and White Box (NYC).

BATYUSHKOVKONSTANTIN

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Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry

Cassidy Routh is an illustrator and graphic artist whose work can be seen on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Maureen Selwood is a ﬁlmmaker whose projects work with multiplicities of form, culture and space. A pioneer in the ﬁeld of independent experimental animation, Selwood has both charted new territory for women artists, and reframed conventional notions of women as objects of desire in art history. Known for developing a pictographic language of body gestures and motion Selwood’s images move in a way in which the mind moves dealing with states of mutability in the human psyche.

Publishers Weekly (*starred review) Rapture: A novel ILIAZD Translated by Tomas J. Kitson “[An] absolutely peculiar world that engulfs the reader from the ﬁrst line.”

ANDREI PLATONOV Translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen “Platonov . . . here emerges as a dramatist who can easily enter into conversation with Beckett.”

Mel Bochner is one of the preeminent ﬁgures in the history of conceptual art. He has used verbal, mathematical and geometric systems to inﬂuence the content of his work since the mid-1960s. His “thesaurus paintings,” which debuted at the Whitney Biennial in 2004, are characterized by experimentation and commentary on language. Mel Bochner’s work has recently been the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. A retrospective at the Whitechapel in London in 2012 traced the artist’s use of color throughout his multidisciplinary career. Mel Bochner received his BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962. He has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

THE RUSSIAN LIBRARY at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonﬁction, and works of mixed or ﬂuid genre.

CUP COLUMBIA EDU / SERIES / RUSSIAN LIBRARY

—Eric Naiman, author of Nabokov, Perversely In Gogol’s Shadow

ANDREI SINYAVSKY

Between Dog and Wolf

LINOR GORALIK Edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokour “Linor Goralik is a Renaissance woman of our own day, writing (and drawing!) in a wide range of genres, all with sharp intelligence. Her writing is fresh and thoughtprovoking, with both profound insight and deadpan humor.”

SASHA SOKOLOV

Translated and annotated by Alexander Boguslawski “Intricate and rewarding — a Russian Finnegans Wake.” Vanity Fair

DEMI KRISTINAMARCALEXANDERAMYZANRYANSHARONKARANRUTHPAIGEDAVIDSARAHE.J.JASONMITRADANIELLEPETERCHARLIEBROTILIANATIMOTHYMARY-ALICELYDIAKARADANIELLECARMIELFREDAMYMEGANJONATHANADEJUYIGBEAMESAMRAMANIOBIARMISENBANASKYBOBKERBROWNCONKLINDANIELDONNELLYFINCKGUPTAHANKINJ.HARRISHENDERSONJOUHARIADAMKATZENSTEINKOHLABRIELITTLEWISMADIEVSKYMAHAJANOLDSPEREZROMANOFFSILVERBERGSTERNVINCENZWONG

Quarterly Journal, no. 17: Comedy Issue

Articles inside

THE MAGIC — FLOATING — MOUNTAIN by Karan Mahajan

TWO POEMS by Mary-Alice Daniel

A GOOD FEEL by Amy Aniobi

ARCHES AND LAND BRIDGES AND PILES OF ROCK by Lydia Conklin

TOWARDS A HUMOR POSITIVE FEMINISM: LESSONS FROM THE SEX WARS by Danielle Bobker

TWO POEMS by E.J. Koh

YET ANOTHER LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME by Jonathan Ames

TWO POEMS by Marc Vincenz

WELCOME TO MY STUNNING AIRBNB! by Mitra Jouhari

GET IN BED by Danielle Henderson

THE FALL OF THE CINEMATIC MUSE by Ryan Perez

HOW I FINALLY LEARNED SELF LOVE IN A POST NUCLEAR WORLD by Broti Gupta