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essays 9 MISSING TIME: TRANSLA TING THE GREAT GATSBY (ONCE A GAIN) by Claudia Durastanti 29 P ASTEL BLUE: A PROMISING INA CCURACY by Katherine McKittrick 38 MEZAIR b y Melissa Seley 45 D AYS OF THE DEAD: FRO ZEN BODIES, REAL MARTYRS, AND THE QUES T FOR IMMORTALITY IN THE CITY OF ANGELS b y Peter Lunenfeld 58 WHA T YOU NEED TO DO b y Shayla Lawson 89 RIGHT THERE IN BLANK AND WHITE by Megan Ward 94 BEY OND JERMAG YEV SEV : A ROUNDTABLE ON ARMENIAN-AMERIC AN IDENTIT Y b y Sophia Armen, A ram Ghoogasian & H rag Vartanian 113 MONUMENT IGNORANCEAL b y Diana DePardo-Minsky 121 DANCER JUST DANCING: ON LITERATURE AND LEISURE IN 2020 by Jordan Valentine Tucker 131 ' PHOTOGRAPH OF A MOMENT': AN INTERVIEW WITH EILEEN MYLES by Jan Wilm poetry 19 TW O POEMS b y Kazim Ali 57 CR YONICS SOCIETY OF C ALIFORNIA, 1971 by Alexandria Hall 65 RENGA SPRING 2020 by Marilyn Hacker & K arthika Naïr 109 TW O POEMS b y Rae Armantrout shorts 86 W OLF CLAN WOMAN b y Terese Marie Mailhot 118 THE S TORY OF MARSHA HUNT b y Maureen Mahon 140 PARDON ME b y Sarah Etter NO . 27 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : MISTAKE CONTENTS

December

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The Firebird and the Fox Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks Jeffrey Brooks, Johns Hopkins University “Brooks brings a lifetime of learning to bear in his new interpretation of Russian and Soviet culture in its most creative century. He is able to suggest how a variety of cultural elds over time grappled with the same set of recurring Russian dilemmas, distilling the powerful motifs that writers, artists, and intellectuals repeatedly embroidered into their works. No one who studies or loves Russian culture can afford to ignore this book.”

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Richard Wortman, Columbia University 2019 9781108484466

346 pages | 32 b/w illustrations, 16 color illustrations 43073.indd124/02/202043073.indd1

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“One of the most fascinating and important portraits of modern American life.”

“This is a fine, often profound book, the very valuable work of a poet and novelist who has thought long and hard about poetry and the many contexts surrounding its writing.”

—Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University “With sharp analytical insight and riveting evidence, Ashley Mears takes us backstage into the glamorous global world of parties and nightclubs.”

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Dreams of Overworkedthe Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian “I learned a great deal from this book; it’s an easy read with a lot to say.”

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Jasper Marsalis, Event 2, 2019, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Courtesy the artist and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN. Photo: Caylon Hackwith

Tauba Auerbach, Extended Object, 2018 (detail). Private collection, New York. © Tauba Auerbach. Photo: Steven Probert

Tauba Auerbach, Pilot Wave Induction III (still), 2018. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Tauba Auerbach

SIMPLE PAST

There are about 15 translations of e Great Gatsby into Italian. e rst edition — in a somewhat ris qué attempt to sound soft and European — was called Gatsby il magni co, pub lished by Mondadori in 1936. It took an other 27 years to release the version that I would eventually come to love — the only possible version of Gatsby in my native language — Il grande Gatsby by Fernanda Pivano. Pivano’s translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic was the rst one I read, the one that stayed with me, and the one I later happened to revise, come my time. As a matter of fact, I was not interested in competing with Pivano on any of her au thors; I have instead started to think that

MISSINGTRANSLATINGTIME:

ESSAY

THE GREAT GATSBY (ONCE AGAIN) CLAUDIA DURASTANTI

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 12

Pivano’s translation has withstood the test of time, though Mondadori did x some mistakes and cultural slips from the 1950s, re ections of the soundscape she was immersed in. I kept Pivano’s edi tion on my desk, looking for signals, sur rendering when I had to, and committing matricide when necessary. In this close encounter, Pivano and I were kept apart by history, biographies, and class. Her ed ucation had been cosmopolitan, she had possessed and mastered a foreign lan guage; I inherited English from childhood and a family of migrants and then lost it, until I slowly made my way back into it. She was a woman in a postwar Catholic country which never truly went through Reformation, but she had privilege and would end up breeding a paci st leftist nostalgia that never quite appealed to me: somehow, she made it seem too easy. But the novels she translated, the poets she gave a body and voice to, that was not easy. It was tantalizing, unexpected, and made me lapse into a long diluted bohemian state of mind during high school. I still felt in exile at that point, even though 10 years had passed since my mother moved from New York to the tiny village in Southern Italy I would grow up in. America was always the green light and e Great Gatsby was always a by-product for me, of Pivano’s life and work. Of her parties, and her “beautiful white [girlhood],” as Daisy would put it. e translations that followed Pivano’s have focused on giving new tex ture to the color and language, as well as the issues of distance and proximity to the present. None so far have focused on time, or changed what Pivano did when it came to drawing a clearer line between the present and the past. Some of these translations are beautiful, some of them I had to ignore. Fifteen translations mean you need to di erentiate yourself and take your risks — which feel increasingly arbi trary and irresponsible — but also carry their own sense of addictive freedom. ere’s no way the expression “old sport” could be perfectly translated into Italian: Pivano and many others chose to translate this tricky line with vecchio mio

I would write about her one day, about her extraordinary life — a young woman who translated Edgar Lee Masters, Ernest Hemingway, and the Beats and even got arrested for it; a nice uptown girl who could hang with the bad boys and never pick up their bad habits. Fernanda Pivano ignored all of the conventions. Fernanda Pivano had it: the intimacy. She not only knew the writers she translated, she ate with them, moth ered them, and was probably fooled by them more than she ever thought she was. And she had a perfect mentor: Cesare Pavese got her into the translation busi ness (he also had an ongoing crush on her that would occasionally turn fever ish — he proposed twice — which gave her a lifetime of ammunition). He him self didn’t dare to translate Fitzgerald: “I didn’t want to translate the books of this writer [...] I liked them too much.” (When I found this note by chance a few months ago, something withered in me.) is was a love triangle I would slow ly slip into: during the months that I spent translating e Great Gatsby, I was more obsessed with Pivano and Pavese, and what I knew about them, rather than the novel itself. Every American author I loved came to me through these two people, so my fascination was originally dependent, joyously secondhand; my own writing is still haunted by their sometimes imprecise and old-fashioned translations.

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When I started translating e Great Gatsby at the age of 35, I tried to sum mon the magic I felt as a teenager locked in my room and it didn’t work. I now ap proached Gatsby as if it were a literary non ction book — an odd example of new journalism before new journalism even existed (should the highly unreliable Nick Carraway be given some credit?). I thought of it as a book that should be taught alongside In Cold Blood or Limonov, character studies based on real people. What startles me now, is the fact that this was an automatic choice, not a rational one. I didn’t question it for a second. It felt completely natural to me: I no longer had the strength to think Jay Gatsby nev er existed. It didn’t seem believable at that point, after all the strata and commentary and mapping of a masterpiece and his endless reverberations in American cul ture. e rst Gatsby I read made the sec ond Gatsby impossible to read as a literary character: Fitzgerald and almost a century of readership brought Jay Gatsby to life, and I had to follow. An American life is a myth, and a myth crystalized in time be comes a fact. It felt exhilarating, although part of it must have be due to the recent intoxication with literary non ction and memoirs, hybrid has almost become the de facto reading mode. Considering e Great Gatsby literary The story of three women by a writer hailed by Haruki contemporaryMurakaminovelist,WINNEROFAKUTAGAWAPRIZE

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 14

while Tommaso Pincio brilliantly adopted a phrase from the old Italian translation of e Catcher in the Rye, knowing that Holden was a sucker for Gatsby. He end ed up using the very odd, very Roman vec chia lenza (meaning someone very astute, a smart ass), which worked in both books. I tried to nd my own way. For ex ample, I had to nd a word to represent something that Italian cities didn’t have at the time and don’t exactly have now: proper drugstores. Unless one thought about the war, when there were ubiqui tous Sali e tabacchi selling basic items (lit erally salt and cigarettes) and impromp tu bodegas vending goods o the books, the so-called spacci. Interestingly, spacciare means “to sell drugs” in Italian, so using spacci for drugstores preserves the idea of a deal, a mechanism of establishing coherent forms of dependency whether they are legal or illegal: either way, it’s still capitalism.When I really started thinking about being a translator, all of my metaphors came from outer space. I felt that working on a book could bring me to the Moon, and every time I landed on Earth again, I would bleed from my nose, while staring at the sun. I always thought about trans lation in terms of space, impossible lati tudes, going cross-country. While trans lating e Great Gatsby, I changed my suit and became a time traveler: the extent of my mission was no longer horizontal but vertical. I would have to travel back not just Gatsby’s time but to a time entirely my own: back to the teenage girl dream ing of social mobility and loud parties, a “white girlhood” in rags. All of my short stories at that time were about disa ect ed girls high on drugs, nothing like the bookish person I was. All those girls were Daisy and Zelda, but not Fernanda. It took me a long time to write about the other part. e James Gatz part, the sail or’s part; all I wanted was aspiration and denial and Fernanda Pivano’s translation suited me just HISTORICALne.

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e Great Gatsby as involun tary literary non ction led to a necessary change in tense. I also wanted to crack the surface of some impossible elegance and posture, but most of all, I wanted to defy the idea that anything ends at all in this book: the past is a dim light, always on in the back ground, shining forever. ere are two major ways to translate the past in the Italian language: Passato re moto, which indicates a fact that happened and ended in the past. ere is no rela tionship between the time the fact is told and the time the fact happened. e fact cannot be repeated and is very distant in time. Passato prossimo: a fact that happened in the past, and before the time the fact is being told. e fact is over but might still be pervasive and is closer in time.

e Great Gatsby has always been translated with the passato remoto. All Italian masterpieces are written in the pas sato remoto tense, and so this is the way foreign masterpieces should be translated. It conveys an automatic elegance; it’s the authorial tense. Many works of Italian lit erature in the 20th century that used the other past tense, the passato prossimo, have somehow been neglected, or sim ply forgotten. As of today, when it comes to translating classic novels, the passato prossimo is often regarded as a fashion able commodity that is both graceless and impertinent, although many translators are now using it. I should note that, despite being so elegant and despite being legitimized by classic literature, the passato remoto has a funny life in the spoken language: it’s barely used nationally, although it stays strong in some regions of the South. As a teenager, I used it every time I could, but when I moved to Rome for college, a professor mocked me saying, “You speak like a fascista.” It started to sound less ap pealing then, and it also made me feel very class conscious, and way too Southern. In some parts of Northern Italy, people never use it at all, as if they don’t know how.

In any case, for the most part it’s con sidered a dead tense, extremely suitable for everything unreal. When we have to shape a character and make it faithful to the sur roundings and upbringing, we mostly rely on dialogue and style, but a tense itself — if used coherently — can o er an entirely di erent idea of class and stature. e pas sato remoto throws Gatsby into pure aris tocracy, the passato prossimo makes him a dreamy bastard. e rst one is faithful to his aspirations, the second one to perhaps who he truly was. is is what I wanted: Gatsby as raw, ridiculous and romantic, wasted. I wanted the vulgarity of close ness. Passato remoto respects genealogies, but Gatsby has no ancestors: they are ei ther made up or dead. He’s new, conjured, and assigning him a bloodline through a prestigious form felt like buying into his own story, like overdoing it. But there was another dilemma: how could I possibly use a form that suggests that some facts are completely over and sealed in the past when e Great Gatsby argues exactly the opposite? How dare I squeeze a text into a sequence of nite actions with few consequences, when the pages I had in my hands completely op posed this? Francis Scott Fitzgerald didn’t have to struggle so much with the right tense to use: the way time is structured in English allows for more ambiguity — there are fewer options and so tenses

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 16 non ction and not ction, says something that I now believe is true: time makes genre obsolete. It can be disintegrated by currentTreatingevents.

can be more ambiguous, out of necessity. Time in Italian is more precise, and the vast number of tenses makes time over quali ed, inescapable. e experience of longing seems more concrete and tangible to me in English: like an object that can be found in the shadows. At one point in the novel, Gatsby really starts looking for the past in the dark corners of his mansion. e experience of longing in Italian feels more like atmosphere, intrusive and allover. is doesn’t match Fitzgerald’s writ ing in a deeper sense. Jay Gatsby is more assertive; he is very con dent that his time is endless. Time is his to spend. Readers are naturally suspicious of this, few are as romantically inclined as Gatsby. How do you keep his con dence in Italian? How to translate the lines, “You can’t repeat the past,” “Why of course you can,” and keep the language from betraying it? Classics in translation are like stars exploding and then reforming, accumu lating all of the debris of the past, and sucking in all the new air and layers of our own time. Translation is usually told through loss, but perhaps accumulation is more accurate. It’s about interference: how long can you keep the ash of the old star luminous enough before the new starts to shine on its own? Beauty is not done once, is not done twice, it’s a con stant con FUTUREagration.

PERFECT e biggest revolution of my adult life was when I broke my own sense of time. I learned about Einstein’s theory of relativi ty, and suddenly, whatever I had learned in school became useless. Einstein overtook the Roman Empire, destroying the idea of civilizations. History became unthinkable.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 18 My life became ghostly, synchronous and extended, no longer episodic — noth ing really ended for me, and if it had, I didn’t have words to convey this endedness. While looking up the word “dia chronic” in the dictionary to make sure of its meaning, I stumbled upon the word “dichroic”: “the property of some crystals and solutions of absorbing one of two plane-polarized components of transmit ted light more strongly than the other.” I wished that’s what I was. But of course, I’m not.Iwitnessed this revolution depicted on screen, one day at the movies, when I saw Martin Eden, a lm by Neapolitan director Pietro Marcello. In this loose retelling of Jack London’s novel, set in Naples, Martin Eden dreams and rages and carries on in a city where the 1930s, ’60s and ’80s blend and bleed into each other. Maybe there are even other eras mixed in, but the director makes every thing feel like it is happening all at once. ere are cars that are not supposed to be there, clothes that feel too out of date or ahead of their time. ere are oddities and inconsistencies that might actually feel familiar for a working-class person, especially a working-class girl. Somehow, you get used to being unsuited — the secondhand clothes are not vintage, they are just secondhand. Gatsby’s pink suit is not eccentric, it’s a sign that he is out of place. Taste is a consequence of belonging which is often a consequence of money. While Martin Eden tries to overcome his origins through education — like Gatsby, like me and many of my friends from my little town — he oats in a society with out much guidance and modernity often knocks him down. Perhaps the only way to understand social mobility in these worlds is through a laceration of boundaries, allowing time to pass inward and outward. You have to conjure your own possibilities and implement them — no one else will do it for you. Synchronicity happens often in science- ction, utopian and dystopi an tales, and yet, in a book like e Great Gatsby, we see that everyday life is a ux in which laws can be subverted. I feel that Francis Scott Fitzgerald often did this in his writing if not in his life. Some readers think the language and tone of e Great Gatsby was already old-fashioned when it was published in 1925. As I translated it again, I simply felt that it contained many eras, like Pietro Marcello’s lm. As I was nishing my Gatsby translation, I moved back to New York City, the city I was born in but had not actually lived in. At that time, a friend of was putting together a book of photography. He had spent months walking the ve boroughs looking for the margins of the city, all of its lost and rebuilt frontiers. He took pho tographs, and the city seemed frail and prehistoric in most of them. It was as if a time machine had brought me there. Because I had been dreaming of coming back for so long, I wasn’t able to realize that things do end, usually when you’re not payingFernandaattention.Pivano knew this well. In one of her letters to Cesare Pavese, Fernanda Pivano confessed she was “ter rorized” by motionless vegetation and growth at nighttime. Before I knew it, I found Nick Carraway standing alone on the shore, on the last page of the novel, with a passage encompassing all the frailty and precarious ecology of our lives: As the moon rose higher the in essential houses began to melt away until gradually I became

CLAUDIA DURASTANTI aware of the old island here that owered once for Dutch sailor’s eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pan dered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. As I was trying to convey these words into Italian, I felt grateful for the sensuous ecological perspective in these words. e book was over, my job done, and my sec ond life in America started. I had left at the age of six, and I always meant to come back to stay. I thought it was very sym bolic to do so while translating the most American novel of all. I always fantasized about returning as a re ned woman, po rous and ready for the city as Jay Gatsby was; America was forever shining, and I was always bothered by its luminescence. And then history exploded in my face, and even geography was lost. Time started to shed itself in a di er ent way. Stranded in New York City, I was forced to relive the life of my mother and my friends in Italy who had been attacked by a virus. eir past became my future. Nick Carraway’s shortcomings and melancholies became mine: he wrote down the people who went to Gatsby’s parties, I’m writing down the friends who are calling. People say we’ll have the same speakeasies of the Roaring Twenties sooner or later, but the “crack up” will be entirely of our own; some Fitzgerald must be around.etranslation of the novel has brought back certain facts, myths, the scum of American life, and I’ve been oating in it ever since. Quarantined life means the restoration of the same time, nothing ends, it just starts all over, and longing turns into psychosis. I wonder how I would have approached the transla tion if this had happened before I started. What kind of excess would I have includ ed inTranslationsit? are explosions that suck and breathe the life they have around, and sometimes the air is toxic. When tragedies and wars happen, we say that irony is lost. Adorno thought literature was barbar ic after the Holocaust, 9/11 killed many novels and styles. We change our writing moods, but we also change our reading moods, and therefore we change the nov els we have read. Surely now I would have another Gatsby, a phantom translation of another translation. e extra he had, the fear in me, eternally bound and beat ing against the current. I go through the pages I read so intensively and so recently, and they feel scary and virgin too. What killed Gatsby, what saved the novel about his true life, was something we might all die for: missing time. e lulling comfort of all things gone, a long endless breath of nostalgia, a green light shut forever, and nowhere to cross.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1952, oil on canvas, 29⅝ x 65½ inches (75.2 x 166.4 centimeters). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of e Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. (1986.43.161). © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel y Christopher Rothko, VEGAP, Madrid, 2019

21 In the hoar between door and woolf Own this glime of glim a glamer of dark In it outline owre in the drinn on his hands And knees he yet bruits cispontine scrip No nonny governed at noon expelled By oar dour our dower oyer ardor Spent skint splinted in form by tintern Unformed along spinet tune spinto Sing note unheard unhoard relanded Transpontine on the trot of spinks awing In this ex change ex stat ex comm Ex hale and hale hollering hallion hail e wodge code vades wadi rode wide Pelled across oud in hand on riant eyre MAJOR KAZIM ALI

Jasper Marsalis, Event 3, 2020, oil on canvas, 60 x 80 inches. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox

23 Spilt somer sedgeward my clef How I scrabble then loken loken Lagan adrift borne swift along seif Split of soma my spent mouth slocken To spy quinks in the eddy where fell e spli whar you at eld or fall in inure Sense all things settle why not kvell In stead of clef your soma spurl Speer the mesne question since Mien may manufacture manacle Manual manuscript manus And this unspooling of spawl Speel into the bedizened daven Be dizzy be quink be daw be ravened Note: Helen Keller’s list of English words deriving from the Latin manus (hand) was invoked by Christina Davis in her introduction to a reading by Susan Howe. MINOR KAZIM ALI

Tauba Auerbach, A Flexible Fabric of In exible Parts, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery. © Tauba Auerbach.

Photo: Steven Probert

Jasper Marsalis, Head, 2020, bowling ball, 13 x 8 ½ x 11 inches. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox

Tauba Auerbach, 2020, 2019, acrylic paint, 96 x 68 feet (29.26 x 20.73 meters), 455 Eddy Street, San Francisco. Courtesy the artist and e Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco

Hedda Sterne, NY, NY No. X, 1948, oil on canvas, 32⅞ x 46⅝ inches (83.5 x 118.5 centimeters). Tate, London. Presented by Clara Diament Sujo, 2012 (T13861) © Tate, London © Hedda Sterne, VEGAP, Madrid, 2019

Bradley Walker Tomlin, No. 4, 1952–53, 1952–53, oil on canvas. 59⅞ x 48 inches (152.1 x 121.9 centimeters). e

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd (Blanchette Hooker, class of 1931) (1955.6.8). © Vassar College, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, 2011

Tauba Auerbach in collaboration with Cameron Mesirow a.k.a. Glasser, Auerglass Organ, 2009. Collection of the artist. © Tauba Auerbach. Photo: Max Farago

Images courtesy of the author.

PASTEL BLUE: A PROMISING INACCURACY KATHERINE MCKITTRICK

31 ESSAY

The rst album I heard by Nina Simone was Pastel Blues. I came to Nina Simone late. Pastel Blues includes the songs “Trouble in Mind” and “Tell Me More and More and en Some” and “Ain’t No Use” and “Sinnerman.” I came to Nina Simone late, in my 20s, and there are days when I am lled up with regret. I am sad her songs are missing from parts of my past. Each time I listen, though, a lit tle relief moves through the room, because Nina Simone’s sense of time is not wed ded to my disappointment; my regret is exposed as tiresome, actually, because her di erent sense of time and place sonically assembles something more pressing than self-remorse. Maybe, when Nina Simone sings and writes and performs, her sense of time is forgiving and expansive.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 32 On the Pastel Blues album cover, the photograph of Nina Simone is awash in light and dark blues; the photograph is atop a background of lighter and soft er blue. I think this photograph of Nina Simone was originally in black and white. e black-and-white photograph was made into a stencil, and it was then put through an o set printer, or a screen print er, using blue inks. It seems the original photograph of Nina Simone was hued to match the blues of the album, the songs, the title Pastel Blues, as well as the other aesthetic choices used on the album cover (font, record production logo, and so on). e hue ties together song and feeling, aesthetics and the creative-intellectual work of the blues; it’s also relational to cor porate infrastructures (Philips, Mercury Records, Verve, UMG Recordings). e hue is relation and in nite. e intensi ty of the blueness, which moves between darks and softs, is indescribable and bold. ese blues stretch outside of palette. Pastel Blues, with its expansive blueness, is an exquisite bundle of everything. e blueness that colors Simone’s album cannot be fully described or rep licated. e blueness, in fact, reveals that engaging color, palette, and hue can be a tumultuous and frustrating experience that requires coming to terms with inex plicability; the inability to fully and abso lutely describe Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues and its blueness (as color, as song, as genre, as evocation, as embedded within corpo rate infrastructures, as image, as record, as creative text, as feeling, as…) means we must live with seeing and knowing something (blue) that we cannot accu rately chronicle or express. Put otherwise, the unexplained and undescribed unfold into a kind of promising inaccuracy. is inability to explain, and the attempt to explain, has led me to explore Dionne Brand’s uses of color in her book e Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos. e Blue Clerk is a long dialogue about poetry and poetics. Each of the 59 versos presents an observation (we might, alter natively, call each of these observations a set of unresolved problems). Here are some crudely truncated examples of ob servations and problems presented: …the crisis at the heart of …hemodernity;hasbecome an accountant…; …the clerk goes about inde nitely; …Mingus suggests another …aterritory;sloop of war…; …he pulls the statement apart; …those aphids … appeared in my real garden. All summer I sprayed them with soap, they haven’t left. Observation, as we know, is under written by the complicated workings of representation. Representation often comes into being through the act of ob servation (“I see the aphid”), which can potentially a rm that the representation is complete and whole and true (“I ob served the aphid, I know and describe the aphid, the aphid will not leave”). Yet ob servations are always tied to the di cult work of telling the world we inhabit while also noticing that pretense and inaccu racy and other contexts are looming (my knowledge of the aphid, my description, is incomplete; the aphid is bound up in these other observations and problems). Together, the 59 versos uncover a se ries of conversations between the clerk and other gures: the poet, the author, and the poet-author. Observation is the infrastructure of these conversations. e

33 struggle to observe and ethically tell or represent each observation, each prob lem, is uncomfortable and intense. e practice of observing-telling weighs each gure down. e versos are wearying. e observers are weighed down by what they tell: the air raids, the gunshots, the oblit erated city, more grief than you can han dle, no time, I lived in a room over the hill. I wonder if the observers regret telling the world in this way. As I read e Blue Clerk, I revis it Brand’s other writings and I read Inventory again, di erently. Inventory is the long poem that one day just sat, present and forever, in my peripheral vi sion. e attempt to lose the inventory of Inventory — I tried neglect, mostly — did not succeed, and here it is again, di er ently, embedded in the versos of e Blue Clerk. I am worn out. In e Blue Clerk, the versos o er poetic-creative renderings of the world. e poet and the author are tasked with observing and telling the world, and a brutal and unkind world is recited to the clerk. e observations are beautifully told. Sometimes terror is beautifully told. e clerk responds. e poet and author tell their observations to the clerk of this world, and the clerk keeps les ( le 65, le 267) and tracks the attempts to ob serve-tell. e clerk tells the world, too. I think the clerk keeps memories, too. KATHERINE MCKITTRICK

35 (How disquieting, to imagine that some one has kept your memories. How painful to imagine that someone holds what you have forgotten.) We notice how the ob servers (clerk, poet, author, poet-author) talk about what they cannot bear, while compulsively explaining their talking as a brutal unkindness. Sometimes the un kindness is replicated in text. Sometimes the unkindness is told and it is enveloped in the sea, Kamau Brathwaite, something like freedom. It seems the text cannot fully express what it feels, and I think that feeling might be love or livingness or both; the text can only partly express what it feels. I read: “violence is the only world I know for elegance.” I give up and seek a di erent entry point (I need a way out).Seeking a di erent way, I turn to e Blue Clerk for its blueness and for its preoccupation with color, generally. e blues and non-blues are the stitching of the text; they underpin, complement, and interrupt the poetic dialogue. More ac curately, the colors in e Blue Clerk are rmly entrenched within the text — they move the narrative forward, yet each hue requires that we imagine what is not of fered in the text itself: color and our imag inative rendering of color. e written word — like “pastel blue” — asks that we imagine and visualize that particular blue in non-text form. e colors written into e Blue Clerk are part of the poetic con versation, but they cannot be contained by the narrative. Indeed, each color asks that the reader focus on and use their own sense of hue to thus imaginatively exit the text. Each color asks that the reader imag ine the world with and outside the textual dialogue Brand has written.

KATHERINE MCKITTRICK

Josef Albers’s canonical text Interaction of Color o ers a series of insights and lessons that speak to our optic and psy chic relationship with color palettes and patterns, color saturations and mixtures, and color combinations and gradations. Interaction of Color shows how the com plexities of color relate to human experi ence. Albers asks that the reader not just read about and theorize color but that they experience color. Indeed, he privileges an interaction with color before discourse on (about) color as a way to emphasize the “relativity and instability” of color. For this reason, he provides lessons: cutting two pieces of colored paper, setting them side-by-side, and understanding their relationship; recalling the “red” of a CocaCola sign, recognizing that our recollec tion is experiential and that the “red” of the sign we are remembering is inaccurate (and di erent from the person sitting next to us); focusing on color pairings, harmo nies, and afterimages. Some of the lessons have steps: “combine 4 equal squares of di erent colors to make one large square. Within this grouping of 4 squares, the lighter will di erentiate from the heavi er darker color […] the task is to transfer these speci c relationships to a higher or lower key within two or more groups of equally large rectangles…”. e lessons encourage us to work closely with color, to move it, to cut it, to invent and imagine unexpected patterns and mixtures, to see its elements in new ways. What Albers al lows us to think about — by doing — is how color (contrasts, harmonies, variants, changes, admixtures) is a form that “in vites constant reconsideration.” e lessons open up how our percep tion of color changes according to con text: when we encounter color — pastel blue — it is experiential because the where of the color determines its meaning (the pastel blue square on a wooden desk looks

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 36 di erent from the same pastel blue square on top of a green book, which looks dif ferent from the same pastel blue square against a white wall). is allows us to no tice that hue is soberly contextual. Pastel blue changes according to context; context changes pastel blue into a memory I do not have. Pastel blue is an a ective-intellectual exercise in indescribable vibrancy. Pastel blue is there, the light-greenish-yellowblue is right there in front of me: palpable, at, within reach, numbered, charted, sin gular, and Anokaveracious.Faruqee draws attention to how factual color — what is right there, in front of us, alone, seemingly singular — is tied to both the viewer’s presence and outlying contexts. She thinks about this in relation to visual art that seeks to isolate and individualize color — huge painted blocks of black, for example. Faruqee not only notices the impossi bility of imagining and seeing singular colors in isolation (there is always a con text through which the factual color is perceived outside its veracity, just as the huge painted block is always framed) but she also allows us to think about how the deep focus on one color, the desire to nd or describe or replicate the essence of a color in isolation, is a useful intellectual project and process that, while leaning on impossibility, underscores the “prima cy of context” and how our perception of color “relies on relativity.” e dilemma she presents, as I see it, is not whether a certain color is “real,” but rather how we work through the tensions between what we observe, what we experience, representation, and how we share what we observe. e authenticity, or essence, of pastel blue, generates in isolation its relationality to the viewer and to other colorful contexts while also highlighting — without reifying — the desire to know, or describe, absolute pastel blue. With this in mind, color also carries feeling. We read of warm yellows and hot pinks. We see cool and soft beiges. We walk past and over frigid grays, peppery reds. Color is symbolism, analogy, and metaphor.Irevisit e Atlas of Rare and Familiar Color: Green: verdant vegetation and healthful vitality, contrary illness and consuming envy, environ mentalism, Quranic exaltation and wholesale liberty; the color green intoxicates with yellow’s incandescence, then allays with blue’s Orange:equilibrium.sweetest clementines and divine illuminations, trans formation, jubilant gaiety, and amboyance, Dionysian ecstasy and deepest empathy; the color orange entrances with red’s vi vacity, yet paci es with yellow’s serenity. ¤ e research and lessons of Faruqee and Albers and others have led me to theo rize the colors within e Blue Clerk as textual provocations — or, more specif ically, prompts — that center and incite imagination. Imagination is experiential and representational; it is also, like color, an act that is di cult to explain with clar ity. For this reason, I understand the work of imagination as both quiet and agentive (our inner imaginative thoughts are enun ciated imperfectly: they outline the condi tions for change, they invite us to do).

Some colors are clustered in versos (there are whole versos for and about the col or “lemon,” for example); some colors are typical adjectives (“a red buoy,” “a yellow house”); some colors are paired with nouns or verbs that, as pairs, we may not consider to be compatible (“blue speed,” “blue dis ciplines,” “violet haunch”); some colors are coupled with adverbs (“never violet”); some colors are nouns (“bone black”); some col ors we may know, imagine, but they are not explicitly named (“wooden dock”). Not all colors or versos with clusters of color are listed in the index. Some of the colors are collected by the clerk in the almanac.

KATHERINE MCKITTRICK

As provocations (prompts) intended for imagination, the colors in e Blue Clerk are perceptively tactile and felt and, at the same time, inexpressible. e colors invite our imaginations to work through the si multaneity of visual, non-visual, textual, and non-textual gradations. us, if we work with the insights advanced by Faruqee and Albers, we can observe how the emotive, dull, bright, and vibrant layers of blues, vio lets, yellows, greens, reds, browns, and other hues within e Blue Clerk, provide a way for us to engage the text, imaginatively, by exiting it momentarily and wondering (by wandering into and experientially engag ing with) how we understand and visualize speci c colors and how color complements how we live and feel. It is worth noting here that my think ing follows and shares Toni Morrison’s in struction: “Only the act of imagination can help me.” When wading through the nest ed processes of seeing, knowing, unknow ing, observing, representing, expressing, sharing, forgetting, erasing (and living with inaccuracies and unresolved problems), it is our imagination that helps us muddle through these complexities. As we wade, it is our imagination that seeks out and a rms already existing freedom practices. Imagination, too, leads to invention (and reinvention). Imagination is not an answer (noun), it is an opening (an act, a verb). And: Imagination does not always lead to representation, explanation, or description. We are permitted to keep some things to ourselves (they cannot have everything; not every silence needs to be told; they cannot have it all). I explore the colors in e Blue Clerk as provocations and prompts for the imag ination. I keep in mind, as noted above, the blue that washes across and exceeds Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues and the dilemma that arises when we grapple with color context, color veracity, and the impossibility of pre cisely equating observation (“I see pastel blue”) and representation (“I cannot ex plain my observation easily”). Put simply, I read the colors in e Blue Clerk as prompts that o er one potential way to attend to the thorny and unresolved problems un derpinning observation and representation. Part of this exercise reveals my own interest in color palettes, in color codes harmonies, and in the ways images and image-making help identify the problems and possibilities of description-representation.Wherearethecolors?e gure of the clerk holds an “almanac of colours.” e almanac could be an archive, a manual, a handbook, a calendar, or any kind of re cording. e almanac of colors might even be, when I stretch my imagination, a col lection of sounds or songs. Near the book’s close, there is an index. Under the heading “Language” there is a list of versos, and part of that list references color and where spe ci c colors are placed within the larger text. For example: “Verso 36.1 (blue, violet)” is indexed, and we can refer back to this ver so on page 184 and read: “blue wine, blue safety, blue havoc […] violet scissors.”

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 38 e clusters of colors are captivating and allow the reader to make connections between the written word, hue, represen tation, and imagination: “Violet terminals have appeared in the violet hours I have spent, the violet bookkeeping has been done, violet o cials have declared the violet kilometers’ violet shoulders.” Or: “blue rain, rind blue, blue turbine, blue vi sas, blue lled, blue tolls, blue storage, blue help, blue sex, poised blue.” I can and do visualize the blue turbine. In a certain sunlight, the turbine I see is a very light grayish-blue. Some colors that are coupled with nouns present a struggle, as do the colors that are paired with verbs. What violet is a violet hour? When is vio let? What kind of violet is a violet hour? What (where) is blue help? e clusters of colors are disciplining and frustrat ing. e bookkeeping and the kilometers and the o cials enclose my imagining. I cannot nd the help that is described here. Surrounded, I recall collecting and organizing objects and stories like this before.e lemon clusters are brilliant be cause the yellow is acidic and bright and sharp. e lemon (yellow) is brilliant be cause it is “…lemonavour.elegies, lemon summary, lemon pulley, lemon factors, lemon ar chives, what lemon, lemon acts, lemon nails, lemon steps, lemon crevasses, writ ten lemon, lemon vanishing, lemon de posit, missing lemon…” e lemons are sensory. ey leave lemon debris. e wreckage (junk, debris, waste) is brilliant and acidic and bright and sharp. Presenting color in this way — words and words and words, adjectivenoun, adjective-noun, adjective-verb, noun-adjective, verb-adjective, nounadverb — shows that text-word can simultaneously constrain and open up our imagination. e turbine is aqua, royal, or indigo. e lemon (yellow) is sweet (the debris is sweet). As prompts, the clusters of color in e Blue Clerk function to anchor and un leash the imagination. Brand’s persistence and repetition (violet, violet, violet, violet, “exhausted violet”) perhaps indicates the struggle to imagine and write and feel color as — and in — text. e reiteration of the same color, over and over, signals a move toward and the inability to pre cisely capture color essences. Each violet has a context that troubles exact violet. Perhaps persistence and repetition expose the limits of description (I tell myself, again: description is not liberation). e clusters of colors are not told in isolation. e attribution (lemon, violet, blue) re quires a complement (archives, o cials, wine). Each complement to lemon, violet, blue, pulls it toward and away from the potential essence of lemon, violet, blue: “violet transcripts” and “violet schemes” somehow, for me, intensify and punctuate bluish-purple.Andifitis a ower? e violet? If the violet is a ower? A noun? Reminder: Color changes according to context. Color cannot be accurately recalled or explained. Color holds memo ries I do not have. If the versos lled with clusters of colors function as provocations that take the reader, if only for a moment, beyond a mode of reading that decisive ly con ates observation and representa tion and attens (su ocates) hue, then the remaining colors in e Blue Clerk are similarly expansive. Some of the nonclustered colors are repeated in the text. e green unclassi ed aphids are intro duced early, and return (without greenadjective). e clerk’s blues (her coat and

Don’t Wear Down.

One could keep listing (clouds re pink, cobalt cranes, brown clay silt). Keep tabulating, arranging (green lake, green glow, aquamarine). Do something; (the risk of accounting is to forfeit a bigger discussion, a bigger life). is (my) list now functions to prompt and prompt endlessly. I see that sense of orange dif ferently than you. I hardly remember the sense of orange. Keep it up.

Placed within the broader context of e Blue Clerk — conversations and poems that drag you through care and unkind ness, versos where glimpses of livingness are emptied into pathos, stories where some love is sustained and other a ec tions disappear and love never was, where we are collected, observed, described, and turned into what they think we are, where the sea is reassuring, where the zinnias pause, where the real-true-honest meaning of poetry is shared and swiftly destroyed (the blackness of it all!) — the interaction of colors, the uses of color, the colorful prompts, a rm, displace, and re calibrate our imagination. e prompts take us through and beyond the love and the emptiness and the endless accounts. Representation, as an unmistakable sign or rendition or expression of what we see or know or feel, is foiled by the prompt. e ink blue is not an answer, it con founds. We are o ered text — “black valves of black engines” — as imbricat ed with imaginative labor, inexplicability, constant reconsideration, and an expres sion of promising inaccuracy and maybe praxis: a lesson.

KATHERINE MCKITTRICK

39 book and hands), and other blues (blue crabs, iridium oxide, blue bale, indan threne blue, blue to the heels, maljo blue, a blue bowl full of feathers, 200 incidents of blue, and more) are constant. Some blues carry connotation: maljo (cf. maldjo) blue, the violet-blue color of laundry blue; maldjo will prevent fever in a small child, maldjo will interrupt the consequences of cut-eye, etc. Some neutral and composite gradations signal infrastructure, institu tion: white shirt, white library, gray white public hospital, white steps, white blouse, gray petrol, brief brown post o ce, gray naval ships, gray paper, her dress is lead white, brown school uniform. e library is ochre, too. Ochre (yellows, oranges, clay-yellows) roves: mars yellow, iron yel low, a column of orange air, her head scarf is ochre, yellow ochre, golden temple, a yellow dress, a yellow ochre dress, black with yellow border, a sense of orange. “I was in my brown school uni form, I think. It/wasn’t brown it was blue and white. A blue skirt, a white/blouse. I would have to have been younger to have worn/ the brown. You are always young er in this type of moment./I have always sat beside this bed in my school uniform …”

MEZAIR MELISSA SELEY

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 40

We are on our way to pick up Amy in my mother’s new sedan, a Dodge Intrepid, a bulbous black vehicle, part buggy, part COPS. We are on our way to pick up Amy and her onion waft. At 11, my baby sister risks social castigating if she does not soon adopt wearing a train ing bra and deodorant. But it is spring. e street signs look especially green. e sky stretched across the windshield is blue and cloud-skimmed. A stout man pushes an empty red shopping cart down a side walk puce with tree pollen. Fifteen, I sit behind the Intrepid’s whipstitched steer ing wheel with my mother riding shot gun wearing a peach silk suit she’d show er-steamed that morning and orthopedic Mary Janes in a dusky eggplant shade with

41 swirls on the toes. At stoplights, I scan the radio stations for Stone Temple Pilots. She taps her foot lightly, constantly. e backseat is buried beneath empty totes and purses, unopened bills and di erent kinds of crumbs. For the fourth consecu tive time this week I’ve blown o geom etry, and while I might prefer my mother show some sign of disappointment over my delinquency, she appears, instead, to interpret these outings as a token of our closeness, a form of bonding much more pressing than cubed roots and Euclidean planes.It’s one of those banal whims, the sort that often precedes an accident. A hankering for french fries. Alignment be tween my mother and me — particularly at this obtuse angle of adolescence — is so hard-won that even basic mutual hunger feels like a gift. For the rest of life, it will give us something to share: remorse. We pull into the drive-thru of the Burger King on Marconi Boulevard. Place our orders. en my mother suggests we switch places. Maybe she gures she’ll give me a chance to scarf my chicken tenders while they’re still hot. Or maybe she’s had enough of my frantic bolts into suicide lanes. Beginning in the second grade, after I completed a summer-long dressage course alongside my then-friend, Annabelle Stickley, my mother has peri odically reminded me that I “look good on a horse.” No one has ever said anything like that about me behind the wheel of a car. My desire to obtain a driver’s license is halfhearted at best. It’s security I crave, not independence.Inourhousehold, things have been backsliding again. Ever since our con frontation in the kitchen a few months ago, my mother has stayed upstairs in her bed more and more, blinds drawn, nursing afternoon hangovers. For all that we see of my older brother, the family’s agship citizen, an athletic history major at a near by state college with a minor in rstborn sibling faultlessness, he might as well have shipped o to an Ivy League like he orig inally intended. Most days, I skip school, wallow in my downstairs bedroom, and attempt to scan the lines of the Vintage Book of American Poetry before abandon ing it to belt out Keith Sweat with my nightstandDuringboombox.thepast year, I’ve seen my mother stoop in a closet to unscrew a bottle of Ernest & Gallo wine, which she had apparently stored in a rain boot. I’ve watched my father carry her up our curved staircase, her eye swollen shut, face and arms scratched, after what was meant to have been a reconciliation din ner with him at Moxie’s downtown. He’d shown up late. Waiting, she’d passed out in the restaurant parking lot. Afterward, I’d climbed into Amy’s bed and badmouthed our parents to divert my sister’s attention from the unfortunate fact that the man who owned Moxie’s was the fa ther of Amy’s current playground crush, Sam Shakour, so everyone would soon hear about what happened in Moxie’s parking lot. Our mother had face-planted. It is, Amy and I both know, fruitless to try to reason with her. “I’m not inter ested in revisiting the past,” our mother will say whenever we cite examples of her recklessness in hopes of dissuading her from getting smashed. “I will not let you girls drag me through the mud. I would like to stay focused on the future,” she’ll replyItcurtly.ismy mother’s vision of the fu ture, more than anything, that undoes me. Her motto: “My version of paradise is if someone would do me a favor and haul

MELISSA SELEY

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 42 me away to the Calistoga Sanatorium to a padded room with a view.” If Amy or I suggested she put herself out there, try to meet someone new, enroll in a ho tel management night class at Sac State, she’d sigh wearily, “When my ship comes in.” Downstairs in the laundry room she’d hung a pastel print of a ranch house in winter. Beneath the picture, in callig raphy font, the print read: Cleaning the house while the children are growing is like shoveling the snow while it’s still snowing.

Whenever I retrieve warm jeans from the dryer or clean the lint screen, that picture reinforces the life my mother has settled into — inebriated against any sense that the present could be swept clean and set right again, absorbing misfortune like snow collecting snow. In the drive-thru, a produce baggie twists in the branches of an elm behind the speaker box. I unbuckle my seatbelt, shift the Intrepid’s leather gearstick into park. Gingerly, my mother steps onto the drive-thru curb. Something slips. e Intrepid drifts backward. In a panic, I de press what I believe to be the brake pedal. en, my mother’s shadow passes over the interior like a cloak. ere’s a heavy thud, and a wail. e Intrepid lurches backward again. is time, it feels as though it will never stop. ¤ Once, during my short-lived dressage courses, we’d taken a family vacation to Half Moon Bay. On the rst morning, our parents had woken my brother and me early in a seaside condo to leave for stables at a nearby horse farm. My father wore a thermal vest. A vest bode well for the day. He liked to lament that vests for men had fallen out of fashion. Vests, he said, were ingenious because in them a man could stay warm and still swing his arms freely. I remember wishing my father would wear them more because in the fog, in his vest, toting a pistachio green ther mos, he looked like himself, like the man I imagined he’d been before I was born. When it came time to select steeds from a timber-fenced pen, my brother, taller at 12 than most high school grad uates, pointed to a white-bearded pyg my named Pirate. Pirate’s long eyelashes accentuated his horsey black eyes, as if Pirate had applied eyeliner for the occa sion. “Don’t you have a donkey out back the poor kid could ride?” our father called to the ranch hands. My brother’s feet in Pirate’s stirrups nearly grazed the ground. Everyone but my brother laughed. e others were in various states of being hoisted and arranged on the hors es’ saddled backs when the last ranch hand approached me, leading a tall chest nut mare. e mare’s name, he said, was Olive. Olive bowed her head, nosed at a few fallen Manzanita pods. I stepped into the ranch hand’s cradled palms, felt myself lifted, landing squarely in Olive’s saddle. Even after the stirrups had been ratcheted, my feet hardly held their iron perches, but the ranch hand, busy fasten ing tack, hadn’t noticed. A slap to Olive’s haunches and we were o at a trot. A light nudge and I blew past everyone, leav ing my overgrown brother atop bubblebutted Pirate in the chaparral dust. In a ash, I saw my parents recede behind me, two startled faces, two wav ing hands. e guide who led my family up the cli ’s paths whistled for Olive to stop or whistled to cheer us on. I couldn’t really tell which. Olive was so big and fast, she amassed a landscape of her own. We moved through this other landscape

43 together: the dense sea air, the hard clay path beneath us littered with shells, the ocean far below and the waves’ froth that gathered and dispersed at its shores, the beds of ice plant along inclines, the pine needles, the sharp corners, all fell under Olive’s domain. Racing, I wanted to think that this previous summer, jumping white fences alongside Annabelle Stickley, had changed me. I wanted to believe I’d dis covered a hobby to claim and devote my self to, like my brother with his hoops and Trivial Pursuit, or Amy with her roll erblades. I hoped I’d broken free onto a new plateau, and that ahead I would see the shapes of my life laid out before me like a picnic on a blanket. I longed to move forward at a steady gait, no lon ger second-guessing every Connect Four move or kickball kick. I thought I might catch some freckles. Wear high-collared starched white shirts forever. Call myself Laura. e others were far behind, down a steep hill. ey wouldn’t have seen Olive bolt to the left, make a break for the woods. Somewhere in a thicket of branch es I lost hold of the reins. Clung to Olive’s rough, matted mane. Screamed into the winds as Olive lurched and whinnied for ward, always faster, forward. Gradually, galloping, Olive’s saddle slipped out from under her, wound up dangling from her belly as though to catch the reams of sweat that streamed from her haunch es. When we reached a clearing, Olive stopped. Not for a rest. But to rear back on her hind legs, stopping for a couple of bucks and kicks. In dressage, these moves are highly prized. Had we been at a com petition, Olive would have displayed her knack for the courbette, wherein the horse rears and hops on her hind legs, and the mezair, which requires the horse to stand vertically in place, punching out with her frontEventually,hooves.

Olive settled. She start ed shifting back and forth, hooving dead leaves, snorting like my father when a newscaster on TV said something bogus. By now I’d stu ed my face into Olive’s neck, and my hands, shredded like the trunks of the redwoods that encircled us, were buried in Olive’s raspy, sour locks. I wasn’t sure I existed from the waist down anymore. en Olive started farting. Each time she exed her anus, I feared sliding o until I thought of how my brother would say whoever smelt it, dealt it at cheered me. I tried calling out for help. I cried. Olive relieved herself. At a certain point, there was nothing left but to wait. I was not going to be tossed easily. I knew how to cling to the thing that threatened to crush me.¤ I clung like that, quietly, for years. At the kitchen confrontation with my mother, I still didn’t know how to let go. Even now, decades later, a woman of 40 in a moment of cultural conversation surrounding sex crimes: how to talk to one’s family about one’s predator?

I know a twentysomething woman who baked a cake in an attempt to cel ebrate her recent confrontation with her father about her childhood sexual abuse. It was white and spelled “Believe Survivors” in loopy cursive pink frosting.

I know a woman in her 50s who told her entire country. I know one of the teenage girls who came forward my freshman year cut her hair like a mushroom in hopes of looking ugly, while another left mid-semester for a boarding school in Arizona. Before they’d

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 44 come forward to confront our principal, they’d asked me to join them. Worried what my brother would think, I’d watched from the sidelines as the news leaked. People, my brother among them, said: Yeah, right. Like he needs to force anything. Others said: ose sluts wish. Girls who were not the girls who’d come forward didn’t want to choose sides; both argu ments made sense. Without direct proof, people didn’t want to tarnish my preda tor’s reputation, ruin his life. Teachers re mained oblivious, or so it seemed — what else was new? Coaches protected their outstanding players. My predator could usually be found in the athletics o ce with a clipboard, in the locker room or on the eld running drills. So, I thought it might go better if my mother actually saw my predator in the act than if I just told her, and I set up an elaborate ruse to allow her to witness it rsthand.Myplan was simple. e phone would ring.Had my father been home — he barely ever was — he would’ve snapped it up and balled out whatever idiot had the gall to call his household at such an hour. Instead, Unidenti ed Caller scrolled across the downstairs portable. My preda tor, who had also been one of my brother’s closest high school friends, his “brother from another mother,” always called be fore he drove over to make sure everyone else in my house was asleep. If no one answered the phone, or if I answered the phone and no one else picked up the line, my predator drove over. With my broth er expatriated to a local college, my father excommunicated to a luxury condo com plete with a pond and molting swans, and my mother generally wasted, my pred ator had gotten to the point where very little deterred him from using the mud room door key code he knew by heart to let himself in, and though I’d repeatedly nagged, my mother couldn’t summon the will to change the code. Any threat I’d made against my predator had long ago fallen on deaf ears. I hung up the phone, I felt like I was sitting not in front of the white shutters closed over my bedroom window but in front of a blazing camp re. e skin be neath my eyes stung. My throat rasped. I heard my predator’s car pull up out front and for a fraction of a second imagined how this lit room of mine looked from out there through the shutter cracks, il luminated, tranquil. Before I could assess where my slippers might be or how to stop the plot now in motion, a car door closed gently. e idea was that I’d wake my mother, hurry her down to the mud room hall so that she could see my preda tor break into our house with her own two eyes. at’s where we were standing, both in our nightgowns, when the bathroom door squeaked open. I held her hand, damp with moisturizer. Regret clamped down on me. ere were other ways to tell her this that she might believe. She didn’t deserve to stand in this spot and watch this person preemptively unbutton his y. No one did. I don’t know what I expected would happen next. I hadn’t thought that far. My predator opened my bedroom door, while my mother and I watched from the hall. She, alerting him to our presence, said, “What in the world is going on? Would someone like to tell me what is going on? Somebody had better explain.” My predator bolted. My mother and I remained motionless. ere were many stages. In one stage, her hand readjusted itself around mine. In another, we both

¤ All around the jacked-up menu stand, sti da odils poke out tall and regal from bark chips, their leaves unfurled at their leafy hips, yolk yellow coronas peering up expectantly like hostesses in doorways.

I told her about the other girls who’d come forward at school and what had happened to them. “Well it’s true,” my mother said, as though the other girls were in the room and she was addressing all of us, “you do have a history of making up stories to get attention.” e blows got low. I admitted I’d told other mothers rst, those of my closest friends. I didn’t mind exaggerating the benevolent reactions of these superior, un questioning mothers if that’s what it took to get it through my mother’s thick head what a sorry excuse for a parent she was. At some point, I made the mistake of say ing: “You ought to be ashamed.” “Trust me,” my mother said, “I am ashamed. at much is clear.”

Further down, impatiens have been fresh ly planted like those my mother mulched in the owerbed beneath my bedroom window on a morning, fuchsia, diapha nous. Common owers, impatiens, with squeaky petals, and my mother still calls them by their old name, touch-me-nots. Along the driver’s side of the Intrepid a mustard yellow gash snakes then s sures into a bash at the trunk, below a keyhole button engraved with a snarling Dodge ram, an icon, like me, perpetually primed to trammel. Beyond the smoking wreck, my mother lays face down in the drive-thru, her arms surrendered up at ei ther side of her head, her legs arranged at a nonhuman angle, silk suit torn and tiremarked, a gash at her nape seeping blood into her hair. A man in a oppy sher man’s hat is knelt beside her, asking quiet questions. Her replies garble in moans. An ambulance pulls into the parking lot. Gravel crunches. I’ve run over my mother, reversed over her. ere’s no reversing it now.

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45 went rigid, listening to the disturbance fulminating around us in the hall. In an other, my mother and I were alerted to our solitude by a peel-out screech on the street. I sat her down at the kitchen ta ble, did my best to explain. “I don’t under stand,” she kept saying.

Julia Leonard, Fallen Sculpture of David, Forest Lawn , 2020, ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.

PETER LUNENFELD

47 DAYS OF THE DEAD: FROZEN BODIES, REAL MARTYRS, AND THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY IN THE CITY OF ANGELS

There is a frozen creature in Southern California that will not die, an Indomitable Snowman straining against his glacial cocoon to claim his rightful place among the superheroes, villains, and shape-shifting chimeras cranked out by entertainment conglomerates from Anaheim to Burbank. is creature is their spiritual godfather, (Walter Elias) Disney on Ice. His body is, of course, not cryogenically preserved beneath Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, as urban legend would have it and was in point of fact cremated and then interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery. But no mat ter. Disney’s frozen head is tailor-made for metaphor. Uncle Walt was an ani mator, bringing to life the insentient and

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 48 making delightful the impossible. With a wave of his hand, brooms danced and mice sang. Playing with mortality is the secret sauce ladled over his corporate oeu vre. Bambi’s mother, Dumbo’s father, both of Cinderella’s parents, deer, elephant, and human — all dead. Yet mortality’s sting isn’t as fatal in Disney’s realm as it is in our own. Snow White eats a poisoned apple and undergoes a sleeping death, only to be reanimated by “love’s rst kiss.” Disney understood Hollywood’s maxim that if something works once, it will work again. us Sleeping Beauty, where yet an other young girl succumbs to the machi nations of yet another evil older woman, falling into a state closer to a coma than to sleep, only to be awakened by another one of those kisses. Eros and anatos were never so colorful, nor so well scored. Disney’s obsessions mirrored those of the region. Southern California was the rst place on earth where human bodies were frozen with the speci c intention of later being thawed out and then — what? Cured? Saved? Reanimated? In 1967 the rst cryonaut, retired psychologist Dr. James Bedford of Glendale, California, transitioned into the icy unknown. e freezing process was overseen by the presi dent of the Cryonics Society of California, Robert Nelson, an Los Angeles–based television repairman later reviled for the “Chatsworth Disaster,” concatenating comic atrocities that included the cram ming of two, three, or even four bodies into capsules meant for one and the abdication of the moral and nancial responsibility to maintain the liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees Celsius. Nelson’s charges putre ed, as meat — even of the human kind — will do without proper refrigeration. e Valley News reported that “the stench near the crypt is disarming, strips away all defenses, spins the stomach into a thousand dizzy ing somersaults.” Should we be surprised that the man behind this debacle in the San Fernando Valley mortuary turned out to be the creator of the myth of Disney on Ice? In the Los Angeles Times, Nelson claimed — without o ering any corrobo rating evidence — that in the short interval between Bedford’s freezing and Disney’s death a few months later, the master’s per sonal secretary had contacted him to in quire about cryonics. “If things had worked out di erently,” went Nelson’s dubious claim, “Walt Disney could have been the rst man frozen.” ere is a poetic logic to rumors of cryogenesis swirling around an animator obsessed with the future. Disney worked with rocket scientists to promote space travel, featured a “Tomorrowland” in each of his parks, and oversaw plans for EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a utopian city he envisioned as the jewel of Florida’s Disney World. Why shouldn’t an imagi nation this capacious have embraced tech nology to escape death? So many denizens of the Disney empire can be counted among the un dead. Take Mickey Mouse. Copyright on this signature rodent has been extended twice, rst in 1976 and again in 1998, with the magni cently named Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. While Disney’s corporate lawyers have done a great job of suing preschools and day care facilities for putting up unau thorized Donald Duck murals, they are occasionally slapped down for overreach. And when it comes to cultural sensitivity to appropriation, it turns out that enter tainment conglomerates could stand to be a bit more woke, especially when dealing with those who have gone to their eter nal rest. In 2013, as a then-untitled Pixar

But Disney didn’t become the most in uential entertainment conglomerate in the world without learning something about “community outreach” and crisis management. Its PR department set to work calming the Twitterverse, reining in the lawyers, and transforming the embar rassment into a triumph of multicultural marketing. One of its masterstrokes was to invite into its realm stakeholders and

Given the Día/Day’s new ubiquity, the audacity of Disney’s legal team came o as particularly o ensive. Nor, of course, would it be the rst time the powerful at tempted to strip the people of ownership of something no one had previously as sumed could be owned. Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, for one, was furious. He created a poster for an imaginary lm titled Muerto Mouse, which starred a Godzilla-sized, skeletal Mickey rampaging through the city’s streets, with the tagline “It’s coming to trademark your cultura!” Twitter mobs and the churning online outrage machine sprang into action, generating petitions signed by more than 20,000 people and garnering mainstream media attention. As CNN observed in its coverage, Disney might do well to note that, its claim to ownership aside, the Día/Day had been listed, as far back as 2003, among UNESCO’s “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.”

PETER LUNENFELD lm went into production, Disney set to work pre-protecting the corporation’s in tellectual property. e animators were tackling a new subject, Mexican folklore, and so on May 1, the corporation’s lawyers led an application with the US Patent and Trademark O ce to trademark “Día de los Muertos,” as well as “Day of the Dead.” ere are places in the United States where this lawyerly hubris would not have had much impact, but Southern California wasn’t one of them. It’s not just the Mexican and Mexican American pop ulations in the region; it’s the fact that even non-Latinx residents understood that what the House of Mouse was attempt ing fell somewhere between trademark ing a religious sacrament and invading the Yucatán Peninsula. Día de los Muertos, a holiday con secrated to venerating the dead, dates back to the pre-contact period. Its best known North American variant devel oped in Mexico, melding Indigenous and Catholic idioms. Traditions include dec orating cemeteries and creating ofrendas, or altars, commemorating family and friends who have passed on. e ofrendas can be as simple or ornate as their builders wish, often lit with candles, covered in the Aztec marigolds known as cempasúchil, and embellished with skulls made of sug ar. An ofrenda usually has two or more levels. At the bottom are the “down-toearth” elements, such as small chairs and woven mats, so the souls of the departed can rest. e middle level holds candles, food, and especially drink, tequila or mes cal in particular. e top displays photos or other keepsakes of loved ones, to keep them in memory. Families in the United States practiced Día de los Muertos at home until the 1970s, when Los Angeles pioneered public celebrations that have expanded across the country, transform ing the holiday into a cross-cultural, ecumenical celebration. In the new mil lennium, Día de los Muertos — packaged and merchandized as Day of the Dead — has become, like Halloween, another opportunity to stoke the desire for carni val, which translates into spending money, this time not on “sexy nurse” or Iron Man costumes but on those evoking the dapper skeletons La Catrina and El Catrín.

50 critics, including Alcaraz, as “cultural ad visers.” When “ e Untitled Pixar Movie About Día de los Muertos” was released as Coco in 2017, the outrage had dissipated and the lawyers’ cold hearts, one presumes, were warmed by the lm’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and the almost $1 billion in revenue generated worldwide.Another of these cultural advisers was the master altarista Ofelia Esparza. A lifelong resident of East Los Angeles, Esparza learned the art of constructing an altar from the women in her family, a tradition she passed on to her own daugh ter, the artist Rosanna Esparza Ahrens. In 2018, they created the Alter to el Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles, which is on permanent display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County . e El Pueblo altar is more than a dozen feet wide and features almost 300 images and objects represent ing the city, ranging from Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers to Jesse Valadez’s famed Gypsy Rose lowrider to a small Mickey Mouse Disneyland souvenir, festooned with sugar skulls and skeletons. Just to the right of Mickey is an im age of a stamp that the US Postal Service issued on April 22, 2008. e face on the stamp may not register instantly, but the name, “Rubén Salazar,” and the legend, “during Chicano protest rally in East Los Angeles,” might take some people back. During the 1960s and ’70s, Salazar was the most important Latino journalist in the United States and for many their rst introduction to what became known as El Movimiento, or the Chicano civil rights movement. Without the memory of Rubén Salazar, the Day of the Dead as we know it — not to mention Disney’s Coco — might not exist. Salazar was the rst Mexican American to hold a full-time position at the Los Angeles Times as a reporter, and while he was always concerned with border issues and immigration, he main tained fairly centrist views throughout the 1950s and early ’60s. But in the later part of the decade, Salazar held two im portant positions, as a columnist for the Times, and news director for KMEX, the rst Spanish-language television station in Southern California. Salazar was there as the political consciousness of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans crystallized under the pressure of endem ic racism, law enforcement harassment, chronically underfunded schools, and the Vietnam War’s toll on the commu nity’s youth, who su ered terrible casual ties during the United States’s Southeast Asian incursions. African Americans’ struggle for civil rights was a paradigm for many other battles: women’s liberation, the battle for gay rights, the American Indian Movement for Indigenous peo ples, and, throughout the Southwest, a movement of and for Mexican immi grants and Mexican Americans that iden ti ed itself with the idea of chicanismo e term “Chicano” was originally a de rogatory word for people who, while liv ing in the United States and of Mexican descent, were not “fully of” either country. However, in the 1960s, activists seized upon the term. With his dual a liation, Salazar was able to introduce Chicano activism to his Anglo-dominant reader ship at the Times, while giving those same activists television time on KMEX, in Spanish no less, to speak directly to their community, not all of whom were ready to embrace Chicano as a label or politic. On February 6, 1970, Salazar wrote a now-famous Times column, “Who Is a

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Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?” In a region “where the country’s largest single concentration of Spanishspeaking live,” Chicanos are the people who “have no one of their own on the City Council.” As for what they want, Salazar was direct: “ ey want to e ect change. Now.” For Los Angeles’s police, notori ous for intelligence operations aimed at “subversives,” and for L.A. county sher i s, responsible for patrolling (and, in those days, “controlling”) the unincorpo rated Mexican-immigrant and Mexican American part of the county known as East Los Angeles Salazar was the ene my — less a reporter than a mouthpiece for the young demonstrators whom they saw as insurrectionaries, if not full-blown communists or anarchists. Law-and-order fetishists saw Salazar as less of a neutral observer than the head of a fth column supported by the Westside’s feckless, self-loathing left-wingers, whom LAPD chief Ed Davis sneeringly referred to as “swimming-pool Communists” rather than the more commonly disparaging “limousine liberals.”

PETER LUNENFELD

e 1968 Chicano high school walk outs were a watershed. Kids demon strating against the separate and entirely unequal treatment they received in East L.A. schools su ered brutally at the hands of the sheri ’s deputies. Television, including Salazar’s KMEX, covered the way they were roughed up for pointing out that at high schools like Roosevelt and Gar eld there was only one college counselor per 4,000 students, though there were more than enough military re cruiters to hit up any Latino who wanted out of the neighborhood, even if by way of Vietnam or Cambodia. e student walkouts were fol lowed by ever larger demonstrations in Los Angeles and around the country, the largest on August 29, 1970, in East Los Angeles. Organized by the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, the antiwar protest drew more than 20,000 people, who marched down Whittier Boulevard to the green knolls of Laguna Park. What started out peacefully quickly escalated into what can only be called a police riot, with sheri ’s deputies sweep ing through the crowds, shields up and batons bashing. e most controversial incident was in a dark little bar called the Silver Dollar, at the corner of Whittier and La Verne. e sheri s stormed the place after receiving an anonymous tip that something was going down inside. Despite the fact that a photographer for the Chicano Movement’s paper, La Raza — surprised by the near-instant massing of law enforcement around this otherwise quiet space — was there shooting pic tures of the action, what happened next is still one of the most debated tragedies in Los Angeles history. What is undis puted is that Deputy omas Wilson red a tear gas canister designed to pierce walls through the bar’s open door and that hours later authorities announced they had discovered Rubén Salazar dead on the Silver Dollar’s oor. Salazar had stepped inside for a beer in part because he was concerned that he was being followed. One didn’t have to be much of a conspiracist to see this as the intentional murder of a journalist. As a foreign correspondent for the Times, Salazar had survived a stint in war-torn Saigon and served as chief of bureau in Mexico City during its worst social un rest since the revolution, yet he ended up lying in a pool of blood on Whittier Boulevard. ere were contradictory re ports from the very start, some claiming

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 52 a bullet to the head, later ones coalescing around the tear-gas canister delivering the lethal blow. ere was a coroner’s inquest into his death and also a secret federal grand jury investigation, but neither iden ti ed enough concrete evidence to bring anyone to trial. Whether accidental casu alty or victim of a targeted assassination, Salazar became a martyr to the Chicano cause. His body was displayed at Bagües & Sons Mortuary in Boyle Heights, and they handled the viewing as if it were a stateHisfuneral.memory still resonates. Laguna Park is now Ruben F. Salazar Park. He is featured in murals everywhere from e Wall at Speaks, Sings and Shouts in Los Angeles to Lincoln Park in El Paso, Texas. Chicano music giant Lalo Guerrero closed his corrido “La Tragedia Del 29 De Agosto” with “Que no haya muerto en vano Rubén Salazar,” a plea that the martyr should not have died in vain. In Frank Romero’s wall-sized painting Death of Rubén Salazar (1986), a stylized phalanx of deputies shoot projectilescum- reworks over the roof of the Silver Dollar, just next door to a movie theater whose marquee reads “La Muerte de Rubén Salazar.” Romero was a member of Los Four, who were among the rst Chicanx artists to show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was also associated with Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG), an Eastside institution founded in the early ’70s by the Franciscan nun Karen Boccalero and artists Carlo Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez, and Frank Hernández. It was there that the most enduring, yet least recognized tribute to the martyred jour nalist began. ree years after Salazar’s death, and as the white-hot moment of the Chicano movement cooled, SHG de cided to do something public that drew upon their own cultura but that would make an impact on the city and beyond. ey invited altaristas to build ofrendas and folks in the neighborhood to parade in costume through the streets, thereby staging the rst modern, public iteration of Day of the Dead in the United States — all to commemorate Rubén Salazar. ¤ Even though we might wish it otherwise, we often remember the powerful bet ter and longer than we do the legends of those who ght them. So it is that Los Angeles o ers far more lasting memori als to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, two Angelenos who rose to power spe ci cally because they promised to wield the cudgel of law and order against the incursions of the “counterculture,” that is, what and whom Salazar was perceived to represent. Nixon’s presidency from 1969 to 1974, followed a mere seven years lat er by Reagan’s, from 1981 to 1989, can be identi ed as the two decades in which Southern California’s political in uence over the nation was at its height. Both men claimed to speak for the forgotten and the voiceless, but their “silent” major ities were not at all silent when it came to denouncing any challenge to their status. Organizing that majority into a reliable, reactionary voting bloc required money, which Southern California plu tocrats — including aerospace’s Howard Hughes, publishing’s Walter and Lee Annenberg, retailing’s Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale, and manufacturing’s Earle and Marion Jorgensen — were more than happy to supply. What all these very rich people shared was a certainty that the “other” had to be battled tooth and claw (Nixon’s preferred feral style) or,

Julia Leonard, Main Public Library Fire, 2020, ink on paper. Courtesy the artist

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 54 alternatively, via sunny guile (the Reagan approach).ese divergent styles are immortal ized in Nixon’s and Reagan’s respective presidential libraries. No other metro politan area can boast of the presence of two presidential libraries, Nixon’s in Orange County’s Yorba Linda, Reagan’s in Ventura County’s Simi Valley, two of the most reliably conservative bastions in Southern California. Presidential libraries are compelling because they straddle the line between celebration and history. e British warehoused notable kings beneath Westminster Abbey, the French created a secular mausoleum for national heroes in the Panthéon, and, since 1924, V. I. Lenin has been on display in Red Square, out lasting the USSR itself. For more than half a century, the trend in the United States has been to entomb presidential corpses in presidential libraries. But their primary purpose is to house o cial pa pers and, secondarily, to provide gathering places for the faithful. In Nixon’s case, the presentation of legacy has been particularly complicat ed. After resigning the presidency under threat of impeachment in 1974, Nixon boarded a plane for La Casa Paci ca in San Clemente, his Western White House, to receive a pardon from his second VP (his rst had resigned for tax fraud), to watch Watergate co-conspirators like G. Gordon Liddy go to jail, and to write his memoirs. e rst of those came out in 1978, and the long and laborious road back to something like respectability be gan. A dozen years later the president and his wife, Pat, presided over the opening of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum on land that once belonged to his family. Privately funded by the same plutocrats who had backed his political career, the new institution faced a crucial question: how to craft a narrative of the immoral, the illegal, and the unethical? For more than two decades, the Nixon Library muted these issues, diverting at tention to Nixon’s diplomatic achieve ments. e place is littered with bronze statues of the man interacting with oth er bronze statues — Prime Minister Churchill, President Charles de Gaulle, and, naturally, Chairman Mao Zedong to celebrate the “opening” of China. e statues are life-sized and placed on the ground, which unintentionally dimin ishes them, making you understand why Napoleon was always immortalized atop a horse. After two decades of this insti tutionalized amnesia, a mandate from the federal government forced a reckoning with the di cult historical realities, and the story of Nixon’s fall is now told with greater detail and accuracy. But the new exhibits on Watergate and the resignation did not sit well with Nixon partisans, who resigned as docents and board members and drafted hundred-page letters of com plaint. Perhaps they were molli ed by a statue added more recently, in the newly recreated Lincoln Study. In this incarna tion, Nixon reclines on an easy chair, feet propped on an ottoman, a pen in one hand, a legal pad in the other. e scale and lighting humanize him, showcasing him in his role as lifelong student of history, one of the best writers to emerge from the o ce, even if he did so in extremis, forever the embattled Nixon Agonistes. e scale of that statue, and even of the library itself, surrounded as it is by an inauspicious suburban panoply of car washes, dry cleaners, and fast casu al restaurants, contrasts with the full-on monumentalism of Reagan’s spread, lo cated in the hills, atop a winding road,

55 at 40 Presidential Drive, the number less geolocative than symbolic, Reagan hav ing been the 40th POTUS. e Gipper left o ce after two full terms, and his reputation has only grown. He is, with out a doubt, 21st-century Republicans’ favorite 20th-century president. at means his scandals — including the failed arms-for-hostages deal known as IranContra — get little coverage, and glossed over are the inconvenient facts about his private life. No mention of Alzheimer’s. No sign of his son’s ballet dancing (a career that prompted AIDS activists to spread rumors that Ron Reagan was gay). His rst wife, the actress Jane Wyman, is given less wall space than that devoted to a “Just Say No” antidrug board game sponsored by second wife Nancy. What the library does o er in abundance, however, is phar aonic ambition. It is the country’s largest, and in 2004 it added a 90,000-square-foot glass pavilion housing the actual Air Force One that ew American presidents from Lyndon Johnson to George H. W. Bush around the globe. Nixon died before the pavilion opened, but one wonders how he would have felt looking at the very same plane that took him back to California af ter his resignation. If thoughts of Tricky Dick invari ably pull us over to the dark side, the Great Communicator’s blithe “morning in America” demeanor, so inspiring to his admirers, so infuriating to his detrac tors, is imbued with the evergreen radi ance that celebrity occasionally confers on those it touches. It should come as no surprise that Reagan’s library was the rst to embrace three-dimensional hologra phy. As of 2018, the rst exhibit visitors encounter is a tableau of the dead presi dent reanimated and re-dimensionalized. Here he is forever xed in time — on a whistle-stop tour, in the Oval O ce, at his beloved Rancho del Cielo in Santa Barbara, his holographic golden retriever, Victory, trotting at his cowboy boot–shod holographic feet. To create this thana topic spectacle, the producers composed the soundtracks out of spliced fragments drawn from the huge archive of Reagan’s recorded speeches. en they found an actor whose mannerisms and body were close enough matches to make the dig ital suturing appear realistic. During the lengthy shoot, the actor wore one of Reagan’s own belt buckles, an actual sad dle from the ranch serving as decor. e million and a half dollars invested in this endeavor, however, did not mitigate its unheimlich creepiness. Reagan isn’t even Southern California’s most famous resurrected icon. at distinction belongs to Tupac Shakur, the rapper, poet, and actor who turned up at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2012 to perform with fellow hip-hop legends Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. When a shirtless Tupac bounded on stage and bellowed, “What the fuck is up, Coachellaaaaa!” the audience erupted into cheers, delighting in Tupac’s return from the dead. ey couldn’t care less that this victim of West Coast rap’s most famous unsolved murder had died 16 years earlier, three years before the very rst Coachella. For that matter, Tupac wasn’t even “really” a hologram, being instead a version of a “Pepper’s Ghost,” an optical e ect dat ing back to the 19th century in which an image is projected onto angled pieces of glass, which then re ect it back onto the stage, creating an illusion of embodi ment for the audience. Many of the same people involved with the Tupac show lat er worked on the Reagan hologram. No matter that Reagan wasn’t exactly a rap PETER LUNENFELD

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 56 fan, being a Great American Songbook kind of guy, or that Tupac once lamented of eight years of Republican rule, “under Ronald Reagan, an ex-actor who lies to the people, who steals money, and who’s done nothing at all for me.” However divided in life, the Te on President and Makaveli (as Tupac came to call himself after reading Machiavelli’s e Prince in prison) are now united in virtuality. In Los Angeles, a city committed to fore stalling death and fetishizing immortality, their di erences are ignored as both are reborn as 21st century avatars of the 3-D afterlife. ¤ Southern California’s cemeteries are big business, and like the entertainment in dustry that surrounds them and supplies their best-known clients, they must inno vate or die. In 1917 Hubert Eaton, who vaingloriously referred to himself as the “Builder,” created in Glendale’s Forest Lawn what he saw as “a place for the liv ing,” with art rather than relics, a “spiritu al” rather than a “religious” space: “I shall endeavor to build Forest Lawn as di er ent, as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness, as Eternal Life is unlike death.” English visitors including Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh could contain neither their contempt nor their gu aws at Eaton’s antiseptic necropolis with its bowdlerized art and ag-waving patri otism, but the regular Folks of Southern California ate it up. Until Disneyland opened, it was Southern California’s most popular tourist attraction and the place Walt Disney’s parents most wanted to see when they came to Los Angeles to visit — and where, as noted above, Walt himself chose to be interred. Another cemetery favored by the entertainment elite was Hollywood Memorial Park, which backs directly onto the Paramount Studios lot. Among the notables laid to rest there are direc tor Cecil B. DeMille, actress/singer Judy Garland, and Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, whose headstone is inscribed THAT’S ALL FOLKS. It was also the nal stop for gangster Bugsy Siegel, but that’s a longer, bloodier story that pauses along the way at the safe beneath his reg ular table at the Formosa Café, a mile and a half west on Santa Monica Boulevard. Siegel was hardly the only shady character associated with the place. Jules Roth, its owner from 1939 to 1998, was a crook who sailed around the world on the company yacht, a head-scratching extravagance he supported by embezzling $9 million from the endowment care fund intended to maintain the grave sites in perpetuity. In 1974, the crematorium literally collapsed around the body of singer “Mama” Cass Elliot, and by the ’90s the cemetery itself wentWhenbankrupt.Tyler and Brent Cassity, two brothers from the Midwest, moved to Los Angeles to take over in 1998, there was much to be done. ey immediately rebranded Hollywood Memorial Park as Hollywood Forever and committed mil lions to renovations. But they weren’t in terested in mere upgrades. Like Eaton, the “Builder” behind Forest Lawn, their plan was to reinvent the category. One of their schemes was the creation of LifeStories video headstones, online tributes to the dead that resembled nothing so much as the “montages” that SoCal kids were fet ed with at bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras, and sweet sixteens. In promoting LifeStories, the Cassitys declared that the “ultimate way in this town to cheat death is to

PETER LUNENFELD become famous” and that at “least with the tribute your memories are preserved forever.” Well, not exactly forever: the cemetery discontinued this service as DIY smartphone memorials became ubiqui tous. More lasting has been the importa tion of actual lms into the resting places of the people, famous and not, who made them. Since 2002, Hollywood Forever has been hosting open-air summer screenings that draw up to 4,000 Angelenos, who come to picnic on the grass, smoke weed, and enjoy the show. ese evenings have reinvigorated the 19th-century tradition of treating cemeteries as spaces to com mune with the living as well as the dead. But for many, the real draw is the stars glittering overhead. FromStars. the inception of the mov ie business in Los Angeles, the city has crafted infernal engines to produce “more stars than there are in heaven,” to quote the MGM Studios tagline. But mystics and string theorists tell us that there are at least as many heavens as there are stars. e connections made here from Mickey to Coco to Salazar to Tupac to Mama Cass are inspired as much by the city’s platzgeist, or “spirit of the place,” as by any trail of evidence, drawing less from the causalities so dear to the discipline of history than from the esoteric correspon dences central to alchemy. Alchemy’s great work had as its goal producing a philosopher’s stone that could perform miracles: the rst, trans muting base metals into gold, and the sec ond, granting immortal vitality. at fame could create in nite riches and everlasting youth remains one of the city’s animating fantasies. But as the sense of Los Angeles’s history deepens, the city that has been at the edge of forever can break through the screen and open itself both to multiplici ties and multitudes.

Julia Leonard, Car in Pool, West Hollywood, 2020, ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.

SOCIETY OF ALEXANDRIA HALL

CRYONICS

When the money runs out, then comes the thaw. Till then, let it mind. Let it long. Let it keep. Will it stay? Will it spoil? Let it keep longing. How long will it keep? If it stays, will it stay long? Say long. Say how long. If kept, will it rot? And if it longs, will it keep? Does it long? Has it gone by? Will we know when it’s gone? Does it mind? Has it kept? Is it saved? Let it wait. Let it cease. If it stays, and it keeps, is it saved? en when it turns, will we know it’s gone by? Let spoil. Let go by. So long. Gone bad. Go by. So long, longing. How brief the going — bye-bye.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO SHAYLA LAWSON

ESSAY 60

In order for this period of Black aware ness to succeed, you need to seriously readjust the ways you think about Black women.Itis a mistake to believe that any anti-Black, anti-racist, activism can exist without the protection of Black feminin ity as its rst concern When I say “Black women,” I mean the lattice of cis, trans, femme, masc, woman-identifying, nonbi nary, gender-queer — queer and hetero sexual — individuals whose bodies signal to the world as both Black and feminine in ways that put them at risk. I say “Black women” in concert with a discussion that is inclusive and non-gender speci c be cause it is Western culture’s weaponiza tion of the Black female body that puts all of us in danger. e myth of the “strong Black wom an” extends all the way back to slavery

SHAYLA LAWSON

It is no accident that Black women have led the charge for every major reform in this country and that America uses this language to weaponize everyone against Black women. We have been completely essential to the acquisition of the rights and protections now enjoyed by everyone, but our safety will not be ensured in this new era of civil rights without addressing how we are treated because it sure wasn’t addressed by the last. e Montgomery bus boycott was a movement started not by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as fa mously touted, but by Black women who worked for the white establishment as maids, seamstresses, and in other forms of domestic labor. It was these women who not only walked miles to protest the segregated bus line (early in the morn ing and late at night, at the risk of their own safety) but who also organized the staged sit-ins that gave us the famed sto ry of Rosa Parks. ese women put their bodies directly on the line: they were spat upon, assaulted, and arrested for sitting in whites-only seats. Although the New York monument commemorating the ght for LBGTQ+ liberation consists of

61 and was one of the fundamental pillars of Western capitalist expansion. Slavehold ers perpetuated an idea of Black women as exceptionally strong, physically and psychologically. is was then used as an excuse to abuse them and as a way of grooming them to be more e cient work ers, machines on the plantation. Black women were also subjected to sexual vi olence, forced procreation, and separa tion from their children and family — all means to keep them from forming pro tective bonds that may have allowed them to function in the world as wives, sisters, mothers … as women and as people. e goal was both physical and social isola tion: A woman whom no one could vouch for, a woman whom no one could protect, and a woman whose life had no social val ue. is was the kind of woman enslavers could brag about. Documents written on slave husbandry o cially acknowledged these women as master’s money-maker, a successful slave. “A woman like that can run your whole plantation.” A woman like that.Even in this time of anti-racist con versations and wide-scale virtue signaling, people still don’t see these common prej udices against Black women as an active form of support for white supremacy. It is a regular and accepted form of casual racism for people across all intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and edu cation to openly lodge attacks on Black women based on this long-held, insidious slave narrative. Black women are “hard workers.” Black women are independent. Black women tell-it-like-it-is. Black women think they know everything. Black women are stubborn. Black wom en are physically assertive. Black women are promiscuous. Black women can ght like men. Black women are angry. Black women will cut you if you touch their hair. Black women are di cult. Black women aren’t attractive. Black women aren’t date able. Black women aren’t approachable. Black women are scary. I have had every one of these statements o ered up to me for a rmation. I have also watched peo ple commiserate over these statements as a way to build group support against me. Until we attack these racist ideas of who Black women are for what they are, hateful tools of an enslaving patriarchy, the anti-racist movement won’t succeed because white supremacy thrives on the baseline assertion in all these statements: that Black women aren’t women.

62 all-white — and all-cis — statues, it was Black trans people who led the actual charge against oppression, Black women speci cally. Black trans activists Marsha P.Johnson and Miss Major fought on the front lines during the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Miss Major is still at the vanguard of the Black liberation movement, con tinuing to work as an abolitionist. is is work that she began in the 1970s, when she was arrested several times for her protests against prison and police force. ough she has been active for over 40 years, there is still no acknowledgment of the extent her activism foregrounds and in uences our current conversation about police and prison abolition. ere’s been no acknowledgment that one of the most accomplished leaders of this movement is — to this day — a Black transgender woman.Asa cis Black woman, I myself am only recently becoming more aware of how closely anti-trans conversations are necessarily tied to conversations of antiBlackness. e same, deliberate, slave nar rative that is continually sustained by ca sually racist dialogue about strong, angry, unfeminine, intimidating Black women also makes it culturally acceptable for an ti-racist and anti-LBGTQ+ discrimina tion advocates and allies to discredit the violence, invisibility, and perpetual danger all trans people nd themselves in. And whatever violence, invisibility, and per petual danger trans people encounter as a result of this white supremacist, patriar chal, dialogue, Black trans people su er all the more because of additional systemic denigration of Black femininity across the spectrum.Itisimpossible to be a self-proclaimed anti-trans liberal (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists [TERFs], for example) and not also be anti-Black. roughout Women’s Su rage in the mid-19th cen tury and on into Women’s Liberation in the mid- to late 20th centuries, white feminists kept cisgender BIPOC women on the outside of the mainstream femi nist movement, claiming speci cally that Black women weren’t really “women” or that Black women’s struggle for equality required a di erent ght. Not only is this language uncomfortably close to the ar guments white people used to abuse Black women’s bodies during slavery, this lan guage to far too similar to arguments made by TERFs today to defend their exclusion of trans women in their feminist activism. In light of this, it was Black women who trailblazed the work for a more inclusive feminism — Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alice Walker, and so on. eir work broadened the feminist struggle to include not only conversations about vot ing and reproductive rights but also social reform, prison abolition, and a rede nition of womanhood (which might abolish the category all together). eir intersection al feminism gave women rights to whole personhood — making the law recognize cisgender women as more-than, whether or not we produce o spring or have bod ies that materialize the feminine form idealized by white patriarchy. Looking back at the history, if we allow TERFs to claim that these rights are privileges re served only for the “women” they think are acceptable, who will be left? Being anti-trans is anti-Black. According to the Human Rights Campaign, amid the rash of fatal violence happening to transgender and gender non-conforming people across the United States, the majority of the fatalities are

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Tauba Auerbach, Reciprocal Score, 2018. Courtesy of Diagonal Press. © Tauba Auerbach. Photo: Stephen Probert

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Black trans women who nd themselves most a ected by the Human Rights Campaign’s “intersections” of under-priv ilege are often those who look the most Black — dark skinned, Afrocentric. ese were features that slaveholders consid ered indicative of Black women’s close ness to livestock. America hasn’t changed.

Black transgender women. According to the Human Rights Campaign, Black trans women are particularly at risk be cause “the intersections of racism, sex ism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and unchecked access to guns conspire to deprive them of employment, housing, healthcare and other necessities.” Aside from this, America’s warfare against Black femininity, and the continued assertion — both tacit and explicit — that Black wom en aren’t women, leaves Black trans wom en particularly vulnerable as intersectional targets. e degree of risk for trans women often increases when they are less able to “pass” as cisgender. Even the term “pass ing” signals the connections between trans lives and Black lives. e term migrated from Black culture — how generations of Black people with Eurocentric features (Black people whose mixed ancestry often stemmed from the rape of Black women) allowed them to “pass” for white, adopting the safety and privilege of white people.

So, when people — especially cisgender TERF women — argue that women born with a biologically male body endanger cis women, whose racially coded, biologi cally assigned, male bodies are they most afraid of? We are in the midst of a cultur al reckoning in both America and abroad, led by the Black Lives Matter movement precisely because of the ways Black male bodies have been painted as dangerous and have been murdered at the hands of law enforcement. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism paints trans women as “dangerous” because TERFS claim these women have — due to being misgendered as men because their bodies are consid ered “biologically male” — experienced the privileges that society a ords cigen der men. is is not only a gross misrep resentation of the extreme violence trans women bravely confront in a world that is transphobic, homophobic, and antifeminine, but — even as this rhetoric vio lently ignores the reality that trans women have never had access to the privileges of cis bodies and obsessively reduces trans women to the biology of their bodies — it also reinforces the racist belief that Black biologically male bodies are the most “dangerous” of all and must be policed. e casualness of anti-Black and anti-feminine racism reminds me of the caption under my favorite Lorna Simpson photograph, e Water Bearer: “ ey asked her to tell what happened, only to dis count her memory.” Simpson’s piece is a black-and-white photograph of a darkskinned, feminine-presenting person in a white shift holding in her hands a silver pitcher and a plastic jug, each pouring wa ter. Although we assume the person in the photograph is biologically female, we can only see her from the back. Although we can tell she has dark skin, we don’t know if her race is Black. We do not need to see her, in order for her memory or her expe rience to be “discounted.” is is the point — it is not what is observable about Black women that informs why you discredit us; this is not why you will not see us, or listen to us, or keep us safe. e violence against us is a direct response to your inherent prejudices.Ispent a lot of time as a young girl, and up through my 20s, searching for interviews with the Black transgender,

65 gender non-conforming, and female ac tivists involved in the centuries-long ght for American civil rights. I couldn’t eas ily nd them in the accounts and histo ry books, but I knew they — we — have always been there, ghting. Of the many similarities I noticed in their stories was how often they were told to wait for their own unassailable rights to be granted. For decades, we have been told to wait. We have been told to wait so that liberation can privilege the visibility of cis male, non-Black, and heteronormative faces. We have been told our work at the front lines of this ght is essential, but our struggle is insigni cant. We have been asked to keep conversations of our safety on the side lines, to wait until other movements have won. Despite our undeniable role as the forebearers of equality throughout history and in modernity — Black women are the founders of Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and the Gay Liberation Front — the vio lence against us is a pervasive, long-stand ing, Oluwatoyinepidemic. Salau was murdered af ter leaving a Black Lives Matter protest, at which she passionately advocated for the protection of the Black LBGTQ+ community. Breonna Taylor, an essen tial Emergency Medical Technician, was murdered by the police while she was sleeping. Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells and Riah Milton were murdered, in two separate states, during the same week that Trump revoked discrimination pro tections for trans people. Nina Pop was stabbed to death just a month earlier, on May 3. As of June 25, 2020, the bodies of six additional Black trans women (Bree Black, Tatiana Hall, Brayla Stone, Merci Mack, Shaki Peters, and Draya McCarty) have been found dead, across the country, within one week of each other. Six Black people were hanged across America — in a period of less than a month — during worldwide Black Lives and Black Trans Lives Matter protests, and yet most re ports about these lynchings misgender Titi Gulley, listing all the victims as men. And just two days after the murder of George Floyd, Tony McDade (also ini tially misgendered) was shot dead by the police. ere are so many stories like this. ere are more stories like this than I can make space in my own grief to mention. It is time for you to amend your beliefs, your system that advantages you over others, your rallying cry. What we need from you is not the simple acknowledgement that we are here, that we, too, have seen “what happened.” We need you to do what we have done to support you. We need you to use your activism to protect us.

SHAYLA LAWSON

Julia Leonard, Bridge to Nowhere, Malibu, 2020, ink on paper, Courtesy the artist

67 MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 68 Crocus, primroses, in locked-down Square LéopoldAchille. e plague spring. Rana sent me a photo of police on Hamra Street enforcing curfew. e boy I watched on the roof of the refugee squat was locked down already, daily, among washing lines — MH, 29 March 2020 Daily lines burgeon on Louis Blanc pavements, each sprout ve feet from the next: Human un-blossoms —sidewalksandgloved,Onebaker-butcher-grocers’outsidedoors.outforonein;masked,sanitizedbeforeaftereachyield.epigeonsstruttingthesameheednodistancing.KN,30March2020

Vêpres à la Vierge (while I’m doing the dishes) on the comforting old squat black CD player: for a moment, there’s connection, if only with that perplexed self, desiring. — MH, 30 March 2020 e desire for self to be more, more than terra rma for settlementsvirusbegets fresh creeds. Parisians grunt and wheeze praise to Lord Jogging, while roaming forlorn as our streets. Romans hymn and drum Volare from balconies. Jack Bernhardt ingests ten whole thousand hours of Bones — libation of eyes and wits to fair Agent Booth. e right mantra for lúc l c spurs my quest across the ’Net. — KN, 31 March 2020

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

69 “Distance between us…” she wrote long ago, and then made it Charpentierpermanent.

Across the street, a girl stands lengthily at the window, smoking and looking at empty sidewalks, sun-soaked on April rst. I wished the tourists would disappear. Now they’re gone. Watch what you wish for! In purdah, in quarantine, I dice one more aubergine.

Preschoolers play COVID-age tag in our courtyard: Not more than two at a time, and “catch” with an out- ung glove.

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— MH, 1 April 2020

— KN, 3 April 2020

Aubergine, once more — braised, bhartha-ed, basil-and-beeffried … in any form: e thought invades aurous noons, leaves sharp pugmarks on my dreams these still-wintry nights.

71 We drove out to the place they called Karantina where crews of ships from Europe once waited forty days to be declared plague-free. Desolate still, but in a lonely high-rise, in a vast gallery, the ninety-year-old painter’s new gouaches, texts, tapestries. Afterward, a huge Armenian lunch in Bourj Hammoud with my two young friends: nobody knew the quarantine was just starting. — MH, 3 April 2020 MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 72 Bedlam just started here, N writes from New Delhi’s migrant-worker camps. How will they lockdown millions who have neither doors nor roof? Millions who must walk many moons to reach a home to Primeself-isolate.Minister Modi bids his nation to light candles. President meanwhile,Macron,warned us o facemasks unless really ill. Spring: the dearth, in my two lands, of roses for all the graves. — KN, 4 April 2020

73 Rose garden hidden in the Square du Grand Veneur — it’s starting to bud, but the gates are locked, only kids from the logements sociaux in the enclosure peer through the grates, in strange bright April sunlight. Here’s a petition against euthanizing the sick old. — MH, 5 April 2020

Sick and old: for Laure and Serge, teens from Block D, I now tick both boxes. L — four-inch heels keen across cobblestones — rushes to hold open all our doors. eir mom, though, no longer hails me with nod and smile: Chemo-shorn, browless beings in masks could spell one more germ. — KN, 6 April 2020

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 74 One more spell, one more incantation — it’s only “ e Art of the Fugue” or Hildegard of Bingen or Alice Coltrane: music mutes anxiety. Abida Parveen sings a Hafez cross-legged,ghazaleloquent hands. … I pick out a word or two. — MH, 6 April 2020 Two words, now, for me: Hum dekhenge — We shall see. Iqbal Bano soars skyward on Faiz’s refrain, and something steelier than hope lights the heart once more. Heart that uttered last evening, stalled a few instants: a frog in the throat these days hearkens to beasts less winsome. — KN, 9 April 2020

— KN, 13 April 2020

75 Ego, clawing beast: with or without our selfhood, beasts try to survive, as does each isolate “I,” newly dispensable, or in the equation. Lock up these, those, forever, then open the doors. I open late windows on unnatural bright April.

— MH, 10 April 2020 Bright as this April Isa, ushed after cycling from Pantin — risking dour nes we none can a ord— brings me dorayaki, homemade with sweet red beans crushed and our ground by Nico, who’d foraged for weeks. Balm for my bile-deluged gut, swaddling for sleep-deprived dreams. Wajdi Mouawad writes to his infant, unknowing son “Quoi dire de plus urgent que l’amour ?” Sometimes, pancakes will do just as well.

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

Pancakes, not huîtres, phone calls, texts, instead of wineavored exchanges in the public privacy of a café. Sautéed snow peas, shallots, chicken, wine anyway, but for one, yesterday’s bread, a departing moon above roofdormers, now my horizon.

— MH, 14 April 2020

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My horizon, each week: the poppy-printed, teal hair cap of Nurse Rose (handstitched, the orets for cheer) as she disinfects — “secures,” in the martial cant so dear to our president –my port-a-cath site. She, of calm hands and raptor gaze, snags any truant vein.

— KN, 15 April 2020

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

77 I play truant when I go to the bakery, or Russian roulette for a baguette tradition, une réglette de macarons. I should be indoors. Back inside I’m dizzy with fear, but I eat one, two, caramel macaroons. “Look, we have come through?” Who knows? — MH, 15 April 2020 Who knows anything today? Prefects, priests, pressmen, physicians … no one. Yet, wait, everyone we know, or don’t, dons shades of prophet. Sun-drenched owed the Quais de Valmy and de Jemmapes these last afternoons while I brooded indoors with Coke as cure and company.

— KN, 18 April 2020

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— KN, 20 April 2020

A rain of ghazals, petrichor from verse by longlost poets, crumble many saber-toothed daymares, if just for a rainbow while. Ghālib, Faiz, Firaq, Sahir (always Sahir), then the doyen, Khushru: su , secular or plain ka r, their ghazal, nazm and sher the rst to strike my early, unlearned ears; demand rebellion yet earn adoration from a resolute nastik heart.

Wolves accompany me, a dream I’d like to have, lope across a steppe howl an ode to the half-moon, break bread with al-Farazdaq, hunt mice if we must. Overarching, the night sky blankets the city we’re immured in, or opens it up to ghazals of rain.

— MH, 19 April 2020

My atheist heart’s an impatient physician, has no words to calm vertigoes, palpitations provoked by a sentence in a news brief, or just the sameness of spring days that lengthen, out of reach. No words then, music, numbers and feeling, metal, thoughts, reeds: oud, violin saxophone,orbehind them a mind, hands, a mouth unseen as a friend’s face now. Today, the doctor’s Mozart. — MH, 21 April 2020

My doctors Bourrat and Blazy — Amazons with spines of carbon steel, shafts marked truth and solace, ngers the envy of neat goldsmiths — take the time to write and ring, enquire and devise relief, with bad puns, in pandemics, covering for painkillers. — KN, 23 April 2020

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

rough nights in Aceh after the tsunami, in a hospital tent she saw herself back in school, saw herself the physician. I imagined her then, now, at a di erent distance, think of her unmasking in the morning, driving home to walk the dogs.

Home with the dogs — four — and spouse of ve-odd decades, my dad (veteran of three wars; child, too, of World War II, famines, a blood-steeped Partition) thunders at the virus, the lockdown, the distance from kin … the years of command futile before this covert agent.

— KN, 24 April 2020

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 80 Covering her face with the mask she’ll wear all night, my daughter goes to meet the patient rst in the queue: midnight in the ER.

— MH, 23 April 2020

Before, I covered my head to enter a mosque. I cover my face now, to go down to the street. Niqab’s forbidden in France, but masks like the one the kiné gave me will be Iobligatory.sentaphoto of my solo atheist Iftar to Samira in Algiers, to Maryam in London. Next year will we sit down together to break bread for anyone’s feast? — MH, 26 April 2020

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 82 Stale bread, feast for one gleaning breath from rotting peel and near-empty cans of red beans from garbage bins around the local Monop’. Streets abandoned by tra c and pedestrians nd homes with vagrants. Vagrants left unfed, unsafe, even as the cops slap nes on their unhoused hands, and leaders applaud our statewide lockdown success. Some deaths never gure, not even as nameless gures. — KN, 28 April 2020

Known, nameless faces, gures, throw open windows up and down the street each night at eight to applaud doctors, nurses, éboueurs, and to show ourselves to each other at the end of a locked-in day I wave to the girl in the fth- oor dormer; she waves back.

Her sixth- oor dormer, a cigarette, the much-loved view of our skyline: Claire — critical-care intern — sighs for one, after twenty hours on breathless feet. Evening applause is sweet, but she’d choose PPE over the President’s praise — and eggs on grocery shelves.

— MH, 29 April 2020

— KN, 1 May 2020

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 84 Shelves in the G-20 are still lled with co ee, cheese, brown eggs, gariguettes, Greek yoghurt, milk, wine — but I hurry, forget tomatoes, get out of harm’s way (masked, gloved) as fast as I can. Food shopping once was community, communion. Poison in the chalice now. — MH, 2 May 2020

In my chalice, now, on good days: mouthful of fresh cirrus and sometimessapphire,nimbus, with falling sheets of vitreous heaven. at daily ramble, required to expel Taxol and its unkind ilk, impossible alone, yet forbidden in company. Once more, Doctor B rides to the rescue, handing armor to my knights: Isa, Nico, Claire, Philippe bear her letterhead as shield. — KN, 4 May 2020

A facemask as shield, or he hopes so, bearing wine and some news, Hisham walks along the Corniche, open now, toward Raouché, his mother’s at, where he hasn’t been in three months. Scholarship, maybe, fall term in London, maybe. Freekeh bidajaj tonight.

Tonight, an empire of pain reigns over attempts to write, think; to be. Fall, even summer, graze past ears as would submerged boulders. RDEB — four horseless, shapeless, ageless words — must play rst ddle; second, third, and last as well while all others earn exile.

— MH, 4 May 2020

— KN, 5 May 2020

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

— KN, 8 May 2020

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 86 Home becomes exile in the punished city. Leaves green beyond grillwork, Nâzım Hikmet’s postcard from prison poems on the sill. Locked-in lovers make love until it bores them. Once through a hurricane in Crete … but that was three days, decades ago, two of us. — MH, 7 May 2020 is, decades ago, was how I gaped at the sea. Reaching Rue Manin, the years sublime, suddenlymuch-younger selves drink from this downpour of gloaming, we gasp at the carnival corralled within Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Cedar, elm and linden, pine, plane, and beech, arch toward the sky; hazelnut and cherry trees aunt wanton blossoms; and the cascades underground serenade us from afar.

From afar, but it wasn’t, thunder, rush of dark clouds, then crash of rain, just after I noticed, no gates blocked the berges of the Île Saint-Louis. No way but, run under the rain, no café shelter. Strip o once indoors, shower. Flu, or worse, I’m on my own. Later, on my own, I slice shallots and mushrooms into olive oil and begin to imagine I might not cough tomorrow.

— MH, 9 May 2020 Tomorrow might bring the unknown — new foes, allies of Taxol; blitzkrieg within the chest; skull a re (the mind sentinels one front alone, these days) — but also Philippe, bonne fée; by the hospital doors, strafed by showers or barraged — joyfully — by vernal sun.

— KN, 12 May 2020

MARILYN HACKER & KARTHIKA NAÏR

WOLF CLAN WOMAN TERESE MARIE MAILHOT SHORT

They didn’t capitalize your name in the obituary. ey didn’t say you were Wolf Clan, or that you died sober. ey didn’t say when you called your grand mother to catch up, she put your abuser on the phone. You didn’t always trust family. ey didn’t say your father was a survivor: he was taken from his people, given to the nuns and priests, and then reunited with his mother. It was a time of joy and recla mation. en lightning struck his house. He was reading comics with his sister. He said, “ e whole house lit up like a million candle lights. ere wasn’t a shad ow in that house.” His leg caught re. e doctors told him he wouldn’t survive.He said, “Get the fuck out of here.” ey didn’t say you wore Skechers: mom shoes, purposely, for the fun of the

T ERESE MAILH OT

89 mention, for the comfort, to say there was some cuteness and resignation in what we do now as mothers. You wore shirts that said “Blessed” and “Hype,” and you watched reality TV like you knew the people, a ected when most would laugh.

Grief is oversight and the things we forget to honor, like being your closest loved one and forgetting to capitalize your name, forgetting text lives forever, beyond us. When you were in the middle of che motherapy, I cleaned your house. I held each wig you owned and examined it from all dimensions — the red one was yourMyfavorite.brother said it made you look too rez, but that’s exactly why I liked it.

I looked at your journals where you listed your plans, organized treatments, and wrote down di erent subsidies you could apply for. I felt honored to see your life as vulnerable as it was. e notes were what compelled me to keep cleaning — to get on my hands and knees and wipe the corners. I wanted you to have one thing. You were a survivor, you know? Even if you didn’t survive everything. We can only contain so much. ey will say, Wolf Clan Woman was so tough, so much gossip, so much criticism and cackle, so much nurturing and home-cooked meals, so much ght — so much yellow in the medicine wheel, that after our last hug, you placed Yukon sweetgrass in my hand. You were tough medicine, and absolute ness — no forgiveness, no second chances: all forwardness and motion. ey didn’t say what lters you liked, or that, when you went to hospice, the man who threatened to kill you came to abduct his child. ey didn’t say how you had to pull up restraining orders on your phone from a hospital bed. ey didn’t say you never had a chance to rest. Nobody wants to talk about all the threats on your life. Nobody wants to make myth of you yet. I’d like to think if I wrote your obit uary that I wouldn’t let you down, but words fail to execute the sharp edge of young death or you.

Flow Separation, 2018. Public Art Fund/John

Tauba Auerbach, J. Harvey. Tauba Auerbach. Nicholas Knight

Photo:

There's been a furor over nothing. On June 2, 2020, millions of wellmeaning people, mostly non-Black, posted black squares on their social media feeds in a phenomenon tagged as “Blackout Tuesday.” Originally proposed by Black music executives Brianna Agyemang and Jamila omas under the hashtag #TheShowMustBePaused, Blackout Tuesday called on the music industry to pause and re ect on the ways it pro ted, often unfairly, from Black art. Instagram in uencers and their followers spread the idea beyond the con nes of the music in dustry, promising to amplify Black imag es and voices by muting others’. But the multiplication of black squares back red. To some, it was a facile move intending

RIGHT THERE IN BLANK AND WHITE MEGAN WARD

91 ESSAY

When print books are translated into dig ital versions, the blank pages are preserved … sort of. Most commonly, what shows up on a screen reader is a white page with an alert, usually something like, “ is page has been intentionally left blank.”

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 92 to signal white allyship without real e ort or consequence. Others pointed out that it had potential negative e ect, as those black squares tagged #BlackLivesMatter took over searches for the term. Rather than being ampli ed, Black perspectives and information were lost in a sea of blank, black Scrollingsquares.through those squares re minded me of another digital void, anoth er nothing that turns out to be something.

When digitization became widespread in the 1990s, practitioners decided not to scan blank pages because it seemed like a waste of data. A 1996 patent notes how “desirable” it is to identify blank pages so that “the page image can be discarded” in the name of e ciency. According to this logic, a page without words or images has nothing worth preserving. All blanks were created equally worthless, so it made sense to substitute a generic white page or omit those pages altogether. Information can be measured, this suggests, as presence or absence. Yet, by announcing its own blankness, the page disrupts that simple binary.Both the black square and the blank page make the same mistake: they an nounce their blankness without full awareness of how much blankness has to say. And it’s not only technology that mistakes something for nothing. For a long time, I misunderstood my whiteness as blankness. Like the black squares and digital pages, I confused something for nothing. It’s a mistake only a white per son could make. It’s not surprising that I have found it hard to see whiteness; I have surrounded myself with it. I teach Victorian literature, long a bastion of white supremacy, colo nialism, and cultural imperialism. I live in Oregon, a state that, in the past, used exclusion laws to prevent Black people from settling in the state and continues to use progressive politics to promote the well-being of white people. Yet, even knowing this, even trying to work against these histories, it’s all too easy for me to slide into not-noticing, to bob along in this sea of homogeneity warmed to a complacent bathwater temperature. Whiteness fails to register when it feels close, comfortable, and intimate. In these instances, it feels valuable to me, even when I also know that it’s against my values. Reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books to my two daughters, for instance, confronted me with the intri cately interwoven whiteness of my own inner life. Reading as an adult, I registered with shock the racism that had never been a part of my own awareness of those books. I spent years of my childhood with a constant Little House inner mono logue. Cleaning my room could be fun if I pretended I was sweeping out a dugout. Walking to my K-5 school became a long walk on the prairie to a one-room school house. Hatred and fear of Indigenous people never gured in those imaginings, but once I read the books to my children, I couldn’t help but wonder what I had done with those messages, so clearly present in the text.e answer lies in the series’ manage ment of the presence of overt racism with concurrent erasures of race. Little House in the Big Woods opens by explaining that, in Wisconsin in the 1870s, “there was nothing but woods. ere were no houses.

Earning it meant adopting the racial hi erarchy and racist beliefs that would put them above Black and Indigenous people. is is part of the process that historian Nell Irvin Painter describes as the “change from white races to one white race.”

Solidifying whiteness made it less visible, less variegated in texture, easier to recede into a background of privilege without calling attention to itself. Alongside rac ism — and crucial to its success — white people learn blankness. To be clear: blankness isn’t a meta phor for whiteness; it’s a lesson in learn ing the power of mistaking presence for absence. When it has been advantageous not to be blank, white subjects have re versed its powers, perpetuating what bell hooks called “the sense of whiteness as mystery.” Nineteenth-century maps of Africa showed a blank interior, inviting European powers to sit down and divvy up a whole continent in what’s known as the Scramble for Africa. In this instance, blankness erased the extant populations, governments, languages, and cultures, the more easily to substitute the impress of the colonizer. Seeing only a blank made it possible to imagine a simple extension of power rather than the violent imposition of a new Recognizingregime. blankness, or unlearning it, means giving up complacency for a new kind of perception. In order to discern the structures underpinning our every day lives, we have to be able to recognize them as structures, as built systems that can be taken apart and rebuilt. More than 30 years after Audre Lorde pointed it out, however, it still often falls unjustly to “women of Color to educate white wom en — in the face of tremendous resistance — as to our existence, our di erences, our relative roles in our joint survival.”

MEGAN

93 ere were no roads. ere were no peo ple.” at lost world of nascent possibility was tantalizing to read about as a dreamy kid tucked in to a safe, predictable life. But, for the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Menominee, Potawatomi, Sauk, Kickapoo, Oneida, Mohican, Fox, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), and Ottawa people who lived in Wisconsin at that time, it was and is a harmful fantasy. ey were erased in the pages of the book, as they were in other public histories. I never learned about Wisconsin’s Native people, despite growing up there, and the small-town Wisconsin that I knew was, and still is, overwhelmingly white. My ed ucation and my experience both re ected a world like Laura’s, a world that I didn’t understand as created because it was all I knew. It was a world where “no one” lived except white people, making it hard to un derstand whiteness as anything other than a blank I didn’t have to see. Seeing blankness means defamiliar izing my family’s history. My ancestors came from Ireland to Wisconsin. But despite being northern European, they wouldn’t necessarily have been considered White when they arrived. As historian Noel Ignatiev explains, “while their white skin made the Irish eligible for member ship in the white race, it did not guaran tee their admission; they had to earn it.”

Like many others, my unlearning has come both from traditional sources such as books and also from platforms such as Twitter or Patreon where Black and Indigenous activists and people of color reach their audiences. My unlearning has also come from those I have been charged to teach: my students. In my department, graduate students of color have been exposing the system ic inequities of our institution — and, by extension, my complicity in that system.

WARD

It has been hard not to lay out my forti cations, to explain away my students’ ob jections, to justify the structures in place or to testify to their immovability. Activist and educator Rachel Cargle has com mented that “many white women believe that the worst thing that can happen to them is to be called a racist.” e fear of being called a racist is a fear of getting it wrong that, ironically, leads white women to actually, truly get it wrong, centering our feelings in conversations about racism, lling it with our guilt, defensiveness, and shame and potentially derailing them. I know, because I’ve felt those feelings, tight in my chest, hot in my pounding blood. I’ve been in rooms where I have needed to contain those feelings in order to lis ten hard, to see what students of color see, even when I initially draw a blank. For all my internal drama, it is prob ably tiresome to witness. As Sara Ahmed explains, “whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it. For those who don’t, it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere.” It is in the best interests of white people not to distinguish whiteness, to see absence where others cannot escape seeing presence. Nonetheless, writing an essay on learning to recognize whiteness is a continuation of the privilege that I’ve always enjoyed in not seeing it. I’m hesi tant even to tell a story such as this, one that unmasks whiteness as its denoue ment. I’m hesitant to accede to the nar rative demands of revelation because I’m not sure that will mitigate the power of blankness, or my unwitting collusion. I hesitate because I know how blank ness seduces. When my daughter Matilda was four, she went to public preschool in our Pittsburgh neighborhood. She was one of a handful of white kids in an oth erwise Black classroom. Halfway through that year, I gave birth to her sister, and Matilda came to visit me in the hospi tal and meet her new sister. She climbed into bed with me and together we turned to peer at the new baby in the bassinet. Matilda pulled back the blanket and ex claimed with surprise, “She has white skin just like us!” I used to tell this as a feelgood anecdote, proof that kids aren’t born with racial prejudices. Now I recognize that in seeking that proof, I was seeking to con rm blankness — even as my daughter was momentarily, innocently stripping it away.As this suggests, blankness shifts with its context. When paper was more ex pensive and harder to make, for instance, authors and their audiences understood blankness di erently. e endpapers and margins of printed text invited written re sponses from readers for hundreds of years — even the spaces between words were used as an opportunity for further compo sition. It is only in our era of cheap paper that a page must be completely empty to be blank. As paper prices fell, blankness be came an important tool for 20th-century avant-garde movements. Conspicuous white space around text and blank pages became methods for introducing silence, which in turn emphasized the value of the text itself. Turning a blank page en acts a hush of reverence. But the digitized blank page wastes that capital by drawing attention to it. It doesn’t feel reverent to click quickly past a not-blank page. Once blankness has drawn attention to itself, it squanders its own power. To maintain its force, blankness often hides in plain sight. at’s why, as Tressie McMillan Cottom explains, the “ultimate expression” of whiteness is its “elasticity.” Whiteness can morph to encompass al most anything, Cottom argues, as long as

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MEGAN WARD

95 it can still be de ned against blackness. As a walking cliché of a certain kind of white woman, I have rued what feels like a lack of imagination on my part: I love trail running, yoga, and craft beer. I can’t get enough costume dramas, midcentury ar chitecture, and indie rock. I am, you might say, a basic bitch. Being “basic” means being unexcep tional, mainstream — but only if your idea of conventionality means whiteness. Co-opted from Black hip-hop lyrics so that white women could insult one an other, “basic” signi es how important it is for race to be so naturalized that it dis appears. e connection between aesthet ics, activities, and race isn’t biological or even necessarily social. Wealth is obvious ly important — yoga classes aren’t cheap — but as Cottom points out, whiteness is so elastic that almost any aesthetic could do the work of making whiteness seem so fundamental as to go unnoticed. “Basic bitch” puts misogyny center stage while attempting to expunge the specter of race. It is a racial term for the “post-racial” era. Erasing whiteness enables it to re main the default setting. It performs the magic whereby blankness is reinstated, and white people don’t have to notice it — which makes me wonder about the recent exhortations to white people to diversi fy our consumption. Easy enough — of course I want to know about more Black runners, artists, and cooks. Of course I want to keep reading books by authors of color and learn new ones. But Cottom’s observation suggests that this won’t create lasting change. As soon as the whiteness of any sphere is challenged, its elasticity will enable it to accommodate that challenge. And so, a nal, possible lesson from blankness: there is only ever more blank ness. Behind every layer of blankness stripped bare, there remains another layer that is yet unrecognized. Blankness re sponds to context in order to recede from view. By probing the vagaries of blankness, I am signing up for repeated failure. I will keep seeking out blankness, even though I will sometimes mistake its presence for absence. I can’t fool myself that it will be enough, but it won’t be nothing.

In 2017, the digital platform Ajam Media Collective published an essay titled “How Armenian-Americans Became ‘White’: A Brief History,” by Aram Ghoogasian. e text traces the history and racializa tion of Armenian refugees in the United States, who were displaced by genocide in the early 20th century. Initially, these ref ugees were classi ed as “Asiatics” by the American government; they were ineligi ble for citizenship because they were not “free white persons.” is classi cation was later reevaluated, and Armenians were deemed proximate enough to whiteness to justify legal naturalization. In one land mark case, the naturalization of Armenian immigrant Tatos Cartozian was provi sionally approved after Cartozian o ered YEV SEV: ARMEN, ARAM GHOOGASIAN &

A ROUNDTABLE ON ARMENIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY SOPHIA

HRAG VARTANIAN

BEYOND JERMAG

ROUNDTABLE 96

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian ¤ HRAG VARTANIAN: Aram, I’ve want ed to have this conversation for years. When your article “How Armenian Americans Became ‘White’: A Brief History,” rst appeared on AJAM Media Collective, I was relieved that someone was nally kicking o the conversation around Armenian Americans and racialization. I hoped it would be a departure point for rich debate, but in many ways, it felt like it stopped a conversation many of us were hoping to have. Particularly around the complexity of Armenians and their racial status in the United States, where the top ic of race has taken on a renewed urgency in every sector of society. What was your intention with the article and how did you perceive the reaction?

ARAM GHOOGASIAN: My biggest frustration with the reaction to the piece has been that many seem to have missed that I was trying to understand Armenian Americans’ racial status as a speci cally juridical process of becoming, as stated in the title, not as a static ontological con dition. In other words, Armenians were not born into the fabricated category we call “white,” they were placed into it, just as Mexicans, Syrians, and South Asians were in the late 19th and early 20th cen turies, through di erent court cases that often contradicted each other. I was not at all concerned with nding out wheth er Armenians are white or not. at, to me, is an uninteresting question, one that does not have a productive or useful an swer. Rather, I sought to understand the logic underpinning two racial prerequisite cases in the rst quarter of the 20th cen tury, In re Halladjian (1909) and United States v. Cartozian (1925), which deemed Armenians legally white based on race science, “common knowledge,” and legal precedent. e brevity of my essay allowed some readers to project what they wanted onto the piece, irrespective of whether or not the text itself supported their precon ceived notions of how race functions visà-vis Armenian Americans.

In his essay, Ghoogasian didn’t approach Armenian racial status as a stable onto logical fact. Instead he demonstrated that racialization was, in part, a product of the US juridical apparatus: legislatively deter mined and repeatedly renegotiated. e essay circulated widely, to aston ishing misreadings. Many held up the text as evidentiary proof — rst, and tacitly, as evidence of the ontological stability of whiteness. And second, evidence that Armenians — whose homeland is situat ed in West Asia and whose communities span Iran, Lebanon, and Syria — are indis putably white. is misinterpretation was so widespread that quotation marks were added to the word “white” in the text’s ti tle after publication. In the co-authored essay below, Ghoogasian joins Sophia Armen and Hrag Vartanian to discuss the history of Armenian American migration, the politics of citizenship and race, as well as the slippages that distinguish becoming white from becoming “white.”

ARMEN, GHOOGASIAN & VARTANIAN

97 himself for the “visual scrutiny” of the court. Cartozian subsequently became the target of an attorney general who disputed his whiteness, and was only granted ap proval for citizenship after winning the case. e United States v. Cartozian ruling a rmed the potential for Armenians to “amalgamate readily with the white races.”

What we do know, especially in Armenian communities, is that Western academia and even Western archives are characterized largely by our erasure, ex cept in instances where we have created initiatives and departments ourselves. We have to consider the historical ghosts and absences in Western academia on these subjects, and instead have to value our own sites of knowledges. We have to write and speak through erasure. We have to think about what we con sider within the purview of history and what we exclude. Our histories don’t just live in Western or English-language his tory books. ey live in our stories, in a rich tradition of oral storytelling and memory work that is passed down through gen erations. So much of the era discussed in Aram’s essay, for our communities and for communities of Assyrians, Arabs, Kurds, Iranians, and Turks, is illegible in current English-based academic work. We need Armenian stories written by Armenians that tell Armenian histor(ies). We need to start a rming ourselves as the experts of our own experiences. ere is a need for studies of migration and refugeehood based in how refugees and migrants have theorized, dreamed, and organized themselves. Many peo ple like Yen Le Espiritu are doing this through critical refugee studies, speci cally for East Asians. West Asians could utilize these frames and think through our di erences. Instead of framing ref ugees and migrants throughout history as a “problem,” these theorists and orga nizers approach them as central political gures who bump up, think through, and organize in and against the realities they face. HV: e early Armenian American com munity was dominated by refugees, and by a sense of desperation. ere were cas es of Armenians being sent back to the Ottoman Empire (which would later be come Turkey) facing death in the immedi ate wake of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. ere’s a 1921 Associated Press article ti tled “Seventeen Armenians Killed After Being Deported from U.S.” that captures that stark reality, and also gives a sense of the stakes.ose early refugees arrived predom inantly from the Armenian parts of the Ottoman Empire, and later waves ar rived from Iran, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere during times of crisis in those nations. e latest wave of refugees from Syria was actually rejected from the United States, as we know, so they went to Canada, Australia, Germany, Armenia, and elsewhere. e history of our presence in the United States is not one of being embraced, but one that is constantly being negotiated. SA: During the early Armenian displace ment to the United States, American o cials were throwing up the entire might of the federal government to try to deal with

SOPHIA ARMEN: Aram’s article starts to probe at the history of why we see the category “White (European, Middle Eastern, North African)” included on the US Census, a category whose relationship to Armenians is actively contested in the current MENA Census checkbox debate. If anything, I think Aram’s article should have been titled “How Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Iranians, etc. … Became ‘White.’” ese “becomings” not only took place at similar times, but relationally. To date, very few have probed the Armenian di mension of this process. I would argue that we are central to it.

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Hrag Vartanian, Fragment from the series "100 20th Century Armenian Americans"

100 this refugee population. Most of the time, it resorted to using a legislative framework that allowed for anti-Asian exclusion. e era of the Cartozian case was de ned by the United States actively denying cit izenship, and thus refuge, to Armenian Genocide refugees. e Naturalization Act of 1790 granted citizenship via whiteness only, and thus whiteness was the only thing that could stop deporta tion. Armenians of this era didn’t win naturalization because of the benevolence of the United States. Armenian refugees won their naturalization because, in the middle of a genocide, they organized a large transnational campaign against the state to prevent their own mass depor tation to villages that no longer existed. Quite simply, they had nowhere to go. In desperation, Armenian refugees crowd funded and pooled their resources across geographic distances in order to hire the best legal representation in the country and to win. ey even secured the legal testimony of anthropologist Franz Boas. ey were battling much of the anti-ref ugee racism that refugees from the region face today, including Armenians. And why were Armenians pursued by the state so aggressively in these legal cas es? We weren’t the only ones, there were cases like Dow v. United States arguing for naturalization through whiteness, United States v. Bhagat Singh ind, and others. Armenians had to be dealt with by the US court system because there were so many of us coming to the United States at the time. at wasn’t the case for many oth er groups from the region. US immigra tion records not only attest to how race is constructed with respect to Armenians, they are also proof that the Armenian Genocide occurred.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

HV: In many ways, Armenian American identity was very much hoisted upon us. It’s an imperial identity insofar as all American identities are the products of empire.It’s important to remember that US de nitions are far from universal and are constantly shifting. Elsewhere, as in Canada and Australia, Armenians are classi ed as visible minorities. In Europe, they’re often categorized as “Middle Eastern.” Similarly, in the United States, the use of this term is historical ly connected to Armenian Americans. roughout the 20th century, when peo ple in the United States thought about the Middle East, they often thought of us. In 1952, when the New York Times writes about one of the recipes at Aram Salisian’s Golden Horne — a celebrity hotspot near Broadway — they frame it as a taste of the “Orient.” e professional wrestler Harry Ekizian — who switched between personas throughout his success ful career — was most famously known as “Ali Baba,” but also the Terrible Turk, the Krushing Kurd, Ali Yumed, and the ArmenianArmenianAssassin.identity, in the US imag ination, is exotic and malleable. In Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority, John Tehranian dis cusses Middle Eastern representation in the media as the “last minstrel show.” He writes that the media constructed an im age of the Middle Easterner by con ating various di erent typologies of the “other.” is endures today. Consider the after math of the Boston Marathon bombing, when some strange stories about Misha, a Muslim of Armenian descent rumored to have in uenced the bomber, began to circulate. Considering the history of con ating the people of West Asia, this

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AG: at’s part of the problem with how we talk about Armenian Americans. We can say some Armenians bene ted from “ legal whiteness” early on. ey were

ARMEN, GHOOGASIAN & VARTANIAN otherwise bizarre story kind of makes sense.In that context, Armenian culture has been systematically subjected to Orientalization. e US government considered that culture more alien than our bodies. is is how you come to have an Armenian display at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, right beside the World of Islam display, and in the same building as dinosaurs, Indigenous North American dioramas, and African artifacts. “White culture,” especially for most of the 20th century, was on display across Central Park at the Metropolitan Museum. It tac itly communicated to visitors, especially school children, that our culture was the purview of the past and belonged with the natural world. Even today, the display of Armenian art at the Met remains limited, while at the AMNH, Armenians are be hind glass as mannequins dressed in bright fabrics, standing on rugs, and showing o ceremonial objects under a prominent wall label that spells out “craft.” My favor ite line in the vitrine reads, “ e powerful role of the work ethic in personal identity places Armenians among the most enter prising Near Eastern people.”

SA: Exhibitions in the United States de veloped through the horri c history of “human zoos,” ethnographic villages, and World Fairs. e fascination with prob ing and exoticizing non-Western cul tures unfolds alongside the active denial of Armenians’ inclusion in the category of citizenship, and thus in subjecthood deserving of foundational rights. As an identity, “Armenian American” has been essentially de ned by bans and by exclu sions from entry into the nation from the period of the Hamidian massacres and the genocide through to events like the Nakba, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Iranian Revolution. Even Soviet Armenian mi gration was determined by who the nation-state de nes itself against e nation-building project of the United States takes on speci c forms of racial ization for refugees from West Asia, and is bound up with the construction of the enemy and the foreigner — someone outside the nation and thus outside its protections. HV: e institutional oppression that Armenians experience through the US im perial apparatus is often incurred through borders. My family in Syria is still banned from coming to this country, and the ini tial version of Trump’s Muslim Ban — which most certainly impacts Christians, Yezidis, and others — didn’t even make it clear if I, as a green card holder, would be able to return to my home in Brooklyn af ter going abroad. is kind of violence through border policing abroad is too often overlooked, and remains unrecognized as a form of violence.One of the strangest things I experi ence with non-Armenians is when peo ple say, “Oh, you’re from Armenia.” I re spond that I’m not from Armenia and it becomes a whole di erent conversation. People dismiss any identity they consider too complicated, even if it feels straight forward to us. When someone decides your identity is too complicated, they stop listening. Which is partly what happened with Aram’s original article, I believe.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 102 deemed eligible for naturalization follow ing the 1909 racial prerequisite case that granted them that right based on their proximity to whiteness. For instance they were de jure exempt from the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which denied migrants who were ineligible for citi zenship the right to own or lease land. is restriction was aimed primarily at Japanese and other East Asian arrivals. (It didn’t always play out that way de facto, as Armenians nevertheless faced a number of barriers to land ownership and lending in the state.) But that shouldn’t be taken as evidence that Armenians writ large reap the bene ts of whiteness today. Where do Armenian Americans who left Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Palestine, for instance, t into the picture? Or Armenians who current ly live in those places? It’s misleading to lump people who, for decades, have been on the receiving end of the full destruc tive power of American imperialism and its proxies into a racial category that is synonymous with political, economic, cul tural, and social power. ese nuances get glossed over or outright ignored when we focus only on how American racial hier archies operate.

HV: Armenians were allowed to nat uralize in the United States under the stipulation that we’d assimilate. Is there any other group for whom this was an explicit stipulation? As John Tehranian explains, Armenians were subjected to “white performance as a proxy for white racial belonging.” is was dependent on Armenians adapting to so-called “European standards,” not limited to reli gion or skin color. “Performance was what mattered,” he writes. Only when you provincialize Armenian Americans does the assignation of whiteness make sense — i.e., when you approach Armenians as purely American subjects, dissociated from a global Armenian community. SA: So much of Armenian diasporic lit erature and political theory is about antiassimilation as a response to ongoing anxieties about erasure, the driving force of genocide. Our nationalism, it means something di erent than the nationalism of colonial powers. It quite literally means nation — a body of people of which one is a part, a collective belonging that is a connection to land and community be yond borders, and the struggle of selfdetermination over our own lives. It’s re ally useful for West Asian communities to think about the “nation,” particularly be cause so many of the borders were drawn on the tables of powerful men outside of the land itself. ese borders have also moved and shifted over time. Much like the Kurds and Assyrians, we are a nation — one that only became an independent nation-state very recently, despite previous attempts and a very long history of struggle. A nation is de ned by its people, and those people can have borders layered on top of them in a vari ety of ways, over many di erent frames of history, marred by violence, displacement, genocide. e borders move, the empires come and go, but the people are being pushed about in various con gurations on the land.What we would call Hayastan has lived for far longer than current Western notions of us as a “nation-state.” It was why my great-grandmother’s name was Hayastan, when the Republic was only a dream. For these reasons, we bene t from understanding what Indigeneity means in the West Asian context, speci cally.

HV: ere are two terms in Armenian that are useful to consider in relation to this topic. ey are jermag chart and sev chart: white massacre and black massa cre. e rst is used to denote assimila tion, and the second refers to extinction and displacement. ese terms are more commonly used in the West, rather than in West Asia or elsewhere. ey capture the anxieties around the ideas of assimi lation and whiteness, and many of us cer tainly grew up seeing the two as related concepts.

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AG: We can play with what “jermag” is doing in jermag chart. It means “white” because it denotes a bloodless massacre, but in the American context the word “jermag” has the additional connotation of becoming a white person or a nonArmenian, even if that isn’t what the term has meant historically. e discourse of jermag chart is present across global Armenian communities, but it has slight ly di erent implications in the US giv en the way race operates in this country. Proximity to whiteness may mean access to power, however limited, but it can also spell a sort of cultural “death.” You can de bate whether this discourse of massacre is too severe, but it doesn’t make the concern any less real I think it’s fair to say that linguistic assimilation, or the fear that subsequent generations of Armenian Americans will not speak Armenian, is most often the primary concern. It is indeed the most easily quanti able indicator of jermag chart. is has little to do with ancestry, blood, or race. Social, personal, and collec tive identity — which are always in ux — are more resilient than language retention, which may contribute to these identities but is not necessarily constitutive of them. At the same time, anxieties over the loss of the language and of Armenian iden tity more generally are not easily disen tangled, and they likely cannot be in any meaningful sense. To further complicate the matter, the desire to remain Armenian can coexist with the desire to reap the so cial and economic bene ts of unhyphen ated Americanness. is tension is at the heart of the issue of assimilation for many Armenians living in the United States.

SA: [ e writer] Monte Melkonian, who is considered a national hero for many Armenians, discusses the term jermag chart in his early political writings. He was deeply in uenced by liberation strug gles around the world. He trained with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and participated in the move ment to overthrow the Shah during the Iranian Revolution. Beyond that, he also learned from his time at UC Berkeley building solidarities with the movements of other oppressed groups in the US. And yet, nobody studies him as an Armenian American — a boy who grew up in Visalia, talks about his childhood experi ences of racism, and goes on to become a guerrilla ghter. In e Right to Struggle,

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What it means to be a nation through time, and not through the frame of the nation-state. Hayastan has lived for a very long time.isis why it is so complicated when someone asks, “Where are you from?” And why “Go back to where you came from” invokes not just rage, but sadness. at where is an existential question of ten tied to loss, and sometimes, to many di erent answers. But in the US you are a “where” because you are assumed not to be a “here.”

HV: is is a good example of Armenians de ning their own realities, using lan guage they created. One of the interesting things about jermag chart as a term — and I’ve been asking people about this term for years — is that no one seems to know its origin. Even author Ara Baliozian, who has opined about the term in his writing through the decades, never knew where it came from. SA: ere are very valid reasons why these histories are often not spoken about pub licly. ey are deeply enmeshed with his tories of surveillance and targeting. ere is also pain and shame involved in reliv ing them. How many times, infuriatingly, have I heard, “Don’t ru e any feathers. Keep your head down,” as a strategy of survival. ese words carry allusions to being targeted by previous governments we lived under, and also reveal the mech anisms of the US nation-building project. ey say less about anything innate with in our communities and more about the multi-scalar systems of oppression that they navigate. HV: at silence perpetuates harm. Consider this in the context of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), the terrible post-9/11 surveillance program for mostly noncitizen Middle Eastern-born males in the US. A number of people I met during that period openly doubted my narrative and personal experience with the pro gram, despite the fact that I was told to register. Several suggested that such a program didn’t exist. Possibly because NSEERS was publicly framed as a way to tackle “terrorists” — a term that, by then, was closely linked in the US imagina tion with Middle Easterners. Of course, the program didn’t unearth any terrorists. Nevertheless, NSEERS lingered until 2016, even if most people — including me — were taken o the list before then, when it became clear how useless it was. We saw a more virulent version of this program emerge under Trump, which is being called the “Muslim Registry,” even though its impact extends beyond the Muslim community. AG: You were on the NSEERS list be cause of where you were born?

HV: I’m not sure I know what my Armenianness versus my Syrianness is. And frankly, I don’t think anyone else does.

HV: Yes, I was born in Syria. AG: I ask because I think it’s important to point out, even if it may be obvious, that Armenians can be more than just Armenians. Armenian Americans’ racial status did little to help you, because not all Armenians across space are treated in the same way by the national securi ty state. In your particular case, you were marked as potentially dangerous because you were born in Syria, not because you are Armenian per se.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 104 Melkonian argues that “if Armenians of the diaspora do not claim their right to live in their homeland they will gradually lose their common cultural identity […] and if this happens, the white massacre of our nation will have succeeded.” For Melkonian, a revolutionary ghter and or ganizer, Armenian identity was a question framed through the lens of Indigeneity, and one with high stakes.

Hrag Vartanian, Fragment from the series "100 20th Century Armenian Americans" (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

HV: In that respect, Armenian identity is still often framed in the US as one pri marily related to geography. SA: It is tied to land, just not a Western view of land. I’ve long thought about the racial trope of the Middle Eastern Christian victim su ering at the hands of a ctive Muslim aggressor as a device of Western imperialism. e trope is used much like that of the “oppressed Muslim woman” that Lila Abu-Lughod theorizes. But there is also a racial trope in the region that constructs West Asian Christians as pawns — or active extensions — of impe rialist powers, a trope that suggests that they are somehow exempt from being the targets of Western aggression. is is di vide and conquer in action: a strategy of colonial power.

Armenians in Syria, just like those in Lebanon or elsewhere, are integral parts of the nation-states in which they live. ey don’t exist apart from them and ar en’t any less Syrian by virtue of their be ing Armenian. at is, the US national security state treats Armenians di erent ly, depending on their geographic origin. An Armenian traveling from the United Kingdom would not receive the same scrutiny as, say, an Armenian from Iran.

Afro-American newspaper reported on the covenant in 1951, and the covenant read: No part of land hereby conveyed shall ever be used, or occupied by, or sold, demised, transferred, conveyed unto, or in trust for, leased, or persons of negro blood or extraction, or to any rented or given to negro people or any person or person of the Semitic race, blood, or origin which racial

AG: at’s what I’m trying to get at.

Armenians aren’t treated as a uniform group by the federal government, irre spective of how they have been racialized as Armenians in the US.

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SA: And yet, we do not start and stop being Armenian at national borders. It’s crucial to distinguish that racial catego ries are not ethnic categories, which is especially important given the way that American discourse con ates “West Asian” with “Arab” and “Muslim.” I would argue that the erasure of Armenians from the category “West Asian” is Turanism in action. Turanism, the basis of the Armenian Genocide, is a racial ideology that classi es Armenians and Assyrians not as Indigenous to the region, but rath er as foreign implants, and thus justi es their expulsion or cleansing in the name of “purifying” the land. e notion of Armenianness as being somehow “out side the region” is connected to these logics.Today, Armenians are banned from the US by the thousands because of the “Muslim Ban,” but their stories aren’t foregrounded because they complicate the narrative; because those stories are not valued in the discourse of power or the re sistance to power.

HV: What we see in the US is that other ing was enacted through various mecha nisms. Yes, naturalization happened in the 1920s, but Armenians still faced housing restrictions through racial covenants up until the 1940s. President Nixon lived in a home in DC with a racial covenant that banned Armenians, for instance, which he bought a decade after racial covenants were outlawed. ough they may not have been enforced, they continued to exist. e

107 description shall be deemed to in clude Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians, or Syrians, except that, this paragraph shall not be held to exclude partial occupancy of the premises by domestic servants of said parities hereto of the sec ond part their heirs or assigns. When sociologist Anny Bakalian conducted a survey of discrimination in the late 1970s, the numbers re ected that discrimination persisted — a major ity of the small survey of US-born rstgeneration Armenian Americans reported that they faced education and job discrim ination. A legal court case like Cartozian does not end everything, and the system wasn’t designed for us. It’s important to note that the impact of Cartozian wasn’t limited to Armenians being admitted to the US. Non-Armenians, mostly from Asia, also used the ruling to gain citi zenship. In that respect, the Cartozian case lends itself to being read as a way Armenians were able to crack the sys tem of white supremacy and the pseudoscienti c ideas about race undergirding its “logic.” at generation of Armenian Americans played the game and won, and the prize was being allowed to stay and gain US citizenship. AG: You could have a judge in Massachusetts or Oregon rule that Armenians are white based on “scienti c evidence” and “common knowledge,” but that may not wind up meaning much. What’s more, the judge presiding over the latter only approved Tatos Cartozian’s citizenship and whiteness provisionally, with the caveat that the government could initiate cancellation proceedings should it see t. To take one example, in Fresno, where many Armenians wound up settling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Armenians faced barriers to land owner ship and employment. Restrictive cove nants against Armenians in housing lasted decades after Cartozian. I think it’s also no table that insults hurled at Armenians — “Fresno Indian,” “dirty black Armenian,” “ lower-class Jew ” — often made reference to other nonwhite peoples. Instances of anti-Armenian discrim ination were commonplace across the country, and there are plenty of anecdotes about these sorts of quotidian interactions. My great-grandparents, for instance, were born about 150 miles apart in what was then the Ottoman Empire — in Tavra, a village near Sivas, and Evereg (Develi) — before relocating to Michigan after World War I. My great-grandfather had dark skin and thick, frizzy hair. On an outing sometime in the mid-1930s, my great grandmother was allowed into a public pool while he was denied entry because he was “colored.” He was also denied service at some restaurants in the state because of his physical appearance. If we say Armenians are white because two cases in the rst quarter of the 20th century said so, that’s missing the point. (Whiteness wasn’t even legally de ned until a 1924 Virginia anti-miscegenation law.) at isn’t what whiteness is, really, at least not all it is. It’s beyond the realm of the juridical. ese judges may have made prescriptive rulings, but reading those decisions tells us little about Armenian American life as it was, and is, lived. If you’re operating from the assumption that there is a yes or no answer to the question of whether Armenians are white, you’re bound to be frustrated. It’s a tempting question to ask, but it’s the wrong one. ARMEN, GHOOGASIAN & VARTANIAN

SA: e US is a nation not only born of genocidal violence against Black and

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 108 e ambiguity is itself the point. e best we can do is historicize it. HV: And do the memory work. But it’s also important to note that we continue to grapple with the legacy of these debates and the violence at the core of these questions today. e internet has contributed to that. For instance, as a Boy Scout in Toronto in the ’80s, I was called a sand N-word at a jamboree which I at tended with my Armenian Canadian Cub Scout troop. Now, on the internet, we’re racialized di erently. e pseudo-logic of Cartozian focused on the “man on the street” argument and how they’d be able to discern your identity. On the internet, that’s no longer as central. Most of my in teractions are mediated through a screen. So when people send me hate mail, it is often based on their reading of my name, my place of origin (which is easily Googled), or other data points about me available online. In the last two decades, the rise in xenophobia in the US has also made Armenians more visible, which we know isn’t always a good thing. I remember going to a gay bar in Roanoke, Virginia, where I’d traveled to knock on doors for the Obama campaign in 2008. e bar tender there was aggressive and thought Middle Easterners should go back to where they came from, so I left. In the 1980s, after a series of inci dents with the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), nationally syndicated journalists like Jack Anderson were going on the radio and saying things like, “Armenian terrorists are the most savage in the world…” I point these out to reinforce that there ar en’t one or two moments, but a continuing history of racialization and surveillance. e narrative in the media about Armenians is almost always crafted with out our input. In Hollywood lms, there’s a reason why Armenians universally an ticipate the credits to look for Armenian names. at’s our representation. We got to keep our last names, most of the time, as long as they weren’t too di cult for white people to pronounce.

SA: In my own ethnographic work, it’s true that the surveillance doesn’t just start in 2001. is is true for most diasporic communities of the region.

AG: It’s important to identify how Armenians interact with a uniquely American taxonomic system that priv ileges certain people, so-called “model minorities,” in relation to others. is hierarchy has, since its inception, placed Black and Indigenous people squarely at the bottom. is taxonomy, in which race and class are inseparable, makes itself felt in every aspect of life here. It’s crucial to emphasize that Armenians don’t bear the full brunt of American apartheid, and they aren't overrepresented among the underclasses in this country. However, this doesn’t mean they have been accepted into the fold unconditionally. Armenians’ — as well as other communities’ — accep tance of a position above other minori tarian subjects is part of a social contract that reproduces anti-Black racism and settler-colonialism. is isn’t a question of personal convictions, of individual mo rality and immorality, or of education and ignorance. It’s about entrenched struc tures of power dedicated to preserving a highly strati ed social order.

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109 Indigenous people, but one where that violence continues today. We know antiBlackness to be the global governing structure. e three pillars of white su premacy at the heart of the US racial proj ect — the logics of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism/Orientalism — interact in myriad ways. But as noted by Black organizers, non-Black refugees and immigrants uphold the system of anti-Black racism, even as they are cast as perpetual foreigners in the US. is means we have to work harder as dis placed people in the US to actively build joint struggle with Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities beyond our own, unconditionally. We are in the middle of an uprising, built on generations of labor and struggle. Support for the Black Lives Matter movement should not be articu lated through words alone, but through action and labor to dismantle anti-Black racism systemically.

Cartozian’s Armenians knew it well. ey left one genocide for a land with its own. e choices we make either fortify or disrupt that system.

Tauba Auerbach, ere Have Been and Will be Many San Franciscos, 2016, o set prints with screw-post binding, cardboard box, and rubber bands, open edition/all unique. 17 x 13 1/2 x 1 inches (43.2 x 34.3 x 2.5 centimenters). Courtesy Diagonal Press. Photo: Steven Probert

111 In physics, every moment lasts forever, if seen OrininisInmeetmyInincreasingfromdistance.nonedoesmotherhergrandchildren.*yourdreams,yourspaceoccupiedbystrangers;mineI’mwithyouanunrecognizableplace.*I’moutandneedtoreach you, but must press my ngers just so into the small pillow people call a phone. MEETING RAE ARMANTROUT

112 It withbegansensing di erence, but since mind is the gape of Ifandweproppedsurpriseopen,canstopthink.comparisons are sketchy, what about contrasts? Since* mind is the gape of surprise propped open, we get What’sbored.thegood of that? SURPRISE, SURPRISE RAE ARMANTROUT

113 Since* mind is the gape of surprise propped open, a betweenhasrollercoasterbeenplacedthosepainted lips. * I keep rolling this aroundlozengeonmy tongue. Where’s the good in it?

Tauba Auerbach, Shadow Weave– Fret Wave, 2015, woven canvas, 60 x 45 x 1 3/4 inches (15.24 x 114.3 x 4.4 centimeters). Aishti Foundation. Photo: Farzad Owrang

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115

Visual imagery, unlike verbal lan guage, presents a plethora of information at once. Patrons, architects, and artists across millennia have developed their own HOW DONALD TRUMP MISUSES IMAGERY

Trump fancies himself an expert im age maker, but, the thing is, he is ac tually bad at it. Really, really bad. While he can create the photo-op equivalent of a tweet, when he attempts more complex choreography, he usually fails miserably. His cavalier overcon dence reveals a visu al illiteracy as well as an ignorance of the iconography used by American politicians throughout our history. Trump’s recent engagement with monuments — includ ing his praise for Confederate abomina tions — illustrates an almost total lack of understanding, either of their historic context or of their visual language.

MONUMENTAL IGNORANCE:

ESSAY

Since then, Trump has repeated this kind of performance over and over, grave ly misunderstanding the signi cance of visual hierarchy whether in placement or scale. His most complex visual composi tion was more recent — a tableau at the Lincoln Memorial, crafted with the help of Fox News. e interview at the monu ment, held on May 3, 2020, presumably intended to associate Trump with the ideals and achievements of the 16th pres ident. Instead, it exposed Trump and his team’s total lack of knowledge of almost everything about the sculpture’s iconog raphy — the visual hierarchy, the typol ogy of seated-ruler portraits, the statue’s symbolic attributes, as well as the rhe torical power of adjacency. e Founding Fathers were steeped in the history and imagery of ancient Greece and of the Roman Republic; these traditions have continued to shape public monuments throughout the early 20th century, appar ently without the current administration's Danielcomprehension.Chester French’s marble of Abraham Lincoln, completed in 1920, participated in this long history of largescale representations of seated rulers pre sented as defenders of unity and justice. (Not all actually were defenders, but they commissioned works that used this ico nography to imply they were.) is way of representing rulers descended from Mesopotamian and Egyptian works from the third millennium BCE, but the most relevant precursor is a statue of Zeus en throned, bare-chested (nudity equaled di vinity; please do not tell Trump!), holding a winged Victory on his extended right palm, and supporting a scepter or sta (an emblem of peaceful rule) with his left. is prototype dates from fth century BCE Greece, the culture identi ed with the foundation of Western democracy. Commissioned for the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and designed by Phidias, this lost colossus nevertheless survived, in large part, because of a description from the second century CE by Pausanias. e

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 116 syntax and vocabulary to compose this enormous ow of information into mean ingful art. ese languages, which long predate print, have allowed the power ful to communicate with people through composition, pose, gesture, and signifying attributes. Audiences might have di erent degrees of comprehension, but repeated tropes have survived and gained currency.

In the West, the Classical world formu lated much of this language, establishing the conventions for a variety of images, including portraits of rulers, either seated or standing. Trump has used these kinds of images as props or as inspiration for his own poses, and yet he co-opts clumsily, often modifying their forms and miscon struing their meanings. He made his rst mistake when he announced his candidacy for president. From the moment he descended the es calator in his Golden House, it was clear that he did not have the constitution to participate in the government of a republic (res publica, literally translates to “a public thing”). Trump chose to arrive from above to the level of the people, presenting him self as a kind of deus ex machina (in this case, a god arriving “on” a machine), recall ing the conclusion of ancient Greek dra mas when pulleys hoisted an actor above the stage, establishing him as a deity who alone could resolve the problems of those below. Trump’s initial visual presentation was later put into words. As he famous ly said at the 2016 Republican National Convention: “I alone can x it.”

117 work presented the deity at peace and tri umphant despite the ever-present specter of division: Zeus sits above a depiction of battling Greeks and Amazons. Phidias’s imagery was copied repeatedly, surviving in di erent iterations from Ancient Rome to Enlightenment Europe, the intellectual incubator of the US Constitution.

A version of Phidias’s work appeared on our shores in 1841, when Horatio Greenough presented his sculpture of George Washington for Congress. is portrait shows the rst president, like Zeus, semi-nude and enthroned but rais ing his right hand and pointing to the heavens, a Roman modi cation of the pose, showing either deference to a high er power or proclamation. Greenough also introduced his own innovation: the triumphant general, with his left arm outstretched, returns a sheathed sword, representing his military command, to the people. is gesture is an acknowledg ment of the country’s system of govern ment: only elected legislators can declare war. e American commander-in-chief, like a Roman republican general, relin quishes imperium (military command) to the people. Greenough’s seated portrait depicts the executive branch in peace time, subject to the laws made by the peo ple’sGreenough’srepresentatives.statue, however, did not succeed with the 19th-century pub lic, partly because he retained an ancient aspect not suited to a modern republic: nudity. Whether or not the audience un derstood Washington’s bare chest as em blematic of divinity, it produced visceral discomfort. Congress removed the statue from the Capitol Rotunda and eventually sequestered it in the Smithsonian (set ting a precedent for relocating public art that departs from contemporary mores). Greenough’s iconographic faux pas also validates the Founding Fathers’ fear that the executive branch would be perceived — or would attempt — to rise above its coequalDanielbranches.Chester French successful ly democratized his statue of Lincoln by showing the president fully dressed in the attire of his fellow citizens and holding no attributes of power, whether sta or sheathed sword. Other than the materi al (marble), hierarchy of scale (Lincoln measures 19 feet tall), and seated pose, only one vestige of the antique tradi tion remains: fasces. Fasces, or bundles of sticks, adorn the front of Lincoln’s arm rests. Carried by lictors, the bodyguards of elected o cials in ancient Rome, fasces il lustrated how one thin rod gains strength when bound together with its equals. In the Roman Republic, fasces functioned as symbols of the authority and the motto of the state, SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus: the Senate and the People of Rome). Outside the pomerium, or sacred city limits of Rome, lictors’ fasces includ ed an axe to show the magistrate’s pow er over life and death. Arms, whether lictors’ axes or soldiers’ swords, were not permitted inside the pomerium unless the Senate granted a general a triumphal pro cession. As in the American Republic, the representatives of the people checked and controlledEmulatingimperium.Rome, the Founding Fathers chose fasces, these tightly bound sticks, as a visual representation of our mot to, E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One), and fasces adorn many public buildings, including the seats of all three branches of government. Since 1789, the mace or scepter of the House of Representatives has had a fascis as its handle. On top, a globe and eagle replace the axe. e mace

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 118 is carried into the House to open sessions and presides there, on a pedestal, through out the term. Two further fasces, sculpted in the mid-19th century, ornament the wall behind the Speaker’s rostrum. ese have axe heads, perhaps to emphasize that only the House, the most democratic of the three branches, has the right to declare war. At the Supreme Court, fasces appear on the west facade pediment and in the frieze above the bench of the Justices. In the White House, horizontal fasces lie above the doors of the Oval O ce. ese ubiquitous emblems reference the citizenry as the source of authority. e signi cance of this symbol is probably not obscure to many who serve in the govern ment: during particularly important leg islation or hearings, the current Speaker wears a pin replicating the mace of the House.e Lincoln monument uses fasces to characterize both Lincoln’s accomplish ments and the people as the source of po litical power. Seated in triumphant peace, the martyred president’s long, elegant n gers rest on top of fasces, a reminder that Lincoln preserved these United States and that the will of the people, exercised by the House of Representatives, granted him imperium to do so. us, in perpetu ity, these ancient republican symbols both support and stand guard (like lictors) of the man who saved the nation. In Trump’s use of the Lincoln Memorial, these vertical fasces also play a critical role. ey lead the viewers’ eyes down from the majestic e gy to a dimin utive Trump and his interlocutors, all perched on portable chairs. is hierar chy of scale, of importance, coupled with the symmetrical positioning of Trump and the journalists around the statue on the central axis emphasize the chasm between the two presidents: one, a lawyer who rose from poverty to power through education, eloquence, and integrity to die for our national salvation and the expan sion of rights; the other, a son of privilege, with little erudition and fewer ethics, who uses bigotry to divide and denigrate the populace.efasces also point to a temper amental di erence between the two men. Lincoln sits parallel to them, fac ing forward into the present and future. Similarly, the Speaker of the House and the Supreme Court Justices, stand or sit parallel, though in front of, the fasces in their halls. Backed by these ancient sym bols, they shape the future with their de cisions. In the Fox image, however, Trump sits perpendicular to the fasces, signaling a shift in the course of the state. His di rectional departure recalls that exactly 100 years ago, between 1919 and 1922, Mussolini perverted this sign of republi can rule into the name and the emblem of a totalitarian regime: the fasces became a double-edged sword — or axe — with two opposing meanings. Trump and his enablers’ ignorance of visual composition, symbolism, and history created a pic ture which, upon close inspection, does not align Trump with Lincoln but pres ents him as a small man turning toward fascism.Amonth after the Lincoln Memorial interview, Trump produced more overt ly authoritarian images: the National Guard occupying the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (a space rendered sacred by Marian Anderson’s song, Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, and John Lewis’s words), the Trumps blocking the statue of St. John Paul II (a pope who supported lib erating Poland from tyranny and pro moted interfaith harmony), and, most

119 DIANA DEPARDO-MINSKY signi cantly, the image of Trump holding a copy of the Bible. ese images accom panied strikingly authoritarian acts. On June 1, 2020, Trump authorized the use of violence against peaceful protestors to clear a path from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church (the church where Lincoln prayed during the Civil War). Trump then posed for another photo-op, standing in front of the church and looking ahead of himself, with his legs, hips, shoulders, and jaw straight and immobile. His left arm hung at his side, while his right held up an inverted Bible in a gesture reminiscent of a tra c cop signaling “stop.”

As with seated-ruler portraits, the long lineage of standing-ruler representa tions goes back to the third millennium BCE. Trump’s image, however, conforms to no norms. Even the serene images of Pharaohs advanced one leg, showing the potential for movement, for change. In ancient Greece, sculptors animated the entire body. Rulers, especially from Alexander the Great forward, often raised their right arms but typically the arm was higher and more curved, rarely cocked perpendicularly like Trump’s. ese rulers hold scepters, spears, or swords, usually in positions implying that their battles have ended. When empty, their raised right hands point up, gesture outward in an oratory pose, or bless the viewer. Books, when incorporated, are almost never dis played on high but in positions for read ing and writing or held nearer the waist as an identifying attribute or a testament of learning.Trump’s Bible image departs from these traditions in almost every way. e sti ness of his pose emphasizes his ob stinate refusal to change. His parallel legs assert that he has staked his claim and will not retreat. is stance, both milita ristic and infantile, echoes Mussolini and Hitler. e sharp right angles of his raised arm, holding up the book, evoke both his di culty with texts (it is upside down) and his opposition to the scriptural principles of peace, compassion, caring, and forgive ness in favor of worldly riches and terres trial power. e composition also implies a complete disregard for the Constitution — rst by implying, that the United States is a Christian country, when the First Amendment states otherwise, and, second, that his power comes through the Bible, like the divine right of kings, rather than from the people. Trump’s pose also suggests an inversion of the swearing in of a president, with the Bible reduced to a prop, no longer a symbol of commitment to the Constitution.eimageofTrump with his inverted Bible should serve as a reminder to future generations of his monumental failings and his threat to the Republic. Republics, like bundles of sticks, are fragile and am mable. We should be careful whom we elect.

Marsha Hunt arrived in London in 1966, a young African American college student taking a break from her studies at UC Berkeley. Her timing was good. English youth were deeply invested in African American musical culture and Hunt made the most of her fashionable blackness as she carved a path through the swinging city. Casting her lot with musi cians, she sang with the blues-based band Free At Last led by Alexis Korner before moving on to Bluesology led by Long John Baldry. She toured the country as a blues rocker, formed friendships and ro mantic connections with musicians, and then auditioned her way into Hair: e American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, mak ing her West End debut in 1968 when the show opened in London. Hair gained

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121 instant notoriety for its rock-ish music, countercultural politics, and nudity — the entire cast disrobed at the close of Act One. Hunt made herself available to the press and soon her image — both in fashion layouts and tasteful nudes — circulated in British newspapers and magazines. Her enormous Afro and good looks helped popularize the “Black is beautiful” concept in England. Responding to the buzz, Track Records, the independent label that was home to e Who and Jimi Hendrix, signed Hunt to a recording contract and put her in the studio with Tony Visconti, the Brooklyn-born producer who had worked with Marc Bolan of T. Rex (and who would go on to collaborate with David Bowie). Hunt’s rst single was a cover of Dr. John’s “Walk on Gilded Splinters.” It charted in England in May 1969, and the weekly television program Top of the Pops invited her on to perform. It was a great opportunity, but Hunt made a wardrobe miscalculation. Recalling the incident in her 1986 memoir Real Life, Hunt wrote, “I appeared wearing a tight bolero top which, unbeknownst to me, allowed my breasts to poke out from the bottom every time I lifted my arms.” is was too much exposure — the British media and the British public recoiled, and Hunt’s single was dropped by the radio stations. Hunt, already an outsider be cause of her blackness, her Americanness, her association with nudity, and her con nection to the bad boys of Track Records (Hendrix and the Who’s Pete Townshend and Keith Moon were all known for de stroying their instruments on stage) came to be seen as “provocatively wayward,” as she put it in Real Life And yet, the wardrobe malfunc tion did yield one more professional opportunity: Mick Jagger had appar ently been following the career of the stylish young American, and he invited Hunt to appear in a publicity shot for his band’s forthcoming single, “Honky Tonk Women.” e pitch was that she would be appear alongside the Rolling Stones at a bar. She would be scantily clad of course. Hunt declined this o er, feel ing that it would be a mistake for a black woman to appear in that kind of image. Although Jagger accepted her refusal, he insisted on meeting her in person. She agreed. In her memoir, Hunt documents the clandestine a air that ensued, the as pects of Jagger’s personality that attracted her, the birth of their daughter Karis — Jagger’s rst born child, Hunt’s only child — and her continued pursuit of a creative life that led her to record an album, host a radio talk show, and become a novelist. Maybe there are no mistakes, just choices and just journeys. Adapted from the forthcoming book Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll by Maureen Mahon. Copyright Duke University Press, 2020.

MAUREEN MAHON

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ESSAY

Iwas dancing in a swimming pool when I heard the bad news. A dear friend of mine and his two acquaintances — three men of color enjoying the Pines on Fire Island in August — had just been stopped by police o cers for having open con tainers of alcohol. Designer sunglasses hid the trauma behind their eyes. On the pool deck, my friend stood above me and three white boys — our housemates — wading in the water. He told us the sto ry and its collateral e ects: rides back to Sayville had been missed, new accommo dations needed to be booked, an absurd debt to society needed to be paid. I can’t recall whether they were still holding on to their paper citations, but I didn’t need to see proof of their false criminality. ey JUST DANCING: ON LITERATURE AND JORDAN VALENTINE TUCKER

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

In that moment, I began to think about what prior narratives supported or undermined our shared wish to have a certain type of experience in the Pines. I did this because I am a literary person, a reader who’d come across Dancer from the Dance, Andrew Holleran’s 1978 novel that best encapsulates the spirit of New York gay life — and, as an extension, life in the Pines — in the history of American liter ature. Ironically, the novel had turned 40 years old that year, and in the spirit of cel ebrating its anniversary, I thought it best to position the book alongside our expe rience in the Pines. What literary knowl edge or capital did I have to help others understand my friend’s experience and ask whether or not he had the right to leisure?

124 were Black and Latino in a space that was unequivocally steeped in a uence, and therefore in whiteness, which had shown its less-than-honorable colors that Monday afternoon in 2018. Here we were, vacationing on an overdeveloped sandbar where Caucasian men, tanning to look more like us, drank, did drugs, and made love out in the open — and those free doms had suddenly been stripped from some of us. I needed a cocktail. While the incident was taking place, my other housemates and I had been lounging behind the gates of our beach house; 630 Fire Island Boulevard was set back from the wooden boardwalk that ran down the center of the Pines. It was a simple house, accented with white sofas, chairs, countertops, and a large Mondrian-inspired fresco that ran across the long wall of the great room. Over the course of the weekend, the rental had be come our little oasis. I’d brought Veblen’s e eory of the Leisure Class — it seemed like a suitable beach read — and had spent my afternoons sporting the bathing suit I’d bought at a boutique in Florence, near Piazza della Repubblica. e cut of the garment freed my legs for dancing. We’d set the table for formal dinners, meals that required conversations about art, politics, and literature, the intellectual fare of yup pies and creative professionals who sup plement their subscriptions to e New Yorker with active Instagram feeds. On Friday, there’d been an underwear party, and on Saturday, we’d attended a similar event at the house of a famous photog rapher, where DonChristian, a rapper I knew from childhood — we attended high school together — performed. In the middle of his act, he asked the crowd to chant the name Nia Wilson. Only a few of us knew about the tragedy, and, now, looking back on the vacation, I wonder if this wasn’t the rst sign that things would go wrong.Butno one could have foreseen what happened that Monday. Later that same evening, as we sat down to dinner, I found myself waiting for my friend to express his frustration. e mood in the house had undoubtedly changed. We were waiting for the oodgates to open. Someone said: “Well, what do you want to do?” We were nally ready to have a di cult conversa tion. “I don’t feel the need to do anything,” my friend replied. He proceeded to argue that the Pines weren’t for him or people who looked like him. en he pointed at every white person seated at the table and suggested that it was now their time to do something. His leisure had been policed, and it was now up to our housemates, and not us, to change society for the better. He felt that it was their job to x what was broken, that his political intervention would be at his place of business and that in the Pines he simply wanted to be on vacation. We all agreed.

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It has always been the case that Black and Brown people who come from “good” families, attend “good” schools, and sus tain prestigious professional careers con sistently ght for representation, freedom, and the chance to engineer their lives in ways they see t. And it has long been the case that members of this same demo graphic have found refuge on Fire Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Mediterranean coastlines. Sadly, however, my friend still felt like an outsider, someone who would always be on the edge. And yet, Dancer from the Dance articulates how Blackness is essential to literary explorations of leisure, to the stories a certain milieu of gays utilize to make sense of themselves. I didn’t want our time on Fire Island to be tainted by a lie — the suggestion that people like my friend and me have not been an integral part of these pleasurable American narratives. Truth be told, we have always been in “the swim,” even if we have often swum in harsher currents. ¤ Dancer from the Dance is a Big Novel. Hunger, lust, poverty, joy: these are just some of the subjects that Dancer from the Dance deals with even as Holleran ulti mately allows desire to take center stage. e book pro les the life and times of Anthony Malone, a lovestruck protagonist, who falls into a pit of longing for anoth er, freer life in his early 30s following an upper-middle-class American childhood. ere is Yale, of course, and a stint work ing in the legal profession near the nation’s capital, but following a late-night kiss with a Puerto Rican man in a Manhattan of ce building, Malone moves to New York to live his truth. e conceit of the nov el relies on how Malone’s WASPy-ness is complicated by his desire for Puerto Ricans and other brown-skinned men who represent the underbelly of desire and sex ual ful llment in Manhattan. Nonetheless, Malone falls in love with an Italian man, Frankie, who beats him, because his de sire for Malone — and his desire to keep him and protect him from romantic vices in the city — cannot be controlled. ese are the dual tragedies that send Malone into the protective arms of Andrew Sutherland, a true New York City queen, who further introduces Malone to the grandiose world that was post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS Manhattan. And as Holleran details Malone and Sutherland’s licentious exploits, including Sutherland’s late-in ning attempts to prostitute his friend — in a move that’s reminiscent of American slavery given that Sutherland’s ances try is based in Virginia — we learn that Holleran’s project is not simply to articu late Malone’s sexual urges but also to con textualize his yearnings for freedom. e notion of Blackness playing an identi able, but often ignored, role in American literature is not a new idea. Toni Morrison, in her famous book of criticism, Playing in the Dark, develops a critical framework to understand how whiteness, as a construct in American literature, relies on otherness — and his torically, on Blackness — to add texture to Caucasian characters. Morrison iden ti es these supposed phantoms as rep resentative of the continual Africanist presence in American letters and society. Her particular angle has a pedagogical slant — she recontextualizes works by Cather, Twain, Hemingway, and others by paying attention to how the Africanist idiom operates in their ction. On how the Africanist presence is romanticized, Morrison writes:

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126 Black slavery enriched the coun try’s creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity creat ed by skin color, the projection of the not-me. e result was a play ground for imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to ratio nalize external exploitation was an American Africanism — a fabricated brew of darkness, oth erness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American. Black and Latino sexuality holds a unique position in American literature, particularly in novels that rest on male homosocial tales of the heart. We see this easily in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Yet Holleran’s novel, like many works in the canon of 20th-century gay literature, is interesting in its acknowledgment of how an Africanist presence acts upon its white characters — Malone, Sutherland, and even the author’s omniscient rst-person narrator follow suit. Dancer from the Dance not only complicates Morrison’s read of Africanism but forcefully utilizes the id iom to make sense of Malone’s selfhood even when describing the protagonist’s phenotype:enthere was Malone. He was the other kind of blond. He re sembled those stylized warriors drawn with black lines on the umbrian hue of Greek ampho rae, whose thighs were sheaths of muscle so clearly de ned they might be plates of armor on the leg. He had the grace of a gazelle grazing on some golden plan in the heat of an African noon […] He had the perfect manners of a man of his upbringing; but even this restraint and formality could not extinguish the glow. On our deathbeds we will remember fac es — not what we accomplished or failed to accomplish, what we worried over anxiously, but the face in the subway, the grace of two black boys who washed each other’s shaven heads with sham poo one afternoon in an army camp in Georgia, the sight of Malone when his eyes met yours. e fact that Holleran uses tenets of Africanism to describe Malone’s looks and e ect on others is apparent in this ex cerpt. What lies slyly beneath the surface is the author’s implicit ranking of Black aesthetic beauty above whiteness, which a reader might nd amusing, but not entire ly out of left eld. When Holleran notes that Malone is an “other kind of blond,” we ask ourselves what other kind of blond is he? By the end of the paragraph our ques tion is answered. He is the type of blonde whose features are comparable to Black boys with shaven heads, those men that have little use for hair color and the status it may render on its subject. is idea is further supported by Holleran’s render ing of Malone as a mythical Greek god in comparison to real Black soldiers, who have no stated interest in the Malones of the world. eir attention is centered on one another. ey are the true ghters, who embody a grace that precedes their homoerotic activities and who have freed themselves from the weight attached to blondeness. In this process, even as

reading Dancer from the Dance we wonder whether Malone’s charac ter is conscious of his connection to Africanism. Sutherland is undoubtedly aware of its presence. Early on in the nov el, while speaking to a random stranger at a nightclub, Sutherland discusses how Black men are ahead of the curve: “Blacks, darling. Shvartzers, negroes, whatever you like. Why are they the better dancers? For they are. ey get away with things here that no white boy could in a million years.” Sutherland completes this gospel by mentioning that if gloves ever came back in style, it would be Black boys who’d wear them rst. Rhythm and good acces sories: these are the hallmarks of desire in Sutherland’s world. Again, we see how Black people and their accouterments be come the primary means for Holleran to orient his characters, and for his charac ters to orient themselves. But we also must consider the other side of Sutherland’s envy. e other side is hate, of course. It is the sort of hate that would allow a man like him to see a crime, or an incident of harassment beside a har bor, and not think twice about getting on a ferry, about leaving the Black boys to dance their own way out of a tricky situation. ¤ On Wednesday afternoon, my house mates and I went to the beach. e media had reported that Aretha Franklin was dying. e Atlantic’s rip tides were too dangerous for swimming, and, following the incident that happened two days pri or, it also seemed too dangerous to drink on our beach blankets. Men in uniform were patrolling the beach, leaving SUV tracks in the sand. eir presence did not stop some of us — me included — from sipping on cans of Montauk Pale Ale and cruising the men who strolled along the shoreline in the skim created by the waves. I was relaxing, and yet I still felt the need to ght for my friend. We had been inseparable when we were younger, but I wasn’t with him on Monday at the dock, and it felt like I had gotten away with something: a feeling of autonomy, a promise to myself that Monday’s incident wouldn’t overwhelm me on these coastal socialMystages.friend and I rst met when I was 21 years old, an undergraduate student at Columbia. irteen years of private schooling had prepared me for the insti tution, and, like many type-A teenagers, I arrived in New York City without the guardrails of a full-time job to help keep me on the straight and narrow. In college, my education relied on the presence of novels just as much as it relied on the dec adence of Manhattan nightlife; on early mornings spent at Chelsea clubs and 23rd Street diners; on gypsy cabs headed down the West Side Highway and yellow cabs for journeys up the FDR; and, most im portantly, on my own perception of this world. As a millennial, it seemed not only commonplace but also chic to be in control of my own narrative, the story that I told myself about myself. I suspect that this type of agency is what a man like Malone would’ve wanted, but never could’ve had, because my ability to centralize myself and my own needs, and be sel sh in the face of a society that attempted to neutralize and categorize my social footprint and desires,

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Holleran tries to construct Malone as a lustful and desirable subject for the ben e t of the novel, his protagonist becomes an object — a thing that has no control overWhileitself.

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Willem De Kooning, Zot, 1949, oil on paper mounted on wood, 18 x 20¼ inches (45.7 x 51.4 centimeters). e Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From the Collection of omas B. Hess, Purchase, Rogers, Louis V. Bell and Harris Brisbane Dick Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Gift of the heirs of omas B. Hess, 1984 (1984.611).

JORDAN VALENTINE TUCKER

To his credit, Greer seems aware of these underlying tensions. He has minor characters question his emotional state of being and the feasibility of his protago nist’s failed literary project. When Arthur Less mentions that his novel is about “a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco,” Zohra, a new friend he meets while riding camels in Morocco, replies as Zohrafollows:asks,“It is a white mid dle-aged man?”

“A“Yes.”white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American “Jesus,sorrows?”Iguess so.”

129 had been honed after two decades of being a person of color in America. My sense of irreverence in the face of stereotypes and bigotry was, and still is, inherently politi cal. As a 21-year-old, it announced itself in the way I moved through Manhattan without seeing locked doors. Obama had just been elected, and his rise seemed to dignify the ease in which I found myself charging into spaces, untethered to any concept of access. I was only committed to my search for good times. ese were found downtown, but also in Harlem and Washington Heights, where Black and Brown boys danced — like, really danced while they drank, did drugs, and made love out in the open. As time passed, the anecdotes of my life seemed to t perfectly alongside the stories written by Holleran and old er generations of similar authors. I was a voracious reader of their works, but I was also something else: an inheritor of a set of experiences that had been distilled in literature, replete with stories that were all too familiar. Reading and writing ction with an identi able tradition in mind that stretches back to Henry James led me to Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less, which won the Pulitzer a few months before my vacation in the Pines. e book also ts alongside the aforementioned canon; like Dancer from the Dance, it’s a novel that seeks to explore otherness in ugly and ro manticGreer’sways.novel follows Arthur Less af ter he decides to travel around the world. His desire to ee his current life on the West Coast is prompted by the news that his “friend-with-bene ts” is getting married to another man. Less, a novelist whose latest work has been turned down from his publisher, turns 50 during his time abroad, and this life transition is the primary hook to generate a sense of empathy in the reader. Less is lonely; he’s getting old. And now he is seemingly col onizing the world with his loneliness. In the process of watching this comedy un fold, we almost forget the reason for his extended journey abroad. Freddy, a man with a “Mexican mother” and “nut-brown” skinned uncle, has cooled on him. With this in mind, a speci c metaphor is easy to identify: Less’s anxieties are exemplary of those faced by many white Americans who sense impending doom as the current demographics change in America.

“Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.” It’s a little hard, indeed, but surely not impossible. Arthur Less shies away from explicitly acknowledging the sentiments I mentioned above. His fear of the other is identi ed with coded language: his sor row. Following this passage, when Zohra wants to push the conversation forward,

I wonder whether someone was read ing Greer’s novel as they boarded the ferry during my friend’s ordeal on Fire Island. Did their experience seeing three men of color being accosted by police make them question their selfhood? It should have. If it didn’t, then their time in the Pines would have worked out similar to Less’s travels abroad. Either way, I’m sure some one grinned as they hustled on board, leaving three Brown boys to ask them selves “Is this all a joke?”

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130 Less says, “Bugger o .” I smirk when I read this section of the novel. Greer’s use of comedy in the novel feels evangelical, except he suggests that humor, and not grace or providence, has the power to come to the aid of his protagonist. In this way, the novel feels very contemporary. We want to laugh. We need to laugh. It is another way that readers and arbiters of cool-kid content feel like they can gen erate agency in a world that leaves them little room to bring about happiness on their own terms. Giggling is easier on the mind and the body than controlling one’s tears. But it is also the case that in Less, humor kicks a more enlightened conver sation about the protagonist’s selfhood down the road. Like Holleran’s Malone, Arthur Less is artfully characterized by who he is not: by men who aren’t white or middle-aged or mobile. A certain type of reader laughs at Arthur, or with him at times, while another type of reader grins, because when it comes to Less’s sense of himself, he struggles to acknowledge the vapidity of his character. His time traveling around the world is tainted by unspoken truths so much so that the jour ney itself becomes an approximation of something else: a desire to experience the better version of his avatar, if only for a moment in time.

Our last night in the Pines was a slow night, a quiet dreamlike evening. e ve of us went for a walk to see the houses located east of the harbor on the bayside of the island, and on our journey home we decided to stroll in the darkness on the beach. I had trouble seeing the waves, but I could hear them crashing. My ears were well tuned after a week of listening and dancing to music. We’d danced in our pool while listening to Travis Scott’s new album and Alice Coltrane’s compositions, to Biggie’s lyrics and Tupac’s polemics, to Sampha’s tracks and Lil Silva’s melodies, and to the voices of Shirley Caesar and Kelis and Beyoncé and James Blake. Yes, I think we needed some type of re, or disturbance, so that we could remember stories about real dancers, with shaven heads, who don’t mind being fashioned as criminals when they steal joy. In the court of public opinion, these dancers are villainized for their very spir it; their way of moving through the world upends the status quo. ey’re often told they’re aloof or naïve, but their danc ing is itself a radical project, condemned by conservative and liberals alike. It is a waltz that requires neither the rights nor privileges licensed by state authorities or dinner party attendees. It is a waltz, homegrown on the shores of America, that relies on graceful, simple steps, cho reographed in the face of perpetual retri bution from skeptics and critics. e sin gle dancer becomes an anathema for an oppressor who seeks to know, own, and depict every aspect of what he oppress es. How did you learn that dance if I never taught you, he says. I didn’t invite you for a reason; this party isn’t for people who look like you. But the dancer smiles as he glides

131 through spaces with abandon, thereby undermining preconceived notions of au thority. I mastered this waltz years ago, the dancer says as a matter of happenstance. I thought you knew? He laughs. He knows his feet can spark a blaze. e dancer nds strength in his individualism that is plain and absolute. It keeps a steady rhythm. It’s a wonderful sight to see. e dancer’s movements are powerful enough to destroy the oppressor’s false perceptions and sto ries, the ctions that he tells himself about the true meanings of jubilation, leisure, and love. is is just how I move, the dancer re minds us. His scalp is as naked as the day he was born as he glides through our con temporary American wilderness beneath trees that will not stand. So yes, I think it’s time for a con a gration. Literature can surely help fan the ames, but only if it sticks to its principles and asserts itself again in our society as a mirror that re ects truths in the face of misinformation. Don’t we all want some thing to burn? e ashes will be dark and beautiful. We can watch them simmer. is activity will be relaxing, akin to lounging in deck chairs near the ocean on a brilliant summer day. JORDAN VALENTINE TUCKER

Julia Leonard, Car in Sinkhole, Cypress Park , 2020, ink on paper. Courtesy the artist

OF"PHOTOGRAPHAMOMENT": A WITHCONVERSATIONEILEENMYLES

JAN WILM

133 INTERVIEW

JAN WILM: I hope everything is alright with you and that you’re safe during this EILEENpandemic.MYLES: I am. I’m in Marfa, which is a small town in Texas. I’m in my house, my dog is here, I have a nice yard and space to go for a walk. e only thing is that Marfa is a liberal town in the mid dle of a conservative state. So, this week, they o cially opened after the lockdown restrictions following the pandemic. We haven’t seen any signs of the end of the lockdown. ere aren’t many tourists here, but it makes people a little wary.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 134 You live both in New York and in Marfa. Did you leave New York when the pandemic began? I wasn’t planning on touring this year, ex cept for a few planned events in Europe. So, I had started work on a new book, and I came to Marfa in the fall and I was here in January and February of this year. My plan was to go to New York at the end of March. But every event in March was cancelled, and you could see the writing on the wall that things would get bad. is meant either getting back to New York fast or staying here. I felt that it was safer here. e only thing is that the health care here is very bad, practically nonexistent. Which means that if it got bad here, it would be really bad. I’m glad to hear that you’re safe, and if I can, I’d like to squeeze a few political thoughts out of you before I move on to talk about your writing. I have very few thoughts that aren’t political. As I’m following US news, I’m not really surprised how horribly Trump is han dling the pandemic, but I’m still shocked and saddened to see what shape things have taken. What are your thoughts about the way things are going? I think all of us are feeling a little disas sociated. We’ve had this cartoon leader for a couple of years now, and anything that’s been a test for him — he has failed at it. e guy is a nincompoop. At the mo ment, most people, myself included, feel that the virus is really just showing how bad things have already been. It’s as if a cloth had been thrown over the surface of America, and what you can see is the outline of a real topology of the country’s politics. People of color are dying dispro portionately, poorly paid front line work ers are a ected, prisons are not safe. At the same time, middle-class white people have been less severely hit. It makes you start to think that we have a servant class and that slavery still exists in many ways. e monstrosity of America becomes abundantly clear. When Trump rst got elected, I nal ly read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which I had car ried around for 20 years. And as I began to read it, it struck me that every single bad thing Trump was doing was a piece of American history. Everything in the present seemed to have a precedent in the past, from the history of labor and unions, to women’s rights, or to the idea that the police force in America was instituted to capture runaway slaves. During the lockdown you saw a bunch of white dudes armed with machine guns walking into public buildings in Michigan to protest the quarantine measures. And Trump says they’re good people. Whereas, when a person of color is shot by the po lice and people of color are protesting police brutality, they’re teargassed in the streets. It’s so clear that the right to bear arms means the right to be white and bear arms. It’s so clear that Trump is essentially for an America of a gated community. I’m trying clumsily to link what you’re saying to your beautiful novel Chelsea Girls. In the Woodstock episodes in the book, you write that listening to Jimi Hendrix playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” you had the sense that it was great to be present to hear the end of America.

And we really believed that in 1969. We believed that the empire was being taken down. In the spiritual sense certainly. You must have thought about these mo ments ever since, but they seem particu larly poignant to me in light of Trump’s presidency and the way it has shown how much he is part of the worst of America.

Do you feel that we’ve been here before, and that Trump merely accentuates the problems of the US, or does his presi dency and his handling of the pandem ic feel as though this is a new kind of an endpoint, whatever that means? I mean, it’s been the great step backward, you know? And that began at the end of the 1970s and 1980s with the move to ward deregulating and shredding what ever social net there was. I often think about the time after World War II and Europe’s response to the end of the war. e war was fought on European soil, and so Europe established a social net after the war. And I think in America there was always the dream of such a social net, and there was talk of it up until the 1970s. ey never quite got it together, but there was a plan, and there still were unions at the time. But after the Nixon administra tion and the Reagan administration, all of that was over. e moment that we’re in now has been constructed carefully for at least 30 years. But what this moment feels like is the beginning of the 20th century, the Gilded Age of robber barons and child labor and the dehumanization of immi grants. We really are going backward. e interesting thing about America is that what’s never been healed is the Civil War. I think about Europe and the impact of a war that was fought on your land. e Civil War was the war that was fought on our land, unless you’re black and there’s always been a war on. But with the Civil War — those lines of separation have never been erased. e map got frozen in time.So, when Trump places all the re sponsibility of dealing with the pandemic in the hands of the individual states, what you see is a very conservative conception of the United States. Every man for himself, every state for itself, every city for itself — except when the federal government doesn’t like what the states are doing, but Trump certainly doesn’t feel responsible for the states. It’s very twisted and outdat ed, but at the same time it’s weirdly linear — in keeping with American history. Do you think that kind of politics has a future in America? Or will the showing of how rotten everything is contribute to the eventual downfall of these kinds of politics? ere would just have to be such a radical disruption. And when we look at what the Democratic Party has o ered us for hope this time: Joe Biden, kind of a corpse! It seems so weird that there was no desire for vitality in the party. I’m the same gen eration as all these so-called appropriate men. I mean, they’re the people who didn’t go to Woodstock, and they run the coun try. I know it’s time for my generation to let go of that kind of power, but instead all we’re being o ered is that “dying white guy rule.” We were brought up in history class on the idea of checks and balances, there are three branches of the govern ment, and we were told we’d be saved. But we learn that with the right kind of dic tator they all work together. Today, a lot of us feel that this country’s going down,

135 EILEEN MYLES

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 136 because you would really have to restruc ture it, rethink it. It just depends on what happens with the election, and if we’re even allowed to have legal elections. If the Democrats take the Senate, if they take the White House, it would be better, but it would still not be the radical change that we need.Totake it to Chelsea Girls. I came from the working class. I went to a ne univer sity, but it was a cheap one, and I didn’t have any middle-class privilege growing up. A lot of the excitement of writing the book and learning to write prose and be ing a poet and living the particular life of a poet was that I felt like I was the person who wasn’t supposed to be there. I felt like I was a mouthpiece for what wasn’t sup posed to speak. It was class, it was queer ness, it was feminism, and it was poetry, and an aesthetic that wasn’t supposed to be mainstream. I couldn’t get anywhere near the mainstream with Chelsea Girls in the 1990s. I couldn’t get an agent, and the stories in the book didn’t have the arc of redemptiveness that the publishing world was looking for at the time. When I came to New York I felt that I was speaking from what seemed like a very exciting and dangerous and possibly inaudible space. For many reasons, includ ing my own alcohol and drug use, it felt that I could be extinguished at the drop of a hat. So it felt very triumphant to write the book. And it’s been interesting to see that it has become this cult classic 20 or 25 years later. But the thing that I came to understand during this whole process was that I had so much more privilege than I ever knew at the time, and part of it was being white.erst story in Chelsea Girls de scribes throwing a punch at a cop, being thrown into a state prison. Later, I went to a women’s prison in Austin, Texas, to do poetry workshops there. It was a lowsecurity prison, but you could see that these women’s lives are screwed, while they all love to write. ere were some white women there, but mostly women of color, and most of them had kids. And as I met them and worked with them, I real ized that if I was of color and had done the exact same thing, punching a cop, then I would still be in jail today — if I was alive at all, if they hadn’t simply shot that crazy woman attacking a cop. So much of the raucousness of that story, of the indigna tion that’s threaded through the book is also a kind of unknowingness about priv ilege. And I guess if I had known more about my privilege at the time, then I would have been writing a very di erent book. I always loved the expression that you’re taking a photograph of a moment, and Chelsea Girls was that kind of pho tograph of a moment in my life and the people around me. Chelsea Girls includes motifs of invisibil ity and of photography, of course, in that lovely scene when you’re taking sel es before the smartphone sel e, or when you meet Robert Mapplethorpe, who takes your picture and so forth. e idea of feeling invisible (or inaudible) and feeling imprisoned is woven through all of your work. And the act of writing is a clear revolt against that. Even the idea of taking a photograph of a moment seems like a rebellion against all of this, of making visible what is made invisible by society or by whatever else. And the whole culture at the time was full of that. Andy Warhol was always re cording the self. I was around Warhol and Allen Ginsberg when I was young. ey

137 were always the de nition of being at a cool party. It was always like: “Andy’s here, Allen’s here.” But they both carried cameras around. e way they dealt with their own fame was to take a photo graph of you. In nightclubs in the 1980s in New York, it was so important to be fabulous. Warhol is a great example of being a working-class Polish kid who loved movie stars and wanted to be fab ulous and came to New York and did. I think that idea was like a dome we were all living our lives under.

I’m reminded of O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke With You” when he develops this idea that even having a Coke with a loved one and making a poem about it can have the same aes thetic value as a classic painting about Saint Sebastian’s su ering. When re reading Chelsea Girls, I was very drawn to this line where you write: “Poet has always meant to me saint or hero.” I love that idea for reasons of nostalgia, because when I was growing up, I al ways felt empowered by that idea. And by the time I went to university, every one was telling me that poetry didn’t mean anything anymore. Fast forward another 20 years, and I feel that today there is a di erent kind of heroism or sainthood to being a poet or any kind of writer that isn’t linked to mainstream ideas of being a hero or saint. In the poetry community, when we were in our 20s, we were all stars to one anoth er. We were just doing little magazines and publishing each other — it felt like we were all part of the same communi ty. is was before the web, before cell phones, and so there was just this feel ing that you were in this culture that cy cled back into itself and reinforced the sense that you were a star. People used to say things like: When did you come on the scene? And there really was this sense that we were on location and that we were being lmed, whether a camera was pointed at us or not. at’s why this sort of mainstream idea of redemption is corny, because just living was redemptive to us. And that also means that every mo ment you’re living is potential material for your art. Exactly! And that really works well when you’re young. It doesn’t matter if you have no money, because you have so much energy. You’re excited and horny all the time, and so you stay within that movie as long as it holds you. For me, Chelsea Girls is the time that that movie held me. It was about 10 years, and I took a picture of those 10 years. Me and my girlfriend at the time just wanted to make our own lms the way Warhol made these ex perimental lms of the people around

EILEEN MYLES

In the poetry world, it was a bit dif ferent. Frank O’Hara, who was a huge in uence on all of us, had his own sense of being fabulous. We were all treating our friends like stars, and to us this seemed like a way of upending classicism. Instead of the poet talking about the gods, they were talking about the movie stars and their friends. When I was young there was this desire that visibility meant sal vation. Even if you were su ering, to be seen was good. I was Catholic, too, and being seen su ering was a form of saint hood. Movie stars were saints, they had auras. It was all right there in the cul ture, both the one I received and the one I stepped into.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 138 him. But we were just too messed up to make lms like that. So I really thought of each of the chapters in Chelsea Girls as little lms about my life. My own Antoine Doinel movies, the way François Tru aut made lms about his life. ere is that endlessly quoted line by Warhol that the stu which ends up on the cutting-room oor of a movie would be more interesting than the movie it self. And I love the idea of the impor tance of ephemera and the stu that is happening on the sides, and how it can then be pulled into the spotlight and be come art, which is what Warhol is about. Yes, by the time of the 1980s everybody is reading Georges Bataille and thinking about waste as well. It’s the same thing. Friends of mine and a bunch of writers that get lumped under new narratives were completely of that culture. It’s like a broken fractured narrative of one’s life — with plenty of sex. You write once: “With me sloppy has always been good, meant sexy.” I love that line so much, because there’s this sense of just bringing in a di erent aesthetic category where that which is sloppy or done or perceived with haste can also be beautiful and again heroic, more so per haps than this very nished, classicist thing. And we know that, too, about some scrap of paper in Picasso’s studio. “Here, look, a little doodle contains all of his genius.” e pleasure of that line for me is that it’s also very gendered. “Dirty female, queer dirty female.” ere was always this sense that male genius could be ugly and dirty, and that was part of its sexiness. But females were still supposed to conform in a certain way and be bound in a certain way, because their job was to please and to be lunar rather than solar. at was so much of my intention when I was writing Chelsea Girls and that always stayed with me. I wanted to be the central character, even if the story of that character was that character’s demolishment and destruction and undoing. I think because of writers like yourself you can see that narrative has changed enormously; much more is possible to day. ere are still those people who haven’t gotten it and haven’t read those kinds of texts, but there has been a lot of aesthetic progress. Even if you just look at the poetry world, you can see that all styles are commingling. It’s really hard to say what somebody is, because everybody read everything, and everybody can do what they want. In the 1980s, Language Poetry reared its head. And I came up at the same time as that. It was very anti-personal, antinarrative. And that’s why a lot of poets went to prose at that time, because they didn’t want to obey those rules, they want ed to talk about their lives and about sex and so on. ose of us who decided to do it both ways, and act as if a poet could be a saint or a hero, were trying to be po ets in a di erent way in the age of me chanical reproduction. We were trying to be frank about the technology we have now, and we felt that poetry was a kind of performance, which I don’t think even Frank O’Hara thought. O’Hara may have thought poetry was an action, but we were thinking in terms of postmodernity, and we were trying to think of how you would perform poetry, how you would perform

139 Tauba Auerbach, ZS Letters (3D), 2015 (detail). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase. © Tauba Auerbach. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 140 consciousness. We weren’t trying to think in terms of narrative, or story, but how we could occupy a story, how we could have some fun inside of a story, how we could make a mess inside the story. My view of your work is that this idea of poetry as performance has stayed consistent throughout. In your lovely memoir Afterglow about your dog Rosie, you write about that as well, and there, of course, you include an actual puppet performance in the book. I’m trying to link this to what you were speaking about regarding prose and poetry. If this isn’t too simplistic a question, can you pinpoint why you chose to write prose besides poetry, even if prose was closer to narrative of course? Well, I think you handed it to me, though I never quite thought of it before. Because prose is puppet theater. If the poet is this endangered hero, one way to make them safe and even more present and distribut able as a larger vision is to put the poet in a larger box like ction or the novel. e idea is to make the poet a character. You know that after plane crashes, they always nd the black box to gure out what went wrong. e black box always survives. And I remember that someone once said, if the black box always survives, why not put the plane in the black box? It’s that kind of thing. You can use ction to pro tect Ipoetry.remember when I was trying to pub lish Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, my girlfriend at the time was saying, “Are you thinking about the readership of this book? Who would want to read a novel about a poet?” And yet, I felt like it was the only thing I knew about and the only life I knew about. But poets have become appropriate characters in novels in the 21st century. I think that’s funny because all of this was there in the epic already. e hero of the epic is a warrior, but often they’re also poets, because they sing the story of the battle. In your work, of course, you are a war rior who sings about the battles of child hood. You wrote once that: “ e past was my country, it remained unchanging in the future.” And also: “It was a dream, the memory of childhood.” After having written Chelsea Girls and having drawn on your childhood there, is childhood still a reservoir that you can tap for other work? I actually think that it has become more present. I don’t know if age has to do with it. Time seems very uid to me, and I feel like something about being an adult and having lived a fairly long life means that you occupy a strange museum of memory. ere was a set of books that I had when I was a child. ey were called Collier’s Junior Classics, and they were great, and very important to me. e ones that I happened to have were, I think, from 1918 or 1919. ey might still exist in my brother’s basement, because he is the sib ling who had children. And so my mother gave these books to him, which was so un just — they were mine! So, recently, I tried to nd them again and I wound up get ting a copy or two. Now these books live in my house, and while I nd the contents not so interesting, the body of the books is fragrant, and I use them to set up my phone on Zoom calls on top of them and so on. I’m now living in a house that is my house. So I can just put anything here that I want to, and it’s not a reconstruction of my childhood, but it still is the furniture

141 of my childhood. And I think it kind of stokes some gauzy feeling of here and there not being so separate. In the book that I’m working on at the moment, I’m writing about childhood a bit, but more than anything childhood still feels acces sible toeme.person I’m reading now that I never read before is Jorge Luis Borges. He was so in your face in the 1960s and 1970s. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was in Cambridge at the time, close to where I was living then. So part of the reason that he was inescapable was that he was actually there. And I refused to read him, but now his dreamlike writing is very interesting to me. In some sense, I think a lot of your work resembles the rooms in a house or the rooms in a labyrinth, and you’re just drifting through them. And thereby they’re more connected than the passages and events that are happening scene after scene in a conventional novel or a narrative poem, because you’re zipping back and forth between them. So just the form of a book like Chelsea Girls gives you the feeling of memory. Because there can be a scene in memory from childhood, and the next remem bered scene can be of you having sex when you’re an adolescent or an adult. And all of those things are together in that messy and uid way. And, again, I was really learning to write prose when I was writing Chelsea Girls. I didn’t know how to tell a story. All I knew was that there were places I wanted to go to or that I had been to in the past. I mean there’s a chapter of my father’s alcoholism. And I didn’t want to write a sentimental story about being the child of an alcoholic. So, I literally decided to just think of the textures of what moments felt like, wait ing for my dad in the car and so on. Feeling the fuzzy roof of the car, just the way children think about things when the world isn’t theirs yet and fantasize about these things. Nothing has use as a child, so everything is an object for fantasy. When people talk about acting class, they tell you that you’re given details around which you construct a character. You’re told that you’re in a room, or you’re given ve props and to tell a story with those props. And I knew what the props of my life were, and I let the props tell the story. EILEEN MYLES

SHORT 142

ME SARAH

mis·take /m stāk/ noun 1. an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong; a wrong action or statement proceeding from faulty judgment, inadequate knowledge, or inattention verb 1. be wrong about; to blunder in the choice of ItUsage:was in France where I blundered, that part is clear. e rest of the trip is warped, a blur and smudge of memory. My father and I on a long layover in Spain, taking a taxi into the city, eating frozen yogurt in Madrid on the plaza of a palace or a castle or a government building, no, no, it was gelato, no, no, it was a palace, my father delighted in the sun standing there before the grand building which stretched up like a white cake, then the next ight to Bordeaux, then the train to Paris, Paris where neither of us ever thought we’d go, we almost did not belong there, so far from the small townhouse next to the PARDON ETTER

SARAH ETTER

143 power plant where I grew up, but there we were, on the train speeding through the French countryside, through acres of up turned sun owers, that rolling sharp yel low, my father drinking a Diet Coke and grinning, alienating the French men who spoke to me in low and accented English, my father with croissant akes on his lips, oh, I still loved him, even then, even when I was ashamed of how American he was, my face ushing with embarrassment over his bright blue polo shirt, his khaki shorts, his bright white new sneakers, I mastered je suis désolé, pardon, nous sommes désolés, I knew little French except for these apolo gies, but then there was his face when we turned the corner to see Notre-Dame, the one place in the world he always wished to go, never thought he would, since he was a boy he had wanted to see it, and there were tears collecting in his eyes in the sun in France, behind his sunglasses in France, and I was no longer sorry, I stopped apol ogizing for him, for us, for how we were, and we lit low red candles which sparkled in the darkness of the church, it felt holy even though I had lost God, I watched my father weep in Notre-Dame, I thought We have come all this way, we have come so far, and it is worth it, and a few months later, Notre-Dame would burn to the ground, all of it destroyed like kindling, and he would call me, and say I am so glad you took me there, I am so glad I saw it with my own eyes rst, smoke billowing from the steeple on the news, but it hadn’t happened yet, not then, not while we circled the pews, eyes up at the stained glass, glowing in deep reds, lush blues, wild greens, not then when my father declined the tour to the top, his knees gone bad, unable to climb 400 ights of stairs, not when we were in the gift shop, where he bought my moth er a small stained glass rendition of the biggest blue window in the church, the way he put on his glasses to study the glass closely, and then he surprised me with tickets to see the sunset from the Ei el Tower, how we rode the elevator to the top, packed with tourists, how the tower began to twinkle once we were inside of it, how the magic of that moment, the sun hot pink and sinking into the horizon, all of Paris sinking into twilight slowly, how I turned to hide my face from him as the sky shot through with pastel because the moment was perfect and I could not speak and my eyes were wet and there were no words for it, for how much I loved him, there, in Paris, at the top, the world at our feet for a moment, God, how it scared me to love anyone, even my father, how I did not know what to do with that perfect moment other than turn around, what a mistake not to say it, right then, and in stead to be humbled, quiet, how the sun nally set and the world went dark around us, and the tower kept glowing, the lights doing new tricks to dazzle us, that bit tersweet feeling in my chest, a crashing, sharp waves on the shore of the heart, rising, the tide coming in, that same sea cresting over my cheeks, then we took the elevator back down, back to earth, and the tide inside of me receded, and we went to our hotel room up the street, a two-room suite, and he ate another croissant and then slept, his television streaming French and then soft music, and I lay in the big white hotel bed in the dark, I could bear it, I was at peace, there against the white sheets, in Paris, after the top of the tower. I was at peace there, I was, in the months before he died, though I did not know it. My heart was nally calm in my chest in the shared silence, my father there, sleep ing, just beyond the doorway, in the next room.

Sophia Armen is a writer and organizer, born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is a former sta member of e HyePhen magazine and has been building in the SWANA movement for almost ten years. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Armenian Weekly, and e Electronic Intifada. She can be found on Twitter at @sophiaarmen and on Instagram at @sophiaarmen.

Claudia Durastanti is the author of four critically acclaimed novels. Her debut Un giorno verrò a lan ciare sassi alla tua nestra (2010) won the Mondello Giovani Prize, followed by A Chloe, per le ragioni sbagliate (2013) and Cleopatra va in prigione (2016). La straniera (2019) was a nalist for Italy’s most prestigious Premio Strega. Translated into fourteen languages, this novel will be published by Riverhead, Fitzcarraldo and Text. Former Italian Fellow in Literature at the American Academy of Rome, she is also one of the founders of the Italian Literature Festival in London. She writes for sev eral literary supplements and she is on the board of the Turin Book Fair. She is the Italian translator of Joshua Cohen, Donna Haraway, Ocean Vuong, and a new 2021 edition of e Great Gatsby.

Alexandria Hall’s rst book Field Music (Ecco, 2020) was chosen by Rosanna Warren as a winner of the National Poetry Series. She is the found ing editor of Tele- Magazine. She holds an MFA from NYU and is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at USC. She lives in Los Angeles.

Shayla Lawson is the author of three books of poetry A Speed Education in Human Being, the chapbook Pantone, and I ink I’m Ready to see Frank Ocean and the essay collection is Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope. She was born in Rochester, Minnesota, grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, studied architecture in Italy, and spent a few years as a Dutch house wife milkmaid braids and all. She teaches at Amherst College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books include poetry, ction, essay, memoir, crit icism, and translation. After a career in public policy and organizing, Ali taught at various col leges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary’s College of California, and Naropa University. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Aram Ghoogasian is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His research covers the circulation of print across the Armenophone world in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Rae Armantrout is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Wobble (2018), a nalist for the National Book Award, Partly, New and Selected Poems (2016), and Versed (2009) which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010. Her work appears in many journals and anthologies. She is professor emerita from UC San Diego and currently lives in the Seattle area. A new book, Conjure, will be published by Wesleyan in October.

Peter Lunenfeld is the author of City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined (Viking, 2020) from which this essay has been excerpted. He is professor and vice chair of the department of Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he is also on the Urban and Digital Humanities faculties.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen poetry col lections, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) a book of essays, Unauthorized Voices, a collaborative book, Diaspo/ Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi (Holland Park Press, 2014) and seventeen books of transla tions of French and Francophone poets, most recent ly Samira Negrouche’s e Olive Trees’ Jazz (2020). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for po etry in translation, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.

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Sarah Rose Etter is the author of Tongue Party and e Book of X (Two Dollar Radio), her debut novel, which won the 2019 Shirley Jackson Novel Award. e Book of X was also long-listed for e Believer Book Award and e Golden Poppy Award, and named a Best Book of 2019 by rillist, Buzzfeed, and Vulture. Her work has ap peared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Guernica, e Cut, VICE, and more. You can nd out more at www.sarahroseetter.com.

Diana DePardo-Minsky is a professional Art and Architectural Historian educated at Yale and Columbia Universities. e American Academy in Rome ( e Rome Prize), the Fulbright, Kress, and Whiting Foundations have funded her scholarship. e Mellon Foundation supported her innovative classes, and e Princeton Review included her in e Best 300 Professors (2012). She is a Researcher at the Levy Institute; she organizes in situ semi nars in Italy; and she has a forthcoming book on Michelangelo.

Katherine McKittrick is professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press 2006) and Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021).

Karthika Naïr is the author of several books, including the award-winning Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (American edition: Archipelago Books, 2019), and principal script writer for Akram Khan’s DESH (2011), Chotto Desh (2015) and Until the Lions (2016), a partial adaptation of her own book. Also a dance enabler, Naïr’s closest association has been with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet as executive produc er of works like ree Spells, Babel (Words), Puz/ zle and Les Médusés, and as co-founder of Cherkaoui’s company, Eastman.

Jordan Valentine Tucker is a ction writer based in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. He is currently work ing on a novel and collection of short stories. Hrag Vartanian is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic, as well as an editor, art critic, curator, artist, and lecturer on contem porary art with a focus on the intersection of art and politics. He co-founded the award-winning Hyperallergic publication in 2009 because of the po litical, economic, and technological shifts in the art world, the publishing industry, and the distribution of information.

Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. She’s e New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries: A Memoir. Her work also appears in Mother Jones, Al Jazeera, Best American Essays, and Guernica

Megan Ward is Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University and co-directs Livingstone Online, a digital museum of the Victorian explor er David Livingstone. Her research investigates the relationship between literature and technolo gy; she is the author of Seeming Human: Arti cial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character (Ohio State UP, 2018). Her publishing has appeared in e Atlantic, e Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Maureen Mahon is an associate professor in the Department of Music at New York University.

Jan Wilm has a PhD in English. He has taught lit erature at universities across Germany. He is an au thor and translator. He published (in English) e Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee in 2016 and (in German) the novel Winterjahrbuch in 2019. Wilm lives in Frankfurt, Germany.

Tauba Auerbach was born in San Francisco, California in 1981, and lives and works in New York. ough best known for painting, Auerbach works in a variety of media including weaving, glass, photogra phy, 3D printing, typeface design, book-making and musical instrument design. In 2013, she founded Diagonal Press to formalize her ongoing publishing practice. Auerbach was awarded SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award in 2008, marking her rst solo museum presentation. Since then, her work has been interna tionally recognized and featured in solo exhibitions and performances in New York, London, Oslo and Sweden.Auerbach’s rst museum survey, Tauba Auerbach — S v Z, will highlight her proli c and varied out put over the last 16 years. Tauba Auerbach — S v Z is accompanied by a fully illustrated 256-page cat alogue designed by the artist in collaboration with graphic designer David Reinfurt and co-published by Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. e publication

FEATURED ARTISTS

CONTRIBUTORS

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Melissa Seley has written for New York Magazine, Playboy, PAPER, Vice, and other magazines. She is the recipient of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence fellowship. “Mezair” is an excerpt from her in-progress autobiographical novel.

144 features a typeface designed speci cally for the proj ect that slants from left to right as the pages progress. It serves as both an artist book and an index of work, process and references. Willem De Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expression ist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926. Post-World War II, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be charac terized as “action painting” and was a leading gure of Abstract Expressionism. He gained critical acclaim with his rst one-man exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in 1948. He was awarded e Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and his work is includ ed in prominent institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and in America such as e Museum of Modern Art, New York; e Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Mark Rothko (b. 1903, Dvinsk, Russia; d. 1970, New York) is known as one of the primary artists of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. After attending Yale University for two years, he moved to New York in 1925, where he attended the Art Students League and studied under Max Weber.

CONTRIBUTORS

Crater Speak, an artist’s book produced in collabo ration with Midway Contemporary, was released in 2019. Under the moniker Slauson Malone, Marsalis released the album A Quiet Farwell 2016-2018 in 2019. rough his paintings, sculptures, music and texts, Jasper Marsalis’ work focuses on the role of artist as performer and painting as stage, recognizing the similarities in their interdependent relationships. Citing in uences as diverse as Philip Guston, Saidiya Hartman, Paul La Farge, J.M.W. Turner, Tan Lin and Mark Leckey, Marsalis ties ideas of identity, history, aesthetics, and representation into a fractured disco universe that expresses the illusions of spectacle and questions its e ect.

In 1935, Rothko, along with other abstract and expressionist painters, founded the artist group Ten. From 1936 to 1937 he worked on easel paintings for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. In 1945, Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at Art of is Century, New York. Rothko’s work is characterized by detail to formal elements such as color, balance, shape, scale, composition, and depth. Rothko committed suicide on February 25, 1970, in New York. Hedda Sterne (August 4, 1910 – April 8, 2011) was a Romanian-born American proli c artist who belonged to the New York School of painters. Her work is associated with Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism although she painted in a variety of styles, from Minimalism to Surrealism and included gura tion as well. Sterne was the only female artist asso ciated with the group of 18 Abstract Expressionists known as “the Irascibles.” Her works are represented in major interna tional collections including, but not limited to, e Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., e Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate, UK.

Bradley Walker Tomlin (August 19, 1899 – May 11, 1953) was a member of the New York School Abstract Expressionist artists. Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1899, Tomlin was interested in art from an early age, receiving a scholarship to study sculpture at age fourteen. He then studied painting at Syracuse University and moving to New York soon thereafter. In 1926, after a stint in commercial illustration, he received his rst one-person exhibition in 1926. From 1939, Tomlin worked towards a surrealist and cubist-inspired style until he adopted a more ab stract and expressive style and began experimenting with automatism and repetition.

Julia M. Leonard is an artist based in Los Angeles. Leonard is known for her alternative space/project Either Way LA in addition to her outdoor exhibitions and collaborations throughout Los Angeles. Jasper Marsalis (b. 1995, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist and musician based in Los Angeles. His re cent exhibitions include A star like any other —, Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2020); A star like any other —, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN (2019); and Flash blindness, Svetlana, New York, NY (2018). His work was also featured in Young, Gifted and Black: e LumpkinBoccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY (2020).

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