Quarterly Journal, no. 31: Semipublic Intellectual Issue by lareviewofbooks

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

no.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

QUA RT E R LY JO U R N A L

Semipublic Intellectual Issue NO. 31

Q U A RT E R LY

JOURNAL:

SEMIPUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

$12.00 ISBN 978-1-940660-77-6

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LIVES and LETTERS From

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An Inky Business A History of Newspapers from the English Civil Wars to the American Civil War

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The Poet and the Publisher The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS no.

Q UA RT ERLY

J O U RNA L:

SEMIPUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

TOM LU TZ

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The Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The LARB Quarterly Journal is published quarterly by the Los Angeles Review of Books, 6671 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1521, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Submissions for the Journal can be emailed to editorial@lareviewofbooks.org. © Los Angeles Review of Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Visit our website at www.lareviewofbooks.org. The LARB Quarterly Journal is a premium of the LARB Membership Program. Annual subscriptions are available. Go to www.lareviewofbooks.org/membership for more information or email membership@lareviewofbooks.org. Distribution through Publishers Group West. If you are a retailer and would like to order the LARB Quarterly Journal, call 800-788-3123 or email orderentry@perseusbooks.com. To place an ad in the LARB Quarterly Journal, email adsales@lareviewofbooks.org.

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CONTENTS no.

Q UA RT ERLY

SEMIPUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

essays 9

D A R K C O A T: ON ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI b y To m a s z R ó ż y c k i

SEMI-PUBLIC. INTELLECTUAL b y J. D. D a n i e l s

UNDER THE BRIDGE: ON SAMUEL GREENBERG by Michael Casper

J O U RNA L:

G O I N G TO T H E S H O W A G A I N by Marsha Gordon

STREAMING ENTHUSIASM AND THE INDUSTRIOUS FA M I LY D R A M A by Michael Szalay

109 THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Jorge Cotte

fiction 56

PERFECT by Nylsa Martínez

poetry

1 2 1 A L I V E TO L I F E I T S E L F by Mar y Cappello

I N P R A I S E O F G R AV I T Y by JinJin Xu

128 T H E Q U I E T M Y ST I C I S M OF ALMANACS by Jess McHugh

SCIENTIFIC METHOD b y Pa u l Tra n

POEM ENDING IN THE LIGHT by Carlie Hoffman

CHRONIC, ALBUM by Amaud Jamaul Johnson

B O DY LO R E by Anna Journey

1 3 3 A C U LT U R A L C O L O S S U S : LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI’S AMERICAN CENTURY by Stephen Kessler

streaming symposium 74

ANTISEPTIC GLASS STREAM by Sun-ha Hong

S T R AT E G I C A U D I O : P O D C A S T S , P R O PA G A N DA , A N D T H E FA I R Y TA L E S O F DATA M I N I N G b y M i c h e l l e C h i h a ra

STUDIO BRANDING IN THE STREAMING WORLD by Joshua Glick

1 1 7 A G A I N S T DAY T I M E by Austen Leah Rose 1 1 8 T R U E S TO R Y by Camille Dung y 126 COME THRU by David Mar riott

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univer sity of texas press |

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LETTER FROM T H E E D I TO R Over the past ten years the Los Angeles Review of Books has emerged as a cultural force, even something of an institution. We enter our second decade knowing that we’re no longer the new kid on the block. Yes, we’re not quite so scruffy these days, but that doesn’t mean we’re any less scrappy. In essence, we remain what we were from the very start: neither prisoners of the Ivory Tower nor street-corner preachers, neither stiffcollared talking heads nor reckless photobombers in tuxedo tees. We are, as this issue’s title boldly proclaims, “semipublic intellectuals” — bringing hard-won specialized knowledge to bear on questions of public significance in fresh, unusual ways, not for the sake of gaining prestige but in the hope of moving the conversation forward. LARB has always veered freely from pop to high, from mainstream to fringe, and the writing gathered here represents that range. Our “Streaming Symposium,” compiled by LARB editors Annie Berke, Michelle Chihara, Phillip Maciak, and Anna Shechtman, views the latest developments in entertainment through novel critical lenses. Mary Cappello and Jess McHugh shed empathetic light on two semi-literary genres — the lecture and the almanac, respectively. Stephen Kessler extends equal empathy and appreciation to the late Beat titan Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who changed American letters from a position outside the Eastern capitals of publishing, while Michael Casper reveals the remarkable aspirations and accomplishments of the tragically short-lived Jewish-American poet Samuel Greenberg, who has long dwelled in the shadow of Hart Crane, who appropriated his work. In an essay translated by Mira Rosenthal, Tomasz Różycki mourns the loss of the major Polish-language poet Adam Zagajewski, who spent many years teaching in Houston, Texas, while Anthony Seidman translates a stylish, ultimately touching noirish tale by Nylsa Martinez set on the US-Mexico border. Poems by Amaud Jamaul Johnson and Camille Dungy, Carlie Hoffman and JinJin Xu, Anna Journey and David Marriott, Austen Leah Rose and Paul Tran weigh the experiences of anguish and transcendence, the lives of the body and of the mind, taking inspiration from folktales, books bound in human skin, and Triple Platinum rap albums. Taken together, these pieces show that no slice of the culture is alien to us — which is not to say that we endorse it all blindly. As semipublic intellectuals we don’t so much stand above the fray as slightly off to the side, taking the proper measure of what matters. — Boris Dralyuk, Editor-in-Chief

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S A Matter of Death and Life Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom “This beautiful, poignant, and uplifting memoir is a love story, a tale of two incredibly accomplished lives that were lived almost as one.” —Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone REDWOOD

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Prose of the World

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Theory of the Earth Thomas Nail “Thomas Nail has developed a much-needed, and previously underrepresented philosophy of geology. This book helps us imagine our planet as neither a static place of habitation nor a protective Mother Earth.” —Matthias Fritsch, Concordia University

The Stadium as a Ritual of Intensity Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht Literary critic and avid sports fan Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht finds powerful, as yet unexplored reasons to sing the praises of crowds.

The Case of Wagner / Twilight of the Idols / The Antichrist / Ecce Homo / Dionysus Dithyrambs / Nietzsche Contra Wagner Volume 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Edited by Alan D. Schrift The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

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Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice Andrea Freeman

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stanfordpress.typepad.com

Walid Raad/The Atlas Group (1989-2004), Better be watching the clouds_Plate 328, 2000/2017, pigmented inkjet print, 30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8 cm). © Walid Raad. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York .

ART TK

Jayce Salloum, hand on heart, Anne, from the video: “Once you’ve shot the gun you can’t stop the bullet…”, 8:00, 1988 Image courtesy of the artist.

ART TK

Walid Raad/The Atlas Group (1989-2004), Better be watching the clouds_Plate 126, 2000/2017 Pigmented inkjet print, 30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8 cm). © Walid Raad. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

e s s ay

DA R K C O AT: O N A DA M Z A G A J E W S K I TOMASZ RÓŻYCKI Trans. Mira Rosenthal

1. Try

efore Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” landed on the back cover of The New Yorker’s special memorial issue, published after the attack on the World Trade Center, and immediately became famous in America, its author was already well known and highly regarded in Europe. He was recognized in many circles as an author whose books were not only aesthetically but also politically important to specific generations and polemics. His presence on the American literary scene began when Farrar, Straus and Giroux started publishing his work on the recommendation 11

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— as Adam later said — of Joseph Brodsky. His poems were admired by Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Susan Sontag, and many American poets and critics, at a time when Adam was teaching at the University of Houston and, later, at the University of Chicago. Then, as the result of happenstance, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” (translated by Clare Cavanagh) appeared at this extraordinary moment in The New Yorker. He was asked often to read it at events, even though most his other poems were in the same vein: in each, he tried to tell of joy and sorrow, of delight and grief, and of the consolation of poetry, which holds all of these things simultaneously. He was born in Lwów, a city where his family had lived for generations and which they lost, forced out when he was a few months old. He was born in a mutilated country, right after the Second World War took six million inhabitants in Poland alone and wiped its capital off the face of the earth. All of his life, he tried to do exactly as his poem says: he tried to praise a world that, in spite of everything, is shockingly beautiful. Perhaps he wished to find a way, like Bach’s St. Matthew Passion does in his poem “Good Friday in the Tunnels of the Métro,” to succeed in transforming pain into beauty. Adam was born on June 21, a day of paradox: the summer solstice, when everything begins and ends at the same time, when the seasons’ needle reaches its zenith and starts to drop, when the earth on its axis of rotation tilts most toward the sun while, at the same time, the days begin again to decline into darkness. The year of his birth was 1945, a year when everything ended and began. He died on March 21, World Poetry Day: the first day of the spring calendar, as winter says 12

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goodbye. In Poland, March 21 has been National Skip Day for years, when thousands of kids play truant from school. That is, until this unusual year of 2021, when schools, in most cases, were closed. And there is the fact that his initials were A-Z, as if a pendulum was passing from one end of the alphabet to the other, travelling through all of the possibilities of language along the way, the whole entire gamut. But enough of this cheap cabala. I remember when I arrived in Kraków for college. Communism had just collapsed, things had turned around, it was the paradoxical watershed year of 1989. Kraków was dirty — the walls of the tenements were almost black, the air polluted with exhaust. The 1980s in Poland were years of fatigue, crisis, and daily struggle. Even the most straightforward task required great effort. It seemed as if life consisted of nothing but obstacles. At a stall near Jagiellonian University, I bought two or three of Adam’s books, which were illegal to print during the Communist era and almost completely unavailable in Poland up to that time. These were “underground” copies, illegal reprints of Paris and London editions of his poems and essays. On that warm day, sitting on a bench in the green belt of a Kraków that still felt unreal to me, I experienced a moment of bewilderment. I sensed that I was encountering poetry that belonged to the element of air: it was possible to breathe it in. It was possible to be lifted — or rather, to be immersed and then lifted up, like the body in a warm Mediterranean Sea. “For a magical moment, everything is equally close to him, everything equally distant: for he feels a connection to everything. He has lost nothing of the past, and the future has nothing to bring him. He is, for an enchanted moment, the conqueror of

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

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time.”1 Then, from that bench, I looked out on our sad and dirty country differently. Someone had proved that there was something else in our lives, perhaps invisible at first glance, but more important and more beautiful, reassuring and emboldening, liberating. Until recently in that time of the People’s Republic of Poland, printing such poems had been forbidden: I thought, how pathetic, weak, and despicable a state must be, with its tens of thousands of functionaries, if it’s afraid of such poetry. It was a very concrete and Polish kind of poetry, as much as Polish recollections of a lost Lwów can be — and, at the same time, it was detached from our cursed Polish problems. It was different, worldly, free. Not because the poems were detached from reality, as Polish critics often accused them of being, no — they were about reality itself, since our reality is twofold, if only because of the fact that it’s made up of the visible and the invisible and, in addition, to quote Hegel, it is threatened by the “fury of disappearance” and, therefore, only accessible to us within the blink of an eye. Moreover, poetry is the awareness of this vanishing, an elegy, a farewell to reality, a moment of mourning, necessary for us to be able to cope with the loss and to deal with the overabundance of memory. I’m writing this because some things only happen once in a lifetime; we can pass them over in silence, but sooner or later that silence will overwhelm and engulf us. We can try to be thankful for them, however ineptly, but that gratitude by its very nature will be less than the gift we received. It’s helpful to gain distance from something in order to describe it. It’s even better if the object of description has

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been frozen, though that’s not possible in this case, even with the help of such a fixative as death. After all, you can’t describe the clapper — the heart — of a bell in motion; at most, you can only try to talk about its balancing act. And I’m not even talking about the fact that distance, in this case, will probably always feel too close. I simply don’t know if it’s even possible at all, since it’s difficult to gain enough distance from oneself. As Wallace Stevens wrote: “[Q]uotations have a special interest, since one is not apt to quote what is not one’s own words, whoever may have written them. The ‘whoever’ is the quoter in another guise, in another age, under other circumstances.”2 And the point is not even that what I want to write about is invisible or elusive, but simply that our meeting took place somewhere in the element of air and, since then, we’ve shared this elusive part in common. The elusive part hasn’t vanished at all but is always here, always in me, and that’s why distance is impossible. Besides — as with the majority of published memoirs about the dead — everything that’s written concerns, to a greater extent, the one doing the recollecting, not the deceased. And that reassures me. Fruit For Czesław Miłosz How unattainable life is, it only reveals its features in memory, in nonexistence. How unattainable afternoons, ripe, tumultuous, leaves bursting with sap; swollen fruit, the rustling

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West 3rd Street Los Angeles

Photo by Melvin T

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silks of women who pass on the other side of the street, and the shouts of the boys leaving school. Unattainable. The simplest apple inscrutable, round. The crowns of trees shake in warm currents of air. Unattainable distant mountains. Intangible rainbows. Huge cliffs of clouds flowing slowly through the sky. The sumptuous, unattainable afternoon. My life, swirling, unattainable, free. (translated by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams)3 2. To Praise His poetry seemed different from anything I had read before, especially from contemporary poetry, which was marked by some king of gloomy heaviness, some kind of dry, wooden palpitation of language. Within Adam’s poetry, there was breath, space; it was not cramped, but exploding with light. Within it, there was no confusion or great toil; it was exactly as he had written — “a search for radiance.” And it was a poetry of joy — the pure joy of being, of admiration for beauty and the world, of being a child in the world. Joy like the joy of swimming in the warm Mediterranean Sea. He understood and wrote about the fact that, in the same sea, refugees were drowning, just as he understood and wrote about the fact that Lwów, a city that he loved dearly, was the site of 16

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so much death just before his birth. “A poem grows on contradictions, but it can’t grow over them,”4 as he wrote in “Ode to Plurality.” His poetry did not absolve him of anything, but it took on what poetry has taken on from the beginning: a celebration of human existence, of human life. The world is sometimes difficult and unbearable, but it also deserves to be praised, life deserves our gratitude and good that is more powerful than evil. Czesław Miłosz adored how Adam’s poems were so “intoxicated with the world.” His poems are often ecstatic, orgasmic, starting with the concrete and transforming into a hymn — as in, among many others, the poem “Lava,” which could be seen as an attempt to answer Adorno’s famous assertion that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. So many poems tell of flashes of happiness — of those times, as Schopenhauer says, when “we are, for that moment, unburdened of the base press of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the workhouse of willing, the wheel of Ixion stands still,”5 and which Nietzsche described with the phrase “eternal return.” Adam’s poetry is slight and piercing at the same time, and when I read it, I get the sensation that the calendar has made some kind of mistake again and forgot to note the holiday that the poem announces. And what if Heraclitus and Parmenides are both right and two worlds exist side by side, one serene, the other insane; one arrow thoughtlessly hurtles, another, indulgent, looks on; the selfsame wave moves and stands still. Animals all at once come into

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ART TK

Jayce Salloum, ripples sun stars, “I bowed my head in shame at having returned a visitor..”, Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (in Bourg al Barajinah refugee ‘camp', near Beirut, Lebanon), from the video: “untitled part 3b: (as if ) beauty never ends..”, 11:22, 2002 Image courtesy of the artist.

TOMASZ RÓŻYCKI

the world and leave it, birch leaves dance in the wind as they fall apart in the cruel, rusty flame. Lava kills and preserves, the heart beats and is beaten; there was war, then there wasn’t; Jews dies, Jews stay alive, cities are razed, cities endure, love fades, the kiss everlasting, the wings of the hawk must be brown, you’re still with me though we’re no more, ships sink, sand sings, clouds wander like wedding veils in tatters. […] Youth dissolves in a day; girls’ faces freeze into medallions, despair turns to rapture and the hard fruits of the stars in the sky ripen like grapes, and beauty endures, shaken, unperturbed, and God is and God dies; night returns to us in the evening, and the dawn is hoary with dew. (from “Lava,” translated by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams) A moment of transition captured, of transcendence: a photograph that catches the vanishing, as if poetry is a Miłoszian “moment everlasting.” “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes,

“but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”6 Everything is still possible, as if there exists “that one over there,” the vanished life; we didn’t lose anything but still feel sorrow, an inconsolable loss that we don’t need to be ashamed of, our lament. Some invisible hand writes a poem, touches us, and rearranges objects in the room while we’re sleeping, alters our world, at times leaving behind its mysterious trace. This from a poem about Goronne in the collection Invisible Hand: […] No one saw, no cameras, only an azure eye; absolute ignorance, serenity, glory, bliss. A letter opener lay on the wooden table, a handful of nuts, a purple plum that shone violet as in a Spanish canvas, a worn-out plastic ballpoint with dark streaks of poetry. (from “Impassive,” translated by Clare Cavanagh) People characterized him as an elegiac poet, to which he acquiesced after a while, given that poetry is an attempt to hold onto something that slips away and tends toward nonexistence. The twofold, the paradox, the dichotomy — but also the whole. In writing about what is at least a twofold reality, he doesn’t mean easy metaphysics. He is not a Catholic poet. “Mysticism for Beginners” — that’s what he liked to call his poetry and poetry in general — or, quoting his father, an engineer, “a slight exaggeration.” Not grand epiphanies addressed to God but an attempt to show the whole of reality — that 19

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is, the invisible, the inner life, the spiritual life intertwined with what is tangible, painful, and cruel. The visible part, too, will disappear in a minute; only light remains, a ray of hope. As in Caravaggio’s paintings, Adam’s poems show the moment of transition, the second when a divine spark ignites and then falls into darkness, illuminating angry, surprised, or happy human faces. Faces twisted in suffering or hatred, or simply ordinary normal faces that the radiance transforms: a moment that determines that nothing will be as it was before. It illuminates cruelty and compassion for the body, for the physical world — this divine spark, mysterious and enigmatic, bringing only a faint flash of hope — as Adam himself wrote in “The Calling of St. Matthew (San Luigi dei Francesi),” “They live in semi-darkness, and suddenly light arrives.” A transformation has taken place, a transition. A simple moment suddenly becomes a window, and the picture frame becomes a door through which we can pass to go beyond our time, into a small eternity, a small resurrection. 3. The Mutilated Adam Zagajewski spent twenty years abroad, living in Paris and Houston, and then Paris and Chicago — he taught in both American cities for some time. He didn’t call himself an exile, objecting that he had gone to Paris because of the love of his life, Maya, although he was banned from publishing in Poland and wouldn’t be able to return easily. The first years in Paris were difficult, but he believed that writers are among the most privileged of émigrés. They’re not lost entirely; they leave a trace behind. Among the poems that I read on that 20

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bench in Kraków was “To Go to Lwów” — which I already knew in high school as a famous poem copied at random in samizdat editions of Zeszyty Literackie. The poem was especially close to me because of my family history. Like Adam, my father was born in Łyczaków, where Zbigniew Herbert, Stanisław Lem, and Debora Vogel also lived. And my family was relocated from there to a post-German, Silesian town. Though this “incidental” connection is true, it’s not so important; it’s not why this poem became such an anthem for me. Lwów is a “second Jerusalem,” a place impossible to return to in our visible reality. The bond of exile is a bond of longing for something unattainable, something mythical that exists only in memory or even more so in the imagination. “To Go to Lwów” means to escape to Lwów, to travel toward an eternal duration, beyond time, to the New Jerusalem; to escape from grayness and despair, to wage an expedition to the land of the dead, to paradise, to that wonderful “Nowhere.” “Real life is elsewhere,” as a certain madman once wrote in the most lyrical of poems.7 Adam’s Lwów is not the Lwów of various societies of devotees who gather to reminisce about their Lwów in quite an orthodox spirit — rather, it’s Byzantium from Yeats’ poem, it’s the Greek Elysium. A peach. Ideal and beautiful. Elusive. I was born into a family that mentioned Lwów on a daily basis, reinforcing my belief that we were only temporarily in Silesia, having been cast out of a heavenly place. Lwów, the most amusing and most beautiful city in the world, was unscathed in such recollections. If anything remained after the horrible war and the cynical destruction of all things sacred during communist times, it was Lwów, “quiet and pure as a peach.”

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This twofold life of exiles is wonderfully described in Adam’s essay, “Two Cities.” Superimposed onto the actual map of Gliwice, where he spent his childhood after his arrival from Lwów, is another visualized map, maintained by the memories of the displaced — family, friends and neighbors, since almost everyone in Adam’s environment was originally from there — a map of the streets of Lwów. So, while walking around Gliwice, they still can imagine that they’re walking around that other city — until there’s a physical manifestation in the form of a downstairs neighbor who refuses to go outside because he can’t concede that what he sees there is not his beloved Lwów. If he appears in the yard to throw out the garbage, it’s always in his pajamas, aiming to give the impression that he’s here only for a moment and doesn’t plan on taking the reality around him seriously. “To Go to Lwów” taught me something important — it showed me the impossibility and elusiveness of my own longing and allowed me to break free from the curse of memory, to place Lwów in the realm of universal ideas. “Why must every city become Jerusalem and every man a Jew?” Reading this, I felt that my longing was connected to a universal bond between all of us, a human bond. The previously mentioned poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” published on the back page of The New Yorker after the tragedy of September 11, suddenly became the voice of many thousands of Americans. As Adam later said, he wrote it after a trip with his father to the borderlands of Poland and Ukraine, where fifty years later they still saw ruins and nettles growing over the traces of Ukrainian villages, now disappeared, whose populations were relocated during the postwar

“Operation Vistula.” The poem was written a year and a half before anyone even imagined the attacks in New York. It was written because the world was mutilated already, because people perished during the Second World War, before it and after it, because there, from under the dark brush, the shadows of our loved ones from Kolyma, Ravensbrück, Srebrenica are watching us still. Because poetry is, finally, a mourning of each death, of every vanishing, witness to the “fury of disappearance.” Adam’s poem suddenly turned out to be painfully true for someone else, somewhere else this time, in another language, because it bears in mind the fact that, in spite of it all, good, truth, love, and beauty exist; that we are here, living in them, living thanks to them, and talking about them is worthwhile. Writing poems is worthwhile so that the world can come back to life and endure. “What an unexpected meeting — the patient finds the doctor,” as he wrote in “Treatise on Emptiness” (translated by Clare Cavanagh). Once again, it turns out that poetry found the words for what was yet to happen: that poetry was there ahead of us, before we were born. And that it was able to join people in a bond of compassion. It’s still one step ahead of us, and it wants to tell us something that, so far, we don’t understand. As if it wants to delay a little longer the inevitable impending moment, stop time for a little while, as if it’s practice for transcendence, preparation for disappearing. Mysticism for Beginners […] The German on the café terrace held a small book on his lap. I caught sight of the title: 21

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Jayce Salloum, ripples sun stars, “..and not a liberator,” ”, Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (in Bourg al Barajinah refugee ‘camp', near Beirut, Lebanon), from the video: “untitled part 3b: (as if ) beauty never ends..”, 11:22, 2002 . Image courtesy of the artist.

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Mysticism for Beginners. Suddenly I understood that the swallows patrolling the streets of Montepulciano […] and the stained-glass windows like butterfly wings sprinkled with pollen, and the little nightingale practicing its speech beside the highway, and any journey, any kind of trip, are only mysticism for beginners, the elementary course, prelude to a test that’s been postponed. (translated by Clare Cavanagh) 4. World If the words from his solitude found their way to my solitude, we shared a bit of solidarity, joined together in the least visible element — the element of air. Just when I was discovering his poetry, a chorus of complainers raised their voices in Poland, and Adam became their first whipping boy. The more his poems were filled with the names of philosophers and painters, references to music and foreign cities, the more he appeared guilty, and the more often accusations were made that he disdained ordinary people — that he was a “fat cat,” that he floated above real problems. The more readers he found in the world, the less satisfied Polish critics and the younger generation of poets were. The more he tried to praise the mutilated world, the more he was mocked as a pretentious aesthete who, they alleged, hadn’t really suffered. People said: this is poetry for intellectuals,

for music lovers, for art connoisseurs, for the American middle class full of its complexes and aspiring to European refinement, for affluent European elites listening to string quartets at sunset while on vacation in Tuscany. People said: right, Zagajewski — supposedly a poet who started out by critiquing socialist reality, who was involved with the Solidarity movement, who was a censored author with all the markings of being a spokesperson for ordinary people fighting in their worker’s uniforms against the social injustices of the system, who was an oppositionist fighting for the rights of the individual — suddenly fled to the West and devoted himself to the aestheticization of reality. They said: he changed because he went to Paris and started going to beautiful restaurants, he forgot what it’s like to be Polish. Such things are never forgiven in Poland. We need our poets to share our fate and, even if they say “I,” to die on the barricade with others. This is another cursed Polish problem: the writer is required to stand with “us,” to be “us,” because only in this way can the community hand over its voice to the writer and impart a sense of importance. The curse is that the Polish “we” is built too often in opposition to the other and can be in profound contradiction to the universal “we.” Adam himself wrote beautifully about this in Solidarity and Solitude, a volume of essays from 1986, in which he tries to find a balance between polar opposites — communal solidarity and skeptical solitary individualism, egalitarianism and elitism — the pendulum of his thought rocking back and forth between. He talks about this balancing act, the continual running of the track between “we” and “I,” about the art of maintaining distance from both of them at times when distance is 23

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nearly impossible but necessary. So that the “we” doesn’t devour, doesn’t engulf the “I,” doesn’t deprive it of the right to dream and to differ brilliantly. But, also, so that the “I” doesn’t lose contact, doesn’t break away from the gravitational pull of the “we,” doesn’t soar into complete solitude; so that solitude is supported by the strength of empathy. It’s essential to establish solitude and solidarity alike. […] I thought of the arts of painting and living, of so many blank, bitter days, of moments of helplessness and my chilly imagination that’s the tongue of a bell, alive only when swaying, striking what it loves, loving what it strikes […] (from “Canvas,” translated by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry and C. K. Williams) As everyone knows, the sound of a bell is delayed. First, the heart’s clapper strikes the bow of its cloak, and before the vibration spreads and the bell surrenders it to the air and then our ears play the sound back, a second passes. The bigger the bell, the more powerful the strike; the more powerful the vibration, the longer the delay and the longer the sound lasts. The sound of a bell, as all music, is time flowing through the air, a delay, a passing away. Contrary to the opinion of his critics, Adam remained committed. At the international level, he participated in dozens of initiatives, invariably and patiently explaining what constituted Polishness 24

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to everyone, to Germans and Spaniards and Americans, and also demonstrating that we all belong to the same community that has space for Bach and Caravaggio, for Cavafy and Simone Weil, for Miles Davis, Anatoly Marchenko, and Ruth Buczyńska. In Berlin, he was a member of the Akademie der Künste. In Paris, he was one of the founders of Zeszyty Literackie, an extremely important literary journal for the preservation of Polish culture, and he was a friend of the Polish “Kultura” circle, of Józef Czapski, and so many others. And, as his friends know well, he did so much for cultural life in Kraków after he returned. It’s impossible for me to list even a tenth of his commitments, primarily because Adam was quite a discreet person, never a star like some writers who surround themselves with a whole court of loyal supporters, of adoring fans and young poets, of fawning critics and publishers. When the government began trampling on civil rights in Poland in recent years, Adam was among those protesting and commenting on the situation, including in his poems. Once again, he became a poet of opposition, and again, those in power hated him. It’s remarkable how often the word “we” appears in his poems, how he is able to establish a bond with the reader. He acted in defense of refugees and against jingoism. He wasn’t afraid of accusations or attacks. Crowds of admirers came out to his readings, while jealous people hissed in coffee shops and on internet forums. In recent years in Poland, only Adam had the courage to use certain mocked words. He followed his own path, and at times it seemed that he had been abandoned there, alone. Sitting on that bench in Kraków’s green belt, I didn’t yet know that we would meet and become friends, that

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Adam would turn out to be one of the most important people in my life, and that I would be sitting here today, unable to find the words to write about him, because the hardest thing is to write about someone who is, simply put, good. As he himself put it in the poem “That Day”: “he is, so it seems, at the strongest point of his existence, he grows, though he is no more, he still speaks, though he’s gone mute, […] he’s achieved completion, absolute completion, he’s so complete, so great, so splendid, he no longer fits inside life” (translated by Clare Cavanagh). And now, in this moment, as I’m writing this disjointed text here in Switzerland, as almost every single newspaper is appearing with a headline about the death of a “great Polish poet,” I think that, finally, many are beginning to realize what a figure we’ve lost. Though the sound of a bell reaches us with a delay, it can still be deafening. An image sticks with me from a festival in a small town high in the Alps, Alto Adige, also known as Südtirol. It was April. The valley was already warm and filled with fragrant flowers. We were going high up into the mountains, first by cable car and then by chairlift. There, several hundred meters above the valley, it was still white. Snow was falling in huge flakes, and we were riding in the chairlift one by one, several meters apart. None of us were prepared for this kind of weather, and Adam was wearing only a thin black coat. I saw him up at the front, suspended many meters above the ground, moving along a row of enormous spruce trees as if floating through a white tunnel. The snow kept falling thicker and thicker, we glided along in complete silence, and the whole setting seemed unreal. At one point, I saw that Adam had calmly unfolded his umbrella to use as a shield, and it appeared to

be holding him up, his silhouette hovering there, a figure in a dark coat swaying slowly in front of me for that moment of delay, elusive in the falling snow like a wavering letter on a white screen that strays and vanishes and returns. Translator’s Coda: The very act of translating this tribute to Adam Zagajewski has been a process of mourning for me. Tomasz and I met thanks to Adam, who introduced us nearly two decades ago. Our friendship and collaboration since then can be credited to his keen facilitation, and now we come together to honor the role he played. He was my mentor and M.F.A. thesis advisor at the University of Houston, where he started the Kraków Poetry Seminar that brought me to Poland for the first time. Sitting here laboring to render Tomasz’s words in English, I feel Adam’s presence at every turn, just as he exists in so many books that do not bear his name but that never would have come into existence without him. This presence includes both encouragement and critique — the amalgam of true mentorship that, perhaps, one can only fully appreciate after the fact. I take courage in recalling his exacting gaze whenever I translate, whenever I write. In addition to this personal act of mourning, I’m also aware of the way that all translation is a kind of elegy. The original words die away and are transmogrified, reborn in a new language. “One is never ‘by oneself,’ however isolating the act of writing might appear,”8 Rosanna Warren says of how all writing receives and transforms — translates — literary tradition. Some transformations gain in the new version, providing consolation for what has been lost and even acquiring additional nuance. I love, for instance, the way this tribute speaks differently to American and European readers (it has 25

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Fernand Deligny, LE PALAIS, À VERDEILHE, October–December 1978, a bottom tracing sheet along with six pairs of tracing sheets, traced by Nicole Guy, 57 x 60 cm. Image courtesy of Editions L’Arachnéen.

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also appeared in Polish and German), highlighting how Adam’s work leaves distinct legacies in each place, in each language and literary tradition. One era’s “poet of 9/11” is another’s forbidden fruit, another’s establishment. Other transformations that occur in the process of translation remain in the realm of grief. How can I, for example, here make up for the fact that what we call the bell’s “clapper” in English is called its “heart” in Polish? And the bell’s body, which we call the “waist,” is its “coat” — a word that plays out in the very title of this tribute and its striking final image. Thus, the process involves both love and loss. It entwines the two in a ritual of grief, this translation, which I offer for you.

3 Noted translations come from the following books by Adam Zagajewski: New and Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), Unseen Hand (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), Asymmetry (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). 4 The translation published in New and Selected Poems reads “A poem grows on contradiction but it can’t cover it.” 5 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Presentation, vol. one, trans. Richard E. Aquila (New York: Pearsons, 2008), 241. 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 1961), 87. 7 “O this life! Real life is elsewhere. We aren’t of this earth.” Arthur Rimbaud, “Deliria I,” trans. Wyatt Mason (New York: Modern Library 2005), 12. 8 Rosanna Warren, “Sappho: Translation as Elegy,” Fables of the Self (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), 11.

Endnotes 1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, trans. and ed. David S. Luft (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011), 49. 2 Wallace Stevens, “Letter to Elsie Viola Kachel, 7 Jan. 1909,” Sur Plusieurs Beaux Subjects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book, ed. Milton J. Bates (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 1.

I N P R A I S E O F G R AV I T Y: SELECTIONS FROM " A J O U R N E Y TO T H E W E S T " JINJIN XU

III. We came into a land so flat it seemed possible In the stillness

you couldn’t tell man

From horse This is the face of the earth The narrative straightforward And fairly simple After years of living Gravity Swollen

I recognized

its pure rough edges unable to speak

You lurch Slanting light The dust behind us thickened

Mountains continued their retreat We began to climb And now — A voice said “They looked in the right place” We bypassed three sisters convinced A monster could hear the red word The sound of wind in

old classrooms

Its tongue-and-groove More or less in tune A child returned from memory His name He picked up Loosened

the piano

his family vein

He emptied the war Dragged a road

behind his father

Raised a closet of snakes a wheel of stars The child sensed the later years In music and history To escape ambivalence He wondered about a single word

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IV. Looking east we spread the ground before us We could see joy blistering We had crossed the immense flatland Its edges like screens Painted white to keep air around Our eyes level to sky The horizon seemed unusually near You watch magpies in flight Like trapped houseflies Rice paddies a smooth margin The world emerging from blue A skyscrapping ground-hugging Shanghai Look — You sense the present Scene by scene — dissolving Sluggish nearly vertical I have a question When we went west Touched the great dying embers Pulling the earth apart

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How things appear known Blue

already dawn

Source text: “Assembling California – II” New Yorker, John McPhee, 1992 31

A R T I S T F E AT U R E : FERNAND DELIGNY P E R WA N A N A Z I F

The hand-drawn maps dotting the Quarterly Journal come from Cartes et lignes d’erre (Maps and Wander Lines), an extensive book on the traces of Fernand Deligny’s communitarian network consisting primarily of nonverbal, autistic adolescents. Filmmaker and thinker Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) is most associated with anti-institutional, alternative pedagogy and practice in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. His film work is known for influencing the French New Wave, and his theories were crucial to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conception of the rhizome. Of particular significance is Deligny’s development of the notion of the “network” and his radical approach to relationality according to what he called the “Arachnean.” A network, configured like Arachne’s web, is a mode of being composed of gestures and forms that are precedent to, or outside of language. Deligny’s ideas emerged from the rural setting of Southern France, which he inhabited alongside nonverbal and/or autistic children, who would otherwise have been institutionalized. Also living there were adults who Deligny called présences proches, or close presences. These adults were not paid to live with the children. They typically included farmers, students, or other members of the working class, rather than social workers or psychiatrists who would have implemented interventionist, reparative approaches. Th is informal living community—a version of the network—was sustained financially through Deligny’s modest royalties. A radical alternative to other forms of communal livingn, the network reformulates possibilities for institutions outside of the concept of the project (of the network) itself, of totality, of language and of the human. Cartes et lignes d’erre attests most to this project-as-exiting-all-projects in its focus on gestures that trace over Deligny’s writing, however poetic and self-reflexive he can be. Over the course of ten years (1969-1979), the présences proches drew maps of their own paths every day, and used tracing sheets to superimpose subsequent children’s movements and gestures. These were termed lignes d’erre, or wander lines. The book gathers nearly 200 of these brilliant maps from Deligny’s archives, found by Jacques Lin and Gisèle Durand, who worked alongside him. The book’s eleven sections are organized

both chronologically and by geographical communal living spaces. Accompanying the maps are Sandra Alvarez de Toledo’s meticulous descriptions of the tracing process and the space itself, based on interviews with the map’s authors. The structure of the book mimics the tracing sheets, layering one on top of the other — yet diverges to find opacities in the minutiae of each map. The exhaustive repetition of each tracing of the same area, over and over again, formalizes the children’s repeated gestures and movements, with resistance and indifference to the exclusionary abjection of representation in language. In the section on the living area of Le Serret from 19711974, Gisèle Durand traces a simplified map, contrary to her style throughout the rest of the book. This particular map includes the two tracing sheets under it in its reproduction. Durand depicts traditional illustrations of bread, a knife, and a chest on a small table with vast negative space all around. Sharp orange waves mark the wander lines of two children, Marie-Pierre and Benoît. Black charcoal squiggles across a bowl of what is presumably food, marking an act by Marie-Pierre — “taking the bowl instead of waiting for someone to hand it to her,” as the description notes. As noted in the book’s essential glossary, an “act,” for Deligny, is distinct from, yet follows the “do” associated with “a speaking subject”. The act, unlike the “do”, does not bear resemblance to wanting, a self-driving vector of violence, nor does it demand reciprocity. The act is activated by both the presence of an adult and a “do”. In this instance, Marie-Pierre’s act is triggered by Jacques Lin’s “do” of chasing away a fly, depicted as orange dots in a gray spiral. One can see how the symbols of gestures and the tracings of wander lines approach and include representation, but, as a structure, the maps indicate a desubjectivized space — Deligny’s network is a mode of being. The tracings are collective, objects that exist in the network and attest to that which Deligny’s theories suggest but understand could never be circumscribed by language. The tracings are the theory’s best exposition. The pages of the book open vertically, already challenging normative encounters with books. They simultaneously orient and disorient the reader, and call attention to their position as a thing in relation to another thing — it’s less about parole or even interpretation, and more about, for instance, touching the maps. Haptic gestures are favored over reading language. Cartes et lignes d’erre brings us into Deligny’s network.

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Fernand Deligny, Graniers, July 1976, a map along with a tracing sheet, traced by Gisèle Durand, 65 x 50 cm. Image courtesy of Editions L’Arachnéen.

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Fernand Deligny, Le Serret, June 1976, a map along with a tracing sheet, traced by Jean Lin, 45 x 30 cm. Image courtesy of Editions L’Arachnéen.

e s s ay

SEMI-PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL J.D. DANIELS

used to work for a fashion magazine based in Los Angeles. The magazine was full of glossy full-color ads for Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta, Dior Homme, Prada, Chanel, and Versace. They had me write about the Louvre, Ramanujan, Borges, Kanye, Sartre, the Large Hadron Collider, Blake, Forster, Ortega y Gasset, Adorno, Antonioni, cuneiform and gematria. I wrote the articles my father’s friends used to say they read Playboy for. I was always glad to have the work, but it was hard getting the long green out of them. One time, they mailed my check, but it bounced. Another time, they tried to tell me the office had burned down. That don’t confront me, I said, but it ain’t the end of the story, y’all need to get on the stick before I drive out there 35

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and burn it down again, don’t think I won’t. Apart from the hassle of threatening to snap necks just to get my fees paid, my editors were great, and it was a terrific job. Normally, to get any writing done at that time I had to drive from Manitoba to Matamoros, my “thrilling adventure” method. But for those cats, I could do library card writing in the air conditioning: Empedocles, Pericles, Testicles. I was a public semi-intellectual. Before any of that happened, I was a semi-intellectual. By day, semi, and, after I clocked out, intellectual. I worked at a tractor-trailer plant in Kentucky — where I was born, and where I lived for thirty years — where my father ran the repair shop, and I touched up and decaled trailers for semi trucks to haul away. We built Allied, United Parcel Service, FritoLay, Bud Light, Mayflower, Atlas, North American, United Van Lines, Wheaton World Wide Moving, custom race-car jobs; I don’t remember what all else. By night, camping at Red River Gorge with my best friends, talking about music and science and poetry and philosophy, and getting high. By day, Mister Murphy strutting into the touch-up shop with two UPS executives, smirking and saying, “Boy, I will tell you something. I do not like your father.” I had already fallen off a scaffold earlier that morning with my drill locked on, and its hot bit had cut into the meat of my upper arm. I’d smelled myself burning, but I’d gone to the infirmary and been cleared to come back to the garage, and White Bill and Black Bill and Philip the Assassin and Little Tony and Ron and Big Tony and Orville were looking at me, wondering was I going to let him 36

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speak about my father that way. So what choice did I have, really, but to wipe the tarry undercoating from the brake-hole off my knuckles onto my coveralls, and to pull my utility knife with its matte gray sheath out of my tool-belt, my thumb on its razor blade’s corrugated copper slider, and to step up in his face, saying to him, “Now I will tell you something, sir. You’re about to fuck with the wrong redneck.” But after work, you know, it was all Kant and Hegel. Those were happy days, full of ambition, desire, desperation, envy and hate, before the dog caught the car he was chasing. Now what are you going to complain about? Nothing. Suddenly the room gets very quiet. William S. Burroughs was pleased in 1966 when the Los Angeles Free Press reprinted his “The Invisible Generation”: “Doesn’t matter what your cover story is so long as it covers you and leaves you free to act… you can pre record the future your future you can hear and see what you want to hear and see.” The man who liked to say that Spanish children in Tangier had nicknamed him el hombre invisible — the man who had written “Is Control controlled by its need to control?” — was, of course, terribly interested in control himself, and in controlling what could or could not be heard or seen. He was especially interested in being publicly private, being conspicuously invisible. Half of his time, Burroughs was trying to rip the temple veil and arguing that he had seen beyond our commonplace reality into bizarre realms of sorcery, but the other half he spent defending himself — for example, versus Lawrence Lipton in the Los Angeles Free Press, this time in 1970

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— against charges that he had done so, that he was “arcane mystagogic esoteric… Just what is so coterie, arcane, mystagogic, closed circuit, secret, snobbish, Kenyon Review, about all this Mr. Lipton?” The intensely private life of an intensely public figure: “Inasmuch as my private utterances are more frequent than my public ones not being a politician,” and so on. His final novel, The Western Lands, begins, “The old writer lived in a boxcar by the river.” Meanwhile, in 1984, Burroughs starred in a Nike commercial. Burroughs had a persistent fantasy of a private “public intellectual.” This was his Hassan-i Sabah, his old man of the mountain, his writer as anti-writer: There is no thing to fear. There is no thing in space. That is all all all Hassan Sabbah. There is no word to fear. There is no word. That is all all all Hassan Sabbah. If you I cancel all you words forever. And the words of Hassan Sabbah I as also cancel. Across all your skies see the silent writing[…] Silent writing: public, but private. Anti-creation: In the beginning was the Word, but there is no word. The old man of the mountain: “William would make a great prisoner,” said James Grauerholz, who lived with him from 1974 until his death in 1997. “You know, I mean, in solitary.” Paul Valéry wrote that the idea of the “public intellectual” meant, to him, “all those occupations in which the principal instrument is one’s opinion of oneself, and the raw material is the opinion of you held by others … They live for nothing else but to achieve the lasting illusion of being alone … Each of them founds his

own existence on the nonexistence of others, who must be forced however to agree that they do not exist.” He cancels all your words forever. It is all, all, all Hassan Sabbah. When I think of Los Angeles and public, I think of the movies, and of the three Oscar-winners I know. I do not know any of them well. The first (one award), an arduous dinner and an after-party. The second (nominated twice, no award, my error), two dinners and several holiday parties. The third (two nominations, one award) I have known for twenty years, but I’d bet five hundred dollars he doesn’t know my last name — and I’d bet another hundred he couldn’t tell you what day of the week it is. These three men are each, in my estimate, on a continuum between basically glum and pathologically miserable, and I have sometimes wondered if their unhappiness is, in part, due to how public they have become, and how disappointing and exhausting that has been. Robert Mitchum told Dick Cavett in 1971: “You don’t know that until after it happens, you know. Because the privilege of anonymity, I mean, every man’s right and gift, it’s too late once it’s gone. You know, once they’ve seen that big red Monday morning eye up on the glorious CinemaScopic screen in full red living color. Everybody knows you, and you don’t know nobody. It’s kind of a hard way to go.” The old writer lived in a boxcar by the river, but the young poet was tending bar on the day shift in the square that summer, a good-looking boy with tight blond curls, big dreamy eyes and a thin tight mouth like a slash. Handsome, tall, studying 37

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engineering at a local college, opinionated, lively and loud: extremely public. “How’s life?” the bartender asked me. “Life is good,” I said. “Life is a gift from God.” “And how is work?” “It’s good. Up and down.” “What are you, elevator? What kind of work you do?” I said, “I’m a writer.” Usually a mistake to admit this. “I’m a writer, too.” “So you know it’s up and down.” He said, “I’m the best writer in the world.” “I always wondered who the best writer in the world was.” “Give me any subject to write poem on. I show you I am better poet than you are. Any subject,” he said. “Come on.” I thought: Another bar I can never come back to, it’s getting to be a long list. “Tell me anything to write. Any one thing. I am better writer than you.” “Okay.” “Anything.” “Okay. Family.” “Family,” he said. “Whew. That is big one. Does not matter. I am best.” He pulled the receipt tape out of the off-white cash register and began to write. Then he said, “Now I read poem to you. Under God. Around neck, silver.” And so on. It took a while. When he had finished, he said, “Now I explain why poem is good. Under God, because God more important than family. Around neck, silver is silver medal, because God is best and win gold medal. Family win second place, like silver medal.” When he had finished, he said, “Give me another. Give me puzzle, any puzzle. Three thing. And I write for you. Hurry, come on.” 38

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“Okay,” I said, drinking my beer. “Lamp, knife, farm.” “Give me two minute,” he said, and he came back and told me a story about those three things. “You see?” he said. “I not just make mouth about myself. My pen is best.” “How old are you?” “Twenty-seven.” “Don’t waste it.” “Give me another.” “Listen—” “Another.” “Okay. You know how if you pour a pile of sand, it can only pile so high — ” “What? What?” “— and then, once it gets so high, it won’t pile any higher. It collapses on itself.” “Okay. I understand. Give me two minute.” When he had finished, he read me the poem, and then he said, “Now I explain why poem is good to you.” “How do you write them so fast?” I said. “That’s what I don’t understand.” “Is because I don’t respect nobody. No one important to me.” “Maybe that’s why I’m slow. I have a lot of people I respect.” “I am best. No one can beat my pen. I make people cry, I swear to God.” “Don’t waste it.” “My poetry is best. I could be king of New York. All these New York! I could be king!” “Would you like that?” I said. “Oh, man, you got to have so many connection.” “Yes,” I said, “that is true. Listen, I’ll settle up. I got to go.” He brought me my credit card receipt to sign. “So,” he said, smiling thinly, “you writer. Tell me. What you write?” “Thrilling adventure.” “What is this?”

J.D. DANIELS

“Oh, you know. Climb a glacier in Iceland. Ride a bicycle across India.” “What?” “Yeah.” “What? What?” “You can’t write that in two minutes, can you, smart guy?” I am not an intellectual, says Clarice Lispector, I write with my body. The body is reality, and the disciplines that control the body are the disciplines that control reality. If you know one thing, then you can teach one thing. That’s what I know. That’s all I know.

SCIENTIFIC METHOD PA U L T R A N

Of the books he wrote about me, my favorite is the book Master had bound with my skin. De humani corporis fabrica. Am I vain? Born poor. Illiterate. Oblivious to any life but this, never did I expect perpetuity. Never did I expect a man to want me the way he wanted me. Master didn’t care how ugly I was. My nose flat. My thighs fat. My teeth the color of horse shit. Master dug me out from the ground. He took my corpse into his arms. He held me so close I forgot I was a body. I became his body of work. Biology. Physiology. Anatomy. Master, doubting the Old Masters, believed doubt could draw a new map to the interior. In his classroom at the university, Master had me undressed and laid on a table for his pupils to see. He descended from his dais with the dynamism of a god walking among his disciples. Whatever he dictated they scribbled on their slates, lapping his theories and thoughts like dogs lapping piss from a chamber pot. Some want to be holy. Some want to be human. Some want to believe the nature of the human revealed reveals the nature of the holy. As Master opened me — groin hard

against my hips, hands in my guts — I opened him. I gave him nerve. Tendon. Muscle. Ventricle. Mandible. Sternum. Tibia. Atria. Labia. Every aspect of myself I hadn’t resource or reason to fathom — heft of the mind, mechanics of the heart — he dissected. Documented. Paraded before his surgical circus. His spectators and skeptics ooh-ing and aah-ing. Shuffling in their seats. Fanning back the heat. Their interest with what was found in me formed from their interest with what could be in them… I wanted to tell them that they weren’t special. They had no soul beyond their investment in the function of the soul. Their gaze not absolute. Not pure. Not empirical. Only imperial. Impure. Approximate. I wanted to tell them that there was much they’d never know. They thought they knew what knowledge was. But knowledge was me: the edge of doubt and belief, of what persists Master after Master, reified and repudiated, preserved in a Providence library — air-conditioned, light-controlled — touched and retouched, awaiting a new Master to approach the edge.

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Fernand Deligny, Le Serret, June 12–13, 1975, a map traced by Jean Lin, 52 x 63 cm. Image courtesy of Editions L’Arachnéen.

POEM ENDING IN THE LIGHT C ARLIE HOFFMAN

When I was suffering, I left Manhattan. It’s not good for me here I wrote over and over on yellow Post-its. There was a park I walked toward in the evenings, cautious to not cross through it to where you lived. I lived with a painter who was obsessed with Atlantic City and the color blue, who was in love with a married man from Virginia. We spent the summer broken-hearted among the green tomatoes. a selfish girl a selfish girl a selfish girl I wrote, thinking of home, my mother at the window with her life gone cold. The night I left I watched the bull speared above Earth, whole as grief, like a moon. And like the moon I was drawing myself inside an unconditional orb of light.

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Basma Alsharif, Still from We Began by Measuring Distance, 2009, 19:06, Color, Stereo, 4:3, DV video. Image courtesy of the artist.

e s s ay

UNDER THE BRIDGE: ON SAMUEL GREENBERG MICHAEL CASPER

ot long after Hart Crane disappeared off the back of a steamship in 1932, the caretaker of his family’s plantation on Isle of Pines, Cuba, collected his belongings and shipped them north. Crane had spent six months on the island drinking beer, helping out around the grounds, and laboring over his elaborate modernist masterpiece, The Bridge, which he envisioned as a response to The Waste Land. He had shipped to Cuba, as he wrote one friend, trunks “full of all kinds of dear familiar things that you have seen and touched in my room.” Along with his ivory figurines and china was a sheaf of papers in a blue folder labeled “Grünberg Mss.” The caretaker would later forward these papers to literary scholar Philip 45

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Horton, who recognized in them some lines from The Bridge, but realized that “the author is most certainly not Hart Crane.” Horton concluded, “One has the successive impressions that the author was mad, illiterate, esoteric, or simply drunk. And yet there flash out from this linguistic chaos lines of pure poetry, powerful, illuminating, and original, lines unlike any others in English literature, except Blake’s perhaps.” He soon appealed to the public “for any information which might lead to the identification of ‘S.B. Greenberg.’” The poems, Horton would discover, were written by a young man from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who had immigrated from Vienna as a boy at the turn of the century. Samuel Greenberg attended public school in New York while working in his Yiddish-speaking parents’ embroidery shop and tragically succumbed to tuberculosis in 1917 at age 23. Yet, in his short life, Greenberg had entered a circle of older writers who admired the eccentric young man and encouraged his craft. His poems’ archaic formulations, neologisms, and idiosyncratic spellings suggested a divine touch — a Dickinsonian charge. Some poems read like rough translations or glossolalia. Here is “African Desert” in its cryptic entirety: And we thought of wilderness That Bore the thousand angles That strew the dust As fine as frost ‘Pon the fancied candels O Black as autumn night Are fed the Holy Forests That fertilized the grain That breathes the birth Of chanted aurists

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The soaring swan of danger That held the mighty plain The Bitter seed of glittering age Seems glad to mourn its twain Other poems were more ambitious, including a series of Rube Goldberg reveries called “Sonnets of Apology,” on topics such as “Man,” “Lust,” “Essence,” and “Immortality,” and the long poem, “The Pale Impromptu,” which unfurls a cascade of koan-like inventions: Leaness will but crave Water waves torque blocks Skulls of saints patience absent Yellow dreams Sensitive Stirs precocious death In 1939, James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions Publishing, included Greenberg, along with Pound and Lorca, in a series of pamphlets that served to orient the fledgling press. This pamphlet, which consists of a long essay by Laughlin that incorporates Greenberg’s poems, inspired John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, and other midcentury experimenters in search of an American lodestar. A new edition of Laughlin’s pamphlet, published in late 2019, makes Greenberg widely accessible again. And yet Greenberg’s place in the canon is still unclear, in part, perhaps, because of Laughlin’s ambivalent presentation of his work. Canonized or not, Greenberg maintains a unique, enigmatic place in the American poetic imaginary.

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¤ Samuel Greenberg grew up in an era of mass immigration and social reform that challenged New York City’s entrenched class divisions. He dropped out of school to work in the family business, which served “rabbi and priest, negro and Greek,” he wrote in his fragmented memoir, “Between Historical Life,” included in the New Directions pamphlet. Greenberg’s brother, Morris, was an avid pianist who ran with musicians and artists. One day, Morris’s piano teacher heard Samuel playing Chopin when he arrived at the family’s Delancey Street apartment. Impressed that the boy claimed to play only by ear, the teacher sent Samuel to meet his friend William Murrell Fisher, a writer who worked as a guard in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He is uncanny and articulate,” Fisher’s friend told him, “but there is something wonderful about him.” At that fateful meeting, the extremely shy Greenberg asked Fisher if he could borrow some “classics,” and Fisher lent him Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Emerson’s Essays, and Carlyle’s On Heroes, HeroWorship, and the Heroic in History — Victorian staples whose diction would have a decisive influence on Greenberg, who memorably told Fisher that he had been reading the dictionary. Greenberg was soon welcomed into Fisher’s crowd of “men of the dime novel nobility,” as Greenberg called them, attending concerts, salons, and art classes while spending much of his free time reading at the New York Public Library. Here are the first two stanzas of “The ‘East River’s’ Charm,” written during this heady and productive period in Greenberg’s life:

Is this the river “East,” I heard Where the ferrys, tugs and sailboats stirred And the reaching warves from the inner land Out stretched, like the harmless receiving hand And the silvery tinge, that sparkles aloud Like brilliant white demons, which a tide has towed From the rays of the morning Sun Which it doth ceaselessly shine upon The excitement was short-lived. Greenberg was weakened by his illness, in and out of sanatoria, and reduced to writing on scrap paper and hospital charts, perhaps in the famous tubercular fever that made his condition a favorite of romantics. He died in a hospital on Ward’s Island — in the East River, which divides Manhattan and Brooklyn — in the summer of 1917. After Samuel’s death, Morris gave Fisher some of his brother’s poems to see to publication, and Fisher ran a selection in The Plowshare, a little magazine based in rural Woodstock, New York, where Fisher had moved to convalesce from his own tuberculosis. Greenberg was “of the few rare, child-like spirits which never become sophisticated, yet through mystic penetration surprise our deepest truths with simple ease,” Fisher wrote in the journal. He was “possessed of a mystic wisdom which disarms and sets at naught our dear-bought worldly Knowledge.” Woodstock had become something of an artists’ colony, and Hart Crane passed 47

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through in 1923. On his visit, Fisher showed Crane his collection of Greenberg originals. “He flared up in a corner with it,” Fisher remembered. Crane persuaded Fisher to let him borrow some poems for a couple of days. Much to Fisher’s consternation, Crane took the poems to New York City for over two weeks, copying them out into the blue notebook. Lines from seven of Greenberg’s poems, including “Conduct,” from “Sonnets of Apology,” made their way into Crane’s “Emblems of Conduct,” the third poem in his 1926 collection, White Buildings, among other poems. Greenberg’s “By a peninsula, the painter sat and / sketched the uneven vally groves” became Crane’s “By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched / The uneven valley graves,” to give one of many examples charted by Horton and reproduced by Laughlin. When The Southern Review, which published Horton’s essays, declared Greenberg to be “the germ of Hart Crane’s poetic method” in 1936, it set off a hunt for Greenberg’s papers, which aficionados treated like some modernist apocrypha. Publishers were already circulating copies of copies of the manuscripts, anticipating who might be first to publish them, while a pair of literary detectives in Long Beach, California tracked down one cache to the closet of a Bronx apartment. Fisher lent his manuscripts to Horton, who lent them to a young publisher named Ronald Lane Latimer, who promptly disappeared to Mexico. By 1938, Latimer was found in Los Angeles, where he had become a disciple of Nyogen Senzaki, a Buddhist monk who operated a zendo out of a hotel where his American followers meditated on folding chairs rather than the floor. In May 1939, after threatening to destroy the manuscripts, Latimer finally mailed them, 48

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with no note, to Horton, who passed them on to a 24-year-old Laughlin. By June, Laughlin wrote Fisher that he was “anxious” to include Greenberg in the New Directions annual anthology. ¤ Laughlin’s anxious interest in Greenberg in 1939, which led to the publication of this pamphlet, should be understood against the backdrop of his lifelong devotion to Ezra Pound, who, he wrote, “was a second father to me; with all his warts, I loved him.” Laughlin first met Pound in 1933, when he made a pilgrimage to the poet’s home in Rapallo, Italy. A year later he returned, on break from Harvard, and joined Pound’s “Ezuversity.” There, for two months, he played tennis, took walks, and ate two meals a day with the éminence grise of modernism, all while imbibing, Laughlin remembered, “this continuous monologue of information on every conceivable subject coming out of Ezra.” This “information” is key to understanding Laughlin and his publishing project circa 1939. “By 1933,” literary historian Greg Barnhisel has written about Pound, “he was already a crank in the U.S. public eye.” Pound’s positive views of fascism, which took shape in the late 1920s, reached a turning point after a 1933 meeting with Il Duce himself. Eleven New Cantos, published in 1934, praised Mussolini directly. Fascism became Pound’s total worldview — his obsession. In 1935, he published Jefferson and/ or Mussolini, his formal appeal to fascism, and issued the first of what would be hundreds of radio broadcasts and propaganda pieces in the same vein. Meanwhile, Pound developed an economic philosophy of social credit that he believed was

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Basma Alsharif, Still from Everywhere was the Same, 2007, 11:38, Color, Stereo, 4:3, DV video. Image courtesy of the artist.

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best expressed by fascist corporatism. His economic ideas centered on demonizing usury, a topic which, not surprisingly, had strong antisemitic overtones, and which was also well represented in the Cantos. In 1934, he wrote the notorious antisemitic American radio personality Father Coughlin to say, “The church has always been right about usury.” Laughlin therefore did not simply study with Pound; he studied under him at the peak of Pound’s radicalization. Upon his return to Harvard, in the fall of 1935, Laughlin offered to publish Jefferson and/or Mussolini in the campus literary magazine, while Pound, in turn, sent Laughlin a charming poem, titled, “Pacifists, 1935, as usual,” which begins: We want the earth! We want the earth! For we are men of English birth Except when we are Frankfurt Jews. We want the earth, your hats and shoes Your coats, your purses and yr cash But between 1935 and the fall of 1939, when he published Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts, Laughlin had blossomed from a lanky and impressionable undergrad into a tall, charismatic, and self-confident publisher. Pound was his pride but also a liability, and Laughlin played a delicate game of pacifying Pound while reintroducing him to a skeptical American public. When Pound visited the United States, in the spring of 1939, Laughlin, his fixer, warned the poet to drop his antisemitism and frequent praise for Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. 50

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But Laughlin gave this dubious reason: “If you mention any of them subjects you will have one hell of a time. You have no idea of the entrenchment of the Jew in the intellectual life of the country.” Laughlin once wrote, “Although I had been raised in a totally anti-semitic atmosphere in Pittsburgh, I got away from all of that during my years at Harvard. I would argue with Ezra about it.” But while he disavowed Pound’s antisemitism, Laughlin remained committed to his problematic economic theories. He wrote Pound, “These next years are going to be bleak for you because of your views and the sentiment against you, but I believe in you and will stick with the ship and see it through to better times. I think when monetary sanity does return to this earth the Cantos will be recognized as an epic of money, of the greatest world importance, in fact a sort of prophetic monument to the new age.” In the fall of 1939, shortly before issuing Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts as a standalone publication, Laughlin included the entire text of the pamphlet in the New Directions annual anthology, where his preface provided more insight into his Poundian worldview at the time, when, he wrote, “as we go to press, the New & Improved World War has been in progress for over a month.” Yet what begins as an apparent anti-war statement quickly falters: “Hitlerism has got to go. The blood sacrifice is inevitable. Great armies of innocent men have got to pay for the mistakes and misdeeds of the bankers and politicians.” Without condemning the war, or mentioning antisemitism, Laughlin used his platform to exculpate Hitler:

MICHAEL CASPER

The harshness of Versailles did much to make Hitler. The Germans are not naturally belligerent, they are only susceptible to chauvinism. Guarantee them a reasonable economy and I think they will cease to be troublemakers. When this war is over let the allies not punish them but make a deal with them […] Give her back her colonies, as a gesture of friendship, to wash away bad blood. One year into the notorious Italian racial laws that barred Jews from universities and public office, he purred, “Italy is in a state of resurgence that should produce good writers,” indulging for a couple of pages about the significance of “radio literature,” in a nod to Pound. Finally, Laughlin, the heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, proclaimed, “We will not have economic democracy till we take the right to create new money away from the privately owned banks and give it back to the people.” Laughlin’s positions in 1939 raise the question of his “anxious” interest in Greenberg, whom he didn’t even pretend to like, writing at the very beginning of Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts, “It is not great poetry, and it is not even important minor poetry.” Laughlin also included in the pamphlet this suspect and inexcusable observation, reproduced without comment in the recent reissue, comparing Greenberg to his brothers: “physically too, he was superior — dark hair but a light complexion.” In 1939, when Pound signed at least one letter to Laughlin with “Heil Hitler,” Laughlin told the poet that he wanted no “outright attack on the Jews” in the Cantos: “You can take all the potshots

at them you want, but no outright attack on the Jews as jews” (emphasis added). So what did Laughlin see in the poor, immigrant poet? In 1939, Laughlin sent Delmore Schwartz his sparse poem, “Letter to Hitler,” asking if Schwartz could help get it published in the leftist Partisan Review. A year prior, Laughlin had visited a 25-yearold Schwartz at his boarding house to offer him a contract, and later promoted him as “the American Auden.” (Laughlin removed the dustjacket trumpeting this comparison before sending W.H. Auden a review copy.) Now, Laughlin explained to his young charge, “My connection with Pound always lays me open to attacks of being a Fascist and that is not very pleasant. The poem might help me clarify my present position.” After publishing the poem, which simply suggests a stance against book burning, Laughlin also convinced Schwartz to write an essay on Pound. As Barnhisel observed, “Laughlin knew that associating his name with such a leftist magazine would balance the political tilt of the right-wing writing and public persona of Pound.” But in addition to providing a leftist cover, Schwartz provided a Jewish one. One wonders if Greenberg wasn't also window dressing for the publisher’s Pound mania, which was fully intact in 1939, at the worst possible time. As Laughlin put it to Schwartz that year, “I’m all for his monetary principles but when he became a Franco and Hitler man, I found the going thick.” As far as a “position” goes, that’s the best Laughlin could muster up. ¤ Greenberg left behind plays, prose, fragments, drawings, and many more poems 51

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than have been published. The editor of the new pamphlet, Bay Area-based poet Garrett Caples, has commendably included over 30 pages of additional selections from Greenberg’s work, primarily culled from other published volumes of Greenbergiana. Especially welcome is “Ward’s Island Symphonique,” a moving account of life in the sanitorium, where The breath of truth is visible a garden yard of strangeness to each tent, as the violin of science, blue Heaven, sings each building, in search of health and strength though knowledge of bodily care be unknown, the deserted soul of corrupted brains and visions bent Another brilliant addition to the corpus is a 1916 meditation titled “Poetical Development” in which Greenberg’s idiolect is on full display. Here he is, apparently, on writing and editing: When the railings are becoming to be sunk into the tracks of a road, that we send new laborers to replace them once only can this happen to the good felt likings, every page that is covered with script is another fault of growth unseen with simple thrills finer than space breathing quality and now my dependence is independence unkingly kingly. But Caples misses the opportunity to provide a new framing for understanding Greenberg. Instead, he calls Laughlin’s 52

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pamphlet “the single best presentation of Greenberg’s work,” even though Laughlin himself relied so heavily on Horton’s 1936 essays that he wrote, “I wish only to add to Horton’s work a visual chart” of Crane’s plagiarism. By deferring to Laughlin, and so to Horton, Caples expands an echo chamber of analysis that reproduces the same nearly century-old ideas about Greenberg and his work — namely, that he was an unsophisticated romantic genius in the manner of John Clare. See Laughlin’s take on Greenberg, that “Logic was not his strong point. His role was expression,” or his references to Greenberg’s “mind’s simplicity,” “intellectual naïveté,” and “pure poetry.” Horton called Greenberg “ignorant of literature and isolated from the world.” Crane described Greenberg, in a frequently quoted phrase — including in promotional material for the pamphlet’s republication — as “a Rimbaud in embryo” with “no grammar, no form.” Yet we do Greenberg a disservice by continuing to present him this way. After all, Greenberg took his writing seriously, copying out multiple drafts and meticulously dating them. He was selfconsciously Viennese and played Chopin. He composed an ode to science in which he wrote, “thy unfolded — systemed way / Of long — long ago — hath begun and lured / Nature to thy heart,” and, if that were not enough, also declared, in his memoir, “Science is perfection.” While his champions point excitedly to his lack of education, Greenberg himself remembered that, as a schoolchild, “I was a reaper of hard fact and geographical bliss, a whole world of purity and history given to me to take home and examine at my interest.” When Crane wrote that Greenberg “lacked ‘the knowledge of grammatic

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Fernand Deligny, Graniers, December 13th, 1974, two maps (diptych) traced by Jacques Lin, 40 x 63 cm (diptyque). Image courtesy of Editions L’Arachnéen.

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truth,’” he took Greenberg’s own words out of context. What is important is that Greenberg, who spent much of his childhood working in a sweatshop, wrote that he wanted that knowledge, sought it, and studied to achieve it as systematically as he could, given his unfortunate material circumstances: “O what I would give for the knowledge of grammatical truth!” Greenberg did not reject knowledge, as an arch-romantic would. Rather, he embraced science, medicine, industry, ideas, new language, the din of the city. In other words, Greenberg was a modernist, albeit in his unorthodox way, and that is why some readers sense proto-surrealism in his fractured expressions of urban life. Crane — who reveled in sensory immediacy, was attracted to visions and to notions of purity, had, according to one biographer, a “youthful fancy for Nietzsche,” dropped out of high school (not to work, as Greenberg did), and committed suicide in dramatic fashion — was the romantic. Repeating the canard that Greenberg represents pure poetic expression has allowed Fisher, Crane, Horton, Laughlin, and perhaps Caples to present him as their own and accrue some of his authenticity, and even, through rigorous editing, coauthorship. Laughlin took this approach to Greenberg furthest by suggesting that Crane completed what Greenberg began. He speculated, “Perhaps if he had lived he could have learned to subject his inspiration to critical discipline — that, essentially, is what Hart Crane did for him in Emblems of Conduct.” Driving home this literary supersessionism, Laughlin wrote that Greenberg, through Crane, “has been resurrected for us.” ¤

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While Greenberg has become an inextricable character in Crane’s story, and vice versa, few have looked at how Greenberg may have functioned for Crane as the latter thought through his response to Eliot’s own highly allusive work. Describing his hatred of London in The Waste Land, Eliot paraphrased Andrew Marvell: “But at my back from time to time I hear / The sound of horns and motors.” The lines are lifted nearly verbatim from “To His Coy Mistress,” a love poem in which the muse is “by the Indian Ganges’ side,” while the author stands “by the tide / of Humber.” It was in “To His Coy Mistress” that Marvell made his famous, theologically inflected declaration of love: Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. Setting aside the obvious difference between referencing a well-known poem and one that is unpublished, it seems possible that Crane triangulated Eliot’s use of Marvell and allusions to Jews and bridges. The proem to The Bridge, published, in 1930, eight years after The Waste Land, is “To Brooklyn Bridge,” an ode to the Gothic Revival span across New York’s East River. In it, Crane writes: And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon … Accolade thou dost bestow

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Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. We know that Crane already associated Greenberg and his death with the East River. As Caples points out in his preface, Crane appended the following mysterious lines, ending in an ellipsis, to his copy of Greenberg’s poem, “The ‘East River’s’ Charm”: “And will I know if you are dead? / The river leads on and on instead / of certainty …” Greenberg, in anonymity, may have helped Crane see the bridge, the river. While The Waste Land ends with “London Bridge is falling down,” Crane’s magnum opus celebrated New York’s built environment, its elevators and future. In some ways, Crane reduced Greenberg to a useful caricature, like the indigenous Americans in The Bridge and in his planned epic about Mexico. But rather than forming some quirk in Crane’s practice, as Crane’s biographers maintain, it seems that Greenberg was present in Crane’s articulation of the difference of his project from Eliot’s, and of his project’s purpose. No one expressed this American ecstasy better than Greenberg himself. The second half of “The ‘East River’s’ Charm” captures it perfectly, and also serves as a tribute to Greenberg’s ephemeral New York minute of a life, in which the mundane could become blisteringly serene:

And the very charms from the reflective river And from the stacks of the flowing Boat There seemeth the quality ne’er to dissever Like the ruffles from the Mystified smoke

But look! at the depth of the dripling tide That dripples, reripples Like lucusts astride As the Boat turns upon the silvery spread It leaves strange — a shadow dead 55

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Kayla Ephros, still life, 2020, graphite on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Fernand Deligny, Le Serret, June 6th, 1974, a map traced by Jean Lin. June 6th, 1974, 63 x 40 cm. Image courtesy of Editions L’Arachnéen.

CHRONIC, ALBUM AMAUD JAMAUL JOHNSON

not as one measures the imagined musics or jeweled light flooding any cathedral, but how this near-dark, north of love, carries the morose and gaudy perfumes we’ve made, which like sound too, inevitably escape, not that the body boils down to some cage, not a site of refuge or perpetual humiliation, and isn’t our silence also the subject, its prolonged lack of eye contact, its brief unedited message, which smirks, which slaps

f i c t i o n

PERFECT

N Y L S A M A RT Í N EZ

Translated by Anthony Seidman

t’s less complicated than you imagine. And no… no great skill is needed to commit a crime. Moreover, I don’t think you need to be someone special to fire a weapon. On some occasions, the moments unfold in such a natural manner that it all hinges on following the logical sequence. What I’m about to tell you took place over 30 years ago. It’s a true story, and today, after finding that pistol in my mother’s house, I ask myself: was it perhaps a gift reserved for the right moment? It all starts with her, of course, on a Tuesday. She was behind the wheel of that car in which we’d so often crossed California. Once again, we were driving together through the Niland desert. My mother was very attractive… you’ve got

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no idea. It was tough to guess her age; she was always so stylish. Her curved thighs and her hair, undulating in the breeze, made you think of Hollywood actresses. She would have looked perfect as a passenger in an Italian convertible. I believe she was never fully aware of her beauty, not even when she was in her coffin. Her almond-shaped eyes could mesmerize someone unawares. And then one fine day they informed me that there she was, in a coffin someone else had chosen. It was a coffin that, logically, I did not open. There’s never a right moment to gaze at one’s dead mother. Strange to think of that night. She was driving, and the car’s potency began to diminish. It was if the vehicle were fed up with so much crossing back-and-forth and had decided to shut down on that last trip. From far off, we saw a Border Patrol agent accelerating to approach us from the side and have us slow down and pull over. My mother wanted to deny that request. The last thing we needed was to stop and be entertained somewhere in the desert. The agent got out of his jeep and, coming closer, gave the curt instruction: Turn off the engine. My mother turned the key and we then found ourselves stuck in the middle of a long silence. Eventually the man asked us for details about our tip: Where you all coming from? Where you headed? I was a little frightened. I don’t know why I had decided to put on a skirt and sandals that day. Perhaps because of the heat … The car had no AC and I’d imagined I wouldn’t last long in jeans. That’s why we decided to travel by night. We couldn’t trust the car, but there was less chance of the engine overheating without the scalding sunlight. I had put on the skirt believing that we would quickly reach Mexicali and that I could slip into some

shorts. After crossing the border, we’d order some tacos to bring home, and then I could stretch out on the armchair in our living room. I could finally rest after those horrible days visiting family. Everything would return to normal. The agent said that the rear lights were blinking, as if they were about to go out: Did you notice that? Mom nodded, as she had realized that the car was losing speed and was about to stall. Perhaps the battery was failing. It was past nine. You need to check that battery at the next town. My mother agreed: Sí, yes, en Westmorland. The agent left us and hopped into his jeep. My mother turned the key. The battery was dead. The engine emitted a low groan and fell silent. The Border Patrol agent dissolved on the horizon. We could barely make out his red tail lights. Mom pressed the horn, hoping to get his attention, but it made no sound. We got out and shouted for help, but he was too far from us. Back then Highway 111 was mainly traversed by trailers, not by families. We were in a desolate stretch and, with our bad luck, some nocturnal animal like a snake could attack us. Now we were alone, but not like usual: we were truly alone. Awfully. I got into the car without knowing what we’d do. My mother opened the trunk and took out a lug wrench. She then wrapped the long metal bar in a towel we’d meant to use at the beach but hadn’t, because we never went. She said to me: Gather your things. What things would I take? Why? She found my tennis shoes and handed them to me: Change your shoes. We’re going to walk. I hurried. Don’t leave anything in plain sight. Lock the door. We set out down the highway. She carried only that lug wrench, a flashlight, and her purse. I’d taken a small backpack 59

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with a camera, two granola bars, and my coin purse with a few dollars in it. It was hot. I asked her: Why are we walking? Why don’t we wait for another agent or someone to help us? Her response was short: No. We’re walking. Then she added: You’d best not cry, because you’re gonna need air. And so, stoically, without saying a word, I followed her down the highway. We hadn’t covered much ground before a car stopped beside us. Inside there were two men. It was a Datsun. I can’t remember its color. I figured out the make of the car as it was the same as one of Mom’s friends. The passenger spoke to us in Spanish: Get in. We’ll give you a ride. Where you headed? My mother clicked on the flashlight and aimed it at the man’s face. What’s wrong, lady? You don’t trust us? Where you headed? Mom said something to the effect of: No thank you, sir. They’re already on their way for us. Of course, now that I think about it, the statement was totally absurd. Just how would someone know to come look for us? Few people had cell phones back then. Get in, the passenger commanded. He got out of the car and opened the rear doors so that we could use the back seats. No, my mother repeated. They’re on their way for us, she insisted. Oh really? the man scoffed. Then that animal, who I can only picture now as a mass of flesh, shoved my mother to the ground and grabbed me by the arm. As he pushed me inside the car, he shouted: Get in! Now! Just as with all accidents and unforeseen deaths, everything happened in an instant. My mother got up from the ground, took out the hidden metal bar, and struck him in the skull. The man let out a howl and tried to protect himself with his hands. My mother then struck him in the side and he collapsed on the gravel. The driver got out with a gun in his 60

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hand and aimed it at my mother: Stupid bitch, you fucked him up bad. Stay still, he ordered. My mother didn’t move. I felt we were about to die. Weapons aren’t like you see in movies. They’re much bigger. And they weigh a ton. Mom pushed me forward and said: Start walking. Go. The man shouted: Nobody’s going anywhere. He continued to aim his weapon, and I started to walk off. Seeing that his friend wasn’t moving, he took his gaze off my mother and leaned over his partner to try and help him. I didn’t see that. I had started to do what she had told me to do. Perhaps you all can’t understand, but it was an order, and it was impossible to disobey. The next blow was the one she struck at the man trying to help his friend. Another blow straight to the skull. No, I didn’t see it, but my mother told me about it years later. She said that it felt like trying to split open a watermelon. What do you mean? I asked. She grew up when the city was still small. The neighborhood where we lived was once filled with jícama and watermelon farms. As a girl she’d steal watermelons and enjoy smashing them against the curb to eat their hearts. That’s just what it sounded like, she said. What I remember next is mother telling me to get into the Datsun. She drove through many fields, and we abandoned the car when we caught sight of the distant lights. We reached Calipatria, a town nearer than Westmorland, on foot. My mother had wiped the steering wheel clean with the towel, and the door handles too. Let’s go! she said. If we were experts in anything, it was the series The Untouchables. Fingerprints were the first thing they looked for. Mom always dreamed that a man as handsome as Eliot Ness would court her. And I imagined having a dad like him, one who would

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defend us from the neighborhood thieves and would always wear a suit and tie. Only bankers wore suits in our city. Calipatria was such a small town that its few businesses were already closed. We passed in front of an auto shop. There was a tow truck in the driveway. The homes seemed to be abandoned. We reached a phone booth in front of a small store that was also closed. My mother took out her phonebook and called her friend Blanca, who lived in Brawley. She told her of our location. Before I knew it, we were inside Blanca’s pickup, headed to her mobile home. She lived in a nice trailer park. What happened? But my mother wouldn’t say a word. She merely recounted what had occurred with the Border Patrol agent, and that we had to walk and walk until reaching Calipatria. Well, how long did you walk? she asked. Oh, a long way. Poor Alicia didn’t want to go on. Can you believe it? She would tell me: Can’t we wait for another ‘migra agent to help us. Just imagine … we’d still be there waiting. I didn’t offer any additional information. I only repeated: Yep. We walked a lot. Mom chuckled. Blanca opened some cold Michelobs and said to Mom: Just like you like ‘em! I stretched out on an armchair and Blanca asked if I wanted to watch TV. Some reruns of Dukes of Hazard were on. My mother would always say that I’d be prettier than Daisy Duke when I grew up. I used to imagine we were the stars of a TV show and that we went on all sorts of adventures throughout Mexicali, speeding around in our orange car. The next day Blanca found us a mechanic. We picked up our car, still waiting on the side of the highway. By one, we were already home. We didn’t cross the border into Calexico for two years, nor did we visit family. My mother said she had

lost her passport. The only thing I missed was the ice cream at Foster’s. I didn’t ask any questions, and I was happy not to see my uncles, who always tried to give me kisses on the cheeks and pat my head. I don’t know anything about weapons, but this one has room for six bullets. It’s still holding the original load. There are no other bullets, but six can do plenty of damage. This revolver is from the night when two men tried to take us by force. I’m certain neither of them died that night, as my mother checked the news for days afterwards. I also don’t think either of them are still living. No one can imagine this feeling of peace, the tranquility I feel, knowing I have a weapon that can’t be traced. No, not much is needed to commit a crime, and I’m considering one. All that’s needed is attitude and a bit of luck. It’s about being able to watch the movie of what’s going to take place and then to erase it. Just like my mother did. Only in my case, I already have the perfect weapon.

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Once there was a myth for this: an ache, a loss, a fairy who carried it off. Tooth Fairy, I’m talking to you. I’ve got a hurt I don’t know what to do with, a stuck one, a stubborn, gnarled place in which the self sits like an interlocutor in all this knotted meat. If I could, I’d unbraid

that wall hanging of driftwood and coarse rope woven with gristle and teeth that other people see as Anna’s back but is actually a demon macramé. Come back, Tooth Fairy. You took what I was too young to give with real understanding and without so much as a wiggle or yank. Come stand here and cut this out of me.

The author’s maternal grandparents, Michael Patrick and Marie Erasmus, in a pair of Photomatic portraits taken in Cleveland, Ohio in 1937, when they were dating.

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G O I N G TO T H E SHOW AGAIN MARSHA GORDON

hat will people remember about moviegoing, such as it was, in 2020? As COVID-19 vaccinations in the US continue, we are starting to imagine and experience what it will be like to get back to a new normal. I’ve been thinking about going back to the movies for the first time in over a year. It’s still hard for me to envision sitting in the dark with people breathing around me for two hours, though at some point I’ll be ready to share air with strangers for the sake of watching a movie on a big screen again. We go to the movies to be entertained, of course, but as I reflect on my own moviegoing lineage, I’ve also realized some of what we lose when we don’t go to movie 65

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theaters. As we emerge from this period of isolation, I’m keenly aware of the ways moviegoing contributes to how we remember our lives, connecting us to people, places, and feelings, as well as to our individual and collective pasts. When I think of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982), I remember the excitement and anticipation of standing in line with my mother and hundreds of other people for hours, literally around the block, sweating in the relentless summer heat of the San Fernando Valley in California, waiting to buy tickets. A month after my thirteenth birthday, I saw The Karate Kid (1984), for the first of what would be at least two theater viewings — with my family most certainly, but also with my elementary school best friend who was headed to private school in the fall, meaning we’d never be as close as when we had been in school together. When The Princess Bride (1987) comes up, I immediately recall seeing it with my best friend, Laurie Palmer, sitting in my first car — a hand-me-down, dirt-brown 1980 Volkswagen Diesel Rabbit — at a drivein movie theater in Reseda, California. It’s not just the movies; it’s the where, how, when, and with whom. Some film scholars have argued that moviegoing history might best be told through “close, detailed studies of specific places, people, and chronologies”; others that “in order adequately to address the social and cultural history of cinema, we must find ways to write the histories of its audiences.”1 For me, this history goes back to my maternal grandparents in Cleveland, Ohio. They were born at the tail end of the Spanish Flu epidemic, when many movie theaters closed their doors to help contain the disease’s spread, and came of age during the Great Depression, 66

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when American moviegoing skyrocketed, despite an economic crisis much worse than the COVID-19 pandemic recession. After my grandmother’s passing in 1998, I ended up with the journals she kept from January 6, 1937 to May 18, 1938, a period of around sixteen months that coincided with her senior year of high school. In these, she documented her life on an almost daily basis, commenting on school, work, family, friends, dating, and many, many trips to the movie theater. Her journals provide a glimpse into the role moviegoing played in the life of a working-class teenager growing up in a major midwestern city during a notable period in American history — not unlike the way my moviegoing rituals reflect my coming of age in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. My grandmother’s journals reveal how “going to the show,” as she often phrased it, factored into her friendships and dating patterns, and occupied so many of her days and nights. After reading them, it is hard to imagine what her life would have been like without movie theaters — as hard as it is for me to imagine my life without them. ¤ On Sunday, January 10, 1937, seventeen-year-old Marie Erasmus had a jampacked day. Before going to bed that evening, she sat down to journal: “Over to Gina’s in afternoon. To Garden; to White Tower; to Gina’s; to Southern (full-house) then to my house.” Her day began with Sunday school in the morning, but most of it was dedicated to leisure: spending time with an acquaintance she described as a “nice kid” who would end up becoming her best friend, and going to the

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movies not just once, but twice in one day. The first show was the romantic comedy Love on the Run (1936), starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, which Marie and Gina saw at the 1500-seat Garden Theater. Directed for MGM by W.S. Van Dyke, Love on the Run had completed its run in New York City weeks before, where it came and went in the late fall. A New York Times reviewer deemed it a “slightly daffy cinematic item of absolutely no importance,” but Gable and Crawford had enough star power and chemistry to ensure the film’s box office success despite any formulaic flimsiness.2 Love on the Run played at seven Cleveland theaters that winter day. Marie and Gina’s decision to see it at the Garden was made out of convenience and habit — it was one of their neighborhood theaters, located less than a third of a mile away from the Erasmus family home. Between picture shows that day, they lunched on a cheap hamburger at the Milwaukee-based White Tower restaurant chain before a stop at Gina’s house, which was conveniently located between the two theaters. These young ladies had plenty of time as they walked from one location to the next, during which they talked about “oooodles of things.” Their second show of the day, at the Southern, featured 1930s box office phenomenon Shirley Temple in a pre-Civil War Bowery tale, Dimples. Rounding out the bill was The Border Patrolman, a sixtyminute low-budget western programmer produced by Atherton and distributed by Fox, the studio to which Temple was under contract. Marie noted that the Southern was at full capacity that day; apparently, Ohioans were not as put off by Temple’s latest serving of “shameless bathos” as The New York Times film reviewer Frank

Nugent was when it played in that city during its initial rollout several months earlier.3 There is only one other occasion in Marie’s 1938 journals that prompted her to comment on how crowded a movie theater was: when she went to the Lyceum theater with the man whom she would eventually marry — my grandfather, Michael Patrick — and found that it “was packed; so we came home and talked to folks.” ¤ Growing up in Canoga Park, California, I often went to the movies once or twice a week. Before I was a teenager with wheels of my own, my mother was the ringleader of these outings, orchestrating regular acts of illicit movie afternoons. She believed that a single ticket, always matinee, bought its buyer admission to the theater for the day. When showtimes necessitated, we would head to the bathroom after one movie ended, lingering awkwardly by the sinks until she was confident that the ticket takers for showing #2 had moved on and the lights would be down. A stealth, coordinated strike, we would slide into the theater for the second half of a self-appointed double bill, calm enough to avoid suspicion but expeditious enough to evade detection, landing in our stolen seats just like we belonged there without missing a second of the “get one free” movie. On Sundays, my mother sat at the kitchen table and mapped out these movie days from the listings in the “Calendar” section of the Los Angeles Times, using a pen to circle conveniently spaced showtimes. No doubt there was a thrill to planning these outings, for her at least — less so for her reluctant co-conspirators, which included me and, when she got 67

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old enough, my five-years-younger sister. My father never joined us, no doubt disapproving of the endeavor and unwilling to be party to the crime. I was perennially torn between anxiety and, of course, absolute delight in getting to spend a day at the movies. These were golden moviegoing years, not just for me but for the Hollywood studios that practically minted money with a steady stream of blockbusters. I still experience nostalgia when I recall what it felt like to see films like Star Wars (1977), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) for the first time, on a big screen in a totally sold-out theater; to be in the midst of an audience laughing, loudly and in synch, during movies like Tootsie (1982) and Back to the Future (1985); the tension-induced hush that accompanied serious fare like Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Witness (1985), which made me feel like I was seeing grown-up movies. (Both were, in fact, rated R). And, speaking of grown-up movies: once, my mother insisted that my grandmother, visiting from Ohio, accompany us to see David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980). I was an extremely sensitive nineyear-old with no capacity for handling such a deeply disturbing film. When my uncontrollable sobbing began to irritate the other audience members, my grandmother took me into the lobby and let me cry on her shoulder while my mother, who was not about to miss the second half, finished the movie. Whatever portion of the film I actually saw inspired nightmares for months, and to this day, I have yet to watch it in its entirety, despite the fact that I’m a professor of film history who has since studied much more sinister documentary material.

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¤ I’m certain that my grandmother never saw the end of The Elephant Man, either, but I know she watched her fair share of movies from start to finish during her high school years. In her diary, Marie recorded opinions about the films she saw, though she usually kept these short and punchy. She judged Winterset (1936) with Burgess Meredith “Excellent!”; Maid of Salem (1937) with Claudette Colbert and The Prince and the Pauper (1937) starring Errol Flynn “Very good!”; Romeo and Juliet (1936) with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer “Beautiful!”; Heidi (1937) with Shirley Temple and Jean Hersholdt “A truly good picture”; The Awful Truth (1937) with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant a “good picture”; Frederick March in The Buccaneer (1938) “the life story of Jean La Fitte, a New Orleans privateer. Excellent”; Hurricane (1937) with Dorothy Lamour “a marvelous picture”; and Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and Spencer Tracy in Test Pilot (1938) “Excellent.” She also “Liked song — ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’” in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Shall We Dance (1937). She deemed Bette Davis a “wonderful actress” in the Southern plantation melodrama Jezebel (1938) and purchased the tie-in sheet music so that she could play the theme song at home on the piano. But of all the films she mentions in her journal, there was only one that inspired an especially strong emotional reaction that went beyond pithy evaluations. In an unusually cryptic response written after she returned from seeing Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armor (1937), she declared: “It left me in a doubtful state.” Marlene Dietrich’s late 1930s films brimmed with sexual energy and moral

2) A page from Marie Erasmus’s diary describes a day that starts with Sunday school (“SS”), includes two different trips to the movies, and notes her family’s displeasure at how late she had stayed out the night before (until the “morn”).

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ambiguity, rattling this midwestern teen’s equilibrium, though not nearly as much as her granddaughter would be shaken, years later, by David Lynch’s morose universe. Marie’s journals depict an array of thriving movie theaters in Cleveland during the Depression era. As a May 16, 1938 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer gracing the same page of a review of Warner Bros.’ 1938 film Robin Hood—which, by the way, Marie enjoyed—explains, … everywhere we’ve been we’ve read about nothing but starvation and woe in Cleveland. We expected to see bread lines all along Euclid Avenue. But when we got here we found the theaters packed, and people spending money in the stores, and other people about to open up a big bank, and filled restaurants and people getting married. Though job loss and financial worries weave their way through my grandmother’s journal entries, this reporter’s description of a commercially vibrant city is much more consistent with the way my grandmother spent her money and free time in these years. In fact, Marie never mentions any financial impediments to going to the movies, and often went to multiple theaters and movies in a single day on the weekends, as well as out for hamburgers or ice cream sundaes before or after. She did, however, sometimes note that her parents did not let her go to the movies, on one occasion because she had a cold. “Mom refused to allow me” to go, she vented in her diary, adding that “After [her friend] Gin[a] left I went upstairs and cried.” In 1916, it was estimated that “In Cleveland one-sixth of the city go [to the 70

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movies] at least once a day.”4 By 1938, when there were 1,231,828 residents of the Greater Cleveland area, making it the sixth most populous city in the nation, attendance was even higher. And by the late 1930s, there were 110 movie theaters in Cleveland with the ability, at full capacity, to seat 122,500 persons. Many of these were richly appointed motion picture palaces, with seating capacities in the 1,500-3,500 range, the likes of which cropped up in cities all over the country in the boom decade of the 1920s. The 1938 Cleveland Directory records that, “Many attractive moving-picture theatres are scattered throughout the city, the largest being Loew’s Stillman, State, Mall, Park, Granada and Allen, where the stars of the screen are shown in the newest productions.”5 In Cleveland, there were not enough days of the week to see all the movies that were playing. Though my grandmother had clear favorites, she regularly mentions seven theaters, which she frequented on both weekends and weeknights. As she put it in a journal entry from the summer of 1937, “Florence & I went to the show. Gosh! That’s the only thing to do around here.” Though this complaint was surely an exaggeration — no doubt recorded with a teenage eye roll as that near-curse spilled onto the page — I know how she felt, with malls and movies the only things it seemed like there were “to do” in the entirety of the San Fernando Valley. My grandmother went to one to three “shows” each week in this period — not unlike her granddaughter on the west coast fifty years later. ¤ When I was going to the movies in Southern California decades later, my

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theater options were a far cry from the luxurious picture palaces of my grandmother’s youth. On my regular local beat, I had three relatively modest theater options with one to three screens, plus a multi-screen drive-in. The Fox Fallbrook Theater that was closest to home, and that our family frequented most often, was a single screen theater that was twinned in 1976. It was located adjacent to the J.C. Penney’s auto center in what would later become the area’s second largest mall (one of three located within two miles of each other), with plenty of room for parking on the acres of asphalt that surrounded it. The theater itself was hardly the stuff that dreams were made of. However, because I grew up just a thirty-minute sprint — on a good day — down the 101 Freeway from Hollywood, I regularly saw movies when I was a teenager in the late 1980s in what turned out to be a special way. Despite the fact that I was no longer grifting under my mother’s regimen, I spent my teen years shuttling from one free movie to another. I happened to live in the land of the never-ending free preview screening, watching films that had not yet been released. Almost every time I went to the Topanga Plaza Mall in Canoga Park — which was more often than I’d care to admit since the mall was my social club and stomping grounds, and I’ve always half-jokingly maintained that Valley Girl (1983) should be considered a documentary — I would be handed movie preview passes. Topanga Plaza was a hotbed of pass-pushers, marauding somewhere between Ice Capades and Contempo Casuals. These waydownstream studio employees were on the lookout for people to press into quid pro quo industry service. The tradeoff was nominal: you got to watch a free movie

in exchange for staying after the credits rolled to fill out a short survey card. Did you love, like, or hate the movie? Did you like the ending, and, if not, what would have been better? Would you tell your friends to see this movie? A minute of rapidly scribbled penciling on paper, and I was out the door, with my conscience clear. I had, at least, earned my seat. ¤ The movie theater played an essential part in my grandmother’s family and social life, including her romantic experiences. On February 28, 1937 Marie had an unintentional near encounter with a young man she had been avoiding: “Florence, Howie, & I went to the show. Sat right in back of Ernie. Pretended not to notice him.” Whatever Ernie had done to deserve this shunning, it was not yet the end of his prospects. Seven months later, they went to the movies on a date: “Ernie & I went to the show. I don’t like him — emphatically.” Ernie’s luck had run out and by November, Marie had moved on, though with an equally dim outcome: “Date with Rolland. To the show — when we got home — I refused to kiss him; said ‘Goodnite’; and ran into the house. That’s that!” On May 15, 1938, she went to the Garden “to see Tom Sawyer in Technicolor” on what would end up being a more significant date with the man she would eventually marry, Michael Patrick. Just two days later, Michael took Marie back to the movies, this time to the “Hipp” to see Robin Hood, which she described with unusual enthusiasm as “A splendid picture also in technicolor. A marvelous production!” The Adventures of Robin Hood was playing exclusively at the approximately 71

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3,500-seat Bros. owned Hippodrome Theater, with seven different daily start times. This was an expensive prestige picture for Bros., starring two of their brightest stars — Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland — and the investment worked: it became one of the top grossing films of the year. The Hippodrome had been running large, attention-grabbing advertisements that touted the extravagance of Warner Bros.’ latest production. One of these boldly announced that Robin Hood was “a thousand times more thrilling in Technicolor,” encouraging ticket buyers to pay attention to the costly technological enhancement as part of an effort to create the kind of ticket-hungry audiences that the studios would cultivate so well in the age of the blockbuster.6 Whether Marie’s excited response was to the film, its flashy production values, or her budding romance, we will never know. ¤ When my grandmother was in her late seventies, she volunteered as an usher at Connor Palace theater on Euclid Avenue, which had been recently restored from the bones of a 1920s movie palace that had fallen into disrepair during downtown Cleveland’s decline years. She loved ushering every week. During a summer visit in the 1990s, I accompanied her on the light rail line downtown, arriving at this dazzlingly majestic, ornate, highceilinged, red velvet space, the likes of which I had never seen before. I got to witness firsthand how happy it made her, though I presumed at the time that her joy derived from contributing to the revitalization of Cleveland’s downtown. I wish I had known then about all of the time she had spent in the movie theaters 72

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lining Euclid Avenue in the 1930s, so that I could have asked her about being back in a space that had been so central to her life her sixty years prior. What memories was she reliving each time she walked into that resplendent lobby and showed people to their seats? My grandmother’s journals tell just a small part of the story of American moviegoing, specific to a region, city, neighborhood, household, and particular young lady — not unlike her granddaughter’s memories from fifty years later, which would take place not far from the seat of the industry itself. Her young adulthood included hundreds of hours spent going to the show, including with the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life. In one of her last diary entries from May 1938, my grandmother wrote, “Michael called for me at work. Swell of him.” After my future grandfather picked her up, they went, not surprisingly, to a movie, after which they “Stopped for sandwiches. Home to talk until l:45. Can you imagine?” Indeed, thanks to her diary-writing, I can imagine my grandparents in this courtship phase, seeing movies and sharing meals, getting to know each other into the wee hours of the morning at the start of their lives together. I crave this experience of going to the movies again, even if it is mingled with lingering fears of contagion that we will all have to negotiate. Although movie theater attendance had been in steady decline in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, I wonder if it might boomerang back in the post-vaccination era precisely because the isolation of the past year-plus inspires a new appreciation for laughing, crying, screaming, and feeling something together, fulfilling our appetite for communal

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experiences. At the very front of her 1937 diary, Marie declares, “This is the truth and should be treated as such!” And here I am, almost one hundred years later, with what might be a genetic predisposition for cinephilia, doing just that. I hope that as people return to movie theaters in 2021, that the records of their experiences — more likely made on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram than with pen on paper — will be discoverable for people looking back at this other time of global disruption. It might help them understand all of the things that were lost during the year that we did not go to the movies — and hopefully that will be regained with our return.

Endnotes 1 Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and George Potamianos, “Introduction: Researching and Writing the History of Local Moviegoing,” Hollywood in the Neighborhood, ed. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (Berkeley: University of California, 2008), 3. Richard Malty and Melvyn Stokes, “Introduction,” Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, eds. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007). 2 J.T.M., review of Love on the Run, New York Times (November 28, 1936). 3 Frank S. Nugent, review of “Dimples,” New York Times (October 10, 1936). 4 Edward M. McConoughey, Motion Pictures in Religious and Educational Work with Practical Suggestions for Their Use (New York: Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 1916), 4. 5 1938 Cleveland Directory, available as a PDF from the Cleveland Public Library at cplorg. cdmhost.com. 6 Cleveland Plain Dealer May 14, 1938. According to Catherin Jurca, the “Hippodrome received the top new releases and ran them for at least a week.” Hollywood 1938 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 38. 73

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Fernand Deligny, Tracing Sheet F/B, August 1973, superimposed on tracing sheet 5/A of Dany’s wander lines (as in, movements and gestures) of Le Serret, June to August 6th 1973, eleven bottom tracing sheets along with eleven tracing sheets, traced by Jacques Lin, 65 x 50 cm. Image courtesy of Editions L’Arachnéen.

S T R E A M I N G SY M P O S I U M

EDITED BY ANNIE BERKE, MICHELLE CHIHARA, PHIL MACIAK, AND ANNA SHECTMAN

n her 2021 novel, No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood writes of her lonely times on the internet: “(There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were Am I dying and Does anybody really love me.)” Incidentally, these two questions map onto the two dominant modes of covering streaming media: doomy, rapid-fire industry news-items about big corporate fish being consumed by even bigger fish, and personal ruminations on our shortened attention spans and long media binges, particularly during lockdown. This symposium seeks to use long-form criticism to fill the gaps around what we talk about when we talk about streaming. In the process, we have committed to pursuing a third way of thinking about the streaming landscape — a way that rejects the reactivity of media merger gossip and the passivity of mindless moving-image consumption. In their essays, writers Michelle Chihara, Jorge Cotte, Joshua Glick, Sun-ha Hong, Phillip Maciak, Michael Szalay, and Kristen Warner put media culture in historical and cultural context; detail the multisensorial and politically inflected aesthetics of streaming movies, television, podcasts, and fitness machines; analyze streaming practices as raced, gendered, sexed, and otherwise embodied; and interrogate our ideological ties to the data-driven narratives that share our air and live rent-free in our busy brains. This collection is not a response to Netflix’s breathless, try-hard demand to “see what’s next.” It has, instead, been our shared purpose to slow down — just enough to see what’s now. — Annie Berke Edited by Annie Berke, Michelle Chihara, Phillip Maciak, and Anna Shechtman 75

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ANTISEPTIC GLASS STREAM SUN-HA HONG

he Peloton stands alone in the antiseptic home. A 2019 viral Twitter thread highlighted exemplary specimens of these ads for the stationary exercise machine, selected from the company’s own promotional imagery. In one, the luxury internet-connected bike stands on a polished wood riser, a veritable monument housed in a floor-to-ceiling glass conservatory. In another, the Peloton takes up the dead center of a spacious urban loft, driving out every other piece of furniture. The dream on offer is a familiar one. Sculpt the self in a pristine space, carefully disconnected from family members, crowded homes, and other exigencies of ordinary life: a disconnection only affordable, in most cases, through the exercise 76

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of wealth. Nothing exists except you, the Peloton, and then the world on the other side of the glass — both the endless streaming content on the screen, and the picturesque views out the window.

virtual high-fives. In an infamous 2019 commercial widely criticized as sexist, the trainer exhorts: “Let’s go, Grace in Boston. 50 rides,” prompting a squeal of joy: “She just said my name!” The natural world can also join the party, with Peloton offering scenic rides through picturesque landscapes in the Italian Alps or Oahu, Hawaii.

IMAGE TK Source: Twitter / Original: Peloton

We are accustomed to thinking about streaming as a technology of indulgent plenty: all our favorite songs and stories are with us wherever we go, from music to fitness to never-ending television. But the streams around us also help us shape particular kinds of isolation. Often, what we are buying through the stream — sometimes at a very high price — is the opportunity to be alone by choice. A paradox of intimacy and disconnection runs through our streaming technologies. Peloton’s home fitness content has seen its stocks soar in the past year, with media outlets declaring that the company has “won the pandemic.” But if tableted bikes and treadmills seem ready-made for social distancing, Peloton combines this with explicit investment in the trappings of community. The monthly subscription ties users to a persistent online profile, embellished with gamified achievement badges (from “Century Ride” to “Turkey Burn 2019”) and basic social networking functions. Live classes feature a leaderboard; trainers regularly call out users (and their tags, like #iamicaniwillido and #PelotonMoms), hailing them with

IMAGE TK Peloton Channel @ Youtube

Peloton is far from the first or only product to fuse the aspirations of expensively sculpted bodies with expensively sculpted lives. Back in 1978, New York magazine ran a cover story called “An Intimidating New Class: The Physical Elite” — and identified its epicentee as the affluent, well-educated, “upscale” people. But the latest generation of these practices are notable because they participate in wider cultural fantasies around frictionless consumption and disconnected intimacy that defines our streaming, “ondemand” economy. Fitness and community gets beamed into the stay-at-home user, just like the food that appears “magically” on the doorstep. All this isn’t to say that intimacy is only good or real when it involves physical bodies in proximity or the open hearth, and technology is ever condemned to mere imitation. In a world of streams, disconnected intimacy isn’t a compromise, but a feature and a pleasure that we pay a high price for. People, content, the world, 77

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is offered as a scrolling continuum, but I am removed one degree, at liberty to dip in and out as I please. There is no need to stay in a class one second longer than I wish. The minimalism of the idealized Peloton room offers a particular type of control, where the only interactions permitted are ones that I can turn on or off as I please. Everything is “content” at a comfortable distance, the glass of the screen or the glass of the windows separating me from it — which is, the suggestion goes, just the way I must like it. ¤ The pandemic has prompted many reflections about the relationship between space and intimacy, whether in the assembly line of too-close faces in the Zoom workday, or the theatrical plexiglass partitions lining schools and restaurants. In this context, what is striking about the Peloton utopia is its careful sterilization of people. The bike is for the home, but often carefully separated from family or housework. In Peloton’s video classes, the instructors themselves join in from otherworldly spaces. Yoga classes are conducted from a spacious, empty gallery floating in gentle baseboard lighting and wall-to-wall beam projection, looking somewhat like a knock-off modern art museum space; ride classes favor full-room mirrors and stage lighting, in which the lone instructor shines brightly against their own reflection. Such pristine spaces — and images of pristine spaces — are central to how we talk and think about our technologies and the future worlds they project. Our visual lexicon around artificial intelligence or smart cities are dominated by whitewashed images, in which holographic interfaces and neon lights convey a sense of 78

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frictionless utopia. Rendered architectural images depict familiar symmetrical skyscrapers and perfectly manicured greenery, projecting technological spaces as sterilized of crowds, mess, rubbish, friction. This is not simply a question of stylistic preference. Such images are typically vehicles of popular and economic speculation, in which these photorealistic (yet entirely unrealistic) images “signal the apparent inevitability of [development] before it has even begun,” as Joel McKim writes. From smart city utopias to the Peloton bubble, such images present a vision of the good life sterilized of inconvenient and undesirable bodies. Hito Steyerl visualizes some of these dynamics in How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013). The resolutions, scales, and other measures by which we map the world and turn it into data also dictate what kinds of spaces and images we can occupy. One section, titled “How to be invisible by disappearing,” enacts a video tour of a luxury gated community represented by depressingly sterile architectural renders. Here, humans are present, but only as uniform gray silhouettes ghosting about the scene. A droll, machinic narration intones the ways in which real bodies and lives can become invisible in such a world: “being female and over 50 […] being a dead pixel […] being undocumented or poor.”

Source: Youtube / Original: Hito Steyerl, 2013

Walid Raad/The Atlas Group (1989-2004), Better be watching the clouds_Plate 85, 2000/2017, pigmented inkjet print, 30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8 cm). © Walid Raad. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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This dehumanizing invisibility is the necessary flip side of these obsessively pristine spaces. Instagram’s “renderporn” trend tracks 3D-modeled digital interiors that are, quite literally, projections. We use that word to talk about things like industry forecasts or business plans, but also to describe dreams that we entertain to keep us going (which, let’s be honest, is also the aim of the industry stuff too). From slick prototype renders of new gadgets, to constant reboots of yearly fitness resolutions, projections serve as a way to cope, a way to keep going, a way to punt anxieties down the road in cruel optimism. We constantly dream — or rather, we’re encouraged to dream — of disconnection and pristineness as a better way to live, a future worth pining for.

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exhaustive exertion.” Minimalism, at least of this sort, has little to do with aesthetic preference, and everything to do with the ability to construct elaborate mechanisms by which human labor and lives can be folded away. A life of “nothingness” is one that only a few of us can afford. Not that any of this is unique to the pandemic. For years leading up to 2020, the “on-demand economy” actively promoted the pleasures of disconnected intimacy, as per DoorDash’s old slogan: “NEVER LEAVE HOME AGAIN.” A meal is neither culture nor nature in this arrangement, but content to be consumed — if you can afford the disconnection. In these technologies, the promise of convenience comes hand in hand with the promise to strip away the visibility of people who make those services possible ¤ (and, in turn, gradually destroying their incomes and working conditions as well). The industries that depend on and cirThe tech industry has consistentculate these projections, driven by smart ly pursued such means of disconnection. tech and AI, depend on legions of “ghost In 2014, “Alfred Club” won first place in workers” who suffer from devaluation and TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Invoking the dehumanization precisely through the trope of the upper-class butler, Alfred’s pernicious myth of complete automation. workers would take care of everything And the moment these sterile visions of from groceries to laundry. Today, the disconnective intimacy are deployed as dream lives on with Jupiter, a similar real relations and products is the moment start-up promoted by venture capitalist when people — and all their “problems” Andrew Chen as a “really magical” expe— flood back in from behind the screen. rience in which groceries simply appear Shannon Mattern observes that in the pantry, eliminating even that brief COVID-19 lockdowns have fueled what step of meeting the worker at the door. at first appears, á la Kyle Chayka, as a But in the end, neither intimacy nor “pursuit of nothingness”: a life “ensconced convenience is possible without people. in minimalist luxury, fortified with food The “pursuit of nothingness” directly redeliveries, entertained by streaming ser- lies on Amazon delivery drivers forced to vices, sculpted by Peloton.” Except peel pee in bottles to meet productivity quotas, back just the thinnest outer layer of this or New York’s food delivery workers tarminimalism, held together by app inter- geted for violent robberies as they make faces, and we find “networks in furious their rounds on e-bikes. To forget about motion, continual overstimulation, and the people in the loop is also to erase 80

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economic disparities, structural inequalities, and differences within and among the “users.” Back in the Peloton world, people also reappear upon close inspection. They appear most notably and notoriously in the pricing of the machines, which currently start at 1,895USD for bikes, and over 4,000USD for treadmills. Although the company generously decouples their content subscription from machine ownership, and charges a “mere” 12.99USD per month, all this places Peloton at the very highest end of luxury fitness products. The brand’s visibility is partly driven by a copious amount of celebrity interest, with the likes of Miley Cyrus and Venus Williams gushing about the brand on social media, and official partnerships such as Peloton x Beyoncé. Meanwhile, Peloton’s hand-picked instructors have themselves reached quasi-celebrity status; ranging from former The Voice contestants to Cirque du Soleil performers, the instructors typically film from Peloton’s studio that founder John Foley describes as a “television streaming facility.” Even Joe Biden took to Peloton for projecting his political vitality — at least, until the machine was deemed a cybersecurity risk. Pelotons are equipped with built-in mics and cameras, and as per their privacy policy, collects information such as users’ age, height, weight, GPS location, and even “[web] pages that you visit before and after using [Peloton services].” Like the rest of the tech industry, Peloton as a social media platform is voracious about the data it collects — and negligent about securing its privacy. A cybersecurity expert recently reported that Peloton users’ private account data could be accessed through an exposed API — and that the company had ignored his warnings.

Given the price, we might assume that many actually purchased Pelotons will go to affluent homes. But even those are unlikely to be quite as sterile as the promotional renderings. Real homes mean pets, kids, family, the various debris of work and life — all the things left out in the fantasy of disconnected intimacy. In March, it was revealed that a six-year-old had died after being pulled under one of its treadmills. Peloton’s luxurious design had not extended to features like rear safety guards present in some alternative brands. After initially accusing the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) of “mischaracterizing the situation” and putting the onus on the users to keep treadmills out of reach of children, the company has belatedly moved to recall over 125,000 units. After all, in the CPSC’s words: “[N]ot everybody that owns a treadmill has a dedicated room for it.” ¤ In an on-demand, streaming world, the promise of pristine space and disconnected intimacy is undermined on a daily basis and refloated as a luxurious image. The rise of “streaming” as a rhythm of existence — in which everything keeps updating around us, and we’re asked to dip into laughter, outrage, get hyped for cardio, moment after moment — does not happen in a technological vacuum. It accompanies what scholars have called “the burnout society” or the “ends of sleep,” in which we are all expected to operate as perpetual motion machines: adding lines to the résumé, hustling for that five-star review, sharing and generating content. In Peloton, too, there’s always a class starting in five minutes, something’s always 81

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on. Jump in anywhere and your trainer will small talk you; as a New York Times piece put it, Peloton works like “a human iPhone, always swiping toward some new distraction […in] a total curation of the mind.” It is not simply that we have become antisocial, but that disconnection is being served up as a refuge from life lived out in the market.

In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber notes that as much as we all seem to hate bureaucracy, it also holds a powerful appeal of impersonality: all those cold, faceless, transactional interactions that we deride as soul-sucking, but also appreciate as (at least in theory) more predictable and dependable, leaving us with energy for other things in life. Data-driven systems tend to extend this promise of distance and disconnection. And long before computers, quantification has served as a “technology of distance,” allowing strangers to interact while remaining strangers. Our Pelotons and DoorDashes, Alberts and Jupiters, extend this modern fantasy into the promise of a screen bubble. Everything that we (think) we desire, from meals to stories to a sense of community, is processed into a deliverable and streamable service, disconnected from its conditions of labor and the wider world. Most crucially, there is the tantalizing promise of control: every connection we establish, we are told, we can turn on and off at will — as long as we can afford to be on the luxurious interior of the bubble. From the inside, every glass window, there’s a new restaurant, a new show, a new video, a new yoga class — and in each, the dream of a pristine world scrubbed of people. 82

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Walid Raad/The Atlas Group (1989-2004), Better be watching the clouds_Plate 94, 2000/2017, pigmented inkjet print, 30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8 cm). © Walid Raad. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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S T R AT E G I C A U D I O : P O D C A S T S , P R O PA G A N DA , A N D T H E FA I R Y TA L E S O F DATA M I N I N G MICHELLE CHIHARA

n 2018, the popular NPR podcast Invisibilia premiered an episode about a reality television show in Somalia called “The Other Real World.” Invisibilia tells stories inspired by behavioral science and aims to explore the “invisible forces” that shape human behavior. The episode in question spun a sweet, hopeful narrative about the power of music, a kind of Footloose fable set against the chaos of the failing Somali state and the rise of alQaeda-linked extremists. “The Other Real World” episode discusses a reality television show much like American Idol, funded by an impartial and humanitarian United Nations. The reality competition, dubbed Inspire Somalia, asked Somali volunteers to risk their lives

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by flouting local prohibitions against music and television. The prohibitions were described on the podcast as the work of Muslim extremist group al-Shabab. By providing this forum for self-expression, according to Invisibilia’s reporting, Inspire Somalia would do far more than crown a winning singer, it would spread lessons about individual freedom and democracy — because of voting … on songs. “The ultimate goal” was to create reality television that would not only explore but “change human behavior,” and thus “change the world.” Around the same time, idealistic rhetoric about the power of auditory art over human behavior was also being deployed by the “unicorn” Swedish platform, Spotify. In fact, this episode of Invisibilia aired just as the streaming wars had reached out to join music and non-music content. Spotify was branching out from its deals with record companies, acquiring podcast start-ups, and cutting deals with National Public Radio to air their content. At the time of writing, Music Business Worldwide has just reported that the Swedish company’s share price tripled in 10 months during the pandemic, giving it a valuation of around $67 billion (US aid to Somalia in 2019 was about 0.0074 percent of Spotify’s value). Spotify touted the circulation of creativity, in music and non-music content, as part of its mission statement. In 2018, Spotify’s CEO greeted investors in New York before a slide that read: “Our mission: Unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by these creators.” Inspire Somalia. Inspire the world. Podcasts have dominated the wave of start-ups in digital sound, the streaming

wars in visual media matched by similar patterns of competition and consolidation in streaming audio. And to the extent that journalistic podcasts like Invisibilia have been generically categorized as creative, it’s because they rose to prominence using a new persona to tell nonfiction stories. If the clipped, military tones of the financial radio show Marketplace represented the traditional “objective” news anchor par excellence, then the Planet Money podcast persona — promising to make economic explanations fun, like going to the bar with your savviest friend — represented innovation. As they leaned toward documenting the journeys of individual reporters and hosts, many podcasts broke with existing journalistic conventions and ethical norms. An intimate and vernacular tone over the airwaves is not, in and of itself, a new technology. In fact, the podcast persona could arguably be traced back to NPR in the 1990s, before streaming audio. A significant percentage of successful podcast hosts trained at Ira Glass’s successful and long-running radio show This American Life, then essentially repackaged their training as digital innovation. But the dominance of this new persona formed around technological shifts in the media landscape. And these tonal and tectonic shifts moved podcasts toward stories about the human potential of data-based behavioral science. Stories about the power of creativity and behavioral science emerged around podcasts in the platform economy, where data analytics could use stories about behavioral science to gather and analyze more data. Spotify’s business model combines subscription and ad revenue streams with AI and the power of data mining at scale. In its quest for market dominance, 85

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it needed a runway of trust alongside its runway of capital, long enough for it to enter the land of the too big to fail. Spotify’s do-gooder corporate rhetoric packaged the algorithmic presentation of audio as a self-generating stream of influence over creative subjects — it streams digital audio in order to inspire the further streaming of digital audio. Invisibilia and another hit about behavioral science, Hidden Brain, were designed by the non-profit NPR to compete in the for-profit streaming wars. NPR used them explicitly as multi-platform formal innovations to enter the fray in “the year of the podcast.” Hidden Brain’s host called the show itself a “mini-startup.” It worked: Invisibilia was popular, NPR struck a deal with Spotify, its podcasts joined the experimental coordination data on the platform. This innovative form would sell behavioral science across radio and streaming audiences, gathering data for more behavioral science as it went. In “The Other Real World,” the power of popular music and popular media was a discovery that data science could use to help Somalis, whom the podcast positioned as culturally backward and in need of such help. American Idol would teach them a new “way of being.” The episode announces that “a certain kind of story” can “create a new reality,” and that behavioral psychologists, who came upon the universal power of poetics in the 1990s, could port this discovery to other countries and cultures with little to no risk of ethical violation. The behavioral scientist quoted in the episode saw the UN project in Somalia as part of a benign increase in the willingness of “foreign powers” to use “popular media to influence the emotional climate and therefore the politics of another country.” 86

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This sentence was uttered in 2018, after about two years of constant headlines about Russia’s use of social media to influence the emotional climate and political landscape of the United States. One of the producers on Inspire Somalia even went on record in the podcast insisting that the show didn’t “feel like some artificial creation or some element of a strategic communication plan” — strategic communications, or strat comm, being the military’s term for new methods of propaganda and influence. Rather, she said, the episode “felt real. It felt like this transcendent space.” The implication that Inspire Somalia was, in fact, strat comm remained. Invisibilia was produced and shaped by different experts in the study of influence, who in turn exercised influence on the politics and climate of different countries. That’s what popular media does. On one hand, the amplification of Somali folk music within Somali culture seems like one of the more benign applications of soft imperial power abroad. But, on the other hand, if Inspire Somalia was a strat comm operation, whose was it, and who was being manipulated by its representation on an American podcast? The financialization of digital audio — as it encloses audiobooks, podcasts, albums, and meditation apps across markets built with behavioral science — creates an evolving gray area of competing influences. Spotify is building a streaming empire with a data-rich, and therefore subtle, form of international reach. Spotify now knows what you listen to when, just as Amazon and Google know what you want, where you go, what you buy, what you do. The convenience and ease with which these technologies slip into intimate listening spaces hides the massive, international,

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financial consolidation behind digital audio. It also obfuscates the dynamics behind digital audio’s working theory of culture, as it shapes music, art, and journalism built with experimental coordination data, along with new applications and apps in fields like mental health, neurofinance, and quantum marketing. As media landscapes shift, so do the conventions that once set the lines between independent news and strat comm, or between objective and subjective reporting. Not all of this reinvention is deleterious. Changes in news and distribution have spurred a bracing reckoning over the sometimes unbearable whiteness of mainstream journalistic objectivity, where a shallow “both sides” stance can cover for systemic racism. But “The Other Real World” was not a failure of journalistic objectivity — it seemed more like a total operational lack of healthy journalistic skepticism. As soon as I heard a reality television show in Somalia presented as a feel-good behavioral science story, I had the strong sense that I was the one, the American audience member, who was being manipulated. So, I did some digging of my own: •

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In 2012, oil discoveries off the coast refocused international attention on Somalia. That year, The Guardian reported that Britain was leading the dash for exploration, offering “humanitarian aid and security assistance in the hope of a stake in the beleaguered country’s future energy industry.” Already, the UN funds sound less neutral. The founders of the production company behind Inspire Somalia

were indeed British. In fact, the company had been the go-to contractor for a “shadowy propaganda unit” working in counterterrorism for Britain’s Home Office. •

Run by two young men who met at British prep school, one of whom had worked in reality television, the company had a questionable track record. Under its previous name, it had not been transparent and forthright about its goals and funding sources, and some of the Muslim civil society groups whom it had approached and worked with felt betrayed. Especially in post–Cold War areas of conflict, it seems that civil society groups do not benefit from being perceived as unwitting puppets of Western interests.

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At a conference in London in 2012, Somali representatives objected to how British aid was focused on British priorities instead of Somali civil society. “When the British government decided to step forward it should have asked what Somalis wanted,” the coordinator of the Somali Relief and Development Forum said. “What they did instead was to identify a few areas. It failed to respect the process and priorities set by Somalis.”

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One independent Somali commentator named Abukar wrote in 2014: Breakthrough Media is also a threat to the Somali 87

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cultural and traditional society, the group belongs to the so-called ‘Don’t ask don’t tell’ community and they recruit only members of this group. For some reason, Independent Somali media companies are excluded from these kinds of UN contracts and the best they can get is to work for these abusive primary UN contractors with an insulting harsh pay. •

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Producers who worked on Inspire Somalia told me, in person and via email, that even though Mogadishu was so dangerous that they could only stay in the city for a matter of days, they felt moved by what they saw. They said they pushed the British execs to give more of the money to the Somali contestants. Invisibilia closed with the suggestion that Inspire Somalia helped make Somalia safe for music again. However, Inspire Somalia wasn’t primarily a show about music. Based on what streamed online, it seems to have been focused on entrepreneurs, with a musical segment — more Shark Tank than American Idol. It did feature some singers, but it’s not clear that it made them safer or brought the music back. One of the judges, a young entrepreneur born in Italy who moved back to his parents’ homeland in order to

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start a florist shop, was killed after the show aired, according to The Guardian and Quartz. •

US and UK government databases show that Zinc Network continues to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars to execute contracts in war-torn parts of the world.

Invisibilia had the savvy, the budget, and the journalistic staff to get this stuff right. But Invisibilia got Inspire Somalia wrong because of the behavioral economic mode of storytelling in digital audio, because financialized power structures are already invested in finding rosy outcomes for compelling narratives built around ostensibly neutral data science and its ahistorical theory of “human behavior.” The episode opened as a fairy tale about music and behavioral science: ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST: Once upon a time, there was music on the radio, but then the music started fading out. First one radio station, then another, then another — until there was almost no music to hear, and people started MacGyvering workarounds. Once upon a time, NPR ran all foreign news stories by skeptical international bureau editors who might not have been duped by the strat comm expert who probably pitched this story to Invisibilia. In 2009, The New Yorker ran an article about Somalia with the headline: “The Most Failed State.” In it, writer Jon Lee Anderson makes clear that the United States was trying to work with the Somali government during the period when the

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Walid Raad/The Atlas Group (1989-2004), Better be watching the clouds_Plate 47, 2000/2017, pigmented inkjet print, 30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8 cm). © Walid Raad. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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government, not members of al-Shabab, implemented restrictions on music and television. Multiple factions of the predominantly Muslim nation share histories that prompt profound anti-Western feeling, and the impulse to divide Somali society into innocent anti-al-Shabab versus guilty Muslim-extremist camps is a willful oversimplification. Also, while Mogadishu was indeed particularly contested and violent, Somalians did not need Westerners to teach them to stay committed to their own culture. They maintained a variety of independent journalistic groups and radio stations of their own. Invisibilia’s fairy tale language simplifies a complicated and brutal history by imagining a pre-modern local population set against Muslim extremists who somehow emerged from the primeval forest only after the Cold War ended. The political history of Western involvement is invisible in this tale. But locals do not see the United States and Britain as newly arrived, neutral, or humanitarian players; many must remember how it was the CIA that first armed the Afghani mujahideen. It is only Western audiences who might fall for Footloose and MacGyver as modern saviors in a distant African village. Sitting on the Gulf of Aden, Somalia occupies a strategic connection point for global trade. In 1991, a Cold War–era dictatorship collapsed, and the country exploded. Despite this strategic importance, in 1993, after sustaining casualties, the United States pulled out of the region in an episode that inspired the movie Black Hawk Down. Since then, climate emergencies have exacerbated the suffering, and various local factions have used famine as a tool of war. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton participated in the London meeting in 2012, once again 90

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interested in Somalia once oil was on the table. For almost half a century, the United States supported bloody foreign dictators around the world in the name of anticommunism, and then abandoned their people. In 2012, Clinton called Somalia a “hopeless, bloody conflict,” as if the West bore no responsibility for the renewed eruption of these ostensibly purely cultural forces. But even this more nuanced summary still flattens the political history, which involves fossil fuel but can’t be reduced to its flows. “The Other Real World” flattened history by waxing poetic about the power of music, about how Somali songs “entered through the ears but then did strange things to the body — made your heart contract at certain moments but at others, made your step lighter, made you feel like your worries could in fact be overcome.” And to some extent, yes, in intimate spaces — as we cook and clean, when we’re alone in the car, or walking the dog in the blue light before dawn — streaming audio enters through the ears and does strange things to our bodies. But the neat, universalizing takeaways of behavioral rhetoric do not encompass culture’s power, nor does that power belong entirely to Western data science. Art and news and criticism can also bring us into contact with the limits of our own knowledge. Culture can make us question our role, it can defamiliarize our relationships to our memory cards and streaming platforms. The people who risked their lives and died for Inspire Somalia were brave and creative, but it’s not clear that paying British strat comm operators for a Shark Tank spin-off did them any favors. In order to do narrative justice to their story, we would have to map out the true historic complexities around a cultural event

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that carried real meaning for them. I can’t do them that justice. But I can point to its absence.

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Hannah Black, Beginning, End, None (2019), Installation View at Performance Space New York. Photography: Da Ping Luo. Courtesy: The Artist and Performance Space New York, New York.

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STUDIO BRANDING IN THE STREAMING WORLD JOSHUA GLICK

s we plow forward through the in-

terminable 2020s, let us not forget the long 2010s, bookended by the bankruptcy of Blockbuster and the beginnings of global Netflix on one end, and the flurry of platform launches on the other. Netflix was once the undisputed streamer supreme, having beaten back such early challengers as Vimeo, Facebook Watch, Sony’s Crackle, Walmart’s Vudu, and Google’s YouTube Red-turned-Premium. However, it is now forced to share the field with a host of rivals, including Disney+, Peacock, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Max (which recently joined forces with Discovery). Some companies have transformed themselves from film and TV distributors into full-fledged studios. Others have moved aggressively 93

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to create an outlet that connects their films with viewers around the world. Critics and journalists have clung to the phrase “streaming wars” — not to be confused with the “cable wars” or the “late-night wars” — to describe how this core group of commercial platforms isn’t just in competition with one another for visibility, but engaged in an existential battle to integrate themselves within the viewing routines of a mass audience. It is easy to see these platforms as becoming increasingly similar in their seeming attempts to accrue the broadest possible audience. Each is scrambling to scale their subscriber base and reduce churn, even as the campaign for viewers might serve ulterior motives: Amazon Prime Video drives Prime subscriptions, and Apple TV+ draws people to Apple hardware or other services that its bundled with. Listen to any Hollywood Reporter roundtable, shareholders presentation, or creative summit interview, and you will hear well-suited and sneakered execs discuss the need to hire big-name directors, a.k.a. “storytellers,” to produce films, series, and event programming for a global market. A quick survey suggests that all these platforms offer a remarkably broad array of genres, from rom-com to true crime, horror, and historical drama. In turn, media libraries — what above-the-line folks dub “good IP” — provide properties that can then be re-issued as well as reimagined for sequels, spinoffs, and reboots. But the imperative to court and keep subscribers, combined with the need to attract talent — many of whom are concerned with curating their own public images — requires something beyond the catch-all pitch of “compelling content.” The race for the streamers to configure themselves 94

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as full-service production, distribution, and exhibition outlets, has intensified the need for each to articulate a more specific brand identity. This move toward differentiation-assurvival-strategy finds its most apt precedent not in the days of the “Big Three” networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) but, rather, the “Big Five” film studios. In the post– World War I era, these studios were all vertically integrated companies, sharing in the practice of making as well as showing their films through ownership of theater chains. In their efforts to appeal to moviegoers, they distinguished themselves from one another through the cultivation of respective house styles (heavily influenced by art direction) and leaned into particular genres. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) promised “more stars than there are in heaven,” often showcasing their actors in elaborate melodramas (Grand Hotel) with Art Deco sets designed by Cedric Gibbons. Warner Bros. reveled in working-class, gritty gangster films (Little Caesar, The Public Enemy) that struck a special chord with audiences during the Great Depression. Tapping into the origins of its Austro-Hungarian founder, Adolph Zukor, Paramount Pictures produced more “European-minded,” romantic dramas featuring émigré director Josef von Sternberg and actress Marlene Dietrich along with “sophisticated comedies” helmed by Preston Sturges. As with the major studios of Classical Hollywood, the streamers today aim to control each component of the media pipeline and advertise to audiences a robust array of alluring titles. At the same time, they aren’t just individual production houses trumpeting the appeal of this film or that film; rather, they are entertainment entities (often connected to larger parent

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conglomerates) trying to persuade people to buy into a constellation of viewing experiences that include a variety of moving image subjects, story-worlds, and narrative formats. What we are seeing with the streaming wars is not the emergence of a cluster of copy-cat services, with everyone trying to do everything, but the beginnings of a legible strategy to carve up the mediascape and compete for peoples’ waking hours. And, as always, these burgeoning brand identities carry great cultural meaning, inflecting what kind of media will be made and viewing as a social practice. Below, I attempt something like a tentative taxonomy of these identities-in-the-making. Leaders of the Pack Since its courting of David Fincher to produce-direct House of Cards (2013– 2018), Netflix has prided itself as a home for filmmakers. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos, along with Vice President of Independent Film and Documentary Features Lisa Nishimura, boast that the studio offers a hands-off approach necessary for individuals to express their personal vision. Netflix’s penchant for character-centered stories with a three-act structure, as well as high production values (an average of $20–50-plus million for award contenders), resonates with the “quality” features of the Classical era. It’s a production ethos mythologized by the studio’s own fictionalizations of Hollywood history, deepened by Netflix’s Sunset Boulevard headquarters and intensive Oscar campaigning (36 nominations for the recent competition, the most of any studio). All the while, it has been pioneering a more flexible, personalized form of production and

exhibition entirely unlike legacy forms of film and TV. Sarandos once quipped that the business of content is a blend of algorithmic evidence and gut feeling. From early on, Netflix cultivated a liberal public image, which has propelled its investment in social documentary and also driven some of its inclusivity initiatives and collaborations with global auteurs and showrunners of color, such as Alfonso Cuarón, Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, and Justin Simien. This has also led to architecting multi-picture mega-deals with public personalities such as the Obamas and the Windsor-Markles. Netflix is currently leading its peer streamers with 195 million subscribers, even as it lacks (for now, at least) a large library and periodically generates some bizarre flops (no finer failure than Bear Grylls’s You vs. Wild). Disney’s embrace of family-friendly entertainment shapes Disney+’s catalog of animated films and key franchises. The notion that individual projects ultimately serve the parent brand is apparent from the logo.

“Disney+” hovers above a horizontal list of assets, which have come to include Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel. The lyrical arc of a crescent line extends from the iconic “D” to the “+,” as if framing a dome under which the IP exists. The prominence of the Disney brand, along with emphatic self-referentiality, is nothing new. The company’s “science-factual” programming and Walt Disney’s Disneyland 95

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TV show in the 1950s attracted attention to its theme parks, which in turn garnered interest in its animation films and merchandize. Fast forward to Disney+, and One Day at Disney and Prop Culture offer a deep dive into the inner workings of the empire and how the creative process of “imagineering” is distributed from the top downward, beginning with former CEO Bob Iger and extending to everyone from the animators to the story artists, theme park performers, and animal doctors. Even the narratives connect thematically: tales of individual acts of virtuous heroism and the sanctity of the nuclear family transcend franchises, as well as the fiction/ nonfiction and human/nonhuman divide. AT&T’s spinoff of WarnerMedia, which in turn merged with Discovery in 2021, was both an admission of a failure on the part of HBO Max and Discovery+, and a concerted effort by both parties to stake out a stronger position within the streaming landscape. HBO Max had originally aimed to build on its key asset’s motto — “It’s not TV. It’s HBO” — and position itself as providing a more selective array of arthouse dramas, investigative documentaries, and big-budget franchise films (Godzilla, Batman). It featured a sleek, less cluttered interface for a slightly higher subscription fee ($14.99/month for ad-free) that reinforced the must-see nature of its offerings. Discovery+, on the other hand, is tied for the cheapest of platforms ($4.99/month). For decades, Discovery had been a major player in nonfiction, or what the platform has recently taken to calling “real-life entertainment.” At launch, Discovery+ contained a staggering 50 original series, including explainer films, game shows, reality TV, lifestyle programming, and self-help series that appeared across HGTV, DIY 96

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Network, Food Network, and TLC. Still, both HBO Max and Discovery+ underwhelmed in their initial roll-outs, failing to capture a strong subscriber base. Whatever form their merger takes, it is clear that the two entities together form a new kind of “high-low” brand. Amazon Prime Video is going through a similar transformation of its own. Jeff Bezos doesn’t do anything small, and the company’s recent purchase of MGM for $8.45 billion will help the tech behemoth reconcile Amazon Studios’s boutique indie film operation with the warehouse of the media world that is Amazon Prime. Epic Misfires, Slow Starts, and Mixed Messages Quibi promised to be a streaming service geared toward the small, vertically oriented screen of the smart phone. The brainchild of Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Silicon Valley maven Meg Whitman, the company assembled a large war chest ($1.75 billion) and boasted an original documentary series by LeBron James (I Promise) and an action-thriller (Most Dangerous Game) starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz. Quibi specialized in programs that were 10 minutes or less and inscribed its target length into its very title: Quibi as short for “Quick Bites.” In turn, the promos wouldn’t so much emphasize “the what” of the programming as the interest and convenience of being able to watch it while waiting, commuting, or just taking a break. However, this unit of prospective viewing time lies uncomfortably between the ultra-brief TikTok video and the half-hour sitcom. The COVID-19 crisis prevented Quibi from course-correcting

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Hannah Black, Beginning, End, None (2019), Installation View at Performance Space New York. Photography: Da Ping Luo. Courtesy: The Artist and Performance Space New York, New York.

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in any way, as it was precisely those experiences of travel and short-term waiting that the pandemic neutralized. Of all the platforms, NBCUniversal’s Peacock shares the most DNA with legacy TV, building its brand on what people already love about it: namely, its affordability, liveness, and topicality. The logo speaks to this sense of stability, drawing on the old Peacock mascot of NBC and a rainbow of vertically aligned buttons to suggest the “channels” viewers can choose from.

Most importantly, unlike its competitors, Peacock offers a free, adsupported subscription option. The content includes flagship NBC TV shows such as Parks and Recreation and The Office, freshly pulled from rival streamers, as well as news, sports from around the world, and reboots of SoCal ’90s kitsch favorites Saved by the Bell and Bel-Air. As the 2020 Tokyo Olympics was to be Peacock’s major showcase and opportunity to strut its plumage, its delay due to the pandemic stymied the platform’s reach. Peacock’s central obstacle moving forward will be convincing would-be subscribers that the things they loved about linear broadcast and cable TV are worth the investment. Apple TV+’s rollout has been the trickiest thus far. The platform began without a ready-made catalog of content, but at least one of its essential challenges was clear: channel the company’s 98

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allure as a laboratory of sleek consumer tech into a studio for cutting edge filmmaking. In part, this meant aligning the aura of Steve Jobs with the auteurs that the company planned to sign. A promising launch event featuring the likes of M. Night Shyamalan, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey waxing poetic about the art of cinematic storytelling, however, has not been followed by a strong enough lineup of films and series or a clearly defined identity. Instead of digging deeper into its parent brand, which might have generated promising narrative intersections of sci-fi, fantasy, documentary, and melodrama, Apple TV+ launched with too little original content (14 movies, 32 shows, and a comparatively low content spend of $1.9 billion) alongside a multitude of films to rent or buy. One of its star producer-directors, J. J. Abrams, walked away from a $500 million exclusive contract, and CEO Tim Cook struggled to explain the company’s misguided 2018 assertion in the Wall Street Journal that it would not showcase “gratuitous sex, profanity, or violence.” The Impression of Totality The internet loves its metaphors, and the impulse by journalists, critics, and industry personnel to speak in adversarial terms makes for a more dramatic narrative. Vivid cover art from the news and entertainment press likens the streamers to ships engaged in a nautical race (The New York Times Magazine) or a Royal Rumble wrestling match (Thrillist). One of the most intriguing and revealing of metaphors, however, isn’t so much related to war as celestial coexistence of streamer-planets within the “universe.” Certainly, the term

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resonates with key franchises, such as the alternative forms of films and media, and “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” and the what the social experience of making and bevvy of intricate stories that such an ex- viewing them might be. pansive environment makes possible. This language stakes a claim for the totality of media — that there are no other kinds of moving images beyond what exists on, or what can be imagined for, these select platforms. Much has been said about how these streamers’ consolidation of power comes with the threat of increasingly higher pricing, homogenized style, inflexible exhibition protocols, and invasive datamining. But there are still additional threats to consider. As these companies continue to amass their holdings of films, series, and live entertainment, they collectively signal a utopia of consumer choice. But the reality is closer to the philosophy of organization guru-turned-Netflix personality Marie Kondo: media will only gain entry to the interconnected walled gardens of these platforms (and retain the right to stay) to the extent that it “sparks joy.” Put another way, programming must fit within the calculus of subscriber growth and retention. Such is the eternal sunshine of the for-profit streamers. This charts a rough path forward for projects that are formally experimental, collectively authored, politically radical, or come from other marginalized corners of moving image culture. The streamers’ enthusiastic claims to an abundance of quality, combined with their perpetual “tidying up” and “de-cluttering,” results in a more limited selection than viewers may realize. Not only does this wreak havoc on a richer and more complex understanding of film and TV history, as searching historically on these platforms is a perpetually disorienting experience. These moves ultimately limit our ability to imagine 99

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Jayce Salloum, cat falling, from the video: “The Ascent of Man..” Part II: Conditions of Mercy”, 6:15, 1986. Image courtesy of the artist.

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STREAMING ENTHUSIASM AND THE INDUSTRIOUS FA M I LY D R A M A MICHAEL SZALAY

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he Streaming Area Has Finally Arrived. Everything is About to Change,” declared Brooks Barnes in a 2019 New York Times article. He went on to proclaim that “[t]he long-promised streaming revolution — the next great leap in how the world gets its entertainment — is finally here.” There would be little point in asking who made the promise, so commonplace has it been for almost a decade. But a particularly revealing version of this cliché appeared in a 2014 New Yorker piece about Netflix, the essence of which was that new media was about to destroy TV as a business model, a kind of content, and a distribution system. “Television is undergoing a digital revolution,” wrote Ken Auletta. He quoted the 101

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venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who co-invented the browser that later became Netscape: “TV in 10 years is going to be one hundred percent streamed.” It’s safe to say that TV will not be 100 percent streamed by 2024, if by streamed we mean delivered over the internet. Streaming has gained significant ground on cable and satellite but has not yet achieved a decisive dominance: according to a 2021 Pew Research report, the percentage of Americans who watch on cable or satellite has fallen from 76 percent in 2015 to 56 percent this year. Then again, enthusiasm over streaming has never been about numbers alone. From academic titles like The Television Will Be Revolutionized and Distribution Revolution to the always enthusiastic pages of Wired, a legion of scholars, critics, and fans have proclaimed that internet distribution has fundamentally changed — no, revolutionized! — television, such that it has become something entirely unprecedented, a new medium entirely. Writing the same year as Auletta, Amanda Lotz waxed similarly breathless while describing the shift from TV’s mass-market “network era” to its micro-cast “post-network era”: The changes in television that have taken place over the past two decades — whether the gross abundance of channel and program options we now select among or our increasing ability to control when and where we watch — are extraordinary and on the scale of the transition from one medium to another, as in the case of the shift from radio to television.

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I’ll return to the question of when and where we watch TV at the end of this essay. Here I note that Lotz can declare TV a new medium in part because of the importance she accords technology: “Rather than enhancing existing business models, industrial practices, and viewing norms, recent technological innovations have engendered new ones.” But enthusiasm over TV’s new tech and its ostensibly changed medium gets us only so far. If we want to take the full measure of what streaming has meant — and what it hasn’t — we need to look more closely than we typically do at TV content itself. Technological innovation does seem to have transformed the industry. As of this writing, Netflix’s market capitalization is around $225 billion, well beyond Disney’s. Legacy studios have rushed to replicate everything from Netflix’s costplus financing production (which gives production companies less profit participation in what they produce than does deficit-financing models) to its compression algorithms. That rush has resulted in an abundance of offerings, which providers tailor to consumers as never before — again, with new tech. Netflix caused a stir a few years back when it claimed to use taste algorithms to determine viewer preferences among “76,897 micro-genres.” The New York Times thought those algorithms would allow the company to make “the mysterious alchemy of finding a hit […] a product of logic and algorithms.” Then again, finding a hit might not be the point. The more advanced the algorithms, and the more diversified the field of production, the less necessity there is for single hits to tentpole mass audiences. Certainly, Netflix seems eager to make us each an audience of one, the recipient of bespoke TV. Our customized user icons whisper to

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us, this TV is for you. And yet, if we look away from the dizzying array of choices that confront us when we log in, we might ask ourselves not simply if Netflix really knows us all that well, but also if the genres that we watch now are really so very different from those we watched 10 or 15 years ago. And if not, does it make sense to say that TV has evolved into something unprecedented? Though newcomers like Netflix have produced an abundance of offerings, a new age of quantity TV, the TV industry remains organized around quality TV, and to a still largely invisible meta-genre that has governed its production for some 20 years. That meta-genre’s function has been both to coordinate more long-standing and familiar genres and new ones as they now emerge, and to selectively endow both with the patina of quality. In thus producing distinctions within and thereby governing TV’s larger genre system, it has been the programming, as it were, the old media software, that has mattered most to the industry. In a forthcoming book, Television’s Second Lives, I call that meta-genre “the industrious family drama.” Codified by shows like The Sopranos, Big Love, Weeds, and Breaking Bad, and still replicated in streaming fare like Ozark, the genre finds white middle-class families living secret second lives, while working furiously, typically in black markets, to outpace a threatening downward mobility. Shows with these general features — and they are legion — might well appear on your Netflix homepage as a microgenre. But the industrious family drama proper is not simply an averaging of this or that plot, style, or mood. It is also, more fundamentally, an argument — about what it means to watch TV now, some 50 years into

the US economy’s deindustrialization. Streaming — and indeed technological innovation generally — plays a very small role in that generic argument. And this important genre has changed relatively little since streaming’s advent. ¤ It’s worth recalling just how ardently journalists and critics greeted The Sopranos and the dramas made in its wake. By all accounts, here was an aesthetic revolution rather than a technological one. No popular entertainment has since received anything like the sheer quantity of impassioned praise heaped on cable dramas in the years following the premiere of The Sopranos. The New York Times compared HBO’s crime drama to the films of Erich von Stroheim and Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the one hand and to James Joyce’s Ulysses on the other, while crowning it “the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century.” Brett Martin thought The Sopranos inaugurated the “twelve- or thirteen-episode serialized drama” that would become “the signature American art form of the first decade of the 21st century.” Critics have given these dramas a multitude of names: not simply “quality TV,” a term that’s been around at least since the 1970s, but also “Prestige TV,” “Complex TV,” “the Complex Serial Drama,” “Peak TV,” “New TV,” and “Third Golden Age” TV. Soap operas and primetime dramas like Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks paved the way for the complexly plotted serial storytelling at the heart of “quality TV,” the term I use. Many add that this TV has cinematic and literary characteristics. Sopranos creator David Chase insisted that episodes of his drama were “mini 103

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films,” not TV at all, and HBO, of course, had been declaring its fare “Not TV” for decades before enthusiasts like Barnes attributed the “blurring” of TV and film to the streaming “onslaught.” Novelists saw their own craft in this new TV. Jennifer Egan said her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Good Squad (2010), optioned by HBO, was inspired by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and … The Sopranos. Others described conversion experiences and joked about a seismic inversion of hierarchies; “I’ve given up on fiction,” quipped Gary Shteyngart. “And like every other writer in America, I’m working on an HBO series.” As Michael Chabon put it, “There can’t be a novelist in America who watched The Wire and didn’t think, ‘Oh my God, I want to do something like that.’” “The tapestry is so broad, it’s like a 19th-century novel.” Television’s newfound prestige gave top-shelf talent permission to decamp into TV production, even as Hollywood abandoned small- and medium-scale film productions and doubled down on heavily branded blockbusters. And Netflix began very quickly to model itself on legacy studios. In 2011, some four years after it started streaming, Netflix announced it would move into original TV production. As Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos put it just before the release of House of Cards, the provider’s first entry into serial drama, “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” A different version of that convergence of old and new media played out at the level of content. Quality serialized dramas prompted comparisons between otherwise distinct media (visual and print, say) and genres, broadly conceived (the serial TV drama and the novel, say). “Television,” said famed futurist William 104

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Gibson in 2010, “particularly at the HBO level in the United States — [has] become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing — there was no equivalent to that medium before. It’s like a new way of telling stories.” Here was the novelist who popularized “cyberspace” and first fictionalized a version of the internet announcing a new kind of drama as if it were revolutionary tech. But what does it mean to consider a “new way of telling stories” a new genre as well as a new medium? When considering the usefulness of the term “medium,” Raymond Williams wrote that “[e]very specific art has dissolved into it, at every level of its operations” — both “specific social relationships” and “specific material means of production, on the mastery of which its production depends.” Those specific relationships and materials express generalized social and technical relations of production, and there should be no account of any artistic medium, Williams argued, that does not establish the significance of both. In Television: Technology and Cultural Form, he showed what this meant for broadcast TV, by tracing its origins to the “transformation of industrial production, and its new social forms, which had grown out of a long history of capital accumulation.” For Williams, broadcast was a response to “new and larger settlements and industrial organizations [that] required major internal mobility.” That mobility produced “the dispersal of extended families” and created a need for “new kinds of social organizations.” TV kept an otherwise isolated nuclear family connected to a larger world. “[N]ew homes might appear private and ‘self-sufficient,’” he wrote, “but could be maintained only by regular funding and supply from external sources,

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and these, over a range from employment and prices to depressions and wars, had a decisive and often a disrupting influence on what was nevertheless seen as a separable ‘family’ project.” TV shaped and sustained that project, by reconciling the family’s imagined autonomy to its external dependencies. Television Studies has long recognized the importance of that family project. But, preoccupied as it is with infrastructure, its critical terms rarely encompass what Williams calls “the long history of capital accumulation.” Indeed, if on the one hand the discipline offers few comprehensive accounts of how the TV industry and even specific media transnationals function within a larger capitalist system, on the other, it offers little in the way of systematic narrative analysis (work on global TV formats is an interesting exception). When not taxonomizing genres with categories supplied by the industry itself, the discipline tends to identify extremely broad rubrics (Lotz’s “cable guys,” for instance). Jason Mittell’s Complex TV is an outlier to this general pattern; even so, it doesn’t read TV complexity so much as insist that it is there. Jeffrey Sconce thinks the discipline’s eschewal of close reading prevents it from considering TV’s medium as it otherwise might: “Despite the isolated efforts of scholars […] to initiate debate over the aesthetic properties of the medium, television remains for the most part a technological and cultural problem to be solved rather than a textual body to be engaged.” TV Studies might read that textual body more closely than it does, but not, I would stress, in the name of aesthetic appreciation. Reading genres as they emerge within a larger genre system, not simply as they are marketed, for instance, allows

us to conceive of TV’s system more accurately. It also allows us to think of TV’s medium in a new way. Because however much “specific social relationships” might “dissolve” into exclusively technological considerations of the medium, they remain visible as content — above all, as content that speaks to TV’s contradictory “‘family’ project.” ¤ “Serialized drama” is a broad category, and Gibson wasn’t pointing to anything so specific as the industrious family drama when he invoked TV’s “whole new way of telling stories.” Still, that genre, which has come to include 30-minute comedy and 60-minute drama formats, almost exclusively on internet and cable TV, has been dominant for 20 years. Its most significant feature is that its central character or characters live secret second lives. Those lives might involve black markets (The Sopranos, Weeds, Hung, Breaking Bad, Shameless, Sons of Anarchy, Peaky Blinders, Ozark), a hidden or remembered past or closeted identity (Six Feet Under, Big Love, Nurse Jackie, Mad Men, Sneaky Pete, True Blood, Rectify, Orange Is the New Black, The Handmaid’s Tale), murder or espionage (Dexter, Bloodline, Barry, Homeland, The Americans, Patriot, Killing Eve, Counterpart), or an alternate reality (Twin Peaks, The Leftovers, The Man in the High Castle, Counterpart, Forever, Stranger Things, Undone, Lodge 49). Secret lives might be kept from a variety of actors, from other family members to neighbors to the state. And those lives might take shape within any number of recognizable generic formats: The Sopranos owes its greatest debt to the gangster film; Dexter, to serial killer narratives; The 105

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Americans, to the cold war thriller; Mad Men, to postwar suburban fiction and soap opera melodrama; The Man in the High Castle, to science fiction and alternate reality narratives. What matters is that, in all of these programs, second lives allow characters to “awake,” as Breaking Bad, Killing Eve, and Undone all put it, from the slumber of their first lives. We awaken too: meth makes for more exciting drama than does high-school chemistry. But the underground to which the protagonists of the TV dramas are drawn are inevitably revealed to be some version of the home writ large, as with Soprano’s two “families.” There is no world beyond the home to which Soprano or by implication the drama’s viewers can escape. Across the genre, alternate worlds disappoint; they cannot transport either their characters or their viewers beyond the domestic tedium from which each desires an escape. As the fantastical becomes again mundane, life beyond the family becomes another version of it. The genre produces a hall of mirrors, in which, say, Tony Soprano’s work in the mob becomes a distorted echo of, rather than a world apart from, his homelife — each “family” now an allegory of the other. At its baroque fringes, the genre transforms that doubling into identical twins and murderous doppelgängers. But core instances of the industrious family drama created in the two decades following The Sopranos tend to reiterate a key point: work beyond the middle-class household has become indistinct from work within it, such that there can be no escape from one separate sphere into another. What begins as escape must end in allegory. To use a different literary term, these dramas are Gothic to the extent that they describe, to quote Eve Sedgewick, a 106

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self that is “massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access.” Across the genre, that something is a world of waged or salaried work beyond the home. More specifically, it is a world defined by “the family wage,” which during the heyday of US industrialization allowed (mainly white) men to support their families on one income. Typically, when historians trace the retreat of the family wage, they note the entrance of women into the formal workforce and the concomitant rise of two-income households. But whether men or women, the genre’s leads rarely support their families with state-recognized incomes, and they rarely work for the giant concerns that still dominate broadcast TV: corporations, hospitals, police forces, etc. The industrious family drama instead captures the household in extremis, navigating some black-market enterprise. The off-the-books nature of these businesses matters more than the specific commodities or services produced. Because if, on the one hand, informal work allows networks like HBO to romance a stylized underground life, on the other it anticipates the rise in the United States of the grindingly precarious, labor-intensive, gray market “mass industriousness” that defines life in much of the underdeveloped world. To be sure, industrious dramas evoke the “presence bleed” and “partial presence” experienced by knowledge workers whose salaries obviate time sheet surveillance and who were able, after the advent of the internet, to work flexibly from domiciles that might have felt, as a consequence, a lot less like home. But more fundamentally, they evoke deindustrialization’s upheavals in the lower rungs of the middle class, as once secure career work bleeds into casualized, outsourced, and frequently

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off-the-books proletarian work. In this growing sector, formal waged and salaried work is no longer adequate to the family’s survival, and no longer fully distinct from the range of informal work with which a growing number of families now supplement their state-recognized incomes. The genre’s families are industrious to the extent that they scramble collectively and off the books for their economic survival. Along the way, they lose their state-sponsored sanctity. “A family is like a small business,” says Ozark’s Marty Byrde. The fallout from his firm’s money laundering sends his family on the run. The estranged husband and wife come together managing illegal businesses. They now work side-by-side rather than apart, and increasingly with their children — but do so under new auspices. “We are not husband and wife anymore,” he tells her. “We are just business partners.” Across the genre, similar predicaments transform once sacrosanct family values — and any lingering delusion that home is a safe haven, where the heart is. Now, home is where the work is. As a consequence, it is everywhere and nowhere, a true purgatory. Wherever you go at the end of the day, someone asks Philip Jennings in The Americans, “is ‘home’ the right word?” In Killing Eve, a character asks, “Home? What do you mean, ‘home’? Where is that exactly?” Walter White escapes his home to become a drug lord; but his newfound work finds him cooking (meth), cleaning (money), and raising (and breaking) a second son. Early versions of the genre seethe with a suppurating resentment that white men have been subjected to the housework to which their wives and minorities were long consigned. At its origins, this is a genre of embittered, white male

self-pity. As it evolved, the industrious family drama turned to white women facing far more pernicious home confinements. In Weeds, Orange Is the New Black, and The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, women struggle to escape the sexual division of labor integral to industrialization and separate spheres. But here too, escapes fail, and TV falls back upon itself. Again and again, the genre discovers that, in a world defined by a newly capacious category of housework, there is nothing but TV, HBO’s slogan notwithstanding. And as the genre has it, the transformation of the white middle-class family throws into doubt the ability of TV’s electronic hearth to preserve any longer the home’s sanctity while connecting it to a larger world. It declares the end of the family project that Williams places at the heart of broadcast TV. ¤ The broadcast schedule, it’s worth remembering, was built from the ground up around the family wage and the rhythms of the male breadwinner’s 9-to-5 work week. As Nick Browne puts it, even [Even] the position [and content] of programs in the television schedule reflects and is determined by the work-structured order of the real social world. The patterns of position and flow imply the question of who is at home, and through complicated social relays and temporal mediations, link television to the modes, processes, and scheduling of production characteristic of the general population. […] Television establishes its relation to the “real,” not only through codes of realistic representation, but through the schedule, to the socially mediated order of the workday and the workweek. 107

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Writing in the early 1990s, Browne would have witnessed the rise of cable networks like MTV and HBO, and with them, new micro-cast forms of repeat and, later, on-demand programming not necessarily organized around the sale of commodities, no longer fully subject to FCC oversight and, no accident, newly hostile to state authority. But he gets at a truth more fundamental: we cannot understand how TV responds to “who is at home” without first understanding changes in the working day and the composition of the labor force. Far from a bleeding edge that has radically transformed how we live, the streaming revolution has been an accommodation to capital as it adapts to falling rates of profit. Streaming is casualized viewing for a casualized workforce — its on-demand serialized narratives, above all, a form of surrogate continuity and stability for workers increasingly denied both. Still more specifically, the Gothic claustrophobia of the industrious family drama — which cannot escape either home or work, the two having become the same — is a generic mediation of the lost “divisions within individuals’ lives” that economist Aaron Benanav associates with informal labor, “between labor-force participation and non-participation, between waged and unwaged work, between employer and employee, and between levels of labor productivity.”

It needn’t matter here whether we attribute these changes to “neoliberalism,” “post-Fordism,” or “flexible accumulation.” What matters is that broadcast TV was from the start a state-sponsored system that existed in the service of an expanding manufacturing base. The Big Three received broadcast rights from the state, and in 108

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turn disseminated state ideology while selling commodities. These networks were the beating heart of America’s industrial economy. But eventually, and however named, the postwar US order experienced heart failure — in the final analysis, because of systemically declining industrial profits, not because new tech heroically disrupted ossified industries. The so-called New Economy of the 1990s was a shell game, in which it seemed for a while that the internet and a host of related technologies would generate labor efficiencies capable of reversing deindustrialization ravages. But all that was new was the name: the internet was and is simply the latest technological fix with which capital has endeavored to decrease its living labor costs while increasing its profits. Thus has it been for quite some time. And, as Giovanni Arrighi makes plain, once that cycle exhausts itself in a world-leading economy, that economy enters into terminal decline. The seat of world power then moves elsewhere, typically to an ascendant economy in the throes of industrial expansion. We remain mesmerized by the New Economy shell game, particularly when we gush about the streaming revolution. The industrious family drama seems beholden to a different illusion. At first blush, it seems to preserve the privilege and prestige of the besieged white family, no less than the power and position of the flagging empire that supports it. In so frequently taking up that family, the crucible of the nation’s self-regard, the genre appears intent to keep the party going, if only for a little longer. But there can

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be no escaping the failure and collapse that suffuses these dramas. And if we watch closely, we might learn something about the real revolution through which we’ve all been living.

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Kayla Ephros, still life, 2020, graphite on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Fernand Deligny, LE SERRET 25 SEPTEMBRE 1974, a map traced by Jacques Lin. September 25th, 1974, 63 x 52 cm. Image courtesy of Editions L’Arachnéen.

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THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD JORGE COTTE

he fugitive and runaway slave Cora steps onto the tracks. She must see to believe, and she must be seen. Her hand rises to shield against a glare that makes a target of her between strange lines of rail, and hot light barrels toward the frame until it dominates, until it is damn near everything but the hint of a shoulder, a tuft of hair, the hiss of clamping brakes. The Underground Railroad is a performance in illumination. Exhausted of bearing its unheralded duty, the source that makes figures visible is put on full display. Cora’s encounter with light in a subterranean station is an example of how this show presses on light’s possibilities: its starkness and brutality, its withholding, its glow, which can hold a face tenderly or consume it, fade figures into background or crush them into panorama. 111

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Cora is the protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel and comes to our screens via Barry Jenkins’s limited series on Amazon Prime. As with any adaptation, these texts illuminate and reflect on each other, but the circuit between novel and adaptation is complicated by the novel’s relationship to its own historical source material — it follows Cora’s escape on a literal underground railroad, drawing on and anachronistically embellishing historical US contexts from the early 19th century to Jim Crow — and by Jenkins’s associative relationship to storytelling, his attentions to moments of stillness and plays of pure luminescence. The series expands on the novel, adding characters and backstory, but it is a critical translation that foregrounds technologies of seeing. On The Underground Railroad, illumination travels across media, refracting and shapeshifting, secreted through description in the novel, chemical writing with light in photography, and as the force behind celluloid’s live projection. Screens supply their own light, and are glowing, chromatic windows, through which we might see or be framed. Through Jenkins’s sensibilities, The Underground Railroad remixes the conventions of the small screen. The show bears televisual aspects, such as needle drops that punctuate each episode’s ending credits and digressions that other forms lack space to accommodate, but Jenkins’s ambitious tele-cinema emerges in a streaming environment that flaunts its freedom from commercial breaks and the limitations of standardized run-times. The series is episodic, but its episodes owe as much of a debt to those of 112

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Whitehead’s novel — a picaresque, like Gulliver’s Travels — as they do the formal conventions of episodic television series. The show plays with characters like a novel, trusting viewers to integrate an ensemble of conductors, antagonists, and allies, who spark and recede into the trains’ dust clouds. It lingers on moments that don’t advance the plot, refrains pitched to a reflective tone, refusing to telegraph to viewers how they should feel. The language of Whitehead’s novel is pushed beyond depiction and beyond analogy, refracted on the screen. The media context in which the show arrives is unavoidable. To watch the show, we must navigate Amazon’s video service, where the work appears next to a standard procedural like Bosch, a niche film anthology like Small Axe, and a surrealist dreamscape like Undone. Someone somewhere is coming off a binge of old episodes of Downton Abbey, deciding whether to dig into The Underground Railroad or just watch Mission: Impossible. Maybe we will find it in streaming’s identity-driven genres, before Comedy and Coming of Age — Black Voices. It is perhaps only in this context that The Underground Railroad’s category avoidance makes sense, on the current of Barry Jenkins’s filmmaking journey, adapting from a novelist James Wood accused of writing in a “filmic” mode, and at a time when content is produced at increasing scales, faced with a demand for more diverse avenues of storytelling, or at least the appearance of diversity, all pitched into the desensitizing blur of streaming. Film, television, something new? Or else, just streaming. The

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Underground Railroad fills these buckets and overspills them. Its component parts are set out for appreciation on their own merits, and they are occasionally framed in ways that exceed the series’s ten-episode structure. Nicholas Britell’s score, for instance, can be streamed in three volumes, and is its own kind of sprawling: epic, haunting, and romantic. The assortment of architectures and textiles announce themselves as much as they do the specificity of each evolution in setting and period. The spectra of colors across chapters, pitched to emulate of classic film stocks and reference such photographers as Gordon Parks, Erwin Olaf, and Jacques Henri Lartigue. Jenkins’s organic tableaux have been uploaded to Vimeo independently in a work called simply “The Gaze.” These are improvisational moments of filmmaking, given space to breathe outside the boundaries of the show. Jenkins’s is a filmmaking practice that comes alive as something other than a unified final product. These outflows are invitations to keep thinking with the show’s provocations, not least of which radiates from obtrusive bursts of light. The Underground Railroad revels in the lens flare. One of cinema’s most widely adopted mistakes, the flare as we know it is an inheritance traced to cinematographers of the late 1960s who valued realism and mobility over propriety. They rebelled against old rules of lighting that said that actors and landscapes should be shot a certain way and that lighting should remain out of sight, which was really a way of naturalizing certain looks and ways of looking. The flares in The Underground Railroad are not mere artifacts, pulled

and suspended across the screen. And not flourishes, but the visual signature of a strategy that makes light a central figure on screen. Throughout the series, cinematographer James Laxton and his crew harness the flames of illumination and grow them wild: brilliant orbs cover the frame, brightening the ground past legibility, consuming faces and cutting figures into dazzling silhouettes. In the first chapter — and they are called chapters, not episodes, after all — flares radiate and absorb the frame. They are the sun’s force in the potent stillness after Cora gives Caesar the brush-off, shine descending over Big Anthony, who crowns a young boy in a straw hat before his ill-fated escape attempt, the pall of death in the sky as James Randall, the scraggly slaveowner, collapses. Through lucent windows, Cora is a delicate shadow when the slavecatcher Ridgeway stares into her, feeling her anger but missing its source. Light catches in the intensity of Big Anthony’s suffering, enshrouding the frame in sickly hues. Finally, the train’s avant-garde, what Cora walks into, a path in darkness. Illumination, then, is meticulously brought to account. Sources are always close at hand. Not an arrival but a matter of degree; a luminescence that had always been here but now rebels. It is prompting us to acknowledge it, to chase it, to see if we can see visibilities, which are not reducible to the visible. The peril lies in confusing visibility with a characteristic, something that belongs to objects or that light reveals. “How might light be illuminated?” asks Eugenie Brinkema. Light refuses to reflect, to show up. If light 113

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is to be illuminated, it must be found in its effects, in the force it exerts and the traces it leaves. Here, light acts — impresses — on the screen, making self-evident its non-neutrality. Despite the mass democratization of image-making in the 21st century, a certain kind of well-funded spotlight holds up as the meaningful stage where power unveils itself. We can’t seem to get away from a version of visibility that is, in Rey Chow’s words, “implicitly analogized to power, hegemony, status, and authority […] as something desirable.” The rabid production and circulation of images, that is incomprehensible, even for us living in it, except as intensity, has not dulled the demands for representation but accelerated them. When she stars in a museum exhibit Whitehead’s text names “Typical Day on the Plantation,” surrounded by the curious, burrowing eyes, Cora learns visibility as a state of confinement. The edges of light, and enlightenment, as in the “luminous environment” of the panopticon, cut both ways, so that visibility is not emancipation but entrapment: “precisely as it enables one to be seen, it also enables one to be caught.” What I’ve described as the show’s interruptions of luminosity are extra-narrative touches, pressure points at the extreme of visuality. They might tell us something about the sun’s force or the opacity of characterization, a visual touch that cannot be assigned to a cinematic or televisual gaze, a kind of anti-representational swerve, perhaps. Backlit against a window, Cora is something less and more than a subject. Where Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad pushes against 114

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the rote imaging of Whitehead’s descriptions, beyond adaptation as analogy, where language and visibility fully diverge, is where the show is most free as a piece of media. In aggregate, the interruptions make light as force visible, against which we might see where light hides, whether illumination captures more than it frees. In North Carolina, Cora’s captivity in an attic restages one of the central images from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs in which the narrator tells of seven years spent in a crawlspace evading her pursuer. Jonathan Beller reads Jacobs’s scene of captivity as a model for the camera obscura that reveals an originary imbrication between photography and chattel slavery. Like Cora and her attic companion, Grace, Jacobs observes the world through a peephole. She watches her children grow up without being able to touch them or even alert them to her presence. This “being in camera” enacts the double-sidedness of a scopic regime that, in Beller’s terms, violently reduces Jacobs to a nearly “pure observer” on one side and “pure object” on the other. After hiding in plain sight in South Carolina, encountering its racist experiments and restagings of the cotton field, visibility means something different in North Carolina. The attic, like the underground, is an inbetween place, as Marquis Bey writes, a place for fugitivity, and a space for seeing in the dark. Light becomes apparent, can be reexamined from the attic, but it is also a space of deprivation that takes its cost out on Cora’s body. Visibility means capture and death, but the other side of looking is no less constricting.

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Jayce Salloum, “I can’t keep quiet about things that are wrong..”, Nameh Hussein Suleiman (in Baddawi refugee ‘camp', near Tripoli, Lebanon), from the video: “untitled part 3a: occupied territories” 23:00, 2001 . Image courtesy of the artist.

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Cora and Grace are rendered observers, and they are drawn by the texture of light. A beam enters their crawlspace, recalling the cone of a film projector or an arm of light reaching down an underground railroad station. Grace plays with the light, fliting her hands through the beam, feeling it between her fingers.The embodied protocamera of the crawlspace presages the next evolution in regimes of looking. Fred Moten, in Black and Blur, draws our attention to the arrival of the aural and temporal in Jacobs’s descriptions of a vision she has in a particular beam of moonlight. At the interplay of music and light, Moten writes, Jacobs is “on the way to cinema.” Cinema’s too-early arrival in a state where black people’s very existence has been outlawed supplies a model of visibility intimately recognizable, one that has not been outwitted by the reiterating technologies of imaging, one that demands black people’s invisibility and feeds on their hypervisibility. And while Jacobs rides the “lawless freedom of imagination” from her crawlspace, conjuring a vision of her children whom she “has and cannot have, sees and cannot see,” Cora and Grace see another display: a black woman executed ritualistically by a community that does not admit the presence of black people. From within the problematic of visibility, screen depictions of chattel slavery are not merely vehicles of truth, and truth proportionate to the ferocity of their violence, but must circulate to intensify their empathic force. Like viral videos of antiblack violence, they must be seen and felt to be believed. It is especially the unrepresentable horror of enslavement that sheds light on 116

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the consuming empathy of witnesses, spectators, and gawkers who demand the crimes of slavery be put on display, that make lustrous spectacles concealing the “quotidian routines of slavery.” It is not just that “empathetic identification,” as Saidiya Hartman puts it, obscures black suffering in its efforts to illuminate it, but that the illumination is a projection into the captive body, making it a vessel and clouding the “materiality of suffering.” The Underground Railroad does not resist the temptation to locate truth-telling in the violence it spotlights, but the perverse inversions of empathy lead us back to a notion of visibility that is incompatible with the figures it makes appear. In “Georgia,” Big Anthony’s pained body is brought close and made to speak: his torture and execution become a narrative trigger, finally pushing Cora to accept Caesar’s plans for flight. Later, his body is sight for the spectacular, forcing itself back on screen through Cora’s trauma response. His pain is kept brutally in frame, but Anthony no longer appears. The particularities of the violence done to him reverberate throughout the series in the scorched landscapes of Tennessee, and in bursts of light that overpower the frame — an illumination that obscures what it brings into view. Light’s movement across media has refracted and crystallized ways of looking, and privileged the visible, but in the screen it’s found a luminous platform for its flat dominance. What visibility accomplishes in the proliferation of images on streaming and social media is accelerated circulation. A light for its own self. Tracking illumination and its interruptions across

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The Underground Railroad provides an opening to see light’s effects in the extreme; aimed into the frame of slavery’s unrepresentable representation, light exposes its blanketing force and provides an opening to peer into the mechanical conditions that make visibility possible, and the material conditions it must obscure.

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Jayce Salloum , koi (nishikigoi), “I imagined that my house was speaking to me..”, Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (Bourg al Barajinah refugee ‘camp', near Beirut, Lebanon), from the video: “untitled part 3b: (as if ) beauty never ends..”, 11:22, 2002 Image courtesy of the artist.

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A G A I N S T DAY T I M E AUSTEN LEAH ROSE

I went down to the river to spend the day with my friends. I sat on a rock. I opened my book. My eyes kept moving between the pages of the book and my friends who were swimming in the river. Nearby, a family shared a basket of fruit. The sun was hot. Soon, my legs burned. Of course the day would hurt me, I thought. The day doesn’t care about me. The day just takes and takes and offers nothing in return. As you can see, I felt sorry for myself. I squinted into the sun. There was something unsettled about the day. It was like flecks of gold floating in the river. It refused to amount to anything. Imagine a photograph where everyone is looking in a different direction. That’s what the day was like. This isn’t to say the day wasn’t beautiful. The water was clear and green like the eyes of a fortuneteller. But I had imagined I might speak to the day directly. That I could have been alone inside the day. I thought the sky might have selected me to wrap in its blue blanket and carry away. But the day was indifferent. It could not send or receive any secret messages. Its light fell on everyone equally. I went back to my book. The book was about an unhappy man. I had not yet gotten to the part where I learn why he is unhappy. We know so little about each other, I said to my friends. On this, we all agreed.

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T R U E S TO R Y CAMILLE DUNGY

The cat wandered between two women. In one house, the kibble and clear water. Sometimes, bits of roast chicken, even, sometimes, translucent fish skin. That’s the house that first called her its own and, for all those nights until she found the other woman, she’d purred there without asking for anything more. But, I’ve already told you, she found the other woman. Whose house held the wondrous calm of no children. A blessing. Wet food in the kitchen. Catnip growing for her in the yard. The women came to be like sister wives. Accepting, if not companionable. Opening and offering everything when the cat came around. For years this continued. They lived next door to each other, the women, on the wooded west slope of a mountain whose winding road runners liked to climb. The cat lay her body down first on one bed then on another until the arrangement settled into a system as unremarkable as love. One woman believed, as Issa believed, that in all things, even the small and patient snail, there are perceptible strings that tie each life to all others. The other woman

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was born in Chicago. There, the lake’s current carried a black boy past some unmarked line and a mob on the white beach threw rocks until the boy was no more. She didn’t side with the mob, this woman, but she knew where they came from. She came from there too. When the cat got sick, the woman from Chicago wanted to put her down quickly. The other woman wanted not so much for her to live forever as for her to fully live every second of her allotted time. Meanwhile, winter rain threatened the shallow-rooted eucalyptus on the hillside. Meanwhile, the runners still ran. The women argued in their divided driveway about how they’d prefer to die. Until she didn’t anymore, the cat continued eating in both the women’s houses.

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Jayce Salloum, dandelion, “..the reason behind the tears,..”, Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (in Bourg al Barajinah refugee ‘camp', near Beirut, Lebanon), from the video: “untitled part 3b: (as if ) beauty never ends..”, 11:22, 2002 . Image courtesy of the artist

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A L I V E TO L I F E I T S E L F MARY C APPELLO

hen asked recently by an interviewer for Kirkus if I could share a list of “favorite” lectures, I said I would begin by turning in the direction of conversations with my mother, which, I explained, move between and among music (she’ll often sing something), poetry (as it is apropos to our conversation), painting, or film. She remarks the state of her plants and the state of the world. She takes the pulse of the day, she shares her observations, she listens with humor, and she moves among and between these forms with a kind of abandon moored by memory, the uncanny coalescence of whose fragments create a magnetic charge that, though they are never pressed into the service of a lesson, create a feeling of being inspired and guided by aliveness to 123

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life itself. My mother may as well be the embodiment of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of the lecture as a “panharmonicon for variety of note.” She can move with as much conviction from Al Capp’s “bathless groggins” to the fact that the name “Laura” means “aurora”; from Jesus Christ Superstar’s “my mind is in a fog,” to the hopeful assurance that “into each life some good must come.” Sometimes she’d cry out, at a world when Trump was at the helm, a line from Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “Will no one rid us of this man!?,” then post a photograph of electrically charged sunflowers to Facebook. She refuses to allow her imagination to be felled. She will not give in to torpor or surcease. Before the crisis came — the crisis that had already arrived without our seeing it, the crisis that was always immanent, that we felt but could not fully countenance in the age of Trump — I wrote a book about the lecture as a lost and forgotten art form. I wrote parts of the book on little to no sleep while tending to my mother, who had taken a fall in her apartment. She had been misdiagnosed with a life-threatening infection, so my own fever dreams as I camped out on a couch adjacent to her bedroom had to do with whether I had properly read her temperature, or monitored the shifting hues of her swollen legs as they sped from rose to fiery red. Could I recognize the signs if the infection had moved from its surface locale to enter her bloodstream and brain? I’d thought I was keeping my mother alive. When a second doctor determined that nothing about my mother’s injury bespoke a staph infection, either locally or systemically, and that the earlier physician was probably just treating her prophylactically, especially as he was 124

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headed for vacation, I felt a combination of rage and relief, none of which minimized the pain I had experienced for and with her as she cried out in the course of many nights, twisted into a kind of torture that the heaviest of painkillers seemed unable to reach. I’m surprised that I’m able to think back from the vantage of these times on the details of those days, proving that, yes, there was a before-time to COVID-19, and that I lived those then, as I do now, tutored by my mother to take note, even and especially when circumstances dictate against seeing, feeling, hearing, thinking, or moving. I remember feeling the strangeness of glimpsing traces of my mother’s daily life: her apartment “as she’d left it” before she fell, even though she was still in her apartment. My fear of her leaving us hung about the objects in her place, every one touched, placed, arranged by her but now, somehow, existing in a space alongside, but without her. There were shot glasses on the kitchen counter, each of which had a single African violet leaf in them. I imagined the day she thought to snip them, hopeful for them to root. There was the painstaking trace of her having hung her socks with safety pins to a line she’d strung across the bathroom tub, and an index card she’d propped on the kitchen table with sentences penned in shorthand, harkening to her secretarial days some sixty years ago. I didn’t consider that she wrote the note this way because she was in a hurry to jot it down; clearly, it was something important, and not meant for anyone but her to read. Would I, wouldn’t I, or should I, shouldn’t I interpret it? I wouldn’t betray her privacy. Though my mother had not broken a single bone in the fall, she was terribly immobilized by her injuries. Since she

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couldn’t yet bathe herself, I took on that sacred charge — first watching a YouTube video (yes, really), before giving my mother a sponge bath and washing her hair. The first time, I wasn’t fast enough to dry her, and she was overcome with cold. I was trying too hard to get the nursing right — it was the way I did everything in life, applying a stringent perfectionism lest I be discovered for the fool that I am. On the second try, I was more able and willing to feel the sponge as it met her body, to let her help me; I leaned into her voice, and felt the holiness of the encounter. We shared the same thick curls — she still had jet black hair amid the gray at 84 — but her curves were hers and hers alone. The last time I’d seen my mother’s naked body, I remember realizing, was probably at birth. One night during this mutual trial, the pain was impossible, and I was hard pressed to find what might work to relieve her suffering. She couldn’t get out of bed and to the bathroom on her own, so I took her there throughout the night, each time fearing she might fall again. We listened to her favorite pianist — Sviatoslav Richter; I tried playing a meditation tape; nothing I thought of to deliver my mom from this long night of the soul did the trick, until she, herself, brought herself out of the pain and somehow slowly back to herself. She did this by reciting Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, most of which she knew by heart; even as she grew tired, she wanted it more, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow too — in particular, his Psalm of Life. Eventually, she asked to hear someone else in recitation, and Ian McKellen’s vocalization of Rime took us the rest of the way to daybreak. I wouldn’t want to say the poetry was an opiate — no, these poems were not

that. They did not, like codeine, knock her out. Like a good lecture, the poetry didn’t put her to sleep but allowed her to sleep. The tempo, the movement, the rising and subsiding, along with the fact of having committed the poems to memory and having carried them with her from a very young age under the tutelage of teachers she revered, not merely in some part of her mind but as a kind of bodily memory, tethered her and lifted her simultaneously. On notes near enough to resemble each other but equally far apart, she sang, “tell me not in mournful numbers” and “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” until eventually she drifted out of the unremitting present-ness of anguish to the prolonged and beautiful timelessness of sleep. ¤ When I talk with my mother on Facetime (our preferred modality to Zoom or Skype maybe because it makes us feel, phoneward, that we’re holding each other in our hands), she’ll remark, with a glassy puzzlement, that she feels she has “come to a standstill.” Do you think we’re in a perpetually recuperative state this year, I ask her, or in a state of blooming stasis? It’s a question some potted annuals had led me to ask during a COVID summer: a bunch of petunias, in three different hues, from Victorian yellow through royal purple to faded parchment blue — the color of airmail paper — that hadn’t at any point across a number of weeks required dead-heading. “The flowers on these plants, eerily, have not changed,” I wrote a friend. “They may as well be artificial to the extent they haven’t called for my care. I don’t know how they’re living — if they even are — and I’m hard-pressed to find 125

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Jayce Salloum, "I’m telling you this and I feel goose bumps”, Nameh Hussein Suleiman (in Baddawi refugee ‘camp', near Tripoli, Lebanon), from the video: “untitled part 3a: occupied territories”, 23:00, 2001 Image courtesy of the artist.

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them beautiful. If nothing about them has changed in weeks, can they really be said to be animate?” A living thing needs tending, a tending tantamount to change. The life or death of the virus works on my imagination similarly. Is the force that compels it to find a host the same that motivates a wisteria frond, mid-air, to seek a post to climb (“the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”)? When it “floats” inside “particles,” it is evidently not accurate to say that it is alive. Or is it? Perhaps it is alive but sleeping, inert until it “finds a way” to the environs of our bodily interiors, without which, it fails to proliferate and reproduce itself, without which, it would die. The virus needs its host in order, not exactly to exist, but to express itself, become itself, morph, or thrive. The lecture, like the essay that it eventually morphs into, asks that we look elsewhere than where we are trained to look — don’t turn to the center, look away. Meaning and truth await us in the wings, in the green room, in the underside of our consciousness, at dusk or dawn, but never in the glare of midday. Today our conversation moves between the aloe plant that sits on her desk — it belonged to her father, she reminds me, and she has kept it alive since his death in 1974 — and the murky memory of a wild line from a Victorian novel called Guy Mariner, Gentleman. She read the book in high school and has never forgotten this hilarious phrase: “the sanguinary exuviae of defunct animals.” (Later, we discovered that the book, by Dinah Craik, is actually called John Halifax, Gentleman.) Her geriatric GP is going concierge, even though my mother has Medicare and a supplementary plan to which she pays six hundred dollars a month on her fixed income. This leads my mother to tell me

about the childhood doctor who, during the Depression, allowed her father to pay with fruit and vegetables from his garden. And of a priest named John P. Cahir (appropriately pronounced, as it turns out, “care”) who arranged during this same period for her and her five siblings and parents to be fed when the garden was not enough. When her father couldn’t afford the requisite payment for schoolbooks at the beginning of the year, Father Cahir proposed another barter: that my grandfather, a shoemaker, repair the nuns’ shoes in exchange for the schoolbooks. On a trip to Italy, she recalls, she and her friend Eileen encountered a group of young boys who respectfully bowed their heads toward them as they passed and said, “Ave.” Many such Latin words remain in Italian, she says: “‘Credo,’ means, I believe.” “‘Amo’ means I love.” “‘Et cetera’ means et cetera, even in English…” My friends are those I like for who I become in their company. And that’s how I judge literature, and lectures too: I read an essay to be deposited into an atmosphere; I listen to a lecture for the way it envelops me, for the force of its encouragement to invite or resist. It’s not about whether I understand it — a book, a lecture — but how, and I’m often hopeful that it will be exquisitely confounding. My favorite lectures are comprised of the music that has made possible across many years the atmosphere for my own thought, a music partly experienced and partly imagined (the experience is always in quotation marks). At a time when we feel crushed by immobility, a lecture provides mobility — it is the true mobile device par excellence, a means of transport that takes you further in, so as to lay a foundation for springing, leaping, further out.

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COME THRU DAVID MARRIOT T

I love the weight of unknown things the trace of a man’s foot which I watched, not for signs, but the nothing that it leaves beneath my feet, a sea breaking into cloud that has suddenly engulfed me, pouring me to the core – as if it illumined, not time, nor the traces we leave, but what vanishes in the downpour,

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each word a threshold, a grindstone, a clay pit, a firing – a thought that beggars reason and what adheres to it: a voice keyholed by what is found but never owned, by an eye that no sea can erase, by wet sand crossed but untouched, crossed without space or volume, or the imprecedent blush of erasure. Who is it that walks on the shingle shore lost to all meaning, who has disappeared from the threshold effaced from the world, who enters the path laid down like a fracture showering year, earth, mind, & word?

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THE QUIET MYSTICISM OF ALMANACS JESS MCHUGH

ust as they predict the weather, farmers’ almanac editors might have easily forecast my obsession with almanacs. Descended as I am not from farmers but from mill workers, maids, and insurance salesmen, it makes all the more sense: farmers’ almanacs have not primarily served farmers for quite some time. My grandfather, the insurance salesman, hung a framed reprint of the title page of Poor Richard’s Almanack alongside copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in his split-level home in Stoughton, Massachusetts. I vaguely remember the Old Farmer’s Almanac around my house growing up — its predictions for snow in Massachusetts 130

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were rarely correct, but they were never entirely incorrect (it is New England, so the odds were in their favor). It wasn’t until a year ago, during an especially bad bout of insomnia, that I started reading the almanac’s gardening guide every night. I read about how to take care of delicate flowering trees. I studied how to plant various types of vegetables that I would never grow. I read about a man who had so many plants that he kept a spreadsheet for their care, spending several hours every day on watering alone. Since then, I’ve started collecting almanacs: poets’ almanacs, French almanacs; I’m still on the lookout for Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Wild Sports of the West. Almanacs are an anomaly in the 2021 literary landscape, a choose-your-own adventure of print culture. So much of reading, especially online, is about seeking: looking for a fact, an image, a bit of information. With almanacs, the information finds us, drawing our attention to whatever it has deemed attention-worthy that year, whether worm moons or split pea soup recipes. Attention has always been a commodity, though not in the same way it is now. Where paying attention was once something that afforded farmers a plentiful harvest, now our attention is increasingly something to be captured and capitalized upon by others. Our attention spans are often described as “scarce.” Some scholars have even started referring to advertising as “attention harvesting.” An almanac is of course a product (and it does sell other products in its advertisements), but it more frequently turns readers’ attention to things that cannot be bought or sold, to remarkable phenomena that can only be found in the natural world: bird migration, meteor showers, or eclipses.

This focus on the expansiveness of nature brings me back to a childhood when my attention was not so divided. I grew up in a 3,000-person town, and when my parents wanted some quiet, they would shoo me and my siblings outside. We spent hours in the woods, looking for salamanders or frogs, settling for slugs. I remember how beautiful everything seemed when lit by the sun through the trees, how I would collect rocks and leaves, only to find how ordinary they seemed when I brought them back to my bedroom. Reading the almanac brings me back to the woods, when I was awed that all of this — the birds, the water, the leaves and trees, the light, the moss, the insects — was there all the time, and all I needed to do was look. Almanacs force the kind of surrender that comes naturally to a child in the woods. Paging through the almanac, readers must accept things as they come. The reward is a wonderfully freeing randomness: in this year’s almanac I read about how to plant trees from clippings, learned that Duluth, Minnesota, is famous for “hawk watches,” and prepared for the “full flower moon.” Even the advertisements delight me: at what other one-stop shop could I purchase artisanal sausages, collectors’ nickels from 1935, and a product called “chicken soup for the soil”? I float along the pages, learning things I’ll likely never use — or things that are so obvious as to be useless. This year’s Old Farmer’s Almanac spent an entire section breaking down the pros and cons of owning different species of pet (in case you didn’t know, dogs are friendly but chew shoes sometimes, and cats are cute but independent). That’s part of the charm, too; the almanac doesn’t take itself too seriously. As its fivepage article on choosing a pet says: “don’t intellectualize dog love.” 131

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Almanacs strike a balance between the practical and the poetic. That tightrope act is even starker in older editions. Looking through 18th-century almanacs, there might be a recipe for refining sugar on one page, a poem on the next, a list of court dates after that, and a smattering of dry jokes and witticisms sprinkled throughout. The Old Farmer’s Almanac tagline has long been “useful, with a pleasant degree of humor.” Their “useful” quality — something that is diametrically opposed to how I use them now — was foregrounded in early editions. They were first intended to provide structure for farmers, to help them plan their planting, growing, and harvesting seasons. These small, handheld books carried sunset and sunrise times, tide tables, even predictions for days best suited for sowing certain seeds or mating certain animals. “The secret of The Old Farmer’s Almanac is: ‘pay attention,’” Tim Clark, a former editor at the Almanac once told me. “Pay attention to the sky, and the winds, and the tides, and the number of acorns on the ground in the fall, and what the animals are doing, and which way the birds are flying. Pay attention. And that’s what a farmer in 1792 — or 1292 — had to do to survive.” What some have considered the first almanac — then a calendar of feast days and holy days — dates back 1292–1225 B.C. (the era of Rameses II). The first use in English came from Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus in 1267, referring to astronomical tables. Historians have suggested, although never definitively proved, that Christopher Columbus may have taken a 1475 almanac with him to navigate to the New World. Since that mishap, almanacs have been inextricably linked with American history. 132

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When the first print shop was established in Massachusetts less than two decades after the arrival of the pilgrims, the second book printed was an almanac. By the time Benjamin Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1732, almanacs were hugely popular in the United States, and he joined some six competitors in Philadelphia alone. For at least the first fifty years of US history, a regional almanac was one of the only books that many Americans would have possessed (some 40 percent of rural New England households did not own a single book during this period, not even a Bible). As such, it took on an outsize importance in a culture where books were rare commodities, earning a place of prominence in the household. The Old Farmer’s Almanac still drills a hole in the top left corner of the almanac, as it is destined not for the bookshelf but rather for a hook in the kitchen or doorway, there for all who need to consult it. In that way, the almanac was a tool as much as it was a book. Americans in particular seem attached to things that are practical: inventions (even literature) that improve us, make life easier or more productive. The almanac both embodies and upends that devotion. It might give readers some practical information, but it is hardly a refuge from ambiguity. If anything, it nuances even its most practical pages: the almanac’s farmer’s calendar is so complex that it requires a three-page key to decipher it. Now that we no longer need them to make it through the winter, almanacs have become both escapism and a kind of meditation. They invite us to take things as they come, to delight in the sediment of everyday life as it surfaces. They are a call to observe the natural world, both the

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grand and the humble: eclipses and harvest moons but also changing leaves and hatching insects. Watching things grow — even reading about watching things grow — connects almanac readers to a tradition that exists outside a highly technologized, often isolated, modern world. With their reminders to count acorns and to avoid killing spiders, almanacs have this wisdom of small things. Almanacs give this impression of permanence, a reminder that a childlike wonder in the woods can be omnipresent. It’s not just because they have a long continuance with the past but because they march on: after all they are intended to predict the future year’s weather. Almanacs are cyclical, a reminder that things happen in their time and place, and we can prepare and make plans, but frost might come anyway. Or a coyote might eat our chickens. But there’s next year. And regardless, we can still count the acorns and avoid killing the spiders.

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Jayce Salloum, orchid, "What about Khalil, Fadl and Abdullah..”, Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (in Bourg al Barajinah refugee ‘camp', near Beirut, Lebanon), from the video: “untitled part 3b: (as if ) beauty never ends..”, 11:22, 2002. Image courtesy of the artist.

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A C U LT U R A L C O LO S S U S : LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI'S AMERICAN CENTURY STEPHEN KESSLER

ith fearful symbolic and historical symmetry, Lawrence Ferlinghetti left this world on February 22 — George Washington’s birthday. If synchronicity is a rhyme in time, the only more poetically coincidental date for his departure would have been May 31, the birthday of Walt Whitman. Despite all his recent revisionist diminishments, Washington remains for better or worse “the father of our country”; Whitman is the undisputed founding father of American poetry, and Ferlinghetti is, along with Allen Ginsberg, the most Whitmanic 20th-century avatar in the creation of a new American poetics. Among such other masters as William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and 135

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Charles Bukowski, Ferlinghetti as a poet and publisher helped liberate midcentury American poetry from the cerebral formalism favored by the New Critics into a formally open, lyrical vernacular that had the ring of ordinary (if highly inventive) speech. In A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) — its title taken from “Into the Night Life,” a 30-page prose poem in Henry Miller’s 1936 collection Black Spring — Ferlinghetti’s fresh and genial voice resonated with readers enough to make that early and enduring book one of the bestselling poetry titles of all time. Ignored and condescended to for decades by the East Coast literary-critical establishment and academic poets of all kinds as a merely popular entertainer — or worse, a disreputable beatnik, though he never identified as one — Ferlinghetti had few laurels to rest on, so he just kept on doing extraordinary out-of-the-mainstream things as a poet, publisher, and bookseller. Of course, the 1956 publication of Ginsberg’s “Howl” under his City Lights imprint was a landmark victory for freedom of expression and the opening salvo in a cultural revolution that continues in various forms more than half a century later. City Lights Publishers has never stopped issuing works of radical thought and experimental imagination, maintaining its independence from the literary-industrial complex as one of the world’s most prestigious smaller presses — second only perhaps to James Laughlin’s New Directions, the primary publisher of Ferlinghetti’s more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction. But even if he had never published a word as a writer or publisher, Ferlinghetti’s cultural importance would be enormous. In 1953, with Peter Martin, he founded City Lights Books, the incomparable 136

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bookshop at Columbus and Broadway in San Francisco’s North Beach, which has thrived since 1953 as a mecca for international tourists and local intelligentsia alike. The shop has grown from a tiny storefront to a three-story forest of imperishable trees (“BOOKS ARE TREES MADE IMMORTAL,” says one of the poet’s hand-painted signs that greet the customer entering from the street), many of whose titles are unlikely to be found in any other biblio-botanical garden. From classical literature to contemporary politics, world history to the latest poetry, philosophy to erotica, international newspapers to offbeat Bay Area magazines, City Lights is an essential resource for readers of all persuasions. Generations of poets have spent countless hours browsing and reading upstairs in the Poetry Room, relocated from the basement, and absorbing the historic atmosphere amid expertly curated shelves and walls full of posters, broadside, photos, and memorabilia. For Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday in 2019, marked by hours of readings and testimonials from scores of notable writers in several neighborhood venues, the store was packed all day long with an overflow crowd spilling out the door onto the sidewalk, into Kerouac Alley, and slowly circulating through the shop in a festive spirit completely in keeping with Lawrence’s carnivalesque sense of community fun, even though he wasn’t physically present. Spiritually and poetically, yes. Ferlinghetti’s poems rang out in the voices of distinguished readers celebrating the master’s populist poetics. Long before that term became unfortunately associated with the 45th president’s know-nothing followers, and long before his own “Populist Manifesto” (“We have seen the best minds of our generation /

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destroyed by boredom at poetry readings” is among its most memorable insights), Ferlinghetti’s poems were for non-specialists, people who don’t necessarily read poetry, or who were looking for relief from the high seriousness and arcane allusions of the prevailing popes of modernism, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. While intentionally remaining outside such lofty realms, he was no primitive, but a highly sophisticated artist with a conscious strategy of lightness and wry simplicity as an alternative to obscurity, complexity, and ambiguity. With a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne — his first language was French — and a body of work rich with echoes of many literary traditions, Ferlinghetti, who also translated from several languages, was a truly cosmopolitan modernist. At the same time, he was a down-to-earth local bohemian who never claimed to be an intellectual, or even the successful entrepreneur he was as a bookseller, but consistently and perennially identified above all as an artist. He’d started out as a painter and continued that practice into old age, and his email address began with the word “poet.” Another of his epigrammatical hand-painted posters reads “OPEN BOOKS OPEN HEARTS OPEN MINDS,” and his poems are meant for the openhearted enjoyment of anyone. Many people discover Ferlinghetti in their teens and find in his easygoing voice and seemingly relaxed style (“free verse” that on closer inspection reveals a precise and rigorous formal control) permission to follow their own rebellious instincts and existential pleasures. I was not one of those. Steeped in the rhymed quatrains and stately stanzas of William Wordsworth and other 19th-century

English poets, I found the formal freedom of the new American poetry bewildering, and was late to get with it as a reader and, eventually, a writer. As late as the mid1960s, when I was an undergraduate at UCLA, I aspired to a sober seriousness appropriate to my bourgeois upbringing. Keats and Hopkins, Yeats and Auden were my exemplars rather than Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, or Gregory Corso. Even after I’d learned to read Ferlinghetti by way of E. E. Cummings — a romantic with a typewriter that enabled him to experiment with fractured typography even while composing sonnets — he still struck me as too easy to understand, too much fun to read, too silly, too socially engaged, too newspapery. At that point, Whitman was challenging enough, and the contemporary Californians were too far out for me. A conservative lad for whom the idea of smoking marijuana threatened a loss of control, I resisted the call of the Beats in favor of less dangerous role models. But as the years and decades passed, I came increasingly to enjoy and appreciate Ferlinghetti’s astonishing stamina and high spirits, his unstoppable productivity and cultural activism, and his drive toward creative transformation, not only in poetry but in society. The more countercultural I became in my life and literary practice — a California native finally understanding my marginal position on the far-left fringes of respectability — I gravitated to the unmistakable authenticity and powerful originality of West Coast monsters like Ferlinghetti and Bukowski, neither of whom was anything like me, whose rebellion against the reigning orthodoxies resonated with the writer I was striving to become. Although my own poetics owes as much to Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Jayce Salloum, “I left everything and I left Nothing”, Soha Bechara, from the video: “untitled part 1: everything and nothing”, 40:40, 1999-2001 40:00, Color, Sound Image courtesy of the artist.

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and Denise Levertov as to any of my California progenitors, the wit and speed and colloquial irreverence of these wild men gradually came to suffuse my stylistic values and expand the range of my imagination. I came to appreciate the integrity of misfits like Bukowski and Ferlinghetti who had the courage to be themselves. As Lawrence proved, if you last long enough and keep on doing your thing without regard for what the critics say or don’t say — as he once wrote to me, “Whole books disappear without a sound, as if dropped into a void”— eventually you may find the respect and esteem you never expected. As the lifetime achievement awards piled up, the beatnik-enabling, smutpeddling publisher of “Howl” turned into an elder statesman, an enigmatic sage, and a widely acclaimed great man of arts and letters. All the while, he never abandoned his core political values, never sold out, and never compromised with any establishment even as he became an icon and an institution. He refused to be defined by others’ demands or expectations; he never made a play for academic respect or government grants, kept his distance from the half-baked outlaw poets who tried to emulate him, and didn’t hit the road, or the bottle, or the other bad habits of so many of his less-purposeful peers. But, even as the living legend of his later years, he exhibited no trace of pretension, entitlement, or superiority. He was not exactly approachable, but that was a matter of shyness more than snobbery. True to his anarchist principles, he subscribed to the idea of an egalitarian, horizontal, nonhierarchical social order, and every time I encountered him — maybe a couple of dozen times over the years — unlike most famous poets I’ve known, he was never

interested in being the center of attention. He had a way of hanging out without standing out in a crowd, vaguely amused and coolly self-contained, at a social event such as a reading or reception, or one of City Lights’s occasional celebrations of one or another milestone in its long history. While Nancy Peters ran the business, Lawrence served as its tall, baldheaded, blue-eyed, bearded eminence and guiding moral force. Politics, for him, were rooted in moral values. His experience in the Navy during World War II, witnessing the annihilating effects of the atomic bomb in Japan, made him a lifelong pacifist. But he could appreciate revolutionary struggles, and in 1979, when the Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Ferlinghetti declared his solidarity with a movement that was not conventionally Marxist, but a hybrid of socialism, anarchism, and capitalism. Long before President Daniel Ortega turned himself into an autocrat, alienating his former comrades, Lawrence visited Nicaragua and published a little travelogue, Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre, on his return. In December 1983, he hosted the poet, Catholic priest, and Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal when he came to San Francisco for a reading and rally at the Palace of Fine Arts. The next day, Lawrence invited a couple of dozen poets and journalists to join him and Cardenal for lunch at the New Pisa, a classic, original North Beach Italian restaurant, with red leather booths, red checkered tablecloths, and pictures of baseball players all over the walls. After the meal, everyone gathered for a freewheeling conversation with the guest. Lawrence spoke hardly at all, and only when directly addressed. When Cardenal 139

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said he thought Pound was a Marxist “because the theme of his poetry is economic,” someone asked, “Lawrence, do you think Pound was a Marxist?” Ferlinghetti replied, “No, he was a Confucianist and an elitist.” This was simply a difference of opinion among friends, not an ideological argument. When someone mentioned Pound’s anti-Semitism, Cardenal changed the subject by saying that one of his grandfathers was a German Jew named Cardenal Teufel (“Teufel means Devil,” he explained). A decade or so later, when I sent Lawrence the manuscript of my translation of Julio Cortázar’s selected poems, Save Twilight, he replied promptly with an acceptance, followed by months of intensive correspondence, hands-on lineby-line editing, and haggling over various selections and exclusions. He showed a firm hand as an editor and publisher, considering things like the economics of page counts and whether the prose passages interfered with the flow of the poetry, but also maintained respect for my judgments as an editor and translator. I felt exceptionally lucky to be one of the last authors to be published in his personally curated Pocket Poets Series. This was around the time he was gradually disengaging from the day-to-day running of City Lights, while devoting more time to painting and writing. In 2011, when he was 92, Lawrence came to Santa Cruz for a prerelease screening of Chris Felver’s biodocumentary Ferlinghetti: A Re-birth of Wonder at the historic Art Deco Del Mar Theater, whose 500 seats were sold out for the occasion. The mayor declared October 18 “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day” and presented him with a certificate. After the film was shown, Felver and 140

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Ferlinghetti, seated onstage, took a few questions from the audience — a custom Lawrence disliked, especially following a reading; he told me once that the audience should be left with the sound of the poems resonating in their heads, not the prosaic commentary of someone trying to explain what is meant to speak for itself. I’m guessing he felt the same way about movies, but he was a good sport and sat patiently for the Q&A. An elderly gentleman in the front rows asked the ageless poet if he had any advice for someone wishing to stay optimistic and productive in his later years. Ferlinghetti replied matter-of-factly, “Read Samuel Beckett.” The Zen-like wit of this remark, recommending the gloomy absurdity and deadpan despair and ruthless humor of the Irish master to someone in search of encouragement, struck me as a brilliant insight into where to look for solace when faced with one’s own imminent oblivion. The comfort is not in good news or geezerly contentment but in the rigor of fearless, fine-tuned thought and musical language. The three ambitious imaginative works he published in the final years of his life — the expansively associative long poem Americus, Books I and II (2004, 2012), and the auto-mythographical novel Little Boy, published in 2019, just before his 100th birthday — reveal a writer still thoroughly engaged with his times and riding the river of his restless imagination as far as it will flow. As he explains in a note on the back of the second volume of Americus, its title, Time of Useful Consciousness “is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time when some lifesaving action is possible.” This poignant metaphor

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for the poet’s job, especially late in life, encapsulates the paradox of the effort to perform “some lifesaving action” even as one’s craft is plunging to its doom. The other important work of his last years is the little collection of epigrams, aphorisms, and pungent zingers, Poetry As Insurgent Art (2007), which reprints both installments of his “Populist Manifesto” (1976 and 1978) to accompany his pithy declarations of poetry’s most urgent and essential purposes: magical transformation, nonviolent revolution, and verbal-cum-spiritual revelation. (“Poetry deconstructs power. Absolute poetry deconstructs absolutely.”) I can think of few, if any, other poets who have sustained such a prodigious, consistent, and joyful practice for so many generations in one century-long lifetime. Ferlinghetti’s contributions have been incalculable, and in time I’m convinced he will come to be known as one of the most consequential cultural figures in American history. His great good luck as an orphan fostered by a wealthy and cultured couple who encouraged his reading echoes all the way through his amazing life and monumental body of work — a luck in which we’ve shared as his contemporaries.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Annie Berke is the film editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and is the author of Their Own Best Creations: Feminism, Authorship, and Postwar Television, under contract at the University of California Press. She has written on film and television for Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, FLOW: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, and Feminist Media Histories. Annie earned her PhD in Film & Media Studies and American Studies at Yale University. She lives in the DC-Metro area.

the Santa Monica Review, Echoes, Mother Jones, and the Boston Phoenix, among others. Her research involves real estate, financial panics and contemporary culture. You can find her online at http:// michelle-chihara.com. Jorge Cotte is a writer living in Chicago. His work has appeared in The New Inquiry, Complex, and Remezcla. When not writing, he is cooking, binging, and tweeting.

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award and The Paris Mary Cappello’s seven books include Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His a mnemic collage; a detour; an anti- debut book The Correspondence (Farrar, chronicle (or “ritual in transfigured time”); Straus, and Giroux) was published a lyric biography; a speculative manifes- in 2017. His writing has appeared in to; and a meditative fantasia on “mood.” Esquire, The Paris Review, n+1, Agni, Lecture—on the lost art of the lecture, the Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of notebook and the nap, is the inaugural ti- Books and elsewhere, including The Best tle in Transit Books’ Undelivered Lecture American Essays and The Best American Series. A former Guggenheim and Ber- Travel Writing. lin Prize Fellow, she is currently Professor of English and creative writing at the Camille T. Dungy is the author of four University of Rhode Island. collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, winner of the ColoraMichael Casper is the co-author, with do Book Award, and the essay collection Nathaniel Deutsch, of A Fortress in Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the into Race, Motherhood and History, finalMaking of Hasidic Williamsburg (Yale ist for the National Book Critics Circle University Press, 2021). Award. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of Michelle Chihara (MFA, PhD UC African American Nature Poetry. Her honIrvine) is Assistant Professor of English ors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Language and Literature at Whittier an American Book Award, and NEA College, where she teaches contemporary Fellowships in both poetry and prose. American literature and creative writing. She lives in Colorado with her husband Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared and daughter, where she is a University in Studies in American Fiction, n+1, Trop Distinguished Professor at Colorado Magazine, the Green Mountains Review, State University. 142

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Joshua Glick is the Isabelle Peregrin Assistant Professor of English, Film, and Media Studies at Hendrix College and a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT. He is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press, 2018). Dr. Glick is currently writing a new book that examines the contemporary investment in documentary on both the left and right of the political spectrum. In collaboration with Patricia Aufderheide, he is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Documentary. Dr. Glick also works actively in the public humanities. He served as the Film and Digital Media Curator for the traveling exhibition, Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 18612008. As a Fellow at MIT, he is designing an online curriculum that explores the past and present of disinformation as well as the civic uses of emerging media. Marsha Gordon is a professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University. With the support of a National Humanities Center Fellowship and an NEH Public Scholar Award, she is writing a new book, Leftover Ladies: Ursula Parrott and the Reinvention of the Modern Woman. She is the author, most recently, of Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019). Carlie Hoffman’s debut poetry collection, This Alaska, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2021. Carlie’s second poetry collection will also be published with Four Way Books in 2023. She is a recipient of a 92Y/Discovery Poetry Prize and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the

Kenyon Review, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Carlie is an Instructor of Creative Writing at Purchase College, SUNY, and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. Sun-ha Hong is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society (2020) and co-editor of Space, Place, and Mediated Communication: Exploring Context Collapse (2017). Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, Red Summer, Darktown Follies, and Imperial Liquor. Born and raised in Compton, California, his honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Dorset Prize, as well as fellowships from Stanford, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Cave Canem. His work appears in The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and The New York Times Magazine. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of WisconsinMadison. Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections The Judas Ear (LSU Press, 2022), The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (LSU Press, 2017), Vulgar Remedies (LSU Press, 2013), and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California. Stephen Kessler is the author of 10 books of poetry, most recently Where

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Was I? (prose poems, Greenhouse Review Press); 16 books of literary translation, most recently Save Twilight: Selected Poems by Julio Cortázar (City Lights Books); three collections of essays, most recently Need I Say More? Portraits, Confessions, Reflections (El León Literary Arts); and a novel, The Mental Traveler (Greenhouse Review Press). He was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and now lives in Santa Cruz, California, where he is a regular contributor of op-ed columns to the Santa Cruz Sentinel. His website is www.stephenkessler.com. Phillip Maciak is the TV editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the author of a book about religion and early cinema called The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), and his film, television, and literary criticism has appeared in Slate, Film Quarterly, J19, PMLA, The New Republic, and other venues. He is also the co-founder — with Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, and Lili Loofbourow — of the “Dear Television” column. He teaches in the English Department and the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. David Marriott is a poet and critic who is currently teaching at PSU. His most recent publications include: Duppies (Commune editions, 2019); and Whither Fanon? (Stanford UP, 2018). Lacan Noir is forthcoming from Palgrave, 2021; and Before Whiteness is forthcoming from City Lights, 2022. Nylsa Martínez is a short fiction writer linked to the boom in noir and detective fiction from Mexico’s northern border region. She is the author of Roads (Editorial Paraiso Perdido, 2007), Tu 144

casa es mi casa (CONACULTA, 2009), and Afecciones desordenadas (Editorial Artificios, 2016). Her stories have been included in such anthologies as Territorio ficción (SEP, 2017), Lados B (Nitro / Press, 2017), LATINX: Writing Los Angeles (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), and Desierto en escarlata (Nitro / Noir, 2018), and have been published in journals like Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Revista de literatura mexicana contemporanea, and Latin American Literature Today. She is currently working on her PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UCLA. Jess McHugh is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, and The Paris Review Daily, and other venues. Her book, Americanon, explores U.S. identity through the lens of 13 bestselling books. Austen Leah Rose is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Narrative, Zyzzyva, The Sewanee Review, 32 Poems, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She received a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from Columbia University. She is from Los Angeles and currently lives in Oregon where she is writing a dissertation on Rilke and eco-bereavement. Tomasz Różycki is an award-winning Polish poet and translator. He has published several collections of poetry in Polish, two of which have been translated into English: Twelve Stations (2004; translated by Bill Johnston, 2015) and Colonies (2006; translated by Mira Rosenthal, 2013). A volume of selected poems translated by Rosenthal, The Forgotten

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Keys, appeared in 2007. Anthony Seidman is a poet-translator from Los Angeles. His recent full-length translations are Caribbean Ants (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) by Homero Pumarol and A Stab in the Dark (LARB Classics, 2018) by Facundo Bernal. Later this year, Cardboard House Press will publish his translation of Contra Natura by Rodolfo Hinostroza. His poems, articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including World Literature Today, Poetry International, The Bitter Oleander, and New American Writing. He currently edits the Museum Poetica of Caesura, an online magazine of art and criticism. Michael Szalay is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party (2012) and New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (2000). Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, forthcoming from Penguin in 2022.Their work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, and elsewhere, including the Lionsgate movie Love Beats Rhymes. A recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is a Visiting Faculty in Poetry at Pacific University MFA in Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Kristen Warner is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. Her book, The Cultural Politics

of Colorblind Casting, was released in June 2015. Kristen blogs at Dear Black Woman (https://kaydubya.wordpress.com). JinJin Xu is a writer and filmmaker from Shanghai. Her work has been recognized by Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, NYU’s Lillian Vernon Fellowship, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Her debut, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, won the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize. F E AT U R ED A RT I S T S

From 1938 to the 1960s, writer and educator Fernand Deligny worked in psychiatric institutions. In 1967 he meets a ten year-old autistic child, Janmari, whose mode of being “out of language” suggests him to found an informal network for autistic children in southern France. The people involved in the network are non-professional educators (an electrician, a farmer, an artist, students). Inspired by the children’s silent relation to the other, to space, to objects, Deligny reflects upon language, the common, and “the human” (as opposed to humanism). To avoid language, he invents artistic practices such as tracing the children’s “wander lines” and encourages filming in the network (Le Moindre geste (1962–1971), Ce Gamin, là (1975), Projet N (1978), A propos d’un film à faire (1989). Most of his writings have been re-published by Editions L’Arachnéen. The last one, Camérer (Camering) gathers unpublished texts on cinema and the image. Walid Raad In part, an artist and a Professor of Art in The Cooper Union. 145

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The list of exhibitions (good, bad and mediocre ones); awards and grants (merited, not merited, grateful for, rejected and/or returned); education (some of it thought-provoking; some of it, less so); publications (I am fond of some of my books, but more so of the books of Jalal Toufic. You can find his here: jalaltoufic. com), can be found somewhere online. Basma Al-Sharif is an Artist/Filmmaker of Palestinian origin, raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip. She has a BFA and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Basma developed her practice nomadically and works between cinema and installation centering on the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes and natural environments. Major exhibitions include: Solo shows at CCA and MOCA Toronto, Modern Mondays at MOMA, the Whitney Biennial, les Rencontres d'Arles, les Module at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Al Riwaq Biennial Palestine, The Berlin Documentary Forum, the Sharjah Biennial, and Manifesta 8. Basma is represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris, distributed by Video Data Bank and Arsenal, and is based in Berlin. Hannah Black (b. 1981 in Manchester, UK) is an artist and writer based in New York, US. Recent solo exhibitions include Ruin/Rien, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2020), Dede, Eberhard, Phantom, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, DE (2019), Beginning, End, None, Performance Space, New York, US (2019), Some Context, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2017) and Small Room, mumok, Vienna, AS (2017). Recent group exhibitions include, 146

Manifesta 13, Marseille, FR (2020), Busan Biennale, Busan, KR (2020) and Sharjah Biennial, Busan, UAE (2020). As if an itinerant geographer of conflicted territories (most everywhere), Jayce Salloum observes the world and creates/ collects images/texts to make meaning from or comment on. Since arriving here - by no means of his own volition - he tries to go only where he is invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, his projects being rooted in an intimate engagement with place. A grandson of Syrian or Lebanese immigrants he was born and raised on others’ land, the Sylix (Okanagan) territory. After 21 years living and working elsewheres he planted himself on the unceded stolen lands of the Xʷməθkʷey̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh + Səíl̓wətaʔł.

Recognizing and acting on this is an everyday practice, but let’s face it, he could do a lot more. In/out of this context not that it really matters, Salloum has lectured and published pervasively and exhibited peripatetically at the widest range of local and international venues possible and most improbable, from the smallest unnamed storefronts in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as the Musée du Louvre, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, National Gallery of Canada, Bienal De La Havana, Sharjah Biennial, Biennale of Sydney and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

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