Quarterly Journal, no. 32: Tenth Anniversary Anthology by lareviewofbooks

no. 32 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Q UA RT ERLY

J O U RNA L:

10TH ANNIVERSARY

$12.00 ISBN 978-1-940660-79-0

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CHICAGO The University of Chicago Press congratulates the LA Review of Books on 10 sparkling years!

Black Paper Writing in a Dark Time

The Nutmeg’s Curse

Parables for a Planet in Crisis

Foxconned Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government

On Revision The Only Writing That Counts

The UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS www.press.uchicago.edu

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Gender Threat

Mexican American Fastpitch

American Masculinity in the Face of Change Dan Cassino and Yasemin Besen-Cassino

Identity at Play in Vernacular Sport Ben Chappell

INEQUALITIES

Refusing Death

Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA Nadia Y. Kim

FO RTH CO M ING

Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace

The Rise, Demise, and Revival of Arms Control Michael Krepon

Unauthorized Love

When the Iron Bird Flies

China’s Secret War in Tibet Jianglin Li

Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State Jane Lilly López

Years of Glory

Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa Susan Gilson Miller

Green Mass

The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen Michael Marder

WORLDING THE MIDDLE EAST

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS no.

Q UA RT ERLY

J O U RNA L:

10TH ANNIVERSARY

TOM LU TZ

PUBLISHER:

E D I TO R - I N - C H I E F:

BORIS DRALYUK SONIA ALI

M A N AG I N G E D I TO R :

SARA DAVIS, MASHINKA FIRUNTS HAKOPIAN, ELIZABETH METZGER, CALLIE SISKEL

CO N T R I B U T I N G E D I TO R S :

A RT D I R E C TO R :

PERWANA NAZIF

D E S I G N D I R E C TO R :

LAUREN HEMMING

GRAPHIC DESIGNER:

TOM COMITTA

ROULA NASSAR, AMITA BHATT, NOAH DAVIS, ASUKA ANASTACIA OGAWA

A RT CO N T R I B U TO R S :

P R O D U C T I O N A N D CO PY D E S K C H I E F:

CORD BROOKS

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I N T E R N S & VO LU N T E E R S :

ISABEL JIMENEZ, EMILY SMIBERT, THOMAS MAR WEE

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.

Many thank to Michael Coffey, Andrew Nichools, and Janet Fitch for your generous donation in support of this print edition.

congratulates and thanks the Los Angeles Review of Books for its continuing support of a diversity of ideas, content, and in presses of all kinds

HAPPY 10 TH ANNIVERSARY

Democracy is in danger. Universities may be our last, best hope. “The methods to defend democracy must be taught, and What Universities Owe Democracy is our textbook.” —Garry Kasparov, Chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative / former World Chess Champion

“This book is essential for any who care about the prospects for social trust, truth-seeking, and the promise of America.” —Martha Minow, author of Saving the News

press.jhu.edu

CONTENTS no.

Q UA RT ERLY

J O U RNA L:

10TH ANNIVERSARY

fiction

film & tv

UNFILMABLE by Carmen Maria Machado

REFLECTIONS ON LARB by Summer Kim Lee

B E A U T Y, M O U R N I N G , A N D M E L A N C H O LY I N A F R I C A 3 9 b y M u k o m a Wa N g u g i

L I F E ( N A R R AT I V E ) I N T H E END TIMES b y Ta n y a A g a t h o c l e o u s

TO O C LO S E , TO O COMPROMISED: KILLING EVE AND THE PROMISE OF SANDRA OH by Summer Kim Lee

E L I O ’ S E D U C AT I O N b y D. A . M i l l e r

U N T U C K I N G R U PA U L’ S DRAG RACE by E. Alex Jung

I T ’ S C O M P L I C AT E D : P E T E R M O U N T F O R T ’ S A YO U N G M A N ’ S G U I D E TO L AT E C A P I TA L I S M b y C h r i s K ra u s

MARROW IN THE BONES: T R A N S L AT I N G D Ö B L I N ’ S “ B E R L I N A L E X A N D E R P L AT Z ” by Sophie Duvernoy

S U B L I M E LY U G LY : ON ELENA FERRANTE’S “ T H E LY I N G L I F E O F A D U LT S ” b y S a ra h C h i h a y a ABSENT FIGURES IN THE FRAME by Min Hyoung Song

102 JOURNEY OF MILES by Clifford Thompson

poetry 111 REFLECTIONS ON LARB by Richie Hofmann 1 1 3 YO U R H O M I E F R O M A N OT H E R H E A R T: O N DA N E Z S M I T H ’ S ‘HOMIE’ by Amanda Gorman 117 DESK DRAWERS AND R E A L E S TAT E b y P ra g e e t a S h a r m a 118 ORPHAN JEONG JEONG-JA by Don Mee Choi

“A balanced, insightful, and accessible treatment of Central Asian history.” —Scott C. Levi, author of The Bukharan Crisis and The Rise and Fall of Khoqand, 1709–1876

“Touching and beautifully written.” —Rosemarie Szostak, Science

“A deeply humane, gracefully written portrayal of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.” —Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, author of The Ideas That Made America

“A brilliant, sensual guide to the pleasures of seeing food and tasting art.” —Emily Gowers, author of The Loaded Table

121 FROM "DEAR WHITENESS" by Charif Shanahan 1 2 7 ATO N E M E N T by Jenny George 128 SAM'S DREAM b y J o r i e G ra h a m 131 AMERIGO VESPUCCI LANDING... by Natalie Scenters-Zapico 1 3 5 T H E D E AT H O F ATA H U A L PA AT T H E H A N D S O F PIZARRO’S MEN by Mar y Ruefle 1 3 6 C H R O N O LO GY by Rachel Eliza Griff iths 138 THE MAILMAN by Diana Khoi Nguyen 141 THE PRINCE: THE MIND OF ART by Richie Hofmann 1 4 2 T H E C O N S TA N T G A R D E N E R : O N LO U I S E G LÜ C K by Michael Robbins

humanities & culture 152 REFLECTIONS ON LARB by Sheri-Marie Har rison 1 5 3 N E W B L A C K G OT H I C by Sheri-Marie Har rison 1 6 2 T H E A R T O F C A P T I V I T Y: L I C H I TA H U R TA D O b y Y x t a M a y a M u r ra y

1 6 7 S A I D I YA H A R T M A N ’ S “BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS” b y K e e a n g a - Ya m a h t t a Ta y l o r 174 THE FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM by Kaya Genç 179 REFLECTIONS ON LARB b y B e n j a m i n A l d e s Wu r g a f t 183 ON READING J O N AT H A N G O L D b y B e n j a m i n A l d e s Wu r g a f t 1 9 2 R I OT / R E B E L L I O N : THE LEGACY OF 1992 by Steph Cha

comics 2 0 3 M I M I P O N D, C A R TO O N I S T R OYA LT Y by MariNaomi

interviews 212 REFLECTIONS ON LARB b y D a v i d Pa l u m b o - L i u 2 1 3 T H E FA L L I N G A PA R T N E S S OF THINGS NoViolet Bulawayo inter viewed by David Pa l u m b o - L i u 2 2 1 H O R R O R S TO R I E S A R E LO V E S TO R I E S Kelly Link inter viewed by Helen O yeyemi

Idea. Book. Action.

Here’s to 10 years of shining a light on the books that shape our world.

in bookstores & mitpress.mit.edu Compelling conversations 100% guaranteed

L E T T E R F R O M T H E E D I TO R - I N - C H I E F

n putting together this special 10th anniversary issue of our Quarterly Journal, we surveyed thousands of pieces on LARB’s site, pored over hundreds of them, and discussed dozens in detail, making difficult decisions at each step. Difficult, yes — but also deeply affirming. The great variety of the work LARB has published over the last 10 years, as well as its invariably high quality, filled us with pride. For me, it was also a trip down memory lane. In pandemic days, of course, any trip is welcome, but I was especially grateful for this chance to assess how far LARB has come and to revisit once more its humble yet daring beginnings. Our work on the issue brought me all the way back to the journal’s first days, long before it grew into the venerable multimedia arts organization it is today — an organization that feels like it’s been an institution for far longer than its 10 years. I was lucky enough to participate, in a small way, in LARB’s making. In late 2010, when I volunteered to join the staff, the Los Angeles Review of Books didn’t really exist. It wasn’t even the Tumblr page that first bore that name. It was little more than a dream, a gleam in the eye of our founder, longtime editor in chief, and now publisher, Tom Lutz. Yet it wasn’t his dream alone. It was one he shared with all the early volunteers, some of whom are still with us today, and some of whom have gone on to brilliant careers elsewhere. The dream was to form a space for deeply engaged cultural conversations, to foster voices too often excluded from such conversations, and to fortify Los Angeles’s place on the literary map. Most daring of all was Tom’s dedication to forming this space on the web,

with its seemingly infinite but, at that time, still unproven possibilities. Online literary and cultural magazines of global stature now proliferate, but LARB was early out of the gate; in fact, it opened the gate for Reviews of Books based in cities from Chicago to Hong Kong. As a lifelong student of regionalism and advocate of cosmopolitanism, Tom envisioned a thriving, decentered cultural landscape — in which LA was one of many vibrant intersections — at a moment when all the talk was about the internet’s role in the decline of local newspapers and the death of the book. The first piece we published was Ben Ehrenreich’s learned and stirring rebuke to the book’s premature undertakers, in which he quotes a story by Bruno Schulz: “a strange characteristic of the script, which by now no doubt has become clear to the reader: it unfolds while being read, its boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations” (“The Book,” translated by Celina Wieniewska). A brilliant description of literature writ large, this passage can also serve as a kind of motto for LARB: we too have kept our boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations over the past decade, and, with the help of our readers, we will continue to unfold in the decades ahead. What you will find in these pages are profiles of major artists in various realms, from Miles Davis to Luchita Hurtado to Jonathan Gold; deeply engaged, deeply informed, and deeply felt encounters with books from around the world, including Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults, two translations of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and an anthology of contemporary African writing; poems by the

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MFA WRITING PROGRAM FICTION NONFICTION POETRY Option for joint course of study in Literary Translation arts.columbia.edu/LA

likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham and MacArthur Fellow Don Mee Choi; some of our finest film and television coverage (a genre in which we Angelenos were obligated to excel); as well as a remarkable roundtable on the riot/rebellion of 1992 with Steph Cha, Gary Phillips, Jervey Tervalon, and Nina Revoyr, and critical pieces by other local leading lights, such as Chris Kraus and Amanda Gorman. Taken together, these pieces reflect, but do not exhaust, the best of what LARB has to offer. We could have easily gone on expanding this volume — but the map is not the territory. Let the contents of this issue serve as a mere sample of LARB’s extraordinary archive. Do as an LA private eye would and launch your own investigation into the site. In one of the first pieces I edited for the journal in 2011, which is not included here, Jefferson Hunter describes Ross Macdonald’s hard-boiled yet kind-hearted PI Lew Archer “looking over Los Angeles on a night after an exhausting day.” What he sees is “something comprehensible if we put our minds to it; a testing-ground for our dependence on and our responsibilities to the natural world; a vast, luminous, infinitely connected community stretching ‘between the mountains and the sea like a living substance.’” That’s the conclusion to a piece from 2011, describing a scene in a novel from 1973, but it is every bit as resonant today as it was a decade ago — perhaps more so. As we enter LARB’s second decade, the world around us remains comprehensible, but it seems to take a greater effort to put our minds to it. Los Angeles remains a testing ground, but our responsibilities to the natural world have grown heavier. Our community, meanwhile, has grown vaster, more luminous, more intricately connected; thank you for being an indispensable part of it. — Boris Dralyuk, Editor-in-Chief

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS congratulates LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS on the 10th Anniversary

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

Gifts that Intrigue, CLASSICS & COLLECTIBLES

A beautiful collector’s object, this is one of the most scientifically important and visually stunning works on butterflies and moths ever created.

A groundbreaking history of the Aztec Empire as recorded in richly illustrated hieroglyphic codices. Luxe gift editions of two timeless classics from the publishers of the Autobiography of Mark Twain and in partnership with the Mark Twain Project.

A stunning boxed set of Homer’s epics, brilliantly translated by a leading scholar of the classics.

Explore hidden city histories in this lavish reinvention of the traditional atlas. “The maps themselves are things of beauty.”—New York Times

Inform, and Inspire LIFE STORIES LARGER THAN LIFE

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s last book is a curation of her own legacy, tracing the long history of her work for gender equality. “Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue is a gift to readers and a stirring call to continue the fights she waged.”—Hillary Rodham Clinton

“Among the books about the legend . . . the most substantial is Jan Caeyers’s Beethoven: A Life, a magisterial account, rich in archival findings.” Books of the Year 2020—Times Literary Supplement

SWEEPING TALES & LEGENDARY HEROES

Victor Hugo meets Papillon in this effervescent memoir of war, slavery, and selfdiscovery, told with aplomb and humor in its first English translation.

Fact is torn from fiction in this first biography of Mexico’s famous independence heroine, which also traces her subsequent journey from history to myth.

Spectacular Palestinian Arab tales that are at once earthy and whimsical—for those who want to deepen their understanding of an enduring people.

ART TK

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Minha vÛ, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 x 2 3/8 inches (182.9 x 243.8 x 6 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

f i c t i o n

UNFILMABLE CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

et us speak, first, of first sentences. The doorway into the house, or, if you prefer, the view of the door. Perhaps even the glimpse of the rooftop from the road. Here are some of Kelly Link’s first sentences over a long and fruitful career: •

• • • • •

“When the sex tape happened and things went south with Fawn, the demon lover did what he always did.” “Fran’s daddy woke her up wielding a mister.” “‘Dorothy Gale,’ she said.” “Eric was night, and Batu was day.” “Q: And who will be fired out of the cannon?” “‘When you’re Dead,’ Samantha says, ‘you don’t

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have to brush your teeth.’” “I. Going to Hell: Instructions and Advice.” “Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet.” “Ainslie doesn’t rip open presents.” “two men, one raised by wolves”

Laid out so, they form a very odd poem, or something a sleep-talker would slur and mutter deep in the pits of REM. They discombobulate, pique, or both. What should a first sentence do? Certainly, it must capture a reader’s attention; it must come-hither in a very particular way. At the very least, it must draw the reader to the next sentence. A short story collection has this problem a dozen times over — instead of a single beginning, it must begin over and over again. In his book Invisible Forms, Kevin Jackson speaks to the unique challenge of the first sentence. Denied more oldfashioned starts, he says — like “Once upon a time,” “It was a dark and stormy night,” or a Beowulf-style “Lo!” — “the self-aware, self-respecting modern writer who stares down at the still unravished whiteness of a page and wonders how best to go about molesting it is obliged to steer between the rock of cuteness and the hard place of mundanity.” This is not a minor task. Upon reading her for the first time, I worried for Link, because her opening sentences seemed to set up impossible stakes. They veered between the above eccentricities and provocative variations on classical openings: “This is a story about being lost in the woods.” “There once was a man whose wife was dead.” “Dear Mary (if that is your name).” How, I thought, could a sustainable story unfold beyond this sort of 18

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sentence? A first-time reader — someone unfamiliar with what she is capable of doing — could be forgiven for expressing skepticism. How could they possibly live up to their own expectations? ¤ In 2010, io9 ran a piece by Link in which she detailed a part of her idea-generating process: writing a list of her literary obsessions. Here, she wrote, were things she “most liked in other people’s fiction,” whether they were “thematic, character driven, very general or very specific.” At the time, I’d never read any of her work, but the reasoning she outlined was so sensible — and the list she wrote so provocative — I couldn’t help but latch on. The list included, among other things, haunted houses, theme parks, invented narratives, twins, old mysteries, ne’er-do-well relations, imaginary friends, mocking celebrities, metafiction, and weird sexual dynamics. I printed this essay and read it over and over. I even made my own list — the beginning of a writerly preoccupation with lists of all kinds: of obsessions, of fears, of potential disasters, of titles. While it’s true that readers can always use writers’ published works to infer their obsessions, there is a unique pleasure to a writer laying bare her obsessions in this way. Link’s previous work, including short story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, has been heavily anthologized, prestigiously prized — she’s won, been nominated, a finalist, and shortlisted for more awards than there is space in this essay to name — and adored in both the literary fiction and genre fiction communities. The stories in these books all seem to draw from her list — a

ART TK

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Verde, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 x 2 1/4 inches (182.9 x 121.9 x 5.7 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

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feat, given that so many of the stories are wildly, incomprehensibly different from one another. Get in Trouble, the newest collection from Link, is a natural progeny of these books, and her obsessions. It features the Link stories that have been wandering in the wild for years now — including “Light,” which appeared in Tin House and later in the anthology Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House; and “Secret Identity,” which had previously been in a limited-edition chapbook and an anthology, Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd — and brings them together in a single volume alongside new work. Despite having been published over a long range of time, the stories in Get in Trouble are both thematically and structurally in sync with each other, and the rest of Link’s oeuvre. One of the collection’s highlights, “Secret Identity,” feels like a kissing cousin to her sprawling novella “Magic for Beginners.” Both deal with identity, adolescence, and narrative layers. “Magic for Beginners” had the reader (you) reading a story about a television show called The Library in which a teenage boy named Jeremy Mars is obsessed with a television show called The Library. “Secret Identity” tells the story of a teenage girl who travels to a hotel hosting a convention of superheroes and dentists to meet up with the object of her affection, Paul Zell — a man who believes she is her 32-year-old sister. In this story, also, we can see Link’s obsessions with metafiction, fictional media (the girl and Paul Zell met in a fictionalized MMORPG called FarAway), celebrities, superheroes, celebrity superheroes, and questionable choices. “Origin Story,” also in Get in Trouble, is set in an abandoned Oz theme park that seems fictional but is 20

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in fact quite real, and appears to be from the same universe as “Secret Identity” — one where superheroes are ordinary people until they develop X-Men-like powers of impressiveness, from flight to the ability to hang pictures straight without a level. Then again, Link’s stories are soaked in so much magic and seem to follow no traditional world-building rules, they might all be in the same universe. Link’s range, compassion, and ability to unsettle — whether writing about the South, deep space, or anywhere in between — are on full display in her other stories as well. In “The Lesson” — one of the collection’s heartbreaking standouts — a gay couple awaiting the birth of their child via a surrogate attends a friend’s wedding on a strange, beautiful island off the Southern coast, and experiences a haunting of sorts as they work through their fears about the pending birth. In “Two Houses” — the story that made me suddenly realize the sun had dropped out of the sky, and encouraged me to turn on the lights — ghost stories with doppelgängers collide with English manor mystery collide with Event Horizon–style space horror, as six astronauts and an AI system named Maureen wind their way through the universe. In “Light,” a woman named Lindsey, tasked with overlooking a Florida warehouse full of people who have spontaneously and permanently fallen asleep, navigates her life and her troublesome twin brother (shaped from half of her double shadow) in a world full of pocket universes — parallel worlds that can be visited from our own — that she encountered through her ex-husband, Elliot: Elliot wasn’t the first thing Lindsey had brought back from a pocket universe. She’d gone on vacation once and brought

__ Lives and Letters __

Freud’s Patients

From

Reaktion

A Book of Lives Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

“A landmark publication which reveals the truth so often obscured in the case histories. The result is a riveting read which is not just better informed but much more interesting than Freud’s fiction.”—Christopher Badcock, author of The Imprinted Brain Cloth $27.50

Hannah Arendt

Samantha Rose Hill

“Hill calmly—and quietly, but without truckling—applies her close readings of Arendt’s most controversial ideas to our own oftentimes taut and illiberal social atmosphere.” —Los Angeles Review of Books Critical Lives Paper $19.00

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journeys to the Extreme Damian Catani

“Catani deftly weaves together the life and the work allowing each to illuminate the other in a brilliant portrait.”—Ian James, University of Cambridge Cloth $37.50

Jean Sibelius

Life, Music, Silence Daniel M. Grimley

“Grimley’s elegant fusion of ‘audible’ musicological detail and warm human insight will enrich the academic and general reader alike.”—Hilary Finch, former music critic, Times (UK) Cloth $35.00

Now in Paperback

Wanderers

A History of Women Walking Kerri Andrews With a Foreword by Kathleen Jamie

“The history of walking has always been women’s history, Andrews declares, even if the weight of manmade literature suggests otherwise.”—Sunday Telegraph Paper $14.00

Distributed by the UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS www.press.uchicago.edu

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back the pit of a green fruit that fizzed like sherbet when you bit into it, and gave you dreams about staircases, ladders, rockets, things that went up and up, although nothing had come up when she planted it, although almost everything grew in Florida. Within these plots, the stories are all studded with images as beautiful and surreal as David Lynch dioramas: a man in a wedding dress riding over shallow water in a glass-bottomed boat; a now-extinct cat-like taxidermied nightmare; eerily intricate little toys and houses filled with moss and molting monsters; RealDoll– style werewolf boyfriends living in storage units; hovering bubbles of blood; butter statues shaped like supervillains; possible nudist ghosts; and too many other oddities to catalog. As in her other collections, Link’s stories — regardless of their actual word count — sprawl and deepen like novellas, or novels tucked into shortstory-sized boxes, or a TARDIS, or the unsettling interior of the Navidson/Green house in House of Leaves. The inside and outside are not proportionate to one another. Her world-building is ecstatic; one gets the sense that no amount of new information about her stories’ universes would make them predictable to anyone except her. And so we return to the first sentences, and by extension, the stories themselves. By virtue of these sentences, by virtue of her premises, her plots, her ecstatically built universes, nothing of Kelly Link’s should, rightly, work. It’s akin to walking into the laboratory of a mad scientist and observing a sprawling, unrecognizable Rube Goldberg–style machine wreathed in tunnels of naked mole rats, giving off blue and gold sparks, sweating tea, smelling like sulfur and hydrangeas, 22

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and belching the second movement of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs; and then watching the whole thing precisely and perfectly crack an egg in a bowl. What Link evokes at the end of her stories — in the case of stories like the “The Lesson,” exactly at the end — is the sort of magic every reader hungers for. It’s the desire to come away from a text feeling slightly altered — whether there are tears snow-globing on the lenses of your glasses or you have to put the book down and bite your thumb or there’s a weird feeling of pressure behind your nose or you utter an involuntary “Oh.” It’s what every good story should do in some way or another, and it’s the sort of thing that seems simple, but isn’t. Or, to put it another way: Most of her stories are unfilmable. They contain so much nuance and so many sleights of hand and so much contortion of form, it would take a filmmaker who does not yet exist to adapt them to the screen. This is not a marker of quality in and of itself — there are plenty of brilliant, beautiful, filmable novels and stories. But it puts her into an elusive category of writers — alongside Nicholson Baker and Italo Calvino — who are so specialized that they have broken fiction down to its most essential elements, then reassembled them into something unrecognizable. This is why Link should be required reading for every writer, even writers whose styles deviate completely from hers: it is necessary to understand the sheer possibilities of form, of genre. To understand how rules can be twisted, snapped, shattered. In an interview with Gigantic Magazine last year, Link talked extensively about her admiration of television shows:

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The other aspect of a television show like The Vampire Diaries is the narrative speed. It’s breakneck, not something you can pull off, in the same way, in a short story. It’s one of the reasons why I loved American Horror Story, too, that sense of how much narrative had been crammed, in such interesting ways, into such a small space. Okay, so maybe that is something you can do (that I try to do) in a short story. The comparison to American Horror Story is an interesting one: whereas AHS’s dizzying array of baddies and side plots often manage to undercut any real-life horror they’d evoked, Link’s wild setups always launch her emotional questions — How do people, women in particular, survive trauma? What does it feel like to grow up? How does it feel to slide slow-motion toward your own mistakes? Why are stories important? How do you know you’re in love? — into the stratosphere. But true to her vision, almost every story in Get in Trouble has other narratives tucked inside them — or “crammed,” to use her word — whether it’s parallel worlds or storytelling or reality shows or MMORPGs or sudden tears into the future. This deepening appears quite literally in “Light” as well, in which the pocket universes serve as metaphors for the way all of her stories are structured: Very few of the pocket universes were larger than, say, Maryland. Some had been abandoned a long time ago. Some were inhabited. Some weren’t friendly. Some pocket universes contained their own pocket universes. You could go a long ways in and never come out again. You could start your own country out there 24

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and do whatever you liked, and yet most of the people Lindsey knew, herself included, had never done anything more adventuresome than go for a week to some place where the food and the air and the landscape seemed like something out of a book you’d read as a child; a brochure; a dream. There were sex-themed pocket universes, of course. Tax shelters and places to dispose of all kinds of things: trash, junked cars, bodies. […] You must be this tall to enter. This rich. Just this foolish. Because who knew what might happen? Pocket universes might wink out again, suddenly, all at once. It becomes clear, after a while, that to read Kelly Link is to give yourself over to her completely. It is an exercise in trust. She gives you that first sentence. She tells you her obsessions, and then heaves them together as if to do so is a challenge she has set out for herself — an Oulipianstyle conceit. Here, she combines twins, old mysteries, ghost stories. Here, Cat in the Hat–type characters/antagonists/ allies, imaginary friends, haunted houses. Here, theme parks, celebrities, weird sexual dynamics. What comes out is difficult to quantify — almost 3,000 words and I still don’t think I’ve nailed it, exactly — and impossible to imitate. Will the egg crack? Will you come away altered? Yes, yes. ¤ Infinite amounts of ink are spilled about the words “genre” and “literature”; so much so, I’m almost reluctant to invoke them here. These labels are problematic, and complicated, but for the purposes of this review, I refer to a Bennett Sims interview in The American Reader where

COUNT VA L ER I E M A R T Í N E Z A poetric reckoning with climate change “I cannot think of a timelier book than Count. And I wouldn’t trust such a book from a poet who’s not as attuned as Valerie Martínez to the urgencies of environmental issues and their inextricable bond to social justice. Martínez has shaped a poetics that weaves the ecological with the mythical with the personal.”—Rigoberto Gonzaléz, Camino del Sol Series Editor

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THE HATAK WITCHES D E VO N A . M I H E S UA H An authentic and mysterious literary thriller “A Native American woman detective is called to the local museum to investigate a murder. A man and his son out hunting come upon a gruesomely slain deer. The owner of the Chalakwa Ranch and his wife witness a dark entity on their land that causes all of the winged beings to flee in a panic. This mystery novel, set in contemporary Oklahoma, tells of tribal magic, dark powers, and forces that manipulate and collide into the present day, causing these characters’ lives to tumble into chaos and to reckon with the otherworldly and supernatural.”—Tiffany Midge, author of The Women Who Married a Bear

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he talks about how “‘genre’ and ‘literary’ have also come to designate structurally distinct culture industries, with parallel publishing institutions and networks of prestige.” Here, these words refer to these specific communities. One of the pleasures of the genre world is the reverence with which it treats short stories. In this community, the short story is not considered a stepping-stone to a novel, or a thing to be published as publicity for a novel, or something to be “linked” with other stories into a novelshaped object after the fact, but as a discrete, important creation all its own. There is an entire network of readers and critics who review short stories by themselves, as they are published in the litany of professionally paid magazines. Short stories are eligible for the industry’s top literary merits like the Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards. By contrast, any writer who works in the “literary” community knows that short stories are treated very differently there. The mainstream literary world struggles with writers who only write short stories, and not novels. Short story writers can recite the following sentences from memory: Collections usually don’t make money. Collections are hard to sell. Is there any way this collection could be linked? Is it a novel-in-stories? Are these really chapters? These stories are great, but do you have a novel? With apologies to Muriel Rukeyser, sometimes it feels as if the literary universe is made up of novels, not (short) stories or atoms. When Link attempted to publish her first collections with mainstream publishers, she was rebuffed. (She explained to an interviewer in 2005: “I had enough stories to make up a collection that no editor wanted to buy, because short story collections don’t sell very well.”) This partially 26

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led to the creation of Small Beer Press, which she runs with her husband Gavin Grant. One of the best small presses currently publishing, Small Beer gives homes to incredible books: Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters. Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria. Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees. Karen Joy Fowler’s What I Didn’t See. The literary world — again, I refer to the community — has now fully embraced Link. They have nothing but rapturous praise for her work. But I wonder if their enthusiasm for her style, as well as her love of the short story, will spill over to other writers with a similar focus? A few years ago, when I reviewed Karen Russell’s new collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove, I lamented the fact that critics kept citing authors like Russell and George Saunders as examples of a kind of revolution for the short story collection, despite the fact that they are documented anomalies. Hopefully, Get in Trouble can give a needed shot of adrenaline to the genre: not as stepping-stones, publicity tools, or practice, but a form worth championing on its own.

A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention

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What will you do if you live to 100? How many parents do you have? We ask these and other questions in our upcoming book, published as part of our one-year investigation Catching Up with Life. Co-published by the CCA and Spector Books, available in October 2021.

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Roula Nassar, what then was the deception?, 2019, clay, paint, mdf, 24 x 12.5 x 2.5 inches.

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B E A U T Y, M O U R N I N G , A N D M E L A N C H O LY I N A F R I C A 3 9 MUKOMA WA NGŨGĨ

few years back I was in Kenya with my father, the writer, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o. We were standing on a small hill overlooking the busy Limuru Market. He looked around: “You know, this used to be our land,” he said. But to me I was simply standing on a hill. I knew that it mattered, that somehow my life had been shaped by that loss — in the same way that I know it matters when, in my father’s book In the House of the Interpreter, he writes about coming back from school to find his whole village burned to the ground by the British colonial government. I have been shaped by that history even though I cannot account for it. It haunts, steers, and shapes me as its heaviness weighs me down. This is the feeling that came back to me as I was reading the excerpt from Tope Folarin’s novel, New Mom, in the new anthology Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara, which begins this way: “The most confusing period of my childhood began when my schizophrenic 29

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mother left us and returned to Nigeria.” After that opening sentence, there is no putting the story down. In the story, we see trauma handed down to the next generation like a prized family heirloom. The story is about first-generation Africans in America, or American Africans, (the name has yet to be settled upon, let alone find a hyphen) children and their immigrant parents. But this is not immigrant literature in the sense of a child of two worlds, or assimilation versus maintaining one’s culture. For the first and second generation of American-born Africans, that battle — if it was ever real — has been lost. It is, instead, the move from mourning to melancholia. Born in the United States, the kids in Folarin’s story see a father mourning things he knows he has lost: country, wife, culture, and so on. From their vantage point on the stairs in the family home in Utah, they can see their father in the sitting room suffering after his schizophrenic wife, who returned to Nigeria in order to heal, deserted him. This Nigeria that the children do not know is a large and looming presence. But they cannot account for it. Their names are African, but having never been to Nigeria they cannot account for their names either. Africa39 spins at this axis, between the colonized generation of Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness — the two best-known novels of colonialism in Africa — and the post-colonial world to which it gave birth. There will never be another Things Fall Apart or Heart of Darkness. The world that made those novels is gone. Africa39 would not exist without these novels and the world that created them. Yet this anthology — which may bookmark yet another beautiful and 30

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painful epoch in the African literary tradition — reveals something crucial about the state of the post colonial generation — my generation — today. The legacy of colonialism’s bifurcated world — on one side the European colonists, and on the other, the colonized Africans — its corrosive effects on both, and the ensuing culture clashes and alienation has given way to something harder to articulate than mere “globalization”: a metaphysical colonization in which language, and racial identity itself, gets scrambled. Despite being written in English, Things Fall Apart features a protagonist, Okonkwo, who is assumed to be speaking Igbo, is well respected in his community, and is fluent in the ways of his culture. He does not bend to the will of the invading culture and so is eventually broken by it. In the Africa of Africa39, the once invading culture and its language are the norm. If Things Fall Apart reflects the time of British Empire building, Africa39 reflects that of the “metaphysical empire,” a term coined by the literary critic Adam Beach, referring to a British languageand-culture empire rising out of the ashes of a dying colonial material empire. It’s a future that was foreseen by Samuel Johnson when, in the preface to the English dictionary1 of 1755, he wrote: I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.

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The English metaphysical empire has overrun my generation. While the Achebe generation debated the question of African storytelling and language — Achebe making the case for writing in English, and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o making the case for writing in the original African languages — the young writers in Africa39, and those like me who are somewhat older, are working from a consensus that African writing in English and French is the inevitable norm. Even translation — the movement from one language to another, that Walter Benjamin claimed gives a piece of literature a second life — is not seen as an option by this new African generation. We do not write in our own languages; we write in the language of the departed yet present colonizer. Except for a few translations into Kiswahili, there have hardly been any translations into African languages, not even of writing by African authors. Despite the call for stories also originally written in African languages, there are none in Africa39. The three translated stories in the anthology were not originally written in native African languages, but in Western languages other than English. This is how bad things are for writing in African languages: since its publication in 1958, Things Fall Apart has been translated into over 50 languages, but not Igbo, Achebe’s mother tongue. A close parallel would be if Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had never been translated into Polish — but even then not quite, since Conrad identified and was received as an English writer while Achebe identified and was received as an African writer. And here is the irony: Things Fall Apart has been translated into Polish. Who will give African literature in African languages a second life, if not some of the 32

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39 writers from this anthology? To understand the aesthetics and political distance African literature has traveled between Things Fall Apart and Africa39, one would have to think of it in those terms of mourning and melancholy, of inherited traumas and memories, which define the new African literary generation. For Freud, mourning is “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” In contrast, melancholia describes when “one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost,” and “is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.” The older generation in Africa can be said to be mourning — they know what they have lost, whether it is language and culture, or land and nation. And their writing is an attempt to recover a lost known object. But the Africa39 writers do not fully know the language they have lost, and have no direct memory of the land and nation that belonged to their parents. In Africa39, the characters, like their writers, have no intimate knowledge of the cultures that formed their parents and grandparents. They are in a state of melancholy. ¤ To my ear, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s story in Africa39 — also set in the United States — suffers from an African, middleclass aesthetic that was also present in her latest novel, Americanah. This is an aesthetic that is so concerned with not telling a single story of poor, fly-infested

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Africans, that it goes overboard into the academic halls of Princeton, of mansions, housemaids, and casually worn and perhaps ill-gotten wealth. The plot breaks new ground in African writing. We meet Umkaka, a heartbroken graduate student in Princeton, and Chinedu, a gay African living without documentation. As the story unravels, we get to understand the tragedies and personal betrayals that fuel their friendship. But Adichie’s writing style does not allow her to enter her character’s inner lives, nor does it allow her a grasp of their trauma; the story reads like diaspora slumming. It is as if she has heard that African immigrants suffer when they do not have papers, and families get broken up when one parent gets deported, so she visits with those families, and then writes about them. The Folarin excerpt, on the other hand, enters the materially cruel and psychologically punishing underbelly of the model African immigrant narrative that has become so popular nowadays. This is the narrative that showcases the achievement of African immigrants and their children, and seems to point out that African Americans have no excuse. As if with that narrative they can erase the history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the racism that allows white citizens and policemen to shoot unarmed young black men, and everything else that haunts black Americans from the first day in school to the last. In Folarin’s work, we get to see the United States as experienced from below. Folarin’s promising novel excerpt points to a new direction in African literature. This literature features African characters who were born in the United States, or immigrated at a young age, and who do not feel grateful, or are caught 34

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between two worlds where one is new and the other old. What ultimately links the Africa39 stories is an intense human connection. In an excerpt from a novel in progress, Echoes of Mirth by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, we find a father and his two sons — the younger of which happens to have a serious crush on his older brother’s girlfriend — living in the shadow of the mother’s death. That human connection is captured in the first sentence, and the story does not let go of it: “I used to like my brother’s girlfriend, until she desecrated our house with laughter not long after Mammy died.” The story ends with laughter, too. In the short story Hope’s Hunter by Mohamed Yunus Rafiq, he does something with language that I have only seen Amos Tutuola do in The Palm-Wine Drinkard: he uses language that is lyrical, beautiful, and physical all at once, as if the words on the page are literally pregnant with the meaning they are trying to convey. For example, “This is the land: once teeming with galloping and prancing antelope, now a desert of fine dust […] But now, shrunken heads are sunk deep on the cadavers’ chests.” Or, “His countenance resembles that of a fisherman who holds a rod at which a might catch mischievously tugs.” Speaking of language, there are no wise old African men who oil their words with proverbs, or speak slowly and deliberately in long, Africanized English sentences. “Suck. My. Dick,” a drunk cat yells at Nadifa Mohamed’s narrator in “Number 9.” But Africa39 is not just opening up new frontiers. Some of the writers revisit familiar themes of colonialism and resistance, and the neocolonial relationships between African countries and the

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West. But they do so with refreshing twists and turns. In the allegorical excerpt from Mama’s Future by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, the mother figure is a personified, humanized, and literalized mama Africa. She is on her deathbed; her children out in the diaspora have returned to bid her farewell and discuss her legacy and the future. Returning to the land of their ancestors, they find a mess of extravagance, theft, and poverty. Rotimi Babatunde’s The Tiger of the Mangrove excerpt recounts the meeting between the colonizer and the colonized in new ways — giving both Africans and Europeans a history and agency. In Things Fall Apart and earlier novels, the white characters are often cardboard cutouts of the khaki-wearing, bible-carrying colonizer. In Babatunde’s story, which is an excerpt from a novel in progress, he reimagines the first meeting between the soon-to-be colonizer and the soon-to-beresisting colonized. The narrator observes after the meeting, “some would later say this duet of omission was the acknowledgement from the two men that Berlin had made dialogue redundant long before they met. So Hamilton spoke about his rafting down the Nile.” Berlin, here casually thrown, refers to the 1884 conference where the major powers carved up Africa. If history had already decided to cast them as enemies, why not get to know each other off the battlefield? Why not be cordial and learn a thing or two from each other? History has already dictated that they be enemies, so they take that history for granted. Eleven of the stories have been culled from novels in progress. They are a promise of 11 excellent novels coming our way soon. In this way, the anthology as a whole is a preview of excellent writing 36

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yet to come. Mehul Gohil’s short story, “Day and Night,” which focuses on how we come to knowledge as children, and the little things that bond the child to the parent, is a longer, happier and yet more melancholic take on fathers and sons than in the poem, Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. The care for the language, the craft, and the form are clearly present. Gohil has what Linda Gregg calls “resonant resources,” those things and experiences unique to oneself that become a “vital force that fuels.” But he has not yet found a way to use them for his writing. He tries to do too much — as if he believes that writers have to be rebels — and the story gets lost in its own cleverness. It is necessary, too, to mention the preface to the anthology. Symbolically, it makes a great deal of sense to have Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, representing the older generation, write the preface, entering Africa39 into conversation with an African literary tradition. But Soyinka’s rambling preface is also the worst part of the anthology. He is fighting a proxy war with nameless political writers of his generation while saying nothing at all about the writing in Africa39. When I was young, I would give books from my then exiled father’s library to that black hole I called friends. My mother sat me down and told me, “Books are wealth.” Well, I am telling you this anthology is wealth. You will find a beauty that is complex and contradictory — aesthetics true to the calling of making us see the world anew. Africa39 will leave its mark on the African literary tradition. 1. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols, London: Printed by WS Johnson - Strahan for J. & P. Knapton [et. al.], (92)

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Roula Nassar, family tree, 2019, wood, steel, plaster, paper, wire, graphite 35 x 25 x 24 inches.

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L I F E ( N A R R AT I V E ) IN THE END TIMES TA N YA A G A T H O C L E O U S

or a variety of geopolitical and environmental reasons, things are feeling pretty apocalyptic right now (postelection addendum — very apocalyptic). While this has been true at other times in both the recent and distant past, what feels new is how our creeping sense of doom has changed the way we think about history and scale: a phenomenon best captured by the overused but suitably solemn word “Anthropocene,” a new geological-historical term that describes the period when the Earth’s environment was indelibly reshaped by human activity. What has happened, though, to the way we now think about the scale of individual lives? If life-writing once situated individuals in a world with an infinite future, 39

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how can it now address our sense of being out of time? Two recent publications present different imaginative takes on these questions by turning reproductive sexuality, the engine of futurity taken for granted in most life-writing, from an assumption into a question: what’s the point? Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, both published in 2015, were immediately buzzy and critically acclaimed works — A Little Life was runner-up for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award and Nelson’s book was blurbed by everyone from Kim Gordon to Fred Moten. They were lauded for many of the same reasons: described as exceptionally moving, innovative, challenging, and subversive, both were also applauded for presenting new stories of queer life. The two books, however, are very different formally. A Little Life is recognizably a novel, while The Argonauts defies genre: it has been described as autotheory, autofiction, metafiction, and memoir, and also contains elements of the academic essay, lyric poetry, the diary, and the letter. But both are biographical in their subject matter and experimental in form, as they adapt the individualistic focus of life narrative to the question of how we might think about “collaborative survival in precarious times,” to use Anna Tsing’s phrase. Neither were hailed as Anthropocene writing, unlike Tsing’s book. But the welcoming of A Little Life and The Argonauts into the queer canon is significant in this regard. While the queerness of these two works operates very differently, as I will show, it is vital to the way that both engage with the problem of futurity, a

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problem that has, until recently, been most robustly staged as a problem by queer theorists. Most influentially, Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) argued that political discourse creates and reinforces “the absolute privilege of heteronormativity” by putting forward a logic of reproductive futurity, so that politics is always depicted as a struggle on behalf of future generations: “we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child.” Queerness is thus a resistance to the idea of “history as linear narrative […] in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself — as itself — through time.” A Little Life and The Argonauts both strikingly create worlds in which reproductive futurity is not the default assumption. In his influential study Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson connects the realist novel’s secular imagination to its representation of “homogeneous empty time”: time, divisible into logical units, that stretches indefinitely into the future, unaffected by the cataclysms of religious temporality. These contemporary works, however, reimagine life narrative so that it feels not so much a movement forward in time as a staying in place. Rather than looking ahead, the main characters toggle disorientingly between past and present, aging — rather than progressing — through their lives. A Little Life starts in red herring mode, leading the reader to misrecognize it as a New York novel of manners in the style of The Emperor’s Children, since the first part, an extended mise-en-scène, focuses on the privileged lives of four Ivy

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League graduates who move to New York and become hugely successful in their various professional fields. In this opening section, the novel presents a vaguely utopian version of the early 21st century: there is no mention of 9/11 or AIDS, and the main characters and their friends are cheerily comfortable with hybrid racial and sexual identities, and eminently suited to their chosen professions, which they are able to master quickly. But then the narrative turns from social comedy to nightmare bildungsroman as its focus narrows, in devastating detail, to the story of one particular character, Jude St. Francis, who is haunted by a childhood of relentless abuse at the hands of an improbable sequence of predators. These include priests at the monastery who take him in after he was abandoned as a child; men he is sold to, night after night, by one of the priests, who has ostensibly helped him escape the abuse at the monastery; a particularly vicious sadist who picks him up after he collapses, weak with syphilis from doing sex work, and tries to run him over with a car after torturing him for weeks in a basement; and lastly, his first boyfriend, who, just as Jude summons up the courage to connect with someone sexually as an adult, subjects him to another relentless round of rape and physical abuse. Though his story momentarily brightens when his best friend, Willem, falls in love with him, the physical suffering he endures from his habit of self-harm, the permanent injury inflicted on his legs by the vehicular assault, and the mental suffering inspired by his memories continue to make his life unbearable. After Willem dies in a freak car accident, he decides to end it. 42

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I provide this massive spoiler because the plot details, both their horror and their unlikelihood, are crucial to the meaning of the novel. Is its purpose really to be the Great American Gay Novel, as a reviewer in The Atlantic suggested, calling it “an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America”? This seems a bizarre mischaracterization, given that the vast majority of the “queer” characters in it are pedophiles, rapists, and abusers, and that the central character, Jude, is depicted as being gay as a default reaction to his treatment at their hands. To what service is this grim, voyeuristic, mawkishly homophobic vision put, then, and what was its appeal to reviewers, prize judges, and lay readers alike when it makes for such a stomach-churning and disheartening read? One way to answer this is to consider A Little Life’s nihilistic yet doggedly aesthetic relationship to novelistic form. Yanagihara claims that part of her inspiration for the novel was a Vogue fashion show dominated by an ombré color scheme, in which color is presented as a gradual, almost imperceptible movement from light to dark. The ongoing torture of her main character in the service of this vision seems ruthless indeed, but does bestow a highly structured form on her long and unwieldy text. Yet her novel eschews even the glimpse of meaning that Georg Lukács identifies as a key characteristic of the novel in a “world without God.” The reader labors through its 800-plus pages in anticipation of some justification for Jude’s suffering and their own as they bear witness to it, for much of it is described in graphic,

visceral detail: an unrelenting realism that sits uneasily next to the fantastical machinations of the novel’s darkening plot. But the novel offers no escape from the past, which intrudes on Jude at regular intervals to create his suffering in the present. He is let down as a child by the state and as an adult by capitalism, for the revenge he wreaks on the world through his ruthless efficiency as a corporate attorney provides him with only passing satisfaction, and the lush material comforts he accrues cannot cushion him from the abuse of his boyfriend or the betrayals of his body, as age leaves his tortured frame increasingly vulnerable. This is a world, in other words, with no redemptive horizon, where we confront meaningless suffering not in the form of war or natural disaster but on the micro-scale of the life-story — and are offered no narrative compensation for it. Part of the novel’s effectiveness in making the reader feel the devastation of this derives from the slow burn of its ombré effect and part from the bait-andswitch of its form, which — in its move from comedy to tragedy — dispenses with myths of futurity. At first, we are presented with four promising youths, who, in their multiculturalism, Ivy League pedigrees, and ability to rise to the top of their professions despite the structural disadvantages they might face because of their disparate race and class backgrounds, perfectly epitomize the American Dream. But then we learn through Jude’s flashbacks that the child who underwrites this dream, according to Edelman’s theories, has been repeatedly violated, his body fully capitalized. There are no structures in place to save him, and there is no space

of redemption: not the monastery, not the workplace, not the vibrant city, not even the countryside, where Jude tells his adoptive father of his longing for death. What is revealed by the mesmerizing unfolding time of the novel’s torture porn is not insight or reckoning but simply … nothing. Like Edelman, though presumably for different reasons, Yangihara chooses no future over reproductive futurism, but also suggests that we all have. The future is now, and we must gaze upon its ruins, Jude’s wrecked body taking on planetary dimensions as we are made to look at it more and more closely. The novel is powerful in this way, in finding a scale adequate to the representation of ruin, but it also cynically and irresponsibly exploits the homophobic logic of the political discourse of futurity that Edelman critiques. As Edelman puts it, “our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even by the threat of potential encounters, with an ‘otherness’ of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve.” A Little Life achieves its power not so much through its genre play as by creating exactly the kind of world that politicians try to evoke when they protest, say, gender-neutral bathrooms: one filled with depraved gay predators who will rob us of our childhoods and our futures. The Argonauts requires less plot summary because there is little plot. The text is narrated by an unnamed writer, a version of its author Maggie Nelson, who reflects on her life as she falls in love with Harry, a genderqueer artist; watches her own body change as she undergoes IVF treatment, 43

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then becomes pregnant; watches her lover’s body change during and after top surgery; and describes the sensations and emotions that accompany new parenthood. These events happen out of sequence, however, and are loosely connected by threads of association and the themes that permeate the book: writing and artistry, sexuality and intimacy, and the limits and potentialities of embodiment. Nelson’s book operates at the opposite scale of A Little Life. Yanagihara’s novel is huge, yet uses the diminutive to suggest the circumscription of Jude’s life and his inability to escape his childhood, his own vulnerable littleness. The Argonauts, on the other hand, is brief and divided into short fragments, some only a sentence long, yet evokes the epic through its title and the Argo trope that punctuates the text. Nelson and her partner are the titular Argonauts on a voyage together, but the title also alludes to the book’s interest in the relationship between language and identity and the radical contingency of both; early on in the book, Nelson cites Roland Barthes on love, the declaration of which, he argues, is like the boat Argo, which was changed and renovated repeatedly while its name stayed the same. In Barthes’s words “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.” Like Yanagihara’s novel, Nelson’s has been described as a queer text, but queerness means something different here. Skeptical of categorical thinking and stable meaning, Nelson cites — and seems largely to adhere to — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s understanding of queer as 44

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“relational, and strange […] a nominative, like Argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip.” She is open to the word being capacious — used, for example, by people in heterosexual relationships, as it was by Sedgwick — as well as potentially detached from sexual edginess. Now that sex is less often linked to reproduction, and so-called deviant practices proliferate in the heterosexual world, queerness might have to change too: “If queerness is about disturbing normative sexual assumptions and practices,” she asks, “isn’t one of these that sex is the beall and end-all?” This text deals explicitly with “no future,” both in the sense that humanness has come to mean, in Nelson’s words, “trashing and torching the whole motley, precious planet, along with its, our, future,” and with Edelman’s work itself. While Nelson agrees with Edelman that “[r]eproductive futurism needs no more disciples,” she also argues that “basking in the punk allure of ‘no future’ won’t suffice either, as if all that’s left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shred our economy and our climate and our planet.” No future, she suggests, is what they want you to think. But because Nelson takes the prospect of no future seriously, her book, like Yanagihara’s, refuses a specific vision of futurity. Despite the importance of her child, Iggy, to her changing vision of herself over the course of the book; despite the nonlinearity of its structure; and despite the way the narrative constantly toggles between death and birth, her parents,

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Harry’s parents, Harry’s child and her own child, that child never represents futurity. Iggy too becomes a voyager on the Argo, which, over the course of the book, becomes increasingly over-determined as symbol: it stands for improvised family, the arbitrary nature of language, the constant refabrication of the self in relation to the other, and the boat that we’re all in together as “human animals” (in Nelson’s words). The Argo is thus a heterotopia rather than a vehicle oriented toward a destination. A term coined by Michel Foucault, “heterotopia” describes a space that functions as a “counter-site, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites […] that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” For Foucault, “the ship is the heterotopia par excellence,” for it is “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea […] the boat has […] been for our civilization […] the greatest reserve of the imagination.” As well as the nonlinear structure of her narrative, it’s this space that serves as a symbol of escape from the logic of futurity, for it also serves as a symbol of a time removed from the relentless destructive pace of modernity: of epic time, what Lukács calls “the blissful time-removed quality of the world of gods.” The Argo, then, is at once time as forward momentum: iteration and change — the constant forward movement of “I love you” remaking the relationship it describes each time it is repeated — and time as space: a temporary symbol of the utopian moment

where we are held together, or given form, by utterance before we break apart again. Though very different in spirit and style, The Argonauts and A Little Life might be seen as two sides of the same coin. In juxtaposition, their experiments unravel the dialectic of the novel by testing the limits of its ability to make form and life commensurate: the little life of Jude with its preponderance of ghastly details and the epic journey of The Argonauts; fixed form and fragmentary form; gathering darkness and open-ended journey. Operating at opposite ends of the spectrum of life-writing, these texts, taken together, are responses not only to Lukács’s world abandoned by God, but also the prospect of no world at all. On the question of “no future,” Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurity and the anticapitalist politics of Anthropocene environmentalists are not identical. Those in the Anthropocene camp, by and large, hope to salvage some form of future by shifting our perspective on it. Edelman refuses futurism altogether, calling on us to embrace the death drive rather than the family. But there is considerable overlap between these stances: both ask us to confront mortality head-on, and to use that confrontation as the occasion for a radical reconsideration of our social structures and their reproductive logic. The Argonauts inhabits this overlap comfortably, emphasizing the precarity of life while celebrating the mutuality that makes it bearable. A Little Life rips the two positions apart by denuding them of their emancipatory politics. Leveraging the homophobia that Edelman opposes but taking up his 45

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nihilism, the novel refuses the hope that drives those contemplating a nonhuman future, opting instead to give shape to the death drive as long-form narrative. The works share an interest, however, in turning the problem of the future into an effect (or affect) of form, making our radical vulnerability as “human animals” (to use Nelson’s term) visceral, and emphasizing the humility that must accompany it. The Anthropocene, in the immensity of planetary history, is but a little life.

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I T ’ S C O M P L I C AT E D : P E T E R M O U N T F O R T ’ S A YO U N G M A N ’ S G U I D E TO L AT E C A P I TA L I S M CHRIS KRAUS

et in Bolivia amid the uncertainty of the first weeks of Evo Morales’s presidency in late 2005, Peter Mountford’s compulsively readable first novel is a book about money. A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a bildungsroman in reverse, tracing the psychic dissolution of the somewhat-likeable protagonist Gabriel de Boya from his first, broke years in New York after graduating from Brown to the cocooned state of permanent transience he achieves as a hedge fund manager. Like Balzac›s Lucien de Rubempre, Gabriel is at once highly nuanced and an allegorical figure. No better or worse than anyone else, he›s just trying to get by in a world that›s systemically compromised. While Mountford, a former financial analyst, is highly informed and informative about the macroeconomic game theories that order the world and color the most intimate parts of our lives, it is his 47

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novel’s premise that the sweeping lifeforce of capital might animate a personal narrative that is truly radical. As he said in an interview with Vanessa Hua for the Los Angeles Review of Books back in June:

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feedback loop of desire, moving between his dumpy Greenpoint apartment and office cubicle. As Mountford writes, “money, in general — the plain and unassailable acts of acquiring it and spending it — had turned out to occupy a more important Finance and economics clearly role in adulthood than he’d expected.” All play an important role in conGabriel wants is to be free from want, so temporary history ... . But if when an opportunity arises to move to you’re aiming to write “serious” Bolivia for the Calloway Group and, with literature there’s a tendency to share options and performance bonuses, write about neurotic suburbanites hypothetically earn millions, he jumps at or upper-middle class dilettantes. it. He aces the interview; when his future That stuff doesn’t interest me at boss Priya asks him why he wants to work all. for the Group, he replies: “I want to make a shitload of money for awhile.” Conceived during his exiled Chilean Gabriel arrives in La Paz on the eve mother’s brief student years in Moscow, of Marxist President Evo Morales’s elecGabriel senses at an early age that the tion. Bilingual and bicultural, he is at world is “more complex” than his old- home, even comfortable, with Bolivia’s school leftist, Nation- and Mother Jones- dereliction. It is a country where — as contributing mother might have it. Mountford writes in one of dozens of Growing up in the oasis of upper-middle stinging descriptions — the sight of rebars class life near Pomona College where his protruding from concrete blocks is a sign mom is a tenured anthropologist, Gabriel’s of hope: should things improve, construcmixed parentage makes him adept, from tion might one day be finished. Gabriel his earliest years, at navigating cultural finds the shag carpets and tawny-glass conundrums. But to where? In the end, chandeliers of the city’s five-star hotels Gabriel’s adherence to the twenty-first sincere and refreshing: “He believed that century truism that “the world is complex” the management knew perfectly well how proves just as useless as his mother’s prim- outmoded their décor was. It wasn’t any itive faith in ideology. funnier than the fact that their roads were When Gabriel accepts a job as re- falling apart. It just made an easier target.” gional analyst for the Calloway Group, Traveling to Bolivia in his late teens he’d a hedge fund notorious for its feral ruth- found its intractable third-world poverlessness, he plans to keep the job just ty personally liberating. Temporarily reuntil he has “enough money to be done leased from the compulsion to “succeed,” with the issue of money forever.” Five he enjoyed the giddy epiphany that his years after graduation, his former class- American life occurred within the Matrix: mates who took Wall Street jobs have “The United States was actually a very bientered the world of adulthood while zarre place. Elsewhere in the world, the he languishes as an online business re- unattainability of great fame and fortune porter. Their opulent lofts and celebrity was more readily accepted, so life was less parties leave him trapped in a low-grade driven by grandiose fantasies.” 48

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Posing as a freelance journalist seven years later, Gabriel is charged with the vague mandate of reporting “anything that might be of interest” to his employers. And this is complicated. The Calloway Group’s impressive returns could not be achieved through such primitive means as investing in industry: to compete, they must manipulate markets. In the brief window between Evo Morales’s election and inauguration, Gabriel sees Evo’s dramatic promise to nationalize foreign gas companies as the only variable in play. If he does so, the handful of companies heavily exposed in Bolivia will become instantly worthless. Bouncing between liaisons with two diametrically opposed, powerful women who are both positioned to share classified information, Gabriel conceives of a shell game even more Byzantine than the Calloway Group’s machinations. (Or so he believes.) If he succeeds, the digits on his Ameritrade account screen will metastasize within hours. In the process, he finds himself torn between his fuck-buddy arrangement with Fiona Musgrave, a 45-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter and his more romantic attachment to Morales›s media liaison, Lenka Villarobles. Drawn with a very wide brush — the naked and ruthless Fiona «had a hearty appetite for sex and fucked ... as if it were an aerobic routine,» whereas Lenka, a sincere believer in Evo›s regime, «put everything into it, body and soul, and expected nothing less in return» — the female characters are just convincing enough to drive the plot forward. For a while, Gabriel believes that his scheme is a means to stockpile enough money to remain in La Paz with Lenka. But his real romance is with capitalism. Pondering Lenka›s naïve moral clarity,

he looks at the «swelling and popping financial bubbles of the past century» and sees «a culture passionately obsessed with the acquisition of wealth. It was all heart.» Most of the book›s fascination lies not with the plot but in Mountford›s inspired depiction of the city›s splendor and squalor, where daily demonstrations are produced more by a surfeit of time than by any political agenda and presidencies conclude, historically, with assassination. In the end, Gabriel’s scheme to bet against his employer goes haywire. His trades fail miserably, yielding him less than six figures ... but he’ll “succeed” when his tainted report ends up reaping millions for the Calloway Group and he’s rewarded with long-term employment. Three and a half years later, the epilogue finds him on the tenth floor of the Lima Four Seasons managing the Calloway Group’s Latin American fund. Commuting within the bubble of five-star third-world hotels and his New York condo, he has come to see life as a funnel with only one way out: “The breadth of possibility shrank every single day until there were no possibilities left, and then life is over.” Mountford’s conclusion recalls the devastating finale of Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the 60s. Leaving Paris for well-paid, secure jobs in advertising, the desultory young couple Jerome and Sylvie eat a meal in the first-class rail diner and “find it quite tasteless.” Gabriel’s own past doesn’t even feel like a memory: “He looked at it and it looked absurd, fake.” Daringly allegorical and written with apt understatement, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism appears as a Trojan horse within the realm of contemporary literary fiction. Mountford has the courage to depict a world in which personal lives aren›t really that personal. 49

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Pink, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 x 2 1/4 inches (152.4 x 121.9 x 5.7 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

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MARROW IN THE BONES: T R A N S L AT I N G D Ö B L I N ’ S “ B E R L I N A L E X A N D E R P L AT Z ” SOPHIE DUVERNOY

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f one were to be completely honest, one would say: we don’t want literature anymore, that’s outdated. Art is boring; we want facts, only facts. To this, I say bravo, bravo, bravo. I don’t need anyone to make something up for me. […] A good author is his own fact and makes space for it in his works,” the German author Alfred Döblin wrote in a 1928 essay, one year before he published his masterwork, the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Döblin hit upon the nerve of his moment in calling for facts rather than art. At the time, Germany was so unstable, an account of the status quo was sure to be more riveting than any fantasy. It did not take long for Döblin’s book to become a best seller in the Weimar 51

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Republic. Within two years, over 50,000 copies of the book had been sold. The meandering story of Franz Biberkopf, excon, pimp, small-time criminal, and ordinary joe trying to stay on the straight and narrow, captured life in 1920s Berlin like no other document. It was banned and burned under the Nazi regime, but recovered in the postwar era and canonized as a modernist masterpiece. Unfortunately, the first English translation, which appeared in 1931, was, as Franz might say, a bust. The AmericanFrench writer Eugene Jolas, a friend of James Joyce, should have been the perfect man for the job. He had an ear for vernacular dialogue and brought a supple, playful touch to Döblin’s oeuvre. Yet the book puzzled English-speaking critics, who wondered what all the fuss had been about in Germany. A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune characterized it as “a sort of evil smelling, Gargantuan stew,” while another simply rumpled his nose, stating, “there was really no need of perfect indecency.” Döblin’s novel remained a minor work within the English-language literary world, which had lionized Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. A new translation that can reintroduce Berlin Alexanderplatz to a contemporary readership has been long overdue. Döblin’s cutting prose and social commentary are no less sharp than they were in the 1920s. He envisioned the work as a book for an uncertain time, a time that demanded nothing less of authors than to reveal its ugliness in full. Our times, racked by economic precarity, political instability, and increasing inequality are just as uncertain and just as ugly. Michael Hofmann’s new translation now promises to awaken readers to the 52

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relevance of Berlin Alexanderplatz as an urgent, raw account of modernity. It takes courage bordering on foolhardiness to translate Döblin’s novel, which is heavy on period slang and local dialect. Hofmann’s accomplishment is to reimagine in English how the novel talks, squawks, screeches, and curses in Döblin’s German. The original is a gabby thing, and Hofmann too makes his translation talk in many voices. Each character uses colorful, punchy expressions and choice words, whether it’s Franz’s friend chiding him for donning a Nazi uniform (“And the sash. Christ, Franz, I’d sooner use it to hang myself wiv than wear it. They’ve really made a muggins of you”), a movie theater manager trying to get rid of a young runt who wants to sneak in (“This ain’t no flicker”), or Franz’s own violently direct thoughts (“Who’s to blame for everything? Ida, always Ida. Who else. I broke her fucking ribs, that’s why they put me in the clink”). All the characters talk a rough, mean English, as dirty as the streets they live on, and though it is inevitably peppered with postwar Briticisms (Hofmann is a Brit), it does not feel quaint or historic. The language remains impressively taut and sharp throughout. Around 400 CE, Saint Jerome, defending his Greek-to-Latin translations in a letter to the Roman senator Pammachius, lamented the difficulties of preserving “the peculiar vernacular marrow of the language itself.” Döblin, who moved to Berlin when he was 10 years old, knew the marrow of his city’s language inside and out. He felt the cadences of Berlinisch, the earthy, hard-nosed, proletarian brand of German spoken by the city’s inhabitants, which incorporates words from French, Flemish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Slavic languages, and Rotwelsch,

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an argot spoken by vagrants and thieves. “Every language requires an encounter with crudeness and unvarnished rawness — that’s the only way it can stay fresh. But it cannot manage to be soulful or useful to philosophy with this strategy. Only ‘High Berlinisch’ has attained this state of perfection,” the scholar Hans Meyer wrote in 1878 in his study of Berlinisch. Meyer continued, “Berlinisch must be able to flash when lightning is called for. […] The flash must jump from the language almost spontaneously.” Berlinisch’s telltale flash — exemplified by its fondness for sarcastic inversions — was not folksy. It had the quasiphilosophical ability to question facts and cut through to the core of things. Crudeness stood in service of critique. Meyer also praises Berlinisch’s capacity to express deep irony and skepticism through tone, which gives it an air of insouciance. This insouciance made Berlinisch the perfect linguistic vehicle for Döblin and his contemporaries. Unlike the rural patois spoken by Françoise, the housekeeper of In Search of Lost Time, or the Irish idiom of Ulysses, the regional vernacular of Döblin’s modernism is relentlessly unsentimental and never nostalgic. Berlinisch wasn’t a minor language in need of rescuing. Instead, it was everywhere — in newspaper articles, cabaret songs, bar conversations, snatches of dreams. Writers such as Irmgard Keun, Gabriele Tergit, Kurt Tucholsky, and Erich Kästner all had an ear for Berlinisch and gave it a prominent place in their work; it was used in the hilarious songs of the cabaret singer Claire Waldoff and the sociological pamphlets of the writer Hans Ostwald. Writing dialogue in Berlinisch meant more than injecting a dose of local

color into one’s prose: it was a means of harnessing the dialect’s flash to illuminate the profound contradictions of modern life — and to do so with humor and wit. Döblin’s approach is exceptional for its time, however, in that he deploys Berlinisch to the bitter end throughout the entire novel, alongside factual passages, brief elegiac moments, and snatches of poetry. His characters not only talk but think and dream in Berlinisch. Their entire world is inflected with the sounds of their home. Döblin thus raised not just the life of Berlin, but its very language to epic proportions. Although dialects and vernacular speech are alive and well in contemporary literature, a new vernacular always brings a new world along with it. How can a translation tackle this problem? One can’t take geography out of a novel that’s all about Berlin and do, for instance, what its first French translator, Zoya Motchane, did in 1933: freely domesticate place and character names (“Münzhof ” is rendered as “Closerie de la Monnaie,” for example). On top of that, the main duty for any translator of Berlin Alexanderplatz is not just to get the vernacular onto the page, but to translate its bright flash. It would be misguided to plump for a vernacular in the target language that lacks similar critical thrust. Jolas, who had the benefit of being Döblin’s contemporary, chose American slang for his translation and was accused of turning the sophisticated work into a raucous potboiler. But it is more likely that this accusation had less to do with Jolas’s abilities as a translator than with what people expected from an important modernist book. They wanted it to exude dignified difficulty, yet this is not how Berlinisch flashes. Jolas’s language is pulpy 53

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and familiar. An exchange between Franz and a prostitute pouring him a drink reads almost like a movie script out of old Hollywood: “Come on, big man, take another glass. I’d walk a mile for Mampe’s brandy, it makes you feel so hale and dandy,” she urges, to which he replies, “To think the girls ran after me like a bunch of sheep and I didn’t even spit at ’em, and there I was, flat on my nose.” In Jolas’s hands, Berlin Alexanderplatz became boisterous, comfortable, and well-worn. In many ways, this approach gets at the marrow of Berlinisch: the language can only flash because it is so close to home. It signals to the reader, You know this life already; you’ve seen it from the inside. And Jolas is equally masterful when he chooses to be elegant. His prose rolls along in rhythmic cadences that are easeful, even lush at times. In an elegiac passage from one of the penultimate chapters, Jolas captures the lucid dignity of Döblin’s prose:

rely on straightforwardly recognizable registers, but builds up sequences of words, fragments, and snippets to produce a sharp-edged book. Hofmann has chosen to preserve the flash of Berlinisch through jagged language. The dialogue jumps, as in this small sentence spoken by the gang leader Pums, Franz’s nemesis: “What’s he want here? He’s mad, I told him he’s barking, if you’ve just got one arm, and you turn up here, and you want to be a player. And he.” This strategy keeps us on our toes as we piece together Franz’s world. It helps us to be shocked anew by the critical flash of Döblin’s language. Hofmann brilliantly creates a linguistic force field that captures the spirit and inflection of the original, choosing a word here and an expression there that slowly build the sense of a close-knit, grimy, grotesque world. Where Jolas’s prose is relaxed, Hofmann creates a tense mood that reveals the claustrophobic desperation of Franz Biberkopf ’s world:

So let it come — the night, however black and nothing-like it be! So let them come, the black night, those frost-covered acres, the hard frozen roads. So let them come: the lonely, tile-roofed houses whence gleams a reddish light; so let them come: the shivering wanderers, the drivers on the farm wagons traveling to town with vegetables and the little horses in front.

Suffer it to approach — night as black as you like, a void. Suffer it to approach, black night, the fields with the hard frost on them, the frozen roads. Suffer them to approach, the lonely brick houses giving out a reddish light, suffer them to approach, the freezing travellers, the drivers of the carts bringing vegetables into the city, with the little horses pulling.

One can feel, as in Döblin, the perspectival pullback away from the city center to its dark, wintery outskirts, a sense of melancholy fatalism, and a quiet letting go. Hofmann’s new translation constructs its sense of world differently. It does not 54

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The new voice Hofmann brings to Berlin Alexanderplatz promises to jolt us from complacency. He gives us a raw book, full of ugliness and force. This is the effect Döblin intended, and perhaps we’re ready for it now. The book speaks clearly, arresting our attention, like Death, which

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pays Franz Biberkopf a visit at the novel’s end. “You lost the war, sunshine,” he tells Franz. “It’s all up with you. You can pack up. Put yourself in mothballs. I’ve had it with you.” Hofmann allows him to finish with the deadly, simple phrase, “I want your heart, mate.” We come away having tasted that heart, and all the strange, succulent marrow of Döblin’s epic.

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Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Laundry day, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 x 2 3/8 inches (182.9 x 243.8 x 6 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

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S U B L I M E LY U G LY: ON ELENA FERRANTE’S “ T H E LY I N G L I F E O F A D U LT S ” S A R A H C H I H A YA

lena Ferrante's new novel, The Lying Life of Adults (translated by Ann Goldstein), is an ugly book. I say this with admiration, as an open-armed compliment, not a backhanded one. The novel begins with a jarring slap — “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly” — and could be most concisely summarized with the statement that “ugly is not bad.” Good and bad are empty terms, as subjective as ugly itself, but nowhere near as intriguing, or exciting. Ugliness, it turns out, can move in and out of a face, or a body, or a story; ugliness is fascinatingly unpredictable, an obscure sign you can neither decipher nor ignore. In this novel, to be declared ugly, or to declare oneself ugly, is often an indication of another thing

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that can’t be ignored, that also sits outside the false binary of good and bad: honesty. “Ugly” appears so often in the novel that its form quickly ceases to hold, the way that any word repeated aloud (ugly — ugly — yugly — glyug?) almost immediately stops being a word. The effect of this repetition is not absurdity or confusion, but rather expansiveness. From the novel’s very first pages, it is clear that ugliness is not defined in terms of aesthetic pleasure or displeasure. Even the fighting words of the opening sentence, which seem so cruelly straightforward upon first reading, immediately shift and warp as our narrator, Giovanna, clarifies that her father didn’t simply claim that “Giovanna used to be pretty, now she’s turned ugly.” Rather, what he actually said is that Giovanna is “getting the face of Vittoria,” his long-estranged sister, in whom “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.” The intrigue of this phrase lies in its superlative degree: Vittoria is far more than just a homely woman, or just a mean one; she is perfectly ugly and spiteful, an awful ideal. In Giovanna’s imagination, she is accordingly granted mythic status — she appears as a creature who, like a demon or a deity, is somehow everywhere and nowhere, “a childhood bogeyman, a lean, demonic silhouette.” That the figure is only a silhouette is significant; even in photographs, Vittoria’s face has been cut out or inked over, leaving only a void. Seen this way, Giovanna’s fear of Vittoria, and of her own face morphing into that of her faceless aunt, is not the predictable teenage fear of becoming unattractive or unappealing. Rather, it is a fear laced with obscure desire, of being undefined, outside the social world of polite emotions that her bourgeois parents cultivate. This queasy anticipation is soon gratified. Upon 58

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meeting her aunt, Giovanna is shocked to find that “Vittoria seemed to me to have a beauty so unbearable that to consider her ugly became a necessity.” This beauty is as harsh and unmediated as truth. Only a word as powerfully elemental as “ugly” can contain it. The dissolving margin between ugliness and real beauty, first articulated in this early meeting, quickly becomes more and more central to Giovanna’s journey of often bathetic discovery through her emerging sexuality, her family’s history, and the different social strata of Naples. The things she has been raised to believe beautiful — like her parents’ relationship and the institution of marriage, and ultimately, the romantic ideals of true love and passion — rapidly grow as brittle as flaking gold leaf. Instead, Giovanna is drawn to the lively mobility of that quality simply labeled “ugly,” which is, in its vitality and changeability, closer to beauty than any of the genteel prettiness of her childhood. It’s a thrilling ugliness that is first glimpsed in Vittoria, but spreads through the city as Giovanna learns to move through it: “Vittoria’s face, to my great surprise, had seemed so vividly insolent that it was very ugly and very beautiful at the same time, and so now I was hovering between the two superlatives, puzzled.” Giovanna is unable to process her suspension between these two violent aesthetic reactions, a state that recalls a dumbstruck response to the sublime. While Ferrante’s ugly/beautiful is in many ways dissimilar to Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject, these two categories share an intimate relationship to the sublime, which Kristeva describes so evocatively in Powers of Horror: “As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers — it has always already 58

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triggered — a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly.” Like Kristeva’s abject, Ferrante’s ugly is “edged with the sublime,” a keen edge that slices open experience and allows it to bleed out “boundlessly.” “Ugly” breaks down and diffuses through the novel, getting everywhere, unprettifying everything. Honesty creeps in along with this pervasive spread. By the end of the novel, the aestheticizing and anesthetizing stories told by the adults in Giovanna’s life — her parents, her older crush, even Vittoria — are revealed to be meager ornaments that are easily stripped away from the truths that they attempt to cover up. As ugliness and honesty dilate unpredictably, filling the hollows of the plot, the terms that oppose them contract and ultimately collapse in upon themselves. Readers of Ferrante are trained to recognize that conventional beauty — or its frequent companions, goodness, or purity, or fidelity — are the lies the adults of the novel tell themselves to stay dully serene atop the calm surface of life. This is where background reading in her short early novels or the Neapolitan Quartet can offer readers a strong foundation in the workings of this particular world: caught between the powerful torque of the ugly truth — that unruly force that twists with a kind of hideous grace — and the order-making yet fragile veneer of polite deceit. Yet nowhere else, as much as in The Lying Life of Adults, do we see Ferrante’s splendidly harsh laws of physics so clearly laid out. Ugliness may hurt, but it is a hurt that strikes clean and true; ugliness may not be pretty, but sometimes it is unbearably beautiful. ¤

The gorgeous ugliness of Naples is a major asset of a Ferrante novel. Many of the essays responding to The Lying Life of Adults so far emphasize its grounding in “Ferrante’s Naples,” an imaginary locale that’s already become as neatly packaged a tourist construct as “Joyce’s Dublin” or “Faulkner’s South.” I get it — it’s very tempting to place all of the books in an extended Ferrante universe. And indeed, there is critical value in constructing a multidimensional, intertextual sense of Ferrante’s Naples, both thematically, as a site of obsessive return, and sociopolitically, as a specific location loaded with real and mythological history. Ferrante herself clearly plays with and upon this repetition through the consistency of certain elements, even specific images, like the inevitability of inheritance — described as the aunt’s face emerging from the niece’s, or the body of the mother deforming that of the daughter — that can often make it difficult to tease these Neapolitan stories apart. All of them, and all of their finely nuanced visions of Naples, are united by a kind of feverish quality, at once sharply focused and blurrily nightmarish. This book has mothers, daughters, dolls, bracelets, insufferable intellectual men — all the things that Ferrante’s earlier works contain. These motifs encourage readers to connect all the dots all the time, and to blur the borders between these novelistic worlds, just as recurrent symbols (a bird, a rose, a mirror) and patterns of incremental repetition make it seem like all fairy tales might happen in the same dark wood, the same enchanted castle, to the same procession of nameless daughters. But while the temptation to view Ferrante’s Naples as a single continuous space that absorbs all of her writing is compelling, its persuasiveness is a red flag. 59

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Instead of allowing the specific miasma of the Neapolitan Quartet to seep out and move through Ferrante’s other work, we must be suspicious of the smoothing processes of amalgamation or incorporation. The particular Naples of The Lying Life is not exactly the blurry-edged Naples of the Quartet, which in turn is neither the haunted, subterranean one of Troubling Love, nor the loud, dark Naples of memory that overlays the removed locales of The Days of Abandonment or The Lost Daughter. The uglinesses of all these books’ Naples are subtly different; laid atop one another, their imaginative maps form a harmonious, ever-expanding palimpsest, but not a single plan. Along with the desire for a singular, shared Naples, another of the tacit assumptions of the Ferrante novel is that the first-person female narrator must always herself be the author of the book itself. Yet, as Merve Emre notes sharply in The Atlantic, this is not articulated in The Lying Life of Adults. Unlike the narrators of her earlier books, who are literary women, authors or editors themselves, Giovanna never declares herself a writer. Instead, she refers obliquely to “the one who is writing,” who may be her, or may be her childhood friend Ida (the only self-declared writer in the book), or may be someone else entirely. “The one who is writing” writes in conversation with Giovanna, but we don’t know if that’s the internal conversation of the past self with the present, or the external conversation of the interviewer and interviewee. It is the conversation that is signified, rather than the one with whom Giovanna converses, to whom she could be telling the story from a distance of decades or mere months, even days. This non-specificity of perspective gives the novel a necessary 60

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immediacy and contingency that none of Ferrante’s earlier accounts of adolescence possess; the reader has nowhere to ground herself but the present moment of the narrative. The novel follows Giovanna from the ages of 13 to 16, the lurching years when every new experience is edged on one side with vague desire and the other with revulsion. It is also the age when the choice between wearing raw interiority on one’s face, or hiding it underneath the mask of comely politeness becomes necessary. One of the elements that The Lying Life of Adults captures best about early adolescence is the ugliest feeling of this time that Giovanna calls “those ugly years”: the involuted, self-loathing pleasure of the sulk. The teenage sulk is a phenomenon rarely expressed with sensitivity or accuracy; it is often caricaturized as a frivolous, playacting affect, where the sulker selfishly gives in to their pettiest negativities and lets them run rampant, at the expense of whoever happens to get in their way. But sulkiness, as Ferrante shows us through Giovanna, is more than just pouting and flouncing. It is also an exploratory, masochistic impulse to lean right into ugliness rather than turn away from it. “I thought I was hideous and wanted to be more hideous,” says Giovanna, a feeling that I remember clearly from those early teenage years, a confrontational, challenging way of being in the world. Like the “ugly feelings” that Sianne Ngai theorizes in her book of the same name, sulkiness might be classed as “minor and generally unprestigious […] [e]xplicitly amoral and noncathartic.” Yet this type of affective response is no less real or readable — or generative — than its grander, more easily aestheticized cousins like anger, sympathy, or shame. Rather than blockages on the

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way to adulthood, as they’re often depicted, Giovanna’s teenage sulks are periods of growth, as she experiments with the effects of immersing herself in the ugliness of the world. The novel ends with a moment as ugly as the harsh statement that begins it, but by the time the reader gets there, she’s learned to read ugliness in its infinite variety. Giovanna has also learned: rather than being frightened or titillated, she is simply “delighted,” choosing of her own will to confront ugliness directly, rather than to prettify it dishonestly. In so doing, we get the feeling that Giovanna is, unlike the lying adults she leaves behind, somehow ready to experience the world as it really is, endlessly expansive. And like the semigrown Giovanna who leaves Naples at the end of the book with Ida, determined to “become adults as no one ever had before,” Ferrante has a spectacular way of diving cleanly into the depths of the ugly without wallowing in them, and of occasionally drawing a kind of wild, almost alarming elation from the ugliest encounters. Trudging sweatily along the waterfront in August, resisting the urge to dip my toes in the horrible mysteries of the East River, it occurred to me that reading The Lying Life of Adults is like joyously plunging into a filthy city river on a hot day. You know the deceptively clear water is full of sewage and needles and condoms and that three-eyed fish from The Simpsons and unspeakable other things. Yet for a second it looks so cool, the soft lapping of waves is so tantalizing, that you forget you’re not at the beach. If you pause and think about it reasonably, the idea is revolting. But the plunge — might not the plunge be sublime?

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ABSENT FIGURES IN THE FRAME MIN HYOUNG SONG

he cover of Killing and Dying shows a starkly rendered street scene. It is mundane but at the same time so precisely rendered that it feels revelatory. It is done, moreover, in a style that readers familiar with the work of Adrian Tomine can easily pick out as his. There are the well-known brands plastered on roadside signs — the happy red and yellow of Denny’s and the ultra-stylized red dot within a red circle of Target. The light inside the distinctive midcentury rhomboid shape of the Denny’s restaurant is lit in a cheery yellow while the pink of the setting sun gives the street a golden-hour feel. The cars are nondescript and impersonal. No figures are visible through opaque windows. Only the headlights seem to 62

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suggest, somehow, some kind of motion. A lone tree interrupts our line of sight almost at the middle of the cover, while the stark silhouette of a palm tree on the right mimics its shape and gives it a sinister twist. There are no pedestrians nor, for that matter, is there any suggestion of humans occupying this space. The scene is at once so familiar and so strange that it conjures the strong likelihood that bad things are about to happen. What these bad things might be is intimated by the title, which dominates the cover in inch-tall white lettering. The two words, “killing” and “dying,” promise hard-boiled crimes committed by tough guys and hardened gals, characters as likely to lose their own lives as to take those of others. Given such expectations, it’s disorienting to read the first of the six stories that comprise this collection. A painfully funny tale about a gardener who wants to found a new school of sculpture, it is drawn in a loose, almost cartoonish style. The lines are rounded, the details are minimal, and the depth of the pictures flat in the way Sunday comics are flat. The drawings lack the kind of draftsman-like precision that Tomine is known for, whether in his covers for The New Yorker or in the drawings found in his long-running series Optic Nerve. The second story returns us, visually, to what we might expect from Tomine’s art, but it’s noticeable that the colors are vibrant pastels. The title pages face each other, the title of the story centered on each page in mirror apposition, the one on the left pink and the one on the right white. This contrast calls attention to the pink, which is a color that Tomine uses extensively in the story itself. When a character gets into a fist fight, for

example, the words “Pop,” “Wham,” and so on float in the air in pink balloon lettering with black borders. Such use of color has a way of softening the sharp edges of the images, a softness that is further accentuated by the rounded curves of the characters’ faces. Each story that follows features similarly unique stylistic touches. This level of self-conscious experimentation says something, I suspect, about where Tomine is in the arc of his career. He’s already a highly successful cartoonist with nothing to prove. Unlike, say, the book-length narrative of Shortcomings, whose protagonist seems unable to leave his childhood behind, these stories feature characters who are much older. Pushing middle age, they are forced to reckon with the messes they’ve made of their lives, and are being asked by every sharp turn of Tomine’s plots to take responsibility for what they have become and what they are becoming. The drawings reflect a style of storytelling that is serious, mature, and mindful of how art becomes differently meaningful as one gets older. Maybe this is the theme that Tomine means to foreground in the first story, in which the gardener spends years defiantly chasing his dream of becoming an artist. No criticism seems harsh enough to deter him, but at the end, looking at the sculptures he’s put up on his front lawn in defiance of the homeowners association letters requiring him to take them down, he exclaims in a moment of lucidity, “Jesus fucking Christ, those things are hideous.” Contrary to what we might expect, this moment reverberates not as a selfcritique of Tomine’s own artwork, but as a sign of how exquisitely self-aware he 63

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is as an artist. He is the opposite of the gardener in the sense that each image and reference seems to mean something more than the story itself is telling us. Tomine’s experimentation with style, then, could be understood, at the most basic level, as an invitation to pay attention to what’s there on the page. We are being asked to see the details, and to wonder at the ways in which they complicate the story that’s being told. Nowhere is this last point more in evidence than in the story that shares the name of the volume. The fifth story in the collection, it is also the most ambitious and detailed. It begins with a frustratingly negative dad who too easily gets angry at his wife for being supportive of their daughter. The daughter, who is painfully shy and stutters when she speaks, wants to be a stand-up comedian. The father opposes this choice. When asked why, he says with the brutal honesty that is a trademark of Tomine’s narratives, “I’m opposed to embarrassment.” Undeterred, the mother signs the daughter up for a comedy class. The class ends with a show, and both parents are amazed to find that their daughter is good. Really good. All seems well until the daughter’s teacher lets slip that he is the one who wrote the jokes. The daughter had only spoken them. The group’s celebratory dinner is awkward, to say the least. The story unfurls in a series of small panels, each neatly bordered into perfect rectangles. There are 20 per page. The quotidian family drama plays out in these confines, the number of identical panels stretching out each moment and making them painfully long. Reading the first few 64

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pages feels like being seated at a Denny’s next to a family who can’t stop fighting with each other. We don’t want to overhear, but we overhear every word and wince at how uncomfortable they make us feel. It’s only when the story reaches the daughter’s performance that, at least for a moment, the reader is allowed a sense of relief — albeit one that’s almost immediately taken away. But of course this refusal is where the story has been going all along. When the parents arrive at their daughter’s show, the mother is wearing a kerchief on her head and walking with the assistance of a cane. When I saw this, I had to look back at the earlier pages and wonder at the depictions of the mother, who seems happy and full of cheek and in many ways more full of life than her husband or daughter. The only detail that might suggest something is askew is her short hair. This is not a very telling detail, since lots of women wear their hair short. Of course, some of the women who wear their hair short are also in the early stages of being treated for cancer. The restaurant scene ends with the mother holding her daughter in a hug. A blank panel follows. Then, the mother is completely gone. Time has passed. There’s only the father and the daughter, and they’re eating pizza. The father wonders out loud if he should have also made salad for dinner. The daughter reassures him that the pizza alone is fine. They don’t have much else to say to each other. It’s clear at this point that the mother has died, most likely of cancer, even though no one in the story ever says the words. The only indications that something was wrong with the mother’s health were the kerchief and the

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Roula Nassar, the (strange) bargain, 2019, ink on paper, 15 x 13 inches.

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cane. At this point in the story, I thought I finally understood how much Tomine had played with my expectations. The killing and dying of the title doesn’t refer to crime. They refer to the fact that the mother in this story is dying, and that the daughter was “killing it” in her comedy routine. Rather than something sinister or awful, the killing is a contrast to the dying, something happy that offsets the terrible sadness of what’s happening in the story’s background. If this sounds sappy, it is, and Tomine refuses to have any part of something so sentimental. The story ends with the daughter appearing on an improv stage, her performance disastrous, to say the least. No reader should expect a happy ending in Tomine’s fiction. In this respect, the ending of the story is both more and less awful that it could be, since the father who saw his daughter humiliated in front of an increasingly hostile audience pretends not to have been there and allows her a face-saving lie. What has always intrigued me about Tomine’s fiction is the absent-present role that race plays in the stories he chooses to tell. Tomine is part of a growing number of Asian American writers and creative artists who have focused their talent on telling a wide variety of stories. These stories don’t always have an Asian American character at their center, and in some instances don’t have any Asian American characters at all. Rather, they seem focused on practicing what the literary scholar Stephen Sohn calls, in his recent book Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds, “strategic antiessentialism.” Just because they are Asian 66

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American does not mean, in other words, that writers and creative artists have to focus all of their energy on telling stories about Asian Americans. They can, but they can direct their energies in other directions as well. A crude assessment of the drawings and the details found in the six stories that make up Killing and Dying suggests that four of the stories are about white characters. A fifth seems to be about a black man, but this is based on only the images and nothing explicit in the storytelling. A sixth story begins in Tokyo and ends in Oakland, but because it is told in disembodied images of cityscapes, objects, and human figures seen either from a distance or with their backs turned toward us, it’s impossible to determine anything about the race of the narrator. What this means is that the one story that seems narratively to fit a story about Asian immigrants (although the story makes explicit that the trip consists of a return to the United States rather than a first voyage) stylistically refuses to give us a visual representation of the characters involved. This seems like a deliberate choice designed to call attention to the absence of Asians and Asian Americans among the book’s protagonists more generally. And yet, despite such purposeful elisions, the book from other angles goes out of its way to foreground the issue of race. In the first story, the gardener Harold is inspired to become a sculptor after reading a book by Isamu Noguchi, the modernist artist and landscape architect who may be best known for having designed the Noguchi coffee table. Noguchi also made substantial contributions to the

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development of gardening as an art form. It’s certainly not surprising that Harold would be drawn to Noguchi, since the artist offers Harold a way of reimagining what the opening panels depict as a physically laborious and not very respected job into something more refined. At the same time, Tomine must certainly have been aware that Noguchi’s father is the famous poet Yone Noguchi, who lived for many years in the United States and was celebrated in his time for the contributions he made to both American and Japanese literature. Because Yone’s work does not deal as directly with the experiences of Asian immigrants to the United States as that of other writers of his time, his status as an Asian American writer has seemed to many critics to be a slippery one. How fitting, then, that Tomine begins Killing and Dying with Harold reading a quotation by Isamu. The quotation not only speaks to Harold’s yearning to be an artist; it also aligns this yearning with an important if not easily categorizable family of Asian American creative artists. Despite the physical absence of Asian Americans, that is, the question of what role they play in the making of American culture remains decidedly on the table. Then, too, we might note that Harold’s wife is black. This story registers this detail, again, visually rather than verbally, and the wife’s race doesn’t play any direct role in what follows. But the inclusion of this detail suggests that race plays a larger role in the many layers of Tomine’s storytelling than might at first appear to be the case. Throughout the book, if we look closely enough, we find that many of the background characters

are recognizably black and Asian. Other characters are racially ambiguous enough that they could be white or some other ethnicity, which points not only to the diversity of the world these stories create but also how resolutely they refuse simplistic categorization. There is, finally, one last turn of the plot in the story “Killing and Dying” that I feel the need to return to, because it very intentionally returns us to the topic of race in a way that has not been so explicit before. Before the daughter appears on stage at the improv theater, a black comedian tells a provocative joke that involves the n-word. As the daughter flounders on stage, trying desperately to connect with the audience, she responds to a black heckler by saying, “But I g-g-guess it’s OK to t-t-tell a bunch of ‘n-word’ jokes, right?” Unfortunately for her, the audience member is a different black man than the comedian who had just been on the stage. Not much more is made of this exchange, but it lingers as part of what makes her performance so mortifying to witness. As she tries to explain away her faux pas, Tomine shows her father tucked behind a doorway, hunched down, his eyes closed. In the midst of his grief for his wife, he also finds himself grieving for his daughter and, through this moment, for a present so full of inequality and loss and racial tension it becomes difficult to tell whom we should be angry at and whom we should simply pity.

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Roula Nassar, holy fools, 2019, pencil on paper, 13 x 10 inches.

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REFLECTIONS ON LARB SUMMER KIM LEE

ince writing this essay, quarantine and living in a remote area of the Northeast got the better of me: I gave in and caught up on the rest of Grey’s Anatomy following Sandra Oh’s departure from the show. Grey’s recent 17th season (I’m looking at this number in disbelief ) took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the season drew to a close, it seemed like the end was near, that this might finally be the show’s last season. The big question, then, was whether or not Cristina Yang would return to say goodbye. But in an interview with the Los Angeles Times’s Asian Enough podcast, Oh stated that she would not be returning to reprise her role. “In some ways, you do your work as a bubble and you let it go,” she stated. “I left that show, my God, seven years ago almost. So, in my mind, it’s gone. But for a lot of people, it’s still very much alive. And while I understand and I love it, I have moved on.” Oh has moved on from Killing Eve as well. While the show’s upcoming fourth season will be its last, recently she starred in the Netflix series The Chair.My own disappointment aside, it’s understandable why Oh wants Cristina to have a life separate from her own. I understand the readiness to let go of something or someone, whether it is a character one played seven years ago, or an essay one has written only a few years ago. Clearly, since I am writing this, I do not mean I am not interested in revisiting and reflecting upon the essay. Usually, I am repelled by the thought of having to reread my work. Inevitably, I feel embarrassed by what it reveals about me and what I was going through while writing it. The embarrassment is particularly heightened in this case since I had written about myself so directly, for the first time. Yet this is personally and precisely why I value this essay — the way it requires exposure and reveal at the same time that it insists on a private relation to representation 6699

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that turns away from public life or a greater political good.Before, I wrote as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation about me, too hesitant to enter into the conversation or else it would mean I gave in to the appeal of recognition, too invested in selfhood. But then, I was processing sexuality and a bad dissertation. The essay gave me room to experiment with writing the self in public, in ways that let me be more intentional, both more guarded and giving, in how I use others — other objects — in my work, whether “academic” or not. It let me figure out that personal writing can still be critical of that cringey self-recognition, even if it is held tight to the chest, in one’s possessive grip.This is my attempt to explain, hopefully with something akin to Oh’s grace, that I have let go of certain parts of this essay. I look to the ambivalence and hesitation conveyed in the utterance, “I guess,” as a sign that such a close, compromised position cannot always be sustained: eventually one has to let go and move on. This does not mean my attachment to representation is gone, or that I no longer care about Oh and her characters. Rather, I wonder if my relation to her and her characters has shifted, from one of identifying as and with Oh, of wanting to be and be with her, to one of using her, not so that I can see myself represented and reflected back, but so that I can be surprised and relieved when I do not. Barbara Johnson wanted to think about how we use people rather than relate to them. While using people might generally be unethical behavior, this view also assumes that people are intact, omnipotent, and self-possessed, as opposed to vulnerable, open, and dependent on others. Given this, Johnson asks, “Might there not, at least on the psychological level, be another way to use people?”1 Johnson was in conversation with D. W. Winnicott’s descriptions of transitional objects: objects that are “‘not-me’ possessions,” neither internal nor external to the self, which do not and cannot offer an image of oneself as contained and whole and relieves on the of the fantasy of omnipotence and control.2 Crucially, upon use, the transitional object survives attempts at its own destruction. The object can withstand the use it endures, becoming the let-go object — “not me,” separate, and distinct — because there is the understanding that it will still be there. Johnson writes, “[O] bject use involves trust that separation can occur without damage.”3 Perhaps, then, what I was trying to do in this essay was use Oh, 1 Barbara Johnson, “Using People,” The Barbara Johnson Reader, edited by Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 262. 2 Ibid., 263. 3 Ibid., 269. 70

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which for Johnson really means “trust” Oh, to better understand not how representation consolidates and prescribes the self, but how, when used without fear of damage, destruction, and harm, the self remains productively split, intermediate, and open in public, in one’s personal narrative, in “the between as beyond.”4When this essay was first published, I wondered if Oh would find out about it and read it. I imagined someone texting her the link; her scrolling through the article on her phone. Maybe she only read about a third of the way through before she got bored. Maybe she did not like it. I worried that I would make her annoyed and uncomfortable, but now I know that it does not matter whether or not she has read it, because she has already let go, and so have I.

4 Ibid., 270. 71

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TO O C LO S E , TO O C O M P R O M I S E D : KILLING EVE AND THE PROMISE OF SANDRA OH SUMMER KIM LEE

hroughout my time as a graduate student, I binge-watched Shonda Rhimes’s first television show and medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy. However, I was not binge-watching the entirety of the show, but only the first ten seasons — more than once. In those 220 episodes that aired from 2005-2014, actress Sandra Oh played the toughened, irreverent, yet fiercely loved and loving cardiothoracic surgeon Cristina Yang. What happened was this: when I reached Cristina’s last episode, at the end of the tenth season, I would stop and replay the whole series again from the beginning. This viewing cycle carried me through bed bugs in Brooklyn, a break-up, and a dissertation. When people found out I did this, and were rude enough to ask why, I always 72

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told them that Cristina Yang was my last attachment to representation. Put another way, Sandra Oh as Cristina Yang was my last attachment to the political promise of representation, and to the pleasures that representation offers: she gave me an image of myself that I actually liked. She was the one Asian American woman character in popular culture at the time that I overidentified with, aspired to be, and unabashedly loved. To say she was my last attachment was my defensive, witty retort, but I was not lying. As Cristina, Oh was the figure through which I could imagine that a representational politics devoted to diversity can be transformative, and not only that, but feel good. Within representational politics, the production of multiple and nuanced roles, narratives, and images depicting minority difference are necessary to combat phobic discrimination and violence. Oh enabled me to hold onto this promise of representation, or rather, she enabled this promise to keep ahold of me, right when I was trying to figure out how to get away from it. As I had told the unduly judgmental (duly concerned) people around me, Cristina was my last attachment. I said this because during graduate school, I remained preoccupied with the problem of representation and how to write about it, especially when cogent critiques were being made to move past it. In that moment, critics and scholars were addressing the inadequacies of a politics oriented around representation that could be dismissed as identitarian, as too individualistic, insular, and at times apolitical. Scholars such as Jodi Melamed, Roderick A. Ferguson, Sara Ahmed, and Kara Keeling among others have crucially written about the liberal incorporation of minority difference by way of its

representation in institutional life but also in popular media, literature, and visual culture. Inclusion within these spaces and contexts in the name of multiculturalism’s celebrations of difference obscure the structural, material inequalities that produce and maintain minority difference in the first place. Indeed, in the contemporary moment, representations of minority difference have become marketable. They make for a good image, good business, and good branding. Representation, in this mode, becomes the compromised object of one’s political desires. But it also becomes the object of critics and scholars’ reading and viewing practices, straining to be over and beyond it, to see it as a shallow obstruction, a liberal front, and a distraction that gets in the way of more urgent, important issues at hand. Furthermore, these representations run the risk of becoming prescriptive at the same time that they are plentiful, and can become subject to reductive modes of critique, wherein representations are evaluated according to whether or not they are good or bad, positive or negative, authentic, or inauthentic, progress or a problem — as if such categories are every fully knowable in the first place. In light of this, I wrestled with how to be properly rigorous in my critiques of representation and a politics around it, now cast as something to be suspicious of and something to leave behind. I struggled with how to acknowledge that diverse characters and stories matter to minority audiences, clearly myself included, who feel excluded and not seen, but without giving in to the idea that one’s political goals should always focus on or end with visibility and the inclusion and normalization of one’s image. I wanted to 73

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articulate the trap of visibility a representational politics creates that would have us believe it can be a liberatory site, when we know it cannot give us those things and in some cases is a hindrance to them. My graduate work was about the contemporary women of color feminist performance practice of detaching oneself from visibility and representation, and yet here I was, attached to Cristina, holding onto to how Oh portrayed Cristina as a power-hungry, ruthless surgeon at the same time that she was a loyal friend to Meredith (the true romance of the show as any Grey’s fan will tell you) and a vulnerable girlfriend, fiancé, and wife to men who did not deserve her (Owen was hands down the worst – any Grey’s fan will also tell you). I could not let go of Cristina even while my academic work and the prevailing critical discourse on contemporary representations of minority difference were doing everything possible to do so, to turn away from such an investment in a character, which, as I have been saying, felt good. When I talk about a “good” representation, I do not mean a representation that is morally good. I do not mean to say that Cristina’s character delivered a respectable, dignified representation of an Asian American woman contributing to a larger, positive, public perception of Asian Americans in popular culture. What I am describing is not for a greater good, for the good of a larger demographic, group, or community. What I am talking about is in fact smaller, and more selfish and personal; I am talking about a representation that feels good just to and for me, one that I hold dear and close. By no means can I claim to be the only Oh fan, or the best one for that matter. But what I am trying to get at is a 74

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particular kind of relation to representation that does not have to be in service to or part of a larger political goal, narrative, or endpoint. I have trouble with the notion that good representations must always have a public life, that good representations’ political significance must always depend on their positive impact upon entering and participating within social worlds and the communities moving through them. Therefore, I am thinking about how Oh’s performances as Cristina in Grey’s, and more recently this past spring as Eve Polastri, the titular character of the BBC America television show Killing Eve, push me to articulate this particular kind of relation to representation that has been nagging at me for so long. This relation is unmoored from the political desires for inclusion and normalization within something greater, and instead remains private, close, and intimately entangled with the ways we desire to get closer to what and who we love, without having to compulsively share it so that it might have a public, properly useful political shelf life. What I am describing as “good” is that which I imagine to feel good just to me, even if and when I know I am not alone in this good feeling. ¤ In Killing Eve, MI6 agent Carolyn Martens, played by a marvelously dry Fiona Shaw, finds out that Eve, a fellow agent, has been independently collecting information on a series of murders she believes to have all been committed by the same female assassin. When Agent Martens asks why, Eve self-consciously explains, “I was just interested in what makes a per — I mean woman — able to… you know what? I’m just a fan.” After

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Agent Martens pushes Eve further on her theory, Eve continues, “She doesn’t have a signature but she certainly has style and I don’t know who or what is behind her but I don’t think she’s slowing down and that just interested me, I guess.” Eve’s fandom and self-effaced “interest” in women who kill leads Agent Martens to assign her the task of identifying and finding the woman behind all of these stylish kills: a charming, multilingual, well-dressed psychopath assassin, played by Jodie Comer, who goes by the name of Villanelle. Throughout the show’s first season, the obsessive back-and-forth chase between Eve and Villanelle offers a twist on what showrunner Phoebe Waller-Bridge calls the “espionage love” undergirding the spy thriller genre. While in recent television, the genre traffics in the homosocial desire between men, as seen for instance in Hannibal (2013-2015), or in the violence and perversion of heterosexual desire between a man and a woman, such as in The Fall (2013-2016), Killing Eve, based on a novella series by Luke Jennings, recasts the genre with two women in its leading roles. Discussion and reviews of the show have focused on how it has exposed the workings of the genre through gender, and specifically through the feminization of a coupled dynamic that otherwise is “implicitly masculine.” Jia Tolentino writes, “the show is about the iteration of a recognizable pattern, its pleasures emerging in the internal twists.” Part of the show’s allure lies not in its ability to radically transform the spy thriller, but rather to, in its gendered recasting, show the queer eroticism embedded within the relation between assassin and spy, or between killer and detective, upon which the genre’s entertainment, pleasure, and recognizability hinges.

Given this, Eve’s fandom becomes an infatuation, an admiration, and a crush, all of which Villanelle reciprocates. Eve’s fixation at times concretely and at other times more vaguely takes the shape of a queer desire that Villanelle also shares and manipulates through flirtatiously terrifying threats. Throughout the first season, Villanelle leaves Eve a handwritten note calling her “baby” (which Eve returns in kind) along with gifts of tasteful clothes and luxurious perfume; she breaks into Eve’s home, only to ask if Eve will have dinner with her. Through Oh’s distracted yet self-conscious gestures such as playing with her hair, which she knows Villanelle likes (the first words Villanelle says to her in their strange meet-cute are “wear it down”), through her concentrated expressions of fascination, fear, and rage, Oh conveys Eve’s “interest” in Villanelle’s “style.” Yet this interest renders indistinguishable the very style of Eve’s queer desire, the kind of attachment she has, or that has her, and the way in which she likes women — this woman in particular. At the risk of sounding like a gay cliché, this brings to mind a performance piece I saw this past summer at Cherry Grove on Fire Island. In her solo work, ALBUM, artist Mariana Valencia sings of interest’s indistinction, calling it “The Lesbian Dilemma.” To a beach full of queers, Valencia mused, “Do I wanna be with you? Or do I wanna be you?” With that I ask, does Eve want to be with Villanelle, or does Eve want to be Villanelle, or both? While Eve’s interest makes her the right agent for the job, this same interest is what also makes her a liability, as someone with an inability to separate personal identification and desire from an impersonal job. Her ruthless dedication and persistence as an agent in pursuit are 75

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Roula Nassar, i swear they are all beautiful, 2019, cotton, embroidery ﬂoss, bird seed, 15 x 8 x 8 inches.

questionable: it becomes unclear whether or not she is doing this for the right reasons, whether or not she is loyal to MI6’s mission, or instead a compromised, reckless agent in the field. Eve’s intentions and unclear motives on the edges of queer desire form her refusal to see the bigger picture of the case she has been assigned. Throughout the season, her coworker and friend, Bill (David Haig), as well as Agent Martens, must remind her of this. They must tell her repeatedly that the point of finding Villanelle is to find who is giving out the orders she follows, who we later come to learn is an all-reaching organization called The Twelve. Eve’s focus on Villanelle potentially clouds her judgment and jeopardizes the investigation, as well as the safety of Eve’s assembled team of agents, in ways that become fatal. Her focus on Villanelle is too shortsighted, off-track, and beside the point. Eve’s statement that she is “just a fan,” points out that she is precisely more than that: she is too close and wants to get even closer. Eve sees herself in the way Villanelle desires both women and violence, the ways she pursues and acts on both. Eve sees how she could be and who she could be with, how her life could be and feel better, through someone she is not supposed to like, through someone she is not supposed to sympathize with, let alone have sex with, or even kill. After Eve realizes that she is the only person who can identify Villanelle, in the opening scene to the third episode, she gives a detailed description of Villanelle while dreamily staring off in the distance, stating wistfully, “she had very delicate features,” and “a lost look in her eye.” When she finishes speaking, the camera pans to another agent trying to map out Villanelle’s face with a computer program, who must

dispel all sexual tension by asking for clarification about the shape of Villanelle’s face. The camera then cuts to Bill, who raises his eyebrows in amusement as he sits across from Eve in what turns out to be an interrogation room. Eve’s description is that of a crush seen in a fleeting moment, at the same time that it is a criminal profile. Eve’s ability to identify Villanelle becomes Eve’s desire to identify with Villanelle. This overlap stages the dilemma of desire that Eve cannot herself figure out even though those around her clearly have. Eve is not alone in this dilemma. As I watch Killing Eve — as I specifically watch Eve — I am captivated and drawn in. Much like my feelings about Cristina, much like Eve’s feelings toward Villanelle, I could not tell the “style” of my own interest, where my desire was directed and for what purpose. I started thinking about how Eve’s fandom reflects mine for Oh: one where representation, identification, and desire get messy and weird with each other, and with me. Another Eve gives me the language for this. As queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, “After all, to identify as must always include multiple processes of identification with.” This problematic confronts heterosexuality’s constructed logic and its reliance on the shaky notion that an identification as and with someone could be separate from a desire for someone. Eve is then not alone in the queerest of dilemmas, which I too share. What I am trying to say is that Oh’s portrayal of Eve — an Asian American woman, who, if not outright queer, then certainly not straight — feels good to me as a queer Asian American women. You probably rolled your eyes as you read that, and trust me, so did I, as I remain stuck in 77

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the dilemma of how to describe my identification as/with Eve, as/with Cristina, as/with Oh as one that lends critical legitimacy to all the good feelings I have about her. The return of Oh brings me to write about this representation and this pesky feeling, rather than to pull back from it as I am wont to do, for reasons precisely having to do with how I am now in the position of having to identify myself in ways that unavoidably and embarrassingly slot me into narratives of coming out and the cohesive categories of racial, gender, and sexual identity at which such narratives are said to arrive. These feelings, and my own questionable intentions behind them, sit in that maddening area between wanting to be someone and wanting to be with someone, between identifying with someone and identifying as someone, all of which speaks not to a queer identity, but certainly to a reading practice born out of a queer desire. Here I process my Oh fandom, I air out this obsession at the same time that I let myself get closer, at the risk of being dismissed as transparent and merely identitarian in my critiques. I interrogate but also indulge in the annoyingly pleasant feelings that Eve and Cristina give me that ostensibly ticks off all the boxes, giving me representations of an Asian American woman I have always dreamed of seeing, specifically enacted by Oh, just to and for myself, in ways that compromise my work as a critic and scholar. ¤ When re-watching Grey’s, the moments that stick out to me the most are those when Cristina surprises and infuriates herself by suddenly bursting into unstoppable, uncontrollable tears. In these 78

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scenes, Oh’s composure as Cristina, the confidence with which she struts down a hospital hallway or charges through the doors of an operation room in her scrubs, beeping pager in hand, completely dissolves and caves into a mess that begrudgingly admits to needing love, care, and the company of others. Oh made Cristina a combustible figure that at any moment could humorously yet heartbreakingly collapse and fall apart. In one of my favorite scenes, Cristina triumphs over the fact that she was right about a patient’s diagnosis, one she stubbornly pursued while herself a patient in the hospital recovering from an emergency surgery. Standing there in her hospital gown and a robe, holding her IV fluids, she repeatedly asserts, “I was right, I was right, I was right,” before giving way to such violent crying that when asked for what she needs, she flinches from everyone’s touch and screams, “SOMEBODY SEDATE ME!” Oh’s face displays disbelief and annoyance that this is happening, that anything or anyone could get so close, under her skin. Her character, although at times flirting with the stereotypes of the high-achieving, self-sufficient model minority, or as the inscrutable, cut-throat dragon lady, nevertheless has moments where something else escapes, where something else happens in those breaks of upset, pissed-off porousness. As Cristina, Oh displays her capacity to break down with the gradual release and relief of tears that express a hotburning anger at having let people and things affect her. To me, Oh’s breakdown gave me an image that conveyed what it felt like to be so compromised and hypocritical in my writing, it mirrored the duplicity and frustration I felt in having this “last” attachment. I felt it as I claimed

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to write about detachment in graduate school, at the same time that one of my mentors told me, “You are too close to your objects.” This mentor did not mean this as outright criticism, or at least I hope not, and I did not take it this way (although tears of self-doubt and devastation were shed). Instead, I took it as an opportunity to think about how proximity, how being too close rather than so distant and detached, unavoidably directs my reading and viewing practice. This closeness puts pressure on how we deem representations of minority difference to be collectively and politically productive, or not. To be too close shifts what we imagine representation can do for us, outside of an imagined collective community, and outside of the ways these formations demand that representation do a certain political, collective work. How do we talk about representation in a way that does not merely desire inclusion and normalization within a larger group? How do we still hold close the desire for the banal, the small, the nonsignificant yet deeply intimate and private modes of identification we feel with certain representations, without reducing this to a sign of reaching normalcy within corny, liberal, affirming depictions of minority difference? It seemed that as long as Cristina was around, these questions could not be resolved, certainly not within my writing. Therefore, when Oh made the decision to leave the show after ten years, I felt sad, but also relieved. Her leaving television, her no longer being Cristina, meant I would no longer have an excuse, an object, and a reason to linger, I would be able to finally relinquish that last attachment and move on to other more pressing political matters. I could detach. Or so I thought.

This past spring, four years after Cristina left Grey’s, I was cautious and hopeful, then giddy and thrown as I watched Oh in Killing Eve. Not only did she come back with a leading role, one untethered from an Asian stereotype, but she was possibly gay, in a manipulative, playful chase-as-courtship and vice versa with Villanelle. Oh’s intensity but also her charismatic comfort and ease on screen shape Eve’s chemistry with Villanelle and others, whether she is averting her eyes from her boss as she conspicuously eats a croissant at a work meeting, or looking directly into Villanelle’s eyes, only inches away from her own, soaking wet in a tight cocktail dress, with a knife held up to her neck. It all surprised me, and I felt tricked for feeling so surprised, for being so affected by the fact that I was seeing Oh on screen again, and for a whole episode’s worth of time. I could not help but feel for Oh when I read that even for her, the role was surprised, for as she told Vanity Fair, when she first received the script for the show, she had to ask her manager which part she was reading for, unable to even imagine the leading role could be hers. Just when I had been able to feel like those first ten seasons of Grey’s were no longer immediate but nostalgic, and just when I had been feeling like I could successfully detach myself from representations in popular culture, Oh came back. She then continues to be who I pursue, or rather she continues to pursue me, following me around as someone who all this time I have wanted to write about but felt like I could not since my identification as/with the characters she portrays made her too obvious an object of study. It was as if to write about her, to admit my attachment, would be proof of a petty identity politics and a non-rigorous mode 79

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of critique that yield to the complicity and inclusive normalcy of representations within popular culture. I guess, then, I finally give in: I return to representation, as something to neither cast off nor recuperate, but as something to sit with too closely, which is to say reluctantly but obsessively. Representation persists as the object of study, inquiry, and critique that I never quite know how to write on or around yet cannot leave behind or ignore. ¤ I am struck by the problem of being too close to representation, as a kind of disproportionate desire and asymmetrical relation to one’s object that one chases, whether that be the alluring serial killer for Eve, or for me, Oh. What does it mean for me to be a critic that gets too close to a representation that feels too good? Especially when I am used to writing about representations of minorities in popular culture that for the most part feel bad, if they even exist at all? It has become expected for queer/of color/women critics to engage with either the lack of diverse representations or with bad ones — with the stereotype, with the inadequacies of diverse representation itself, and its inability to make good on its political promise of transformation and change. To be sure, we critics still derive pleasure from bad representations of ourselves, or the lack thereof. In fact, we have become virtuosic at finding pleasure where it is not supposed to be, at inventing reading practices wherein we might, as Sedgwick puts it, “smuggle” representations of ourselves and our own meanings so that we might still enjoy things even if and precisely when they are not meant for us and we are not supposed 80

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to be there. We do not critique to say this is why we cannot have nice things. Rather, in our critiques, we refuse to not have nice things. Scholarship in queer, feminist, and critical race studies has then been invested in the possibilities of the guilty pleasure or the “problematic fave,” the “cruel optimism” of our attachment to troubling objects, such as the “bad tv” we cannot notwatch even when it undermines our political subjecthood. These bad objects are the sites where we might find traces of ourselves when reading against the grain, when intentionally misreading, when reaching and stretching meaning in perverse and inappropriate ways. We are not used to having representations that give us what we want upfront, therefore we have grown accustomed to keeping bad company, to sitting with what does not feel right in ways that have made our modes of critique more capacious, fun, indirect, shady, and bizarre. With that said, during a moment when critics engaged with minority representations have more or less gotten used to writing about the bad, about asserting our guilty pleasures and bad object choices as a means of making do with the few representations we either get or never get in popular culture, what happens when after all that, we start to get what we want, and what we think is and feels good? What happens to our critical and political relation to representation when a representation is not “bad,” which is to say, not the injurious, hurtful, phobic stereotype? What happens if our reading and viewing practices must no longer solely navigate the bad, but now must make sense of what feels good, politically and affectively, and in a way we need not be ashamed of ? How does Oh, as Cristina and as Eve,

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offer encounters with representations of queer Asian Americanness, of Asian American women, wherein a willfully pleasurable self-recognition takes place in a way that feels fun and pretty hot? Furthermore, what are the risks of giving into good representation and its attendant feelings? How does admitting our enjoyment of a good representation compromise our politics? It is this compromising position that Oh drudges up for me, and it is a critical, readerly one that for me is without firm answer or resolve. Arriving at the good representation does not mean we have arrived at a political good, yet even when saying so, something of ourselves and our political grounding has still been compromised. These conversations have recently emerged given the success of Crazy Rich Asians, and here I also insist upon the Netflix indie rom com darling To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. For with these films comes the possibility of what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls a “narrative plenitude”, when more than one representation – more than one narrative in more than one genre – can exist at the same time. Nguyen writes that the political possibilities of narrative plenitude emerge with “the luxury of making mediocre movies,” and perhaps, too, the forgettable, average, or bad representation. Yet, as we are seeing, with this plenitude also comes the possibility of some good movies and television, and their representations that give us what we want and what feels good. (To clarify, this is not a positive review of Crazy Rich Asians, so much as it is a love letter to Lara-Jean and To All the Boys.) We need to shift critical discussions around Asian American representation in contemporary popular culture to account for the spoils found in plenitude. We must take

seriously how good representation and its pleasures can operate within problematic, dominant narratives of liberal progress and inclusion, of which we should remain critical and suspicious, but also how such representations and its pleasure are not reducible to them. Again, and from the other side of things, I refuse to not have nice things. Hua Hsu writes that what he liked most in Crazy Rich Asians were not the moments in the film displaying capital’s excess, but rather the moments in excess of the narrative and the rom com genre. He writes, “I found myself moved by moments when very little was happening, the kinds of everyday moments that I’ve always wanted to see onscreen. […] Maybe it’s the endpoint of representation — you simply want the opportunity to be as heroic, or funny, or petty, or goofy, or boring as everyone else.” I wonder why the pleasures derived from the uneventful and banal, from the in-between of the quotidian as montage, becomes pleasures derived from the inclusiveness of being like “everyone else.” For what resonates with me in Hsu’s description is the way these ordinary moments that could have been cut or discarded in production do not move along a plot line or develop a character but nevertheless gesture toward the nonproductive moments of sociality, intimacy, and care shared between Asians and Asian Americans sharing screen time instead of being the only one. When we find ourselves within these scenes, no narrative has progressed – they just give us smaller moments we as viewers like to imagine we found on our own. The scenes I have described in Grey’s and Killing Eve provide that for me. These scenes are moments when viewing and identifying as/with does not solely 81

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and necessarily speak to a collective and communal practice. Instead, these moments are what feel so personal, so personally good, and not for everyone else, in a way that for now might not need to do, change, or advance anything beyond and outside of myself. When I watch Oh, I imagine that the good feelings I have in identifying as/with her are not like everyone else’s feelings, and therefore stay for a moment politically nonproductive and noncommunal. I entertain the idea that these moments can be imagined and felt as so private and singular, and that is enough, for now.

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and “our” community attaches itself, as a point of identification for the collective whole. This articulation of Oh’s burden gives me pause, and not just because I am acting like a jealous girlfriend, although I am a little bit. What makes me uncomfortable is how Oh’s work, as an actress, as Cristina and Eve, cannot just be about her, and instead must enable and facilitate a community that needs her to mark “our” progress. In a way, I am jealous that Oh has to be that representative figure for so many people, and I am frustrated that in her feeling like it is not just about her, I must then position my own identity in this way, ¤ in relation to her work. Why can’t she feel like it is just about her? Or really, why This past July, Oh became the first wom- can I not just feel like it is about her and an of Asian descent to receive an Emmy me? Bowen Yang works out this relation nomination for best leading actress in a and dilemma in his lip-synch to one of drama for the role of Eve. Even though Cristina’s monologues he recorded with the Emmy’s have passed, and we are now his phone and posted on social media. I left with the disappointment of know- cannot stop watching it. While sitting in ing that Oh (along with Keri Russell in what appears to be his living room, with FX’s The Americans) was robbed, regard- the smallest of gestures such as the curl less it is a significance landmark. In re- or tremble of the lip and the furrowing of sponse to the nomination in an interview the brow, Yang imagines, as the caption with E. Alex Jung prior to the awards for the video describes, “when u Sandra show, she explained, “I’ve always felt like Oh,” enacting the mumbling of her it’s not just me. […] I know that I’m part stubborn words as they melt into a tearful of my community. […] So I am excep- breakdown. tionally honored that I am able to hold Through Oh’s return to television, her this moment, not only for myself, but Emmy nod, and #AsianAugust, I have what it may mean for our community.” had to revisit my political desires for repOh takes on the burden of representa- resentation and what it promises to fortion and lets herself become a public fig- mations of “my” and “our” community, ure who, as an Asian Canadian actress “when u Sandra Oh,” and also when this working in American film, theatre, and identification as/with her might mean you television, is always already representing want her to yourself. I have had to think and speaking for a community of which about it what means for me to feel a cershe is a part: “my” and “our community” tain identification as/with Oh and the of Asian North Americans more broad- roles she inhabits in a way that I might ly. She becomes a figure to which “my” not want to always have to be about and 82

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for a community. I say this knowing it makes me come off as self-centered, as a bad political subject complicit with liberal fantasies of individualism, one seemingly not down for the greater good and cause, a compromised critic and academic. For critics and academics, especially when queer and/or of color, one’s political desires for representation seen as springing from one’s identity are crucial to one’s reading and writing practice at the same time that they are understood to deter or jeopardize one’s skills and critical capacity as such. Such political desires mean one speaks on behalf of that same community, as Oh says, but not too much or else personal feelings and investments will undermine the validity of one’s critique. Likewise, Eve is a character whose queer desires, the ambiguities around identification as/with Villanelle, lead her to getting the job, but get in the way of her ability to do her job the right way – the right way being that which keeps in mind the larger picture, beyond Villanelle. What Oh conveys in Eve is a dissatisfaction, a boredom, and moreover a longing for Villanelle and her pleasure in killing, as well as in flirtation and sex. In the first season’s final scene, these pleasures become indistinguishable from one another as Eve and Villanelle become entangled with each other in a bed with sheets, blood, a knife, and champagne. Eve’s longing and her inability to act on it or follow through – which is to say, both her inability to have sex with Villanelle and her inability to kill her – is what makes her an agent with questionable intentions. There is then a way that the compromised scholar and writer, “too close to your objects,” is like Eve, the compromised agent in bed with the enemy, too infatuated and interested in her suspect to have the distance

assumed necessary to catch the criminal, to make political critiques. To be compromised is to be too involved and too close to one’s objects in pursuit. It is to perhaps willfully cultivate forms of clouded judgement and irresponsible, shallow desires that shape a compromised political subject position, one that does not let representation wholly organize one’s politics and sense of community and collectivity, but nevertheless lets it feel good when it can. I am not making a case for some kind of optimistic, individualistic approach to representation. I still am wary and weary of it and the version of identity politics it can promote. Instead, in my compromised position, I sit with what feels good about Oh’s work, the representations she gives us, and my identification as/with them, without calling them guilty pleasures or pleasurably bad objects. This is my own way of admitting that, like Eve, I’m just a fan and that all of this just interested me, I guess.

Noah Davis, LA Nights, 2008, oil on wood panel, 25 1⁄2 × 19 1⁄2 inches. © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

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hroughout the exasperating tradition begun by Maurice (1987) and continued with Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Moonlight (2016), the mainstream gay-themed movie (or MGM) has pursued three consistent objectives. First, to elicit sympathy for gay male love in its struggle to affirm itself under the barbaric repressions of the closet. Second, to limit the visibility of gay male sex, whose depiction is scrupulously kept from approaching the explicitness reserved for heteroconsummations (which the MGM by no means dispenses with: the gay protagonists regularly pass through the bisexual antechamber). The synergy between these aims hardly needs to be stated. Only by averting our eyes from the distinctive gay male sex act can we defend a man’s 85

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freedom to perform it; in the classically abstract liberal way, all is approved of on condition that nothing be looked at. More interesting is the MGM’s third objective: to be a thing of beauty — beauty so overpowering, or overdone, that (provided the other objectives are met) it persuades viewers they are watching a masterpiece, “gay sex or not.” This mandatory aesthetic laminate, which can never shine brightly enough with dappled light to win critical accolades, is a curious phenomenon. Other mainstream cinema with a liberal agenda can be less careful about its appearance — good intentions are felt to count for a lot. But “breathtaking” beauty is as essential a requirement of the MGM as a quick shot of a man’s crotch. Not that these are at all the same things. The ballyhooed beauty never refers to the onscreen male bodies or to the film’s strategies for eroticizing them; it’s what we are asked to look at instead. No surprise, then, that Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, the MGM’s latest exemplar, has been praised, as rotely as if the phrase had its own keyboard command, for being “beautifully shot.” Or that this means, among other things, for not having shot the gay sex scene that it’s spent well over an hour making everyone anticipate, a scene that might have taken our breath away for real. Just what is being “beautifully shot”? When Guadagnino’s lovers finally get around to doing it, the camera modestly pans away to contemplate, not for the first time, the lovely orchard outside. The photogenic backdrop is typical of the MGM, be it the Wyoming mountains or Trinity Great Court, a moonlit Miami beach or the Palazzo del Commune in Crema, Italy. The beauty of this beauty is that it gets us outdoors, to a 86

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scene that, because no more than scenery, is not homosexual. Yet Call Me by Your Name takes the MGM’s beauty requirement radically farther than its predecessors. Here, the sporadic bella vista serves to promote the sustained loveliness of an ethos, of a whole Beautiful Life. The story unfolds one summer at the Perlman family villa “somewhere in Northern Italy,” an Arcadia where we get to realize the dearest dream of every tourist: not being one. Here no migrants or sightseeing buses disturb our casual — yet deeply rooted — intimacy with the resplendent plains, lakes, and mountains. Our daily round takes us past charming old buildings and squares, for which we never need a guidebook because we’ve never not known them. We dine all’aperto, in an orchard, washing down the homemade tortelli and fresh-caught fish with frizzante, and finishing up with an espresso — these Italian words being perhaps more flavorful than the dishes themselves. And because we too are indigenous, the old men playing scopacut us in, and the peasant woman stops shelling beans to fetch us water; the picturesque is literally at our service. There is more and better: the good things of life coexist here in perfect harmony with the finer things, the world of the mind and the arts. The Perlmans are possessed of these things, too, in almost parodic profusion: from the father, Samuel, who is a university professor of Greco-Roman antiquity, to the mother, Annella, a multi-lingual translator, down to the 17-year-old son, Elio, a musical prodigy. They are joined by Oliver, a postdoc preparing a manuscript on Heraclitus and Heidegger! More astonishing than the Sontagesque range of high culture on display is the exquisite facility with

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which the family commands it; the acquirements are so natural, or naturalized, that that they show no sign of having had to be acquired. “Darling,” says Annella to her husband, in the tone a lesser woman would use for her sunglasses, “Have you seen my Heptaméron?” She finds a copy, but — how did that happen? it’s in German! No matter; she translates a tale on sight — even in the dark — for the entertainment of father and son. Young Elio, too, moves easily between languages, for no apparent reason but to demonstrate that he is as proficient in them as he is at the piano, an instrument he plays like a virtuoso without needing to practice. As for the professor, his unstudied scholarship glides through classical archeology, art history, philosophy, and philology alike. No arduous dig for this archeologist; his latest find has simply floated up from the bottom of the nearby lake. “What a beautiful place to work!” someone says to the creatively blocked director in 8 1/2. The irony of Fellini’s spa seems no more than the simple truth of Guadagnino’s villa. Except that in this locus amœnus, there is no work to do; stripped of drudgery and even effort, it has become play — Schiller’s aesthetic state stands achieved. Yet in this aesthetic state, remarkably, nothing is pursued for aesthetic reasons alone. If the villa, with its statuary and frescoes, is a fitting abode for the Perlmans’ erudition, that erudition remains cozily domestic. However extreme, it never leaves the proximity of home for gratuitous pedantry or autonomous formalism; it’s as lived-in as the villa itself. Indeed, the more extravagant a reference appears, the more relevant it proves to the family drama of Elio’s crush on Oliver. The tale from Marguerite de Navarre, for instance, spurs the boy to tell his beloved

everything; his mother has probably chosen it for that reason; and certainly, Elio has only to allude to its tongue-tied hero for Oliver, equally familiar with the story, to bring the conversation to the point. Similarly, when juice, pressed from the orchard fruit, becomes the occasion for Oliver’s jaw-dropping etymology of the word “apricot” (from the Latin praecox, or early-ripening), the intellectual display hangs in the air as a misty, soon-to-be condensed, allusion to Elio’s precocious and fruity cock. In his later sex play with a peach, Elio himself takes this subtext out from between the lines. The art/life interfacing culminates when the professor calls Oliver’s attention to the “ageless ambiguity” of Hellenistic male nude bronzes: it’s as if, he says, “they’re daring us to desire them” — and as if Praxiteles himself has come to bless the age-blind homosexual desires harbored by Elio, Oliver, and (as we will later discover obliquely) the professor himself. Though the film is said to take place in the early 1980s, it more truly unfolds in that mythic time when, as Georg Lukács famously put it, “the starry sky is the map of all possible paths,” and life, radiantly authentic, is identical to its meaning. The Perlmans’ mesh of self-reference holds their milieu so tightly together that nothing ever goes to waste, or does not belong. Such organic unity suggests that their Beautiful Life is the naïve form of a work of art — in other words, the embryonic form of this very film. Grounded in that life, but raising it up to artistic selfconsciousness, the film points to itself as the Beautiful Life’s last and finest flower. Guadagnino took pains to show himself as at home in this narrative world in the most literal fashion, moving the action from the Liguria of André Aciman’s source novel to 87

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Lombardy, where he lives, and furnishing the villa with objects from his apartment in Crema. Even at this level, Elio’s world has been subsumed in Guadagnino’s artistic identity as its mouthpiece. “I’ll call you by my name” indeed! ¤ The Beautiful Life admits homosexuality in three manifestations. As the ancient Boy of the “beautiful” and “sensual” bronzes, of course, homosexuality wins Professor Perlman’s unreserved enthusiasm. In the avatar of the modern Gay, however, represented by an older male couple who come to the villa for dinner, it is the object of more equivocal mere tolerance. The Perlmans all find Isaac and Mounir a bit absurd; their dandified matching outfits are as embarrassing as the shirt, of a kind formerly euphemized as “festive,” that they’ve sent Elio from Miami. The beauty lies not with these gays but rather in the family’s acceptance of them even so — which is why Elio must wear the hairshirt to dinner. His father explains to him: “You’re too old not to accept people for who they are. What’s wrong with them? […] Is it because they’re gay or because they’re ridiculous?” But since they’re obviously both, the message ends up mixed, as messages of tolerance typically do: these silly queens just happen to be gay. But the third and most memorable way the Beautiful Life welcomes homosexuality is in the parents’ diligent incubation of the sexual relation between Elio and Oliver. Quickly and quietly, these watchful parents grasp their teenage son’s desire for a grown man, and they do something cleverer than fighting or condoning it, behaviors that would just bench them. Instead, they superintend its 88

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consummation, so that they will never not be in the know and everything will remain in the family. Having privately ascertained from Oliver that he “likes” Elio, Annella shares the encouraging information with her son. Samuel, for his part, emboldens Oliver with his praise of the desire-baiting bronzes. Together, they even organize an unchaperoned sleepover for the boys in Bergamo. Mother and father behave beautifully, some might say — and the father pretty much does say, when he is alone with Elio after Oliver’s departure. “In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away […] but I am not such a parent.” This smugness comes in the middle of a long, Hollywoodly-wise speech in which, with a mighty twinkle of the magisterial eye, the professor proposes to explain Elio’s experience to him. The speech is a bona fide head trip, but let me be clear: what’s repulsive about it is not that it expresses sympathy for Elio’s gay desire or its being acted out with a grown man. Give Sammy and Annella this: most parents in their place would be too busy worrying about an older man “preying” on their son to recognize the fact that their Tadzio might be the one cruising him. No, the speech is repulsive in the root sense: it seeks to drive away every possible understanding that might make the relation with Oliver a serious sexual experience for Elio — and thus also make it that significant social experience we call “coming of age.” The father’s knowingness (capped with this masterful finishing touch: “Have I spoken out of turn?”) leaves no breathing room for the son’s self-knowledge. It is worth pointing out a few of the avenues that this smother-father blocks. One, quite simply, is the possibility that the encounter with Oliver might clarify Elio’s

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sexual orientation, that (like the queens his liberal parents can’t help mocking) the boy might be gay. A second, consequent possibility is that something besides misery and bad shirts (an original relation to life? some hot guys?) might intervene between the teenager’s broken heart and the moment of future suicidal despair evoked by his father, where “no one looks at [your body] much less wants to come near it”! Of whose superannuated body can this merely middle-aged man, who still enjoys the occasional PDA with his wife, be speaking? But the problem with the paternal sagacity is less that it comes from a can than that it seems aimed at turning a 17-year-old gay boy into a closet case with one foot in the tomb. This is why a third foreclosed possibility is most pertinent of all to this film: the chance that Elio’s sexual being might rupture the close-knit family circle, and with it, the roundedness of the Beautiful Life, which is the halo around that circle. These enlightened parents believe they can curate their son’s sexuality in the same way they must have chosen his piano master, or seen to his French lessons. So of course now, the father’s idea of loving care is to bury his son’s homosexual experience under his own beautiful idea of it. Like the closet case he admits to being, he does everything he can to embellish — and thereby desexualize — the relation with Oliver. “You two had a beautiful friendship,” he affirms, going on to lift a phrase I once wrote for a personal ad: “maybe more than a friendship.” A reference to Montaigne and La Boétie sets the high-cultural seal on this transfiguration of the sexual relation into an amicable relationship; and the father’s faux coming out — “something held me back or stood in the way” — is just more holding back. The vaguely

gestured-at “something” that blocked his own homosexuality remains standing behind his beauty treatment of Elio’s. ¤ The film’s own manner of holding back will suggest what the trouble is. The camera’s demure retreat from the sex act, almost comic in its old-school Hollywood decorum, is all the more striking in a film that gives us so much uninhibited manon-man kissing. Guadagnino has offered a couple of rationales for his reticence. At the New York Film Festival, he has claimed that “to put our gaze upon [the gay] lovemaking would have been a sort of unkind intrusion.” In another Q-and-A, he advances the contrary suggestion that it is not the gay lovers who require protection from our gaze, but we who need to be screened from something we might see in them: I didn’t want the audience to find any difference or discrimination toward these characters. It was important to me to create this powerful universality, because the whole idea of the movie is that the other person makes you beautiful — enlightens you, elevates you. The other is often confronted with rejection, fear, or a sense of dread, but the welcoming of the other is a fantastic thing to do, particularly in this historical moment. The incoherence of all this sanctimony is dazzling. To gaze on love-making had been perfectly acceptable when Elio lost his (heterosexual) virginity with Marzia; to speak now of an “unkind intrusion” is inevitably — and tellingly — to confuse the act of seeing with the act that is not being seen: the wrong kind of fuck. And it’s anyone’s guess how preventing people from “find[ing] any difference” 89

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Roula Nassar, the birth of gesture, 2019, clay, paint, cement rock, 13 x 8.5 x 6 inches.

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in the homo coupling might facilitate their “welcoming of the other,” since it is precisely the other’s Otherness that has been left out. In any case, who is welcoming whom? Are we welcoming Elio and Oliver or are they welcoming one another? And are these welcomes of the same kind? No doubt, I’m overthinking remarks better understood as fashionable repressions. While his camera is flying out the bedroom window, Guadagnino finds it helpful, à la Peter Pan, to think wonderful thoughts. But make no mistake: his enthusiasm for welcoming the Other, like the professor’s appreciation of friendship, is far more homophobic than any simple elision of gay sex. That, after all, has the advantage of leaving everything to the pornographic imagination. By contrast, the beautification campaign in and around Call Me by Your Name runs gay sex through such grandiose sentimental misrecognitions that we would no longer know it even if we did see it. Only in the neo-closetiness of present-day sexual liberalism could “the welcoming of the Other” be anything but a very funny bowdlerization of what Elio does with Oliver in bed. Even the film’s discreet connotative codes are more precise, and everyone who hasn’t willfully ignored them knows exactly what it would be unkind to show or off-putting to see here: the unlovely spectacle of blood, shit, and pain that is the initiation of Elio’s desiring asshole. Such a spectacle is not likely to be a fantastic confirmation of our humanity at this or any other historical moment. Montaigne, as the professor might have remembered, extolled his beautiful friendship and condemned “Greek license” in the same essay. And though this initiation has been the object of Elio’s keenest desire, his

post-coital mood swings do not suggest that he unambiguously enjoyed it. Certainly, he gives no evidence of the ecstatic discovery of the same-sex body. This sexually unforthcoming film is, of course, politic enough to assure us that the sexual relation, desired by Elio and sanctioned by his parents, was not of a nature to get Oliver “in any trouble.” But the fact that Elio was not abused or harassed has not kept him from experiencing the awkward, unhomely, compelled self-dispossession inherent in sex itself. It is this negativity of sex — epitomized, of course, in felt ugliness of the via rettale — that revolts both the Beautiful Life and the beautiful film that speaks in its name. It is an irreconcilable difference. Even when the homosexual lovers have done their thing, and the camera finds it safe to return to the bedroom, it offers us an arty close-up of their faces upside down. It is as if Guadagnino wanted to make up for the invisibility of the prohibitively “different” gay sex by this eye-catching show of post-coital ordinariness. And indeed, attention must be paid, for it is during this distracting shot that Oliver makes Elio the proposition that gives his and Elio’s love its leitmotif and the film its title: “Call me by your name, and I’ll call you by mine.” Elio accepts — the names are already near-palindromic — and together they coo an enraptured duet of soul-mating, in which the many obvious differences between them are at once acknowledged and abolished. Under the spell of equivalence, Elio moves his head to the other side of Oliver’s so as to give the verbal exchange of names a visual counterpart. And yet, even at the call-me fantasy’s core articulation, tiny flaws throw off the symmetry: Elio calls Oliver “Elio” three times, but Oliver only manages to call 91

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Elio “Oliver” twice before the shot cuts off, with a bit of Oliver’s own brusqueness, leaving Elio’s crossover incomplete as well. It starts to seem as if the fantasy’s appeal (for both parties) consists in fantasizing over what would otherwise appear as a painful one-sidedness in the relation. And now the shot’s upside-downness makes a kind of sense, as we absorb the affinity between the horizontally reversed image attempted by Elio within the shot and the vertically reversed image that is the shot itself. Guadagnino’s image seems bent on performing a similarly wishful affirmation of parity against the obscene (off-screen) dissymmetry of phallic top and anal bottom. But what Aciman’s novel calls “the fungibility, of […] bodies” can occur here only in a topsy-turvy world in which the protagonists’ pillow-talking heads appear to lie below their waists, and thus to be replacing those nether parts whose own manner of intercourse has not enjoyed the same mutuality. Guiltridden Oliver will do almost anything to make amends to Elio for fucking him — sup his semen, kiss his mouth after he’s vomited — anything except let him take a turn topping. And abjected Elio, too, has his own imaginary way of righting matters. As he intrudes his cock between the halves of another kind of stone-fruit, the film’s metaphorics let us understand, even without benefit of the Emojipedia, that fucking the full-grown peach is the reparative counteraction of having been plucked as a precocious apricot. Whenever the film, or anyone in the film, confronts the negative in sex, the call-me fantasy surfaces as consolation. Oliver’s “billowy blue shirt,” as the novel calls it, puts the pattern in a nutshell. This is the upper-body garment, not to say top, that the self-assured American wears on 92

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his arrival at the villa. But it later serves as the wipe used by Oliver and Elio to clean themselves after sex. (Nervous Elio: “Mafalda always looks for signs”; confident Oliver, wiping away, “Well, she’s not gonna find any.”) The soiled shirt speaks gay sex more loudly than anything in this whisper of a film ever does, and the camera lingers over it lying crumpled on the bedroom floor. To a too-close viewer, the smutty shirtwipe seems to bear all the signs that it has been used to keep the snoopy housekeeper from finding; as Guy Hocquenghem has aphorized, “A dick always brings back some shit.” But having allowed us to glimpse, or imagine, as much, the shot, in a variation on the earlier pan out the window, dissolves to the image of a beautiful lake at dawn. We recognize, of course, the conventional use of a dissolve to convey the passage of time; but the overlap more pertinently suggests that Guadagnino couldn’t wait to put the dirty shirt in the wash. Has ever a dissolve been used more literal-mindedly: to do a solvent’s work of removing stubborn stains? But, in a sense, the deep-cleaning had already begun when, having just tossed the actual wipe to the floor, Elio asked Oliver for the remembered top as a keepsake. Oliver will oblige, of course, and after the shirt has been properly laundered, Elio finds it on his bed accompanied by a note that launders it yet again: “For Oliver, from Elio.” ¤ I liked this movie so little that I broke my longstanding habit of sitting through the end credits; I left as soon as the words “Call Me by Your Name” appeared in the shot of Elio tearfully looking into the fire. But when (for purposes of this review) I saw

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the film a second time, I understood that, by leaving when I did, I had cut myself out of the best shot in the film, a shot so good that it caused me to wonder whether, in reading the film against its grain, I had in fact been faithful to a complexity in Guadagnino’s intentions. With the credits rolling over it and spectators checking their phones, the shot was destined to be a throwaway, but that, I belatedly realized, was its ethical dare to us not to overlook what wasn’t crying out for attention. The shot had been lost to me initially; what could I find in it the second time around? Call Me’s summer romance has a winter coda; the family has returned to the villa for Hanukkah. The postcardperfect snowfall only enhances the holiday warmth inside: latkes a-making, a fire in the hearth, the table shimmering in candlelight. All of a sudden, Oliver calls and Elio picks up. “I have some news”: he’s getting married. “You never said anything.” “It’s been off and on for two years.” The pain is submerged — or converted into pain of another sort — by the booming jubilation with which, breaking in on the extension, the parents wish Oliver joy: “Wonderful! Congratulations! Mazel tov!” At harmonizing thrilled surprise with gratified foreknowledge (for in conjugal culture, we do foresee these things), Sammy and Annella could not be better if they tried. But they’re not trying; the point is that they’re naturals. No matter how far their liberal conscience has taken them, their unconscious will always side with the marrying kind. They are hard-wired partisans of positive, publicizable sex, the sex whose “signs” need never be hidden from the housekeeper, the once and future nanny of such signs. The fact that the conjugal imperative seems to command a deeper, more automatic

attachment than he does cannot get easier for Elio to swallow when Oliver, back to one-on-one, remarks that the professor is treating him like one of the family, “almost a son-in-law.” If only he had a dad like that — Elio is so lucky! Predictably, Elio tries to resume the your-name game, but he’s playing alone. Oliver echoes him only once, then tersely relegates the habit to the past: “I remember everything.” Elio’s devastation at this moment comes from what we can think of as the social enforcement of his sexual abjection: having been fucked, he is now being fucked over by the deep norms of a world where marriage sweeps all before it. No explanation is required for why his lover has retreated into a heterosexual engagement without “saying anything”; or for why his parents have applauded the retreat as a return to fundamental form; or for why his father has found a son-in-law (read, a son who will carry on the patrilineage) in the man Elio presciently called “the usurper.” In the general engulfment, even the solicitude of which Elio has been the pampered recipient must give way to indifference. To render the boy’s sudden extreme isolation — the near-absoluteness of his nonrecognition — Guadagnino shoots him crouched near the hearth, looking into the fire, and crying. It’s a very different shot from the ones that, by contrast, it must recall for us: crybaby Elio with his mother, his father, Oliver. This time, the boy takes care that no one see his tears because what they lament is his newfound, unsought identity as someone no one can see. He looks “into” the fire, at nothing but an inwardness that he can no longer imagine finding expression in the blur of the Beautiful Life behind him. (Could he really explain to the parties concerned how 93

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completely the spontaneous bond they have formed around heterosexual marriage, and the right kind of sex, has annihilated him?) The strength of the shot lies precisely in its uncomfortable prolongation, its stubborn dwelling on Elio as he would grieve his social death, while the credits rush him along like a quick-and-cheap funeral service. The exhaustively inclusive roll call of names seems to intensify his loss of both a name and a sense of belonging, almost as if he knew they were sharing the screen. The infinitesimal nuance that Timothée Chalamet, the virtuoso actor who plays Elio, keeps bringing to the boy’s expression suggests that the shades of privation are infinite, that the shot, in this respect, might be as interminable as end credits always feel. Annella of course is the first to summon her son back to the Beautiful Life: “Elio?” Mechanically — it’s a familiar drill — he starts to turn his head toward her, but he pauses to wipe his eyes on his shirt before answering the call. For these are, effectively, the last tears of his youth; it is with “wash’d eyes” — in Cordelia’s sense of a cleared-up vision — that he will take his place at the dinner table. There, the film lets us suppose, the only thing that will diminish his enjoyment of the comfort foods on offer is the knowledge that he has just become, in every important sense, a ghost. And that knowledge, this more-than-exasperating film also lets us suppose, is what gay coming of age — so different from gay coming out — still amounts to.

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U N T U C K I N G R U PA U L’ S DRAG RACE E. ALEX JUNG

ike many other gay boys who loved to read books, I loved Virginia Woolf. The first time I read Mrs. Dalloway was in high school. I was too dense to fully wrap my head around those long, lingering sentences, but I liked the way they felt, how they moved inside me. I thought, of course, that Clarissa Dalloway was a kindred spirit from another era. I understood how the most ordinary thing could feel like everything. The distinctions between reader and writer and protagonist grew indistinct; I was Clarissa, who was maybe Virginia, too. This triangulation structures The Hours, a film based on the Pulitzer-prize winning book of the same title. It’s a movie filled with the ambition of its literary foremother, but with the artistic sensibility of a Hollywood producer (read: Oscar bait). The internal drama that unfolds so well in Woolf ’s prose becomes overbearing and tinny within the context of Hollywood narrative cinema. Rather than capture the quiet ache of its female protagonists, the film presents three interlacing case studies of the female hysteric. 95

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I had downloaded a grainy bootleg version of the movie off Limewire, not soon after I had read both The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway. I was captured by the extravagance of the movie, its overwrought sense of drama. I watched it repeatedly on my computer with the silhouettes of audience members bobbing across the bottom of the screen. There was one scene in particular, one that never occurs in the book, that I loved. In it, Nicole Kidman attempts to run off to London, and her husband catches her at the train station, bringing her back home to “eat Nelly’s dinner.” I could recite every single line of the scene, imitate every inflection in Kidman’s voice as she fights with Leonard, her husband. I loved how her protracted nose drew your eye inside of her face. I loved the sibilance of her esses when she said “custody” and “imprisonment” — and most deliciously “interests.” I loved the intractable language: “I choose not the suffering anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the capital.” I loved the turgid swell in Philip Glass’s score when the scene began to resolve itself. And most of all, I loved the way her voice scraped along in a whisper before she thundered: “I’M DYING IN THIS TOWN.” I would erupt into giggles. I still do. Even though I did not have the words to name it, this was the first time I had watched something as camp. Susan Sontag wrote that camp was a sensibility, a way of making sense of the world. Meaning, a thing does not need to be intended as camp in order to be read as such. An analysis of Art Nouveau, she wrote, “would scarcely equate it with Camp. But such an analysis cannot ignore what in Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp.” Camp is not just a genre or an 96

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aesthetic, but more importantly, a way of understanding art. Moreover, camp can be “a private zany experience of the thing.” My own mimicry of Virginia Woolf came not from a place of cynicism, but adoration. I loved Virginia Woolf. I loved Clarissa Dalloway. And as a little queer Korean boy living in St. Petersburg, Florida, I fixated on New York City in the way she must have done with London. I felt, with the acute sense of drama particular to teenagers, I was dying in this town. I’m not sure I could have loved a movie that would have rendered a “realistic” Virginia Woolf; she was too singular and too personal for me to fall in love with someone else’s version. That the movie failed so wonderfully only seemed appropriate. It was fitting she turned tragicomic, as though only then could I hold her inside of me. ¤ I have often thought that if I were ever a drag queen, and more specifically that if I were ever a drag queen who was a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race, I would play Virginia Woolf — or rather, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf — in the Snatch Game episode when the contestants don their very best celebrity impersonation. (Others I have considered: Björk and Song Liling from M. Butterfly; the latter of which is really just a camp version of Cio-Cio San from Madama Butterfly). The segment is a spoof of the 1960s game show, Match Game where two non-celebrity contestants try to “match” answers with the celebrity panel. Snatch Game reverses the dynamic, with celebrity “contestants” (who are actually judges) trying to match answers with the “celebrity” panel (who are the drag

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Roula Nassar, family tree, 2019, wood, steel, plaster, paper, wire, graphite 35 x 25 x 24 inches.

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queen contestants). Their portrayals run the gamut of the gay man’s canon, from popular icons like Cher and Diana Ross to those with a twist like butch Alicia Keys. RuPaul, out of drag and in a suit, plays host. I imagine myself sitting on the top row where I can get a good look at the more derivative queens, invariably portraying some pop star — a manic Lady Gaga, a bland Katy Perry. I shoot them withering glances while rolling a case of cigarettes. RuPaul strolls out lean and lithe in a bright green Prince of Wales check suit with a matching tie in a fat double Windsor knot, the studio lights casting a soft sheen on his head. I scratch at my bird’s nest of a graying wig, and when I feel nervous, I rub my hands together before shoving them into the pockets of a long peasant dress. I don’t know if they are my nerves, or Virginia’s. RuPaul: “Here’s how the game works. I ask a question and our celebrity panel fills in the blanks. And you give an answer you think will match. Let’s play!” Behind us the sequined blue curtains would sway to the blasts of the air conditioner. RuPaul: “Slutty Sally is soooo slutty that when she opens her legs “blank” falls out. Virginia? What did you write down?” I jerk my head towards the camera and squint long and hard. Then, flipping the blue notecard, I reveal my answer: STONES. ¤ For the uninitiated, RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality TV show that premiered in 2009 on LogoTV. It takes the form of a classic reality competition show; a dozen or 98

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so drag divas compete to become “the next drag superstar,” which really just means that they are trying to become the next RuPaul, the one drag queen who had the media savvy to sustain a commercial brand. She came up through the club circuit, not the ballroom scene in Harlem (made famous by Madonna and the House of Xtravaganza with their introduction of “voguing”). Still, the success of the Xtravaganza children helped pave the way for RuPaul’s 1992 debut song, “Supermodel (You Better Work),” which refashioned the same ballroom argot for mainstream pop. The single eventually led to a contract with MAC Cosmetics and her own talk show on VH1. It is an enviable career for anyone, but wildly so for a drag queen. RuPaul’s success has hinged on his ability to curate drag for mainstream taste, and Drag Race is an embodiment of that ethos. Within each episode, there is a mini-challenge and a main challenge that measure whether a queen has the chops to become the next RuPaul. In keeping with ball style, the queens throw on heels and wear something sickening (meaning, so fabulous it makes you sick) down the runway, usually as part of a theme like “post-apocalyptic couture” or “executive realness.” The hallmark of drag, that is, its referential dexterity, is present on the level of language. For instance, RuPaul constantly reminds the contestants that the winner is the one who has charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent — or “cunt.” It becomes a fun game to listen for the words that come before and after the phrase, such as “raw charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent” and “I hope your charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent are all warmed up,” and so on. In one mini-challenge, the

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queens take turns “reading” one another, aka “throwing shade,” aka taking a razorblade to your flaws. Jujube from season two was a master of this: “Tyra honey,” she would drawl, peering over plastic sunglasses. “Was your barbecue canceled? Cuz’ your grill is FUCKED.” The challenges pull from every cultural reference available. The queens perform a ballet of RuPaul’s life, shoot trailers for Drag Queens in Outer Space: From Earth to Uranus (and its sequel), lead 1980s workout videos, and turn heterosexual dads into their pregnant drag sisters. They sing, dance, and wrestle as the “luscious ladies” of the WTF — Wrestling’s Trashiest Fighters. In a riveting duel to the death, RuPaul tells the bottom two queens, “The time has come. For you to lip sync. For. Your. Life.” Welcome to the Thunderdome: 12 gentlemen enter, one queen wins. If drag is about references, what then, is the original referent? Well, on its face, it is often a woman tinged with tragedy: Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Whitney Houston. But woman, in this sense, is both literal and metaphorical; she is an idea, an aspiration. Season four winner Sharon Needles said she was not interested in “pretty.” In a camera confessional after participating in a wet T-shirt contest, she said, “I never want to create a character that someone would want to fuck. I like to mock sexiness.” Her archrival, Phi Phi O’Hara represented a side of drag that valued fishiness (dragspeak for femininity), glamour, and beauty. But however hard Phi Phi pursued the original referent, it was, as Derrida would say, always deferred. Drag is heavy on the signifiers: the vast constellation of accoutrements — the jewels, the gowns, and the walk — that

eventually constitute Woman itself. It is this performativity, the grotesquerie of gender that is always part of the joke. Through exaggerating signifiers, drag suggests that no signified exists. The joke, it seems, is on us. We might feel that our sartorial choices are more natural, but they are still attempts to approximate an ideal. In an appearance on the Geraldo Rivera show in the early 1990s, RuPaul told the audience, “You’re born naked and the rest is drag.” Sontag advocated camp on the basis of its ability to “find the success in certain passionate failures.” Through drag, we understand that gender has failed, and that it can be beautiful. ¤ The idea that not every spectator directly identified with an on-screen character had been taken for granted in early film theory. It really wasn’t until second-wave feminism that the belief came under scrutiny. In her essay, ”Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey said movies were constructed around a “male gaze.” This was a difficult admission for her because of how much she loved the movies. Feminism lifted the veil and forced her to see just how patriarchal Hollywood was. Once she saw it, she couldn’t un-see it. Even though black feminist bell hooks criticized Mulvey for her white bourgeois perspective, she too prescribed a political reading of film, which she called the “oppositional gaze.” For her, the pleasure of watching came from the pleasure of critique. Both women marked a time in feminism concerned with excavating the political from the cultural, and judging cultural productions against an 99

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ideological standard. This perspective comes, I suspect, after a certain politicization occurs — the moment it becomes apparent how many stories of the queer, the colored, and the female are told not by them, but by others. In John Stahl’s Imitation of Life, bell hooks addresses Peola, the young black daughter of a maid who could pass for white: “We cried all night for you, for the cinema that had no place for you. And like you, we stopped thinking it would one day be different.” Watching can be more than pure acquiescence or resistance. It is complicated, dynamic, and fraught. It may very well be that a new Hollywood blockbuster reinforces repressive gender roles, but it doesn’t mean that in watching it — or even loving it — our engagement is a straightforward slingshot to identification. Watching is a complex interplay between our own subjectivities and the narrative on screen. We aren’t just listless viewers, nor are we impenetrable monoliths. Just as we work our way into narratives, they also have a way of working their way into us. In The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin recalls watching old Hollywood movies as a child. Bette Davis was one of his favorites. He could see his own frog eyes in her “pop-eyes popping.” Her ugly beauty connected with the ugliness he felt as a child, a child of his mother. Watching Bette Davis, he describes how “when she moved, she moved just like a n[...].” In The Women, Hilton Als’s identification as a “Negress” led him to “the dark crawl space” of his mother’s closet where he would put on her stockings under his clothes so that he “could have her…near [him], always.” This is the circuit along which camp operates. Gay men are not the purveyors of camp simply because of an “aristocratic 100

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posture” that Sontag believed characterized “homosexuals.” There may be an affectation of class, but it is rooted in a deep longing to seize control of the dominant narrative. José Esteban Muñoz calls this act “disidentification”: “to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect.’” Disidentification is different from identification in that it is indirect, askew. “Disidentificatory performances opt to do more than simply tear down the majoritarian public sphere,” writes Muñoz. “Disidentification uses the majoritarian culture as raw material to make a new world.” In an episode titled, “Ru Ha Ha,” the queens do a standup comedy routine. One contestant, Shangela, struts onto the stage dressed in a leopard pantsuit and a long fur coat as “Laquifa, the PNP: the postmodern pimp ho.” She accessorizes with garish stereotypes: big, gold jewelry, a floppy purple hat trimmed with chartreuse feathers, and silver shoes where her feet hang off the edges, because she says, the recession has made times tough. “Yes I’m still a pimp, but I’m also my own ho,” she quips. Drag, here, is about power: a way of claiming a narrative that has otherwise left you for dead. This way of seeing the world, eating it up, is what constitutes the “look,” or your drag. Your perspective is reflected through your clothes, performance, and persona. Drag personas are often constituted of deeply personal references. In a lunch over orange tic tacs, Jinkx Monsoon told RuPaul about enduring her mother’s alcoholism. Her drag, which sometimes has the scent of mothballs clinging to it, is a way of “making peace with a dark childhood and make light [sic]of the disheveled kind of crazy, kooky mom.” At the Gramercy

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Theatre in New York, she performed “I dreamed a dream” from Les Misérables as Little Edie. This conflation of tragic women was completely incongruous, and yet incredibly fitting, and so very Jinkx. Her look (way of viewing the world) constitutes the look (her persona). “In a ballroom you can be anything you want,” said Dorian Corey, one of the elder voices of Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary on the ballroom scene, Paris is Burning. “You can erase all of the mistakes, all of the flaws, all of the giveaways, to make your illusion perfect.” This was true for whatever look you were going for, whether Marilyn Monroe or a major company’s CEO. What mattered was that if you could convince your peers of this illusion, then maybe it could be true. Often desire coincides with what everyone recognizes as the good life: fame, beauty, wealth. In Paris is Burning, Octavia St. Lauren went on model castings and photo shoots in pursuit of the good life. She wanted to be on the cover of magazines and she wanted everyone to know her name. She dreamed big. “I believe that there’s a big future out there with a lot of beautiful things, a lot of handsome men, a lot of luxury,” she said. The desire for good, rich, and beautiful things has always been part of drag. This assimilationist impulse may run counter to what some have romanticized as drag’s “radical” critique of gender norms. But both have existed, side by side, and will continue to do so. It is not inaccurate when RuPaul calls her drag queen contestants her “children.” RuPaul’s Drag Race is a new house, one that fits squarely within a gay movement that has turned its focus towards the most assimilationist of causes: marriage. For better or for worse, RuPaul has ushered in a new era of drag,

one that hopes to capitalize on the desires for wealth and fame expressed in Paris is Burning. The real kind. ¤ There are moments when the show is powerfully still, when the edges tremble. The contestants are getting ready for their runway presentation. They stand in front of lighted vanity mirrors, halfnaked with pads stuffed in their pantyhose, contouring their faces and adjusting their wigs. Conversation strays to their personal lives: their families, loves, and struggles. They talk about prison, addiction, homelessness, and suicide. Some are estranged from their biological parents, and some have loving ones, but all call their drag mothers and sisters, family. More than once a queen will say how drag saved her life. One of the most memorable RuPaul moments came midway through the first season. The queen is Ongina, a petite Filipina diva with a tattoo of a Japanese anime princess on her right arm. The challenge winner becomes a spokesperson for Viva Glam, which donates all of its sales to MAC’s AIDS Fund. Ongina stomps down the runway wearing a sheer and shredded black dress under a fringed military jacket, signature headpiece (this time a black bow) on her bald head. Her makeup looks bad, but it doesn’t matter because, honey, she looks sickening. Guest judge and former Calvin Klein model Jenny Shimizu tells her, “I had the same feeling I had when I first saw Naomi Campbell walking down the runway: a savage beast.” After she wins, Ongina collapses on the stage in tears. She tells them how meaningful this win is for her. She had 101

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Roula Nassar, mortal clay, 2019, clay, paint, 31 x 2.5 x 3 inches.

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been HIV positive for two years. She didn’t wanted to say anything on television because her parents didn’t yet know, but she couldn’t keep it inside any longer. “You have to celebrate life and you have to keep going,” she says between gasps. “And I keep going.” As a queer Asian American male, I had, up until that point, never seen myself on screen. Asian men, queer or not, have a long history of invisibility. I looked everywhere for someone who looked like me, felt like me. The obvious visual representations, the ones that told me, “This is you,” were worse. I remember watching the American version of Queer As Folk, when Emmett Honeycutt shows off his new Japanese boyfriend. He didn’t speak a word of English, but instead, repeated the word “kane,” which Emmett learns in an anti-climactic deflation, means “money.” The Asian guy was just another money boy. I understood then that caricature was really just another form of absence. Ongina was the first queer Asian American man I had ever seen on television. But it is a mistake to say I saw myself as her, or anyone else for that matter. What I saw was an understanding of what it means to live a queer and Asian life. What I saw was the same look. The look that returns your gaze, unblinking. The look that says: I am here. I survived. ¤ Long before I had read Mrs. Dalloway or watched The Hours, I practiced another scene: It is summer and I am in my dining room, surrounded by a pile of clothes I pulled from my mother’s closet: pants, sweaters, blouses, and bras. Outside, the afternoon sun is a searing white, but

inside the house is cool and dim. I am six, maybe eight, and home alone. I tie the clothes together, arm to leg and leg to arm, and I make big strings, draping them around my father’s chair. I keep adding until the chair is fully wrapped in clothes, a multicolored chrysalis. Then, I get down on my hands and knees and worm my head through the tunnel of fabric until I am standing upright, with my back against the back of the chair. This is Cinderella at her lowest point, her moment of ruin. She has spent the day mopping the floors, sweeping out the chimney, and dealing with that mean old cat Lucifer. She has her heart set on going to the ball, but it is too late: she has nothing to wear. When she climbs the creaky wooden stairs to her room in the attic, her animal friends unveil the dress they made from her stepsisters’ discarded clothes: a pink and white gown with straps and pretty little bows. She puts it on and hurries downstairs to catch a ride in the carriage. That’s when her stepsisters see her. They are mad with jealousy. They lunge into Cinderella — clawing and tearing at her dress. I do the same. My hands grab at the clothes and fling them in wide arcs around the dining room table. Cinderella begs them to stop, crying and screaming in futility. Cinderella is in pieces. She runs out, cries and cries and cries. I am on the floor; my palms and knees feel itchy against the rug. Then I get up, gather the clothes, and do it again.

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JOURNEY OF MILES CLIFFORD THOMPSON

he jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis was a kind of blue storybook adventurer. In the course of creating or helping to create several subgenres of jazz, he embodied, both personally and artistically, the characteristics of a number of heroic and distinctly American archetypes, from the Old West gunslinger to the hard-boiled private eye: he was forceful yet quiet, his effectiveness seeming to owe as much to keen judgment and heart as to raw ability. Never the most dexterous of trumpeters, Miles remains, in death, arguably the most identifiable, his vibrato-less tone one of the most moving sounds in all of jazz, indeed all of music. His quiet nature found expression in his playing, in the spaces — the silences — surrounding his solos, in the room he gave himself in order for his music to resonate. 104

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Don Cheadle seems to have had a couple of these thoughts in mind when he co-wrote, directed, and starred in Miles Ahead, his fictionalized treatment of the musician’s life, which is less a biopic than a sensationalized meditation on one period of his life — ironically, the one in which he played no music. For four years, beginning in the mid-1970s, Miles holed up in his house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, retreating into his own mind, down a pathway made slick and dark by drugs. If his life is viewed in terms of music, this would be his most pronounced silence, one in which the vibrations and echoes of his jazz-rock fusion and jazzfunk efforts of the late 1960s and early 1970s were being absorbed by musicians too numerous to name, while fans waited, and waited some more, to hear what he would do next. And while the action sequences in Miles Ahead are a product of Cheadle’s imagination, they correspond to the notion of Miles as adventurer. Classic heroes of literature, folklore, and film, from Homer’s Odysseus to Indiana Jones, have never stayed in one place. That trait was Miles’s hallmark as a musician, beginning in the 1940s, when he joined the bebop movement led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and continuing on into the “cool” school Miles spearheaded later in the decade; the “stretched-out” sound and lengthy solos he pioneered in the mid-1950s; the modal period beginning in the late 1950s and culminating in the transcendent album Kind of Blue; the tightly woven musical threads of his second “great” quintet of the mid-1960s; and the aforementioned fusion and funk projects. But to return for a moment to the concept of space: it is contained even in the musician’s own first name. Most fans

refer to him as “Miles” rather than “Davis,” for much the same reason people refer to “Hemingway” rather than “Ernest”: it just fits better. “Miles” has one syllable, but it is a long syllable, its pronunciation difficult to rush, its sound both spare and demanding of time and room, like Miles’s music, like the man himself. The concept of space pertains to Miles’s origins as well as his music, and the first, I would argue, greatly influenced the second. Miles Dewey Davis III was born on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, a small town on the Mississippi River. The nearest city was East St. Louis, Illinois, 25 miles to the north. At that time the Midwest (or “Middle West”) had just recently come into its own, as both a region unto itself and a destination for blacks moving north in search of economic opportunity and eager to escape the racist South, where slavery was still, for some, a living memory. Blacks in the Midwest enjoyed greater freedom than their southern and more urban counterparts, mentally and emotionally as well as physically; relatively free of the burden of oppression, their thoughts, feelings, and bodies had more opportunity to explore. As Gerald Early puts it in One Nation Under a Groove, his 1995 book about Motown, in the Midwest blacks “learned how to feel truly what they were instead of how they should feel or pretend to feel for whites. It was as if life in the slave quarters had finally been given space to expand and air to breathe.” In his introduction to his first essay collection, the 1964 volume Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison, who was born in 1913, describes his own experience of growing up in what many blacks called “the Territory” (in his case, Oklahoma):

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[O]urs was a chaotic community, still characterized by frontier attitudes and by that strange mixture of the naïve and sophisticated, the benign and malignant, which makes the American past so puzzling and its present so confusing; that mixture which often affords the minds of the young who grow up in the far provinces such wide and unstructured latitude, and which encourages the individual’s imagination — up to the moment “reality” closes in upon him — to range widely and sometimes even to soar. Miles grew up in comfort: his father had a successful dental practice and was even involved in local politics. It was from his father that Miles learned not to fear whites, or anyone, for that matter. In his famous autobiography, written with Quincy Troupe and published in 1989, two years before his death, Miles writes: I knew even way back then that you’ve got to fight to protect who you are. So, I’d fight a lot. But I was never in no gangs. And I don’t think I’m arrogant, I think I’m confident of myself. Know what I want, always have known what I wanted for as long as I can remember. I can’t be intimidated. But back then, when I was growing up, everybody seemed to like me, even though I didn’t talk too much; I still don’t like to talk too much now. Here, in a nutshell, is the Miles ethos, both personal and musical: independence of mind (“I was never in no gangs”); self-confidence and a determination to stand up for himself, often taken as arrogance or even rudeness; and the tendency to say what needed saying and little more, be it in words or notes on the trumpet. 106

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To these bedrock elements two others were joined. One had to do with the time Miles spent on his maternal grandfather’s fish farm in Arkansas, where the boy’s mother sometimes sent him and his two siblings, putting them on a bus with nametags on their shirts. In his autobiography, he recalls walking the region’s back roads at night when he was six and seven, hearing hooting owls and the music in nearby churches — music that combined gospel and blues and that became linked in the boy’s imagination to the great open land. The other element was introduced by a radio show, Harlem Rhythms, which first introduced young Miles to the music of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Lionel Hampton, and many others. Soon Miles began taking private music lessons, and his personal determination found a focus. In 1944, at the age of 18, Miles already had something of a local reputation on the trumpet when Billy Eckstine’s band came to play in St. Louis. Miles went to the club to see if he could sit in with the band. And it turned out they did indeed need another trumpeter. The man who told him was himself a trumpeter in Eckstine’s band, one John Birks Gillespie, better known as Dizzy. In the band, too, was the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, also known as Bird. In his autobiography, Miles refers to his experience that night as “the greatest feeling I ever had in my life — with my clothes on,” despite barely being able to play because he was so entranced by the solos of Bird and Diz. Miles already knew of these two men, who would be remembered as the central figures of bebop. When he left the Midwest the same year for New York City, in search of Bird and Diz, Miles entered history, embarking on the first of his

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voyages that would mirror the adventures of the classic storybook hero.

you could remember.” Miles played solos that set anchors in listeners’ memories, solos pared down to their essence. ¤ In the years after Miles left Bird’s band — for much the same reason as Diz While Miles would remain physically had earlier — and joined or rejoined othbased in New York for the rest of his life, er bands, including Billy Eckstine’s and bebop was only the first of the musical Oscar Pettiford’s, he displayed the stylistic landscapes on which he would leave his restlessness that would define the rest of mark. Bebop grew out of jazz musicians’ his career. In the late 1940s, he began the “cutting” sessions, after-hours jams at up- periodic collaborations with the composer town clubs in which rapid tempos, shift- and arranger Gil Evans that would lead ing chords, and breakneck solos separat- to some of the most significant work of ed the truly gifted players — newcomers both men’s careers. In 1949 and 1950, the and veterans alike — from their lesser nonet that Miles and Evans formed with brethren. Imagine you’re walking down baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, alto the street and someone is outpacing you player Lee Konitz, drummer Max Roach, while going up the front fire escape, across and other top sidemen recorded the landthe roof, and down the back fire escape of mark album Birth of the Cool (released in every building you pass; you’re the tradi- 1957). Miles’s group created “cool” meltional jazz musician and the other person odies as distinctive as those of Bird and is the bebop player, improvising solos that Diz, but less intense and more accessible explore harmonies, rapidly incorporating than bebop. Miles envisioned the nonet notes of chords that change numerous as a choir, with one horn (Miles’s) repretimes in the course of a tune. senting the tenor, another (Konitz’s) the This was the landscape in which the alto, and so on; and the performances are young Miles not only found but distin- indeed choir-like, with the various voices guished himself. After Diz left Bird’s interwoven in a way they had never been band, no longer able to tolerate his friend’s in bebop, a soloist often playing over other unreliable drug-addict ways, Miles re- horns as well as over the rhythm section. placed him on trumpet. He couldn’t On these tunes we can also hear Miles match Dizzy’s velocity or range, but he not only playing notes in his highly secame close enough, and, just as impor- lective fashion but also creating space for tantly, he gave Bird something Diz hadn’t: his sound to resonate in other ways. On space in which Bird’s own solos could res- “Jeru,” for example, Miles plays individonate. True to his nature as both a mu- ual phrases that are separated by silence, sician and a person, Miles found ways as other horns play in unison behind him. to add breathing space into those short, Among the more than three doztwo- and three-minute bebop tunes. In en recordings Miles made between 1949 his autobiography, Miles explains that he and 1954, none were more important did not play every note of every chord, but than Dig, from 1951, and two recorded rather chose the most important notes: “I in 1954: Walkin’ and Miles Davis and the used to hear all them musicians playing all Modern Jazz Giants. His work on Dig, for them scales and notes and never nothing which he wrote all the tunes, benefitted 107

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from a technological advance, the invention of the long-playing record (LP), which allowed musicians to extend solos the way they would in live performances. Dig, which featured the tenor of Sonny Rollins and the alto of Jackie McLean, found Miles doing just that. In his first solo on the title track, he plays for 32 bars of music in 4/4 time — compare that with the eight breakneck bars of a typical Bird solo (if “a typical Bird solo” can be said to exist). In this marathon of a solo, Miles, our storybook hero, becomes a storyteller as well, spinning a tale with a beginning, middle, and end. He would keep telling such stories throughout his career, in vastly different musical settings. Dig also hints at another direction Miles would take. His sound on trumpet had differed from Dizzy’s in part because the latter worked in a higher register, where Miles, as he once put it, simply didn’t hear the music. But in a passage from “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” Miles inserts one of his characteristic pauses, then reenters the fray on a note significantly higher than those he had usually played. On the album Walkin’ (which was a 1957 compilation of tracks originally released in 1954), Miles set out to recapture some of the intensity of his bebop period while infusing the music with the blues he loved. By now Miles had begun habitually playing trumpet with a mute, which lent his sound a wiry quality — as wiry as his physical presence — that inspired countless imitators and yet, six decades later, remains distinctive. Around this time, Miles also found confirmation of his own tendencies in the music of pianists Thelonious Monk and, particularly, Ahmad Jamal: their playing made full use of space, inspiring the trumpeter to continue experimenting in 108

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the same vein. Ironically, in applying that approach to his late-1954 recording Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants, the trumpeter created the space he desired by largely leaving out the piano (played by Monk!), giving the rest of his rhythm section — consisting of the luminaries Percy Heath on bass, Kenny Clarke on drums, and Milt Jackson on vibes — room to “stroll,” as he put it. Taken together, these records mark the emergence of 28-year-old Miles Davis as a mature artist. ¤ Of course, no artist, not even one as innovative and independent-minded as Miles, can exist in isolation or without influences. Often enough, those influences come from outside the artist’s chosen discipline. Miles, a lifelong devotee of boxing, found his own hero in the great middleweight fighter Sugar Ray Robinson. “Ray was cold and he was the best and he was everything I wanted to be in 1954,” the musician recalled. It was a telling, and not very surprising, choice of role model. The boxer, that most solitary of athletes, fits well into the heroic tradition: a figure who learns from others, including younger versions of himself, but who performs his most important acts alone, in real time, relying solely on his own powers and judgment, bringing them to bear on every new situation — like a jazz soloist. Not all of the challenges Miles faced in his hero’s journey were of a musical nature. He endured mistreatment by bigoted white police; he already had a family by the time he fell in love with the actress Juliette Gréco in Paris; and having to return to the United States, which was long on racism and short on Gréco, put

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Miles in a state of mind that helped lead to his nearly fatal four-year heroin addiction. That habit, in turn, led him to steal and even pimp, turning him into the kind of person he himself despised. With his father’s help, Miles kicked his addiction, and it was in that restored condition that he found the discipline that Sugar Ray Robinson represented for him. Miles admired the respect that Sugar Ray commanded, and in his own quiet but effective way he insisted on that respect for himself. While performing, he refused to compromise his dignity by clowning like Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie; he would seldom, in fact, communicate with his audience in any way, except through his music. Once, while traveling with Bird’s band to Chicago, he sat down to eat in a restaurant with his friend Max Roach. Four drunken white men began talking to Miles and Roach, referring to them as “boys,” and on learning that the two black men were musicians, one of the white men said, “Why don’t you play something for us if y’all so good?” Miles recalls in his autobiography, “I knew what was coming next, so I just picked up the whole tablecloth with everything on it and threw it all over the motherfuckers before they could say or do anything.” Miles, the classic American hero, did not speak; he acted. ¤ The next couple of years would find Miles assembling and leading one of his most celebrated groups. This quintet included the young bassist Paul Chambers and the pianist Red Garland (himself a onetime boxer, who even fought Sugar Ray!). The group’s sound was largely driven, as Miles’s groups tended to be, by its

drummer (in this case, Philly Joe Jones), and featured a tenor saxophonist — John Coltrane — who would become a storybook hero in his own right, a figure whose increasingly note-y sound contrasted interestingly with Miles’s spare playing. He was the perfect foil for Miles, as Miles had once been for the by-then departed Charlie Parker. That quintet won Miles great acclaim, but he was never one to rest on his laurels. Instead, he set off for new musical territory. Miles Ahead, the first of his three highly celebrated album-length collaborations with Gil Evans, appeared in 1957. Those records found Miles playing trumpet in front of an entire orchestra; paradoxically, the sounds of all those musicians formed a background that only served to isolate Miles’s solos. Miles is, in effect, alone with his horn, bringing to mind once more the image of the archetypal tough-guy loner, the haunted gunslinger or private eye. In this case, the hauntedness finds full expression in beautiful sad passages. To chronicle Miles’s career is to fight the constant temptation to repeat the phrase “explored new territory,” for that is what he continued to do. On Milestones, from 1958, he added alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley to his group. The six tunes on that record find the six musicians playing in a modal style, which largely dispensed with chord changes, giving them still more space to roam in a single direction; the challenge, as Miles put it, was to “see how inventive you can become melodically.” Miles’s solos had become stories years earlier, but here, on Milestones, they approach the weight of novels. In addition, the sweetsounding alto work of Cannonball, whose velocity rivaled Coltrane’s, created even more of a contrast with Miles’s generally 109

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spare sound. While the solos by Coltrane and Cannonball impress the listener with their pyrotechnics, Miles’s resonate in the memory; imagine a hunter who has two dogs much faster than he is — but who, in the end, is the one to bag the game. The modal style of Milestones laid the groundwork for what would become not only the most celebrated album of Miles’s career but also the best-selling jazz record of all time: Kind of Blue (1959). The album’s relaxed tempos, the solos that stretch on and on without chord changes, affect the listener somewhat like hypnosis, neither overriding thought (like heavy metal) nor staying out of thought’s way (like elevator music), but transporting the mind to another plane, one of contemplation and beauty, one of contemplation of beauty. Miles’s working band had different configurations as he moved into the 1960s, reaching its most stable and celebrated lineup of that decade with another quintet, featuring pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, tenor man Wayne Shorter — who composed many of the tunes the group recorded — and, in some ways most importantly, the very young but profoundly gifted drummer Tony Williams. However, by the middle of the decade, jazz was all but eclipsed by rock. Our hero Miles found himself at the proverbial fork in the road: one direction might have led to irrelevance, the other — to accusations of selling out. Miles took the second road. Imagine if that mythic hero, the steel drivin’ John Henry, had encountered the steam drill and, instead of dying in the act of defeating it, had seen the future and hopped aboard. To hear Miles tell it, though, his embrace of rock — and partial spearheading of jazz-rock fusion — represented not an act of surrender but just another 110

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fresh development in the career of a man who never stopped exploring. In his autobiography, Miles expresses disdain for musicians who still play music in the style that he, Bird, and Diz perfected in the 1940s. Why not move on? With regard to playing jazz fusion and adding guitars to his sound, Miles claimed to have been inspired not by white rock musicians but by the black soul legend James Brown. But even Miles admitted that embracing electronica wasn’t simply a matter of testing new musical possibilities; he hoped it would bring him more listeners — and he saw nothing wrong with that. Miles in the Sky (1968), Filles de Kilimanjaro, and In a Silent Way (both 1969) added new elements to Miles’s sound, but it was Bitches Brew (1970) that placed our hero in a whole new aural landscape. Yet, as always, he remains true to himself. Amid the chugging sound produced by electric piano, electric bass, bass clarinet, and not one but two drummers, Miles retains the spare quality of his playing, but, in order to be heard over the fray, rises to the higher register he had been investigating over the years. In its layering of instrumentation, the record also echoes Miles’s work from as far back as Birth of the Cool; if Miles had envisioned the nonet of Birth of the Cool as a choir, then Bitches Brew might be seen as the work of an electronic choir. These echoes indicate that Miles maintained his integrity even in the face of new situations. In some ways, the electronic sound was particularly well suited for Miles’s trumpet style: his instrument needed amplification, which tends to work less well with rapid trumpet lines, and so the sparseness of his playing was ideal for the setting. Get Up with It (1974) may provide an even better demonstration of Miles’s

CLIFFORD THOMPSON

commitment to his musical principles. On that record, Miles’s band infuses the rock-inspired “Honky Tonk” with the blues sound he had always loved, reminding the listener of rock’s blues roots and testifying to the connectedness of all homegrown American music. Miles’s jazz-fusion period tested his musical limits. In the years that followed, Miles reached a kind of personal limit as well. In 1975, the silences that characterized his music overtook it completely; due to health issues and personal demons, Miles did not touch his horn for four years. ¤ This is where Cheadle’s film picks up the story. While Miles Ahead is set during the 1970s, its beautifully shot sequences take us back into the 1950s and ’60s, to Miles’s princely elegance during his nightclub years, to the romance and chauvinism that marked his relationship with dancer Frances Taylor (the first or second of his three or four wives, depending on where you start counting), and to a lot of wonderful music. As if there were not enough drama in the ongoing saga of Miles’s illnesses, addictions, and other personal troubles, and in his having apparently lost his way as an artist, the story adds a more immediate conflict: his contract battle with Columbia Records, which descends into a fictional — and, frankly, silly — shootout over a stolen tape. What makes this sequence disappointing is that Cheadle, who as an actor does a marvelous job of capturing Miles’s crustiness and the vulnerable soul underneath, could have given a riveting performance by simply sticking to the facts. The film ends with Miles returning in triumph to the music scene, though in fact

he emerged from his hiatus a somewhat diminished musician, at least at first. Over the next few years he gradually regained his strength as a trumpeter. Some took issue with his choice during this period to record versions of contemporary pop tunes, such as his covers of material by Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper on his 1985 record You’re Under Arrest; those critics perhaps did not remember that jazz musicians had been playing instrumental versions of pop hits since at least as far back as the heyday of Coleman Hawkins. By the release of his 1986 album Tutu, named for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Miles was again playing fine trumpet lines. His work with a muted horn on that album is strong, though some were put off by the synthesizer-created sounds on this and later records; whatever one’s feelings about the sound of Miles’s jazz/fusion period, that electronic music had at least been played by human beings, whereas now his signature trumpet came to us through a filter of technology. Miles, our storybook hero, had once again ventured into new territory, which always presents its dangers. ¤ Miles Davis had, as he once put it, changed music four or five times, charting an artistic journey perhaps matched in his era only by that of Picasso. But his was a particularly American journey, exemplifying those classic traits that his countrymen have always treasured in their heroes — adaptability, fearlessness, doing rather than talking. Miles’s life spanned most of what has been called the American Century, and it mirrored that century’s relentless drive, its spirit of exploration, its perpetual openness to the new. 111

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Amita Bhatt, Desire. Motives. Assassins, 2014, oil on canvas, 48 by 48 inches.

REFLECTIONS ON LARB RICHIE HOFMANN

s a poet and a critic, I am immensely grateful to the editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books for supporting my writing and for giving me the opportunity to write on new books of poetry that matter to me. I was especially delighted to share my passion for the poetry of James Merrill with readers occasioned by the publication of Stephen Yenser’s well-executed edition of The Book of Ephraim (Knopf, 2018). And to praise Jericho Brown’s deft handling of love and violence in his unforgettable collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019), which went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poem reprinted here, “The Mind of Art,” is from a sequence of dramatic monologues called “The Prince,” in the voice of an imagined 18th-century exiled courtesan, based loosely on the Comtesse de Soissons, in which she meditates on art, sex, letter writing, motherhood, murder, fashion, and abandonment. Mostly, I interact with LARB as a reader, hungry for sophisticated, complex, enjoyable book reviewing in a landscape where fewer and fewer publications make space for serious and rigorous critique. I look forward to the next 10 years of insightful criticism and memorable creative writing. I am truly honored to be a part of this magazine’s history.

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Amita Bhatt, Heroism is believing in the possibility of the impossible, 2015, oil on canvas, 48 by 48 inches.

p o e t ry

YO U R H O M I E F R O M A N OT H E R H E A R T: O N DA N E Z S M I T H ’ S ‘HOMIE’ AMANDA GORMAN

anez Smith's latest poetry collection, Homie, is actually not titled Homie at all. As the National Book Award finalist confirms point-blank in a note on the title: “this book was titled homie because I don’t want non-black people to say my nig out loud. This book is really titled my nig.” Indeed, a second title page announces: “my nig / poems / Danez Smith.” Which raises the question: how are we meant to read this charged word that Smith stylistically summons in a work deeply concerned with solidarity and survival, friendship, family, and the frailty of the body and its blood? For starters, the title unapologetically alerts us to the collection’s wider magnanimous project: who these poems 115

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are for. If Smith’s previous book Don’t Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize, is a rumination on the ruination of black bodies, then Homie heralds the redemptive power of black friendship. Whereas lamenting poems in Don’t Call Us Dead, such as “summer, somewhere” and the viral “dear white america” detail a black afterlife beyond this troubled planet, Homie is anchored in the homie heaven here on earth, in neighborhoods, churches, and kitchens. Smith — they/them/theirs — celebrates unsung heroes who create safe spaces for the marginalized. For them, these everyday fortresses are found on the frontier of family, fraternity, and friendship. In a three-paged anthemic opening poem, “my president,” Smith heralds the community-building of common people: & every head nod is my president & every child singing summer with a red sweet tongue is my president & the birds & the cooks & the single moms especially Here Smith repositions the political power of a president within simple social acts of solidarity, such as nodding kindly in the black quotidian fashion. In a crescendo highly reminiscent of Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” the wordsmith continues: & the boy crying on the train & the sudden abuela who rubs his back & the uncle who offers him water & the drag queen who begins 116

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to hum

o my presidents! my presidents! my presidents! my presidents!

show me to our nation my only border is my body i sing your names sing your names your names

my mighty anthem

Smith pluralizes the title “my president” at the poem’s climax, expanding and elevating a diverse cohort of souls to the highest office in the land. Here, the defenders of the free world are not in the Oval Office, but drivers of buses and children smiling brightly with their innocence. And Smith’s presidents aren’t just a multitude; they are also multilingual. Smith praises their grandma, whose “cabinet is her cabinet / cause she knows how to trust what the pan knows / how the skillet wins the war,” tapping into her own cultural wells of knowledge. Yet Smith also describes the “sudden abuela” coming to the aid of a child. English rolls seamlessly into Spanish, because they are part of the same transcendent tale. To truly understand this poem’s genius, it must be read within the sociopolitical context of digital declarations of #notmypresident, wherein liberals have rejected Donald Trump’s shady ascent to Pennsylvania Avenue. Which inevitably leads us to wonder: If Smith explicitly lists who their presidents are, who is their president not? Trump, we might assume. Yet Smith also does not list former

president Barack Obama in the poem. It would be embarrassingly reductive to read these absences as mirror representations of Smith’s true political beliefs. In fact, not a single inaugurated president appears in the poem at all. This dearth points to the poem’s most democratic of declarations: Smith’s presidents are not elected by the people. Smith’s presidents are the people. These persons are praiseworthy not for the offices they hold, but for the intimacy they institute as they uphold others. Perhaps this is one of Smith’s grandest talents: diving into the pool of a poem at one angle (for example, “my president,” in the singular sense) only to emerge in a new framework (the multitudes of presidents) that makes us see poetry and its meanings anew. For example, consider “fall poem.” Its title subconsciously implies a traditional nature poem, idyllic and dreamy, where we are lulled by imagery of the changing seasons. Yet the piece is anything but: the leaves have done their annual shimmy. now the streetlight with no soft green curtain cuts a silver blade across my bed & my body. i didn’t want to start with leaves even though I love how the trees turn the color of aunts & should-train-line to ground each October. no one wants to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen body, something easy to mourn, body cut out of the light body lit up with bullets. see how easy it is to bring up bullets?

is it possible to ban guns? even from this poem? i lie in the light, body split by light, room too bright for sleep thinking of the leaf-colored bodies, their weekly fall In a tonal shift tectonic enough to render us with literary whiplash, falling leaves are juxtaposed starkly against fallen bodies. One can almost hear the soft, resonant echo of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Furthermore, in the sharp pronouncement that “no one / want to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen / body,” Smith draws attention to the fetishization of suffering and violence. And in their use of fall as an allegory for gun violence, we must grapple with how accepted, how easily environmental and inevitable that collective unwarranted death, particularly of colored bodies, has become in the United States, almost as natural seeming as the shimmy of bright leaves from an oak. Hence, Homie is not just an anthem. It is also an elegy. A requiem. An eloquent and yet guttural moan, where, as Smith writes in “for Andrew,” there’s “nothing left to leave me / but sound.” The poet alerts us to the collection’s elegiac enterprise when earlier in “how many of us have them?” they write: “the wind is tangled / with the dust of the dead homies, carrying us over / to them.” And then, in lines that slice through the skin: “i miss them. all the dead. how young. how silly / to miss what you will become.” This breath of anguish leaks out in every single line of “fall poem,” a funeral procession that proclaims that as much as Homie is full of humor and hugs, it’s also heckled by haunts, alive and dead. In fact, the elegy of the collection begins even 117

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earlier, when Smith dedicates Homie to “the realest one / Phonetic One / Andrew Thomas.” Later, in “for Andrew,” originally published in The Rumpus, Smith delivers a eulogy-like poem for their departed friend. With anguish that equals that of Achilles, the Greek hero who fouled his face with mud and soot after the death of his most beloved Patroclus, Smith writes: “when you went i choked on dirt.” We are made witness to the most pointed of pains, wherein death robs a loved one too soon, and, along with the speaker, our very ability to speak. Smith is no stranger to death. Continuing in the concerns voiced in Don’t Call Us Dead, Smith latest book not only ruminates on brotherhood, but also on the body, its blood, its bruises, its breaking, and the brutality it bears, particularly when it is black and brown. Yet Smith’s body isn’t just under threat from bullets; their own HIV status brings deliberations on death and disease to the forefront of their profound poetics. In “sometimes i wish i felt the side effects” they write: there is no bad news yet. again. i wish i knew the nausea, its thick yell in the morning, pregnant proof that in you, life swells. i know i’m not a mother, but i know what it is to nurse a thing you want to kill & can’t. you learn to love it. yes. i love my sweet virus. it is my proof of life, my toxic angel, wasted utopia 118

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what makes my blood my blood. Smith’s language here is particularly striking, if not surprising, especially when they describe HIV as “a thing you want to kill.” Is not HIV the thing that wants to kill them? Their very inversion of the fatality of the virus also upends the disease’s power over Smith’s own self-love. Instead of robbing the poet of their own physiological agency, the “toxic angel” HIV, like the angel Gabriel gracefully arriving before Mary, tells Smith that something else lives inside them. But that does not make their blood any less their own; in the end, their body is still their body, still something holy, which Smith learns to celebrate. Perhaps loving the body, loving the self, is akin to friendship — learning to love another, even while we pray that bad news will not come. Again. In its cutting compassion, Homie is as much a celebration of loved ones’ lives as it is a lament for their loss, equally a war cry for kinship and the burial dirge after the battle. The collections rings as a heartfelt call to love our beloveds as if they’ll be gone tomorrow, because they just might be. Yet Smith teaches us that one thing is still certain for today: in our homies, despite our most harrowing of hurts, we can always find the hope of healing.

DESK DRAWERS AND R E A L E S TAT E P R A G E E TA S H A R M A

For Mike Stussy Have you noticed that dresser drawers have gotten smaller? It’s in keeping with the real estate market, pay more for what you had in some past life: the larger drawers of childhood. Or perhaps you never had a deeper, wider, preponderant clearing to open every morning. Bedroom drawers and real estate engage in the same reduction. Tempted by low interest rates for something you never wanted until you made a comparison thus initiating a consciousness in something offhandedly morbid that won you over. If you want to pay for bigger spaces — so you can fold with abandon or ecstasy you have to shell out more money than you are comfortable with. American real estate punctures your freedom with exiguous effort and disastrous effects in order to re-organize your brain’s desires. I imagine the ratio is equal: 2 more inches is equivalent to 200 additional quare feet. Paying for the quality we might have misunderstood, are we still children in this sense? Dresser drawers are no longer comforting, expansive, and ordinary as the houses we now live in. The box-drawn life we thought was so much bigger than what is in front of us is outside and lives in our hungers. I sigh and feel the world inching closer to my mortality button and shove my clothes into the corners of all that will close a square.

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ORPHAN JEONG JEONG-JA (AGE 8)

DON MEE CHOI

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In a dream I asked my auntie if I could touch the moon. Everyone was wearing pretty blouses and skirts except for me. My mom and sister took off, leaving me behind. It was snowing. I saw a cluster of fleas. They were soldiers. They yelled, Come out! Listen to our speech! I didn’t know what speech was. Speech was scary. Commies! Bastards! Not even human! Not better than dogs! The fleas scattered, then began spitting at us. Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! Speech was scary. I was the only one wailing in my dream. Then I was hungry. I asked my auntie if I could touch the Milky Way.

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Roula Nassar, the myth of abundance, 2019, color pencil on paper, 11 x 22 inches.

from DEAR WHITENESS, CHARIF SHANAHAN

Early on The sun formed a borderless room. Colors Broke through the light In small patches Of body: a brown forearm, A tan cheek, a green iris, A ginger stretch of something and so on. We had been waiting, but did not Know we had been waiting. It was difficult to see the whole. It was, It turns out, a birthing room, my birth room. Still Forming, I lifted you up: Here, I said. Take this one. Let this one be my face. Flat expressions, barely a reaction As if to say Of course. What else would you have chosen? I handed you over to the authorities Asking them, repeatedly, to hold you

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For me. They tried, they failed. You slipped through their fingers As you would through mine— Not like water, or sand, but like The air around us, yes, More like that: without The illusion of containment. In the unformed liver: static silhouettes, a depressive. In the middle distance: Brother, my brother—

Well what happened is I was walking down the street and I entered a kind of dream state, right? And in that dream I slept many nights and each night as I slept a spider crawled into my mouth. It lodged itself in my throat and in the morning no matter how much I coughed, how much water I drank, how long I held my breath, it did not budge. It was fixed. When I spoke my voice exited my mouth with a faintly visible gray hue. The room filled with that voice until it looked eventually as though the air had a color.

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On every wall of that school, Between each tile, On our shoes, in the nuns’ hair. In the milk glass, on the milky glass, On our bones, in our bones (even the jagged baby teeth Our gums kept losing), In the brightness of our sclera, On the notebook pages that once were Trees, we learned, on which we were Free to scribble our brilliant ideas About racecars-come-to-life Or the magic elevator that traveled To a plane of existence Recognizably human but not on any map, Our precious little right Brains, so certain then Of you: A radiant cloak, an aura The eye detects before it sees Beneath it.

When I spoke I heard my voice at a distance, as though it were coming from another room. The sensation was strange until it felt familiar, which is to say safe, which is to say contained, which is to say within my control. I spent my days sitting on a backless stool, looking out a bricked-up window. The voice from the other room told me things I did not know I knew, things I believed I did not believe.

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I chased you for twenty-five years. At the bathroom mirror. In the drug store thick. Feral, Obsidian, I held my breath. Pale. Blanched, paling. Where were you? At least half these cells Were you, were they not? And now The teacher of life insists It is important to recollect The half of me That could never Despite my body and the need Of those around me Present itself as the whole, Not convincingly, In any case— The teacher explains After recollection, re-imagine: But how to make one See what one does not see With the vast ubiquitous discerning eye? How To dismantle a machine One cannot touch or even locate—?

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On my body but not inside my body on my mind but not inside my mind Of you but not you Over here brother over here come sit with your sister come sit with your love

Thank you but no thank you is a privilege for which I resent you Do you have any idea who you are what you have done and to whom Here take this one Let this one be my face

If you could speak without aid what would you say what would you say without aid if you could speak Are you ashamed Do you feel regret Do you feel at all It is how I felt that I regret not what I said to myself or to anyone or what I believed not to know

Of course what else would you have chosen it is like holding water in your hand Do you know when you are in the room the air takes on color the air that enters our lungs our lungs Over here brother come sit over here with us come sit with your loves with yourself with your love

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Roula Nassar, the escape dream, 2018, color pencil on paper, 24 x 19 inches.

ATO N E M E N T JENNY GEORGE

I stood in a lamplit kitchen looking into my empty life. Outside, moths grazed the windowscreens like tiny winged horses. I had lived so close to my life I could almost feel it: it hummed like an electric fence. Often I had been afraid, standing motionless at the dark border. Forgive me, I sang to the life. How beautiful, how painful you almost were, I sang with my burning inaudible voice.

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SAM'S DREAM JORIE GRAHAM

One day there is no day because there is no day before, no yesterday, then a now, & time, & a cell divides and you, you are in time, time is in you, as multiplying now u slip into our stream, or is it u grow a piece of stream in us, is it flesh or time you grow, how, is it an American you grow, week 28, when we are told dreaming begins. Welcome. Truest stranger. Perhaps one of the last conceived & carried in womb. Father and mother singular and known. Born of human body. Not among the perfected ones yet. No. A mere human, all first hand knowledge, flying in as if kindling—natural. The last breath before the first breath is mystery. Then u burn into gaze, thought, knowledge of oblivion. Rock yourself. Kick so I can feel you out here. Push your hands against the chamber. The world is exhausted. I moisten my lips and try to remember a song. I have to have a song to sing you from out here. They say you now hear vividly. This could have been a paradise my song begins. No, this is, was, is, never will be again, will be, we hope desperately wasn’t a dream, maybe in your dream now there is a clue, can you dream the clue, you who are dreaming what having had no life to dream of,

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dream from—what populates you—bloodflow and lightswirl, stammering of ventricles, attempts at motion, absorbings, incompletions, fluidities—do you have temptation yet, or even the meanwhile—such a mature duration this meanwhile, how it intensifies this present—or nevertheless—no beyond of course in your dream what could be beyond—no defeat as so far no defeat—cells hum—no partiality as all grows in your first dream which is the dream of what you are—is that right—no attempt as there is no attempting yet—no privacy—I laugh to myself writing the word—oh look at that word—no either/or—but yes light filtering-in, root-darknesses, motion—and the laughter, do you hear it from us out here, us, can you hear that strain of what we call sincerity—Oh. Remain unknown. Know no daybreak ever. Dream of no running from fire, no being shoved into mass grave others falling over you, dream of no bot, no capture filter store—no algorithmic memory, no hope, realism, knowing, no quest-for, selling-of, accosting violently to have, no lemon-color of the end of day, no sudden happiness , no suddenly. It is much bigger, faster—try to hear out—this place you’re being fired into—other in it—judgment of other— logic, representation, nightmare—how to prepare you —what do you dream—what must I sing— it says you cry in there & laugh—out here a late October rain has started down, soon you shall put your small hand out & one of us will say slowly and outloud rain and you will say rain—but what is that on your hand which falling has come round again in the forever of again to reach your waiting upturned hand. I look up now.Clouds drift. Evaporation is a thing.That our only system is awry a thing.That u will see rains such as I have never seen a thing. Plain sadness, this hand-knit sweater, old things, maybe u shall have some of—in this my song—in my long song not telling u about the

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paradise, abandoning my song of what’s no longer possible, that song, it is a thing. Oh normalcy, what a song I would sing you. Child u shall god willing come out into the being known. First thing will be the visible. That’s the first step of our dream, the dream of here. You will see motes in light. And lights inside the light which can go out. A different dark. And spirits, wind exhaustion a heavy thing attached to you—your entity—as u enter history and it—so bright, correct, awake, speaking and crying-out—begins. And all the rest begins. Amazing, you were not everything after all. Out you come into legibility. Difference. Why shouldn’t all be the same thing? It’s a thing, says the stranger nearby, it’s a new thing, this stance this skin like spandex closing over you, it’s you. A name is given you. Take it. Can you take it? All seems to be so overfull at once. Now here it is proffered again, this sound which is you, do u feel the laving of it down all over you, coating you, so transparent you could swear it is you, really you, this Sam, this crumb of life which suddenly lengthens the minute as it cleans off something else, something you didn’t know was there before, and which, in disappearing now, is felt. The before u. The before. That dream. What was that dream.There,as if a burning-off of mist, gone where— not back, where would back be—dried away—a sweetness going with it—no?—feel it?—I do—I almost smell it as it is dissolved into the prior by succession, by events, not raging, not burning, but going—nothing like the loud blood-rush in the invisible u & u in with its elasticities, paddlings, nets, swirls. In this disunion now stretch. Take up space. You are that place u displace. That falling all round u is: gazing, thinking, attempted love, exhausted love, everything or it is everyone always going and coming back from some place. They do not stay. They do not

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stay. And then out here circumference. One day you glimpse it, the horizon line. You are so….surprised. How could that be. What are we in or on that it stops there but does not ever stop. They tell u try to feel it turn. The sun they will explain to you. The moon. How far away it all becomes the more you enter. How thin you are. How much u have to disappear in order to become. In order to become human. Become Sam.

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AMERIGO VESPUCCI LANDING... N A TA L I E S C E N T E R S - Z A P I C O

“Amerigo Vespucci Landing…” — 1499 A thousand boats I set aflame on my chest, just to watch them burn. My knees are caves, my belly home to a colony of snakes. If I could walk this river, the way I walk through our bedroom, without clothes, I could conquer the world. You draw maps of lands I’ve never seen on the palms of my hands. I push the world together in prayer, & tear it apart to wash my hair. All the world’s

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water is in my eyes. You steal it by cupping your hands & raising them to your lips to drink. When you got the cartography wrong, you said we should tear the map in half, so as not to get confused. We did. I bled & bled.

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Roula Nassar, involuntary memory, 2019, clay, paint, 16.5 x 6.5 4 inches.

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T H E D E AT H O F ATA H U A L PA AT THE HANDS OF PIZARRO’S MEN MARY RUEFLE

He couldn’t read so when they handed him The Book he threw it on the ground like a useless, heavy thing and they killed him then and there making sure that he was dead Perhaps every death is as simple as that A simple sad mistake under the azure sky where birds with gold feelings watch what is happening below and form a circle overhead It may be our heads Are filled with feathers From the stuff We don’t know

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C H R O N O LO GY RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS

I don’t remember when her name begins in the world. I forget what maiden word the water made against my mother’s tongue. Unbroken thirst. Black earth. Darkness, singing blue & green. Fruit trees of her hands. Animals roar her blood into bright air. Ghosts scrape brown rivers upon her skin. The teeth of the dead tear her unborn words into rafts. My mother’s maiden name is Pray. She is a pure being of blood, promise, trouble. Perhaps, I was there, gaining details. Wonder corrodes our armor of ribs & speech. Contours breaching the wave that will widow our family. Her breath going down & staying beneath its darkest tongue. The water recalling who the earth believes she was before the god. I want to open my mother’s dead hands & listen. Let the human record show our slant of suffering. Let cum & rain lash chokecherry leaves with desire, pain, imagination. Show me how the art of losing masters each morning. The mind of

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the earth turned like a heart after death. Our wounds took the form of night. Our fears rocked like white, tearful waves against the last ships. Our mothers rolled like shells under the raging seas. Which means, by what I must write in blood –– my naked hand labored through the bruised dark to speak. Which means language is neither innocent nor free. A woman swells alone inside mauve fields. A grief makes its own blood. The petals beneath me have already changed. The wound of life gave the night endless shame & would not close its mouth.

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THE MAILMAN DIANA KHOI NGUYEN

In an empty room I sleep the shape of my skull in my hands thinking about how to ask God to be nicer. The sky is bright as a bowl on a nurse’s table then it’s as bright as the shadow of the bowl. And my body as if detecting a red dress in fog hears the soft shimmer of notes trembling lighter than the wing of a moth landing on a collar. As suddenly as it fills the chamber it takes leave. What comes unexpectedly isn’t uninvited. A thud from the chute in the wall — each time the thrum different.

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I lace my sandals retrieve from the bin of the chute a mandolin glistening like the flesh of an onion. I wipe my hands on my ashy coat take her to where a man who looks like me thanks me for coming again. When he lifts her up to play the music spills like a man at his sentencing doesn’t deliver it —

who having written his own sentence

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Roula Nassar, the dimension of eternity, 2019, clay, paint, 11 x 8 x 3.5 inches.

THE PRINCE: THE MIND OF ART RICHIE HOFMANN

If I were a love poet, I don’t know to whom these various letters would be addressed. Have you wanted to inhabit the mind of art? To know, if for a moment only, what was being made? To know that you had made it — to know, in the precise instant of its making, at least, what it was that you had made? I thought the child would change me, but he was also, of course, a fiction to which I felt, in the end, all too proximate. All too proximate. In the having made him, at least — do you understand? Surely you understand — That’s why we don’t fall in love with our children.

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T H E C O N S TA N T G A R D N E R : O N LO U I S E G LÜC K MICHAEL ROBBINS

hen an American poet reaches un certain âge, publishers like to mark the occasion with expensive omnibuses. Recently we have had John Ashbery’s Collected Poems 1956–1987, Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959–2009, and Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems. Now Louise Glück, nearly 70, has a premature tombstone of her own: Poems 1962–2012, a brick of raw feeling collecting all of the poet’s books, from 1968’s Firstbornto 2009’s A Village Life (the title is thus something of a puzzle). Glück is as important and influential a poet as we have in America, a tagline whose strangeness deepens the more one reads her. She has won every major award; she served as Poet Laureate (how 144

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incongruous to think of this bleak, private poet in such a smiling, public role). Her work is an occasion for something like rapture among her admirers. Maureen McLane describes the fervor with which Glück first gripped her in terms thousands could second: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris was a companion more intimate than any living friend, a murmur and rasp and balm in the mind those months the structures of living you yourself had erected were now collapsing, the foundations battered by you yourself. I’ve encountered this devotional attitude in unexpected places, a shared and paradoxical sense that Glück’s stark, insular verse speaks to you insofar as you are the worst enemy of “you yourself.” Now that we can read Glück’s poetry as a lifework, both her greatness and her limitation become more evident. Both might be summarized by these lines from The Wild Iris (1992), her most famous and adored collection: The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me. These lines, like many in The Wild Iris, are spoken by a flower; nevertheless, someone with a mind has produced them. Glück’s principal weakness — it mars all of her books to some extent — is that she too often allows herself to be so governed by her feelings she forgets she has a mind. If she weren’t aware of this tendency — the lines above prove she is — she’d be insufferable. Instead, she’s a major poet with a minor range. Every poem is The Passion of Louise Glück, starring the grief and

suffering of Louise Glück. But someone involved in the production knows how to write very well indeed. This tension animates almost every page of Poems 1962–2012. After the apprentice work of Firstborn — Glück later claimed to feel only “embarrassed tenderness” toward the volume — there is an unnerving consistency of tone. I’d be tempted to call it a flatline if it didn’t so often lurch into the beeping peaks and valleys that indicate life, however attenuated. From the first, Glück has been half in love with easeful death. “This will be the death of me,” she writes in Firstborn, but it never is. Forty years later she’s writing that “It’s natural to be tired of earth.” For her sins — the melodrama, the litanies of intimate, first-person life — Glück has often been grouped with the confessional poets. But the best of the latter (Plath, Lowell, Berryman) are worddrunk and always onstage. Their inner lives, their embarrassing personal revelations, are proscenia that enclose a sold-out performance (“The big strip tease,” Plath calls it). Insofar as they seek exculpation, to attain which is the purpose of confession, they do so theatrically: proud, not able truly to repent. But this is not Glück; unlike Plath or Berryman, she depends upon the fiction of privacy. The poems exist within the illusion that their speaker is addressing precisely nobody but herself — and perhaps some flowers. Even in their frequent apostrophe, they seem letters never sent; even God, when he appears, seems to be only a less accessible region of Glück’s psyche. She doesn’t care who, if she cried out, would hear her: “It doesn’t matter / who the witness is, / for whom you are suffering.” Of course this is a fiction: poems are written to be read by others. But it’s 145

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a fiction that sustains the poems’ confined tone, their weirdly detached intimacy. What saves the confessionalists is their care for the words on the page, which in their best poems they place before the funerals in their brains. In this, Glück is like them, but it’s the vocabulary that does the strip tease: “everything is bare.” Even the soggiest early work — before the twin pinnacles of The Wild Iris and Meadowlands (1996) — contains lines that stop you cold in admiring recognition of her right placement of right words. “The moon throbbed in its socket,” she says in “12.6.71,” a poem so bare it can support only a date above it. The ending operates on the smallest scale of perfection, like Webern’s microtextures or one of the Thorn miniature rooms: And the snow which has not ceased since began

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breadth, joy). What a weird little book it remains after 20 years. The poet’s voice is still Old Testament in its lamentation, but other sensibilities are allowed to temper it. There are talking flowers and an arch god, both of whose lines dramatize Glück’s awareness of her own susceptibility to self-pity. The poet herself is a gardener whose marriage is failing, blighted like the tomatoes she tends (somehow, this allows her to be witty for once: “I must report / failure in my assignment, principally / regarding the tomato plants”). In bitterness and anguish, she addresses the god: What is my heart to you that you must break it over and over like a plantsman testing his new species? Practice on something else … The flowers are having none of it: “What are you saying? That you want / eternal life? Are your thoughts really / as compelling as all that?” The flora’s sarcasm frees the poet-gardener to address the god wryly, witheringly: “I see it is with you as with the birches: / I am not to speak to you / in the personal way.” She is outraged by divinity’s “absence / of all feeling”:

The uncharacteristic lack of punctuation mimics the beginning of unceasingness described. Glück achieves a union of form and content that would seem Zen if it weren’t so cranky: of course the snow hasn’t ceased; even the weather is a bummer. (“There is only the rain, the rain is endless,” a poem in A Village Life ends.) By Ararat, Glück has mastered an … I might as well go on austere, self-punishing style, almost an addressing the birches, antistyle. She wrings the necks of scrawas in my former life: let them ny nouns and verbs until they flop undo their worst, let them naturally to one side, tongues lolling out. bury me with the Romantics, “From this point on, nothing changes,” their pointed yellow leaves she writes, and it’s true. Except she gets falling and covering me. stranger and better. In The Wild Iris, Glück’s flayed, indignant artistry finally This passes, on Glück’s sparse stage, for provides recompense for the poetic plea- delicious irony. Of course she knows that sures she refuses (adjectives, description, she invites the charge of Romanticism as

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Roula Nassar, spiraling, 2019, ink on paper, 10 x 17 inches.

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she lies bleeding on the thorns of life. It is precisely such knowledge that acquits her. Glück thus allows the god to be as exasperated as the reader by his creation’s hysteria; the brief poem “April” provides a précis of the entire drama: No one’s despair is like my despair — You have no place in this garden thinking such things, producing the tiresome outward signs; the man pointedly weeding an entire forest, the woman limping, refusing to change clothes or wash her hair. Do you suppose I care if you speak to one another? But I mean you to know I expected better of two creatures who were given minds: if not that you would actually care for each other at least that you would understand grief is distributed between you, among all your kind, for me to know you, as deep blue marks the wild scilla, white the wood violet. This caustic, snippy god clearly owes something to the Judaism Glück has mostly disavowed, but he also suggests a debt to the not-exactly-Judeo-Christian mysticism of Rilke. In the original, cancelled version of the tenth Duino elegy, Rilke describes the angels’ inability to do more than mimic “the tiresome outward 148

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signs” of grief: you would call down, shout down, hoping they might still be curious, one of the angels (those beings unmighty in grief ) who, as his face darkened, would try again and again to describe the way you kept sobbing, long ago, for her. Angel, what was it like? And he would imitate you and never understand that it was pain, as after a calling bird one tries to repeat the innocent voice it is filled with. [trans. Stephen Mitchell] Once you’re attuned to Rilke’s influence, you see it everywhere in Glück: the obsession with classical myth; the metaphysical yearning; the world-weary death fetishism. (William Logan, in his review of A Village Life, calls Glück Rilke’s “secret mythographer.”) But where Rilke is often as florid as D.H. Lawrence on peyote, Glück’s language is ordinary as Oppen’s. Rhetorical flights would simply distract her from “How lush the world is, / how full of things that don’t belong to me.” Glück manages to be overwrought without any filigree, paring down language while ramping up emotion, opposing to the lushness of the world the few words that do belong to her. This is a risk only certain poets should take. It pays off for Glück in the merciless, darkly comedic Meadowlands, in which the marriage finally crashes and Homer takes over metaphorical duties from the Yahwist. (Genesis is about exile; The Odyssey is about trying to find your way to

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a home you no longer recognize.) Glück makes comic verse from the bickering that dominates conversation at the end of a relationship. “Ceremony” begins in the middle of an argument, ostensibly between Glück and her then-husband John, about dinner: “I stopped liking artichokes when I stopped eating / butter. Fennel / I never liked.” The exchange that follows is a small triumph of realism, as one partner’s (presumably the wife’s) responses lag behind the other’s accusations: One thing I’ve always hated about you: I hate that you refuse to have people at the house. Flaubert had more friends and Flaubert was a recluse. Flaubert was crazy: he lived with his mother. Living with you is like living at boarding school: chicken Monday, fish Tuesday. I have deep friendships. I have friendships with other recluses. *

Another thing: name one other person who doesn’t have furniture. We have fish Tuesday because it’s fresh Tuesday. If I could drive we could have it different days. I know of nothing else in contemporary poetry, besides James McMichael’s Each in a Place Apart, that portrays this

minutely the inane friction of falling out of love. Much of it is surely invented, but, as Plath says, it feels real. That in itself isn’t enough to make a good poem, of course, but the poems in Meadowlands seem to me the best Glück has written. It’s as if she’s internalized her husband’s critique; letting his voice, or her impression of his voice, into her poems allows her to sustain the critical perspective gained in The Wild Iris: “You don’t love the world. / If you loved the world you’d have / images in your poems.” So, in the next poem, we get a rare image, attached to a rarer simile: “the white blossoms / like headlights growing out of a snake.” This is how Glück’s sparseness transmits: in small signals of mastery, the dots and dashes of a lifetime’s learning. A lawn in moonlight becomes “a whole world / thrown away on the moon.” “White fire” is “leaping from the showy mountains” — you can imagine her elongating the upright of the n of “snowy,” transforming an adjective anyone might use to one that encodes an epistemology. Or, just when you’re starting to wish she’d never read a word of Homer or Ovid, she might let in a little light from a century you’ve walked in: How could the Giants name that place the Meadowlands? It has about as much in common with a pasture as would the inside of an oven. Yes, Phil Simms shows up in a Louise Glück poem. And the outside world cracks these poems open, lets a little air out of their inflated sentiment. An early poem in Meadowlands begins, “A lady 149

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weeps at a dark window.” Well, of course she does — and a lady, not a woman; weeping, not crying; a dark window, not a Burger King. But a few lines later, “next door the Lights are practicing klezmer music. / A good night: the clarinet is in tune.” Meadowlands is a bitter but funny book. “Anniversary” begins, “I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean / your cold feet all over my dick,” which elicits the retort: You should pay attention to my feet. You should picture them the next time you see a hot fifteen year old. Because there’s a lot more where those feet came from. “We can all write about suffering / with our eyes closed,” John tells the poet, so Glück writes about it more obliquely, with her eyes open: I want to do two things: I want to order meat from Lobel’s and I want to have a party. You hate parties. You hate any group bigger than four. If I hate it I’ll go upstairs. Also I’m only inviting people who can cook. Good cooks and all my old lovers. Maybe even your ex-girlfriends, except the exhibitionists. If I were you, 150

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I’d start with the meat order. I have to say, I’m sorry they got divorced. I like this guy. Glück’s felicity in such registers is the flipside of her tendency to grandiose utterance. Glück has a fine ear for the obvious, for what might strike a lesser poet as not worth noticing: the name of a football stadium, a couple’s in-jokes. The obvious is what we most often overlook — “It takes genius to forget these things” — concerned as we are with smaller pictures: “Life is very weird, no matter how it ends, / very filled with dreams.” It’s true that this can lead Glück to forget that poetry should be at least as well written as a Hallmark card: I can verify that when the sun sets in winter it is incomparably beautiful and the memory of it lasts a long time. When she writes like this, you’re not even frustrated, really, just confused. “What?” I said to the page. (I think that dry “I can verify” is supposed to save the banality that follows, but selfparody doesn’t work if the reader has to hope that’s what it is.) But there is something admirable about such devotion to the obvious, and it might be that dreck about the beauty of winter sunsets is a small price to pay for Glück’s vision at its cleanest. In her late work, especially Averno (2006) and A Village Life, she’s adopted a conversational tone that happily resists her attraction to summary wisdom: “Snow began falling,

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over the surface of the whole earth. / That can’t be true.” She knows what little things to notice, and how to notice them: “the streetlight becoming a bus stop” in the dawn; a neighbor calling her dog. “The dog’s polite; he raises his head when she calls,” but he’s busy rooting in the garden, “trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.” If we’re lucky, we get a poem that leaves these things well enough alone, unencumbered by deadening morals: Child waking up in a dark room screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back in a language nobody understands in the least — There is no duck. But the dog, all upholstered in white plush — the dog is right there in the crib next to him. Years and years — that’s how much time passes. All in a dream. But the duck — no one knows what happened to that.

a harp, its string cutting deep into my palm. In the dream, it both makes the wound and seals the wound. Her teacher Stanley Kunitz once asked “How shall the heart be reconciled / to its feast of losses?”, but it’s Kunitz’s close friend Theodore Roethke whom Glück, at least in spirit, more nearly resembles: I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks — is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. Glück’s work is all edges — some, it’s true, rather blunt. But the sharper ones can inflict heavenly hurt, where the meanings are. If you want to know about the last half-century of American poetry, you need to read these poems.

Reading this collection from cover to cover is exhausting but purifying (see, it’s contagious), like sitting through a Robert Bresson marathon. Critics like to use scalpel metaphors to describe the poems’ effects (Glück’s father, everyone notes, helped to invent the X-Acto knife). Glück slices, she dices; she cuts and stabs herself, her readers, the words she has to use but mistrusts, the illusions she despises but relies on. A scalpel damages in order to heal. In a late poem, Glück dreams of

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Noah Davis, The Casting Call, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 62 inches. © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.

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REFLECTIONS ON LARB SHERI-MARIE HARRISON

y partner has a habit of Googling my name to see where in the world my words are popping up. When he notices a new citation, he texts me an image or link of where I’m quoted. The only thing that circulates more widely than my work on Marlon James is “New Black Gothic.” Indeed, many discover my scholarship on Marlon James after encountering this essay. I am glad no one discouraged me from publishing it in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Academia can be weird like that; in some circles there is disdain for public venues, because supposedly, they lack the necessary prestige to be taken seriously as repositories for scholarship. A colleague told me once she was discouraged by a mentor from publishing in LARB for fear of damaging her brand as a serious scholar. Another demurred my congratulations on her newly published review even as she lauded the pleasures of publishing public scholarship that this venue affords. As an immigrant woman of color scholar, who works primarily on minoritized topics, one can’t be entirely dismissive of professional proscriptions concerning seriousness. Meanwhile, this essay is cited in the third volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic. We made Gothic history, y’all! Cambridge said so. Markers of academic prestige and merit aside, this essay began in a graduate seminar, where one of my students’ observations about the Southern Gothic elements of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing sparked something in my brain that made me conscious of an aesthetic terrain, across multiple media, that I had been tracking unknowingly for a while. It was the last seminar meeting of the semester; that weekend Donald Glover was host and musical guest on SNL. And since these things tend to come in threes, Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video premiered that night too, after 153

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SNL ended. I should have been grading seminar papers, but when I sat at my computer the following day to do just that, I ended up writing this essay instead. I knew LARB was where I wanted to publish it and a day later, I emailed Lee Konstantinou and asked him if he wanted it. I don’t think I would have trusted my sense that we were in the midst of a Gothic revival in Black art if my imagined venue for the piece wasn’t one that reaches a discerning but very public audience. This essay is the first thing I have ever written that invests my intuition with confidence — bravado even. Under the editorial tutelage of Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre on the finer arts of LARB style in previous essays, I not only broke some disciplinary habits of specialized opaqueness, but I also began to take pleasure in explaining a thing I was bursting with excitement and certainty about. Among this essay’s most gratifying afterlives is its circulation in classrooms. Since its publication, I’ve been emailed or tweeted at several times by college and high school instructors letting me know they’re including it on their syllabi. This is humbling, and immensely gratifying. I’m told it is taught not only for what it says about the contemporary Gothic revival in Black art, but for how it says what it does about multi-generic texts, and the accessible ways it models a discussion of systemic racial violence for students. Understanding this pedagogical use of my work in the world is why the voice and style of this essay are the ones I continue to take forward in my writing, regardless of venue. Thank you for the opportunity, LARB.

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oward the end of Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, one of the narrators, a black teenager named Jojo, comes across “a great live oak […] full with ghosts.” “[W]ith their eyes,” the ghosts speak their violent deaths to him in unpunctuated prose: He raped me and suffocated me until I died I put my hands up and he shot me eight times […] they came in my cell in the middle of the night and they hung me they found out I could read and they dragged me out to the barn and gouged my eyes before they beat me still. This litany of brutal torture and death spans the history of black life in America. The ghosts’ attire, “rags and breeches, T-shirts and tignons, fedoras 155

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and hoodies,” brings together in a single Gothic image the brutality of slavery and Jim Crow–era lynchings and the more contemporary and familiar violence that claimed the lives of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown. In the logic of the novel, Ward’s ghosts are “stuck” and unable to “cross the water,” the final transition in the Yoruba cosmology that also makes its way into Louisiana Voodoo culture. They are confined to the terrestrial realm, searching for “keyholes” of human misery and need through which they can slip into the lives of the living and amplify their suffering, while approximating a sort of half-life for themselves. Ward’s award-winning novels are among a number of works, literary and otherwise, that rework Gothic traditions for the 21st century. As my graduate student Cynthia Snider has observed in my class on contemporary fiction and book prizes, Ward engages specifically the Southern Gothic tradition. In American literature, there is a long tradition of using Gothic tropes to reveal how ideologies of American exceptionalism rely on repressing the nation’s history of slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Such tropes are, as numerous critics have noted, central to the work of Toni Morrison. But unlike in, say, Morrison’s Beloved, the spectral reappearance of America’s violent history in recent fiction is neither about recovery nor representation. Ward’s ghost tree does not recover the lost stories of the voiceless. For Ward, there is no buried trauma that must be converted into language for its victims to move on. Instead, racial violence has never gone away. It is indeed, as the ghosts are, at home with us. Ward’s ghosts speak to an ever-present and visible lineage of violence that accumulates rather than dissipates 156

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with the passage of time. Gothic violence remains a part of everyday black life. This black Gothic revival has appeared not only in literature, but in an array of popular forms. On the May 5, 2018, episode of Saturday Night Live, while he was simultaneously hosting and serving (in the role of his alter ego Childish Gambino) as musical guest, Donald Glover released the controversial music video for “This Is America.” Within the video’s first few frames Gambino, clad in what looks like Confederate army trousers, pulls out a pistol, and in the clumsy exaggerated elegance of a pose borrowed from Jim Crow minstrel show advertisements, shoots a man in the back of his head. The video takes place in a cavernous empty warehouse and — in addition to the shooting I just described — features another shooting in which Gambino mows down a church choir with an automatic rifle; police violence; the lively choreography of a number of viral dance moves; and numerous other things the internet devoted itself to analyzing in the days after its release. For the most part, analyses focus on cataloging how much there is to see in the video’s chaotic tableau and on annotating the important things we may not have seen or properly understood. The consensus seems to be that the choreographed dancing is meant to distract from what is happening in the background — police violence, riots, mass shootings, and even one of the horsemen who, according to Revelations 6:2, is supposed to herald the Apocalypse. As Aida Amoako puts it in The Atlantic, the video “is a denunciation of the distractions that keep many Americans from noticing how the world around them is falling apart.” If the world is Gambino’s warehouse, we stay grinning

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Amita Bhatt, A Fantastic Collision of the Three Worlds-XXVII, 2016, charcoal and oil stick on canvas, 9 by 12 feet.

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and dancing and mugging for our phones with the glee of children while chaos and violence lick at our heels. But the video does more than denounce our social-mediated distraction and apathy. What is one to do, for example, with Gambino’s costume, his minstrel-like poses, and his exaggerated facial gestures? One gets the sense that the video is not only deeply invested in the violent history of black life in the United States, but also that Gambino is himself performing in blackface. This is not too much of a stretch when one considers the issues of colorism that, according to Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Glover, inflects Glover’s relationship with his darker-skinned brother, Stephen: Growing up, Donald was lightskinned and sunny, and his friends were the white kids at his school for the performing arts; Stephen was darker-skinned and stoic, and his friends were the busedin black kids at his school, which was not for the performing arts […] Many of the show’s rawer moments are underpinned by real-life affronts that Stephen sustained […] Glover said, “My consciousness began to change when I hung out with Steve as an adult, because he’s scarier to white people. It made me super-black.” In the last sentence, Glover points to the performative nature of race, which he in turn subverts in “This Is America” by appearing to wear part of a Confederate uniform. The satire is bizarre, but if we understand Gambino’s costume as a convoluted minstrelsy of sorts, we can begin to see how protests against the video’s depiction of what looks like black-onblack violence as gratuitous and irresponsible may actually be missing something. With his pants and opening posture, Glover gives a nod not only to centuries 158

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of cultural appropriation of blackness and black culture, but also establishes the parodic, historical, and aesthetic contexts that are central for understanding the present that the video depicts. As with Ward’s tarrying ghosts, the exploitative and violent ways black bodies have been used in the service of white supremacy across history continue to linger in the present. The mise-en-scène staged by Glover and his frequent collaborator Hiro Murai thus finds common cause with other works that deploy Gothic tropes to make sense of black life in relation to the present day neoliberal manifestations of white supremacy and the institutions it requires to maintain its violent dominance — institutions such as the police, the judicial system, and the NRA. Among the things that viewers have found confusing about the video is the presence of numerous large, 1980s model cars. Why are they there? I’d like to suggest that the answer to that question is a lynchpin for the video’s political commentary, an answer that requires thinking of the music video’s relationship to the literary Gothic revival contemporary black writers are staging. This black Gothic revival includes tropes of darkness, madness, ghosts, and isolation that combine to create unease and evoke fear and terror. In this regard, “This Is America’s” cavernous warehouse evokes the gloomy Gothic castles of the 18th-century Gothic novel, or the dilapidated plantations of 20th-century Southern Gothic. This aesthetic tradition has seen a resurgence in recent years through novels like those of Ward and James Hannaham, whose Delicious Foods depicts a form of modern-day slavery on a Southern factory farm worked by drug addicts who have been transported there

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from their precarious urban lives. These novels work to document and make sense of the social forces that constrain and marginalize black life. Exploring these same questions, “This Is America” participates in and is informed by this much larger aesthetic conversation, employing Gothic tropes to embed contemporary developments such as mandatory minimum sentencing and the War on Drugs in a longer history of slavery and Jim Crow. Indeed, as Michelle Alexander suggests, these policies and initiatives have come to constitute a new Jim Crow. Beyond works of fiction, “This Is America” also finds clarifying company in Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out, in Glover’s own television show Atlanta, and in various sketches from the episode of SNL that Glover hosted. Think, for example, of the dark corn field of “A Kanye Place,” or the rainy creepiness of the “Raz P. Berry” sketches. Together, the black Gothic revival not only works through what it means to be black in a nation still structured by violent white supremacy, but also dramatizes how black artists like Glover, Peele, Ward, and even Kanye must negotiate their celebrity while also remaining cognizant of the ways their race binds them to the vulnerabilities of a racialized second-class of citizenship. One thing that distinguishes the contemporary black Gothic is its dark humor. Atlanta is classified as a sitcom and Get Out was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy, yet both focus on forms of black danger and violence that lurk in the most mundane circumstances. The humor of Atlanta and Get Out is not comedic, as Jordan Peele has pointed out in an interview in which he noted that there aren’t any jokes in Get Out, but that the humor functions as a

form of tension relief. Atlanta does something similar. Take, for example, the second episode of the first season, in particular the scene in which Earn is detained in a jail and sees a mentally disturbed man drink toilet water. The scene maintains as much humor as it can while portraying black men detained by the police, right up until the man spits the toilet water in an officer’s face. At this point the scene pivots: the man is beaten at length, while the other detainees work hard to ignore what is happening. As these examples suggest, the laughter of the new black Gothic is always proximate to the ways in which daily black life can suddenly descend into horror. This shit is not supposed to be funny, but we laugh uncomfortably anyway. The juxtaposition of choreographed dancing and violence in “This Is America” creates a similar effect. Get Out has given us disturbing yet enduring metaphors, like the sunken place, that describe the marginalized position of black people within a system of white supremacy that actively silences them “no matter how hard [they] scream,” while also appropriating their culture and bodies for its own power, profit, and survival. The film is a touchstone for Atlanta, much as Childish Gambino’s music is a touchstone for Get Out. That Glover and Peele are in conversation with each other is undeniable. Get Out opens with the soulful yet haunting groove of Gambino’s quadruple-platinum record “Redbone.” In this way, the film implores its black audience to “stay woke” even as it reassures them that its main character, Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is indeed woke and will be able to find his way out of the film’s web of psychological terror. Similarly, it is probably not coincidental that Chris and his girlfriend, Rose, 159

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hit a deer with their car on the way to visit her parents for the first time, and in the fourth episode of the second season of Atlanta, Earn and his girlfriend, Van, played by Zazie Beetz, almost hit a wild boar while driving to a German festival called Fastnacht. In both cases, the accident foreshadows discomfiting and at times horrifying relationship turmoil that unfolds against the backdrop of racial disparities, and in strange and threatening locations: in Get Out, the clearly Gothic estate of Rose’s parents; in Atlanta, an eerie German town north of Atlanta. These similarities and creative overlaps suggest a shared aesthetic that both artists use to explore contemporary black life. While Glover’s performance hosting SNL might seem unrelated to this project, Glover in fact brought the new black Gothic to the sketch comedy show, where it functioned as an introduction or primer of sorts for “This Is America.” Watching the show, one thing I couldn’t shake was how obscure and random it seemed to parody Oran “Juice” Jones’s one-hit wonder “The Rain.” In fact, however, this parody of a briefly popular song begins to answer the question of the cars in “This Is America.” “The Rain” was released in 1986, the same year as the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. This Act enacted mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses that disproportionally affected African Americans, exploding the US penal population, according to Michelle Alexander, “from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.” The result, in the terms of Alexander’s well-known argument, is a new racial caste system that stigmatizes and confines a racial group through law and custom. The Raz P. Berry sketch, which reworks 160

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the Gothic overtones of the original song and video — the theme of a man stalking an unfaithful lover, his threats of violence, the dark urban setting — helps us to see why “This Is America” recalls the mid1980s. In the SNL sketch, the joke is that every attempted act of revenge by the man against his lover results in self-harm. “This Is America” tells a much larger — and darker and less funny — joke about the forces driving violence within the black community. There are more layers to “This Is America” and the new black Gothic than mass incarceration and the new Jim Crow. Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles is portrayed on Atlanta as being immensely uncomfortable with his newfound fame. The title of season two’s final episode, “Crabs in a Barrel,” references the precarity of black success and the anxiety of being pulled back down into the barrel with the rest. In this episode, Uncle Willie’s golden gun reappears to demonstrate how the season has come full circle. The anxiety we experience for Uncle Willie, as a black man on probation who has police at his door and marijuana and illegal firearms in the house in the season’s opener, is the same we experience for Earn at an airport security checkpoint with Alfred, who is also on probation, and that same illegal firearm forgotten in his backpack in the season’s finale. Just as Willie makes his escape by releasing his pet alligator, Earn escapes airport security by putting the gun in a bag that belongs to Clark County, the rapper who is headlining the European tour on which Paper Boi has secured a spot. In the end, when Clark County eventually boards the plane, he tells Earn and Alfred that his (white) manager won’t be making the flight because he was detained by the

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police for possession of a weapon. Earn’s distraction backfires — but with a crucial irony. The crabs-in-a-barrel logic suggests that Clark County’s trouble with the law will elevate Alfred to his rightful spot as tour headliner and will redeem Earn’s poor performance as his manager. But Earn does not factor in that Clark County’s having a white manager means that the black rapper has a fall guy who will receive a much more lenient sentence for any charge. Earn and Paper Boi’s smooth escape from a gun charge is, at this moment, stripped of triumph or even relief. In this respect, it’s a perfect metonym for the show as a whole. The scene at the end of “This Is America” where a terrified-looking Gambino is being chased by a mostly white mob is reminiscent of Get Out’s sunken place, in which black people’s autonomous consciousnesses are sequestered so their bodies can be appropriated for the use of white people. At its simplest, the sunken place is a metaphor for the sometimes-forced appropriation of black people’s bodies, labor, and culture for capitalistic endeavors like slavery or the record industry. The final pursuit of Gambino similarly dramatizes the precarious position of the black man in America, who is almost always already criminalized in the aid of white supremacy’s need to violently appropriate black labor and black bodies. Critics of the video who point out its problematically masculine focus are exactly right — near the end of the song, Gambino repeats, “Black man, get your money,” while Young Thug’s outro begins, “You just a black man in this world” — although it’s worth noting that Atlanta at least makes some strides toward encompassing black women in its diagnosis of contemporary black life through the

character of Van. Consider the episode, for instance, in which she desperately boils her daughter’s diaper to try and extract urine to foil a mandatory drug test at work. She fails the test and ultimately loses her job. Another unifying feature of the new black Gothic then, along with humor that is not comedic and a preoccupation with the domestic legacies of the War on Drugs, is a sense of inescapability and the eschewal of hope for the future. These contemporary black Gothic texts bring into sharp focus the near-constant vulnerability of black life. We see the presence of this vulnerability at the end of Sing, Unburied, Sing when the toddler Kayla faces the tree of ghosts and tells them to “[g]o home.” They “shudder, but they do not leave” at her command. As if recognizing their need for comfort, she “raises one arm in the air, palm up, like she is trying to soothe […] but the ghosts don’t still, don’t rise, don’t ascend and disappear. They stay.” Kayla’s next effort in comforting or ushering the ghosts home is to begin singing “a song of mismatches, half garble words” that her brother, Jojo, cannot understand, though the melody is familiar. As she sings, the ghosts “smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease.” While they seem soothed by her song, they are not encouraged away from their perch. They remain there in the trees, still saying “home,” even as Kayla, Jojo, and their grandfather walk away from them and the novel ends. In its resolution, Sing, Unburied, Sing does not offer safe passage home for the ghosts of the past who have suffered racial violence across centuries. In this way, Ward’s new black Gothic does not offer correctives or hope for a brighter future, nor does it exorcise the ghosts from past 161

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brutality. It instead lays bare the realities of our time and their roots in systems that depend on the criminalization and disenfranchisement of black people. It’s not too difficult to think of “This Is America” as a parallel of sorts to Kayla’s song. Like Ward’s transhistorical ghosts, Gambino’s minstrel poses, the video’s images of police brutality, and its tableaus of riot and chaos cumulatively demonstrate how the past is an actor demanding recognition in the present. Knowing this makes one, rightly, hopeless, and the works I have been discussing don’t shy away from this hopelessness. But it doesn’t only make one hopeless, insofar as it also provides varied contexts for recognizing how white supremacy and systemic racism continue to organize American life. The new black Gothic aesthetic thus functions in popular black art as a tool for representing black life on its own terrorized terms.

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Amita Bhatt, A Fantastic Collision of the Three Worlds-XXVIII, 2017, charcoal and oil stick on canvas, approx. 9 by 12 feet.

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T H E A R T O F C A P T I V I T Y: L I C H I TA H U R TA D O Y X TA M A YA M U R R A Y

efore she could wander through her light-dappled studio in Santa Monica, preside at her blockbuster 2019 show at the Serpentine Gallery, bask in the acclaim of breathless art critics, or submit to exhaustive interviews with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist — interviews now gathered in this splendid volume edited by Karen Marta and published by Hauser & Wirth — Luchita Hurtado squeezed her painting practice into her kitchen, her dining room, and a small closet. Other great female artists had worked in minimal settings before. Lee Krasner created her game-changing Little Image series at a tiny table in the bedroom of her East Hampton house; the Impressionist

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Berthe Morisot painted in her bedroom and drawing rooms. That we know of these white female artists’ constraints and travails is due in part to the fame they achieved later in their lives. We may never learn of the thousands (or more) unsung female artists of color who have struggled to make their work in the corners and basements of their homes, cadging free moments between childcare and day jobs. Learning about the life and career of Venezuelan American artist Hurtado throws into relief the unwritten histories of Black and Brown creators who struggled amid scarce economic and social resources. We learn about Hurtado’s journey from the conversations she had with Obrist, which they began to conduct during their initial meeting in 2017 and ceased only upon her death in 2020. Hurtado regales Obrist with tales of New York in the 1940s, when she and her first husband, the journalist Daniel del Solar, resided at 95 Christopher Street. There, while also caring for her sons Daniel and Pablo, Hurtado managed a heavy schedule that included creating window displays for Lord & Taylor and drawing fashion illustrations for Condé Nast. Meanwhile, when possible, she began crafting crayonand-ink abstract drawings that revealed her skill at composition and talent as a colorist: I always worked — I couldn’t help myself. I never really felt that I had the time to show people my work, or that there was any interest in it, but I worked when I could, usually at night in my kitchen. I had to enjoy my painting. I was just as interested in the making of the pieces as in the end results, and I felt the pieces would happen as they happened. […] It was exciting for me. I felt very good about

the medium of [ink and crayon], and it opened up to me. And that’s what I did. I began. She began and endured. During the long decades of her life (she died last year at 99), Hurtado presaged and participated in many critical developments in contemporary art. She did so by remaining faithful to her own narrative, even while faced with the devastating death of Pablo and increasingly thorny household arrangements. In the early 1950s, when Hurtado moved to Mill Valley, California with her second husband, the artist/philosopher Wolfgang Paalen, her life became “complicated.” Hurtado describes how the painter Lee Mullican introduced her to his circle, and how Mullican soon took the place of Paalen in her life. The emotional stress attendant on these developments can perhaps be discerned in her suspicion, at the time, that disobliging spirits had imbued her rooms with the scent of mimosa and were teasing her cat. (“I would get up and say, ‘Show yourself, drop something,’ but nothing ever happened.”) Yet, as she waged war with an array of domestic poltergeists, her work became more pared down and focused. Hurtado strayed from a wholly abstract style and embarked on brightly colored figurative tableaux. One of these is Untitled (ca. 1951), a pink, orange, yellow and purple-brown drawing of a female torso with crossed arms that looks to have been inspired by Cycladic sculpture. As before, Hurtado had to secure a spot in her home to do this work. This could not have been easy during this period, when she found herself transformed into “Luchita Mullican,” wife of a leader of the Dynaton Group, an artists’ collective with utopian ideals. “Did you consider yourself part of [that 165

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association?]” Obrist asks Hurtado. “No, not really,” she replies. “We spent so much time together, playing these Surrealist games and such, but I was working separately. In Mill Valley I painted at night in the dining room.” In the early 1950s, Mullican, Hurtado, and their children (including Mullican’s son, Matt) moved to Chile for a year. This period was also marked by hardship, as well as the further development of Hurtado’s style. Hurtado soon learned that Mullican was “having an affair with another woman, and I was very hurt.” Hurtado retreated to a closet in their rented home, as she still did not have sufficient privacy or access to a studio. In this narrow space, she embarked, during the 1960s, upon her indispensable I Am series, in which she painted her nude body from her own perspective looking down upon herself. She tells Obrist of the constrained conditions under which she created these artworks: I was beginning to paint my own body, but I felt — in Spanish the word is pudor, being ashamed of your nakedness. […] That was me. I had to go in the closet because I didn’t want to see myself naked. In such a small space the only way to see and paint my body was by looking down. Those self-portraits were a real surprise to me. I felt that all I had was myself. […] At the time I felt that my skin was on loan to me rather than being some essential part of myself. […] I began to think about the words “I am.” I am who? I am what? I am the moon? Who am I? The I Am paintings present this viewer with a shock of recognition of living in a Latina body. In the oil-on-paper Untitled (from 1968), for example, we see the breasts, rounded belly, thigh, and toes of a woman standing on a red carpet. Shadows 166

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cast by shuttered windows bar both the carpet and the subject’s flesh, lending the piece an ambience of captivity and solitude. In the oil-on-canvas Untitled (also 1968), we see this same figure repeated on all four sides of the painting, all looking down upon a child’s red toy car. The recurrence of this protagonist staring at household clutter infuse the works with a mood of chaos and exhaustion. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that, during this period, Hurtado embarked upon her collaborations with the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists (a group that included Vija Celmins, Alexis Smith, Judy Chicago, Mako Idemitsu, and Barbara Haskell), whose members encouraged Hurtado to retain her maiden name and assert herself. “It wasn’t until I had joined this women’s consciousness movement that I started to show people my work and not turn my paintings toward the wall,” Hurtado remembers. This awakening would lead to her decision to take up more space, so that, by the mid’70s, she had managed finally to obtain her own studio. Luchita Hurtado provides a color photograph of this generous, bright domain. Having left her cubbyholes behind, Hurtado loaded the studio’s white walls with her extraordinary Moth Lights (ca. 1975–’76) paintings, a series of rectangular panels with the telling motif of dark, enclosing borders that give way, in some renderings, to a central incandescent aperture. At mid-career, Hurtado launched herself through that shining escape hatch, and in her newfound liberation came to embrace eco-feminism, or what she called “planetarianism.” This ethos, which can be traced back to some of her earliest experiments, acknowledges that “[t]rees are our cousins. We’re related to the tree directly

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Roula Nassar, untitled, 2017, color pencil on paper, 17 x 14 inches.

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because it breathes out and we breathe in. […] We are a species, you know, just like the dinosaurs. And just like the dinosaurs we are not in charge of the world like we want to be.” Hurtado celebrated these ideals for the rest of her life, and they gained traction and scope as her own practice developed. Her 2018 work Untitled is an epiphanic blue, green, white, and red acrylic on canvas painting that chants the words AIR WATER EARTH FIRE. Another Untitled from 2018, this time crayon and watercolor on paper, declares SKY WATER EARTH in the colors blue, pink, black, and yellow. These both connect to the elemental Birthing (2019), an acrylic on linen work that shows a mountainous and golden pregnant woman spreading her legs against a misty backdrop, while a tiny head presses out from her body. In 2020, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held a Hurtado retrospective titled I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn, which exhibited many ecstatic paintings that are not included in this book. It is a shame that readers of this beautifully produced tome do not have access to the full span of the I Am paintings, as well as Hurtado’s additional birth and pregnancy paintings (such as the nearly Kubrickian Eve, from the 1970s, which depicts a fetus floating in pink amniotic fluid, among ankhs) or her cosmic planetarian paintings (such as Untitled, from 2019, which shows another Cycladic figure standing in front of a huge green oak). But we must thank Obrist (and editor Marta) for the gift of these interviews, which chronicle the journey of a complex, suffering, and resilient Latinx artist. At the end of their conversation cycle, Hurtado tells Obrist:

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Today I feel air, water, and that’s what’s important. Survival. Surviving. Time is involved. But I must have help from beyond. Someone is looking after me. […] I am here. I am here. Survival is an energy. I am trying to paint energy and the sky. I just made a painting called The Last Human Alive.

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S A I D I YA H A R T M A N ’ S “BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS” KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

he crisscrossing currents unleashed by the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era created the modern United States. The processes of industrialization and the mass migration of people from agrarian spaces into combustible cities signified the emergence of epochal change. The anticipation of possibility created within this unfolding social transformation was tempered by the unbridled greed and brutality of “robber barons” that underwrote the economic largesse of this new era of capitalist expansion. The reckless and unrestrained pursuit of profit created brutal working conditions and invited premature death among those who labored for a living. These perilous conditions not only existed in workplaces, but also in neighborhoods, which were also sites of financial extraction: deadly conditions in 169

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tenements and other makeshift dwellings used by the urban poor posed a constant threat. It was a period before the presumption that the state was obligated to protect the public’s welfare. These harsh conditions were buttressed by the mania of white supremacy and its violent outbursts of lynching and rape — brutality hardly bound by an imaginary Mason-Dixon line. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that sanctioned segregation sutured the entire geography of the United States together, sewing racial hatred into a national creed. This era, from the 1890s through the 1920s, became known as the “nadir” of African-American history. It created a paradox: a period defined by dynamic change and possibility, but also the ever-present threat of white terrorism. Saidiya Hartman’s new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, is a radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of “ordinary” young Black women in this period — women who escaped to Northern cities, living on the great expectations of the Great Migration. Hartman deploys Black feminism as the framework with which to understand the tremendous shifts in political economy, culture, and resistance in this time, making an extraordinary comment on the centrality of Black women’s history and experience to the history and politics of the United States. By situating them as central agents, Hartman disables the notion that US history thrived on the momentum of progress in the Progressive Era. Instead, the lives of ordinary Black women hold the horrors of the American past as much as they represent the possibility of the future represented in their movement and rebellion. 170

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Hartman tells a story about the interior of these women’s lives that exceeds the abuse and torture enacted on their bodies. She is ultimately interested in the multitude of ways that Black women “made a way out of no way,” whether through flight, migration, work, sex, singing, dancing, screaming, and all of the social and cultural innovation born from pure defiance and a refusal to do what you are told. Hartman searches for the residue of ordinary Black women’s lives among the avalanche of information and data created during this time. As is redolent of all of Hartman’s work, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments offers a blistering critique of historical archives as the singular or even most authoritative source of credible knowledge. Hartman’s critique extends to official bodies of knowledge that are popularly assumed to be impartial, dispassionate receptacles of facts. Even where this is not assumed, as in the case of the collected letters and ledgers of public officials and private citizens, Hartman implores us to pause and consider who is inside of and outside of the archive; whose voice is heard and whose voice is silenced; whose lives matter and whose lives do not. Hartman’s book is, in part, a critique of the mono-dimensional and flat portrayals of Black women and girls as “social documents and statistical persons, reduced to the human excrescence of social law and slum ecology, pitied as betrayed girl mothers, labeled chance creatures of questionable heredity.” Such depictions are prevalent in the social science, becoming the basis upon which wider bodies of work on Black women and girls are built. Changing that requires seeing Black women, their experiences, and their historical traces, differently.

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The women at the center of Hartman’s text are outcasts, castoffs, and official nobodies in the hallowed annals of history, but whose “lives [were] shaped by sexual violence or the threat of it; the challenge was to figure out how to survive it, how to live in the context of overwhelming brutality and thrive in deprivation and poverty. The state of emergency was the norm not the exception.” This is important. Hartman is not trying to romanticize or sanitize these women’s lives by looking at the ubiquitous and, yet, nebulous examples of Black women’s “agency.” Nor is she trying to over-contextualize the conditions under which they made decisions to engage in sex, to perform sex work, to terminate unwanted pregnancies, to more generally live a life on the margins. While not determinative, the context is important, which is why, for example, Hartman critically dissects the insidious role of the police and their presence in cities as agents of misery and abuse, wholly complicit in the illicit enterprises, which they universally blamed on the presence of Black people. Hartman incisively unravels the duplicity and hypocrisy of social scientists and reformers who stood in judgment of the lives of Black women and at times colluded with the police and the criminal justice system to punish Black women for a failure to conform to their imagined social order and hierarchy of society. Some Black women’s resistance — either real or imagined — to social norms and hierarchy was claimed as evidence of general disorderliness which was often criminalized, thereby making urban-based Black women vulnerable to imprisonment or other forms of institutional punishment. Black women were often accused of prostitution regardless of whether they

were actually engaged in sex work because of the vicious assumptions about their presumed, innate licentiousness. This is a point of exploration for Hartman instead of a reflexive defense against the charge. Black women did perform sex work for a variety of reasons, including the autonomy it leant them in other aspects of life. Sex work could mean relief from the misery of domestic labor, where, beyond physical exhaustion, sexual assault and rape were also hazards of the job. Sex work provided a variation of the “escape subsistence” that thrived on the margins. The autonomy and, in many cases, the anonymity of urban life, gave Black women the foreign experience of sexual exploration, experimentation, and consenting promiscuity as a point of departure in their own investigation of the possibility and promise of desire, even lust. Hartman is interested in the role of the state as it created boundaries and borders that captured and enclosed upon Black people, but she is especially interested in the creative ways that Black women navigated, and what they produced, within these spaces. Black women were constrained, but their experiences cannot be reduced to those constraints. Instead, Hartman is inviting us to look at the lives of ordinary Black women at the turn of the century on their own terms — even when those terms have to be deduced from objectify historical records — to accept these women as credible, intuitive, and discerning people, a few generations removed from slavery and in an active pursuit of freedom as praxis. It is important to say that Hartman is not asking her readers to simply or mindlessly celebrate the lives of these women on the margins though that, in and of itself, would be a break from the ways they have 171

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been pitied or ignored by historians and so-called reformers. Instead, Hartman is asking us to see, learn from, and attribute to these women what they have demonstrated and taught the broadly conceived public. This, of course, raises the question: what can we learn from the poor, marginalized Black women of history? The challenge of this question begins with the complexity of creating a composite of ordinary Black womanhood from the fragments of life that Hartman pieces together. This book is not a monographic exploration of a particular black woman from a particular place. Instead, Hartman’s subjects are found in the indices and ledgers on the periphery of archival refuse. There is a name here, an article there, or even a small discarded photograph from which Hartman is able to quilt together a common story for a great majority of Black women in slavery’s aftermath. Hartman is primarily interested in the women who decide to leave the agrarian life in the South, walled in by the smothering brutality of white extralegal and sexual violence. Hartman disabuses readers of any notion that Northern, urban destinations were a “land of hope.” Instead she describes the ways that cities — particularly New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and eventually the “black city-within-a-city” — were dynamic spaces within which “beautiful experiments” disrupted the rhythm of poverty. ¤ Wayward Lives is in harmonious conversation with an array of literatures that explore the simultaneous torques of possibility and peril in the emergent city at the turn of the century. The mythology of “rugged individualism” fed by the isolation 172

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of frontier or agrarian life succumbed to the high density, overcrowded, and rhythmic bustle of city life, upending deeply ingrained assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. The anonymity and expansive possibilities of urban life threatened to subvert everything within the social hierarchy. Most pointedly, Wayward Lives conjures the spirit of George Chauncey’s Gay New York (1994) and Khalil Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness (2010). It also, of course, echoes the dynamic tension distinguishing “the ghetto” and “the Black city” within the 1945 sociological classic Black Metropolis, but Hartman demonstrates how dramatically different these texts would be if Black women were at their center. That does not diminish those works, but it speaks to the specificity and importance of Black women’s history and experience on its own terms. Hartman is interested in how her subjects navigate abject misogynoir through improvised kinship and friendship networks newly born in the close quarters of tenement and rooming house life. Where Chauncey describes the “overcrowded and imposed sociability” of the crowded quarters of working-class denizens, Hartman is also interested in the “beautiful struggle to survive” evidenced in “alternative modes of life” and “illuminated in the mutual aid and communal wealth of the slum.” Hartman imagines what can be created in the “cramped space” of the ghetto, “beautiful flaws and terrible ornaments.” In this way, Hartman engages in older debates in new ways. She examines the complex delineation between the enclosure of the ghetto and the racial opulence found in the Black metropolis — what Kiese Laymon might refer to as the “Black abundance.” Enclosure is a

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condition imposed on Black people. There is wretchedness and deprivation but, as Hartman writes: Negroes are the most beautiful people. The communal luxury of the black metropolis, the wealth of just us, the black city-withinthe-city, transforms the imagination of what you might want and who you might be, encouraging you to dream. Shit, it don’t even matter if you’re black and poor, because you are here and you are alive and all these folks surrounding you encourage you and persuade you to believe that you are beautiful too. One of the more controversial aspects of Hartman’s book is her use of speculative or fictionalized interjections throughout the text to literally imagine how her subjects may have reacted, spoke, experienced life in a particular moment. It’s a method that, though she uses it with restraint, represents a deeper engagement with the emergence of a modern 20th century. The hallmarks of the modernist turn in American arts reflected the fragmentation, disruption, dislocation, and chaos that distinguished the white imaginary of a prelapsarian world from this supposed new world. Hartman rewrites the multiple sources of disorientation that animate most of the chaotic renderings of industrialization and urbanism — the maturation of capitalism, migration patterns, world wars, and beyond — as a source of inspiration and exploration for African Americans. Perhaps Hartman is offering us a new modernism when she places African Americans at its center. The text itself resembles the height of

the modernist form with the debris and fragments of pictures, ephemera, official records, diaries, and newspapers through which she creates a complex montage of representations. While historians and other social scientists may recoil, Hartman is not just wildly imagining or speculating to create a dialogue or experience, or intervening within the text, for its own sake; she is providing a space for Black women in the history that has systematically left them out. But she is doing more than that. Hartman is also tapping into a much longer history and tradition of storytelling as a method of keeping histories alive. These were the devices of a people for whom, in the majority of their time in this country, it was illegal for them to read or write. Hartman’s speculative and fictionalized interjections call upon the oral traditions of Black and African storytelling traditions. Hartman “speaks into existence” the experiences of those otherwise rendered invisible or simply disappeared by the gatekeepers of the archives. In doing so, Hartman’s role within the text becomes a part of its greater significance and meaning. She is narrator and interlocutor, fluctuating her own subject position within the text. She moves throughout it, never settling, thereby making herself a kind of beautiful experiment within her pages. Her experiments with orality and audial text throughout beg for portions of it to be read aloud. Hartman creates sonorous lists at a legato pace that literally give voice to the centrality of movement as the physical expression to be freed. She writes: Like flight from the plantation, the escape from slavery, the migration from the south, the rush 173

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into the city, or the stroll down Lennox Avenue, choreography was an art, a practice of moving even when there was nowhere else to go, no place left to run. It was an arrangement of the body to elude capture, an effort to make the uninhabitable livable, to escape confinement of a four cornered world, a tight, airless room. Tumult, upheaval, flight — it was the articulation of living force, or at the very least trying to, it was the way to insist I am unavailable for servitude. I refuse it.

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Black life, especially as rendered by the social sciences that predicted the inevitability of Black extinction in the early 20th century. For Hartman, the range of Black movement from migration to dank dance halls to the chorus line to the palpable sexual energy that courses through the women in the text is life, expectation, hope. It is a different kind of movement, certainly distinguished from the motion required to “strive,” where all is succumbed to the movement up or down an imagined social ladder. How does this connect with Hartman’s description of Black women as progenitors of the modern? There are Freedom, here, is not a specific desti- two ways to understand this. The first is nation or a single thing that can be gath- through the recognition that moderniered by way of a document or a prom- ty is a highly contingent and cumulaise. Freedom is self-determination and tive expression of the previous epoch. In self-possession. It is the ability to move in other words, the supposed new world the world free of economic, political, so- of American Progressivism stood high cial coercion. It is the ability to say, “yes” upon the shoulders of the society it was — or “no” — and mean it; it is relaxation; intended to replace: its prehistory was it is: absolutely central to its 20th-century emergence. If the “rosy dawn” of capi[t]he swivel and circle of hips, the talism, as Marx called it, came dripping nasty elegance of the Shimmy, into existence with the blood and dirt of the changing-same of collective slavery and genocide, then its maturamovement, the repetition, the tion — measured in the innovations of improvisation of escape and subwar, imperialism, industrialization, and sistence, bodied forth the shared urbanization — were only possible bedream of scrub maids, elevator cause of the exploitation and abuse of boys, whores, sweet men, steveBlack women’s bodies. The resistance to dores, chorus girls, and tenement this order could also be read through the dwellers — not to be fixed at the violent thrashing of Black women’s bodbottom, not to be walled in the ies against the new order, boundaries and ghetto. Each dance was a rehearsborders that distinguished the supposed al for escape. modern age. Hartman invokes this paradigm when she describes how social reHartman is consumed with the move- formers dismissed Black women and girls ment, the physical locomotion and literal as “ungovernable” or when she describes vibration of Black people as a rejoinder to the sonic upheaval of young Black womthe stasis and supposed predictability of en who resisted their imprisonment with 174

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relentless screaming and destruction of the prison’s interior. In 1917 and 1918, Black women and girls, imprisoned for imagined and real transgressions against a social order erected on the mores of white supremacy, rebelled within a New York State prison to protest their conditions and so much more. Part of the ritualistic violence and abuse endured by these women and girls involved torturing them by hanging them from handcuffs so that their feet could barely touch the ground. The point was to get these women and girls to conform to the norms of a brutal social order — exemplified by all parole routes leading to domestic work in the homes of white people in Upstate New York. Black domestic work was considered a normal part of the social hierarchy, and the regime of brutality in the prison was intended to domesticate Black women into accepting the role. The technologies of torture, the prison itself, were markers of modern life even as they were activated in regressive ways against Black women’s bodies marked the bridge between the past and the contemporary. In opposition to this order, these Black women and girls led a multiracial rebellion of “ungovernables” by trying to physically destroy the prison and then settling on a noise strike where their screams were recorded as resistance. It was one of the first political rebellions of the young 20th century and provided a model of resistance that African Americans returned to repeatedly over the remainder of the century. Hartman finds hope in the qualities that marked ordinary Black women for premature death at the turn of the century — qualities like waywardness and a desire to find freedom in their everyday acts of existence. She is not just writing about the

past but also mapping a direction for the inevitable future struggles that must arise from the persistence of white supremacy, misogyny, police abuse and violence, and the ever-radiating violence from the state itself. Hartman insists that engaging these questions requires more than theory or even “good politics.” She calls upon us to look at the lives of those who are on the bottom of the social hierarchy: How do they move, what gives them pleasure and not just pain, and most importantly, what do they want? How do we read resistance from the mundanity and alienation of life under capitalism as an actual desire to be free? Saidiya Hartman would tell us to watch and listen to ordinary Black women. She is not romanticizing the margins, though she suggests that we can find romance — the implacable pursuit of freedom — within the margins’ constraints.

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THE FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM K A YA G E N Ç

little more than 500 days has passed since Orhan Pamuk opened the doors of his Museum of Innocence to the public in Istanbul’s Çukurcuma neighborhood. It has been a lively, intense, and dangerous 500 days, during which time Istanbul witnessed frequent outbursts of violence and the destruction of any trace of innocence it might still have possessed. The loss of Istanbul’s innocence had been a gradual process: on May 1, 2013 (four days after Pamuk’s museum celebrated its first anniversary), the city’s governor abruptly canceled the May Day gathering in Taksim square. When the government had opened the square for the May Day gathering in 2010, after a 32-year-long 176

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ban by previous administrations, the move was much praised by the country’s leftists and liberals. Four weeks after the cancellation of the May Day gathering a small group of die-hard environmentalists kick-started the events in Gezi park, struggling to protect one of the last green areas in Taksim, where the government wanted to install a kitschy shopping mall. During the early days of protests, when local youths marched to the park, tourists continued to fill Pamuk’s museum. As the violence snowballed and spilled onto the streets I walked past the museum door, looked at the building’s red facade and tried imagining the silence inside. The museum stands at the entrance of a street that connects Karaköy (which is adjacent to Bosporus) to Cihangir (which is close to Gezi Park) — a neighborhood that had its share of tear gas during the events. I had first visited the museum in midApril last year before it had even opened its doors to the public. Pamuk had arranged for me to visit the building for a short piece commissioned by a British paper. Early one morning I knocked on the door and was greeted by the museum’s first curator, who showed me around. After her departure I enjoyed, for more than an hour, being alone among the museum’s fictional objects and sound installations, which had been freshly installed in the building’s three stories. Listening to Turkish contemporary artist Cevdet Erek’s brilliant sound recordings of a stilettoed woman’s walk among the streets of Nişantaşı was a priceless experience. So was the chance to get a close look at the small bed of the book’s protagonist Kemal and at Pamuk’s manuscript, in which I could see, in the writer’s longhand, the early sketches of Kemal’s character. In another installation

I heard Istanbul’s birds as they clapped their wings; leaving the building I felt sure I would come back to the place and to its silent innocence. Before he allowed writers and journalists like me inside, Pamuk had brought another group of people, a group that must have mattered much more — his neighbors, most of whom are antique dealers. I heard stories about how they had explored the objects of the museum with much pleasure. They were proud to have been the first visitors of the place. It made sense since they had been on that street long before the museum was even an idea in Pamuk’s mind. In the days I passed by the museum I had paid little attention to its neighbors. When The New York Times had listed Istanbul in a “places to visit this summer” article last year, a picture represented the city that showed those neighbors and their families as they visited the museum. “How can those people represent Istanbul?” one user complained on Twitter. He might have preferred seeing smartly dressed Turkish businessmen on the page instead of those not-soglamorous locals. But then the neighborhood did belong to those people, in whose eyes we must have been little more than visitors. Some of them shared with Pamuk an impressive devotion to the art of collecting. Their shops, around a dozen of them in Çukurcuma, look like miniature museums of innocence themselves. They are similar products of meticulous labor spent collecting objects. One morning in August I visited those antique shops. They seemed to me to have been placed there as an extension of Pamuk’s artistic vision, so brilliant was his choice of locale. I visited Esra Aysun, the museum’s new curator, in her office 177

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adjacent to the building, and she described it as the museum becoming an “organic part” of a neighborhood those shops had defined for so long. “We didn’t change the neighborhood at all,” she said. “Instead we set up an institution that is looking after its objects just like they look after theirs.” Çukurcuma’s antique shops (antikacılar in Turkish) had long witnessed the life in the neighborhood. They helped make it safe when Taksim was not so safe a place in 1990s — a time when the tension between the city’s Kurds, Roma people, sexual minorities, and the police force was at its peak. This was also a time when torture in police stations was widespread and street violence a basic fact of life. Mahmut Gezmez, the owner of Yaşam Antik, seemed like a grave character when I first met him in his dimmed shop filled with many objects made of copper. He described how the number of his customers had dropped after the protests this summer. But when asked to talk about his neighborhood he cheered up. “Our customer profile changed dramatically thanks to the museum,” he said. “Young and beautiful people are now frequenting this street. They are not shopping that much, but you know, one can’t expect young people to shop that much. I totally forgive them.” When I asked him whether he approved of the way Pamuk’s curator displayed the museum’s objects, he said he didn’t feel qualified to answer the question. “Professional architects designed those object cabinets in the museum,” he said, “who am I to criticize them? I think the museum is very nice.” In an even more cheerful mood he told me how his fellow antique dealers learned English to better communicate with new customers. “Me? So far I have not managed to master the language,” he said. 178

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“My English consists of two words: hello and welcome.” Gezmez, who had traveled to Istanbul from Adana (a city which the country’s other major novelist, Yaşar Kemal, beautifully describes in his epic books), promised to read Pamuk’s books and improve his English before I left his shop. I then visited Fikret’in Dünyası (“Fikret’s World”) owned by a young collector named Fikret Bilgin Yılmaz. Yılmaz said he had devoted his life to collecting; he focuses on toys and has been collecting them for the last 15 years. “Orhan Bey purchased many of the toys for his museum from my own shop in Cihangir,” he said. (Everyone I spoke to that day referred to Pamuk in this way, as “Mr Orhan.”) “Orhan Bey is not a collector in the classical sense of the word. He collected stuff in order to create this museum and then he seems to have quitted the habit. Another famous Turkish writer, Sunay Akın, is also a frequent visitor.” Akın owns a museum in the city’s Anatolian side named Istanbul Toy Museum (http://www.istanbuloyuncakmuzesi.com/eng/). “I think Pamuk is the better writer and Akın is the better collector,” Yılmaz opined. Another shop I visited on the street was virtually empty except for its owner, Haydar Tekin, who said he had lately decided to turn his place into a “transportation facility.” “My family had lived here for more than a century,” said Tekin, whose surname means “deserted place” in Turkish. “The grandfather of my grandfather came here first. Our family witnessed the transformation of this neighborhood over many decades. We know who helped Çukurcuma and who did not. Let me tell you,” he said in a passionate voice, “Orhan Bey is a very good fellow. His museum

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added energy to our neighborhood! If respectable people are now frequenting these streets it is because of his museum.” Tekin then complained about the coverage of Gezi events by the international media. “They represented this city as if it was a war zone,” he said. “In fact not much had changed here. All the violence took place around the park. It was peaceful in Çukurcuma.” Ahmet Ok, who runs a leather shop on the other end of the street, begged to differ. Living in an apartment in Cihangir, Ok experienced firsthand how the tear gas used by the police affected even the residential areas that had nothing to do with the events. Ok told me how things have changed over the last four years as people from the United States and Europe started renting houses in the neighborhood. He said he had been a tourist guide for more than 25 years; when I suggested whether he was bored sitting behind a desk all day long in his shop he said he had lately become an avid reader of books. (He confessed to enjoying My Name is Red, Pamuk’s IMPAC winning novel, more than the Innocence.) “I heard that Pamuk is about to finish a new book and that it is about a boza seller,” he said. “I wonder whether he will build a museum for the boza seller as well.” Pamuk has frequented the streets of the neighborhood for the last 13 years. When he is in town (which is not always, since Pamuk is lecturing at Columbia University one semester a year) he visits the shops and talks to their owners. In Turkish we call antique dealers antikacılar, which is a neutral word. Antika insan (an antiquated person), on the other hand, is not so neutral: it means a weird kind of person, which the protagonist of Pamuk’s book arguably is. (Following

the death of his lover, he collects everything she left behind.) During my childhood, my relatives told me that writers, artists, and such people were antika insanlar, and that I should keep my distance from them. Seeing how much the Nobel laureate, his antique-dealer neighbors, and the thousands of protestors who had wanted to preserve trees in a public park had in common, I feel glad that I have never taken their advice.

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Roula Nassar, in memory of a miracle, 2019, ink on paper, 19 x 33 1/4 inches.

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REFLECTIONS ON LARB BENJAMIN ALDES WURGAFT

“O

n Reading Jonathan Gold” is my personal celebration of the food writer Jonathan Gold and his version of Los Angeles. I felt lucky to have it appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books in November 2018, just months after Gold’s sudden passing, because it was in Los Angeles that I started to rediscover myself as a writer, and Gold’s work and the Los Angeles Review of Books were both crucial parts of that process. I hadn’t moved to Los Angeles in 2012 entirely by choice; I had lived in Northern California for 10 years and celebrated fog and sweater weather, not bright sunshine. But I did love good food, and as I navigated L.A., Gold’s restaurant reviews gave me guidance. That’s how I found Chef Wes Avila’s Guerrilla Tacos truck, where Avila made the best, and most creative, tacos I had ever eaten. It was through Gold’s writing that I started eating chapulines at Guelaguetza, and driving for hours to search for food trucks that seemed potentially mythic but always, eventually, appeared out of the night like lighthouses, illuminating their crowd. I had done some food writing up north, but I suddenly felt I had been missing out on something profound, a set of links between plate and place and people that even discussions of terroir, which Northern California’s food scene is full of, couldn’t touch. Gold was a master of those links. At the same time I found my way into something else: an arts space called Betalevel, in Chinatown, which boasted a regular evening of talks called the Errata Salon. All kinds of people spoke: librarians, writers, artists, local faculty. I joined in too. We talked about all kinds of topics, from personality tests to telephone booths to Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat novels, to Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia. The big lesson was that no topic was too small to prompt serious reflection. You could call this Proustian, but the style was not to take yourself too 181

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seriously, to never elect yourself Proust. For some of us it became a workshop for smart nonfiction writing, a place to test out our ideas before trying to publish. I was showing up for Errata Salon talks at about the same time as I started submitting work to LARB, and I thought of them as sharing a similar loose and playful spirit. They both helped me to shake off some of the stiffness that had crept into my prose in grad school. I miss the Errata Salon to this day, and wish I could sit in that dark basement, munching pretzels and learning something unexpected about Vanishing Point or the history of Los Angeles street names. I’m curious about many things, as a writer and a scholar, and one of my basic principles is that there doesn’t need to be an official story about how my interests relate. Intellectual life is not, for me, built out of a singular obsession, but of many different things, and being curious about epistemology and being curious about, say, Sichuan restaurants in Alhambra, are likely to be different kinds of curiosities, served by different ways of writing. That happy disunity is something that writing for LARB has helped me to discover. I still think of LARB as my favorite journal of the appetites, wide-ranging and ardent, but resistant to doctrine wherever doctrine would block honest reflection about the world. To my knowledge, the journal has not followed my constant suggestions and served larb (the famous Laotian and Thai meat salad) at one of its gatherings, but I live in hope.

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Roula Nassar, untitled, 2019, graphite on paper, 18 x 13 inches.

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Amita Bhatt, Dedicated to Delight, 2009, oil on canvas, 48 by 48 Inches.

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ON READING J O N AT H A N G O L D BENJAMIN ALDES WURGAFT

“P

erhaps you would like to read a restaurant review this morning,” Jonathan Gold often wrote, broadcasting his Los Angeles Times reviews on Twitter. I want to read an uncountable number of additional reviews by Gold, who died July 21 at the age of 57, just a few weeks after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. To read one Gold review after another, which you can do in the collection Counter Intelligence (2000), is to enter a world in which flavors are vivid and the virtues and flaws of each eatery are picked out in fine detail. He covered food trucks, white tablecloth restaurants, and 2:00-a.m.-hangover-recovery-noodle counters in Koreatown, and he described them all with a voice that was playful, 185

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literary, and just. July 28 would have been his 58th birthday, and several buildings in Los Angeles were illuminated with gold light in commemoration. He was, and remains, beloved, irreplaceable. Now Gold’s trademark silhouette — a tongue-incheek imitation of Alfred Hitchcock — is drawn on the wall of a taqueria in the Arts District. One of his familiar mottos, “The taco honors the truck,” is written next to it. Gold offered weekly reviews of restaurants in the Los Angeles area, but he also represented Los Angeles both to the city’s residents and to the world. His reviews and notes on food may bear the timestamp of workaday journalism, but they also transcend their time and geography. They constitute a full-fledged chapter of Los Angeles’s literary history, and of the history of food writing. Encomia aside, I owe Gold a personal debt as a reader. His reviews taught me to love Los Angeles, shaking off cinematic and literary visions of the city that had taught me to mistrust the place. Needless to say, L.A. detraction is available for cheap. Mike Davis, in his well-known study City of Quartz (1990), surveys stereotypes of Los Angeles as a city where the mind in particular comes to ruin, a place that celebrates our appetites but not our intellects. Davis lists writers who seem to have been undone by L.A.: Fused into a single montage image are Fitzgerald reduced to a drunken hack, West rushing to his own apocalypse (thinking it a dinner party), Faulkner rewriting second-rate scripts, Brecht raging against the mutilation of his work, the Hollywood Ten on their way to prison, Didion on the verge of a nervous breakdown, 186

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and so on. Los Angeles (and its alter-ego, Hollywood) becomes the literalized Mahagonny: city of seduction and defeat, the antipode to critical intelligence. The brain becomes the victim of the body’s seduction, even as long episodes of sitting in traffic (perhaps en route to the next binge) wear down the body. Food, one old story went, was not so much appreciated in Los Angeles as consumed like gasoline. In 1971, the architectural historian Reyner Banham, an English celebrant of Los Angeles whose high estimation of the city Mike Davis would criticize, mused on the relationship between movement and food in a city built for the personal car: The purely functional hamburger, as delivered across the counter of say, the Gipsy Wagon on the UCLA campus, the Surf-boarder at Hermosa Beach or any McDonald’s or Jack-in-the-Box outlet anywhere, is a pretty well-balanced meal that he who runs (surfs, drives, studies) can eat with one hand; not only the ground beef but all the sauce, cheese, shredded lettuce, and other garnishes are firmly gripped between the two halves of the bun. Los Angeles still has its fast food aficionados, but, as I would learn, food as mere fuel for a city on the go has nothing whatsoever to do with Jonathan Gold’s Los Angeles. The city is full of appreciative eaters for whom restaurants are more exciting destinations than beaches, or cinemas, or parties. L.A.’s chefs are eager to draw on a dizzying array of produce found at farmers’ markets that put those of most other cities to shame. Los Angeles is full of people for whom three hours at a meal is not wasted time. Gold’s affection for taco trucks had less to do with speed or

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restlessness than with the fact that the truck suits a city defined by its thoroughfares. The taco truck honors the city. I moved to Los Angeles with my partner in the late spring of 2012. She had taken a new job, the kind that seems promising enough to move a person from the cooler (and for us, happier) climatic conditions of Northern California to what struck me not as beautiful but rather interrogating sunshine. Each ray of light seemed to shout, “Why aren’t you satisfied by your choices?” Unemployed, missing my bicycle rides through the Oakland hills, not to mention my security blanket made of fog, and knowing few people in our new city, I sat at our dining room table and tried to turn my three-year-old doctoral dissertation into a book. I noticed the restaurants, taco trucks, and produce markets (I have good instincts in this area of life, at least), and made the occasional foray, but I stubbornly refused to let their obvious quality change my opinion of our new home. Every once in a while I would pause in my work to hate Los Angeles in unhelpfully vocal ways. I am not given to epiphanies, so I remember very clearly the day when my loathing for Los Angeles turned to love. I was in the middle of a long bus ride. It was my weekly routine to travel that way down Sunset, from our apartment in Echo Park down to the UCLA library. I was alternating (as is my distractible wont) between two different kinds of reading material, both of which I had picked up in an effort to get to know the city better: several of Gold’s reviews, current to 2012, and Reyner Banham’s classic work of urbanism from 1971, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, the fruit of the years the Englishman spent visiting and studying Los Angeles. Although they

were of different vintages, you might say the readings paired well. Gold’s restaurants began to fit into Banham’s map of the city as locations you could reach if you were just willing to see the highways as connections rather than barriers. The bus ride was not too jolt-filled. We had passed from the cold-molasses-like crawl that characterizes Sunset during rush hours to a somewhat smoother flow, as if the molasses had been brought up to room temperature. I had time to think clearly about what Gold’s reviews and Banham’s book share, namely a love for Los Angeles as a place, maintained in full knowledge of the city’s flaws and shortcomings. They appreciate ramen and the Romanesque, respectively, as these elements crop up in places that seem entirely accidental or willful, apart from any considerations of planning. From that point on, I delighted in a minor form of Gold emulation. Not having a newspaper’s budget to back my eating habits, I mostly ate tacos, ramen, and pho, avoiding $40+ entrees and dishes of pork shoulder designed to feed six and priced accordingly. I found out-of-theway markets and farm stands to support and inform my cooking. In my mid-30s I followed a track Gold had laid in his 20s, learning to eat in Los Angeles by following Pico (and other streets) and eating every interesting thing I could reasonably afford. I continued to hate the traffic (and the heat), but as millions know in their guts, there is no incompatibility between traffic-hatred and love for Los Angeles. At first blush, one thing was obvious: Gold’s work recalls Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker essays of the late ’60s and ’70s, in which Trillin described what he called “research,” and what Trillin’s wife Alice called “being a food crazy.” I found this 187

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association comforting, having first read Trillin’s essays as a high school student, finding them in collected volumes on my food-loving parents’ shelves and coffee tables. Trillin was ultimately after stories of political or human interest, but he lavished attention on his own appetite for comic purpose, wandering New York and beyond in search of sausage rolls, steamed fish, maybe a pretzel. He devoted an essay to his fantasy of serving as a diplomatic tour guide to Chairman Mao, making sure that the chairman missed no important New York delicacy — all in the name of international relations, of course. Trillin’s essays never betray the reader’s pleasure by wasting time on, say, defining the Platonic form of a pastrami on rye, or offering the correct definition of béchamel. Only later would I learn that Gold had read Trillin with devotion. If we were to trace out a family tree of North American food writers, one that would include James Beard, Helen Brown, M. F. K. Fisher, Craig Claiborne, Ruth Reichl, and so on, Gold would be Trillin’s direct descendent, a generation younger but still animated by Trillin’s revolt against the high-low culinary distinctions according to which French cooking had been enshrined for critics, and the simple pleasures of seeking treats while wandering one’s city never got their due. Gold loved the rebelliousness of punk music, and it’s important to note that modern food writing contained a rebellious spirit of its own. Gold drew water from both wells. Gold made his most famous statements about taco trucks relatively late in his career, which I feel should have been his mid-career; one of the features of a mortal creative life is that we never know whether or not our current style is, in fact, our “late style.” Earlier, Gold specialized 188

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in discovering restaurants that the critics of an earlier generation might have abjured because of a prejudice against vernacular food, which rendered regional Mexican, Korean, or Chinese cuisines as simply ineligible for criticism per se. There is no single quintessential Gold food form, because his tastes were as broad as his knowledge was deep, but many fans know him as a connoisseur of the weird, who refused to turn up his nose at tripe, whose question about hagfish was not, “How do I avoid eating this awful-looking creature whose stress response is to turn water to slime?” but rather, “Does it taste good?” If Gold was like Trillin insofar as he was on the side of the eaters, he was very unlike him in that he was also, and perhaps more unwaveringly, on the side of the cooks. The outpouring of grief from Los Angeles chefs after July 21 testifies to this. I do not know for sure, but I suspect Gold’s affection for chefs was tied to his own identification with artists, as a writer. Addressing a 2013 UCLA graduating class, Gold told his audience that he came to them as an emissary from “the world of failure,” in which artists (and critics) usually live. He went on: while he was now a “semi-successful writer, a chronicler of Los Angeles,” he still thought of himself as his UCLA undergraduate persona, a recently failed cellist. This might have seemed like false modesty. Gold’s youthful audience might have seen him as an avatar of literary success, bearing his 2007 Pulitzer, the first and still only such prize awarded for food criticism. But this address also hints at how Gold understood his own work. His creative process took time, like the work of any artist. He was famously late for dinner and his reviews infamously late to editors, but his sidetracks through books and films and other forms of living

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Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Meu remÈdio, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 x 2 1/4 inches (182.9 x 182.9 x 5.7 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

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led to inspired observations. He was lucky that a combination of professional success, and the patience of editors and loved ones, gave him time to think and to write as he would, something few writers receive. But I think that we, his readers, were luckier still that Jonathan Gold took his time. Gold was born in 1960, when, according to Mike Davis, Los Angeles was “the most WASPish of big cities.” If that characterization was true in demographic or cultural terms, everything had changed by the time of Gold’s maturity, and Gold would become a voice of that change, himself benefiting by it both gastronomically and professionally. Gold’s tastes in music, art, and food were not always popular, and his interest in the cello and in classical music could be called downright anachronistic. And yet his career was defined by timeliness, by being on the scene for punk, gangsta rap, and grunge, by drawing connections between Los Angeles’s struggles with diversity before, during, and after the L.A. riots, and by chronicling restaurants that would spring up and die off as waves of immigrant chefs tried to find their footing. Gold was born just five years before the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, one of the most consequential legal turns for restaurant culture in the late 20th-century United States. The Act eliminated a quota system that had favored Western Europeans, and enabled not only more skilled workers from other countries to immigrate, but to bring their families too, creating favorable conditions for businesses like restaurants. The Chinese-American population alone doubled within about 10 years of the Act’s passage, bringing chefs from Hong Kong and Taiwan, along with their regional cuisines. Change came from other sources too. As Gold observed in his essay “The 190

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Year I Ate Pico Boulevard,” when he was a young writer just out of college, many of the restaurants he encountered up and down Pico Boulevard were the happy result of an influx of immigrants who had fled political instability and war in Latin America. By the time Gold got his Pulitzer, it would have sounded ridiculous to call L.A. “WASPish.” Gold began his career as a music critic, writing first on the classical music that he had himself studied as a musician, and then on rock and hip-hop, mostly notably covering the beginnings of gangsta rap and the recording sessions of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. This was more than flexibility on Gold’s part; it was a delight in exploding old ideas about the differences between high and popular genres of music. Gold did exactly the same thing in his writing on food, something I only started to understand when one of his reviews, just for a second, broke the skin of my culinary reverie, annoying me. This was his September 7, 2013, review of Echo Park restaurant Allumette (since closed), where the kitchen of chef Miles Thompson turned out dishes so carefully composed that they appeared to have been plated with tweezers, while bartender Serena Herrick transformed farmers’ market produce into beautiful cocktails with punning names like “Strega Genesis.” Gold’s mind seemed to drift from these delights to Ariza, the taco truck parked across the street, or to Chengdu Taste in Alhambra. “What about those potatoes!” I cried internally, thinking of the way a piping hot plate of fried potatoes made katsuobushi shavings dance as they curled from the heat. “Focus, Gold!” I thought. I was only starting to realize that Gold was looking for joy, and he would go where it took him. He insisted on this freedom.

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What makes restaurant criticism difficult is not the basic task of describing a meal or that of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a restaurant, although these have their complexities and there is a vast difference between the way professionals and amateurs do them. What’s hard is that mere description is boring. Much like coverage of a ball game, a description of a meal can run afoul of recursion: the report of a spectacular run to catch a ball exhausts its meaning (and some readers’ patience) in the adjective “spectacular,” and in similar fashion, a food writer must say more about a dish than simply listing the qualities of its ingredients if they want us to keep reading, week after week. This problem in food writing may explain what divides great criticism from a casual online customer review, and also why so much of the best food writing uses food as a jumping-off point from which to discuss family, heritage, personal identity, the complexity and fragility of our collective social life, and so forth. To read an essay by M. F. K. Fisher is to know that a segment of an orange both is and isn’t the actual topic at hand, just as to read A. Bartlett Giamatti on baseball is to see the American immigrant experience traveling with the curve ball. Gold beat the problem of recursion by a different means. He simply learned so much about each dish, cuisine, or chefly community that there was always more for him to say. I still want to live in Gold’s reviews, which he wrote in a distinctive second-person style. For example, “You might follow a salad of ripe heirloom tomatoes and soft-cooked egg with a sliver of crisp-skinned branzino on a bed of chewy tapioca scented with shellfish stock,” as Gold wrote in his review of Allumette. “You will wonder whether

there is a point to an old-fashioned made with lamb-fat-washed bourbon or a pisco sour with pink peppercorns, and you will decide that there might be,” as he wrote in one of his last reviews filed, of a new Middle Eastern restaurant called Bavel. Gold’s “you” never seemed like an invitation for one, prompting me to choose my own culinary adventure, but a group invite, telling us that Los Angeles could be large in the sense of opportunities and small in the sense of neighborliness and access, of commensality. Commensality is one good word for what critics of L.A. think is impossible here. The word literally means “the quality of eating at the same table.” It implies community. Commensality is a special challenge in a city whose first language is movement; Banham said that he had learned how to drive in Los Angeles in order to “read Los Angeles in the original.” Director Laura Gabbert, in her 2015 documentary film about Gold’s life and work, City of Gold, established a clear parallel between Banham and the food critic: “I’m an L.A. guy, I drive. I am my truck, my truck is me,” Gold says to the camera. The predominant urban form of a Jonathan Gold review is the mini-mall, a Chinese (or Filipino, or Persian, or Japanese) restaurant tucked in the corner, the car potentially driving up to the front door, depending on the neighborhood and how quickly Gold’s readers have responded to his latest review. But cars are unavoidably separate and separating forms of travel. The highways often make L.A. into a city of origins and destinations without opportunities to connect with others enroute. Gold seems to have understood full well that commensality in Los Angeles was both a goal and a challenge. In an elegiac piece written in response to the L.A. 191

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Riots when he was a young critic, Gold celebrated neighborliness, meditating on the garlic pounded by his Korean landlords, whose son was tragically shot during the rioting. You could read so much of his later restaurant criticism as an extension of this essay’s closing line, “I wish that they would invite me over to dinner.” “I want to make Los Angeles smaller,” Gold once said. As his career progressed, Gold deepened everyone’s knowledge of their neighbors, demonstrating that much of the most exciting cooking in Los Angeles took place within local enclaves where chefs cooked for audiences of their peers. But this is something less than ensuring that Angelenos eat together across the lines of geography, ethnicity, and culture. The irony of City of Gold is that it is a portrait not of an L.A. bound together by food across lines of identity, but of distinct “food nations” that intermingle while remaining, for the most part, separate; and whose separateness is actually a great source of strength, in terms of the cooking itself. To produce an array of culinary microclimates — one way to think about L.A. and food — takes the relative isolation of cultures just as much as intermixing. Diversity doesn’t necessarily mean togetherness. Gold’s dream of commensality begins to seem like an ideal he held out for himself and for his readers, rather than an observation of what was actually happening at street level in Los Angeles. Just as Gold was the gastronomic beneficiary of post-1965 immigration to the United States, he also benefited from the fact that he came to prominence just as the restaurant took on a new centrality as a form of cultural expression in American life. People started to skip the movie and go directly to dinner, the restaurant 192

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experience supplying much of the sense of play and personality that we previously expected from light passing through celluloid. As restaurants rose, so did the trend to level value distinctions between different types of cuisines. Thus we enjoy the high-end taco, or a new restaurant in Koreatown that sells slightly polished versions of the stews already available down the block. When Anthony Bourdain died, Gold wrote, “I cannot imagine how the food world is going to cope with this gaping Bourdain-shaped hole — not at its center but on its fringes, looking exactly like a man throwing rocks at the status quo.” What was true of Bourdain’s career was also true of Gold’s, however: if you begin your writerly life “throwing rocks at the status quo” and find some success, don’t be surprised if a new status quo that centers on rock-throwing emerges, with you are canonized as a primal stone-tosser. Over the arc of Gold’s career, “ethnic restaurants” and street food came to enjoy a visibility in Los Angeles dining they had not previously enjoyed, even as that term, “street food,” started to raise questions. What street? Do you mean carts? Elote? Tacos? What about the street is supposed to be delicious? Is this simply about middle-class (or upper-, or wealthy) diners longing for some magical form of culinary transformation imparted by that often-empty black box of a word, “authenticity”? Unclear. When Gold’s outline decorates the wall next to a booth at a very hip, very popular, post-truck L.A. taqueria, we are riding the line between deep appreciation and canonization. In honoring the critic and his legacy, we must be careful not to turn him into an image, part of a dearly loved status quo that must inevitably move on.

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When Gold died, I felt a depth of sadness that I worried I had not earned. I had not known the man personally, after all. We had exchanged a few witticisms on Twitter, and Gold wrote me out of the blue, once, to tell me he had read my work. I was floored. I had no reason to think my writing would have crossed Gold’s desk. He was kind, and I was awkward, because Gold’s work had inspired me, and I risked embarrassing him by telling him what his reviews meant to me: “your work has made my life better.” We then corresponded in the months right before he died. His range of reference was wonderful. We joked about the writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard and the sculptures of Joseph Beuys, and right after the passing of the philosopher Stanley Cavell, we talked about the fact that Gold’s daughter had just taken a seminar on Cavell; Gold seemed like a proud father and husband, and this is how I think of him now, open to learning from a world he had helped to create in Los Angeles, but that he never pretended to control. I left L.A. four years ago, but I continued to read Gold’s restaurant reviews every week, it making no difference that I couldn’t use them as dining advice. I will continue to reread them now. That taqueria in the Arts District I recently visited, on a return trip to L.A. that felt a bit like a post-Gold pilgrimage? It belongs to Chef Wes Avila, and it is called Guerrilla Tacos, the same name as Avila’s former truck, one of Gold’s favorite places to eat tacos toward the end of his life, and one of my old favorites too. A framed photograph of Gold stands on a shelf above Avila’s current kitchen, but when I think of Guerrilla and Gold, it is of a guy (I don’t know his name) who used to turn up at the truck in the early evening with a bottle of wine

and a few extra glasses. I wish I were there right now to toast the man who helped me love Los Angeles.

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R I OT / R E B E L L I O N : THE LEGACY OF 1992 STEPH CHA

t's been 25 years since a Simi Valley jury acquitted the cops who beat Rodney King and Los Angeles erupted in flames. The L.A. Riots, or Rebellion — more on that later — constituted the most destructive, expensive civil disturbance in US history, and became a definitive event in our city’s history. I was a clueless child in the suburbs in ’92, but the events of that spring are integral to my understanding of Los Angeles. Every older Angeleno has stories about that time; I remember talking to my auto body guy while waiting for a ride a while back, and it turned out he was close friends with Eddie Lee, the 18-year-old Korean-American kid killed by other Korean Americans who thought he was a looter. I talked to Gary Phillips, Nina Revoyr, and Jervey Tervalon about their memories 194

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of ’92 and the history of Los Angeles. These are three L.A. writers I admire deeply, whose work and lives are bound to our city. Phillips’s written numerous novels, comic books, and short stories — most recently the collection Treacherous: Grifters, Ruffians and Killers; his Ivan Monk series has tracked Los Angeles since his ’94 debut Violent Spring. Revoyr’s entire oeuvre circles around Los Angeles, and her novel Southland is a seminal work centered on the Watts Rebellion of 1965. Tervalon is a poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, teacher, and gatherer of stories; in 2002, he edited Geography of Rage, a collection of personal writing by a diverse group of writers, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the unrest. ¤ STEPH CHA: You all have deep ties to Los Angeles. How has this city shaped you as writers? GARY PHILLIPS: It’s where I was born and raised and came of age as a community organizer. It’s in my blood, my DNA. A city I know by its dive bars and mom-and-pop donut shops, but a city I have to constantly relearn as it continues to reinvent itself. Where I grew up in South Central is now a majority Latino working-class area, as opposed to the majority black working-class area I knew in the ’60s and ’70s. On my block of Flower Street alone, eight or nine people were in one union or another. That is no more. These days, in Boyle Heights, groups like the Zapatista-styled Serve the People militantly struggle against who they perceive as gentrifiers, and along Fairfax Avenue near Canter’s Deli, in what is the historic Jewish section of town, young people of various hues and persuasions

line up for the latest limited edition tennis shoes or hang out in shops selling DJ turntables and what not. So, of course, it’s my job as a writer who sets a good number of his stories here to have as current a grasp of this city as I can. Not to info dump on the pages, but all the better to soak up the stuff that gives a sense of the fault lines, as well as where there are those intersections and interplay of its people. NINA REVOYR: Los Angeles shaped me both as a writer and a person. I did not grow up in privilege. I was an immigrant from Japan, the child of a single dad, and we lived in a neighborhood where gang members hung out on the playground, where hearing gunshots was not uncommon. It’s probably fair to say our neighborhood in Culver City was lower middle class, but I also traveled to much more impacted areas — Compton, South Los Angeles, parts of Inglewood — to play basketball. Many of the kids I grew up with fell into drugs, the criminal justice system, early pregnancy, and that shook me; these kids had all kinds of smarts and potential, but lacked support and access. My jobs with nonprofits and now in philanthropy grew directly out of that knowledge and those experiences. My high school in Culver City — which was a totally different place then — was incredibly diverse. There were something like 47 languages spoken in my school, and there were black kids, Latinos, Jewish kids, Vietnamese, Japanese, and various mixes like me. This completely shaped my view of what the world was like. When I went to the East Coast for college, to a much whiter environment, it was a shock to the system. Los Angeles — and particularly my high school 195

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Roula Nassar, (the fear), 2019, clay, paint, 22 x 6 x 2 inches.

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experience — gave me my multiracial view of the world. People often remark on the diversity in my novels. But my characters aren’t diverse because I’m trying to make a political point. They’re diverse because they reflect the world as I know it. JERVEY TERVALON: As a teenager in South Los Angeles, I worked for AntiSelf Destruction, a government-funded neighborhood advocacy nonprofit. There I met Ollie, a handsome, slender supervisor who rocked lime green jumpsuits and sported a neat beard. One day I needed to talk to Ollie — he had been a Black Panther — about being more serious, more down for black folks, and being committed to the cause. He looked at me with perfect seriousness and said, “Just keep being your weird-ass self.” I took his words to heart, and have never let them go. I have never let South L.A. go either. I grew up in the middle of the Crenshaw– Baldwin Hills–Jefferson Park area, otherwise known as Black Los Angeles, a place that punched way above its weight as a center of black life in the United States at the time. Often when whites write (sometimes to great critical success) about Black Los Angeles, they describe it as the sum total of its self-inflicted pathologies, rarely seeing the beauty of the particularity of life there, or the complex intersection of class and intraracial conflict. I remember going shopping with my mom at the Boys Market on Crenshaw when Crenshaw was still Japanese. And I remember hanging out in the magazine and book section and being terrified by Alfred Hitchcock short stories. Later I discovered that Japanese magazines had naked women in them, but no one seemed to notice my 10-year-old self panting with excitement.

The nearby Holiday Bowl bowling alley was probably the only place in the world where you could get sashimi, hot links, grits, and donburi under the same roof. I was lucky to live on the edge of everything — near the shining affluence of Baldwin Hills, and close enough to the heat of working-class neighborhoods. In 1964, we moved to a neighborhood of New Orleans expatriates, and I attended Holy Name of Jesus Christ Catholic Church on Jefferson. I attended their elementary school for just one year, because a nun there decided that I was mildly retarded. My mother threatened to rip the veil off of the nun and I was sent to a public school to study with the heathens. Sure, I got my ass kicked, and occasionally guns we’re pointed in my direction, but that could happen anywhere in the city of angels. The Black Los Angeles I grew up in is a moveable feast of memory. How could I not become a writer? SC: Where were you during the unrest of ’92? What do you remember about that week? That year? GP: Leading up to the riots — or civil unrest, to some — I was the outreach director for the Liberty Hill Foundation. Then as now, Liberty Hill funded grassroots community organizing efforts in underserved areas of the Southland. That could be anything from issues around police abuse, to tenants’ rights, to the then-volatile black-Korean relations in South Central. My gig took me from meeting with groups in the projects in Watts, churches in Boyle Heights, to meetings with other foundation types in high-rises downtown. Also, a few of my friends and comrades and I had been reading and discussing Mike Davis’s 197

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seminal work City of Quartz. After the conflagration, a number among the punditry class said he had predicted the riots. Be that as it may, I don’t recall any particular rumblings before shit jumped off, but pessimism was high in the black community. The Soon Ja Du verdict was fresh in folks’ minds, and there was the feeling that, despite George Holliday’s surreptitious video evidence of the cops beating the living daylights out of Rodney King, would there be justice this time? The trial of the four officers was, of course, talked about in the media, in barber shops, and on talk radio. I do, though, vividly recall that day when the verdicts came in. The countdown was on and the jury’s decision was said to come down that afternoon — special bulletins bleeped from TVs and radios that April 29. When we heard the news in the Liberty Hill offices, we looked at each other and knew it was not a good thing. Even as my boss told us we should all get home — Liberty Hill was headquartered in Santa Monica in those days — there came that surreal moment that invariably happens during stressful events. The phone rang and it wasn’t the media, but a colleague from out of town had just landed at LAX and he needed a ride. I mean, he was clueless as to what was going down in Los Angeles. I’ve written about this elsewhere (Geography of Rage, edited by Mr. Tervalon), but once the fuse was lit, I hunkered down with a bottle of Jack for liquid courage, and my pistol, too — like any other terrified member of the petty bourgeoisie, looking to protect his property — in our crib in Mid-City as my wife took our then young children to the relative safety of a friend’s place in the Valley.

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NR: I was living in a small village in the mountains of Japan. It was the year after I graduated from college. Because of the time difference, and the fact that my only source of news was Japanese television, my experience of learning about the unrest in Los Angeles was disjointed and strange. A friend sent me hours of videotapes of L.A. news coverage — this was in the time of VHS tapes — and I sat transfixed, watching it for hours. It was beyond bizarre and heartbreaking to see neighborhoods I knew become the scenes of such violence and disarray. At some point, there were National Guardsmen surrounding the shopping center near the apartment where I grew up. It was like watching something terrible befall my family, and I was so far away I couldn’t do anything about it. That summer, I came home for a couple of weeks and drove around South Los Angeles. So much had been destroyed — the scars on the landscape were still vivid and fresh. When I finally returned to Los Angeles a year after that, I went to work for a Head Start agency in one of the hardest-hit areas. Even then, two years later, there were shells of burned out buildings and empty lots. There still are. JT: My wife at the time didn’t want me to go, insisting that it was a stupid thing to do when the television shows were being preempted by breaking footage of rioters setting ablaze palm trees in front of Parker Center. I told her not to worry, that as a big brown-skinned man, wearing his Malcolm X beanie with a walking stick and a 75-pound Siberian husky on a leash, I felt fully capable of handling whatever might come my way. Yeah, I was a fool. The protestors started downtown at Parker Center and seemed much like the

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Greens and other social activists protesting World Bank and IMF gatherings, but that was only the beginning; the turmoil rolled on, gathering in strength and viciousness, and by that time the fires had spread to dozens of neighborhoods and got huge legs. The rioting involved much of the central city and beyond. I shared that rage. The police were sadistic pigs; the city had earned its bitter harvest — but I didn’t know then how intensely the fires were burning, or how sharp the odor of burned-out homes and looted businesses would be. I turned onto Prospect Boulevard, that lovely tree-lined street with the occasional mansion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright or the Green Brothers. By the time I reached Arroyo Boulevard, the street that overlooks the Rose Bowl, I heard the faint but unmistakable sound of staccato gunfire coming from around the Bowl. Looking into the darkness, I strained to see what was jumping off down below. Then tires squealed and I saw various cars roaring away from the road that encircled the Bowl — where we jogged and cyclists buzzed by in their crazed peloton. I heard it again, closer — this time the sound of different caliber weapons — and I was genuinely panicked. Looking into the weirdly dark roads below, I saw cars roaring away from the Rose Bowl, flashes from the muzzles of their guns, up toward the sweet, moneyed Prospect neighborhood: the neighborhood I was walking in. They’d see my big white husky and me and think I was a rich bastard that needed shooting. I trotted back to my working-class neighborhood, but not so quickly as to miss noticing how deserted the streets were. Just about home, I saw a black woman working on her car, adroitly using

an engine jack to drop her engine all by herself. I shouted to her that some fools were shooting up the Rose Bowl. She sighed and shook her head. “I told those idiots not to be doing that. Nothing good is gonna come out of shooting up the city. That’s not gonna do nothing for nobody.” I remember that woman’s words more clearly than Rodney King’s “Can we all get along?” SC: You’ve all written about these events in some form or another. Where do they fit into the history of Los Angeles? How about your imagination of Los Angeles? NR: The ’92 incident was the second civil disturbance, after Watts in ’65. The fact that there was a second one underscores how little had actually changed since the first. The recommendations of the McCone Commission report — on issues like education, jobs, and housing — weren’t heeded. Huge disparities existed — and still exist — between the incredibly privileged and the more burdened parts of the city. The LAPD, in ’92, was still in suppression mode, particularly in black communities. And because Los Angeles is spread out geographically, it was easy for people to stay in their separate spheres and not feel like part of the same place, the same community. The uprisings fit into the history of Los Angeles by reminding us — dramatically, and at great cost — that the hopefulness and opportunity for which L.A. is rightly known are not necessarily available to everyone. As far as my own imagination, the uprisings remind me that history doesn’t always happen in textbooks. Most of the real stories are passed over by recorded history, and by mainstream media, too. 199

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Some of the most compelling stories involve people and families, as well as the conflicts — and allegiances — between communities. While there are still a lot of divisions in Los Angeles along lines of race and class, there are also places where people unexpectedly come together — the mix of Latino, Jewish, and Japanese in Boyle Heights; the deep connection between Japanese Americans and African Americans in Crenshaw. That latter connection is at the heart of my novel Southland. I loved going into the Holiday Bowl and seeing black folks and Japanese folks of all ages bowling and eating together. I loved what it said and meant: that people took great pride in who they were, but could also see themselves as part of a larger community, a larger collective whole. It’s the work and charge of artists to uncover those stories, and to push people to see the complexities. Los Angeles has this image of being light and superficial, of being “La La Land.” It may be easier for most people to see it — and dismiss it — that way. But the real place is much messier, and much more interesting. GP: Once the rioting was over and the analysis and condemnation began on the right and left, the idea percolated in me. I’d written a previous mystery novel, but couldn’t get it published. Yet here I was in the thick of the aftermath as I transitioned from Liberty Hill to being one of the directors (a politically correct troika, I might add, of an African American, a 1.5er, and a Chicano) of the MultiCultural Collaborative, an effort begun by the social change players in Los Angeles to address matters of race at the grassroots and policy levels. I knew the terrain from various sides, including meetings with the 200

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individuals involved in hammering out the gang truce. The story was right there in front of me. I had to draw on my own experiences and the terrain I’d been traversing and insert my private eye Ivan Monk into what became Violent Spring. It seems one of the historical lessons of Sa-i-Gu is that imbalances in the socio-political sphere, ignored or merely covered by a Band-Aid, will invariably create a backlash in some form or another. From the streets in Ferguson to Trump’s victory at the ballot box, you can see that play out. I’m old enough to have seen the Watts Riots of ’65 — or Rebellion, if you prefer — as a kid, and what was that result? There was a federal response of job training programs and the like, unlike ’92, where Bush the Elder did his bus tour and essentially said we were on our own. But the white backlash to ’65 was Mayor Sam Yorty demonizing soft-spoken candidate Tom Bradley, and Ronald Reagan being elected governor. But back to the riots and what they symbolized as expressed in our pop culture. The work they inspired is both an expression of the imaginations of cultural artists and, in turn, fired the imaginations of the consumers of the material. Grand Canyon, made before ’92, but about the racial and class divides of the city, has been cited, like City of Quartz, as presaging events. A month before the riots, Ice-T and Body Count had released the song “Cop Killer,” which sent Charlton Heston into a tizzy; Ice Cube’s The Predatoralbum, reflecting on race and police accountability, among other issues, was released in November of that year. “Riots ain’t nothing but diets for the system,” declared the man who would, years later, go on to make the kid-friendly movie Are We There Yet?

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Roula Nassar, the myth of escape, 2019, ink on paper, 13 x 23 inches.

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JT: I don’t think that Los Angeles much wants to remember the largest and costliest civil disturbance in the history of the United States. No, it’s almost as though the city has some sort of amnesia, or maybe it’s fear — fear that what happened then could jump up and bite us again. For some, the riots were almost a random event, linked tenuously to the Rodney King beating: another example of those damn black and brown folk getting out of hand again. At least that’s what the media fed us. I guess their reasoning was that the minorities accepted police abuse before and didn’t try to burn the city down like back in Watts in 1965, so why should 1992 be much different? This kind of reasoning is only viable when the natives are so far off you can’t hear the drums pounding away, venting rage. What preceded Rodney King was the 1965 riots, but maybe there wasn’t really a gap of decades between these events … maybe it was one continuous through line: incoherent rage becomes coherent rage and shit happens. I came to Los Angeles in 1964 at about the age of six, and the city burst into flames just to welcome me. As a boy, it was disturbing to see fire in the distance and smoke wafting to the Jefferson Park area where I was growing up. Though seeing the tanks and half-tracks rolling along Exposition Boulevard was cool. I’m inclined to think of disaster, and the riots only confirmed my fears — but nothing, no riots or whatever, could have prepared me for Trump … I feel on the verge of rioting. SC: We’re all writers here, and we know that language matters, so I want to talk terminology for a minute. It seems like the events of ’92 are commonly referred 202

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to as the L.A. Riots, but I gather that this isn’t exactly a neutral designation. How do you refer to them? What distinguishes a riot from an uprising or a disturbance? GP: The classic definitions are that a “riot” is spontaneous and an “uprising” is planned. But, as you said, language matters. While the conflagration wasn’t planned to jump off at Florence and Normandie — an opening salvo that looked like it was out of the Battle of Algiers textbook — nonetheless, this did represent a violent, inchoate expression of the pent-up anger and frustration the community was feeling. It’s in that political context that I use “unrest” or “uprising.” Even then, as buildings burned, the analysis was also happening — from the right on KFI and the left on KPFK, as examples — and notions of what to do once the embers started to cool were being offered from some quarters. I mean, what if there had been an organization, a formation, that was poised to contend for state power should a riot break out, and agents had been salted in, as it were — the gardener, the housekeeper, the hotel maid, and so on — who could fan the flames while also carrying out strategic actions? I suppose that’s why the only thing I have in common with Steve Bannon is that I’ve read Lenin, too. JT: When the police regularly use deadly force or brutal force as a tool of suppression, we don’t have a police force there to protect and serve. Rather, it’s an occupying force. Communities rebel against an occupation, and a disorganized rebellion functions as a riot. It’s logical to assume oppression will lead to organized rebellion: either Guerilla warfare or passive resistance, maybe both.

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I used to call it the 1992 Riot/Rebellion, but now I say the 1992 Rebellion. And as definitions have been refined over time by organizations such as Black Lives Matter, I think the concept of rioting as mindless destructive behavior will give way to more thoughtful analysis in mainstream media. NR: I don’t think either ’92 or ’65 can be simply defined. People acted for a variety of reasons. But the issue with using the word “riot” so easily, as much of the press does, is that it can suggest that there was no causality, no context. The ’65 unrest happened in direct response to a police stop gone bad in Watts — and decades of suppressive actions on the part of police toward African-American residents. The ’92 unrest happened in the wake of the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King — the beating that caused disgust and anger not just in Los Angeles, but all over the world. Each of these heartbreaking periods of civil unrest happened in response to precipitating events, which caused years of frustration, anger, belittlement, and despair to spill forth. And that frustration and anger was not just about the police, but more broadly about the lack of opportunity, racism, the systemic exclusion of entire sets of people. A lot of what happened was obviously terrible and destructive, and certainly there were individuals who took advantage of the chaos and acted in ways that had nothing to do with resistance. But I don’t want to dismiss the very real — and justified — pain and anger of entire communities by using language that oversimplifies what happened. SC: Could this happen again? Are we doing better than we were 25 years ago?

NR: We are doing better than 25 years ago, but not well enough. There is significant progress in South Los Angeles: real investment in infrastructure through projects like the new Metro Line, the soccer stadium, the Lucas museum, the new Martin Luther King Community Hospital, the Frank Gehry project my old organization is building in Watts. There is progressive political leadership, and entities like Community Coalition and L.A. Trade Tech are pushing real change, bridging racial divides, and thinking strategically about education and jobs. All of this can lead to economic opportunity and hope, which is the antidote to the despair that caused the unrest. And LAPD has made some real strides, too — partly through the prodding of civil rights attorneys like Connie Rice and tools like the federal consent decree, partly through a few key police leaders who have emphasized engagement over suppression. There’s a highly successful community-policing model, first started in Watts at the behest of resident leaders, that has been recognized by President Obama and is now being expanded to other parts of the city. In the areas where it’s operated, it’s led to huge decreases in violent crime and big increases in levels of trust between communities of color and the police. But these positive changes need to spread and continue. And policing is only part of the puzzle. The underlying issues of economic insecurity, educational quality, and lack of access still exist. There are other parts of L.A. county — the Northeast Valley, the Antelope Valley, and East Los Angeles among them — that are also struggling. And now there is the new layer of fear and insecurity around immigration. Could there be another civil disturbance? 203

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Possibly. But I hope that the combined efforts of resident leaders and more enlightened police could minimize the chances. GP: I remember years ago being on a KPFK radio show commemorating the Watts Rebellion and the host asked us that question. I said yes, a riot could happen again, and the host advised that no, it couldn’t, given the superior firepower of the LAPD and so on. Yet they did. Now Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Chicago, et cetera, have had their tense confrontations. An enraged people often have nothing to lose. Maybe what we’ll see is not about race. I can easily envision long-haul truck drivers who will be displaced by self-driving trucks lighting one of those bad rascals on fire on Main Street, and it’s on. If rents keep going through the ceiling like they are now in Los Angeles, rent strikes like in the Great Depression will for sure make a comeback. A nightstick slips and cracks an elderly lady’s skull, and who knows what might be the result. Yeah, another riot can happen. With a jaundiced eye, I would offer we are better off. But I also see in the triumph of Trump my failure as a lefty crime fiction writer. Sure, you can’t reach everyone in those places like Fresno and Modoc who voted for him. I mean, I think people there would dig some of my stuff on an entertainment level, and maybe take away something else, given that people of color, male and female, are featured in my tales. I’ve been wrestling with how to do a Blue State Writers tour of the Red States. But, of course, something like that can only work by incorporating writers from those areas, and not coming there to preach, but to learn.

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JT: The riots seem to come every 25 years or so, but now the enemy isn’t the LAPD or City Hall — the enemy is external. The enemy is the Trump World, and I believe we will be rioting against that with more ferocity than our riots in the past.

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M I M I P O N D, C A R TO O N I S T R OYA LT Y MARINAOMI

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REFLECTIONS ON LARB D A V I D PA LU M B O - L I U

am honored and delighted that LARB has decided to feature this piece in its retrospective. As I began to reflect on our interview, I note that it was done in 2015. It seems so much longer ago than six years plus a few months. At that time, I had gotten to know NoViolet fairly well — she was a visiting writer here at Stanford, was involved in various projects that I was also interested in, and she had been kind enough to visit an undergraduate seminar I was teaching. Among the books we were reading were both We Need New Names, and Sandra Cisneros’s text The House on Mango Street. In class, NoViolet spoke about how as a young girl she was taken by the narrative center of Cisneros’s book — another young girl named Esperanza. We had a long discussion both in class and during our interview about how Bulawayo’s narrator, Darling, is given a similar task — that of trying to understand the world, interpret it, and tell a story. While The House on Mango Street tackles a number of very dark and troubling issues — misogyny, sexual violence, abuse, poverty, racism among them — We Need New Names added another dimension, one which in retrospect eerily anticipated the US presidential election of 2016. Bulawayo told me that the task she set before herself in writing We Need New Names was “to map a vulnerable young girl’s experience against a background of a country coming undone.” She added, “which is a story that can happen anywhere really.” In the case of Zimbabwe, we had, in Bulawayo’s words, a situation where things were falling apart in the recognizable ways of non-functional governments — political unrest, repression, economic collapse, et cetera. The tragedy of Darling’s generation is that they are 213

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betrayed by their own, through failure of leadership, and I was interested in how this affects what happens when a country starts unraveling, and what happens to its most vulnerable citizens. As I look back at that moment, I note that the students who took that class would have graduated in 2017, a year into the Trump administration. I cannot help but wonder how they will tell the story of that period. All the interviews I have done for LARB have been done with the aim to extend the classroom into the public sphere, and to expand both the duration and space of learning. It is no accident that I choose people to interview whose work I admire greatly, and I hope in each interview to both bring out the artists’ perception of aspects of their work I am most intrigued by and to learn myself new things that feed back into my appreciation of their work, and into the ways I teach. I have been immensely grateful for all LARB has done and continues to do. It is a rare gem — a vibrant, compelling, creative open space that has allowed me to do my thing, and others theirs as well. One way to put this: It’s a wonderful common reading room.

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T H E FA L L I N G A PA R T N E S S OF THINGS N O V I O L E T B U L A WA Y O

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iterature circulates in such unpredictable manners, flows amongst people of diverse backgrounds, changes hands between strangers, and from that moment on they are no longer as unknown to each other than formerly. Last summer, I met a young woman from CCNY who was visiting Stanford and who was working with me in a summer mentorship program. She was entranced by a book I had not heard of, We Need New Names, by the young Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo. The student was from Ghana, and felt strongly that what Bulawayo wrote of — the postcolonial world of Zimbabwe and then her relocation to Detroit — spoke to her life in important ways. As we read through the text together, I found it a remarkably 215

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Ovo, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 90 1/8 x 1 3/4 inches (203.2 x 228.9 x 4.4 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

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powerful novel. Not only does it connect with a tradition of African writing, it also seemed to echo in different ways the work of Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, and Toni Morrison. Each of these authors of course comes from a particular time and place, yet there is no doubt that they too are part of this unpredictable circulatory system. I was fortunate to have the chance to sit down and talk with Bulawayo recently, and asked her more about her background, writing, and outlook in this extensive interview. I was especially interested in how she locates her writing in a tradition of storytelling and literary narrative, and also within the context of African literature, culture, and politics. As her website states, NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of We Need New Names (May 2013) which has been recognized with the LA TimesBook Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award (second place), and the National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Fiction Selection. We Need New Names was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and selected to the New York Times Notable Books of 2013 list, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers list, and others. NoViolet’s story “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing. NoViolet earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She was

a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she now teaches as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction. NoViolet grew up in Zimbabwe. ¤ DAVID PALUMBO-LIU: First, thank you so much for speaking with me. I know you are busy on a writing project and have been touring extensively. It must be very different writing under these circumstances, compared to your first book. Or is it? Can you tell us a bit about what has perhaps changed in your approach to writing? NOVIOLET BULAWAYO: Thank you David. It’s definitely different from when I was writing Names; there wasn’t a book to travel for then, along with the attached hecticness — I mean I just had all the solitude and stillness I needed. Perhaps most importantly, nobody cared, and there were no expectations, and I absolutely loved just being left to my own devices. The solitude and stillness are not always readily available now, I have to actively fight for them, sometimes fake them, work a bit to channel my energy and give myself room to create, work even more to honor and protect the time and process of writing. Thankfully I’m back at work, doing what I need to be doing, and quite excited to be writing the way I need to be again. But, really, I can only complain with restraint — Names is such a lucky book from all that has happened to it, and it’s still great to share it with readers everywhere. Many interviewers have spoken to you about your use of a young girl as the narrative voice, which you do with such authenticity and sensitivity. You are able to tackle tremendously complex and 217

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difficult subjects through this voice, and have them appear both as they might appear to a young girl, but also in a way that reveals their rather deep significance. The question of hunger, for example, appears as a gut-level experience which most of us can only vaguely and distantly relate to, and use those sensations to get at the reality of Zimbabwe at that time; you attach that felt experience to rather profound political and historical insights that go well beyond that girl’s conscious understanding. Why was it important to tell the story in this way?

in a situation like the Zim that inspired Names, which in some ways is different from the Zim of now by the way. The dilemma of children is that they are not really major players in the grand narrative at all, but of course still suffer profoundly as the most delicate members of society, as we know from the general condition of children in times and places of crises all over the world. But still I wanted Darling and her friends to be more than victims, I wanted them to push and direct and illuminate the conversation, and raise hard questions.

I wasn’t necessarily pushing for the reader to recognize anything specific, but to map a vulnerable young girl’s experience against a background of a country coming undone, which is a story that can happen anywhere really. I’ll quickly mention that I didn’t always start out with a girl narrator, early versions of Names were told in an adult perspective that ironically ended up falling short in achieving what Darling seems to have, and with less effort. I think to some of my favorite young narrators —Tambu in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Yunior in Junot Díaz’s Drown, Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and I remember that I loved them for some of the same reasons you bring up, including their being acute observers and commentators of the world, so perhaps a part of it could speak to the possibilities of this kind of narrator, how sharp and alive and resonant and engaging a child’s gaze can actually be, even as the world is complex. I’d say for me the child narrator also allowed for this giving voice to a marginalized and powerless character, someone we ordinarily wouldn’t hear from, and this on its own is important, in the sense that children are the real victims

You told me you came from a line of storytellers. Could you expand on that a bit? How did that influence you, both when you were very young and heard your relatives tell stories, and then when you began yourself to write? I do come from a space where stories were told, especially when I was growing up, part of the air we breathed, and I was lucky that my grandmother and my father were some of the most riveting storytellers I have ever known. And, sure enough, their stories were a big part of what sparked and sustained my imagination when I was young (my grandmother’s were mostly fictional, my father was in the nonfiction department so I had a nice balance) and quite inevitably from an early age I became interested in language, character, image, tone, composition, and other components of the verbal arts, though I couldn’t always necessarily name these things at the time. And of course in the everyday, people dealt in language — in my ‘80s, ‘90s Gwanda and Bulawayo, where I grew up, men went to work and a good number of women stayed home, running things and talking neighborhood

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truths and lies and hopes and dreams and lives — we even did live Twitter years and years before it came to the US on fancy gadgets. It was beautiful — you woke up everyday to inhale language, and you understood it as currency and character, as something alive, something that made things move. I loved it all, and I know I would not have become the kind of writer that I am without this specific background, and indeed when I started writing seriously, this influence came out, especially through voice and style, because I don’t necessarily imagine just a reading audience, but a listening one too, so I must actively write for the ear, an ear that also has to see things of course. And, somewhere inside me I suspect is a consideration for a reader who isn’t a reader, you know, someone who has no time for books but might, if you dished it out in a certain way — I’m always figuring out how to write for this type of person as well. And lastly, I’d also say the influence also comes out in my English — it definitely gets its energy from my mother tongue, IsiNdebele, it being the language that all the different storifying happened in, so that my imagination naturally understands it as the language of telling stories. I see its fingerprints in all I do. Well that leads to an obvious question, so obvious that I didn’t even write it down initially; but I was just wondering, what authors influenced you? I like the term “spoke to me” better — and my list includes my favorite Zimbabwean writer, Yvonne Vera, who was especially important to me in my early years. There’s Tsitsi Dangarembga, who wrote one of my favorite books, Nervous Conditions, she is another, and so is Junot Díaz.

Toni Morrison, Colum McCann, Zakes Mda, Jhumpa Lahiri, IsiNdebele writers Barbara Makhalisa and N.S. Sigogo, and many others. And of course, in the list are the many storytellers I’ve known, two of which I mentioned, they are not writers, but when I think about “influences,” I’d say these are even at the top of my list. In terms of influences and legacies, I was also noting how throughout Names the phrase “things fall apart” recurs, an obvious reference to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Can you talk a little about that? Achebe was certainly in my imagination, and I was interested in continuing the dialogue of the falling apartness of things, but of course in a different context, i.e. a nation not in direct confrontation with the beast of colonialism, but with a different animal, seeing as it is that Names is happening about three decades after the fall of colonialism. The scars are, and will always be there of course, but the beast has changed shape. That’s exactly what I was going to ask you, Nigeria in the ‘60s and then Zimbabwe after 1980. The Names’s Zimbabwe is specifically the Zim of the 2000s, which is different from the ‘80s, ‘90s Zim — decades of promise, excellence, and stability for the most part. Enter the 2000s and the beast that is the nation starts eating itself, and selfrule and independence and black power don’t save it, and things do fall apart in the recognizable ways of non-functional governments — political unrest, repression, economic collapse, et cetera. The tragedy of Darling’s generation is that they are betrayed by their own, through 219

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failure of leadership, and I was interested in how this affects what happens when a country starts unraveling, and what happens to its most vulnerable citizens. I have to mention that engaging like this means I’m also desperately interested in how we can move forward of course, as most are. I write because I care. You said you first intended to attend law school. What changed your mind? Do you see anything that you hoped to do as a lawyer seeping into your writing? Or do you see those two things as totally separate? I did intend to study law, yes, but that was mostly a result of coming from a background where you’re expected to pursue sensible and practical things, and if you told people, at least at the time I came of age, that you were studying “law,” “engineering,” “medicine,” et cetera, then you were a person-person you know, whereas “writer” or “artist” would be a waste of time. Of course it’s perfectly understandable for families to push their kids toward “real,” “tangible” careers, but that unfortunately always means traditional fields; the arts can just be another distant country for those who cannot afford the luxury. I sometimes see the same dynamic play out with the many young people who come through my classes, the agonizing over what to do, what they love versus what is practical and what not, what the parents expect, and of course I just wish them the courage to sort it all out. It’s not always easy, like most life decisions. Anyway, I suppose what changed my mind, or should I say, what opened my eyes, was finding myself on the page after taking classes at Kalamazoo Valley Community College in Michigan (I can’t

speak highly enough of that school) and understanding that writing was what I was meant to be doing, which then shaped the 12 or so years between taking my first creative writing class, and the publication of my debut novel. My law aspirations at 18, 19 were vague, I was still in the process of figuring myself out, but as an artist I’m interested in literature as a social project that allows for imagining ethics-driven representations and interrogations of the world, that allows us to talk about and around rights, wrongs, problems, issues of justice, et cetera. I imagine this is where my powerless and marginalized characters, normally children and women, as well as my socially engaged themes, come from. There are some notable moments in your novel where you note the naïveté of Western aid workers. You do not doubt their good intentions, it seems, but still you see a gap in understanding. Was your novel at least in part motivated by a desire to correct some notions people in the West have about Africa? What kinds of misconceptions do you feel it’s most important to address? The misconceptions about Africa are numerous, but I believe a better way to think about the issue is to perhaps consider why they exist in the first place — from cultural arrogance to problematic media representations to lack of information et cetera. And quickly, I’ll note that as an educator I’m quite surprised by how much Africa seems to be missing from the formative Western Curriculum, so that it’s possible for a student to get to college and complete it without encountering Africa in any meaningful and balanced way. And as we all know, uninformed young people 221

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make for a dangerous society, because these are future leaders and players who will, among other things, have to deal with Africa in one way or the other. Let’s prepare young people who are able to adequately engage with the world, period, not just Africa by the way. It is 2015 after all, and globalization is here. The NGO section in the novel is concerned about the culture of dependency, where the adults are in fact not inspired to take any initiative, but to simply wait for handouts, being disappointed when these don’t come on time. Where aid is concerned, people in the receiving end are better served by the type of intervention that also leads to self-empowerment, otherwise the aid itself can easily cease to be a solution and become a part of the problem. Even as I cast a light on it, the gap in understanding seems to me like it would need more than literature — I’m writing about characters of course, but they come from systems that are in many ways responsible for shaping who they are. It reminds me of how I sometimes watch America’s racial madness, count the black boys and black men that are still being murdered by white policemen, and it’s business as usual, and I think how mind-blowing that the prophetic James Baldwin spoke about these issues decades ago, and his literature did not, and is not, saving anybody, not counting the numerous contemporary writers who are writing around the issues everyday. Literature has its value of course, but systems need to have active participants, after all. Not everybody is reading. I read the novel as both a call to political action, but also a very realistic understanding of capacity and effectiveness. Has anything changed in terms of your 222

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optimism or pessimism about how positive change might come in Zimbabwe? As long as we are under the same leadership that failed the country, and that arrogantly believes that liberating the nation gave it the right to choke its dreams, and not be accountable, then I’m still disappointed, even as I’m grateful for the quiet. I mean, it is no longer the Zim of 200809, when I wrote the novel, and the crisis was at its height. I’ll say that to hope is human, so I do and still hope for the kind of leadership that is able to carry the country forward.

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H O R R O R S TO R I E S A R E LO V E S TO R I E S K E L LY L I N K

INTERVIEWED BY HELEN OYE YEMI

’m still not sure exactly who I should thank for alerting me to Kelly Link’s story collection Stranger Things Happen, but I do remember when it came my way. I was at university, a time when books and references to those books seem to circulate mysteriously between local and international bookshops, libraries, your room, and those of your friends’. It was just the right time to begin reading Link, who immediately became one of the first to come to mind when I think of writers who are most excitingly and alarmingly contemporary. In her work there is often more than a hint of sympathy for the ways in which technology and modernity complicate all the old predicaments connected to being human. 223

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In Link’s latest collection, Get in Trouble, stories like “The New Boyfriend,” “Valley of the Girls,” and “The Summer People” are laced with humorous resignation to the frequency of mind-body disconnects. Shifts in tone and atmosphere click together so artfully that you almost feel as if the words are changing you as you read them. How on earth does she do this? In the conversation that follows, Kelly Link generously gives thinking time to questions in which I unsuccessfully attempt to uncover her methods. (Well, I had to try.) We corresponded by e-mail, and here’s what we wrote: Helen Oyeyemi: Your new collection is called Get in Trouble. Are there ways in which you see fiction as getting its readers into trouble? Or do stories have a greater tendency to get us out of trouble? Or both? Is there something else to keep in mind about the statement/invitation/command of this book’s title? Kelly Link: The title has a lot to do with a realization I had about the underlying mechanics of narrative. Which is that trouble drives story. Certainly it drives these stories. What did I think, previously, that stories were about? I have no idea. I spend so much time in my own life considering consequences and imagining outcomes, that it’s a kind of joy to inhabit characters who don’t overthink. Or who, perhaps, think but act anyway. You’ve mentioned that you feel a sense of fullness upon completing stories, and I remember feeling quite mystified and delighted by that. Mystified because my own experience of writing is feeling drained afterwards, but delighted by the possibility of stories actually nourishing

their teller. To me it also sounds as if stories occur to you as external chains of ideas and it’s then necessary to take them in and make them presentable. Is that it, or not at all? And now I’m trying to figure out what a workable metaphor for writing would be, when I think of how I do it, and what it feels like to be done with it. I did have the sense of pushing back from the table, I suppose. And of satiation. But I think what I meant was more that I had too much in my head, all the finished stories jostling around, that I couldn’t find a way to clear the cupboard for more. This last year was one in which I got a great deal of writing done, at least for me. I’d finished one story, “I Can See Right Through You,” which took almost two years, and then I got three other stories done as well. What was it that kept “I Can See Right Through You” in development for two years? Could it have been finding the right beginning? (I’m thinking of that anecdote Italo Calvino tells about the artist who required ten years, a country house, and 12 servants before he was in exactly the right frame of mind to draw a perfect image of a crab with a single brushstroke.) “I Can See Right Through You” took such a long time because I knew the kind of relationship that I wanted the two central figures to have, but not much about them individually. For a while they were two women. I gave them a failed marriage. Some children. I saved something like a dozen different openings (I’d get about three to four thousand words in, and then be stymied again) so that later on, I could go back and see if it were possible to figure 225

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out a better way to proceed in the future. But it’s still a mystery to me, how to make yourself find the right way forward at a smarter pace. The slower I work, the more I stumble. As for my requirements, it did take renting a friend’s house in Polperro, Cornwall and the company of other writers, for the rest of the story to come clear. Stories usually arrive as fragments that attach to questions. Sometimes the question is from an editor: Would you like to write a story in honor of Ray Bradbury [“Two Houses” Or, I’m thinking about two ghost stories told to me by two friends, plus a desire to write about a murder-house-asrepulsive-art-object. The bits that go into the story are things that have been stuck to me for a while. Sticky things. So less external chains than a Katamari-style ball of the like and the unlike. And once I have the question and the material, it’s a matter of establishing a tonal quality that will suit. This often takes the longest to figure out. There’s a shift that happens when I’m writing, in which the internal voice moves from, “What about this? Maybe? Or maybe this?” to a more definitive series of yes/no. Eventually there are more “yes” responses than “no”. But I can still look at stories and see a line of dialogue or description that never quite got to “yes”. They’re placeholders for whatever I wanted to do that I couldn’t get done. I’m always lending bits of stories to other stories, and then having to come up with new bits. It makes sense that “Two Houses” has a Bradbury connection. There’s a quiet expansiveness to it that reminded me of my favorite Bradbury book, Something Wicked This Way Comes: a sort of circular wave silently and rapidly expanding 226

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at the heart of a lake, the source of the commotion not (yet) visible. Trouble! I also like the leaving in of dialogue and descriptions that don’t necessarily smooth the reader’s path — yes, they’re placeholders, but for a reader they can also be seen as elements that build a story’s logic. Lending bits of stories to other stories and having to make up new bits (something I find myself doing, too) makes me think that once the trouble in a story revs up it doesn’t ever really wind down. Now I’d like to know what, in your opinion, is the difference between a love story and a horror story? So how it works is that I immediately begin to think of the similarities, rather than the differences. The idea of falling, that vertiginous feeling, the idea of being seen and known; a kind of attention to the body — attentiveness to the being, the presence, the whole of oneself or of the other; being seen and known, absolutely; absorption. The extension of oneself into the unknown. I think of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. I suppose that was a bit of a trick question because I, too, see more similarities than differences there and it’s a perspective I’ve recognized reading your stories. The Haunting of Hill House is full of scares, but one of the biggest for me was the realization that it’s a love story. Though maybe the love story bit falls under conceptual shock. I do believe there must be a difference between love stories and horror stories though, that it’s more than just labeling; the difference may be subtle and may often dissolve, but it’s a pet project of mine to find or tell a story or two that knows what this difference is . . .

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“Shock” seems like the right word for that place where we aren’t quite sure what emotion we’re experiencing: intensity in the moment that swamps meaning. Let’s posit that a love story can be sustained longer than a horror story. (“Love bears all things.”) Perhaps a love story is also a more capable container? Horror and love are also maybe modes of interpretation/ reading. One of my favorite things about your writing is the gentle but implacable escalation of strangeness. The shift always takes me surprise, and then once the first blast has receded I marvel at the way it was done. Reading your ghost stories is a bit like walking on moving platforms, with the sound or vision that’s to be feared always just ahead or long past, having gone by in a flash. I was thinking about other writers who also work with atmosphere in idiosyncratic ways: Shirley Jackson, who warns you quite clearly that all is far from well but somehow amplifies the moment of crisis beyond expectation, and Robert Aickman, whose narrative preference seems to be the equivalent of keeping you in the gloom with a blindfold on and then shaking things up by allowing an occasional peep through the fabric. Hidden somewhere in this rambling comment is a question about technique and how important it is to you as a reader and writer. Do you reread your favorite stories and novels, for instance? Is there anything in particular you look for in a story (or poem, or essay) while you’re reading it, or any structural requirements that you have when it comes to your own?

Thank you! Coming from you, this gives me the most perfect kind of happiness. I’ve been rereading Robert Aickman recently. I keep going back to “The Cicerones” and “Rosamund’s Bower.” Although “Ringing the Changes” may always be my favorite. When I write I spend a great deal of time putting cloths over all the mirrors, so to speak. There are always the things that you want to be clear to the reader. There are the things that you want them to make up their own minds about. There are the things that you wish them to be surprised by. And then there are the things that you want to leave lying there unanswered. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was a Reader’s Digest book called Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. Faces that appeared as stains on tiles, the Russian countess who dreams that her father appears and says, “Your happiness is at an end.” Kaspar Hauser: I think I memorized most of it. That countess in the Reader’s Digest book — do you remember if it transpired that her dream father was right?? Her father says to her, “Your happiness is at an end. He has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino.” She has this dream three times, and she and her husband, a Russian general, search on a map for Borodino and cannot find it. But then her husband goes off to fight a battle against Napoleon’s army, and he dies in a place called Borodino — and as in the dream, her father comes into the room where she is staying, and says the words from her dream. I do reread books and stories, all the time. Often children’s books and ghost stories, especially anthologies of ghost stories. Stephen King’s novels or collections. I reread things that I loved, or that 227

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had a particular effect on me. I once asked a bunch of horror writers why it was still pleasurable to reread scary stories when their power to scare us has diminished. The writer Nick Mamatas said, “I read to feel a sense of dread.” Are you writing something about Angela Carter? I was asked if I would write an introduction to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber last summer and agreed, and then spent far too much time not only rereading her short stories, but also reading various introductions. I felt I needed a crash course in how to write that kind of thing. At the same time I was also reading Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s fairy tale anthologies. Reading other people’s reworkings of fairy tales was a way of reading fairy tales, of course. Seeing how other people read them. What mattered to me with Angela Carter was her voice, the way the register switched from high to low — from an arch, almost nails-on-blackboard surface doodling to something that was almost sodden with meaning. (“Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation.” I love “The Lady of the House of Love” best, the way you are moved from the horror of the gothic to the horror of World War I, on a bicycle, of all things!) Her fairy tale stories had a kind of show-your-work scribbliness to them. (I read Tristram Shandy a bit later.) I liked that quality. The part of writing that is most pleasurable to me is problem-solving. Story math. How do I achieve a certain kind of mood? What can I leave out? What are the different ways to read the fantastic bits of the story? (The introduction of the fantastic means that there are going to 228

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be metaphorical meanings, and this gets messy very quickly, especially with horror. What are we afraid of ? Who is the other? Who is being punished and why? What is precious or a marker of beauty/ value/worthiness of love? Why?) Angela Carter, working her way through a fairy tale, takes it apart at the same time so that you can see the seams that she sees. What was the last thing you read or saw (art exhibitions, films, TV) that took you aback in a good way? So, three things quickly. An exhibit of Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCa, and a short film about the 65 people who drafted and painted the wall drawing installation according to his recipe. Tanya Tagaq, a singer. The Vampire Diaries, which has all my favorite things in it: recursive patterns, including doppelgangers; unreliable narrators interacting with each other; lots of surprise kissing and also surprise impaling; oh, and a reading that the poet Mary Ruefle gave at the Tin House Workshop.

ART TK

Roula Nassar, untitled, 2019, ink on paper, 10 x 18 inches.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Tanya Agathocleous is a professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.Her research interests include 19th and 20th century British and Anglophone literature and empire and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge, 2011) and Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (Cornell, 2021); has edited Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent for Broadview Press and Great Expectations and Sultana's Dream for Penguin; and is co-editor (with Ann Dean) of Teaching Literature: A Companion (Palgrave, 2002). Along with a number of academic reviews and articles, she has also written for Public Books and LARB. Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her family. Sarah Chihaya is an assistant professor of English at Princeton University, and senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is one of four authors of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2020). Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), and The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010). She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary 230

Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, International Griffin Poetry Prize (Translation), DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship. Sophie Duvernoy is a PhD student in German literature at Yale University, where she focuses on literature and aesthetic theory of the Weimar period. Her translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin was published by New York Review Books in 2019, and she is the recipient of the 2015 Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators. She is now working on a translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers and Emmy Hennings’s Das Brandmal (The Stigma). Her writing and translations have appeared in the Paris Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Man’s Land, and The Offing. Kaya Genç, the Istanbul correspondent of the Los Angeles Review of Books, is the author of four books: The Lion and the Nightingale (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris, 2019), Under the Shadow (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris, 2016), An Istanbul Anthology (Bloomsbury/AUC Press, 2015), and Macera (Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 2008). The Economist called Under the Shadow a “refreshingly balanced” book whose author “has announced himself as a voice to be listened to.” The Times Literary Supplement praised the way The Lion and the Nightingale “grounds Turkish current affairs in the context of the past couple of decades and explains the attraction of extreme politics to the country’s youth.” He contributed to the world’s leading journals and newspapers, including two frontpage stories in The New York Times, cover stories in The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and the Times Literary Supplement. Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the Boston Review’s Discovery Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships

c o n t r i b u t o r s

from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, Granta, Iowa Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy. Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in US history, as well as an awardwinning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied sociology. She has written for The New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House. Jorie Graham is the author, most recently, of Fast and From The New World (Poems 1976– 2014). She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard. Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, photographer, and novelist. Her recent hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton, 2020), was selected as the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2021 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a 2020 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths's visual and literary work has appeared widely, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, and many others. She has received fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, and Yaddo. Griffiths's debut novel, Promise, is forthcoming from Random House. She lives in New York City. Sheri-Marie Harrison is an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she researches and teaches contemporary literature and mass culture of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Postcolonial Jamaican Literature, and among her ongoing projects is an author study of

Marlon James and a monograph on genre in contemporary Black fiction. She is also one of three co-editors of the Routledge Companion to the Novel (Routledge, forthcoming 2023). Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems, A Hundred Lovers, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2022. He is the author of Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. A former Stegner Fellow, he teaches at Stanford University. E. Alex Jung is a features writer at New York Magazine. Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, three books of art and cultural criticism, and After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is a co-editor of the independent press Semiotext(e), alongside Hedi El Kholti and Sylvère Lotringer. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at ArtCenter. Summer Kim Lee is an assistant professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the best selling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, among others. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia and is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. MariNaomi is the award-winning author and illustrator of the graphic books Kiss & Tell: A 231

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Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22, Dragon's Breath and Other True Stories, Turning Japanese, I Thought YOU Hated ME, the Life on Earth YA trilogy, and Dirty Produce. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, the Smithsonian, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Japanese American Museum. She’s the founder and administrator of the Cartoonists of Color, Queer Cartoonists, and Disabled Cartoonists databases. She lives in Los Angeles with a menagerie of rescue critters and her partner, Gary. D. A. Miller was for many years the John F. Hotchkis Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent books include Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD (Columbia, 2021) and Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago, 2016). Yxta Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, and law professor. The author of nine books, her most recent are the story collection The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (University of Nevada Press, 2020), and the novel, Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Press, 2021). She has won a Whiting Award and an Art Writer's Grant. In 2022, she will be a fellow at the Huntington Library and a Walter E. Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell University and the author of Unbury Our Dead With Song (a novel about competing Tizita musicians), The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership, the novels Mrs. Shaw, Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness. A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery 232

Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Helen Oyeyemi is a British novelist and writer of short stories. Since 2014 her home has been in Prague. David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. His latest book is Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back, forthcoming. Michael Robbins is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Walkman (Penguin Books, 2021). He is an associate professor of English at Montclair State University. Mary Ruefle’s latest book is Dunce (Wave Books, 2019) and her poem here published is in it. Mary lives in Vermont. Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) and The Verging Cities (Colorado State University, 2015). Winner of a Windham Campbell Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and a Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she currently is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of South Florida. Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright grant to Morocco, among other

c o n t r i b u t o r s

awards and recognitions. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs.

writings on books, film, jazz, and visual art have appeared in publications including Best American Essays 2018, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review.

Prageeta Sharma’s recent poetry collection is Grief Sequence, out from Wave Books. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award and a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize, she taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.

Ben Wurgaft is a writer, historian, and critic. His books include Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Penn, 2016) and Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California, 2019).

Min Hyoung Song is a professor of English at Boston College, where he is also the director of the Asian American Studies Program and a member of the steering committee for the Environmental Studies Program. He is the author of several books, including Climate Lyricism (Duke, 2022), and the co-editor of several volumes, including The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature. His words have also appeared in numerous academic journals and edited volumes, and in venues like The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chicago Review of Books, and Public Books, in addition to LARB.

Amita Bhatt received her BFA from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, India and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, USA. Bhatt’s work steadfastly explores conflict, and ideology in the war-torn world we inhabit. Armed with humor, paradox, symbolism and mythology, Bhatt creates complex worlds that implode and explode as she encourages her audience to reflect on the endless cycles of conception and annihilation, highlighting the impermanence of all things, animate and inanimate. Her protagonists negotiate abundant, primordial and potent spaces. They oscillate precariously between the ambivalent edges of insatiable desire and aversion; knowledge and catastrophe; monumentality and sacrifice, passion and destruction. They experience and exist within suspense filled spaces and are armed with the indefatigable resilience of the human spirit. Amita Bhatt’s art has been exhibited at prestigious venues and her works are included in noteworthy collections globally. Amita Bhatt is represented by Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Clifford Thompson is the author of Signifying Nothing: A Novel (iUniverse, 2009), Love for Sale and Other Essays (Autumn House Press, 2013), Twin of Blackness: A Memoir (Autumn House Press, 2015), and What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (Other Press, 2019). He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men, due out from Other Press in the fall of 2022. His personal essays and

F E AT U R ED A RT I S T S

Born in Seattle, Washington, Noah Davis (1983–2015) studied painting at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where, in 2012, he 233

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founded the Underground Museum in the city’s Arlington Heights neighbourhood with his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis. Davis’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California (2008, 2010, and 2013); Tilton Gallery, New York (2009 and 2011); PAPILLION, Los Angeles (2014); and the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago (2016), among others. Noah Davis: Imitation of Wealth, which had previously been presented at the Underground Museum in 2013, opened at LA MOCA in 2015 on the same day as the artist’s untimely death at age thirty-two, due to complications from a rare cancer. In 2016, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, presented the twoperson exhibition Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum— the first large-scale museum show to explore Davis’s work alongside that of his brother’s. In 2020, an acclaimed solo presentation of Davis’s work was on view at David Zwirner, New York, a select portion of which will travel to the Underground Museum in December 2021. The artist’s work is featured in the landmark exhibition 30 Americans, which was organised by the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, and has been travelling extensively throughout the United States from 2008 to the present (the exhibition is currently on view at the Arlington Museum of Art, Texas, through 5 September 2021, and subsequently travels to the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, in October 2021). Davis’s work has been included in other notable group exhibitions, including ones held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (2010 and 2020); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012 and 2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2017); and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams (2018). Davis was the recipient of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 2013 Art Here and Now (AHAN): Studio Forum award. Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of numerous 234

institutions, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Rubell Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Born in 1978 in Saudi Arabia, Roula Nassar lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Asuka Anastacia Ogawa (b. 1988, Tokyo, Japan) creates large figurative paintings that depict androgynous children in chimerical dreamscapes, otherworldly scenes formed from solid fields of color and flat picture planes. Her subjects have wide thin eyes that gaze forward, piercing the fourth wall. Ogawa conjures these compositions through an exercise that embraces unmediated impulse and channels the sense of curiosity, wonder and play paramount to childhood. Ogawa was born in Tokyo where she spent much of her childhood. When she was three years old, Ogawa moved from this vertical urban backdrop to rural Brazil, where she passed a handful of formative early years amongst wandering farm animals and rushing waterfalls. The artist later relocated to Sweden when she was a teen, where she attended high school, and soon thereafter she moved to London to pursue her BFA from Central Saint Martins. After having her first solo show at Henry Taylor’s studio in Los Angeles in 2017, she had a solo show at Blum & Poe Tokyo in 2020 and at Blum & Poe Los Angeles in 2021. Her work is in the collection of X Museum, Beijing, China. She is currently based in New York and Los Angeles

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The COVID-19 pandemic will forever be

American higher education is under attack today as never before. A growing right-wing narrative portrays academia as corrupt, irrelevant, costly, and dangerous to both students and the nation. Budget cuts, attacks on liberal arts and humanities disciplines, faculty layoffs and retrenchments, technology displacements, corporatization, and campus closings have accelerated over the past decade. In this timely volume, Ronald G. Musto draws on historical precedent – Henry VIII’s dissolution of British monasteries in the 1530s – for his study of the current threats to American higher education. He shows how a triad of forces – authority, separateness, and innovation – enabled monasteries to succeed, and then suddenly and unexpectedly to fail. Musto applies this analogy to contemporary academia. Despite higher education’s vital centrality to American culture and economy, a powerful, anti-liberal narrative is severely damaging its reputation among parents, voters, and politicians. Musto offers a comprehensive account of this narrative from the mid twentieth century to the present, as well as a new set of arguments to counter criticisms and rebuild the image of higher education.

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Quarterly Journal, no. 32: Tenth Anniversary Anthology

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NEW BLACK GOTHIC

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ATONEMENT

FROM "DEAR WHITENESS"

ORPHAN JEONG JEONG-JA

DESK DRAWERS AND

JOURNEY OF MILES

REFLECTIONS ON LARB

YOUR HOMIE FROM ANOTHER

TOO CLOSE, TOO COMPROMISED: KILLING

ELIO’S EDUCATION

UNTUCKING RUPAUL’S

ABSENT FIGURES IN

MARROW IN THE BONES TRANSLATING DÖBLIN’S “BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ”

IT’S COMPLICATED: PETER

BEAUTY, MOURNING, AND MELANCHOLY IN AFRICA39

UNFILMABLE

LIFE (NARRATIVE) IN THE END TIMES

REFLECTIONS ON LARB

SUBLIMELY UGLY