In the first issue of Volume 48, the Nass is more back than ever, reading, listening to country music, and getting away from it all.
The Nassau Weekly
Volume 48, Number 1 February 22, 2024
In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com
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February 22, 2024
Balls Dropped
Masthead 4 6 8
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13 17 20
Cover Attribution
Editor-in-Chief Events Editor Charlie Nuermberger John Emmett Souder
Of Friendship, Sex, and Bacon By Ceci McWilliams Designed by Jasmine Chen
A Yoga Ashram, Donna Tart’s The Secret History, and Discobitch’s C’est Beau la Bourgeoisie By Mia Mann-Shafir Designed by Vera Ebong
A Summer Education in Hawaii By Zheng Guan Designed by Jasmine Chen and Eman Ali
Sorry About the Air Conditioners Being Off: Townes Van Zandt, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Aesthetic Signatures of Heat By Charlie Nuermberger Designed by Vera Ebong and Chloe Kim
New Year, New Me / I Was Cutting My Fingernails and Eavesdropping By Emmett Souder Designed by Hazel Flaherty
Fruit Flies By Ayse Basak Ersoy Designed by Cathleen Weng and Chas Brown
Letter from the editor: You can read Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide note if you want but only on Genius Lyrics for some reason and only while 50jitsteppa offers up a studio performance of his track “I Know” in a concurrently playing video. It’s sort of a deep cut for 50jitsteppa and sort of mystifying. I’d like to imagine it’s exactly how Thompson would want it, at least until 50jitsteppa finishes, and Noah Kahan’s mug comes up on autoplay. The whole thing’s 51 words (the note), and Thompson titled it “Football Season’s Over,” and he’s right. The Nass put $19 worth of Fliff Coins on a six-leg parlay that never ended up materializing. Football season’s over. We think that vaping can be sexy as long as the device is small and sleek and unextravagantly flavored. We think that smut and scary movies are the twin ur-forms. We think My 600 Lb Life is zeitgeist literature, and we hate it. We think, to tell you the truth, the manifesto is a tired form and adolescent, maybe even pedestrian. Maybe, we think that Taylor Swift has mostly forfeited a moral status of personhood. Maybe the necessary intervention is a dada that rips itself free from the tongue and the cheek. Maybe it multiplies and heterogenizes and selects for sincerity. All my love, Charlie Nuermberger, EIC
Publishers Isabelle Clayton Ellie Diamond Managing Editors Sofiia Shapovalova Julia Stern Creative Director Otto Eiben
Alexander Picoult
Web Editor Abani Ahmed
Historian Jonathan Dolce
Trustees Alexander Wolff 1979 Senior Editors Katie Duggan 2019 Frankie Duryea Leah Boustan 2000 Eva Vesely Leif Haase 1987 Marc Fisher 1980 Junior Editors Rafael Abrahams Ivy Chen 2013 Melanie Garcia Robert Faggen 1982 Teo Grosu Sharon Hoffman 1991 Marisa Warman Sharon Lowe 1985 Hirschfield Mia Mann-Shafir Alex Norbrook Aiko Offner Sasha Rotko Head Copy Editors Cailyn Tetteh Sabrina Yeung Design Editor Vera Ebong
Crossword By Simon Marotte Designed by Vera Ebong and Alexander Picoult
Audiovisual Editor Mia Dedic
Art Director Alexander Picoult
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Volume 48, Number 1
This Week:
Verbatim:
About us:
Fri
7:30p Richardson Sinfonia Concert Presents: A Night at the Opera
8:00p Chapel B A C H: The Gamut from A to G
Tues
4:30p McCosh Hall Edward Said Memorial Lecture
8:00p Taplin Princeton Sound Kitchen presents Gallicantus
Sat
3:00p Frist PSOPH Weekly Philosophy Discussion
Wed
10:30a PPL Book Club: “Musicophilia” by Oliver Sacks
12:15p Robertson Iran & Persian Gulf Studies Wednesday Seminar Series
Sun
2:00p Woolworth Princeton Undergraduate Composers Collective
5:00p Frist Umqombothi Open House - Princeton’s premiere African acapella group 7:00a Frist Taekwondo Musubi Sale
Thurs
12:30p Chapel After Noon Concert
7:30p Firestone Crafternoons at Firestone
Mon
5:30p Frist Zen Whispers— Meditation Classes with Chung Tai
4:30p Bowen Lincoln, the 1860 Election, and the Future of Slavery in America
Got Events?
Email John Emmett Souder at js0735@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.
For advertisements, contact Isabelle Clayton at ic4953@princeton.edu.
Overheard in Murray Dodge Student, talking to a potential English major: “Try the starving artist thing for a while, and if it doesn’t work out, you can always be a consultant!”
Overheard near New South Athlete, talking to a group of childless parents: “That writing class…most important moment of your life, probably.”
Overheard on a bus traversing Sicily Former HUM student: “I want to embrace the Russian tradition of suffering.”
Overheard in Tower Fed-up frosh: “If all the men here are assholes, they might as well be 6-foot assholes.”
Overheard whilst stretching Pretentious yoga enthusiast: “I feel like if you have issues they’re not of the mermaid variety.”
Overheard in RoMa Frosh: “Where do you report a bully in college?”
Overheard in East Asian Library Promiscuous Freshman Bottom: “Because when it’s uncut the tip has a little tang to it.”
Overheard in Whitman Courtyard Disgruntled south campus resident: “Every walk in Princeton is 3 minutes too long.”
The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit writing and art. To submit, email your work to thenassauweekly@gmail.com by 10 p.m. on Thursday. Include your name, netid, word count, and title. We hope to see you soon!
Overheard in Tiger Tea Room Cloister Bro: “Do you ever try to figure out if a guy is sexist before you date him?” Cloister Bro’s Female Friend: “If they’re still talking to me after seeing “feminist” in my Twitter bio that’s a good sign.”
Overheard in Terrace Gay man: “Gay twins scare the shit out of me.” Overheard on the street Well-meaning white girl: “I’ve never felt more, like, not around white people. Not bad, just different.” Overheard outside Ivy WASP-y Ivy Member: “The WASPs are up to something…” Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com
Read us: nassauweekly.com Contact thenassauweekly@gmail.com us: Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly Join us: We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5 p.m. in Bloomberg 044!
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February 22, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY JASMINE CHEN
Of Friendship, Sex, and Bacon
for ourselves—one of competence, ease, and maybe even warmth—we must keep some secrets.
How to conceal, expose, and generally deal with the high stakes of early February.
But are we really all that capablBut are we really all that capable of secrecy? Too many secrets, Bacon thought, rot the soul. Just as we must expel diseases of the body, we must release secrets of the mind. Cue friendship, or better yet, perceptive friends.
By CECI MCWILLIAMS
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t is February 6th. These days, image matters. At the time I am writing this, people are taking a few extra seconds to choose which sweater to wear in the morning. They are swiping on one more layer of mascara. They are going to great lengths to make sure their breath doesn’t stink. There are toothbrushes in backpacks. When the current circumstance of social life (it’s a B-word which I refuse to honor in print) concerns image, suddenly, it seems, everything does. Even lecture. Take the image of my professor. He is sweating through his polo
shirt. He is so excited about truth and dissimulation and anger that he must stop every few minutes to catch his breath. Occasionally he sits on the desk and kicks his legs out, anthology in lap, while he reads a quote. He hovers his hand in front of his face because he’s just accidentally spat. He is talking about the disappearance of the self. This man is unabashedly happy. I think it’s because he’s cracked the code of selfhood. He says that the self, when concealed, doesn’t just hide—it vanishes. He doesn’t know it, but he’s striking resounding chords. After class, some of his audience will march down Prospect to participate in a decades-old tradition that involves
editing the self in subtle ways. The contrarian might choose to eat alone, but she never wants to be forced to, much less in a college dining hall. But enough of that. My point, inspired by my professor, is that Francis Bacon was right on when he said that proper conduct hinges on the proper balance of concealment and exposure. In a self-soothing tactic, my friend and I say of those of us (all of us) who are awkward, at times accidentally brusque and not a little inept, that we didn’t get The Manual, an imaginary book of how to act. Perhaps this negotiation— between revealing and concealing—is the true substance of The Manual. In other words, to construct the image we all envision
You’re compulsively vacuuming the rug—I almost think you got dumped; You think she’s an idiot—I can see it in your eyes; Have you been sleeping okay? Your outfit is uncharacteristically boring. Perhaps my examples exaggerate the wisdom of friends. Perhaps true friendship is simply the failure of concealment. In any case, if covering ourselves up proves futile in friendship, the technique is fatal when it comes to seduction. Sexiness, my professor observed, is partial concealment. Evidently the same rules apply to attraction as to social conduct:
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reveal just enough to inspire intrigue. Hide the rest to preserve mystery. Again, my sage professor: this is why nudist colonies are so depressing! They have destroyed eroticism! Those in the business of romantic coaching—a field, when you think about it, couldn’t not exist—agree. There’s a book I won’t recommend called Why Men Love Bitches. It’s the kind of cover you hide under your anthology of Bacon. It’s also the kind of cover you can’t forget. The title makes the answer to a stupid question irresistible, and one suddenly can’t go another minute without knowing: why do men love bitches?
on. Those who read Argov and begin to believe dissimulation merits love, please turn to Selin. She counters, “If there were rewards you got from lying, I didn’t want them.” Selin doesn’t want to play games, at least not the ones that involve concealing the self and, if Bacon was right, minimizing it to oblivion. Yet Argov insists she’s not playing games. She’s empowering women to leverage romance to their advantage. All this so you don’t have to feel like a doormat. All this balancing of restraint and affection, all this crafting of intrigue so that you don’t ever have to do the hard work of saying out loud, “I’d rather not be a welcome mat, please and thank you.” Instead, choose wisely what you share. Do favors sparingly. Don’t make requests so he knows you’re self-sufficient. In other words, calculate. And what is a game, if not the calculation of risk and reward? The author, Sherry Argov, is kind of famous. In addition to understanding why men love bitches, she also knows why they marry bitches. The masses demand and she delivers, doing some strong work in transforming women from “doormats” to “dream girls.” Don’t sacrifice your friends and passions for him. Don’t go out of your way to see him. Don’t wash his socks. Remember: he’s no Park Place, just one of those forgettable purple properties. She almost redeems herself as a vaguely feminist author of seduction guides until she crushes you with the predictable conclusion: do these things for
yourself—and he’ll like you even more. He’s a hunter. Men love to fix things. It’s enough to make you throw the book across the room if you weren’t laughing instead. Selin, the protagonist in Either/ Or, a novel by Elif Batuman, might have a word with Argov. All the women in her family are too virtuous to engage in the nonsense Argov prescribes. Being honest about your feelings is always better. Turns out Pushkin thought the same. Selin says, “I loved Pushkin for calling out the kind of people who conflated discretion and virtue.” Discretion might be a business strategy, but it is no hill to die
If that’s what love is–a game– then I think we’re better off as friends. If the self disappears when we cover it up, then I commend the nudists, but I’m more interested in saving the self without having to freeze. It’s February 6th. My professor wore shorts today. He seems to have figured some things out.
Those who read the Nassau Weekly and begin to believe dissimulation merits love, please turn to Ceci McWilliams.
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February 22, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG
A YOGA ASHRAM, DONNA TART’S THE SECR AND DISCOBITCH’S C’EST “In high school I once wore my Pitbulls for Obama t-shirt (turned muscle tank) — which depicts three pitbulls, a speech bubble attached to one of them, saying “we don’t need no stinking lipstick”...”
I
By MIA MANN-SHAFIR
sit on my mat. It’s 7:58am, and I’ve already swum in the ocean, taken a freezing shower, eaten two granola bars, and bellowed out four, or maybe twelve, Sanskrit chants. My knees, an aching red, remind me of my twice-daily prostration. (There are five monks presently at the ashram. That means a whole lot of bowing for me, plus a whole lot of up-close encounters with feet (monks usually do not wear shoes)). As I wait for my first daily yoga asana class to begin (two per day, each an hour and 45 minutes long), I bury my nose deep in Donna Tartt (unlike the aforementioned monk-foot encounter, this I mean figuratively). I scratch at my bug bites and tug at my sopping wet t-shirt, and then I freeze at a line spoken by the protagonist of The Secret History: “I had a confused idea that my dissatisfaction was bohemian.” You know when the professor brings up a “tardiness issue” at the end of class, after you, and you alone, and you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of the semester, have stumbled in late? That’s kind of what reading this
line felt like. I first discovered the ashram in February of last year, at a time when I felt a particular disdain for the world and all pleasures and joys so-associated. Thinking myself superior to, and yet simultaneously terrified of the Thursdaynight Whiteclaw-fueled events that awaited at dreaded college, I had deferred my acceptance and boarded a plane with the destination of not fucking there. For a while it seemed to work. I rode the bus down the Uruguayan coast and shared a bunk in the “all-female dorm” with a 75-year old man named Carlos; I ate fatty cakes (like funnel cake but better) in Cape Town around the kitchen table I shared with thirteen students from thirteen countries; I met a guy named Marcus in Mozambique on November 24th, and Marcus’s mom owned a restaurant, so I spent Thanksgiving Day sauteing crustaceans and watching the Morocco-France World Cup game live on the restaurant kitchen’s TV. I encountered wonderful humans and places everyday, and that was awesome. But eventually I grew sick–or sad–of living on continents where I knew no one, of countless interactions that I could not find a place for in the narrative arc of my life. In March of 2022, I booked my first trip to Paradise Island, Bahamas. The island is host to the ashram, a spiritual center where anyone who shows minimal proof
that they’re not a murderer can go spend three months and get room (a 3 x 6ft tent) and board (beans, cabbage, cauliflower) in exchange for (6-8 hrs/day of) work (floor mopping, dish washing, cooking). For three months, I wore only white and yellow (“pure, sattvic” colors), woke up at the 5:30 a.m. bell, and then, thinking that lazy, began setting my alarm earlier to allow my friend Krishna-Victor (here I am called “Rukmini-Mia”) and me to squeeze in a 45-minute breathwork session before 6 a.m. meditation. When I reminisce about my time here, I remember the long talks I had with fascinating characters. I remember the constant state of epiphany, where insights came and felt huge, like my mind was being lit with a fire that burnt all remnants of what I thought I’d known. I remember the fact that I did not own shoes after they got carried away by the ocean my first week there, and how it didn’t matter because there was no need for them. I remember that I didn’t have a mirror, and, after a month or so, forgot to care what I looked like. My dad, a behavioral scientist, loves to talk about context. And this particular context, it’s just so weird. I never foresaw any chapter in the narrative of my life–anything beyond a short paragraph called “random dude I work with’s wedding”–taking place in the Bahamas. But things didn’t go as planned.
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RET HISTORY, T BEAU LA BOURGEOISIE I’ve now been to the ashram twice: once, for three months last spring, and then again this winter break. At noon on January 14th, I sauntered off the plane, carving a path through the sea of soon-tobe-pinker, pink faces. A Bahamian man dressed as a pirate greeted me and every incoming traveler with an Ahoy! and then Welcome to the Bahamas, mon, in an obtusely fabricated accent, which sounded distinctly Jamaican. I got in line. My ears perked up at the sound of Reggae. I turned, recognizing the same three musicians I remembered from last time. It hit me that they’d been here this whole time, playing these same tunes for the mobs of laughing pink. I wondered what they thought about, standing there all day. Maybe they mentally teleported to a customs line on the other side of the world, where they too were gearing up for a guys’ weekend instead of performing for a bunch of heliophiles in Terminal A. Scrupulous surveillance of the crowd, a compulsion of mine, endowed me with some empirical data on the passengers of United flight 1408 from EWR to NAS; about 3/10 were Orthodox Jews–I’m told that they travel here annually for some conventions. Of the other 70%, each possessed at least one of the following: a Louis Vuitton tote, false eyelashes, an airplane-fueled inebriation, children in matching outfits clutching matching iPads which made me curse Steve Jobs
and whatever code he conjured that allowed for such ear-piercing barks–the likes of Pet Hotel or some mumbo-jumbo cousin like Pet Cruise–to emanate from these devices. Other passengers I decided must have been sponsored by Giorgi Armani, or had a plan that involved draining a perfumery of all of its stock, and a strategy that was “wear an entire fucking bottle of the stuff, today.” My favorite subgroups were the crews wearing custom t-shirts saying things like Mommies and Daughters Bahamas 2024, or Jim’s Bachelor Weekend, beneath a photo of grinning pink people in straw hats. My friend at the ashram said something to me once over a meal of I-don’t-remember-what form of lentils. “You know how they talk about a fly in the ointment–a speck of filth in an otherwise fine thing– the ashram is like the opposite.” In case it isn’t clear, he was saying we yogis are the dash of ointment in a big ole bucket of flies. First of all, I don’t know what’s so marvelous about a dash of ointment, or what it does to fix a bucket of flies. And then of course, there’s the issue with calling a mass of unfamiliar thousands a “bucket of flies.” I think back to Tartt’s quintet: students of Ancient Greek, clad in black, sipping whisky in their minimalist apartments, laughing at the shortcomings of the plebs, the hoi polloi they deem unsophisticated, of inferior intellect and unrefined taste. As I wince at the roaring guffaws of this crowd, I wonder
if my disgust is justified, or if I’m just a snob. I guess my disdain comes from the supposition that these people have traveled here–the Bahamas–to have an experience geared precisely towards unawareness of where they are: they golf, and drink, and shout, in blissful oblivion of their whereabouts or fellow humans (aside from the ones they came with). I overheard some group behind me in I-don’tremember-which line, talking about how, in Mexico, they treat you as they should, like a king, whereas here, oh, they won’t be back, it’s like these hotel workers “treat you like you’re lucky to be here or something.” While this is all horrifying, I realize that my fellow ashramites and I gravely overestimate how much we differ from these people in any sense beyond aesthetics. The ashram was designed to be an oasis from the world, a world that includes the Bahamas and the people who live here. Over our morning chai, it is the cruise goers at whom we scoff, but it’s not like most of us go out of our way to see Bahamian culture–or Bahamians at all–beyond the few individuals who keep the ashram’s gardens beautiful and its water running.. I leave the airport in a taxi with three Israelis. We are all heading CONTINUED ON PAGE 15
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February 22, 2024
A Suburbanite’s
Safe Adventure in Downtown
Hawaii
“I’m thrilled to be a witness after many uneventful years in suburbia.”
B
By ZHENG GUAN
efore leaving for Hawaii, I read in the news that Maui is on fire. The wedding I’m attending there is still on—after all, Big Island is not affected as much. Half of me, that one which couldn’t be bothered to travel, sighs in disappointment. Is this really a good time to celebrate anything? The other half isn’t eager either. I know I will have to travel, and it’s been a long time since I’ve left Princeton for leisure for more than 3 days. Do I even remember what the airport looks like nowadays? What if something toward happens on the trip? Or worse, what if nothing happens? Filled with dread, I drag my suitcase out of the basement of my apartment for a long-winded journey: five hours to LAX, five hours of layover, and another five hours to Kona. My day is cut piecemeal, I’ll have no time for real sleep, and all my meals will get messed up—I might snap at any moment today.
Luckily, there’s only five hours until midnight (locally, at least), so maybe I can save my temper for tomorrow. White dress, candlelight, tropical cocktails, and a roasted piglet. The wedding waltzes in and out of my day. I stay on Big Island with some friends for two more days to do what tourists do: watch a soul-destructing, watered-down luau performance, stroll at the bottom of a volcanic crater, and source some coffee beans native to Kona. The next minute, we’re in Honolulu, Oahu Island. The urban heat and maritime humidity strike me as home instantly, so I expect nothing more than a safe adventure before I head back to “nothing ever happens”-ton. My fellow travelers and I visit a beach, and then we go to one of the colossal shopping malls downtown for a quick bite. There, a friend’s drawstring bag goes missing in the food court. Two people of the group return to search on the beach, but I’m sure it got lost here. I saw it hanging on the back of his seat when I joined them late. So the victim (let’s call him M) and I stay behind and inform the
security. I already had a suspect in mind: a seemingly homeless guy whom I noticed earlier was foraging from table to table for leftovers. At some point he stopped by the table behind M and held up his right arm to drink from a container. His forearm, uncovered, was full of disease-inflicted wounds and scars. Feeling a mixture of sympathy and repulsion, I was prepared only to react in case he spilled anything
on M. He didn’t, and after he finished drinking, he swept whatever remaining food on the table into a huge Walmart shopping bag. My attention turned away, but, now to think of it, he also snatched M’s drawstring bag in those few seconds. Our suspect has a pudgy build and wears a black t-shirt. Messy all over, curly hair, and “no, officer, I can’t tell what ethnicity he is!”–I would soon find myself muttering
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this to an inquiring security guard, our first point of contact with the local authorities. While waiting for the police, we chat with the guard, who’s from another lesser known island of Hawaii. He looks serious (given the circumstances) but friendly, reminding M to cancel all cards immediately. He educates us on what happens next per procedure and says he will try his best. I shrug in suspicion–out of a general skepticism of any authority– and keep scanning the food court. “There! That’s him!” Suddenly I spot the homeless guy and shout quietly to our guard. The audacity to show up again so soon, with the same clothing and that Walmart bag! The security guard asks me if I’m sure and then tells us to stay put. So M and I wait, along with the two fellow travelers who are just now returning from their beach search. We all think it ironic that it was I, the only one not studying
PAGE DESIGN BY JASMINE CHEN ART BY EMAN ALI
visual arts, who should notice and remember what the suspect looked like. Granted, it might also be that I was the only one not feasting on Raising Cane’s during the crime. We see a cheerful police officer striding towards us to interrogate M and me. She throws a few follow-up questions at M–and him only, to my slight disappointment, for I’m thrilled to be a witness after many uneventful years in suburbia. She writes up a report. Then the security guard comes back to join us. “We lost him. I searched his bag and asked him about a blue beach towel. He started running away…” That towel is from our Airbnb. So it WAS him. Up until this point, I’ve actually avoided saying that I witnessed his picking up that drawstring bag. All I’ve told the police, albeit repeatedly, is that I only saw him standing behind M and the next
thing we knew, M’s belongings were gone. I’m not a stickler for logical rigor outside P-ton (I think or at least hope), but I will confess now I’ve probably watched way too many detective series. The security guard shows me a photo from his phone, and the person in it resembles our suspect but wears a different shirt. “Is this him?”, the guard asks. I probably look confused, for he then swipes to another picture. “What about this? This is from today. That one’s from another time.” And there he is, exactly as I saw him earlier. He’s probably a regular to the food court, as I’ve guessed, and he doesn’t seem a specialist in pickpocketing. That drawstring bag was just too convenient a catch. M decides to pursue the case and lists me as an eyewitness. Then everyone leaves for the rest of their day. One of our group jokes
that if I get called to testify in the future, M should pay for my flight tickets. The prospect of returning to suburbia, my long-time comfort zone, grips me with a dull pain. I’m hungry again but can’t bring myself to care for anything from the food court. As we head towards the exit, we find our security guy standing there. With our remaining strength and enthusiasm we greet and thank him, feebly and lacking unison: “Tha-thank you…” “Welcome,” he gives M and me each a fist bump, “enjoy Hawaii.”
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February 22, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY CHLOE KIM
SORRY ABOUT THE AIR CONDITIONERS BEING OFF A Nass writer sweats through readings of some outlaw country tunes and a splatter horror classic. By CHARLIE NUERMBERGER
W
hile introducing his seminal ‘Pancho & Lefty,’1 Townes Van Zandt says, “Sorry about the air conditioners being off, but it won’t be very long.” He’s lying. The 1973 double album Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas stitches together five nights of shows and tops out at over ninety minutes. “It gets really hot,” he says, “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Live albums have this tricky problem of simulating an event that consumes your sensory capacities wholly and overwhelmingly. According to the 2007 John Kruth biography, these Townes shows fit a hundred people “packed shoulder to shoulder” into a barroom whose square footage totaled a little under 700 square feet. Sweat and BO and warm beer. Enough Texan heat to give you a case of the blues. It didn’t help that a heatwave swept through the state that month. Temperatures peaked at 110 degrees. It turns out that the Old Quarter burned down later that year. Suspected arson. A likely crime of passion and summertime delirium, according again to
Kruth. But in these ‘73 live recordings, Townes mutters on about the quixotic and essentially American ramblings of a bandit (Pancho) and a fool (Lefty)2. Then, he slides into his well-worn saddle seat of bluesy anhedonia. He plays a lot of his hits on the record, but it often takes him a few moments to work up to them. He tunes the guitar, strums, tells a few mostly miserable jokes to cut through the tension that burns hot through these shows.3 And these are the moments that are interesting to me because it’s like you can detect the heat. It almost buzzes, reverberates off the audience’s applause. Excited molecular activity in the slack moments before and after all these familiar TVZ hits. Paranoid languor and lethargy. Something palpable and uncomfortable emerges from the sonic. Townes sweats. You can tell without looking at him.
That same July, Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel shot their The Texas Chainsaw Massacre about a two and a half hour drive from Houston. Also seminal. Poor Leatherface suffered through 16 hour shoots the whole hot month, caked in make-up, clad in unwashed slaughterhouse garb. His five young victims also work up a sweat in this one. “It’s all the more tragic in that they were young,” claims the opening crawl of text.4 The screenplay occludes this introduction and, instead, begins, “There is no sound. The sun is larger than the frame and white hot.” Like Live at the Old Quarter, sound does important work in the movie, especially its back half. It accretes into a hot, frenzied ambience of women screaming, inbreds laughing, and the eponymous chainsaw whirring, whining, cutting. But Massacre unmistakably centers the visual. We learn this early on, when the young victims pick up a hitchhiker outside the slaughterhouse.5 He shoots a discolored, poorly developed polaroid of the young victims and tries to sell it to them. “It’s a nice picture,” he says. “Two dollars?” All five young victims sweat some more. Heat opens up the belly of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Thematically, the “white hot,” soundless sun
signifies exhaustion, expiration, madness. It raises the stakes, limits the five young victims’ options, and pulls a line of tension tight across Central Texas. Hooper and Kimmel’s narrative economy prioritizes representation of heat, sun, sky, and shimmer over the asphalt. Townes doesn’t really have any songs about heat. In fact, he mostly avoids it; “Pancho & Lefty” has a line that goes, “The desert’s quiet, Cleveland’s cold.” Is the desert hot? It turns out, whether you try to represent heat on its own terms like Hooper and Kimmel, or evade the problem like TVZ, heat manages to inscribe its own signature into the stuff of the media. No getting around it. So, what kind of traces did the ‘73 heatwave leave in Live and Massacre? How can these traces assemble a representative toolbox to better communicate this new landscape of excessive heat? We’re still mired in the sludgy, gray wastes of February, but we just escaped the hottest year on record. We hopped bloodsoaked into the bed of a passing pickup, à la Massacre. We should attend to the heat. If everything’s getting hotter, maybe it’s worth thinking about what exactly that means for our various modes of representation. We should keep an eye on it especially in this climatically disrupted winter. We don’t know what’s coming next. I heard the
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Townes Van Zandt, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Aesthetic Signatures of Heat sequel’s really bad. Two readings. It won’t be very long.
We’re returning to the hitchhiker scene because it’s so strange. A van full of the five young victims cruises alongside a slaughterhouse paddock, and you would not believe how sweaty everyone in this van looks—Franklin in particular,6 who has been telling the group about various methods of cattle slaughter. They pick up a hitchhiker, who whoops and throws up his hands in a way that’s very reminiscent of Leatherface’s emblematic chainsaw dance at the close of this movie.7 The hitchhiker delivers the incredibly dumb and corny line, “My family’s always been in meat.” Already, the heat seems to have erected walls around the five young victims. Now, they are locked up
with this total lunatic after making the generous but admittedly dumb decision to pick him up. The windows are down, and this humid breeze sort of moves through the van, and some jangly, nondescript music echoes in the backdrop, and they pass miles of land. Outside the window, there is only white.8 On the radio, the music keeps running the same riff again and again.9 There is nothing except the stifling contents of this van: five young victims and this semi-rabid hitchhiker they’ve picked up. The heat renders the background register inaccessible. There is no escape to the endless backdropped country. Everything pushes up to the foreground. Everyone is close and sweaty, sweating more when the hitchhiker takes Franklin’s knife from his hand. So, here is one thing: the heat restricts access to regions that aren’t in immediate focus. All the matter of the movie is right where you can see it and close enough to touch. The whole scene is bloated to a level of discomfort. It approaches an inexcusable ten minutes. Hooper and Kimmel hang onto these weird, languid shots of the five young victims, paired against similarly weird shots of the frantic hitchhiker. They are confused, disturbed, amused, and tired. The sequence isn’t cut very tightly. There’s a lot of screaming. They boot the hitchhiker out of the car.
He keeps kicking the bumper. The victims keep screaming. Franklin keeps staring at the back of the van in a state verging on shock. Here’s another thing: the heat pulls sequences into uselessness. This entropic agitation of the story. A restlessness that pervades even the following, more tightly edited sequences. These moves–entrapment in the foreground register and dismemberment of a tight narrative economy–do a lot of work. Texas Chainsaw Massacre pummels you with an affect of terror. These trac-
with a whole lot of intention. Instead, I’d argue that these moves are signatures of heat that have embedded themselves into the film. We can feel them even in this post-productive stage of editing, which, I hope, occurred in a room with functional air conditioning. I imagine that, in some maybe immaterial but creatively significant way, the heat inscribes a sign of itself. After all this time in the heat, the footage leaves itself as distorted and discolored and terrifying as the hitchhiker’s photo of Franklin.
es of heat freak you out. But, as much as I love the movie and the heaving effort of its production, I don’t want to suggest that Hooper and Kimmel deploy these moves
Now a reading from Townes. He has this track “Waiting ‘Round to Die” on the record.10 “I’ll play this,” he says at The Old Quarter. “This is the first serious song I ever wrote.”
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Good job, Townes, because this one is great. It gets even better because in the James Szalapski documentary Heartworn Highways, which is also great, we get some footage of Townes in his trailer outside of Austin. Footage of his girlfriend Cindy. Of his dog. Of Rex Bell, who owned The Old Quarter. Of this incredibly old guy named Uncle Seymour Washington. They all hang around. Townes plays “Waiting ‘Round to Die.” He says, “This is the first song I ever wrote,” and Cindy says, “Is it? I had no idea.” I’m not going to break down this video of Townes. But the cramped conditions of the trailer, the persistence of this song through the TVZ discography, and the fact that Cindy forgot about it are important. I don’t want to say it’s overwrought, but you can mostly tell it’s his “first serious song.” It sounds like he was a young guy on the circuit, and he wanted people to think he was all that. At the Old Quarter, Townes plays it just like all the rest. The “gambling,”
February 22, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY CHLOE KIM
it’s counterintuitive, membranes become more permeable under heat. Saturation points become higher. One final thing: the heat facilitates transmission of these stories, especially stories that are beat up, fried, otherwise discolored. In Townes’s codeine ballad, everyone just shuts up, maybe enraptured. The performance is adulterated and well-inscribed but just really solid. Aesthetic excitation. Acceleration. We listen a little deeper. Maybe we absorb it through open sweat pores.
“booze,” and “rambling” melt away into a sort of professional sincerity. So here’s something else: the heat vaporizes any memory of its own inception, especially the irony surrounding its inception. All of a sudden, the heat has always already set heavily across the bar, Texas, this great country. It has always already made you sweat.
“I’ll play this song I wrote in Oneida, New York,” says Townes while closing out the record. “It’s a good song to play last. It’s kinda about leaving.” The sun is out shining while I write this. It’s sixties and sunny, and people are eating outside. February. I’m starting to sweat a little bit, quietly, subtly under this sweater. I’m listening to Townes Van Zandt in the afternoon, and, boy, it’s really nice out here.
We’re still mired in the sludgy, gray wastes of the Nassau Weekly, but Charlie Nuermberger just escaped the hottest “Waiting ‘Round to Die’” spirals year on record.
around codeine addiction and typical southbound bluesiness. This one’s unabashed about being a live track, but the living part is difficult to detect.11 Other than the introduction, you might forget you’re listening to a recording in the field. The audience falls silent until the eventual applause when Townes says, “Thanks. Boy, it’s really nice in here.” That’s weird. Townes has spent most of the record complaining about the heat, the nonfunctional air conditioners. Townes has played five shows that coalesce into the greatest performance of his outlaw country career. As much as
Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas calls this song ‘Pancho & Lefty’ while The Late Great Townes Van Zandt calls it ‘Poncho & Lefty.’ The Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson versions both adopt the Old Quarter spelling convention but drop the ampersand. Troubling. 2 American and drawing parallel to McCarthy in that they are wrapped up in what exactly that Southern border means to the Union. 3 A dumb one from Jerry Jeff Walker. Another that starts: “There were these two drunks having this argument outside a bar. They were arguing as to whether that object up in the sky was the sun or the moon.” 4 I have heard that they paid the crawl’s narrator in weed, but I cannot verify. Wouldn’t put it past Hooper and Kimmel. 5 Allegedly, this character’s name is “Nubbins Sawyer,” but I have no recollection of them naming him at all. I will call him “the hitchhiker.” 6 The most interesting of the five young victims. Mildly but playfully sociopathic. In a wheelchair. Survives far longer than anticipated. 7 At one point, Franklin calls the hitchhiker “Dracula,” which mostly serves to remind you that Massacre is only really preceded by movies like Psycho and Night of the Living Dead and all those b-movies. 8 I mean this literally. In every shot from the interior of the van, you cannot see any of the outside Texan country. There is nothing out there. 9 The song is “Fool for a Blonde” by Roger Bartlett, and I’m listening to it again now, removed from the movie, and it’s awful. Unlistenable. 10 In an earlier draft, I had a line about how the title of the track tied in well with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it doesn’t. Everyone in Massacre ends screaming, struggling, spasming, dying in myriad horribly grotesque ways. Nobody waits around. 11 Another living: I swear that you can hear crickets chirping in the quiet moments of “If I Needed You.” You can also hear a guy coughing in the audience. 1
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Volume 48, Number 1
NEW YEAR, NEW ME
An essay and a poem grappling with spirituality and the self in the wake of the new year.
P
By EMMETT SOUDER
eople change. At the beginning of a new year, many people try to change themselves. Sometimes I wonder if I can change so much that I’m a different person. Was I myself ten years ago? Will I be the same person in fifty years? Thinking about all the change, I realized I wasn’t sure what the constant was. Am I constant in some more fundamental way than my body? Do I exist in a deeper sense than just my brain state? Over break, I read Derek Parfit’s chapters on personal identity in his book Reasons and Persons. He aims to show that personal identity is not something like a soul or a “separately existing entity.” We are entirely physical, entirely subject to the laws of physics. Unpleasant, I thought. I wanted to believe we have a spiritual nature or an essence or something—that we are not just neurological processes. I really do feel like it feels like something to be me, and I don’t see how that feeling couldn’t be the non-physical, ineffable, subjective experience I think it is–the experience of some non-physical spirit, whether it’s divinely created or somehow naturally arises to transcend the non-conscious. Spirituality afforded me what I thought was an indispensable foundation for value. What is objective value in a physical universe? Valued by who if not by some spiritual creatures? Why
would physical machines valuing anything matter at all? Beyond reasons for abstract value, spirituality also often comes with the value of community, and those relationships could not be less real to me. I grew up in a large and friendly church. My dad’s a pastor and so was his; my uncle’s a priest. I respect them. I think they’re intelligent and kind people, and I want them to accept me. 83% of Americans believe they have souls. I don’t particularly want to alienate myself from all but 17% percent of people. Spirituality as a practice has many benefits. But spirituality seems very hard to reconcile, both intellectually and emotionally, with what we see. My grandma has dementia and gradually forgot everything. People can lose their most precious memories. People can lose their most essential beliefs. Medication and brain trauma can change personalities. We seem electrochemical. If we believe in souls, we believe in convoluted things, things that we may not need to explain ourselves. What seems to have the most explanatory power and the least burden of proof is that consciousness or awareness, whatever you call it, is not non-physical. My memories are information stored in the brain. My experience of those memories is my attention (a computational signal-enhancing method) acting on that information and my brain telling itself that those memories are its own and that it is aware of them in the moment. It’s not magic. It’s physical information processing. I can’t explain it well. Michael Graziano wrote the book though. Consciousness and the Social Brain. His office is 281 in the Neuroscience building But back to my tight grasp on
my belief in a “more-than-physical.” Do I really want to believe I’m just a physical mechanism? How does that idea make a person feel? Soulless does not have a good connotation. Reductionism, or rejecting spirituality, might seem to lead to nihilism and alienation. It feels a bit like turning away from the people you love and thinking about jumping into an abyss. Why would we do that? What is the point of such a gloomy exploration? What’s weird to me is that even as I can’t find reasons to take down deeply unsettling theories claiming I’m not what I thought I was (quite more than biology, I thought!), the sublime isn’t any less sublime, whether or not I believe I have a soul. I still experience overpowering wonder and awe. I still love people with the same intensity. I still enjoy food. Why should food suddenly taste less good, love feel less powerful, or the stars look less pretty? So a perspective shift about what I am doesn’t seem to take away what I value. But knowing my headache is just a computed process in a mechanistic brain doesn’t stop the pain either. And seeing dementia still makes me cry. So was all of that reading I did, and those conversations I had, and what I’m writing now actually at all valuable if it didn’t change anything? In lively debates with my roommates and friends, sometimes we all just concede that the point doesn’t really matter, and that we’ll go on living basically as we have. That being said, I think all those conversations and explorations have been valuable. I especially find this new perspective to come with meaningfully different applications to living. Like Parfit said it did for himself, his new perspective
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February 22, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY
My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness... When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others. This resonated with me. Letting go of our spirituality should make us feel closer to other people. All people. Closer to animals, to the natural world. We should let go of our idea of spiritual entitlement to use nature. Our ideas of cosmic justice working itself out. Our allegations that people are spiritually evil. I think we’d be better off grounding ourselves. I’ve been using the language of “without”: “without spirituality” and “without a belief in a soul.” Letting many beliefs go. But I’m realizing this perspective shift isn’t just a negation or a narrowed field of vision. It’s a new lens—not rose-colored, but clearer. Clearer is better if you think the world is beautiful. Through that lens, I think the stars are even more mysterious for why they make me feel anything. Through that lens, I think my relationships have to be the basis of any value beyond myself. Through that lens, I see myself less seriously. I’m here so briefly, experiencing such an infinitesimal swath of the total. I like this Huxley quote from Island: “I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me.” Trying to be less heavy-handed than I may have been, I present a poem sketching a finish to this essay, taking us back to where we started from and suggesting we’re not just our brains. If we’re just information, or just computations of information, then we also exist in
each other’s minds as well. I find that closeness comforting.
Those three pounds of the Nassau Weekly are essential but not enough, and not all there is to Emmett Souder.
On my friend’s phone call conversation When I realized I love it when people say my name Just that “I think the group picture was on Emmett’s phone” Or a “Say hello to Emmett”
I Was Cutting My Fingernails and Evesdropping
may provide some relief:
Hearing my name makes me feel so much more real Because sometimes I feel not really here You ever just look at your hands? They seem so divorced from what’s behind my eyes When I look at my eyes long enough I wonder what’s looking at me I’m here without my fingernails, Without my arms and legs and Without 98% percent of my body, aren’t I? Is that all there is of me? Sentience is somewhere between a mollusk and a shrimp, Singer says Somewhere in between my ears, I suppose But I’m not even that and I’m not just that Those three pounds of pinkish grey Are essential but not enough, and not all there is to me I’m not just a brain, but a brain in a world I am a person because we are people together Alone, I wouldn’t have happened Alone, I wouldn’t have come up with a language to think with And without me, several people wouldn’t be the same Someone will say my name for the last time someday I wonder when And in what context For now, I’m glad to hear my name I’m glad to exist in that way too
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Volume 48, Number 1
PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7
to the boat dock where we’ll part ways: them to Atlantis, me to the ashram. This would be the last leg of their jaunt around the US, the cherry on top of their OrlandoMiami-Vegas sundae. Charming, I think, and sit up front with the driver, hoping to let my ridesharers go Instagram-live in peace. What ensues, however, is a group-wide conversation, in which the driver offers his thoughts on Atlantis. First to the Israelis: “Expensive, good drinks, good fish, expensive.” And then, re the ashram, to me: “Good people that go there, they mean well. But sitting around and chanting about peace all day? That’s not gonna bring anybody peace.” My navel-gazing, of which the current subject is “the aesthetic I prescribe to my sadness,” is gently disrupted by a wonderfully aesthetic Om. I say it gently because here, you never know if you’re imagining it or actually hearing it–it’s like the air is one constant Om. In this case, though, the source is in fact a yoga teacher, letting us know that class is starting, so please shut up and lay down in savasana. Transitions are important. I’ve always disliked the Spotify feature which blurs the last five seconds of one song into the first five seconds of the next song–I like to experience the conclusion of one thing and the distinct beginning of the next. But when Discobitch’s first electronic note crashes right into
the deep, self-important vibration of this bearded yoga teacher’s Om, I like it very much. “La petite bourgeoisie qui boit du champagne?” she calls out. My eyes open wide. “Oui! C’est moi, c’est moi! Je suis la!” I answer. In an instant, Discobitch swoops down from the heavens, scooping me up in a golden chariot, the pegasus drivers sporting giant shades and stereo headphones. I smile dopily, recalling nights, or snippets thereof, that share no common thread besides this song, tequila, and an amnesic respite from the world. A buddhist with whom I’d spoken several weeks earlier told me to notice: to notice the way things make me feel as they enter my consciousness. “It’s like how when you eat an apple, you can feel that it’s nourishing you. When you eat a doughnut, you can feel that it’s not.” Well, when Discobitch called out, it felt like I was hearing my guru, like the stars were aligning. Maybe I’d mistaken the ashram for my mecca, when really it was Ibiza’s nightclub, Eden, where I should’ve been all along. Still basking in the glory of C’est Beau la Bourgeoisie and its fabulous evocations of jet planes, Hawaii, and booze, I hear the teacher explain that those responsible for the din are some ten frat boys staying in the mansion next door, who have a clear knack for EDM played at a decibel count above 150. But wait a second… Frat boys? I could scarcely believe my ears. Having Atlantis
just down the beach was always a mind-fuck, me trying to live my ascetic life and all, but next door?! Suddenly, I couldn’t wait for the class to end. What if I go spend the week with them? I wondered, coming up with scenarios in my head. Would I come up from the beach or ring the doorbell?
Giddy with excitement, I stopped myself, aware of the irony of it all. Weren’t these boys just what I was escaping by coming here: People my age whose behavior I found boring, depressing, and not on par with my own level of engagement with the world? If my sadness is bohemian, the contempt I feel might get me nominated as a stand-in for Bunny, Tartt’s lost sixth. Bunny gets killed by the others, basically because he is too happy and too dumb for their sophisticated liking. Tartt’s “cult” is totally isolated from the rest of their college campus, sequestered in physical spaces unavailable to the rest, discussing esoteric material and speaking a language (ancient Greek) that literally nobody else understands. The ashram feels similarly isolated, especially stationed next to the rest of Paradise Island. I romanticize the fantastical story of a strange, secret, other-worldly world, and I cherish the feeling of awe that I experience at the ashram, or reading The Secret History. But seeing how quickly I can be pulled back to my hedonist, regular-old-teenager roots, I realize that here at the ashram, I romanticize the world that, just yesterday, I couldn’t wait to get out of. These frat boys are sending me a postcard
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from that world right now; I close my eyes tight, hoping that if I concentrate hard enough on Discobitch I might be able to teleport next door and join them for a Heineken in the pool. The ashram is stationed between two bodies of water. To the north is the ocean: it is beautiful, turquoise, etc.–a boring picture to paint, with either colors or words, because perfection is all the same whereas imperfection is always imperfect in its own way (thank you, Mr. Tolstoy). To the south is the bay. This is the port of entry to the ashram: the first part you see, after the rusty old boat picks you up from Nassau and takes you the half kilometer trek to a different universe. The bay is shared by other vessels making their way to Paradise Island: think thousandfoot-long cruise ships fitted with waterslides and enormous, inflatable homages to Mickey Mouse. Party boats cruise by at all hours of the night, and if you squint hard enough, you might just see a large gyrating behind, or six, or sixty. The ocean is perfect, but I love the bay more. Many of my greatest moments at the ashram have taken place as I’ve gazed out wistfully at a Royal Caribbean vessel. Deprived of all colors besides white and yellow, I crane my neck to get a better look at the partying pink people in pink Hawaiian shirts drinking pink cocktails around pink lawn chairs. My ears perk up at the sound of Jason Derulo, which blares from giant
February 22, 2024
speakers. His vulgar, misogynistic lyrics fly right over my head, and in these moments, I find the hymn nothing other than divine. I smile across the water at masses of drunk people. I don’t feel envious, exactly, but I remind myself, nonetheless, that at a moment’s whim, I could be one of them, dancing to Derulo’s boastful accounts of blowjobs from women who don’t speak English. I worry that I am a “grass is always greener [on the other side]” person. I am writing this from the Starbucks at Atlantis, sipping on a chai tea latte. I abhor Howard Shultz and don’t even have a particular taste for poison-concentrate with extra whip, but suddenly, forbidden from A) leaving ashram premises, and B) caffeine, without this latte, I feel I might just drop dead. So I skip meditation to drink contraband Starbucks and sunbathe with loud Floridians at Atlantis. Immersed in that same sea of Floridians, I feel out of place and read an American classic about bookish little pricks and smile to myself, feeling like that is my tribe. But at Princeton, I recoil from an elitist environment grounded in perfectionism and miss the air of nonchalance apparent in these sunbathers. On the weekends, I reunite with Discobitch for a few hours of hedonism and jungle juice until I get antsy and start the cycle all over again, missing the ashram, and its lack of mirrors, and Western scholarship, and shoes, and substances.
In high school I once wore my Pitbulls for Obama t-shirt (turned muscle tank)–which depicts three pitbulls, a speech bubble attached to one of them, saying “we don’t need no stinking lipstick”–to a July 4th party at a Republican classmate’s house, which also happened to be the town police chief’s (his father’s) house . This felt A, just funny, and B, emblematic of my instinct to create (sometimes Molotov) cocktails out of radical extremes. Wherever I am, I like to remind myself that some other exists–that the belief system shared by those around me at a given moment is only one of many possibilities, one that somewhere else, they’d laugh at or dismiss wholly. The grass may be greener on the other side, but you’ll never be standing on it–wherever you are, there you are. And luckily, none of us have to pick–we’re allowed to jump around between conflicting affinities. A yoga ashram, Donna Tart’s The Secret History, and Discobitch’s C’est Beau la Bourgeoisie: My holy trinity. The triumvirate in my mind, each holding one rein, yanking me, again and again, into a state of equilibrium.
But when the Nassau Weekly’s first electronic note crashes right into the deep, self-important vibration of Mia Mann-Shafir’s Om, I like it very much.
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Volume 48, Number 1
PAGE DESIGN PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN BY PIA CAPILI WENG ART BY CHAS BROWN
FRUIT FLIES “The end product is a picture with many suns that capture the real in infinitely many instances. Yet it represents nothing of reality.” By AYSE BASAK ERSOY
I open my eyes in the kitchen, sitting on one of the wooden IKEA chairs that my mom cherished, holding a small fruit knife. It is cold and the kitchen door is wide open. The transparent pinkhued curtain is dancing to the cold breeze. I am alone in my mom’s apartment. There are tears on my face but they don’t taste like mine. I get up from my chair and stare at my bare feet. The cold marble floor stings my soles, so I snuggle my feet and rub them on my inner thighs. I walk up to close the door and see the pigeon poop stains on the windowsill. Mom’s contraption for the pigeons fails again. The faint ringing of the doorbell snaps me out of my meditation on bird poop and morning haze. II I look through the peephole and let out a sigh of relief after I
I
see my mom. She has a big market cart full of fruits and vegetables from the Sunday market. I open the door and help her carry them into the kitchen. She scolds me for going around barefoot and throws my fluffy slippers at me. I tell her that I am resistant to the cold. Deep down I am grateful for her small gesture. I go to my room and open the Venetian blinds that keep creaking. III I sit down on my table and turn on the reading lamp. The last two books I read, The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe and Osamu Dazai’s short novella Schoolgirl, stand next to each other. I grab the post-it sticking out of Oe’s book and read the short passages I’d noted down on it: “…the same certainty developed directly into a feeling that the “I” bending down there now was not the child who had once bent his bare knees there, that there was no continuity, no consistency between the two “I’s,” that the “I” now bending down there was a remote stranger. The present “I” had lost all true identity. Nothing, either within me or without, offered any hope of recovery.”
“ ‘Schopenhauer said, didn’t he, from news articles, or Matisse that you can squash a fly, but the postcards my friend gifted me ‘thing in itself’ doesn’t die,” she on my sixteenth birthday. It is all whispered, gazing intently at the smoothed out and clean. black speck. “You’ve only killed the V fly phenomenon. Dried up like this, My biggest ritual coming back it really does give the feeling of be- home is to find albums of my baby ing a ‘thing in itself.’ ” pictures tucked behind book shelves. The pictures track my de- Oe in The Silent Cry velopment until the first day of first grade. Then they restart in fourth I space out, thinking. It’s the grade upon the purchase of a new kind of writing that will haunt me digital camera. Maybe because of for years. the texture of the pictures taken by IV the old film camera, I remember I zone back into the world with my pre-school years better. an ambulance siren. It must be Mom always keeps them out of headed to the hospital on the sight. My best speculation is that street parallel to ours. On my eve- she derives pleasure from the nosning walks, I see people lingering talgia that comes from occasionaround the emergency room. Some ally remembering that there was bawl their eyes out, others silently once a baby who lived in this house stare into the distance. Used to the and reigned over the neighborsoundscape and sight of hospitals, hood with a loud and clean cry. She I walk away. took most of the pictures. It could I’m staring at the empty beige be that she wants to protect her walls. It was freshly painted a few memories of my early years. I can months ago to celebrate my return only perceive my infancy through home after a few years. The few her eyes. traces of my childhood I’ve left beI sometimes wish to uncoil the hind in my room are now covered bundle of my blurry memory. with coats of paint. No marks beVI sides the paint swollen from moisA few days ago, I watched a ture at the bottom. No marks left movie called After Life directed by from the vampire posters, collages Hirokazu Kore-eda. It is set in an
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February 22, 2024
afterlife where there are officers who interview the deceased and ask them only one question: “If you could only hold onto one memory from your life, what would you choose?” Some people struggle to meet the deadline for the choice. It is funny that there are office workers and deadlines in the afterlife. What would I choose to remember? What would I choose to forget? I guess I always believed that the basket of future held better memories than the past. VII I thought of one of the first pictures ever taken in the world, one taken by the French photographer Nicéphore Niépce. It depicts the view outside his window. Throughout the many hours-long exposure time, the sun changes positions, creating different light patterns. The end product is a picture with many suns that capture the real in infinitely many instances.
Yet it represents nothing of reality. He will never see with his own eyes the view captured by the camera and we will never see anything but the overly exposed reality I look outside my window. The view is a gray apartment building whose paint is scraped off. The sky is also gray today but it won’t rain until the night. The only thing that doesn’t fall in between black and white is the tall spruce whose top is visible behind the apartment. It sways back and forth to the wind as though nodding along to my thoughts. Black and white white and black black, white, and gray black, white, and tree Tree and… My mom calls me for dinner. VIII My mom asked whether I was happy during dinner. I nodded along as I glanced at the war
footage rolling on the TV. I didn’t ask whether she was happy, not because I didn’t care for the answer but because I thought that some things were better unsaid. The material acknowledgment of happiness through words, sound vibrations spilling out of one’s mouth, terrified me. My mom didn’t question me further, perhaps aware of my character, or thinking that I was happier than her. I gulped down the dry red wine and started cleaning the dishes. IX I float back to my room. The window is open and the blinds are clapping along to the wind. The sharp air seeping in through the window carries tinges of burning coal that makes breathing difficult. I intend to read for a bit, but feel myself drift away from consciousness and retreat into the comfort of sleep.
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Volume 48, Number 1
X I had a dream that I lost my journals. In the dream, I was looking for them. Upon not finding them in their usual place, I went up to my mom and asked her where the notebooks were. Yet she couldn’t see me. I screamed and cried until I found myself in front of the mirror with no reflection. My childhood pictures weren’t in their usual place either. I went back to my room and found empty notebooks on my desk. The very journals I had filled up across many years stood there, rid of any trace of my existence. I woke up, feeling disconnected from my body. I grasped at the sheets to feel their coarse texture against my skin. I needed something to remind me that I was still here, still real. So, I grabbed the cup I had left on the radiator next to my bed the night before. I gulped down the water to wash away my dream of inexistence. It had a hollow stale taste that made me feel emptier. The decaying apple core gave the air a sticky texture. I felt like my tongue was taped onto my palate and breathing had become a hassle. Fruit flies were orbiting around an invisible pole. XI Later that day, Mom and I sat on a bench by the sea. She told me about her youth and how she loved and detested people so strongly. When she was 19, she fell in love for the first time. By the time she turned 20, she thought she was dying of love. I sat in silence, looking at a tanker that moved slowly in the offing. Its movement was imperceptible and gave me the illusion that time was standing still. Everything farther than a few meters also looked blurry under the fog and without my glasses. I had left them home since seeing too much of the world irritated me. XII Tonight, I am leaving home. I had my last breakfast: green olives,
feta, and honey with fresh bread. Me and my mom, we were alone together. I avoided her gaze, refusing to see the face I was about to leave behind. I focused on the fruit basket standing in the corner. Above the basket lingered the fruit flies, who were at home more than I was. The clementines had white spots on them and gave off a fermented scent. Their season was over. I grabbed the fly swatter and killed the fruit flies. Their small dried-up flesh dotted the white tiles. I squatted to see them up close. They still existed. I felt empty, emptier than ever.
The Nassau Weekly’s movement was imperceptible and gave Ayse-Basak Ersoy the illusion that time was standing still.
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February 22, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY ALEXANDER PICOULT
SUPER
SIMPLE By SIMON MAROTTE
ACROSS 1. Improve, as wine 4. “Didn’t need to hear all that” 7. Global center of Shia Islam 9. Crew necessity 10. Change, as an alarm clock 12. Bride’s new title 13. Yellowstone attraction 15. Narrow inlet 16. Modest 18. Some online communications, for short 19. Conical dwelling 20. Aunt, in Spanish 21. Business that benefits from making cuts? 22. Calgary’s province: Abbr. 23. Ash Wednesday follower 24. ___ letter (part of an application) 25. Letters hilariously etched into the ground in the gateway to Whitman DOWN 1. Wannabe rocker’s instrument 2. 1999 Tom Hanks film, with “The” 3. Super simple 4. Sociopathic role for Matt Damon 5. Transportation option for the President 6. Their work is taxing 8. Loch ___ Monster 11. Oral, e.g. 14. Regrets 17. Late ___ (Frist offering)