This week, like most weeks, the Nass looks inward
The Nassau Weekly
Nasshole Freakly
Jenny McPhee is Diabolical By Aiko Offner
Art by Danny Flaherty
Picking Pastries By Chas Brown
Art by Chas Brown
Craigslist Car By Aina Marzia
between viznar and alfacar By Frankie Duryea
Girls (After Jamaica Kincaid) By Sofia Cipriano
Art by Caroline Madsen
Dishwashing Ethnography By Elena Eiss
Art by Eden Reinfurt
Yesterday’s Coffee By Daniel Viorica
Nass Recommends:
By Narges Anzali
Art by Aidan Cusack
By Matt Picoult
Art by Alexander Picoult
One of the least nassholish ideas that I hold dear to myself is that, in the end, we will all be delivered. Forces beyond our knowing care for us in ways that our slimy, underdeveloped sensory organs cannot appreciate so frequently. Call these forces Fatherormother, Older Brother, the North American arboreal superorganism. They are here amidst ourselves, and they love us. These days, we are so apishly faithless, and they love us despite this. We are granted grace.
I’ve never seen a whale, but I imagine it is colossal in a way that is wholly transcendent, as if their buoyantly lipidic bodyweight outsizes them to a higher category of being that is also thinking and also loving and maybe closer in its dimensions to this deliverer. I imagine the whale renders you tremulous as if changing medication. You can’t help but envision the content of its bowels, the belly of the creature, and you–some Jonah with iPhone-face–trapped in that benthic cauldron of gastric juices and krill. I imagine the world folds into itself and starts to turn around the creature like a gravity well. The blowhole tears a hole in the sky. I also imagine that it is nothing at all like that. Only love, Charlie Nuermberger, EIC
Editor-in-Chief
Charlie Nuermberger
Publishers
Isabelle Clayton
Ellie Diamond
Managing Editors
Sofiia Shapovalova
Julia Stern
Creative Director
Otto Eiben
Senior Editors
Frankie Duryea
Junior Editors Ivy Chen
Melanie Garcia
Teo Grosu
Marisa Warman
Hirschfield
Mia Mann-Shafir
Alex Norbrook
Aiko Offner
Sasha Rotko
Head Copy Editors
Cailyn Tetteh
Sabrina Yeung
Art Director
Alexander Picoult
Events Editor
John Emmett Souder
Masthead
Audiovisual
Mia Dedic
Web Editor Abani Ahmed
Alexander Wolff 1979
Katie Duggan 2019
Leif Haase 1987
Marc Fisher 1980
Robert Faggen 1982
Sharon Hoffman 1991
Sharon Lowe 1985
This Week:
4:30p James Stewart Film Theater Irish Studies: Lecture by Robert Spoo
9:30a Robertson Auditorium PUEA Energy Conference, breakfast and lunch provided. Ends at five.
11:00a Forum, Lewis Arts Complex Stand In Waves: Installation
7:00pm Princeton Public Library Panel Discussion with Vivia Font on Latino Poetry
5:30p Forum, Lewis Arts Complex Stand In Waves: Installation & Performance
12:00p Hinds Plaza: Sylvia Beach Way Unruly Sounds Music Festival 2024
4:00p Fine Visualization Lab
Advanced LaTeX Workshop: Fun Times Guaranteed
4:30p McCosh Hall, 10 Can Harris Win? Lowincome Voters and the Election. Panel with Bishop William Barber II
Verbatim:
Overheard at Small World Poetwithshoulder-lengthgray hair: “I received my quantum physics for beginners book. It crows about the fact that it does not contain math. That troublesome stuff. It’s like reading a list of ingredients on fruit juice and finding it does not have high fructose corn syrup.”
Overheard at Wawa
Hopefulstudent: “I mean, an associate’s degree technically counts, right?”
Overheard in Firestone at 11:40 pm
Bathroomrevolutionary rousingtheirfellowstudiers: “Don’t misuse the bidet!”
6:00p Labyrinth Books
Althea Ward Clark W’21
Reading by Elizabeth McCracken and Brenda Shaughnessy
11:00a Firestone Plaza 2024 Fall Campus Farmers Market
4:30p Robertson Hall, 016 The Forgotten Responsibilities of First Amendment Freedoms
5:00p Frist Campus Center, 212 Young Democratic Socialists of AmericaGeneral Meeting
12:30p Chapel Afternoon concert with visiting organist.
Got Events? Email Emmett Souder at js0735@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.
Overheard in JRN seminar
Change-maker: “Everyone in this fucking school has a sister named Gigi. People need to stop having sisters named Gigi.”
Overheard in dining hall
Linguist: “I can’t tell if he’s gay or South African. If you saw him or talked to him once, you’d get it.”
Overheard while lounging on Cannon Green
Super-super-senior: “I might have to violate the honor code to get one more semester.”
Overheard in Cottage Socialchair: “I remember when I tore my groin, she was
helping me tape it, and I was like you’re taping my fucking balls.”
7:00p Fields Center MPR 104
ReMatch Meet and Greet. Connects first- and second-year researchers with grad students.
For advertisements, contact Isabelle Clayton at ic4953@princeton.edu
Overheard in the Fitness and Wellness Center
Gym-bro: “Creatine makes me so bloated.” Gym-bro’sbro: “It’s like one of those things: if you’re turned on enough, you can be into anything.”
Overheard at Graduate Student Welcome Event
Hormonalundergrad: “Shopping for a boyfriend here.”
Overheard while talking about cars
Traumatized: “As the youngest, I’ve been in many trunks.”
Overheard in Dod Basement JewishDemocrat: “Time is a block that grows in two directions.”
Overheard while walking to the street
Spanish&Portuguesemajor: “Every matter is homosexual because covalent bonds. I don’t know how I got chemistry involved in this.”
Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com About
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!
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JENNY MCPHEE IS DIABOLICAL
A Nass editor gets dinner with Jenny McPhee and talks growing up, teaching, and translating the Pope
BY AIKO OFFNER
It is five-fifty on a sunny afternoon in March, and Jenny McPhee and her shadow appear to be the only moving things in the whole world as she walks through an empty courtyard to meet her students at the dining hall. The corridor is long, her steps are short, and suddenly it is conspicuous that she is smaller than everything; the trees, the walls, the columns are all disproportionately large, and for a split second, McPhee is like Alice in a gothic Wonderland. She had taken the train from New York a day earlier than usual, to participate in take-your-professor-to-dinner-nightbefore teaching Introduction to Fiction the following day to a group of twelve Princeton students. Over dinner, which is a plate of chicken and two french fries, her students ask her about her career and life, and how she knew she wanted to be a writer. She shrugs and looks them in the
eye and says, “You just know,” and keeps looking them in the eye.
McPhee presents as rather unassuming–both in her physique and her voice. She sports a lob, that is, a long-bob of curly gray hair that she parts on the side and hikes away from her face with a studded bobby pin. She religiously sports shoes with at least a two-inch heel and possesses a voice that is sometimes spritely and sometimes whispery and to describe it how adults describe things like wine, it is sweet and dry with an unexpected brassiness. As she walks, her large blue eyes trace the ground as if she were peering into some world underneath. She’s been here before, not only as a professor.
McPhee grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, attending Princeton High School and serving food at the Cap and Gown club, one of Princeton’s many social clubs (“eating clubs”). She was well acquainted with it all; her father is a “pretty well-known writer” and former professor at Princeton, and her mother owned a photography studio in town. One of her sisters, Laura McPhee, went to Princeton University. McPhee pointedly didn’t. “I graduated early from high school because I couldn’t wait to
get out of Princeton,” she says with a laugh.
And yet, forty-five years later, she’s returned. Every Friday, she leads a fiction class (though she mostly teaches translation) that meets for an hour and fifty minutes in a classroom with floor to ceiling windows. She enters the classroom looking at no one in particular–there is no pre-salutation for the class pets–and often says very little. Within minutes, without raising her voice or telling her students to stop chatting, class just starts. McPhee, with her coiffed hair and high heeled shoes enters the classroom like she entered the courtyard, unassuming yet somehow assertive, inexplicably commanding a room with little more than her presence.
McPhee has tended to wild creatures her whole life. She grew up imagining the lives of Whooditz, Geeditz, Sally, Kack, and Dane. Whooditz and Geeditz were the twins who rode their pink and blue elephants to Firestone Library, Katz was a goat, Dane was a shapeshifter, and “Sally was, you know, 164 years old.” McPhee is the middle child of five girls, all of whom are published authors, but she was the storyteller in the most demand:
“They’d ask, ‘Where are they going tonight?! Just tell us another one!’”
Born in 1962 to two writers, McPhee knew she wanted to be a writer since she was young. Her father, who has published forty-one books, would often scream, “Don’t ever be a writer! It’s the worst profession ever!” McPhee notes that her father–who enjoyed reporting significantly more than writing–came to love the craft only in his nineties. Yet the deterrent from writing naturally was not John McPhee’s warning so much as his own success.
Her mother, Pryde Brown, had wanted to be a writer, but switched to photography after marrying John McPhee. “There is a shadow of Dad that I’m sure she felt. She probably pivoted to photography because it was hard to compete with that,” McPhee says. Yet Brown never stopped writing and working on novels, even winning a grant from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts.
McPhee knows that shadow well. Her own aptitude for writing often garnered praise in high school, yet she doubted the genuinity of the comments and in doing so ultimately doubted her own abilities. She did not write
creatively all throughout college. Yet somewhere, she remembered and chased the feeling her mother gave her when McPhee was just five years old, when Brown read one of her stories and reacted with pure joy. Under this encouragement swam a current of Brown’s own ambitions, McPhee says, though much more casually, “You know how relationships are between mothers and daughters and kind of unrealized ambitions and stuff like that. I think my mother probably had an even greater influence on me than my father.”
McPhee is now a published author with three kids, none of whom are writers, although the youngest is still in middle school. When asked if she feels relieved about the older two avoiding that fate, she answers the question more as a creative than a parent. “If there’s something in you that’s wanting to spend your life trying to make the words make some kind of sense, and connect to people somehow, you’re just going to do it. The resisting of it takes more energy than the actual doing,” she says.
McPhee’s winding eighteen-year journey from graduating college to publishing her first novel suggests that this wisdom is hard-earned. After studying comparative literature at Williams College, McPhee left for Europe where she studied semiotics with Julia Kristeva in France. When the program ended, she decided to go to Italy to learn the language and work at a publishing house, a decision that catapulted McPhee into her career in translation, writing, and academia. In 1994, the Pope happened. By then, McPhee had returned to the U.S. and was working as a junior editor at Alfred A. Knopf (which is, ironically, the publishing house which rejected her father’s first book, leading to a familial legend where McPhee’s grandmother apparently said “I’m going to Knopf his block off!”). That year, Pope John Paul II had published his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which needed to be translated, edited, and
published within a six-month time frame.
Though she doesn’t make a point of it, McPhee often separates her professional career into before and after the Pope. Her time in Italy and understanding of romance languages enabled her to edit translations of high-profile authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gabriel García Márquez. Her background then catapulted her into her first translation job, where, in just six
canonized.
When McPhee was still young, her mother became one of the founding members of the Princeton chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW). McPhee helped Brown with the research for the organization, which meant that at age nine she was counting the number of times women were presented in stereotypical roles as stay-at-home mothers, or on the sidelines as boys played
weeks, McPhee had translated the 227 page book with her sister, Martha. “My experience with that was incredibly intense,” McPhee said. “It wasn’t a particularly good book for me, so I thought this can’t be the last experience of me doing translations.”
Now, as a translator and novelist so prolific that she has a tab named Bazaar on her website, McPhee is selective about the work she translates–she only translates dead female authors. She requires the author to be dead following difficult experiences with inevitably high-maintenance alive authors. She requires the author to be a woman after learning how few women’s work get translated and
reflect her commitment as a feminist. However, McPhee acknowledges the nuances that draw her to translation: “I think it’s kind of gendered, but it’s so much easier for me to champion a book that I didn’t write, even though I feel so totally invested in translation and I feel like I am the co-author.”
soccer in children’s literature.
Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that fifty years later, she can rattle off current statistics on gender equity in translation. In the U.S., only three percent of published books are in translation–a statistic that McPhee attributes largely to American isolationist tendencies. Ten years ago, only 25% of books in translation were authored by women. “All those statistics came out so I had to decide, alright, now I’m only translating women,” McPhee says.
Yet McPhee is not without contradictions, even in realms where she has expressed her ideals in the clearest of ways. Her work and pointed decisions as a translator
These contradictions are inherent and implicit in a woman, McPhee argues in her debut book, The Center of Things (2001). Her novel centers around Marie, a neurotic, insecure, and frustratingly ambitious tabloid journalist who is enchanted by fictitious star Nora Mars’ “ability to unite apparently contradictory visions of a woman’s role.” Surrounding Marie is the love interest Marco, an unbelievably odd “freelance intellectual” who lurks around the public library. McPhee published when she was 39, becoming a published fiction writer. Post-Pope and having joined her husband’s health insurance, she was able to quit her full-time job at Knopf to freelance and write. She went freelance at the urging of Sonny Mehta, the Editor-in-Chief of Knopf at the time, who had advised her to quit completely, which McPhee struggled to do. Writing a novel requires commitment that is at once necessary and terrifying, she explains: “You commit, and you know you’re going to be doing this thing, and you think, of course, it’ll be a failure, and nothing will ever happen, it’ll be a humiliation, you know, all the horror, and while you’re in the writing and in the world, that’s okay. It’s when you come out, that’s the problem. It’s the coming out and going back in, but of course, we have to eat and sleep and go to the movies and everything else.”
Nevertheless, she harps on the necessity to commit to this process. As a professor, McPhee’s comments and bits of advice are minimal, with the goal to aid and not interfere with the delicate process of translating one’s imagination to the page. For example, her response to panicked and neurotic
emails from teenagers with writer’s block are little more than what she says in class: “Struggle is good,” she will write, between instructing them to submit whatever they have and her signature. “It’s what a writer does all day long. Allowing something you write to be less than you hoped or expected is also part of the learning/writing process.”
Yet, in regard to unemployment, she felt at liberty to offer some liberal advice: “I guess my advice for young writers will be, you know what, you can always get a job later. You can always join that thing later. Just really try as hard as you can now, to get those books out, going, and written.” Her point, at least from her own experience, is this: that the money and stability the workforce offers is too convenient an escape from writing.
This is because McPhee, like her father, will tell you that writing is very hard. The process of writing, “which is basically sitting around procrastinating” is arduous not only technically, but the personal disappointment it hands out. There is a dissonance, she explains, between the imagination and what is translated through language onto the page. To be a writer is not just to grapple with language, but to grapple with the disappointment between one’s imagined world and the tangible world on the page. “There’s a built-in failure all the time,” she says, “but it’s embracing that failure and being happy enough with what you do get to, eventually, which gives you a great amount of satisfaction. When you do get something you can be proud of.”
One of the most engaging elements of The Center of Things is the precision of Marie’s own imagination and voice. It is Marie’s specific insecurities and fantasies–which, by the way, McPhee argues does not make her character less competent than the men in her story–that lets the reader fall in step with the character who is driven and strong and fretting about height and facing the existential threat of
being unmarried. Following this precision, McPhee’s claim in an interview in the back of the book that she identifies the most with Marco, the oddball intellectual, feels implausible.
There is an element of McPhee that is not odd, but very individualistic. McPhee, whose studies in semiotics influenced her to think more critically about language and empowerment, decided that her children would carry her name. Unfortunately, until twenty years ago, it was illegal in Italy for women to give their child their surname, no matter the conditions that led to their conception.
In 2004, Alessandra Mussolini brought a case forth to the higher courts in petition to keep her last name as Mussolini. The court ruled in her favor, which legalized passing down maternal surnames. Alessandra Mussolini kept her last name, and Jenny McPhee gave her two eldest children McPhee.
She explains that there are two counteracting forces with a last name: the disempowerment of the legacy a name inherits, and the empowerment of a name in constructing an identity that one can claim as their own. There can be sheer power in a name “like Rockerfeller, or McPhee in its own little way,” she says. In the shadow of that power and inherited greatness is disempowerment, the necessity to live down and live up to randomly placed expectations, admiration, disdain, judgment–something McPhee and her sisters had to do a lot of. Yet there’s the pure power–and this is what McPhee clings to–of a name, any name, like Smith or Jones, that then becomes a part of you, how you’re known, and how you know yourself. And to give that up, well, McPhee views it as inherently disempowering. “It’s a gift, it’s a lovely thing–I would just love it if it went both ways. That it wasn’t gendered.”
McPhee’s youngest child is her adopted daughter, who initially had to take McPhee’s husband’s first and last name–Passoleva–under
Ethiopian law. She also eats red meat whenever she can escape her mother’s environmentalist household and has chosen to keep her last name as Passoleva–she just likes the sound of it better. Perhaps she has inherited her mother’s (and her grandmother’s) “rebel without a cause,” a phrase that McPhee uses to describe her own disbelief at her return to Princeton.
It is hard to imagine McPhee, with her coiffed lob and gentle eyes, as rebellious. But she returns to Princeton having claimed her father’s name of many years–Professor McPhee–as her own, and in doing so, perhaps she challenges and rebels against the notion of legacy itself. In walking through the courtyard to have dinner with her students, she at once establishes her own presence and stands up to the disempowering factor of a
name. Though of course, she still signs her emails “Jenny.”
“It’s always weird, hearing Professor McPhee. But you know, so much is weird in life. I just go with it. You’ll notice I never sign it that myself.”
One of the most engaging elements of the Nassau Weekly is the precision of Aiko Offner’s imagination.
Picking Pastries
On baked goods and latecapitalism, post-indulgence depression
By CHAS BROWN
Setting: a coffee shop with various pastries. I crave a sweet treat. My friend, right in front, orders a cake-like confection consisting of alternating layers of creamy white and gelatinous red substance. I’m next in line.
The hungry but indecisive will recognize this situation as hell. Although dozens of promising pastries stare seductively at me from their acrylic-cased prison cells, section three paragraph four of social norms dictate that I can only choose one (1) pastry. Those are the rules. Rough, but rules tend to exist for a reason. A one-pastry limit is surely good for my wallet and my waistline—I just can’t choose which. I want the almondy creamfilled bread and I want the flaky chocolate confection. Critical decisions, truly. However, as I feel the nonexistent judgment in the eyes of the employee patiently waiting to take my order and simultaneously fail to feel the very existent frivolity of this incredibly first-world problem, I cede and order just one pastry (a strudel-like bread that’s long, thin, and covered in what looks like sprinkles but are actually black sesame seeds), and sit down with my friend, jealousy eyeing her clearly better choice the whole time we eat.
I need not repeat that this is the biblically correct description of the underworld, and one that I could not–logically you’ll agree–bear to linger in any longer. In a fit of
passion, I broke out of this purgatory, the torturous, self-taught social dance. “Just one pastry,” they (I) say. Pfft! I (to myself), spit in return. The next time I entered a pastry shop, I channeled the inner leader my resume professes I am and I rebelled, ordering not just one pastry, oh no, but two!
In theory, my plan was perfect— fail proof, even—and the promised rewards great. The newfound latitude that getting two pastries affords is, well: consider pairing a rich pain au chocolat with a fruity raspberry tart. Imagine: a savory pastry perfectly complementing an extra-sugary confection. The patisserial possibilities expand exponentially when what was once one pastry becomes two.
However, this victorious initial period after my rebellion was, perhaps predictably to anyone learned in the histories of passionate revolutions, short lived.
My first oversight was that appetites (even my own) are not infinite. Consuming a pastry when your stomach is full is tragically not nearly as enjoyable as eating one when your stomach, or at least your “dessert stomach” (known to no scientist but all children), has the space to accommodate another visitor.
My next miscalculation was, however, the heart of the problem. A pastry seldom tastes as good as it looks. The shaved coconut and shining glaze on that croissant look unbelievably delectable together, but they will taste in reality very believably fine. Disappointment is inevitable. The difference with my revolutionary and patented two-pastry idea lies in the fact that if a pastry was bad back then, denial was still an option. I could have simply made a poor decision. But two mistakes are less brush-offable. Maybe happiness isn’t just one purchase away after all.
Such acute pastry-disappointment is a modern phenomenon. Surely the concept of two pastries existed only in the most far-fetched dream of my sheep-herding ancestors. In fact, peasants would experience what can only be described as euphoria when they so much as tasted the mere degenerate predecessors to our modern day confections. Hard brown lumps would be gratefully received as a once-a-year concession in exchange for their equally hard and brown labor in the swampy potato poop fields irrigated with cholera water. Indeed, social revolutions of the kind I epitomized by ordering two pastries the other week were routinely lulled in this way for centuries.
I’m obviously making this up. I’m also stuffing a pasteis de nata down my gullet to try and fill the empty inside. Modern prosperity made the two-pastries dream realizable, and that realizability killed the joy in its fantasy.
Pastries are now ubiquitous. When I chew my overpriced croissant, I don’t get the satisfaction of enjoying something someone else can’t have (siblings will be familiar), nor do I any longer properly enjoy the delicate dances of starch, sugar, butter, and more butter on my tongue. Instead, I expected something more, something that might not even exist. I wanted gustatory orgasm.
Modern prosperity made the Nassau Weekly realizable, and that realizability killed the joy in Chas Brown.
Craigslist Car
Loving and living with a white 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera
By AINA MARZIA
For what felt like an eternity in the sun was a 6-minute walk from my school. A place nobody else walked home from. They had their loud motorbikes and air-conditioned cars that played American music. I struggled against the overly frictional concrete that was hotter than usual and reached up to touch my hair. It stung. The sun hated black hair. Nature hated me too. Babi grabbed my backpack; at the time, it was the heaviest thing one could hold–he was kinder than the sun. The sun hated Amina too. I looked over my shoulder, and my older sister squinted sideways at me as she fought to keep her steps in tune with the louder thuds in her head. Zoya was too small to go school, but too old to stay home. She wanted to be like me; I didn’t know how to tell her, she did not.
Together, Amina, Zoya, and I walked home, skipping the cracks in the sidewalks as we went. We didn’t want to risk falling through.
“Zoya,” I cried, “Stop tugging my hair.”
“I am not,” she answered defensively. And we argued back and
forth until we reached the porch. The leaves scattered when we opened the door. Immediately, my sisters and I pulled off our laceless matching shoes. Laces were for big kids, my mother said, as we all tried to rub our sock lines from our calves, and we hadn’t reached that level of maturity. Six sweat-filled socks lay near the porch, Babi closed the door, and the leaves seamlessly returned to place.
We still didn’t have any furniture; a patterned chader on our living floor was a dining table. And doubled blankets that my Mami insisted we bring from Pakistan were the beds. “Muh pe paani pehnko,” Mami told us from the kitchen. We formed a line. My toes curled as I walked barefoot on the carpet. In the distance, I heard her saying something about us having to exercise in the sun, and then walking home. It was a frequent argument. Mami urged Babi to buy a car, and he told her that there wasn’t enough money.
Not having a car meant we’d have to take the bus. I hated public transportation; the ladies on the bus didn’t like that Zoya cried a lot. I always wondered why they hated crying–I know they did it too. Mami read the English twice before asking Amina to double check that she understood it. Amina and I took turns reading the metro map; we made sure to remember the numbers. It was the only thing that mattered anyways. When we
got on and when we got off.
The sun struck through the bathroom window, hitting my tanned face as I pulled my feet up into the sink. Zoya, who seemed to be still hung up on what happened on the walk home, pushed me. I stupidly clung to the sides of the sink and shot her a look. Quickly I threw some water on my warm face, and half of it landed on the floor and mirror. Secretly, I hoped she would slip on the water.
I went and changed into my pajamas. I never understood how kids could wear the same uncomfortable clothes from 7 am to 8 pm every day. Steel pots clanked together in the kitchen as Mami rigorously mixed aromas. They were so strong we could smell them a mile away; we’d take turns guessing what she made on the walk home. Sometimes I felt bad for the neighbors—they had to smell delicious food all day.
Amina and I laid the sheet on the carpet, as Marium conceitedly brought a dhaji full of rotis. Mami took the cold shikanjabeen from the fridge (it’s like lemonade, but better). We laughed as we tried to stop the tadpoles from entering our mouths. Little black round balls, with a clear coating. Mami said they helped with heat stroke. She was constantly worried about Amina; she always had a headache when we came back from school. Part of it was her migraines, and I think the sun on her dark hair every
afternoon didn’t make it better. Just as we all sat down to eat. A knock at the door.
“¿Quieres una sofá?” the man asked. My dad, who’d opened the door, was confused. “A sofa?” Losing patience, the man repeated his question: “Si, ¿la quieres?” My father stepped out to see what it was. “Ah, I know what you mean, a sofa!” I had now figured out it was the neighbor, and he looked as my dad had moments ago. After a few minutes of dialogue I couldn’t make out, he and my dad pushed a 3-seater sofa across the apartment balcony. We all watched as my mother urged us to go inside. We still peeked from our room.
I was exhilarated. It was a nice brown sofa that complimented the light brown carpet perfectly. We then learned where all the old things went to die; our neighbor told us about a website with everything. Clothes, furniture, books, toys. The empty corners of the apartment became molded by the past of someone else’s; every piece of wood in this home was from another’s, and they made our home. I don’t know if the sellers ever realized what they were giving us or how the coffee table that sat in the center of the living room was our first dinner table. How the computer that baba used for work now had a pedestal and the chair that spun so that he could see everything all at once. I loved Craigslist.
We found our car on Craigslist a year later. A white 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. Mami was overjoyed. The A.C. didn’t work and it didn’t take much time until we all had graffitied over the side handles and roof. But it was our car. No more walks from school. No more hot hair when I got back.
Babi was a good driver too! He could take turns, drive fast and even take his hands off the wheel. Sometimes he’d let me hold the GPS and tell him the directions.
A year later it broke down in the middle of I-10. It was a Thursday on a very crowded freeway. Amina, Zoya and I helped push the car to the side lane. “Kya ye kaam karega?” I asked. “We don’t know,” Babi told us. We called a taxi and got home. On the way back, I rested my head on the plastic glass of the taxi. Tears ran down my face; I kept it turned towards the window and pretended the stars looked interesting. I remember Mami telling us not to worry.
My foot moved at least 50 mph underneath the seat and my heart raced. I don’t know why I was scared. I thought of school, I thought of heat stroke, I thought of bus tickets, bus stops, ladies shouting at my mom at the bus stop, I thought of not knowing English, I thought all the things 7-year-olds aren’t supposed to worry about.
7-year-olds are supposed to color books and draw on Barbies. They are supposed to play with water guns and swing at the park. I wondered if all the things that came off Craiglist would break too. Did these people lie to us? Why was everything that was ever mine not mine? All the things borrowed, stolen. I want my car back. Passing the yellow dashed cracks in the street, I want it unbroken.
The empty corners of the Nassau Weekly became molded by the past of Aina Marzia.
GIRLS After Jamaica Kincaid’s 1978 “Girl”
By SOFIA CIPRIANO
Even if it’s sticky outside, bring a sweater if you’re going to ride the subway at night; your clothes are too tight, change before you leave; your clothes are too loose, they don’t do you any favors; if you’re being followed, don’t go home, stay calm, call a friend on the phone, walk into a store; at a party, don’t leave your drink unattended; when you get cat-called on the street, act like you didn’t notice, don’t make eye contact, never make eye contact: eye contact is an invitation.
This is how to act like a “girlboss” without being threatening. This is how to be kind without being a kiss-ass. This is how to be chill without being a slut. This is how to apply no-makeup makeup. This is how to punctuate a polite email. This is how to pretend to be in love with a boy you’re not in love with. This is how to pretend to not love a boy you do.
This is how to find a dress silhouette that looks flattering on your body. This is how to figure out what color looks good with your skin tone. You should wear sunscreen all the time; you should get a tan; don’t use products with chemicals; buy new products
hot when you’re fifty?
This is how you act like everything is perfectly fine after you just threw up from period cramps in the bathroom stall; this is how you discreetly carry a pad in your pocket. This is how you get on birth control — don’t expect him
stressed — what are you even stressed about?
This is how to dress to see your grandparents; this is the minimum length your shorts can be if you’re thinking of wearing them to school. You can wear that skirt, just expect to have guys looking at your ass. This is what you wear to have a drink in your friend’s dorm room; this is what you wear clubbing. This is how to track what you eat without developing an eating disorder; this is how to respond when your aunt says: you’re eating all that? and your grandma says: you’re looking too thin, are you eating enough?
when you discover the old ones are full of carcinogens; buy new tampons — yours have arsenic, did you see that news article? Buy anti-aging cream, it’ll prevent wrinkles, it doesn’t matter if you’re only nineteen, you should start early, don’t you want to look
to have condoms, you really should get on birth control. This is how to fix your hormones after birth control fucks them up— actually, are you sure your hormones are fucked up? You’re probably just dehydrated, get more sleep, eat more iron, be less
This is how you ignore what people say about you behind your back. This is how you figure out if a man is making “feminist” arguments because he believes in them or if he wants you to have sex with you. This is how you figure out if he’s actually into you, or if he’s “love-bombing” you.
This is how you look taller than you are; this is how
you look shorter. This is how to walk in heels; this is how to walk in shoes that give you blisters (always carry a bandaid); this is what to do if your heel gets stuck in the grate; this is what to do if your dress strap breaks.
This is how to change a guy; don’t date a guy you have to change. This is how to be friends with a guy without leading him on (oops); you should give nice guys a chance. This is how to make a guy respect you. This is how to make a guy like you. This is how to make a guy want you (it’s not that hard, wear a low cut top). This is how to play hard to get without being a tease; this is how to act available without acting desperate. This is what to expect of a “situationship”; this is what to expect of a guy you’re dating (but not exclusively); this is what to expect of a boyfriend. This is how to fake an orgasm; this is how to look a guy in the eye
and be civil even though you know he described your naked body to his friends — don’t start any drama, you’ll be the villain, not him. This is how you become good in bed without being a slut, without being crude, without knowing too much. This is how to figure out if you were raped. I’m not sure what happened, I didn’t say no? But I didn’t say yes, it just kind of happened, I didn’t want him to be mad at me? It wasn’t that bad, I guess, I’m not sure?
This is how to interrupt a guy after he interrupted you (say sorry at least twice). This is how to walk so people don’t mess with you — stare straight ahead, chin up. This is how to apologize, even when it’s not your fault. This is how to not be a burden. This is how you have an Ivy League degree and a corporate job and a child and a tidy household. Oh, you’re going to work full time and hire a
nanny – you mean you’re going to neglect your kid? You’re going to stop working to stay at home – you’re bringing the feminist movement back decades, too much money has been invested in your brain for you to waste it, don’t you appreciate how many women have had to risk so much to have the opportunities and freedom you have? Don’t you see how much freedom you have?
Dishwashing Ethnography
The Nass turns its anthropological gaze to the more-than-human: this time, a dishwasher
BY ELENA EISS
One of the most amazing things to watch is someone in their element when you yourself are not. In that moment, you inhabit the role of the viewer of someone who is so comfortable in what they do that they belittle you with their competence, not intentionally, not a glance or thought thrown in your direction at all.
As part of a short stay at a Canadian summer camp, I was assigned to clean the dining hall after a dinner. This was something I had done countless times working in the U.S. There were motions to cleaning a camp dining hall that my body had memorized, that I would do without thinking: arms stretch in instinct to grab stacked plates, feet move before mind, movements are cataloged and repeated for each of a hundred-fifty plates, forks, bowls. At the last sink of three, I no longer had to count the seconds before lifting each dish from its turquoise sanitized water, a minute’s circadian rhythm at work in my hands.
But here…they had a dishwasher. I stood in the dining hall, still new to me, and watched as others
flew into motion. They revealed steps I hadn’t conceived could exist: different tools, even. Out of nowhere emerged plastic trays, like milk crates on which you were meant to arrange bowls, that were then brought to the even-more-unfamiliar kitchen and placed on the dishwasher’s conveyor belt: the Hobart.
I asked for a task, but the person I approached was a new counselor himself, an apathetic Brit flown in to help manage the camp’s staff shortage. He wiped pesto and tomato sauce from forks.
“Why are you here?”
I told him.
“They just told you to help?”
I said yeah.
“So screw them. Just leave if you want.”
I stayed. I imitated the actions of others, most campers half my age, and watched as my work was undone. Five bowls on a tray is too many; three fit on this one, two fit on that one, this big bowl is the only one on its tray; you can’t stack them, see how they go into the Hobart? Hobart, Hobart, Hobart… dishwasher-turned-proper noun, deified, mythological. At first glance, it appeared to take up a corner of the kitchen; at second, when switches were flicked to on, water was set to course, and its presence consumed the whole room.
Another counselor stood at the dishwasher in his ratty Nike slides, as if Neptune himself rose from the
soapy waters of the flooded kitchen floor. He slung trays into the sightline of the monstrous Hobart, devourer of dishes, consumer of cutlery, and blasted each with more water from a hose suspended octopus-like from the ceiling.
As soon as I saw him towering over the conveyor belt and stacks of trays like an Olympian, I knew I had become an observer. My view of this kitchen was clinical, ethnographic even, and I had no place here as a participant. There was something shameful about this, about watching this performance of moving parts I had not rehearsed, knowing it would continue to be performed after I left the next day. I didn’t have to be competent as a temporary observer, but is there not joy lost in the distance between me and this well-oiled machine of dishwashing competency?
If we don’t acknowledge it, that distance is comfortable. Too comfortable. We trust that other people can fly our planes better, make our bridges safer, and deliver our mail more efficiently than we could ever accomplish, so we don’t think about those other people—unless you are, of course, a pilot, a mail carrier, or majoring in CEE. Detaching ourselves from the world lets us live on our own inhibiting islands where we don’t see the hands taking our plates off the dining hall conveyor belts and
counters or the people past the glass partitions cooking our food.
Sure, it’s uncomfortable to recognize that the rest of the world is better than us at…most things, actually, but in that discomfort, we can find an opportunity, too, to witness the infinite number of great feats accomplished every day by the people around us. If I listen to the students in my hallway struggling through their p-sets in the common room, using a whole palette of unfamiliar terminology to paint this impressive and obviously-informed art piece of logic and numbers, then I can appreciate their work even more than they can. Can’t they see how they must be doing something right to be able to talk like this? Can’t they see how they shine?
It makes life more interesting to consider all the labor that keeps it going, and more beautiful. We can only hope someone might stop to consider our own work and efforts, but it’s a loss if we leave all the wondering to other people. Unlock this hidden, anthropological joy: being rendered an observer of excellence, a speck staring back at the world.
We can only hope someone might stop to consider the Nassau Weekly, but it’s a loss if Elena Eiss leaves all the wondering to other people.
Yesterday’s Coffee
“The first time I saw the house for itself—not as the house two doors down, but as the house that could be parent’s—was the estate sale. Here, the relics of a life.”
By DANIEL VIORICA
Iwas thinking of the river. It seemed emptier than that time last year, slower. Just a little track through the desert, barely wider than my thumb, with only a bit of grass and a few trees at its banks. When I was a kid, we took a trip there with my mom and dad. We set up a tent in the forest just north of the city. In the morning, the air was full of light and mosquitos, green things growing and dying. At night, I could hear the river. Everywhere. Like it was flowing around me, through me.
They told me in school that the river was full of trash. Misshapen metal rods, fishhooks, cans, rust, plastic bags getting dirty in the wash. Fish lived by it and through it; they learned to eat, rest, and mate around its edges. There was poison in the water, from the factories in the industrial district. I’d only seen their smokestacks from a distance, seen the fumes. None of it could be true. There was the water. I went swimming in it with my father and sister, while mother
watched behind her magazine and polka-dot hat. Shaking her head. But I knew the water was clean in the river that afternoon in the autumn. It had always been clean.
Soon the river was gone behind the clouds, and the intercom was telling me to adjust my seat. Then only the sand out the window and the hills. Trails that must be dirt roads. I always tried to remember where they might be—Placitas or Bernalillo.
The airport was the same as always, the same as last summer. Heat through an open door, the dust. Sun and the plate glass windows, making the terracotta floor shimmer.
There was mom, waiting for me alongside Eve. Standing next to one another, in the middle of the terminal. Looking almost confused. Hello, I said, and my sister fell on my shoulder. I missed you, Eve was saying, we missed you. Mother was wearing a white linen dress. She looked older. She must have stopped dyeing her hair. As Eve drew back and said, oh, but how are you, mom almost gave me a smile.
On the way home, I let my head trail against the car window. Eve was driving, she was terrible. Every time the car in front of us slowed she’d slam on the brakes. A lurch. And mom would curse under her breath and say, hita, it’s okay. I really should have been driving but I couldn’t take my eyes off the
houses. There was the base, where we’d lived in sixth, seventh grade. The little brick houses side by side, the sound of planes on the runway. Then we were in the international district, those empty parking lots, the fair grounds. Where Eve and I had lived in college. Drunks banging on the window of our apartment, red walls and wrought-iron bars on its door.
He isn’t leaving the bed much these days, said mom. You told me on the phone.
Jane isn’t doing well. You should talk to her.
I’ll go by today, I said. Tomorrow, if we don’t find time.
Then we were in the little neighorhood off the freeway that became theirs after I left: twenty or so houses backing up to a ditch. Eve lived two doors down from mom, identical houses with xeriscaped lawns. Mom’s had a plum tree. In the springtime it would be pink, soft, and lovely. Eve’s had a desert willow. Across the street, a neighbor’s apricots dripped over the gate. Dogs barked and fruit rotted on the blacktop.
Inside, it was cool and dark; there were curtains, it was very empty. I sat down on the leather couch with one of them on either side, head on Eve’s shoulder. Talking. About something silly. How my postdoc was coming along. Maybe I said, it’s slow. Eve had posters and prints on the walls, decorative tiles in blues and
oranges. Succulents in little pots. All I could feel was the couch under me, cool, and Eve’s sweater. Under my cheek. Mother’s hand on my back, moving up and down. Just like when I was a kid.
Iwoke up when Jane came by to say hello. The boys were already home—from middle school, now—but they were quiet, already in their rooms. Jane, my older sister, was in the dining room. Still in her nurse’s scrubs.
They say they might not let us in, she said, not tomorrow, not until Monday. And I told them that our sister just flew in. They said that they didn’t have any choice, just a matter of procedure. Something about cleaning the room. But I know it’s not standard procedure, I spent all day working downstairs and they know that. They’re making it up as they go.
I stood up and felt a little pain beneath my forehead. And I heard, look, Rachel’s up.
Can we try to go by? I asked. I just said they’re closed. Something’s up if you ask me–it doesn’t seem right.
But I want to see him, I said. I want to see him tonight.
Iwoke up with pale blue light through the window, bright like the sky in the winter. I was lying on the couch in Eve’s front room. There was a throw blanket crumpled over my legs, I’d fallen asleep in my clothes. The house was still. I spent a long time looking out the windows onto the street. A car went by. Once, a roadrunner perched on a neighbor’s brick wall. It had a lizard in its mouth.
I heard steps behind me. It was Eve, wearing slippers. We must look alike right now with our tangled hair. People always said we
look alike. Are the boys still asleep? They sleep until ten on the weekends, if I let them.
We went to the kitchen. I helped her get started on the coffee. It was odd, doing something together that we probably do every morning hundreds of miles apart. We each had our own rhythm. By the time I found the coffee, Eve had the mugs ready. Her coffee grinder was old, it belonged to an aunt or a cousin. Deafening. But nobody seemed to wake up.
Mom went home, Eve said, not long after you dropped off.
Right. And she’s doing okay.
Well, only as well as you can be. But better than Jane, you saw her.
Jane lived a mile away. She kept to herself. Now she came by, Eve told me, once or twice a day, before work when she could. At the hospital, she gossiped with her patients about the doctors upstairs. One day, Eve told me, she came by a little drunk and talked about the diagnosis: Just a tremor, nothing serious. Not a cardiac event, nothing that would need, you know, a bypass or anything. And there you go. He was driving one evening, he said, and right there, on the left arm. Went right to the hospital. Only fifty-four.
I can’t stand it, said Eve. They’ll think we’re all like Jane. They’ll never let us in.
Well, I said, we just express things differently.
She could express it a little bit more quietly.
I’m not sure she could. That’s just Jane, I mean.
Maybe you’re right, said Eve. She pressed a button on the coffee maker. It was new, bright red, still shiny. Give me a chance, I said–I haven’t had a chance yet to talk to them. Who knows if they would
listen. I watched the coffee dribble down into a mug. It was too sharp when I tried it.
There was mom’s house. Offwhite stucco, a shade of almost-violet. Cracked. I never noticed that before. The roses climbed up a rusting pole on the porch, all wilted, dried out with leaves brown at their edges. I don’t remember it like this, I said, and Eve said, but it hasn’t changed. It’s always been like this since mom and dad bought it. Which was only five years ago now, or had it been six. When they retired, to help their daughters with their kids. I heard the news first from Eve: not next door but very close was for sale. The old woman who lived there passed. A steal. The first time I saw the house for itself—not as the house two doors down, but as the house that could be parent’s— was the estate sale. Here, the relics of a life. Mostly brass trinkets, photo frames, fine glass bottles, ivory carved in simple yet fantastic shapes. A crocodile, an elephant. I ran my fingers over it, over the price tags. Five dollars, ten dollars, thirty dollars. There was a scent. Flowers and spoiled perfume. We opened all the windows on the first day, to air it out. The old woman used cotton sheets to block them up, block the light. Eve and I took them down and the sun came in like a knife. Revealed dirt on the walls and in the carpet. The smell stuck to our hands, even when we washed them, even when the house was empty.
Eve rang the doorbell. Nothing. Oh well, she said, and dug the key from her pocket. We went inside.
Two big chairs in the living room, father’s blanket still tangled on his. It was only a week ago when I’d gotten the first call. It seemed
like he could stay home. I can come, I said. Eve said, there’s no need. It’s nothing to worry about. The next call came from Jane. An ambulance at three in the morning, screams, eyes rolled to the back of the head. Many of the details were exaggerated or, apparently, invented.
You should have told me earlier, I’d said.
I didn’t want you to worry.
Mom was awake. She’d gotten over the habit of smoking her cigarettes in the kitchen. She was pacing, back and forth. God, Eve said, it’s only seven. We sat her down in the sitting room and opened a box of candy orange slices. She downed two and complained how bad they were for her teeth. Ah, well, going to have them out soon anyway. Won’t even make that much of a difference. You get to my age and you learn to stop worrying.
We got to the hospital at about two o’clock. We argued about it. It won’t make any difference, Eve said, you heard Jane. They won’t let us in. The hospital was like a different world, one where the carpets were new and the light never changed. Harsh, harsh fluorescents, reminding you that things can be clean. And those starched green scrubs on the nurses. Hello, I said at the desk, my father’s here. I think he’s on the first floor. He’s pretty sick, and I just got into town. I was hoping I could see him.
And your name is?
Rachel Gonzales.
And your father’s?
Thomas Doyle. We have our mother’s name.
The nurse took us to the door of a room and left with a warning: try not to upset him too much. And there he was. Lying in a hospital
bed, a tube sticking into him, a bag filled with liquid. Clear and bulging. He was asleep and had rings under his eyes. The blanket over him was thin, thin enough that I could see the bones in his legs. It was very cold. There was a small window looking out to a parking lot.
We sat in the two chairs and waited for him to wake up.
Just the eyes. Then a smile on his lip. Then I was on my knees taking his hand, my cheek against his hand until he said, get up off the floor. You don’t know what’s been down there.
How do you feel?
Well, not great.
For some reason he talked slowly. When he moved—especially the large box of his chest—you could see it in his face. The heart. An infection. But he talked. Mostly little things. My work, Eve’s sons. How hot it was this summer, warmer every year. The nurse came, checked his vitals, asked about his pain. Four. Maybe a five. The doctor was only here once a day. If that. He was a nice man but was very busy.
We agreed that one of us at least would spend the night. The nurse found a blanket.
There’s a photograph of the five of us; it’s still on my wall. Dad in the bed, mom and me and my sisters on either side. How alike we all look, with our curly brown hair. Our thick round glasses. We’re smiling. It’s an oddly colored photograph, warm, almost brown-tinted. Even when we first had it printed, a few weeks after, it looked very old.
I remember noise in the room. How full it could be with people. And sometimes quiet. The beeping. Wind outside the window. One day, the boys were there. Eve
had stepped outside with the older one, looking for food. The younger one was eleven; at one point, he tapped me on the shoulder. Father was asleep, you could hear his breath. And the boy leaned towards me, as if to whisper. But he didn’t say anything.
How do you feel, I asked.
I don’t know.
That makes sense.
Sometimes, he started, I wish I weren’t even here. I know we need to be. But when I’m at home or at school I can forget.
Are you tired?
Yes.
That’s good. We can go to sleep. We put together a makeshift bed from the two chairs and a sheet; I helped him settle down. Soon he was breathing easily. I looked at him every few minutes, or glanced at dad. He looked so much different from last year. So much older. Like he’d been replaced. Eve was taking a long time to get back; I started to get tired. I managed to prop myself up with my head against the hospital bed. The floor was cold. It was dark. With my eyes closed, it almost seemed like I was home. It almost seemed like any other place.
NASS RECOMMENDS :
Ten “NYRB Classics” Titles
Not one but ten recommendations from the NYRB archives
BY NARGES ANZALI
In the back of the only bookstore in my tiny Vermont hometown, there’s a small spinner labeled NYRB. For the uninitiated, this stands for New York Review Books. The NYRB Classics series is self-described as “the kind of books that people typically run into outside of the classroom and then remember for life.” Their mission is to find and publish books that have been left largely unacknowledged and gone out of print. This tends to include a lot of international books which were either never translated, translated badly, or were never distributed outside of their country. In my town, those books represented an outside world where arts and culture seemed to be formed, far, far away from where I was—a world which can open us up to so many new ways of looking, speaking, and understanding. When we close ourselves off to the great variety of art that there is in the world, we lose something important in return. I still come back to this collection to find something that excites me, something I’ve never seen before. I hope they’ll do the same for you.
10. STONER, John Williams (1965)
This is the book that your friend who got a little too into dark academia loves, and you’ll never tell them, but you love it too. The titular character, ‘Stoner,’ goes to university and instead of fulfilling his father’s dream of an agriculture major, falls in love with English instead. This book takes you through dark, sepia-tinted days of academia and isolation, and one man’s seemingly cursed attempts at love. One might say that it’s the perfect book for Princeton students who disappointed their parents by majoring in English.
9. LIFE WITH PICASSO,
Francoise Gilot (1964)
There are a lot of narratives that go around about Picasso. There’s a camp which portrays him as a monster, another that sanctifies him for the sake of art. I find this narrative the most compelling. It
is an attempt of Francoise Gilot to understand the man that she had a child with. There has been much debate about the great men of art (see; Monsters by Clair Dederer) but Gilot doesn’t try to convince us of Picasso’s character one way or another. Instead, she recounts her life with him in chronological order, bringing us down the winding roads of a post-war Paris and to face the complicated character of the artist in his real life.
8. ON BEING BLUE (A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY)
, William H. Gass (1975)
Do you remember that super controversial argument about which color notebook you should use for each school subject? This book takes that heated debate to a whole new level. There are spaces and emotions in life, he argues, that are completely blue. The space between a pause in the conversation, sex, empty spaces, and the psychological experience of loneliness.
It explores how color affects the way we view the world, and ties in some amazing poets like Wallace Stevens to help prove his point. A great beach read for those who stare too long at the big blue line where sky meets water.
7. CHESS STORY, Stefan Zweig (1942) Short, slightly disturbing, but worth it. Stefan Zweig is the influence behind Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, and the parallels are clear. Zweig writes with a certain equilibrium, never letting a sentence dangle for too long. His scenes are immaculately timed, as though he writes to the beat of a metronome, and his internal rhythm seems to guide every sentence intuitively. As he takes us through the story of a chess game on an up-scale passenger ship, the images seem not only perfectly
color-coordinated but also balanced in a way that helps you slide down the story’s narrative and land at the end without any idea of how you got there. Read for chess, intrigue, and a surprising amount of psychological torture.
6. THE DOOR
, Magda Szabo (1987) Szabo, who is a fairly famous Hungarian novelist, was relatively unknown in the United States until recently due to a lack of translations of her work. Her novel unravels the fascinating dynamics of her own life in a semi-autobiographical attempt to understand her relationship with her maid, Emerence. Playing off Soviet-era dynamics of class and the contrast between city and village life, this book is a moving portrait of a relationship between two women who seem to be at the opposite poles of their respective society.
5. MY DEATH, Lisa Tuttle pub. 2004
A recent widow sets out to write a biography on an eminent artist of her time, whose most radical work is a mystery. This book takes every established rule of its own world and flips it on its head in a mere 144 pages. From the first page, this vibe is reverie crossed with a fever dream. As she talks more and more to this old, eccentric artist, both her mindset and the prose of the book become muddled in mysterious ways. With a twist I bet you won’t see coming, you will leave this book feeling a little hollower on the inside.
4. SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH, Tayeb
Salih (1966)
One of the cornerstones of post-colonial literature, Season of Migration to the North is perhaps one of the best known books on this list. Salih flips the narrative of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad–in SOMN, a man goes to the mysterious and seemingly dreaded world of the European, and the things he finds there send him back home, where he appears in a mysterious flurry to a small village on the banks of a river. A young man, idealistic and naive, seeks to unravel what exactly happened to him. This book examines in depth the relationship between the colonized and the colonizers, and how exoticization takes a piece out of us all.
3. NOTES OF A CROCODILE,
Qiu Miaojin (1994)
Are you too artsy for your own good? Do you have Wong Kar Wai in your Letterboxd top four? Do you want to read genuine queer representation? This book is definitely for you. Set in Taiwan, these diaries chronicle a student’s life at university, consisting of all the haziness and surrealism of her contemporaries in Asian literature, but with a dry wit and exploration of sexuality that sets it apart from the rest. Wander down the streets at 2am with her–you won’t regret it.
2. GOLD, Rumi [trans. Haleh Liza Gafori] (2022)
Mistranslation of important cultural works has become a prevalent issue, especially in the translation of Persian literature. Many so-called translators ‘interpret,’ adapting already existing English translations instead of actually providing new reading of the text. Haleh Liza Gafori’s stunning atmospheric translation prioritizes sentiment over form. Her strategy of gathering passages with the same feeling, instead of a stiff direct approach, for the first time successfully communicates the ecstatic and spiritual feeling of Rumi’s original poetry. The purpose of her translation is not to
create moments within the text to interest English readers, but rather to direct the powerful rivers of emotion that flow through Rumi’s writing. It leaves you feeling the title of the book—as though the world is really made of gold.
1. THE WOUNDED
AGE
AND EASTERN TALES, Ferit Edgu (2007)
If I was the type to build altars for things I love, I would build an altar for this book. One of the single most creative endeavors I’ve ever read, this book follows a Turkish journalist sent to the border regions. The things he witnesses are recorded entirely in poetry and prose, horrors filtered through language so beautifully curated that it scarcely seems real. This book is about the in-between spaces and the growing pains of both nations and people. A scathing analysis of the ethnic battle lines drawn in the Middle East, this book pushes boundaries that I didn’t even know existed.
If Narges Anzali was the type to build altars for things she loves, she would build an altar for the Nassau Weekly.
A Horse Walks Into a Bar...
By MATT PICOULT
Ahorse walks into a bar.
The Bartender says, “Why the long face?”
“Well,” the horse says, “it’s my life.”
“What about your life?” the bartender says, “What’s the story?”
“That’s just it,” says the horse, “I don’t have a story. I’m a horse, And I’m like all the other horses, and all the other horses are like me.
There’s only two things a horse can do: plow a field, and pull a carriage.
“You see, I’d like to wear Jordan’s, but I have hooves, not feet.
I’d like to play piano, but I don’t have thumbs.
And maybe I’d go to school if I could hold a pencil, But the fields need plowing and the carriages pulling.
“Sometimes I think if God pitied anyone It wouldn’t be me.
How am I supposed to manage
on four hooved feet?
“You want to know my story? You know, maybe, if my face were shorter, It wouldn’t be so long.”
“I feel for you,” said the bartender, “I really get what you mean, But I don’t know what to say, Horses are horses after all.”
“I guess I’ve got to get going,” responded the horse, “I’ve got to plow a field and pull a carriage in the morning.”
A horse walks out of a bar
And the bartender takes a rag off his shoulder He starts to polish a glass and think How everyday in that bar, he seemed to get a bit older.
And as he polishes he notices His reflection in front of him: A tiny man enclosed in the pint cup.
And he asks the man, “Why the long face?”
“Well,” the man says, “maybe I don’t plow fields, But I pour drinks. Maybe I don’t pull carriages, but I clean glasses.
“You see, A horse is a prisoner to his hooves, I am a prisoner to nothing but this bar.
But who is to blame but myself, For the strongest chains are not chains at all; Iron links may break and sever,
But a broken will shall break no further.
“And I’ve thought about leaving, Buying the Jordans, learning the piano.
Hell, I’d even go to school. But I was younger then, it’s too late now.
And even though my face is shorter, it’s still long.”
Matt Picoult’s reflection in front of him: A tiny man enclosed in the Nassau Weekly.
