It’s Time to Radically Rethink Online Book Events

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Before the stay-at-home orders came down in Baltimore, the last thing I did in person was participate in a panel conversation about—ironically—“art and the apocalypse.” In retrospect, we should have cancelled, but the threat in Maryland still felt surreal; those were the days when it seemed like we could beat the pandemic by washing our hands.

Internet readings have lacked some of the magic of human connection. Is there a way to recapture that magic online?

I’ve been thinking about that panel a lot lately because my first novel is coming out in August, and I’ve been trying to envision a book launch without an in-person event. I’m embarrassed to be grieving for this tiny problem, which is less than negligible compared to all we have witnessed this year. But publishing a novel has been a lifelong dream for me, and book events have been an important part of that dream—because other authors’ events have been such meaningful parts of my own inspiration. I have vivid memories of electric readings by Victor LaValle, César Aira, and Tim O’Brien. I got teary-eyed watching a hundred public school kids crowd in to see D. Watkins at the Baltimore Book Festival. After hearing Valeria Luiselli speak about The Story of my Teeth, I was so inspired I wrote an entire short story in an afternoon. When my dreams have felt far away, when my fiction has seemed meager and hopeless, I have gone to a bookstore and sat on a folding chair and been reminded that books are my spirituality—they are my connection to my own humanity, and to my understanding of grace in others. The magic of a book event is in the revelation, fresh every time, that my very favorite thing to do, a thing I do mostly alone, is also the thing that connects me most closely to other people. 

As COVID has become our new normal, book events have started up again, in virtual formats. But like every other online substitute we’ve instituted—family Zoom calls, Instagram birthday wishes—these internet readings have lacked some of the magic of human connection. Is there a way to recapture that magic online?

For the first week of isolation, it was easy to imagine a return to normalcy. I think many of us saw ourselves emerging from a fourteen-day quarantine having drunk a little too much, maybe, but also having written King Lear. Personally, I did more drinking than writing. But I still felt optimistic. 

By the third week, I had swung from denial to despair at the never-ending stream of news of illness and death, health care system failures and government malfeasance. The experience of these months reminds me of when I fall asleep on the couch watching a movie and then refuse to get up to go to bed. I know that I will feel terrible sleeping on the couch, but all I want to do is keep sleeping on the couch. My friend Nicole calls this feeling “special features,” because back in the days of DVD, she would demand her partner play the special features after the movie so that she could continue to sleep. By my fifth week of staying at home, I felt like I was living in special features.

To alleviate the loneliness, I found solace in online book events. Bookstores and literary festivals, podcasts and grassroots publicity efforts, and publishers and authors had intrepidly brought their work and energy online, gathering readers together despite the pandemic with heroic success. I went to more book events online in April than I have ever been to in a physical month; there were nights I hopped between three different conversations, from Zoom to Crowdcast to Instagram Live; it was like wandering through a literary night market, the tents all patchwork-stitched together but the doorways tacked open to warm, inviting fires inside. In those first three lonely months, wandering through this nightly market has been a comfort.

But lately, I’ve started to wonder why these events have not yet evolved. Most events are still following the old-fashioned format of the in-person bookstore event, where two authors have a conversation, maybe with a short reading, maybe with an audience Q&A. Rather than developing new ideas for book events to suit the technology we’re using, the literary community is by and large continuing to do what we’ve always done. 

The internet rarely mimics the conventions of the physical world. So why are we still limiting book events to what is possible in person? 

Don’t get me wrong—many of these events have been truly excellent. But the internet, which can be thrilling and inspiring and creative, rarely mimics the conventions of the physical world. So why are we still circumscribing book events according to the limits of what is possible in person? 

These restrictions are not ideal for digital space. In bookstores, the “in conversation” model works because it gives you the inspiration of being in the same room as the author, as well as the excitement of being part of an audience. Neither of those translates organically to Zoom or Instagram Live, where it doesn’t really feel like you’re in the same room. And while there is often a chat box, or little hearts floating up the screen when people “like” something, the sensation of being part of the crowd is abstract. Without this sense of community, some online book events have left me feeling lonelier than I was before. 

It’s time to start experimenting—and to try radically reinventing what a “book event” can be, in this radically different year. 

I’ve started bringing this up with friends, looking for new ideas and possibilities of what an online book event can be. The general answer I’ve been getting is: Nobody knows! This is a new frontier, and it’s going to take a lot of playful experimentation to figure out what works. But as reopening plans falter nationwide, and it’s clear that gathering 30 or 50 people into a bookstore isn’t going to be a responsible choice anytime soon, it’s time that we start playing around. 

I’ll go first. I’ve been throwing spitballs at the wall, and I came up with these nine ideas for ways an author could reinvent the book launch format: 

  1. MTV Cribs: The author gives a tour of their workspace, from the desk where the book was written to the research library that inspired it to the corkboard string-map of characters to the spot on the floor where the author laid prone in despair. (Update: Baltimore’s Pratt Library and The Ivy Bookshop have been hosting a similar “Writer’s CRIBS” series since April!)
  2. Bookshelf Bingo: The author hosts a Bingo game based around a tour of their bookshelf, pulling out a selection of favorite works that inspired the new book. The first audience member who also owns a copy of four of the featured books hits bingo, and wins a prize. 
  3. Pet Readings: Pets are the internet’s staple food; the author gives a reading from their book to their cat or dog (or, inspired by the Barcelona opera, their houseplants).  
  4. Two Truths and a Lie: In each round of this game, the author makes three statements about the book, only two of which are true; the audience guesses (in the chat box) which is a lie. 
  5. Short Film Festival: The author curates a YouTube playlist of videos related to the book—movie clips, interviews, classroom science films, news footage, home movies—and screens the playlist live, offering running commentary and answers to audience questions in a chat box alongside. 
  6. Wildly Unprofessional Powerpoints: Several authors host a raucous, high-energy online lecture showcase—telling stories or explaining topics of interest to their books, alongside screenshared powerpoints (perhaps in the model of the Drunk Education series in Brooklyn or Trampoline Hall in Toronto). 
  7. Live Cooking Class: The author shares a recipe (or cocktail) that has some connection with the book, then makes the dish or cocktail on a livestream platform. It might be fun if the audience has a couple of days to gather ingredients, so they can cook (or drink) along with the show.
  8. Google Documents Editing Tour: The author shares a Google Document that shows early drafts of the book, pointing out specific changes and talking about their editing process. (This is obviously for truly hard-core craft nerds only). 
  9. Virtual Book Signing: With the support of a moderator/gatekeeper, the author takes 5-minute individual video calls with people who have purchased the book. Similar to the few moments you get at the front of a real book signing line, this is a chance to ask a question, or give the author a compliment, before getting your book “signed” (the author writes a bespoke message for the reader on a piece of paper, then holds it up for a screenshot—it’s a selfie AND a signature in one!). 

If we start playing with these tools, we can make online ‘readings’ feel like their own kind of event rather than a substitute.

This list is just a first draft. Some of these ideas probably won’t work at all. Others will be more comfortable for some authors than others, and not every book will have a natural tie-in to these ideas. The point, though, is that we need to start thinking outside the “in conversation” box. Online events don’t have to feel like placeholders for the “real” thing while we wait for an increasingly far-off return to crowded rooms. The internet offers incredible varied tools for storytelling, playing, creating meaning, and connecting. If we start playing with these tools, we can make online “readings” feel like their own kind of event rather than a substitute, offering experiences that aren’t possible in physical space.

It’s important to note that all online events come with real safety concerns, which can be a serious barrier to experimentation. The flood of attacks from racists and bigots has made many bookstores and authors rightfully cautious about online events; it is especially infuriating because the attacks mainly hurt people of color, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and so many others who have too rarely received their deserved publishing deals and attention. I’m grateful for and impressed by the work many have done in developing effective ways to block trespassers; as we experiment with new formats, security measures are a non-negotiable prerequisite. 

I hope we can deepen and extend the literary community through online events, not just keep it afloat. The writer and critic Maris Kreizman wrote on Twitter that she hopes “any author tour, no matter how many cities are on the agenda, will also have a live digital element” because livestreams are so much more accessible. It’s not a perfect solution—for one thing, there are still far too many people without access to computers or the internet at home—but online events are a big improvement for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, those caring for children, those in rural or poor areas without bookstores, and others with countless barriers to weeknight events. 

The more we can make online experiences exciting and engaging, the more we can cement an enduring tradition of truly accessible events.

Innovation is part of the push for universal access—the more we can make online experiences exciting and engaging, the more we can cement an enduring tradition of truly accessible events. And we can also open the door to people who might never walk into a bookstore. In 2017, the artists Yara Trevieso and Bridghid Greene performed La Medea—a musical dance performance designed to be experienced over livestream, with live audience voices in the role of Greek Chorus—on the Twitch platform. The artists found Twitch attracted entirely new audiences to their work: “… [it was a] major turnout in viewers that were predominately male watching a hyperfeminist musical.” Maybe—if we get this online thing right—book events can attract new audiences, too. 

I started this essay by describing a March panel conversation about art and the apocalypse. But I didn’t tell you how that event turned out.

Nobody came! The panel went great, except for the fact that we had no audience. We talked about art, hope, feminism, and the future, in an empty auditorium. In the old days, that event would have felt like a failure. In the context of COVID, it felt strange and kind of magical, like something that would happen in a novel. It was my moment of realization: Talking about the apocalypse, to an apocalyptically empty auditorium, I was faced with the fundamental change sweeping the globe. 

In the past few months, I’ve gathered hope from the ways our art and literature is shifting to reflect and respond to these new times. I’m looking forward to seeing all the ways our literary events evolve. 

Who Do You Confess Your Sins To?

Posted on by Jo Lou

Set in a small town in an abstracted American South, Catherine Lacey’s Pew traces a week in the life of its eponymous narrator, shortly after they are discovered sleeping on a church bench by the congregation and promptly nicknamed—like a dog—after the place they were found.

Pew is difficult to classify: androgynous and ethnically ambiguous, itinerant and without memory of either past or origin. They become first an object of Christian charity, and soon, a challenge to conservative Christian values and the townspeople’s need to “know what kind of person” a person is, in order to know how to treat them. Tension rises as the book approaches a mysterious “Forgiveness Festival” and Pew hears the stories and confessions of the town’s inhabitants. Pew, whose face cannot be pictured, presents a portrait of a community faced with the impossible: a body, bare of signifiers, that is only human.

I spoke on the phone with Catherine Lacey about complicity, forgiveness, growing up in the South, and more. 

Olivia Parkes: From the moment they are discovered, Pew refuses to speak. Why and how did you make that choice? 

Catherine Lacey: I think this is the first time I wrote something where I just knew the container of the book from the very beginning. I just had this question of what would it mean if we weren’t able to determine someone’s gender, race, background, or age? What would it mean to look at a person who was like that? And I think that once I had that question, it basically required this person not to speak. Because speech carries these different indicators in it. So the whole conceit of the book sort of required the central character not speak. And I was interested in the challenge of that. 

OP: One function of that choice is that the book is made up largely of the monologues of other characters. Many of those monologues end up being confessions of one kind or another. It emerges over the course of the book that certain kinds of crimes have in fact been committed and are still being committed by the community there. How were you thinking about the ways in which the crimes of the individual and the crimes of a community intersect?

CL: It’s interesting that you frame it in terms of a crime that has been committed, and these different people having to confess to different ways in which they’ve been a party to these crimes. Because I do think that’s a part of any society. Being a part of any government, being a part of history, being a part of the community means that you are a party to all different sorts of violence and oppression that occurred long before you’ve gotten there. And so how do you reconcile that? Especially if you’re confronted with what in one way is just a sort of void. You know, this person, this character, this body in need or body in an absence of context. I guess it seems like the appropriate place to confront your position in this society, or for these characters to confront their positions in their society. 

OP: The book moves towards a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, which is framed by the townspeople as a way of trying to “actively reconcile with the past” and “unite both sides of the community.” But it emerges that that’s not really how the festival is functioning. Could you talk about your skepticism of forgiveness as it’s handled in Pew? 

CL: I remember having this question really early on: If all sins can be forgiven, then what is the meaning of justice? In the town that I grew up in, in Mississippi, every single person went to a church. It was not a weird question to ask somebody what church they went to. There was an assumption that you belonged to one. So from a really young age, because I believed the adults around me, and because I was a reader, I read the Bible quite intensely. And it was really hard for me to reconcile the world that I was living in with the messages as I understood them in the Bible. To me, that’s the interesting question of the South. How do you have this place that’s so built around the teachings of Jesus, ostensibly, and yet has some of the most vile human rights problems in the country? I can’t stop thinking of that question but I also can’t answer it, but fiction never answers anything directly. 

OP: Pew gets taken in by a traditional cis-gendered hetero white family, and the problems of the book begin as soon as they try to identify Pew, or in the face of Pew’s inability or unwillingness to answer the question: What are you? Why is it so dangerous to this community to leave that question unanswered? 

CL: Well I think it would be dangerous in any context. You know, the conceit of the book is one that’s basically impossible. There’s no such thing as a person who has no racial background, gender, no identifying anything. There’s always something, right? But if we could imagine what it would mean to interact with someone who we knew was a human being, but we didn’t know anything else beyond that, I’m not sure if any community would know how to deal with that in a way that would be comfortable or reasonable. I don’t think there’s anything about the South or about this abstracted community that is more poorly suited for it than anywhere else. It’s just the place I know the most intimately.

OP: One of the ways the book dramatizes Pew’s indeterminate appearance is by having them look different ways to different people. What other characters see seems like a projection of their own minds, which affects how they want to “deal” with Pew. For example: Do they see a white female child of twelve, or a black male teenager of fifteen? How were you thinking about projection or that range of identity in Pew? 

Being a part of the community means that you are a party to all sorts of violence and oppression that occurred long before you’ve gotten there.

CL: I’m really interested in the psychological concept of dysmorphia—both physical and mental. At different times in your life, even different moments of the day, you might see vastly different people in the mirror. It’s difficult to reconcile the difference between the self you invent and the much more mutable, unknowable self that is actually out here living your life.

With the fact that the characters all see something different in Pew, I never envisioned each character seeing what they wanted to see, just that their interpretations would conflict. In some ways, I think you can read a novel as a kind of dream in which you’re being asked to identify with every character. In this novel, however, the main character you’re being asked to identify with has nothing for you to latch onto. What does it mean to confront a void or an absence or the part of you that isn’t gender or the part of you that doesn’t have a background? Where is that in your body and in your psyche?

OP: Pew is an impossible person—a person with no background or fixed characteristics–and also an unconventional character. They don’t really want anything, and are often passive—they stay, for example, in the town, even when it becomes unpleasant for them to do so. How conscious were you of playing with literary conventions around agency, or the idea that narrative is driven by a character’s wants and the thwarting or forwarding of those desires?

CL: I’ve always had a hard time with this concept of agency. I did an MFA, but in creative nonfiction, and I would overhear conversations between fiction people about this at the bar. This whole concept that every character in a story has to have something they want, and try to go get it—I just never liked that idea as a rule. Maybe some books function that way, but not all books. It’s a very alpha male view of the world and of narrative and what narrative is supposed to do. There are so many books that have no fucking clue what the main character wants the whole time, and I’m willing to follow them. 

OP: As you said earlier, you’re from Mississippi. This is the first novel you’ve written that’s set in the South and is perhaps also the first book that is explicitly political in this way. What prompted that turn for you? 

CL: I think the fiction I’ve written in the past has been more obliquely political, but in general I’ve been much more focused on interior, psychological questions. You might say my first novel was about the psychology of depression and abandonment and the second was about the psychology of heterosexuality. The later contained more social questions, and now Pew, I guess you could say it’s about the psychology of how we judge others. 

I’ve always been very hesitant to write about Mississippi, or maybe just too hurt by that place, too exasperated, but ultimately it’s more a portrait of an idea than it is a portrait of a real place. It’s a portrait of white supremacy short-circuiting. 

OP: Despite having no memory or past to draw on, Pew seems to address the reader from a position of experience, proffering statements about life, or people and their condition. Without those conventional anchors of background, how did you understand for yourself where Pew was speaking from?

If all sins can be forgiven, then what is the meaning of justice?

CL: I’ve been feeling these two, conflicting feelings as I get older—One, I’ve started feeling more capable, more willing to dig into an idea and get to the bottom of it, and two, I suspect that this capability and this ambition or drive is probably hindering me from knowing more subtle, silent things I already know. Part of the problem is that as you learn to navigate the world, you also acquire all this other crap that inhibits you from what you know innately. Things everyone knows. Things a person knows in a way that is wordless and completely without context. So I think I wanted to have a character that was made up of just that – all the stuff that people already know. 

OP: I think that’s a great answer. It’s funny because it maps directly onto the Clarice Lispector story that prompted me to ask the question— “The Smallest Woman in the World”. 

CL: I love that story. It’s the story of hers that’s stayed with me the clearest and longest. 

OP: That makes sense. The story has a lot in common with Pew. It catalogs reactions to an explorer’s discovery of a foot-high woman from a Lilliputian tribe, which range from tenderness to unease. Like Pew, the tiny woman does not speak. There’s a line in the story after the woman experiences equal love for both the explorer and the explorer’s boots: “This love might be must be called profound love, since having no other resources, she was reduced to profundity.” That idea, of being reduced to profundity, is pretty much exactly what you said.

CL: Well I’m glad you gave me that quote because now I can just use the Clarice Lispector answer. 

OP: Reduced to profundity. Thank you Clarice! 

CL: Yeah, I think that’s the funny thing about reading. I haven’t thought about that story in several years, but I totally see how it was like a pea under the mattress. It’s a reminder that you have to be very careful about what you read, because everything goes in and you don’t necessarily get to control what comes out. In my 20s, I read a bunch of Thomas Bernhard back to back, and four years later when I was writing Nobody Is Ever Missing, all the Thomas Bernhard was being expressed—it had that same kind of ranting cadence—but I really had no clue until I had published the book and somebody asked me about him as an influence. And I had nearly forgotten that I had even read him. So, you know, everything goes in, and you don’t really get to decide what comes out. You have to be careful about what you put in. 

I Remember the Drowning Years

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Landscape with Self-Actualization

after Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Let’s start with the horse: sometimes,
especially when working, I’m the horse,
as well as the ploughman whipping the horse

Too much time online and I become
the shepherd with his back turned,
arms folded into a firm no-thank-you

I really like when I’m the dog, loyal
only to my basic canine needs:
companionship, kibble, a bone

Sure, I’ve been the flock of sheep
led around to this place or that –
too much time online does that

Now, once – years ago – I became
the harbored city in the distance
and had to travel great lengths to find myself

Likewise, I have also been white mountains
to the east, cold and mysterious –
but since taking Lexapro, less so

Most days these days I’m the hatted fisherman
seated in the corner with a cup of coffee,
waiting for a bite, from a bass, or an angel

But yes, I guess, if forced to admit
(and I don’t like to talk much about this)
I do remember the drowning years

When everyone else seemed a full-sailed ship
and I was underwater with loss –
broken. From which I got up, dried off,

and lived all this life that came after

Pallbearers

The grandkids were tasked
with carrying her casket

I nodded and waved to Zoe
from the other side of the body

It was awfully heavy
the box I mean but the moment too

Teary-eyed Zoe, sixteen,
all youth and bloom

On Z’s left hand
written in pen: Hot Pockets

Cuz, I whispered over our grandmother,
why does it say Hot Pockets

To remind myself, she replied,
that I like Hot Pockets

We laughed –
We were sad, and we laughed –

The great inheritance

How to Listen to Judy Garland in 2020

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Judy Garland and I spent a lot of time together last spring. For months on end she kept me company on subway rides, New York Public Library trips, and writing sprints at my desk. I was hard at work on my book, Judy at Carnegie Hall, a small tome on the 1961 concert the famed performer staged at the New York City institution. My book on the Grammy-winning double album, which captures what was then called “the greatest night in show business history,” made me intimately familiar with all 26 of the album’s tracks— from the instrumental “Overture” to Judy’s rousing rendition of “Chicago,” her fourth encore of the night. These songs became the soundtrack to my life for much of 2019 as I researched, wrote, and later proofread and copy-edited the final manuscript. 

When I needed a pick-me-up, all I needed to do was put on Judy’s first number, “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)” and follow the song’s lead in grinning my troubles away. “When you’re laughing,” she sings, “the sun comes shining through. But when you’re crying you bring on the rain; so stop your sighing, be happy again.” The song is an apt opening number for an act that, despite featuring its fair share of broody ballads, depends on Garland’s unwavering optimism. Ever since, as a little girl, she’d sung about going somewhere over the rainbow where bluebirds sang, Garland has come to embody a shining beacon of sunny cheerfulness amid dreary doldrums. If Dorothy could make it all the way to colorful Oz and back home again, so could we weather whatever storms our tears bring on. 

I knew merely smiling couldn’t make all my troubles disappear. But hearing Judy’s voice could. Rufus Wainwright saw a similar kind of power in Judy’s live album. “Whenever I put on that record, that Judy Garland record, that concert,” he remembered, looking back at the months he spent listening to it on loop following 9/11, “everything brightened. And I just couldn’t help but sing along.” It’s what drove him to attempt the Herculean feat of putting on Garland’s concert in its entirety for a new generation of fans with Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall back in 2006. Wainwright was right to hone in on the unbridled joy that runs through the 1961 album, which merely captured the energy of the 1961 concert itself. The cheers from the audience, for instance, give merit to Lewis Funke’s description of the concert in his New York Times review as something akin less to a live performance than to a revival meeting. 

Garland’s album scored what was, back in 2019, a transitional moment in my life as my husband and I began plotting our departure from New York City. The prospect of leaving the place I’d come to call home after more than a decade was daunting. Overwhelming, almost. It helped that I had Judy to keep me company. For many weeks my days were spent alternating between finishing a draft of the manuscript and packing up our apartment with precious little time spent wondering what was ahead. “Why should I care?” Judy sings at one point in one of the most jubilant songs on the album, “Life is one long jubilee, so long as I care for you and you care for me!” This was the Judy I keyed into last year, the one who made her acrobatic belts feel effortless and who’d turned herself into an icon of resilience. Her devil-may-care attitude was invigorating and helped make the choice to leave New York City without having settled on where we’d arrive feel less careless than it sounded. Our summer was as close to one long jubilee as we could make it as we spent time in Chicago, Austin, and Los Angeles, trying each city on for size. Judy would approve, I hope, of our current West Hollywood address, which is but a short drive away from her own Hollywood Star of Fame. 

Lately, all I hear are the darkened edges of Garland’s delivery: the melancholy that ran through her best performances.

But if sunny anthems like “When You’re Smiling” and “Who Cares?” helped me make peace with leaving New York City and saying goodbye to my friends, I’ve recently been revisiting the album through a decidedly darker lens. Last year, these life changes felt promising — necessary even. Judy’s infectious enthusiasm felt like fuel. Lately, though, all I hear are the darkened edges of Garland’s delivery: the melancholy that ran through her best performances, the sadness she conjures as she sings about heartbreak and loneliness, even the grievances she couldn’t help but make into punchlines in her banter. The sunniness is still there in numbers like “The Trolley Song,” but it’s her torch songs and sorrowful ballads which now occupy my mind. 

Titles like “Alone Together,” “How Long Has This Been Going On?” and “Just You, Just Me,” ring differently amid a pandemic that all but derailed what was to be a moment of celebration about getting Judy at Carnegie Hall out into the world. “I’m weary all the time,” Judy sings in “Stormy Weather,” before the lyric itself echoes such weariness with its repetition: “the time, so weary all the time.” But reading the words alone doesn’t do justice to Judy’s delivery. She stretches her syllables, making you feel the added effort it takes for her to go from one word to another. She doesn’t just sing about weariness, she embodies it. She had good reason to feel weary. For years on end, and after her Hollywood career came to a standstill, she’d had to book live engagements to keep debtors at bay, at times quite literally singing for her supper. There are moments in the recording when you can almost hear the audience wanting to lift Judy’s spirits; they cheer loudly after she bungles a note and clamor uncontrollably when she flubs a line. Inherent in those moments was the conviction that her moving performances were nothing more than cathartic insights into her troubled personal life. 

The sorrows Judy sang about then continue to rankle us precisely because they’re so familiar.

As I spend my days wondering how, if at all, we’ll make it past this pandemic and musing whether my own anxieties about my inability to properly launch my Judy book in a crisis that dwarfs such concerns, Judy’s lamentations feel more personal than ever. “I have a machine in my throat that gets into many people’s ears and affects them,” she recalled in 1964. “There’s something about my voice that makes them see all the sadness and humor they’ve experienced. It makes them know they aren’t too different; they aren’t apart.” That’s not quite as comforting as it sounds. The sorrows Judy sang about then continue to rankle us precisely because they’re so familiar. It’s hard not to listen to the Carnegie Hall record and remember how much Judy craved and feared being alone, apart from others. How days by herself in a hotel room was ultimately what cost her her life. It’s there in the way her voice breaks in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the way the crowd loses it when she hits and elongates the final note in what has to be one of the saddest lyrics ever written—a question many of us are asking ourselves while locked in our small apartments wishing we could be merry outside: “Why, oh why can’t I?”

Chronicler of the gay community Vito Russo once described Judy Garland as “an iron butterfly.” Her strength, he posited, was always laced with fragility; one couldn’t think about Judy’s resilience without somehow also calling up the frailty it kept at bay. Writing 20 years after Garland died, Russo mused instead about what it had meant for so many gay men to have clung to such a icon. (He even wondered aloud whether her death in 1969 had somehow caused the Stonewall riots. Answer: no.) “Her audience was never sure whether she’d fall into the abyss or soar like a phoenix,” he wrote, getting at precisely why certain men felt both so protective of her while also seeing in her a towering strength they themselves looked to. Until last year, this kind of assessment had been nothing more than an intellectual exercise for me. I’ve long been fascinated with how Judy once appealed to what one reviewer in 1967 had euphemistically referred to as “those boys in the tight trousers.” Now, though, I find myself enraptured with the potency of what that iron butterfly once stood for and what she keeps teaching us boys more than fifty years after her death. In the last year, Garland has been a comforting presence even as listening to her songs on loop can feel like its own form of masochism. She’s been both my rainstorm and my rainbow.

Now, though, there’s an added layer to finding solace and (dis)comfort in Judy at Carnegie Hall. The singer’s rousing renditions of songs like “Rock-a-Bye Baby with a Dixie Melody” and “Swanee” (“Swanee, Swanee, I’m coming back to Swanee! Mammy, Mammy, I love the old folks at home!”) for instance, conjure up a nostalgia wrapped up in visions of the South that, amid Black Lives Matter protests and images of toppled Confederate statues, feel even more insidious than they did last year when my research necessarily pushed me to reckon with the minstrelsy roots of those Judy staples. As bands like Lady Antebellum (now “Lady A”) and The Dixie Chicks (now just “The Chicks”) remind us, our musical lexicon keeps traces of deep-rooted racism alive. Garland is no exception. She was, after all, always dubbed the heir apparent to Al Jolson, a famed performer known as the preeminent practitioner of blackface on Broadway in the early 20th century: “There is Judy Garland. And there was Al Jolson. And then the mold is broken!” read The Hollywood Reporter in its review of the Carnegie Hall concert: “Ask anyone who remembers the days when ‘Jolie’ took over the Winter Garden runway and they will tell you that never since has a singer of songs been able to mesmerize an audience as Judy can.” 

In singing of bluebirds, she encouraged us to look away from the colorless lives laid bare before us. What place is there, in 2020, for such a call? 

And so I’m left with an album that last year made me giddy—at the prospect of possibility in ways both creative and professional—and which has soured as I experience it in a much different world than the one I hoped to reintroduce it to when I finished writing about it this time just last year. “One wanted to hold her and protect her because she was a lost lamb in a jungle,” Russo pointed out back in 1989 about Garland, “and yet be held by her because she was a tower of strength, someone who had experienced hell but continued to sing about bluebirds and happiness.” In singing of bluebirds, though, she encouraged us to look away from the colorless lives laid bare before us, a uniquely privileged move that can feel like an embrace of willful indifference. What place is there, in 2020, for such a call? 

To listen to Judy at Carnegie Hall—whether in anticipation of a cross-country move when its rousing cheers felt emboldening, in the midst of a pandemic when those same cheers feel like taunts from ghostly crowds, or now as a relic of a sunny vision of white America—is to experience firsthand why Garland is a figure that demands you speak in oxymorons, for that is the only way you can make sense of the contradictions she embodies and inspires in equal measure. She was both bluebird and phoenix, as much a balm as an irritant. But she was also an iron butterfly that could just as easily nudge you to go on as invite you to give up. Judy and I will continue to spend a lot of time together. Just yesterday, six comp copies of my book arrived and now sit tidily next to the original vinyl my husband got me ahead of my pub date to celebrate. We’ll continue to be together, not just “come rain or come shine,” as she sings, but ideally both. How else will we conjure up that rainbow of hers? 

A Ghost Haunts the Tokyo Olympics

Posted on by Jo Lou

“I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.” 

Yu Miri begins her exploration of the life of Kazu, a manual laborer from the country’s Fukushima prefecture, with this meditation from him as he walks the afterlife, which turns out to be exactly the (homeless) life he left behind. Yu Miri chills the reader’s blood over and over with lines like this: “I did not live with intent, I only lived.” 

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Kazu came to Tokyo to build the city for the 1964 Olympics, the games which delivered a gleaming Tokyo, a mere two decades after World War II, to the world’s eyes. Kazu’s story is the backstory of the city’s builders, invisible and marginalized. He experiences the untimely loss of his son, and later his wife, and ends up in the homeless village in Ueno Park. Kazu’s fate is contrasted by a series of connections with the imperial family, who exist in a much loftier realm. 

Tokyo Ueno Station’s final scene devastates in a dream-like fashion. Without totally giving it away, the crescendo involves the 2011 tsunami in Kazu’s hometown. The 2020 Summer Olympics, which was scheduled to begin in July but has been postponed to 2021 with the global pandemic, shadows the book. Kazu’s contemporary counterparts toiled as he did to enable the games. 

With the gracious assistance of the novel’s translator Morgan Giles, I interviewed Yu Miri—who is a part of the country’s Korean minority population—about listening to the dead, her personal (and political) history with the Olympics Games, and what pandemic life is like in Fukushima, which is still recovering from the 2011 nuclear accident’s devastation. 

J.R. Ramakrishnan: “I thought that once I was dead, I would be reunited with the dead…But then I realized that I was back in the park.”  In terms of afterlives, this seems like the worst. How did this novel begin for you? 

Yu Miri: The truth is, Tokyo Ueno Station is the fifth in my series of novels involving the Yamanote Line [a subway line in Tokyo]. In the first in the series, the short story “The Inner Loop of the Yamanote Line,” which was published in 2003, a woman who’s thinking about jumping in front of a Yamanote Line train goes into a bathroom in the station and masturbates, then gets on the train, gets off at another station and masturbates again. I depicted the destinationless impulses toward sex and death (eros and thanatos) of this protagonist who is shut out from life. And in this story, the protagonists of the four other novels in the series that I went on to write make their appearances. 

I’ve depicted the directionless lives and deaths of characters whose diverse lives radiate out from the ticket gates of Yamanote Line stations, who get knocked out of life and, passing through the gates heading toward the center of the circle, find themselves standing on a precipice—the edge of the station platform.

The second in the series, Goodbye Mama, is about a mother who has separated from her husband and is raising a preschooler on her own (set at Takadanobaba Station, Toyama Entrance). The third, Gotanda Station, East Entrance is about a man who works at a securities company; he and his wife do not speak to each other at home. The fourth, Meeting, is about a high school girl who runs a website recruiting people for a group suicide. And the fifth is Tokyo Ueno Station, with a homeless man from Fukushima as the protagonist.

The Yamanote Line is a loop line that runs around the center of the capital, Tokyo; it’s a double circle, actually. The circle that runs clockwise is on the outside and is called the “Outer Loop,” while the line that runs counterclockwise on the inside is the “Inner Loop.” At the center of this double circle, right in the middle of the donut hole, is the palace where the Emperor lives; it is surrounded by moats, a construction that makes it impossible to approach it or look inside.

There are two themes that deeply influence my Yamanote Line series. The first is suicide, which every year over 20,000 Japanese people lose their lives to. The other is the multiple spheres that arise from the Imperial system, and from the Emperor himself who is designated in the first article of the Japanese constitution as “the symbol of the State and of the unity of the People.”

Japan has one center and multiple spheres, which creates a huge gap between rich and poor, fortunate and unfortunate. Tokyo Ueno Station is the story of the suffering and death of a homeless man, born in Fukushima on the same day as the Emperor, who had to leave home for work as a young man due to poverty, losing his home and family.

The four protagonists in the earlier works in my Yamanote Line series all stand on the platform, a precipice between life and death. I didn’t write scenes where they are hit by trains. In the few moments while the train is approaching, they might hesitate and be pulled back toward life. I decided to let the reader’s imagination guide what happened to those characters next.

JRR: You begin the novel, as you end it with sound. In between, there are snatches of overheard conversations, sounds of the rain, the station’s sonics, and then finally the sirens and roars of the book’s ending. As a reader, I could hear so much! 

YM: It makes me very happy to hear someone from a different country who speaks a different language say that they could hear so much.

Japan has one center and multiple spheres, which creates a huge gap between rich and poor, fortunate and unfortunate.

I think that the role of a writer is to listen to the voices of the voiceless. It’s my job to listen to the voices of the spirits of those who die in the midst of discrimination, poverty, and loneliness, unable to bring anyone’s attention to their suffering.

We can’t save the dead, but by listening, we can give comfort to their spirits. By listening to their suffering, we can bandage their burning, bleeding skin, no matter how many tears that bandage might have or how patched together it might be.

JRR: You take us to Tokyo’s fringes. The homeless community has work, interests, pets, and suffers threats of crime. How did you imagine these characters? 

YM: What first inspired this novel was seeing a homeless man in the bathroom at Ueno Station 18 years ago. Afterwards, when I’d talk with the homeless men living in Ueno Park, one of them told me this: “You have a house. We do not. The haves don’t understand how the have-nots feel.” 

I couldn’t find any words to say back to him.

Since then, I kept going back to Ueno Park and listening to the stories of the homeless men living there, but those words—the haves don’t understand how the have-nots feel—stuck in my heart like a thorn I couldn’t remove.

Then, on March 11th, 2011, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster happened. I started visiting the area around the reactor a month later, in April. From March 2012, I hosted a radio show on the emergency radio station in Minami-Soma, Fukushima, an area which was part of the designated evacuation zone due to the nuclear disaster; on my radio program, I interviewed 600 local people about their experience of the disaster.

Through listening to the stories of people who had been forced to evacuate due to the tsunami and nuclear disaster, I was again faced with “the difference between the haves and have-nots,” with the issues of poverty and discrimination that exist in Japan, known globally as a rich country.

“The haves don’t understand how the have-nots feel.” That certainly might be the case, but the pain of those who are discriminated against isn’t something that can be gained as information from the outside; actually feeling that pain in your own body and to live (and die) with it is something that can be made real through writing a novel or reading one.

I think if you read Tokyo Ueno Station and it feels to you like the lives and struggles of the homeless are incredibly real, then that’s because I’ve written a novel not as one of the haves but as one of the have-nots, that I was brought up in poverty with discrimination, and this novel is based on empathy with the homeless.

Right now, we’re all told to “stay at home” as one of the measures touted to prevent infection during this pandemic—indeed, this has become a keyword globally—and I just think, well, you’re only speaking to people with homes. These words must sound awfully cruel and ironic to those without.

JRR: Kazu works as a laborer on the sites for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The world would have been cheering the start of the 2020 Olympics this July—without much thought to the people like Kazu who did the work this time around—if it were not for the global pandemic. How do you feel about the event’s cancellation? 

YM: In Japan, it was presented not as a “cancellation” but as a “postponement” to 2021. I’ve been opposed to Tokyo holding the 2020 Olympics from the beginning.

It’s my job to listen to the voices of the spirits of those who die in the midst of discrimination, poverty, and loneliness, unable to bring anyone’s attention to their suffering.

This is because the demand for building materials for the Tokyo Olympics and the construction of infrastructure such as roads have caused the price of construction materials to jump throughout Japan, and this has also resulted in a shortage of construction workers for civil engineering projects. And as a result, the recovery and reconstruction of the Tohoku coastal area, which was the area affected by the earthquake and tsunami, has obviously been delayed.

To start with, the official name of the nuclear power plant that caused the accident in Fukushima on March 11, 2011 is “Tokyo Electric Power Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station.” As the name implies, all the electricity generated by the nuclear power plant was supplied to the Tokyo metropolitan area and was not used in Fukushima Prefecture. The cause of the accident lies in the way people live in the metropolis of Tokyo—it’s clearly there, in the lifestyle of urban residents who use electricity like hot water, but even when such a serious accident occurred, Tokyo still looked at Fukushima’s reality as somebody else’s problem. And unfortunately, very few Tokyo residents know that, as of January 2020, there are still over 41,000 evacuees from the nuclear accident.

I would like to see the huge amount of money that we plan to invest in the Tokyo Olympics be spent on the reconstruction of the Tohoku coastal area, as well as for the tsunami victims and  those displaced by the nuclear accident.

JRR: The last time a Tokyo Olympics was cancelled was in 1940. I read in an interview with (the novel’s translator) Morgan Giles that your grandfather was a marathon runner who might have participated in that event and that your next novel to be translated into English, The End of August, is based on your family’s history in Korea and Japan. Could you give us a brief preview of it? 

YM: My grandfather was born and raised in a small town called Miryang in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea. He was a long-distance runner on the Japan National Team in Korea, which was then a colony of Japan. He was likely to get a spot on the team for the Tokyo Olympics, which was scheduled to be held in 1940, but then the Olympics was canceled due to World War II.

The Korean Peninsula was liberated from colonial rule by Japan’s defeat in the war, but the joy of independence was covered over by ideological confrontations. Due to the Korean War that broke out in 1950, Miryang, where my grandfather’s family lived, became a battlefield where residents informed on and killed each other. My grandfather’s 23-year-old brother, who was a leader of the student movement, was hit in the leg while running in the schoolyard and taken away by the police; his whereabouts are still unknown.

My grandfather was also accused of being a communist and was imprisoned, but just before his execution he broke out of jail and escaped to Japan on his own. My grandmother boarded a small fishing boat with her four children, including my mother, and smuggled them into Japan as refugees.

When my grandfather, who due to the war ran off with just the clothes on his back and lived a life with what seem like constant emergency crash landings, realized that he had cancer and was going to die soon, he went back to the small town in Korea where he was born, and he died there at age 68.

The End of August is a long novel that follows in my grandfather’s footsteps throughout his life as an unknown long-distance runner. I am convinced that my grandfather’s difficult life is tied in the present day to the hardships of many who are almost crushed by the struggle between countries.

In the conflicts created by the innumerable differences of religion, race, ethnicity and ideology, we are letting go of the ideal senses of freedom and equality.

Do we go from this enclosure out into the light, or do we choose to strengthen the walls of our enclosures and live in the dark?

JRR: You live in Fukushima. Would you tell us what life is like there right now? I can’t begin to imagine how the pandemic must feel to survivors of the nuclear disaster. 

YM: I live in a town called Odaka, part of Minami-Soma, Fukushima. Odaka is about ten miles north of the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor that caused a level 7 nuclear accident on March 11, 2011, in the former “exclusion zone” where, due to the accident, the population once dropped to zero. The evacuation order was lifted on July 12, 2016, but only 3,663 inhabitants have returned (from a population of 12,842 before the nuclear accident).

I’m running a bookstore for the locals in a part of my home, located a 2-minute walk from Odaka Station on the Joban Line. In the area where I live, even before the coronavirus, I rarely pass by others when I’m walking or running.

However, even in the areas affected by the nuclear accident, there are repeated announcements from disaster preparedness loudspeakers installed around the town, telling us we should refrain from going out to “to protect your own life and the lives of your loved ones” and to spend time at home. When a person whose connections with others were cut off by the nuclear accident loses their few points of contact with others, what happens to them?

The most unbearable suffering is loneliness.

In the emergency public housing where the elderly people who lost their homes in the tsunami and nuclear disaster live, the daily exercise they look forward to in the courtyard every morning, the tea times in the common room, and the individual visits by social workers have all been canceled. 

An act “to protect your own life and the lives of your loved ones” is to have contact with others so that you do not feel isolated, in my opinion.

The most unbearable suffering is loneliness.

The magic phrase “stay at home” is correct when it comes to preventing the spread of coronavirus. But when I imagine the insides of all the homes where residents of the area affected by the nuclear accident are staying, I wonder if that phrase might be inappropriate.

Because in this town, filled with empty houses and vacant lots, there are lots of people isolated in the houses they returned to. On April 8 this year, in the midst of the pandemic, an 87-year-old man and his 58-year-old daughter’s bodies were found in a house not far from mine. Their cause of death wasn’t coronavirus. According to the police report, they both died of suffocation. The house was locked from the inside, no evidence of a third person’s presence was discovered, and inside the house there was a suicide note, they said.

Fukushima is currently facing the issue of these solitary deaths and suicides. As of May 31, there were 2,307 deaths in Fukushima Prefecture related to the disasters, far exceeding the 1,830 direct deaths due to the earthquake and tsunami. Among the related deaths, 115 people committed suicide; 12 people took their own lives last year. 

I am depressed and frightened.

In Fukushima, the recommendations to “stay at home” and practice “social distancing” may put people in mental and economic distress, and might cause more “related” deaths than direct deaths due to the coronavirus.

The human soul suffocates without interaction. Interaction means being acted on by others, or acting on others. There is no greater joy than making others feel joy, enjoyment, and healing with your own words and actions.

This is an “intimate” experience in which one responds to the call of others by leaving the self, interacting with the souls of others, penetrating the depths of each other’s emotions, and breaking the boundary between oneself and others.

Before the second wave of the pandemic locks down cities around the world again, we have to think about how we can build “intimate” relationships with people who are isolated.

What to Read After Bingeing “Indian Matchmaking” on Netflix

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In mid-July, Netflix dropped the 8-episode series Indian Matchmaking, which follows Mumbai matchmaker Sima Taparia as she travels around the United States and India, attempting to find true love—or at least acceptable compromises—for the marriage-seeking young people who can afford her services. “Arranged marriage” for Taparia’s clients often means little more than having family and a hired consultant heavily involved in a process that otherwise looks a lot like online dating.

To non-Desi audiences not already familiar with the shaadi scene, it might come as a surprise to see how considerations like skin color, socioeconomic status, and height—prejudices that are often kept more covert in Western dating—are explicitly and unapologetically baked into this centuries-old tradition. The show also completely fails to acknowledge that queer people exist, that not every boy is looking for the perfect girl and vice versa, and that non-binary people might want and make great partners.

Despite these very valid caveats, there is something undeniably compelling about the idea of a dedicated professional who learns as much as possible about your preferences and then criss-crosses the globe in search of your soul mate. Perhaps someday we will see more inclusive and progressive versions of this service. In the meantime, if Indian Matchmaking—which ends with most storylines unresolved—has left you craving more tales of young South Asians balancing traditional marriage expectations with contemporary romantic aspirations, check out any of the following books.

The Marriage Clock, A Novel eBook by Zara Raheem | 9780062877932 ...

The Marriage Clock by Zara Raheem

Leila Abid is a 26-year-old American-born Muslim from Los Angeles. When her Indian parents, whose happy arranged marriage has lasted three decades, decide to find her a match because of her “advancing age,” Leila negotiates a three-month reprieve to try and find a suitable Muslim man for herself. Unwilling to compromise her independence or her desire for a Bollywood-style love story, Leila goes on a series of awkward dates before accompanying her mother to India for a cousin’s wedding and recognizing at last what she must do.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu

Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu

Genderqueer Tamil author SJ Sindu’s debut features Lucky, a second-generation Tamil Sri Lankan from Boston who meets Indian student Kris at their elite college. Recognizing each other as the only other South Asian queer students on campus, they decide to marry to get Kris a green card and placate their parents while continuing to pursue their own affairs in private. However, this plan is thrown into disarray when Lucky travels home to care for her grandmother and reunites with her high school lover Nisha, who is facing her own arranged marriage to a man she’s never met.

Thirst

Thirst by Shree Ghatage

During World War II, intelligent but sheltered Vasanti is thrown into an arranged marriage with wealthy and accomplished Baba. Though neither particularly wishes for this, they work their way from tolerating one another to falling deeply in love, in a narrative that moves between India and London during the Blitz as it hurtles towards a shocking conclusion.

Marrying Anita

Marrying Anita by Anita Jain

In her 2008 memoir, Harvard-educated journalist Jain recounts her 2005 move to Delhi after she grows weary of the dating scene in New York. Though she has long resisted her parents’ interest in arranging a marriage for her, she now permits her father to put a matrimonial ad in the Times of India. However, dating in a rapidly modernizing Delhi in which technology and tradition mix and Western values begin to take hold, proves to be no less confusing than New York. The traditional doctors and engineers she meets on the arranged marriage circuit don’t quite live up to the ideal of the literate, feminist-minded, well-traveled man she hopes to meet, but Jain enjoys playfully analyzing the situation and the forces that give rise to it nonetheless.

The Matchmaker's List by Sonya Lalli

The Matchmaker’s List by Sonya Lalli

Raina’s grandmother is horrified that she hasn’t found a nice man and settled down yet. Raina, a 29-year-old who works at an international bank in Toronto, agrees to look at the men her nani has picked out for a possible arranged marriage, though the globe-trotting banker she had previously fallen in love with is back in the picture and still perfectly noncommittal. As she prepares for her best friend’s wedding to a white fellow pediatrician, Raina permits her grandmother to believe she is a lesbian to ease the matchmaking pressure, but suffers backlash for this as well. Even while navigating their stifling expectations and pressure, Raina appreciates the strength of her community and how they support each other during difficult times, and works to claim a life of her own within it.

The Heart is a Shifting Sea by Elizabeth Flock

PBS NewsHour and Forbes India Magazine reporter Flock tells a story of marriage in modern India through the lives of three Mumbai couples—two Hindu and one Muslim—whom she came to know well. The couples navigate getting to know online matches as they prepare to wed, marriages arranged in the wake of unrequited love, infidelity, strict laws preventing divorce, infertility, and tradition-defying adoption, against a background of Bollywood-influenced expectations and the rise of the far right in one of India’s most progressive cities.

Arranged Marriage by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Arranged Marriage: Stories by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

This 1995 story collection from Indian-born, U.S.-based poet Divakaruni centers young Indian women—mostly students and brides—attempting to navigate the demands of traditional parents and husbands and often alienating middle-class American culture, while creating independent and fulfilling lives for themselves.

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

Comedian Ansari’s own parents had an arranged marriage. As his father tells it, one prospective bride was too tall and another too short, but Aziz’s mother was a good height so he chose her. Inspired by his own romantic woes and the tyranny of choice in modern dating, Ansari teams up with sociologists to conduct a survey of modern dating practices, including a cross-cultural look at the scenes in Tokyo, Paris, and Buenos Aires, and a historical look at how the classified ads and video dating of the 1980s gave rise to dating industry giants like Tinder today.

The Trouble With Hating You by Sajni Patel

Liya Thakker, a biochemical engineer from Austin, Texas, is perfectly happy being single. When her conservative father surprises her at dinner with a nice Hindu boy from a respectable family he’s hoping to set her up with, Liya sneaks out the back door. However Jay soon turns up again, as the lawyer who is bailing her company out of a legal mess, which means the two will have to work together closely despite the awkwardness between them.

Marriage Material - Sathnam Sanghera

Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera

Arjan, the only child of Sikh immigrant parents who run a convenience store in a crummy town in the West Midlands, U.K., works as a graphic designer in London and is engaged to a white woman named Freya. When his father dies from a supposed heart attack, he hurries back to help his mother, once again dealing with all the indignity and racism of standing behind the counter for long hours at the store. He grows increasingly appreciative of his parents’ generation, whose story of leaving India in turmoil also involves a nontraditional marriage, while growing more apprehensive about whether he and Freya are truly right for each other.

The Marriage Bureau for Rich People

The Marriage Bureau for Rich People by Farahad Zama

In an effort to stay out of his wife’s hair, retired civil servant Mr. Ali starts a matchmaking service on the veranda of his South Indian home. Business thrives and he is able to hire Aruna, who has an aptitude for this line of work but has given up hope of marrying herself because her family cannot afford a lavish wedding and dowry. When a handsome doctor and his family walk in looking for potential brides, he and Aruna take a liking to each other, and it’s up to Mr. Ali to see if it is possible to find a solution that will make everyone happy.

Ayesha At Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

This list would not be complete without at least one Desi Jane Austen retelling (there are plenty). Jalaluddin’s novel is a Pride & Prejudice adaptation set in a Toronto Muslim community full of scheming aunties. As the first chapter states, “while it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single Muslim man must be in want of a wife, there’s an even greater truth: To his Indian mother, his own inclinations are of secondary importance.” High school teacher and aspiring poet Ayesha first assumes that handsome Khalid—with his traditional beard, flowing white robes, and disinclination to challenge his overbearing mother—is too conservative for her tastes. However, as the two must work together to plan a conference, it becomes clear there is more to both their stories than meets the eye. 

9 Books About Being Homesick for A Place That Doesn’t Exist Anymore

Posted on by Jo Lou

Gov. Pritzker issued a stay-at-home order for Illinois starting on March 21st. Ever since then, I’ve been watching Chicago out of my third-floor apartment window, walking the streets of Chicago with my daughter (both of us masked, edging around others at a six-foot distance), and all the time, missing Chicago. It’s right there, out my window. It’s right there, on Clark Street, Broadway, Devon. But it may as well be 2000 miles away.  

COVID, I know, will change my city, has already changed my city. I’m afraid to imagine all the ways it will change my city. Will my favorite restaurants, bars, bookstores make it? Will I still get to make a wish on a gingersnap at Simon’s Tavern over a mug of glögg in the implacable Chicago winter?  What about Ravenswood Used Books, where I could ask—mustering my courage, controlling my blush—the shop owner, a titillating cross between Rupert Giles and the Outlaw Josey Wales, for some obscure bit of fiction, and he’d always know whether he had it and where in his teetering piles to find it?

What will be left when all of this passes? It makes me gut-wrenchingly homesick, just thinking about it.

I’m not from Chicago. I grew up in Louisiana, raised by a Cajun French family whose language may not see another generation of speakers, in a state that has been losing a football-field size plot of land to coastal erosion, on average, every hour since 1985. Preemptive nostalgia is a way of life. I can’t remember a time when I was not aware that home would not always be what I knew it to be, that it would, both figuratively and literally, disappear. My story collection, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights, is about the damage done to the spirit by a dying homeplace, but it’s also about the awful yearning you feel when you’re homesick for a place that does not exist anymore—and maybe never did exist as you imagined it. That loss may be due to climate change, gentrification, war, or even a change in oneself—a growing up or a growing away. In 2020, it’s due, at least some, to pandemic. 

Here are some of my favorite literary expressions of that peculiar brand of homesickness.

Fiction

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 1*KGhfZI1bqeu6wKhBfW870Q.jpeg

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

With satire that will singe your eyebrows, Paul Beatty tells the story of Bonbon, a young Black man raised in Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto” on the outskirts of Los Angeles. After racially profiled and much maligned Dickens is removed from the California map, Bonbon campaigns to redraw the borders (literally, with white paint, but in other ways too) of a home that is oppressed, oppressive, and still, despite that, home.

Inheritors by Asako Serizawa

Inheritors by Asako Serizawa

The interwoven stories in this new collection by Asako Serizawa follow a Japanese family through 150 years of history. In a kaleidoscope of places and points of view, Serizawa explores the lives of characters whose sense of home and history is disrupted by war, imperialism and migration.

Pin on ✒Wordy

Severance by Ling Ma

Ling Ma’s Severance is a literary zombie-apocalypse novel, irresistible as a stack of sugar cookies but packing a wallop of heartbreak. A mysterious illness transforms its victims into walking dead, doomed to act out repeating loops of nostalgia until they waste away completely. Meanwhile, the central character Candace Chen photographs devastated, empty New York, her adopted home, reluctant to leave even as her world is falling apart around her. 

Poetry

Books To Watch Out For: August 2019, Guest Edited by Krystal Languell

Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

The bilingual and prose poems in Losing Miami reflect on Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s Cuban American upbringing and the potential loss of his home city to rising sea levels. Ojeda-Sagué wonders “what it would be like to be exiled from Miami, to have the city be an effect only of memory and simulation as Havana is for the Cuban exile generation, to have any description of the city be a dangling modifier.”

Image result for poster

Everything Must Go by Kevin Coval & Langston Allston

In this collection of poems and illustrations, poet Kevin Coval and artist Langston Allston take on the gentrification of Wicker Park and Humboldt Park in Chicago. “Humboldt’s beautiful,” Coval writes, “& changing like all / the neighborhoods / for how long / we will live / here / how long / will we call / this / home.”

Flood

Flood by J. Bruce Fuller

My Louisiana Cajun compatriot J. Bruce Fuller’s poems place two floods in counterpoint:  the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and the deluge that followed Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on family stories, survivor accounts and personal experience, Fuller reveals how tenuous a home the Mississippi Delta is. In the title poem, he writes of the river, “If she dries up / changes course / we wilt and brown / like chaff / And if she is angry / her belly constricted / by our levees / she will erupt / silt like ash.”

Non-Fiction

The Yellow House by Sarah Broom

Sarah Broom’s memoir The Yellow House explores a family’s long relationship with a beloved but decrepit shotgun house in the forgotten neighborhood of New Orleans East. When Hurricane Katrina wipes away the house and neighborhood and scatters her family across the country, Broom faces a reckoning. “The Yellow House was witness to our lives,” Broom writes. “When it fell, something in me burst.”

Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild 

Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild ventures into my hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana, to make sense of the “Great Paradox,” far-right political activists’ opposition to the federal help they seem desperately to need. With astonishing empathy, Hochschild describes the exasperating, often misguided perspective of people whose home and health have been destroyed by the same petrochemical companies that keep them afloat.

1939453

A Month and a Day & Letters by Ken Saro-Wiwa

Before he was executed under Sani Abacha’s military dictatorship in 1995, Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa led a peaceful movement to hold foreign oil companies like Shell accountable for the destruction of the Ogoni people’s land and waterways in the Niger Delta. A Month and a Day is a record of his detention in 1993 and of his fierce love for a homeland turned wasteland by the callous indifference of the oil industry and the complicity of the Nigerian government.

The Long, Fraught History of Outlaw Translation

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Two hundred meters beneath a chateau in the Italian countryside, eight people stand trembling in a bunker, backs against the concrete wall. Apart from expressions of panic, they’re wearing only underwear, having been stripped down as part of a search. This eclectic group, assembled from all corners of the globe, selected for their complementary skills, had been enticed by a special mission. But over the course of the operation the project unraveled. Now two guards train guns on them while a man in a designer suit, seething with quiet rage, warns, “I know it was one of you.” Something precious to him has been stolen, something he values a great deal more than the lives of the men and women in front of him. 

This scene is the climax of director Régis Roinsard’s latest film, a thriller released to French theaters in January of this year. Though it features familiar tropes, the film is surprising for a couple reasons. First, the casual American filmgoer’s vision of French cinema entails more languid cigarette smoking and tasteful nudity than it does bunker capers. Second, the target of this heist lies not in a hardened vault, as the genre might lead us to expect, but between the soft covers of a manuscript. These scantily-clad hostages are translators, brought together by a publisher intent on a global release of the next installment of a best-selling series. As pages of the manuscript begin slowly leaking onto the internet, along with demand for payment, they become the prime suspects for the increasingly unhinged publisher. 

Though seemingly far-fetched, this tale is, as the saying goes, stranger than fiction. In 2013 Roinsard had to look no further than the pages of his daily paper for inspiration for his film, Les Traducteurs (The Translators). There, he would have read about two rather prolific French translators, Dominique Defert and Carole Delporte, and their recent working conditions in Italy while translating Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s latest novel, Inferno. The translators described being confined to a basement conference room for a month and a half, without phones or internet, with even their bathroom breaks logged by armed security guards. Though their experience wasn’t quite as high-stakes as the film’s plot (spoiler: there was no blackmail and they kept their clothes on), Roinsard remains faithful to the setting details, using them as a jumping-off point for his thriller. 

Dan Brown’s manuscript, along with the drafts of the translations, never ventured outside the underground bunker or the watchful eyes of armed guards.

What Defert and Delporte describe is one publishing house’s attempt to solve an age-old problem. For as long as our modern notions of copyright have existed, publishers have attempted to slay the multi-headed beast of leaks and outlaw translations, which can be financially disastrous for highly-anticipated new releases. Brown’s Italian publisher, Mondadori, devised an intricate solution entailing collaboration with the American publisher Doubleday to fix a global release date with simultaneous publications in English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Catalan. Eleven translators, under strict confidentiality, worked long hours over the course of two months in an underground bunker in Milan. Brown’s manuscript, along with the drafts of the translations, never ventured outside the room or the watchful eyes of the armed guards. Comings and goings were recorded diligently and access to the internet was restricted to a single computer provided for double checking vocabulary. The translators were advised to keep a low profile when outside and to have an alibi for being in Italy, as journalists were reportedly attempting to track down scoops on the novel. These harsh conditions proved successful for the publishers who, in May 2013, released the book simultaneously in dozens of national markets. 

Were such tyrannical measures really necessary against such an unassuming group? If we asked, for example, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, perhaps with the help of a time machine or ouija board, the answer would be an emphatic yes. Franklin first began working on his autobiography while sojourned in England in 1771. The book was ostensibly meant to relate the story of his life to his son and future descendants—“Dear Son,” it begins. Hectic decades of scientific discovery, nation-building, and generally being a man about town left long gaps in the composition of the four parts of his autobiography, leaving him in a rush towards the end of his life to complete the work, probably dictating aloud the final pages to his grandson, to whom he would leave the rights to the manuscript. Upon his death, newspapers from Philadelphia to Vermont began publishing excerpts of the book, gleaned from drafts circulating among Franklin’s friends, in an attempt by publishers to satisfy demand for the complete story of the famed patriot. 

In 1793, frustrated publishers in England published an English translation of the French translation of the autobiography.

But the American reading public wouldn’t get their hands on the whole book until well after Franklin’s other biggest fans: the French. Franklin’s fame extended to Europe, where he was mostly celebrated as a man of science—and in 1791, just a year after Franklin’s death, a shady outlaw translation meant that France had the first opportunity to read what was believed to be his full autobiography. “I will not go into detail, surely of little use for my readers, on the manner in which the manuscript copy of this memoir, which is in English, landed in my hands,” wrote the publisher, slyly, in his preface to the edition. A lack of rigorous intellectual property law—a bit of an anachronism in the 18th century anyway, and complicated even further by the upheaval of the French Revolution—meant that booksellers, authors, and publishers often found themselves in a bit of a free-for-all. As Franklin’s grandson took his time to correct and polish the manuscript, it leaked—no, gushed—throughout the newly-formed United States and across the Atlantic. Based on the French translation, German and Swedish editions were quickly printed. In 1793, frustrated publishers in England, still without an authorized edition and following the lead of their peers, went forward with the publication of an English translation of the French translation of the autobiography. Americans would have to wait another quarter century before they could read Franklin’s original words, and still then it would be incomplete. In 1828 French publishers would again beat American presses to the punch by publishing the complete edition of his text, again in translation. 

The history of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, the story of a story, is hardly unique. As long as written words have circulated, we have copied, translated, parodied, and shared them—often with little regard for whose chisel, pen, or keyboard they may have come out of. It is not until rather recently, considering the long view of writing, that we have become caught up with who owns which words; or perhaps even more precisely, who owns which words in which order. Further complicating things is that in the case of translation, we are concerned not with who owns the words but rather who owns their meanings. Claims are staked not on the surface but in the essence, a notoriously slippery creature. The history of translation attests to the possibility of words finding their afterlives in a new language, but as we see in the case of Franklin’s autobiography, occasionally it’s the ghost who shows up first.   

In the case of translation, we are concerned not with who owns the words but rather who owns their meanings.

Owing to the massive and almost instantaneous reach of the internet, publishers have nowadays become increasingly more careful to protect their manuscripts from leaks, which can result in outlaw translations. More than 200 years after Franklin’s time, but again in France, a similar rogue translation caused a stir. It was 2007, and millions of fans were eagerly waiting for the July release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The publisher, Bloomsbury, was jealously guarding the manuscript, careful to avoid any leaks or Franklin-like blunders. There were even reports that GCHQ, one of Britain’s surveillance and intelligence services, was keeping a digital eye open for any errant pages. All this protection paid off handsomely as when the novel hit stores it shattered records: over 10 million copies sold in the U.S. and U.K. in just the first 24 hours.

But the sword Bloomsbury used to guard the manuscript turned out to be double-edged. Keeping the circle as tight as possible meant that no translator had even a peek at Rowling’s novel before millions of Anglophone readers were spending a sleepless night buried under their Gryffindor comforter set with a flashlight. To the chagrin of French fans, the release date for the translation was set three months later. Then a hero, or villain depending on your perspective, emerged in the form of a 16-year-old in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. Within days of the book’s release, the teen feverishly translated all 759 pages and posted it on a popular French internet forum. The French publisher, Gallimard, quickly alerted authorities, who jumped into action, arresting and jailing the teen overnight—but not before the translation had been viewed and downloaded thousands of times. This prodigious creation, not without a certain magic of its own, even elicited positive reaction from the French law enforcement, who were quoted as qualifying it as “quasi-professional.” No financial motives were found and in the end no charges were filed. Perhaps the publishers recognized that suing a teen might cast a damaging spell on the franchise’s reputation. 

What these examples of outlaw translation show is that the scene of translating deserves our attention.

Stories, seemingly by their own volition, resist containment. As Les Traducteurs shows, publishers’ most recent effort to think outside the box resulted in putting translators literally inside a box—but no box is completely impermeable. And what these examples of outlaw translation show, and what the film dramatizes, is that the scene of translating deserves our attention. This is despite the fact that the translator’s profession is, almost as a point of pride for some, largely invisible. Scholar and translator Norman Shapiro analogizes translation to a pane of glass: “You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections— scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.” A film like Les Traducteurs attempts to focus its gaze on this pane of glass between viewer and story: a pane like that through which we first read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, or like the one hastily constructed by a French teenager to look into a magical realm. Roinsard’s film brings our attention to stories like these, the stories of the telling, all born of the same desire: to share with the reader something that mattered to the translator. 

Despite the intensified focus on protecting copyright and controlling the dissemination of intellectual property, these vagabond translations are almost certainly here to stay. Vouloir, c’est pouvoir: where there’s a will, there’s a way. But the point of bringing together Benjamin Franklin, Harry Potter, and Les Traducteurs is not to argue against the importance of copyright law or to hammer a Barthesian nail in the coffin of the author. Instead it is to help us to appreciate the glass, how it was made, and to understand that the story of translation itself is often just as interesting and exciting as the translated story. 

Confessions from the Stranger at the End of the Bar

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

An Excerpt from What Happens At Night
by Peter Cameron

The lobby was deserted; the woman behind the reception desk was gone and the lanterns the gryphons held no longer glowed.

Because it was now darker in the lobby, the light in the bar that lit up the red glass beads of the curtain seemed brighter than before. The man crossed the lobby and paused for a moment just outside the entrance to the bar, and then pushed his hands through the hanging beads and lifted away a space through which he entered.

The bar was as small and intimate as the lobby was cavernous and grand. It was a long, low-ceilinged wood-paneled room, and for a moment the man felt himself back on the train, for in shape it was exactly proportional to the carriage. The bar itself, which stretched across the length of the room, was inhabited by two people, one at each end, as if carefully placed there to maintain balance. At the end of the bar nearest the door the bartender stood, leaning back against the dimly illuminated shelves of liquor, staring far ahead of himself, although the room was very shallow and there was no distance to regard unless it was inside himself. At the far end of the bar, at the point where it curved to meet the wall, at that last and final seat, a woman sat gazing down into her drink in the same rapt way the bartender looked ahead.

The placement of these two people at either end of the bar made clear the position the man should take, and so he sat on a stool midway between them. For a moment neither of them moved, or responded in any way to his presence, and he felt that by positioning himself so correctly he had not upset the equilibrium of the room, and they would all three continue to maintain the quiet stasis he had feared to interrupt, as if he had assumed his given place in a painting, or a diorama. This notion affected him with a debilitating stillness, as if one’s goal in life was simply to find and occupy a particular ordinate in space, as if the whole world were an image in the process of being perfectly arranged, and those who had found their places must not move until the picture was complete.

He gazed through the regiments of bottles that lined the mirrored shelves behind the bar at his reflection, which peered back at him with an intentness that seemed greater than his own, and for a second he lost the corporeal sense of himself, and wondered on which side of the mirror he really sat. In an effort to reinhabit himself he reached out his hand and patted the copper-topped bar, and the touch of the cool metal against his fingertips flipped the world back around the right way, but the bartender interpreted this gesture as a summons and unfurled his leaning body away from the wall, walked over, and placed a napkin on the bar in front of the man, in the exact spot he had patted, as if he were applying a bandage to a wound.

The bartender was a young man, tall and dark, vaguely Asiatic and remarkably stiff, as if he had been born with fewer joints than normal; he seemed unable, or unwilling, to bend his neck, so he gazed out over the man’s head and spoke to the alabaster sconce on the wall just behind them. The foreign words he uttered meant nothing to the man; in fact they did not even seem like words. He remembered how for a long time as a child he had thought there was a letter in the alphabet called ellemeno, a result of the alphabet song slurring L M N O together (at least in his mother’s drunken rendition).

He assumed the bartender had asked him for his order, but what if he had not? Perhaps he had told him the bar was closed, or insulted him, or was merely inquiring as to his well-being. The idea that language worked at all, even when two people spoke the same one, seemed suddenly miraculous; it seemed like an impossible amount for two people to agree upon, to have in common.

The idea that language worked at all, even when two people spoke the same one, seemed suddenly miraculous; it seemed like an impossible amount for two people to agree upon, to have in common.

It was the woman who saved them. She abruptly looked up from the depths of her drink and said, quite loudly: English, English! No one speaks your bloody language, you fool.

The bartender flinched, and waited a moment before speaking, as if he wanted to put a distance between the woman’s admonition and his words, and then said, in perfect English: Good evening. What could I get you?

The man was unsure of what to order. The constellation of bottles was arranged on the glass shelves of the bar in a pattern that seemed to him as intricately undecipherable as the periodic table, and to choose a liquor seemed as daunting as picking one element out of the many that comprised the world. The man shifted his head a bit so he could look around the bartender at the bottles behind him, hoping one bottle would call out to him—he wanted scotch, a large glass of scotch, neat, that he could warm between his palms and sip, he wanted the liquid gold of scotch, the warmth of it, but he had lost some fundamental confidence in himself over the course of the journey that made it impossible for him to ask for what he wanted—but once again, the woman at the end of the bar, apparently displeased with his indecision and the bartender’s inertia, apparently wanting to make something, anything, happen, said, Have you tried the local schnapps? It’s made from lichen, which sounds horrible I know, but it’s not, I promise you, it’s one of the loveliest schnapps I know. Lárus, give him some schnapps, let him see if he likes it. I think he will like it.

The bartender turned around and selected a large, squared, unlabeled bottle half full of clear liquid. He pulled the silver stopper, which resembled a stag’s antlered head, from its mouth and poured a dram into a large snifter, which he set before the man, who realized the liquid was not clear, but tinged with the silvery blue glow that snow reflects at twilight. He picked up the snifter and swirled the liquid up and around its glass walls, aware of both the bartender and the woman watching him, waiting, and then lifted it to his mouth and smelled the clean bracing smell of institutionally laundered linen and poured a little into his mouth, and let it pool there for a moment, cool and aromatic, tasting faintly of bleach and watercress and spearmint and rice.

He slowly lowered the glass to the bar and said, It’s lovely.

I knew you’d like it, said the woman. Lárus, pour him more.

The bartender once again removed the stopper from the bottle’s throat and held its open mouth above the man’s glass and, when the man nodded, he poured another dram of schnapps into the snifter. He then walked to the far end of the bar and poured more into the woman’s glass. She raised her glass to the man and looked into his eyes. She was old, the man realized, probably in her seventies, but there was something overtly and disconcertingly sexual about her. She wore a tight-fitting black gown adorned with iridescent sequins that reminded the man somewhat of fish scales—he thought of the prismatic bellies of fish lifted out of the water, how their flexing struggle made them gleam—and her long silvery-gray hair was swept back from her face and coiled atop her head in an intricate, antique sort of way. Her face was lean and strong, her eyes dark, her nose sleekly formidable, and her lips polished a deep wine red that separated them irrevocably from her pale skin. Her eyes were large and seemed to be set a fraction too far apart, as if some constant eagerness to see both what was in front of her but also beside her had caused them to become unfixed and migrate to either side of her face.

One shouldn’t shout in bars, she said, especially this late at night. I’m an actress, my voice is trained to project, but allow me to come sit next you, for I know you won’t come sit next to me, and it’s really too ridiculous to have this distance between us.

Without waiting for his reply, she stepped down off her barstool and picked up her drink and walked around the corner of the bar and reseated herself on the stool next to the man. She carefully placed her glass on the bar at the same latitude as his and then looked not at him but at their reflection in the mirror, through the interruption of bottles. Their eyes met and held there in the mirror, and the man felt the strength of the schnapps like electricity coursing through his body.

Are you here for the healer? the woman asked him. Or the orphanage?

The orphanage, said the man. There’s a healer?

Yes. Brother Emmanuel. Surely you’ve heard of him.

I haven’t, said the man. A healer? How do you mean? 

How do I mean? What do you mean? He’s a healer. He heals people. 

For real?

They say he does. I, myself, have not been healed by him—at least not yet—so I can give you no definitive answer. But why do you ask? Are you looking to be healed?

No, said the man. But my wife is ill. Very ill. 

Incurably ill?

Well, said the man, I suppose it remains to be seen.

Of course, said the woman. Everything that’s coming remains to be seen.

Of course, said the woman. Everything that’s coming remains to be seen.

The man realized that the bartender had somehow floated back to his original position at the end of the bar and was pretending he could not hear them, or see them, was pretending that he was alone onstage in some different play, a one-man show. The woman sighed and touched her hair, first one side of her head and then on the other, and the man realized she wore it as intricately coiffed as she did so that it could occupy her at moments like these; it could always be attended to, adjusted, primped.

It can work, she said. I’ve seen people arrive here at death’s front door—in the vestibule, even—and a few days later skip merrily away.

The man did not reply.

But I think for it to work you have to believe. Do you believe in that kind of thing?

I don’t know, the man said.

Then you don’t, said the woman. If you did, you’d know. What about your wife? Does she believe in it?

I don’t know, said the man. I doubt it.

Well, I don’t suppose it can hurt her to see him, so you might give it a go, since you got yourselves here. People come from all over the world to see Brother Emmanuel. Fortunately, I’ve never been ill a day in my life. My eyes are fine, my teeth—everything works fine. Knock wood. She rapped the underside of the bar with her knuckles. I don’t know why. I drink. I smoke.

You’re very fortunate, said the man.

Yes, she said. About that. My body has never failed me. Everything else, yes—but my body, no. I wonder how I’ll die. I am Livia Pinheiro-Rima. Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette? It makes me nervous to talk and a cigarette calms me down.

The man shook his head, indicating that he had no objection to the woman smoking, and she fished a silver cigarette case out of her bag and sprung it open and slid a cigarette out from beneath the clasp. She held the cigarette between two of her fingers, and with her thumb she flicked it cartwheeling up into the air and caught it neatly by the filtered end in her mouth.

That’s a trick from my circus days, she said. She bent her face down and stuck the tip of her cigarette into a candle and sucked at the flame and then raised her head, exhaling smoke through her nostrils.

I really was in the circus, you know, she said.

What did you do? the man asked.

I swung from the trapeze and rode atop an elephant. This was centuries ago, of course. But some things last.

It’s a good trick, the man said.

I know, she said. That’s why I’ve kept it. There are certain things I do every day, and that’s one. If you do something every day, you’ll never not be able to do it. People give up too easily in this regard. You, for instance.

What? the man said.

I can tell. You’ve given up, let go of certain things. I’ve had this dress since I was twenty-seven. And do you know, I was one of the original Isadorables.

You mean the children who danced with Isadora Duncan?

Yes. Although she didn’t think we were children. She thought anyone over the age of three was autonomous.

I don’t see how that’s possible, said the man. You’d be one hundred years old.

Perhaps I am. But don’t you know it’s rude to talk about a woman’s age?

I’m sorry, said the man. You’re remarkable.

Yes, but a lot of good it does me. It’s like a tree in the forest falling: if there’s no one there, who cares if it’s remarkable or not? I used to spend a lot of time in forests, waiting for trees to fall. It happens, you know—they suddenly just let go and crash. It’s the most intimate thing I’ve ever witnessed. And I’ve witnessed an awful lot of intimacy, believe me. Oh dear God the intimacies I’ve witnessed! By rights I ought to be blind. Do you believe in that?

What?

Hysterical blindness. The optic nerve ceasing to function as a result of a shock to the psyche.

I don’t know, the man said. I suppose—

I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, the woman hurriedly continued. I wasn’t in the circus for long. You see, I wanted to act, I wanted to be in the theater, and you’ve got to start out however you can. Wherever you can. So I started out dangling upside down from a rope and doing the splits atop an elephant. I don’t know if it still happens, but once upon a time there were people who were born to be on the stage. I was. They say I got down from my mother’s lap and crawled up the aisle towards the stage of the New Harmonium Theater when I was one year old. Who’d want to sit in the dark when they could be up there in that gorgeous light?

I would, said the man. Lots of people.

Yes, and God bless them! It’s the beauty of the world, isn’t it, that there are both kinds. The ones who will sit in the dark watching the ones on the stage. The ones who like to feel pain and the ones who like to give it. I’ve never believed in God because I think men’s and women’s anatomy is all wrong. The invariability of sexual intercourse, of men penetrating women, is amateurish; it wasn’t created by a God. I think homosexuality is proof of this. And my God, in the insect world, the horrible things that happen! Traumatic insemination! Postcoital chomping! I was once married to an entomologist.

It doesn’t sound very pleasant, said the man.

Being married to an entomologist?

No, said the man, the trauma and chomping.

Oh. No. Well, neither was being married to an entomologist for that matter. Have you heard of Kristof Noomeul? 

No, said the man.

I was married to him too. He was a theater director. The last really great theater director. I’m talking about real theater, pure theater, of course. It’s how I ended up here, at the end of the world. Of course, it being round, it doesn’t really have an end, but you got yourself here, so you know what I mean.

The woman looked down into her drink.

The bartender once again lifted himself away from the wall. He selected the schnapps bottle, uncorked it, and stood before them. Another? he asked.

The woman looked up from her drink, turned, and looked at the man. She saw that he was crying, silently, the tears on his cheeks. She nodded at the bartender and he poured some schnapps into both their glasses. He corked the bottle and left it on the bar in front of them and resumed his post at the far end of the bar.

You’re thinking about your wife, aren’t you?

Yes, said the man.

That you may lose her.

Yes, said the man.

After a moment the woman said, It’s startling for me, to encounter such depth of feeling. Of love, I suppose. Perhaps it’s not love, but to be moved to tears . . . When one stops feeling, one forgets that feelings exist, that other people actually do feel them. Like love. Perhaps it’s simply a result of aging—perhaps feelings, like muscles, atrophy. I’m sure it’s so, at least for me—it’s why I keep performing, even though hardly anyone comes to hear me—I play the piano and sing for my supper in yonder lobby five nights a week and Sunday afternoons. I do it, you see, because it’s the only way I can feel anything these days, even if they’re not real feelings, only facsimiles of facsimiles of facsimiles. And here you are feeling something real, right beside me. I’m ashamed. And privileged.

And here you are feeling something real, right beside me. I’m ashamed. And privileged.

The man crossed his arms on the bar and then leaned forward, so his forehead rested on his arms. I’m so tired, he said. The schnapps has made me tired.

No, said the woman. It isn’t the schnapps. She placed her hand gently on the center of his back. The man felt the pressure and warmth of her large hand and was afraid she would take it away.

Your hand is so warm, he said.

It isn’t either, said the woman.

It feels warm, said the man.

That’s something else entirely, said the woman. 

No one comes? asked the man.

Occasionally there’s someone, said the woman. She carefully did not move her hand, carefully did not increase or decrease the pressure of it against the man’s back.

But most nights the lobby is empty, she continued. Or there’s a few businessmen chatting up whores. But I don’t let that deter me. Anyone can perform for an audience, can’t they, for that warm welcoming murmur out beyond the footlights that’s so often mistaken for love? Other people go on doing other things, so why shouldn’t I? It doesn’t hurt anyone, as my mother would say. Five nights a week, as I told you. Do you know, I’ve never understood why there are seven days in a week, it seems such an odd number, why not ten or five? It’s another reason to doubt the existence of God, for wouldn’t he have divided up time more neatly? It’s all rather a mess, it seems to me.

She gently removed her hand from the man’s back and said, Are you still weeping?

No, said the man. He sat up straight and wiped at his wet face with his hands. Then he lifted his glass of schnapps and drank it all down like a child swallowing nasty medicine as quickly and neatly as possible. He placed the glass back upon the copper surface of the bar and smiled wistfully at it. He reached out and touched its rim with his fingertip. I’d like you to come hear me sing, the woman said. I think it might do you good. It might take you out of yourself.

Can that be done? asked the man.

What?

I’d like to be taken out of myself. And put away in a drawer somewhere. A drawer you open in a dream when you’re packing in haste at the end of the world.

Oh, that dream! exclaimed the woman. That drawer! Well, I can only take you out of yourself. Where you go then is up to you.

Now I shall go to bed, said the man. He looked at the bartender. What do I owe you?

Don’t worry, said the woman. He’ll charge it to your room. It’s the beauty of hotel bars. It’s time I left, too, but I’ll let you go first. It would be unbearable to leave with you and say good night in the hallway.

Do you live in the hotel?

I do. I had a sweet little house but I didn’t take good care of it, in fact I didn’t take any care of it, and so it fell to pieces, it really did, you’d think houses would last, at least I did, but they don’t. Especially here, with all the cold and the snow. Things expand and contract, and then collapse. So now I live in the hotel. Go, just go! I’m going to return to my original place over yonder and finish my drink.

The man stood up. Good night, he said.

Oh, don’t say good night. Just go! I’m going back to my place. See.

Livia Pinheiro-Rima stood up and walked back to her seat at the end of the bar. She sat and placed her glass on the bar in front of her and gazed down into it. The bartender stood in his original place at the other end of the bar, gazing implacably in front of him.

The man dove back through the red beads, which trembled ecstatically behind him, but after a moment they hung straight and perfectly still. 

9 Books to Read If You’re Missing Olympic Gymnastics

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

With the cancellation of the Summer Olympics this year and a pandemic continuing to rage on, most of us are stuck at home watching grainy YouTube videos of old gymnastics competitions—or “Athlete A,” the new Netflix documentary on female gymnasts.

“Athlete A” highlights the costs of being an Olympic gymnast to the forefront, explicitly addressing the widespread sexual and emotional abuse that runs rampant in the community. Although we see immaculately poised athletes with gleaming smiles on screen, it’s important to remember that these young women grapple with physical danger and intense emotional pressure on a daily basis. Similarly, the books below offer multiple perspectives on gymnastics that extend beyond a 45-second bar routine. They cover a wide range of what it means to be a competitive gymnast, whether through details of minutiae like blistered, chalky hands or a comprehensive documentary of multiple gymnasts’ lives. They provoke the reader to look beyond the oh-so-satisfyingly timed flips, and challenge us to think about the systems of power, inequity, and (often) abuse that govern the world of competitive gymnastics. 

So, the next time you find yourself missing the Olympics and perfect gymnastics routines, try reading one of these books. Perhaps we can welcome the 2021 Olympics (pandemic permitting) with a new fuller understanding of the sport, and better recognition of what being a gymnast entails. 

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

Forget soccer moms; Abbott’s critically-acclaimed novel takes “gymnastics mom” to a whole new level. Centering on a talented gymnast’s mother, You Will Know Me is a thriller examining the psychological toll of competitive gymnastics within the family. Katie and Eric Knox have dedicated all resources possible to support their daughter’s gymnastics career. But when someone in the gymnastics community is suddenly killed, Katie herself is not sure how far she’ll go to make her daughter into a star. Abbott’s unreliable narrator amplifies community hysteria and parental ambition in the gymnastics world. 

Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics‘ Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams by Jennifer Sey

It’s impossible to talk about gymnastics without talking about bodies; female gymnasts are often described as “racing against time” to claim fame, before their bodies give way. Sey, a former U.S. National Champion gymnast, writes in her memoir about constantly trying “to beat the menacing development of my own body… before puberty and curves and weight made it nearly impossible for me to fly through the air.” Chalked Up plunges readers into the mindset of a young female gymnast, and explores the extent to which she tried to control her body into perfection. 

Letters to a Young Gymnast

Letters to a Young Gymnast by Nadia Comaneci

It is just as impossible to talk of gymnastics without running across the legacy of Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian gymnast that first scored a perfect ten from judges. Framed as a series of letters to an inquisitive younger gymnast, this memoir is a clear-eyed, no-nonsense look at stardom. “Perhaps you expected short and simple answers,” Comaneci writes, “My life, like your own, is much more complex than a simple list of failures and accomplishments, and I will not cheat you of your answers despite some discomfort on my part in the telling.” Comaneci writes frankly about her experiences as a world champion, as well as her motivations for her career decisions.

The Little Communist Who Never Smiled by Lola Lafon

The Little Communist Who Never Smiled by Lola Lafon, translated from French by Nick Caistor

While Comaneci frames her career in her own words in Letters to a Young Gymnast, Lafon’s novel highlights the political context of Comaneci’s career, exploring the intersections between gymnastics and global power struggles. Comaneci constantly made headlines not only for her perfect routines, but also for her eventual defection from then-Communist Romania. A re-imagining of Nadia Comaneci’s life that blends together historical research and fiction, Lafon shows how the Cold War affected Comaneci’s individual story, making her into a political symbol. 

What is a Girl Worth?: My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics by Rachael Denhollander

As “Athlete A” shows, Denhollander was the first to speak up against U.S. Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse. This recent memoir by the former gymnast (now attorney) similarly exposes the corruption and power abuse of gymnastics officials. What is a Girl Worth emphasizes that this is not an individual problem of one abuser like Nassar; rather, it is a systematic, national issue of injustice. Denhollander also speaks up against the abuse she faced in her church community, and her memoir intertwines her experiences with religion and forgiveness alongside legal battles. 

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes by Joan Ryan: 9780307828552 ...

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes by Joan Ryan

Published in 1995, this non-fiction book shows that the system of gymnastics has been off-kilter for decades. Sportswriter Ryan analyses the abuse of gymnasts and figure skaters, recording a range of issues from eating disorders to psychological abuse; with Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, it’s all too easy to see how the world of gymnastics allows abusers like Larry Nassar to continue working. Ryan’s book also poses a question about the sports industry, one that seems resonant for Americans at large: at what cost must we pursue this idea of “winning”? 

The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score—from Nadia to Now by Dvora Meyers

Have you also been confused why undeniably stellar gymnasts today—like Simone Biles and Aly Raisman—never get that “perfect” score, ending up with minuscule point deductions? In Meyers’s non-fiction study, she meticulously tracks why the current scoring mechanisms do not allow for numerical perfection. The system of gymnastics scores have changed from a 1.0-10.0 system into a convoluted matrix of scores; since 2004, we are a far cry (or leap) away from the time when Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10. A former gymnast herself, sportswriter Meyers draws upon extensive interviews and research to explain a seemingly random process. 

Head Over Heels by Hannah Orenstein 

If you’re looking for a more feel-good narrative that still deals with the tensions of modern gymnastics, Orenstein’s rom-com novel hits that mark. Avery, a former competitive gymnast, is struggling to recover from a disastrous performance and injury—but things start to change when she starts co-coaching a younger gymnast. Head Over Heels acknowledges the deep systemic failures of competitive gymnastics; Avery struggles with a chronic injury and depression, as well as an abusive former coach. However, as Orenstein wrote for Lit Hub, her gymnasts “defend the sport’s beauty while striving to make it a safer place for the next generation of athletes.” 

Tumbling by Caela Carter

Tumbling by Caela Carter

Before dismissing Tumbling as “just” a YA novel, think again. Given that so many star gymnasts are themselves young teens, the YA genre offers acute insight into the emotional roller-coaster of competitive gymnastics. Imagine puberty, but then add on Olympic levels of stress. Alternating between five girls’ perspectives, Tumbling takes place over the two days of the U.S. Olympics Gymnastics Trials. While the girls compete for a spot, they also struggle with personal sacrifices and secrets of their own, from burgeoning sexuality to family pressure.