Married with Kids: One Star, Difficult to Assemble

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

“Patience”
by Courtney Maum

After putting his daughter Roxy on the school bus in a parka he had won a battle over and flip flops he had not, Mark returned to a kitchen bright with detritus from the night before. Crusted cake dishes, garbage bags of torn up wrapping paper, pink sequins here and there. It was a milestone of consequence: Mark had weathered a princess party with something close to grace. 

And then he saw an object on the kitchen table that hadn’t been there earlier: an opened birthday present with a Post-It note attached. It was immediate, the disheartening. His swallowed coffee burned.

This was the gift that had caused problems; the low point of the night. Initially, their four year-old had been thrilled with the LED “Glowbrite” drawing easel whose neon markers made your sketches look all psychedelic, but there was no way for mortal humans to wipe the markers off the screen. After Roxy had presented them with a slate full of “R”s and demanded room to make her “O”s, he and his wife had tried soap and water, even an ancient burp cloth, but the markers were immutable; these efforts only transformed his daughter’s letters into a beaming smear. 

Well after Roxy had been bribed into bed, Laurie had been sore about the botched cleaning, turning the scratched screen over and over with calculated sighs. Because his wife had been out of the room when Roxy had actually opened up the present, Laurie remained convinced that the challenge they were facing was Mark’s fault. That he’d misplaced the instruction manual, even though there hadn’t been one. 

Research? the Post-It on the easel asked, the question mark so coy it made Mark want to go back upstairs and take a sleeping pill. Tomorrow is another day, unfortunately, a college friend wrote recently on Facebook. Mark had pressed the heart button and liked it. And then he unliked it, because he didn’t want anybody to think that he didn’t like his life.

Mark sat down at the kitchen table with the offending item, the room almost indecent with October light. These Post-Its were a sickness. A manifestation, their upscale hippy friends would say. Laurie knew Mark was being visited by existential questions and she used it to her advantage. He’d spent most of last Friday researching toddler size 9 waterproof boots because of a sticky note he’d found on his own shoe.

Mark looked up the Glowbrite drawing easel up on his cell phone. The company didn’t even have a website, just terrible Amazon reviews. Only two of the markers weren’t dried up when we got it, read the first one. Impossible to clean. What a headache. Worthless and scratched. 

Mark scrolled through the various ways that strangers felt cheated by their products. And then he came to this: If the markers don’t work, the toy doesn’t work, and the markers don’t work.

He sat very still. He held his phone and waited. He had a feeling that this consumer review might hold something magical for him. Then his phone pulsed with a phone call. It wasn’t even 8:00 a.m.

“Hello?” he asked, his question mark, hopeful. 

It was his assistant producer. The lead in their new feature film quit. 

It wasn’t that Mark Lambros was an opera buff, exactly, but he was interested in the story of a once-famous opera star who, in the 1860s, refused to sing in public anywhere but her country house in Winsted, Connecticut, a humble river town which, back then, was reached by horse, train, horse. She spent her weekdays refusing different public concerts, and on the weekends, she would cart her favorite friends out for days and nights of opera, her singing it, them enjoying it, all of them discussing how much such singing meant. 

Mark wasn’t entirely sure why he was drawn to the project. The arbitrariness of this woman’s decision, her wish for control, maybe, her wish for something special that took place entirely in private. The director was young and fiery and convincing, and he’d done prize-winning shorts. Plus, he’d thought, how beautiful would it be to hear opera in the woods. 

What r we going 2 do?!! his assistant producer texted, even though they had just spoken. The star’s deflection was urgent; the calls coming were urgent. But Mark did not feel moved. At forty-six, he’d done this twenty times. It was so exciting in the beginning, producing indie films. The undiscovered talent, the electrifying hustle, even the gummy turkey wraps at film festivals and the weird seasonal beers. But now, distribution, the goal you used to aim for, and once in a while, get, had become such a pipe dream, that it didn’t really seem worth it to make movies any more. He could post a video of his daughter singing about poop and have more eyeballs on it than he’d ever have for his three-million-dollar doc/fiction-blend about a niche group of opera fanatics living in the woods. Who cared? No one really did. 

A duck fell out of the sky into the small pond outside his office. The pond was man-made, and had seemed like a charming water element when they’d visited the house. Now Mark spent as much time parenting that pond against infestations of filamentous algae and duckweed as he did his daughter against head colds and Lyme. Shouldn’t there be two of them? Shouldn’t that duck be south?

The director called. Mark let it go to voicemail. When he thought about the size of the thing he needed to accomplish, the cinematographer and the Belgian lighting director and the wistful supporting actress who’d all signed on to the film because of its big star, when he thought of the important people who would also quit when they heard that Mark had lost her, well this was a hurdle he wasn’t ready to run toward at 8:30 a.m.

He put his cellphone in a drawer where he kept the expired family passports and searched until he got back to the review about the toy not working if the markers didn’t either:

My two year-old received this easel as a birthday gift, and we decided to put it away until she was three, because at two years old, she could not properly handle the markers that came with this product.

Waiting for another birthday might account for why some of the markers were so dry by the time we gave it to her. We stored the gift in its original box which took up a lot of room in our house. Maybe it needed a different environment, the basement, for example.

This product is almost impossible to clean and it looks scratched after the first time that you use it. Before this, our daughter was only allowed to draw on paper though so she is very proud of it. Even our six year old plays with it sometimes. 

The reviewer’s dignity was striking. No agenda other than the sharing of a personal opinion, an opinion that didn’t point any fingers at the children who maybe left the caps off of those markers, or the husband (Mark bet it was a husband) who’d bought the wrong thing at the grocery store, again. Together, as a team, these parents had decided to delay the giving of the gift until their child could have a successful experience with it. It was awe-inducing, truly.

Mark looked above the review for the person’s name. Debbie Meyer. Debbie’s community activity board showed a smiling woman wearing a fleece coat. She appeared to be holding something, maybe a falcon. Her reviewer ranking was 2,250,249. She lived in Salt Lake City.

The drawer started rattling from the vibrations of his cellphone. The less quickly Mark responded to the assistant producer, the more frequently he texted. Mark looked at the other products Debbie had reviewed. A baby sun hat. A Nalgene water bottle. Metallic two-tone shoes. A “Better Life” floor cleaner that smelled like citrus mint.

Something in Mark’s heart twinged at this last product. Was he not living his life right? Should he have fragrant floors? There were a lot of people he knew who were having shameful problems in their home lives, but Debbie Meyer maybe wasn’t one of them. This was a woman who had kind and good solutions, who was probably raising a child who faced forward at the dinner table, instead of backward, with her feet up by her ears. Was she a pragmatic wife and mother and a falcon-tamer, as well?

Mark turned back to his computer, his hand shaking a bit. The most recent thing that Debbie had reviewed was a box of “Happy Belly Decaf.” She’d given it four stars. Delicious and FRESHLY ROASTED was the title of her review.

Mark got up and walked around his office. He felt moved—maybe irreversibly—by this woman’s praise. He let himself imagine what it would take for him to be the kind of person who took the time to leave four-star reviews of a bag of decaf coffee. When I got this, Debbie had written, it had only been roasted five days earlier. How awesome is that?

Mark felt sick to his stomach. He turned off his computer. He’d do the breakfast dishes, now. There had been a Post-It note about this, right next to the sink.

“Have you ever reviewed anything on Amazon?” Mark asked his wife that night after they’d reheated the food their daughter had refused to eat and eaten it themselves. 

Laurie was cutting up that day’s school notices into an ever-growing scratch pad. She didn’t like to waste paper, and every time Roxy’s backpack came home stuffed with all these notices, she threatened to say something to someone at the school. From the stack of flyers in front of her, Mark noticed two identical ones about “Socktober.” 

“Books,” she said, cutting both notices in half. “I’ve reviewed books.”

“Never a product?” he asked. 

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said, disappointed that she wasn’t going to surprise him. “What would make you want to leave one?”

“Of, like, what?” she asked, her eyes meeting his.

“I don’t know, a thing. Or a kid’s toy.”

“I guess if it caught on fire or something, I’d want people to know that.” She shrugged. 

“Would you ever review, like, coffee? If it was really, really good?”

“Well, no. I wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

She squinted at him. “Because who has time for that? And also, there’s too many kinds of coffee. People are totally out of control about caffeine.”

“What about a decaf? Like if I found a really good decaf?”

Laurie looked to the lacquer tray they kept above the fridge with the unfinished bags of potato chips and an ancient Fed-Ex envelope of pot edibles that had a Post-It taped to it, DON’T EAT. 

“Are you high?” she asked.

The next morning, after learning of the star’s departure, the film’s supporting actress told her agent that she felt like she was working “in an unstable film environment” and Debbie had a new review up. It was for a “Utah Riffic Snapback Trucker Hat” from a company called, “THATS RAD.” It was fifteen dollars and forty-nine cents, and she’d given it four stars. 

What a fun hat but toooo big for this lady! was what she’d gone with as a title. Except, no, she wouldn’t have “gone with” anything, not Debbie. She didn’t question herself, try to present herself as anything; she cleaned her floors with “Better Life” floor cleaner and did not do coy:

I got this hat to hike in because my toddler pulls on the neck protector of my other hat. I am a woman with an average head size, I would say, but this hat was really big! What a disappointment because the hat was very cute. Unfortunately, this hat only comes in one size. So I had to return it. 

Mark indulged himself in the flood of good feelings that this news brought to him. Debbie had been excited about something, and it hadn’t worked out, but she was going to keep climbing up life’s mountain, regardless. Faced with the revelation that she didn’t have an average head size, Debbie hydrated her children and sunscreened the lot of them and went on without a hat. It occurred to him, as it did sometimes, in a burst of adrenalized clarity, that there was  beauty in his life that a simple change of attitude could help him to admire. Obstacles were challenges. Challenges were opportunities. When life put a big rock in front of Debbie Meyer, she just climbed around it. 

This mindset was challenged when Mark went into the kitchen and found a new Post-It note attached to the coffeemaker. The note read, Beans?☺

The thing was, Laurie hadn’t always been a castrater. (The couple’s therapist asked Mark not to call her that the first-and-only time he’d tried to; she suggested “deflector,” instead.) Laurie was a novelist who worked around the clock when she was inspired, and in the beginning (“their salad days,” as Laurie liked to call it, which wasn’t right, really, because they ate way more salad, now), they’d had a loosey-goosey life. A lot of things—a lot of them—fell through the cracks. They had to pay back taxes one year. The car would sit with the same sludge of unchanged oil for months. Or years, until something cracked. They’d run out of coffee and it would be something they complained about until one of them complained the hardest and finally made the trip out to the store, which was kind of far away, because in their early thirties they’d made the decision to leave the city for the country so they could have more time for art. 

Laurie had weathered that move phenomenally: she produced untold amounts of work in the new peace and silence. In the beginning, Mark had been inspired, too: he’d produced some award-winning shorts, and even written one himself which made it all the way to Tribeca, three hours away, but a big deal in the film world. And then, the projects had stopped appealing to him, or stopped feeling urgent, and he’d started tinkering with the house, learning a little carpentry, which was useful to the both of them because the house was kind of falling apart, and he was no longer doing the two-film a year thing that would keep him in the scene, and his name started to carry less weight, until it didn’t carry any weight at all. And the real problem was that it didn’t really matter because Laurie’s books were selling gloriously, so she told him to take time, take all the time he wanted. When really, if he really looked back on it, what she probably wanted was for him to fix more things around the house.

He had pushed for a child. He wasn’t allowed to forget this, by the way. And it felt awful to admit this about a being who brought him so much simple joy, but their little girl kind of decimated their marriage. Or at least, Roxy changed the way they were married to each other. They were married worse.

To Mark and Laurie’s credit, they’d fought off the operations management roles that parenthood auto-suggests. They tried not to have the mundane “checklist” conversations they’d witnessed other parent-friends tick through with defeated eyes. Do you have a snack, the bottle, do we have diapers, do you have the disheveled T-shirt blanket that probably is riddled with Ebola? They skipped these domestic check-ins because doing so felt like proof that they were still “spontaneous” and maybe even “in love,” but these forced inattentions usually resulted in Roxy pissing in her car seat because each of them thought the other one had put the diaper on.

It had never been a conversation. Something about parenthood had depressed Mark, in the full sense of the word, it had filled him and had slowed him, and it hadn’t done this to Laurie, so she was still working furiously and making money and he wasn’t, or he wasn’t making much, and so without either of them really talking about it, he’d become the eighty-nine percent-of-the-time caretaker of their child, and Laurie was the winner of the whole grain, sprouted bread. And the fact that they had never talked about it, hadn’t used words like “time out” or “depression,” hadn’t used any words at all, really, but just kind of shifted into these new positions that saw Laurie leaving Post-It notes that were punctuated as love letters but were obviously chores, had Mark feeling immobile. He resented his wife, and she resented him, but he needed her, and she needed him, also, but not for the kinds of things that he wanted to be needed for. 

That night, Mark asked Laurie if she had an Amazon wish list. In between trying to find a replacement for his opera star and convincing the panicked cinematographer not to jump ship also, he’d been tracking the things that Debbie wanted. She had a lot of stuff on hers. 

“A what?” Laurie was separating the school notices at the kitchen table, again. There was going to be a field trip to the fire station Friday. Their child was going to have to walk through a “smoke trailer,” and if they didn’t want that to happen, he was going to have to call the school. 

“An Amazon wish list. Where you put the things you want.” 

Laurie squinted. She was always squinting at him. “I just buy the things I want.”

“Exactly,” Mark said, pleased. There was an apple on the table for some reason, and he decided to eat it. 

“Are you accusing me?” she asked.

“Of what?” he crunched.

“Of, I don’t know.” She was holding onto a blue piece of paper. The Socktober notices had changed color. The need was urgent, now. 

“Well, what would you have on your wish list if you had one?” he asked.

“I would have less notices from this stupid school.” 

Debbie Meyer’s wish list had 27 items on it. Mark monitored it daily. She wanted a book of poetry by Mary Oliver, a replacement mop head for her spin mop, and a travel memoir by Bill Bryson. But she also wanted a lot of books about God. How incredible to see someone’s desires listed out so plainly! It made Mark dizzy to imagine a world in which he could see what Laurie wanted. The transparency, the happiness, the access of the thing! To know with a single click that you were living with someone whose heart sung for an expandable pull-out cabinet shelf, waterproof adult sandals, a 6.5 inch cast iron pan for making homemade donuts, and a turquoise shawl. It made him start with longing. It was a freedom—a freedom with a framework that he would never know. 

Mark and Laurie had composed wish lists once, under the supervision of their therapist. They’d had to fill out sheets that read, “What would make me feel loved?” at the top. It was bad, definitely, that Mark couldn’t remember what Laurie had on hers. He’d put “speak to me with the same face she uses for her girlfriends,” on his.

They’d made it three sessions with that therapist. Things improved, so they stopped going. Then things got sad again a year later, so Laurie called for an appointment, but the therapist had moved. To North Carolina, the voicemail said.

Socktober passed; 272 pairs of socks were gathered which didn’t come close to the 383 pairs received the previous year. “Humanity is fucked,” Laurie said when she fished the disappointing news from the “Parent/Teacher Communication Folder” in Roxy’s glitter backpack. 

Well it was true, wasn’t it—there wasn’t much hope left. They’d started 2016 with so much fury, tipsy with the potential of their specific rage. Laurie set up automatic payments from their checking account to ACLU and Planned Parenthood; they attended sign-painting parties with Roxy, and took those signs (and Roxy) to crowded government lawns; they hand-wrote postcards to senators; bought sheets and sheets of stamps.  

But you can’t stay in the fury stage; it’s followed by defeat. If you bang and bang on a door, and nobody opens it, barring the exception of the person who actually knocks the door down, most people walk away from the door with a new hunch in their shoulders, burred shame in their heart.

Mark’s wife was a fighter, but she disliked wasted time. Laurie wanted results for her actions that she could track online. At a dinner party the other night, she announced that the lack of action around gun laws had gotten to a point where she fully expected to be shot. That every time she went to some big chain place like Target or Trader Joes, she wondered: Is this the day it happens? In the patio and garden department, considering a pouf?

It was a lot to reckon with. It was. In so many ways, Mark understood why Laurie left him all these Post-It tasks. They ran out of coffee beans, and he got some. Roxy wanted to be a mermaid for Halloween, so he found her a costume. Laurie was worried she’d trip on her mermaid tail getting into the school bus, so on the 31st, he put it in his Google calendar that he’d drop her off at school. On the micro level, their world was manageable and functioning, they were winning every day. He ordered things from Amazon and like clockwork, they showed up. There was a gaping, spreading hole underneath their driveway, enlarging weekly, widening its gullet to swallow the whole world, but at least Laurie could go down knowing that Mark had stocked the fridge. 

A lot of his friends seemed like they were on the brink of losing it. But nobody did.

That Thursday was date night, every second Thursday was. They’d chosen a new place their friends had raved about that had an eighteen-dollar burger. Was this considered a good deal? The burger came with fries so Mark supposed it was.

The waiter handed them the menus, and they took time looking through them even though they’d probably order burgers. While they were waiting for the waiter to return, Laurie made an announcement. 

“I’ve sent the new manuscript to my agent,” she said.

“That’s great!” he answered.

“She’s going to hate it,” she added, pulling at the menu’s tassel.

Mark didn’t say anything else because this was probably true about the agent, who didn’t like Laurie to take risks of any kind. His wife wrote romantic chic-lit comedies about busy moms who did things like send their kids to school plays in an Uber. She’d put some lesbians in this one. 

“Well,” he said. “What now?”

Laurie actually looked at him. She had put on earrings. The unexpected effort both flattered him and made his stomach clench. Three years ago, she had asked him if they should try an open marriage. While they were folding laundry, he recalled. He said he’d rather not. He really did not want to have this conversation again. 

“What now is…” she faltered. The waiter had come back. But then he left again because he’d forgotten his writing pad. 

They both searched for something to say in the gape of the waiter’s absence. 

“How’s the opera proj—film?” Laurie course corrected. There had been hot water over this at the therapist’s, the fact she never called his films films, she called them “projects.” “That’s because so few of them actually become films,” is how she explained it to the therapist. Right in front of him. 

“I think what we’re going to do,” he said, picking at a tear in the menu’s lamination, “I think what we’re going to do is change the filming dates. To…accommodate her new schedule. So, like, April probably, instead.”

Mark watched Laurie work through the way this information would impact her own schedule. Her lips tightened, brow furrowed, the whole thing. 

“You couldn’t have mentioned this before?”

Mark stopped himself from saying that he was mentioning it now. He stopped himself, but it didn’t feel very good. “If we don’t get her back, the whole film will fall apart.”

His wife was going to say something, but the waiter re-appeared. 

“Are you ready to order?” the waiter asked.

“Um, we’ll have the burgers?” he replied. “Medium, for both?”

Laurie exhaled. She shut her menu. “I’ll have the mussels, actually.”

“Oh,” said Mark, once the waiter had left them. “Wow.”

“I know,” said Laurie. “Wild!”

Her earrings made a swoosh-swoosh sound when she laughed her little laugh.

In November, the cinematographer quit because April didn’t work for him, and Debbie added a new book to her wishlist: The Uncertain Church. She also posted a two-star review of her garlic press. We have now been using it regularly (a couple of times a week) for 8 months and the metal has become bent and rendered itself useless. It is possible, she accommodated, that we pushed too hard.

The fact that Debbie seemed to be flailing in her life and her belief system made Mark want to be strong for her. It made him want to be strong for the entire world. It made him want to be the exceptional person who knocks down the fucking door. 

He called up the cinematographer and used strong words. He ordered a drain cap and installed it in his gutter so that the leaves and chipmunks and whatever wouldn’t keep going down the S drain and clogging everything up. He went to a new Tai Chi class at the town recreation center and let everything flow. And when he found a Tupperware in his fridge with a Post-It note that said Really bony whitefish? Mark stuck another note on it that said, This is NOT my problem.

That night, for the first time in forever, Laurie initiated sex.

By December, Mark had convinced their original star to come back into the fold using the age-old solution of flattery and cash. They’d shoot the film in May, which was a terrible month to shoot in (black flies, persistent mud), but they’d shoot the film with her. Mark celebrated by taking Roxy and Laurie to the local church.

It had been something he’d been thinking about for quite a while now, going to a church. The catalyst had been the underlying piety of Debbie’s careful wishlist (she’d purchased a new copy of He Whispers Your Name, but had bought God Has a Plan for Your Life, used), but also, there was the quagmire of Roxy’s current age: she didn’t take what her parents said as fact any more, for each question, there were more questions—her mind was like an existential set of Russian nesting dolls. 

And then there had been pet week: the disastrousness of that. One day, Roxy came home with a missive in her Communication Folder to bring in a pet photo: this was what the kindergarteners were doing, bringing in photos of their pets. This was going to be difficult for Roxy, because the Lambros’ family pet was dead. Or at least they thought he was dead: Muffins had not come home one night and after three days of steel-hearted optimism, Laurie told Roxy that he’d gone to Coyoteland, which she had meant as a euphemism, obviously, but just made things more complicated. (“When will he be back?”)

So an irate Laurie had sent Roxy off to school with a picture of their dead cat, Muffins, when he’d been alive. (“What kind of public school assumes that everyone has a pet?” she asked.) It did not go well. No it did not go smoothly, and now Roxy was talking about death all the time, and because Mark didn’t have the answers, he had started thinking that they should go to church to find them. They had one right across the town green, a nice place that flew the rainbow flag and offered monthly “maker space” activities where the elderly passed on their knowledge of…well, Mark didn’t know of what, exactly, because they hadn’t been yet, but the young received instruction in something from the old. Aside from gratis activities and the fact that they had something to do on Sundays other than make pancakes (which, honestly, took Mark all day to digest), there was something stronger pulling him—all of them—to the Northwest Congregational. Wasn’t it kind of irresponsible to raise a child without religion? Not that religion was ever something he or Laurie had. Laurie’s parents were admitted atheists, and Mark had grown up thinking he was “epa-skopp-lian.” 

But still. A person should have answers. Especially right now when everything…felt hard. A person should be allowed to indulge in the belief of a master plan holder if it enables them to floss, drive on the right side of the dotted line, not phone all of it in.

To Mark’s astonishment, Laurie was enthusiastic about the church outing when he found the courage to suggest it. She spoke of it like a field trip—like a trip to the museum. At an ice cream social fundraiser for the school’s roof (which needed reinforcement, an assurance of some kind), she regaled their circle with a teaser about “their upcoming trip to church.” What she didn’t tell their friends is that—after that initial visit—the Lambros’ had kept going.

Roxy loved the little “houses” for the Bibles in the backs of all the pews. She liked to follow along in her prayer book like a “real” reader, and sing the grown-up songs. As for Mark, he loved the Pastor. (It was “Pastor,” right? The Fathers were Catholics?) Mark loved Pastor Rick in a way that made him think (worry?) that he was opening to the wonders of the world outside his house. Plus, he was so progressive! PR—as Laurie called him—was tall with boyish skin and a pair of glasses that weren’t interesting at all. He was a new kind of hip—earnest, vitamized. PR incorporated pop culture into his sermons and he ran around the neighborhood in freshly laundered sports gear; if Mark and Roxy made it out of the house five minutes earlier than usual, they could watch Pastor Rick run by in his ironed clothing while they waited for the bus. 

It was becoming very important to Mark, the church-going, but it was a fragile thing. He had no idea why Laurie was encouraging it—participating in it—and he was too afraid to ask. If he asked, he worried that it would wake her from some reverie, cause her to announce that now that they were expected there on Sundays, it was time to stop.

So Mark didn’t prod and Laurie didn’t say anything, and soon enough the holiday gauntlet was upon them, and they powered on. The church-going felt even more restorative and significant during the holidays—plus, it distracted Mark from the guck of daily life. In church, Mark didn’t need to consider whether Roxy was too young for the computer tablet she desperately wanted for Christmas, or ponder where he was going to find three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of lighting equipment with the hundred-thousand dollars he had left to light his film. No. On Sundays, Mark could think about babies in mangers, and what myrrh actually smelled like, and whether there was any way—like, scientifically?—that there actually was a God. Church kept him from, well, grinding, really. It sprung him from the cog. And it got him thinking of the big things—the great big, great beyond.

The best thing was the sermons, though. Thanks to these, Mark was finding answers to questions he didn’t know he’d been holding in the closed-up interrogation room inside him. Last week, Mark had spent hours mulling about the Pastor’s view on credence: “Don’t put a question mark where God has put a period.” But two weeks ago was the really good one; Mark’s favorite so far. Pastor Rick talked about Tom Petty, who had stopped living, recently. He used some of Petty’s lyrics to explain God’s relationship to his flock. 

It’s alright if you love me
 It’s alright if you don’t
 I’m not afraid of you running away, Honey
 I get the feeling you won’t

“God waits,” the Pastor said. “He is patient. He’s the most patient man there is.”

Laurie was changing, too, from church, and definitely for the better. Normally, by this time of year (post Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas—or rather, the “Winter Holidays,” as Mark had recently been corrected by a woke gaffer), Laurie would have had Mark researching different thread counts and scouring holiday listicles for teacher appreciation gifts that made elementary teachers feel “seen,” but this year, she declared an entirely different tack. They were going to focus on giving experiences instead of things; privilege memory making over buying. So far, all of the ideas that Laurie was culling off of lifestyle blogs actually did entail buying things, but Mark was game. They were looking at different camping tents, and Laurie really wanted to find an ice skating rink for a family outing—they could rent the skates and get one of those little hobbly things for Roxy, who had never been on skates before. They were going to bake, also. They were going to bake for other people. Roxy was not going to take the news well that she would be giving, rather than getting this Ch—holiday season. There would be no tablet. But they agreed to present a united front about it. They agreed to stay the course.

Meanwhile, in Utah, things were not so good. The formerly steadfast Debbie Meyer seemed to be experiencing a real form of malaise. She was adding all kinds of funky items to her wishlist, but her actual purchases remained run-of-the-mill, which made Mark think that her soul’s song wasn’t being heard. For example: she wanted a weighted blanket; she purchased a second set of “Tike Right” drink trainers which she only gave three stars. Worse still, she left a one-star review of the choose-a-sheet paper towels she’d switched out for the basic family roll from a “bulk retailer” she’d previously favored. (“This product might be appropriate for a family who can’t easily make it to a supermarket, but I plan to switch back to my old paper towels after this because those towels were cheaper.”)

It was just defeatist, this attitude, defeatist and not like her. The Debbie who had taught Mark something important about faith and its rewards would have credited her children for making fewer spills than they used to, so she was one of the lucky few who didn’t have to be concerned about a superior absorption rate for a higher price. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” 2 Corinthians 12:9, she might have added, the Debbie he rooted for.

Even though it would break the “memories over materialism” credo that he and Laurie had aligned on, it just didn’t seem right—it didn’t—to let Debbie go ungifted. It was in Mark’s power to buy something off her Amazon wish list—he had looked it up, it was a new service they were offering called “Be an Awesome Neighbor.” And while Mark recognized that it was a little weird to buy something for someone that you had never actually met, the truth was that they had been through something together, he and Debbie, and so it wasn’t invasive, what he was considering doing. It was modern friendliness; a long-distance version of goodwill. 

Mark had been eyeing the Warm Tartan Checked Shawl that Debbie had had on her list forever, but then—two weeks before Christmas— it went out of stock. (This occurred before Debbie checked the item off as “purchased,” which pained him, on her behalf.) Of course there were the Mary Oliver back titles, but even Mark recognized that the sending of poetry was a step over the line. Laurie—if she knew any of this—would consider it all over the line, that you didn’t buy things for strangers that you had effectively been surveilling, but Mark had come far enough along in his intrapersonal efforts to recognize that this would be Laurie’s criticism of the situation, not Mark’s. As for Debbie? Debbie in Salt Lake with the falcon and the spills? Debbie would appreciate having her bird call answered, even if it was by a customer named “Spyro the Dragon” with no customer reviews.

Reminders about the Mitten Tree and the Cookie Drive flooded Roxy’s backpack; Laurie’s purchases of buckwheat flour and silicone oven mitts and Healthy Cookie Cookbooks flooded their mailbox. It became December 18th, 20th, and still Mark hadn’t found the perfect thing for Debbie. In search engines bearing mistletoe logos and chili pepper Christmas lights, Mark browsed gift lists for friends who were “having a hard time.” He found a furry worry monster with a zippered pouch that you could put your scribbled doubts inside of, compression socks with affirmations on them, non-stick egg rings in the shape of hearts. Mark paused —not for the first time—over the weighted blanket that had been on Debbie’s list for months now, his internal sensor zinging because of 1) the price and 2) the fact that Laurie would think it way over the line to give a stranger an item for her bed.

Grey and queen sized, non-toxic and hypoallergenic (which were kind of the same thing?), the blanket that Debbie wish-listed had glass beads inside that aided Deep Pressure Stimulation for an epic sense of calm. One-hundred-and-forty dollars (without shipping!) was way more than Mark should spend on a stranger—honestly, it was approaching the most he’d ever spent on Laurie from his own account—but still, the blanket felt just right. This was his parting gift to Debbie, proof that Mark wished her the very best on her particular path, which couldn’t be his path any longer—Laurie was keen on them doing a digital detox for the new year, so his access to the Internet was going to be severely pinched.

Mark ticked the blanket from her wish list and followed the “Be an Awesome Neighbor” instructions that an Amazon video tutorial had showed him how to do. He manifested the happy life he wished for Debbie inside of her new blanket, along with dreams that smelled of Nalgene bottles and citrus mint-cleaned floors. In his stomach, in the dark part where he kept the things that even PR hadn’t troubled, Mark registered that he was going to miss Debbie’s children and the things they spilled on floors, miss the demanding titles of the books she wanted to read, the real-time tracking of the money that she was saving up to spend. But you had to let go of an apple seed to grow an apple tree. (Pastor Rick that Sunday.) And so, with a sentiment closer to resignation than acceptance, Mark confirmed the buy.

White Supremacy Is America’s Original Pyramid Scheme

Posted on by Jo Lou

Ijeoma Oluo started writing about issues of race out of necessity. “The issues that were impacting me, my family and other Black people in Seattle were really incongruent with Seattle’s political attitude and reputation. It felt like gaslighting, and I was trying to find a way for people to get engaged.” Oluo started by sharing her work on Facebook and on Twitter. “First mostly people of color in the Seattle area started really being drawn to the work and asking if they could repost it.” Soon magazines and editors began contacting her. “Within a matter of years I really had to make a choice if I was going to continue writing or with my day job because I couldn’t do both. when you find a space where you can write openly about things that matter and can make a difference there really isn’t a choice.”

Her New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race guides readers in thinking and discussing race, gender, and sexuality while deconstructing white supremacy. Each chapter focuses on questions such as “What is intersectionality and why do I need it?” or “I just got called a racist. What do I do now?”

Oluo and I spoke by Skype the week that the Chicago teachers went on strike, a few days after Atatiana Jefferson was shot to death by the police, and a week before the 45th president deemed the current impeachment hearings a lynching. As a citizen of a nation founded on the twin evils of enslavement and genocide, I hesitate to say that Oluo’s scholarship is needed now more than ever, but I know that it is needed.

Oluo and I spoke about the model minority myth, how the origins of the police force play into the murders of people of color, and why protecting the childhoods of children of color should be viewed as a national emergency.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: You talk about white supremacy as being this nation’s original pyramid scheme,  one where even those who have lost everything are still waiting to cash out. Do you mind elaborating on this?

Ijeoma Oluo: The system of capitalism is a brutal system that exploits almost everyone. Slavery and the American system of race were created as a function to justify capitalism by getting as much free labor as possible out of Black people to justify the brutality required from it. Also it was to give a space for lower-income whites to play a part in the system to help uphold the system when they were going to get very little payout. The promise was that you were going to get something out of it, that you were going to at least be better off than Black people, that you were going to get your reward, that if you worked hard enough you were going to rise to the top in a way that people of color never would, because it was your birthright, not theirs. 

The system of capitalism is a brutal system that exploits almost everyone.

It helped convince lower and middle-class white Americans to play their part in exploiting Black people and Native people, in order to increase their chances and their payday that was never going to come, because capitalism has always been designed to make sure that a select few get the most profit out of the system. It’s a pyramid scheme. You’ve got middle managers getting lower-class whites to buy in constantly, telling them, “Your paycheck’s coming, your paycheck’s coming” and everyone is stepping on everyone else but all that cash is already spent. It’s already allocated to everyone on top.

People have wasted their entire lives and have participated in really violent systems in the hopes that one day it will pay off for them and all that it’s giving them right now is just a sense of identity and the ability to look in the mirror and go, “At least I’m not Black.” They’re losing so much more potential because there could be using a different system, one that doesn’t restrict 98% of the wealth to the very top. 

DS: Agreed. It’s so disgusting to me that right now the working class is being taxed at a higher rate than the billionaire class. We just had this highly racialized election and people have blatantly got screwed over and they’re still buying in. Speaking of, I love that you cite Ronald Takaki, who wrote about how racism is experienced by different ethnic groups in America and introduced me to that subject from a historical perspective.

IO: I first read Takaki in college. His work is so fundamental to talking about race in America, and the bamboo ceiling, and the model minority myth. I wish he was referenced more in contemporary works on race.

DS: I actually wanted to ask you about the model minority myth, which you say is an act of racism that harms Asian Americans and benefits white supremacy. Can you elaborate?

IO: It’s really important to recognize that the model minority myth was created to first be used against Black Americans and to say, “Look they have nothing to complain about. Look how great Asian Americans are doing.” It harms Asian Americans on so many levels because the story of the success of Asian Americans has to do with patterns of migration, who is allowed in and who isn’t, but also people like to lump all Asian Americans together. Asia is a huge section of the world and has so many countries and so many cultures and circumstances. [Lumping all Asian Americans together] ultimately erases the struggles that many Asian Americans face. It hides extreme wealth and opportunity imbalances within Asian American communities. It makes it much harder for many Asian Americans to effectively advocate for services and to be heard when they do because people go: “what are you talking about? You’re Asian, you should be just fine.”

It’s important to recognize that the model minority myth was created to first be used against Black Americans.

It also hides other issues impacting Asian American communities like the fact that you may well be able to rise up to middle management but your chances of being promoted to upper levels of management if you are Asian American is decreased. Your chances of being elected to government and having that sort of representation are decreased. Your chances of getting help for domestic violence or mental health issues are decreased because these myths are ingrained, that Asian Americans are strong, that they’re stoic, but also that they’re not really leaders. All of these work against Asian Americans and they also work against other people of color because that message is used to silence the issues of other groups of color have as well. It also stops any sort of solidarity between Asian Americans and Black Americans or Latinx Americans or Native people, because people are played against each other in a way that only serves white supremacy.

DS: Right now the nation is reeling from the death of Joshua Brown and Atatiana Jefferson, and before that from the death of Botham Jean. This past weekend here in my community of Athens, Georgia, a 28-year-old man is in serious condition due to excessive use of police force. You say that few subjects shed greater light on the racial divide in the United States than the subject of police brutality. Can you discuss the history of the police forces and how they were born from the Night Patrols, the units who controlled Black and Native populations in New England and assisted the Slave Patrols?

IO: I think it’s really important for people to understand that our police forces are rooted in violent white supremacy and they’ve always had dual purposes. The dual roles of these were to capture escaped slaves and protect white citizens. From the very beginning of the police forces we’ve had two separate mandates—to control Black people and to protect white people. It’s important to know that this is in the DNA. This is how our police forces were started.

The night patrols were precursors to police in America. Many white people who don’t understand the issue of police brutality because they are being served by that other mandate to protect and serve white people and it’s hard to reconcile how one officer you trust to save your life will take the life of a Black person. It’s important to recognize that the entire training, that the entire structure of the police force has been designed to ensure that that is what happens, that they will protect and serve whiteness and that they will control violently if necessary Black Americans. That dual identity has always existed and is part of the bones of American policing.

DS: This morning I was listening to NPR and they were talking about how the warrior mindset played into the death of Atatiana Jefferson. Basically this mindset views people as threats and that’s the way officers are trained. 

IO: That’s the part that always confuses me because the reason why we are supposed to appreciate police forces is because they’re supposed to risk their lives for us, but at the same time it is very clear even by the justifications given for the death of murders of Black Americans is that they are never supposed to risk their lives for us. Even at a hint of possible danger, they are trained to shoot us. So then why do we have police when they are never trained to risk their lives for ours?  Why do they have all of these vests? Why do they get all these accolades if they aren’t supposed to take some risk and that risk is this person may not be armed? 

From the very beginning, the police forces had two separate mandates—to control Black people and to protect white people.

But if that person is Black, that is not how they are trained. They’re trained to shoot to kill. They are not trained to protect us. They are not trained to risk their lives for us and that’s something I think we really need to understand is that all this defense people give for police, what they’re actually saying is when they say that phone could have been a gun, that hand in that pocket could have been a gun, what they’re actually saying is I’m not willing to risk my life. My life is so much more important than yours but even the hypothetical risk that your hand could be a weapon means that you deserve to die because that hypothetical chance is not big enough to take. I’m that much more important than you. It’s really what we’re saying about the value of Blacks and Native Americans in this country, that the hypothetical risk to our police isn’t even worth it and they’re the one people tasked to risk their lives to save people. That hypocrisy always just gets to me.

DS: I taught in public schools for fifteen years and was fascinated by all you had to say about the school-to-prison pipeline. Can you discuss how the high levels of suspensions and expulsions lead to the school-to-prison pipeline?

IO: Any time you have youths out of school, you’re going to increase the chance of crime, so when you have youths of color being released continuously from school you increase the likelihood with all the free time and the bad decisions that students make they’re going to tend towards crime. Also what we see is school resource officers are used to enforce suspensions and expulsions. Often the student is not just suspended and expelled, they are arrested. School resource officers really escalate the situation and not only that, they are predominantly placed in schools with large amounts of African American children. They predominantly target them in a way that doesn’t actually match any increase in violence, drugs, or truancy at school. They target them because they are there. 

Once a child is entered into that system, it’s very hard to get them out. Being removed from their friends or their social support groups and placed in detention centers, it is really hard for them to ever get back on track and it’s very hard for them to be treated like children worth educating by the school system after that, and it’s really the beginning of a lifelong relationship with a criminal justice system that really robs our youth of their whole livelihoods. It’s really important to recognize how heavy use of school resource officers, how unchecked discipline programs of suspensions and expulsions, are forcing our Black children and Hispanic children into the system, especially if they are at a really young age—dooming them to a life in prison before they even know what hit them. 

We have to find a solution to this, we have to start recognizing the right to education, a safe education for all of our children. What is deemed a threat to our children is different from what is deemed a threat to white children. Maybe some families might feel safer sending their white children to a school that has a school resource officer, but it often does not make Black and brown children any safer at all. Just like the rest of our criminal justice system, there is very little accountability for how youth of color are treated by the system. Very few people are looking into these numbers and figuring out nationwide how many of our children are being stolen. Activists are, of course, but I’m talking about the accountability government level. Our youth jails are filled with children of color, no matter how few children a color are within a demographic area. That absolutely needs to stop.

DS: You talk about how we are teaching from textbooks that teach white culture and taking tests designed for white students. A lot of the teachers are majority-white and come from different backgrounds from their students.  All of these things make it harder for children of color to succeed in school. How can we have a diverse and inclusive education for all of our kids in a white supremacist society?

IO: I think it’s important to realize that no matter what the racial makeup of your classroom is, you’re not adequately educating your children if you’re not providing a diverse and inclusive curriculum, if you’re not recognizing that absolutely every subject has contributions from people of color and it’s more than just one month a year for one racial and demographic. Your children aren’t learning anything accurate or adequate about any field—math, science, English, history, social studies—if they aren’t learning it from a diverse perspective. 

You’re not adequately educating your children if you’re not providing a diverse and inclusive curriculum.

Often times when I go into schools and workshop with teachers, we start talking about what sort of opportunities each class has to teach about to increase the diversity and teach through a racial justice lens, it’s often really hard for them to imagine the different ways. But when I do these exercises with students, especially students of color, they have a myriad of experiences. In almost every single class we have billboards of ideas from them that they know that if they had a class that really cared about racial justice, teachers that cared about racial justice, they have so many ideas about what that would look like. Because we are a racialized people, every subject has a racialized lens. Every subject has people of all races that are contributing to it and deserves to be heard and we need to normalize the thought of people of color existing and achieving and interacting in every system and every subject matter that our students learn about, and that’s something that students of color need to see and that’s something that white students need to see.

Oftentimes teachers only tend to see this issue if they have a high minority population in their class, but they’re also cheating their white students out of an adequate education if they don’t do this.

DS: For the most part I’ve only taught predominantly students of color, but thinking of my own education, I agree, it’s imperative for people, for society, to understand. I so appreciate you writing about children and sharing stories about your family and yourself. You say the biggest tragedy of our schools is the loss of childhood joy. Can you elaborate on this?

IO: Our children, I mean children of color, are not able to be rambunctious. They’re not able to make mistakes. They’re not able to be rebellious. They feel the thrill of discovery of seeing someone who looks like them in their textbooks, of getting the praise and attention from their teachers that white children get. All of these things are integral to childhood. They’re part of the whole fairy tale that we tell about childhood and it’s robbing our youth. And of course, in the more extreme, they’re being robbed of their youth when they are kicked out of school, when they are being sent to prison at an early age, when they are being brutalized by school resource officers. They’re being robbed of childhood and we can’t get those years back. 

As adults we can sue, we can do whatever we can to try to rectify the harm done to adults, but we cannot give a childhood back to someone. Those years never come back. Those formative experiences never come back and that absolutely breaks my heart when I see how often being an actual child just costs Black children, Native children, Hispanic children, in particular. They don’t get that back. They don’t get that carefree joy back. It robs you of something for the rest of your life and that absolutely breaks my heart. Too often instead of looking at how can we preserve and protect childhood for children of color, we look at how can we compensate them after it has already been stolen. And you can’t ever. To me, it’s an emergency. Each child that goes through the system without us doing something has lost something that can never be returned and that’s an absolute tragedy and a crime. We have to treat it like every day that we don’t address this, like we have lost another childhood. We have to treat it with that urgency.

7 Books About Insomnia to Distract You From Late-Night Dread

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

There are two ways people handle not being able to sleep––lie in bed staring up at your dark ceiling in an attempt to Pavlov your body into unconsciousness, or accept your fate and scroll through your phone in the hopes that its light will burn out your retinas. Maybe that second one’s just me. But we’ve all had our fair share of sleepless nights. This list ranges from the day-to-day experience of insomnia to imagined countries where no one can sleep, and from garden-variety sleeplessness to the world of dreams or sleep walking. Will these books cure you of insomnia? No. But they will distract you from something even worse: late night existential dread. 

Insomnia by Marina Benjamin

Insomnia by Marina Benjamin

More than a third of all adults experience insomnia and the number rises in those over sixty-five. Marina Benjamin writes on her personal experience with the condition and adds new dimensions to both our understanding of sleep, the night, and how we perceive darkness. In her usage of  literature, art, philosophy, psychology, pop culture, and more, Benjamin pays close attention in her musings to the relationship between women and sleep detailed throughout history. 

Sleep Donation by Karen Russell

Russell’s novella imagines a near future where hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost the ability to sleep. Trish Edgewater recruits for the non-profit Slumber Corp, which connects sleep donors to the needy afflicted. However, the discovery of the first universal donor, Baby A, lands Trish in a moral dilemma as the disease takes a terrifying turn and she discovers the secrets her employers have been keeping.

Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun

Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun

In another novel about the sleepless apocalypse, our narrator Biggs has just lost his wife Carolyn to an insomnia that is wreaking havoc across the nation. Sleep has become a precious commodity in this world. The telltale signs of red-rimmed eyes, slurred speech, and a clouded mind have yet to manifest in Biggs so he while he can still sleep and dream he sets out to find Carolyn–encountering others fighting against sleeplessness along the way. 

Image result for compass mathias enard

Compass by Mathias Enard 

Insomniac musicologist Franz Ritter takes to his sickbed and spends the entire night moving between dreams and memories, revisiting the span of his long life. At the heart of all these memories of his life-long fascination with the Middle East and the thinkers he admires is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami
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After Dark by Haruki Murakami 

Nineteen-year-old Mari is reading in a Denny’s when she meets a young man who insists he knows her older sister–who has fallen into a deep sleep for the past few months–thus setting her on a late night odyssey through Tokyo. In the space of a single night, the lives of a diverse cast of Tokyo residents—hotel owners, prostitutes, mobsters, and musicians—collide in a world suspended between the surreal and the mundane. 

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

In an isolated Southern California college town, a freshman falls asleep in her dorm room and doesn’t wake up. Mei, her roommate, can’t rouse her, or the paramedics that carry her away, or even the doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, until a quarantine is announced.  The National Guard is contacted, classes are canceled, and stores run out of supplies. Why won’t the affected wake up, and what are they dreaming of?

The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke 

A fourteen-year-old boy named Niannian watches as one fateful night the residents of his small town deep in the mountains of Balou don’t go to sleep. They sleepwalk instead, at first carrying out their usual day-to-day activities like tilling fields and roaming the streets, before devolving into their baser impulses and growing increasingly violent. Niannian and his father work throughout the night to try to help their neighbors.

Poetry Can Give You What You’re Hungry For

Posted on by Jo Lou

Tommy Pico’s Feed, the fourth collection in his tetralogy, explores loneliness and growth. Pico interrogates ideas of life and death—what it means to live a full life, what it means to know your life could be shorter than others’. He plays with form and structure, asking the reader to reconsider these themes with each tracklist, each conversation at the High Line in Brooklyn, each text-like word. He recalls and recreates memories, hoping the speaker and readers will find their own answers about life. 

Image result for feed tommy pico

Pico, also known as Teebs, moved from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation to attend Sarah Lawrence College as a pre-med student. Now based in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, Pico has written four books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, and Feed. He co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude, the podcasts Food 4 Thot and Scream, Queen!, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.

I talked to Tommy Pico about how we’re all hungry for something, making mixtapes, and always needing a place to return.

Arriel Vinson: Tell me about the title of this collection. It’s called Feed, but there is so much lacking for the speaker—love, the idea of life, access, etc.—rather than a fullness.

Tommy Pico: It’s not about arriving at a fullness, it’s about understanding what it is that ultimately nurtures you. I think the speaker is on kind of an endless search to process and refine what that is: is it poetry? Is it friendship? Is it song? And maybe some things that were adequate nutrients in the past don’t work anymore. Some things you loved, you can’t really digest anymore. Today, especially, with the endless feed of the internet? Sometimes you need to restrict some streams of intake. Sometimes you need to log off.

AV: There’s a line in the beginning of Feed that says “the reason why we don’t have the conversation is because we’re afraid we already know the answer.” Even though this is about a current conversation between the speaker and someone else, the quote feels like a theme in this book. Can you say more about how this idea works throughout the piece/the life of the speaker?

Some things that were adequate nutrients in the past don’t work anymore.

TP: This is part of the process that I think the main dude is going through. I wanted to point to places in the poem where the person is given the opportunity to change and takes it up. This whole series of books started with IRL, a book that stacks evidence after evidence that the main character should change, the main character clocks all this growth, and then ultimately decides to choose pursuing dudes rather than art. He’s given the opportunity to change and doesn’t. I think Feed is that person choosing something new. There’s a different moment in the poem, later on in their lives, where Leo doesn’t let our hero off the hook, and he has to have an honest, real time admission of feeling—rather than not having the conversation, “because we’re afraid we already know the answer.” Instead of creating conflict by avoiding conflict, they resolve conflict by confronting it.

AV: Feed uses both song titles and lyrics to explain the speaker’s feelings. We move from Beyoncé to Salt-n-Pepa to Drake. Why does music speak in this collection, and what does that do?

TP: I just miss making mix tapes for people, lol. I wanted to make one for the reader but also for Teebs and for the book and for writing in general and I think what might be my last foray into poetry. It’s been a hell of a time, but I don’t know that I have anything left to say in poems. And let’s be honest, songs are so much better than poems tbqmfh.

AV: The form/language in Feed is also its own. There is text language, line breaks in some parts, paragraphs in others. Tell me more about not sticking to one form and how that decision was made. 

TP: I was commissioned to make a soundscape for the High Line park in New York in 2018, for the launch of their Spring ephemeral garden. The idea is that you would listen to it as you wandered the grounds. It came at the same time Vignettes Gallery and Gramma Press in Seattle commissioned me to make a soundscape about the difference between loneliness and being alone, that you would listen to while walking around Seattle. Both commissions came on the heel of a self-imposed curriculum where I could only listen to food podcasts, watch food movies and tv shows, read food books, could only eat things I cooked, and made myself cook with friends in their kitchens twice a week. When I braided those in the summer of 2018 to create the body of this work, I wanted to approximate a walk through the High Line, a walk through memory, a travelogue, that had the juxtaposed feel of the microclimates of plant life in the High Line. It’s curated to recall wilderness & wildness.

AV: Feed raises a lot of questions about love and loneliness, whether that be between romantic or familial relationships. The speaker is trying to define loneliness, but also figure out why we’re alone. Why was this a theme you wanted to explore? 

With the endless feed of the internet, sometimes you need to restrict some streams of intake. Sometimes you need to log off.

TP: In my personal life, I had basically just spent three years on book tours, finding that performing on the road could actually pay my rent. There was so much freedom in that! I had spent the previous 10 years only knowing at most a two mile radius in New York. I made friends, real ride or dies, in places like Baltimore, Philly, Seattle, San Francisco, Providence, Portland, Chicago, St Louis, etc etc etc. while on the road, reaching more and more people, but I missed the homies. The grind was constant and I found myself in hotel bathtubs—the height of luxury in my mind—wishing that my friends could be with me. 

I was also reading a lot about these projects to try and find extraterrestrial civilizations on exo-planets, how pointless that seemed to me, how much like dating that seemed to me, and I just thought: what if life is actually super rare? What if multicellular life is actually super rare? What if “civilization” is actually the rarest resource in the galaxy? What if we’re all that there is? Would that make you feel like life is even more precious, or would that make you nihilistic?

AV: This collection also deals with the idea of loss and life. In one section, the speaker says “I would love to imagine being alive in five years but I have these bones u know?” right after talking about a cousin’s death. Why is life a privilege in this collection?

Forming your worldview around death makes growing any older seem audacious.

TP: It’s literally in the text. The average age of death on my reservation is 40.7 years old. I’m 35. Even though I don’t live there anymore, I still get the texts from my mom on her way to funerals and anniversary masses and graveyard cleanings. Forming your childhood and your adolescence and your worldview around death makes growing any older seem audacious. I don’t have time to spare! I don’t have years to toss things in an editing drawer! These shits have to happen now!

AV: Throughout Feed, the speaker wrestles with memories — of the mother recognizing her aging, of the father being drunk one night, etc. How did memory shape the way you wrote Feed? 

TP: Memory isn’t necessarily the past. Memory is a craft, like writing. I think it can be a jumping-off point for starting to imagine writing a poem or a book or whatever because what you remember has a resonance. There’s something particularly loud about it. If you investigate that, I think you can probably connect the theme of that memory to something you’re interested in exploring in your writing.

AV: Feed is very concerned with place as well. The speaker wonders if we’re the only outpost of life in this large world, but we are also asked to think about Indian territories being taken/destroyed. How is setting significant in Feed, and what did you want the readers to take away from it?

TP: I think the person is very concerned about grounding, about finding his footing as he’s consistently traveling and going on dates with exoplanets in far flung galaxies. Having a topography to come back to, whether that’s familial or platonic or terrestrial, was something I wanted to keep referencing. I think by the end he realizes he makes home wherever he goes. As for the reader, I want them to keep reading lol.

AV: What are you working on now?
TP: I’m working on one film in particular and a few other screenplays in general and getting ready for another book tour and two podcasts (Food 4 Thot and Scream, Queen!) and maybe making out with someone in a movie theater that gives us double gin & tonics and a tater tots + queso.

9 New Books That Show How Truly Weird Artificial Intelligence Can Be

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

I’ve encountered a lot of artificial intelligences, both the ones I’ve trained for my blog AI Weirdness, and the ones I’ve written about for my book on artificial intelligence, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why it’s Making the World a Weirder Place. I focus on the machine learning algorithms that exist today, the ones that sort spam, tag photos, and drive cars. We call them AI, but they’re as different from the AI of science fiction as a toaster is from a person.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

In the book, I spend a lot of time explaining why today’s AIs, with their tiny worm brains, don’t understand their tasks or the human world. They won’t be taking over from people, but they also won’t be saving us by questioning bad orders.

In science fiction, though, anything can happen. I’ve been working on my book for two years, and just in that time, a wealth of new science fiction stories have used AI to examine life and humanity. I’d like to step into the world of fiction and talk about some of these stories.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

When I mention that this novel includes an AI named Black Swan that generates band names, paint colors, weird recipes, and terrible poetry, readers of my AI Weirdness blog posts about band names, paint colors, weird recipes, and terrible poetry will understand why I was excited about this story. The book is epic in every sense of the word (including being about 1000 pages long), with room in it for every terrible thing you could possibly imagine happening during an apocalypse. But it also has moments of humor and tenderness, and I’m tickled that a goofy AI is part of it.

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Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

Murderbot is one of my favorite narrators ever, with its snarky self-awareness and totally relatable social anxiety. (Breq, from Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice series is another, published too early for my list, but among excellent company on this list by Tansy Rayner Roberts and Rivqa Rafael.) Among the many great things about the Murderbot books is a keen awareness of what it means to have a mind and body that are owned by a corporation and designed for its purposes. Murderbot is aware of the flaws in its original corporate design and is able to do something about it; today’s AI, often designed in ways that are less than competent, or which prioritize corporate profits over their users’ interests, doesn’t have the ability to fix these problems.

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Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

As its title indicates, this novel digs deep into questions of autonomy and personhood. In this future vision of North America, the ability to own and hack sentient AI has lead neatly to the ability to own and hack sentient humans. Any future that has human-level AI intelligence will have to deal with these issues head-on, and Autonomous makes them vividly, warningly real in the parallel struggles of enslaved human and AI protagonists.

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Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Second in the same universe as Tchaikovsky’s award-winning Children of Time, Children of Ruin has minds running on all kinds of strange hardware, artificial, biological, and even somewhere in between. It would be spoiling the surprise to reveal the natures of the minds that encounter and try to understand one another; only know that their differences are delightful and their similarities crucial, even as they push the definitions of mortality in their various ways.

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

“On the Life Cycle of Software Objects” in Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Speaking of mortality! I move now to a short story, published in Ted Chiang’s astonishing collection Exhalation, which asks tough questions about life and mortality, and our responsibilities toward the lifeforms we create. Just recently an update to one of the most common machine learning toolkits, Tensorflow, made a bunch of algorithms suddenly out-of-date, unable to run on modern systems unless someone goes to the trouble to update them. Ted Chiang’s story vividly anticipates this, asking what will happen to virtual lifeforms as their codebase inevitably ages. It’s a realistic look at what would happen if we did make artificial general intelligences, as opposed to the highly-specialized narrow AIs we have today, and a strong argument against doing so.

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“Trojan Girl” and “Valedictorian” in How Long Till Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin

A pair of short stories in N. K. Jemisin’s collection How Long Till Black Future Month? looks at possible futures for artificial intelligences that have emerged on their own, and their complex relationships with the human world. Essential are compassion and coexistence, yet humans generally don’t make this easy. The AIs in “Trojan Girl” hide from the human world—in a nod to the pervasive problem of algorithmic bias, the earliest and least creative of these hide behind Caucasian avatars, “a human minority who for some reason comprised the majority of images available for sampling in the Amorph.” The AIs in “Valedictorian” are also separated from humanity—but has humanity walled them out, or walled themselves in? If generally-intelligent AI did someday emerge, would we be able and willing to recognize it?

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Prey of the Gods by Nicky Drayden

The theme of recognizing personhood also runs through Nicky Drayden’s novel Prey of the Gods, in which a future South Africa must come to terms with various forms of divinity and magic that thread through the history of the land and its people. At the same time that humans and gods are figuring each other out, sentience is spreading like a virus through their personal assistant bots. Most of the humans don’t realize this, treating their bots like inanimate things. We see some of the same issues today. With today’s AI unable to handle many of the tasks we most desperately want it to do, like voicemail transcription or customer service chats, many companies are turning to a hybrid approach that sometimes substitutes in remote human workers when the AIs falter. Of course, these remote workers sometimes end up being treated poorly by customers who don’t know they’re human, echoing the plight of the bots in Prey of the Gods.

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“The Low Hum of Her” from Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

Many stories of clockwork creatures are really stories of AI. This vivid, warmhearted story is set in an alternate version of 1940s Europe where a persecuted man builds his daughter an artificial grandmother to replace the Bubbe who has died. What was first a resented replacement becomes a vital comfort, as the family flees house and homeland. It’s a story of adaptation to new circumstances and new modes of being, and echoes the theme of many of these recent AI stories, of seeking humanity in others.

Love, Robot by Margaret Rhee

The last AI story in this list is actually a collection of poetry. While other stories explore AI minds, Love, Robot focuses lavishly on hardware. With its clockwork and circuitry, its wires and its servo motors, the feel is very retro. The poems deal with the beginning, middle, and end of relationships – the feel is tender and quirky, with the NSFW section particularly so. 

Personhood, autonomy, weirdness, and human rights—even if the AIs of science fiction are worlds ahead of the AI of today, they are still entirely relevant to the ways we use these technologies. In a world where screens and oceans can separate us from the people we’re interacting with, or where impersonal algorithms can be used to hide biased decisions behind veneers of plausible deniability, science fiction holds important lessons in recognizing the humanity of the people whose lives we touch.

Carmen Maria Machado Has Invented a New Genre: the Gothic Memoir

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In the middle of Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir In the Dream House, CARMEN, stylized in all caps like a play script, sits across from the woman with whom she’s been in an abusive relationship (THE WOMAN IN THE DREAM HOUSE). The scene is set (“the curtain rises”) and we’re shown, “the house inhales, exhales, inhales again.”

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This moment, setting the tone in its quiet terror, is an example of what makes Machado’s memoir so extraordinary. The construction and style of playwriting is the perfect way to show what is so hard to describe: that trauma objectifies us in the strangest ways, that we can feel like figures moved around on stage by something unseen. This othering works because that’s how memory works; we look back in time to see ourselves talking and acting but we’re powerless to stop it. And there, at the end of this scene, we have the Dream House, which breathes and terrifies and haunts throughout the memoir. This small scene is one glimpse into how In the Dream House is not only a memoir but a masterclass in what genre can do. 

Genre is Machado’s sandbox; her short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, troubles genre as often as it indulges in it, cherry picking from science fiction, horror and apocalyptic fiction. Dream House takes this to a delightful extreme. It picks up tropes, motifs and imagery and mixes and matches with joy. We see the dream house as soap opera, folk tale, self-help book and, running throughout always, the gothic. In Dream House, with its doppelgängers, hauntings and descents into trauma, Machado shows us that there is nothing more gothic than our own memory. 

Surely, no genre is more ripe for gothicizing than the memoir. To write about yourself is to double yourself, and looking back at your own life with present-you eyes is definitely uncanny. The point in a memoir at which we confront the worst parts of our memory is the ultimate descent: into trauma, into the bottom floors of our minds, into madness. These are all characteristics of gothic literature, the joys found in reading The Castle of Otranto, the fear waiting for us in Jane Eyre’s red room. And yet, for whatever reason, most memoirs not only ignore but resist the innate gothicness of memory; instead, they provide an artificially neat story, with no significant hauntings. Machado has the guts and the chops to embrace the fundamental eeriness of her project, and thus invent something new. It’s a retelling of an experience that feels at once uncanny and uncomfortably familiar to the reader. All of the ways in which memoir has the potential to be unsettling are heightened by the use of gothic standbys. And in memoir, the gothic can take new forms in ways that reinvent a centuries-old genre. 

No genre is more ripe for gothicizing than memoir.

In the classic gothic novel, a woman descends within a house, usually down stairs—away from the light, into the unknown. Memory sometimes works this way in a memoir, with the author delving further back into her past (although it’s more common to start all the way at the bottom of memory, as it were, and then ascend). But Machado also gestures toward descent in other, surprising ways. Footnotes draw us to the bottom of the pages as we read, directing us to an encyclopedia of folk motifs. “Choose Your Own Adventure” moments give us the allusion that we can control something that’s already happened even though it will remain unchanged. “Go to page ____ if you _____,” as if memory offered any possibility, as if we can change what’s already been done to us. 

Doppelgängers abound in Dream House, too. This is where the possibilities of gothic memoir really shine. Machado moves through the book with different pronouns: she is “I”, “you” and “CARMEN” at various points. By moving swiftly through pronouns and disrupting point-of-view, she others herself and renders language itself uncanny. At the same time, the act of writing about yourself is its own doubling. Machado is our unreliable narrator, reminding us how tenuous the connection between memoir, storytelling and the truth of memory can be. And, to complicate further, when a book is built in a way that purposefully mimics tropes from other genres, is the book itself a doppelgänger? 

And throughout the memoir, there’s the most recognizable gothic trope of all: the haunted house. The dream house itself serves as a character, as well as a place that haunts and is haunted. There is doubling here again: the dream house is at once the physical house where the abuse took place and the structure of memory we navigate while we read. Within it, you can lose your mind to the point that you feel like you are the one doing the haunting. The house transforms with every chapter: The Dream House as memory palace, The Dream House as Murder Mystery, The Dream House as Modern Art. A house can be so many things at once when you lived there during one of the worst times in your life. It takes new shape again and again so that we can understand it. Shapeshifting: another gothic trope. 

In the gothic there is always something we know is there but can’t see until the time is right: the monster in the house.

When we picture haunted houses we imagine long corridors with doors that lead nowhere or doors that won’t open at all. A memoir can work like that, too. You navigate another person’s memory and find questions with answers that aren’t easy and questions with answers that don’t exist.  This is one reason memoir, though rarely explicitly gothic, always has an element of the gothic to it. In the gothic there is always something to be found, something we know is there but can’t see until the time is right: the monster in the house. Often, we think of writing memoir as a cathartic way to face deep traumas and truths within ourselves; but the craft of writing memoir also offers the unique opportunity to choose where those dead ends and closed doors are placed, and what we discover behind them. The memoirist gets to both build the house and haunt it. 

In Dream House, the house is inhabited by two people in love—past Carmen, the one Machado calls “you,” and the unnamed woman—but it’s also haunted by their pain. Like most ghosts, this relationship is at once absence and presence, then and now: lovers in a house, but cohabitating with something darker. To marry the gothic and the memoir is the perfect way to illustrate the harsh realities of abuse, because abuse rarely feels linear; in an abusive relationship, a source of comfort becomes strange and unfamiliar, a secret monster. By moving in and out of time and manipulating tropes, Machado creates an uncanny and unsettling portrait of how a once loving and exciting relationship can decay and self-destruct.  Every ghost has a before-and-after: what they were and what they’ve become. Reading Dream House, you witness the optimism of a new relationship turn into something awful. What should be a place of safety becomes a site of anguish and hysteria. The spectre of abuse, the pain and shame of it, lurks around every corner in Dream House. 

Machado cites studies of abuse between queer women, using objective research along with the gut-punch of her own experience. Machado’s memoir introduces The Queer House to the genre when she shows us the house she shared with “the woman.” It’s a house with closed doors, that presents itself as benign to outsiders but is filled with horror: this is the house of abuse. About halfway through the memoir, light is shone on something that we don’t talk about within the queer community, something we rarely look at directly—if the house is queerness, then queer abuse is our monster in the house.

No one’s experience with abuse is the same, just as each queer couple’s dynamics differ from others’. But In the Dream House exists as an unsettling, spiraling account of queer abuse as it happened to one woman, in one house, in this way. The abuse illustrated in Dream House is hard to witness, like most accounts of abuse are, but it demands acknowledgement. Much in the way that gothic literature and horror forces us to look at things we’ve long avoided in our own lives and in the world, the gothic memoir marries the toughest moments of personal and universal experience. It serves a dual purpose; it’s a very real moment in one person’s life and a crucial piece of a larger narrative, a hard look at something that’s always been around us. The abuse is there, but no one talks about it. The ghost is here, in the house with us, and confronting it is the only way to push through. 

There are moments in Dream House that feel impossible to confront for Machado and, in turn, for the reader. She’s in the car with the woman from the Dream House and the woman is driving fast enough to kill them both, and the fear is heady and suffocating as you read. But you cannot look away. She’s in the Dream House and the woman is beating her fists on the bathroom door. We read, and feel the thudding within ourselves. The story feels wholly personal and internal, but also painfully, painfully universal.

In the Dream House may be the first book that could be described as a “gothic memoir,” but it also highlights all the ways in which the memoir was always already gothic. The gothic is all about ghosts (real and imagined) and just like ghost stories, memoirs are all about witnessing. In Machado’s descent into memory, we see a necessary portrait of a queer relationship rarely shown. And just as much as the relationship with “the woman” illustrates the realities of queer abuse, the memoir’s plot twist—yes, a memoir has a plot twist—reminds us of the depth of queer joy. Finishing Dream House is like walking back up the staircase, into the light. 

Every Generation Battles Its Own Doom

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Self-Portrait with 80s Trash

We’ve ruined the planet, I say as I drive my daughter to piano, remembering 
my sister and I fighting about who sat in the front seat
 
in our rusted car the color of menstrual blood where you could watch the road
through the floor, fighting for the chance to choose the music

on the tape deck, and then I see it: island of plastic bags the size of Texas
I’ve read about, but this time: 8 track players, rotary phones with blank faces,

an IBM Selectric, floppy disks each the size of a man’s open hand
about to slap a girl. That’s my childhood, I’d say, on the tour of my life,

as the girls and I drive through my past, along the Gulf, 
watching chrome and bad plastic floating in too-warm waters.
 
Meanwhile I’m still fourteen in New Orleans and a man drives a truck 
alongside, keeping pace with me, as I walk faster, truck the color of green
 
hospital scrubs, man calling out, over and over, 
Hey, baby, do you want a ride?

Of Resist

I want to tell my daughter about the suicide pills—

when in the car, on the way home from school, she explains 
seventh-grade science. She says proudly, nuclear fission,
 
and we both agree: it is a beautiful phrase.
She names isotopes. Uranium-238. She explains

a nuclear chain reaction and I remember my first week of college,
when students in the mailroom gave us ballots to vote:

Should the university health services stock suicide pills in case of nuclear war?
Student organizers insisted we should have the option to die.

Suicide after a nuclear war would take on a whole different context than it has in this life.

Cyanide was the poison. I imagined us, seventeen-year-olds, lining up to drink a vodka-
colored poison from a shot glass, then one by one, dropping to the ground.

A student said he would vote for the referendum “just as an idea—just to put the word 
“suicide” beside “nuclear holocaust.”

I could only imagine it as a scene from Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, my favorite book at 
thirteen. I would swallow the pills as Esther Greenwood did and secret myself 
away, in a cellar or somewhere beneath the earth, where no one would find me.

*

To put the word beside:  daughter   death   war
 
To put the mother back in the girl’s body

in the car    in the mailroom    on the college green

in the cellar

*
 
I  used  to  think  motherhood  was  the  gradual  extinction  of  self  because  I  knew  nothing 
about  extinction  and  I  had  a  new  baby  and  I  wanted  to  be  alone—and  putting  the  baby 
down  early  meant  we  are  burying  her  in  the  dirt,  we’re  tumbling  her  small  body  in  an 
empty  grave,  she’s  a  swaddle  of  cotton,  deep  into  the  ground,  the  place  she’ll  go  years 
from now though she doesn’t know it and I can’t bear to think of her death, and although 
I strive to keep the knowledge of my death from her, though she knows, she knows, and 
as she gets older, she brings it up, especially at bedtime—

Frog and Toad Are Queer Relationship Goals

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

“You remind me so much of Toad,” my partner says one day as I’m lying on the couch, refusing to go outside.

“I remind you of a toad?” I ask, aghast.

“No, of Toad, like Frog and Toad.”

I wish for a second that I could lick my eyes, just to freak him out, just to make him watch what he says. I’m not familiar with Frog and Toad, though I know he’s referenced this children’s book before and that it probably isn’t an insult. I’m too tired to investigate further and anyway, I’d really rather get back to the comic book I’m reading. So, I settle back on the couch as he goes outside to rake leaves.

Six months later when my partner’s parents tell us they are going to play a recording of a Frog and Toad story, “Cookies,” for their gathered children and their partners, I do my best not to roll my eyes. My partner grew up on Arnold Lobel’s sweet stories about these two amphibians and the last thing I want to do is spoil that, but while he was learning about sharing and playing from an orange toad and a green frog, I was watching Showgirls. Let’s just say our parents had very different ideas of what a kid needed to be successful in the world—and very different means to bring about that success.

The second I hear about Toad’s cookies and Frog’s mechanisms for cultivating willpower, I realize three things. First, I love them so much I could weep. Second, he was right; I am just like Toad. (And not only because I love cookies.) And finally, they’re obviously a queer couple. They made me feel understood not just as a person, but as a queer person in love. 

They made me feel understood not just as a person, but as a queer person in love.

The Frog and Toad stories, collected in four volumes, follow the adventures of two dandy amphibians. Within the narrative, the relationship between Frog and Toad isn’t explicitly presented as romantic and since they neither kiss nor share a household, many children (and adults, no shade) might not pick up on the romantic element. But I’m not just projecting onto these tweed-jacketed queerdos. Author Lobel came out four years after the books did, and his daughter, Adrienne Lobel, has speculated that the stories represented Lobel peeking his head out of the closet door. Though Lobel never explicitly stated that Frog and Toad are queer, it’s safe to say that had the books been created and published in a different time and place, that truth would be unquestionable.

One of the most challenging parts of being queer is not having a lot of queer couple role models around. Many queer people are born into straight households and grow up without an example of what queer love and commitment can look like. What my partner and I have found, though, is that in the pages of Lobel’s queer love story, there is a blueprint for how to live and thrive as a queer couple. The beloved characters are good role models for children in any number of ways, demonstrating positive ways of coping with anxiety, frustration, and boredom. But having discovered them as an adult, I’ve also realized that they’re the model of a queer relationship I always needed.

Toad is grumpy, short (in stature and temper), playful, and frequently contrarian. Frog is agreeable, clever, thoughtful, and rarely without a plan. Together, they care for one another, explore their world, and treat each other’s vulnerability with tender love and respect.

When Toad loses a button and makes Frog spend a whole day looking for it, only to find it back at home, he takes all the wrong buttons they found that day and sews them onto his jacket, which he then gives to Frog. Frog sends Toad a letter in the mail to cheer him up and then sits with him for days until the random snail Frog gave his letter to delivers it. Autumn arrives and Frog rushes to Toad’s house to rake up the leaves while Toad rushes to Frog’s to do the same.

Queer kids don’t often get to see this kind of simple, ordinary, yet extraordinary love between two characters who are men.

Time and again, these two hold each other’s hearts with love and joy, each trying to find ways to encourage and care for the other. And, while their tenderness and attentiveness is an example for any romantic relationship, it is all the more significant for the fact that we get to see it manifested by a queer couple living their everyday lives as a queer couple. Queer folks, and kids in particular, don’t often get to see this kind of simple, ordinary, yet extraordinary love between two characters who are men.

In that first story I ever heard, “Cookies,” our valiant heroes take up the greatest debate of modernity: How do we stop eating cookies before we finish the entire batch? Toad has made the best cookies he’s ever had and rushes to share his baking success with Frog. As the two munch, they decide they should exert some willpower to keep themselves from eating them all. First, Frog puts the cookies in a box, but Toad points out that boxes can be opened. Then, Frog puts a string around the box, but strings can be cut, so he places the box on a high shelf. But the ladder he used to put the box out of reach, Toad notes, could also be used to retrieve the box again. Finally, Frog decides that the best way to have willpower is to feed all the cookies to the hungry birds. He does. Toad is devastated. (The author wrote “sad,” but I know he was devastated because I am Toad.)

Normally, I wouldn’t be inspired by a story that seems to champion the exhausting good food/bad food divide, but Toad’s reaction changes everything. When Toad is sad about the loss of the cookies, Frog points out that they “have lots and lots of will power.” You can keep it, Toad tells him. He’s “going home to bake a cake now.”

Up until that moment, the moral of the story seems to be about self-control and gluttony, but as soon as Toad says he’s going to go bake a cake—which is, of course, a lot more food than the remaining cookies—that moral is undermined. What, then, is the point?

As with all Frog and Toad stories, there is no perfect moral—but there is always a lesson, and the lesson is not in how Frog and Toad deal with cookies but in how they navigate their differences. People are different, the story says, and if you want to make a relationship last, you have to learn how to take care of your own needs—and make space for someone else’s. This theme only reveals itself after Toad makes the decision to leave and bake a cake—and Frog doesn’t protest. 

The lesson is not in how Frog and Toad deal with cookies but in how they navigate their differences.

This challenge—handling differences with love and grace—is a relatable one for me and my partner. We differ about almost everything: which way the toilet paper should face, how much money we should spend, what our sexualities mean to us, what the point of life is, what to do with our spare room, how many vases we need, how we express our genders, the list could go on forever. And sometimes, when we are hurting or tired or—let’s be real—hungry, we treat our relationship as a zero-sum game, as if one’s joy comes at the cost of the other’s pain. We fight over all those banal things, things that make us feel foolish after the fact.

But most of the time, we remember that we’re just two people in love, trying to make it work. We look for lost keys that aren’t really lost at all. We send each other funny emails and re-watch videos we’ve already seen apart so we can hear each other laugh. We sneak around to clean up the house, shoving the pile of laundry the other’s been dreading into the wash, only to find the other person washing the dishes.

No matter how many times we frustrate or hurt each other, we remind ourselves to hold one another’s heart with love, tenderness, and joy, balancing the care for one’s self with the care for another.

Frog and Toad are relationship goals, not just for my partner and me, but for all queer couples. They get that love is made up of minor moments, all the small gestures that build a lifetime together. Love is not a declaration you make and then forget, but an active process: finding joy in simple things like buttons, sending letters and waiting for their arrival together, raking up leaves for someone you love, and making a cake for yourself when your partner gives your cookies away to a bunch of birds.

This kind of love, this kind of commitment, doesn’t take anything from the individual, but allows everyone to become freer and stronger together. There are no blueprints for queer love except the ones we claim for ourselves. And though our relationship is often complicated in ways others do not understand, realizing Frog and Toad have been there for my partner and me all along has buoyed us through even the darkest of times.

Ananda Devi Is Making Sure Mauritius Gets Its Due

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Mauritians have thorough introductions at the ready when asked where we’re from. We pull out our phones, swipe to show pictures of our obscenely pretty island as well as “normal” life—our food, typical houses, vibrant towns and cities. The photos help to quell some of the questions I know will come my way: “is there just like, sand everywhere?” “do you have internet?”—never mind that we have one of the most competitive economies in Africa and a particularly fecund artistic heritage. 

Glib condescension usually tails writers from Africa, from islands, from the “Global South”: there’s the notion that our literature is embryonic, of anthropological interest, since—in the case of Mauritius, say—our literary tradition, as it were, only really emerged in the last century or so. Thank the ancestors, then, for Ananda Devi, whose work will not be denied.

Devi’s talent, radical vision and prodigious work ethic has earned her a plethora of awards and cemented her place in Francophone literature. She was born in 1957, into a small but effervescent literary scene; at 15, she won a short story competition organized by Radio France Internationale, inscribing herself in a world where Mauritian literature was dominated by the name of Nobel prize-winner J.M.G. Le Clézio. Her novels, with their supra-beautiful prose and sometimes supremely violent depictions of local life (poverty, misogyny and toxic masculinity in particular), paved the way for other Mauritian writers to find homes for their work, and win serious accolades in the process; without her trailblazing efforts, English-language readers might never have heard of Nathacha Appanah, another multi-award-winning author (The Last Brother and Waiting for Tomorrow were translated into English by Geoffrey Strachan). Many Anglophones still haven’t heard of Barlen Pyamootoo, Shenaz Patel, or Carl de Souza, but they should all be names on your radar soon: Devi’s a harbinger of translated Mauritian literature, too. 

Devi’s Eve Out of her Ruins, her laurel-garnered work originally published in French in 2006, was translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman and published on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016; this November sees the release of The Living Days, her latest title to be translated into English (also by Zuckerman), set in a city in turmoil: London.

Ariel Saramandi: I think you’re an extraordinary writer of cities. You’ve written of the beautiful, shattered fracas of Port Louis (Eve Out of Her Ruins, Rue La Poudriere), and in The Living Days you show the insidious way gentrification operates in London, glazing land with the power of money and pretty glass buildings, strangling life. 

The Living Days is a novel of austerity, and I’m very interested in the way the decaying city and the body become one in your work. I’m thinking about this particular quote, here:

All that would remain of her would be the short, trampled grass she had always been. An entire city had gone over her body. An entire city had entered her body. Its weight, its matter, its texture, its place beneath a blue or gray or black sky.

Was this melding of city and body something you were conscious of, while writing the novel? 

Ananda Devi: What a beautiful, poetic comment! Yes, absolutely, cities have a deep resonance for me, it’s as if they are bodies from which my stories and characters can grow and expand and feed to become part of an organic, volcanic whole. It’s perhaps not so strange, given that I was born in a tiny rural village and grew up in a quiet and rainy little town, that the turbulence, harsh sensuality and raw energy of a city like Port-Louis would fascinate me from a very young age onwards. I remember, as an adolescent, going with my father to Port-Louis and sitting in the car for hours on end, watching everything that was happening around me, taking notes, writing stories in my head and absorbing the otherness of this turmoil and glimpses of these different lives. All my senses were assailed. Several of the short-stories in Solstices, my first book, published when I was 19 years old, were directly inspired by these observations. And of course, Rue la Poudrière emerged from the city, this toxic, menacing and magnetic playground. 

I did not realize at the time how much the sense of place would come to be an essential part of my writing. It just seemed to happen naturally. But by the time I wrote Indian Tango, set in New Delhi, I was more conscious of it.

That’s what brought this novel into being, after all these years: the realization that we were standing on a brink.

As for The Living Days, I had this novel in mind since I was a student in London towards the end of the 1970s, and I knew I would write it one day. But the time had to be right. I had to be able to bring together these disparate sensations and experiences: the heady freedom of student life in London, the terror of fascism, the loneliness of the old, the dance on the cusp of death… and, by the time I did write it, the sensation of a world ending. That’s what brought this novel into being, after all these years: the realization that we were standing on a brink, on the verge of toppling over, and in London, the myriad lights of consumerism were starting to shatter and disintegrate, leaving people more naked than ever. I wrote this novel in 2012, before Brexit and its madness and chaos, but this end-of-the-world feeling seems to me even more urgent now. Where in the rural setting of Pagli or Soupir, I had to delve below the surface to find the fault lines, the incipient earthquakes, the tragedy of loss, in the cities, whether Port-Louis, New Delhi, or London, I felt freer to roam, to wander, to allow my characters to be tossed by this powerful force and to shatter or to emerge stronger. There is a magic to cities, that’s for sure. I too am crazy about them…

AS: You were a student in London in the 1970s; you set this story in 2005; the novel was published in 2013. I’m interested in knowing your thoughts on The Living Days and of London today, six years after it was published, 40 years after you lived in the city, as England implodes after the Brexit vote, and—if the economists are correct—as another global recession is on its way. 

AD: As I said earlier, this novel had a very long gestation period. But somehow, it seems we have come full circle, from the 1970s, when racism, the rise of far right extremism, the divide between rich and poor, and the rejection of immigrants poisoned this society, to the present time, when these same poisons are rampant. I must say that when I wrote the novel, in 2012, setting it in 2005, I had absolutely no idea that Brexit would happen! I had no idea that Trump would happen either. I was flabbergasted when both events took place. 

Even as recently as that, I believed that the democratic process, and simple common sense and judgment would prevent this populist drivel from gaining ground. How wrong I was! In fact, the opposite has happened. And I believe that the rise of social media has contributed significantly to this. Although we thought that the internet had abolished frontiers and brought the world together, in actual fact the mechanism of social media has narrowed both confines and minds. You can now live virtually in a bubble where you only read and hear what you want to read and hear. There is no balance, no differing ideas, nothing to offset people’s often uninformed opinion. It’s a world of make-believe, of self-delusion and narcissism, while in other places, the machine of war and disintegration is taking its toll on entire populations. 

Looking at all of this from a historical perspective, I feel we are living in a terrifying time where past horrors are being revived.

What feeds these wars, these conflicts, this disintegration? What is the economic purpose of war, if not to enrich those who manufacture all the military machinery, to give power to a few while subjugating the many? It’s a horrific vicious circle that’s throwing destitute people literally into the sea to try to swim to safety, while those who could offer them this safety, and whose governments are directly and indirectly responsible for the chaos, prefer to hide behind their prejudices and the illusion of material comfort. Looking at all of this from a historical perspective, I feel we are living in a terrifying time where past horrors are being revived. 

The Brexit chaos is like watching the crew of a ship squabbling on a sinking boat without any of the other passengers being able to do anything about it. It is like an absurdist play by Ionesco and would be grotesque if it were not so tragic.

I do not believe the bubble will last long. When the illusion is dispelled, it will be too late to take action, whether it is about the climate or peace. The feeling of urgency is now far greater than when I was writing the novel, and yet, it also suffuses the novel, which gives it a more topical feel than it might have had a few years ago. 

AS: Abandoned children, children left to fend for themselves, poor children who have terrible—sometimes monstrous—parents are often found in your novels. In some of your most powerful work, these children are Mauritian Créole, or of African descent more generally (I think of Eve in Eve Out of Her Ruins, Jeremiah in The Living Days). As a Mauritian writer of Indian descent, raised well away from the slums of Port Louis, what propelled you to write these stories? Was there the belief that they wouldn’t get told, otherwise? 

AD: I do not like being called “the voice of the voiceless”—it sounds overly pretentious. However, I did quote Aimé Césaire’s powerful words once: “Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n’ont point de bouche” (“my mouth will be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth”). It is true that when I wrote Rue la Poudrière, I did feel that my protagonist had no say and no voice, and was being irrevocably crushed by the gigantic hand of fate in the form of her parents, her pimp, society and the city itself (and the bulldozers looming over her at the end of the novel, that will crush the entire neighborhood). The silence of Mauritian society concerning the descendants of slaves was deafening. Their own memories were long repressed, until they began to reclaim their ancestry. But it isn’t only their silence that runs through my books. It’s that of everyone who is denied a say, or whose story will never be told.

The silence of Mauritian society concerning the descendants of slaves was deafening.

I realized after having written many books that my characters often had an impediment that prevented them from speaking out or being listened to: Gungi becomes mute, Mouna has a harelip, Pagli and Josephin are thought to be crazy and thus not worth listening to, and so on. Even in my last novel, Manger l’autre, the protagonist is aware that her obesity prevents people from hearing her, because they only see her external appearance and thus ignore her intelligence. Deep down I think all this comes from my own silence, my shyness as a child, my reluctance to speak out in front of others (even though I have conquered this over the years and am no longer stricken with stage fright!), and the feeling that few people are really listening. It’s no coincidence that I entitled my autobiographical book Les hommes qui me parlent (the men who speak to me).

AS: Othering is central to the novel: I think it’s particularly brilliant the way you show how Jeremiah believes himself to be mature, wise, sexy—cognizant of his looks, and of what the exoticization of his own body could bring him: “They’ll be kneeling before me. They’ll be my way out of Brixton” he thinks. But of course he’s a child; he has no idea of what those thoughts would entail if acted out, he’s 13 years old, for him it’s all play. His thoughts are only revealed to us after he’s met Mary, and we’ve seen the way Mary sees him: as a vulnerable child. 

If there is a characteristic that unites all my protagonists, it is their ambiguity. They are never entirely good or bad.

AD: If there is a characteristic that unites all my protagonists, it is their ambiguity. They are never entirely good or bad. They are complex, strange, and ultimately human. But it’s a facet of humanity that goes beyond the mundane, the routine, the mediocre, everything that drags us down and makes us less than we can be. And so, Jeremiah is a kid, but a kid who has become an adult because of the environment in which he lives and because he feels responsible for his mum and sisters. This Otherness is thus the complexity we see in him as he transitions from child to something more, not quite adult but almost, the fluctuating tides of growing up that brought him to Mary and that will make him stay. Which means that what we see is something closer to ourselves than we think, but we just don’t recognize it. It’s a similar kind of ambiguity that we see in Eve, in Eve de ses décombres. Admittedly, she is older, she is seventeen and for a girl, closer to an adult than Cub is, but she is also both a child who never grew up and a woman able to face danger and confront it headlong, able to fight even if she knows there is no way of winning. This is why, in these environments, children have a deeper knowledge of life than in other societies, and have this cold, almost cynical view of the world that makes them see people for what they are. Their gaze is truly unflinching.

AS: There’s also this wonderful section where Mary, for perhaps the first time in her life, is “the Other.” The white body becomes foreign, unwelcome: 

She discovered pockets, open spaces that each group had appropriated and where she felt like an intruder. The pointed glares and closed-off expressions were a stern warning that she ignored anyway with a courage that astonished her. Even the aromas changed: guavas, paprika, smoked meat, dried fish […] bits and pieces of civilisation thrown in a bag and mixed together energetically without actually combining them, violence clashing against violence, these momentary alliances engendering dizziness—the foreigner she was entered as her risk and at her peril.

There’s an extraordinary act of mimicry later on, too:

In spite of the fear that seized her as she got on the 159 bus, she kept going. She followed a group of women to the local market, watched what they were buying and picked up the same things […] copied their way of weighing the vegetables.

What was going on in your mind as you wrote this scene?

AD: It came from this idea that, even if they were all living in the same city, they inhabited different worlds, almost different planets that never collided. Although Mary has not had an easy or overly protected life, she has never had the opportunity to see how this other world lives. She has become almost mummified, frozen in her narrow house, in her memories, in a past that never bore its promised fruits. And so, when she steps over the line, over the frontier that separates her from Cub’s world, she is swept into a tidal wave of sensations, colours, perfumes, images that she has never experienced before. Because she is so fascinated with Cub, she wants to know his life, to know his tastes, his likes and dislikes, and thus becomes a pale ghost following these women and trying to understand how they live. She will even try to cook Caribbean dishes, although, ironically, Cub’s mother herself didn’t cook them and Cub never ate them. It’s as if her foray into his world is fated to fail, because it is so little, and far too late, but at the same time it expresses her deep love, her tenderness, her willingness to follow this path away from herself and towards him. They, however, see her presence in their world as an invasion, because this is how it has always been. There is no true common ground, in the end.

AS: “They weren’t human. Nor were they animals. They were relics.“

They climbed onward like giants, as if they owned the earth, and that was how they saw things, free for the taking, as was their right, and each step they took as they ran was a claim on a bit more land, they swallowed up kilometers of pavement, swelling their unrelenting desire like wildfire.

These are highly evocative descriptions of white supremacy and its mechanisms in The Living Days. 

I’m particularly struck by the idea of ever-returning “relics,” and the way you deftly use time in the novel. Mary’s dementia is fascinating in this respect: it makes time in the novel a much more convoluted thing, one randomly coalescent in places, and defies the idea of strict, linear, epochal time. Wars, austerity, nationalism, racism come like tides, and in her mind these aren’t separate events; they aren’t “relics” to be safely stored away in history books, and forgotten about. 

Some people have this sense of power ingrained in them, and it is a primal power.

AD: This scene was there in my mind from the beginning, I knew it would happen, but it also scared me, I tried to delay it while knowing that I was heading towards it inexorably. I had this experience as a student, when a fellow student took me to a footbridge over St. Pancras station, and told me that this was where most suicides happened in London. Later on, as I was going home, the tube car was invaded by a raucous group of completely drunk football fans who started teasing the women and verbally aggressing the men. One sat down on a woman’s lap and another pinched a young girl’s breasts. I was terrified of what was going to happen. I got out of the tube at the next stop. Nothing happened to me, but the terror in the eyes of these women, who were unable to do anything, and of the men who couldn’t do anything either, has stayed with me ever since. So this male supremacy, and white supremacy, and their feeling of complete immunity and of “owning” the world, yes, it’s impossible to measure it, it’s as if you are suddenly made to realize how little of that power is in your own hands, how terrifyingly weak you are. These two scenes from the book are directly related to these two experiences from my student days, but also to my observation of society since then, the realization that some people have this sense of power ingrained in them, and it is a primal power, a kind of remnant of biological urges to dominate, it is not something that is reasoned or that can be reasoned with, it does not belong to human rationality but to biological instincts. This is why I call it a relic, a relic of these primeval urges, of our base biology, but consolidated by a society that has done nothing to curb them, to change them, to “socialize” them.

As for your interesting comment about time, yes, there is no linear time in this novel, and this is what allows Mary to “revive” Howard from real and figurative death, it is what makes London exist simultaneously in all these different periods, and it will also allow her to prolong Cub’s life beyond the realm of possibility—because that’s her power. Mary is London, in a way, both ancient and new, wizened and beautiful, joyous and tragic, and completely immortal and intemporal.

Are You a New York Writer or an LA Writer?

Posted on by Jo Lou

You go to a coffee shop in order to focus on your craft. What do you order? 

A. A black coffee. 

B. An almond milk matcha. 

What is your critically acclaimed debut novel about? 

A. A man getting stuck on a subway train and revisiting the weight of all of the mistakes he’s made in his twenty- four years of life. 

B. A sweeping family drama about migrants crossing the border and the brave white man who meets them and has the guts to tell their story. 

What do you eat for breakfast? 

A. I don’t, because I’m distracted by the hustle and bustle of the world outside me. I’m constantly on the move, engaging with strangers and enemies, friends and lovers. 

B. I don’t, because gluten before noon muddles the mind and destroys the body. Actually, gluten at any time. Actually, all food. 

How explicit are your sex scenes? 

A. I describe the curve of her breast. 

B. I describe the curve of her [CENSORED BY THE EDITOR FOR PUBLICATION]. 

What’s served at your local cocktail parties? 

A. Microbrews and cocaine. 

B. Cheese and cocaine. 

What are you dressing as for Halloween this year? 

A. I don’t dress up for Halloween because it’s a holiday for children and crass consumer- ists. So either that or Maxwell Perkins. 

B. A serial killer, but one who hasn’t been caught yet. 

If you answered mostly A’S 

You are a New York writer. Your best work will be done in a notebook while standing on a subway platform, waiting for a train that may or may not ever arrive. The rats that have burrowed beneath your nonfunctional dish- washer are probably just a metaphor for your grandfather’s sins. 

If you answered mostly B’S 

You are an LA writer. Your best work will be done by dictation while you’re waiting in traffic. Your blog posts about the lighting in Tarantino films will one day have upwards of eighty views. Enjoy pretending to call yourself a novelist while you’re really just waiting for the right person to read your screenplay. 

(The above is an excerpt from The White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon written by Dana Schwartz and illustrated by Jason Adam Katzenstein.)