Courtney Summers is a master of the bitch. For ten years, she has written nuanced, wrenching stories about angry girls, unlikable girls, girls we now call “nasty.” Summers uncovers the stories behind them, explaining why they are the way they are without apologizing for it; her books deal with grief, poverty, trauma, and often, the aftermath of sexual assault. In her newest YA novel Sadie and its podcast tie-in, Summers examines how we consume stories about girls, and how we consume girls themselves.
The book follows nineteen-year-old Sadie, who leaves her hometown to find the man who murdered her younger sister Mattie. In alternating chapters, we read the transcripts from a radio producer named West who starts a Serial-style podcast, The Girls, to find Sadie and bring her home. It’s a harrowing, feminist thriller: Will West find Sadie? Will Sadie exact her revenge? Will she die trying?
Summers’ publisher Macmillan created the podcast in real life using selections from the audiobook as a pre-publication marketing tool, released over six weeks to drum up anticipation for the book. It could be written off as a simple teaser campaign, but it shouldn’t be; listening to the podcast in conjunction with the book, it becomes its own interesting artifact. Both Sadie and The Girls show how we tell stories about girls, but they do it in markedly different ways.
The Girls consists of six 20-minute episodes, and it explains itself thus: “It’s a story about family, about sisters, and the untold lives lived in small town America . . . And it begins, as so many stories do, with a dead girl.” Spurred by Sadie and Mattie’s surrogate grandmother May Beth, West retraces Sadie’s road trip through depressed Colorado towns, always a few steps behind. He interviews acquaintances and learns that the sisters’ mother is an addict, largely absent, and that Sadie essentially raised Mattie on her own. The show ends on a cliffhanger, about two thirds of the way through the story, but there are additional West chapters in the book.
When Summers listened to The Girls, it felt like a real podcast to her, separate from the narrative she’d created.
“I just listened to it on repeat over and over and I couldn’t believe I had written it,” she says. “It’s truly an adaptation so it made me feel one step removed from my own book, and I feel like I got as close as I could be to a reader of my own work.”
It could be written off as a simple teaser campaign, but it shouldn’t be; listening to the podcast in conjunction with the book, it becomes its own interesting artifact.
Even though it’s all part of the same book, certain themes become more prominent in the audio telling. From the beginning, West is reluctant to tell this story, not because of its tragedy but because it isn’t interesting enough. “Girls go missing all the time,” he says. “Restless teenage girls, reckless teenage girls, teenage girls and their inevitable drama . . . I wanted a story that felt fresh, new and exciting, and what about a missing teenage girl was that? We’ve heard this story before.” To West, Sadie is just another emotional runaway, unremarkable, as if all women who make choices he doesn’t agree with are the same. As if girls taking control over their lives is reckless.
As West tells it, girls are all of a type. After he learns that Sadie pulled a switchblade on someone, he goes back to her grandmother:
West McCray: Was Sadie a violent person, May Beth?
May Beth Foster: No. No! Never. I mean…she could’ve been, but in the way we all could be. It wasn’t something she was.
West seems to think that violence defines a person, not that Sadie may have been pushed — by anger, by trauma, by a need to protect herself — to brandish a knife. Later, he interviews a hitchhiker Sadie picked up, and dismisses her too: “Cat, in a lot of ways, is what I expected Sadie to be. Restless, reckless, dramatic.”
Eventually, talking to Cat about her own experiences as a runaway is a turning point for him. “It all suddenly, and belatedly, felt too real, and I didn’t like it,” he says. By the end of the podcast, West comes around to being truly, personally unsettled by Sadie’s story, and Cat’s, and all the stories of violence against women before and since, though it’s frustrating for him to have to come around at all. Still, he’s telling the story, producing it for an audience.
“I thought West would be the perfect vessel to pose those questions and to come to those realizations because he’s someone that is producing content, even as he realizes that, he still has to make this the way that people want to hear,” Summer says. “So he’s forever caught in that place of knowing something and feeling it and then also realizing that he’s an entertainer, he’s a host, he’s still gotta do his job. And it’s completely conflicting with his emotional response to Sadie’s story.”
Reading the book, West can be forgiven all this, but there’s something about actually hearing him say these things and not hearing Sadie’s voice as counterpoint that makes it feel so much more dismissive, more judgmental, and, frankly, more male. Of course, Sadie herself is absent from the podcast, even though it revolves around her. What’s more, Sadie has a stutter — audio wouldn’t be the best medium even if it were allowed to her — so she’s especially distanced from this mode of telling her story.
The book explores the idea that true crime podcasts may capitalize on the pain of victims, and creating an actual podcast with a true crime conceit brings those issues into relief. For Summers, it’s a complicated question.
The book explores the idea that true crime podcasts may capitalize on the pain of victims, and creating an actual podcast with a true crime conceit brings those issues into relief.
“I don’t think it’s true for every true crime story out there that it’s coming from a place of negative intent or an exploitative approach, it’s just that the possibility is there and so I think it’s worth asking the question of why we engage with this media, why we create this media. [Sadie’s] not an indictment against true crime, it’s a question of, why do we love it? What’s in it for us? Who does it potentially hurt, if anyone? How careful are we? Who should we be thinking of?”
We do need to read the book after the podcast, though perhaps not in the way that Macmillan’s marketing department expected. After listening to a grown man from New York attempt to tell a poor young woman’s story, it’s so much more important for her to tell her own. The book gives Sadie agency, and West’s stereotypes of girls seem thinner when juxtaposed with the full story of one.
For her part, Sadie also thinks about girls of a type. The girls working the parking lot of a truck stop. The pretty girls on Instagram. The runaway girl who needs a ride. But where West saw a “they,” Sadie sees a “we.” The way she discusses girls is more sardonic, recognizing that she doesn’t fit in with anyone’s expectations, but maybe no other girls do either. When she allows herself to dance with a boy, she thinks, “I let the music own me, turning myself into the idea of a girl, or an idea of an idea — a Manic Pixie Dream, I guess, the kind of everyone says they’re tired of but I don’t know that they really mean it. The girl nobody ends up loving long or loving well, but nobody wants to give up either.” It’s as if she knows her life is a story, and she won’t be silenced from the telling of it.
Sadie also thinks about girls of a type. The girls working the parking lot of a truck stop. The pretty girls on Instagram. The runaway girl who needs a ride. But where West saw a “they,” Sadie sees a “we.”
Every female character in the book, young and old, bears the weight of something — addiction, single parenting, a difficult family life, a dead husband. Summers allows them to feel their feelings and act on them. In Sadie’s chapters, we learn that sexual violence is a part of her story, and her reasons for seeking out the attacker go much deeper than teenage ennui: vengeance for her sister, herself, and for the protection of other girls. As opposed to West’s shock at the possibility that Sadie was violent, the book allows for female rage in a way that the world often doesn’t. Sadie’s story is about a girl following her anger and pain, recognizing and using her strength in a way that young women are rarely permitted. To put it plainly, Summers takes young women seriously in a way West — and much of our culture — doesn’t.
“I really wanted people to confront their own perceptions of teenagers,” Summers says. “We never take teenage girls seriously, do we? As soon as a teenage girl likes something, whether it was Twilight or Bieber or One Direction, as soon as a girl loves something it’s suddenly not worth our time or attention. We just look for ways to dismiss them. And it’s the same with their pain and the real things that they’re going through. We don’t give it the kind of gravity that it deserves because we treat girls like disposable objects.”
Like a meta Ouroboros, a book about dead girls and crime podcasts became a crime podcast about a dead girl. Summers upends the classic dead girl story by giving us both the story and the girl. Mattie and Sadie are fully-drawn characters. The book revolves around them, and Sadie takes control of her own life and her own story.
“I think we’re so used to consuming violence against women and girls as a form of entertainment that this is really an extension of that,” Summers says. “You never have to look too far to find some sort of story that centers on a brutalized girl that we sort of come to expect it as something that will entertain and give back to us in that way. And that’s a very strange thing when you pause to think about it. We’ve normalized that sort of violence and that sensationalism and we’ve turned it into bingeable content. We tune into it weekly on certain shows on TV and once you create that kind of relationship with that sort of media how can you not foster that sort of obsession with it?”
Sadie seems especially of and especially for our current moment, without feeling pedantic or ripped from the headlines. Summers shows men who think of abusers as “not the guy I know,” and much later in the book, West is chastised for explaining that he’s drawn to Sadie and Mattie’s story because he has a daughter of his own.
“You never have to look too far to find some sort of story that centers on a brutalized girl.”
“It’s so upsetting to think that they have to have a personal connection to a woman to be able to empathize and show compassion and care towards what women in the world are going through,” Summer says. “You really have to say, ‘I have a mother, I have a daughter, I have a sister,’ to be able to recognize that heinous crimes against women are heinous? It’s like, really? It was funny — well not fun, but I liked being able to articulate that little jab in Sadie.”
Like Summers’ other books, Sadie is dark. The murder of girls, the dismissal of women, the prevalence of sexual violence. The obliviousness of men, even if they are well-meaning. Characters who are attacked, over and over again. Summers jokes that she revels in making people cry, but she has reasons for hurting her characters, and her readers.
“I think it’s because, first of all, I respond to those kind of stories myself,” she says. “They resonate with me. And I think it’s because I sort of see them as a challenge to readers to pick them up. Like this is something I’m telling that is true about the world and it’s ugly and it hurts, but now what do you do about that going forward. What are you going to put out into your world, because we all have the ability to make positive choices, make positive change.”
A s a previous Temporary Protected Status-card holder with lots of family and friends who are still undocumented, I knew Jose Antonio Vargas’s work way before he wrote his recently released memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. From his groundbreaking 2011 essay “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” in The New York Times Magazine where he came out as undocumented, I knew his was a fearless voice, a voice that gave me the courage to be honest with my immigration status.
In 2011, I was about to enter my last year of undergrad at UC Berkeley, without any federal funding because of my immigration status. I was fed up, I was tired, I was angry. Reading that essay gave me the courage to pursue my dream of becoming a writer. Without it, I would’ve perhaps never written the poems I did in grad school; or they would’ve taken much, much longer to understand that it was ok for them to be written.
Vargas’ voice gave me the courage to face my immigration status, to speak out, to demand humanity. Similarly, his new memoir reminds us that no human being can ever be “illegal,” that there is no such thing as a good or a bad immigrant, that immigration affects a vast majority of people in the US, “citizen” or “non-citizen” alike.
I spoke to Vargas over the phone about his life-long work fighting for the immigrant community.
Javier Zamora:I have a few questions for you, but first off, I want to say what an honor it is to talk to you! I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done, do, and will continue to do, for the undocumented community.
While reading Dear America, I kept thinking of Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. In her book, she advises us [immigrants] to “create dangerously for people who read dangerously.” Early in the book she also mentions the following quote by the poet Ossip Mandelstam in which he defines creating dangerously as “creating as a revolt against silence.” You’re certainly doing what both Danticat and Mandelstam envision.
My question is, what do you want your undocumented readers, or previously undocumented readers like myself, to take away from your own revolt against silence? What should we do with this dangerous material? And how can we act?
Jose Antonio Vargas: Edwidge to me is essential. She is one of our essential writers. That’s why I asked her to write a blurb.
JZ: I saw that, which reminded me of her book.
JAV: You know I reached out completely cold? I think I messaged her on Facebook.
JZ: What?
JAV: I was surprised she responded. I was like “I would love for you to read the book and if you feel compelled I would love to have you blurb it.” I love she’s one of the very first people to read the book. That’s how much her work has meant to me. She’s a writer that has created a humanistic language around what being a migrant means and feels like. I would hope that this book honors that work and continues the work she started. Thank you for asking that question.
So, the question you asked… Another writer that meant a lot to me is Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye is one of the very first books I ever really read and it was a book that really challenged me. When Toni Morrison writes, she writes without the white gaze; meaning that she centralizes the experiences of black people in her books. One of the things she has to do, is make sure she’s writing without the white gaze: meaning writing for just white people.
When I was writing this book, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t writing for US citizens. That I wasn’t writing to explain my humanity to American citizens that want people like me to “fit.” I was really thinking about how to get into the psychology of understanding this position. Understanding this undocumented position. I think I’ve been depressed since I was 16. I just happen to be one of those people. You know I have friends that smoke weed and say that weed helps them. I just haven’t tried it. I never really tried to do drugs before. Thankfully I haven’t needed drugs to deal with my depression. I’ve dealt with my depression by asking: how many things can I be doing? How many balls can I be juggling? Just so I don’t have to deal with my depression.
JZ: And you talk a lot about that in the book; this idea of compartmentalizing identity, compartmentalizing feelings.
JAV: Yeah, really distracting myself from my own emotions. And part of living dangerously is facing yourself. Which is a very dangerous thing to do. I would argue that a lot of us spend a lot of our time trying intentionally not to face ourselves. This book was my attempt to really look at myself for the first time and try to understand why I am the way that I am. And try to get at the depression/mental health state that I’m in. Why haven’t I allowed myself to be in a romantic relationship? I don’t do that. I don’t. I never have made time for that. To be intimate with somebody you have to be willing to be intimate beyond just the physical intimacy. I never allowed for that to happen. And now I know why. Now I understand myself better by writing this book.
The message from me to undocumented or previously undocumented people is: the language that is so mainstream out there about what immigration is — which is political, politicized, all these acronyms that people have no idea what they are, TPS, DACA — our humanity is more than all these acronyms that people don’t know and all the politics that people don’t even really understand. My goal in writing this book is to say that our humanity is measured by more than pieces of paper and laws that can’t even pass. We owe ourselves — under these conditions, under these oppressive deplorable conditions — we owe ourselves dignity and we owe ourselves every bit of joy we can find.
My goal in writing this book is to say that our humanity is measured by more than pieces of paper and laws that can’t even pass.
JZ: To follow up on that, reading this book after I wrote my book of poems, I wrote it similarly to understand myself and to understand why I was a certain way. But after writing it, I found out that I was very much still traumatized. Writing was not enough to heal from my trauma. This realization convinced me to finally seek counseling out of my own volition. And I learned many coping mechanisms to deal with the stress. Even talking and traveling to give readings around the book was/is stressful.
Having said that, I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of stress you were in while writing this book. While living your life. I kept wondering, besides the juggling, the compartmentalizing that you talk about in the book, there must’ve been something else. Some other coping mechanism. I know you travel a lot and will continue to do so for this book. It must take a toll. I’m interested for other undocumented people, to share some other skills to deal with the stress.
JAV: Another coping mechanism is friendships. I treasure friendships. I was never really prepared to be a public person. I didn’t know what that really meant. The pressure for me to speak for people when I can’t, I’m one person, so there is a lot of expectations that are projected onto me, that have been really painful and hard to deal with. Because of that, the way I cope is to hold my friends very closely and very dearly. The friends that I don’t have to explain myself to. The friends that know I’m totally imperfect, totally flawed, but I’m trying to do the best I can. That is one way for me to cope.
Thankfully, I’ve been really blessed. I have some ride or die friends. The things for them too is that they know when I’m hiding from them. They’re like “Okayyyy. I know you don’t want to see me because you don’t want me to ask you questions, but how are you doing? Here I am, I see you anyway.”
Immigration is not solely about legality because legality has always been about power. About who gets to define what’s legal and who’s legal. That’s always been about who has the power to do that.
JZ: Thank you for that. Ok, now more into form. You were very visible when you wrote your NYT Magazine essay. You were very visible — and I remember clearly — when you spoke in front of Congress. When I watched the video, I feel like you held back in the book. You don’t dwell in the description of your emotions. Yet, I teared up watching the video in real-time. My question is, was the memoir always a thing you were thinking about in the back of your head? For me, trying to explain your life to Congress under five minutes, that must’ve been a turning point into realizing you have to write something larger.
JAV: It was not at all my intention to write a memoir. Initially, I wanted to write a manifesto. I wanted to do a migration manifesto. I wanted to be more academic; so what I did was read about 30 immigration-oriented books, different genres. I had just packed up everything I owned and for the first time in my life, I didn’t and don’t have a permanent address. I really wanted to understand my own mental state and why I never feel at home, anywhere, even though I have a home. The question became, what does psychological homelessness mean? And I tried to look at books that spoke about this and I couldn’t find one. When I was writing the book proposal, I wrote a manifesto book proposal. My editor, after she bought the book, said: “Jose, FYI [laughter] I want to go deeper into the personal.” I was like what? That’s not what I wrote in the proposal! She was like “Jose, you have to let us in, what was it really like?” And then she asked me a really fascinating question that no one had asked before; she wanted me to list the top ten most painful experiences in my life. [laughter] I think my first reaction was no fucking way. But then when I was writing it, it became apparent that every single painful thing was either about lying, passing, or hiding. Each one of those ten moments had to do with those three things. That’s how we came up with the structure.
It took me about nine months to read everything. I read a fascinating book by Dan-El Padilla Peralta who was undocumented, he was actually the first person to write a memoir. Fascinating guy. I read Sonia Nazario, Enrique’s Journey, I re-read that. I reread JFK’s A Nation of Immigrants, I read a lot of Edwidge Danticat. Reading is a lot like writing. I grew up in the Philippines watching Filipino telenovelas. You know, very melodramatic. There were so many moments in the book that were so intense, that I really didn’t want to overwrite anything. I was so careful in making sure that the language was spare and direct and not over-written.
JZ: Why?
JAV: Because I wanted the moments themselves. For example, the morning I left the Philippines and my mom, that was such a dramatic moment. But for me, the most dramatic thing about it was how little I remembered of it.
JZ: And even in the book your time in the Philippines is the shortest section. It’s the place you describe the least. I think another writer would’ve dwelled in it.
JAV: Right? And for me as a writer, what I say, what I chose not to say, is as important as what I do say. For example, that chapter about strangers is two pages! I really wanted to — and as a writer it’s all about momentum — I wanted the book to really build, so by the time you get to the detention section, I hope you understand how trapped this person — me — is: mentally, psychologically, physically. So in that section, the language is longer, is more legato it’s not staccato. For me that was all very intentional. In the beginning it was all very direct, very short. I was talking to a writer in the SF Chronicle — for me, I really appreciate when writers want to talk about craft — and he was like, some of the sections felt like prose poems.
JZ: Absolutely! They’re vignettes!
JAV: Totally! I was going for Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street, with some Baldwin and Didion thrown in. That’s what I was going for, but again, every time I tried to write it, I overwrote. You know I grew up obsessed with The New Yorker, so I love complicated never-ending sentences. I love sentences with the semi-colons, dashes, and commas, all of that. As writers, punctuation is all we have as musical notes; so I really tried to not over-do it. Asking “Ok, Jose, do you really need that semi-colon?”
People migrating to America is much more complicated than the search for a better life and the quest for the “American Dream.”
JZ: A short follow-up, you mention in the acknowledgements, that you wrote and revised this book in people’s couches because you were moving around a lot. And I couldn’t help but wonder if this affected the shortness and brevity of each vignette?
JAV: Yes! OMG! You are the very first person to notice that my man. That’s craft. I call it plumbing. Trying to find the structure. The tempo, the length, the language, all of that matters to me. Thank you for recognizing that. I appreciate that. And you know, the longest sections were all written on airplanes. Yes. The longest sections in the book were all written on airplanes. Why? Because that is usually the only time — flying across the country from the west coast to the east coast — where I’m completely still, where I’m completely in one place and there is nowhere to go.
JZ: Wow. [laughter]. That’s fucking crazy.
JAV: You know for me, as a writer, I’ve written a couple documentaries over the past eight years now. You know architecture, structure is as important as the content, so all of these questions you’re asking, that’s totally what I was going for my man.
JZ: It’s all in the book. Now, let’s shift to my last question. I know you’ve done a lot of fact work with Define American, I think it’s your life’s calling to get at the facts around undocumented issues and anyone can go to your site and look at the truths regarding undocumented immigrants. Which makes me ask, what do you think are the top two facts that you want every citizen to absolutely know and understand?
JAV: First, I’m really proud that I’m an undocumented person and I could start and scale this organization [Define American]. I just wanted to say that. So one, immigration is not solely about legality. That’s one of the first things I want to say. The second thing is…Let me go back to that first one. Immigration is not solely about legality because legality has always been about power. About who gets to define what’s legal and who’s legal. That’s always been about who has the power to do that. The first thing.
The second thing is, we know the what, we know the where, we know maybe some of the when, but when it comes to the issue of migration we don’t know a lot about the why. Like, why are people coming? As you know from reading the book, understanding that question is really important.
People migrating to America is much more complicated than the search for a better life and the quest for the “American Dream.” It’s way more complicated than that. I would argue that the push-pull factors of migration and the fact that we are coming to this country because this country has been and is in our country. That whole section in the book of “we are here because you were there.” And by saying that, Javier, what I want to get at, is that this issue is much bigger than just America. The book is partly dedicated to the 258 million migrants in the world. The question of migration and who gets to be a citizen of a country is a global conversation, that even I — who can’t physically be part of it because I can’t travel outside this country — can’t take part in. Writing this book is me taking part in that global conversation.
The question of migration and who gets to be a citizen of a country is a global conversation, that even I — who can’t physically be part of it because I can’t travel outside this country — can’t take part in. Writing this book is me taking part in that global conversation.
JZ: And it’s a conversation that we’re going to continue to have for a long time.
JAV: For a long time. I would argue that it is, if you think about it, we haven’t even talked about climate change.
JZ: And water, we’re running out of water.
JAV: We’re running out of water! For me, migration is the defining issue of our time. For me, arriving at language that deepens the humanity and complexity of the issue in order to not be afraid of complicating what the issue is, is of utmost importance. That’s where I want my work, as a writer, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, that’s where I want my work to live.
JZ: I think it does, and it will. I’ll end by thanking you and by going back to that essay by Edwidge Danticat where she says something along the lines of: if you do write dangerously — the immigrants that do — they imagine a future that is unimaginable in which their words are going to be read and people are maybe even going to risk their lives to read their work because they could foresee what was to become.
The other day I went to the Chopo market with a friend who is a punk music aficionado. On the way he told me that a while ago he went to Other Music in New York and ended up talking with a woman who was also a punk music lover. He told her the NY Dolls were the most punk of all the NY punks. She answered that was total bullshit and introduced him to GG Allin, the most punk of punks. Hours after telling him about the heroin overdose that killed GG after a concert, and about his funeral, where his friends and brother injected more heroin into his corpse and doused it in whisky, they kissed. Most likely, they will never see each other again.
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A Punk could be an inexperienced young man.
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It turns out GG’s brother (by the way, for the record, GG’s real name is Jesus Christ) now sells masks of his brother’s face (Halloween costumes?).
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Before, I thought the most punk people at the Chopo were really the Rastas. Surrounded by metaleros, punks and rockers, their little tricolored oasis was the most rebellious of all.
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Punk=Different
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When I was a girl, in my mind there was a free but firm association between punctuation and punk. For me, an asterisk was a punk period. A Star. The best.
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A punk could also be a passive homosexual, and soft wood for kindling.
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The other evening, at an experimental music concert (whatever that means!), after much solemnity, finally this old guy came out like a celestial clown, surrounded by stuffed animals and full of mezcal and humor. I would say he was a punk in his genre.
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Beginners 4ever!
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In the 1930s, punk day was when children were allowed into the circus, gratis.
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In German, a period or point is punkt.
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The Algonquins, who invented the word punk (from ponk, dust-ashes) were neighbors with the Mohawk who invented the famous hairdo. Punk is a tribe.
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Recently, a fashion or phenomenon called normcore appeared. It’s something like hardcore normal: beige ironed-down-the-middle pants, white button-down shirt and socks, moccasins (not the native kind). A uniform to conform. I was invited to a normcore costume party. I couldn’t bring myself to go. Sometimes some things that are against still aren’t punk — no matter what.
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Seapunk: yay; steampunk: nay.
To each her own and Anarchy in the UK.
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The first punk in my life was my grandfather. He was a Spanish Civil war refugee. And even though he used espadrilles, his scars and tattoo said it all.
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Some would say that punk music is fast and strong.
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The first time the word punk appears in print and with relation to music is in a 1976 Creem article that references Rudy “?” Martinez, part of the protopunk band ? and the Mysterians. They are Latino; the name of their band is pure Japanese sci-fi.
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Alien is another way to refer to a foreigner. The immigrant as punk.
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I remember the first time I saw a “proper” punk (already a contradiction in terms) when I was a little girl: it was London, the early 80s and I was on vacation with my parents. The feeling: awe. I hoped they might kidnap me. Though I worried that if they did, I might not understand their language. I was excited about spiked hair.
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To declare war on the world!
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Burroughs is a goddamn punk if you ask me, and I don’t mean because of his homosexuality.
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Alien Kulture (1979–1981) was a British punk band with members of Pakistani origin.
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Too drunk to fuck
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Etow Oh Koam, an Algonquin-Mahican chief, accompanied three Mohawk chiefs to visit Queen Anne in England in 1710. They were popularly referred to as the Four Mohawk Kings. Those would be two good names for a punk band.
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Nowadays punk is the name people give difference when they are too tired to think. So if someone’s too drunk to fuck but still does, would that qualify as a punk fuck?
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Palmolive was the drummer for The Slits from 1976 up until she fought with Malcolm McLaren in 1978 and joined the Raincoats in 1979. She and Viv invited Ari Up, age 14, to make up The Slits. Palmolive’s real name was Paloma, of Spanish origin. Ari Up’s real name was Ariane, of German origin. Both had alien accents in the UK.
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To be against ordinary language!
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Speaking of punk names, ever think of Poly Styrene? I think some of the hottest sex to be had is while listening to X-Ray Specs.
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In Mexico City a couple of years ago there was a famous fight that took place between Emos and Punks. But why did it all start, one wonders?
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Is Glam Punk an oxymoron?
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Remember the eighties kid TV show Punky Brewster about a little girl abandoned by both of her parents? All punks are orphans.
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And Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.
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New Years chez Nina Hagen in LA: There were many amputees, who felt they had an extra limb, an appendix or excretion they had to cut out (in fact it was an arm, a leg or a regular finger). The whole thing might have qualified as punk.
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And the children shall inherit the earth.
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Freaks, Punks, Queers, Cunts — in the beginning were the words. And the words were made flesh. And the flesh was cut, marked, pierced, tattooed, inscribed all over and back to words again.
***
Urban jungle battles need Cherry Bombs.
***
We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs. (Cathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates)
***
Punk is also: ashes from a fire that burns fast and strong.
About the Author
Gabriela Jauregui was born and raised in Mexico City is the author of a book of poems in English, Controlled Decay (Akashic, 2008), and two hybrid genre books, Leash Seeks lost Bitch (Song Cave 2015) and ManyFiestas (Gato Negro, 2017) as well as a book of short stories in Spanish (La memoria de las cosas, or The Memory of Things, 2015). Her critical and creative work has recently been published in Art Forum, Huizache Magazine, MAKE, and El País, amongst others. She is founding editor at Surplus Ediciones and has been named one of the 39 best Latin American authors under 39 by the Hay Festival’s Bogota39 list.
In a 1997 review, David Foster Wallace referred to John Updike as “a penis with a thesaurus.” Unfortunately, this is my type.
I have a propensity to sleep with boys who keep copies of Infinite Jest on display somewhere in their bedrooms. It’s not that this is a prerequisite — I’ve never denied myself a sexual experience purely because my partner didn’t employ the DFW bible as room decor — but rather, a not-so-happy coincidence.
This, alone, is not a character flaw. To each his own — the tome makes for an extremely reliable doorstop, and an even more effective paperweight. But willful display of the novel is often a precursor to a number of other traits in a man: namely, a tendency to recommend literature with all the presumed authority of a graduate professor, and none of the credentials. (I recently met a waiter who insisted that I peruse his thesis on Heart of Darkness before accompanying him to a screening of Apocalypse Now.)
For years, I scurried to complete assignments like these, but now, the didactic instinct kills the appeal — of the date, but more importantly, of the writer. Few things unflatter a man like delivering a verbal syllabus over dinner — but even more so, few things unflatter a writer like the men who so fervently recommend their works.
So to all of the single-and-looking lit-bros out there, I offer my one humble request: Please please stop recommending literature to me.
Few things unflatter a man like delivering a verbal syllabus over dinner — but even more so, few things unflatter a writer like the men who so fervently recommend their works.
The disservice in recommending literature in a romantic context has something to do with the patronizing quality, certainly, and something to do with the assumptions that underlie the impulse. But that’s not even the half of it: At the crux of the matter is the fact that it cheapens the literature itself.
For years, I couldn’t read Phillip Lopate without thinking, disdainfully, of the boy who’d handed me an early essay collection littered with his notes, watching me read from the other side of his decidedly tacky leather couch (a decade later, I fell for the very same collection in a non-fiction writing workshop). I couldn’t touch Welcome to the Monkey House without calling images of the boyfriend with the asterix tattoo (Kurt Vonnegut’s depiction of a butthole) who’d gifted me three separate Vonnegut box sets for two consecutive birthdays (and one Hanukkah), before shattering a ceramic mug of coffee against a wall behind me in fit of non-sci-fi-related rage. Milan Kundera — who later became one of my favorite writers — was long out of the question, as The Unbearable Lightness of Being had been passed to me mid-breakup with an inscription reading “I think this will be important for you.”
Nothing demolishes a great novel like the pedantic insinuation that it will be good for you.
Nothing demolishes a great novel like the pedantic insinuation that it will be good for you.
In college, I slept with a boy with a misspelled tattoo who studied poetry and wore things with the Carhartt logo positioned front and center. He was older in the way only boys in college can be, and thus I practically invited his pretension — I drank it right up. In fact, in my absolute devotion to configuring myself into the shape I imagined a “writer” might take, I was all the more open to his unsolicited criticism of my essays, and his insistence that I read Roberto Bolaño in bed before breakfast.
The problem was not what he recommended — he was slightly more creative than your basic Salinger-touting poet — but rather, the way it was presented to me. When I read fragments of Savage Detectives in his room, jammed into a clapboard house in a college town in upstate New York, it was a test — I read because I had something to prove. When I perused the novel later, it still gleamed with the residue of not being smart enough, or learned enough. For a long time, Bolaño put a bad taste in my mouth. I couldn’t read him without that bitterness.
I only flipped through Savage Detectives again some six years later while dog-sitting for neighbors in South Brooklyn (the novel was holding a stack of neatly extracted New York Times crossword puzzles in place). Having finally outgrown my pre-ordained concept of that shimmering writerly ideal, I found that some of the residue was gone — Bolaño no longer made me feel small. I read his work sans the weighty pretenses I had come to associate it with, and almost immediately, I was infatuated.
The man now takes up sufficient real estate in my personal library. The boy with the misspelled tattoo occupies far less space.
Later on, at some point in the midst of my first post-collegiate waitressing job, I began to read William Carlos Williams voraciously. Not typically an avid reader of poetry, my adoration surprised me. I hadn’t touched his writing since the summer prior to my freshman year, when I’d devoured his poems ardently under the watchful gaze of my then-boyfriend — a devoted worshipper in the church of Williams. But at some point in between double shifts shepherding plates of smoked salmon across a dining room, I realized that I had spent so much time making a display of my readership — proving my diligence — that I’d failed to actually read the work. It was only when a line from Autumn snagged my attention, folded into an essay in The Atlantic, that I’d found myself ready to pick up one of his collections again. As it turned out, I could only love Williams on my own, far from the man who’d offered him up to me. For anyone who has ever loved any great work of poetry, this should come as no surprise.
I had spent so much time making a display of my readership — proving my diligence — that I’d failed to actually read the work.
Of course, not all writers can worm their way into the intimate alcoves of our personal libraries. In my case, the reigning odd man out is Mr. Charles Bukowski — a writer who typically falls in the gold medal range on the objective ranking of American lit-bro favorites. In direct response to the sheer volume of Bukowski recommendations I have received while lying in bed beside one partner or another, I have spent much of my adult life either trying desperately to like Bukowski, pretending to like Bukowski, or wondering what the hell I must be missing when I page through Ham on Rye.
Maybe we’re simply not aligned, Charles and I, or maybe I’m in far too deep to determine with any clarity — but it seems I am sentenced to ask myself unendingly: Did men ruin Bukowski for me, or did I never like Bukowski to begin with?
I should clarify that I welcome — even request — reading suggestions from the people close to me. In these scenarios, neither party has something to prove. The offering is not a test, nor is it a stroking of someone or other’s already over-inflated ego. It is, instead, a desire to communicate — a thing great writing should make us want to do. Good-faith literary recommendations are simply driven by the human impulse to share experiences, good or bad, with people of import in our lives. At its core, this is a poetic exchange.
Did men ruin Bukowski for me, or did I never like Bukowski to begin with?
But this particular right — the right to recommend a novel, an essay, a poem — is a right you earn. It requires the absence of ulterior motives, romantic or otherwise. There can be no desired result. And if you watch a girl while she reads William Carlos Williams, chances are, this will taint her experience.
The French have a word for their own fashionable brand of boredom: ennui. It is the sort of lassitude one proclaims with a lengthy sigh, waving a cigarette unabashedly in someone else’s living room sans permission. It’s an elitist sort of boredom, preoccupied mostly with a world-weariness — a sense of fatigue in the face of things that are not themselves, particularly boring. That is how it feels to read a work of literature that has been jammed down your throat by a man who, for whatever reason, sees romance in assigned reading. These are the books, the essays, the poems, that are gripped by a certain malaise because of the pretenses under which they came into my life. However truly I may come to love them, however profound they may be, they are colored by the expectations that came along with completing them — what I was supposed to think of them, what they were supposed to mean to me. These are the works I ticked off my list with a bleary-eyed sense of ennui — they were carrying a weight that wasn’t theirs to bear.
As most reverent readers will tell you, there can be no work of literature quite so holy as the one that finds you at the right place and the right time. That might be Didion while New York is still new, then maybe Whitehead if you choose to stick around. Perhaps Sari Botton when you leave, and not one of those can be rearranged. That’s the magic of the thing.
So to the next boy who feels that it is his obligation to fill in the holes in my library: you do not reserve the right. Regardless of the purity of your literary offerings, the result is one more volume rinsed in the brine of the romantic encounter it came tangled up inside — whole archives of paperback casualties, none of which were worth the sex.
Remember when Twitter was good? Now you wake up in the morning and see that Toad from Mario Kart is trending and click to find out why and it ruins your day. Everyone’s feed is mostly politics horror, racism horror, climate change horror, yelling at people for not being horrified enough by all the horror, petty trash talk, and drama. It’s gotten to where the petty trash talk is actually the good stuff. So, in our best attempt at a Marie Kondo, we’re taking a look at our social media homes and asking: “Does this account spark joy?” Or conversation? Or community? Or creativity? The world is rough, so we should be good to each other, and sometimes that means using Twitter to tell stories, boost other writers up, or make us laugh at ourselves.
Here are twelve of our favorite authors who not only know how to write long form with style, but can also command 140 characters in ways that inspire. Use this list to bring some signal to the howling void of noise. Or heck, unfollow everyone else and rebuild from here.
I overheard a young man on the train on the way home today, talking to another young man. Holding hands. In college, I guessed. About that age anyway. Much younger than I am.
Maybe he's right. I don't know. It's not the first time I've heard the theory. He spoke with clarity and with confidence. Youthful, full of conviction. But.
Makkai, author of the beautiful book on the AIDS epidemic, The Great Believers, also has one of the freshest twitter threads. Go to her for author-comrade boosts and lists like these:
Things You Can Move: The dial Houses Your feet The goalposts Cities An inch The needle Heaven and earth Mountains That body A muscle Your ass The audience, to tears The deckchairs on the Titanic My cheese
Things You Can Bring: Date Change of clothes Troops home Heat Thunder House down Noise Funk Pain It You, into this world, and I can take you out again The bacon, home My baby back to me A gun to a knife fight The worst in me (out) Just yourselves, thanks!
If you read one thing on the internet today and it’s Tucker Shaw’s thread, read two things, because you need this whole thread, too. Read to remember, in the words of Audre Lorde: “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”
27 years ago, 1600 black women took out a full page ad in the NYT to show support for Anita Hill. I was 20 years old. I put $25 toward the price of the ad and signed my name.
But i remember that she said, you don't have to pay to sign your name, but this is a moment for you to give money, and make a sacrifice, to show it matters to you.
Her thread inspired the creation of a GoFund Me campaign to put ads in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in support of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
@tayari@annekate Channeling my outrage: I started a @gofundme to do the same for #ChristineBlaseyFord that you did for #AnitaHill 27 years ago. Let's raise enough to put a full page ad in @nytimes & @washingtonpost w/ women & men who support her & Kavanaugh ⚖️https://t.co/Uqnyj2LhV2
Jones’s thread also inspired one New York Times archivist to unlock the archive so we can zoom in on all the names in the full page ad, which include Audre Lorde and Farah Jasmine Griffith.
Phillips is a poet who has tweeted a beautiful thread about “fallow periods” in writing, and her own experience with the dreaded season. Read when “productivity” feels like an insensitive comment on your depression.
The other day I promised a #thread about why fallow periods in #writing are not only okay, they are sometimes good, especially after 1) finishing a substantial work or 2) experiencing some kind of personal trauma. First, I will tell the story of my most pronounced fallow period.
YOU ARE STILL A WRITER EVEN IF YOU ARE TAKING TIME OFF FROM WRITING. YOU ARE NOT USELESS IF YOU ARE NOT WRITING RIGHT NOW. YOU CAN STILL GIVE SOMETHING TO THE WORLD RIGHT NOW EVEN IF IT'S NOT A POEM. MAYBE THE WORLD ONLY NEEDS YOU TO BE YOU RIGHT NOW.
Go to Irby for important retweets, an education in how to use caps lock the right way, and the best methods for promoting your own work. (We’re sticking with Twitter for this list but Irby is also the Queen of Instagram.)
Did I download the audio file of Laura van den Berg's Politics and Prose reading/discussion to my phone and have I more or less listened to it on repeat for the last 3 days? I mean. Lower your voice. Why are you so loud. Let me live. Yes. It's very good.
I was trying to read during my early morning reading time and my brain was like fuck you, you need to hand write instead and I ended up having the best time.
Go to Chung for insights on the best reading recommendations and also to remind yourself that kids really do know everything.
I am SO EXCITED that @noahreservation is writing a food column! The first, on how his white mom taught him to cook Korean food and draw comfort from it in the best & worst of times, is up today (w/ perfect art by @sawdustbear): https://t.co/WLg4knPBvL
After a summer of retrogrades, things are picking up speed. Most notably, Mars, the planet of action, is direct, inspiring us to pick up creative projects and reestablish routines that may have fallen by the wayside. Jupiter, planet of expansion, and Saturn, planet of responsibility, are direct, too, bringing us extra boosts of luck and drive, respectively. The outer planets — Uranus (rebellion), Neptune (dreams), and Pluto (rebirth) — are still retrograde here at the start of autumn, but the feeling in the air is crisp and full of promise.
Venus has a short retrograde this season in Scorpio and then Libra, slowing us down and prompting us to look to past projects and loves for inspiration. Mercury, too, has its last retrograde of the year, from November 16 to December 6, encouraging us to review our communications — double checking newsletters and Tweetdecks, reading the fine print before signing contracts.
But the feeling is distinctly different from the heady, slow of summer. There’s a precision to fall 2018.
In part, this is because we have cleared summer’s eclipse season. We are now processing and integrating all that the eclipses of Cancer, Leo, and Aquarius brought us. The powerful, forward motion in the sky compels us to put into action everything we have downloaded. It asks us to do the work. It asks us to put our imagination into practice. Put the pen to paper. As Stephen King once said, “Writing equals ass in chair.”
This season also brings us a blessing. The big news of the season, in addition to Venus Retrograde, is Jupiter’s transition from Scorpio into Sagittarius on November 8. Jupiter changes signs about once a year, so this is noteworthy. However, Jupiter rules Sagittarius. Jupiter is the planet of expansion, and Sagittarius is the archer who loves freedom, who longs to roam. In Sagittarius, Jupiter is extraordinarily powerful and able to bring bounty to what it touches, whether it is a writing project, the revitalization of a home office, or a savings account dedicated to a new laptop or coworking space payment. Pay particular attention to where Jupiter is in your chart — particularly if you have any planets or angles (such as your rising/ascendant) here. Jupiter wants to bring luck — but you have to put in the work.
The powerful, forward motion in the sky compels us to put into action everything we have downloaded. It asks us to do the work. It asks us to put our imagination into practice.
ARIES
Mars, the planet of action, is now direct in your house of social consciousness, friendships, and the internet, which increases your energy for networking and putting time into your online presence. On October 1st, Pluto, planet of transformation, also goes direct in your house of fame and public recognition. Since Saturn, planet of responsibility, is also now direct and hanging out in this house, you have an extra boost of energy to focus on long-range career planning that may have taken a backseat this summer. Together, Saturn and Pluto want to build and transform and bring a new sense of seriousness to your writing efforts.
On October 5th, Venus, planet of love and beauty, stations retrograde in your house of intimacy. Venus is in Scorpio, a sign that she’s not so comfortable in; in Scorpio, Venus takes a walk on the darker side of things. Now is a time to explore darker characters, funky museums, and unusual inspirations. On Samhain/Halloween, however, she retrogrades back into Libra, a sign where she enjoys the finer things. Feed your Venus muse with beautiful surroundings, good conversation, and harmonious balance.
Feeding Venus will help mitigate the turbulence brought by Uranus, the planet of revolution, turbulence, and change, which retrogrades back into your sign of Aries, and into your house of identity and self, on November 6th. It’ll be here until January 6th, wrapping up some lessons, scraping over the last degrees of Aries once more. Check your chart to see if you have planets or angles (like your ascendant) here in these last degrees, as you will especially feel Uranus winding up over this part of your chart once more, making extra sure you’ve got the lessons, if that’s the case.
The season ends with Jupiter, the planet of expansion, changing signs. Jupiter shifts signs about once a year or so, but this shift brings a boon for you. On November 8th, Jupiter is going into Sagittarius — and into your house of publishing, travel, philosophy, and long-term plans. Jupiter is where we find our luck, if we use it right. This is a time to pitch and publish. Mark your calendar for November 26th, when the Sun and Jupiter make their annual conjunction (a time when they sit right next to each other) — this could be a lucky day to pitch a piece you’ve been sitting on.
WRITING PROMPT: Make a list of creative projects you meant to work on this summer, and didn’t. This isn’t a time for guilt — this is a time to make a long-term plan for the next year, and to commit to it. Now, sort the list a few different ways: what project would take the longest to complete? What would take the shortest amount of time? What would require others’ input, versus what could you complete on your own? And what project are you most excited about?
TAURUS
Have you recently felt a boost of energy when it comes to your writing? After spending the entire summer retrograde, Mars, the planet of action, is direct in your house of career and public recognition, giving you a sense of direction. It will be here until November 15th, when it enters Pisces and your house of social consciousness, friendships, and the internet — use this fierce energy to your benefit.
You get a boon with a full moon in your sign on October 24th. Full moons in our signs are often energetic boosts, with full moons being a time of release and completion. Use this energy to bring an existing project to its realization, or to release things or people in your creative life that are no longer serving you. Since the moon is in Taurus, the body, senses, and themes of nourishment and growth may be involved.
Uranus, the planet of rebellion and change, shifted from Aries to Taurus earlier in the summer, so you may have been feeling some sense of dissonance around the self and identity. However, on November 6th, Uranus retrogrades back into Aries for one last cull of your house of rest and spirituality. Review your practices around self-care: what served you well this summer during eclipse season and retrogrades, and what made you feel more tired? You, especially, need time to care for and connect with your body. How are you listening to your body?
For the last year, Jupiter has been transiting your house of committed partnerships, bringing you a newfound sense of how you want to commit to people: how you want to invite people to partner with you, personally and professionally. The people in our lives affect our work, affect our schedules, affect our emotional states, can even affect what we write about. This transit, however, is coming to a close. On November 8th, Jupiter, planet of expansion, is taking a deep dive into your house of intimacy. Get ready for some deep emotional depths: thinking about inheritance in many forms, about connection with folks in many forms. About the impacts of committed partnership, in business, creativity, and in life.
WRITING PROMPT: What committed relationships — personal and professional — have most impacted your writing life over the last year? Make a list. Friends, family, lovers. Your therapist; your writing group. Choose one person, and write them a letter. A thank you letter, an angry letter. A “this is what I’ve learned from you” letter. (You don’t have to send it.)
With the planets finally going direct, your creative drive and curiosity is unstoppable. Mars, planet of action, is finishing a trip through your house of publishing, travel, and long-term plans. If you spent the summer revising and reviewing projects while Mars was retrograde, now is the time to put those plans into action, to lay track for the train that is coming. On November 16th, Mars goes into Pisces, which is your house of career, fame, and public recognition: those plans and projects are getting ready for the spotlight, but you’ve got to put in the work.
These big plans are supported by other transits in the sky. On October 1st, Pluto, planet of transformation, stations direct. Pluto is currently in Capricorn, a sign known for building empires. Pluto is currently in your house of intimacy, allowing you to do some deep emotional work for those big projects, laying a strong foundation for how you ground yourself.
Meanwhile, Jupiter, planet of expansion and luck, is going through your house of daily habits and work. Your routines may have undergone a shift over this last year — a change for the better and more healthy and productive. Reflect on the changes you’ve gone through as you anticipate the projects you’ll be further developing in 2019 and the habits you’ll need to really level up. On November 9th, Jupiter dives into your house of committed partnerships, inviting you to take a deep look at the personal and professional partnerships that inform and influence your daily life (and, perhaps, your creative work).
Also hanging out in your house of daily habits and work? Venus in Scorpio, which is retrograde and consequently asking you to consider what is serving you in your creative life. How do your daily habits and routines serve your creativity? Not everyone writes every day, but how do you take care of your life (and your body) in a way that supports your creativity? Now is a time to review your schedule, your diet, your fitness: the ways that you run that make your mind run. On October 31st, Venus retrogrades further back into Libra and your house of creative inspiration and imagination, which inspires you to reconsider how you find the magical in the everyday.
You have a full moon in your house of self and identity on November 23rd. Full moons are a time of release and completion, and this moon is a time to really pay attention to how you have grown as a person over this past year, to tune in holistically to your creativity, your physical body, your spirit, your mind.
WRITING PROMPT: Where do you spend most of your time? Write out what a typical workday looks like for you, or what a typical not-working day looks like for you. Now, write out how you would actually like to be spending your time: on working days and on off or weekend days. What does an ideal schedule look like? How can you feed and nurture yourself creatively, even in the everyday?
CANCER
You may be breathing a bit easier after a summer of retrogrades and heavy eclipses, one of which was in your sign, in your house of self and identity, asking you to do some cleaning house. But more eclipses will be coming in 2019 in your houses of self and identity (Cancer), as well as of committed partnerships (Capricorn). You’re on the verge of major breakthroughs, and now is the time to get your house in order: to lay track for the train that is coming.
One of the big stories in the sky this autumn is Venus, planet of beauty and art and culture, which is retrograde until November 16th. Venus is in Scorpio, a sign that she isn’t always comfortable in — Venus wants to shine, and Scorpio is more comfortable in the shadows. However, she is blessing your house of creative expression and inspiration. Feed Venus in Scorpio with shadowy inspirations: offbeat museums, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, the dark and abject and hidden. Shore up your reserves here.
Venus retrogrades further back into Libra and your house of family and home on October 31st. If you haven’t been satisfied with the relationship between your physical workspace and your creativity, take this opportunity to revisit your workspace and redecorate. Bless it with beautiful touches.
Meanwhile, Jupiter, the planet of expansion and luck, is also transiting your house of creative expression and inspiration. Jupiter has been here for almost the last year, helping you get in touch with some of the deeper parts of yourself that you aren’t always comfortable with. As Jupiter gets ready to enter your house of daily habits and work, spending the rest of 2018 and 2019 transforming your routines and everyday work life, draw on this ability to dive deeply into the unknown that you aren’t always comfortable with. Especially as we ready for the eclipses that are coming.
WRITING PROMPT: The work you create can start to feel like home after a while, can start to feel like a security blanket. Same old project, same routine. But is the work you’re doing right now inspiring you, or do you feel a dull sense of obligation? Now is a time to take advantage of the direct energy in the sky and really sort through your motivations, Cancer. Journal about what inspires you, about the projects you would work on if you knew there would be no strings.
LEO
The eclipses this summer rocked your houses of self and identity, of committed partnerships: much of the story for you this year has been on how your relationship to yourself and to the important folks in your life informs your work. Whether this manifests in the content of the work itself or in the work/life balance, or in some other capacity, you are working through tensions between the personal and the professional. This fall, the story continues as the planets highlight your relationship between the self and the other, between your home and your career.
Mars, the planet of action, has spent the entire summer retrograde in your house of committed partnerships, asking you to review how you treat others you want to exist in relationship with — and also asking you how you expect to be treated. He is finally direct, barrelling forward, bringing people in and out of your life (personally and professionally). Creative folks don’t exist in isolation, and healthy relationships of all kinds are vital for an active and imaginative life. Long-term, committed creative partnerships may be highlighted for you this fall, whether that looks like a writing group, editor, agent, or other creative relationship.
Meanwhile, for the last year, Jupiter has been journeying through your house of family, home, and nesting. Jupiter is expansion: you may have been inspired to put down roots and invest in your community and/or family, whatever that looks like to you. Venus has also recently entered Scorpio and this particular house, bringing an extra bounty of love and beauty to this part of your life. Venus is retrograde, inviting you to consider your home office or workspace: what does the relationship between your creativity and your physical home (and the people in it) look like?
On November 8th, Jupiter jumps into Sagittarius, which for you is your house of creative energy and inspiration. Here, Jupiter is playful, energetic, flirtatious, and extraverted. Look for opportunities to go out with your creative friends and to spark inspiration by going out and being your big, beautiful, bold Leo self. On November 26th, Jupiter hooks up with the Sun for its once a year super-lucky conjunction — mark your calendar for a particularly high dose of inspiration.
WRITING PROMPT: What have you learned about yourself, creatively, through other people over the last few months? What kinds of creative people, events, and energy do you want to surround yourself with in the coming year?
VIRGO
Happy Birthday, Virgo! It’s autumn, which means it’s your season, and you’re ready to thrive. Jupiter, planet of expansion, has spent the past year in your house of communication and short-term plans, boosting your energy around a variety of creative projects. Venus, planet of love and beauty, also recently entered this house, offering you an extra burst of interest and inspiration. She will be retrograde most of the fall, offering you the chance to go back and tie up loose ends on any projects you (somehow) didn’t get to.
On November 8th, Jupiter will enter Sagittarius and your house of family, home, and nesting for the next year. If you feel a push-pull, don’t be surprised: Sagittarius is a sign that wants freedom, and for you, this is a feeling of wanting freedom — while at home and within the nest. Find time to carve space for yourself and your work, even if working from home. A home office, or even a well-ordered desk, could do the trick. Jupiter will bless your efforts.
Meanwhile, Mars, planet of action, is (finally) zooming direct through your house of daily routines and work. Most folks wouldn’t consider this sexy, but you’re not most folks, Virgo. Also, fall is upon us, and it’s cuffing season: time to rededicate yourself to your work, and Mars is giving you an extra sense of commitment to your work. On November 16th, Mars enters Pisces, which is your house of committed partnerships — personal and professional. Be on the lookout for folks who may bring long-term opportunities for creative partnership into your life.
Meanwhile, Pluto, planet of transformation and rebirth, is finally direct in Capricorn in your house of creative energy: your work ethic is on fire. Put it to good use and make that list of projects you’ve been meaning to get to. By the end of 2018, you’ll be sure to have accomplished it.
WRITING PROMPT: We aren’t sure if we believe that cleanliness is next to godliness, but certainly, a clean working space in the home helps to declutter the mind and invite Venus and her muses to play. This autumn, take the time to create (or redo) a space in your home that’s all your own, no matter how small. Write about it.
LIBRA
There’s a New Moon in your sign on October 8th, Libra. This is a good time to set intentions, start new projects, make a list of things to do this season. Start the autumn right.
Venus is in Scorpio in your house of value and material assets. Venus rules this particular house, which is also where you find your sense of self worth, where you lay foundation for how you build your life and the things in it. In Scorpio, Venus is asking you to consider the dark parts of yourself that might bring you shame, that you historically have swept under the rug. These next months bring you the opportunity to shine a lot on them, to clear out the dross that holds you back. When Venus retrogrades into Libra, back into your house of self and identity, this transforms into a chance for integration. What lessons have you learned over the last few months, with the summer of retrogrades and eclipse season?
Meanwhile, Jupiter, the planet of expansion, is also traipsing through your house of value and assets, transforming your relationship to your finances. On November 8th, Jupiter goes into Sagittarius, a sign that loves freedom and rules your house of communication, short-term plans, astrology, and writing. For those of you who are inclined to the occult, this next year may well bring a boon when it comes to writing about the occult. For others, Jupiter will bless your short-term creative projects. Jupiter craves travel and freedom, so especially consider opportunities — professional and personal — that feed this part of you creatively.
All of this energy is getting off to a start while Mars is (finally) direct in Aquarius, which is your house of creative inspiration. Mars was retrograde all summer, and while we all felt it, you may have felt especially melancholy, or in a rut, creatively. Now, the ideas are flowing once again.
WRITING PROMPT: Where is your favorite place to travel? Imagine yourself there, in a favorite spot. Picture it. Describe the people, the sights. The scents. The sounds.
SCORPIO
For the last year, Jupiter, planet of expansion, has been rooting through your house of self and identity, shining a light on what makes you tick. Over the last year, you have been pushed to grow in new ways: some that were perhaps expected and longed for, others that were perhaps unexpected and uncomfortable. You’ve been noticed, too, and for Scorpio, a sign that prefers to operate behind the scenes, born when the days are getting shorter and the night is expanding, this has been a time.
But it’s not just that others see you in a new way, Scorpio. You see yourself in a new way, too. This has been a profound year of growth for you, of coming to a new sense of self-understanding.
Now, Jupiter prepares to enter Sagittarius and your house of value on November 8th. This house isn’t just about material worth, however: it’s about your sense of self worth, of valuing yourself. Now that you have spent this last year coming to a new sense of identity, how are you going to let Jupiter expand your sense of value, how you truly consider yourself worthy?
You get a boost this season from Venus in Scorpio, which will retrograde through your house of self and identity, asking you to consider how you show love and affection to yourself. How you allow yourself to feel beautiful. On October 31st — Samhain — she will retrograde into Libra, which for you is your house of spirituality, where she will ask you to look for harmony. To look for opportunities for rest.
Meanwhile, a New Moon in your sign of Scorpio on November 7th brings a special opportunity for new beginnings. Journal, set intentions, start new projects.
WRITING PROMPT: What is an aspect of your creative process that you have had the most difficulty accepting? Write about it. Then, write about it from a perspective where that difficulty is a part of you that you accept.
SAGITTARIUS
The summer of retrogrades is over, and the planets are once again moving direct. Pluto, the planet of transformation and rebirth, is now moving direct in your house of value. For the past few years, Pluto has been asking you to consider and reevaluate your relationship to materiality: to possessions and your belongings, but also to money, to what you value, and to how these things relate to your sense of self-value. What is your attitude toward the relationship between your writing and money, between inspiration and money, between your life goals and money? Between your sense of self and how you provide for yourself in this world? The business side of writing isn’t always sexy, but Pluto is rooting through this deep side of your unconscious, and if you are willing to put in the work, there is rebirth to be had here.
Meanwhile, Venus, the planet of love, beauty, and value, is in the deep waters of Scorpio, rooting through your house of spirituality and rest, asking you to do that deep, unconscious work around your relationship to value.
But, a boon: Jupiter, the planet of luck and expansion, is finishing up a transit through your house of spirituality and rest and will be moving into your house of self and identity on November 8th. From the ultimate behind the scenes to all eyes on you. This may have felt like a year of internal work or preparation, but Jupiter getting ready to go into your sign will be the ultimate blessing. A particularly lucky day is when the Sun and Jupiter make their annual conjunction (when they are right next to each other), bringing a bounty on November 26th.
Remember, though: a transit on its own isn’t necessarily lucky. It’s what you make of it. Plant intentions for this Jupiter transit on your very own New Moon in Sagittarius, which takes place on December 7th.
WRITING PROMPT: Make a list of ten ways you would like to grow — personally, professionally, or otherwise — over this next year. Bonus points for doing this on the New Moon in Sagittarius.
CAPRICORN
We are approaching your birthday season, Capricorn. We are also approaching a series of eclipses next year that will be in your sign as well as your opposite sign, Cancer. But before we get there, the planets are asking: are you ready for what’s coming? Are you doing your work?
Work is something that comes pretty naturally to you, in that it is something that often emotionally fulfills you. However, is your work purposeful, or is it just there? Is it driving towards a goal, or is it just busy, helping you bide the time until the next indeterminate thing?
Planets which were retrograde, asking you to review and revise, are now direct, asking you to take action, to build a plan, to make moves. Mars is moving through your house of value, asking you to bring order to your finances and material possessions this fall, but also to organize your sense of value. On November 13th, Mars goes into Pisces, which is your house of communication and short term plans. You’ll find it easy to brainstorm and daydream some big new projects and plans for the new year.
Jupiter, the planet of luck and expansion, has been moving through Scorpio and your house of social consciousness, friends, and the internet, bringing blessings to your Twitter, your newsletter, your writing groups. On November 8th, Jupiter moves into freedom-loving Sagittarius and your house of spirituality, intuition, and rest. You feed this quiet part of yourself with independence: with travel, with alone time. Be sure to make ample room for that over this next year.
We do have one last major retrograde of the year: Venus, planet of love and beauty, which is retrograde in Scorpio, in your house of social consciousness, friendship, and the internet. Double check those newsletters, tweets, and online interactions. On October 31st, Venus spirals back into Libra and your house of career and public recognition — again, make sure to double check contracts and be particularly conscientious when asking for a promotion or pitching an editor. Retrogrades aren’t a time to put your life on hold; they’re just a time to take care, review, and revise. (But you always do that, don’t you, Capricorn?)
Underneath it all is Pluto, the planet of transformation and rebirth, which is still in your house of self and identity — where it has been for years — asking you to consider who you are, what you want, what drives you.
WRITING PROMPT: Time for a pro/con list. Which creative habits served you well this summer during the retrogrades and eclipses, and which slowed you down? What have you outgrown? What goals are you hanging on to for old times’ sake, that haven’t kept up with where you are now? Time for some autumnal cleaning.
AQUARIUS
Congratulations, Aquarius: you survived the summer of retrogrades and a nearly two-year long series of eclipses that rocked and redefined your houses of self and identity and committed partnership. Take a minute to take it in, to give yourself time to process and cohere and absorb the lessons of this last major season of your life.
This fall, the planets are encouraging you to cohere your lessons in senses of self, as well as home and career. Mars, the planet of action, was retrograde all summer long, but it is now moving direct through your house of self and identity, asking you to examine what you want and how you’re going to get there. Meanwhile, Venus, the planet of love and beauty, and Jupiter, planet of expansion, are moving through your house of career and public recognition, highlighting the work you’ve been putting in over the past year. Uranus, the planet of rebellion and change, has been journeying through your house of family and nesting, asking you where you make your home and who you consider family.
On November 8th, Jupiter enters Sagittarius and your house of social consciousness, friendships, and the internet. For the last year, Jupiter has been blessing your career big time — odds are good you’ve taken leaps forward. Here, in Sagittarius, Jupiter continues the party. You’ve laid a strong foundation with a work ethic and a commitment to building a career. Now, it’s time to build the relationships that will feed that career for years to come. No matter how introverted or extraverted you are, no matter if you live in Iowa or New York or Alabama, this transit is about doing the social work of connection.
Networking is business, but that doesn’t mean it’s inauthentic. This is about building your website, building an online presence, connecting with likeminded folks on Twitter, going to events that suit your personality, signing up for AWP. If you’re established, this is about mentoring and giving a hand to those who are coming after you. This is about volunteering to help kids with writing at the local school. This is about meeting people and talking with people you wouldn’t normally talk with about the love of the written word. This is about the fact that writing does not happen in isolation, that interesting people do not live in ivory towers, that ideas are best generated in flow.
This next year is about your writing — and writing community.
WRITING PROMPT: So, building a writing community. Do you have one? Have you had one? What’s your relationship to the word “networking”? How does this make you feel?
PISCES
For you, the big story this fall is the unconscious becoming conscious. The summer’s eclipses lit up your houses of daily routine and work, of spirituality and rest. What did you learn about active rest this summer, about learning to bring different parts of your self into harmony?
Mars, the planet of action, is here to continue the lesson. This fall, Mars completes a summer’s long journey through your house of spirituality and rest and the unconscious. Here, you’ve had the opportunity to experience awakenings around what you really want in life. Mars brings this lesson fully from the unconscious into the conscious on November 16th, when he goes into your sign of Pisces, and your house of self and identity. What do you want? Who are you becoming? And how are you going to get it?
Around the same time, Jupiter, planet of expansion, completes its transit through Scorpio in your house of publishing, travel, and wisdom. Over the last year, you’ve perhaps done some creative work that you put out into the world, or started preparing to put out. Certainly, you’ve spent the last year doing internal work: Jupiter in Scorpio in your house of wisdom asks you to go dig deep, to scrape the bottom, to be uncomfortable in life’s hardest lessons. But those lessons are about to turn to gold as Jupiter enters Sagittarius, where it is most at home, in your house of career and public recognition. This next year is a time to show up for yourself and your work. This is where you truly reap what you sow. Jupiter in this house can be a tremendously lucky transit — but you have to do the work.
Meanwhile, Pluto, the planet of transformation and rebirth, has gone direct in your house of social consciousness, friendships, and the internet, digging up the dross, sifting through the networks of your life that best serve you — and letting go of the ones that have outworn their utility. Pluto has spent several years in this part of your chart, and it will continue here for several more, transforming your personal and professional social lives. Creative work can be solitary, but Pluto in Capricorn — the sign of empire building — is here to teach you to build genuine, transformative connections that will be mutually beneficial for the long haul. You have a lot to give, Pisces. Don’t let others take advantage of your spirit. Hold onto your boundaries. Hold onto yourself.
WRITING PROMPT: Which of your projects is just on the cusp of becoming, Pisces? You know the one — the one that you’ve been sitting on, the one you aren’t quite confident about. It’s time. Grab a pen and start writing. But don’t just write the damn thing. Make a plan for how you’re going to finish (and sell) the damn thing. You’re worthy — and you’re ready.
September is a time for cooling weather, new school supplies, and the same damn books by mostly-white mostly-male authors that have been assigned in high schools and colleges for the last 50 to 100 years. These are not bad books! Many of them are great books! But are they the best books to assign to a student body that has gotten more diverse as education has become less elitist and inaccessible? Are they the books students are most likely to connect to and learn from? Or are they just the books we assign because they’re the books we’ve always read?
Welcome to Fire the Canon, Electric Lit’s limited series on making the standard high school syllabus more inclusive. We convened a panel of writers and educators to suggest alternatives and supplements to the usual assignments: Glory Edim, founder of Well Read Black Girl; high school English teacher Larissa Pahomov; National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado; writer Jaya Saxena, who among other things wrote a series about classic children’s literature on The Toast; and writer and professor Kiese Laymon. Over the course of the back-to-school season, they’ll be suggesting books that they think do similar jobs to the old standbys, but feature a broader range of authors, characters, and voices.
First up is The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about class, identity, longing, and the American Dream. Gatsby is incredibly rich for a novel that’s under 200 pages long (six hours when performed out loud), but high school readers rarely get to appreciate it fully, probably because its still-relevant concerns are couched in wealthy Jazz Age trappings. Here are the books our panelists think will bring its lessons home.
My bookshelf is filled with every single Toni Morrison book. Jazz, without question, is my favorite. Morrison’s get-right-into-it approach opens the novel with a mysterious, gossiping narrator who shares the details of a torrid affair. The interior lives of Joe Trace, Violet, and Dorcas quickly hold your attention, the plot is driven by the captivating rhythm of the Harlem Renaissance. Morrison’s sixth novel is rich with complicated voices, cultural memory, and unfulfilled desires. Jazz is politically sharp and pinpoints a changing landscape in New York City in the 1920s. How did the continuous flow of Southerners arriving in Harlem find their footing? What lives did they long for? Although, Morrison’s characters leave us with half-hearted answers, there is a sense of satisfaction. Because Morrison has given us an extraordinary love story: Passionate everyday people facing loss, experiencing joy, and coping with oppression. Now, add the layer of history, marred by racial violence. “History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.” Morrison constructed a narrative open to all of life’s vibrant possibilities…and harsh realities. Overall, definitions and identities serve as a central theme in the novel (as in Gatsby). It should be required reading in every high school.
These days, your first contact with the American upper crust doesn’t happen when you move to New York — it happens when you first set foot on an elite college campus. In Donna Tartt’s best novel, Nick Carraway has been transformed into Richard Papen, hiding the fact that he’s from Plano Texas when he lands at bucolic Hampden college in Vermont, and gaining newcomer-observer status with a genteel clique of students who study Ancient Greek. Schools have gone co-ed, so instead of a cotillion-trained Daisy, we have Camilla, flexing her intellect right alongside the boys. Her heart is complicated, too, but she knows that choosing a man won’t solve her problems. And problems there are, because this group makes a literal bloody mess — only Tartt, unlike Fitzgerald, stages this at the beginning of the novel, so we get to see the long-term impact of their attempts at self-preservation.
While it might seem strange to replace such a singularly American novel with a novel so firmly ensconced in Colombian history, they have more in common than you’d think. Both share a singular breadth and ambition, and explore human lives against turbulent historical time periods, the strange movement of fate, and the inescapability of the past. And there’s probably no better indictment of American imperialism than the climax of the novel, which is based on the real-life Banana Massacre. Solitude can provoke a discussion of U.S. political interference in South America and elsewhere in the world, and demonstrate the American Dream doesn’t just fail Americans, but everyone it touches.
I don’t think the Great Gatsby is overrated. It does what it does very well. I think the main issue is that people are really ready to misread the Great Gatsby. I mean, Baz Luhrmann thought that the point of it was that it was a beautiful love story, not a commentary on the hollowness of American mythmaking and how ready we all are to delude ourselves with the “self-made man” for the sake of a good party. The misreading proves the point I guess — we’d prefer a love story. The House of Mirth is already part of the canon pretty much, but it also touches on themes of a morally corrupt upper class who offer all appearances and no substance, and is perhaps more obvious in its message than Gatsby. But honestly, I think we just need to teach better reading comprehension.
Jubilee explores the life of Vyry, a character based off of Walker’s grandmother. Some consider Jubilee to be one of the first black historical novels. While many focus on the daily terrors faced by Vyry, I’m equally amazed by the descriptive attention paid to the ways bruised black women’s bodies move through violent American deeply southern space in search of joy, and minutes of respite. Jubilee is a book that cannot be forgotten.
What does the American Dream look like when the U.S. economy is crumbling around you? Behold the Dreamers concerns two families—Cameroonian immigrants Jende and Neni Jonga and their employers, the white, wealthy Edwardses—and how they’re affected by the 2008 financial crisis. Like Gatsby, it’s about money, identity, self-invention, longing, and the way that Americanness and capital are inextricably intertwined. Unlike Gatsby, immigrants and non-white characters take center stage.
One of the things I love about New York City is the mere possibility of Eileen Myles. In 1974, it was possible for Myles to move to New York with the intention of being a poet. It was possible to build a community of poets around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and take advantage of workshops and events happening around the city. In 1977, it was possible to find a rent-stabilized apartment in the East Village, and in 1992, it was possible to run for President of the United States with an “openly female” campaign.
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When I was a child, queerness was not a possibility because I had no mental model for queerness. Until I turned 30, writing poetry was not a possibility because it never dawned on me that I could or should write creatively. The mere possibility of Myles’ work and life has had untold effects on queer artists and feminists like me. It was possible for Myles so it is possible for us.
On a cloudy Saturday morning, Myles and I conducted a phone interview with each of our rambunctious pit bulls vying for attention over the phone. We talked about settler colonialism, pedagogy, queer humor, and Myles’ trip to Palestine.
Candace Williams: In “I am Ann Lee,” I really love the midway revelation via footnote that we are in fact reading a keynote you delivered at the Feminine Mystic Conference. When I reread the poem with that information, it becomes a different experience in some ways. Can you talk about your process for writing and delivering the actual speech? What was it like in the room when you gave the keynote at the Feminine Mystic Conference?
Eileen Myles: Well, it was in a little church, like a chapel, which could have gone a lot of different ways, but in fact, it was actually really great. The setting was good and there was something about the shape of the setting that made me feel like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. When I got the invitation, I was like, “How can I not want to speak at a conference called the Feminine Mystic put on by the Shaker Museum?”
Embarrassment propels me a bit. It’s always like, “Okay, I’ve made myself really uncomfortable. What do I close myself in now?”
I started by doing research. My friend, David Rattray, who died in the ‘90s, was a poet, translator, and a researcher. He worked at Reader’s Digest Books and I had him come to the first class I ever taught with NYU and it was expository writing for adults. It was an evening class. So, David came to talk to them and he said the first thing you always do when you’re doing a research project, is to make a list. I started to make a list because I had a few things on my mind and I started to find information about the Shakers. Now, I understand the Shakers differently. I understand that Ann Lee wasn’t celibate for celibacy sake. Women in colonial times were just cattle. A man could get a woman, and he would make her pregnant as many times as she could be, and one of those pregnancies would kill her, and then he could get another wife. A woman was just produce and it’s amazing that we’re still on some end of that same condition right now, politically.
But, just that alone made me really feel differently about all the Shakers. Also, it was really fun to say, because I think as somebody who does write about sex and is even a little bit known for it in some ways, it was really a pleasure to put my own sexual condition right at the top and say I haven’t had sex for X number of months. I thought, “Okay, this is outrageous.” This is a revelation that felt naked in a way because I feel like embarrassment propels me a bit. It’s always like, “Okay, I’ve made myself really uncomfortable. What do I close myself in now?” And it became facts, and thoughts, and feelings and so on. Then, the location, PTown was perfect and I was still uncomfortable and I couldn’t believe I had to write this talk. But, the political condition of the world was surrounding me, so I think writing a talk like that is kind of shedding. At a conference, I don’t have to worry about who’s coming. It’s self selecting so I imagined the room and the building while I was writing.
I was able to explore the Comey situation in an immediate way. We tweet to have a collective experience with other people and I think the very nature of the invite gave me an opportunity to talk and to process that stuff in detail. It was almost like processing with a friend.
CW: I think that sounds a little similar to how I write. I spend a lot of time reading, whether it’s poetry or historical documents. I like going into the archives and pulling up the New York Times from 50–100 years ago and seeing how they wrote about black people, how they wrote about the FBI, how they wrote about different things.
EM: Oh, that’s cool. That’s really smart.
CW: I teach sixth graders how to write. I say, “This is notebook is gathering place and some of these scribbles might become seed ideas that you water and grow into a finished piece, but you should always have some kind of gathering place for all of these ideas.” Actually, I’ll tell them that you said that maybe I was right about gathering.
EM: Good. Believe me, because you’re right, what an amazing thing.
CW: Thinking more about “I am Ann Lee,” I noticed that you mentioned Palestine pretty early in the poem, then you circle back to it multiple times in the book. I talk to a lot of poets who are afraid to even mention Palestine in a poem, or even in tweets. I have friends who can’t even tweet about Palestine because they’re afraid to be fired by their employer.
EM: It’s astonishing. I think it’s incomprehensible, but also entirely comprehensible how we got to this place. Israel’s policy with Palestine is the same as the United States’ policy of with the native people and the enslavement of African-American people. It’s like this America, the way it was constructed and established, is of choices that are so similar to the choices of Israel in Palestine. We’re watching the same thing happen.
CW: That reminds me of June Jordan’s poems about Palestine. I was wondering how you approach writing about Palestine. Is it similar to how you approach other topics or do you say to yourself, “Okay, I’m going to go ahead and talk about the Palestinian people and what’s going on in Israel.”
EM: Well, I had the astonishing good fortune, to travel to Palestine. There was a group called PalFest and I was invited to come to five cities in Palestine with this group. We were there to be shown and I think we were chosen as people who are already disposed to know and think about Palestine. For me, it’s really been the gradual thing. I just wrote an essay that I’m writing nervously about Palestine. I’m not even sure of the name of the journal, but it’s a friend of mine Ismail, who was on that trip, and he’s working with a magazine and they’re doing a Palestine issue. He asked a bunch of us to contribute.
The trip was the first time I’ve been in something that is exclusively about Palestine. It’s been leaking into my tweets and my life. I think I was really out of it in the ‘80s with talk of the PLO. I didn’t seem to get it. I didn’t know what was going on really. When I finally did understand, and started to see similarities to other struggles, natives peoples in this country, Ireland, and daily living for African-Americans. When I went to Palestine, the U.N. had us come to their offices and showed us maps. We went to checkpoints and museums. We had journalists and guides on the ground and it was mind blowing that this could be possible in this moment in time after so many fought against what happened in South Africa. I realized that we were in an apartheid state and we’re acting somehow as if that’s okay with the complete support of the EU and the United States. It was mind boggling. The world continues to be a place that produces the impossible.
The decisions made 75 years ago stick. In “I am Ann Lee,” I write about meeting that lawyer, Diana, who defended people whose homes were being knocked down. We talked about the politics of that, which were completely impossible. A village that’s about to be destroyed for no reason, for no reason, except that they want that land.
But, even here in Texas, we had a pipeline put through that nobody wanted. The state collaborated with the Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who wanted to bring oil and gas from Texas to Mexico. These are rich people. They put that pipeline in because that’s what they wanted to do. It was government that was beyond government. The situation Palestine is exactly that and I don’t know. It renders me speechless that it’s possible, that our senator, Chuck Schumer believes that these are not human rights issues. Again, people are deemed not human, like they’re terrorists when they stand up for themselves. The people who are going into Congress during these hearings right now are being brought out and are not seen as people expressing their freedom of speech. They’re trouble. They’re problems.
I don’t have anything more articulate to say than that the very common, simple language I heard when I went there. They explained the colonial settler projects and then I understood. I was like, “Oh, right. We just settled this land. We acted as if there wasn’t anybody here,” you know?
It’s like when you talk about shepherds and you say, “Well, they’re not using the land.” Well, shepherds don’t use land like that. Don’t they graze? That’s the nature of it. We don’t say ranchers aren’t using the land if you don’t see cattle in every single spot, so this is in a rational deliberate erasure being supported with millions and billions of dollars.
Now, we’re cutting back billions of dollars in aid to Palestine, meaning that schools and people will be starved.
Why does the United States still ally itself with Israel? 24 states have laws against BDS. That’s, again, incomprehensible. Why does Israel, in a sense, have more rights than the United States in terms of our right to speak up and our right to protest?
CW: I was taught in school that I should be logical about things, that I should avoid emotion, and that if I thought about things long enough, then they would make sense. Then, I feel like when I hear people talking about colonialism and people losing their homes and sickness and schools, all of those things, to me, feel very simple. There’s a logic that our government and greedy people put around it but it’s actually impossible. It doesn’t make any sense yet it’s still so real in the lives of people. It seems impossible to even cut through but I think that at least we can write about it now, start talking about it, and hopefully make some changes.
EM: Just one more thing — the thing that people are looking at now is the argument that it is an ancient homeland. That’s just untrue. There was so many different peoples in that part of the world. There was so much immigration. Nobody’s talking about the ancient homeland of indigenous people here in the United States and what is constructed as Israel has so much less a valid claim than Native Americans do to the land we’re standing on.
I feel overwhelmingly engaged and outraged with Palestinian issues. How could I keep it out of my writing? The silence around Palestine is what’s astonishing to me.
Okay. I’ll let go of it there. All it is is that if you care something about something to the degree which I feel overwhelmingly engaged and angered and outraged with Palestinian issues, how could you keep it out of your writing? How could you not tweet about it? The silence around Palestine is what’s astonishing to me.
CW: One of the reasons that I like teaching is that teachers can help people break silence or to even know they can write. You mentioned your NYU expository writing class and I know that you teach quite a bit. I was wondering how you go about teaching writing and how you help people start to talk about the impossible.
EM: I think, like what you were saying about reading about something a lot, I feel like with politics and anything that you want to write about, you have to consume it and put it in your body and see how it circulates. The thing about teaching writing is that you’re really teaching someone to notice the rhythm of their mind and the way they manage language intrinsically. I think that everybody has a language body. In workshops, I always start with exercises that are about using language and texts that aren’t originated by the students, just appropriating stuff and making poems out of found speech. I don’t like the term “found” so much, but it’s just listening to the world, listening to a consciously chosen reading. I mean, it’s obvious we all go to readings all the time, we’re always taking down notes, and taking down words, and walking through the world taking language. I like to get people practicing taking language, not because appropriation is so inherently important, but to start to understand how the way you build something has everything to do with your metabolism, and your choice, and your energy, and your way of hearing, your way of not hearing, and knowing when to shut up, and when to listen, and what to put next to each other. I like to make people self-conscious about their own experience of taste and collage.
I think once you start to have a habit of language in mind and realize that there’s something signature about your particular way of assembling poems, and prose, and whatever genre, then you realize that everything is content. You just dive into an area, and then it’s like the more you become obsessed with it, the more it becomes part of your thinking and part of your moving. What you put back out into the world is intrinsically yours. Palestine is the material I’m using to construct the edifice of mind, existence, and belief. I mean, in a way you’re sort of always writing the same thing but you’re using different materials and different content for different purposes. Everything is an invite in some way.
Once you realize that there’s something signature about your particular way of assembling poems, and prose, and whatever genre, then you realize that everything is content.
At the height of writing Cool for You, which I call a nonfiction novel, I had this dilemma. My Irish grandmother was in a mental hospital for the last 17 years of her life. That was my dad’s mother and we used to go to the mental hospital when I was four years old. We would visit her one Sunday a month. It was never explained to me how she was there, how I had a grandmother, why she was there, and what the story was. When I was working on this book, I was looking at the idea of women inside of institutions, myself being a teacher, camp counselor, and family member. I petitioned the state of Massachusetts to get my grandmother’s records. Then, I got them. It was shocking because there was more information in them about my family than I had ever been given, not just about her but about who they were in 1940, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
It was exactly the same thing you were talking about, where I just read it, and read it, and read it, and read it, and read it until I sort of became it. Then, it came up in my work because it inhabited me. So, it’s kind of like that. I worked with a composer once on an opera and that’s exactly what he did. Writing is an act of composition. Michael had me write the libretto. Then, he memorized it and then he wrote the music to it. He needed to inhabit my speech and understand my rhythms, and write with it, and through it, and alongside it. He occupied it. So I feel like it’s an intimate to approach a subject. Palestine is like that. I feel like it’s one of my beloveds at this point in time. I mean, I can’t stand to use the word occupy in terms of Palestine, but I guess there are occupations that are liberations, and that’s probably what I’m talking about. Obviously writing is one of those and anything that we love is an occupation. It’s like you’re just occupying something to bring it to another pitch.
CW: I like the idea that you occupied what wasn’t even really the text of your grandmother, but the text of the state, and of the medical industry in relation to your grandmother. I like the idea that we can occupy the different texts that tend to be weaponized against us.
EM: Yeah, of course.
CW: For my writing, a big direction that I’m going in is erasure poetry. I find an article from the New York Times from 1906 that talks about people who are like me but lived a long time ago. The media depicted black people a certain way and that kind of dictated our future.
EM: Exactly.
CW: With erasure poetry, I’m actually able to change and subvert the power relationship. The New York Times still has way too much power over my life. Even if I don’t read it, it’s forming the opinions of people who either by voting, or even by these really underground backroom deals, influence everything around me. I wish more people really thought about found poetry and erasure. I’m going to teach a Poetry Project workshop about it soon because I think that erasure poetry really helped me understand the power of relationship between me and everything I read. Whether it’s an ad, or an article, or a tweet, there’s actually a power dynamic being enacted and I think we have to subvert some power dynamics and create new dynamics.
EM: Right. Right, right. No, I think that’s absolutely it. I remember a few years ago there was a group, who had an after-school program to teach kids how to unpack media and how to read the news. That is so interesting and so valuable because I feel like I came to it so late. I mean, I knew sort of maybe in the late ’70s (which is me and my late 20s), I started to understand that the demonstrations I went to were being reported inaccurately by the media. The numbers kept becoming smaller and smaller on the radio after I’d been someplace where it looked like a billion people were there. There was an investment on the part of the media and the government to say that we were fewer than we were. I saw that in action but it took me longer to understand it. It’s when I became engaged with any particular issue, during the ’80s and ’90s it was AIDS and Act Up, and you watched how the media describes it. You saw it every day. I see it with Palestine all the time, how they under-report it. Any violence towards Israel is over-reported. It’s not that things are lied about, they’re just omitted, or only one part of the conflict is described. It’s like the math is off and the math is invisible. The true calculation, you know?
CW: I try to teach media literacy with a librarian to our sixth graders. We try to teach them how to read the Internet, which they read all the time. I mean, they’re on their phone all the time and they’re on their computers all the time, but it’s just this really interesting thing to watch a child compare websites and talk to you about why they think that a website is accurate or not. Then, you have to explain to them that there are tricks that people use to make themselves seem more reliable than they actually are. Yeah, I just wish more people had access to that kind of information and training because I think it would change a lot of things.
EM: When I was growing up there was a class called political science but we did nothing. We just learned the difference between congress and the Senate, and so on. It was the most boring class. It was not at all lively or contemporary. Education is invested in the opposite of creating citizens.
CW: How so?
EM: Well, in that the tools that you’re describing are not routinely given to kids. People are not taught how to vote.
CW: No, not at all. I just think about my consciousness as a person. I went to college and I went to teacher grad school, but it wasn’t until I moved to New York and started reading my own stuff and meeting people, that I had heard my black history actually explained to me. Or even had the idea that the media could be wrong. I think gaslighting is also huge when it comes to power dynamics. I think we’re all being gaslit about gender, and race, and Palestine. The work of white supremacy and hegemony is that it erases all the work and it makes it seem like it’s a natural way of things.
EM: Exactly, exactly. Just the language you just used, “my black history,” it’s so intimate and empowered as opposed to being African-American and reading history.
CW: Yeah, definitely. Or even just making it feel like I actually have a place in history. My college was kind of conservative and I feel like we just read the Federalist Papers and Machiavelli 50 times. I read The Prince and The Art of War at least once a year for college credit. My college turns out a lot of lawyers and doctors. Honestly, a lot of white men who go on to have a lot of power. Why is it that I wasn’t reading something like Angela Davis, or Frederick Douglas, or Audre Lorde? How come I didn’t learn about Audre Lorde until I moved to Brooklyn in my early 20s? Why is that? That tells us who the education system is really for. I think it’s one of the reasons why I started teaching but I didn’t realize the full expanse of it until I actually started teaching in the Bronx, and seeing what kids are being taught, and why, and how it contributes to how they see themselves.
Earlier, you talked about helping people find their own voice or signature. I interviewed Michelle Tea a few weeks ago. In her book, Against Memoir, she has an essay about your work. During the interview, she said that queer humor is very important to her curation and writing and that queer humor helps us survive. Can you talk about how humor works for you? Do you think that there is kind of queer humor that is part of queer culture?
EM: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like when I think about humor and its place in writing, I think about grade school. I went to very conservative Catholic schools. I’m thinking about how much we laughed and how important it was. We established our own secret hierarchies within the classroom. We were up against the nuns. Whether it was a song we were supposed to be singing or another activity, there was this elaborate anti-code in the room that linked us and disrupted the tedium of the day.
When it exploded, you were tossed out of the room. I spent a lot of time standing in the hall and I was in trouble all the time in grade school and junior high because I could not control my laughter. I was always trying to kindle it in my friends. When I think about it, it was like sexuality. It was like this incredible like bursting thing that had to do with the fact that we were alive despite the fact that the system was trying to tamp us down and tamp down our sexualities, tamp down our minds, tamp down our bodies, and tamp down our presence. So much of the writing process is like when I’m writing something and suddenly think of something funny. It totally comes alive. People always ask, “well, who do you write for?” You know, I don’t know that until I think there’s something funny. Then, I think I know who will think it is funny and it makes me work. The work changes velocity, it speeds up, and it starts to have a real shape. When I was a kid, when I first discovered jokes, I remember telling my dad a joke and my dad laughing, how important that made me feel, and how he seemed shocked that I told a joke. He was shocked that his own daughter was funny and that I wanted to tell him a joke. I saw me changing in his eyes at that moment and I wanted that moment repeatedly, you know? When I was young and an insomniac, I would just lie in bed making up jokes, thinking about how it would change tomorrow, how I would seem, what I would be, and who I would be. It always made you into another person. It always changed the power relation. So I think humor is just the bedrock of my writing, you know? I probably think of jokes and Gertrude Stein more than anything when I think about writing and what I do. She always talked about circulation, breathing, thinking, and talking at the same time, and this kind of simultaneity of mind and body. I think humor is right in there as a trigger.
CW: This is making me miss teaching younger grades and I think one of the hallmarks of second grade is kid humor, and just helping them figure out what’s funny, and why, and who might enjoy their humor. I like kid humor because they actually notice very gloomy things but somehow they’re still so optimistic and so giddy.
EM: You can’t resist. Kids are just mowed down by laughing, it just blows their minds. Their response is so total.
CW: I connect to kids in middle school by laughing with them. They do hilarious things and they don’t think that I notice. Iff they do something, and it’s hilarious, I’ll just crack up in front of them and we’ll share that laugh. I think they realize, “Oh, Candace, is actually a real person”.
EM: And you have to give the laugh it’s total time. If it’s happening, it becomes the message, it becomes a teaching moment like you’re describing. It doesn’t go away till it’s been given all its time. A joke has a size, which is an incredible thing. I think when you’re writing a poem, it’s the same thing. You don’t know how long a poem is, you’re starting a poem and you’re really not cognizant at the outset. The joke is alive and that’s exactly what you were just saying. It’s a teaching tool.
CW: I’ve followed you for a few years now on Twitter. You mention it in a few poems, especially “El Diablito.” What does social media do for you? What does it allow you to see?
EM: When I first started to write poems there was a lot of immediacy. There were open mics that I would take part in, so it meant that if I had written a good new poem, I could go to the thing on Friday night and my friends would be there. Once I arrived upon having a gang of poets, there being places that we agreed that we all went, and it’s St. Mark’s open mic. I mean, it was such a melange of older characters and newer characters, but we were the newer characters and so there was immediacy. In the telephone era, much more than the cell phone era, when I wrote a new poem I would call my friend and read it on the phone.
Part of writing on the internet is one way of touching this creature, which is us. It’s a new public body.
There was exchange that was immediate and that reduced as I went along. I remember one time there was a poetry organization did some kind of poetry team event (that wasn’t slam). There was a team from the Academy of American Poets and we were in competition. One competition was to write a spontaneous poem and I remember that I was trying to push Tracie Morris who was on my team into doing it, she was like, “Oh, I’m not gonna do that”. I got up and did something really dull. The opportunity to write a poem and distribute a poem at the same time just never seen like a rare egg. It seemed like a space that I could occupy.
I keep notebooks and I’m always composing. I’m composing all day long. I think most of us are doing that. When I discovered Twitter, I realized that I could come from a new kind of place of composition. I realized when I got a line, I could send it out to 25, or 50, 1,000, or 5,000 people depending on how many followers I had, and that you could engage the world regularly as a poet in a way that had never been possible. You could be alone and public at the same time. I realized that part of the difficulty with composing, in front of people was the fact of being in front of them. I can’t get up at a mic and write a poem but I can be sitting outside with my dog and get a good line and tweet it immediately. It’s revealed and hidden at the same time. It’s like the after-writing, which is private, can become public, which is an uncanny new tool.
It’s funny, I think I was going through a breakup a few years ago during a trip, and I just decided not to tweet. I just couldn’t let my insides out because I felt so vulnerable. So, I just wrote my tweets in notebooks. I still haven’t really dealt with that poem. They are like poems. I think they are pieces of poems or poems in themselves. I think they’re like poems and different from poems too. Tweeting might have produced fewer poems because it’s like jerking off in public. It’s sort of like you’re relieving some kind of tension in a way that you’re not used to. So it probably does affect the number of poems I write. But I still write plenty of poems. It’s not the problem. So that’s been an enormous tool…and there was a second part of this question that was interesting. What was it?
CW: What does it help you see?
EM: I think “who likes it” is interesting. There’s information that I get in my life that I continually think about like plants absorbing water. There’s all sorts of information. I just absorb without even thinking about it and I don’t know how that is. And I think that part of what happens when you tweet something, and a ridiculous number of people like it, is you really get this sense of how we absorb knowledge and information.
Tweeting is like the after-writing, which is private, can become public, which is an uncanny new tool.
I remember when I was reading about chaos theory and the notion of a singularity. Something that has a shape that always goes that way. I think certain lines have a singularity and it’s so interesting to experience that at that kind of a micro/macro level. It’s not like you put a whole poem out and think, “Whoa, that was a good one.” You put out this piece and everybody can put that into their own book somehow.
The search term is a much more interesting thing. We’ve all started to think of things in terms of how “If I know what I want but I can’t get to it, what piece of it would bring me there?” The search term is an interesting new use of language and I think it’s affecting us much more than we know. There’s an elephant in the room and we’re all discovering it in all these different ways. I Part of writing on the internet is one way of touching this creature, which is us. It’s a new public body. I think we were always engaging that as poets, but now, some of the dreams of the Internet are true and real and the question is which piece are true and how do we use it? Politically, we’re all obviously seeing it used incredibly by our president.
CW: Yes, and there are a lot of systems that we don’t see that use it. For example, the NYPD are constantly searching tweets from people who live in New York. IBM and Google are developing algorithms and software that allow our law enforcement agencies and the government to parse this information. There’s the NSA. It’s interesting how each person is able to search through Twitter. I do it all the time. Actually, when I wanted to read older interviews that you had done, I did that on Twitter, because it was easier to find all of that in public tweets than it was through a search engine. But also there’s this bigger level of institutions doing it at scale with terrible purposes or they do it so they can sell us things.
EM: It’s just a question of what part of our mind is out there.
CW: Yeah, the way I explain it when I do crypto and tech security trainings for artists and activists, is that it’s almost like a homunculus. Google is building a copy of you. This you that you don’t see gets coffee at the same time at the same places as you. It has all the same friends, uses all the same turns of phrase, and goes to the same stores. When I explain it that way, people are kind of shocked, and the scary thing is that we don’t own this copy of ourselves. That’s the intellectual property of Google and Facebook.
I don’t like saying that social media is good or bad, because it’s actually just a thing. What’s good and bad about it comes down to greed and what people are willing to do to monetize it or to weaponize it against other people. So, it’s definitely something I think about and talk to my students about. I tell them that down the road, everyone can Google them and see what they posted as 11- and 12-year-olds.
I’d like to ask you a final question. I love the poem “Acceptance Speech.” I feel like I probably could’ve just spent this whole interview asking questions about it. You talk about CETA, which is a program in the ’80s that funded artists in New York City. I started thinking about the Federal Art Project in the ’30s and ’40s and how most of my favorite artists, especially black artists and institutions in black neighborhoods like the Harlem Community Arts Center, were able to get money from that program. If you were given a few million dollars to pilot a similar program now, what kinds of projects would you fund, and what would you look for in the application process?
EM: I think I would just make poetry mundane. I think that I probably would assign poets to unlikely institutions across the country so there would be a pulse going on. There would be a different kind of news, a different relationship to language that would be driven and gathered locally. There are already are poets in the schools, MFA programs, and magazines.
This is just an interesting and amazing time to be a poet because of all the things we’re talking about. To normalize it by having poets occupy, not something as so obvious as libraries or the government, so I don’t even know what I’m talking about, it’s almost like—
CW: Like supermarkets?
EM: Like supermarkets. Or a farmer’s market. And maybe not even call it poetry. To have this relation to language be something that’s much more everywhere because it already is. People are already doing it. Ads are doing it, people are tweeting, and people are climbing this mountain of language in a whole different way, all the time. The program would be more like a facilitator.
Years ago I was at Naropa, and this poet Lorna Smedman, was giving a talk on Gertrude Stein. I appropriated her trick and started to use it in my classes. She used some text, maybe “Lifting Belly,” and she gave 80 people handouts. At certain points in the enterprise, she said, “Now let’s all read this together.” There was something so amazing about hearing Gertrude Stein together.
There are these plural possibilities in language, that certain poets use as part of what they do. I think that there’s so many ways that, unlike the school band, there could be a collectivity of voices in poetry and language. This could carry politics. Where there are pipes, water flows. It’s just more connectedness using poetry and language as the utility it is rather than the aesthetic object.
There could be a collectivity of voices in poetry and language. This could carry politics. Where there are pipes, water flows.
I mean it’s so funny is that when they started CETA in the ’80s, I applied and I got a little postcard that invited me to come for an interview. Somehow, I was so conditioned to get rejection and not acceptance, that I didn’t know I had been accepted. I thought I was rejected and I just threw the postcard away. Then all these friends of mine, Chris Crouse, Jeff Wright, and a bunch of my friends, created something called the Poetry Bus, and they traveled around New York State doing readings. There was a performance artist Diane Torr, who died recently, and there were CETA projects for women. I remember standing outside with Diane on a cold winter’s day for hours and being interviewed by various people but I couldn’t find my way into CETA.
It’s just so funny that I couldn’t even calculate acceptance as part of my story. That makes me think that the process is wrong. The cool thing about the Poetry Project when I got involved with it in the 70s was that I didn’t have to apply. I just came. They just made these little rooms behind the sanctuary, cold rooms with long tables, and you just walked in on Friday night and there was Alice Notley, you brought your beer and the workshop began. We were all there. There was a way of just gathering, more like Act Up than a poetry workshop. That kind of thing should be happening already and you just walk in and join it, rather than you apply to it. I would want whoever wanted to come, to come. Summer is such a jamboree of teaching poetry for a week and all these different places. I never pick the people. I never choose who takes my workshop. I always presume some people have MFAs and some people are in high school. I think it’s the best kind of workshop — that completely unstable level of proficiency. On some level, nobody knows how to write a poem. If I’m not writing a poem at this moment, I don’t know how to write a poem and I need to be brought there.
I have a lot of ideas, like doing a collective reading with CAConrad in a London gallery. These are ideas that I’ve gotten from other people like the LTTR collective. Ginger Brooks Takahashi, K8 Hardy, and Emily Roysdon were a gang of lesbians came out of the art world in the aughts. They had a magazine and gatherings. They did a Printed Matter event called called a Radical Read-in. Everybody came for two hours and read silently. You just hung out and read together. All sorts of people I know have friendships where they write together. They go to a coffee shop for two hours and write. I think collective writing is really great too. It’s nice not to think so much about production, readings, and creating little publications, as much as creating collectivities in which these activities are just happening.
M y father gave me stories, and the stories he gave me were dark. He read me Catcher in the Rye when I was nine, let me watch The Exorcist when I was 10, and rented me Misery on VHS after I broke my ankle at 11. As an adult, I developed an aversion to any non-emotionally devastating narratives as my tastes veered towards all things perverse and repugnant. Keep your George S. Kaufman to yourself, thank you very much, and bring me some Tennessee Williams! If it doesn’t end with cannibalism, why bother? Yet, when my father told me he had terminal lung disease and the only treatment was a lung transplant — a major procedure with its own risks and a fairly shaky five-year survival rate — his influence on my tastes all but vanished.
In the first weeks after his diagnosis, I experienced brief flashes of the moments just before he delivered the news. I had been eating Alfredo pasta with my fingers. In my mind’s eye, I would see my thumb and index finger, caked in chalky white sauce, pinching three loose ringlets of noodles. In “Shipwrecked,” essayist Janna Malamud Smith writes of constantly thinking of scenery from Robinson Crusoe after her mother’s death and realizing this was a metaphor. Her mother was the ship and she Robinson, ransacking the remains for valuables. I thought pasta was my Crusoe, but later realized it was a flashbulb memory. This is a term for exceptionally detailed, snapshot-like recollections of the moments preceding bad news. The mind cannot instantaneously process trauma, so it clings to its context for later examination. The details of these moments make them seem meaningful.
They are not. Desperation lacks introspection, so scraps stowed under its guidance are often benign. But this doesn’t mean the mind has no capacity for self-soothing. To paraphrase Smith, our brains often scour their repositories and deliver the necessary. With time, mine delivered. I found solace in a soapy NBC melodrama. My Robinson Crusoe was not pasta; it was the Pearsons.
One night, about a month after my father’s diagnosis, I felt a sudden urge to watch the new This Is Us even though I had missed three episodes in a row. I was transfixed. I spent the weekend re-watching the first season and then catching up on what I had missed of the second. After this, the show became a treasured weekly ritual, an obsession worthy of roughly 42 minutes of undivided attention per week.
‘This Is Us,’ given its decidedly non-literary nature, felt like a display of disloyalty to my father and his aspirations for me.
At first, I felt embarrassed by my infatuation. My dad wanted me to be, and still wants me to be, a writer. As he got sicker, my resolve to do so grew. This Is Us, given its decidedly non-literary nature, felt like a display of disloyalty to him and his aspirations for me.
To appreciate This Is Us, you must first accept that it is not high art. This is an observation, not an insult. Smith does not classify Robinson Crusoe, a rather pulp-ish novel, as high art either. Robinson is a classic, but Smith concedes a classic does not a masterpiece make. Classics, by Smith’s account, are measured less by artistic mastery and more by how many find within them something intimately necessary. Beowulf is one of the first stories in human history. You can kind of tell, but the central lesson it preaches — evil must be vanquished, but will always regenerate — helped define the moral backbone of Western culture. The story’s not great, butit’s important.
This Is Us has become an important weekly ritual for millions of Americans. In the Golden Age of Dystopian Narratives, no one particularly expected a traditional family drama to thrive. The show goes against every fashionable convention in modern television. The characters aren’t morally ambiguous, but fundamentally good people who make mistakes. The worlds in which they exist are not bleak futuristic settings or seedy underbellies, but average cities and towns. The dialogue is not laced with subtext; the characters say mostly what they mean. Yet the show was a bona fide hit from the moment it premiered in 2016, earning a slew of Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Somehow, This Is Us crammed itself into a secure spot in the otherwise bleak airwaves.
In the Golden Age of Dystopian Narratives, no one particularly expected a traditional family drama to thrive. The show went against every fashionable convention in modern television.
In the show’s early days, I watched the program on occasion but never found it particularly compelling. I could, however, understand the appeal. I remember reading a review that stated perhaps the creators of This Is Us sensed a public fatigue overlooked by other show runners. The future was uncertain due to a multitude of environmental and political factors and human existence was feeling increasingly precarious. Viewers, therefore, may have grown tired of all the high concept, high fantasy, and high cynicism in modern media and longed instead for a soothing elixir in the form of good old-fashioned stories about relatable people. The timing for a show like This Is Us to thrive was impeccable for the public and, with time, for me.
Before my father got sick, my preferred brand of solace was all things raw and brutal. The Odyssey was important to me during my formative years as a reader and this bred an ardent belief in the archetype of the journey to the underworld. To return home, one must first plunge into the dark. You cannot rise before fully embracing the fall.
To return home, one must first plunge into the dark. You cannot rise before fully embracing the fall.
Two months before my father’s diagnosis, I was clinically depressed, unemployed, and fixated on two pieces of art. I re-watched the BoJack Horseman episode “Ruthie” and read the same Tony Hoagland poem, “Disappointment,” every day. “Ruthie” employs a framing device in which Princess Carolyn’s eponymous great-great-great-granddaughter Ruthie purportedly narrates from the future, but we later learn Ruthie is a fantasy spun to cope with a miscarriage. It isn’t real, Princess Carolyn says, but it makes her feel better. The episode reflected a mentality Hoagland captured in his poem:
She played the flute, he played the fiddle and the moon came up over the barn. Then he didn’t get the job, — or her father died before she told him that one, most important thing —
At the time, the motif of engaging with the fantastical as a coping mechanism rang painfully true, but I am no longer much of a daydreamer. I have stopped envisioning my future. I don’t think about crowning professional achievements while waiting for the bus. I don’t think of names for my potential children while in line for coffee. When my father got sick, my narrative changed abruptly. I could not recalibrate. Instead of “Ruthie,” my would-be daughter was named Ramona and, just like Princess Carolyn’s offspring, she was poised and funny and articulate. I still hope to have her someday, but envisioning that baby frightens me because the familial unit I always saw surrounding her is disappearing. When we lose our loved ones, we lose aspects of our imaginations; some realities are no longer tenable, and our fantasies dissipate into the uncertain abyss of a future without.
This sense of instability makes us long for narratives more comforting than our own, seek out stories that do all the imagining for us.
When we lose our loved ones, we lose aspects of our imaginations; some realities are no longer tenable, and our fantasies dissipate into the uncertain abyss of a future without.
My present disconnection from Hoagland and “Ruthie” is probably for the best. Distancing myself from these works has let me appreciate their more understated moments. My definition of high art remains imprecise, but I do think the definition relates to the amount of impartial study a work demands. Without requiring anything from a reader or a viewer, a story is just that — a story.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with storytelling for the sake of storytelling. Some tales are told for commiseration, to share personal joys and fears without delving too deep into the complexities of such emotions. This seems to be the intent of This Is Us. The program, in fact,openly invites viewers to eschew detached scholarship and instead view the work through the lens of personal experience. I mean, this is in the title. This solicitation of personal connection is not a weak point, especially because the decision is clearly intentional. In “The Trip,” Kevin slyly remarks on this when a pair of pseudo-intellectual New York City actors show up uninvited to his family’s cabin. The interlopers laugh uproariously at campy home videos of Kevin and his siblings, trying to dissect and deconstruct this archetypal display of the American family. Kevin’s response? “It is quaint, it is American, but guess what? So are we . . . what’s wrong with being normal?”
This question gets to the meat of the narrative. It is not really a genuine inquiry as much as a not-so-subtle argument. Human beings are often conventional, uninteresting even, but average experiences are still worthy of documentation even if they’re not intellectually challenging. We can all fit in the cabin — both the brooding academics and those of us just trying to be human.
Human beings are often conventional, uninteresting even, but average experiences are still worthy of documentation even if they’re not intellectually challenging.
That being said, for all of these proclamations of authenticity, This Is Us is not by any means realistic. Some of the situations are realistic and the underlying emotions behind those situations are realistic, but the theatrics that go into conveying all this are beyond belief. The Pearsons are characters meticulously crafted in a writer’s room. They exist in a heightened reality, the Platonic Ideal of our own. This brand of storytelling was vastly more fashionable in Shakespearian times, when drawn-out speeches were the norm, but today we want our drama grounded, our characters nebulous, and our stories unsentimental. To put it in laymen’s terms, we simply shouldn’t buy the shit This Is Us is selling in 2018. And yet, we do — sometimes. Why?
In her brazenly unsentimental Blue Nights, Joan Didion talks frankly about the loss of her daughter and reflects on the shelf life of awe. The memoir is less about grief and more about the inevitability of regret. The central message is that gratitude is an entirely un-sustainable virtue and grief makes this obvious. In the most poignant passage, Didion takes us on a journey of the storage spaces in her New York apartment and shows us all her mementos of lost loved ones: fading photographs, Burberry raincoats, ivory rosaries, her daughter’s old school papers, wedding invitations from people who are no longer married.
“In theory, mementos serve to bring back the moment,” she writes, “In fact, they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment was something else I could never afford to see.”
I believe this to be the root of the flashbulb memory, the reason my brain clung to lukewarm pasta; it’s the mind’s way of recognizing and then compensating for this lack of awareness. When we confront the transient nature of life, a switch is flipped and our minds go into appreciation hyper drive. They cling to anything and everything — no matter how inconsequential — to make up for what we could never afford to see. But this is not enough. We are not cognitively capably of perpetual awe and so we are all fated to overlook and, with time, regret overlooking.
But the Pearsons? They can always afford to see.
The Pearsons never fail to recognize the Big and Important moments and such moments are marked by overt declarations of passion, prolonged soliloquies in football fields, and confrontations far too bold and poetic to ever manifest in reality. The characters do not exist in a happy world: Kevin is an addict, Kate has lifelong issues with weight and body image, Randall struggles with mental illness, and the Big Three lost their father at a young age in a horrible accident. Yet, these characters receive consolation earthly humans are not granted and watching this play out on screen is a cathartic experience.
These characters receive consolation earthly humans are not granted and watching this play out on screen is a cathartic experience.
Look at Jack’s death. Unexpected, terrible, drawn out to an almost gratuitous degree, but that funeral? Rebecca leads her children out of the funeral home with her late husband’s ashes in tow. They drive to a tree, where Rebecca recounts an emotionally resonant story, and then lays out some frank truths for the kids. Kevin and Randall don’t have to be the man of the house and it wasn’t Kate’s fault her father died, even if she insists on believing as much for the rest of her life. Everyone hugs. They scatter the ashes. End scene.
Trying to manifest this kind of reality with my own family would require such a dramatic shift in the established dynamic that it would take us years to get there, if we ever got there at all. It isn’t that my family is highly dysfunctional; it’s just that most people are simply not as aware of their emotions or as good at identifying the underlying emotions of others. I cannot picture myself, in the event of my father’s death, somehow astutely diagnosing how everyone is feeling. Even if I managed to pull this off, I doubt me giving a drawn out speech under a tree somewhere would provide the nearly instantaneous emotional relief it provides the Pearsons.
Life is not like this. Life is more like The Catcher in the Rye and BoJack Horseman, filled with conversations we will never have and realities that exist only within the confines of imagination.
Immediately after my father’s diagnosis, I cried every day for about a month. It was all very painful, but also normal, and the conventionality of my grief felt like a betrayal to my father. I thought frequently of how he pushed me to write. He gave me Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I felt he wanted me to have a literary reaction to his illness, but I had nothing original to contribute to the zeitgeist of loss. My reactions — time slowing down, the initial denial, the little things that made it feel real — were all pretty typical. The first Christmas after my father got sick, “As Time Goes By” played in the airport bar while I waited for a plane and I wanted to smash my half-full glass of IPA onto the counter and shatter it. I resented that the fundamental things applied to me. I was supposed to be different.
The conventionality of my grief felt like a betrayal to my father. I resented that the fundamental things applied to me. I was supposed to be different.
Grief is insulting because it is not interesting. If you have to go through something terrible, can’t it at least be revelatory in some way? Can’t it lead to Promethean fire instead of something quaint, American, and normal?
The only thing that felt original to me was the fact that I adapted. We often don’t talk about it, for fear of sounding cold, but even tragedies become routine with time. Some biologists theorize grief is not, in and of itself, evolutionarily beneficial. It is a side effect of having relationships. Our loved ones are advantageous to have around as packs increase the likelihood of survival. Grief, then, is an alarm reaction that occurs when the sense of security provided by a vital pack member is taken away. Luckily, we are equipped to cope. We have a way of finding new pack members to fill the void. After my father got sick, I grew closer to my friends and to some family members. I weaved a stronger network for myself and, after awhile, felt happy and secure on some days, and then on most days.
I was thankful to know I could survive psychologically despite the potential loss of my father, but I disliked feeling detached from my feelings. Even when faced with reminders — news on progression, discussions of treatments — that my father was no more than a bundle of increasingly fragile organs hauled around in a flesh sack, I found myself unconsciously repressing my emotional reaction. I went from crying every day to being unable to cry at all.
Grief is insulting because it is not interesting. If you have to go through something terrible, can’t it at least be revelatory in some way?
To combat the sense of numbness, I turned to all my usual desolate narratives only to find they sparked no emotional reaction. It was only that night a month later, when I rediscovered the Pearsons, that this numbness broke. In the episode, the family goes to therapy together. The show overtly spells out some painful truths about sibling rivalry, addiction, and all those familial arguments that are never fully resolved. But I did not particularly care about the subpar dialogue and gross misrepresentation of what therapy actually entails.I sobbed, and it was the freeing and restorative cry I sorely needed.
Roger Ebert always said you have to judge a work by the standards of what it wants to accomplish. This Is Us is essentially emotion porn, but that’s the point. For that, four stars.
Right now, I do not need convoluted dramas, because — whether I liked it or not — my grief is not convoluted. This Is Us is my go-to cry aid because it does not require heavy analysis. While my father, who does not watch the show, may not consider it literary, I don’t need it to be. This Is Us reflects my brain’s base emotions back at me, and reminds me it’s okay to be normal.
For an hour a week, I choose to exist in a world that strives only to show me an overblown performance of human experience. She played the flute and he played the fiddle. The moon came up over the barn, and then he didn’t get the job. But he got to wax poetic in a football field and teach us all a valuable lesson about how short life is. Her father indeed died before she told him that one important thing, but in her late 30s a kindhearted fiancé and a lovable shelter dog helped close the wound.
In the back of the house there is a corner room that does not open onto the lush and well-tended garden. Its shutters are eyelids opening and closing with the wind. Light comes in small beams from the courtyard where pots are being washed. A woman is sweeping dirty water away from the steps outside the window. At a certain spot behind the empty teak wardrobe that barricades the door, all noises from the courtyard and the kitchen it adjoins are muffled by thick wood. Crouching there, it is not possible to hear the women shouting at each other, mistress to servant and back again, scolding and fretting, cramming the small house full of nervous life.
Flat on my stomach, facing the wall, I can look at my paintings. They are vivid miniatures, set low, near the molding. Their tiny faces sport green Kathakali dancing masks, leering with painted lips and yellow hair like aging American starlets, their glossy eyes faded. My paints have dried in large, expensive tubes littered on the floor, strewn in the dust along with tiny sable brushes that were once a woman’s accessories. The mirror on the wall is British, cracked and decadent looking with too many faded gilt curlicues around it. Amid old newspapers and combs black with hair dye, I keep my shaving kit, and my traveling case. The mirror, like the room, is dark. When I look into it I see the sweat on my forehead and chin and wonder how it remains in the air-conditioned coolness.
I shelter myself from the house with second-hand screens, four of them, made of wood that looks better for the dust on it, less costly and more secure. I write after the others have gone to bed, hiding my diaries and papers during daylight hours. Sometimes their faces flash by me in the darkness, as if they were peering in rudely through a space between the screens. Only the visitors are overcome by curiosity; the niece from the States who looks at me with her little cat face, jeans curving around soft hips; my sister the doctor, talking about leper colonies at tea, bringing medicine and the toasters when she comes, making the house smell of Ben-Gay and bread. Even the trees in the garden move away from the house, as if in disgust. The living room is brightly lit behind embroidered cotton drapes. On each evening of her stay, from behind the screens, crouching. I hear the news on television and listen to loud, excited voices talking above it, nearly drowning it out. The niece is always quiet when her mother and my father shout about corruption and bribery or point to picket signs and angry crowds when they appear on the old-fashioned screen.
No one in this house knows that I listen to a radio hidden in my room, and that I read imported copies of The Herald Tribune. Or that I spend the money given to me by Father on tobacco, and go to the same place almost every afternoon with my pockets bulging. Nixon, Watergate — my sister doesn’t know how much I know, how much I hold fast in my memory from those times. Imprisonment, Emergency. Who wouldn’t have been paranoid then? But it’s my sister who’s the smart one, the doctor lady. She thinks of us as dull-witted rice-eaters, waiting for her borrowed, Anglo china plates and blue jeans, silk ties and pantyhose, perfume in fish shaped bottles, white linen napkins and forks — so we won’t eat with our hands — expensive bolts of brilliant cloth,smelling slightly of glue, precious… “The exchange rate is wonderful,” my sister remarks, at least with the grace to laugh uneasily. Once she brought paints on a visit — “Padma picked them out specially,” she explained, handing over a shiny gift-wrapped box. Padma’s gift. They are beautiful and useless now. Exotic.
I don’t voice my opinions anymore because I know they only pretend to listen, looking at me as if I still ranted and raged as I did in the early days of my illness. Break down. Maybe schizophrenia, all his ranting…I can hear them whispering, concerned. The cleaning woman who goes everywhere, poking into wardrobes for silk pieces and loose change, cleans carefully around my teak screens, never daring to touch anything behind them. On trips to the kitchen to fill my coffee mug, I watch her slowly moving and she peers at me, afraid. That’s what the barricade is there for.
From behind the screens I can smell food from the kitchen, the smell cleaving to the carpets, damp, stronger than the scent of leaves and sweat from the courtyard. The old man calls me “demon” when he sees me eating, muttering as if I were still a young child and he were bending over my pillow promising candies in my ear. I am his youngest son; years and years ago he called me “eyes” in Tamil, which meant I was the dearest. Then in school I didn’t turn out like his nine good children, neither physicist nor lawyer, neither doctor nor engineer. I got sick, I remind him often, just before my college exams. I got very ill, it was terrible. First tuberculosis, then something else, something in my head. I was in pain, for pity’s sake. It became too late, impossible to work. To do anything but sit or stand very quietly, in peace, left to myself. I’ve tried to explain. “But you’re a grown man now,” Father says in disbelief, “and that was years ago.” He talks about my hair and the sweat on my face, jabbing at my clothes, fuming, gesticulating, until my mother stands between us, the veins bulging in her frail hand on his arm.
Mother used to come at night, years ago, before I put up the screens, to ask how I was, but now she’s afraid. Once I pushed him hard, not her, never her, and I felt disgust at his shriveled skin, his nasal voice, always skeptical, his tiny well-read eyes like an elephant’s, nearly blind but remembering everything.
On some evenings when the house is empty my father and I sit in the library pretending to read, not looking at each other, crickets caught between the pages of old books, gray moths appearing from the bare bulb on the ceiling as if by spontaneous generation. He taps his cane as he turns the pages, licking his soft, wrinkled thumb as he lifts the corners like a toady hidden in reams of office paper, calculating newborn deaths and taking bribes. I stare at him first if he’s been bothering me that day. “Have you taken your medicine?” he asks in English. Patrician, concerned, I am silent. In the dim light he can see the outline of my face, my bones almost his bones, my hands threatening. “Don’t hit me,” he says, as a warning, though I never do, and he knows it. It has become an evening ritual, more honest than prayer.
When my sister comes in the summers there are annual rituals — special prayers, more sweets, more garlands lying on the puja-room floor or hung in glossy pictures of the gods. She calls for the barber to come in the evening. He does his work squatting on the steps leading out toward the blue main gate of the house, never coming in the house. He squints up at the dimming sunlight and tells my sister’s son to hold still — he uses scissors and a gleaming old fashioned razor. The little boy shakes his head no, rubs his soft, protruding belly and laughs. Once I watched from the doorway, making him laugh even harder by imitating the girlish, feline sounds of his voice, until my sister stood in front of me and edged the door nearly closed. “Leave him alone, he’ll get himself cut,” she muttered quietly, not looking up at my face. I stared at her as she turned away, aware of the fresh smell of her hair and clothes. “Why don’t you take a bath,” she advised, watching the boy, her shoulders tensed until I moved out of sight.
The large book cases in the corridor between my room and the puja-room are opened in the summers for my sister’s daughter. Her back pressed against the wall, eyes fish-flat behind thick glasses, she reads old books, like Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyyat, in the failing light. “Conserve your eyes,” my father says when he passes on his way to prayer, rapping on her glasses with a finger. He adds with an old woman glimmer in his voice, “Near-sightedness is a reading disease.” She puts the book down, covers her face with her palms for a moment and laughs, as if pretending to put her eyes away.
When she was younger, she asked me all kinds of questions about Indian politics, Shakespeare, the price of sandalwood soap in villages, why I had painted on the walls. She would nod calmly at the answers and say little. She would lean against the door of my room near the book cases, staring like a pretty cat with blue-black eyes and secret thoughts. “Don’t bother Jagat Mama,” my mother began to say, when the girl grew older, and she nodded as if she understood. “Leave Padma alone,” my father said once, stopping me on my way out from taking salt from the kitchen. Now with her large feet in new American tennis shoes, with her hidden breasts and her delicate neck, she only glances at me now and then with that same mute questioning look, grown-up ivory jangling at her wrists.
When my sister comes every summer, Father comes out of his room to talk to her. My niece and mother smile and whisper to each other as my sister talks about San Francisco, New York, Santa Fe, the old man repeating the names, drawing them out with his proud camel lips. My sister doesn’t know that I’ve seen the names in books, in the paper. I’ve heard them pronounced properly on my secret radio. They talk about the days she has left in India, counting up the brief nights and muddy afternoons watched from the window of the genteel Ambassador car, traffic stopped for thin men driving even thinner cows across the road and being photographed by the niece’s new expensive camera. I listen to them without hearing words, staring from behind my book at the faces. I am quiet in my dusty chair, sitting away from the soft light that hangs over the center of the room. Crickets chirp near my ear on the window, the light bounces off the limbs of a black dancing Shiva that has been placed on top of the television set. I watch their faces as they think about the tiny airport, old man and woman pressed against a large window with other damp cotton cloth-wrapped bodies, looking out at the plane with tiny windows about to take off. Men in white, Western style uniforms will dot the runway, red English and Hindi letters juxtaposed on glossy machine white wings. Before leaving the house they will pray, jeans and mustard seeds packed, my niece and sister looking awkward in new saris. They will mix languages in a sad babble of exclaiming. When my parents cry they look like blind newborns, skulls soft and nearly bald, features melting so that the sharp creases of age grow mild and nearly invisible.
In the early afternoons, after lunch has been cleared away, I sit in the dark room near the door, listening to the servant wash pots outside; my travel kit propped on my knees. The women sleep lightly in a cool room, the door closed, the light soft on their thick eyelashes. I close my eyes, waiting, wondering if the old man is too tired to watch me. He asks me questions like a child. “Where are you going? Where do you go in the afternoons?” When he has not eaten well he demands, “Why don’t you go get a job, demon, if you feel strong enough to go out every day?” He combs back his few strands of white hair, crackling them with static and impatience.
He follows me to the main road only on dry afternoons. I sense the gate swinging open again behind me. I hear my father softly complaining to stray dogs. “That man shoveling dirt over dead bodies is better than you,” he said once, when he saw me stop to look at a young man with dirt on his teeth. “He’s working at an honest job.” I made no answer, walking on as if he were a beggar I heard whimpering in the street. My father continued. “He isn’t draining the life out of his parents.” I took longer strides that day, aware that my breathing was strained, aware of the wind pressing against my back.
In the afternoons, I lose him easily in the crowd, when we get to the rikshaw stand where drivers are always waiting. He follows me only to demonstrate that he can, I suppose. The effort of the gesture is enough. He turns back without running after me, wiping his high forehead with a white handkerchief my mother ironed herself, and slowly starts the walk home. Chewing paan and leaning on his auto-rikshaw, the driver watches the old man as I climb into the back. The driver is a young boy who comes to the big house in his rikshaw on some evenings, waiting by the blue gate to take my sister and niece to the bazaar. He notices the flowers in my niece’s hair, glancing down at her soft brown fingers gripping the bar against his warm back before asking where to go.
The driver doesn’t need to ask where I am going. Like all auto drivers he is careless, even dangerously fast. I can barely see the road from the tear in the plastic sheet that serves as a door. I grip the metal bars tightly, knuckles showing white, tasting the potatoes and rice I ate before I left. I am thrown forward when the driver stops for a person or an animal. I swallow the different tastes in my mouth, remembering the salt hoarded in my room from the kitchen in newspaper packets. I imagine the peppermint taste of the crushed medicine my sister bought for me this time, which my mother will soon start mixing in the salt. When I fell ill again last year, Father cried on the phone to my sister long distance. No doubt the connection took hours to get, with long silences and wrong houses woken up somewhere in the middle of the night by a sudden ceaseless ringing. After the phone rang in the right house, darkness here and light there, Mother excited and barely whispering, “It has come, it has come,” in girlish Tamil — I could hear my sister loud and soothing, yelling calm assurances through the static.
The women stand in the doorway as the rikshaw pulls up, watching for me and tittering slightly. They’ve never asked my name, but they know who I am. I wear dirty orange kurtas like scarves around my neck and knotted around my waist so they will set me apart from other men. They speak to me in more measured voices. I pay them well with Father’s money. They don’t smoke cigarettes in my presence, though they accept the tobacco I bring for them with gentle smiles and nods, hiding their eyes. I have seen each one of them with mouths wiped clean of paint, hair loose and smelling of hibiscus, laughing at their children and stroking black kajal on their babies’ eyelids. My face is dry when I lie on their cotton sheets, gather up the hems of their thin embroidered saris in my hands. The sweat disappears from my chin and my cheekbones, though the rooms here are warm and the breeze is barely stirred by low ceiling fans.
At times I stay past the late evening, missing dinner at home but not needing to eat. I stay for the morning, sensing the presence of women waking and stretching their smooth, bare arms in flats above and below me, hearing children fighting downstairs as if they whispered in my ear, and the dogs from the street below as if from a great distance away. I hear bangles jingling from downstairs where sugar in coffee is burning, the smell stronger passing from the downstairs windows to where I stand on the sturdy balcony, waiting for the night to pass into morning, listening to the woman in the room behind me as she unwinds the sari from her slender hips.
The balcony is made of slate gray concrete that, where chipped away, looks like the softened surface of stone dancers in northern temples, with faces torn away by harsh, factory polluted wind. There is a thin black railing that stretches out in a winding pattern of water snakes around the balcony, with the thick slabs of concrete rising up from the base like graceless fingers pointing up much higher than a small child’s head. I have seen the children often play up here; I have heard their laughter as I stood waiting. There are spaces between the thick slats for their small brown faces to look out.
At night most people in Bombay and all the big city-villages far from here throw dinner parties, and use their balconies to hear moonlit fake American music with evening-gowned, light-skinned ladies beside them. Here the smells below the balcony predominate: corn cooking in street fires, pigs nudging garbage, incense burning in a window, cows leaving holy excrement for fuel, autos letting off fumes while drivers gossip, smoke and count money. But there is nothing at all to see on the urchin-abandoned street until just before the sun rises.
The paint on the railing is chipped away in places, showing metal that glows underneath in the dark like sudden fireflies. The rest of the railing is slowly revealed by the dim progress of morning, until the full, unblanching sunlight hits it, is seized by it, and is made burning black. But there is no hint of that when the early morning buses approach the street empty, pausing until the motor scooters have passed and the factory workers have disappeared inside, five to a bus seat and some hanging on the railing above, peering through small windows. Their faces can barely be seen from the balcony, but when they smile their betel-stained teeth gleam.
For an hour between the departure of the buses and the appearance of wobbling rice-flour faces and flower design on the ground of the balcony, new smells of clarified butter and talcum powder twist out from the room inside, lingering after those smells have been replaced by cooking green beans, tiny pickled mangoes, and saffron-flavored rice. A woman’s acrid sweat tinges the stone as the seven o’clock sun approaches. I avoid her eyes as she moves about next to me, hiding my eyes with a hand, staring down at the loud crows beating their wet wings below to drive the garden awake.
There is a child’s school uniform draped over the side of the railing which never dries completely. Several small pictures have been inserted in the slates of the balcony; the expectant face of the goddess of learning, a bubble-gum wrapper full of salt, and a much-handled picture of an erotic couple on the porch of the Temple of the Sun torn from a tourist magazine. At times, I finger a worn Vishnu prayer book with doodles that blind the serpent upon which the god is resting. I picture the old man praying under his breath at the tea table. The balcony is an unsmiling witness, uncritical save for an occasional blast of wind or smog that it harbors which ruffles my hair suddenly.
And the trees outside the balcony, not whispering like pines in a Canadian forest, not readying themselves to scatter and blush like New England trees after the first spring respite from the cold? There may be trees like that in white winter resorts at hill stations, modelled after slick postcards, but here the trees are lush and solitary. There is one great and rustling tree, tropical, green, shimmering and wild, never cut back from the balcony so that on certain nights it sweeps drying cloths with branches like fingers gesturing and rolling a cigarette. “Isn’t that a banyan? Or perhaps a neem?” I imagine an American accented voice saying, pointing at it, as young hippies stand on the balcony and marvel at the rustic charm of the street. A washerwoman stricken with typhoid in some rainy night has been seen crouching down next to the trunk outside the main gate, looking up warily at the balcony and the people.
I know there will be no dinner parties here, and music that issues from the room opening onto the balcony — a woman singing in Hindi about a god being mistaken for a deer — is often quickly and abruptly ended. But there will be moonlight. Peace in the leaves of the tree and the awkward protective slats of the balcony after screaming fights about men, the price of school books, the length of a child’s new frock and the rust on the body of a new black bicycle. Its wheels are closely entwined with the circle designs of the black railing of the balcony. Leaning forward in my seat, I remember my father named me Jagatishwaran, “lord of worlds”, holding me aloft.
In the darkness approaching I look at the ground, peering down through the slats, seeking out the sudden fireflies, the lighted tiny lamps in the windows, roadside meal-fires in the street. But there is nothing to look at in the twilight except the feeling of night itself in the slammed doors and fading child-shouts on the street below. The promise of moonlight contains the promise of the burned incense and rice-flour tracings that I will see there again in the morning, after the view and the objects of the street calmly and fatalistically appear.
One evening when I return to the house it is the end of the rainy season, nearly time for my sister, who is so adept at comforting, to leave here for her American city. They have all gone to the market again. A pink carnation has budded, tender, in the box of green placed outside the front door. I crush a few petals underneath my tongue, wondering why they are not sweet, sucking them like candy, resisting the dank smell that permeates the unlit rooms. Even the maid servant has finished for the day. She will return in the morning to clean pots and thalis piled high in the stone sink in the courtyard, excavating soap and dishrags as if they were moist treasures.
I sense dust on the covers of old books in the corridor, their pages crumbling — a good wind would blow away the words, the fine English print. I wonder if the old man would even mind that only husks were left if every one of their pages were gone. I run a hand along the old curved spines lined in neat rows before opening my door.
It’s darker here than in the rest of the house, though there is a small kerosene lamp burning. “You’ll set a fire,” the old man always says to me. “Use the good American fluorescents.” I can see my niece’s hair gleaming in the light, near my paintings, her head bent forward. She sits cross-legged on the floor, old books lying open all around her. Her back is to the door, her wide shoulders relaxed. The room smells of turpentine. “Near-sightedness is a reading disease,” I say, in my best grandfather voice.
She turns quickly, her eyes solemn, hiding something in her hand. The dust makes her cough. She smiles when she recovers herself. “Look,” she says, opening her hand. I look away from her, afraid. There are pictures of stone Cholas maidens in a few books left carelessly open, revealing contemplative moon-faces, wide hips and shoulders, girl-breasts, gray and perfect in relief. “Please look,” she says again. I see the brushes in her hand. There are caps on the clean tubes of paint now, a water jar on my dreams, a tiny palette made of wood. “It’s carved,” she says, smiling. There are drop cloths on the ground, as if my work could begin at any moment. She is silent, drying off the last delicate brush with her long fingers. “Why?” I ask, not exactly unkind.
“They are gifts from me,” she says. The teak screens are closer together than before, as if they have been gently moved aside and then carefully eased back into place, order preserved. She drops the last brush into a child’s pencil box on the floor, probably her brother’s. The paintings are brighter in the lamplight, the smiles on the mask still lewd and masculine. The wall above them is blank, expectant like Padma’s face. “Please get out,” I tell her. She takes off her thick glasses and wipes the sweat from the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are distant, as if she were listening to crows settling on the roof for a moment.
“Have you seen this?” she asks, holding up a book and pointing. A woman smiles in black and white, her hips exaggerated, legs strong, arms bent with hands pointing upwards, fingers curled. We stare for a few moments, meditating. “I know all the hand gestures mean something,” Padma says, her voice soft. She adds excitedly, “Some of the dancers in this photo are wearing Kathak masks like the ones in your mural.” I look away from her at the dresser, at combs and open bottles of hair dye and smile furtively. The book in her hand was once before in this room, on that dresser, open to the picture of a woman balanced on a tiny demon’s back, vanquishing greed with her graceful stomping feet. I had made marks on the pictures of the dancers. In a notebook hidden under the bed there are line-drawings of masks, of temple-dancers — all useless, exotic and beautiful.
She stands up, the book still in her hand. I gather the others, shutting away the orange colored abstract Ganeshas, Rajput miniatures with black staring beetle eyes, Nataraja dancing on the top of a temple, trapping gaudy life between the fading covers of old books. She takes them from me, brushing my hands with her smooth child fingers. Her hair has come undone from the effort of the afternoon; suddenly I feel ashamed. I promise to work on my paintings again, and her eyes open wide with pleasure. When she smiles like my mother I look down, unable to thank her. “You know, I may be in love,” she blurts out, pausing at the door and balancing books on her hip, trembling slightly. “Uncle, please don’t tell.” She disappears behind the screens. In the dark somewhere the town is closing, and my sister will come soon.
In the morning, I watch my niece, waiting for clues. She is quiet as usual, setting off on long walks when the women are bathing or asleep, or hiding by herself in the garden, reading secret letters. “When she was small she was afraid of snakes,” my mother says fondly, waiting for the vegetable seller with his cart and watching Padma move a chair behind the trees. My father retreats to a back room with a book, preparing for abandonment as my sister packs and talks to her husband on the phone. She does her packing everywhere as usual, suitcases open on the floor and in the landings, saris and scarves mingled in radiant profusion, lists made on crumpled envelopes and pieces of newspaper. Sometimes Padma swings on the gate with young children or waits while they play, serene and maternal. “Only one more trip to the market,” my sister promises, when she sees Padma waiting at the gate for the auto-rikshaw. When he finally arrives, her smile is pure and flushed, the twilight settling on her neck. Her mother waits in the rikshaw as Padma slowly gathers up her full skirt using both hands. “Don’t forget to lock the front door,” my sister tells me, and I nod, dutiful. Padma’s hair is loose and long enough to fall in front of the cold metal pole that separates the driver from his passengers, her black curls helpless, streaming down as the rikshaw jerks forward. Strands of Padma’s hair are crushed between the pole and the driver’s back, tickling his bare skin through the white cotton shirt. “You’re imagining things,” my sister would say, if I described it. Her voice would be angry. On trips from the square with the driver I say nothing, watching him in the rear-view mirror until he turns once, his eyes full of laughter, stopping for an old woman who’s wading with difficulty between animals and bikes. He is young, I realize, like my niece. We wait. “My name is Ramdas,” he whispers in Hindi, like the medieval bard by the same name. Then he looks ahead again, lurching forward quickly before anyone can cut him off, because the old woman is safe now, after all. He resumes hurtling onto my usual, my only, destination.
Months later, standing on the balcony in the early afternoon while there is still light, I read Padma’s letter. It is the first time she has written to me since she was young, when she held onto the gate like a child, waiting only for her mother. The letter is new but is already faded, crumpled, sent by air-mail on cheap blue aerogram with wispy ballpoint pen handwriting like mine. “Uncle,” she wrote, after some grown-up pleasantries. “I thought of you when Ramdas told this to me.”
‘Wild-eyed, blacker in your brows than crow-black nights, your legs are twisted into heavy branches, rivers fallen in your tangled hair. You take me up into the dance, your arms taut with the tiger-tooth bracelets. I was silk-clad and pale in the incense-burning light. Bells and gongs clamoring, emptying my mind of fear, I forgot that you had burned the body of the god of love when he teased you with his beauty.’
A man puts washed clothes on the balcony, nodding politely, cutting the cloudless sky into dark, wet shapes. A bottle-green sari mingles sinuously with the shining body of black lattice. The dark green is flecked with gold crisscrosses and flanked by deep yellow borders of crushed silk ending in tangled threads. It is faded with many washings, a pleasure gift when there was no chiffon to turn the eye away from grandmother cloth. I put my face up against it, as if smelling my mother.
Days after waiting on the balcony, I stay at home, away from the women. It is the day my niece Padma has been scheduled to leave. There is no time for argument or recrimination — every member of the household strains in silence under heavy suitcases, loading two taxis. The taxi-drivers are fed, given tea, made to engage in small talk and polite price-negotiation. Sweating, I look in my room and see that the paints are just where Padma has left them. I wipe my face with a damp cloth, staring at the mirror and feeling impatient. To go to the airport, I will have to bathe. My face is dry in the bathroom mirror, even with steam rising from the walls. Turning from her post beside the window, Padma smiles when she sees that my hair is washed and combed. There is a red tear-drop in the center of her forehead. Her hair is bound in rose and daisy petals like a bride’s.
Padma’s hands are soft, pressed together. She prostrates herself before the old man, then the old woman, her mother looking on. They touch her smooth hair with approving, wrinkled hands. She eludes them by promising to be back in half an hour, walking quickly down the street. Her mother sits on the front steps, saying nothing as Padma’s younger brother plays in the driveway. He giggles, imitating me as I describe the route the taxi-drivers should take with my hands. The old man stands behind my sister, hands resting on her shoulders, little eyes squinting in the light.
In the taxi I sit in front with the driver, next to my father. His elbow is sharp in my side when the driver makes a wrong turn. When we reach the airport early he wilts, no longer angry. He waits before opening the door, trapping me inside the car for a long moment. My mother’s voice is unnaturally bright as she adjusts the back of my shirt collar, her hands shaking a little. “Appa,” my sister says softly, when she helps him out of the car, easily bearing her weight.
The airport is crowded, hot, inefficient. There are nuns everywhere. “Oh, don’t sneer at everyone,” my sister says, her voice matter of fact, before she takes her place in line with Padma. I help the taxi drivers load suitcases onto a cart, which is then wheeled to the tiny airplane and loaded on by men who soon become tiny dots in the distance. I put change in vending machines, buying copies of the Times, bottles of Limca soft drinks. My father, rooted firmly to the earth like some ascetic waiting for a boon, says nothing. He stands in one spot as people push past him impatiently.
Padma and her mother become dots too as the line of passengers moves toward the runway. We wait at the large glass, looking out, old man and woman waving, bodies pressed against tall windows, straining hard to see. Long after Padma and her mother are hidden from view, we stand there and move into ourselves, imagining trays of candy and bright-painted stewardesses, hearing the canned Ravi Shankar music, breathing the sweet, stale pressurized air that must be coursing through the plane at that moment.
Weeks later, in my sanctuary with Padma’s neat letter in my hand, I breathe easily, wondering at the purity of polluted air.
“Ramdas said you were named after Shiva. I miss you. Please write soon, and paint. Your loving niece,” she has written, printing her name at the end in round childish letters. I turn the blue leaf over in my hand, looking at the address of my father’s house…Jagatishwaran, Padma has printed before it, with no last name, only lord of worlds.
A woman stealing up soft behind me, having first turned to the radio in the room below, places her hand on my neck, her lips soft on my cheek. I put Padma’s letter in my pocket, thinking of how I stood in the airport, watching the old man and woman stare out the window as the plane began to move. As we watched it take off I had moved close behind my father, bracing myself against his sobs, my hands steady on his bony shoulders. “Let’s go home,” my mother said, fumbling for a handkerchief. They looked up at me as if they were children, Father’s eyes almost erased by tears. “Please get the taxi, Bhuvan,” he had said, calling me by name.
Now, here on the balcony, I feel bare female arms around my waist, woman-soft while a radio plays a song below. My hands on hers, flat against my stomach, we brace each other gently, waiting for dark to settle on the street.
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