It was right around the moment all seemed lost and her man lay dead on her lap, the moment the friar had left her to do whatever, when the candles addressed their warmth to her alone, their crackling sound like angel wings, like insects pinched above the flame, the moment her lover’s lips lost their warmth, and the slab felt extremely slablike, cold as the crypt around her, which she had chosen as the best location for this performance but was lately feeling a bit dramatic and — she could admit — a little silly, the candles smoking up the place and dripping wax all over, walls lined with wrapped figures of the proud familial dead, this place being so gross and forbidden even from her most wicked cousins’ most wicked dares that she had never so much as touched its heavy iron door and now here she was camping out, long after dark with a man’s body pinning her, it seemed, to the slab; pushing him off her required setting down his dagger, but at last he slumped aside, and his head when it tipped from the low-set stone bumped on the floor like a fresh summer melon and she saw him then for what he was, a dead boy in his own grave, glory fading with the night, candle wax stuck to the long lashes she had loved until that moment. When she pulled herself up and felt the pins and needles of feeling come back to her legs, she nearly cried out with a keen and sudden sense of everything, of the whole glorious world filled to bursting, wild and ready for her and, stumbling over herself, she made a break for the iron door and the east, where life itself would rise to meet her with the sun.
Psyche in the Dark
by Miranda Schmidt
When he comes at night, he is invisible. She hears his approach in the sound of his footsteps, in the pulse of his breath in the dark. He could be anything.
Some nights, she imagines him human. Some nights she imagines him monster. A man’s head. A snake’s body. A wolf’s teeth. Hooves.
She is not here by force, though she has trouble remembering when it was that she made this particular choice, how it was that she entered into this peculiar marriage. The rules are simple: she cannot see him. She may roam the castle freely but, when he comes to her, she must cast no light.
Her sisters believe she has married a monster. They visit her. They give her advice. Light the lamp, they tell her. See the monster. Kill him. Free yourself.
Sometimes they almost convince her. Sometimes, when they leave, she feels so sure of what she must do. But, as she listens to the deep breaths of her husband’s helpless sleep, she cannot bring herself to cast the light.
In the dark, she lives in possibility. Her husband might be a monster or a god or a man. He may be ugly or beautiful. He may be human or beast. Sometimes she believes it would be possible for her to spend her life in this way, to trust in not knowing, never knowing, the truth of her marriage.
But when the lamp is lit, as she knows, one day, it must be, her marriage, her life, all the nights behind her and all the nights to come, become singular. So, for now, she keeps the lamp beneath the bed, the knife beneath the pillow, and when her husband comes to her, she keeps her eyes closed so she can feel him in the dark.
I f you’ve ever been to a wedding, you’re likely to have heard the following lines wistfully recited by a teary-eyed bridesmaid reading from a perfectly embossed cue card printed by the bride: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.” Or perhaps you’ve gotten to see a best man reach back to his English major roots to serenade the happy couple with the Bard’s wedding-themed sonnet: “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove.” These words, staples of nuptial readings, hope to both invoke and describe the union being celebrated. Their rose-colored (or, rosé-colored) vision of love feels self-evident — love is obviously kind, Karen. But this Hallmark ideal of “love,” which is also “not self-seeking, it is not easily angered,” and, “is an ever-fixed mark/That looks on tempests and is never shaken” does us all a disservice. Much like the ideals of romance that Hollywood tends to lob our way, these images oflove oppress in their implausibility. Some of us aren’t as patient and kind. Nor are we as easy to love as these anodyne readings would have us aspire to be. How dispiriting then to have to preclude oneself from these capital-L love stories.
Those hollow if hallowed banalities came flooding back while watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread — mostly because the entire film seems hellbent on snidely snickering at such naive if aspirational ideas of romantic love. It may well be the perfect swoon-worthy paean to romance between two equally-matched pricks I didn’t know we needed. Turns out, it is possible to make a romantic movie about love relationship that’s not exactly exploitative—at least not in the expected ways—but nevertheless hinges on quite appalling behavior from both parties involved.
Reynolds Woodcock, the charmingly cantankerous fashion designer played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is not someone you’d describe as patient nor humble, and most of what he alters are hems and sleeves. He’s a perfectionist when it comes to his work and he doesn’t suffer fools, holding both those who make and wear his designs to the same high standards — at one point he all but yanks a dress off a woman whom he feels is disrespecting his gorgeous gown. One doesn’t envy the person who chooses to be with him, and yet the film gives us not the story of such a woman, but has us rooting for them both by the time the credits roll.
“Reynolds has made my dreams come true,” Alma (Vicky Krieps) tells us in the opening moments of the film, “and I have given him what he desires most in the world…every piece of me.” As an introduction to the power dynamics at play, the line all but demands you be horrified. Warmly lit by the fire and placidly looking at her off-screen interlocutor (a doctor, we find out later), this young woman comes off as perfectly happy and pliable. We’re not given any indication of what her dreams may have been — surely just getting to be by Reynolds’ side — but that she’s so happy to have paid such a high price for them is discomfiting. When Anderson then cuts to images of the fastidious Reynolds getting ready in the morning, applying face cream, brushing his hair, pulling his socks up, adjusting his pants, you fear this will be yet another tale of a brilliant but difficult man strong-arming women into submission.
You fear this will be yet another tale of a brilliant but difficult man strong-arming women into submission.
The tyrannical man and his ever-doting wife may well be a story as old as time — would she then come to domesticate him or would she merely learn to bow and genuflect? — but once we see the idyllic meet-cute between the young waitress-turned-muse/model Alma and Reynolds (she stumbles, he smiles) the film hints that the prickly love affair that ensues will be something much more entrancing. He is imperious and demanding. This is what he orders for breakfast: Welsh rarebit with a poached egg on top (not too runny!), bacon, scones, butter, cream, jam (not strawberry!), lapsang tea, and some sausages. She, on the other hand, is accommodating, letting him keep the order form where she’d just jotted down all of this, blushing at his clear advances though showing she’s no wilting wallflower when she hands him a note with her name on it addressed to “the hungry boy.”
The infantilizing nickname, not to mention the unavoidable connection Alma makes between Reynolds and his hunger, give her a welcome sense of agency. She’s coy but also cutting. She may wince when, on their first date, he takes her measurements and offhandedly comments that she has no breasts. “It’s my job to give you some,” he adds. “If I choose to.” But she keenly understands how someone so boisterously insecure as Reynolds needs to be handled. She no doubt takes her cue from his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) who appeases her brother when she needs to but reveals herself to be just as deliciously cold as Reynolds can get. “Don’t pick a fight with me,” she advises him at one point, without even batting an eyelash. “You certainly won’t come out alive. I’ll go right through you and it’ll be you who ends up on the floor. Understood?”
To love Reynolds is to bear the brunt of his unkind behavior, suffering through breakfast quarrels, dinner spats, and occasional bratty outbursts. But to live with him is to find ways of going on the offensive without resorting to those very same tricks. Lest she be mistaken for a compliant little girl who’ll merely turn the other cheek and soon be discarded — like the young woman who’s dating Reynolds at the start of the film and gets summarily dismissed as if her contract work at the house had been fulfilled — Alma soon finds ways to stand up to her lover. She does so with kindness, yes, but with a kindness that’s rooted incruelty.
Like some witch in a grim (and perhaps Grimm) fairy tale, this beatific beauty actually goes ahead and poisons Reynolds with mushrooms she picks herself. It’s her way of dominating him, her way of claiming supremacy within the domestic space of the kitchen while also indulging in his most base desires. The “hungry boy” is punished by the very means he was ensnared. Earlier in the film, knowing she still has an unwavering grip on his wants, she asks him if he’s had enough to eat (“you seem thirsty,” she adds), appropriating the language of consumption to lead them giddily into the bedroom. That the film frames this gesture as romantic — Alma gets to be the one to take care of Reynolds, nursing him back to life, and quieting his insufferable bouts of arrogance — offers a radical image of what love can be between two people. Perhaps not one worth emulating, but one worth witnessing in mirth and horror from afar. Marrying its bombastic score (provided by Anderson staple, Jonny Greenwood) with its rom-com trappings (its comedy is more mordant than usual for the genre, but one can’t deny the fact that Anderson takes us from meet-cute to makeover to domestic rift to a happy reconciliation in ways that feel decidedly familiar), Phantom Thread begs to be understood not as realism or didacticism but as mythic and archetypal. At first offering a portrait of the toxicity of masculine bravado, which Reynolds outright admits is mostly a front, Phantom Thread ends up telling the story of a couple who finds tenderness in cruelty and who looks on tempests with the eagerness of a storm-chaser.
At first offering a portrait of the toxicity of masculine bravado, Phantom Thread ends up telling the story of a couple who finds tenderness in cruelty.
Though the film warps it into something twisted, Anderson says that his inspiration was a genuinely tender moment with his wife. “I was very, very sick in bed one night,” he told the audience at a Q&A in New York back in November of last year. “And my wife looked at me with a love and affection that I hadn’t seen in a long time. So I called Daniel [Day-Lewis] the next day and said, ‘I think I have a good idea for a movie.’” Only, if you’ve seen the film, you know Anderson turned that joyous moment of domestic bliss — his wife Maya Rudolph staring at the father of her four children with an affection she always harbors but perhaps rarely shows so nakedly — into a kinky, near-sadistic confrontation that’s as much about affection as it is about power. “I want you flat on your back,” she tells him the second time she serves him the poisoned mushrooms which he then gladly and knowingly ingests. “Helpless, tender, open with only me to help,” she continues. “And then I want you strong again. You’re not going to die. You might wish you’re going to die, but you’re not going to. You need to settle down a little.” She not only stands up to him but, crucially, makes him lie down. Reynolds may yell and abuse her even when she tries to do kind things for him like bringing him tea (“I didn’t ask for tea,” he mutters in exasperation) but she’s unconcerned, eventually realizing that if she shows weakness she’ll be easily replaced. After unsuccessfully trying to ingratiate herself to him, she opts to assert her power in as unassuming but effective a way as she can.
Alma dangles the power she has over Reynolds not to scold or abuse him but to show him just how much she loves him. To love a man, in the world of Phantom Thread, is to know how and when to weaken him, how to help him settle down a bit, how to defang him long enough for him to be thankful you’re there to build him back up. That sounds very intense until one puts it in romantic terms we’re more comfortable celebrating: “I’d trust you with my life.” “Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick,” Reynolds tells her in the flush of desire he feels when finishing his poisoned meal. And in that sentence, which empowers, belittles, demands, and relents, I heard yet again another romantic truism taken to the extreme: you must be vulnerable, you must be open to one another. Actually, Alma doesn’t just require it, she demands it — in her own twisted way. As a literal coupling Reynolds and Alma should make you wary, but as metaphorical avatars for romantic love, they’re not as monstrous as they sound.
To love a man, in the world of Phantom Thread, is to know how and when to weaken him.
This is the kind of romance I wish were more exalted at wedding receptions. The kind where the fight for one another’s submission is an ever-swaying see-saw that requires constant attention. The kind where kindness in spirit if not in action fuels the fiery embers of desire. Except that just makes me sound like I’m advocating for consensual poisoning as a necessary element of modern-day romance—or, worse yet, hoping bridesmaids and best men make sure to remind the couple how toxic their life together may yet become. This is not, in fact, Anderson’s point, nor mine. But the argument of the film, mushrooms aside, focuses on the effort that goes into making a relationship work, especially one that still functions within gendered archetypes (artist/muse).
What Phantom Thread does away with is the asinine image of romance as mere bliss. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Grand Guignol of a rom-com acknowledges and represents love affairs that make room for petty tussles and bratty spats. Not as things that should be brushed (or blushed) aside, but as reinvigorating elements that strengthen one’s bond, that help one negotiate how to live with one another. At the end of the film, Alma daydreams about a future together where she’ll finally understand Reynolds, charting a course for their life as a couple as striving for more balance, an endless deferral of the unattainable ideal of romance those nuptial readings prescribe. “Yes, but right now we’re here,” Reynolds tells her as he rests in her lap, bringing her back to the push-and-pull dynamic they’ve come to master, “and I’m hungry.”
I n great short story collections, the stories work both in tandem and against one another. Across their separate worlds, characters speak to one another; sometimes themes and motifs emerge, other times contrast illuminates subtleties. In other words, the best collections are much more than an accumulation of work; they are completed puzzles.
Anjali Sachdeva’s nine-story collection, All the Names They Used for God, is filled with surreal stories grounded in reality. A comparison is Black Mirror, the TV sci-fi anthology show that explores the dangers of technology when it’s too deeply integrated into our lives. Similar to the show, Sachdeva is fascinated with exploring how large-scale movements like technology and religion impact our humanity. She sets her stories all over countries and eras, from a pioneer prairie farm to modern day Africa, and occasionally casts her reader into the future. The stories usually begin under the premise of normalcy, but slowly and deftly, Sachdeva weaves in something other.
I spoke with the author about her fascination with the danger and thrill of religion and technology, and how that fascination has affected her writing, and her life.
Adam Vitcavage: When exactly did you start writing this collection?
Anjali Sachdeva: A couple of the stories were written between 2004 and 2006 when I was at Iowa. The rest span from then until now. The most recent one, the title story, was finished a few months before I sent it out to try to find a publisher.
I wrote other stories over the same stretch of time and picked these ones because I felt they had some thematic connection. I’m an obsessive editor and go through eight to ten drafts of everything. There was nothing in there that I hadn’t read through many, many times already. It’s kind of a different experience to think of them as a group.
AV: When new collections come out, I feel the publicity engines and review publications often assign buzzwords that can be disingenuous. How do you describe your collection?
AS: All of the stories in the collection are dealing with larger forces that affect our lives. Technology, religion, nature. I was really thinking about how those things could be both terrifying and wonderful. What is appealing about them, and why we like to interact with them, is that there is that touch of something being bigger than you and that’s thrilling. But for the exact same reasons those things could be really destructive.
A long time ago people were more conscious about that. People thought more about how something larger than you could benefit you or destroy you in some way. These days, people think they can be separated from those forces, that they are autonomous, but I don’t think that’s true.
People think they can be separated from the forces that destroy, but I don’t think that’s true.
All of the stories approach that, but in very different ways. They all have some surreal element because that’s how I like to think about the world and work through problems.
AV: You open the collection with “The World by Night.” Why was that the first story you wanted readers to consume?
AS: I picked it in part because it is a story about entering another mysterious world. It felt like a good gateway into the collection as a whole. The main character Sadie is trapped in this confined environment and she discovers an underground cave system. That becomes her escape from the constraints of the real world. I hoped this book as a whole would provide a world for readers and I felt like this story was a good place to start.
AV: There’s a lot of strong realism mixed with almost supernatural elements. How did you end up with such a wide variety of scope?
AS: It comes in part from my own reading. I’m an opportunistic reader. I don’t set out to read somebody’s whole set of books or focus on one genre. I tend to read whatever looks interesting to me. Along the same lines, I will often come along an idea or a piece of information that is fascinating to me and the story builds out words from there. With most of these, there was some piece of information that caught my imagination and I couldn’t let go of it. Because I read such a wide range of stuff — like with “The Glass Lung” I was reading about fulgurites, which are these objects when lightning hits sand. That idea was so fascinating to me and the story really built out from there.
Once I got interested in that idea I came across all of this information about deserts and living desert glass, which is found in various parts of the Sahara. People think that a meteor struck the sand because there is a lot of it. So topics like that will chain together in my head and I try to figure out how that becomes a story.
AV: The story “Logging Lake” is set in a real place, Glacier National Park. Can you talk about the park’s role in inspiring your story?
AS: I love to hike. I love backcountry hiking. A friend and I were at Glacier National Park and we thought we were going to cut a hike short. We ended up at a campsite that had a sign saying it was closed because it became inhabited by wolves. In the stories the characters go to the campsite anyway; in real life we did not.
Years later, I went back to that memory and started thinking about the story. That hiking trip was when I was in college. But I’m currently in a couple of writing groups — I find them to be really great emotional support, but also a great place to get feedback and have deadlines. It was one of those weeks where I had something due but I didn’t have anything to turn in. I was sitting at my desk thinking what could I write about. I ended up thinking about this hiking trip from undergrad. It was the first trip I had planned on my own and my first time heading out into the wilderness of my own accord, so I drew from that.
My first drafts are always a hot mess so I just revise and revise and revise.
AV: When you’re drafting, are you okay with throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks?
AS: My first drafts are always a hot mess so I just revise and revise and revise. I know some people really love writing first drafts and that it’s exciting to get the words down on paper. I hate writing first drafts. I find it painful. I really love the editing and revising process. The first draft is just something I have to push myself through so I can get to that next phase that I love doing.
“All the Names of God” had about six or seven drafts. Some of them had huge changes while some of them were more refined to start. At one point I felt that story was finished and I sent it to my agent to look at it. She noted how there was so much implied violence in the story but how the reader never sees what happens. There wasn’t a push to have sensational or gratuitous violence but there were glimpses of what the women in the story have gone through.
In one scene, the women are kidnapped at an encampment; there’s no attack described, but people come to rescue them and there is this bloody encounter. That scene wasn’t in there up until close to the end.
I know some people talk about writing by committee and question if you’re writing your own story if you’re getting advice from people, but to me it’s just that I want to hear what reaction people had. I run that through my own filter and think about which of it makes sense to me as a writer.
AV: Do you prefer working in the short story form to the novel?
AS: I love short stories. A lot of my reading from high school onward was short stories. Not just contemporary, but also old-fashioned short stories. And I do love reading sci-fi and fantasy. To me, the golden age of sci-fi was when all of these stories were being published in pulp magazines. There is a wealth of short stories in those genres. There are now many speculative fiction novels being published, but not as many collections.
It’s harder for me to write a novel. I’ve done drafts and find them much more difficult to write. What I love about short stories is that you have this ability to really dig into one idea through one event or closely related series of events. Because I get enchanted by very different topics, writing short stories allows me to explore all those ideas. I couldn’t have a novel where you have modern day Nigeria and also 19th century frontier land or a futuristic setting. It gives me that freedom.
But I am working on a novel now. Fingers crossed that it will work out better this time — I’d like to think that I’ve learned some things as a writer over the past ten years since I’ve been out of grad school.
I love about short stories because you have the ability to really dig into one idea through one event or closely related series of events.
AV: And I know no one likes to talk too much about the novel they may or may not be working on, but is yours in that speculative fiction wheelhouse?
AS: It is. If you’ll forgive me, I have this superstitious fear of talking about it. I don’t want to hex myself.
It was sixth grade, and Mandy Winder texted in a way that made Thomas feel things. He didn’t know who she was texting during class, but he could sense by the way her thumbs jutted and poked that her words were kind.
At lunch, Mandy always sat with the Peterson sisters. The Petersons liked to talk, and Mandy would listen. The sisters were taken out of class one morning to get their teeth cleaned, leaving Mandy to sit alone. She rotated an oatmeal cookie in her hands, eating it carefully from the outside in.
“That’s cool,” Thomas said. “How you eat.”
Mandy set the cookie on her tray, and Thomas knew he’d spoiled things.
“Want to thumb war?” he said.
“Okay,” Mandy said. Thomas sat down, and Mandy stuck out her hand. They hooked their fingers together and tightened their hands into a big fist.
“One, two, three, four,” Mandy said, and Thomas joined her: “I declare a thumb war.”
Mandy didn’t waste time. She bobbed her thumb from side to side. It was long and smooth and seemed sophisticated somehow. Thomas tested forward and Mandy batted him away. They flicked their thumbs, sizing up each other’s moves.
It was developing into a kind of conversation. In fact, it was the best conversation they’d ever had. They lunged forward and smacked the soft pads of their thumbs. They swiped low blows that brought the bone of their knuckles together.
“Wow,” Thomas said. “Yeah,” said Mandy.
Mandy found leverage and clinched Thomas’ thumb near the base. She began to count out her victory.
“One,” she said, but Thomas could already tell it was over. Her grip was true.
“Two,” she said, and Thomas saw Mandy smiling right at him.
By the time Mandy Winder said “Three,” Thomas had stopped resisting altogether.
Every afternoon, the schoolbus would pass a bungalow whose porch sagged under a refrigerator that once had been white. I’d seen the people going in and out, the kind adults around me called white trash because they hadn’t managed to translate their one advantage into any kind of success.
One morning my mother read about a boy found dead inside another defunct refrigerator, and warned me never to get into anything I might not be able to escape. I scoffed: getting stuck inside an abandoned appliance struck me as a thing only a boy would be fool enough to do. A girl would be too smart to do that to herself; surely, it would have to be done to her, as in a romance I loved that told of a sexy, disobedient medieval lady, walled up and forgotten. I’d figured that kind of thing only happened in the old days, mostly to Catholics; now I knew that it had never stopped being possible that you could be buried alive.
That afternoon, as the bus rumbled past, I saw that things were doubtless bad in the bungalow. Any place to hide must have looked like a good idea. I put myself inside the once-white refrigerator, gulping and scratching in the airless dark. I imagined pulling my boy out into safety, his grateful smile as good as breath to me.
Riding day after day, I came to believe that he was there on the bus with me, a few seats up, where I might see if he was picked on, where I might kiss him if I found the nerve. I figured I never would. Each afternoon he sat at the smudged window, waving shyly to me as he rode on and I walked backwards up my driveway, still looking after him.
Power and powerlessness are key elements of conflict — elements that, in some cases, render the word “conflict,” in its two-sidedness, something of a misnomer. On the political level, one cannot talk about “conflicts” like the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories or the US occupation of Vietnam without grappling with radically imbalanced realities of power and powerlessness. The word “complexity,” if mis-wielded, can deflect attention away from such power imbalances.
That said, “power” and “powerlessness” are not synonymous with “evil” and “good,” as certain simplistic strains of political discourse come close to claiming. The brilliance — the relief — of reading novels and short stories is that worthwhile fiction is not that interested in fairytale categories of good and evil, at least when it comes to characters: fiction is interested in that which is human. And that which is human is always complex.
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The lives of the characters in my new book, Sadness is a White Bird, are framed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jonathan, a young Jewish Israeli, is excitedly preparing to enlist in the Israeli army, but when he meets and befriends Palestinian siblings Nimreen and Laith, the clarity he once felt about his future choices begins to crumble. Political context and history weigh heavily on all three characters as they seek to form relationships across “opposite” sides of the same conflict.
What follows here is a list of pairings, some books and short stories, that deal with the complexities of various conflicts. I chose the pairs not in order to draw a false parallel of power, but rather with an eye past the realities of power and powerlessness that form the palpable background of each novel or story. Through each of these ten works of fiction pulses devastation, beauty, humanity, and suffering.
These two novellas were written respectively by an Israeli combat soldier who later became a Member of Knesset, and a Palestinian spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was eventually assassinated by Israeli forces. Each was published directly after a major violent milestone in Israeli-Palestinian history. Khirbet Khizeh was published shortly after the events of 1948, known by most Israeli Jews as Milhemet HaAtzmaut (the War of Independence), and by most Palestinians as the Nakba (the Catastrophe). Returning to Haifa was published shortly after 1967, known by most Palestinians as the Naksa (the Setback), and by most Israeli Jews as Milhemet Sheshet HaYamim (the Six Day War).
Both books deal directly with the political realities of their times. Khirbet Khizeh is told from the perspective of a nameless, tormented narrator, and is the story of an Israeli combat unit’s mission to expel Palestinian civilians from the fictionalized village of Khirbet Khizeh during the 1948 War of Independence. Returning to Haifa follows Said and Safeyya, Palestinian refugees who fled Haifa during the 1948 Nakba (losing their infant son in the process), and return to the same city after Israel wins the 1967 war, occupies the West Bank and permits those Palestinians newly placed under Israeli rule to “visit.” Each novella is gripping, disturbing, enraging, torturous — and deeply humane. Though both deal directly with politics, and both writers were deeply political in their lives and careers, neither book is a simplistic polemic: there are no caricatures in either work, no goblins — just people, and violence, and pain.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s acerbic narrator muses, in reference to a thinly-fictionalized version of Apocalypse Now: “Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved …’’ The narrator goes on to explain how it doesn’t make much of a difference if it the American soldiers portrayed are gentle or cruel, if they feel bad for the Vietnamese they are killing or remain wholly indifferent to their deaths: because either way, the Vietnamese are merely supporting characters — or, more often, extras — in America’s story of “the Vietnam War.” The Sympathizer is a brilliant book for many of reasons: it is funny, gripping, distressing, sharp, delightfully strange (the narrator manages to turn even an episode of onanism via dead squid into an opportunity for biting commentary on the hypocrisies of a culture that normalizes and glorifies war while proclaiming puritanism in regard to masturbation). And it is a different sort of American story — a Vietnamese-American story — about “The American War” than the stories most Americans are told by Hollywood. And by novels.
Reading The Sympathizer, I found myself thinking back on one of my favorite books in high school, which I’ve since reread twice: The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. It is a gorgeously written book, and the chapter titled “How To Tell A True War Story” remains one of my favorite meditations on the meanings of truth and fiction (or: truth in fiction). But in thinking back on this richly detailed, deeply empathic novel, I have trouble remembering if there were any Vietnamese characters in the book at all. In fact, the American soldiers’ act of killing that I remember most vividly is the episode in which the narrator’s comrades torture and kill a baby water buffalo (and ultimately throw it down a well, poisoning the water for nameless, faceless Vietnamese villagers). I do not note this absence, necessarily, as a critique of The Things They Carried. Perhaps even the opposite: There is a disturbing honesty, I think, in the way in which the Vietnamese are rendered to the American soldier-narrator’s eye: largely invisible — sometimes threatening, sometimes pitiable, never the center or the main point of this story. And this story, of young American soldiers in Vietnam, of their friendship, of their loss, of their fear, of their savageness, of their decency, is a story that needs to be told and read, and The Things They Carried is a book that tells that story movingly, circuitously, powerfully. The story of almost-children being made to kill and maybe die for the sake of some psychopathological ideology or fatuous policy-goal is a major story of our world. It’s just not the only story.
Almost-children being made to kill is one story of conflict in our world. Actual children being made to kill is another one. In The Stilt Fisherman of Kathaluwa, from the hard-hitting, stunning collection entitled Foreign Soil, Maxine Beneba Clarke tells the story of one child refugee who was forced to do horrific things to other children in the context of the conflict in his home country of Sri Lanka. “The ocean hums like a snoring monster,” the story begins: a strange, wonderful description that immediately conjures that world of imagination and terror that children everywhere have to navigate; soon, though, it becomes clear that the real-life terrors little Asanka has been through are far more horrific than nightmares about monsters. As the story progresses, we slowly discover more details of Asanka’s past a child-soldier for the Tamil Tigers, both the violence inflicted upon him and the violence he was forced to inflict upon others. His story is told in parallel with that of Loretta, an Australian lawyer who volunteers at the Asylum Seekers Centre, where Asanka is being held after arriving by boat. This telling of all three stories, interwoven — Asanka’s past, Asanka’s present, Loretta’s encounter with Asanka — forces the reader to keep looking, rather than turn away or fall back on self-protecting, distancing mechanisms (“That sort of thing happens way over there, far away from me, from my life”). There is little in the way of zoomed-out judgement in this story, and an immense amount of suffering palpitating in its pages.
This centering of a child’s narrative of incomprehensible violence is also part of Madeleine Thien’s breathtaking novel about the Cambodian genocide, Dogs at the Perimeter. In this story, the continuum of children being horrifically victimized and children being made to perpetrate horrors is fluid. Clarke’s short story focuses on the recent past of the main character, and on the effects it has on him shortly after; in Dogs at the Perimeter, we meet the narrator, Janie, decades after she survived the genocide in her native Cambodia. This novel’s explorations of memory, and of one adult’s efforts to explore the harrowing, terror-drenched corridors of her own past, are perhaps unparalleled in any other book I’ve read. Thien’s writing about one of the most atrocious genocides in modern history is stunning, and the book is both relentless and melodic, dealing with a story that is crushing almost to the point of unbearability, but with notes of beauty, of relief, even, threaded through the fabric of the life of its narrator.
Two other novels, I’jaam, by Sinan Antoon and The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers, deal startlingly and powerfully with questions of memory and state violence, each from very different positions in Iraq’s modern history. Antoon’s novel is set in mid-to-late 1980s Iraq, before the two “Iraq Wars,” as they are known here in American contexts, during the Iran-Iraq War, back when Saddam Hussein was a US ally, and its main character is a jailed Iraqi dissident. The language — and the focus on the nuances of the Arabic language — is beautiful and nauseating and claustrophobic, and the short novel is dizzying, poetic, and powerful. Powers’ novel is set during the early days of the “Second Iraq War,” and is told from the perspective of a traumatized American soldier, back at home in Virginia, attempting to grapple with some of the most horrific elements of his recent past.
Both novels contain vertiginous amounts and descriptions of violence, and both center around characters who dissent, in one way or another, from the political currents with which they are expected to flow. These two novels shed light on very different parts of modern Iraqi history, and the conflicts that have torn apart the country and devastated its residents (as well as those sent to carry out the violence there). Yet both are beautifully written books.
Both of these novels feel like they are about everything, in their respective conflict-contexts (India and Lebanon): History, gender, class, micro-interactions and macro-machinations, violence, friendship, loss. Both are kaleidoscopic stories centered around an array of masterfully crafted, flawed, human characters, seeking to live decently as staggering levels violence and misery ebb and swell around them, threatening to engulf everything.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness delves into a number of conflicts, past and ongoing, in modern India, including a stunning, sprawling story of three interwoven characters and their interactions with each other and with the conflict in the Kashmir. Beirut ’75, written with dizzying prescience in 1974, delves into the lives of various people and peoples in Beirut, and the tensions boiling beneath the surfaces of the Lebanese capital; it’s set just before the start of the Lebanese Civil War that erupted in 1975, and lasted for (at least) a decade and a half.
Both of these books, through the depth of their characters and the apathy-shattering quality of their prose, were, to me, crucial reminders that there is no actual “There” and that there is no absolute “Other.” Conflict in Kashmir is only unrelated to my life to the extent I pretend it is; a person seeking meaning and safety in Beirut in the early 1970s is only foreign to me to the extent I delude myself that they are.
A t a party a few weeks ago I was talking to a friend about The Boy Next Door (2015), a thriller starring Jennifer Lopez he’d never heard of, and which is easily the worst movie I have paid to see in the past five years (someone else paid for my ticket to mother!). “It’s awful,” I gushed. “I love it so much.”
The Boy Next Door is awful, and I do love it, but it’s at best in the minor arcana of bad movies. “So bad that it’s good” can be a slippery descriptor; a lot of terrible movies are so bad they are simply bad, or so bad they’re not worth seeing. The rough canon of the qualifying genre spans the history of filmmaking, from Reefer Madness (1930) to Showgirls (1995), and although the criteria for inclusion are difficult to pin down, the basic tenet is that you know it when you watch it.
Detractors of the so-bad-it’s-good genre may see the celebration of cinematic failure as mean-spirited, an ironic pose that makes filmmakers the butt of a snobby cultural joke. That bad-movie fandom is typically a cinephile’s game only adds to the gloss of its perceived snobbish nastiness. While it may be true that the badness of a bad movie is heightened when one has a grasp on the goodness of a good movie — how an establishing shot works, for instance, or the basic concept of narrative — it seems like a lot of energy to spend, flocking to a sold-out midnight screening just to be mean about a film.
History is littered with failures of cinema, some of them failing in ways that make them appreciably bad — a kind of pop-cultural upcycling.
My earliest exposure to bad movies was through my parents’ love for Mystery Science Theater 3000 — or MST3K, as it’s known — a late-night TV show consisting of an actual B-movie screened while a visible first-row peanut gallery gives wisecracking commentary throughout. VHS recordings of MST3K stood next to tapes of Apocalypse Now and the original Star Wars trilogy in a micro-democracy of taste. Watching MST3K as a young person I knew the movies weren’t intentionally made to be bad, and that their real, accidental badness was what made them funny to watch, but I was still mystified by their existence outside the context of MST3K. Where did bad movies come from?
Economics of the early film industry aside, history is littered with failures of cinema, some of them failing in ways that make them appreciably bad — a kind of pop-cultural upcycling. But when so much has been achieved in the medium of film, what’s the enduring appeal of seeing the form poorly applied? Why do people who love good movies so often also love bad movies? And what makes a bad movie like Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) different from other bad movies, like Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (2015)?
Tommy Wiseau’s infamous shitshow The Room (2003) is among the greatest of the so-bad-it’s-good movies, and for all the hype surrounding it, it truly is as bad as everyone says — and exactly as enjoyable. It was shot in both 35mm and high-definition, non-standard to say the least, and although things happen, the film has little in the way of a discernible plot. Atrociously written and woodenly acted, it is also a goddamn laugh riot.
In the film, Johnny (played by Wiseau, who also wrote, produced, and directed) asks his girlfriend Lisa (Juliette Danielle) to marry him, but she’s having an affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). A critical reading might take Wiseau’s characterizations at face value, with him playing the kind and faultless hero, and Lisa and Mark representing the forces of romantic love and success who conspire against him, despite his evident goodness. It’s not clear that Wiseau consciously commands even this level of symbolism, but it ultimately isn’t important. The Room is a cinematic failure that its creator believed would be a cinematic triumph, and this total conviction — combined with the ham-fistedness of its filmmaking — makes it a modern camp masterpiece.
‘The Room’ is a cinematic failure that its creator believed would be a cinematic triumph, and this total conviction makes it a modern camp masterpiece.
Not all failure is equal, and the nature of artistic failure depends on the nature of the attempt. This is the framework Susan Sontag outlines in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” to describe objects that can be enjoyed for their awfulness:
In naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is a seriousness, a seriousness that fails. … When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish.
The Room is an awful movie, but it’s trying to be a great film, and this generates its basic charm. By extension, Wiseau is an awful filmmaker trying to be a great one, and his blindness to his own deficiencies is what allows him to be canonized in the so-bad-it’s-good tradition. Whether due to narcissism or a lack of taste, or both, pure Camp cannot fathom its own shortcomings.
James Franco’s The Disaster Artist (2017) dramatizes the development of The Room, based on the book of the same title by Wiseau’s friend and costar Sestero. The film plays like a dramatized making-of, going so far as to reshoot many of the original’s most infamous scenes. Franco’s portrayal of the director evolves from convincing to uncanny over the course of the film. (A tag after the credits features Wiseau himself in a frame beside Franco-as-Wiseau, and for a moment the two are legitimately difficult to distinguish.) For the most part it’s a love letter to its antecedent, a generous portrait of a man possessed by the same thing that drives most people to create: the urge to make emotion visible, and to be beloved for the power of one’s art. This quality of burning desire is seen more easily in figures like Wiseau, whose passion far outpaces their abilities, and indeed is intensified by the width of that gap. The Room is a feat of blind self-assurance, made possible by a mysterious and seemingly endless cash flow. Laughing at Wiseau and his opus is certainly easy, but finding The Room hilarious doesn’t preclude lauding the earnestness of his effort. He is pure artistic id, unchecked by any self-regarding ego.
In terms of its driving intent, The Disaster Artist shares much with Ed Wood (1994), Tim Burton’s pseudo-biopic of the director Edward D. Wood (Johnny Depp). Ed Wood follows Wood’s efforts to make his two most famous films, Glen or Glenda (1953), about a transvestite, and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), about an alien invasion that leads to the creation of zombie vampires (or something). The latter gained cult status when it was described as the “worst film ever made” by brothers Harry and Michael Medved in their 1980 book of bad-film criticism, The Golden Turkey Awards. Ed Wood portrays its subject as a misunderstood visionary, if not quite a genius, rejected by his peers. Like Wiseau, Wood yearns to be a box-office success, to prove his worth in the court of public adoration.
Plan 9 is, of course, a terrible movie, but Ed Wood forgives its questionable quality for the passion at work behind it. Wood’s total devotion to making film — in spite of awful reviews, laughter, and massive losses of cash — shows an iron artistic passion that’s rarely so visible in more successful (and talented) artists, buoyed in their careers by consistent acclaim. Wood and Wiseau, toiling at the base of the mountain, commit to the same hard artistic work that success demands, but they never get there.
There is a baffling literalism to Wiseau’s search for fame. Wood and Wiseau are, ultimately, celebrities, if not in the way they’d like. But theirs is not a cynical or self-serving quest for their fifteen minutes, and everything it would provide. Rather, both of them seek fame as a means to prove to others that what they do has artistic value.
The Disaster Artist portrays Wiseau’s approach to art-making as a color-by-numbers endeavor, evident in his belief that to become as famous as James Dean, one simply has to imitate James Dean, as if Hollywood stardom were a recipe for apple crisp. Wiseau wrote and financed his own James Dean movie, and cast himself as a James Dean hero. The Room‘s most famous line — “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” — is a clear pull from James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause(1955). Fine acting, Q.E.D.
Wood’s total devotion to making film — in spite of awful reviews, laughter, and massive losses of cash — shows an iron artistic passion that’s rarely so visible in more successful (and talented) artists.
From an artist’s perspective, the ultimate fear is that of making bad art which you have no idea is bad. It’s what causes so many truly talented people to downplay their own work, because it’s safer to assume that it must be terrible than to believe it’s good without really knowing. It’s also what keeps most critics in business, designating the great successes and the withering flops, on a scale of achievement that claims objectivity and leaves little room for joy, or for blind self-belief.
Cherishing failure qua failure is an antidote to cynicism in a grave and dispiriting age. A lover of bad art seeks joy; rather than dismissing out of hand something like Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) as unserious and poorly assembled, they, alongside the cast of MST3K, applaud the sheer scale of its badness as a feat in itself, as though it were simply a different flavor of filmmaking. In effect, the fandom of so-bad-it’s-good movies rejects the critical assumption that there are only certain valid responses to art.
The Museum of Bad Art takes the appreciation of bad movies to the logical art-world conclusion of physical collection and display. Founded in a basement in 1993, MoBA now occupies two gallery spaces: one “just outside the men’s room” in the basement of the Somerville Theater in Somerville, MA, and another in the offices of the Brookline Interactive Group in Brookline, MA. The MoBA’s permanent collection ranges from landscapes and still lifes to “noods” and “poor traits,” with a lot of earth-tone Fauvism and alarming perspective work across the board. But in its isolation from “great” art, the “bad” art of the MoBA has value on its own terms. Visual art is for looking at; what does form matter if the effect still evokes joy, pleasure, introspection? The enjoyment of art that fails to achieve what it means to — quality, broadly defined — transcends the good-bad critical framework as a measure of artistic merit. This leads to a kind of anarchy of taste, a rejection of the notion of quality as something that can be critically delineated.
This line of art nihilism is an ontological danger to the MoBA, dedicated stewards of “quality bad art,” but the curators admit that the common thread running through the collection is “a special quality that sets [the works] apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent.” Just as a special quality sets apart a Monet from any other French poppy field, not all bad art is created equal.
Just as a special quality sets apart a Monet from any other French poppy field, not all bad art is created equal.
Even among beloved bad movies there is variation. They can be grandly inept, baroquely ill-suited to their aims; either way, the pleasure of them is generated by the distance between their creators’ outsized hopes and their actual quality. The bad drawings of children might be oddly prescient or naively misshapen, but without a knowledge of the Mona Lisa — without grand ambition, and the stakes that come with it — their work can never achieve failure. It’s the aching wish for grandness, and the falling short of it, that makes for great terrible art.
Bad art cannot be made in bad faith; it is wholly, purely honest. In the burning heart of every wretched film is the wish to be a cinematic masterpiece, and often a degree of misplaced self-assuredness. The Emoji Movie (2017) made $217 million last summer, with Patrick Stewart as the voice of Poop. But The Emoji Movie cynically aspired to nothing more than massive box office returns, and it achieves nothing beyond that — not even failure.
The cat says, “I’m only here on sufferance.” The dog doesn’t understand, so the cat defines the word “sufferance.” It has to do with a kind of tolerance. It has to do with permission that is indirect, permission through failure to prohibit. She uses the word “tacit.” The dog doesn’t understand “tacit.” The cat gives up. She thinks he probably got the idea anyway.
The cat knows they love the dog and merely tolerate her. There is enthusiasm when they greet the dog at the front door. She sits off in the background, watching. They see her and say, “Hello, kitty!” but without much warmth. The dog is more demonstrative than she is. He wouldn’t understand the word “demonstrative,” though he enacts it. He wouldn’t understand the word “enact.”
Later, the cat says to the dog, who stands below her, in the kitchen, sniffing the air, “Now she has left the room. I’m sitting within an inch of her sandwich. That puts a strain on me.” She reaches a forepaw toward the sandwich, but she is not comfortable.
The dog likes her and is interested in her. He would not find it a strain to be near the sandwich.
Later the cat is chewing on the broom again.
The dog does not understand why she would do that.
The cat says, “She scolds me because I’ve been chewing on the broom. She leaves it out and I see it. Then she sees me and puts it away between the refrigerator and the wall where I can’t get at it, though I try. I try when it seems to be where I can reach it.”
The dog listens to her explain all this. At least it is a change from going back to sleep, yet again, in that pool of sunlight.
“Dogs in Love”
by Ali Shapiro
I.
The dog who reminds us of you is easily wounded: every loud noise lands like a blow. She never barks but occasionally moans. The dog who reminds us of me has only two modes: all-out and asleep. She eats dinner out of a maze, has to be saved, every night, from her own appetite. She loves, in this order: food, tennis balls, you. Both dogs love squirrels, but once we saw the dog who reminds us of you leave an almost-dead one at the feet of the dog who reminds us of me, then slink carefully away. The dog who reminds us of me ate it.
II.
We break up, but our dogs don’t. We pass them back and forth through various impromptu airlocks. I let them into your yard and they disappear through the back door, admitted by your invisible hand. You transfer them from your car to mine, then drive away before I get behind the wheel. Because the dogs have always been each of ours (your dog; my dog), and because they are each a part of us (daemons; animal familiars), the pass-through becomes a space where we are somehow still together, a world of what-ifs embodied and lovingly, grudgingly maintained.
III.
Our reunion comes with animal inevitability: a few drinks, flush of skin, clash of teeth. Then we’re back where we started: cooking, vacuuming. Walking the dogs. The one who reminds us of me now insists on sleeping not just next to but on top of the dog who reminds us of you, who accepts the warm weight with a heavy sigh. Maybe it’s true: opposites attract. Or maybe love is just knowing, no particular alignment of selves or stars but a groove one animal wears into another, slowly, surely, until the warmth becomes particular, the weight light.
I am the uncle who gives books to my nephews and one niece. I do this out of love for them and the books, but also out of the need to recover things I may have lost. Most often, the books I give are those iconic lodestones masquerading under simple turns-of-phrase: The Giving Tree, The Little Engine That Could, etc. Each one I love in the way we love the books we are supposed to love; and I love to pass them on to the next generation, like bestowing a stash of especially effective pathfinding breadcrumbs upon worthy heirs. I liked to believe that these books will help them find their way, but a few Decembers ago while shopping for my niece’s birthday gift, among others, I struggled to keep this faith. I’d been trying to give my niece and nephews books that would be maps to show them the way—but I hadn’t yet found my own way, and it suddenly seemed disingenuous to give yet another map that had thus far proven itself unreliable.
So, that December evening in the bookstore, I decided it would be better to give my niece a compass rather than a map. The one book that came to mind was “Mrs. Rumphius” — a book that I had told myself was “my favorite,” the one that “really influenced” me. Both of those things were true, and I did truly cherish the book’s influence on me. But seeing the title on the cover of the new copy I held in my hands, I realized that I had for years been woefully calling it by something that was not its name.
Miss Rumphius — not Mrs. — is perhaps Barbara Cooney’s most beloved work, and certainly her most well known. The 1982 book tells the life story of Alice Rumphius, an equestrian-elegant, red-haired girl born sometime before the ascendancy of the steamship, somewhere in northeastern America. Something of the young nation’s aloof confidence, charged with untested potential, energizes Alice’s tale of self-reliance — a quality she exhibits from the very beginning. As a child, she adores her immigrant grandfather’s wide-ranging stories of “faraway places,” shared with her in the firelight of his home “in a city by the sea.” She promises that she will travel the world too, one day, and that when she’s finished, she will come home to a house beside the sea. Her grandfather blesses her intentions, but on the condition that she fulfill one request: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”
She accomplishes all three in the course of long, enviable life of global adventure that comes to its end on the rocky Maine coast. Here, she fulfills her final promise to make the world more beautiful by scattering lupine seeds “along highways and down the country lanes….around the schoolhouse and the back of the church.” Year after year, the lupines multiply thanks to wind and birds and curious children, imperially redecorating the rugged Maine landscape. All said, Alice succeeded in making the world more beautiful, but what is important to remember, and what seemed unimportant to me until recently, is that she planted the flowers herself. There was never any great love for Alice, nor was she ever a “Mrs.”
I had forgotten that part, perhaps because for a very long time I considered it the fulfillment of every person’s destiny to find true love in this life, and to fuse with that person until the very end. In doing so, I had also forgotten the unspoken message of Miss Rumphius: true love is not the only wonder in the world, and not necessarily the greatest.
To a certain extent, Alice’s entire life is a kind of anti-Odyssey — a journey not toward closure, not toward home and birthright, but to ever-wider openings. Three years ago when I found the copy of this book that I would purchase for my niece, I was doing the exact opposite. I was headed toward closure, to an end to the precarity that had dominated my life since I graduated high school. Strange, then, that this book spoke to me. If there was anything I wanted not to be, it was the free, solitary, singularly time-agnostic Alice Rumphius.
The message was vaguely optimistic, yet clearly actionable; open to interpretation, yet specific.
Our differences aside, I found Alice’s charge “to make the world more beautiful” a useful directive for myself and others, even so many years after reading it for the first time. The message was vaguely optimistic, yet clearly actionable; open to interpretation, yet specific. And Alice’s declaration that she did not know what she could do to make the world more beautiful seemed to me important to share with children. After my own adolescence of calculated careerism, a clear reminder to the next generation that life’s mysteries need not be solved by age 18 was a necessary and vital one.
But beyond my appreciation for its developmental nuance, I felt deeply connected to Miss Rumphius, and it wasn’t clear to me why this should be the case. The book wasn’t emblematic of my childhood. I was a kid who loved magic and wanted my own, and while there is a witchy haze about red-haired and strong-willed Alice, there is no sorcery in this book. There was, however, some power at work in those pages that I had not realized until that night in the bookshop, thumbing through the copy I would give my niece. Perhaps I had forgotten it, or perhaps I had just to wait until that moment to remember, but I saw as if for the first time something wonderful on the book’s dedication page.
“This book is dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children, sailors, and maidens,” reads the text beneath a very specific and very familiar rendering of my namesake saint. This was an eikona, a sacred image; and this Saint Nicholas was properly OAgios Nikolaos: his hand contorted into the blessing cipher IC XC, his body adorned in the full regalia of a Roman bishop, and his face haloed with to aktiston phos, the “uncreated light.” Here, on the first page of the book that I called my childhood favorite, was a message to me that I never knew was there: my name, my faith, my own moment of “wonder” — a concept with which St. Nicholas is richly interconnected.
In Greek Orthodox tradition, one of the beloved saint’s many honorifics is O Thaumatourgos, literally, “wonderworker.” Although imprecisely appropriated into English as “thaumaturge,” the Greek word’s etymology stretches from remote Hellenic antiquity up into the occult origins of modernity, science, and empirical knowledge. Touched thus by almost all of Western written history, the whole lineage of wonder is archived in the root word, thauma (pronounced in Modern Greek as “THAV-ma.”)
“In Archaic [Greek] and early Classical [Greek] literature, the characteristic reaction to a well-crafted image is thauma,” writes Richard T. Neer, an art historian and classicist at the University of Chicago, in his monograph theorizing the cultural genesis of Classical sculpture. Applied variously to crafts, feats, and, famously, to the dangerously deceptive allure of the first woman, Pandora, thauma describes any “figure of dazzling alterity” or “a moment of limitless present” in the finite world. Across all these instances, “wonder derives from the fact that a single thing can somehow be two things all at once.”
Originally an aesthetic term, thauma acquired new figurative meanings through its frequent use in Plato and Aristotle, the latter of whom contended, “[P]hilosophy begins in wonder.” For Aristotle, thauma inhered in the “apparent conjoining of chance and necessity” in otherwise unrelated events that “occur contrary to expectation yet on account of one another” so perfectly as to seem divinely designed. In the interstices, then, thauma sparks and illuminates, situating wonder itself between any “this” and any “that” fortuitously and randomly in communion.
Which is to say, for wonder to truly dazzle, the needful thing is always some kind of disparity, incompleteness, or capacity — a truth intuitively acknowledged in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase “capacity for wonder.” It’s the filling of that capacity that one could say eventually eliminates the last bit of enchantment from the world. For Alice Rumphius, the great work is to rage against the enervation of that enchantment, to re-excavate the capacity for wonder, to beat back against the currents that enclose the imagination. In this sense, above all else, hers is a story about wonder, about thauma. In Miss Rumphius, the portent of thauma for life today glimmers for any who have eyes to see — and whose hearts put their faith in the promise of another half.
Alice’s heart plays a strangely minor role in this story of a life well lived, offering comfort to anyone unrepresented in the glut of stories that culminate in happily ever afters. She does not follow her “heart’s desire,” and her journey around the world seems less of a passion project and much more of a baseline function. To be Alice is to be in motion, to approach every almost and then instantaneously tangent out to uncharted places with unknown people. For that reason, although she finds early on in the book a home that fulfills her requirements — far away from where she grew up, near the sea — Alice leaves. What’s more, she leaves behind the only man in whom she’d felt romantic interest, according to Barbara Cooney in a 1999 interview with The Los Angeles Times:
When I asked her why Miss Rumphius…never married, Cooney said, “She didn’t feel the need to. It was simpler just to go knocking around by herself.”
Didn’t she ever meet anyone who interested her? I prodded. There was a long pause.
“Well,” the author finally said with a little lilt in her voice, “she met Bapa Raja, but he was married.”
Here was a home, a point of closure; yet her journey had never pointed toward the polestar of a yearned-for homeland. Instead, it webbed out into sparkling dizziness, unceasingly in pursuit of the next vacuum. She knew wonder must of necessity be incomplete, and hearts are too easily convinced that they are sufficiently filled.
I learned that the hard way, almost two years after I rediscovered Miss Rumphius on that evening in the bookstore. I had either forgotten or never remembered Alice’s lesson that a full life is not necessarily predicated on occupying one’s heart with love for another person. If wonder emerges “between any ‘this’ and any ‘that’ fortuitously and randomly in communion,” then I thought wonder’s true form must be the rarely successful alchemy between two people in love.
And if not, it was still the case that every book and film and song I ever absorbed affirmed that love outranked any other wonder in the world. Without love, what should be wonderful would be one-dimensional, bereft of the combustible internal tension that generated thauma. I knew better than this, once, but had forgotten by the time it was too late. Perhaps this was why, for years, I referred to this book as “Mrs. Rumphius,” rather than by its proper name, appending a phantom husband to a woman who never needed one.
For many of us, love is the last real sacrament in a secular world that is nevertheless glutted with approximations of transcendence. We are encouraged — demanded, even — to find the sacred at yoga, in the “spiritual but not religious,” in various wellness practices, in cloudy crystals charged at midnight on roofs far away from the ground the made them; I’ve done similar things. Where the divine has been scaled into a compulsory (and, often, capitalistic) component of wellness, love is the last untamed and utterly incandescent wonder; it’s the cherub with its flaming sword.
For many of us, love is the last real sacrament in a secular world that is nevertheless glutted with approximations of transcendence.
And in such a world, the route of Alice Rumphius, which seeks out wonder instead of love, seems pointless. Why work so hard to find wonder outside of love, when wonder is so readily available within it? To be in love is to return to paradise, to enter into the last temple, to do in earnest the things you could previously only do ironically. In this sense, love in its form as the ultimate wonder is perhaps the one baptism we still universally acknowledge for the remission of sins. “Well, I met a boy…” does certainly have something of the sparkle of a preemptive exoneration.
But in exalting love as the epitome of all wonder, we transform it into its antithesis. This kind of romantic love tends toward closure, to completion; it tries to compact the poles that produce thauma into one solid whole. It tells us love can only be true if it lasts through successive rounds of hookups, through trauma, through fights — through a battery of tests, like a laboratory subject. It produces hookup culture as an erotic manifestation of empiricism — a series of adaptive assessments to optimize us, and others for us. This kind of love proceeds, unconsciously, with the intent to decommission the imagination, to fence it in, to atrophy it. Its aim is to avert that other kind of love, the kind that is not wonderful, but full of wondering. I’m sick of wondering. I’m sick of wondering if you really love me, I’m sick of wondering if you will be here.
We want a love so wonderful we need never wonder again.
The problem with such a love is that it is dead on arrival if it is to be the final and ultimate wonder in one’s life. The lesson of Miss Rumphius that I’ve encountered all these years later is that our capacity for wonder is not a cavity that can only be filled, or even best be filled, with love. Love need not be the sum of all wonders, and it is to our own disadvantage to consider a life lived without a great love, a soul mate, or a partner to be a regrettably unactualized one.
Similarly, it dishonors one’s own potential by pinning the hope of happiness on the life-long requited love of another person. Such hope is ultimately invested in certainty, in closure, in the quick algorithmic accomplishment of promises such as those Alice made to her grandfather and whose slow fulfillment spanned her whole life. It caulks the interstices of life — the uncertainties, the voids, the discontinuities across which only imagination can carry us, ultimately impoverishing the world now and in the future.
If love had been Alice’s only objective, her only form of wonder (and for many of us, I think that is the case; it was for me), it’s unlikely she would have ever left Bapa Raja, or that she would have ever climbed mountains or trekked through jungles. In the forfeiture of these experiences, it’s unlikely she would have ever imagined a way to make the world more beautiful.
If love had been Alice’s only objective, it’s unlikely she would have ever climbed mountains or trekked through jungles.
By leaning into the ever opening horizon, she saw more than most will ever see, such that by the time she settled into her new home by the shore, at the margins of the world, she could look into the sunset and say, in earnest, that the world was “already pretty nice.” To fulfill her final promise to make the world more beautiful, she had to imagine a world that did not yet exist. Even after she had presumably seen the whole world and acquired the certainty of experience, she entered the chasm between what is known and not known, and imagined a more beautiful future. Her eyes were quite useless to help her see what had not yet been seen.
Accustomed to the nexus of “chance and necessity,” Alice answers the charge to make the world more beautiful by planting flowers in the stony ground around her home — far from optimal conditions for new growth. To her wonder, at least some of the seeds bloomed in the spring — only the lupines, the flower she “always loved best,” and that are also, incidentally, considered a symbol of imagination. When she finds a patch of lupines far away from her garden, she makes it clear: “I don’t believe my eyes!” To make the world more beautiful is to bring something into it that did not exist before, a task which demands a indefatigable return to the dark interstices where wonder wakes up.
In such places, the lupines grow year in and year out, “in between the rocks around her house,” as her great-niece tells us. The same little girl concludes the book, not with closure, but with new uncertainty, in an embrace of wonder that it’s this book’s prime directive to encourage. It’s in this wonder, of which love is only one of many optional, moving parts, that one approaches the thauma at the heart of life and becomes, in time, thauma idesthai: “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself.”
To make the world a more beautiful place, then — to make anyone else’s world a more beautiful place through love and partnership — Miss Rumphius teaches by example to first become a wonder to behold for yourself. The flowers will then find their own way to bloom.
The reputation of the Bronx, New York’s northernmost borough, is often eclipsed by a narrative that includes violence, drugs, and a wave of arson and riots that occurred in the 1970s. But the Bronx is unique. It’s artistic. It’s a place that lifted up some of the best musical artists of our time as well as literary artists: Don DeLillo was a Bronxite. Newly published writers like Lilliam Rivera and Jamel Brinkley have also called the Bronx home. The Bronx is also one of the most diverse areas in the nation.
The Bronx is no longer engulfed in flames—it’s thriving, especially in the literary world thanks to the artist communities showcasing the richness of the area’s heritage and evolution. We cannot and should not ignore the contributions being made to the larger literary canon from this borough. That’s why I wanted to spotlight several people who have been working to increase Bronx representation and offer the communities, most notably communities of color, the opportunity to access work about their hometown but also contribute to the arts.
How Charlie engages the Bronx literary community: Charlie is the Deputy Director at Bronx Council on the Arts (BCA), which has supported the development of artists and art organizations in the borough since 1962. He directs the Bronx Writers Center program there, which has served local writers since being formed in 1996. Events are free and open to the public!
When you think of the Bronx what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
How rich our culture is! The Bronx is the birthplace of hip-hop as well as home to many arts and culture institutions such as our Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos Community College, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, BronxArtSpace, the Andrew Freedman Home, Bronx Music Heritage Center, Poe Park Visitor Center (adjacent to the legendary writer’s final residence), BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance), and Pregones Theater — are just a few. The Bronx’s creative legacy has been informed and deepened by the diverse groups of immigrants who’ve settled here as well as through the efforts of cultural leaders serving some of the nation’s poorest districts. The Bronx is a people-of-color/immigrant-majority county.
The Bronx’s creative legacy has been informed and deepened by the diverse groups of immigrants who’ve settled here as well as through the efforts of cultural leaders serving some of the nation’s poorest districts.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
How green it is. I was born and raised here in the 1970s and 1980s, during the burning buildings era people still think of. And although I didn’t grow up in the South Bronx, where the majority of the devastation occurred, I witnessed the heroin, AIDS, and crack epidemics firsthand. Bronxites are survivors who’ve contended with negative stigmas for most of our lives. The Bronx is also the greenest of New York City’s boroughs despite this. Van Cortlandt Park, Mosholu Parkway, the NY Botanical Garden, the Bronx Zoo combined with the Pelham Parkway Greenway that runs all the way to Pelham Bay Park, has sustained urban wildlife in the borough since its very beginnings.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
The best way for anyone to support arts and culture activities in the Bronx is to make a donation to Bronx Council on the Arts. No gift is too small and will go directly toward the various artist services and public programs we provide year-round to under-resourced communities being targeted for development. This puts countless artists at risk! Our programs include art exhibits at our Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos, Bronx Writers Center events, and various project funding grants we award yearly to an average of 75 community-based arts initiatives, bringing the arts to the people. You can help out here or sign up for our newsletter to learn more about our amazing exhibits, workshops, and offerings here.
What’s next for you and Bronx Council on the Arts?
BCA has an amazing new executive director, Viviana Bianchi, as well as a headquarters under renovation in Westchester Square, which we hope to move into later in 2018 — so lots of change to come. As an author I’m wrapping up a new supernatural mystery novel and short story collection set in Puerto Rico.
How Saraciea engages the Bronx literary community: Saraciea is bringing a book festival to the Bronx on Saturday, May 19. Her dream is for Bronxites to discover a love for reading and to engage with authors, illustrators, and creatives. The Bronx isn’t burning anymore, the Bronx is reading! It’s never too late to cultivate a culture of reading. The festival will also host school visits on Friday, May 18 via The Bronx is Reading literacy program. Select authors from the festival will visit Title I schools and the festival will provide free copies of their books to students.
When you think of the Bronx what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
When I think of the Bronx, Fordham Road comes to mind. It might seem odd, but walking up and down that area is where I purchased a ton of urban fiction books from street vendors. It’s where I went to pick up books from The Bronx Library Center because my local library had been shutdown.
Poe Center & Poe Cottage — Named after Edgar Allan Poe, the cottage is a literary landmark. You can’t possibly be a writer living in NYC and not have visited the center and the cottage at least once.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
According to the New York Times, “The Bronx remains the poorest county in the state, and one of the poorest in the United States.” And it really is poor. It’s also no coincidence that the borough’s demographic is largely Latinx and Black. There are over 600,000 children and teens living in the Bronx and many don’t read, can’t read, and/or can’t afford books. I’m hoping to change that with the festival and with The Bronx is Reading program.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
The literary community can support the Bronx Book Festival by donating to our Kickstarter campaign (launching in mid-February), donating books, following us on social media and spreading the word about the festival.
What’s next for the Bronx Book Festival?
We’re gearing up to launch the Kickstarter campaign. Shortly after that we will release the exciting author line-up!
How Ron is engaging the Bronx literary community: From its Bronx lair, the Literary Freedom Project (founded in 2004) publishes Mosaic Literary Magazine, one of a handful of Black literary print magazines; creates social engagement lesson plans for high school educators; and presents the Mosaic Literary Conference, an annual event that places literature as the nexus for discussing social and cultural issues that inform and influence its South Bronx community. He is also on the planning committee of the annual Bronx Book Fair (lead by Lorraine Currelley).
Recently, Ron launched a new initiative, One Book One Bronx, as a way to create book clubs throughout the borough. Each would select a book that reflects the culture of its specific community. The goal is to get more families and friends focused on reading together.
He also is the social media manager at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
When you think of the Bronx what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Of course Yankee Stadium is the iconic landmark that everyone thinks of but I see new art spaces as being the next big draw. There’s Hell Gate Arts gallery, BronxArtSpace, Andrew Freedman Home, 6Base, Bronx Documentary Center, Wallworks, Longwood Art Gallery—the list continues to grow. And within walking distance of most of these new spaces are restaurants with eclectic menus: sushi, Italian, Latin, Nigerian, American, and plenty of breweries. The challenge is that there isn’t a critical mass of institutions in close proximity to each other so visits require pre-planning or finding a Bronxite that can help navigate the borough.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
Its diversity. We have vibrant Pakistani, Ghanaian, Albanian, Mexican, Dominican, Garifuna, Nigerian, and Puerto Rican. And each community has wonderful international restaurants. There’s an “I like to eat” theme here.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
Everyone professes to love paper—subscribe to Mosaic (subscribe to any print literary magazine). Mosaic is full of curated literary content. New York artists such as Nicole Dennis-Benn, Javaka Steptoe, William Melvin Kelley, Jamel Shabazz, Lucille Clifton, and Saeed Jones have all been featured in the magazine. Each issue is also supplemented with a lesson plan focused on cultural and social engagement.
Mosaic, which was founded in 1998, and turns 20 this year. It’s amazing that when you consider all the lit mags that have come and gone Mosaic is still publishing. As readers gravitate to digital and apps, each year becomes more of a challenge. We’re online and have vibrant social platforms but I still believe in print and still see some upside potential—yes, I’m in denial and may need therapy. That said, I think this is the year that I will have to decide to stop printing or find new markets for the print mag. Otherwise it has to be full-on digital, and something will be lost.
Also, folks should get on the train and attend an event in the Bronx. Stop claiming you’re a New Yorker if you never go above 14th St.
Folks should get on the train and attend an event in the Bronx. Stop claiming you’re a New Yorker if you never go above 14th St.
What’s next for you?
Continue to grind. Go to readings, listen for new voices to document. Read more—would love to read more books. Too busy being an admin to just slow down and read consistently. Twenty years in, I’m finally getting close to shaping this organization in a way that’s sustainable. There’s a core of four programs: Mosaic magazine, Mosaic Literary Conference, lesson plans, and One Book One Bronx, that I feel have a comfortable synergy to build on.
How Noëlle is engaging the Bronx Literary Community: After the sole bookstore remaining in the Bronx closed in 2016, Bronxite Noëlle started a Indiegogo campaign to open what will be the only independent bookstore in the Bronx. She not only met her goal but surpassed it by 25% last March. The bookstore will officially open in Mott Haven this spring. She’s been honored by the New York Yankees Hispanic Heritage Month Community Achievement Award and been a keynote speaker at various business events on crowdfunding. She also hosts a monthly Movers & Shakers book club in the Bronx bringing together readers of books by underrepresented authors.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
That we’re home to 10 colleges and thousands of intellectuals. The Bronx is still stigmatized by the fires and urban blight of the 70s, and while we’re still affected by that history, the Bronx is not to be slept on. We have beautiful communities, disproportionately produce talent, and yes, we read.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
Pull up for events and support with your dollars to help me show the world what many fail to see/that the Bronx is no longer burning… except with a desire to read.
The Bronx is no longer burning… except with a desire to read.
Project X, a Bronx based arts organization dedicated to elevating and re-centering the Bronx as an artistic hub.
How is Project X engaging the Bronx literary community?
Project X connects Bronx communities to each other through art and collaborative programming. During our October to May Season, we work with and feature artists of all disciplines in a community effort to highlight and safeguard Bronx and Latinx artists. Our monthly slams bring out some of the borough’s best poets and features a Latinx poet in the writing/performance community. Through monthly artistic partnerships as well as our Poetry Slam Series, held every last Thursday, we are producing the first ever certified Bronx reppin’ Slam Team headed to Nationals, 2018.
In addition, Project X partners with Bronx community organizations, venues, and artist collectives to produce community engagement events throughout the year. So far we have hosted a healing workshop/open mic for our communities affected by DACA with Bronx Native, a local clothing company, a health and wellness workshop led by Chef Gabriela Álvarez of Liberation Cuisine, a DJ Party featuring four Bronx-based DJs at Port Morris Distillery, and #PoetsforPuertoRico: The Bronx, a fundraiser for Puerto Rico Hurricane Relief at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Each collaboration not only connects creative and passionate Bronx natives to each other but also invites those outside of the Bronx to witness our community as crucial and sustainable.
When you think of the Bronx what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
How the Bronx uses its spaces to the fullest potential. Across the borough we have all these amazing parks with nonstop art events happening! From Lucy Aponte at Poe Park Visitor Center curating art and writing events throughout the year to Friends of Soundview Park coordinating their annual music festival, Bronx parks are unforgettably unique and artistic and always a community to explore.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
People who still believe the Bronx is as devastated as it was in the 1970s, that we are a failed borough and always will be. Even more, people equate the disenfranchisement of the borough to everyone in it, surprised to find out many of us are successful, creative, and educated. The Bronx is nowhere near where it needs to be in 2018, but we are also nowhere near where we were. The essence of the borough is and always will be grit, passion, hustle, and survival. So we won’t ever stop building a better future for ourselves.
The essence of the borough is and always will be grit, passion, hustle, and survival. So we won’t ever stop building a better future for ourselves.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
Project X is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts service organization. Donations for the purposes of Project X are tax deductible by law and can be made online here. Specifically we hope to find monthly donors to support our regular programming efforts. As gentrification begins infecting our community, we need the financial backing of our people to keep the Bronx in the hands of Bronx natives.
We want to continue to branch out. We have some strong partnerships already, from ID Studio Theater to the Bronx Museum of the Arts to the Bronx Music Heritage Center but we know there are so many other organizations we haven’t connected to, both in the Bronx and beyond. We need to bring the art to the people, that means partnering and collaborating with similar groups doing important work across the entire city. This also means exploring a diversity of art forms, from film festivals to art galleries we are trying to do it all. We want to support our gente who haven’t been able to access these artistic platforms before and prove that the Bronx has and always will be a hub of artistic creation.
“I’m a minimalist, so I only have two forks,” you said as you tended to an egg with one of them. It sizzled in olive oil. For our date, you told me it would be easier if we met at your place so you could do the cooking. Your diet condemned most foods. Our future seemed finite, but I had spent years with a man who in the middle of May loved to roast whole turkeys and mash piles of potatoes. You made me feel light.
Over the next few months, I watched as you pruned your life. First your table’s chairs disappeared, and then your pillow. Soon there was a single lonely towel in your bathroom. Your bed went next. You slept on the floor with your arms stiff at your sides, like a vampire that had forsaken its coffin.
But you kept your houseplants. You kissed me among the ferns and I felt like we were camping in a tiny, wild piece of Brooklyn. I could smell the fresh earth.
On the day you got rid of your table, I dropped my tote bag onto your lacquered wood floor. It was heavy with the shampoo I carried back and forth so I wouldn’t burden your bathroom. I got it from a $25 donation to WNYC. I shared that out loud to crack the silence. “You shouldn’t get a thing for giving,” you said without looking at me. “That ruins it.”
When you minimized to one fork soon after, I knew what came next. “Minimalism is about freedom,” you began.
“Save your words,” I said. Well, I’m sure you threw them away.
There was nothing to gather. I picked up my tote and opened the door. You sat on the floor surrounded by greenery and said goodbye just once.
Two nondescript people of the traditional number of toes and fingers, noses, ears, hearts, and lungs, sat in a parked car in front of the apartment they shared.
A group of boys, young enough still to feel like the world bent itself to them, walked by the car. Death, addiction, illness, failure, war, murder, car crashes, sexually transmitted diseases, heartbreak — those were all things that happened to other people. They felt too big in this world for any of that to happen to them. One of them pointed at the car, another made a pussy joke, and the four of them walked by the car laughing. None of them lowered their voices as they passed a mother and her young son. The mother, with eyes that weren’t really paying attention, watched her son bend down to pick up a rock. The boy was learning about dinosaurs in school and was hoping to find a fossil. The mailman in his truck, passed the mother and her son and moved around the parked car. Seeing the mother, the mailman couldn’t help but think of his youngest daughter and how she was getting married next month. Of all the things in the world to be and feel — the mailman continued down the street feeling like the most inconsequential man in the world.
The sun shone. The planets moved. The moon orbited the Earth. The tree exhaled oxygen. A man in power called another country a dirty word. And these two people inside the parked car said goodbye to the other. Said goodbye to the life they had hoped to have together, to the love they had fostered between them, to the midnight back scratches, the soft hand that draped itself over her waist as she slept, and her snores that kept him awake.
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