the trees over there have arms tangled in intercourse —a moving tomb that crawls inches by the decades. an amber tint has leaked from the sky, somewhere far, somewhere with no name and thrown bucketful after bucketful of itself onto the chapped surface of the tree’s waistline.
i try my hardest to get her attention but she has already started to kiss him her green hair giving way to the wind, the strands of dead brown ribbons hanging gnomic, winsome, childish.
i want to go up to her and brush against her hunched shoulders, knot my fingers through her’s as she is locking necks with this other one.
in another i see her warm mouth tremor against the still brick wall they pose by, a hundred flickering diamonds cast off from the cracked asphalt —they have done it and they are exhibitionists.
i want to go up to him and clamp down his roots, bruise his forearms, steal his strength but the indian minors cling on to both their heads so i cannot move, not even an inch.
i remain amorphous to them i am a bristling sculpture waiting to be named or used. in another life i would be far away from this carcass forgetting my old age. this face, i have always known it was mine, but i wore it like indignity suspicious of those who stare.
i pout my plump limbs and flick my hair they stand still with obdurate faces chaining plastic signs around me as panoply they will soon send me to a prison a nullity of nature then make me into something where shoes clap against me in a nave somewhere far somewhere with no name.
For the kinder one
Because it was made in the time that it took and because nobody else was there to see it, I could not tell you then what happened to the tree— the how it fell and the how it drained.
Once it was taken, the barks began to slide, they slipped off the skin of the skin like water on rock and many things I have yet to see.
Because nobody told you to see to see and nobody warned you of the slip and the slip the how it grew off and the how it shed like open pores.
I made a sign with my fingers through your fingers like an unbroken chain ready to break in all the right places.
Solitary Confinement
My mother knows this house well, she knows its speech and candor. For years, since our migration from the foreign land of our birthplace it has become her dearest friend — her only friend, her orphan and her orphanage.
During the years of our schooling, the years I’ve now forgotten, the house became her companion, her closest confidant and saving grace.
She’d leave only to walk out the front to admire its view from the street, to trace with her gaze its tall impervious frames, in all its shiny double bricked splendour.
She’d spend her days studying its cracks and misalignments— the timber limbs and uncanny scars. They provided a comfort, a reciprocated respect something not quite present through her relations with people.
I had not known of the quiet dissatisfaction. I had not known of the wailing walls. I had not known of her secret mantra and the space between the two cracks on the ceiling that comforted her when my father lost his humanity.
I remember the night my father forgot we were in the house and slammed his head against the kitchen door and my mother emerged after we were put to bed and wiped the crimson spots on the splinted knob.
My mother spoke to the rooms often. She spoke to them more than us. Had I known of its meaning, its worth I’d not have signed the papers.
“And it fell out, as they watched a fit time…she was desirous to wash herself in the garden: for it was hot. And there was no body there save the two elders, that had hid themselves, and watched her.” — Susanna 1:15–16, King James Bible
Alias Grace knows Susanna and the Elders was a horror story.
When the protagonist, Grace Marks, sees Guido Reni’s painting in the home of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, she’s fascinated but unsettled; her eyes keep sliding back to the recoiling figure of Susanna..The suave Mr. Kinnear suggests it’s frightening because a woman was falsely accused of a grave crime, and only the intervention of a clever man saved her. Grace, his maid (and later, murderer), listens politely to this foreshadowing. But when she looks at the painting itself, Grace is clearly troubled by something deeper. Kinnear’s retelling, which barely mentions Susanna, has done nothing to explain what’s actually so unsettling about Susanna recoiling from the men who came upon her when she thought she was alone. Grace doesn’t yet understand that the horror of the story is that women are always being watched.
Reni’s “Susanna and the Elders”
The novel by Margaret Atwood centers on real-life crime celebrity Grace Marks, convicted in 1843 of murdering Thomas Kinnear, and possibly the housekeeper Nancy. Its character study unspools with the deliberate dread of a psychological thriller, with Grace gently pulling (fictional) psychiatrist Dr. Jordan through a story that suggests no matter who struck the fatal blow, patriarchy is the monster behind the crime.
Netflix’s recent Alias Grace, written by Sarah Polley, makes the most of this villain. Despite some stylistic flourishes, the series keeps its central focus on Grace’s struggle against the inexorable, banal horror all around her; patriarchy is frightening not because men can torment you, but because most men think nothing of tormenting you. Grace (Sarah Gadon) often asks questions she doesn’t answer, because the truth is both so obvious and so disheartening. Men behave monstrously because they can. Women believe men love them because the other option is to buckle under the weight of the truth. Women must think about men every second of the day, while men can get away with thinking about women so little that Dr. Jordan (Edward Holcroft) has to ask what goes into household chores.
What makes Grace an uncanny rather than a tragic figure is the control she exerts in the telling. Half the satisfaction of her interviews is seeing what scraps she keeps away from Dr. Jordan’s prying eyes. And as she presents her unanswered questions to Dr. Jordan, he is, inch by inch, forced to answer them himself. Director Mary Harron is most famous for the kinetic frustration of I Shot Andy Warhol and the hyper-aware dread of American Psycho, and here she seeks to deconstruct them both; with every shot, Alias Grace demands that we think about what makes a horror movie.
To say “male gaze” is something of a shortcut; it suggests a monolith where the reality is often more nuanced. But the idea of patriarchal norms as an unconscious, poisonous force is highly present in Atwood’s work. Its most direct distillation might be The Robber Bride: “Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” What better way to describe the camera?
The camera is inherently a vehicle of suspense; to watch anything on film is to be waiting for something to happen. But the camera is far from a neutral observer. Harron knows it; familiar tricks of the horror genre are presented in a way that forces us to consider how we accept the camera’s gaze on women, and the violence it implies. In horror, anticipating the violence is both a source of suspense and of perverse glee (perfected in American Psycho).Either she’ll survive, or the monster will get her in the end, and either one is entertaining. (The fact that Grace is the subject of the violence, rather than the object, is one of the many things that makes the usual visual beats so discomfiting.) Within the narrative, Grace constructs her story for her male audience; in the intimacy between Grace and the viewers, Harron’s camera asks what we take for granted.
Within the narrative, Grace constructs her story for her male audience; in the intimacy between Grace and the viewers, the camera asks what we take for granted.
The show deliberately structures itself around the monster in the room. Conversations between women are almost exclusively about men — even beloved Mary speaks more often of her political hero or the son of the house than about herself, or about Grace. (Grace would have nothing to tell that wasn’t about a man, anyway. Her dead mother is already a footnote; her father abused her, then demanded she send money home.) And if anyone in the room speaks about another woman, it’s usually on the binary of whether or not she’s made herself available for sex. Why, Grace almost asks but doesn’t need to answer, is women’s currency of reputation designed to be so easy to bankrupt?
Even the things we’re meant to look at suffer from the great divide. Much is made of quilting, Grace’s favored craft, and so far removed from Dr. Jordan’s experience that the moments she talks about it play like a codebreaking scene in a spy movie. It’s not an art men are meant to understand; it’s a warning from women to women about the inescapable. The only other piece of art we see is Susanna and the Elders, a striking painting whose story Mr. Kinnear is only too happy to explain — and why would you need more than that, when that’s the only story possible for a woman?
Harron’s visuals draw us back and back again to these unspeakable answers. Grace’s first position at the Parkinsons’, with Mary, has the soft-focus flatness of a story being forced into something happy; later, the Kinnear house is lit with the same encroaching shadows as the painting of Susanna. And in the frame-story parlor, Grace is bathed in beatific light that we know is Dr. Jordan’s doing. It’s the same light as his daydreams of rescuing her — standard, even expected, story beats that have been so quietly debunked by the camera that instead of romantic, they land halfway between laughable and invasive. In these daydreams, he never rescues her from the handsy guards or heroically demands her freedom in a busy courtroom; he always comes upon her when she’s alone.
But even his increasing uncertainty about Grace’s role in the murders doesn’t stop him from having these dreams — from focusing his wide-pupiled attention on her, from inching toward her until their knees are married, from trying to trick her into giving up the key that will let him understand her and be done. Given how much of the series rests on this claustrophobic rhythm, it’s remarkable how effective it always is to cut from Grace’s carefully-arranged features to the Doctor’s vampiric attention — an old-fashioned horror beat that works very, very well.
And Grace knows. Sarah Gadon deftly threads the needle of both Grace’s slyness and her melancholy, and though some specifics of Grace’s confinement are glossed over, the implication is clear: she has gotten on in life in direct relationship to her ability to navigate what men want. Even alone, Grace is observing herself; in her cell at night, she constructs her own life from the outside, quick-cuts of alternate explanations and angles. When she takes the fateful nap in the Kinnear’s meadow, speaking to the doctor of her solitude, she paints the Doctor a quiet mockery of pastoral melancholy, and then — more honestly — imagines herself from behind, watched by farmhand Jamie. It’s a horror-movie shot, and a moment of quiet tragedy from a Grace who knows better. (Without quite meaning to be a monster, Jamie does, in fact, get her in the end.)
In Alias Grace, patriarchy isn’t just men taking advantage of women without consequence. It’s the only thing that shapes Grace at all, and Polley and Harron let us linger in how wholly it’s become the gaze Grace turns on herself — so unforgiving, angry, and powerless she can’t remember the moment she broke beneath it. It means everyone is possessed by the same demon that no one can exorcise. It’s a horror so pervasive and unimaginable that a glimpse of its true power drives Doctor Jordan mad. (He goes to war rather than think about it; back home, his nerves shot, Grace consumes him.) Outside of the male gaze, Grace as we know her doesn’t exist, and the idea of a Grace without it is the ghost that haunts her.
Outside of the male gaze, Grace as we know her doesn’t exist, and the idea of a Grace without it is the ghost that haunts her.
There are few victories in this story; half the horror of having the patriarchy as your villain is that the monster’s almost bound to win. The Doctor never writes his letter. Mary and Nancy meet sorry ends. Grace doesn’t even get to name her righteous anger and claim the murders — either it was Mary after all, or she’s clever enough to give Mary credit. (That scene, with its widow’s weeds, is both the height of the series’ uncanny affect, and the stripped-bare truth of Grace as object. Even those agitating for her freedom have a matinee-audience detachment about her suffering.) By this point, Harron’s camera has made us painfully aware of the horror of being looked at, of the idea that women are constructed of wounds men leave behind. Grace is not herself, because without men, she can’t be; this itself is murder by a thousand cuts, right before our eyes.
Traditionally, if the girl in a horror movie survives to the end, there’s one last scare — the killer glimpsed again, a prophetic nightmare, the stomach-dropping reveal that the evil has spread — to remind us that horror is the constant of life, not the interruption. It’s fitting that this horror belongs to Dr. Jordan, and not to Grace. The last time Dr. Jordan sees her she’s merely looking back at him, but Harron frames it like the last horrible discovery in a thriller: the corpse of the person you thought was far from the danger, the demon that survived the exorcism after all. Hers is a look that knows what lies ahead for him.
Half the horror of having the patriarchy as your villain is that the monster’s almost bound to win.
For Grace, things are quieter, both because she’s already at the center of the story’s violence (overt and otherwise), and because she knows this is a demon that can’t be conquered, only bargained with. And so our reassurance, such as it is, is that Grace makes her peace. Harron’s camera leaves the claustrophobic close-ups of the parlor, at a respectful distance as she wanders her farm and hangs a quilt of her own in the same flatly unreal light of her early happiness, quiet and unobserved. She’s sufficiently outdone the men who sought to fathom her; they’re diminished by trying (the doctor and Jamie both). And at the last she looks out at us — for once, the examiner.
Uranus, it has been pointed out, has long been the butt of jokes. As an initiation for those unfamiliar with the genre, I offer the ne plus ultra of Uranus humor:
Q: Why are the U.S.S. Enterprise and toilet paper alike?
A: They both hunt for Klingons in the rings around Uranus.
Well, that’s out of the way. Sorry if the low humor discomfits, but when writing about Uranus jokes, it is the nature of the business.
Most of us heard, and then gleefully repeated, our first Uranus jokes during childhood. The scatological juvenile obviousness inherent in the myriad variations of these essentially identical gags did not and will never diminish our appreciation of them. (There is no definable difference between good Uranus jokes and bad Uranus jokes — there are only Uranus jokes.) My own introduction to Uranus jokes must have come close to half a century ago, and certainly the playground comedian who related the jape was working solidly within a received older tradition. But how old might that tradition be?
There is no definable difference between good Uranus jokes and bad Uranus jokes — there are only Uranus jokes.
Certainly, no planet Uranus joke can predate March 13, 1781, as that was when astronomer Sir William Herschel first discovered the celestial body from the garden of his house in Bath, England. Okay then, you say — the tradition started March 14, 1781. But the story of the planet’s nomenclature is more involved, as Herschel didn’t just peer through his telescope and say “I can see Uranus.” The astronomer’s name for the object he discovered (and at first misidentified as a comet) was Georgium Sidus, after King George III. According to Mark Littmann in his 2004 tome Planets Beyond: Discovering the Outer Solar System, that appellation proved “instantly unpopular” wherever the monarch did not reign. German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, one of the first observers to properly identify the body as the seventh planet from the sun, named it Uranus after the father of Saturn and grandfather of Jupiter in ancient Roman cosmology. However, writes Littmann, “The new planet remained officially ‘The Georgian’ in Britain until after the discovery of Neptune and through the 1847 publication of the Nautical Almanac for 1851.”
Uranus as photographed by Voyager 2 in 1986
Okay then, you say — the tradition started no later than 1851, at least among the English speaking peoples. In the absence of documentation, however, that would be mere speculation. Something as elusive as the earliest appearance in print of a Uranus joke would seem very difficult to track down, unless the planets all lined up just so.
The Conjugation of the Planets
I was set on the circuitous path to the first Uranus joke by sheer chance, via a history book for general readers titled 100 Diagrams That Changed the World. In it, author Scott Christianson identifies the first print appearance of an emoticon, a type of diagram defined by Wikipedia as “etymologically a portmanteau of emotion and icon…a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression that, in the absence of body language and prosody, serves to draw a receiver’s attention to the tenor or temper of a sender’s nominal non-verbal communication, changing and improving its interpretation.” (There are other, simpler definitions of “emoticon” I could have used, but none that are as spectacularly annoying.)
Emoticons first appeared in an American satirical magazine called Puck on March 30, 1881. This is what the original ones looked like.
First emoticons in print, Puck magazine, 1881
Christianson reproduces the entire page of the periodical, showing the busy layout in which the first emoticons were buried.
The full page from the 1881 Puck magazine in which emoticons first appeared
Curious as to what constituted satire in 1881, I read the copy surrounding the emoticons, and came across the heading “END OF THE WORLD,” top right. The text below recounts an unfortunate interaction between a professor carrying a telescope and a “grizzled old ‘49er” concerning the “conjugation of the planets.” The professor describes his findings about the solar system to the loquacious ‘49er, explaining to the old man that Mercury, the Sun, and Uranus are set to align at right angles. You can read the end of the exchange for yourself in the clip below — the key passage appears in the last eight lines, though by all means start at the beginning for the full comic effect.
A Uranus joke (“Uranus will be at right angles” / “My what will be at right angles?”) from 1881, Puck magazine
So there you have it, a Uranus joke from 1881 — AND IT’S STILL FUNNY!
Is it Uranus Joke Zero, though? The attribution indicates that the joke was reprinted from the Virginia Enterprise of Nevada, attesting to a longer-lived frontier tradition. (Intriguingly, Samuel Clemens first used the pen name “Mark Twain” when writing for the very same Enterprise in 1863, though no mention of the planet occurs in his writing for that publication.)
What we can surmise is that in 1881, three decades after the consensus agreement about the name of the seventh planet from the sun in a world without mass electronic communications (but not without playground comedians), a Uranus joke was still novel enough to merit inclusion in a noteworthy satirical publication in New York City. Unless the punchline is actually “Those will be the principal occurrences,” which I wager it is not.
So here was a curious historical convergence on that one page of Puck magazine — the first emoticons and a 136-year-old Uranus joke. Is it possible that the joke was also the first of its kind? I wanted to find out. Before we leave Puck, however, I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to the cartoon on the same page about a lecherous clergyman.
The lecherous clergyman is dealt a “manly kick”
That kind of stuff is also evergreen. ;‑)
Uranus is Newsworthy
The first time “Uranus” appeared in a U.S. newspaper (at least, one that has been digitized by the Library of Congress) comes in 1838, when the New York Morning Herald listed a ship by that name in its September 24 edition. A second citation appears in the Rutland, Vermont Herald in February 1840, in an article picked up from the Journal of Commerce titled “An Idea of the Universe” that explores Herschel’s astronomical work. At that time, the seventh planet Uranus represented the farthest known reaches of our solar system.
The biggest astronomic story of the 1840s was the discovery of Neptune, the eighth planet from the Sun, which was posited mathematically in 1843–45 by the brilliant British professor John Couch Adams after he noticed irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. Adams not only concluded that another planet was responsible, but worked out on paper its location in the solar system. Due to academic arrogance and snobbery, the Royal Observatory’s leadership ignored Adams’s work (a saga detailed in the “Trouble with Uranus” chapter of Planets Beyond). Within a few years, multiple Continental astronomers independently arrived at the same conclusion and soon located Neptune via telescope. The German faction wanted the new planet to be named Janus, the British Oceanus, and the French (who first made the official identification and thus had naming rights) wanted Neptune. Eventually, the name Neptune was adopted, thus thwarting the development of a parallel folkloric tradition of planetary low humor.
American newspapers starting covering the discovery in 1846, when articles about the odd behavior of Uranus started to appear. In a letter to the editors of the Weekly National Intelligencer, astronomer Sears C. Walker explained the most recent scientific findings, concluding his missive as follows:
When the particulars of Prof. Peirce’s computations are made known, astronomers will see in the still unexplained perturbations of Uranus a source of hope, and, I may add, a stimulus to exertion for a further enlargement of the boundaries of the system.
While elements of potential Uranus humor may be said to be present — seeing a “stimulus to exertion” in “perturbations of Uranus”— Mr. Walker’s letter is clearly intended to enlighten rather than amuse. The phraseology might have been good for a chuckle by the cognoscenti, but an intentional subtext is unlikely.
A False Start
The first discernible stage of the modern Uranus joke’s evolution occurred in 1852, a year after “The Georgian” ceased to be the standard English-language name for the planet. This front page editorial in the Baton Rouge Daily Comet titled “Mechanics and Manufactures” is a hoary bit of civic boosterism promoting Louisiana’s capital as a city of the future, and is addressed
not to the bloated nabob who believes nothing good, that has not a foreign savor — and who sends his shirts abroad to be washed because of the miserable quality of home starch: we are not talking to these people, we address ourselves to the frugal and the industrious, and prosperous and happy population of the transcendently great and enlightened Pelican State…
The editorial cites the many advantages Baton Rouge offers to manufacturers, and then takes the opportunity to blow the newspaper’s own horn, albeit in a way that this modern reader finds perplexing.
It would be wrong to close this article without speaking of ourselves. There is nine sterling literary and political papers in this place, viz : The Vis-a-Vis and the Gazette is two, and the Vis-a-Vis and the Advocate is four, and the Vis-a-Vis and the Comet is six, and the Vis-a-Vis and the CapitolianVis-a-Vis is eight — where in the ninth? Well we will set the Vis-a-Vis down for the odd number. We would like for nine more papers to be found anywhere this side of Uranus, to compare with these in wit — pith — point — or parts of beauty; if any of our editorial compeers will drum them up we will never brag more.
Here the citation of Uranus may be construed as denoting the far outer edge of the solar system, but hey, it was 1852 — it could have read Neptune. Although there is no way to ascertain the editors’ intent, the tone of the editorial is clearly jocose and I suspect that the double entendre would have registered with the happy population of the transcendently great and enlightened Pelican State, which would later give us tunes like “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say.”
The Comet editorial approaches, but does not conclusively establish itself as, Uranus Joke Zero — call it instead an ur-Uranus joke.
The Comet editorial approaches, but does not conclusively establish itself as, Uranus Joke Zero — call it instead an ur-Uranus joke. For one, it seems to be an evolutionary dead end — I could find no other Uranus jokes either in the Comet or contemporaneous publications. In fact, Uranus humor would actually take an evolutionary step backward in the decades to come.
Uranus Fails
By the 1870s, three potential Uranus jokes circulated among American newspapers. Remarkably, none seize upon the double entendre.
The most popular, “About Astronomy,” was authored by M. Quad (pen name of Charles Bertrand Lewis, one of the foremost humorists of the day) for the New York Graphic. More of a set piece than a joke, the anecdote (similar to “End of the World”) involves a bumpkin’s encountering a professor with a telescope. The professor, who has set up the telescope in a busy public square, invites the bumpkin — “a young man who prefers to feast his soul with scientific knowledge rather than become a sordid, grasping, avaricious capitalist” — to observe the planet Venus. Alas, the bumpkin instead points the telescope at a fifth story window and exclaims: “I see a feller hugging a girl!… [D]urned if there isn’t a dozen of them!”
The story continues in this vein down the roster of planets, finally reaching Uranus.
“You are now looking at Uranus,” replied the Professor. “Uranus is 97,502,304 miles distant from the earth, and yet I warrant that it doesn’t appear over 80 rods away to you. Will you be kind enough, my friend, to tell this crowd what you see?”
“Give it to him! Whack him back! Go in, old woman!” shouted the [bumpkin], slapping one leg and then the other.
“Speak up, my friend. What do you see?”
“That’s it! Got him by the hair now. I’ll bet fifty to one that she’ll lick!”
“Won’t you be kind enough, my friend, to tell this crowd what you see!”
“Whoop! That’s it now she’s get him purtiest family fight I ever saw!” cried the young man as he moved back and clapped his hands.
Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Ehhhhhh. So it’s not exactly a knee slapper (cut to the big finish — the bumpkin is actually a plant whose titillating observations are designed to drum up a crowd, to which the professor tries to hawk tooth powder), but it tickled the funny bones of enough editors across the nation to appear in at least six other newspapers, several times on the front page.
As I researched 19th-century newspapers, I was surprised by how many times I encountered the same articles in rural and frontier journals far from urban centers, often within weeks of their original publication dates. I was also impressed by the depth, breadth, and sophistication of the news and feature stories — Americans of that era who read their local papers would have been very well informed. “It must not be thought that country papers were generally contemptible or negligible in this period; the contrary was true,” wrote Frank Luther Mott in his 1961 history American Journalism. “There were over 12,000 of them by 1890; they had more than tripled in twenty years,” Mott observes. Content was shared in several ways — for one, the exchange of papers between publishers had been carried gratis by the US Post Office since 1792 to facilitate the dissemination of important news, ideas, and political messaging. More significantly, writes Mott, “by 1880, more than 3,000 weeklies…were supplied with readyprints by twenty-one companies,” content distributed in the form of metal sheets that became known as “boilerplate,” the origin of the term still used today.
By the 1870s, three potential Uranus jokes circulated among American newspapers. Remarkably, none seize upon the double entendre.
The plates moved nationwide rapidly by train, and so one will repeatedly encounter humorous miscellany like this second Uranus joke fail, a lament called “Tall Men” putatively written by a short fellow. “I am always sorry for a tall man,” the writer begins, because “a very tall man is always pursued, haunted by one unvarying joke. Every short or ordinary sized man that approaches him throws back his head, affects to gaze up into the heavens with a very painful effort, and asks, ‘Isn’t it pretty cold up where you are?’” The writer concludes,
I wish I was the Colossus of Rhodes and a little man four feet eleven and a half would come up to me some day when I felt right good, and stare up at me with a grin longer than his body and ask me “If it wasn’t pretty cold up there” and I would hold him up by the neck, and I would swing my brazen leg until I got the motion and impetus of a walking beam, and then I would kick the little fellow so high that he could read the names of the streets on the street lamps in Uranus, and I would sarcastically shout after him, “No, it’s red hot!”
The piece is characteristic of American humor writing of the day, overwritten and none too funny. It is frequently hard to discern just what exactly what the reader is supposed to find amusing in many of the jokes, with one overriding exception — crude ethnic humor. Even in mainstream publications, stereotyping was pervasive, with reappearing stock characters such as the lazy Negro, the conniving city slicker, the clueless hillbilly, the stuffed shirt blueblood, and, as seen in this third (seemingly sui generis) Uranus joke fail from the Pacific Northwest 1878, the vainglorious sozzled Irishman.
This failed Uranus joke centers on the idea that Uranus was Irish and named “O’Ranus” and is not worth explaining further
Perhaps publications in the 1870s were too restrained by contemporary mores and genteel sensibilities to seize upon the comic potential inherent in the obvious double entendre. That reticence, however, would soon change.
Back to the End of the World
The trail to Uranus Joke Zero eventually led back to “End of the World.” The joke originally appeared on page 3 of the Virginia Daily Territorial Enterprise on February 16, 1881, but with two crucial differences to the version published in Puck magazine. First, it featured a subhead: “A Man Who is Anxious to See the Grand Wind-Up in the Set-to Between the Planets.” The second difference is that the joke doesn’t wrap up with the professor’s line, “Those will be the principal occurrences”; instead, the grizzled old ‘49er has some additional dialogue.
The ’49er diverges from Uranus jokes to say that he’s eager to “see old Merkry git in the last at the sun and bust up all her creation,” which is not as funny
I know — ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. As the joke reads in its unredacted form, it seems as if the object of the humor is meant to be the apocalyptic ravings of a coot ‘49er, and not Uranus at all. The subhead would also signal as much, and maybe this was done to camouflage the subversive ribald element. Without a doubt, Uranus humor is present and could have been enjoyed by readers of the day, but it is not the fulcrum of the joke.
Newspaper editors across the nation nonetheless found the original story rich enough to warrant republication. As copies of the Territorial Enterprise crisscrossed the continent by rail in the spring of 1881, the complete version of “End of the World” appeared in the Iron County (Missouri) Register, the Hartford (Kentucky) Herald, the Democratic Northwest (Napoleon, Ohio), and the Idaho Statesman (Boise City). All these newspapers ran the original version of “End of the World” before Puck magazine published its truncated version of the joke on March 30, 1881 — the day that the modern Uranus joke was born. Here, an editor at Puck excised the ‘49er’s unamusing additional dialogue so that the joke wraps up with the indignant geezer demanding that the professor explain: “My what will be at right angles?” To which the professor replies: “Uranus.” To which the ‘49er rejoins: “Thunder! Then I’ll be in at the grand bust-up, sure. Is that all?’’
“Those will be the principal occurrences,” the professor says — boom, joke over. This closing line, which seemed so off when I first encountered it, makes sense as a vestigial remnant of the original. What’s more, the Puck editor also took out the original subhead so as to ensure that his readers would not get confused and think that the laugh was about a man who is anxious to see the grand wind-up. Clearly, this person grasped the comic potentialities of the Uranus joke.
Is it a coincidence that the first true Uranus joke appears almost precisely 100 years after William Herschel discovered the planet on March 13, 1781? Uranus Joke Zero appears so close to the date of that milestone as to make one wonder whether the wag at Puck might have been inspired by a contemporaneous headline about the centennial of Uranus.
Is it a coincidence that the first true Uranus joke appears almost precisely 100 years after William Herschel discovered the planet?
As the March 30 edition of Puck moved west from New York, other editors realized the magazine had struck comic gold. After Puck, two of the three subsequent reprints of “The End of the World” I was able to find (the Standard of Albert Lea, MN and the Los Angeles Herald) featured the story in its shorter, pure Uranus joke incarnation. It’s a small sample to be sure, but given the geographic dispersion of the three publications, by 1881 the Uranus joke had established beachheads on the East Coast, West Coast, and heartland of the United States.
Who was the person who recognized the deathless comic potential buried in “End of the World”? We can’t know for certain, only that he exemplified the creative spirit of the nascent modern age as summed up by Kirk Varnedoe in A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern. The birth of the Uranus joke exemplifies
…as sharply chiseled out a kernel as we could hope for of what cultural innovation is all about [- s]omebody operating in the context of one set of rules sees that there is another way to go, and takes matters into his or her own hands; and someone else, or a lot of others, chooses to view this aberrant move, not just as a failure or a foul, but as the seed of a new kind of game, with its own set of rules.
On that one page of Puck, there is an abundance of modern mold-breaking. With emoticons, we see a reimagining of the use of movable type for the first time since Gutenberg introduced it in 1450; with the advent of the digital age a century later, this innovation would revolutionize modes of communication worldwide. With Uranus Joke Zero, we have a literal breaking of a mold — the snapping off of a piece of boilerplate — in a way that would alter juvenile potty humor forever. Not only that, Puck readers got as a bonus an irreverent anticlerical cartoon about a randy man of God.
As a discrete sub-genre of humor, the Uranus joke will not only endure, it will prevail.
Not that there haven’t been efforts to kill it. In 1986, a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary dictated that henceforth the preferred pronunciation of “Uranus” was going to be “yor-uh–nuss,” suggesting that by the 4th quarter of the 20th century, the Astronomer Community had finally exhausted its patience with sniggering 3rd graders, and had joined other Establishment forces in an effort to quash their infernal impudence.
Their social engineering project was destined to fail, because Uranus. Not only do I trust the world’s playground comedians to continue to keep the oral traditions about Uranus alive, I am certain of the gag’s literary longevity. True story — on the same morning I first encountered the joke that appeared in Puck magazine, my nine-year-old son gleefully pointed out the following passage in the book he was reading:
Seamus and Dean, who were working nearby, sniggered loudly, though not loudly enough to mask the excited squeals from Lavender Brown — “Oh Professor, look I think I’ve got an unaspected planet! Oooh, which one’s that, Professor?”
“It is Uranus, my dear,” said Professor Trelawney, peering down at the chart.
“Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender,” said Ron.
Most unfortunately, Professor Trelawney heard him, and it is this, perhaps, that made her give them so much homework at the end of class.
This, of course, penned by J.K. Rowling, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
The Harry Potter series is destined to be read for a long time to come, ensuring that future generations will be introduced to, delighted with, and shaped culturally by the low humor of the Uranus joke. What’s more, I believe that the genre, it roots in the American frontier, has a chance to persist even longer than Rowling’s books.
Imagine if you can the end of the world, the grand wind-up, when mankind is forced to abandon the dying planet Earth for a new home in another solar system. The final spaceship will pass the seventh planet from the Sun, and as it recedes in the distance, you have to figure that someone on board is going to say:
“Get ready, dude — this is the last time anyone is ever going to have a chance to look at Uranus.”
And with a merry chuckle, humankind’s stragglers will hurtle past the rings around Uranus and blast, like the U.S.S. Enterprise, into the final frontier.
The author would like to thank Prof. Michael Fuhlhage and Prof. W. Joseph Campbell for their kind assistance in identifying research resources for this story.
When you really love a book, you kind of want to climb inside it and get lost. But of course, you can’t literally climb inside books—or can you? We found seven structures from around the globe that let you surround yourself with stories on all sides. These awe-inspiring tunnels, towers, and mazes combine art, architecture, and a deep love of literature.
The Yangzhou Zhongshuge library in Yangzhou, China
Step into this bookstore in Yangzhou, China and prepare to be mesmerized by a river of never-ending books. Architecture firm XL-Muse found inspiration in the city’s waterscape and created black mirrored glass floors that reflect the lighting bolt above and the ceiling-high arched shelves, guiding the visitors deeper into the tunnel of infinite tomes.
Using books as a building blocks for a giant tower, Slovakian artist Matej Kren tries invoke a sense of greatness, confusion and reflection in his art sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna (MAMbo). He uses mirrors in the narrow inner-space to create an illusion of infinity and to confuse the viewer’s spatial perspectives. The conflict of false infinity in a tight space introduces the viewers to the problem of latent perception and how conventions cloud the way we experience place.
Spanish artist Alicia Martín’s sculpture in Madrid depicts a cascade of books tumbling out a window like a rushing waterfall. Her gravity-defying Biografias series transformed 5,000 used books, suspended from a mesh wire cage, into a giant sprawling chute. Pages from the books rustle in the wind, giving life and imbuing a restless energy to this inanimate art piece.
Tower of Babel by Marta Minujin in Buenos Aires, Argentina
This Tower of Babel was made of 30,000 donated books in languages from all over the world. Argentinian artist Marta Minujin created the 80-foot-high, seven-story art piece in celebration of Buenos Aires’s designation as the 2011 World Book Capital. At the dismantling of the sculpture, book lovers picked a book from the tower while the rest were preserved into archives of The Library of Babel, named after a story by the great Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.
Bargain hunters and #bookstagrammers alike pilgrimage to the Last Bookstore in downtown L.A. On the second floor of this bookstore is the Labyrinth: a vast and chaotic maze, home to more than 100,000 used books priced at just $1 each. The perfect place to get lost in a book, the space features doors that go nowhere, time-travel portholes looking into artwork of the cosmos, hidden pathways that lead into secret bank vaults and a glowing tunnel of paperbacks. Don’t forget to look down! The ground is covered in pennies.
Yet another mind-boggling literary sculpture by artist Matej Kren! This staggering installation at The Prague Municipal Library in the Czech Republic is made up of hundreds of used books stacked Jenga-style to form a cylindrical tower. The reflection of the mirror at the base of the tower resembles looking down into the watery pool of a wishing well. Another mirror placed on the ceiling creates the mirage of an endless stack of books going on forever. #trippy
https://vimeo.com/46750756
aMAZEme by Marcos Saboya & Gualter Pupo in London, U.K.
This mesmerizing time lapse video shows the construction of this gargantuan literary labyrinth from the placement of the first book until the opening day. Designed by Brazilian artists Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo with production company HungryMan, the maze pays homage to Jorge Luis Borges and his love of mazes. Volunteers meticulously arranged 250,000 books into the shape of the Borges’ fingerprint. The Argentinian writer once said: he did once say: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” Little did he know, that paradise would one day be a book maze shaped like his fingerprint.
Have you ever loved a book so much you wanted to live in it? I know when I was finished reading Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, I yearned to be a resident in the town of Gilead and smell that fresh Iowan air while gazing at the rich gold landscape. Of course, a version of that is possible but now that I live in Brooklyn, that kind of vastness, space, silence, seems so far away from here that it is almost fictional.
What follows are some fictional cities that are truly works of the imagination, and will make you wish you could live in your library.
This entire list could be composed of the imagined metropolises of Italo Calvino’s Imaginary Cities. We have 55 to choose from and they are all named after women. For this list, we chose Isadora to represent, a place where, “the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors.” It’s a city of desire and the desire never dies as we grow older. “In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”
This town-turned-city is based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s hometown, Aracataca. Initially, the people of Macondo don’t have connection to the outside world, but the village evolves into a thriving landscape and city. Think Garden of Eden but Colombian. I’d like to live in this place before the banana plantation is set up and (spoiler alert) the eventual windstorm destroys the town.
The exact location of Whoville is up for interpretation. Sometimes Whoville is on a clover, other times it is has been on a snowflake. Regardless, it is an entire town held together on a speck. Because it is so tiny, Whoville experiences any kind of change at a dramatic level. Any movement or unexpected weather can create quite the turbulence. But this city is great because of the locals! The Whos make great neighbors, the kind of neighbors that help you brave the weather.
Gethen is technically a whole fictional planet, but very little of it is inhabitable so the regions where people live amount to, roughly we’ll say, a city. Also known as Winter, Gethen is in the middle of an Ice Age in The Left Hand of Darkness. The people are biologically adapted to the cold, which does not mean they are perpetually curling up with their Netflix shows or tucked in with a couple dozen good books until the Ice Age breaks. But that’s what it would mean if I lived in Gethen.
Living in West Egg is a dream with a condition — we get to live there in Gatsby’s mansion. The place is sheer decadence: “The one on my right (Gatsby’s house) was a colossal affair by any standard — it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.” And the parties! “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue garden men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” West Egg is based on Great Neck, Long Island, but modern-day Great Neck will not do the trick—we want to live in specific Gatsby luxury.
The Flying Okie cities, from the Cities in Flight series by James Blish
Hold onto your fidget spinners—the Spindizzy is about to take you to a whole other level. This machine from James Blish’s “Cities in Flight” series is an anti-gravity device discovered by resident Dr. Corsi that allows entire cities to fly through space. If flying through space isn’t your thing, Dr. Corsi’s second discovery in the course of the books might be: the “anti-agathic” drug, also known as the anti-aging drug. In other words, this drug allows you to fly back through years.
There’s something whimsical yet scary about living in the Emerald City. At the end of the yellow brick road, the people of Oz live in harmony with one thing in common: they all see the city with a green tint. The Wizard figured it was easier to give everyone green-tinted glasses than to actually build a city of emeralds, so the citizens live in a low-key Matrix where what they see isn’t exactly real. In later Oz books, after the humbug wizard is deposed, the city is redone with actual emeralds—so if living in luxury is more up your alley than living in blissful ignorance, the Emerald City still suits. But even if it meant wearing green goggles all the time, we’d be okay with it in exchange for eternal life, magical animals, and lunches that grow on trees.
Ankh-Morpork, from the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett
Ankh-Morpork isn’t a safe city; for one thing, it’s disgusting, and for another, Discworld teems with grumpy wizards, professional assassins, and werewolves (and the werewolves are the good guys—one of them’s on the police force). Plus, the entire planet is floating through space on the backs of four elephants who are themselves on the back of a turtle. But where else can you visit the Dwarf Bread Museum, the Isle of Gods, and the library of the Unseen University all in one day?
Arkham, a fictional town in Massachusetts, is a town for people who enjoy giving themselves a good fright. With salacious murders and brutal hauntings, Arkham would be a great place to live for three to five days, at which point the novelty and thrill of living in a horror story would probably wear off. The deceptive sleepiness of the town combined with some very awake afterlife makes this a desirable temporary oasis for finding your inner self and thinking about everyone—and every thing—that has ever back-stabbed you.
I t’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. After all, I’d picked up André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Namemostly out of a desire to read for myself a certain juicy scene involving a peach and a much too-horny teenager that friends kept whispering and snickering about. But as I made my way through the story of the precocious Elio and his obsession with Oliver, the dashing graduate student saying at his family’s Italian villa for the summer, I found myself blushing — not (just) at the sumptuous sex scenes between them, but at the musings on yearning and desire that make up the bulk of the text. Reading Aciman’s novel took me back to those cheek-flushed days when I’d pine away for boys I both hoped would fancy me and worried would never notice me at all. Feelings I’d long forgotten and thought I’d finally outgrown kept flooding back in ways that embarrassed and, I have to admit, titillated me to no end.
Told in the first person, Call Me By Your Name is a novel about longing. At seventeen, Elio is that shy if outgoing kid who hides behind his know-it-all attitude. “Is there anything you don’t know?” Oliver asks him at one point, in response to yet another mini-lecture on music, history, or the classics that Elio has thrust upon him. With a doting academic father and a loving liberal mother, whose laissez-faire parenting encourage his own independence, Elio is used to being in control of the perfectly constructed world around him. The feelings that erudite and attractive Oliver inspire in him vex Elio in ways he cannot begin to comprehend until he attempts to reconstruct them years later. In the novel, an adult Elio sets out to tell us about that fateful summer in the 1980s when he realized “that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.” And hoo boy, is there a lot of testing and edging into uncharted territory throughout the book.
I may be close to twice Elio’s age, but reading the musings of a lustful and hungry 17-year-old felt all too familiar. This is, perhaps, because much of our vocabulary for desire is couched in youth. The feelings of sheer abandon, of an attraction that you can’t control, have been construed as signs of immaturity. Puppy-love, crushes, infatuations — these are things you’re supposed to outgrow. There’s nothing more ridiculous-sounding than a 33-year-old pining away, wondering whether that cute boy who just inched closer was giving him a sign.
But this is the reality, and one that Aciman nails: love (and it is a kind of love) makes words fail. His novel may make no room for the closet or the shame many of us grew up with, but it still pushed me to remember how desire, especially the kind that looks to be unrequited, can be paralyzing. When he is around, there is nothing you do that is not done for him, for his attention. But it also forces you to evaluate everything they do with the same attention; just as you are constantly crippled by the hope that they’re watching you intently and reading into everything you’re doing (say, noticing your guitar playing skills or any slight change in appearance), you’re driven by the conviction that they must be equally fixated on their own demeanor, eager to have you read into their behavior the very attraction you’re projecting and internalizing in equal measure.
Aciman’s novel pushed me to remember how desire, especially the kind that looks to be unrequited, can be paralyzing.
It’s no surprise than Elio succumbs to that most dreaded of pitfalls: imitation. “I tried imitating him a few times,” he admits. “But I was too self-conscious, like someone trying to feel natural while walking about naked in a locker room only to end up aroused by his own nakedness.” The novel plunges you deep into this mirrored sensibility where desire and identification are intertwined. As is obvious from its title, Elio’s plight is sutured to the near-narcissistic idea of same-sex desire. “Call me me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” Oliver tells him as they lay in bed in post-coital bliss once they finally give in to their lust for one another.
That’s when it struck me that my blushing wasn’t just about remembering first crushes and feeling that sense of possibility anew. Entangled in my own all-too physical reaction to the book was the reminder that, unlike Elio, I’d never quite been able to indulge in such knee-buckling attractions. Definitely not in my teenage years. To read about Elio’s summer affair with Oliver was to be reminded of the way I’d forced myself to closet such desires. Where friends and schoolmates got to live out teenage flings with abandon, accruing the kind of anecdotes that would later inform the relationships in their 20s, 30s, and presumably beyond, I’d spent too many years denying my own attraction to other men. Part of why reading such nakedly sexual and unabashedly erotic longing in the voice of a 17-year-old embarrassed me was because I could only belatedly identify with it. I’d never been able to be Elio in my youth but could all too easily be him in my 30s.
Part of why reading such nakedly sexual and unabashedly erotic longing in the voice of a 17-year-old embarrassed me was because I could only belatedly identify with it.
It’s why I worried about encountering him on the big screen. So much of the novel takes place in Elio’s head, with his near-insufferable soliloquies on desire, that I worried director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory wouldn’t be able to capture the very thing that had stirred such youthful (and shameful) feelings in me. I shouldn’t have worried. In the hands of Timothée Chalamet, Elio comes alive in ways I could never have dreamed of. Thankfully stripped of any kind of tired voiceover, Ivory and Guadagnino opt instead to let Elio and Oliver’s interactions brim with a physicality that speaks volumes. Elio’s bumbling walk whenever he’s moving in Oliver’s direction, as well as the infinitesimal changes in posture whenever he sees Oliver’s eyes alight on him, telegraph the many moments of interiority Aciman’s novel so depends on. The self-consciousness that comes across in Elio’s prose has been internalized in Chalamet’s body which, like a compass, is constantly looking for its North in Oliver.
And if words are “futile devices,” as Sufjan Stevens croons in one of the songs in the soundtrack, it’s no surprise Elio turns to actions — outlandish ones at that — to project exactly how he feels. Here’s where the film itself made me blush just as intently as the novel. Since they share adjacent rooms, Elio oftentimes sneaks into Oliver’s room to survey the realm of the man he desires. In one instance he happens upon one of Oliver’s recently-worn swimsuits. And, in what has to be one of the most sensual moments of the film (yes, even more than that peach scene) Elio splays himself out on all fours in Oliver’s bed as he wears the red shorts over his face and inhales the musky odor therein. I’m usually very composed while watching films, especially when surrounded by hundreds of other viewers as I was the night I first caught Call Me By Your Name at the New York Film Festival. But, during this scene, I quickly felt my pulse quickening and my palms getting increasingly damp. How many times had I fantasized about being so bold, so shameless? I thought back to instances where I’d been left alone in another man’s bedroom (while I took a phone call, or while they took a shower) and I’d kept myself from plundering their dirty laundry to get a whiff of the intoxicating smell that so drew me to them. Gladly, just as when I’d read (and later re-read) Aciman’s novel, there was no way others could see how flushed I got when I saw Chalamet all but convulse at the joy he felt upon inhaling Oliver’s smell.
But I blushed furiously in the dark, and also, I cried. Not only had Elio and Oliver survived their translation to the big screen, but in the process, they’d managed to further burrow themselves into my heart, making me both giddy and melancholy about having them in my life, if only for a short while. Seeing them biking along dirt roads, swimming in pools, groping one another inappropriately, and later embracing the electric connection they’ve inadvertently stumbled upon, they reduced me to a smitten schoolboy. And, like Elio in the final moving frame of the film, when the prospect of it all being over leaves him in a pool of tears, mourning something which had yet to be, I was a sobbing mess.
Part of wanting is understanding that those feelings have a depressingly short shelf life. Nothing quite like what Elio felt for Oliver could last long even (especially) after it was consummated. The emotions endure only as prized memories, mere flashes of lightning in darkness; or, as Guadagnino presents them at one point when we see Elio reminiscing, as overexposed and highly saturated images that brim with brightness, make everything else seem dull, but also singe your sight if you watch them for too long. And that’s where the ultimate if predictable tragedy of Call Me By Your Name lies: in its portrayal of the blistering ephemerality of longing. The way its flame engulfs you, making you unable to know whether you’re being warmed or burned. It’s no surprise Elio’s father, speaking to his devastated son after Oliver departs, instructs him to nurse his pain. “And if there is a flame,” he adds, “don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it.” They’re words I could’ve used at 17, for sure. But they rang, in between blushes and tears, all the more poignant at 33.
I had never been to the National Book Awards before, but this year, a year when Anne Hathaway and Bill Clinton were presenting and the nominees were diverse in both voice and form (Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection was on the fiction longlist alongside Daniel Alcaron and Jennifer Egan), this wonderful publication sent me in a press capacity. They promised an open bar, but I found a much more interesting spectacle. (And also an open bar.)
A dim Instagram picture of the appetizers Salman Rushdie ate and we probably weren’t supposed to see
I arrived to see guests including past winners Phil Klay and Jacqueline Woodson filing through the tent trying to avoid the red carpet. National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas fretted over something “missing at table 4." That something, it emerged, was the table. (They found it.) I, um, accidentally found myself in the upstairs balcony area where fancy people like Salman Rushdie were eating confusing-looking appetizers that might have been flattened flan. The view from up there of 50-something delicate tables, stacked with books and wine glasses, made for an elegant calm before the storm.
The awards commenced with Cynthia Nixon introducing Bill Clinton — or she tried to, but he made for the stage before she could read his bio, to which he remarked in his speech, “First of all, I owe Cynthia an apology, I guess, for barging in but I thought I was being introduced.” Having just read a harrowing article in The Atlanticabout his history of sexual harassment, I found that one hard to stomach. (Did this year, of all years, have to be the one where a significant American literary award was presided over by a serial harasser?) But I guess Bubba spoke well, and he introduced and awarded Dick Robinson of Scholastic a Literarian Award, for outstanding service to the literary community. Robinson’s corporation is doing an incredible job of upholding the human ability to communicate in words and letters. Like really, especially now, American children would be illiterate without him.
Did this year, of all years, have to be the one where a significant American literary award was presided over by a serial harasser?
Anne Hathaway was up next, supremely eloquent in her introduction to lifetime achievement award winner Annie Proulx. “I don’t know Annie,” Anne remarked, “My connection to her is rather tenuous given that my character lives in a single paragraph towards the end of Brokeback Mountain…they beefed me up in the movie.” But clearly Anne knew her work; she told us, “Because of her work I am better able to welcome the tenderness of loss if not the loss itself.” The author, of course, was also riveting in her articulation of the role of great fiction anytime and in the Trump era, an era she described as “the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending.” Proulx also brought the first major shock of the night when she told us, “Although this is for a lifetime achievement award I didn’t start writing until I was 58…so if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off…”
Then we broke for dinner. It looked like the guests were eating a circular steak. I went to the ladies room and while waiting in line, imagined once again what it would be like to be a man, go to the bathroom, and just walk right in.
The press area was EXTREMELY LIT, as this photo shows (note: photo does not show a lit press area)
After a long video and a brief speech about the work of the National Book Foundation, the book awards, the sauce of the evening, began. Robin Benway, author of Far From the Tree, took the Young People’s Literature award. Her speech was full of family: her father would have asked her when she was getting to work on her next book, her book was dedicated to her brother, her mother was the one who taught her to look up every word she didn’t know. Also, she asked her current editor to forgive her for being more than a year late with a new manuscript now that she’d won an award. We second that.
Monica Youn, poet and — did everyone else know this? — lawyer, presented the poetry award. “We keep being asked, What can poetry do?” Monica said. Her answer: be ornery. Frank Bidart won the Poetry Award, and his first shoutout of gratitude was to his editor, Jonathan Galassi. Cheers to editors! “I realized within the past month, that I’m almost twice as old as all of the other finalists,” said Bidart. “Writing the poems was how I survived.” A theme of the evening was emerging — great literature doesn’t happen in a rush or a rushed life.
A theme of the evening was emerging — great literature doesn’t happen in a rush or a rushed life.
Paula J. Giddings was the presenter for nonfiction. The longlist was history heavy and I realized only after she entered the stall that I had been standing in the bathroom line with nominee Masha Gessen. Guess what: She won! I waited to pee with a National Book Award winner! “Okay, I actually don’t have notes because I did not think this was going to happen,” Gessen began her speech. “I was rooting for another finalist.” She then continued, “I didn’t think that a Russian book could be on the [American] National Book Award longlist but of course things have, um, changed.” True facts.
Jesmyn Ward with her National Book Award for Fiction, from the live stream
And finally, this editor’s most anticipated award came up: Fiction. Jacqueline Woodson was presenting. She has so many awards that it was impossible to type everything Cynthia said in her bio so you can google it. She took to the stage in an illustrious yellow and grey tux and fabulous oversized tie, and recalled the many states around which she hauled hardbacks to keep up with her award-judging reading. And then the award went to…it went to… it went to Jesmyn Ward for Sing, Unburied, Sing. Yes! Her speech was moving for what it said about confidence in her convictions. She talked about early rejections: “People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.” But now that she is a well-deserved (two time!) National Book Award winner, she has been recognized for, in her words, “my poor, my black, my southern.” So don’t listen to those rejections, kids.
The formal evening then came to a close, and I had no intention of staying sober enough to record the rest of it. Though I will say that Instagram sponsored the after-party, and they were the creators of the tagline: “I’m definitely not drunk I’m just reading.” Good words to live by.
In a slight revision of the old trash and treasure aphorism, it is also true that one man’s utopia is another man’s hell — and almost always a woman’s hell. The thing is, the worlds we each dream of all look very different, and there are many great authors—beyond the go-to guys like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke—who tell stories of imagined worlds. Below is a list of stories that envision planets and places that are better, or at least an alternative, to the Earth you’re currently reading this from.
Pattie and her family are among the last refugees to flee a dying Earth in an old spaceship. And when the group finally lands on the distant planet which is to be their new home, it seems that the four-year journey has been a success. But as they begin to settle this shiny new world, they discover that the colony is in serious jeopardy. Nothing on this planet is edible, and they may not be able to grow food. With supplies dwindling, Pattie and her sister decide to take the one chance that might make life possible on Shine.
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides it’s time to bridge the distance and overcome that hatred that have separated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this will mean giving up his family and life on Anarres, and traveling to the utopian mother planet Urras, where he challenge the structures of life, society, and government. This is a book about the illusions of a utopia, and the pitfalls of both communism and capitalism.
Solomon has been called an heir to Octavia Butler, and her debut novel does bring Butler’s seminal work Kindred to mind. The story follows a sharecropper, Aster, who lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land — and ship leaders have imposed deep indignities on workers like Aster. As the story moves towards civil war, the novel becomes both a reflection of history, and a warning for the future.
Russell is a trained paleoanthropologist, and she brings that expertise to her first novel, The Sparrow, about a Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, and his expedition to the planet Rakat. The story follows two narratives, one that begins in 2059 after the voyage, and one that begins in 2019 when an astronomer first intercepts the transmissions of songs from Rakat’s people, the Alpha Centauri. Sandoz arranges to bring a mission to the singing planet even though 17 years will pass on Earth. He is the sole survivor. An unusual juxtaposition of religion and alien culture, the book won the Arthur C. Clarke and the James Tiptree, Jr. awards, the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, and the British Science Fiction Association Award.
The Wanderers follows three astronauts—Helen Kane, Sergei Kuznetsov, and Yoshihiro Tanaka—who have been selected by the private aerospace company Prime Space to pilot a trip to Mars. They’ve all been to space before, but for this mission’s training, they must endure 17 months of the simulated world of Eidolon, created in the Utah desert. While it’s a novel about a vision of another world, it’s as much a story about relationships, interpersonal dynamics, and what survival reveals about humanity.
Wells, who—fun fact—was once serialized by Cosmo, is most often celebrated for his scientific romances such as War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, which paved the way for the modern sci-fi genre. But I’m putting him on here so we can mention A Modern Utopia, written in 1905. It’s full of beautifully written hard truths (see: “a Universe ceases when you shiver the mirror of the least of individual minds”), and it presents a truly fascinating new world: there is gender equality, no capital punishment, and every individual shares the plan for “comprehensive onward development.” In the words of Tina Fey, I want to go to there.
While Asaro, a doctor of chemical physics, writes many books about other worlds, she spends a lot of time looking out for this one: she’s a member of SIGMA, a think tank of speculative writers that advises the government as to future trends affecting national security. So she knows some stuff about…worlds. In the Skolian saga books, the titular Empire rules a third of the civilized galaxy through its mastery of faster-than-light communication. There is war and power struggle with the rival Eubian Concord, several generations of characters, political intrigue, and of course, romance.
When I lead a workshop, I often say on the first day “I hate adjectives.” I see the participants’ eyes widen in fear, shock, or contemplation. Let me explain.
While I was in graduate school for my MFA, a good decade ago, I read The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pileby Noah Lukeman. Lukeman, a former literary agent, breaks his advice down at the line level as well as addressing the overall goals of writing. Each chapter ends with assignments that apply his advice. Lukeman is direct about what excites and bores him. It’s not an intimidating book so much as a reality check to consider what you may be doing without being conscious of it. He speaks to the reader as prospective editor, declaring we need confidence.
As an editorial assistant at the time, of course I wanted those tools — tools I felt I wasn’t getting in my MFA program so that I could solidify my style of writing for my career. I was eager to learn everything and this was where I was going to learn it. Like the nerd I am — yes, I was that person on honor roll/dean’s list and proud, dammit — I took to each chapter’s exercises with the ambition of finding the salve to any and all of my writer issues.
In Chapter 2 I hit his advice on adjectives and adverbs.
“The quickest and easiest way to reject a manuscript,” Lukeman wrote, “is to look for the overuse, or misuse, of adjectives and adverbs.” He goes on to list the six reasons why manuscripts reliant on adjectives and adverbs don’t work:
less is more;
writers shouldn’t underestimate the reader by assuming they can’t see what you want them to;
writers should always make the reader use their imagination;
the most overused adjectives and adverbs (big, small, wide, heavy, pretty, etc.) are common words that don’t add much to your writing;
they may not pack as much power as you think;
and, it can make for some slow reading despite intentions.
By the time I finished that chapter, let alone his book, I was a convert. I hated adjectives and adverbs. They were “weak”! They didn’t add anything! Words had to pack a punch! To the thesaurus! To this day The First Five Pages is a book I recommend and use in line-editing workshops to help people look closer at editing on a micro level. Lukeman’s book isn’t the only one to note this; William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style also mentions using concrete words and omitting anything unnecessary. And that was published in the 1920s.
Now, I’ve toned down a bit in the past ten years, in some ways at least. My dislike for adjectives and adverbs is not as vehement. But I still agree with Lukeman that the abundant use of them brings something down in the writing rather than ramping it up. Just this weekend, after editing a piece rife with adjectives, I started reading a published book that was well-received. I went into this book eager to not edit and simply let myself fall into the content. That didn’t happen. Before I was even done with the introduction, I was bombarded with adjectives describing everything the narrator and those around them wore, as well as the sky and the club and the city. There was the slinky and sparkly skirt. The dazzling city. The loud music. The pretty people. Too much! The weight of all those adjectives and adverbs made it impossible for me to turn off my editor brain and enjoy the story.
Before I was even done with the introduction, I was bombarded with adjectives describing everything the narrator and those around them wore, as well as the sky and the club and the city.
Nope, I said and turned on Stranger Things 2 instead.
It is possible to write a long sentence that’s not a weighed-down sentence. There are pieces like Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” that are actually one sentence (with the help of commas and semicolons). But sentences that are over-reliant on adverbs and adjectives don’t just get longer; they get heavier.
Case in point:
After Ryan broke up with me, I dragged myself upstairs to my wooden, four-post bed and plush, overstuffed pillows where I sleepily rested my melancholy head, that is until my brother came and got me for evening dinner.
I made that one up, but I have received work laden with this many adjectives in one sentence. Contrast this with a description in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn:
Kings County Hospital. No rooms, just wards. Slide a curtain back and there’s a baby crying. Slide another one and there’s a girl with the crazily hanging arm. Curtains and children. Nurses and noise. Where was my brother?
Minimal usage. Clear visuals. Makes me fill in some of the blanks but provides the specifics I need to see the girl, the baby, and hear the noise that often blankets a hospital.
Here’s another, less weighed down, example:
I yawned tiredly from the day’s events.
Not horrible, but you can also keep it simple: I yawned, tired from the day’s events. Or: I yawned.
Or, instead of leaning on an adverb, heighten it with specifics: As soon as I came home I plopped myself on the sofa. I didn’t have the energy to take off my coat.
One of the best poetry collections I read last year was Counting Descentby Clint Smith. Here’s a bit of Smith’s poem, “Passed Down.”
Sometimes I forget there are freckles
on my face. It’s the sort of thing where
I’m not always proud of my skin
for being light enough to illuminate the patches
of darkness that emerge from beneath it.
There are many ways that Smith could’ve approached this description of his face, the tone of his skin, and the feelings that stem from observation. He could’ve said he was light brown or compared his shade to food, something many have said not to do. But what he chose was to be distinct with the smattering of (dark) freckles across his lighter skin tone as a Black man. “Patches of darkness” is what stands out to me here. “I’m not always proud of my skin” is what makes me re-read this poem. In the economy and the precision of his choices I can comprehend this pain without being given a laundry list of adjectives and adverbs while also not needing anything more in general to understand this inner conflict.
When nothing else can be gleaned but that someone is tall, pretty, old, young; or that their home is big, square, bright; or that someone’s wedding dress is cute, expensive, ivory, I’m not seeing details so much as a checklist.
Adverbs and adjectives can and have been used effectively. “Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power,” says Ta-Nehisi Coates in “Fear of a Black President” in The Atlantic. Here “power” is a good word in and of itself, but Coates speaks to the symbolism of that power when it came to Trayvon Martin’s murder. To not recognize that candy and tea along with hoodies brought a visual that is both innocent and simplistic belies the galling nature of Martin’s death.
Often, adjectives and adverbs serve as a crutch for lazy writing. This can come about when presenting people as much as describing worlds. Adjectives/adverbs exist for a reason and, yes, they can be helpful. (I’m sure I’ve used several in this piece alone.) Yet when nothing else can be gleaned but that someone is tall, pretty, old, young; or that their home is big, square, bright; or that someone’s wedding dress is cute, expensive, ivory, I’m not seeing details so much as a checklist. Maybe this is one of those controversial opinions. In reality I don’t hate adjectives and adverbs; they definitely have their place in writing. But, before adding any into your work, consider whether they’re adding that desired description or an unnecessary weight.
I learned about Othello from a professor who didn’t want to discuss Othello; he wanted to tell us about Othello. He was tall and pale, and his dark hair created a contrast to his long, white face. He had his delivery down pat — no observation about a character hadn’t been said before, no quiz was new. For me, his observations about Iago, however rehearsed, were profound, but not for the reasons they should have been.
My professor didn’t talk about how people like Iago exist in the real world and tear people down for their benefit — Dick Cheney, Steve Bannon, Rush Limbaugh, to name a few. Instead, he — and I — focused on the way that people with wit and charisma could be dangerous in matters of the heart. I’d fallen for a few charming men, and I was happy to disparage them — villains weren’t always brooding in the corner, but they were sometimes the life of the party.
As for the character of Othello, I don’t remember much. I certainly didn’t have sympathy for his pride and jealousy; I didn’t connect with him, his experience, or his pain. I didn’t need to.
When I started teaching Othello, I started to realize that the play was not just a warning about the dangers of love and jealousy, but a warning about complicity and coercion, specifically on the part of people in power. Iago does not become evil alone. People support him, believe in him, and trust him, even though he’s clearly a misogynist and a racist.
Iago does not become evil alone. People support him, believe in him, and trust him, even though he’s clearly a misogynist and a racist.
The school I taught at was a private school in Washington, D.C. It was majority white and majority well-off, and it was full of potential Iagos — students who, if not as evil or conniving, were just as susceptible to believing that they deserved what they had and would go to lengths to prove it. Fifteen percent of students were outside of the financial majority, and about 20 percent were students of color (these numbers have since increased to 20 and 31 percent). Most of their teachers were like me: white, with a background in private school education. People with enough money to afford teaching at a private school, where the pay wasn’t great but the community was worth it.
Though none of us considered ourselves Iagos — we believed in equity, in kindness, in honesty, and of course we would never hurt another person for our benefit — we also murmured among ourselves about some faculty members getting positions solely because they were people of color. We resented multicultural work, because we considered ourselves educated, and therefore above racism, misogyny, and micro- or macro-aggressions. We expressed confusion about why some of the students of color couldn’t just be a bit more grateful for what they had there, in the white mansion on the hill.
I say “we” because even though I sat on the diversity committee and considered myself an ally to both students and faculty of color, I had those thoughts, and I was in those conversations. I am, as we all are, a part of the system of racism, classism, and sexism that fuels this country — handed down, in part, from the countries in Shakespeare’s Othello.
I am, as we all are, a part of the system of racism, classism, and sexism that fuels this country — handed down, in part, from the countries in Shakespeare’s Othello.
In 2007 and 2008, I worked for Barack Obama. I was sent to the white suburbs of St. Louis after volunteering in St. Louis city, where I made connections with black community leaders. During my time in the city, I’d arrive to the house parties I falsely believed I had a hand in organizing, and awkwardly wait for my time to sign up volunteers and build my team. These house parties were my first experience at being the only white person in the room, and I was often embarrassed to tell my story. I joined the campaign because I wanted a change in my life, and I joined because I could.
During Obama’s inauguration weekend, I went to the staff party, where Arcade Fire and Jay-Z performed. Obama gave a speech about continuing the good work of the campaign, and continuing to push for the change we believed in. After his speech, I noted that it was strange that so much of his staff was white, and a friend said to me: “It’s a privilege to quit your job, move somewhere, and work for free.”
At the end of Shakespeare’s Othello, the protagonist realizes that he murdered his wife on false grounds. She hadn’t cheated on him after all — he was trapped in a web of Iago’s lies. She lies dead behind him, and he speaks to his white comrades, saying: “When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am…” Then, he stabs himself, falling onto his dead wife’s body.
At the conclusion of a modern movie adaptation of Othello, entitled simply O, the Othello character, Odin, walks through the hallways of an old New England dorm with a gun in his hand after smothering Desi (Desdemona) to death. The camera zooms in on the tears covering his face. When he gets to the porch, he yells at his classmates: “Somebody needs to tell the goddamn truth. My life is over…but while all y’all out here living yours, sitting around talking about the n****r that lost it back it high school, you make sure you tell them the truth…You tell them where I’m from didn’t make me do this.” Then he shoots himself, collapsing on a white wicker couch.
In the documentary O.J.: Made in America, the conversation between O.J. Simpson and LAPD detective John Lange plays as you watch one of the strangest and most televised car chases of all time. At that point, O.J. is the primary suspect in the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. As he is driven in a white Bronco by his friend Al Cowlings, he is holding a gun in his hand; he suggests more than a few times that he may use it to kill himself as Lange tries to keep him from doing so. He explains to Lange that he’s “sorry,” that “all he ever did was love Nicole,” and he says that he wants to be remembered for the person he feels he was, before all this.
What would have happened if, on that bright sunny day, as his friend drove him down the highway and away from his Brentwood home, he had shot himself instead? How would the story been different? Would the blame be placed on him, or the societal structures that never allowed him to find a sense of belonging in the first place? What the documentary makes clear that it isn’t just fame that caused his downfall, but a particular brand of it — for O.J. to become O.J., he had to base his identity around what white America required and wanted from him at that time. And regardless of whether there was a particular person plotting his downfall, there was, in a sense, a culture waiting to witness his demise.
When I taught Othello, I would start with an excerpt from Description of Africa, written by Leo Africanus, in 1550. The book was considered the most comprehensive written work on the subject of Africa until the 19th century, and we’d look at a section with the title, “The commendable actions and virtues of the Africans” and subtitle “What vices the foresaid Africans are subject unto” to get a better sense of the narratives and stereotypes Shakespeare was working with when he created Othello. We can’t know if Shakespeare read the text, but it seems likely that this idea from Africanus — “no nation in the world is so subject unto jealousy; for they will rather lease their lives, then put up any disgrace in the behalf of their women” — and this one — “yea they so behave themselves, as if they had continually lived in a forest among wild beasts” — made its way to him, and found homes in a text centered on a person from Africa who can’t control his jealousy.
Throughout O.J.: Made in America, it becomes clear that O.J.’s trial is not about whether he killed Nicole Brown or Ron Goldman but about whether or not a black man could ever be found innocent. In the documentary, we see that O.J. is as much a symbol as a person, as much a construction as a man. He knows this, too, and he plays into it, as do his team of lawyers and close friends. By the end, it seems as though a part of them comes to even believe it — they seem to think O.J.’s innocence could be a kind of revenge, not just for Rodney King, as the film suggests, but all the accused black men, subjected to generations of violence simply for the color of their skin.
I always asked my students if Othello could have been white. They’d debate it for a bit, going back and forth about how what he wrestles with is in part universal, and also connected to his gender. I’d wait for the moment when they’d bring in the Leo Africanus reference, and discuss how those stereotypes about jealousy wouldn’t resonate if Othello wasn’t African. Many of them say he was easier to prey on because of his race.
One year, one of my black students wondered what it would be like if Iago was black, and she said: “He wouldn’t have been as trusted as much as he was — I don’t think.” This was the same student who, after the Trump election, said to a room full of white students: “the fact that y’all are surprised is funny to me. I’m sorry, but…look around.”
O is not a great movie, and for that reason, we didn’t use it all that often when teaching Othello. Looking back, I wish I had. What O seems to get is what is ahead of its time about Othello, and it isn’t the fact that Othello was black. It is the message about the community that surrounds him, and how they allowed a person like Iago to flourish, exist, and believe in his power.
It is the message about the community that surrounds him, and how they allowed a person like Iago to flourish, exist, and believe in his power.
In O, the character of Iago (Hugo) is the son of the basketball coach. He is handsome, smart, and great at basketball. But O is better, and so at the start of the movie, O gets MVP instead of Hugo, kicking off Hugo’s plan to take O down. The decision to make the coach Hugo’s father gives Hugo’s revenge more heft, because we understand that Hugo has not just been slighted, but a societal code has been broken in the process. Usually, white people hand things to one another; it is familial, it is filial, it is in our blood.
Washington D.C. is 49% black, and no private school in the area reflects that number. In some ways, that is not a surprise, but even writing that sentence — even typing “it’s not a surprise” and then thinking, “it makes logical sense” — feels strange to me. There is no logic to systematic oppression that keeps money in certain pockets and not others based on skin color; and if there is, it is not a logic I want to feel comfortable with.
D.C. is 49% black, and Donald Trump, a white billionaire from New York, lives in its epicenter — a white house where, for eight years, Barack Obama lived. When Obama lived there, Donald Trump went on T.V. questioning where he came from, asking hackers to check his birthplace. Even when Obama showed the birth certificate, Trump continued to spread rumors because he could, and because people let him. We know what happened next.
During O.J.: Made in America, the documentarians chart how white and black people responded when he was not found guilty. I remember that my family, and everyone we knew, thought it was preposterous. They believed he did it, and they were shocked. In black communities, there was a sense of relief. A sense of justice. Even if they didn’t believe he was innocent, they knew that so many others had been, and it felt good to see a black man walk free.
In the past two years, numerous white police officers have been charged with murder, and they walk free. People on both sides are outraged, posts go up on Facebook, and then, quickly, we look away. Then it happens again. And again. And again.
And yet, O.J’s initial walk toward freedom will never be tolerated, particularly in the white community — it was a failure of the justice system as we know it, an outrage, and an insane breakdown of all we know to be right. I’m not arguing that Othello, O, or O.J., should be able to away with murder — I’m just saying that Michael Brelo, Daniel Pantaleo, and Darren Brown shouldn’t either.
I’m not arguing that Othello, O, or O.J., should be able to away with murder — I’m just saying that Michael Brelo, Daniel Pantaleo, and Darren Brown shouldn’t either.
At the end of the play, I’d ask my students if Othello deserves any compassion. Many of them would say yes: they would argue that it wasn’t his fault, that he was betrayed by his best friend, that he couldn’t have done anything to stop his actions. He was a victim. Others would say no: he didn’t have to believe Iago over his wife. He didn’t have to go so far as to kill her.
It’s certainly hard to argue that Othello had to kill Desdemona, even if she really had cheated. And yet, I was always happy that some of the students argued on his behalf, because I think those students understood something fundamental about the structures that caused Iago to get away with what were really his murders. In the end, it is Iago who deserves the blame. Yet he lives on, making the tragedy of Othello not just the tragedy of The Moor of Venice but the tragedy of a culture that believes in justice.
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