In Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands, we are introduced to seven-year-old Marina. Her family has been in a car accident, and she is the sole survivor. The book begins, “My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital.” It’s a kind of inverse of The Stranger, packed with the gruesome specificity of devastation.
Marina is sent to an orphanage, and what follows is the story of her relationship with the girls who live there. Barba has engineered a sort of dance between the individual and the group, between the girl and the world. She is at once the object of their desire and their enemy. She is their peer, and she is also someone set apart. Their tenuous friendship is playful and dangerous. Such Small Hands is a slim volume teetering on the brink of awful possibility.
I started thinking about Barba’s title, which is also the very last phrase from an e.e. cummings poem. Such Small Hands is perhaps a commentary on the capabilities of children, the outsize nature of their actions and emotions when compared to their physical proportions. An earlier line from the same poem reads, “i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens.” It seems to me that this is a crucial part of Barba’s beautiful book: a meditation on the way grief shuts doors inside us, on the way imagination leaves our minds ajar, on the way we are each mysterious and fragile, ultimately unknowable to one another.
Hilary Leichter: The premise of Such Small Hands takes its cue from an unsettling incident that took place in Brazil in the 1960s. A girl at an orphanage was murdered by the other children, and for a week they kept and played with her body, like a doll. Though your book goes in very different directions, what was it about that real life event that inspired you to write this story?
Andrés Barba: It struck me that beneath that seemingly sinister tale there in fact lay a great love story. A childhood love story, one of love between children, with everything that entails, the outsized emotions that can be incomprehensible to adults. The springboard for this story was not, “How could these girls have done something like this?” but “Why did love take on this form in the case of these girls?” It seemed to me that it was in fact a tale as classic as Milton’s Paradise Lost. The spark that ignited the whole thing could have been the same as the one that gave rise to The Bacchae or TheOdyssey.
Leichter: Can you tell me a little bit about how your work as a translator has influenced your own fiction and creative process?
Barba: When I’ve translated very long texts (in my case that’s only been with Conrad, Melville and James), sometimes those authors’ “music” has filtered into my own texts, but the influence has actually been more in terms of the imaginary. I start to “think” in images that more resemble theirs than mine. It’s fun, like a little case of demonic possession. It doesn’t last long, after a few weeks my head stops spinning, I stop speaking dead languages and foaming at the mouth and become a reasonable guy once more.
“I start to ‘think’ in images that more resemble theirs than mine. It’s fun, like a little case of demonic possession.”
Leichter: I was very interested in your use of the word “polished”throughout the book. It appears frequently in the text as a descriptor: polished enumeration, polished faces. I started thinking about the other more colloquial use of this word, as a verb, a synonym for finished or devoured. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you came to this word, how it was important to the story, if it was at all! Were there other words that you were thinking about as necessary or valuable while writing?
Barba: I’d never thought that word (I believe you’re referring to “pulido” in the original) was particularly important in and of itself, although there’s an idea contained within the word that is: surface. The sense that things happening inside Marina, with respect to the other girls, are things occurring “on the surface.” Which leads us to the classic theme of to what degree can we hide what’s really going on inside, to what degree does what’s on the surface give us away, even if we don’t want it to? Things are “polished” because they’re shiny (sometimes because they’re worn, yes, but sometimes because just they’re just the opposite: brand new). The new and the old are another important dialectic in this book. The known world and the unknown world, and the way the boundary between the two is broken by the appearance of a character who belongs to both worlds.
Author Andrés Barba
Leichter: Your book is also an interesting commentary on how language fails, or how language shapes perception. There are some beautiful visualizations of what it means to hear a sentence, to absorb information. When Marina learns that her mother and father are dead, she cannot quite hear it at first: “The girl still inhabits the suburbs of the words.” Or this: “Marina was still watching the words as if they were an airplane, flying from one end of the hospital room to the other; she was staring after the white contrail the words left in their wake.” When Marina meets the other girls at the orphanage, she thinks about their names: “At that point the names were all empty, no girls inside them yet.” Language almost becomes a physical object that can be moved here and there throughout the text. Do you visualize language in this way when you’re writing? Is there something about grief or shock or pain, the kind Marina is feeling, that makes language disembodied, a creature unto itself?
Barba: Of course! Language is everything! We only truly know what we’re capable of enunciating. I know many people aren’t of the same opinion, but I sincerely believe that’s the way it is. Our knowledge ends, to a large degree, the same place as our ability to manifest it in words. What’s been that might be consciousness, but to a large extent it’s stopped being human. Language is very important in this book, the words that the girls use to name things and, more importantly, the way, before the arrival of someone new (a new love, a new reality) “old” words no longer serve, they become obsolete.
“We only truly know what we’re capable of enunciating. I know many people aren’t of the same opinion, but I sincerely believe that’s the way it is.”
Leichter: The point of view switches between third person and first person plural. How did you find this structure, and why was it important to use a different point of view for Marina, and for the girls of the orphanage?
Barba: Greek tragedy. It was very clear to me that the girls at the orphanage had to comprise a chorus. That’s where I took it from. It struck me as I was reading Euripides. I said to myself, how could I have been so stupid? I’m writing a Greek tragedy! I hadn’t realized it, but once I saw that, all I had to do was appropriate its structure as well.
Leichter: Such Small Hands was first published in Spanish eight years ago. What is the experience of coming back to this book after spending a large chunk of time away from it?
Barba: Ha! Yes, it’s a slightly bizarre experience. In part, like talking about an old girlfriend many years later. Sometimes you don’t recall things with much precision, an idea might be a little hazy, but rereading the book it’s been lovely seeing how alive it is. For me, I mean. Suddenly, I remember all of my doubts and the struggles I had, trying to make it sound natural.
The following story was chosen by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2017 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. The winning entry receives $1000, a 10-week writing course with Gotham Writers Workshop and publication in Electric Literature. The winning work will also be performed live on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space in Manhattan.
A Guide to Fooling Yourself
Take one man and one woman. Let them be: not that young anymore, and feeling it lately. Give them good jobs, their own places, a little money in the bank. How about a recent move? How about California? Honey light, a bike commute to work for him, bougainvillea on the fence of her bungalow, gold in them hills. Day after day after day of blue sky, and then what passes for bad weather: taking your sweater off and putting it on again every half hour. Let them both think: Hallelujah.
On one of those sweater days, get them to the same backyard barbecue. Christmas lights on cacti, succulents in the gravel bed. Make her way out of his league. Make her feel like smiling at him anyway. Make him feel like it might not be pity. Give them something in common. Paul Simon, the Concert in the Park, 91. No kidding, you too? Then something deeper — dysfunctional families. A father who abused him and a mother who let it happen. A father who left her, a mother she buried at seventeen. But they’re survivors. Thrivers! Bootstraps, he says. She says: Blood, sweat, and tears. Siblings? Can’t stand mine either. Always playing the victim. The details aren’t as important as a preexisting sense, for both of them, that the light around the corner is just about to swing into view. For that matter: make the sun come around the corner of the house and suddenly swing into view.
He’s too skinny, but this needn’t be a dealbreaker. It makes him insecure, which makes him seem kind. She’s had a hard past, harder than his. Make her a fighter. Make her tired of fighting. Make her in the mood for a little kindness.
When they go back to his place, for once let there be no neighbor clunking around upstairs. For once, let the condom be in the drawer exactly where he put it. Give them, please, a little grace. Let the silence afterward seem to hold them, so softly that, if they weren’t both lapsed Catholics, they’d call it holy.
Give her a strong will; give him a lack of direction. He denies his own needs; she needs to take up space. Have somebody break into her bungalow while she’s sleeping at his; give him anxiety dreams about burglars and trouble making the rent.
When he’s just about decided she’s too controlling and she’s just about decided he’s too weak, let her get pregnant. Make him feel guilty, then optimistic; give her a sudden and profound belief in fate. Let them both see forty coming and think: If not now, when?
If you want to keep it going, make sure the kid’s an only child. Make it just smart enough to convince them they’ve produced a genius, but obedient enough so they don’t clash over discipline. He’ll love too much, just to show up his unloving father. She’ll parent too much, to make up for having no parents of her own. When they overdo it, let them bond over the kid rejecting them. Let them stay up at night talking in the dark — should we send the kid to therapy? Reform school? Japanese lessons?
Many times, they’ll want to leave each other. When they do, twist their luck; good and bad both work. She gets promoted. He almost dies of a burst appendix. The value of their home appreciates. Her brother commits suicide. If all else fails, let the kid become an asshole, yell at them, insult them, pull away, move to Japan. They’ll hold each other in the dark, saying if only, and think the problem is the kid.
Now here’s how you’ll pull out the rug from under them. Let the kid move back to the States. Let the kid get a steady job, forgive them, start calling once a week. Let there be a time without disaster. Let a holy silence settle in.
They’ll be reading in the living room. It’s one of those do-I-wear-my-sweater days. He’ll see himself in the window: skinnier than ever. And she’ll realize she’s tired, more tired than she’s ever been. She’ll feel like saying — but she doesn’t know what. And he’ll want to say — but she never spoke.
The silence is a pang, like an honest answer. And they can’t remember what the question is.
Coming to New York City from May 1–7, the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature will feature 150 writers and more than 70 panels to address the restive relationship between gender and power in the Trump era. For a complete schedule of events, including Jeff VanderMeer’s apperances at the Gender, Power, and Authoritarianism and Dystopian Wastelands panels, visit: www.penworldvoices.com
The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch
A fever dream of a novel grounded as much in the mystic as the real, The Book of Joan combines psychological realism with the fantastical or science-fictional to illuminate the horrors of late-stage capitalism and its effects on both humans and animals. But the novel also posits resistance that lives in the body and the skin in interesting ways, with elements that fuse dystopia and post-apocalyptic fiction. A bracing and fearsome exploration of what it means to resist and what it means to retain your humanity in the face of devastating forces.
Amatka by Karin Tidbeck
This June 2017 release explores a strange world where the nature of reality is controlled by the mind; be sure to call a table a table and hold it in your thoughts or it may become something else entirely. This is the dystopia of anti-fact and shifting fact, and Tidbeck could not be more timely in the ways in which she shows us how our imaginations shape the world we move through. Imagine poorly and you wind up with a world of terrors and a vision of humanity that is destabilized. One of the most unique dystopias I have ever read.
The Troika by Stepan Chapman
A Mexican woman, an intelligent jeep, and a brontosaurus on a quest across a desert ruled by three purple suns might sound just surreal and nothing else, but forgotten genius Stepan Chapman’s The Troika is a perfect dystopia for the modern era. Published in 1996 its tale of men becoming machines, a war of frozen clones, a futuristic Noah’s ark, and tangled relationships between the three main characters pinpoint the dysfunction at the heart of our world and foreshadowed the fragmentation of the digital era.
About the Author
Jeff VanderMeer’s latest novel is Borne, out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which Colson Whitehead called “a thorough marvel.” He is also known for his critically acclaimed NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy from FSG, which won the Shirley Jackson Award and Nebula Award. The trilogy also prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau” and has been acquired by publishers in 35 other countries, with Paramount Pictures releasing a movie in 2018. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic.com, Vulture, Esquire.com, and the Los Angeles Times.
I should get this out of the way up front — for me, music is for singing, and for feeling. My taste trends sentimental. I like country more than I want to admit. Folk music is my drug of choice, anything nostalgic, women with hard-living voices, and yes, I love a good sad man with a guitar. I grew up in rural northern Michigan, incongruous land of both country music radio and months of endless snow. And so perhaps it’s not a surprise that my debut novel, Marlena, is set in this remote and beautiful place, and that the girl at the heart of the story harbors secret dreams of becoming a singer.
The book came out earlier this month, and in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asked over and over again how autobiographical it is. I find this question annoying, but it’s not totally unjustified — the narrator of the book, Cat, is a woman slightly older than me, also from northern Michigan, looking back on an adolescent friendship that ended in tragedy and changed the course of her life. I have written nonfiction about losing a close friend from high school; it’s no secret that certain elements of the novel are influenced by real experiences. But the plot is fictional, the girls are characters, and the story is not my own.
Except for the music. That’s one hundred percent ode to the songs I loved as a teenager. I was in high school in the early 2000s, a few years before Cat and Marlena were — but like them, I preferred the older stuff, and was a bit of a snob when it came to Top 40 radio (except for the Dixie Chicks). And when I grew up and moved away from the midwest, as Cat does, to New York City, I found that my taste had mostly cemented, that the songs I played on repeat while waiting for the subway were the folk and country songs I thought I’d left behind like the parts of myself I didn’t much like. Turns out, those parts were just as stubborn as my taste in music. And that’s what those songs capture so well — the impossibility of ever outrunning yourself, no matter how far you go.
This is a soundtrack for city people from small towns — the leave and I’m never coming backers, the runaways. The list can be split into roughly two groups — there are the tracks that make you long for where you come from, that fill you with yearning, and the ones that remind you of the promise of the place that took you in. No explanation can evoke what I’m trying to get at as deeply and fully as Jackson C. Frank singing “Blues Run the Game,” or Gillian Welch singing pretty much anything. You just have to listen; you just have to feel it.
1. Joni Mitchell, “River”
Marlena, the title character of my novel, is a 17 year-old girl with perfect pitch and wide ranging taste in music — from folk to country, pop to punk to blues. But Joni Mitchell is Marlena’s favorite. Her voice, as I imagine it, is a cousin of Joni’s — a little more textured, but full of that same trembling strength, a similar ability to make high notes pierce and shimmer. In the opening pages of the book, Cat, the narrator, remembers Marlena singing “California,” one of the anthems of small town girls, no matter the decade. That aural memory will haunt Cat for the rest of her life. But when I thought about what I wanted my novel to be, how I wanted it to make readers feel, I thought of “River.” I wanted to write that song in novel form.
2. Neko Case, “I Wish I Was the Moon”
In the second half of Marlena, Cat records a video of Marlena singing this song. Both girls want to be famous, or feel famous already, in that bashful way that all teenagers sort of believe they are the true center of the universe. But Marlena really is talented. She’s got a musician’s ear — and like so many teenagers, a hubristic faith in her own instincts. Marlena’s rendition of this song — slowed down, a little angstier, inflected with a vocal crack and tear here and there for slightly misguided and melodramatic impact — is the embodiment of her aesthetic. If Marlena had lived, I imagine she might have tried to write her own version.
3. Gillian Welch, “Look at Miss Ohio”
Gillian Welch’s “The Revelator” is a sacred album to me, and this track my favorite. I don’t want to ruin it with words — just hit play.
4. Dixie Chicks, “Wide Open Spaces”
The Dixie Chicks are wonderful and many of their songs would work for this list. But it had to be this one, this wailing, emotional, even playful tribute to the desire to break free from your life, from the place that defines you, and strike out for somewhere new, somewhere you can write your own story. “I need wide open spaces / room to make a big mistake…” You can hear the teenage girls the Chicks were in every note.
5. Prince, “Purple Rain”
Another thing that all these songs have in common is they’re especially good for driving. When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to drive around the back roads singing this song at the top of our lungs. (Is anyone more fun to sing than Prince?) Prince is the patron saint of midwestern kids who dream of bigger, brighter lives — and we loved him like a god.
This goddamn beautiful song. Jackson C. Frank released a single folk album — it’s called, simply, Jackson C. Frank, and it contains ten plaintive and moving and perfect tracks. After the record was released, Jackson’s life took a downhill turn — he was mentally ill, diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression, and died in 1999 after years of living in poverty, often homeless. There’s something about his story — all that promise, the single influential and striking album, the bright future canceled out by forces he couldn’t control — I always think I can hear what happened to him in these songs, the texture of his voice, the yearning and heartbreak in every note, but maybe that’s just because I know how his life ended. I thought of him a lot while I was writing Marlena, in its own way about a real talent snuffed out too soon, and must have listened to this album a thousand times.
7. Fire & Rain, James Taylor
I considered an alternate version of this playlist that was just the album “Sweet Baby James.” If you’re from a small town anywhere in the midwest and you can hear a James Taylor song without being overtaken by a knee-weakening sense memory, I would be very very surprised. When James sings, “But I always thought that I’d see you again,” I don’t think of a person, I think of being sixteen and taking a running jump off a pontoon boat into Walloon Lake, or how it felt to lie in the grass in my backyard with my best friend, how I took the starry sky for granted. I had no idea that I’d grow up to live in a place where being able to make out four stars in the sky at night would be a rare occurrence.
8. Journey, Don’t Stop Believin’
The ideal condition for listening to this song is in a car going over the New Jersey Turnpike at night, while Manhattan comes glitteringly into view, the volume turned up so loud it hurts a little and the windows all the way down, in hour fifteen of a drive that started in northern Michigan and wound through Canada, your throat sore from at least two packs of Camel Lights. Honestly, if you can’t replicate that exact circumstance, there’s no reason to put this one on — it’s corny as hell, and listening to it casually (if it appears your playlist, say, while getting ready for a dinner party) will just fill with you vague embarrassment. But if you can set it up just right — the car, the night, finding yourself in a great city after a long, long drive from nowhere — every chord will make you feel like anything is possible.
9. Peter, Paul & Mary, 500 Miles
This is a drinking alone song. This is a sitting on the fire escape of your crappy Brooklyn sublet with a bottle of two buck chuck and seventeen dollars to your name, can’t even afford cigarettes kind of song. A what have I done song, an I want to go home song, a song for that exquisite brand of sadness that’s closer to joy than heartbreak — because yes you’re lonely, yes you’re broke, but you got out, and isn’t that exactly what you always wanted?
10. Alabama Shakes, Heartbreaker
The Alabama Shakes are a blues rock band that scratches my country music itch while managing to be totally appropriate — even cool — to listen to as an urban twenty-something. Also, they are incredible, and Brittany Howard’s voice is the stuff of legend.
11. Alicia Keys, Empire State of Mind
I know, I know, everyone on earth is sick of this song — there was that summer after it first came out when you couldn’t go into a bodega in any of the five boroughs without hearing it on blast. But tell me it doesn’t perfectly capture the mystique and allure of the city. Even though I’d lived here for nearly ten years by the time it was released, hearing it at just the right moment still gives me shivers. Sometimes, if I’m splurging on a cab home and we’re going over the Brooklyn Bridge I put in my earphones and play this song and look out at the whole gorgeous mess of New York City and think yes, this is the place that saved me.
Julie Buntin is the author of the new novel, Marlena. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction writing at Marymount Manhattan College, and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
We had it together but we also had it when we were apart. We got it in that comedor in Oaxaca, we both agreed. Or maybe it was that little town, just a few palapas actually and a beach with a deceptive number of black dogs, called San Angelino. But it’s also quite possible that we had gotten it on the subway. Don’t forget about a head of lettuce! our naturopath said. They caravan those heads in from anywhere imaginable. And water these days — it’s no good washing with it.
We made a list of what was now okay and what wasn’t. Sugar, yeast, all the essentials — out. Enter: lines and lines of herbaceous esophagus-jamming pills we swallowed noon dinner and night.
“It’s not so bad,” you said. “We weren’t into that kind of junk anyway.”
But who could tell? What we were and weren’t into? For instance, Bloody Marys at Giondo’s, what about that? And occupation politics — was it possible our parasite was affecting those too? Before, we’d been heavily committed: gotten arrested even, clubbed by the militia-era NYPD.
“Let’s take it back to where it came from,” you said. “Niagara Falls or the Jurassic period or what about that town you like, Boring, Oregon? It really feels like it came from there.”
What we shared had sticktuitiveness. You had to give it that.
When we looked it up online the definition said: “one who eats at the table of another,” which seemed kind of cordial, so 1950s, like a neighbor plus misshapen apple pie dropping by.
But who had neighbors like that?
Ours were more like that guy we knew, Raif, who on his way home sloppily inserted himself into our kitchen, slogging through our sole bottle of scotch, probably shoveling coke up off the back of our toilet seat without offering any, probably crying even — before wheeling away again into the splashes of light and dark, the leafy trees and trash that made up our block.
We had it together, this relative of giardia partying in our now shared intestinal tract, but we reminded ourselves — we could have picked this thing up anywhere. The lack of fault was comforting. Plus the parasite wasn’t all. In our Greenpoint yard hard pink asparagus-like weeds were erupting everywhere, pubing skyward with a level of tenacity I no longer recognized.
When I was young I knew that everything was sentient and I was capable of great harm. Moreover, I knew that things should not be separated — that pairs, no matter where you found them, should stay intact. Under everyday pressure, that feeling had gone underground. Now, looking out at our yard, a spray of turf between the parallel avenues of McGuinness and Manhattan, it swam up again.
The stalks seemed so invincible, thrusting through the heavy metals and constant turnover of Popov bottles that made up our soil. Should I inject them with syringefuls of recently outlawed weed killer, as RAT574, my new buddy in the underground chat rooms, urged? The kind that gives everything gooey eyes? I could do it at night beneath the pale gray dome of light pollution we lived under.
Or what if I let the stalks showboat, have their time in the sun? Nothing else was growing.
“Make a choice,” you sighed. “I don’t care.” You’d been saying that a lot lately.
Still I was locked in an intractable standoff. It distracted me no end. I often stood on the pitched steps, dolefully. Then I would descend into the dirt and snap off their waist-high heads, pinching the magenta frill between my finger and thumb. That barely slowed them. Even pulling at them did no good. It was Japanese knotweed, and, as you liked explaining, their roots flanged out at the base like butt-plugs.
Around that time I got fired from the Baltic, a ramshackle tavern on a drifty block of Avenue C, left smoldering from an older, more terrifying era. It was huge, draped in once-regal green felt, with smoke stains that stippled the floors and ceiling like Sherwood Forest fungus.
“Too bad about that Big Fuck Up,” said my boss, Terry, a pleathery fag in white Keds. He shook my hand in a friendly way.
I’d been there for years, dutifully slinging Yuenglings. But I didn’t have the heart to fight for my job. I knew he was trying to get rid of us, his loyal few, so he could bottom for the Pinnacle Corporation. In the last month their goons had come around nonstop, checking the place out while Terry twisted them a fortune of cold beer.
I faced the barroom for the last time. Ooooh I feel good I feel good I feel good, said Donna Summer. Gerald sat on his stool with his long braid dangling behind him, drinking E&J. I walked over to him.
“Well,” I said.
He grimaced. He’d been tall but now his body was cinched up.
“I hate to go home,” he said. Gerald was stuck in the eighties. His nightmares were endless hospitals. I wedged a twenty under his glass snifter.
“Not tonight, pal,” I said. I wanted him to keep getting good and drunk.
“Try to remember,” I said, arranging his lapel. “We’re safe now.”
I stood on the Bowery platform and waited for the late-night J train. My gut yowled. Our parasite was a new and mysterious development. It was gross, but it gave us something to talk about. I glared warily at the track. Did everyone want to jump in front of the subway as much as I did? Not necessarily to die, although that was, of course, likely. Help! I’d shout. Someone would come. Still, once the thought occurred, it felt impossible to resist. Persuading myself that everyone was gripped by the same mania — a mania so regular it was boring — made it less awful when I shrunk from the inevitable approaching train, scrunching my eyes against the finishing blow.
That night I sat for a long time in the dark of our kitchen, looking past the window’s reflection, out into the yard. Then I went to bed as usual. Our apartment was so narrow it seemed as if we together were Jonah, inhabiting the “inner whale.” You’d disagree, scoffing into your hand: as early as 1520, Rondelet knew it wasn’t a whale but a Great White Shark, you’d say — but for once, you were sleeping quietly. Your job at the new pot shop was wearing you out.
“Can anyone really live in a shark?” I thought drowsily.
Then the Casio was flashing 3:47 and a voice was peeping up from the blankets, urging me awake.
I sat alert, staring at the tapered gloom. Pressing my hand to the wall for balance, I tried not to wake you. But focusing on your warm skin, I found myself in a panic.
Earlier, we’d fought.
You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown, I heard myself saying, a perennial favorite of my father’s. I’d followed it with something ridiculous, light-headed, unhinged even. You hadn’t responded. Was this why I’d stayed up so long, staring out? There was a new edge to everything, wasn’t there?
“Gabriel?” I said.
“Let’s begin,” the voice insisted.
My bladder thickened. You continued to sleep, coma-like.
I wriggled around you, clicked on the sound machine standby, “Gurgling Brook,” and crept into the also sloping kitchen. The boards were old, shards of gone forests. The Famous Grouse was capless on the table where I’d left it.
“Leon,” the voice said.
I stood there dimly and searched for its origin. In plain view was a giant mason jar of kombucha plus dividing mother. A pair of gunk-smeared garden gloves. An ancient Vogue with Tilda Swinton on the swanny-white cover.
“It’s me!” the voice said.
The room smelled like snapped pine needles. In my chest, a river was bludgeoning heavy stones.
“Ms. Swinton?” I stammered.
Her alien parts and cinnamon hair, I’d always loved her, the queasy look she gave me!
But the voice came from somewhere closer, near my belly.
“You have a problem,” the voice said.
I digested this halfway.
“I do?”
I thought hard. I pointed, finally, to the garden.
But our parasite disagreed.
“Do you know anything AT ALL,” it said, “about the history of Mexican art?”
When I woke again, a belt of sun was cinching my eyes. Your bare torso moved around the kitchen, pouring maté water, stretching. Outside silent cars were starting up their phony, pre-recorded engines. “Safety first!” an automated voice announced.
I raised my head from my cardboard arms. I’d finished the night at the table with Tilda. Turning my cheek, I followed your movement. Your darker areolas met the fawn of your chest with the casual kismet of belonging. I suffered to join their easy glow.
“So that’s it, I’m gone, blitzed, finally cooked,” I said instead.
Your nostrils tightened.
“What happened.”
“Gay bars are out!” I snapped my fingers to my thumb. I wanted to be back in your good graces but I resented working for it.
“Terry called,” you said. “Did you really do something as substantially dumb as that?”
I sighed. My relationship to right and wrong had always been murky. I had a healthy, some said Catholic approach to guilt. But in recent years I’d begun to wonder if my guilt was so all-encompassing as to be irrelevant to any motive or consequence. The realization stranded me without a barometer. It was clear, I didn’t trust myself with much. But I was also sure I could do no wrong. I toed every line almost religiously but was given to taking wild risks without any forethought at all, then, overcome with denial, hiding them.
“Gabriel,” I said, “Giga,” throwing my arms toward your waist.
“I have to go,” you said. “Work.”
A new relationship was being drawn. You worked. I didn’t.
I drifted around the apartment drinking expensive single-source coffee and clicking back and forth between Manhunt and my newest discovery, YardHard. The homepage was full of popups about “green bums” and “top tips for hoeing,” but RAT574 seemed to know something.
Him: Man knotweed is Axis of Evil numero uno. You got to be tenacious. Know how to spell that?
Me: You just did.
Him: Ok first let those suckers get big and hard. Then when they’re dick thick ? ? ? you machete o the tops RAMBO-style.
Sun was banking off the window, showing all the grease on the thin glass.
Got me???
I twisted on my stool, staring at the yard’s newest growths.
Got you.
Him: Then you dump your kill juice down the stalk. Kill juice? It seemed extreme.
Me: Can “kill juice” be organic?
Him: No way! Its got2be poison!
Me: . . .
Him: Great band by the way.
When I tried to remember why we’d fought, a gelatinous feeling descended. I was growing increasingly more wired from the caffeine plus somehow I was starving. The combo made me pharmaceutically woozy. Had our parasite, a microorganism who was leeching my precious nutrients, all those hard-earned dollars spent on kale and handpicked cashews, actually talked to me last night? Given me a lecture on art? I mean, there was Rivera of course, and Kahlo to be sure. But that was baby stuff. It was true, I knew next to nothing about Mexican art!
I depended on you to teach me things. Your father was a writer from the outskirts of Mexico City. Your mother was an engineer from Ottawa. You were the New North American: impervious — perfectly sealed off. That was why one night during our recent trip to Mexico, when we were refueling in central D.F., I wanted to go out alone. You were so chulo, so natural in the wide avenidas and plazas that nobody spoke to me and I was anxious to try out my Spanish.
“You stay here,” I begged. We had taken over your friend’s newly emptied Condesa apartment. “Go talk to your abuela or something.”
Your father was her baby, which made you in every way preferential.
“On the telephone?” you said, rolling your eyes. “It’s a big city, maricón.”
“I don’t know, eat flan then.”
I was suddenly desperate to be alone.
“Grow up,” you said. But instead of shoveling into your jacket you watched me go.
At noon it was time to take a Paradex from the naturopath. I grimaced and unscrewed the cap. Then I walked out into the yard. The season was changing. It would be light for hours and hours and hours. Pink shoots raved in the breeze, their heads glistening. They were much taller, already, since yesterday.
My feelings about objects had always been orphic — they penetrated my deepest levels. It was painful to be alive, I knew. Worse, I was somehow responsible. Undisturbed — walls, chairs, rocks, et cetera could fend for themselves. But my presence troubled the atmosphere. If, while walking, I kicked a rock but not the rock next to it, I created an imbalance, pointed at a wound. It then followed, it was the rule, that I turn around and similarly move the other rock. But what if I touched that second rock (it was bigger and so my toe needed more force to push it) longer than the first? Things were now severely out of whack.
“Sorry,” I’d whisper, retracting my foot at hyper-speed.
Small crises like these followed me everywhere I went. Throwing out a dirty chopstick if its mate was clean made me pause at the trash can like an awful, disloyal god. Other times, lone discarded shoes or cracked bathroom tiles leered out to me. Don’t notice them! I’d mutter. But their suffering was insistent.
Now my stomach gurgled but gave no further orders. Above me, a flight of molting pigeons swooped low. I juggled the pill anxiously. It was sweaty in my wintersoft palm. As if on auto-pilot, thinking about nothing, I used my thumb against the soil to dig a small indent. Then I plopped the dark gel cap in.
That night the clock dragged. You were late. I went to bed and kicked around. Our mattress felt like it was filled with overturned traffic cones. For half an hour, I read about Rufino Tamayo. What, I began to wonder, did our parasite think of his 1978 work La Gran Galaxia? In it the figure, who wore something like a jailbird’s smock, was staring over a bowl of sea. As if a mirage, the inner pink organelle of his body was reflected out, shimmering over the blue expanse, while above the horizon line, a luminous geometry of constellations flexed.
The figure appeared to be yawning.
In quick succession, I sent you some texts.
One said: Our parasite’s kicking, is yours?
No response. I continued.
I think I’m having contractions.
Silence. I switched tacks.
What’s eating you? ?
Tired of looking at an empty screen and the arrow that said slide to unlock, I turned off my phone.
I dreamed but my sleep was disturbed, watery. In it, I repeated a scene from my childhood. I had grown up near islands — rocky, fir-smothered pods on the north-northwest coast. As a kid I often accompanied my father in his boat.
One morning he woke me up early.
“There’s been a wreck,” he said.
We went down to Fidalgo Marina. Behind us, the sun simmered up over the Cascade range. The consensus among the boat owners was: Drunk Indians. There was a reef between the Lummi-owned Gooseberry Point and a local casino. During the night, a small Bayliner had hit it going full speed.
The men refilled their Styrofoam cups of coffee. Someone handed me one, topped to the brim. Drunk Indians. A no-brainer, everyone agreed. I was ten or eleven, newly effeminate. I liked to wear a solo rubber band in the back bud of my hair. I felt a chill and clutched my cup.
As the day went on, more news came in. There’d been six passengers, all still alive, but some were in pretty bad shape at Harborview and other trauma hospitals nearby. They’d been ejected forward from the boat, thrown like sacks onto the sharp rocks.
Toward evening my father let go of his usual German clamped lip. There weren’t any deliveries to make. He could be wily, even impish at times. He closed the engine compartment where he’d been slowly tinkering at the fuel lines.
“Let’s go,” he said.
We untied and cut out across the strait. I struggled to nice up the buoys. I loved helping my father and did it with a silent pride. But I was brimming with the idea of the wreck. Violent pictures filled my mind. I found myself searching the waves for a sign of tragedy. In all directions, there was nothing. The after- noon was calm and hot.
Then the small tan boat tilted into sight. It lay halfway across the reef, which was, at low tide, a dwarf island.
My father cut the engine and brought in our bow.
“Go on,” he said. “See what’s in it.”
I jumped onto the wreckage with a thud. Suddenly alone. I snooped as best I could. The category “Drunk Indians” dominated. I expected its presence to look fundamentally different from what my father and his brother did together with pails of Coors most nights. Fuck you, I muttered. Fuck you, fuck you. But here was no mess, no beer cans or incriminating plastic jug of booze. Just a small suitcase on the ripped-up fiberglass floor and the bracing zing of being this far away from land.
“Open it,” my father pressed, his voice still close to me.
I hesitated. Drugs, I thought. Big plastic bags of coke powder like I’d seen on TV. My imagination was limited. Money, Uzis.
We were trespassing but my father had his own law.
Queasy, I unzipped the stiff fabric and looked down. A stack of clean washcloths crouched in the web of the opening, starched and tightly folded. I poked them. Towels, shirts. The bag was immaculately packed with someone’s laundry, as if the person who owned it was going on a trip.
“Leon!” my father shouted.
The tide had flipped and the current was ripping sideways. Our bow dragged closer to the reef. We were a team; now he needed me. Dutifully, I hurdled aboard.
“What was it?” he said, as he slammed us into reverse. Freezing green water foamed over the transom.
“Nothing,” I reported, facing ahead.
But that night I was stricken.
I’m sorry, I said again and again to my lowering bedroom ceiling. I’d done doubly wrong. I’d pro ted from someone else’s bad time. But worse, what really concerned me, was that I’d left the bag abandoned with all that dark water surrounding it — the cloth open, its contents exposed.
I tried to tell you this once but you just shook your head.
“Your dad is nuts.”
Now it was almost midnight and very hot. I thought about the small graveyard, a day’s worth of pills, out in the yard. I fuddled with my phone’s screen. A picture of your face flashed up when I touched your name. Your hair was short and your jaw was feral.
I paused.
Is this about Mexico? I jabbed down onto the screen.
In the D.F., having left you, I walked toward the park that I remembered marking the center of Condesa. Earlier in the day kids had been playing soccer on the concrete monument. Next to the fountain stood a series of columns whose plinths were covered in vines that evoked a jungly snarl without actually being unkempt. Together we’d sipped cans of Bohemia in the sun.
The entire trip, you’d been trying to show me something — at least, I thought you had. In front of me Parque México was blue and empty. I pulled another can of beer out from under my sweatshirt and sat with my back to a column’s shaft. I wanted to go to Tropezedo — a club I’d read about in El Mercurio. Along the path that led out of the park, sodium lamps flashed on, popping and fuzzing into cold arcs. A figure moved between them with his head down. He seemed to be walking toward me, but without actually getting much closer or larger.
Watching him, I was furiously sad. We need separate, differentiated points, I realized, to understand the concept of space. The figure was of course you and the gap between us was only growing. No matter how hard you walked, you couldn’t get to me. In between the lights, the shadows completely overtook you.
My palm was damp, wrapped around the can. I looked down, adjusting my grip. But when I raised my head again, the figure was suddenly directly in front of me. He wore Levis and black high-tops and his hair was long. How could I have thought he was you?
He paused, shifting from foot to foot. His breath was heavy from the effort.
“You want something?” he said in English.
“These are Megaspores,” he grinned, uncapping his palm.
His fingers were smooth and his hands were big. Steam drifted from his body.
“No,” I laughed, embarrassed.
Untroubled, he repeated himself and smiled again. “These are Megaspores.”
He crouched over me and slipped his hand into mine so now I was holding the mushrooms too. We stayed like that under the monument, touching.
Now I was pacing, far from sleep. I pushed into my jeans and a windbreaker; it was humid out and it seemed like it might rain. I descended into the subway. There was a stilled train that felt like a mirage of the train I needed to catch. Lucky. I loped on. Inside, the G was bright and yellow. It dragged through its dark funicular caverns and at Lorimer, the L platform was for once empty.
It’s Friday night, I realized. I considered my options. The problem was, Terry was missing a case of top shelf. He thought I’d fenced it, used it at the BALLZDEEP party I occasionally threw. The accusation was lazy — easy to ignore. But the more I thought about the case I didn’t steal, the more I realized how easy it would be to take.
To my left, the tunnel gaped sourly, waiting to spit out the next train.
“Don’t you get it,” I’d said to Gerald. We were adrift in the horizonless midpoint of a happy hour east of A.
“Between what I might do and what I did do — there’s no difference at all!”
He stared at his brandy hand, planted thickly around his perpetual snifter.
“Have you ever eaten crêpes Suzette?” he said.
I knew by now that he’d cooked for Samuel, stubbornly brought him dishes at St. Vincent’s even when Samuel was intubated, practically gone.
I spilled out for another round. “Yeah, yeah.”
But he described the crêpes to me again in careful detail, so careful that even half-listening, I was sure I could smell them and taste them — the liqueury tangerine syrup, the brown crispness around the broken bubbles where the batter met the scorching, heavily buttered pan.
This train was taking forever.
“Yo,” interrupted a voice I recognized, sounding less like an art professor and more like an East Village court rat.
“Yo, B-boy. You sure about this Tamayo cat?”
I grabbed my gut. Was I sure about Tamayo? I mean, of course I should dig deeper, I had only just started to research.
“Shh!” I hissed into my windbreaker pouch.
But he was onstage now, looking for an audience.
My cheeks baked. It was my fault, I reasoned. Only I had stopped taking the pills — you were racing toward health. The more I thought about it the more it irked me. What was your rush? Let’s convalesce together, baby, I wanted to shout. Yoga retreats, long raw food dinners — once we had planned to go to meditation on Tuesday nights.
I should get my own life!
I stared at the subway map of Manhattan. It had always looked like the pro le of a big west-facing cock. Now a single beam glared out from the tunnel. I watched as it grew bigger and bigger to the point of engulfing me — then suddenly sliced into two.
I emerged through the mechanized subway door at First Avenue limp-legged. Under my windbreaker, my T-shirt was sweat-logged and I wrung the left corner of it until my fingers made prints in the cotton. The rest of me was wiry but no matter how many pull-ups I did my chest was soft. The wet fabric pooled there expectantly.
I slid through the turnstile cage with my head down. The message I’d sent you drifted in space without defense. I jammed my phone from my pocket, waiting for the signal to show.
It had rained while I’d been underground, and a tuberous smell came up from the pavement. I wiped my face, finally street-level. In this early-summer heat and quickly hosed sky, thousands of safety bulbs speckled the half-built condos: mutant-sized fireflies.
I no longer felt capable of being out. Shapes walked around in the dark with their shoulders bunched. I checked my phone again: blank. Mindlessly I logged onto YardHard as I moved. Rat574 ballooned up — he was perpetually “in the garden.”
Me: nice night.
Him: want to score?
I’d followed Megaspores toward what I guessed was Avenida Michoacán, trailing at a distance. Lebanese cypress lined the path, shooting upward, roughly rimmed by giant palm fronds. He walked briskly. I’d entered an alternate universe and was meeting an unknown version of myself who could have easily starred in Cruising.
Branches stretched over us like arms. Stuffed in my pocket, my left hand prickled where he’d held me. He walked faster, taking a staircase two at a time toward the corner of the park. His hips were narrow. Exposed, they’d be sharp. Yours are like that too and when you let me, I grabbed them as if you were a view scope and I was trying to stare inside. I imagined you back at the apartment moving around with purpose, turning the pages of a book or licking a joint.
At the top of the stairs, there was a small plaza. Megaspores stopped. We stood there, again very near. His long hair was oiled, glimmering in the light. Around us the atmosphere of the city buzzed and blared. I tipped the rest of my beer down my throat.
“Duck pond,” he said, pointing to our left. Helpless, my eyes followed. Where the concrete broke off, there was a low patch of water and, I supposed, a fountain. Then he grinned again and under the sodium lamp I could see the ’shroom caps hiding between his gums and teeth — he’d been chewing and chewing as we walked.
“Duck pond,” I repeated lamely.
Then I was mashing my lips against his open mouth, running my tongue everywhere. Duck pond, I thought again. His saliva was casting a kind of spell. Now my mouth was full of wet brown caps. Duck pond, my brain insisted. The substance was leathery, crumbly, and underneath, fecal, soft.
I shoved him against the cement base of the lamppost. He was my same height exactly. I felt his hips warm and springy on mine. But this had nothing to do with him! I was only finishing an act of balancing that he’d started when we asymmetrically touched. Meanwhile my cheeks had begun to fizz. I felt full of goop and light. I saw you at the balcony window waving. You and I hated each other sometimes but together we’d be fine.
“Tentigo.” Megaspores pointed, laughing.
I shrugged o my hard-on. So what? But I was becoming confused about which parts of me had touched him and which hadn’t. That morning in the shower you’d bent down wide for me to fuck you but I couldn’t relax and you’d turned off the water with your hair full of soap.
Now my upper lip was coated in sweat but when I ran my tongue along it the hairs were sour. He moved farther away. My brain was whirring. He must know Tropezedo, I thought. Light pooled around him in bright beams. My nipples pulsed where his chest had been. The distance was suddenly constant: unbearable. I closed the space with my arms but as if disconnected from my brain my hands crashed into his denim-covered ribs and crotch and then whacked at his chest.
“I’m hitting you,” I heard my voice saying.
I sounded hysterical.
“ESTOY fucking PERFORADO.”
He sidestepped me easily, dropping to the ground in a kind of squat thrust. Then he put his face down into the weeds. Beyond my panting I heard cars and sirens parading the boulevards. Blandly, as if he were at the clinic about to get a booster shot, he inched his jeans over his chonie-less ass.
“I’m Carlos,” he said, turning his misty head to me.
I passed through the Friday night party tents and teepees of the East Village in a hurry. This season everyone was tall and leafy. A girl with flaming hair smoked under the spastic yellow of Gray’s Papaya. Tilda again. She was like you. Safe from pain — emotionally no holes at all.
At the corner of C and Tenth, I bent over. All those pills in the dirt, now my bowels were involved. The leftover vegetarian gumbo I’d geniusly eaten for dinner slushed back and forth. I concentrated on squeezing my ass closed. Any port in a storm, I thought, whimpering my body through the fudge-colored door of the Baltic.
I stared around the familiar scape. Behind the long run of oak laminate, the cracked stools, the bartender’s skin emitted a neon sparkle. The new guy was just Terry’s type, as twinky as they come.
“Hey,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
He swished his towel over a chalky spot I’d scrubbed a thousand times before.
“I need the staff bathroom,” I said. “I work for Terry. I run, you know . . .”
Wincing, I paused, giving him the chance to make something up.
“Uh-huh.”
“Give me the keys.” I stretched out my palm. “Right?”
“I should call Terry.”
Casually I rejoined a stray straw to its holder.
“You could,” I said. “In this shitty economy where no one trusts anyone, it’s one of those things you could do.”
I was yelling, the Baltic had become ear-splitting. Out near the dance floor and the wall gallery of second-rate reindeer heads, a karaoke machine blared. Someone was murdering Meatloaf. A guy with a bristly beard stood up on a chair and waved his arms. I would do anything for love! he shouted.
The bartender shrugged. His eyebrows said: I’m hot?
Fields of Japanese knotweed plowed through my brain. I caught myself in the long barroom mirror. My eyes looked like meatballs. I thought suddenly of RAT574. What a guy, he really cared . . . thick-chested, chest hair glistening, a warrior with Teutonic strength blasting our personal scourge from the face of Brooklyn eternal.
Would it really be so bad to have a clean yard? I saw us sitting there in it, drinking icy things. Weeds are like hair on the body of the earth, I said to myself. Not personal.
My pocket buzzed. I took a deep breath. One message. Slide, yes.
The text bubble popped. I squinted down.
Mexico??? you said.
I took the master key ring and made o into the annals of the bar with my heart wacking. Past the urinals, the pool table, the broken-off pay phone and its Sharpie forest. I had no idea what I was doing, only that Terry owed me my last check. I stood in the small liquor-barricaded office. Hundred-dollar scotches stared me down.
I wanted to know. Had you taken Terry’s side? When it came down to it? Or did you believe me?
It was dawn when I got to the Condesa apartment and the fruit vendors were unlocking their carts. I slid under the crisp sheet.
“How was Tropezedo?” you said, petting my abdomen. “Same old pinochas?”
I nodded.
But Tropezedo had been black and shiny, practically Scandinavian, packed with Carlos’s friends and bowls of metallic condoms sitting everywhere like grapes. Then there was Cockspot and a series of other bars with similar names. Over the course of the night my body had become big and dim and I floated in it like a visitor.
The next morning, we left for Oaxaca on a small seven-seater plane. I sat next to the pilot, a gaucho in polished aviators. As we skidded over the dark green hilltops, my hands crept under the backs of my heat-pancaked thighs. My head was in a tequila-made vise. With the copilot’s controls in front of me, I was sure I was about to wrench the plane down into the jungle floor.
Later, at the airport cafeteria, you were ebullient.
“Did you see it?”
My face was gray. “Giga,” I confessed, staring at your beautifully remote nail beds.
You grabbed my shoulders as if I was made of rocks.
“Earth to Leon,” you said, cradling my head, laughing. “We landed, we’re safe.”
A sick feeling spooled inside me. My vision turned to pixels and points. Our parasite rammed my sphincter. And my sphincter was just a weak wall! I could crawl to the bathroom but for what? For once I was exactly where I needed to be. Sweating, I unbuckled my belt and crouched down. Hanging my ass back past my heels, I squatted wider, my ankles pitching forward. This would disgust you. “Raunch factor ten,” you’d say. But what about Herrera, Bustamante, and No Grupo? Our parasite and I — we were careening toward a more conceptual kind of art.
I palmed the cash shelf for balance, breathing with yogic purity. The carpet smelled of large cat. Forget about order. I opened and a sheet of water and rice poured out, then I was sure I felt something tug free from my stomach lining and whoop down the chute. I stared between my legs — I felt suddenly better than I had in months. Out out! I chanted. In this zen state I could finally give as much as I wanted and more would come gushing down to fill the void always.
My phone rang.
I wiped with a discarded bar rag and quickly stood up.
“Hello?” RAT574 said. He sounded different than I’d expected, breathless and old, like he’d been sitting for too long with something in his hand.
I eased the office door closed and gave it a quick twist. The Baltic was blurry, more crowded. “Leon!” Gerald called from his appointed stool, but I barely recognized him. I threw the keys in the direction of the bar and ducked out into the cooling night, shoving the curtain out of my way.
At Fourteenth Street, a wad of guys with gym hats padded past plus all the regular queens but this time they must have been joking, their makeup caked thick and droopy.
I dropped down into the First Avenue subway.
Drunks plastered the lavender seats. A Poetry in Motion poem attacked my eyes, then an ad for Botox. Halfway through the tunnel I slammed a cartoon hand onto my forehead: you were in Chinatown at your brother’s, a plan you’d made weeks ago, probably under a roll-neck of Xbox and bong smoke.
It didn’t matter, I told myself. In Terry’s office I’d remembered my only rule. This rule trumped all others, which perfectly explained the crumpled shape of my life. As a kid I had another habit. Whenever something was too ruined, too bereft, or sick — say a saucer with no matching cup, a napkin mostly unused but with a splotchy stain, a baby mole tugged half-dead by a dog — I crushed it. More than anything I couldn’t stand to see suffering.
“Giga,” I said into your voice mail, as I stood on our corner of McGuinness and Nassau, waiting for who knows what.
I took a breath.
Then I confessed all kinds of things into the at receiver — disgusting attachments, lies blotting back as far as I could see, betrayal upon teetering betrayal — anything and everything that ran into my mind.
Check Out the First Teaser Footage of the Stephen King Adaptation
We have a first glimpse of the hotly anticipated adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, thanks to the stars Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey.
The first teaser features McConaughey’s Man in Black — the story’s villain — traversing a field filled with dead corpses. In the second, Elba, who stars as hero Roland Deschain (The Gunslinger) loads his revolver. Check out both videos, and some banter from the actors, below.
No list of five books could give a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of gay male writing today. Each of the books below stands in for ten or a dozen others.
Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart
Later this year, FSG will publish Half-Light: Collected Poems, gathering more than fifty years of poems by Frank Bidart. Desire, especially disastrous desire, has always been Bidart’s central subject. His recent work, like that collected in Metaphysical Dog, has seen him expand his already impressive range, adding to his extraordinary candor and fearlessness both lyricism and a new political urgency. He is an essential writer.
Proxies by Brian Blanchfield
A remarkable group of writers — Hilton Als, Olivia Laing, Maggie Nelson, and Melissa Febos, among others — are together creating something we might think of as the new queer essay, extending the tradition of Montaigne, Barthes, and Guy Davenport in writing that combines philosophy, confession, and criticism. Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies is a marvel, a kind of fractured autobiography in which the most seemingly haphazard subjects — tumbleweeds, Man Roulette, frottage — open into territories of intellectual and emotional risk. It’s among the most brilliant books I’ve read in years.
Boy with Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis
Much of the most exciting writing being done in America today is coming from young queer poets of color, among them Eduardo Corral, Ocean Vuong, Saeed Jones, Danez Smith, Derrick Austin, and Sjohnna McCray. Rickey Laurentiis’s poems are disarmingly gorgeous and armed to the teeth — with intellect, verve, insight.
My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci
Statovci’s surreal, compelling debut novel has just been published in the US, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston. It centers on Bekim, who was born (like Statovci) in Kosovo and immigrated as a child to Finland. A novel of dislocation and the search for connection, it explores a range of relationships — from internet hookups to Balkan weddings — seeking through an invigorating mixture of realism and fantasy to get at something new about identity in a fractured and ever more mobile world.
Infidels by Abdellah Taïa, Infidels
Taïa’s dream-like, urgent novel (translated from the French by Alison Strayer) centers on Jallal, the gay son of a prostitute, following his life from Morocco to Belgium and exploring stigma, immigration and extremism. Along with books like Saleem Haddad’s Guapa and Hasan Namir’s God in Pink, Taïa’s work — Infidels is his eighth novel — offers a crucial portrait of queer lives in the Muslim world.
— See Garth Greenwell live in conversation with Ali Asgar, Edouard Louis, and Tobin Low at the PEN World Voices Festival — on Wednesday, May 3rd.
Maman died tomorrow. Or today maybe, I don’t know. Today is Sunday where I am in New York but tomorrow where she was, Iran.
My father calls me on Sunday to tell me he wants me to write something. He says it to me like he doesn’t even have the words to tell me my mother died but says it like all he can say is for me to repeat after him, My mother died today.
I don’t know what to say, so I ask him what he wants me to write.
Then time stands still, no, not time. It’s me that is standing still, but for a second there we are the same after not being on the phone for some time, my father and me. We’re standing there on either end of the line and between us is some memory of Maman.
Maman. Mother in Farsi, informally. Maman. It sounds more motherly than mother, Maman.
The word Maman written again and again when I was a child trying to learn Farsi and there was still the matter of trying or not trying enough.
My earliest memory of Maman might be one of my earliest memories too. The word Maman written again and again when I was a child trying to learn Farsi and there was still the matter of trying or not trying enough. Maybe if I had tried harder I would have learned Farsi, but most of the words I still remember now in Farsi seem to stem from some French like Maman and merci. Stranger still is that most of them seem to begin with an M like morte. Maybe not all the words, but there are worse first words to remember in a second language than Maman.
Maman naan daad.
How many times had I written the same words, Maman and naan and daad. I don’t remember any other lines I read at first and wrote as a child and repeated more than Maman naan daad.
Maman naan daad means Mother gave bread.
The way it is though, translated word for word, where each word is, Mother bread gave.
There are however many languages there are unlike English that will have sentence structures composed with their verbs at the end, subject and object right up against each other in the interim — the subject-object-verb counterpart to the English subject-verb-object — German being one language that comes to mind, but Farsi also all subject-object-verb like Maman naan daad.
My mother, my father starts to say in Farsi on the other end of the line. Mamanam morte.
Maman Mother
am my
morte died.
My father doesn’t have the words to tell me my mother died because he isn’t trying to tell me my mother died but his mother has died.
My father doesn’t have the words to tell me my mother died because he isn’t trying to tell me my mother died but his mother has died.
Maman naan daad I remember now isn’t the line from my childhood but Baba naan daad.
Baba, or Father, gave bread in a Lord’s prayer sense of give us this day our daily bread. I must have misremembered it as Maman naan daad because it sounds better in my head, but either way my mother will call me tomorrow to tell me my father’s mother died, Mamanesh morte.
Maman Mother
esh his
morte died.
His mother died this morning, my mother says again in English but it isn’t the same as Mother his died. What a difference there is between his and has, the same difference between I and a.
I have nothing to say but something like we all die from mourning in the end, so say nothing.
Maman tomorrow died.
2.
Maman died today. Or, not my Maman, and not today if in Iran, but I still haven’t told anyone.
I did drink a lot last night. I like drinking at bars a lot because I can tell the same story a lot of times, a lot of times to the same person, but they won’t remember it or even if they do they won’t remember it the same.
My father is a lot older than me, I said.
Isn’t everyone’s father older than them.
Yeah but he’s a lot older, I told them. My father could be my grandfather.
Then they tell me about theirs or they don’t and we think our way through the rest of our drinks.
I wake up in the morning and count my teeth and ears to make sure everything is still there or more or less where it was before. I have heard more than once how the ears are supposed to keep growing even after one’s hair and teeth have fallen out, so I run my hands through my hair and I see the fallen-out hair between my fingers as I stare at my hands. I think I’ll take a shower to see what my hands will look like when I am old, but I still bring two bottles of beer with me into the shower, one to drink and the other to drink and to piss inside because the water doesn’t drain fast enough for how long I’ll be in here.
I bring two bottles of beer with me into the shower, one to drink and the other to drink and to piss inside because the water doesn’t drain fast enough for how long I’ll be in here.
I open up the beer and back into the shower and the warm water outside me and the cold beer inside me feels good. I drink most of the beer with the water up against my back before I start to worry how long I’ve been in here. I try not to look at my hands, but they hurt.
The water at the bottom of the tub is up over my feet and I step in and out of it and it makes a different sound than the water hitting it from the shower head when I turn around to set the beer down on the shelf between shampoo bottles. I don’t piss in the shower now because I don’t like to stand in myself.
I don’t throw up as much as I used to, but I don’t drink as much as I used to, which isn’t saying much to how much we all want to keep our insides inside. I’ve thrown up a lot in my life because I’ve drank too much in my life, but what worries me more is pissing or shitting myself. Pissing or shitting oneself is something most someones my age must not find too worrisome, but maybe my grandmother must have before she died.
My grandmother died before she ever met me. I don’t remember much of last night, but I have yet to tell anyone, though it’s odd to think my body can be somewhere without me for some time, but what would I tell them if I told them. I’ll say, I’ll never know someone I never knew.
Who.
I don’t even remember her name, I’ll tell them and drink and I’ll try not to think how mourning is louder than dying.
I don’t even remember her name, I’ll tell them and drink and I’ll try not to think how mourning is louder than dying. The nonmemory stays with me though because forgetting is still something. Forgetting is all we had.
Maybe I would have felt something if I knew her name or if it had been my mother, but I only finish the beer and open another bottle to drink from one while I piss into the other one. It feels good to feel something within me and without me.
3.
Maman died yesterday and is behind me now and no longer ahead in time because she is dead. It is still tomorrow where she was, but she isn’t.
The ambulance is red and white and loud passing by the bar and it’s been passing by for some time now, but sirens are supposed to pass by and sound higher pitched when they do, but when I turn to look I see the siren is still going even with the ambulance standing still. It is standing still long enough that I remember sometimes I forget there is someone in there. Some of the others in the bar cover their ears with their hands and they stare at the ambulance because being deaf must not hurt as much as seeing the lights.
The word ambulance sounds like ambulance in French like in Farsi even if it isn’t pronounced the same, but sirens don’t always sound the same.
Life and death, I say to their deaf ears. Life and deaf. Death after all the dying is quiet, isn’t it.
Once I tell someone she is dead, I tell everyone because all I can do after I tell someone is tell everyone else. Maybe I tell them only to hear what they say, because when someone else is dead you can always say how sorry you are to have heard.
Once I tell someone she is dead, I tell everyone because all I can do after I tell someone is tell everyone else.
I say it because it is something to say, but my father wanted me to write something for him in English to say something about her passing, so he had something to say.
My father hadn’t seen her for forty years and he was in his forties when my mother had me, so I’m at the same age he was when he last saw his mother. I try to remember what my mother looks like, but a photograph my father sends me of his mother comes to mind instead and I see how she looks like him, or he looks like her rather, but everyone starts looking the same nearer to the end. Maybe soon I’ll stop looking like my mother and my mother will start to look like me.
My mother and father married and left Iran around the time of the Iranian Revolution and left for Germany where my brother was born then Los Angeles where I was born and when we were children and they would argue they argued in German because we both sort of understood Farsi, so it just sounded like sounds, though I’ve heard English is made up of French and German, but I still don’t know it as anything more than sounds, sounds that sound like words sound.
Non-experience is an experience though. I still don’t remember her name but namelessness is something else. We have so many names and still some of us have the same names, what matter is her name and if she isn’t my Maman. Maman is still Maman whether or not it is Maman.
Someone tells me I look like someone else, so we drink a round or two together.
It’s better than looking like something else, I say.
We see everything through similes to the point that we see through the similes, to the point that we explain everything in our lives through something else in our lives or someone else’s life. It’s just like something it isn’t.
Maybe there is some verb, some word in some subject-object-verb language, that will come at the end to make some sense of this mess.
Maybe there is some verb, some word in some subject-object-verb language, that will come at the end to make some sense of this mess, but for now there are words that only sound like sounds to me, but are they words if they’re just sounds, if there are words like Maman and naan and daad I will never remember and will never have tried or not tried enough in childhood to have remembered.
I walk home wondering how I am thirsty and have to piss at the same time.
My memory is only as good as my writing because there is a give and a get, for we don’t have to remember when we have something else to remember for us. All we do is forget to remember, because something has to be a memory to be remembered.
We don’t have to remember when all we have to do is remember to remember.
4.
Knausgaard says something and I have trouble hearing him over the laughter. I won’t remember what he said, but I do remember he is larger than life in front of his hundreds of fans here in this bookstore in Brooklyn, all the ones here to see him for his My Struggle: Book Four. He is larger than life simply because he is alive.
For some, life is enough to be alive. You live and then you live and then you die and then you lived, but Knausgaard is our self-obsession with ourselves and with a self. We overlay ourselves on the lives of others because it is after all, before all, an age of self. Knausgaard is you and me. You as subject and me as object and the verb, of course, Knausgaard.
We overlay ourselves on the lives of others because it is after all, before all, an age of self. Knausgaard is you and me.
It is not to Knausgaard or not to Knausgaard because it isn’t a question, though questions are an instance in English’s subject-verb-object language in which one might invert the natural order to verb-subject-object, which isn’t that as close as one might get in English to subject-object.
They laugh at what he says that isn’t funny and don’t laugh at what he says that isn’t funny, so it’s hard to say who is humoring whom, but they still get in line to have him write his name again and again, signing hundreds of copies of their My Struggle: Book Four.
I’ve worked as a bookseller in this bookstore almost more than a year now and I couldn’t even remember how many books of his I’ve sold and how many I’ve not sold, but I have seen his face a lot, not more than I’ve seen my own, but maybe more than he has.
Someone hands me a lager and says no one drank from it, not even Knausgaard. Knausgaard’s people got it for him, but he doesn’t drink, so here is this beer that was his. I suppose we’d get along because I wouldn’t drink a lager either, but some people Knausgaard must have.
Maybe they misheard, but maybe it’s how he sounds. I’ve heard that Norwegian sounds closer at its roots to the first sounds man made, like in caves. That sounds too true to be true, but I’m no linguist. There are a lot of writers that are that must be better writers than I am, in a phonological sense, but all I do know is how we respond to sounds that sound sort of the same because that’s a way to make sense of what we don’t know.
All I do know is how we respond to sounds that sound sort of the same because that’s a way to make sense of what we don’t know.
The beer is warm and someone else tells me he saw Knausgaard drink some before he started signing. I don’t remember that but I do remember Knausgaard saying, “For me length is a failure.”
When I started to write this, the first thought I had for a first line was for it to start like, It ended like it had started like it would end like it ended.
Because it’s always good to go from beginning to end, ending like it did because it started like it did, now it doesn’t start like it had started or end like it ended, like My Struggle: Book Four. It became more like something lost in transliteration that, in translation, is found, like Struggle My: Book Four.
5.
For three days two summers ago I saw, no, not saw, heard all of time as if it were at once.
I was hearing every voice I had ever heard in my life, in that it was all in my head, a thousand thousand — thous and thous — voices like a Greek chorus I was hearing over everything not in my head. It was like the opposite of someone speaking in tongues, in that it wasn’t one person making no sense, but everyone I’d ever heard now in my head and all of them together making some sort of sense.
I don’t remember much from the three days, but then there I was in an ambulance and I know there weren’t any sirens because I wasn’t dying enough to have everyone we were passing cover their ears. I told them, I hope the only other time I’m in an ambulance it’ll be worth the sirens.
In the ward I asked one of the doctors if I could have tinfoil for my head, but he only laughed at me, so I was sure he was there, which was good, but laughter isn’t always the best medicine. I made two horns with my hands against my head and my index fingers spinning into antennae to show him I wasn’t serious, but that he didn’t laugh at.
Once they were sure there weren’t any drugs in me, they put drugs in me.
In the morning I had stopped hearing voices and when I was being held in there and couldn’t get a line to non-New York area codes to reach my mother or father I asked one of the doctors when I could leave the ward.
Once they were sure there weren’t any drugs in me, they put drugs in me.
Maybe you should brush your hair.
I tell him, I can hardly keep my head on straight and now I have to straighten my hair.
He doesn’t laugh, but he does smile at me. He sees my name and knows I’m Iranian-American because he is Iranian, so he speaks Farsi to me and I smile that I don’t understand too much Farsi. You’re a writer, right.
Right.
You should talk to the other patients. Maybe that’ll give you something to write.
He gives me a half pencil and a blue book like for a blue book exam, but I don’t write in it as I am afraid they will read it, so I keep all of my thoughts in my head and try to remember all I see, but what was there I heard in my head for three days and what was there I saw for the four days I was in the ward.
Everyone in here has their insides on the outside.
Out of mind, out of sight. Out of sight, out of sound.
The only reason I’m here is I’m here.
It is one thing to go up the mountain, but it is another thing to come back down.
Everyone in here has their insides on the outside.
Back on the outside everything is still the same. Everything was as it was then everything wasn’t as it was, but then everything was as it was again.
My father calls me and I hear his voice in my head through the phone and here we are in another time on either end of the line and between us is some memory. I remember I don’t like talking on the phone because it reminds me of things that aren’t there.
I try to remember if I heard Maman in my head, but my memory isn’t what it once was.
6.
New York is full of sirens and shit, so I go to a bar to drink. I think I’ll tell the bartender, I’m here waiting on an ambulance. Everyone everywhere is waiting on an ambulance, I think he should’ve said. He doesn’t because I didn’t.
I wrote a lot of this out then went out and I did a lot of this I said I would do and I said a lot of this I said I would say, so where would this fall between fiction and nonfiction.
Fiction is to nonfiction as experience is to non-experience, in the sense that the latter two start with the prefix non, in the sense that Maman non daad or the sense that we’re all prefixed.
Fiction is the truth over time, but where does that put it in the past and present. What about all the things I said I’d do that I didn’t do, the things I said I’d do that I’d said I’d never do.
Fiction is the truth over time, but where does that put it in the past and present?
I come home drunk and like to look at myself when I’m drunk because I look less like myself. My hair is still black and my skin is brown, but I am worried I am growing bald, though my hair has never been that thick. My father told me when I was a child that I showered too much and I’d lose my hair because I washed it too much.
Now he tells me that I’m going to lose all my hair because it’s long, but it’s been long and thin for as long as I can remember it being long.
I always part it to the left to hide how thin it is on the top and show how thin it is on the side. My hair is thinning but has always been thin like my mother, like my mother’s, thin like mother was when she wasn’t my mother.
Maybe my father is right after all. The shower drain must be full from my hair, so right now I have to drink another bottle to piss in the shower, but tomorrow I clean myself up and after three days of mourning I take some time off after all the drinking and I even think I’ll write something, but then I find a hair in my hair that isn’t my hair but gold.
It’s dyed bright blonde and I take it out of the shower with me to see it in my room and see it shines in the sun. I don’t even know all the hairs on my own head, but everyday I lose more and more of them because my hair is too long and life is too long. Life is too long it feels short. If it was shorter it would feel a lot longer because there wasn’t so much.
Maybe this is the closest I’ll ever get to writing a multigenerational novel, but it’s always been more subject-object than Iranian-American for me, more only begotten than begat and begat and begat for me, more you-me to Knausgaard.
Italian-born artist Michela Martello draws and paints, more often than not, on materials that have previously served some other purpose. At her current exhibition Future is Goddess, there are a handful of paintings on traditional canvas, but some of the most intriguing works are created on kimono fabric, loose sheets of Italian cotton, vintage quilts, and disassembled army bags.
Martello freely incorporates words in her paintings. One especially striking piece includes a hot pink painting of a fetus on a turtle skull, with the text “is going to be easy is going to be Wonderful” in gold script underneath.
When I noticed that several of Martello’s paintings are on the surfaces of pages from Shakespeare plays, I wondered about the relationship of literature to her artmaking practice. We chatted in person at her exhibition and in more detail via email, about the creation of a narrative in literature versus art, and about her thoughts on David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, among other topics.
Future is Goddess is on view through May 20, 2017 at Pen and Brush in Manhattan, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the work of women in the literary and visual arts. In addition to curating exhibitions in their gallery space, Pen and Brush hosts writing groups and mentorship programs, and they have created an imprint, Pen + Brush Publications, to electronically publish literary fiction and poetry.
Catherine LaSota: In the exhibition catalog, you state: “There is a secret place within every woman, a garden of Eden with darkness and light where we can have access using the keys of knowledge, courage, and confidence. Inside this place we find that everything manifest is not as we are told to believe; instead, we are pulled into a spiral of compellingly beautiful anonymity.” Is the beauty of anonymity in opposition to the use of labels to identify people and things? If so, how can we avoid interpreting words, or cultural symbols (which you also utilize in your artwork), as some form of identification of what we are looking at?
MichelaMartello: If we dare to dive within the secret/sacred place and to hold onto its energy, we find ourselves automatically outside our comfort zone, where lack of labels are paramount for us to create a new perception. Creating an empty space allows us to receive the meanings of symbols and words in their original purity. It is an endless process, since we always tend to identify and put labels on things to feel safe, but if we keep that sacred door open, we can always reawaken and recreate ourselves. At least for me, it works in this way. It has to do a lot with that special moment right before the intellect manifests — there is always a sparkle of intuition. It’s like the first impression, that we have to trust fully — that experience comes right from the sacred place, and it is very precious!
LaSota: Some of your pieces in Future is Goddess are drawings and paintings done directly on pages of books of Shakespeare plays. Can you talk about your decision to make images on top of existing text? You also repurpose materials such as vintage kimonos and dismantled army sacks — do you view these unorthodox canvases in a similar way to working on pages of books, or is there a difference when language is part of the “canvas”?
Martello: Years ago, I found an antique beautiful collection of Shakespeare plays. Most of the pages were changing colors, showing signs of decay, but the quality of the paper was very good, as they used to make books fifty-sixty years ago at least. As soon as I went through the pages, I felt a strong desire to create art on the surface of those amazing plays.
Shakespeare’s genius is ageless — he knew how to speak to the masses using very simple/subtle yet sophisticated words. Between the lines, I often find answers to my anxiety, because he understood the darkness of human complexity and used comedy to display it. So this was the inspiration that led me to use his words as a background with specific plays. I used pages of The Comedy of Errors for three of my artworks where I explore the theme of mirror — identity and unity of time. I used The Taming of the Shrew, inspired by the always-changing roles in life from one opposite to another once we discover the interdependency that connects us all, painting among others a little paper called Family Constellation. I used Henry V, and many others, always finding in each play infinite inspirations.
For sure, backgrounds play a big role in my artwork process — from an old paper with Shakespeare’s words to a certain textile, fabric or embroidery, the background can really provoke the idea of my next painting. I like to use material that tells a story and has a memory because I like to give continuity to that material that maybe is old or damaged. For instance, when I found these old vintage army sacks, I was immediately inspired to paint on top themes related to the opposite subject, from spiritual to magical to introspective, and so I dismantled the bags, sewing them back together to create a flat canvas, and I repurposed them juxtaposing the opposite.
Michela Martello & the Graffiti Goddesses. Photo by Manny Fernandes.
LaSota: The way you talk about background materials inspiring the direction of your artwork…it reminds me of authors who draw on the geographic location or physical landscape where their stories take place, sometimes to the point of writing about the location as if it is another character in the story. There are some stories, for example, that could only take place in New York City, or in the rural American South, just as the paintings you make on a repurposed army sack or on the pages of Shakespeare plays could not exist in the same way on a different surface. If this is an accurate comparison, and your background materials act like geographic locations in a story, are there other aspects of your paintings that you view as pieces of a story, in terms of character, conflict, narrative arc, etc.?
Martello: Sometimes yes, but it is not a prerequisite condition. For instance, I will have an idea of a painting, using references that I feel will create a narrative I am very fond of, and then, when I start the painting, everything takes a completely different direction. So I just let the process flow, and I understand that those specific references were just symbolic tools that led me into new dimensions. Sometimes, I use animal skulls, and in that case the work is very much related to the idea of impermanence — therefore, the skulls are essential, and the work manifests exactly as I thought about it. But of course, in this case, I am not talking about a background — this is a very specific tool.
LaSota: You mentioned to me that you have been making artwork with a relationship to the writing of David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami. What about these particular writers are you drawn to, and how do their words influence your artmaking?
Martello: Shakespeare is present here as well! I painted two little artworks in homage to two of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, using the inside cover of the collection of plays. The background is illustrated with a graceful decorative motif aged by time, and I felt a strong desire to pay homage to these two writers using an inside cover of the master.
David Foster Wallace has a unique quality that I have never experienced with any other writer, the perfect schizophrenic balance between intellectual mental clarity and amazing spiritual insight — these two aspects, if well nurtured, can either create a guru or a madman. Wallace makes me feel compassionate about reality in the way it is supposed to be — he really helps me to see things straight and therefore he becomes my muse, creating the necessary void for inspiration to shape it up. Sometimes I do have a mystical experience beyond pure enjoyment reading some of his lines. He was a great mind, a great intellect, a great soul.
Haruki Murakami is therapeutic in a marvelous way. His style of course is superb, but it is not just that. I definitely am inspired by the surrealistic vision of his writing, and also I feel empowered by his enhancing way of portraying women — always very feminine, mysterious, and magical, with a perfect balance between strength and delicacy. He encourages me to work on paradox and juxtaposition. Murakami allows us to see forbidden landscapes, making us believe everything is possible in the most paradoxical way.
LaSota: You were born in Italy and studied illustration there, then moved to New York ten years ago. You make art that incorporates the words of different languages, but the predominant language you use in your work is English. Are you particularly drawn to the English language as an art element, and if so, why?
Martello: Well, when I was a child, I always dreamed about coming to live in New York. I used to pretend I knew English, and mimicking the sound of Americans made me feel almost there…and, I guess, for an Italian child dreaming of coming to America, I thought I was very “cool,” sounding English. Besides this, English language is universal; therefore, there is a certain usefulness in adapting English words to my paintings. It is quite useful! In the Italian language, for instance, to explain a concept you really need to compose a paragraph, versus English, where, quite often, only one word is needed — paradoxically that word can open many doors.
Sometimes I am criticized because I use words in my paintings — some say that using words makes me less universal because I personalize too much, giving direction to the public’s reaction. Well, for me it is exactly the opposite: words are magic like symbols. I never explain a concept with words — I just use words following an instinct, and I let the perceivers have their own experience.
“Some say that using words makes me less universal because I personalize too much, giving direction to the public’s reaction. Well, for me it is exactly the opposite: words are magic like symbols.”
LaSota: Do you think that your years of studying illustration, which certainly have an influence on your variety of artmaking techniques, had an impact on your decision to include language in your paintings when you returned your focus to the fine arts?
Martello: That is a very interesting question — honestly, I never thought about this. Certainly it could be a consequential reaction since I had to interpret words to create illustrations. I now mix the process. For sure the narrative element is very important in my work, but I tend to believe that I build up a narrative using symbols and shapes instead of words, and that is probably why I do it, since I was trained with language narrative, being a children’s book illustrator. It’s interesting to see how we reinvent ourselves using the tools we learned at the beginning of our studies, and sometimes this happens in a not premeditated way.
LaSota: Do you have a favorite book? Are there any individual stories or works of literature that you return to again and again or that have had a particularly strong influence on your artmaking practice?
Martello:This is Water by David Foster Wallace always helps me to reground myself and make space within — it is a great source of inspiration in the most nonjudgmental way, but it is not my favorite book by him. Strangely enough my favorite book by him is The Broom of the System.
My favorite book by Haruki Murakami is Kafka on the Shore. Some of its passages are so powerful that I just have to close the book to either laugh, cry, or draw my immediate ideas — many of his books have this effect on me.
Other favorite books include almost every book by Banana Yoshimoto; Zazie nel metro by Queneau; L’isola di Arturo by Elsa Morante; the travel stories of Alexandra David-Néel; Memorie di Adriano by Marguerite Yourcenar, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita; almost every book of Somerset Maugham; Italo Calvino’s Il Barone Rampante and Il visconte dimezzato; the list can go on and on…. I am also an avid reader of biography, especially artist’s bios, and no matter what, they are always inspiring.
Ahh! Another book that I go back to on and off is (Salinger’s) Franny and Zooey. The last three pages are always a great source of inspiration for me — it’s like a catapult into compassion mode.
Flanked with 100,000 copies of banned books, Argentinian artist Marta Minujín announced she is constructing a massive art installation, The Parthenon of Books, to honor the tenets of democracy and creative freedom. According to Open Culture, the structure will be built in Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, Germany, which is a former site of the Nazi regime’s infamous ideological book burnings. Minujín will utilize books that are restricted from around the world in various countries — some of the titles date as far back as the early 1500s. If you want to peruse the full list of the books, you can do so, here. The public is also welcome to submit their own text suggestions, and in pretty much all senses, this project aims to include and benefit the international community of readers. Those who visit the site are permitted to take a book with them when they leave. Minujín hopes that every single copy will be gone by the end of the installation’s run.
The Economist predicts that the construction of the banned book Parthenon will be a top ten moment of 2017. They put together a short video outlining Minujín ambitious plans, which believe it or not, they’ve been executed before in Argentina in 1983. Enjoy!
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