Easter is almost here, which means that children across the world will be hiding in their bedrooms, trembling in fear of the grotesquely large Easter Bunny — a frightening mythological monster as large as a man with hind legs able to crush human bones like matchsticks. This weird creature is said to stalk around houses, secreting “eggs” from its quasi-mammalian glands in hiding places for unlucky children to find.
Or something like that. It’s been a while since I went to church.
In any event, in anticipation of the Easter Bunny’s visit here are five of the most disturbing stories about bunnies:
“Stone Animals” by Kelly Link
Kelly Link’s wonderfully creepy short story “Stone Animals” isn’t just the best horror story about rabbits, it’s one of the best horror stories I’ve ever read period. (We published the story in Electric Lit’s Recommended Reading, which you can read here if you are a member.) The story centers around a family that moves out of the city into a house where everything is somehow a little off. The small disturbances grow more and more bizarre, and most of them center around rabbits that appear on the lawn:
In the other bed, Tilly was dreaming about rabbits. When she’d come home from school, she and Carleton had seen rabbits, sitting on the lawn as if they had kept watch over the house all the time that Tilly had been gone. In her dream they were still there.
General Woundwort in the animated adaptation
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Watership Down is probably the best-loved novel about rabbits, and for good reason. The adventure story is moving and filled with wonder, readable for children and adults alike. The story follows rabbits in a warren who are dying out without any female does. They end up struggling against a brutal militaristic rabbit warren run by a dictator bunny named General Woundwort. While hardly a horror story overall, there are plenty of frightening moments with Woundwort and his army.
At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit’s idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him.
From the film adaptation of Jesus’ Son
“Emergency” by Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson’s hallucinatory short novel-in-stories, Jesus’ Son, contains more memorable moments than most writers can fit into a career. It’s hard to say any of the stories stand out — they are simply all that good — but if push came to shove “Emergency” is probably the best. In that story, which features a man coming to a hospital with a knife in his eye (played by Denis Johnson himself in the film version), the narrator Fuckhead and fellow addict Georgie find a dead rabbit and slice it open, only to find it was pregnant:
Georgie came back to my side of the truck with his shirtfront stretched out in front of him as if he were carrying apples in it, or some such, but they were, in fact, slimy miniature bunnies.
Like most things that enter Fuckhead’s life, these slimy bunnies don’t make it out okay.
“Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” by Julio Cortázar
Rabbits are normally cute and furry, but not when you are vomiting them magically out of your mouth. In Cortázar’s bizarre and beautiful story, “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris,” a man writes to the woman he is house-sitting for while he vomits up rabbits:
When I think i’m about to vomit a rabbit I put two fingers down my throat like an open set of tongs, and I wait until I can feel the warm hair rising like the fizz of an alka-seltzer.
Despite the premise, this is not a whimsical story in the least. Like much of Cortázar’s work, it’s philosophical and ends on a dark note.
(I love this story so much that I once wrote a sequel where a rabbit vomits up tiny men.)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
While the White Rabbit who leads Alice down the hole is the most famous bunny in Wonderland, he’s no match for the March Hare when it comes to the disturbing (or disturbed). The March Hare always thinks it is tea time because his friend the Mad Hatter “murdered the time” in a song:
The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, “It was the best butter, you know.”
One of the things that writing teachers, and, increasingly, literary journal guidelines, warn writers against is this: Don’t, they say, ever, they say, write a story or novel about a writer. Worse, they say, is a story or novel about a writer writing about writing. The best stories and novels often break the rules, though, and this is the case with the original, astute debut novel, Oola, by Brittany Newell.
Newell is, frustratingly to this mid-twenties writer, only 21 and graduating from Stanford this spring. It’s also frustrating to know that many, if not all reviews, will mention this fact and possibly focus on it. It’s a shame, because whatever her age, Newell’s insight, intelligence, and prose are all clearly prodigious, which is obvious in her creation of this book, which is both subtle and outrageous, wonderfully readable yet philosophically challenging.
The novel opens with a short prologue chapter, followed by an odd scene, which Newell’s blog (she is a “drag queen” and performance artist who goes by the name Ratty St. John when not writing brilliant novels) suggests may be somewhat autobiographical (I only mention this because I was struck by how bizarre and specific the image in this scene was, and knowing there may be some personal experience with it allows me to feel that image all the deeper for its likely accuracy). In this scene, which takes up the whole of the second chapter, narrator Leif and titular Oola have made up a game. They gather in the living room of the house they’re house-sitting, wearing bits of clothing belonging to the house’s usual occupants. “Then, when she felt moved to, Oola would put a pair of nylon stockings on her head.” Quickly it becomes clear that the pantyhose are on Oola’s face:
Through the stretched fabric, her features were blurred, as if a left-hander had been penciling her, smudging the last stroke as he made the next. Her eyelashes were crimped, her nose squished, her mouth forced open, her cheeks Botoxed back.
Then Leif also wears the stockings, and they take turns until it turns light outside and the game stops with some embarrassment.
This scene, so early in the book, before we really know who Leif is, who Oola is, or what their relationship is, serves two purposes: one, it shows us these characters’ ability to act very, very weirdly, to enjoy it, and to be self-aware about their oddity. Two, it demonstrates a theme that will be present through the book: the blurring of the self, the other, and the perception of that difference.
In terms of plot, the book is quite simple. Leif is a WASP with wealthy parents who have wealthy friends who go out of town and need house-sitters, a perfect situation for Leif, who is traveling around Europe in an attempt to be a writer. Or maybe more accurately, he is attempting to become a writer through the tried and true method of being very privileged and traveling a lot and hoping that worldliness will lead to wisdom. Oola is a conservatory dropout, a pianist taking time off to wander around Europe and sow her wild oats (some more). The two meet, have amazing chemistry, start traveling together, sleeping together, and as far as we can tell, falling madly, deeply, truly in love with each other. Eventually, they end up in Big Sur, California, indefinitely living in a cabin belonging to a relative of Leif’s who’s gone, also indefinitely, into hospice care.
In Big Sur, Leif’s project, alluded to earlier in the book and which has clearly been developing in his mind for some time, starts in earnest. Leif is attempting to write a book about Oola — maybe and maybe not the book readers have in hand; it’s never made 100% clear whether we are reading Leif’s thoughts, his notes, or the finished product of his labors. Oola, by the way, has consented to this project, a fact that Leif sees as excusing everything he goes on to do. Her consent is in the first pages of the book, as if in order to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt; but her consent is flippant and flimsy, not the “firm and enthusiastic yes” we’re taught in consent workshops. On page 3 of the book, when the couple is climbing into bed to go to sleep, Leif announces that he is thinking of a new project in which Oola will either be the main character or the person on whom the main character will be based. The extent of Oola’s consent is this: “Me? Well, fuck, I’d read it. Guaranteed five-star rating. I turned the light out last night, by the way. So scoot, fatty.” I’d say that’s a half-hearted consent at best, but Leif takes it firmly, enthusiastically, and quite too far.
In order to write the book about Oola, Leif is determined first to know his subject inside-out. He watches her closely from the very beginning of their — for lack of a better, more precise word — relationship. In Europe, he goes so far as to begin tallying the various ways men look at Oola, creating a point system and scale on which he places everything from casual glances to leers and beyond. She notices the fact that he’s watching how others watch her and gets frustrated by it. She, a tall blond American woman who knows, because she has always been told, that she is both beautiful and desireable, is well aware of how men look at her. Women in general are aware of this, and especially those who society has deemed particularly attractive. They have no choice by to notice, and learn to ignore, the male gaze. Leif, however, whom Newell imbues with a truly believable liberal male mindset (he apologizes for using the term “Indian summer” despite its un-PC-ness, for example) is paying attention to this phenomenon for the first time in his life in a concrete rather than abstract way.
But Leif doesn’t stop at watching those whose gazes eat up his beloved Oola. In Big Sur, he collects her orange peels, her toenail clippings, the hair caught in the shower drain. He learns to identify the names of the shades of makeup Oola wears, the fabrics her clothing is made of, the gestures she makes in each of her moods. He goes further, into a territory that is so rife with interpretive possibilities that the mind reels at trying to tally them all, but to discuss this in particular would be to ruin a big part of what the book’s climax is about, which I cannot, in good faith, bring myself to do.
In looser terms, it’s worth commenting on the themes Newell seems to be exploring in the book as a whole. One theme is love, the kind of love that can either destroy the self or the loved one, and sometimes both at the same time. It is the kind of love that is violent in its need to possess, even if the actions are not aggressive in the physical sense of harming another person — they are aggressive in the denial of personhood and selfhood to another human being instead. Another theme is male privilege, and how men, even in their deepest devotion, even enlightened, always have more power than even the most beautiful, goddess-like woman. Newell seems to be questioning that very notion of female beauty, how it can utterly destroy a person even though it gives her a kind of power and social cachet; beauty is so commodified, so absolutely beloved and worshipped in our society, that it can erase the person inside the meat suit that is her body. There is also a tricky and rather extensive and complex conversation about gender and gender performativity that is likely to emerge from many readings.
On a slightly personal note: I started this piece by mentioning how writers are supposed to never write about writers or writers writing; Newell, in breaking this unholy rule, besides writing a brilliant book, has also written some of the most resonant writerly truisms I’ve read in a long time. One such, that is so true as to make me want to weep with gratitude that someone has written it, is that “writers have a natural terror of the afternoon… This terror is least defined in the morning, when the world is hushed and manageable, the body limp and emptied, while the night at least promises morning’s return. The afternoon, on the other hand, is an armpit. One never knows what to do with it. Is it funny or neutral or a little bit sexy? It never feels quite right.”
The afternoon is indeed an armpit, and Britanny Newell’s prose is full of such witty moments that will make even the most skeptical reader yearn to love Leif — and, as mentioned, love can be very, very dangerous in Oola.
I hoped to have a conversation with a writer about games that went a little deeper. There were two main reasons I turned to the Whiting Award-winning writer Tony Tulathimutte. The first was because of his response in an interview with Playboy, in which he said that his interest in gaming probably “had something to do with my desire to bend or break formal conventions in fiction.” The second was his three thousand word essay about Clash of Clans, “Clash Rules Everything Around Me,” which was exactly the type of essay about gaming I wanted to see more of. Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens, which we listed as one of the 25 best novels of 2016.
What I want is long-form literary criticism. But writers should just write what they want to read. The body of work will be there and the audience will follow it. The ‘Field of Dreams’ approach.
Graham Oliver: Can we have this conversation without getting stuck trying to legitimize video games as a medium?
Tony Tulathimutte: “Are video games art?” “Have we had the video game Citizen Kane yet?”
GO: That’s such a boring and overdone conversation. I think it’s more interesting to look at the ways in which video games actually do interact with literature, and not to hold the conversation just as a demonstration of our respect.
TT: Take the respect for granted and go from there. I thought about starting a literary magazine about video games a while back, but the discourse had by then become so toxic that, even with the most anodyne academic essay you could write, the best you could hope for was that it would be ignored. There needs to be more space for this kind of writing, but I just didn’t want to wade into it then. I feel a little better about it now, which is why I did the Clash of Clans essay.
GO: What is the difference between video game-related essays showing up on a literary site, versus a site where the primary purpose is the intersection of video games and literature? What could that site do that can’t be done (or isn’t being done) otherwise?
TT: Part of it is just volume. You can’t have a general interest magazine like the New Yorker covering video games to the same depth or degree as it does film or music or even theater. Every big magazine at this point covers video games occasionally — I know the New Yorker has written about Minecraft and No Man’s Sky, for instance. New York Magazine just did a big essay on gaming more broadly.
Gameplay still from ‘Clash of Clans’ (top), and footage from ‘No Man’s Sky’ (bottom)
But for some reason, there’s no video game editor at the New Yorker, no dedicated departments or verticals, except at newer places like VICE, Vox, The Verge. Unlike music or movies, video games aren’t equally distributed through the culture; it’s more compartmentalized. This owes in part to a marketing apparatus around games that caters to and fosters a specific audience, and because the audience for certain genres — responding to these pressures — became self-selecting, especially with respect to gender. Video games may be art, but they are also a STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] industry, which makes them no different from any other STEM field in that regard.
GO: It’s a question of access. I was thinking about your Clash essay; you have this entire paragraph that has to explain this massively popular and mechanically fairly simple game. Does that automatically turn off an audience who are already proficient in those basics? In which case, are you only writing for people who don’t game? I suppose that’s another conundrum of coverage in a general interest publication…
TT: If you read an essay by Susan Sontag or Martin Amis about the great books, or by André Bazin about film, they can assume a certain level of knowledge about the text or film from their audience. I can write that way about games on my own time and my own dime, but there’s no presumed canon or general readership for games, because they’re not taught in schools and not regularly discussed in big publications. So you either write for the diehards — the equivalent of film buffs or bookworms — or for novices.
GO: Is that why we haven’t had novels which interact with video games the way David Foster Wallace did with tennis, or Ann Patchett with opera? Neither of their books included explanatory paragraphs; it’s so ingrained in our culture that it seems almost impossible to have grown up without some idea of what tennis or opera are.
TT: Most people have played a game, and the average gamer spends six hours a week playing them. I think it has less to do with the medium inherently than just the failure of writers who have approached the subject. I haven’t read everything on games, but so far, the fledgling efforts have been too literal or kind of corny. Some writers seem to think that you’re supposed to transpose the form of games into fiction — to provide this very lightly remediated experience of reading a book so that it feels like you’re playing a game.
The last thing you want to do is create a watered-down experience of gaming in a text. A book should still work as a book. It’s the usual difficulty of writing about other mediums; there’s that old chestnut that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But there are special considerations for how to write about any form in a way that conveys deep presence and vividness comparable to the experience itself.
GO: When you’re writing about games in one form or another, do you find you prefer to write for someone who is like you — very interested in both writing and video games — or is your preference for someone in that liminal space somewhere between them?
TT: I approach it as I do with all my creative writing, which is to write for the audience of Tony. That frees to me to write things irrespective of their publishability. Right now I’m working on a long essay about Metal Gear Solid — the whole series. That’s between ten and twenty games, depending on which ones you call canon. The dialogue alone stacks up to something like sixty thousand words each. And the companion synopsis is almost three thousand words. I’m just trying to make points about the series that haven’t been made before. Would Kill Screen or The New York Review of Books ever run that? Hell to the fuck no.
Gameplay stills from across the Metal Gear Solid series
If writers keep doing this, eventually there will be a readership equipped to deal with it. For the longest time there have been really smart people playing video games and wondering where all the good criticism was. It’s a discoverability issue, to a certain extent. There’s so much good writing out there about games, but most games-writing outlets cater to fairly niche perspectives. Action Button is extremely good, irreverent creative criticism, probably my favorite. Five Out of Ten is academically oriented, Kill Screen is mainstream journalism. What I want is long-form literary criticism. But writers should just write what they want to read. The body of work will be there and the audience will follow it. The Field of Dreams approach.
GO: You said earlier (and you’ve also mentioned it in your Playboy interview) that the discourse around games is toxic and partisan. Are you talking about within or outside of the gaming community?
TT: All of it. Partisan lines have been drawn within it for purposes far beyond aesthetic disagreement. In part because so much of this discourse occurs in a medium where people are not held accountable for their words, i.e. on the internet.
TT: I want to do my part to de-estrange gaming discourse. Not de-stigmatize or demystify, but de-estrange. This cancerous shit happens everywhere — it just happens in a spectacularly aggressive and organized way in gaming.
GO: When you’re not actually writing about video games, what place do they hold in your life? Are they the stress relief at the end of the day, the reward after two hours of writing? Or something you try to avoid when you’re in the middle of a big project?
TT: I’ve played video games since I was three years old. I have loved video games a lot longer than I’ve loved literature — which is not to say more. Actually… yeah, probably more. It just so happens that I’m a writer. I don’t feel the guilt that some people do who, even if they enjoy gaming, approach it feeling as if it’s a waste of time, or a form of entertainment which takes them away from their “real life.” You wouldn’t condemn a cineaste or a lover of literature. But a fug of non-respectability still attends video games.
That said, the reward mechanisms in most games are designed to get you hooked in cognitive motivational ways that don’t apply to most literature. So it’s absolutely possible for games to displace other things that you would want to do just as much. I don’t struggle to fit them into my life, but I probably would, if my life consisted of much more than just teaching and writing.
GO: I suppose I was thinking more about the effect on your mental state. For instance, I have to save video games for the end of the day, because I have a hard time going from the almost meditative state of game-playing into writing. How does it fit in, not in the sense of time but in how it interacts with your ability to produce writing afterwards?
TT: If a visual narrative enters my head before I start writing, it’s enormously difficult to pull myself back into writing. A huge amount of psychic inertia has to be overcome to transition from consuming a narrative to assembling one. I have a lot of wacko bird theories as to why. Perhaps language is such an information-poor medium that it demands a sparseness of input, so that you can have room to envision or create new stuff in your head. Maybe the act of viewing, which puts you in the posture of evaluation and judgment, beefs up the inner critic that makes it hard to write. That’s all pure superstition, I have nothing to base that on.
GO: What about when it comes to the type of video game? You’ve mentioned playing DotA 2 in other interviews, which is very different from more narrative-heavy single player games. In the middle of a big writing project, do you find yourself drawn more to one type of game over another?
TT: With the caveat that writers are the worst self-appraisers, I’ll say that I have not noticed any influence from the type of games I’m playing on what I write. I think games engage an entirely different part of my brain, which might also account for the difficulty I have toggling between those two modes. That said, I think longer games can work like long books — immersively — where you have to pinch your nose and take a deep breath before plunging into the Neapolitan books and it just becomes the medium you swim in for months. Some games demand a higher or more frequent degree of engagement to get any kind of nuance at all. You can play a thousand hours of DotA 2, without coming anywhere near understanding it.
Gameplay still from ‘DotA 2’
GO: How does that compare to the relationship between reading and your own work? Do you avoid other people’s writing when working, or do you keep books on your desk for the sake of referencing them?
TT: I do. I try to keep a messy puddle of books around my work area, in case I want to steal something from somebody else. But I Google as much as I refer to other books. I don’t disconnect from the internet when I’m writing, like some writers who have this almost mystical anathema against technology. I generally find I benefit from my procrastination.
You can have a rom-com game, a campus game, an adultery game, or a boring-but-important game that will get taught in high schools circa 2110.
GO: You referred to language as being information-poor a minute ago, which reminds me of the AGNI essay you wrote on boredom. The thesis of that essay was basically that boredom in literature is okay. Can you also apply that idea to video games? Can there be meaningful or productive boredom while playing, through the act of repetition, for instance? I just played Her Story, which I know you enjoyed, and while it has a super interesting story you have to slog through a certain amount of repetition to get to it.
TT: The democratization of game creation is producing a wider range of games, like the Super 8 camera did with film. You can have vignette-style games like Nina Freeman’s — Cibele, how do you Do It?, Freshman Year, etc. You can have “walking simulators” that are almost purely meditative, like Gone Home, Firewatch, or Dear Esther. I just saw a piece on a game based on Thoreau’s Walden.
The impulses and tendencies that make people want to create literature are present. It will happen more as people are able to do what they want to do, without enormous corporate financial support or even crowdfunding, which, to an extent, just moves the bottom line to having to be crowd-pleasing. Games can be plenty boring in spite of themselves, even if that’s not what they’re trying to do. It’s a cliché by now to point out that the most time investment-heavy games like World of Warcraft consist largely of “grinding.” Or, if you play something like DotA 2, queuing for a game.
GO: For DotA 2 you also have to spend a lot of time reading up on viable builds. Work that’s not in actually playing the game.
TT: Yes, although I will say that that intellectual work doesn’t feel like tedious labor to me. I have fun looking up builds. The deep strategy and understanding are coextensive with the pleasure of playing the game.
Moments of boredom are built into games for reasons that range from comedy to suspense. I think a lot about the moment in Final Fantasy VI where you’re directed to just wait at the edge of a floating continent for a character to come along. On the one hand you’re sitting watching a clock tick down. On the other hand, it’s extremely tense.
Contrasting aesthetic effects in games to those in other media is not always productive, because it’s like playing Twenty Questions. Can games do X like books? Can games do Y like films? In the same way we should assume games are art, and that there’s an audience out there hungry to make something of them, we should assume that games can do anything. You can have a rom-com game, a campus game, an adultery game, or a boring-but-important game that will get taught in high schools circa 2110.
GO: I go to these academic conferences where a similar conversation is happening among professors who write in the field of gaming studies. Some bring in literary and film theory, and try to lay that on top of video games, while others reject that. The tools and the language are already there from other fields, so it seems easy. On the other hand, it can be kind of reductive, and perhaps prevents you from having the more meaningful conversation.
TT: Right, or even just the conversation you’re trying to have. There are also those efforts to create a language around game studies, partly I think try to legitimatize it in the eyes of the academy. You get people going on about the Ludologists versus the Narratologists, about ludonarrative dissonance, copping these quasi-academic terms. I can see the point of systematizing things, but my favorite criticism helps you not to just describe and understand, but to enjoy stuff more.
GO: How much do you worry about the effect that being an “out” gamer will have on your literary career?
TT: If I were bashful or coy about my love of video games I wouldn’t do this interview. The same goes for pornography or television. Even the language of being “out” implies a political and social pressure or an importance that just doesn’t exist. I’d hate to believe that being a writer means living in a constant state of deposition, publicizing everything you do, think, or feel. The fact that I like video games isn’t interesting. Video games are interesting. I love talking about them with smart people, both within and outside of gaming culture. But I’m also perfectly happy to be left alone with them.
GO: Do you hope there’s a day around the corner where a game developer decides to make a narrative-heavy game like Life is Strange, Her Story, or Kentucky Route Zero, and they look at a list of literary authors to figure out who should write it?
TT: Not at all. I believe that I can do a lot of things in writing, but I haven’t felt an urge to create a video game since the third grade. It’s always good to have some kind of interest that is totally pure, where you’re going to be an eternal fan, because sausage-making can disillusion you fast. If part of the charge of art comes from mystique or sheer baffled admiration, that’s something I want to preserve in at least a few departments of my life.
GO: As a writer, you’re expected to be both a creator and a thoughtful critic as well. It seems like once you publish a book, there is an expectation that you’ll be reviewing or blurbing for other books for the rest of your life. How does your approach to writing about literature differ from your essays on games?
TT: I review books as a practitioner; I know what goes into putting one together, so I can pan one that isn’t well-made. I write about games as an appreciator, in that I want to take something I like and enlarge people’s sense of pleasure or wonder at it. This doesn’t mean that I can’t be critical of a game. I have negative things to say about everything. But because I’m not highly qualified to trivialize or disparage a game on the level of craft — for instance, a sunbeam in a video game might look shitty and aliased because of technological or budgetary constraints that I’m not aware of — my main task is to study its narrative and to add value.
GO: You’ve been thinking about games critically for a long time. I read that you wrote your theses — both in undergrad and for your first master’s degree — on video game interaction. What were you looking at in those?
TT: I majored in something called Symbolic Systems, which would be called cognitive sciences anywhere else. They add linguistics and philosophy to the standard curriculum of formal logic, computer science, and cognitive psychology. I applied the extremely specific language of human-computer interaction studies to video games. So I wrote pretty dry literature surveys of game-writing and interaction theory, and how the latter could be applied to the former.
One was about game controller design, which ended up anticipating the Nintendo Wii controller by a couple of years. I talked about the potential for modular design and gestural input. The second thesis was about menus. They’re the basis of turn-based RPGs, and in games their definitional boundaries are weird. Take the Warp Zone Pipes in Super Mario Brothers. You go over a ceiling and drop into a room where you’re invited to select one of three pipes to go through. It is very clearly a menu, where you’re selecting one of three options, but it’s also a part of the action.
God, I sound so stoned when I talk about this.
Gameplay still from ‘Super Mario Bros.’
GO: I hate to keep mentioning Her Story, but I just started it today. In that game, the user interface also has this blurry boundary. You read a ReadMe file to learn how to use the system, but that’s all part of the in-game computer you interact with as part of the story.
TT: Yeah, it’s brilliant. Any computer interaction can be extrapolated into a game premise. Here it’s basically Database Search: The Game, but it’s fun and well written. To analogize with literature, there are plenty of stories whose premise comes from its formal conceit. My favorite is “Going for a Beer” by Robert Coover. He takes a simple sentence gimmick — where two things that happen at different times are written as though they’re simultaneous — and it becomes the conceit of the story. The story is, “what if your life was composed of moments with endings and beginnings but no middles?”
GO: Form matching content. That happens in all types of art, right? There was a piece on Hamilton which pointed out that, as the first half progresses, the Marquis de Lafayette’s rhymes get denser and faster, coinciding with him being in America and increasingly speaking English. The music reflects the plot.
TT: Form generating content, I would say. It’s a classical idea. Sometimes it’s done very explicitly, like with Oulipo. It can be super corny, but it’s a dependable source of inspiration.
It’s Tristram Shandy-levels of batshit.
GO: Going back to your idea for a game-writing website, were you imagining a place that just collected the kind of long-form writing you want to see, or were you also imagining a community that would be built around it?
TT: I am not too concerned with building community. The idea was simply to get critical essays on games — not fiction, poetry, reviews, or personal essays, but literary analysis. Like the essay I’m working on about the Metal Gear Solid series… So many of the male characters lose their hands and are sterile and have daddy issues and misinterpret the will of one female character, The Boss. Aside from the glaring Freudian overtones, what’s that about? This is not stuff that figures into the plot as it plays out, but is something that I think screams out for conversation.
GO: I was a Nintendo kid and then jumped to PC gaming, so I never got into the Metal Gear games.
TT: It’s like the Infinite Jest of games. As far as I know, it’s the longest continuous scripted narrative in games. You can make a strained case for things like Zelda or Metroid, but this is the most sustained vision from an auteurist figure, Hideo Kojima, and it’s just bonkers. It’s Tristram Shandy-levels of batshit.
GO: Well, that sells it. I now have to ask the big, speculative question, since you just called it the Infinite Jest of games. What do you think David Foster Wallace’s writing would have been like, had he been obsessed with video games rather than television?
TT: This question is so enormously counterfactual it might as well be a novel. The guy was hugely tech-avoidant. He typed with one finger on an old computer. But games seem very contiguous with his concerns in Infinite Jest. Though who’s to say Virginia Woolf wouldn’t have also gotten equally invested in games? Wallace is a gimme because of the technological overlap, but to me the more interesting speculative question is, What would a game written by P.G. Wodehouse be like? I want to see an essay on that.
Girls, Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking comedy about short-sighted, well-meaning millennials in Brooklyn, will air its final episode this Sunday. The show invited early comparisons to Sex and the City with its premise — four friends in the city, each a type: the free spirit (Jessa/Samantha), the type-A (Shoshanna/Miranda), the image-obsessed (Charlotte/Marnie), and the charismatic narcissist (Hannah/Carrie). Though some episodes of Sex and the City have aged better than others, that show’s focus on the enduring friendships of single women marked a cultural sea-change. “Maybe we could be each other’s soulmates.” Charlotte says to her three best friends in Season 4, Episode 1, “And then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with.” This moment is Sex and the City’s thesis; the emotional equivalent of a BFF broken-heart necklace.
But it’s clear, as we near the end of the sixth and final season, that the thesis of Girls could not be more different. In last week’s episode, when Hannah tells Elijah she’s considering moving upstate for a teaching position (did you know that publishing a handful of essays online can land you a full professorship, with benefits, at a leafy university?), they make a direct nod to that Sex and the City ethos. “But you’ve made so many wonderful friendships here,” Elijah says, and they both burst out laughing.
Hannah, Shoshanna, Marnie, and Jessa aren’t each other’s soul mates. In fact, these women don’t even like one another, and they haven’t for years. In “Beach House” (Season 3, Episode 7), Marnie calls a seaside friendship summit to “heal” and “prove to everyone via Instagram that we can still have fun as a group.” The weekend ends with drunken Shoshanna evisceratingher so-called friends with what will come to be her signature, cutting tongue: “Sometimes I wonder if my social anxiety is holding me back from meeting the people who would actually be right for me, instead of some fucking whiny nothings as friends.” Last week, the plot of the “Beach House” episode was replayed in a single scene. Marnie calls a “group meeting” in a crowded bathroom, where Shoshanna delivers the perfect rejoinder to Charlotte’s sentimental proclamation. “I have come to realize how exhausting, and narcissistic and ultimately boring this whole dynamic is,” she says. It’s a perfect Girls thesis: self-deprecating, ironic, and self-referential. The emotional equivalent of retweeting your trolls.
As the series draws to a close, each character is growing up and moving on. Hannah has embraced her pregnancy and a new life of responsibility. Shosh fulfilled her wish from season three: she has gotten engaged and found a new group of friends. Jessa, whose emotionally reckless behavior no longer suits her, seems about to turn a corner toward kindness and reciprocal love. Marnie, who finally knows what a high person looks like, is doing some serious soul-searching on her mother’s couch and may soon find gainful employment. Elijah has rapidly discovered and realized his acting ambitions, and, despite his protestations, will be absolutely fine when Hannah leaves the city. Given all of these character’s trajectories, it’s clear that Girls is not a show about friendship; it’s a show about self-knowledge.
There will be no central love story (other than the one between Hannah and Elijah, perhaps) or dramatic conclusion. Re-watching old episodes, I realized I had forgotten so many of the plot points, hook-ups, and exes: Elijah’s brief relationship with Doyle from Gilmore Girls; the time Shoshanna dated Jason Ritter from Parenthood; Jessa’s job as a nanny and her flirtation with the kid’s father. Desi, Charlie, Sandy (Donald Glover), Mimi-Rose (Gillian Jacobs), Fran… Then there’s the time Marnie slept with Elijah, the time Hannah blew Ray, when Shosh dated Ray, when Hannah dated Elijah, when Marnie dated Ray, when Hannah dated Adam, when Jessa dated Adam. In the end these relationships matter as much as relationships from your early- to mid-twenties are supposed to matter, which is not as much as you thought they would at the time.
It’s fitting that the show’s best episodes are not about these relationships and interpersonal dramas of its characters. The masterpiece of Girls, in the end, is not plot but character-craft, achieved through nuanced dialogue and sensitive observation, epitomized in three standalone episodes. Each focuses on a mini-arc of a single character and is self-contained and satisfying unto itself. The industry term for these would be bottle episodes, but I prefer to think of them as short stories — alive on-screen but written for the page. Watching them for the first time, and again, I was reminded of short stories I’ve loved. The fraught sexuality and intelligence of Mary Gaitskill, the wry asides of Lorrie Moore, the urgency of girlhood in Jamaica Kincaid, the tightly wrapped, but still unexpected plots of Alice Munro. The satisfaction one can get from a well-crafted short story is not often found in television in its serial, increasingly bingeable form, but as evidenced here, the two are unexpectedly compatible.
Hannah & Joshua, “Another Man’s Trash.” (2013)
“Another Man’s Trash” Season 2, Episode 5
Watch if you like to read: Lorrie Moore or Jhumpa Lahiri Story type: Close quarters Subset: Unlikely friendship/romance
Hannah spends two days shacked up with handsome older man — Joshua (not Josh), played by Patrick Wilson. If you’ve forgotten the details of the episode you may remember the attendant internet furor: this was early in the series when people were enraged by the site of Lena Dunham’s naked body on television. Probably, they still are; I’ve stopped paying attention to their childish fits of misogyny. “Another Man’s Trash” was the ultimate affront to these trolls — why would a man as gorgeous as Patrick Wilson go for pear-shaped Hannah Horvath? If I recall, topless ping-pong was her greatest offense. Being naked during well-lit sex requires a certain amount of confidence, but playing topless table tennis requires a level of comfort with one’s own body women are actively prevented from ever achieving.
The backlash has little to do with the plot, which is subtle and sophisticated; and the interaction of the story’s themes with the visual politics and public perception only deepens their meaning. Hannah is working at Ray’s coffee shop, and after confessing to a neighbor that she has been disposing of the shop’s trash in his garbage bins, they end up having sex in the living room of his brownstone. At Joshua’s urging, she stays, spending the night, and the next night, luxuriating in his cashmere sweater, visiting his life the way one visits a luxury hotel. She is equally impressed by his belongings as she is by the ease with which he possesses them. The lemonade in a highball glass, a grilled steak (“Were you planning for guests, or…?” “No, I was planning for steak.”), the fireplace, the shower, which she makes so hot and steamy she passes out.
Of course Joshua rescues her, wraps her in a plush bathrobe and comforts her sweetly. This is when she has her epiphany: she wants something traditional. She wants a nice place to live, and she wants to be happy:
“I made a promise such a long time ago that I was going to take in experiences and I guess tell other people about them and maybe save them but it gets so tiring. Taking in all the experience for everybody. Letting anyone say anything to me. Then I came here, and I see you, and you’ve got the fruit in the bowl and the fridge with the stuff, and the robe and you’re touching me the way that you… And I realize, I’m not different, you know? I want what everyone wants. I want what they all want. I want all the things. I just want to be happy.”
Over the last day and a half, Hannah has realized what it takes most people all of their twenties to accept: that she wants the comforts of a upper middle class life. It’s almost a sweet moment; Joshua seems to understand the emotional place she’s in. But Hannah, being Hannah, can’t stop there. Like any good epiphany in literature, this one is false, undercut by an inability to change. She sabotages the moment by confessing the worst things she can think of: she once asked a guy to punch her in the chest and then cum in that spot. When she was three, she lied, or maybe didn’t lie, and told her mom a babysitter touched her vagina in the bath. Joshua tries to reciprocate her non-sequiturs by telling her he once let a boy give him a hand job when he was nine, be she dismisses his attempt to connect: “Well I think that’s pretty different because you let him and this wasn’t my choice.”
Like any good epiphany in literature, this one is false, undercut by an inability to change.
She explains she is too smart, and too sensitive, and “too not crazy” to not want to feel all the feelings (the logic is tangled). It’s a tantrum of sorts, and it has the desired effect: she ends the weekend’s romantic charade while maintaining the posture of the powerless party. The cocoon of their affair is broken by her actions, but she blames Joshua when he pulls away.
In the morning, Joshua is gone. Hannah makes the bed and, the finishing touch: she takes out the trash as she leaves. (“Say Yes” by Tobias Wolff, which is structurally similar, also ends this way, with a character taking out the trash.) In the shot of her walking away down the street, I was struck that she has no purse, and probably no phone or wallet. She had just stepped out to apologize to a stranger, and she lost two whole days to impulse and spontaneous connection.
Hannah & Philip, “American Bitch.” (2017)
“American Bitch” Season 6, Episode 3
Watch if you like to read: Raymond Carver or Mary Gaitskill Story type: Metafictional polemic Subset: Story in dialogue
“American Bitch” works beautifully as a coda to “Another Man’s Trash.” Besides Hannah, no other characters from the regular Girls cast appears. (“Another Man’s Trash” includes Ray in the opening scene.) Hannah again arrives at a nice home, only this time she has been invited. It’s a beautiful apartment on Central Park, owned by the novelist Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys), who has summoned Hannah after she wrote a blog post responding to accusations that he had coerced a college student into giving him oral sex while on book tour.
Chuck’s apartment is introduced with a Wes Anderson-esque survey of objects set to courtly music (the same tactic is used in “Beach House”), but Hannah is notably less impressed by the well-appointed apartment than she was by Joshua’s renovated brownstone. “I didn’t know novelists could make this much money,” she says, almost disparagingly. She’s more concerned with her self-presentation this time; she applies lipstick in the mirrored elevator, wipes armpits in the bathroom. The proximity to a life she covets — even one that so closely aligns with her career ambitions — no longer destabilizes her sense of self.
The episode is like a play, or a short story made entirely of the dialogue of a debate. (Think “Bangkok” by James Salter or “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver.) The topic is, as Chuck puts it, “How exactly does one give a non-consensual blow job?” It’s useful here to consider the old writer’s adage “show don’t tell.” The episode does both. First the telling. Hannah starts with a quip: “It would be very chokey,” and goes on to argue her point more adequately, through dialogue. But, like the best stories, the question is eventually answered, unequivocally, by action.
Chuck argues that Hannah, who is “clearly very bright,” should write about topics that matter. Hannah argues that this topic does matter, because of “the larger significance” which she defines as “the power imbalance,” and which is apparently lost on him.
“The part where she looks like a Victoria’s Secret model and I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 25 and I was on Accutane, that part’s not lost on me,” Chuck retorts.
“Ah no,” Hannah says:
“I’m talking about the part where you’re a very fucking famous writer and she’s working really hard to get just a little bit of what you get every day. So you invite her back to your hotel room. What’s she supposed to say? No? She admires you. Then you unbuckle your pants. What is she going to do next? You’ve got it wrong; it’s not so she has a story, it’s so she feels like she exists. And by the way, people don’t talk about this shit for fun. It ruins their lives, you know that.”
Hannah has done an excellent job arguing how someone can end up giving a non-consensual blow job, but Chuck, a charismatic, intelligent manipulator, is still not convinced. He senses Hannah’s vulnerability when she tells a story about an elementary school teacher who massaged her neck and shoulders in class (an appropriate story for the moment and the context, unlike the ones she told Joshua). Chuck listens respectfully. He says he’s sorry that happened to her. He asks if he can read her something.
The story he reads is about the night in question, and casts him as alienated and lonely, sympathetic and sensitive. He stops reading aloud and asks her to take over, stepping aside in a revealed attack. Now she literally has to say his words, and it’s enough to convince her to see his side.
From there, they connect easily. Chuck flatters her by calling her “not just a pretty face” and telling her she’s “a fucking writer.” Though Hannah has already called herself a writer many times during their visit — in fact, it’s the first thing she wanted to say to him — you can tell by her face that it has more weight coming from him.
He shows her a book in his bedroom; a signed copy of When She Was Good by Philip Roth, which he tells her to keep — “I like how happy it makes you.” Then he asks her to lie down with him on the bed for “just a moment.” He’s already lying down when he says, “I’d encourage you to keep you clothes on to delineate any boundaries that feel right to you, but I just want to feel close to someone in a way I haven’t in a long time. If you please. If you please.” He says that last part twice. She frowns, but joins him, clutching the book. The silence is awkward. “I’m sorry I wrote something about you that upset you so much,” she says, probably to fill it. “Without considering all the facts.” Chuck tells her it’s all right. He’s not angry. He shifts his weight and then turns over. He has an erection and he’s taken it out of his pants, and placed it right on her leg. She looks down, and grabs it, still clutching the book. Then she snaps out of it, jumps up, and exclaims, “You pulled your dick out, and I touched your dick.” She’s stating the obvious but the obvious is remarkable. It was like a reflex, like he’d tossed her something breakable and, like any reasonable person, she’d caught it. Chuck smiles. Checkmate.
She’s stating the obvious but the obvious is remarkable. It was like a reflex, like he’d tossed her something breakable and, like any reasonable person, she’d caught it.
Had Hannah still been the girl she described to Joshua, the one who “took in all the experiences for everybody” and wanted to have all the feelings, her brief grip would have surely turned into more. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is how exactly one ends up giving a non-consensual blow job. The writing has answered the episode’s central question, undid its own answer, and through the art of showing, answered it here, again.
Watch if you like to read: ZZ Packer or Alejandro Zambra Story Type: One-thing-leads-to-another, road trip Subset: Unreliable narrator
“Panic in Central Park” is Girls’only episode completely dedicated to a secondary character. In it, Marnie shows that she can be spontaneous and honest. For perhaps the first time, the Girls audience sees her with her guard down, having fun, acting on impulse, and forgetting about appearances. After a fight with Desi, she leaves her apartment and runs into her ex Charlie, who looks like he’s been to prison. He’s beefier, has a new amorphous Brooklyn accent, and a tattoo across his chest that says “Humble Life.” He convinces her to come to a party uptown, basically by telling her he was only mean to her when they broke up because his dad committed suicide. On the way, they buy Marnie a shiny red dress with a plunging neckline, in which she will later be mistaken for a prostitute. Charlie is always going to the bathroom, but foreshadowing Marnie’s future problems with Desi, she doesn’t think anything of it. When he leaves her alone in the consignment shop, Marnie, unbidden, delivers a perfect puff of self-infatuated hot-air to the disinterested salesclerk:
“That guy’s my ex-boyfriend. I haven’t seen him in literally, almost two years until just now. Or, just before right now. He left without literally any explanation, and now I’m married to like an entirely different man, who’s also my musical partner. [Salesclerk: “Cool…”] I know you might be wondering, like, how does someone fit that much action in such a short amount of time? Yes, I am only 25 ½ years old, [Salesclerk: “Mmm, sounds right.”] but somehow I’ve managed to live so much. I feel like I’m looking out with the eyes of a women at hands that have touch and have been touched… Does that make any sense?”
Charlie returns from the burrito shop bathroom and pulls her aways just as her monologue goes comically off the rails. But later, there’s a delicious touch. When Marnie asks the age of the Eastern European girlfriend of a man soliciting her for sex, the woman’s answer, perfectly, is 25 ½. “Sounds right,” Marnie says. This is a trick of a restrained writer: it didn’t seem like Marnie had even heard the salesclerk, but with this bit of call-back dialogue, it’s clear she’d heard it, internalized it, and is now using it to appear more mature than she is.
They leave the party, get drunk at an Italian restaurant, steal a boat in Central Park, fall in the water, get robbed, plan to run away together, and have sex. Afterward, while Marnie takes a shower, Charlie shoots up, and Marnie walks home barefoot, abused and betrayed by smoke and mirrors of her own invention.
On the steps to her apartment, she finds Desi, waiting. “I don’t want to be married to you,” she tells hims. And then, my favorite line in all of Girls, one that perfectly captures Desi’s mood swings and hysteric condescension, he says: “I mean, Probably you’re going to get murdered. I mean that is how little of a sense of the world you have.”
All Girls, “Beach House.” (2014)
Further Viewing, or Honorable Mentions
“Meanwhile, on the other side of town,” was a familiar editing tactic of Sex and the City, one that allowed each episode to jump between its four characters as they lived their lives from tip to toe of Manhattan, very occasionally visiting an outer borough. Looking for other bottle episodes in Girls, I loathed the legacy of that trick. So many I remembered as possible bottles actually jump back-and-forth to the plot lines of other characters. “Hello Kitty” (Season 5, Episode 7), in which the characters attend a play recreating the Kitty Genovese murder, cuts to a party at Elijah’s boyfriend Dill’s house. “All I Ever Wanted” (Season 6, Episode 1) finds Hannah on assignment at a surf camp, where she learns to stop worrying and love the ocean, but then also features a subplot involving Marnie’s divorce. “Hostage Situation” (Season 6, Episode 2), in which Hannah and Marnie take a strung-out Desi to Poughkeepsie, also includes some bullshit about start-ups and blue jeans. Earlier in the show, they are self-contained, ensemble episodes. “Beach House” (Season 3, Episode 7), is topped only by “Welcome to Bushwick, aka The Crackcident” (Season 1, Episode 7), featuring all of the main characters at a warehouse party in Bushwick. The titular “crackcident,” which leads to Shoshanna running down the street pant-less, remains the funniest scene in all of Girls history — a perfect short story all on its own.
Sylvia Plath letters reveal abuse, while United Airlines squares off against a new foe — the dictionary
Just your typical flight on United Airlines…but wait, what does ‘typical’ really mean?
Today we saw sassy dictionaries, the launch of a campaign for a new kind of bookstore and some dark allegations about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ troubled relationship. Never a quiet day in the book world. Want to feel a little better about things? Maybe take a trip to your own local bookstore, pick up one copy of The Bell Jar & one book written by a POC. Then repeat.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary Weighs in on United Airlines Controversy
'Volunteer' means "someone who does something without being forced to do it." https://t.co/qNAcMyplhZ
Since searches for the word “volunteer” are up 1,900% since United Airline’s curious interpretation of the term (by now you’ve seen the video of Dr. David Dao being forcibly removed), Merriam-Webster weighed in with the word’s official definition, which, predictably, doesn’t jibe with United’s usage. The dictionary also weighed in on United’s misuse of “overbooked”:
“News accounts of the incident made mention of the fact that the flight was overbooked, but, as dictionary people, we also notice that the airline’s statement used overbook adjectivally to modify a noun, a definition that we don’t yet include. This use probably shows one way that language evolves: specialized words that are frequently used within an industry sometimes undergo functional shift and may or may not spread to common usage. We volunteer to watch this one.”
Kickstarter Is Live for Duende District, a Diversity-Focused Bookstore
Washington D.C. resident Angela Maria Spring has launched a Kickstarter campaign to open a bookstore that will be “owned, operated, and managed by a majority of people of color.” Spring, who is a veteran bookseller at the D.C. literary institution Politics and Prose, has set a goal of $9,000 for her shop, Duende District. The campaign is already making great progress.
Unseen Sylvia Plath Letters Assert Abuse By Ted Hughes
A new batch of letters written by Sylvia Plath have been revealed. Dated from February 1960 to February 4th, 1963, a week before her death, the letters were sent to her therapist, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, and help to illuminate biographical doubts about the writer’s highly productive final years. In the nine documents, Plath discusses abuses perpetrated by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, as well as her emotional processes after discovering his infidelity. The most harrowing account recalls a beating from Hughes that took place two days before Plath miscarried. It may take some time for the letters to reach a wider audience, as their sale is currently on hold due to a legal challenge regarding their ownership.
John Green and Chuck Palahniuk are among the authors challenged this year
The US Office of Intellectual Freedom, part of the American Library Association, has released its yearly list of books that parents and administrators have attempted to ban in American school libraries. According to a report fromQuartz, this year’s challenge total is up 50 from last year with 323 in total. OIF director James LaRue noted that because the organization only has access to self-reported data, these figure likely account for only about 18% of all challenges.
Mariko Tamaki’s graphic novel This One Summer (illustrated by Jillian Tamaki) received the most ban attempts, with complaints focusing on the book’s queer characters and drug use. Issues with character’s gender and sexual identities dominate the top of the list, with the five most banned entries featuring LGBT protagonists. Further down, YA stalwarts like John Greenereceived dings for merely acknowledging the existence of sex. The only entry not challenged for its content was Bill Cosby’s Little Bill series, which came in at number nine.
See the full list here:
This One Summer (2014), by Mariko Tamaki, illustrated by Jillian Tamaki (Macmillan)
Drama (2012), by Raina Telgemeier (Scholastic)
George (2015), by Alex Gino (Scholastic)
I Am Jazz (2014), by Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas (Dial Books)
Two Boys Kissing (2013), by David Levithan (Borzoi)
Looking for Alaska (2005), by John Green (Dutton/Penguin)
Big Hard Sex Criminals (2015), by Matt Fraction, illustrated by Chip Zdarsky (Image Comics)
Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread (2015), by Chuck Palahniuk (Anchor)
Little Bill (1990s; series), by Bill Cosby, illustrated by Varnette P. Honeywood (Simon Spotlight)
Eleanor & Park (2013), by Rainbow Rowell (Saint Martins)
I am five and I’m the exact height of the top of the surgery scar on my mother’s leg. I know this because she lets me sit on the toilet when she is getting dressed each morning. The scar is kid-high and the length of my torso. Pearly white railroad tracks covering her “birth defect.” My mother is “disabled” though that word is never used in our house. My mother’s leg is six inches shorter than the other leg. I don’t know what “disabled” means but we heard it once when we did the March of Dimes walk door-to-door nice people giving donations something about children. I walk everywhere with my mother. We can’t afford a car San Francisco is made of hills. Later in life I’ll learn just how much walking all of those miles gave her pain in her leg.
Today we walk to a “polling station.” We wait in the line. We walk up to a “polling booth.” This year my mother begins to explain what “Democrats” are and she cries describing “assassinations.” John F. Kennedy is a word I know. Shot dead. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a word I know. Shot dead. My mother loved Bobby Kennedy the best. Shot dead. Nixon is a word I know my father swears at the television at night. God damn asshole is a word I know. The “Vietnam War” came into our living room through the television. Once I saw a fire hose and German Shepherds back some black people against a wall on the television and I cried and I couldn’t understand why dogs would do that. Our dog named Maggie would never do that. My best friend Merrit is black and he wears a white shirt and tie almost every day to kindergarten. My teacher Mrs. Webb is black.
John F. Kennedy is a word I know. Shot dead. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a word I know. Shot dead. My mother loved Bobby Kennedy the best. Shot dead.
People make fun of me my hair too white people make fun of me I’m too shy people make fun of me I’m a crybaby. My favorite place to be is in a tree.
We go behind a plaid curtain plaid like my skirt. My mother pulls a lever. She whispers “Oh…Belle…” Belle is my nickname. My mother was born in Texas but she married a “Yankee” and left and never went back. Then she takes my hand and turns and opens the curtain.
I step with her into the future, a daughter and a mother moving though time and space, her lopsided heels clicking our misshapen path against the floor.
It will take years to undo that year. It will take lives.
:: 1980 ::
Seventeen is the heat and sweat of Florida and the rush of hormones but my desires move toward other girls about to be women and I do not have a prom queen body or a Seventeen body. I have an athlete body. Training two hours five thirty A.M. to seven thirty A.M. then high school then pool again four P.M. to six P.M. In between the waterworld hours I skip class with a boy gone to man who is infinitely more beautiful than I am. His brown skin his black hair his black eyes his perfect hands his desire for others like him. He makes art. He makes me a burgundy satin prom dress. My biceps bulge but I have no cleavage.
Seventeen is the heat and sweat of Florida and the rush of hormones but my desires move toward other girls about to be women and I do not have a prom queen body or a ‘Seventeen’ body.
Seventeen is the cusp of everything. A girl’s mind morphs toward woman faster than her brain can track, and so her body lurches and grinds forward more like an animal’s. All around her images from her culture of what to be, what to look like, how to be wanted and thus counted.
At fifteen we moved from Seattle, Washington to Gainesville, Florida, my father told me that we moved so that I could train with the best swimming coach in the nation, Randy Reese. It was a big sacrifice they made. For me.
In reality, a place my father never lived, we moved because his engineering and architecture firm, CH2M Hill, transferred him. I’d already survived a childhood with my father. I’d survived an adolescence, though not without war wounds from the home front. My body carried a story underneath all the cover stories he told. From fifteen to seventeen I swam for my fucking life.
Why would a father tell a daughter that story? Why do men with power tell us stories away from what we know in our bodies? What do we do with the stories left ringing our ribs like tuning forks? Why do they lie?
At seventeen, I understand what voting is. I’m in honors English and History classes. I know my turn is coming up. But that’s not where my dreams live. All my kid life I dream of going to the Olympics.
Why would a father tell a daughter that story? What do we do with the stories left ringing our ribs like tuning forks?
At eighteen I’m on a high school relay team with the fastest time in the nation. Torry Blazey Holly Blair Michelle Reagan. 200 Yard Medley Relay. 1:47.620. All Americans listed in Swimming World.
The 1980 Summer Olympics boycott is one part of a number of actions initiated by President Jimmy Carter to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Where do the dreams of girls trying to swim or run from home go? Do they leave? Do our body stories make a nexus with the politics and histories of war and men? Or do they stay in our bodies, hidden like skin secrets, waiting for some future tense where we too might become realized?
What would a realized woman look like in America?
I don’t vote.
I get a swimming scholarship from Texas Tech University, but in my heart I quit.
My beautiful baby girl fish dies in my belly waters the day she is born. I leave reality and enter a real place called grief and psychosis. Everything is fractured water.
When I emerge, I am a writer; stories pouring from my body as if an entire ocean had been waiting there. Or maybe the voice of a girl — the one I was, the one who died in the belly of me, or the one who survived her father’s hands and house — either way, she has an ungodly fire in her.
:: 1984 ::
I vote.
I vote because a new rage has emerged inside my body.
I have not yet learned that the rage is hope. I don’t care about the democratic nominee for president, I care about Geraldine Ferraro. Geraldine Ferraro is the first woman presidential candidate representing a major American political party. I know that she is not the first woman to attempt ascension within the law and land and realm of the fathers, I know that Victoria Woodhull, whose running mate was Frederick Douglass, ran for president in 1872, for example, preceded her. She founded her own newspaper. She was the first woman to own a Wall Street investment firm. Douglass voted for Grant.
I vote because a new rage has emerged inside my body.
I have not yet learned that the rage is hope.
I know that Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood ran in 1884. She drafted the law passed by Congress which admitted women to practice before the Supreme Court; she then became the first woman lawyer to practice before the Court.
I know that Shirley Anita Chisholm was the first African American woman to seek a major party’s nomination for U.S President in 1972. Before becoming the first black woman to serve in Congress, she was a school teacher and director of child care centers. I also know that Patsy Takemoto Mink ran in 1972, also one of the first women of color to serve in the U.S. Senate.
I know because I take women’s studies classes in college, where I discover that this information has been left out of my entire American education. All those women’s bodies. Voices. Stories.
The shape my rage takes is art. Drawing art painting art performance art and writing stories. So many stories are pouring out of my fingers I can’t keep up with them. I don’t even know where they are coming from, though I have a hunch they are coming from all the fathers who enact power on the bodies of others, biological fathers and state fathers and fatherlands and father heroes and father saviors and god the father from what’s left of the Catholicism I was raised up and through. I am away from my father for the first time in my life. I suddenly wake up to the idea that America and democracy and capitalism are all about fathers. A certain idea of a father as head. Hero. Leader. Person with power. I denounce all fathers.
Rage blooms and grows in my mind and body and gut — where my daughter lived her entire life until her birthdeath — like an unapologetic violent flower. Thank oceans there is a word and action for it: feminism.
Ronald Reagan, formerly a Hollywood actor, is elected president. His face the word for it.
:: 1989 ::
The art I love most: Kathy Acker Karen Finley Lynne Tillman Laurie Anderson Andres Serrano Joel Peter Witkin Tim Miller Robert Mapplethorpe Holly Hughes Barbara Kruger Carolee Schneemann Cindy Sherman. In all of their work violence, death and sexuality kiss. Like in my life.
In 1989 two art pieces draw controversy to the NEA, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment. Jesse Helmes emerges on the scene leading and effort to repress artistic production with obscenity laws.
In 1990 the NEA Four, performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes have their grants vetoed.
In March 1990 NEA grantees begin receiving a new clause in their agreements that states:
Public Law 101–121 requires that: None of the funds authorized to be appropriated for the National Endowment for the Arts … may be used to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which in the judgement of the National Endowment for the Arts … may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoerotocism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
I hate Reagan. I hate “Morning in America,” Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign which uses nostalgic images of America’s heartland to help sell an optimistic future televised image.
In 1990 the NEA Four, performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes have their grants vetoed.
I hate how the Reagan administration begins sending arms to Iran, via Isreal, in hopes that the weapons sales will lead the Iranians to pressure allies in Lebanon to release American hostages. The secret arms shipments violate Reagan’s pledge never to negotiate with terrorists. Again.
Underneath that cover story Congress passes a law banning the diversion of US government funds to support Nicaragua’s anticommunist Contra rebels. The Reagan administration violates the new law, leading to the Iran-Contra crisis. Reagan wins a second term in a historic landslide.
In 1986 a Lebanese magazine breaks the news that the U.S. has been secretly selling weapons to Iran. President Reagan delivers a nationally televised speech to address the Iran arms-for-hostages scandal. “Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands,” he says. “We did not — repeat, did not — trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.”
Attorney General Edwin Meese, a staunch Reagan loyalist, begins an internal investigation into White House involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal. Meese allows Iran-Contra conspirator Oliver North to shred thousands of potentially incriminating documents before they can be seized as evidence.
Meese finds administration officials guilty.
Marine Colonel Oliver North is fired.
In 1987 President Reagan goes on national TV to deliver a ridiculous apology for Iran-Contra: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” he says. “My heart and my best intentions tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it’s not.”
The same year I watch Reagan give a speech in Berlin, telling Soviet Premier Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall.” Where does he get off? People of color in my country are dying starving crawling from border to border.
Because I am high up in college, I’m reading about Marxism and Psycholinguistics and Semiotics and Feminisms — Eco Feminism and waves of Feminisms and Psychoanalytic Feminism and Marxist and Socialist Feminism and Cultural Feminism and Radical Feminism — Deconstruction and Literary Theory and Social Politics and Sociology. All I see is a sea of fathers and a runaway global kinesis made of money and power and guns. I understand this as capitalism. I understand my country as creating policies that have brutal, war-making and death-making consequences.
I understand my body as collateral damage.
All I see is a sea of fathers and a runaway global kinesis made of money and power and guns. I understand this as capitalism.
My favorite writers are Ursula Le Guin and Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko and Elfriede Jelinek and Margaret Atwood and Maxine Hong Kingston and Marguerite Duras and Christa Wolf and Arundhati Roy. All of them telling and telling how the brutality of history is written on the bodies of the vulnerable and disenfranchised. How those bodies are walking skin maps of the spectacular and endless violences we commit culturally. Politically. Globally. All of them unwriting varieties of violence at the site of the body. All of them naming women and children as the necessary “matter” to colonize.
:: 1989 ::
I’m standing in a shitty voting booth in Eugene, Oregon. I vote so hard my eyes shiver. But even my heart sinks watching the televised image of Michael Dukakis riding around in an impotent tank. When Lloyd Bentsen debates what appears to be a moron-boy, Dan Quayle, and he delivers his best line, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” I cry for nearly an hour.
Not because I could see the democrats were losing, but because memory came rushing back into my body. Loss. Grief. My mother. Her scar, her limp, the cancer that ate her lungs and breasts alive. The return of the repressed. A Nixon-ness coming back for revenge. The civil rights era being subsumed by consumer culture and capitalism. Television images forever asking us, are we dead yet? What brings us back to life and why? And when?
George H.W. Bush becomes president. But war was already being written across our bodies as well as the bodies of those we intended to colonize. Oil, power, land grabs, guns and money subsume all humanity, it seems.
I go to the courthouse in Eugene to protest Desert Storm every day and every night. No blood for oil. I’m accidentally on the cover of Eugene Weekly. I’m accidentally in a writing class with Ken Kesey. But I know there is no other father coming to save us.
:: 1997 ::
TESTIMONY OF PATRICK A. TRUEMAN
_____
HON. JOHN T. DOOLITTLE of California, in the house of representatives
Tuesday, April 15, 1997
American Family Association:
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of American Family Association. As you are aware, for the past eight years AFA has been the leading organization opposing federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1989, AFA president Rev. Donald Wildmon called to national attention the funding by the NEA of Andres Serrano’s work “Piss Christ’’ which consisted of a crucifix submersed in the artists’ urine. The fact that such a blasphemous work was federally funded outraged a great segment of American society and precipitated a battle to end federal funding of the agency. That battle will not end until funding for the NEA ends, rest assured of that fact….
The threat that the NEA poses in the prosecution on obscenity and child pornography cases is not merely hypothetical. The difficulties I have outlined in this regard were faced by the U.S. Department of Justice during my years in the criminal division with respect to the funding by the NEA of an exhibit by the late Robert Mapplethorpe.
The American Family Association is convinced after years of monitoring the NEA that the agency will never change. While it is only a small portion of its annual budget the NEA continues to fund pornographic works as “art.’’ Some of the more recent and troubling works funded by the agency include grants to a group called FC2 and another called Women Make Movies, Inc. FC2 was provided $25,000 in the past year to support the publication of at least four books according to U.S. Representative Peter Hoekstra who has been tracking the NEA: S, by Jeffrey DeShell, Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest, by Doug Rice, Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics, edited by Cris Maza, Jeffrey Deshell and Elisabeth Sheffield and Mexico Trilogy, by D.N. Stuefloten. These books include descriptions of body mutilation, sadomasochistic sexual act, child sexual acts, sex between a nun and several priests, sodomy, incest, hetero and homosexual sex and numerous other graphically described sexual activities. Women Making Movies, Inc. received $112,700 in taxpayer money over the past three years for the production and distribution of several pornographic videos. Here are descriptions of but two taken from the groups catalog: “Ten Cents a Dance,’’ a depiction of anonymous bathroom sex between two men; and another called ”Sex Fish’’ which is “a furious montage of oral sex.’’
Oral sex is not art and the NEA and Congress should not pretend that it is. Please stop offending the taxpayers of America. Funding for the NEA should be eliminated.
I find my first literary tribe when I am published by Fiction Collective Two (FC2). Lance Olsen becomes a lifelong art and heart comrade. Ralph Berry becomes an experimental writing mentor to me. Jeffrey Deshell and Elisabeth Sheffield rise like human beacons illuminating for me how writing can work against the grain of cultural repression. Like Kathy Acker, Doug Rice blows the top of my head off by daring to place sexuality and the brutality of fathers and capitalism naked on a page; Blood of Mugwump becomes one of my favorite books. My stories also appear in Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics, edited by Cris Mazza, Jeffrey Deshell, and Elisabeth Sheffield.
Then congress holds hearings on the hill on the topic of art and obscenity, and all of our art flashes up like burning crosses.
:: 2001 ::
I vote for Bill Clinton twice. I know that he is a womanizer, I know that he lies, I know that the sentence “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” is a crisis in representation. Everything we seem to have gained carries within it loss. Every birth has as its other, a death. My daughter’s. Every sex act has my sexual history in it. My body carrying a culture.
Everything we seem to have gained carries within it loss. Every birth has as its other, a death.
Bill Clinton’s presidency ends with a sex act.
George W. Bush is elected. A witless wealthy begetting of fathers.
My son Miles is born the year 9/11 happens. I’m breastfeeding Miles in our house in the woods. George W. Bush is on the television visiting a primary school in Florida when he gets the news. I see Miles’ face at my breast. I see the face of Bush there on my TV, I see the faces of children. Seven minutes of Bush just sitting there processing what he’s been told.
Suffer the children.
Who are we?
What is history? Does it live in our bodies or on our televisions? Do we move within it, or against it, or do we merely view it, consume it and move on? What can we move or not move? What part is ours to move?
:: 2008 ::
Did we choose the savior story? Did it save us? Has it ever? And what was the story underneath? And what work did we do to save ourselves and each other? Did we forget what might be coming?
:: 2016 ::
There is no photo for what my father did to his daughters.
It came into our bodies as a habit of being, a structure of consciousness, a way of life. Maybe it is akin to feeling discovered and conquered and colonized. Maybe the first colonizations are of the bodies of women and children, and from there they extend like the outstretched hand of a man grabbing land. Cultures.
In my body my father and all the fathers after tried to annihilate my spirit.
He failed, but I carry the trace of the war in my skin song.
On the television a man stomps around behind a woman while she is trying to speak. I’ve seen this movie before. It’s called my life. All the reasons people named for why Hillary Rodham Clinton was not good enough are exactly the same as everything ever said to women who were driven to stand in that place called power. Or was it simply self?
On the television a man stomps around behind a woman while she is trying to speak. I’ve seen this movie before. It’s called my life.
We did not survive all this way to let it ride.
:: 2017 ::
This is your present tense calling.
In some ways, I was born to do what’s coming: to step exactly into the chaos and dark in order to live a life at all. There was no moment of my childhood that gave me joy except those rare pieces of time when I was out of the house of father. Thank oceans for swimming, for all the waters that have saved me.
We do know how to stand up. We do know how to hold a hand out for others, to make a human chain of hands and bodies against the wrong. We have to love the planet and animals and vulnerable people differently — with our whole bodies. No other now but this. The rest of life is reaching toward each other, loving into otherness, coming out of the dark, like some of us had to do as kids just to survive. If you forget, or if you become exhausted, ask your native brother or sister or people of color brother or sister or LGBT brother or sister. If this kid so scared she sometimes choked on her own breathing to get a word out of her mouth could do it, then all of us can.
We do know how to stand up. We do know how to hold a hand out for others, to make a human chain of hands and bodies against the wrong.
If I could survive and escape my father’s house, then it is possible for all of us.
[1] The year after my birth, Ronald Reagan appeared in his last film before he left Hollywood for politics. The Killers, based on a story by Earnest Hemingway, was a crime film starring Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, and Ronald Reagan. The movie remains notable for being Reagan’s last theatrical film before entering politics, as well as the only one in which he plays a villain.
– Tilburg is at the heart of the story. It’s what everything revolves around.
– There’s no sea in Tilburg.
– The sea is everywhere, even in Tilburg
– I don’t really get that, I guess.
– You don’t have to. You just have to go with it, with the story and the sea.
– Alright. Alright.
– Just go with it, do you promise?
– I promise.
– Otherwise you won’t understand any of it.
– Because there isn’t a sea in Tilburg?
– The sea is everywhere and especially in Tilburg. Especially there.
– Let’s go.
– We’re going.
For J.
(NO) GOLDFISH AND CONCRETE
A Chain
1. My father says he ended up in Tilburg because he got into a car one day. It’s one way of telling your life story. ‘Your life doesn’t begin until you have a home,’ he says. ‘That applies to everybody, not just me. Everything that happens before that doesn’t count.’
Nonsense, I think. And you do too, probably. You know just as well as I do that life can also end (yes, that too) with a feeling of finding a home, but let’s agree with my father for now. There’s no need to start off by complicating things unnecessarily. Who he was before he ended up in Tilburg doesn’t matter for the sake of this story.
This is the beginning. (I can tell you this much already: the beginning lasts the longest, it’s the run up. The end is just a full stop, a period. It’s always just a full stop. But if you look carefully, that full stop is an opening, a little hole you can go through. Behind it, a beginning that takes much longer is waiting for you. If you want, it never ends.) I still owe you the moment when I politely introduce myself to you; that will come later. Sometimes you’ll talk with someone at a party for a couple of hours: you stand there, leaning against the kitchen units, clutching bottles of beer, you watch a stranger’s hands peeling off the label and then picking at the sticky white remains of the paper on the bottle, you just say anything until you’ve settled on a topic you’re both happy to talk about and it isn’t until you’re saying goodbye that you ask: do you mind if I ask your name? Even though it’s more often: what was your name again? — and, sorry, sorry, sorry, only to forget it again afterwards. The answer doesn’t matter and means everything all at once — Irene, Eva, Omar, Karel, Jenneke, Sophie, Soundos, Jan — that name too stands for an ending or a beginning, then it’s like a label, a skin, the first layer. I promise you: my name will be the beginning.
First this, back to where I come from.
‘I got into my car,’ my father says, ‘and I drove around a bit as usual. I drove along the highway as long and as fast as I could. I took the exit at Tilburg.’ (He forgets to tell me where he was coming from, what kind of car it was, what color it was, whether it had a diesel or petrol engine, what the car smelled like. He forgets to tell me what music he was listening to and whether he was thinking about anything or anyone, whether it was cloudy that day and whether the sun was to his left or right and how high it was in the sky. In particular, he forgets to tell me if he was looking for anything specific, that made him get into the car, and whether he was happy. All of this he omits to tell me.)
What I can tell you is how it must have gone, more or less. At least, this is what I’ve heard my father say about three hundred times to about three hundred different people: an invisible hand guided him towards the Tilburg exit that day. My father doesn’t believe in God but he does believe in good stories. If you give him the chance, he turns all the decisions he ever made into stories, often in his own inimitable way. I don’t think there are invisible hands pushing us. They’re our own hands. Perhaps we don’t know why we do what we do, but we move, even though we generally don’t know where we are going or why. My father sees things differently. He wants to add that his driving about was rather random anyway; he often just went for a drive, the car was ‘a mobile living room’ in which he felt comfortable. ‘And you can steer things a bit,’ he said — but the exit taken at Tilburg wasn’t random at all, he says.
You should know that my father’s a holist. For a long time I thought a holist was a person who believed in emptiness, in hollowing things out, a hole, a cavity, the space between buildings, fingers, between yourself and others. I pictured a duvet that a warm body had just emerged from underneath. It wasn’t about the body but the duvet, open and abandoned, leaving the warmth and the shape of a person behind. It turned out this was my own belief. A holist is convinced that everything is inseparably connected to everything else, like all the seas and oceans have their own intrinsic variability and complexity yet consist of the same water, even though those seas each have their own name. According to my father, everything is a chain reaction, a series of linked events (and then he invariably comes up with the story of the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil causing a tornado in Texas). You can never see things separately from each other. That’s why I’m starting with my father, since without him, I wouldn’t even know you. In a way it’s pointless thinking about stuff like this, since it’s a completely logical fact: if you take away all the people, all of space, all of time, all the invisible hands, of course there is nothing left. Nothing exists in isolation. And neither do we.
‘No,’ my father says. ‘There is something left, even in that case. There’s always something left; it just takes a different form.’ (I wasn’t so far wrong then, with my belief in the duvet.) He doesn’t want to simplify life by allowing all events and meetings to depend upon coincidence. My father says some things are inevitable and closed off to fate; one truth flows from another truth like the ebb and flow of tides. Truth (he pronounces that word unusually loudly) and fate aren’t even in the same room as far as he’s concerned.
What is true, or (as far as I’m concerned) coincidence:
He’d already allowed dozens of signs with place names to go past and now some kind of voice inside him decided: this is where I (or ‘you’ — how does that kind of voice address you?) need to leave the road. He moved into the exit lane and the indicator flashed rhythmically, familiarly, like the cursor in an empty Word document; something new was about to happen. My father said this to me time and time again as he plucked at my hair as though pulling off chunks of candy floss. ‘Something very new, kiddo. I felt it.’ When I was young I thought about the invisible hand and sometimes I thought that maybe I had been it, that force. I’d had my father take that exit to find a place for me. He could also have ended up in Helmond, for example, or Leiden, Groningen or IJlst. Or on an industrial estate. Not all exits lead to residential areas.
My father drove into the city past a mosque, a few apartment blocks, a museum and the Wilhelmina Park. That’s where he parked his car. In the park, he lay down on his back in the grass to look at the treetops and listen to the birds singing. He thought: other people have lain here and laughed, cried, made love, dreamed, drunk, smoked, exercised, reflected. Here relationships were broken off or began, ducks were fed, unspoken words written down in diaries, people took each other’s hands, shared secrets, picked flowers, they fell down here, stood up again, cheated on their partners, they pulled up blades of grass, peed in the bushes, hid things, they lost money here, became ill, spat on the ground, played guitar, stamped, danced. They were here. My father didn’t want go past this moment in time like he’d gone past so many other things before. He recognized it and made a promise to himself: I won’t leave here before I’ve done all those things. My father took a deep breath, pulled up blades of grass, dusted off his trousers and went into the pub on the park corner. When he opened the door, he saw that it was empty, bar a couple of customers. It reminded him of himself: an empty space ready to be filled. All of the customers looked at the door, and in doing so at my father, as though they’d been sitting there waiting for him. They said so too: ‘Someone’s here at last.’ It was exactly how my father felt. It was all about him. The long awaited. He sat down at the table with the men and did what he was good at: talking. His voice echoed through the pub; his words, precisely there, precisely then, formed the new link that connected everything that was already in movement and also gave them a new twist, from a still unknown place. (Me, you. 2–2.)
My father in turn, who has a natural talent for drama (he calls it being a romantic himself), said to those folks with a sigh: ‘Finally, the sea.’
“Duvet” by Janine Hendriks
2. What if you don’t think: I’m coming home. Is your home still your home then? What if you don’t know what to do with a stopover? All those stations in between. Is a journey still a journey then?
What I want to say to you in a cold, dark station (you can drive past it if you like): if I can’t be with you, I look for a form and my form, my shape is language. (This too turns out to be a chain, time after time.) I can be everywhere, just like the water. And particularly in Tilburg; the city like a duvet you’ve just emerged from under. (Form/Content).
3. My father drank more jonge jenever than was good for him and told me that he’d met a couple of kindred spirits there in that pub on the park whom he never wanted to let go. To be entirely truthful, I must add that in my father’s story the bartender was playing ‘Down Under’ by Men at Work and that song didn’t even exist yet, any more than I did. What’s more, my father considered everyone alive a kindred spirit, because ‘We’re all alive.’
One of the men in the bar apparently didn’t want my father to disappear from his life either and said, after eight glasses of jenever and three different strong beers, that he had a house for him. He’d been wanting to go to Spain for a while because he’d met a woman.
‘Do you really have to go all the way to Spain for that?’ my father asked. And do you know what the man said to him? He said, ‘An invisible hand guided me towards her.’
My father swallowed. And again. It didn’t help, the tears came. He’s always been sensitive to kindred spirits. To everyone. He’s a very sensitive man. He knows this himself because he says it all the time. Sometimes he says he can’t take the smell of spring, soccer matches, the way the men sweat and play together, kicking up clumps of grass, or the way certain women step onto their bicycles, a little awkwardly. Then he’ll say: ‘I’m a mollusk. I almost can’t take this.’ I think he’s right. While my mother was a mammoth (she was big and strong, plucked everything bare, stomped through life), my father is a mollusk. He’s open to the whole world, everything goes in, as though he were an infinite landscape where everyone’s welcome, a hole everything falls through. But anyway. So he’s the reason I’m living here. In a house next to the railroad. I didn’t have much choice in the matter. My father began to drive one day and took an exit. And I’m here (just like you).
(curtains)
4. Behind the curtains, I tell you this. Because we haven’t got that far yet (visible) you only listen down the telephone, which becomes hot and glowing which in turn makes your ear warm and glowing and I want to see what kind of red your ear has gone. Since I can’t see you at the moment, I imagine you. Not just your ear but also your feet, your hair, your hands, your eyes and your smell. You don’t have to be shy. I can make things exist that you can’t see, like (I’m not going to repeat this a lot, but it does come back a couple of times) the sea in Tilburg. You don’t have to believe it, but I know that it’s there. Like we are there.
You listen. Your silence is all-encompassing. I talk — not as easily as my father does, but I am talking. We can choose. 1. We see each other. Or 2. We talk about it. I say: it’s a pain that makes my heart hum at night. I used to think that a heart could only beat, but a heart can do so much more. There’s a chamber you inhabit and it’s buzzing in there, I imagine a broken striplight, like in a film. I’d like to play the sound to you. You’d listen to it with your naked ear, no stethoscope, this kind of listening has got nothing to do with illness. My heart buzzes like an insect, as though it wants to drown itself out in vibrations. Or worse, like a device with a battery that’s going flat. Insects are useful creatures, and that’s the way I like to see my heart too. I think about the movements a bee’s wings make. How clever that those creatures can bear their own weight. I don’t know if people are capable of that. I’m not, at any rate.
I once read that bees belong to a superfamily that bears the name Apoidea. In that same article, I also read that there are solitary bees, thank God. They live according to my father’s principles. All of them together contribute not just to the survival of their own species; they also contribute to life in general. The only difference between a bee’s life and my father’s life philosophy is that there’s only one female among the bees. And that female is also brilliant, inimitable, superior, strong and sovereign. If she wants to reproduce, the queen bee takes to the wing one day. She leaves the hive. She flies away. Off she goes. All the males fly after her. At first it goes well. There’s a beautiful and at the same time terrifying cloud of bees in the air. A concentration of buzzing movement, from a distance you could put your hands around it, but close up the space between your hands is meaningless, from close up it’s too big, even dangerous. The female flies ahead of all the bees for days on end. The cloud thins, becoming a trail, a line, and afterwards: dots, an ellipsis in the air. More and more males fall away. They are weak, exhausted. They can’t cope with the journey and aren’t worthy of the female. When there are just a few bees left, the queen stops flying. Now only the strongest bees are left, the ones that are allowed to possess her, just for a moment. No one knows in advance which place the queen will choose in which to reproduce. Maybe she doesn’t know it herself, maybe the place is chosen before there’s even a choice. At the end of this story she flies back home again, completely alone, to her hive, and shortly after that everything starts all over again. Everything always starts all over again.
5. In the night, you and I swim across the ocean. Nothing has to start over again there. There is no end. Just water. We meet each other at the bottom, our eyes open, above us the waves, but we’ve gone in search of silence. We’re not like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s story. We can never get like that. The fish in the story forget what water is because they are in the water. (What is water?) We don’t. We’re in it and we know it only too well. We don’t have to wonder. The sea comes to our door every night. It streams through the cracks, along the walls. In the morning I wake up in my own bed, soaked. My hair is stringy, the salt stings, my scalp feels tight, my duvet presses on my clammy body and my eyes have to get used to the daylight, to the dry city air, to the ocean now lying between us. Reassuringly, we both know how to swim, how to push aside the water, the way it closes behind us, like another curtain. And we go through it. We always go through it.
6. When I was old enough, my mother not yet dead and the tunnel under the station not yet built, I moved from one side of the tracks (a train driving past sounds like a kettle just before it boils) to the other, the rails forming a fault line between the past and present. My father had hired a big green removals van. As we drove to Statenlaan in Tilburg-West, where I’d found a place to live thanks to an ad I’d pinned up in the supermarket, he’d hit the curb from time to time. Steering was difficult: both of his hands were bandaged. He’d conducted yet another pointless experiment. My father was one of the best when it came to conducting pointless experiments. (I can list more than a hundred of them — if you want to hear them, you have to come to mine. We can make an evening of it.) That afternoon, he’d seen a fire department practice. A group of firefighters had set a car on fire on the square, and then extinguished it as a demonstration. They weren’t just practicing, they wanted to show people what they were capable of, that they could guarantee safety when the situation called for it. The spectators clapped when the fire had been put out. (Really, people like that exist.) My father hadn’t been able to get the fire and the smell of burning rubber out of his head and once he was home, he decided he had to figure out the best way to escape the house if it was on fire. He hung a rope out the window and slid down on it into the front garden. He did this too quickly — he’d been drinking whiskey and beer — and didn’t have any control over his actions. Strictly speaking, he had willingly fallen out of the window using the rope. Nevertheless, he had clutched the rope overly anxiously and his hands were now covered in burns. I couldn’t think of a more fitting image to sum up his personality: my father was able to burn his hands without a fire. When he came back from the hospital and showed me his wrists he said, ‘666’. Every time something went totally wrong, he acted as though he’d sealed a pact with the devil. My mother didn’t like it and in retrospect, I also think he should have been more careful with that; he himself may have been immune to that sequence of random numbers, but it could have caused my mother’s death. But my mother’s accident was the one thing my father said was probably chance. And I thought: people need to place traumatic events outside of their own reality somehow. (Me having you live behind a curtain, inside my head doesn’t mean that you’re a traumatic event. It’s everything else, the daily reality that approaches trauma. All of this stuff that I’m telling you for the first time.)
After my dad had parked the green van in front of my new home and I’d carried everything to the second floor (number 205), aside from a few small things my dad clutched in his burned fists, he left me behind in a house full of dirty boys, as he said so himself. Later, he said that he’d cried as he drove back to his side of the tracks and that he’d laughed too, because he was a crying man in a green rental van with both his hands bandaged who had left his daughter behind in a bare apartment with boys who clearly didn’t know what to do with themselves and therefore really couldn’t know what to do with me. But he also said, ‘Dirty boys go with the territory. I can’t prevent that as a dad.’
There were five boys and they did nothing but watch obscure films (VHS), drink beer and talk about what they called life but in practice was just girls. I liked girls too, but not just randomly, not often, and the girls who wandered into those boys’ lives were mainly a youthful addition to the world, a bit of cheerfulness on a bicycle, nothing more. I usually sat in my own room reading books and sketching. I often drew foxes. Once I saw a fox at night in a parking lot. The animal ran in between the vehicles and it made me cry. I’ve never drawn a good fox, for that matter, things that are hard to know are hard to draw.
7. Are you still there?
…
You shouldn’t suddenly disappear.
Come back. Even though you’ve become a thin line.
8. We’re going this way (yes, of course, into the woods).
9. In the woodland park behind my house, I met a boy who said he was a Buddhist. We got talking because we were both looking at a couple of small red turtles swimming in the pond. They must have been released in the woods because someone had exchanged their ardent desire for a few turtles with a desire for independence. There’s a big difference between really wanting something and thinking it. I mean: thinking that you want it. If you think you want it, the wanting stops the moment you feel like getting it. If you really want something, the wanting begins at the moment you feel like getting it. It always multiplies terrifyingly fast. It rushes through your body. You want it and you want more. But anyhow, those turtles weren’t bought by a person with self-knowledge. Now they were swimming in the pond in the woods, far from where they belonged, and also far from where they didn’t belong.
‘People treat all living things like that,’ the boy said. ‘They bring them inside. They throw them away.’ He also said, ‘An unhappy person, just like a happy person, is an egoist.’
I thought the turtles might have been better off here than in a bath or a sink. But I didn’t dare to say it because there was something authoritarian about the boy and I’d left my flat to go for a simple walk and look at the trees, not to end up in an argument. In the end, I did become interested in him. How exactly it came about that the conversation moved from turtles to vases, I don’t know, but it happened. The boy had recently heard an archeologist say that he’d rather find a broken vase than an intact one. The cracks could tell him far more about the past. Those vases and cracks piqued my interest, so I took him back to where I lived with those dirty boys. We could have started kissing or worse. But while the boy drank tea on the bottom half of my bunkbed, the first plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers. My father called me, all he said was to turn on the TV. I watched the news for the entire night together with the Buddhist.
When he left my house the next morning with red eyes, he hugged me longer than anyone had ever hugged me before and said, ‘You have to pluck inspiration out of the air, it’s infinite.’
I don’t believe in inspiration, but for a while I could think of nothing but that infinite sky, how it could be that everything that matters always comes down to infinity. I’ve forgotten the Buddhist’s face. But these things will remain of him, for always: the turtles, the vases, the Twin Towers, the infinite sky and afterwards: my mother’s death.
10. My father loved my mother. It’s the thing I’m most certain of. When they met each other they both had somebody else. My father said they’d had to let go of a lot of things so that they could hold each other’s hands. (Time, effort, stories, past, a piece of themselves.) And that it had all been worth it. He’d rather fall down with the right one than stand up straight with the wrong one. And of course my mother felt welcome, just like all the others did. She had to go with him, she could do little about it. When she met my father she was married to a pastry chef from Oisterwijk. He named a cookie after her, but aside from that wasn’t very passionate. She worked in a bookshop and because she grew tired of that closed world of words, she took the train to Tilburg every Saturday to go dancing. Her dancing looked more like waving her arms around. And my father fell for that waving because he thought she was greeting him with wildly enthusiastic determination. They both have different interpretations of what happened next, but the pastry chef took his cookies off the market and my mother became my mother. As I already said, my father really loved her. You could see it clearly in his body, the way he looked at her and even the way he argued with her. He said, ‘You have to take care of the people you love. And be careful with them. At least, as careful as possible. Alright, not too careful because that’s not good either.’ Being careful or not too careful with someone turned out to be a relative term, because my father often took other women home. He considered it a waste to live just one life, purely and simply because of the fact that you only have one life. ‘If you get the chance you must multiply. Preferably by an uneven number.’ (This is probably the reason I remained an only child.)
My father made sure my mother didn’t have to see the other women and if she didn’t want to know, she didn’t have to, because you only know those kinds of things once you’ve seen them. My father was less careful towards me. I saw many women arrive. I almost never said anything about it, I only thought I should pay close attention to how the game worked. I paid close attention and understood little. The only time I cautiously asked whether mum was alright about the other women coming round, my father started to tell a story about strawberries.
‘It can’t be the idea to stop someone from eating strawberries, can it? Smashing things to smithereens, bursting into tears or walking out because the person you love ate strawberries? That’s not normal, do you see? If that’s love, it’s not the way to treat each other.’
I thought strawberries were quite different from women, but to be honest, I couldn’t explain why.
11. Maybe you’re thinking: where have I got to (in terms of visibility)? I’m thinking exactly the same thing. You are allowed to be present from now on. You’re coming. Or more accurately, I’m coming. We have to both want it at the same time, and independently of that, we have to (whatever, just say something) dare at the same time. I’ll come get you in the car. I won’t toot the horn, I won’t make a sound. It’ll be deafening nonetheless. I will stand under a street light. I’m hoping for orange light. You have to look out for a blue Peugeot. A small one. I know you’ll take off your shoes when you’re sitting next to me. We know so much before it becomes true. I’ll make us exist alongside everything that already existed.
You ask, ‘What do you like so much about me?’
I say, ‘Your strength.’ I ask, ‘What do you like so much about me?’
You say, ‘Your height.’
I will make myself bigger, infinitely bigger. But first I smile at that reply.
“Dive” by Janine Hendriks
I came across the actual reply, the reply that cancels out all possible answers, in a book by Clarice Lispector. She had bandaged hands too; her hands had been burned by a real fire because she was smoking a cigarette in bed and the duvet caught fire. I hope that you’re ready for someone else’s words explaining how I see it, but sometimes you need another person’s words to be able to express yourself better. ‘I saw something. Really something. It was ten at night and the taxi was driving at full speed along the Praҫa Tiradentes when I saw a street I will never again forget. I’m not going to describe it: it’s my street. The only thing I can say is that it was deserted and it was ten at night. Nothing else. But I was awakened.’
12. Have a rest now. The fish in the sea know how you feel.
13. First rate.
14. I love hands shuffling cards.
15. I’m afraid of fortune tellers. I think that everything they say can come true. The truth isn’t necessarily always what you were hoping for. Maybe it never is. Who wants truth? I don’t. Kind, she is not. She is always a woman, dressed in black. And then I’m not talking about a pair of black trousers and a black blouse (there’s nothing sexier than that in my eyes), but a straight long black dress, down to the ankles. Like the ones you never see anymore.
16. Someone could have told me that my mother would die and I would have believed it but not understood it. But first this (a person can say it ad infinitum and it will always make sense): before I tell you about my mother’s death, I’d like to keep her alive for a moment.
The most alive thing I can tell you about her and something my father loved so much was that my mother believed she’d been hit by lightning. I said, ‘Mum, that’s impossible. People who get hit by lightning die.’ (Perhaps the answer was right there, the beginning of the end.) According to my mother, you didn’t have to die from a lightning strike. ‘Those are extreme cases,’ she said. She said that only her personality had been changed by it, that she’d become gentler, more open. Her old self had been uncoupled to make space for her new self. I didn’t notice any of this myself — my mum was simply my mum — but if she said she’d been hit by lightning, it must have been true. Being hit, being touched can take so many forms. Perhaps death is the last and most tender touch. Compared to that, human hands are a joke. My mother has been to a place I still have to go to. And that’s how it should be, with mothers. She went the same way my father came, by the highway. Near the Drunen Dunes.
It wasn’t even her fault, someone had driven the wrong way down the highway. He had a head-on collision with my mother and the people who were there didn’t even have to look to see if she was still alive. She was thrown out of the car, thrown out of time, like a broken elastic band. And just like the day my father took the exit, a new sequence of events was set off again. (Me, you. Part 2.)
17. If you take vases out of the kiln too quickly, the glaze on the porcelain cracks. All those cracks, all those fault lines, leave a sound behind. Something breaks but you get something else in its place, even if it’s just a modest sound, movement. It’s called craquelure. The sound of broken vases turns up at random moments. It comes when you’re not expecting it. A presence. It’s the same with absence, there’s a void and at the same time, there’s consolation. Naturally it didn’t go very well at the start, daily life. Buying bread and saying hello to people. During the daytime I was numb and at night I couldn’t sleep. I lost handfuls of hair each night. When I went to the hair salon in Nieuwlandstraat (even the street name hurt, “New land street”), the guy said he could see the sorrow in my hair. ‘Chop it out,’ I said. He said he’d be honest with me: ‘My dear, it needs time and nutrition.’
I wondered how something that was dead could still be sorrowful? I hoped that my mother wasn’t sorrowful. That seemed to me the only positive thing about being dead as opposed to alive: you got out of all the sadness for good. I bought a packet of fortune cookies to hear something nice. The first note I read said: ‘This will be a prosperous year/ Cette année sera une année de prospérité. / Dieses Jahr wird ein gutes Jahr.’ I ate all the cookies and read all the messages; what a stupid idea that was, since not all of the predictions could be true, even if they were written in three languages. If your mother’s just died, you should eat regular cookies.
My father said, ‘If you’re sad, art can help. Because you can see — no, feel — more in a painting sometimes than in a face, more even than in a pair of kind eyes, that someone has understood you.’ I was so ripped apart, so wounded, that I listened to everyone who turned up with good advice. So I listened to my father as well. What’s more, he’d lost someone too. How can it be a law that when you lose someone you also lose yourself right away? — I don’t want to go with you, I don’t want to! Now I know: no resistance.
It is like when a wild animal grabs you, or a strong current: feign ignorance. Don’t be a hero.
18. There I stood in the Museum De Pont in front of a piece by Anish Kapoor, the black circle, the black hole painted on the floor. I thought about how I’d cried for hours in the past because there was a hole in my sandwich that all the chocolate sprinkles fell though. It wasn’t about the chocolate sprinkles but the hole. My father told me not to be a baby, that the sandwich would be gone anyway after I’d eaten it; hole or no hole. He could tell me that, but it wasn’t the point. What it was about was that there was a hole in my sandwich and it hurt me. Now there I was with the same pain, even though I knew that a sandwich and my mother had nothing at all to do with each other.
I went back to that artwork like others return to a house or a loved one. Again and again I was drawn to that hole. The way space and time disappeared into it, as though it were a secret opening. I stood behind the rope looking at it and I was clearly present and capable of disappearing at the same time. Like the trick you know as a kid, you only have to close your eyes to become invisible.
And after God knows how many years (how often could we have stood next to each other there? I might have been a woman already), after God knows how many kissed lips, you stood next to me — it was a Sunday. We looked at the suction effect of that hole together. I didn’t look at you. You didn’t look at me. We both looked at the hole and I knew you were the first person to see exactly the same as me. Above all, that you were the first person to not see exactly the same as me. We stood there next to each other for an eternity. And then, what did you do then? You dared to do it; you trusted in the moment, in yourself, in everything that could be undone perhaps, and did what no one would ever do in real life just like that: you took my hand. And very quietly you said something you must have often thought about. You said, ‘There is a hole / painted on the ground / into which you’d like to drop everything / that’s left behind.’ I didn’t understand what these lines meant and at the same time I understood them at once. Like me, you needed to be relieved of something.
And then you looked at me. I knew at once that like my mother and father had done, I wanted to drop everything and go with you. Nothing should be left behind. (However wonderful it was.)
I said to you, ‘You fix the time, I’ll figure out the logistics.’
And the next thing I know is that I was coming to get you in the car.
(Behind the curtains then. We could just get through them.)
“Roots” by Janine Hendriks
19. I’ve never met anyone who is so careless and yet has to be treated with such care.
20. There’s a network of tree roots under the ground. All those trees stand there alone, have their own core, their own bark, their own crown and leaves and growth. But under the ground they are all connected to each other. They hold onto the soil and each other, like hands searching for safety. On occasion, one of them topples in a storm. When there’s a more serious storm, the city looks like a cemetery of trees. I wonder what that looks like under the ground — if it’s as much of a mess there as on the street, and who is going to tidy it up. Cleverer animals. The network will repair itself, just like I do. Or in time, it will tell a story we know little about as yet, like a broken vase.
Recently I was sitting on Café Spaarbank’s terrace next to a boy who was playing a computer game in which you could build worlds. I asked him, ‘How far does it go? Does it ever stop?’ Just like the Buddhist, this little boy said, ‘No, this world is infinite.’ He slid across the screen like a little god, the king of his own kingdom. He asked me whether I wanted to see how deep it was and I nodded and said, ‘Yes please, show me how deep.’ He tapped on the screen many times in a row and there we went, from the lightest black to the blackest black.
I’d like to draw a map of my friends and loved ones (or actually, of you), how deep you go. I’m hoping for eternity.
In computer games the depth is infinite. I don’t want it to be/seem/become true, that reality stops at the same point where the imagination stops. Who says that the imagination is infinite? That’s believing in your own ability. I want to reach out my arms and know that what I’m measuring, but especially that what I’m not measuring, is equal to the way the world works. That the space between my arms is a place the world fits into. That I displace air with every step. That you slip through there somewhere. I want you to form a link, not far from me. But better still: for you to be the end, and at the same time be the beginning. We’ll start off the chain. We won’t fall. (If we do fall, it’ll be quiet.)
21. Time and time again you turn out to be the opposite of things. Enough reason to ask you, ‘Shall we go?’
22. I told you to close your eyes, and after that I finally brought you to the sea. What I can say about it is that we went for a drive that night. There was almost no one else on the roads. I guided our room through the country. ‘Where would you like to go?’ I asked.
You didn’t reply. You only smiled.
I said, ‘We’ll do that then.’
When we were there you cried. I kissed your wet eyes and said, ‘Let’s go for a swim.’ We took off our clothes and didn’t know whether to run or whether it was a moment we should make last. I think we decided to run. You can’t only wait. We ran and you kept on crying, even under water, and everything was so painfully beautiful for a few seconds, exactly as it should be. It was so close and everything we’d made big became small in the sweetest possible way, like something we could put our hands around, something we could easily keep. I was awakened. All those things I thought and said. And you wanted to say something, too.
23. You called me early in the morning. I heard your voice, so quiet that I pictured the sound as something tangible I could have stroked. I closed my eyes and you said, ‘I didn’t plan this beforehand.’
‘Isn’t it time for not everything to go as planned?’ I asked.
After that it seemed as though everything would take its own course. It just took its course.
You read a story about a tree and a boy and I heard your voice break like a twig. If there’s one truth that was it. As far as soulmates are concerned, I’m the opposite of my dad. At times I thought I’d found someone, we spoke the same language for a while, but in the end there was nothing left but goldfish and concrete, which sounds really nice but you should see how something like that turns out in the end.
I put a goldfish on the concrete next to the railway track. A small, orange, living fish on the hard grey ground. I love concrete. It’s got one clear defining feature and that is: concrete. I looked at the fish. I’d expected it to thrash about, that I’d have to 1. save it (i.e. put it back in the water), 2. put it out of its misery (i.e. a fast death as opposed to a slow battle). But the goldfish didn’t move. It lay there on the concrete and accepted its fate. I looked at it and I thought of you. I have seen life and I have seen death. I thought of water around the fish. I thought: water! But the fish was already too far gone.
24. So: no goldfish and concrete. Instead: waves, foxes in parking lots, birdsong, treetops, lava.
25. OK, even with the goldfish and concrete, we’d be able to manage it. Why not? We order sushi and say, ‘Forget the damn fire.’
26. You see, there is so much left when something is lost. You walk through the park. Let’s make it the Wilhelmina Park. That park is so old the trees have started to understand each other. We can walk and lie down on the grass like my dad did the day he arrived. We can laugh, cry, make love, dream, drink, smoke, exercise, reflect, feed the ducks, write words in diaries, take each other’s hands, share secrets, pick flowers, fall, get up, cheat on our partners, pull up blades of grass, pee in the bushes, hide things, lose money, get sick, spit on the ground, play guitar, stamp, dance. We can have been there.
We will truly sense that everything that was there, will always be there. I will reveal my belief to you: it is infinite. An infinite moment of recognition. I have recognized it (you). I get up, pull up some grass if necessary, brush the dirt from my trousers and take your hand. (I’m really not going to add that it’s such a soft hand; that the hand too is sweeter than it appears.)
I run my fingers across your knuckles.
‘What are you thinking about?’ I ask.
I don’t know everything. But we both know the same things.
27. I don’t leave you behind. We raise the flag. When we’re done, we send postcards. Greetings from Tilburg on Sea.
28.
– Wait. You still have to introduce yourself to me. That’s what you said, at the beginning.
– It’s too late for that now.
– Who are you then?
– It’s me.
– Is it really you?
– If you believe it is.
– Don’t leave then. Never leave.
– Of course I’m not going to leave. No one is saying ‘Bye’ inside my head.
– Alright.
– Alright?
– Yeah. Hi, then.
– Hi!
Now that we’re here anyway, what shall we say? Maybe this: if you ask astronauts why they want to go into space, you expect a long, complicated answer, but usually they just say, ‘Because it’s possible.’
We do stuff because it’s possible.
If you ask me why I want to drive around with you and stop the car in an empty meadow to look at the moon, I’ll say, ‘Because we’re alive.’ We ended up here because we once got into a little blue car.
So here we are. We look through the windshield. I’ve turned off the engine. We don’t know what will happen but we’re here, we exist, we move.
(No curtains)
29. No rules.
(Alright, one rule: no even numbers. Infinite, infinite.)
But you can save your sorries because Alec Baldwin is NOT hearing that noise…And other literary news from around the web
Your nightmare, circa 1991.
Well, it’s been a quiet day in the book world…Wait, no it hasn’t.
Stephen King Acknowledges Damage to Clowning Industry
Bravely taking to Twitter, Stephen King has taken the first step in a reconciliation with his longtime foe — clowns. The famed horror writer acknowledged that his murderous clown — Pennywise, from the novel It — has caused the goofball industry significant damage over the years. And while King stopped short of taking full responsibility, “sorry” is a start.
The clowns are pissed at me. Sorry, most are great. BUT…kids have always been scared of clowns. Don't kill the messengers for the message.
However, with the trailer for the new film adaptation of It reaching nearly 200,000,000 views within a day of release, it seems likely that the problem may very well continue, or even worsen. Clowning industry veteran reportedly called the situation “very bad.” Not pie-in-the-face bad, but definitely worse than whoopie-cushions. [The Huffington Post/Katherine Brooks]
Indonesian X-Men Illustrator Faces Religious Backlash
Marvel and artist Ardian Syaf are facing criticism this week over illustrations that were inclucded in the most recent X-Men: Gold release. Images inside the comic included “212” and “QS 5:51” in background detail. Those figures are reportedly a reference to Tjahaja Purnama, the first Christian mayor of Jakarta, who previously asked residents to disregard a verse from the Qu’ran, Al Maidah 5:51, that instructs Muslims not to be led by non-Muslims. (“212” refers to a protest against Purnama.) Taking to Facebook, Syaf apologized for his actions and wrote “my career is over now.” [The Guardian/Danuta Kean]
Alec Baldwin Complains About Sloppy Memoir Editing
The actor’s new memoir, Nevertheless, is apparently not up to his exacting standards. Baldwin lashed out at publisher HarperCollins, which he admonished for not doing “a proper and forensic edit of the material.” The former 30 Rock star will be updating his promotional Facebook page with corrections as he sees fit. Despire citing “SEVERAL typos and errors” as his primary gripe, Baldwin’s first update concerned an issue of phrasing, with the actor clarifying that his declaration of love for a variety of female co-stars was meant as an admiration of talent rather than an expression of romantic lust. Sounds like a perfectly legitimate beef. [The Guardian/Danuta Kean]
After a 2016 hiatus the Folio Prize has returned with revamped funding and a new wrinkle: now non-fiction writers are also in contention for the £20,000 award. Founded in 2011 as a rival to the Booker Prize, the Folio rewards literary writing that does not necessarily conform to standards of “readability” and commercial success. Check out the shortlist below:
— The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus) — The Return by Hisham Matar (Viking) — This Census-Taker by China Miéville (Picador) — The Sport of Kings by CE Morgan (4th Estate) — The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (Melville House) — Golden Hill by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber) — Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (Granta) — Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami (Pluto Press)
Could it be the end of ‘Peak TV’? What about Jon Snow?
Trouble is brewing in Hollywood
You know how we’re living in a golden era of “Peak TV,” and it seems like every day there’s an announcement in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter about how Talented Writer X and Visionary Showrunner Y have signed up with Netflix or Amazon to make the series-of-your-dreams and nothing could possibly interrupt this amazing stream of smart, ambitious entertainment?
Well…hold on to your Fire Stick because the writers may be striking.
THR is reporting that the Writers Guild of America has announced that if a new agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers isn’t reached by the time the current deal is up on May 1st, then on May 2nd the writers are going on strike. A new round of negotiations began yesterday and will continue through the end of the week. According to a letter the WGA sent out to media buyers yesterday, the writers are seeking a total of $178 million per year from studios across the industry. It’s the first time the Guild’s demands have been laid out in public, putting a little extra pressure on the opposite side of the negotiating table. I mean, $178 million seems like a fair price if it gets us two more (albeit abbreviated) seasons of Game of Thrones, right? Or how about Master of None? What about Sharp Objects? Is anyone considering just how many Neil Gaiman adaptations are in production right now? These are the hard questions we need to be asking.
In case you need a refresher for what all this means, remember the ‘07–’08 Writers Guild strike. A standoff will result in the halt of scripted TV shows, movies, late-night shows, and also Netflix, Amazon, and web-series. Everyone’s playing it relatively nonchalant so far, but this is an earth-shattering prospect, especially considering that all of us have gotten so used to (maybe even addicted to) enjoying the incredible, massive output of content over the last eight years! We’ve been spoiled, yes, and we would like it to continue. So let’s hope that the writers get the money they deserve and none of us has to worry about going a full calendar year without Jon Snow.
Rest assure — if there is a strike, EL will be ready to (1) hit the picket lines, and (2) provide you with enough summer reading to stave off those DTs.
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