The Paris Review's Blog

Fall Books: On Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues

The Centrale Montemartini. Photograph by Briner2306, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Cesare Pavese referred to his Dialoghi con Leucò (The Leucothea Dialogues) as “a conversation between divinity and humanity.” In the twenty-seven dialogues, written between 1945 and 1947, figures from ancient Greek mythology discuss things like desire, fate, language, memory, nature, and death. The speakers, many of whom have been extracted from the narratives in which they serve as tragic heroes or gods, exchange words in a space that might be nowhere or anywhere. They reflect on their own existences and dilemmas, debating, interrogating, or confiding in one another. What is it to be Orpheus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Sappho, Endymion, Hermes, or Ixion? What is it to be in love, to be cursed, to be lost, to lose one’s love, to remember, to smile? And what is it to be mortal, to be subject to death, or to be immortal, to lack a death of one’s own? (The author’s suicide, three years after the publication of the Dialogues, gives many of these questions an autobiographical resonance, and has made the book, which he was carrying at the time of his death, into a mythical object.)

The discussions in The Leucothea Dialogues are as wide-ranging as mythology itself—that “hothouse of symbols,” as Pavese writes in his introduction. In one dialogue, two nameless gods admire the symbolic capacity of human beings: “Those people knew too many things. With the simplest name, they could tell the story of a cloud, the forest, the fates. We barely know what they certainly saw. They had neither the time nor the inclination to get lost in dreams. They saw terrible, unbelievable things and weren’t at all shocked. They knew what it was.” Elsewhere, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, speaks to Hesiod of a similar capacity:

Haven’t you ever wondered why a given moment, just like so many other moments past, would grant you a flash of happiness, make you happy like a god? You were looking at the olive tree, the same olive tree on the same trail you’ve walked every day for years, and then one day your exasperation lifts, you caress that old trunk with your eyes, almost as if you were looking at a long-lost friend who utters the very word your heart’s been waiting for. Maybe another time it’s the glance of someone walking past. Or the rain that doesn’t let up for days. The shattering call of a bird. Or a cloud you’ve seen before. Time stops for a moment and the most ordinary thing seizes your heart as if there were no before or after. Haven’t you ever wondered why?

For Pavese, every mythological symbol calls up something of the vastness of human experience. Greek mythology is immediate, conventional, and familiar (at least to Europeans in the twentieth century), and it’s this “stirring up [of] the familiar” that produces the most disquieting effects. Pavese’s path, he writes, is to “stare fearlessly and steadily at the same object.” After a while, “that same object will seem like something we’ve never seen before.”

Archipelago Books’s publication of a translation by Minna Zallmann Proctor is an occasion to stare anew. Prior to this edition, the English text had been available in a 1965 translation by the classicists William Arrowsmith and D. S. Carne-Ross. The midcentury prose tends to be stiffer and sparser. Many of Proctor’s phrases, on the other hand, have an informality that’s closer to contemporary speech without being overly naturalistic, although at times they can feel overworked.

In her introduction, Proctor cites Pavese’s friend Italo Calvino, who wrote of the “living multiplicity” of the classic. The classic is “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,” by which Calvino wanted to connote the orality of ancient storytelling traditions and of dialogic form, where things are kept open and unsettled and abundant. Yet classics must, in an important and more challenging sense, be dead. Classics like the Dialogues are texts populated by statue-like beings, characters that might as well be made of white, smooth marble, with vacant eyes. They speak in a stilted, cryptic, wooden manner. This is precisely why brief instants of animation, in the hands of Pavese and Proctor, are miraculous. The characters in these dialogues are both in and out of time, both mobile and static. That dialectic and its uncanniness clearly fascinated Pavese, whose smiling gods are trapped within a continuous present. These gods watch as mortals, who have a relation to death and to the past that immortals do not, and who have encounters and make meanings, however fleeting and intimate. Without these there would be no living, no history, no beauty. “Everything they touch becomes time,” says Demeter. “It becomes an action. Waiting and hoping. For them, even dying is something.” Myth is as untimely as ever.

 

Alec Mapes-Frances is a writer and designer.

Fall Books: On Chris Kraus’s The Four Spent the Day Together

Chris Kraus, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Chris Kraus is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Chris Kraus is also the author of The Four Spent the Day Together, a new novel in which the main character, Catt Greene, is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Catt jokes that I Love Dick is “the one with the cover everyone posed with and tweeted.” Catt suspects at least a few of the people who pose with her book haven’t actually read it, but they like what owning the book implies: that they, too, love dick. It makes no difference that the novel is not exactly about loving dick, but about loving Dick, a particular man, not a sex organ.

Kraus is interested in words that mislead, in facts that point in various directions (the aliens in Aliens of Anorexia aren’t extraterrestrial but inside of us, and there is a great deal of energy in Torpor). Based on title alone, Kraus’s latest novel might suggest an image of four friends enjoying a luncheon on the grass followed by a charming trip to Brighton Beach. But in fact the novel is a fast-paced mystery told in three interconnected parts that culminate in a subtle reflection on class, power, and the banality of our brute instincts.

Catt, the novel’s heroine, starts out as a hitchhiker and drug dabbler who, in the novel’s second act, buys a cottage in Minnesota’s bleak, meth-plagued Iron Range. By the third act, she’s obsessed with a stunning, senseless murder that took place nearby: three working-class teenagers kidnapped an acquaintance, hung out with him for a few hours, and then killed him.

The randomness of the act confounds Catt. She struggles to understand the teenagers’ motives, their lives prior. “What were Brittney and Misty, Micah, Brandon, and Evan really like? What were their jokes, who were their other friends? Whom did they envy, what were their dreams?” Kraus writes.

Catt interviews the locals. She reads through the teenagers’ texts (lots of “wyd” and “Where you at”). Still, she can “find no answers.” She is locked out of their innermost consciousnesses, left to put their internal worlds together based on the bits of information provided to her. The lack of causality haunts her, the unconvincing inferences she is forced to make frustrate her. The frustration echoes the reader’s experience of Catt herself—throughout the novel, we are provided only with the facts of Catt’s life and are left to infer the intensity of the emotions that correspond to them. The reader must usher in a lo her reactions towards her alcoholic husband; toward her developmentally impaired little sister; towards the myopic wrath of her Twitter (and real-life) detractors. The most dramatic Catt gets is in her description of herself as “shaking and super-alert” in response to Paul’s drunken anger. But even this intensity is quickly smothered by logistical information: “She was catching the plane up to Oakland early the next morning. In eight more days she’d start the long drive up to Balsam, where, god willing, she’d finish the Acker biography by the first week of September. And she had to finish it then because once the pilot dropped in late August she’d be too busy to work.”

While in many ways this is a novel about aspirations, class, and addiction, it is most of all a novel that considers the opacity of human nature. We are composed of plans and facts: accumulated data that, on paper, have an aching lack of causality. A dossier on each of us exists somewhere. And it can say everything about you, yet reveal nothing. Or it can simply mislead. Like a photo of you with a book you’ve never read.

 

Sophie Madeline Dess is a writer. Her story “Zalmanovs” appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of The Paris Review.

Fall Books: On Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds and The Ice Palace

Vesaas’s home in Telemark, Norway. National Library of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There are books that don’t leave you once you have finished reading them but remain with you, some for the rest of your life. To me Tarjei Vesaas’s two masterpieces, The Birds and The Ice Palace, are such books. This is not just because they are good—the world is full of good books—but also because they did something to me, changed something in me. I think of The Birds as a place, a place where something vital becomes visible, something that is always present but goes unnoticed, something that Vesaas’s novel, through its great attentiveness, allows to appear. The protagonist is named Mattis. He is mentally disabled and lives with his sister, unable to provide for himself. In social settings he is helpless, he senses other people’s wills and demands but is unable to satisfy them, he gets all tangled up inside. But when he is by himself, in the forest, for instance, or out on the lake below the house they live in, his being opens up, and the world he knows, the world of nature, flows through him; in his relation to it, he is free and unfettered. The linguistic sensibility that Vesaas evinces to accomplish this is unsurpassed. The same sensibility is found in The Ice Palace, which is about an encounter between two eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn. They are drawn to each other without knowing why, and their encounter—where everything that is at stake, everything that happens between them is wordless—takes place in an indefinite zone between sensations, emotions, and thoughts, a zone in the novel with its own animal alertness.

Seen from the outside, it is difficult to imagine a literature further from the center than these two books. The center of power, the center of money, the center of the entertainment industry. We are in the Norwegian countryside in the fifties, in the mind of a village idiot and in the mind of an eleven-year-old prepubescent girl. And the author himself, Tarjei Vesaas, came from a small, isolated inland village, surrounded by deep forests and high mountains, where he lived his entire life, and he wrote his books in Nynorsk, a language used by a mere half a million people. But when you open The Birds or The Ice Palace and begin to read, you are transported not to the periphery of the world but to its very midst. The circumstances of life in which the main characters, Mattis and Siss, find themselves, are far removed from the reader’s, but their being, their existential presence, is not. And this span of the reading experience is in a sense built into the books themselves, in their rhythm and overarching theme: the interplay between the familiar and the foreign, the near and the far, the graspable and the unfathomable. Vesaas himself called this the “Great Cycle.”

Throughout his entire body of work, so rich in life and the presence of all things, there flows an undercurrent of darkness, which when it surfaces can look like this, from the 1949 poem “The Serpent’s Way”:

And the snake glides across,
slowly polishes the rock
going about its tasks,
and the bird the void will swallow
sings

Tarjei Vesaas himself was a gentle, taciturn, modest, and mild-mannered man who rarely gave interviews, and when he did, he said practically nothing. He took up little space in public life, he turned down a lifelong honorary salary from the Norwegian state, he declined the offer to live in Norway’s honorary residence for artists (where the author Jon Fosse currently resides), and he refused to accept the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Saint Olav, on the grounds that “it is not in keeping with my nature.” He was the eldest of three brothers and by tradition should have taken over the family farm, as the eldest son had done for ten generations, but he relinquished his inheritance, he wanted to become a writer.

He made his literary debut in 1923 and thenceforth published roughly one book per year until 1968. All in all he wrote twenty-three novels, four short story collections, six volumes of poetry, and eleven plays.

The farm he renounced was called Vesås, and it is still there, six hundred meters above sea level, lying by itself with no other houses in sight, only a lake far below, and the majestic mountains on the other side. But although the farm buildings are still standing and the surroundings are much as they were in 1897, the world that Vesaas was born into was radically different from ours—all labor was manual, trees were felled by hand with axes, lumber was hauled out of the forest on sleds, the fields were ploughed with horses, the meadows mowed with scythes. All of the books Vesaas wrote take place in this landscape, wrought out of experiences that were made there. Not that the external world was absent, it seeped in; one of his earliest childhood memories was of hearing news from the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, and about the First World War, which broke out when he was seventeen, he was later to write: “It burned into you so that you could never again be rid of it. In those first months there seemed to be a tremor beneath your feet—no matter that it was happening far away.” In the twenties and thirties he made several long journeys in Europe, and among his experiences there he singled out the plays he had seen, in particular Artaud’s absurd drama, and the rise of Nazism in Germany, which he witnessed with dread. In literary terms it took a long time for these impulses to manifest in his writing. His early books were heavily traditional, neo-Romantic peasant novels. Not until 1940 was there a turning point in his work, with the utterly luminous novel The Seed, which plays out on an island over the course of a day and a night, filled with disturbing violence and mass hysteria, clearly an allegory of the events then unfolding in Europe. It was followed by several symbol-laden modernist novels, Tårnet (The tower), Brannen (The fire), and Signalet (The signal), in the last of which Beckett can be glimpsed in the background.

The Birds was published in 1957, when Vesaas was sixty, and The Ice Palace followed in 1963. These novels are the high point not merely of Tarjei Vesaas’s oeuvre, but also of twentieth-century Norwegian literature as a whole. Had they been written in English, there is no doubt in my mind that they would have been part of the Anglo-American canon, right up there next to the novels of Virginia Woolf, for example, with which they have much in common, in the sense that both represent an answer to the same question: how to wrest literary expression out of the grip of the narrative, how to make it pass beneath the arch of the epic, the arch of history, and get to where human beings really live, think and act, in other words, to the moment, where reality is not a given but something that comes into being? Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are two of Woolf’s attempts to answer that question, while The Birds and The Ice Palace are two of Vesaas’s.

The Birds and The Ice Palace remained with me after I had read them, I wrote at the outset. They did something to me, I went on, they changed something in me.

What was it? What is it about these two novels that made me write that?

To recall one’s experience of a book is a bit like remembering pain—we are able to describe what happened and what it was like, but without the feeling that filled us then, and since the feeling is the pain, what we are talking about is merely the husk, what gets left behind in our memory. The sign for pain, not pain itself. From the moment I sit down, open The Birds, and read the first sentences again, it no longer matters what I already know about the novel. For when you get to a place, the essential thing is not what you know about it. The essential thing is that you are there. On a grassy hillside on a sunny day in May, who tries to understand the leaves of the birch rustling in the wind, the long grooves in the water traveling along the windblown blue fjord below? Now literature is not nature, of course, but when it is good literature, it has a presence of its own, its own atmosphere, its own timbre, and, I increasingly believe, this presence is what really matters. Not whatever meaning it may or may not produce.

To this one might object: What is the value of presence? It is a good question, but no better than the counterquestion: What is the value of a meaning?

To mean something is to take control of it. It is an active act. To be with something and allow oneself to be filled by it requires the opposite, it involves relinquishing control and is passive. The difference between meaning something and being with something is the difference between taking up space and giving space. There is no doubt that the former is given precedence in our culture, and that remaining passive, not acting, has low status.

This difference is essential in The Birds. The protagonist Mattis, ridiculed and dysfunctional in the company of others, is in a whole other space when he is out in the forest, it is as if his thoughts take one step back in his mind, the thoughts that otherwise shut other things out. Here they are given room, and he is so finely tuned to his surroundings that he is afraid to take up space, merely being there might be enough to frighten the bird he is watching and cause something to break, he thinks. Something vital. What might that be? The bond he has with the bird, perhaps, so fragile that the slightest thing is enough to break it. His very sense of belonging.

Powerful, conflicting forces come together in Mattis, in a fierce ambivalence, in particular in the relation between man and nature. While Mattis longs to be a part of the social world and its language, the novel yearns for nature and the wordless. While Mattis searches for an act that will gain him acceptance into the community, the novel seeks nonaction and the form of being that emerges from it.

All of this comes together in the novel’s key scene: one evening a woodcock flies over the house. Mattis sees it as a sign, brimming with meaning. And he thinks triumphantly that it will give him the status he lacks. But no one else sees any significance in it, no one understands what he is talking about. While Mattis identifies with the bird in the belief that it will help him be admitted into human society, the novel identifies Mattis with the birds as the nonhuman—his eyes are shy as birds, and when he calls his own name towards the end of the novel, his voice is that of a bird.

The Ice Palace is a very different novel, but there too, the relation between the human and the natural world is central, in a world where the boundary between the one seeing and that which is being seen is not fixed but in constant flux. This is how it begins:

A young, white forehead boring through the darkness. An eleven-year-old girl. Siss.

It was really only afternoon, but already dark. A hard frost in late autumn. Stars, but no moon, and no snow to give a glimmer of light—so the darkness was thick, in spite of the stars. On each side was the forest, deathly still, with everything that might be alive and shivering in there at that moment.

There is something out there. Siss is about to discover something within her, a sudden warmth, a sudden joy, a sudden fellowship, but the thing that is out there, cold and still and beautiful, does not vanish, it remains there throughout the novel. When I read it, it is difficult not to think of the image in the poem from 1949: “and the bird the void will swallow / sings.” For there is a consuming hunger in this novel, on the one hand for warmth and life, on the other for darkness and death. The central image, the ice palace, is just a frozen waterfall, but in the minds of those who see it, it becomes something other and more. “They bring out what sorrows they may have and transfer them to this midnight play of light and suspicion of death,” it says in one passage. And in another: “They recognize it so well that they tremble. It is unsafe, but they wish to do it, they have to take part in it.”

The danger that threatens in both of these novels is a life outside the community. Loneliness is a dangerous emotion, because it doesn’t come alone but is always accompanied by another, namely meaninglessness, since all meaning derives from others, never from yourself. Why meaninglessness is dangerous is obvious to everyone. If life has no meaning one may as well end it, and if the pain is great enough, that unimposing “may as well” can be replaced by “must” and “shall.”

Vesaas knew loneliness well, the years of his youth were painful, and both Mattis and Siss have much of him within them. He wrote one final masterpiece after The Ice Palace, the autobiographical, genre-fluid The Boat in the Evening, which came out in 1968. And then a poetry collection penned by him was published only a few months after he died in 1970, titled Liv ved straumen (Life by the stream). In one of its poems he describes the approach of death, in a warm, serene and limpid image as far removed from the frozen waterfall in the ice-cold, dark forest as it is possible to get. We are on the stoop outside the house on a summer afternoon:

From the Stoop

The shadows drift down the meadow
like cool, calm friends
after a scorching day.

Our mind is a silent
realm of shadows.
And the shadows drift down
with their friendly riddles
and their dim blooming.

The first shadow-tips
reach our
feet.

We look up calmly:
Are you there already,
my dark flower.

 

 

From the introduction to Tarjei Vesaas’s   The Birds , to be published by Pushkin Press Classics in October.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest novel, The School of Night, will be published by Penguin Press in January 2026.

Diary, 1978

Photograph courtesy of Celia Paul.

This diary entry was written on November 15, 1978, just after my nineteenth birthday, before Lucian Freud took me to meet Frank Auerbach for the first time.

And the nervous head-jerks and twists of a wild bird. He receives you nervously, tentatively at first and then lunges at you, kissing you as though he would drown you, then as suddenly withdraws and with a serious, abstracted expression, moves towards the hall.

That night, he said that he was just about to have a bath when I arrived so would I mind waiting. I sat down on the floor in the hall, beside one of Rodin’s great Balzac statues, proud and potbellied, and listened to the gentle lapping of the water, my heart hammering in trepidation at the thought of the encounter with Auerbach. Lucian wanders through the hall, from bathroom to bedroom and back again with a purple towel tied around his waist, casting me a smile to stir my roots with such an endearing nervous head contortion. I continued to sit for a while, trying to convince myself that the silence is peaceful rather than embarrassing. He joins me now, fully clothed, and we’re off, to meet Auerbach. As Lucian arrives, he rests one hand on my knee—this fills me with such warm pleasure. All the traffic lights are green for us. We arrive at Auerbach’s house. Lucian gets out and goes through the gate and follows the sign “to the studios” down a flight of steps and closes the door. The house is Victorian and somehow castle-like — perhaps the full moon lent an atmosphere. It was between more Victorian …

 

Celia Paul is a visual artist. Her prints Rose 1 and Rose 2 for the Paris Review Print Series are available for purchase.

Indian Names

Ed Archie NoiseCat, Coyote Survives the Night. Courtesy of Julian Brave NoiseCat.

The night watchman who found my newborn father in the dumpster said his cries for life sounded like a cat. But that was pure, if darkly ironic, coincidence. Because our last name, NoiseCat, originally had nothing to do with noises or cats.

Instead, “Noiscat,” as it was once written, is a missionary’s bastardization of our ancestral name, Newísket. My family was colonized so hard we don’t remember what Newísket means. What I do know is that the name belonged to my great-grandmother Alice Noiscat from the village of Canoe Creek on the Fraser River. Listening to family and elders, I figure Alice was either a daughter, granddaughter, orphan, or slave of Copper Johnny Noiscat. Copper Johnny must’ve been both clever and industrious. During the Gold Rush and subsequent settlement of the colony and then province of British Columbia, he laid claim to a meadow that still bears his name. Today, Copper Johnny Meadow Indian Reserve No. 8 is part of the reserve lands of the remote Stswecem’c/Xget’tem (Canoe Creek/Dog Creek) First Nation. I’m not sure what Copper referred to. Maybe it referred to his red skin—a name stuck on him by semé7 (whites) who gave Indians names for amusement and convenience: “Oh yeah, this one’s ‘Indian Jim’ and that one’s ‘Copper Johnny.’ ” (In Secwepemctsín, the 7 denotes a glottal stop. The word kyé7e, “grandmother,” for example, is pronounced “kya-ah.”) Or maybe it referred to his wealth. In the Indigenous Northwest, copper is a prized trade good signifying that its owner has a wealth of food and culture to share. In a world where Indians had all our land taken from us, an Indian with land like Copper Johnny was rich. Copper Johnny Meadow may be the ancestral territory of the Newískets going back to some mythic progenitor whose deeds were marked and remembered on that land—through creation, transformation, and forces both natural and supernatural that make our world the way it is—all the way back to Coyote and whoever the first Newísket was. Or maybe, Copper Johnny is that first Newísket. He’s the oldest one we still remember today.

Based on conversations with my kyé7e, Alice’s daughter, the name Newísket could mean a couple of things—maybe “Long Day” or “Tall Timber Day.” But to see how that might be the case, it’s necessary to understand some of the history and peculiarities of Secwepemctsín and the Salish languages. Because like the meaning of my name, my ancestral tongues are fast slipping from the Land of the Living to that of the dead.

***

Salish languages are what linguists call agglutinative. Which means speakers make words by combining morphemes—linguistic units of meaning—into words and phrases. Fluent Salish speakers are, in this sense, constantly making words. The very act of speaking the language is an act of creation and transformation. For example, Secwepemctsín, the word for our language, combines our endonym Secwépemc with the suffix -tsín, which means “mouth” or “speech.” Secwépemc, in turn, combines cwep, meaning “spread out,” with -emc, the root morpheme for both land and people. According to the Dutch linguist Aert H. Kuipers, versions of this suffix are common to all Salish languages and can be traced back to the proto-Salish word tmícw.

Salish languages have been studied extensively by linguists because of their challenging phonology, which is likely evident in your attempts to sound out the Secwepemctsín words I’ve used here. In some Salish languages like Nuxalk, spoken in Bella Coola, British Columbia, there are entire words composed only of consonants. For example, the Nuxalk word clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts means “he had in his possession a bunchberry plant.”

The comparative study of Salish languages led the American linguist Morris Swadesh to develop a statistical approach to linguistic analysis called glottochronology. Glottochronology starts with a list of core vocabulary, usually a hundred common words, known as a Swadesh list in linguistic parlance. Across languages, these lists are compared to identify cognates. Languages with more cognates are more closely related. Languages with fewer cognates are more distantly related. When glottochronology is applied across multiple languages from a single language family like Salish, which has twenty-three distinct languages including Secwepemctsín, linguists can construct a proximate vocabulary of the ancestral tongue that was spoken before those languages diverged.

Salish languages are often grouped into two branches: Interior and Coastal, with Nuxalk and occasionally Tillamook from the Oregon Coast, sitting apart from these two. They have changed over time. Swadesh likened this process to radioactive decay and asserted that the date when languages split could be estimated using statistical analyses. Swadesh’s method suggested that all Salish-speaking peoples, whose homelands span parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia, spoke a common language until about 5,500 years ago, when Coastal and Interior Salish diverged. Subsequent studies by the anthropologist and linguist William Elmendorf pushed back the date of that divergence to 6,900 years ago.

Using a reconstructed list of words for plants and animals in proto-Salish, proto–Interior Salish and proto–Coast Salish, the linguist M. Dale Kinkade deduced that the homeland of proto-Salish must be coastal because proto-Interior Salish retains words for plant and shellfish species found only on the coast. (Interestingly, words for “horse clam” and “geoduck,” large shellfish with phallic-looking necks, became words for “snail” in Interior Salish languages. T’əmyéq means “geoduck” in Lummi, spoken in Bellingham, Washington. T’am’yó means “snail” in Flathead, spoken in Arlee, Montana.) By mapping words onto ranges for flora and fauna, Kinkade identified the lower Fraser River in present-day British Columbia and the area south as far as the Stillaguamish River in present-day Washington State as the likely Urheimat of Salish civilization and language.

Starting about five thousand years ago, Salish ancestors on the Fraser River built round winter homes into the earth that were called c7ístkten, kekuli, or pithouses. Salish pithouse builders spread their salmon-fishing culture up the Fraser River into the interior, where they encountered nomadic hunter-gatherers who left behind distinct, lightweight stone microblade tools befitting their mobile culture. For about a thousand years, the sedentary Salish coexisted and intermingled with these nomadic hunters. Then the two merged, creating the Interior Salish and giving rise to a distinct subfamily of languages. Coyote’s name—Sek’lep in Secwepemctsín—likely dates to this era and has cognates in all Interior Salish languages:

N’kyap in Ucwalmícwts (St’at’imc language)

Sn’kyap in Nlaka’pamuxcín (Thompson language)

Snk’lip in Nsyilxcn (Okanagan language)

Snclé in both Qlispe and Sélis (Kalispel and Montana Salish, respectively)

Coyote Stories relate ancient memories of geological, climatic, ecological, and cultural transformation. This antiquity was acted out in the telling. When our downriver neighbors the Nlaka’pamux performed their cycle of Coyote Stories, the trickster not only spoke in a high-pitched tone like a coyote, he also spoke Secwepemctsín, the language considered most akin to the ancient tongue of the trickster and the people of his day. I mostly use Secwepemctsín, the language I learned from my kyé7e and that she, in turn, spoke with her mother, Alice Noiscat. Because that’s the way our trickster ancestor and his descendants spoke.

As the root morpheme cwep, meaning “spread out,” from our endonym Secwépemc suggests, my ancestors spread north across the rivers and plateaus, fishing the Fraser and its tributaries like Canoe Creek, where my great-grandmother once lived, our tongues slowly transforming to fit these new geographies. In the winter, our ancestors built pithouse villages into and out of our tmícw, our living earth which is also animate, at places like Copper Johnny Meadow. In our oral histories, Coyote often sculpted himself and others into and from the land. Because the words for “human being” and “earth” share the same root, when we name people or place in our language, we are sculpting ourselves, our nations, our villages, our rezzes and their names into and from the land—like Coyote and the pithouse builders.

And like the trickster, speaking our language can also be an act of play. Aert Kuipers worked with May Dixon, an elder from Tsq’escen (Canim Lake), and other fluent speakers to codify a Secwepemctsín curriculum in the seventies. May and her friends decided to give Aert’s people, the Dutch, a Secwépemc name: Sxetsxts’icén̓ (Wooden Feet), a joking reference to their clogs. Kyé7e always laughs when she says that one.

***

Back to my name. Like all Salish words, Newísket can be broken into its constituent parts: newis, which may mean “tall timber,” and -ísket, meaning “the day of.” My best guess, again, is that Newísket means “Tall Timber Day” or “Long Day.” The former is intriguing because I come from people named after trees and tree parts. The son of Coyote is Yekw7úscn (Stump). My pé7e (grandfather) was given the Indian name S’Zik (Log Lying Down). My father is a carver. And the man who found him in the dumpster was, in our language, a Sxetsxts’icén̓—a wooden-footed person. But the latter, Long Day, seems to me more likely. And it feels even more significant. Because every year for the four years while I worked on the Coyote Story that is my book, I fasted four days and four nights with no food and no water in a ceremony that spans the longest days of the year. Because for my people, like for many other Indigenous peoples, the summer solstice is sacred.

In James Teit’s 1909 ethnographic text The Shuswap, I found reference to a warrior called Newísesken. Newísesken and his brother Aná’na brought a murderer, horse thief, and kidnapper to justice near the Fraser River—a tale that reminds me of my dad and his more than occasional and sometimes belligerent fists of justice. I don’t know if Newísesken is the same as Newísket, and if so, if he was my ancestor, my ancestor’s owner, or the ancestor of my ancestor’s owner. But there isn’t an Indian I know who wouldn’t want to be descended from a righteous warrior.

Or maybe he or she or they are all of that? Their identity transforming alongside our family and our relationship to land, language, and lineage. To our relationship with our ancestors like the enigmatic Coyote, who was constantly transforming and could not be defined as just one thing. I like to think of the meaning of Newísket as forgotten, plural and transitioning at the same time. The meaning of my name is shapeshifting, diverse, maybe even righteous. And possibly connected to wood, the summer solstice, or both.

Or maybe, my name really is dead. Maybe the ideology that condemned my father to an incinerator did its job, turning our millennia-old Salish language, world, and Weltanschauung to ash. Maybe we are extinct, and I am none of these things. Nobody, like Dad when he first showed up in New York, a printmaker fresh out of art school. Or Victor Joseph’s favorite Indian in Smoke Signals. Or Gary Farmer’s character in Dead Man: “He who talks loud but says nothing.”

But death is not permanent—at least not this kind of death. No, this cultural and linguistic death is, as the trickster told us, like sleep. Because the Land of the Dead is right there at the other end of that red road. Our ancestors speak this language and know these stories there. They have our names. And they could bring it all back, if only we could reach them.

***

I went out to Canoe Creek to see Alice Noiscat’s home with my kyé7e in 2013 when I was twenty. On the road, we saw an unusual black bear, its coat streaked with cinnamon and blond, run into the bush. “Sq̓wtews,” Kyé7e said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Kyé7e held up her thumb and pointer fingers like she was taking a half measurement of something. “That bear is sq̓wtews like you.” I chuckled uneasily because she wasn’t wrong.

At Copper Johnny Meadow, an old cabin no bigger than my kitchen stood beside a small shed on the edge of a wood. The cabin, little more than four walls without a roof, felt lonely. The meadow was tanning under the summer sun. Alice must have been a rugged woman to live on that land.

The settler society closing in on Copper Johnny Meadow was a cruel place for Indians. When Alice spoke her language—the one that connected her to family, ancestors, land, spirits, Coyote, Creator, and Creation—white people in their white towns laughed at her. Alice wanted no part of their world. She tried to prevent Kyé7e and the rest of her children from being taken to the Mission—which was a crime at the time. Of Alice’s eight children, one died as a little boy and seven were forced to attend Saint Joseph’s. Alice did not get to raise a single one.

My father is the oldest of Kyé7e’s nine children. She was not married to Pé7e when she got pregnant. She was a devout Catholic. He was a womanizing Coyote. So, she hid the pregnancy from him and, seemingly, most others. A child born out of wedlock could be taken away. And on many nights at the Mission, Indian babies were abused and discarded like trash.

The story of Dad’s birth and abandonment at St. Joseph’s has long been whispered but seldom spoken. When Dad was discovered and brought to the hospital in Williams Lake—the same hospital where Kyé7e worked as a nurse—his temperature had fallen to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. His soul had already started to drift down the red road to the Land of the Dead. His discovery and survival were, according to the night watchman who found him, an “act of God.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police opened an investigation. They threatened to examine every Native woman in the area. Kyé7e was apprehended. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in jail for abandoning her child. According to the Williams Lake Tribune, if Dad had died, the crime would have been murder.

The incident raised troubling questions in the surrounding community. A column in a subsequent issue of the Tribune examined “The Unfortunate Case of the Unwed Mother”:

This woman was definitely above average of her kind in intelligence, training and outward appearance, in fact was successful in obtaining a position in the local hospital—no mean feat in itself. It is no longer uncommon procedure for these unwed mothers to enter hospital for the birth of their first child. It seems passing strange, therefore, that a girl already somewhat attuned to its surroundings should choose to journey several miles, assume the risk and endure the anguish of delivering her first-born in dreary solitude when she could so easily have availed herself of the skills and care of her associates. What intangible force could possibly impel her on such a course? Needless to say some male person contributed to her fall from grace. Did he or some other person very familiar with routine procedure at the Indian Residential School instruct and persuade her in the course she pursued while assuring her all evidence would be completely destroyed without being discovered, thereby reducing to the absolute minimum the danger of being apprehended? The matter of intimidation cannot be totally ruled out.

These were not questions raised by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Native activists, or even investigative journalists. They were raised by A. J. Drinkell in a recurring column for the Williams Lake Tribune called the Cracker Barrel Forum. Whenever someone tells me the Mission’s troubling history was “hidden” and that they “had no idea,” I struggle to square those statements with the fact that a conservative small-town paper was asking damning questions about “intimidation”, “intangible force[s],” and “routine procedure at the Indian Residential School” in 1959.

The Indian residential schools were, in the words of one of their Canadian architects, designed to “get rid of the Indian problem.” I think, on some basic level, society knew what it was doing with Indians. It was stamping out all the Indian in us and throwing us away. And eventually, that’s what we started doing to ourselves. Kyé7e remains the only person ever punished for the infanticides perpetrated at Saint Joseph’s. And Dad is the only known survivor of the school’s incinerator.

After Dad was found by the night watchman, he was picked up from the hospital by his grandparents, Alice and Jacob, who raised him for much of the first seven years of his life on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve. He was the only child Alice had the chance to raise. And Alice was the first mother he knew.

***

Dad remembers Alice towing him out onto the Archie family trapline with their horse named Earl and a sled made from an old car hood. Together, they would check the traps, pulling frozen beaver and muskrat out of the water so she could sell the fur and feed the family. They didn’t have much. Hunger was common. But Alice was generous with her grandson. Dad remembers the time she found a fresh apple—a hard thing to come by on the rez, even today. She fed it piece by piece to her grandson, keeping not one bite for herself.

Dad remembers and still recites some of the little kid words Alice used with him. When they woke in the morning in their tiny, drafty cabin where the cold seeped under blankets as the fire dwindled overnight, she would take a rag to his face to wipe the cts’em̓llós (eye boogers) from his eyes. She’d hold his big head and mythologically proportioned Salish cheeks in her hands and say “Tsewínucw-k” (you survived the night). When she was ready to brave the cold and visit the outhouse down the way from their dry cabin, she’d exclaim, “Té7cwéll!” (pee-ew!). And when Dad was just learning to dress himself and had put the left shoe on the right foot, she would say “Stutyucen”—you put your shoes on the wrong feet.

When I was little, before Dad left for good, he would use many of those same words with me. I thought everyone said “Té7cwéll!” when they smelled a fart. So even though I never met Alice, my ears and voice can hear and play the music of her tongue. I think Dad holds onto those kid words because they carry memories of a monumental, life-affirming love. Or maybe I’m just projecting onto him what those words mean to me.

***

When Dad was seven, Alice headed into a blizzard to look for her husband Jacob, who was out drinking. She was caring for a little boy, my dad, who had narrowly escaped death twice already: once the day he was born at the Mission, and once when he caught tuberculosis from Jacob and was sent away to the Coqualeetza Indian Hospital, a segregated Indian-only tuberculosis sanatorium far to the south in Sardis, British Columbia. Alice needed Jacob to be healthy so he could provide for her, my father, and whoever else needed to be taken in, like her niece Marge, who stayed with Alice and Jacob for a time. I imagine she went out into that blizzard full of fear, love, and the determination that they all survive that night. Jacob was drinking himself to death. I don’t know what devils he needed to drown. But I do know that the drinking didn’t get him first.

Because the next morning, when Dad woke up, Marge was sitting at the end of his bed. “Kyé7e is dead,” Marge said. Dad was just old enough to understand what that meant.

***

Until he was of age, Dad lived house to house with whoever would take him. The moves were so many and frequent, he can’t remember most of them. There were logging camps. There was the house his siblings burnt to the ground trying to stay warm. There was the trapper’s cabin down the valley that smelled like pack rats. There was Uncle Percy’s place, far away in the provincial capital, Victoria. And there were those white families in Forest Grove, the nearest settlement west of the rez, who took Dad in when he was playing hockey with their sons.

It seems like almost everyone was abused or worse at the schools built to save little Indian souls from themselves. Back on the rez, those broken little boys and girls grew up to be the parents, uncles and aunts of my father’s generation. Life in some of the homes they created could be as dangerous and dystopic as life in the Indian residential schools. Because that’s all they knew and that’s how colonization works.

I’ll never forget how my barrel-chested father broke down, his whole body shaking, when my aunt unwittingly spoke the name of the uncle who raped him. We were a continent away from Canim Lake in New York City to celebrate my college graduation. Five decades had passed, but his body remembered.

And it’s not like life off the rez was safer. The way Dad tells it, recess at the town’s newly integrated school was a fight club. Dad was one of the school’s smartest. He learned to read at the tuberculosis sanatorium when he was four. But every day, his cousin Laird would push him to fight—often a white boy, usually bigger than Dad. Like Dad, Laird was a stray. Laird’s mother gave him away to another Canim Lake family at just six months old, because his biological father was white and long gone. Laird’s adoptive family was a cesspool of abuse. Laird told me his adoptive father raped his own children. Out of eleven kids, seven committed suicide. Laird turned into a relentless bully. Dad, the Garbage Can Kid, was a frequent target.  So, win or lose, Dad knew he would have to come back and fight another day.

When my father married my mother, he thought he was done fighting to survive. He wanted to leave behind old ways and lives. In a marriage, it turns out either party can legally change their name. So, Dad did some research. He called his Uncle Percy, his mother’s younger brother, who helped raise him. Percy knew the language and our ancestral names. He suggested Stikayetsun, my pé7eúy (great-grandfather) Jacob Archie’s Indian name. But to this day no one is sure whether the proper pronunciation is “Stikayetsun” or “Kikayetsun.” Then Percy suggested Alice’s last name. Mom says she can still picture the consternation on the face of the clerk at Boston City Hall. On April 23, 1991, Edwin James Archie became Edwin Archie NoiseCat.

***

In Minnesota in the early nineties, Dad received a call from a man named Tony, who said he had been the one who found Dad in the garbage. This must have been Antonius Cornelius Stoop, the night watchman who pulled Dad out of the incinerator and into the Land of the Living. But by now, Dad had put so much distance between himself and the circumstances into which he was born that he didn’t realize who this “Tony” was or what he was talking about. The Mission? The trash? Being found? Dad didn’t know the story of his own birth, and maybe he didn’t need or want to know. That was multiple lifetimes and names ago, after all.

Dad was a new man—a NoiseCat. And this Indian name has nothing to do with the fact that Dad’s infant scream for life sounded like a cat. No, that is just coincidence.

Or maybe, as Stoop said, it’s an act of God. A transformation wrought by Creator, Coyote, and the forces that make and unmake this world—that made and very nearly unmade the world that is our family. Ours was an ancestral name bastardized and thrown away until Stoop and the night came along and saved us from the precipice of oblivion, giving us new life and meaning.

After Tony hung up the phone, Dad never heard from him again. Stoop died in Kelowna, British Columbia, in 2005. He was seventy-seven years old and had no wife and no kids. Meaning that, to the best of my knowledge, the only child he ever helped bring into this world was my father.

 

This essay is adapted from We Survived the Night, which will be published on October 14 by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and Penguin Random House Canada, as well as by Profile Books in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth on October 16.

Julian Brave NoiseCat (Secwépemc/St’at’imc) is a writer, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker. His first film, Sugarcane, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Tour Diary, 2008

Photograph by Alexander Fleming. Courtesy of Natasha Stagg.

In 2008, I graduated from the University of Michigan and went on a North American tour as the merch girl for my boyfriend at the time, a drummer some fourteen years older than me in an indie band. I didn’t have a smartphone or laptop and perhaps couldn’t find the privacy to write in a notebook from the van, so I typed a “tour diary” in the days after we returned, on a platform that I had until recently assumed was deleted.

By 2008, the band had gone through several lineup changes since its start. The men—my boyfriend and the lead singer—were the only remaining original members. The women—a bassist and a second guitarist, also backup singers—had been hired to replace other women, whom I had already gotten to know and like. I mention this as context because my connection to a previous iteration may have been subtly felt. Either way, I’m sure my boyfriend had to defend the decision to take me along. Everyone else was older and treated the band as a job, because it was. I had been hired to sell T-shirts but treated the tour as a vacation from my day job (selling groceries).

I’ve changed the names of band members because I’m not in touch with any of them and can’t ask their permission to publish this. I’ve also obscured or deleted the names of other bands, because mostly I wrote about how bad they were and how, in one case, I broke their merch intentionally. Accidentally rediscovering these notes, I am mostly struck by my own immaturity, although perhaps I shouldn’t be. It’s clear to me now that I was trying to convince myself of some intolerable situation, something that was worse than (or larger than?) leaving college and entering so-called real life.

 

May 15, 2008

Subterranean – Chicago, Illinois

Wake up around 11 A.M. to Andy’s mother in his house [in Ann Arbor, Michigan].

Have breakfast nervously, making sure I have everything.

Ride in the back seat (because I’m told to) while Andy drops off his mother at a dumpster so she can dive in it.

Go back to Andy’s house.

Ben [the singer/guitarist], Carly [the second guitarist], and Daria [the bassist] arrive, having driven a rented van and trailer from the band’s practice space outside of Detroit.

They help us load our suitcases into the trailer, which already has Andy’s drums in it.

Ben drives us to Chicago.

Early show, 7:30 P.M., not many people because of a false advertisement, bad opening band (lead singer steals all our free PBR tallboys and chugs them) but good show from [the touring opener].

Meet Ernest, our tour manager, who flew in from El Paso, I think.

Pack up, check into the hotel (six of us in one room), and go across the street to a diner.

Eat, then go back to the hotel to watch TV and go to sleep.

 

May 16, 2008

High Noon Saloon – Madison, Wisconsin

Get up around 9 A.M. and get into the van.

Ernest drives us to Wisconsin. From here on out, he always drives.

Check into the hotel (just outside of Madison).

Walk around with Andy and find a restaurant.

Start to cry for no reason, then sit in the sun until I’m finished and okay.

Drive to the venue.

Meet Carly’s husband, who has driven over from Minneapolis, where they live, and some of their friends, who live in Madison.

Load in, then have cheese curds at the restaurant next door.

The opening band is okay, sort of full of themselves, like the last opening band.

All the riders have beers, wine, fruit, cranberry and orange juice, and usually chips and salsa. Or bagels and cream cheese. Or both and pita and hummus and vegetables with ranch dressing and tahini dipping sauce.

After we load out, we drive back to the hotel, all of us except for Carly, who stays with her husband at their friend’s place in town.

Andy and I get the big bed, Daria the foldout, and Ernest and Ben each get their own big beds. This will become the pattern.

 

May 17, 2008

The Waiting Room – Omaha, Nebraska

Wake up around 9 A.M. and pack up. Usually we get free coffee, sometimes Continental breakfasts.

Usually, Carly works out in the gym before we’re all awake.

This morning, Carly comes to the hotel from her friend’s house, angry that her husband passed out.

Drive to Omaha.

Usually, we stop a few times for gas, Taco Bell, and bathroom breaks.

Ernest has IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). That’s why no one minds that he and Ben get their own beds.

Eventually, we are always arranged like this: Ernest drives and talks to his “sweetheart” on his hands-free phone attachment while holding a tanker or Big Gulp of Diet Coke. Daria sits shotgun with her Game Boy and iPod. Ben gets the second bench, sprawled out with his hood up, headphones on, laptop playing a movie or Home Movies or Freaks and Geeks or The Office (after he watches everything, he will buy a PS2). Carly sleeps or reads, sometimes with her Discman, on the edge of the second bench. Andy and I get the back bench, the biggest but the bumpiest, he with a New Yorker or Bejeweled on his phone, me with a book or a Zoetrope: All-Story.

Omaha looks small and seedy. A lowrider with monster-truck wheels drives by.

We load in, then eat at a vegetarian place and go to the hotel.

We miss the opening band.

At the show, a fan freaks out and has to lie down because he danced too hard. A boy has a Bright Eyes shirt on, but everyone else looks like a hick. One man wears a Detroit Red Wings jacket.

I usually get drunk, but it doesn’t feel like it because I’m basically alone. Drink tickets are better than beers on the rider because I get Bloody Marys or martinis.

[The roadie] from [the touring opener] drinks with me, and we compete for the highest merch sales. I always win, even though their shirts look cooler.

I sell seven kinds of shirts, a sweatshirt, a belt buckle, and an EP. They sell two full-lengths, two compilations, two 7″s, a vinyl split, and a shirt. We both give out free stickers.

 

May 18, 2008

After Omaha, which I don’t really remember (it was Andy’s birthday at midnight, so, shots), we wake up in the hotel and drive for almost a whole day.

The scenery suddenly becomes beautiful.

Once near Denver, we get three hotel rooms, but then [the touring opener] invites us to stay at [their singer]’s godfather’s summer house in Frisco, Colorado.

Andy, Carly, Daria, and I take the trailer off the van and leave Ernest and Ben in the suburbs.

We go up and up a mountain, stop in a convenience store full of cowboys for snacks and a huge kitten b-day card from me to Andy, then drive up and up again.

The house is tall and typical of one that no one lives in: framed photos of ski trips, books for beginning philosophy readers, a drawing of rustic wheelbarrows.

The boys are grilling corn and veggie burgers and drinking wine when we arrive.

Carly ends up dancing on a huge ottoman.

Andy, Daria, and I end up in the hot tub surrounded by snow.

 

May 19, 2008

The Falcon – Denver, Colorado

The next morning we go on separate walks, and I am soon out of breath because of the thin air.

In the van, I finish Reena Spaulings, by Bernadette Corporation, and one of my All-Storys.

We all check into a hotel farther into Denver, then drive to an Applebee’s or Perkin’s or something. Andy and I go across the street to get sushi.

We have an early sound check in Denver because it’s an all-ages show.

After loading in, we eat gourmet pizza from the restaurant and colorful corn chips from the rider.

Andy and I play Shaq Attaq pinball while the others bowl in the alley next to the venue.

The show is probably the best so far, and I sell the most merch yet.

A lot of the fans and the opening band had to go home early because their parents were there.

I guess we went back to the hotel, another of which I have no recollection of.

 

May 20, 2008

 Ernest drives us down through New Mexico for a whole day. The Southwest is much more spaced out than the Midwest.

Try to find a cute New Mexican diner in a tiny town, but some of us are scared. I almost get in a fight with Andy when he says that the reason I’m not scared is because I’m from a place like this, meaning Tucson.

“No, and anyway, so?”

“But you’re not like these people.”

“Yes, I am. I am these people. Don’t be scared.”

We eat at Denny’s, even after Ernest says that the last couple times he ate there, he found himself projectile vomiting later.

All the hotels look too seedy, so we drive to Deming and sleep in a Comfort Inn or something there.

 

May 21, 2008

Hotel Congress – Tucson, Arizona

Drive into Arizona, into dust storms, tumbleweeds, less cows, and uglier mountains. Daria seems impressed again by the drastic change in scenery; everyone else seems put off by the dullness of the air.

The sky is always big and blue, but I think it gets bigger and bluer, even more than it was in Denver, in Tucson.

All the exits are closed to get into the city, so I see it go past me. It’s a strange feeling, seeing the convention center, my elementary school, and “A” Mountain fly by. It’s a lot smaller than I’d remembered.

We park at the Hotel Arizona and unpack. It is the fanciest place we’ve been so far.

Daria goes down to sit by the pool.

I start crying for no reason.

I call my dad, and we meet up downtown. We walk around, then to his house, stopping at a little store where he buys chips and AriZona Iced Tea.

He gives me a stack of records he’d found in the dollar bin at Value Village and my school evaluations he got in the mail. We talk for a while, then get in his car.

He drops me off at the venue, where I help the band load in and set up merch.

My friend Alice arrives, and I introduce her to the band. She asks me, whispering, if Ben is a jerk.

We all sit down at the restaurant, but Ernest gets a call from his sweetheart and misses dinner.

I share my free meal with Alice: an appetizer, a salad (“with blue cheese AND ranch, please”), and a main course. She has a dirty well martini with extra olives. Andy and I each have a huge, perfect Bloody Mary.

Ben tries to order lemonade or a root beer float, but all they have is limeade or a Dr Pepper float. He has water.

I sit on the patio with Andy and Alice and drink a Blue Moon while the rest of the band go change at the hotel.

We go inside when the first band starts playing. I don’t like them.

Dad shows up with his new girlfriend and her daughter, who is my age and just graduated from the U of A with a creative writing degree. She has the same attitude about it as I do.

Alice buys me another Blue Moon.

The band plays, and we watch, until Andy and Ben tell me FROM THE STAGE to go sell merch.

It is the least amount of people and the least amount of merch sold so far.

After loading out, everyone else goes to the hotel, but Andy, Alice, a fan, and I go to the District [a bar my sister-in-law owns], where I get a free Bombay and tonic.

After last call, we go to the Grill [a twenty-four-hour diner], where we meet Alice’s boyfriend and my friend Miles in a big group.

I am so drunk, I don’t think I introduce myself to anyone.

Andy orders the meat loaf.

Alice gets a ride home.

We leave, and Andy becomes urgent. Miles says, “Sounds like you just had the meat loaf at the Grill.”

I lose Andy. He is sprinting in a direction, maybe that of the hotel.

He doesn’t answer his phone, and I get lost. I call again and again, but when he answers, he is angry and confused. He says he is being escorted to his room.

I finally get him to come find me, but we get in a fight because he is mad about getting caught being drunk in the lobby by a security guard.

We are so drunk. I get so angry that I kick a gate, which happens to be loud and metal and open, so it clangs against a brick wall. It sounds nice, and I kick it again and again. Andy sits down on the sidewalk and doesn’t want to talk to me. I kick a construction cone.

A policeman finds me and says, “You got my attention—give me your ID.”

We don’t get arrested, but he says if he knew the condition of the gate before I got to it, he’d be able to. Apparently, it’s fucked up, but neither of us know if that’s my fault.

The policeman says he wants to separate the two of us, but we explain we have to leave in the morning. I almost don’t say “Yes, we’ll stop fighting,” because I don’t want to. I say there is no reason I should be arrested. The policeman seems angry, calling the cone his cone, but he gets another call and leaves.

We apologize to each other and go back to the hotel, where I cry until I fall asleep.

 

May 22, 2008

The Casbah – San Diego, California

When we wake up, Andy and I are almost afraid to talk to each other, but he ends up apologizing more, profusely.

We all get in the van.

When we’re at a gas station and Andy and Ben are out of the van, Carly tells us the story of Andy going into the women’s restroom in the lobby of the Hotel Arizona the night before:

Apparently, the security guard followed him in and told him to get out, to which Andy replied, “You don’t want me to open this door.” So the guard left him alone for a while, but when he got out of the women’s room, the guard railed on him for being in there at all, and drunk, then escorted him to our hotel room, which was on the top floor. Carly let him into the room and vouched for him, but the guard still wasn’t happy. He said something like, “I’m doing my job, but I’M the asshole? I’m always the asshole! I used to be in a band! And by the way, your friend here has EXPLOSIVE diarrhea.” So, Andy was like, “Asshole.” And then the guard left.

Andy and Ben get back in the van, and we drive all the way to San Diego.

The mountains, yes, and the windmills. Big hills made of black things, and cows, and horses, and ponies (yes), alpacas and/or llamas.

A little town below a hill is home to a cherry picker lot. There are about fifty in all different colors, nestled in a valley, looking up at us and at the villa-like neighborhoods, hopeful like baby birds, or just there, like pins in a cushion.

Three openers tonight. It seems like people really like everything.

When we load out, guys from the first band help. They had stolen the best merch location, which I resent.

Carly and Daria try to get free sweatshirts from the Casbah owner.

Ben talks about how Carly drinks too much.

Ernest gets sick of waiting around and makes us all leave.

We go to the hotel to shower and sleep.

 

May 23, 2008

Safari Sams – Los Angeles, California

On the way to LA, things get pretty pretty.

We drive to the Vlaze.com studios first to drop off Andy and Ben so they can be interviewed.

Ben has been doing some phone interviews in the van during the past eight days, but this is the first one Andy does with him on this tour.

The rest of us go to our Hollywood hotel rooms, which border the pool and have framed records over each bed, in front of which we pose like the people on them (Carly and Daria are Barbra Streisand from both angles, and the three of us are three of Fleetwood Mac).

We get dressed (I put on some feather eyelashes I bought somewhere) and go to the venue.

During sound check, [the touring opener] and I look at pictures of them in LA Weekly.

After sound check, me’n the girls go across the parking lot to a dollar-and-up clothing store.

My friend Rachel comes to the venue, and we hug.

Andy and Ben are interviewed by someone else.

[The touring opener] are interviewed by the same people, outside. I sneak a cigarette.

Rachel and I eat edamame and salad, then I set up my merch, and we start drinking free beer from the upstairs party room and free sparkling water from the downstairs greenroom.

We do shots of whiskey.

[The singer] from [the touring opener] thinks my feather eyelashes are something hanging from my face and plucks them off. Then he says he feels “like a real asshole” in his thick accent.

Rachel and I sell more merch than I have before in any other city. Some ladies give us their drink tickets.

We get really drunk and don’t really watch the show, which is four bands, again.

The first band sucks. I pick up a tambourine from their merch table, break it into a million pieces, and leave it there.

Rachel says she has to go check on a cat and come back. She does.

After the show, [the touring opener] goes to Jumbo’s Clown Room for [their bassist’s] twenty-second birthday. Rachel doesn’t want to go without me, and I have to pack up the trailer.

We go to the 101 Coffee Shop, which is attached to the hotel where we’re staying.

I think I eat a sandwich and then feel sort of shitty and go back to the room to sleep.

 

May 24, 2008

In the morning, Carly, Daria, and I are picked up by [the band’s publicist], who drives us to MAC, and we all get our makeup done.

Carly’s is “glam” (red lipstick and false eyelashes), Daria’s is “vampy” (smoky eyes and lots of coverup), and [the publicist’s] is “natural” (the least natural-looking of any of us).

Mine is “eighties,” which means this girl covers my face in concealer, fakes cheekbones with brownish blush, makes shiny blue cat eyes, and lines them with semi-permanent teal. Then she gets mad that I’m not in the band. I guess I don’t blame her, getting the merch girl and having no way of knowing, seeing as any of us could be in the band—there aren’t any press pictures with Carly in them, and I think only one with Daria. So, I almost have to pay forty dollars to be afraid of my own reflection, but one of the other makeup girls says we can leave, and we do.

Carly and Daria will be sent packages of ten products in the mail.

I wonder if the makeup girls know that the band isn’t playing a show tonight and that either way, at 11 A.M., their makeup looks like shit.

We go to a restaurant, and [the publicist] buys us lunch.

Then she takes us on a little tour of LA, starting with the mall because she HAS to get this one kind of fake tanner and ending with Hollywood Forever, a graveyard.

I call Andy, and he says he’s just been in a graveyard and saw baby goslings and Johnny Ramone’s grave. I say I’ve probably seen the same goslings then, and he sends me a video he took of one drinking.

Back at the hotel, I call Rachel, who comes over and cuts Carly’s bangs.

I try to get some makeup off but can’t get it all.

Carly looks for her wedding ring, which had fallen off her finger the night before.

Rachel, Daria, and I go to In-N-Out.

We go to Rachel’s boyfriend’s house and drink a beer.

From there, we walk to Melrose, where we shop until it’s dark out. Daria buys a jumper, and I buy a sweater, jeans, and Miu Miu shoes from a thrift store.

Rachel drops us off at the hotel so she can go back home and eat crackers or toast or something.

Daria and I eat salads at the 101.

I call [the singer] of [the second opening band from the night before], but she doesn’t answer. I was supposed to call her in the morning.

We go back to the room, and Daria goes to bed.

Carly and two of her friends come in, and we all go back down to the 101 to have a few glasses of wine.

Then we go to some awful bar down the street and have martinis. We sit in a cage with hula-hoops behind us, and everyone keeps asking if we want to hula-hoop. “Yes,” we say.

Carly’s friends walk us back to the hotel and leave. Carly wants just one more glass.

She buys me some red wine, too, but I have drunk so much, I just can’t, so I don’t, and the waiter takes the full glass away.

Some guys sit down with us, and we talk about books. I like them. One is old, and one is young. I end up talking to the old one.

After they leave, Carly says, “I hate getting interrupted by guys hitting on you.” I didn’t think they were.

We go to bed, and Andy comes in and goes to bed, too.

If I can’t find a model wearing my Miu Miu shoes on Style.com, are they fake? They look a lot like the wedges from Fall 2000, but they have the coloring and shape of the brown ones and the peep-toe straps of the red ones, plus they’re suede. I’m new to owning designer things.

 

May 25, 2008

The Independent – San Francisco, California

I guess I’m just not going to go on like before about the rest of the tour after LA since I hardly remember details anymore anyway.

Some highlights:

Beauty Bar

The band is photographed for Skyscraper

 

May 27, 2008

Dante’s – Portland, Oregon  

Biggest bookstore in the country

A walk alone

 

May 30, 2008

Sugar Nightclub – Victoria, British Columbia

Ferry ride to and from British Columbia

Andy’s friend is fun

Walk down to the water

Sold out of most shirts

The most beautiful places

Red mountains, purple mountains, orange mountains

Green water, blue water, a lone horse watching us from a cliff

Green hills, mist thicker than clouds

 

May 31, 2008

Richard’s on Richards – Vancouver, British Columbia

Shopping

Alone time

Fans flashing Ben

Andy falling off the stage while drumming

Trouble with the law (no merch permit crossing back over the border into the U.S.)

 

June 3, 2008

The Bouquet – Boise, Idaho

Days on end driving

A date with Andy to a fancy Thai restaurant and a movie

A half pipe in use during the show

 

June 7, 2008

Varsity Theater – Minneapolis, Minnesota

Days on end driving

Shopping

Walking around the city with Carly’s husband

Co-op food

Hair done for free by Carly’s friends (“Doesn’t it feel good to get those roots back?”)

Seeing the band featured in Spin in the salon

Drinks and dinner at the Thai restaurant where Carly works [when she’s not on tour or in Michigan with the band]

Shows, parties, a biker bar

Dinner at a restaurant in a house where Bob Dylan lived (?)

Best venue, with leather and velvet couches and mirror balls

Beans the long-haired bulldog and a kitty at Carly’s house, where we stayed one night and then dropped her off there

 

June 8, 2008

Finally home to Andy’s house

 

Rest of June and some of July

Back to work at Village Corner in Ann Arbor

Big show, possibly filmed for a vampire movie sequel, in Detroit, where I get paid in cash for tour

See the new band of [a former band member] play in Toledo

Friend’s birthday party in Ferndale

New job copyediting through the mail

Go to Grand Rapids and play a show with [my own band, in which I’m the lead singer]

Meet [my high school best friend]’s puppy Doogie

Pick up stuff from Grandma’s empty house

Get offered a promotion at Village Corner

Write some lyrics

Clean out Andy’s house and garage for yard sale

I’ve been ungainly lately. The upstairs landing of the house I rent with roommates is very dark at night, but I can usually navigate, and two nights ago, after going up to use the bathroom, I fell down the stairs, hitting my head on the wall. People have asked me if I’ve been crying when I haven’t. After having a conversation about a fight I had earlier, I get in a fight with the person I am talking to about it. I cry so much when I’m in fights that my eyes and nose don’t get sore from the tissues anymore. I’m a college graduate, depressed, and delighted. I have a plan, sort of, for the next two years. It may sound stupid, but that’s what I like about it. If I say it aloud, it won’t come true. No, it does not include Europe like I thought it would.

Just now, I found this list of animals I saw from the car and around venues while on tour:

Horses, colts, foals, ponies, mules

Sheep, lambs, a mountain goat

Elk, deer, llamas/alpaca, dogs

Cows, calves, bulls

Rabbits, opossum, a dead rat exploded

Ducks, geese, goslings, babies, a cat

Safari Hunt video game

 

Natasha Stagg is the author of four books: Surveys, Sleeveless, Artless, and Grand Rapids. 

Fall Books: On Shamanism: The Timeless Religion

From a portfolio by Jacques Hérold, originally published in the Fall 1961 issue of The Paris Review.

In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Ethnographer,” a white American graduate student named Fred embeds himself into a Native American tribe. Eventually, he penetrates its “secret doctrine.” His advisor then summons him back to report on it:

He made his way to his professor’s office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it.

“Are you bound by your oath?” the professor asked.

“That’s not the reason,” Murdock replied. “I learned something out there that I can’t express.”

“The English language may not be able to communicate it,” the professor suggested.

“That’s not it, sir. Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now.”

Borges’s story plays with the view that Western and non-Western cultures are fundamentally untranslatable. Stepping into a non-Western belief system makes one fall off the edge of purportedly rational, secular knowledge.

This exchange between the professor and his rebellious student captures the ambivalent frisson that surrounded transcultural work in the thirties, when Borges supposedly met the man who inspired this story. The period’s anthropologists hoped that such cross-cultural metamorphoses could liberate them and their readers from Western social ills and malaises. Perhaps, Margaret Mead speculated, learning about the relative sexual freedom of Samoan women could heal American women’s sexual prudery. Marcel Mauss and his student Georges Bataille speculated that learning about alternative modes of exchange—gift-giving, the potlatch—could break the spell of early twentieth-century capitalism. However, this excitement came with a certain trepidation: as “The Ethnographer” suggests, adopting a different cultural perspective might put one irretrievably out of touch with one’s own.

A century later, anthropologists are once again deploying cultural comparisons to estrange their (predominantly Western) readers from staid cultural assumptions. These more recent modes of estrangement play in a different key: instead of emphasizing striking differences between so-called modern, secular cultures and “traditional,” non-Western practices, they highlight the surprising similarities between them. They hunt for ways in which even supposedly disenchanted societies are pervaded by forms of enchantment.

Hunting down such similitudes involves taking the anthropologist herself down a notch from her scholarly position. Our supposed cultural others are typically more skeptical than we assume, and we ourselves are more credulous than we dare admit. To understand the faith of others, the anthropologist must admit to her own will to believe. In Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, which came out recently, Manvir Singh puts himself on such a Borgesian cliff’s edge. While witnessing a shamanic initiation on an island in Indonesia, he finds himself on the brink of succumbing to the dancers’ rhythms:

The veranda felt like an orb of spirit-infused light suspended in thick darkness. And as seemingly everyone around me went into trance, I experienced the same pull. I inhaled deeply and felt my eyes turn upward under shut lids. I stood on a precipice, a pool of water beneath me. I only had to jump. I could let the sound and social environment and a deeper consciousness wash over me. I could let my body jerk and my head shake. I could give in to ecstasy.

Singh speaks both as a scholar and as a popularizer of the new comparative assessments of human religiosity toward which his field has recently moved. “Comparison seems to dissolve cultural hubris much more than it reinforces it,” he insists. Universalism has long been a taboo notion within his field because of its associations with Western-centric oversimplifications of non-Western thinking. But a different kind of universalism—one that levels the playing field between supposed moderns and non-moderns—can, Singh argues, powerfully provincialize Western beliefs in the exceptionality of the so-called secular state.

Shamanism defines religion as a yin-yang battle between its “shamanic” and “institutional” elements. The chaotic forces of individual prophecy, possession, and inspiration give rise to formal religious rituals and doctrines, which in turn constrict those same forces. Singh argues for an extreme broadening of what “shamanism” refers to. It encompasses not only Siberian and Pan-American Indigenous practices, whose similarities (and potentially shared Asian origins) have long been acknowledged, but also a broad and much more transcultural spectrum of phenomena including charisma, possession, mounting, glossolalia, dream journeying, catching the holy spirit, trance, and other things. These phenomena all involve inducing special states of consciousness in the “shaman,” their audience, or both, in order to communicate with the beyond: to speak with gods and ancestors, to see the future, or to discover one’s spirit animal.

Singh’s broadening of the conceptual sphere of what “shamanism” means is exciting. Hebrew prophets were shamans, he argues; so was Jesus. So were the ancestral early humans who etched drawings of hybrid human-animal beasts into caves secreted in the French countryside; so are the hedge fund managers of Wall Street and the New Age shamanistas of Burning Man. To tie these figures together is heady, and it’s food for thought. Singh himself sees it as a gesture that humiliates the West even as it elevates its supposed cultural others: “Jesus and Wall Street money managers seem to exemplify Western exceptionalism,” he argues; “that is, until considered alongside Kalahari trance healers and countless messianic prophets.”

Singh, alongside others in his field, calls his readers to lift a supposedly fundamental divide between “enlightened,” self-reflexive thinking and the magical thinking it claims to have left behind. This is an important paradigm shift, though Shamanism also exposes some of its weaknesses. Singh’s book ranges widely, but, dare I say, sloppily: A common denominator that expands too far rapidly runs the risk of losing its critical edge.

The shamans he encounters are all credible and all suspect; though he insists, in passing, that some shamans are more effective than others, he offers no clear criteria for how the sham shaman might be distinguished from the real thing. He provides no insight into what shamanism could—or should—mean to us, only a warning that we are bound, at some point, to be duped by it.

Which brings me back to Borges’s story. When Fred tells his advisor that science has become uninteresting to him, his advisor believes this to be a statement of cultural separatism. Yet, this turns out to not be the case:

The professor spoke coldly: “I will inform the committee of your decision. Are you planning to live among the Indians?”

“No,” Murdock answered. “I may not even go back to the prairie. What the men of the prairie taught me is good anywhere and for any circumstances.”

That was the essence of their conversation.

Fred married, divorced, and is now one of the librarians at Yale.

By placing Fred at Yale, a quintessentially Western institution, Borges suggests that his life and career might have proceeded along the same lines even if he had not enacted his dramatic cultural crossing. Did his time among an Indigenous tribe change him, or did it simply give him a slightly different lens on the same life path? It’s both a boon and a pitfall of Singh’s book that, at its broadest conceptual horizon, an Ivy League professor like himself, or like me, seem as shamanic as Siberian shamans.

 

Marta Figlerowicz is an associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.

Fall Books: On George Whitmore’s Nebraska

George Whitmore in his New York apartment, 1980. Photograph by James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

I’m going to make a man out of you yet. Parents have probably been making variations on this threat for as long as they’ve had to tolerate weird sons. All sons being weird, that adds up to many threats. But some sons are queer; what then? Two years before his death from AIDS in 1989, George Whitmore—a one-time member of the Violet Quill, the short-lived early-eighties gay-male writing group that also included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran—published his third and final novel, Nebraska, on the theme of anguished man-making. The long-out-of-print text asks what combination of forces and tactics might induce manhood in a fruity kid: isolation, kidnapping, alcoholism, neglect? Now the Song Cave has reissued the book, and, in addition to an inventory of mom-and-pop solutions for correcting aberrant masculinities, we’ve recovered a perfect expression of horniness: “There came a singing in my head.” Desire is an earworm.

Nebraska is a stubby gay bildungsroman that tracks an amputee named Craig Mullen, our narrator, from his bedridden preteens in fifties Flyoverlandia to his desperate twenties in SoCal. The novel is a stomach turner that plays sick tricks on the reader. Craig levels false accusations of sexual abuse against a closeted family member, and the results are catastrophic, as his relative undergoes a forced infantilization that runs parallel to Craig’s growing up. When Craig encounters the man again years later, genuine abuse rockets into the frame as a kind of outrageous punchline. The prospect of happiness for the gay characters of this era is rendered as a book-length joke. The novel twists its horrors into funny shapes, like balloon animals filled with poison gas.

I laughed, then, in a hysterical, disgusted, admiring way, at Whitmore’s audacity. Craig’s matter-of-fact recollections of post-amputation torment got me, too. “The County sent me back to the hospital to break my arm again,” Whitmore writes. “Parts of me were now yellow.” Elsewhere, less evil species of comedy warm the prose. When Craig’s sister learns of an affair, she declares, “And all this time I didn’t know!” He thinks, “Betty sounded like someone discovering a floorwax on TV.”

Whitmore’s twangy, understated style occasionally erupts into fevered lyricism: here is possibility, here are dreams, both of which, for Craig, involve violence, danger, and the specter of a mercurial father obsessed by a desire to fix his offspring. More often, the sentences lend to a kind of dramatic irony in which the narrator, his guard up, manifests a persona in language that knows less, that feels less, than Craig must. Early in the novel, Whitmore unloads a threat stranger and more pernicious than the age-old proclamations handed down from fathers to sons. “You are not ever going to be robbed of your precious childhood,” his mama says to him in the hospital, after he’s been “chawed up” by the car that costs him a leg. The only fate worse than becoming a man is getting stranded in adolescence.

 

Paul McAdory is a writer from Mississippi. He lives in Brooklyn. 

Fall Books: On Helen Garner’s The Season

Students playing football, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

At the first footy practice she attends with her grandson, Helen Garner doesn’t know how to act. She is surprised to hear herself greeting the coach, who is twenty, with “Hey, boss.” She has never paid more than “token attention” to Amby’s athletics, but she needs something to write about, and she wants to be near her youngest grandchild. So she keeps showing up to his training and games, paying attention, seeing what happens. She is open to being amazed, or even just interested. 

In her new nonfiction book, The Season, which came out in Australia last year and will be released in America this month, Garner, the low-key doyenne of Australian letters, whose body of work includes many novels, nonfiction books, diaries, and screenplays, writes with her signature immediacy, an elegant right-there-with-her-ness: “There are no seats. Wait, there’s one.” Soon, she starts to feel like part of the team, too: “We’ve won,” she reports, when they have. 

The book tracks the team over the course of seven months, as the boys brawl, lose, win, and physically grow. The “Under-16s,” whose names and nicknames include Angus, Silas, Meth, Seany, and Boof, are “poised trembling on the cusp of manhood,” Garner writes. She observes the way gathering in groups makes the boys seem more like men and how opposing teams of teenagers hurt each other. But she sees “up close, oh, their soft faces and special haircuts, their pimples, their nascent moustaches.” The specter of suburban violence, a persistent concern of Garner’s work, hangs over “our” team. Her own sweet Amby, who confides in her about girls and daps her up, also pantomimes throttling and punching with his swelling arms, admitting, “I feel like that all the time.” 

The Season is a wonderful book about sports that doesn’t try to make sports do too much work. Garner uses the world to elucidate footy, lavishing attention on the game and its players. The sport is likened to dance, to Wagner, Virgil, and Homer, to the Indonesian puppet tradition Wayang, and to “an ancient common language between strangers.” Players resemble “twisting supplicants in a Blake print” and “Milton’s mighty angels.” But Garner largely resists the impulse to extract sweeping insights about oneself and others from what happens on the field; she lets footy, and the boys, breathe. She takes it all in. 

Garner bears witness in a mode that is mischievous but sincere, fresh but almost wholly free of snark, illuminated by a roving interest in the random, illustrative, unsettling, and profound: a man on the 59 tram carries a hundred and twenty eggs. A hand, having punched someone, gets infected from the bacteria of the victim’s teeth. She appreciates a dad who is “deeply and benevolently sunk into the social fabric of the suburb,” and she heeds the “Zumba-mad, cricket-tragic psych nurse” who lives nearby. 

When Garner said she was writing a book about Australian football, friends assumed she was writing a polemic about sport and society. That’s not it at all, she demurred, modestly but firmly. She just wanted to write a “little life-hymn” about her grandson and his footy team, “a record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.” 

 

Lora Kelley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

At the Shakespeare Festival

Photograph by David Schurman Wallace.

 

A HEY, AND A HO, AND A HEY-NONNY-NO

The old people are going apeshit for the mariachis. My dad and I are sitting on a bench in the plaza at the bottom of the hill, killing time before the next play. We were hoping to do a little reading, but then, under the light of a half moon shaded by trees, the musicians appeared and started playing a promotion for the reopening of a nearby Mexican restaurant. A crowd appeared from thin air: the ranks of the silver-haired and still-fit, the perennial window-shoppers of this cultural oasis, who show more enthusiasm for this advertisement than for any of the Shakespeare plays we’ve been to so far. They take a lot of pictures on their phones of the brass-buttoned musicians, who put in their work. They try to clap along. A couple even dances for a song or two: a dip, a twirl, more applause. Romance never dies—its definition only degrades.

For several years when I was growing up, my family drove to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In Ashland, the main drag of olde-time, small-town storefronts fold into the surround of rolling evergreen hills; an actual babbling brook, complete with footbridge, runs through it. Ashland is a certain kind of cultural haven for those who mute their wealth tastefully under their shawls. With a complex of three theaters at its heart, it hosts a ninety-year-old institution dedicated to spreading the word of the Bard all summer long. As a child, I was always soothed sitting in the darkness, where everything felt perfectly in order. One scene stitched into the next, the actors hit their lines, and together we headed toward marriage or death.

It began as a nostalgia trip. My parents hadn’t been since before the pandemic, and for me it had been even longer. A combination of COVID and wildfires had threatened to bankrupt the festival, so we agreed it was time to both support and take stock. And my parents are getting older—who knows if we’ll ever do it again. On our drive, we see the dead skeletons of trees still left after the burning, with new greenery coming up in their shadows.

My dad, cheerful enough but fatigued, maybe, from the day’s first show, says that we can just park him anywhere, that he’s going to finish reading tomorrow’s play, August Wilson’s Jitney. I linger with him near the town’s fountain. Ashland is supposedly known for its famous Lithia water. I examine the sign: the natural spring source can poison you (“contains elevated levels of Barium—daily consumption is not recommended”). The town’s founders hoped the water’s alleged healing properties would create a tourist destination, but the water tasted awful and its mineral residue clogged the old pipes. You can still get some at the fountain in the square. I’d describe it as yeasty-tasting with an unpleasant smell. For subsequent tourists, Shakespeare would have to do. People come to be healed in a different way now, to enter the high church of Art, if only to stand around in the back pews for a few minutes.

The band plays on, and my dad tunes it out. We don’t speak. I feel a bit like a Thomas Bernhard character, wallowing in my low opinion of my fellow man. Nothing in particular against mariachis, but this scene is just bulk storage on these people’s devices, never to be looked at again. There’s a Ren Faire energy here now, but without the benefits of the Renaissance. A snatch of trumpet melody from the musicians, just playing their part, becomes another input into the scroll-in-progress. Who will miss all this when it’s gone?

 

FIRST DAY

One pleasure of Shakespeare is that every era projects itself into him. As the critic Harold Goddard wrote more than seventy-five years ago in The Meaning of Shakespeare (God, if we could name our books so confidently now …), “One by one all the philosophies have been discovered in Shakespeare’s works, and he has been charged—both as virtue and weakness—with having no philosophy. The lawyer believes he must have been a lawyer, the musician a musician, the Catholic a Catholic, the Protestant a Protestant.” In some sense it doesn’t matter what we say about Shakespeare—he gives us an occasion to talk about ourselves. What, then, is the meaning of Shakespeare in the Rogue Valley, a little liberal enclave in the forest?

We arrived in the evening, met my aunt, a therapist who also traveled up for the festivities, and had dinner (along with the best margarita in southern Oregon, some say). Everything in Ashland is encased in the amber of the upper-middlebrow: there’s one fancy hotel with an oddly Palm Springs–esque restaurant, several bistros with so-so food and elaborately-named beers (“Drink Me Potion” Fruited Sour), boutiques where men buy sun-shielding hats and women buy comfortable sandals, and places for people to “nourish themselves with artisan pastries and Direct Trade coffee,” as one bakeshop puts it. The Shakespeare fanfare isn’t too ostentatious around town; the knowing have been coming for years to stay at the Bard’s Inn and the Stratford. At the gift shop, my mom looks for a wacky T-shirt to buy my nephew and complains that the merchandise has become too standardized with the Festival’s logo, presumably an effort to build its Brand. Even if kitsch has been mostly ousted, you can still buy a I READ PAST MY BEDTIME throw pillow or a surplus prop from last year: “take a piece of LIZARD BOY set home with you / $5.00 each.”

The complex of three Shakespeare theaters, including a full reproduction of Shakespeare’s own Globe (a sign in faux-Gothic script proclaims it “America’s First Elizabethan Theatre”) is up a decently steep hill. The complex is efficiently run, with ticket-takers, impromptu music, and restaurants where tired patrons can be easily deposited after their journey in the dark. My dad’s leg is hurting him, so we decide to try out his wheelchair. Over the last few years, both of my parents’ ability to walk long distances has declined. Pushing my father in a wheelchair, even a temporary one, marks the time gone. (The infinitely kind ushers are ready with the kind of chitchat that alleviates some awkwardness—”So sporty that your wheelchair is red!”—and this both soothes and aggravates me.) Being temporary, the chair is also flimsy, not suited for an old public sidewalk, with little wheels that constantly risk lodging the chair in ruts or grooves and throwing my father to the ground. More than once I think I see him putting his head in his hands in what looks to me like a rare sign of emotion.

Filing into the matinee performance of Julius Caesar, what makes the biggest impression on me is the audience. They are old. At least two phones, full-volume ringtone, go off during every performance. As the play progresses, eyes close, postures slouch.

It’s a fairly boilerplate production, except it has an all-woman cast. Maybe because it’s a play so often taught in schools, there’s a temptation to stick to what people know. Brutus is mild, and Caesar has been dressed in white fatigues, a cape, and a red beret, some cross between Las Vegas magician and Hugo Chávez. In a play about empire and insurrection, images of contemporary politics are bound to figure. It’s one of the ways we speak our time into Shakespeare, draw his political imaginary into our own. It leads us back to the particular in the universal, even at the risk of an insipid flattening. (I have attended Shakespeare in the Park and seen the Stacey Abrams sign in a backdrop window, a flourish they repeated the following year when she wasn’t even running for office.) Trump as Caesar, sure. But Caesar is also a figure of illness; he has epilepsy, “the falling sickness.” His body is always betraying his immortal ambitions. Perhaps a little Joe Biden rattling around in there too? But no one goes there. Maybe the production’s limpness—my eyes glaze over during the choreographed fighting and dancing—is in the inability to find a coherent liberal narrative in a play that suggests assassination might be desirable.

Regional theater, man. You want it to continue to exist, but you don’t always want to be the one who has to sit through it. Part of the problem with reading Shakespeare is that performance rarely equals the text. If you see enough plays, you know the standard tactics that productions everywhere use to keep the audience “in it”: shouting as a substitute for passion, leaning heavily on Shakespeare’s bawdy puns (this year we’re spared the actors jerking off in pantomime), enlisting the audience to clap along. The text often gets tweaked to make sure we stay oriented, a bit like bowling with bumpers. The next day, when an actor shouts “Give me a break!” in reply to a fatuous speech, I’m fairly sure the line isn’t one of Shakespeare’s.

I’m disappointed most by the performance of Cassius, that slippery arch-plotter, another of the yellers. Her eyes wide, her teeth bared, she stands firmly planted to deliver her lines. The flip side of Shakespearean universality: there are so many characters who don’t let us understand why they do what they do. When Cassius tells the story of saving Caesar from drowning (“Help me, Cassius, or I sink!”), isn’t there a mysterious hurt there when he says, “Cassius is / A wretched creature and must bend his body / If Caesar carelessly but nod on him”? Caesar is obviously a father figure, striding over us like a Colossus. Set aside the Freudian thing for a moment. Cassius wants power, of course, but there’s more. There’s compassion inside Cassius’s story, the near-tenderness by which body raises body, and the speech shivers to life. It’s a complex feeling to recognize the frailty of your enemy. Even the strongest of us become helpless, often before we realize it. There’s an image from another epic inside Cassius’s speech: Anchises, the father of Aeneas, carried on the back of his son as they leave the burning ruins of Troy. We all swim in the waters of time, and we don’t know when our bodies or minds will give out. Suddenly, we find ourselves carried.

After one of the plays, we squeeze the wheelchair into an elevator with a man in a gray T-shirt. In the way people do when they want to banter in an elevator, he looks at us and says, “It’s like Groucho Marx said about the woman who told him she had ten children: ‘Lady, I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.’ ” I’m not exactly sure how this relates, but I think about it. I keep thinking about it for a while.

 

SECOND DAY

I spend most of the morning  reading As You Like It in the hotel breakfast area over a plate of powdered eggs. Nobody said I wasn’t a procrastinator. For the matinee, we see Fat Ham, a loose adaptation of Hamlet that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022. It takes place at a cookout—the family business is barbecue—where the would-be prince is visited by his father in a white sheet with eyeholes. Hamlet is queer, Ophelia is queer, Laertes is queer. Loose reimaginings of Shakespeare can work: Where would the nineties teen romcom be without them? It does surprise me when the lead bursts out into a full rendition of Radiohead’s loser anthem “Creep.” Bizarre, but weirdly effective. The actors sell everything as hard as they can.

At Caesar, an older man—silver-haired in a purple polo shirt, still vigorous—had been sitting behind us, discoursing to his two women companions. “When they talk about ‘woke,’ ” he said, “it means that they feel defensive. They feel bad about themselves, and then they want to take it out on other people.” Maybe, though when I watch these modern renditions, I feel the drip of self-satisfaction more than anything. As long as I’ve been going to see Shakespeare, he has been a harbor for the politically correct. This says something about liberal politics and its seizure of the canon, sure, but it also says something about the playwright’s essential generosity. Call it the “dyer’s hand,” that ability to remove a singular interpretation and let all the dueling voices echo and intertwine. Diversity is inside the plays from the beginning—anyone might inhabit the words and infuse them with their own voice. But in Fat Ham, a direct monologue about inherited intergenerational trauma lands with the thud of received wisdom. The strange friction of Shakespeare’s thinking about fathers and sons is reduced to a formula.

The play winds up with a happy ending (and a drag show to boot), as the characters ask us if we deserve better than tragedy. We’ve been doing this, too, as long as Shakespeare has been performed, perhaps most famously in a 1681 revision of King Lear by Nahum Tate: Cordelia marries Edgar, and everyone can feel good on the way home. I think there’s still something more subversive in Shakespeare’s protean originals. Isn’t Hamlet a little on the side of madness of revenge? Maybe “not to be?” is more than the rhetorical question that we take it for. I’m still waiting for the production that tells me that suicide is painless.

 

OUR ARDEN

It’s a nearly perfect mid-May evening when we head back up the hill to As You Like It, and I put my back into it. My mother is going with my aunt to a cabaret performance of the musical Waitress. Even at the Shakespeare festival, musicals tend to do a better job of filling the seats. In the theater, it’s another similarly aged audience, with the exception of three millennial jackals that sit behind me and talk through the entire performance. They laugh heartily at the jokes and stage-whisper about how the actor playing Duke Senior looks like Will Forte.

The court of Duke Frederick is minimal. All white benches and backdrop, the nobles and courtiers in white too. For me, there’s only one way to interpret this: the Apple Store. The corrupt court, then, is another boomer nightmare: What’s wrong with my phone? (And why can’t I stop looking at it?) When the play reaches the forest of Arden, a vast carpet rolls down the back wall of the theatre and across the stage floor: soft green shag, bright cartoon flowers. We’re in the hippie sixties, the summer of love, a common choice for productions of As You Like It, which has the most songs of any Shakespeare play (five, perfect for some Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young–style riffs) as well some appropriately one-with-nature rhetoric: “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

Who really knows why Duke Frederick usurps Duke Senior? Why is Olivier determined to put down his brother Orlando, our naïve “hero” so quickly upstaged by Rosalind, his female counterpart? Family antipathy is no more logical than family love—because both ultimately evade our understanding, we accept the comedy’s “unrealistic” twists. Jaques, the play’s melancholy dissenter, is dressed up as Leonard Cohen, in a black suit, black fedora, and sunglasses. Sixties-appropriate, I suppose, but misses the swirl of cynicism that Jaques injects into the would-be Utopia. Everyone knows the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, or at least the first lines. One might forget: the subject of the rest of the speech is about growing older, as Jaques outlines the seven acts of man’s life. I’ve heard it argued that the speech is really a bit of banal conventional wisdom. But it still ends with force:

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As the speech ends, Orlando bursts in, desperate for food after carrying his old servant Adam into the forest with him. In the play, Adam is the true father figure, true to his name, the first man. He has rescued Orlando from his family strife, and now Orlando repays him, making him his family. Apocryphally, this part was played by Shakespeare when As You Like It was originally performed. Adam, though he goes into twilight, is not childish. He lacks neither eyes nor taste, at least for now. After the play, I push my dad home, holding his weight as we move slowly downhill. We all go to bed early.

 

THIRD DAY

We catch August Wilson’s Jitney for the final matinee. It’s easier for audience and performers alike; it’s skillfully done, and done straight. It’s a bright, hot day, the start of summer, and we take a cab to an extremely early dinner at a farm-to-table restaurant that theatergoers love. My dad, who has finished his reading, expresses great admiration for it. My aunt asks which of the plays was my favorite. I offer some tempered criticisms of each, or they seem so to me, before adding a self-deprecatory caveat: “But I’m a snob, of course.” Everyone agrees, leaving me chagrined. My family, very reasonably, has enjoyed their time here. The quotable chestnuts of Caesar rang out, and Fat Ham thrilled with unexpected song and dance. Since when was it no longer enough to simply sit in the dark and let speech ebb and crest in the mind?

For the next few days, driving home and at my parents’ house, I have a series of dreams. That I’m back in school again, but that I can’t read. That I’m running down a long, dark corridor, with someone coming up behind me. I think back to Julius Caesar. It’s easy to forget how turbulent the play is, especially its first half. Omens and apparitions, strange fires in the sky. A lion walks through the Capitol. While we’re in Ashland, we’re all resting in a dream. A peaceful one, and peaceful perhaps because of its broken relationship to everything beyond these forested hills. The theater has a promise we can’t entirely reach; it bores us, it disappoints us, it can hardly compete with the rush of time. I could complain, but the actors were still there, delivering beautiful lines, upholding something even as it slips away. The darkness there still gathers something difficult, elusive.

During Caesar, I turned to see how my father was doing. I couldn’t tell if his head was slouched because he was looking at the iPad of captions that had been provided for him, or if he had dozed off. I turned towards the rest of the audience, and surely many were resting out there, silver-haired sleepers, soothed by iambic pentameter. I hoped they were having good dreams.

 

David Schurman Wallace is a writer and editor living in New York City.