The Paris Review's Blog, page 10

Time Travel

Old cherry orchard, 1994, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

What do we hold fast, what do we let go? The question, like a living being, hovers onstage in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. It hovers, whirls, mutters, speaks aloud, corrects itself, mutters, as Firs—an elderly butler who has faithfully served the Ranevskaya estate for so many years, his chest covered in medals from forgotten skirmishes—is left behind when everyone departs for the train station. In the beautiful rendition of the play now at St. Ann’s Warehouse, even Firs’s voice, with its House of Lords vowels, is a murmur of an annihilated past, gone now to the carapace of lost things.

Thwack! is the sound of the ax in the cherry orchard where Lyubov Ranevskaya sees her dead mother walking in the evening among the white blossoms, the trees like angels of heaven that the gods have not neglected. My grandmother loved the theater, and when my grandfather’s hearing began to fail, she began to take me with her. I was then probably seven. About the theater she used to say, “You could get me up in the middle of the night.” When she was young, she’d been an actress in the Yiddish Theatre—somewhere there is a photograph of her playing Ophelia at the Henry Street Settlement, with her hair down to her knees. She lived for Chekhov. How many productions of The Cherry Orchard, of The Seagull, did we see together? “Shh,” she would say. I wasn’t allowed to whisper, ever, after we took our seats. “Shh,” she said, “you’ll wake the actors from their dream.”

What is the story of The Cherry Orchard? Lyubov Ranevskaya returns to her family’s estate, which has within its precinct a famous cherry orchard. The estate is inhabited by characters who filter in and out: her brother, Gaev; her adopted daughter, Varya; the old servant, Firs; her drowned son’s tutor, Trofimov, who is a perpetual student, waving his rhetorical fists. The estate is heavily mortgaged, and there’s no money to pay it off; Lopakhin, a rich businessman whose father was a serf on the estate, offers to buy it and subdivide the land for holiday houses. The orchard is untended; there are no longer any serfs to turn the cherries into jam. A frenzy of regret and magical thinking ensues—the old question, wearing its fools cap: What do we let go?

A long time ago and far away, in the year when stood we stood six feet apart, washed milk cartons before putting them away, when death knocked hastily at the door, a friend who is a theater director, and his wife, a dramaturge, brought together a small ensemble of actors and nonactors to read the four major plays of Chekhov. Between the surreal first days of lockdown and that early summer, we read The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Our performances, such as they were, occurred about three weeks apart. On a series of evenings, each from our small lit square on a screen, we read the plays aloud. Afterward, we discussed them. Those evenings felt like small makeshift Quonset huts—structures assembled quickly with unskilled labor that provided shelter in desolate times. Chekhov is a writer of answers that lead to questions. The old riddle “Which weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks?” might have been his.

Last week at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in the Donmar Warehouse production of The Cherry Orchard, transferred from London, Nina Hoss as Lyubov Ranevskaya presided like a redwood tree in a bedizened orchard of saplings. The industrial space of St. Ann’s had been turned into a theater-in-the-round so intimate that the actors themselves had seats in the front row, to which they retired on the rare instances when they were not onstage, coming and going, singing, weeping, chatting, and throwing up their hands.

In this Cherry Orchard, the liveliest piece of furniture was a century-old bookcase; as Gaev tells Lyubov: “It hasn’t a soul of its own, but still, say what you will, it’s a fine bookcase!” And then, for Gaev pulls a member of the audience onstage to play the bookcase—at the performance I attended, a good-natured fellow of about fifty in a polo shirt and jeans—he addresses it directly:

My dear and honored case! I congratulate you on your existence, which has already for more than a hundred years been directed toward the bright ideals of good and justice!

The ideals of good and justice! At that the audience heaved a collective sigh. Later, Trofimov, the tutor, accosted Lopakhin with one of his many speeches: “We’re being held hostage by protofascist tech oligarchy while they amass obscene wealth, rob the rest of us blind, so they can fly off to Mars, leaving us on a dead planet!”

This line was updated, but not very much changed, from the gist of the original. The audience applauded for a full minute, with much stamping of feet. What time are we in? At a Chekhov play, it can be hard to tell. Next to me, my grandmother, dead forty years, her hair never gray, sits in her seat, leaning forward to catch every word. What is it you were saying? 

In this spectral performance of The Cherry Orchard, two things stood out. The first was Nina Hoss’s performance. I first saw Hoss in 2018, onstage at St. Ann’s in the remarkable Returning to Reims, based on Didier Eribon’s memoir of identity and class, which asks: How do we become who we are, not only in work and in love but at the voting booth? Hoss is the kind of preternaturally alive actress whose every lived emotion is evident in each gesture. Ranevskaya is often portrayed as a kind of Russian Blanche DuBois, overcome by life, clinging to a fantasy. Instead, Hoss plays her as a woman of substance, with foibles and regrets, who decries the demise of her beloved cherry orchard but will put it behind her and return to Paris to her impossible, unreliable lover, who sends her beseeching telegrams. Rather than collapsing in tears, she stands by her decision, wrong-headed as it may be. “For that,” I can hear my grandmother saying to Ranevskaya, “you’re going to bang your head against the wall?” But so it goes.

In another moment—one of those theatrical snares that’s like a soap bubble, and that you can shake your head over later, a little shy at being so moved—a homeless child, almost sleepwalking (the actor is Kagani Paul Moonlight X Byler Jackson), drifted onstage, like a blossom from the cherry orchard, singing, in a high-pitched treble, John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery”:

Just give me one thing
that I can hold on to.
To believe in this living
is just a hard way to go.

What do we hold on to? The question flaps its wings. Lubov gave the child her purse, the last of her money. “What?” her daughters protested. There was nothing left but the sound of that clear, high voice. “Don’t wake them,” I hear my grandmother saying. But all of it—the rainstorm outside the theater (the actors walk out into the street, beyond the theater, to catch the train to Paris), the bookcase, the little brooch that Varya wears in the shape of a bee, Trofimov’s bare feet—are engravings in a book of hours. It has been 120 years since the first performance of The Cherry Orchard, at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. A hundred years from now, what story will it tell audiences about what they hold fast?

One of the finest Chekhov productions I’ve seen was more than forty years ago: a student production of Three Sisters. A very young Peter Sellars lined stage right and left with narrow stands of trees. An equally young Alice Goodman, with whom he would go on to collaborate on the operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, played the old nurse, Anfisa. She wheeled a huge empty black pram with, as I remember it, spiderweb wheels, and said almost nothing. The plot folded into those silences, like an origami owl eating a mouse. Like all Chekhov plays, a blueprint marking the elevations of implacable yearning, about which the collegiate audience knew very little, at least not yet.

But an astonishing thing is that one does learn with age, although what one learns is not what one hoped to learn. Instead, one learns that there’s seldom a solution to the woes that plague us; rather, life changes in an instant, and then goes on, which may in the end be the thing that’s most startling. A lit match, a wind out of nowhere, and the house and the orchard blown to smithereens.

 

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent books are Inverno, a novel, and Next Day: New & Selected Poems. Her second novel, Estate, is forthcoming. She teaches at Yale University.

The Marriage Dividend

New York, November 9, 1965. Courtesy of AP Photo/Robert Goldberg.

Something has changed since Richard and I got married in December. I’m not sure what. Have you ever looked in the mirror and noticed you are able to cock one eyebrow higher than ever before? I’m happier. I didn’t imagine I would feel this way when I went downstairs to his studio and said, “I think we should get married.” He looked up from his book and said, “Okay.” Was he bemused, half smiling? I can’t remember.

It’s been three and a half months since we met with a judge in the courthouse in Hudson, where we live, and he pronounced us “married people.” Afterward, Richard and I had happy hour drinks on Warren Street with a friend. For the first few weeks, we imagined the marriage dividend was we wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves as much as before. This has proved untrue.

The thing we did was not twisted up with family and property. It’s more a tighter squeezing of the hands as we slip off the surface of the earth. The earth that appears, understandably, to be sloughing off the pesky Homo sapiens species overall. What I’m describing is a party when the power shuts down. The party is us getting married.

I remember such a party in 1965, during the huge power failure in New York City. I was nineteen, and going to Barnard College, and living with a roommate in a small apartment on Broadway and 107th Street. My boyfriend, Bruce, was more or less living with us, and also living in the building were Dave Bromberg and his girlfriend, whom I’ll call Trudy. I think that was actually her name.

Dave Bromberg was a singer and a songwriter, and he was friends with Dylan. Dave would go on to play guitar with Dylan often, and he’d have a huge career as a musician separately. He was lanky and goofy and friendly, and I think Bruce knew him from Columbia College, where Dave went before he dropped out to be an artist. This quality of Dave’s, the artist-making-his-way vibe, outside the institutions of higher education I was so excited to be a part of, this aspect of Dave cast a dangerous and seductive glow.

At nineteen, living in an apartment in New York City, everything is your first time. Your first rambling man. Your first close-up free-spirit artist. Your first spontaneous orgy.

Trudy was a little older than me, and I remember having dinner at their apartment. She prepared stuffed pork chops. I had never cooked pork chops. I didn’t know they could be stuffed. I can smell them, and the other savory and juicy food she served. Probably there were potatoes. In the game they were playing, Trudy definitely had the part of the Earth Mother girl opposite Dave’s boy in the world. He was heading somewhere with that almost-famous aura rising off him. She was bustling, and plump, and kindhearted—a door that said to me, “Do not enter.”

On November 9, 1965, when the power cut off in a massive Northeast blackout, Bruce had to walk to 107th Street from NYU on Eighth Street, where he was going to law school. In those days (and still, honestly) it wasn’t a big deal to walk five miles in the city, except the streets were dark, and there was a magical feeling of carnival reversal, misrule, and anything goes.

That night, we hung out with Trudy and Dave in their apartment. They had candles, and we sat around talking. Maybe Dave played and sang. Maybe Trudy sang harmony. What I remember is they had sex. Did Bruce and I have sex, too, in the same room? I think so. I think we would have thought it was rude to refrain or leave. During this period and in the many days to come before aids, this sort of thing happened. I didn’t smoke pot often or drink hardly at all, so I was someone awake enough to take notes, and the notes I took are what, right now, look like a memory.

When you are nineteen (and still, honestly) you are casting around for ways your life can go. The man-and-wife-like arrangement of Trudy and Dave wasn’t something I wanted, although, at the time, it seemed the only item on the shelves. It was like going to a store in Soviet Russia, where you had to buy the one thing in stock, let’s say a jar of preserved cherries available right after cherry-picking season. This idea of marriage, as the one jar you can buy in the supermarket of life, put me off marriage for seventy-eight years, and then suddenly—I think it was sudden—I didn’t give a fuck about how people saw me with regard to being married. My bigger concern was being seen as female and old. Not a category with a lot of room in it to grow.

A few months after the Northeast blackout of 1965, Bruce and I got married, in order to move into a larger apartment. The building required that my father cosign the lease, and my father required that I marry Bruce, and so I did, with the feeling of a suitcase on a conveyor belt at the airport. We lasted five years. It was the sixties. Five years was a miracle, like the Hanukkah lights lasting eight days. I got married at nineteen to put an end to marriage.

Getting married to Richard at seventy-eight feels, instead, like the start of something. No one likes endings. We only like beginnings. Richard and I met when I was sixty and he was fifty-six. Why are some people a plane you want to jump on? Because they are the ones leaving the airport?

Being married to Richard feels like the name of the pub in Lancashire owned by Richard’s grandparents. It was called the Help Me Through, short for the Help Me Through the World. Our getting married has made other people happy. A look comes over their faces that is made of angora fur. Angora is a kind of rabbit. I don’t often receive looks that are the fur of a rabbit. I try not to lift the lid on why our marriage makes people happy, in case I find a moldy old tea bag left in the pot.

One of the things that felt familiar to us in the other was that we’d both left home for good at seventeen. We weren’t runaways. We didn’t leave our families in anger, and we weren’t kicked out. It was just time to enter the world, we both felt, and see what would happen.

Richard lived in England and had to work. I had money from my parents to go to college and pay for an apartment. I also always worked some kind of job or made things to sell.

Growing up, no one had hovered over us. Where we had lived—both of us outside large cities for the most part—you went out to play the way a dog is let loose to run around and find its way home. You hooked up with kids on the streets or on the beach. You learned early to cultivate a secret life, and it made you creative. You got hurt jumping out of windows in houses under construction, or you walked miles through pastures of sheep and cows because you’d spent your bus fare sharing a sandwich with friends. No one cared. No one knew.

Richard was the favorite of the four children in his family. In the rest of the world, it would be impossible to find that much tenderness and acceptance. For me, the larger world was easier than home, I learned the first summer at sleepaway camp, when I was five. Strangers had no idea who I was and neither did I, because what you learn when you are set free that young is you are not one thing all the time. You’re plastic. You’re another person’s mirror.

Yesterday on Warren Street, Richard and I bumped into our friend Jake. If you are recognized on Warren Street, it answers many questions for the rest of the day. I said to Jake, “I love you.” I said, “Richard and I both love you.” Jake owns a shop and sees you in the way Godot would see you if he ever showed up. No one on Warren Street is waiting for Godot. If anything, we are waiting for Godot to leave. Jake said he had bottles of scented oil and he would give me some. It’s one of those offers  You have to weigh to yourself, if you are going to remind him. People can be more generous than they bargain for.

When Richard and I continued walking, he remarked that The Pitt, the doctor show we’ve been watching, is a morality tale, where we’re instructed about how to act in the face of death as well as life. It explained why it’s so much more fun to rewatch The Americans, where there is no possibility of moral certitude. At the end of the series, the FBI agent Stan allows Phillip and Elizabeth, who are spies and assassins, to escape back to Russia.

He likes them. He’s been their neighbor, and he’s felt affection for them grow, day by day and year by year. Phillip doesn’t believe in spying for Russia. Elizabeth is the ideologue, and Phillip will do anything to stay near her. They are married, he keeps explaining to her. After a while, growing near each other, trees don’t know which roots are theirs.

 

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Streaming Now column for LIBER: A Feminist Review, and her Substack is Everything Is Personal.

Out of Step with the Rest of the World: A Conversation with Zheng Zhi

All stills from The Hedgehog (2024). Photographs courtesy of Zheng Zhi.

The writer Zheng Zhi’s first novel, Floating, was published in China in 2007, when he was nineteen years old. Since then, he has published three more—a fifth will come out this year—as well as numerous volumes of short fiction, all while writing prolifically for film and television. His literary career has placed him at the vanguard of what is now known as the Dongbei renaissance, a group of writers hailing from the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Zheng’s native Liaoning, all of whose upbringings were marked by the recession that occurred there in the eighties and nineties. Given Zheng’s stature in his home country, it feels surprising that “The Hedgehog,” which appears in the Review’s new Spring issue, is his first work of fiction to be published in English. With help from the novelist Jeremy Tiang, who translated the story, we spoke to Zheng about the turns of fate and the funding issues that have, over the years, led him away from and back to serious writing, as well as about his childhood fear, which makes its way into the story, that his sanity would hold out for only so long.

—Owen Park

 

INTERVIEWER

“The Hedgehog” was first published anonymously with the title Xiānzhèng (Immortal syndrome), as part of a competition in the literary magazine Lǐ (Newriting). The story caused a bit of a stir among readers in the Chinese literary world as they struggled to guess the identity of its author. Up to that point, you’d been more successful in the realm of commercial fiction. What was it like to participate in this anonymous contest?

ZHENG ZHI

The entries were a mixture of open submissions and solicited manuscripts. One of the editors, Zhou Jianing, approached me to ask if I’d be interested, and of course I accepted the challenge, in part to force myself to try something new. Six months later, with the deadline fast approaching, Jianing checked in to see how I was doing—and as I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to do it, I ended up writing the whole story in the final three days. The word limit was twenty thousand characters, and my story was nineteen thousand. If not for this restriction, I’d probably have kept going and turned it into a novella or even a short novel. All the short-listed stories appeared in the magazine—I remember they were spread across three issues over three or four months—and also on the magazine’s WeChat page. Readers had the choice of buying the magazine or simply reading them online. As promised, the stories were credited only by a serial number—I was no. 11—and people were speculating about who each author might be. I was surprised by how many young writers got involved in these discussions, which became quite animated. The organizers did a good job keeping things confidential—or at least I didn’t know who any of the other authors were. The whole competition felt fair, and very exciting. I’d previously seen this sort of “anonymous” competition only in the world of variety shows, where singers wear masks and the audience has to guess who they are based on their voices. The way I see it, an author’s style is equivalent to a singer’s voice. Being identifiable is very important.

I still remember the award ceremony vividly. Generally, literary award ceremonies aren’t particularly thrilling. This one was different—in the final round, the three judges conferred in a separate room for two hours as their deliberations were broadcast to the live audience in the auditorium. I was seated in the audience, which was quite a weird experience. I hadn’t been nervous, but the atmosphere made me more and more anxious. And it was thrilling when they announced the results. I could say to myself, This short story is definitely the most brilliant one in the whole contest—no need to be modest at that point.

Onstage, receiving my prize, I was excited to say that I looked forward to everyone getting to know me all over again. For many years, I’d been writing all sorts of random things that you wouldn’t really call “literature,” just putting words on the page to earn money, but I had gained a little bit of fame through that. On that stage, though, I realized that the audience—and even the judges—had no idea who I was. Turns out I wasn’t as well known as I’d thought! That’s when it came home to me that the worlds of literary and commercial fiction are completely separate, so even though I’d already been writing for a decade, I was still considered a newcomer.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by “random things that you wouldn’t really call ‘literature’ “?

ZHENG

This is hard to describe to people outside of China. Around 2014, social media took off in China, especially Weibo, and online writing gradually changed young readers’ tastes. Many writers sidestepped traditional publishing to put out their own “little stories” or “bits and pieces” online. Unexpectedly, these became hugely popular. This writing was web-friendly in length and subject matter—short, fast-paced, mostly to do with romance, and full of online hipster slang. Quite a few people managed to become famous from this kind of writing and earn a fair amount of money. At the time, I was trying to write novels, but my books sold poorly and I wasn’t making enough to support myself. So I forced myself to chase this trend and began publishing random things online. I found this painful because none of it had anything to do with literature. Ironically, these posts got me a lot of attention and attracted producers who purchased the film rights, so I decided to become a screenwriter. In doing so, I realized that my random scribblings were more like film treatments than fiction—they were full of dramatic incidents and pacey narration and they had a strong visual element. They also had what we call “golden lines”—slogan-like bits of dialogue that the film studios loved. I wrote more of these and earned even more money. As soon as I no longer needed to worry about supporting myself, I reflected on what I was doing and understood that if I went on like this, I would end up destroying myself. I returned to proper writing, which is how I came to write “The Hedgehog.” And so the prodigal son returned.

INTERVIEWER

You also wrote a screenplay of “The Hedgehog,” which was made into a 2024 film of the same name. What made you decide to turn the story into a script?

ZHENG

Ten years ago, when I stumbled into screenwriting, every script I wrote was adapted from my short stories and other online scribblings. Later, I also adapted one of my novels into a sixteen-part web series. To this day, I’ve never written an original story for the screen. I don’t really determine whether a particular narrative becomes a short story or a screenplay. I’ve always been a fiction writer first, and the screenplays have grown out of my fiction.

Writing scripts is painful. Even though my scripts were adapted from my fiction, I have a lot of mixed feelings about the way writers don’t get the final say over their scripts. It’s a sad joke, a paradox of the movie business. I adapted “The Hedgehog” because the director Gu Changwei got in touch and told me that he liked the story a lot. He’s a well-known filmmaker, and I was very fond of his earlier work, so I decided to try collaborating with him. Rather than handing it over to another screenwriter, I thought I might as well work on the script myself and earn a little extra money. Writing the script was a more rigorous process than with my previous work, and now that I’ve won some awards for it, I’m taking the movie business a bit more seriously. In fact, I’m in the process of transitioning from screenwriter to director.

INTERVIEWER

This story is mainly told in the form of memories. Why, to you, is it important that we learn about the narrator’s family—and Shenyang in the nineties—from his perspective as a child?

ZHENG

Many readers outside China don’t know about the pain that the three northeastern provinces, especially my hometown, Shenyang, which is in Liaoning province, experienced during the national economic downturn in the nineties. I wanted to put that context into the story because I felt that then readers would better understand why a voice like this narrator’s was bound to come along. The generation born in the fifties and sixties experienced a wave of layoffs. These were people around my father’s age, and the narrator’s uncle Ensign Wang went through these things too. But they’re far from the only injuries that Ensign Wang suffers—he was born in the forties and lived through the Cultural Revolution. To the narrator’s way of thinking, Ensign Wang’s madness is easily explained because equally tormented lives were everywhere to be seen in that era. I needed to maintain a critical distance and understand Ensign Wang as the product of a particular time and place, so as to avoid exoticizing him as simply “a lunatic.”

Like the narrator, I’m part of the generation that chose to leave those provinces, because leaving meant a greater chance of survival, whereas staying offered only despair. I went away early, leaving a similar sort of household so that I wouldn’t wish to go mad. In the story, I chose to send the narrator to the other side of the world, to Nice, France. A boy from China stumbles into a bar while backpacking and happens to meet someone with a similar background, yet he finds that the most ordinary things about his hometown—I wanted to use a calm, even mundane, register—sound bizarre to the girl, like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

The thing is, I’ve never had the chance to travel abroad, so I mainly got to know the world through travel programs on TV. In one of them, the host described Nice as the most beautiful seaside town in France. Watching footage of French people by the ocean, wearing sunglasses in cafes and bistros, eating seafood and drinking wine as they talked about all sorts of things, I felt relaxed, contented. It was the complete opposite of my hometown. For me, Shenyang meant steel, smokestacks, grimy tire tracks through the fallen snow. It felt heavy, oppressive. I was tense all the time. I had no idea what it meant to be relaxed. When I had to choose a place for the protagonist of “The Hedgehog” to visit, Nice popped into my mind, and I looked up more and more travel programs about the city, until I felt like I’d seen it with my own eyes. To this day, I’ve never been to Europe, let alone Nice. I hope to make it there in the next couple of years, to finally set foot in this place I’ve written about.

INTERVIEWER

How would you describe the narrator’s relationship with Ensign Wang?

ZHENG

The narrator is a version of Ensign Wang without his mental illness. Subconsciously, though, the narrator wishes he could lose his mind, too, and become truly free by becoming out of step with the rest of the world. That’s why the narrator thinks so fondly of Ensign Wang after he’s gone.

INTERVIEWER

Are mental illness and religion important concerns throughout your work?

ZHENG

Yes, they are—that’s the environment I grew up in. Almost all my female relatives are Buddhists, and they’re always going to temples, donating money and praying to Buddha statues at home. Afterward, though, they go on just as before, eating meat, drinking alcohol, and swearing up a storm. I find this fascinating. One of them, an older woman, changed her religion three times in one decade, from Christianity to Shamanism and finally to Buddhism. I believe she did this out of despair and a sense of helplessness. The character of Ensign Wang’s wife is inspired by her.

A higher proportion of men than women go insane, which means virtually every large clan contains a madman. It always feels like something has tipped them over the edge, maybe a curse or a law of nature. They can’t control their negative thoughts, and that drives them insane. When I was very little, I worried I would lose my mind someday. I don’t know why I thought that might happen. Perhaps from a young age, I had the sense that going insane was very easy to do.

 

Owen Park is an editorial assistant at The Paris Review. This interview was translated by Jeremy Tiang, who is a novelist, a playwright, and the translator of more than thirty books from the Chinese.

The Ghost of Reem Island

All images courtesy of the author.

For the past decade, the “Ghost of Reem Island,” as she was referred to in the press, has haunted me.

On December 1, 2014, Ala’a al-Hashemi, a Yemeni-born Emirati woman, murdered a Hungarian American schoolteacher in a public restroom in Abu Dhabi. The media cited the incident as a “lone act of terror.” I too was an American teaching in Abu Dhabi and, by a bizarre coincidence, had been spending an inordinate amount of time in public restrooms, photographing female bathroom attendants for a creative research project.

More than ten years after the murder, I still find myself sifting through the little that was left behind—the government search-and-arrest video that went viral, news articles chronicling the political landscape of the time, and my own photographs of bathrooms and their attendants.

***

In 2010, I was sitting in my office at NYU, where I teach in the film department, and knew something had to change. I’d been trying to secure financing for a feature film, actors had attached and then dropped out, and I was gripped by a sense of inertia and myopia; I wanted to be engaged in a larger conversation with the world. Around that time, I received a phone call from the dean of the College of Arts & Science, telling me that I’d been selected to serve on the committee for an exciting new project: NYU Abu Dhabi. “An international honors college, a Swarthmore in the desert.”

I only vaguely knew where the United Arab Emirates was on a map.

Thanks to a partnership with the UAE government, the venture was well funded. The forty-acre campus of twenty-nine buildings would be built in the cultural district on Saadiyat Island, soon to be home to the Louvre, Guggenheim, and Zayed National Museums. So much of academia involves splitting hairs over a pittance of funds, but this, I was told, was a unique opportunity to reimagine the university for the twenty-first century from the ground up: an expansive and bold vision predicated on an international student body and a global approach to learning that promised to erase the barriers between disciplines. The Arts Center and the Science Center would sit side by side, cross-pollinating and informing large research projects.

I was asked if I’d consider working on the Abu Dhabi campus, and flown out to the UAE for an exploratory visit. It was my first time flying business class and upon boarding, I was handed a mimosa, black pajamas folded into drawstring bags, and a menu printed on ivory cardstock; I marveled at the airplane bathroom with a shower. Upon arrival, I visited the fledgling campus, walked the superblocks, and explored the honey, pastry, and stationery stores. At the Emirates Palace, I ordered a gold-leaf latte and toured the heritage village exhibits on falconry and pearl diving. At sunset, I cycled along the corniche where I was told I could see the shores of Iran on a clear day.

Eventually, I agreed to take the job; to teach and serve as the associate dean of the arts, overseeing working groups of artists and scholars ideating new approaches to film, theater, music, photography, and technology that would marry theory and practice.

 

I commuted the seven thousand miles every six to eight weeks. My kids were seven and nine. At the baggage claim in Abu Dhabi, a colleague said to me, “I could never do what you’re doing.” There was judgment behind her self-deprecation, and I started to avoid her on campus. Every time I left my kids crying on the curb in my husband’s arms, I questioned my choices.

But the work was heady and exciting, a time of Moleskine notebooks and endless to-do lists, bottled water and back seats of town cars, business class flights on Etihad, hotels and guest apartments, blueprints unfurled across tables and 3D models revealed with fanfare, interviews with artists and scholars, and reading Appiah, Said, Amin Maalouf, Naguib Mahfouz, and Assia Djebar.

Prospective students were recruited from around the world and underwent a rigorous admissions process that promised free tuition to those accepted. Our first class had a hundred and thirty students from forty different countries. At the center of NYU Abu Dhabi is its stated mission to “welcome and educate global citizens, and produce knowledge in order to promote human understanding and to better society …”

But it was also a time of large museum projects, labor infractions, and NYU faculty in New York expressing concerns about the vision of the “global university” and academic freedom at our emerging campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. The regional turmoil in the wake of the Arab Spring and soon the arrests of activists, lawyers, professors, and students in the mass UAE94 trial would hang over the project. ISIS would be on the rise, the U.S. would bomb Iraq and Syria, and oil prices would be crashing.

After two years, the commute was no longer tenable for our family, and we decided to move to Abu Dhabi on a two-year contract. Our farewell to the States was emotional and chaotic.

We moved into an apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise overlooking the Arabian Gulf.

And some mornings, we woke up inside a cloud.

***

One of the first places I visited in Abu Dhabi was the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. Completed in 2007, the mosque incorporates Persian, Mughal, and Indo-Islamic traditions and serves as a beacon of tolerance that can host up to fifty thousand visitors. Reflective pools, the expansive marble courtyard, inlaid tiles, minarets, and the largest hand-knotted carpet in the world inspired awe, but it was my trip to the bathroom that left the deepest impression.

A circular ablution area, bathed in sunlight from the glass dome above and made from white and green marble, greeted me at the bottom of the stairs. Stone-and-marble stools circled the green basins and metal faucets used for wudu, the ritual washing before the recitation of prayers.

In the ladies’ room, I was struck by a sense of safety and international female camaraderie that reminded me of the Dubai airport, a global crossroads that feels like the capital of the world, a hub that embodies and holds our human connection as we pass one another on the concourse, order coffee, and wait at the gate. In the bathroom, women from Pakistan, France, and Jordan exchanged greetings at the mirror. The bathroom attendants, both from South Asia and on two-year contracts, cleaned the stalls, stocked supplies, and provided a sense of protection and care. When I asked if I could take the attendants’ picture, they wrapped their arms around each other and posed in front of the botanical tiled wall.

The first photograph I took in a women’s bathroom.

Across the UAE, prayer rooms and bathrooms live side by side, and this pairing of the sacred and the profane was my favorite aspect of the built environment, an acceptance of our flawed humanity and our desire to purge, wash, and dedicate ourselves, once again, to do better.

The UAE has one of the highest concentrations of surveillance technology in the world, and I was aware of the chip in my identity card and the rumors of the government listening to phone calls and tracking locations. The wide and shadeless boulevards left me feeling overexposed, fading in the heat, and public restrooms offered pockets of shade and human connection.

My excursions to malls, bus stations, and parks to photograph bathrooms and bathroom attendants fed my desire to push beyond the proscribed lines of my experience as a foreigner into something authentic. These bathrooms became places of intimate exploration—windowless public spaces beside the prayer rooms that were not surveilled.

Prayer room, Sharjah bus station.

The bathroom attendants often had children back home in Kerala, Colombo, Lahore, Manila, Addis Ababa—and while many of them lived in labor camps and worked for large companies, their workplaces were private. The bathrooms were their offices, their spaces to monitor and take care of; I was the visitor.

I don’t remember much about the Sharjah International Book Fair or the Rolling Stones concert in Abu Dhabi, but I do remember the attendants and their bathrooms.

All the women I spoke with were working in the Gulf to send money home to their families, to save for a house, school, or medical bills. As they shared their longing for home, my own loneliness found theirs, and I often thought of my own mother, seven thousand miles away in an assisted living facility in Maine.

Maybe these encounters brought me back to the pink slips and bathroom passes of my girlhood: whispers with friends in graffitied stalls, tears at the mirror, and spanning time on tiled floors beneath frosted glass windows and throwing wet paper towels against pockmarked ceilings.

Or the bathrooms in the homes of friends, portals into the private lives of grown-ups. Parents who painted their bathroom black, attached glow-in-the-dark constellations to the ceiling, and enjoyed the night sky from a claw-foot tub with a stack of wrinkled Playboys within reach.

Or the en suite bathroom that belonged to a friend’s parents who were a doctor and nurse. We had to cross their bedroom, past the sprawling king-size bed with taut sheets, to use the toilet. Their bathroom, with rough towels, mustard-tiled walls, and glass bottles filled with soap and shampoo, and, in the medicine cabinet, only aspirin, Band-Aids, and Neosporin. No lipstick, blush, or lotions—just the necessities—an unsettling medical efficiency that left me feeling chastened.

I’ve always been curious about people’s medicine cabinets; I like to snoop through their lavatory supplies, to discover their secret ailments, their chosen creams, the scents they use to augment and camouflage their smells. The bathroom, where our animalness lives.

When I was eight or nine, I had my tonsils taken out and tubes put in my ears. I returned home from the hospital with a fever and stood naked beside my mother as she drew me a bath. My hearing was restored, and the sounds of water gushing from the faucet, the pouring of Epsom salts from the box into the tub, and even my mother’s voice asking me to undress, brought me to tears. My mother bathed me with a washcloth as red dots appeared on my arms, legs, and stomach. “Chicken pox,” she announced. “No wonder you have a fever.”

***

It is December 1, 2014, the eve of National Day in the UAE. My family has moved back to New York City, but I’ve returned to Abu Dhabi to host an academic conference exploring the narration of national identity by scholars and artists in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. 

The UAE defines itself as a progressive Arab nation of the twenty-first century. Emirati citizens comprise only 11.5 percent of the country’s population and much of their labor comes from guest workers, white collar and blue collar, living in labor camps, high-rise apartments, or in gated communities, all working on multiyear contracts to build and support the country, a nation vigilant in protecting its borders from extremist groups. Shia mosques have recently been bombed in Saudi Arabia, and the UAE is hosting U.S. military personnel taking part in military campaigns against Islamic State groups and Shiite rebels in Yemen.

Tomorrow, the country will celebrate forty-three years of independence from the British protectorate, with parades, fireworks, and dancing. Today, I learn that an American schoolteacher has been murdered “in an act of terror” in a public bathroom out on Reem Island, an island I’ve never visited but is only a fifteen-minute drive from campus. I have colleagues who live there. In the guest apartment, a loaf of bread, a carton of eggs, a stick of gold-foiled butter, and a liter of milk welcome me home. The cold tile floors send me in search of socks, and I shut off the air-conditioning and open the windows into the desert night.

Less than forty-eight hours later, the assailant is apprehended, and a barrage of text messages from colleagues alert me to the UAE government YouTube video documenting the police arrest of the “Ghost Killer.” I search the closet for extra blankets and burrow into one of the twin beds with my computer. The video is not hard to find. Already, there are 8,072,198 views. 31,923 Thumbs Up. 5,110 Thumbs Down.

I press play.

***

FADE IN:

The green-and-gold falcon crest of the United Arab Emirates fills the screen and the theme music of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES propels us into the action.

This is a state-sanctioned video sending a message to its citizens and the world: We do not tolerate terrorists, you are safe. But the Batman soundtrack skews the video toward entertainment and I feel uneasy.

INT. MALL PARKING GARAGE – DAY

HIGH ANGLE – CCTV FOOTAGE:

A SECURITY GUARD stands in front of glass doors leading to the elevator bank. He welcomes a WOMAN dressed in a black abaya, a black niqab, and black gloves. She has a square build, a lumbering gait, and she carries a large purse on her shoulder. They nod in mutual acknowledgment as she passes.

The WOMAN pushes the elevator button and regards two large standing posters as she waits.

The poor image quality obscures the posters, but it looks like an advertisement for YAS WATERWORLD and I imagine bikini-clad girls careening toward the camera.

Yas Waterworld—a place of manufactured fun in the middle of the desert, a place I’ve endured for our kids when all other forms of entertainment failed. A place where I camped out on lounge chairs with my books, surrounded by water slides, chemical-blue pools, the garrulous screams of children, while couples sip slushies out of neon plastic cups after a float down the “lazy river.” The smells of fried food and coconut oil mingle with the piped-in music of Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Pharrell Williams—“Happy.”

The elevator arrives and the WOMAN disappears inside.

INT. MALL – CONTINUOUS

The WOMAN emerges from the elevator.  She ignores the other shoppers and moves into the foreground to speak with a security guard, who points her down a hallway.

I suspect she’s asking for directions to the bathroom, but she must have scoped out the location for the murder. Perhaps this is strategic—she’s talking directly to the security guard in order to avoid suspicion later. This worked for me when I stole things as a teenager.

The WOMAN grabs a NEWSPAPER from a rack before disappearing around the corner.

We’re left watching a round-bellied man with a beard, a lanky worker in a blue uniform, and a South Asian woman waiting for the elevator.  

FADE TO BLACK

Because there are no surveillance cameras in the public restrooms, there’s a ninety-two-minute gap in the footage when the murder takes place. The media reports that she waited for over an hour in a bathroom stall to pick her victim. I wonder if she looked at the newspaper during that time. Perhaps it calmed her nerves to read about the street closures for the National Day parade, about the decreasing cases of Ebola, about Yazidi girls training to take on ISIL, or about how Emirati women took up arms against the British in the early 1800s. The weather was 25 degrees Celsius and sunny. Maybe grabbing the newspaper provided some kind of comfort, like a blanket across her legs while she was waiting. Planning. Maybe she used the newspaper to hide the knife.

I imagine she was worried about her six children.

Or perhaps she was thinking about her husband, who’d been taken from their house in the middle of the night for questioning and had not been seen since. Months after her arrest, he’ll be charged with plots to bomb the Formula I racetrack and IKEA. He had made plans to kill tourists and assassinate a local leader. It will also be reported that Ala’a had visited Al Qaeda websites and had given the organization money in Yemen. The Guardian speculated that her husband’s disappearance had stoked her fanaticism and compelled her to act alone that day.

Apparently, she decided against a British woman who came into the bathroom with a child in a pram. Someone told me that, but I don’t know how we would we know that kind of detail. Perhaps it was something she told the press.

I wonder what it was about the teacher that caused Ala’a to choose her. The “ghost” asked for help getting into the handicapped stall and the teacher obliged. A witness heard a woman say, “Be quiet or I’ll kill you.” Ibolya Ryan’s willingness to help led her into the stall, a stall reserved for the physically vulnerable. Ala’a manipulated the social contract between women to kill her victim. 

Meanwhile, Ibolya Ryan’s eleven-year-old twin sons waited for their mother at a café. When their mother did not arrive, they decided to walk home to their nearby apartment. I imagine their fear, that liminal place of dread, between not-knowing and knowing, the weight and volume of impending catastrophe.

Someone reported the SOUNDS of SCREAMING and STRUGGLE as the teacher was stabbed to death with a carving knife.

Perhaps the bathroom attendant at the Boutik Mall on Reem Island was on her lunch break at the time of the murder. If she’d been present, surely she would have noticed a woman camped out in the handicapped stall for over an hour. Concern would have ceded to suspicion. I want to believe the crime could have been thwarted.

The bathroom attendants I interviewed during my time in Abu Dhabi felt ownership over their bathrooms. While they may have been invisible to many of the women who used the facilities, they were aware of every woman who arrived and departed.

This photograph was taken at Marina Mall, in a hidden-away bathroom on the ground floor.

The attendant pulled out a worn newspaper clipping that featured her child and asked me to take a picture. The crease in the newspaper was torn and frayed from the many times she’d reached for her son and refolded him into her pocket.

For this picture, the woman asked to change out of her sneakers and into her “day” shoes. In the storage closet across from the shelves of toilet paper and glass cleaner, she’d taped a photograph of her daughter playing the piano at her second birthday party to the wall.

All these mothers and children, separated by distance. Now, with this crime, nine more children have lost their mothers.

***

SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE: ELEVATOR BANK

The WOMAN, circled in red, is on the move, and shoppers get out of her way. A mother grabs her son’s hand and disappears into Bath and Body Works. A woman in a headscarf tries to block the WOMAN from getting on the elevator and calls for help. In the corner of the frame, a man in a kandura looks at his phone.

The WOMAN steps into the elevator. The doors close as a man dressed in black lunges at the buttons.

EXT. MALL PARKING GARAGE – CONTINUOUS

The WOMAN swings through the glass doors and heads toward her car.

EXT. STREET – CONTINUOUS

A white SUV with a National flag draped over the back window heads down the street.

EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING – DAY

The WOMAN walks toward an apartment building, pulling a black suitcase behind her.

During the nineteen-minute gap in the CCTV footage, she plants a pipe bomb at the doorstep of an Egyptian American doctor. The bomb never goes off.

EXT. PARKING LOT – NIGHT

A handheld camera moves through a group of police officers. We see police cars, flashing lights, men in reflector uniforms, men in kanduras.

CLOSE-UP: HANDMADE BOMB

Tape secures a rectangular device, maybe a phone, to a tube. It looks like a poorly bandaged limb in a child’s game of war.

A SERIES OF SHOTS ACROSS A TILED FLOOR: blue plastic bottle caps, white straws, red confetti, UAE flags on toothpicks.

I’m confused by this shot and these items and am not sure what I’m looking at.

EXT. PARKING LOT – CONTINUOUS

The camera circles POLICE OFFICERS listening to a man in a white kandura. The police are dressed in green uniforms, bulletproof vests, and magenta berets. Another man in a kandura stands with his hands clasped in front of him. The faces of the two men in kanduras are blurred out.

EXT. HIGHWAY – NIGHT

Police cars head into the night—red lights flashing to the rising orchestral score of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

INT. POLICE CAR – CONTINUOUS

CLOSE-UP on MEN’S FACES: serious and intent.  

EXT. HOUSE – NIGHT

The SWAT team pushes through the iron gate and divides in half, left and right. The men head up the driveway toward the nondescript McMansion—guns drawn.

INT. HOUSE – CONTINUOUS

The police storm the house. The floors and hallways are bare, without rugs or much furniture.

I pause the video to inspect the paintings and photographs on the wall, but they’re too blurry to decipher. I’m desperate to know what they are, to gain some insight into this woman and her family life.  

The officers surround a woman in a black tank top and leggings. She kneels on the floor, her face blurred—the Ghost Killer? She’s pushed to the ground where she’s hand-cuffed.

INT.. FOYER – CONTINUOUS

Another WOMAN drapes a tablecloth over her head to hide her identity as she’s escorted out of the house and into a police car.

MONTAGE: POLICE SEARCH

The music, its pulsating strings and beat, builds to a climax as we watch the police officers scale an outside ladder, kick open closet doors, and tip over empty cardboard boxes. We see a series of shots: a bloody steering wheel, bleach, and walkie-talkies.

I think of her six children. In seven months, their mother will be charged with terrorism and executed by firing squad.

EXT. HELICOPTER – DAY

We sweep above the skyscrapers of Abu Dhabi, the Arabian Gulf below, the UAE flag fluttering in the wind.

CREDITS: United Arab Emirates, Ministry of Interior

***

I close my computer and sit in the dark. Outside, the sodium-vapor lamps of the campus catch the leaves of newly planted palm trees. It’s quiet and empty along the walkways, no insect chorus or fireflies. I go to the bathroom. The light flickers above a bar of unwrapped soap and a thin towel, white and folded, on the toilet seat. The smell of chemicals and disinfectant roils my stomach. This act of terror committed in a bathroom stall fills me with dread. The crime expresses inherited and shared histories; reducing Ala’a to a ghost serves no-one.

I slip between the covers, where my mind churns through the night toward dawn. Just as Ala’a is not a ghost, Ibolya is not just a victim. Ibolya Ryan was born in Romania and grew up in Hungary. She was a woman, divorced, with two twin sons living with her in Abu Dhabi and a daughter residing in Europe with her ex-husband. Years later, I’ll discover a photograph of her family online, taken not long after the murder. The three children sit, awkward and hollowed-out, on the couch beside their father. One son grasps his sister’s hand as his head sinks into her shoulder.

***

***

I grew up in an old house in the Berkshires with my parents and grandfather. We shared the bathroom at the top of the stairs, a room with a low window that overlooked five crab apple trees and a driveway where my grandfather would sit, silent, in a wooden folding chair for hours. There was no shower, only a bathtub that we were required to clean with a sponge and Comet after each use. We revealed our private lives through a handful of intimate objects—my grandfather’s dentures soaking on the sink at night, his black-and-yellow box of Preparation H, my mother’s Valium, baby powder, and pink bath pillow, my father’s steel razor, Barbasol shaving cream, and Old Spice deodorant, my sanitary pads hidden beneath the sink, a palette of blush leftover from a display at my pharmacy job, the scale that weighed our bodies, and the towels that dried them. Tender and tidy offerings of ourselves comingled in this room at the top of the stairs.

Everyone in the house was afraid of my father, how humiliation and fury could take possession of him and last for days; a thick haze that left us isolated, without our bearings, wondering whether it was day or night. This bathroom at the top of the stairs held our bodies, our sexuality, our sickness, the nakedness of the family that no one shared. The twinning of intimacy and violence, larger histories and pain, earaches and water bottles, bandages wrapped around swollen limbs, cuts and the sting of peroxide, splinters and tweezers; all our filth and attempts at cleanliness and healing resided in the silence of that room. 

***

When I lived in Abu Dhabi, I felt on the outside of another people’s history, a witness to a National Day that was not my own. But like Ibolya Ryan and Ala’a al-Hashemi, like the bathroom attendants from India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh—I am here, stranded on the threshold of these bathrooms, scanning the hand soap, toiletries, and counters, the mirrors, toilet paper, and towels, angling toward something still out of reach.

 

Mo Ogrodnik is a filmmaker and professor at New York University. Her first novel, GULF, is forthcoming from Summit Books/S&S this May.

Snow White Is Tired

Stanley Schtinter as Robert Walser.

“I know the story well,” says the Snow White of Robert Walser’s Schneewittchen, “about the apple, the coffin. Be so kind as to tell me more. Why does nothing else come to mind? Must you hang on to these details? Must you forever draw on them?” In Stanley Schtinter’s 2024 adaptation of Walser’s 1901 dramolette, characters from the Grimm fairy tale exhaust themselves and their images in a recounting of the story in which they are inscribed. The film is a complete performance of the English translation of Walser’s text, which picks up where the Grimm tale leaves off. The queen, who has tried to kill Snow White twice, wants her daughter to forget everything. Under her orders, the hunter, her lover and Snow White’s would-be assassin, reenacts the attempt on Snow White’s life. There is discussion of the desire for death, springtime, fresh garden air, kisses, snow, and sleep. The characters chastise each other for telling fairy tales, rehearsing scripts, making use of “gesture and technique.”

Schneewittchen is a shot-for-shot remake of another experimental adaptation of Walser’s text, João César Monteiro’s Branca de Neve (2000). As in Monteiro’s version, the drama takes place in complete darkness, against a sonic ambience of rain, wind, and birdsong. We hear, but do not see, the characters. Punctuating the darkness: brief shots of a blue sky, sometimes clouded, sometimes unclouded, blinding in the black theater, scenic breaks in which we find ourselves, with Snow White, “immaculately watching an immaculate sky.” But Sean Price Williams’s skies are less saturated than Monteiro’s. The environmental sound, by the artist Joshua Bonnetta, is louder in the mix. The flute and piano are gone.

Schtinter’s version premiered in New York on the occasion of Disney’s 2025 live-action remake of their 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In the spirit of Disney, Schneewittchen has also been merchandised: at Anthology, Schtinter cheekily offered Schneewittchen snow globes (empty) and Schneewittchen T-shirts (blank). Like a proper Hollywood remake, Schneewittchen has an A-list cast (Julie Christie is the queen; Stacy Martin is Snow White; Hanns Zischler is the hunter; and Toby Jones is the prince). These glossy professionals deliver blocks of dispassionate dialogue as though shrink-wrapped, their high-budget polish contrasting humorously with the film’s starkness.

Aside from sky and the red curtain of the opening and ending credits, the sixty-seven-minute film contains only two other images. The film opens with a sequence of black-and-white stills of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow outside the Switzerland asylum where he’d been living, a scene originally captured by a police photographer on Christmas, 1956. His unseeing face turned skyward, Walser is the picture of his own Snow White, who “long[s] for that open coffin, laid out as this frozen image.” Where Monteiro uses the widely circulated photographs of Walser’s real corpse, here Schtinter himself plays Walser, restaging the “dear winter scene” on location in Herisau. The effect is slightly comic, Schtinter’s younger figure slightly too photogenic, too clean. Finally, Monteiro’s film closes with a beguiling shot of the director standing in front of a tree; Schtinter shows us only a tree.

“Rather than look, I’d rather hear,” says Snow White. “I’m speechless,” replies the prince, “imageless at such an image.” “Woe unto me that I must hear,” says Snow White. “Woe unto us that I must see,” replies the prince. In his third-order reenactment of the Grimms’ tale, Schtinter joins Monteiro and Walser in questioning our compulsion to endlessly repeat the same story, forever draw on the same details. In such a state of exhaustion, it might be better not to see or hear anything at all. But the film is not a plain negation, a repudiation of the cinematic culture of the remake, and although it participates in what might appear to be the degradation of its sources, it’s not parody. Schtinter remakes with careful ambivalence. He finds for us a place between speechlessness and imagelessness, between empty speech, exhausted image, and the new. In Walser’s text, Snow White ultimately accepts the queen and the hunter’s story. “Say what you want. I believe you.” Refusal or affirmation? Snow in a silent winter world.

 

Alec Mapes-Frances is a writer and designer living in New York.

Anne Imhof’s Talent Show

Sihana Shalaj and Eliza Douglas in DOOM. Photograph by Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory.

Anne Imhof’s DOOM: House of Hope, a three-hour, influencer-studded “blockbuster” performance of Romeo and Juliet, presents a variation on the talent show more akin to a talent situation. Imhof invents a world in which artistic talent might emanate at any moment, unprompted, from the ranks of a psychically bonded skater mob. Staged around a cavalcade of Cadillac Escalades parked at random diagonals across the Park Avenue Armory’s fifty-five-thousand-square-foot hangar, the show began with a wolf’s howl ringing out from the darkness. The Jumbotron suspended overhead started counting down from 3:00:00, instilling a Hunger Games–esque sense of urgency while a crew of youths, their clothes emblazoned with DOOM in varsity lettering, trickled in to mount the industrial-beam platforms attached to the Escalades. Projecting defiance or disaffection, the actors stared down at us, pantomiming tears trailing down their cheeks.

Finally, the metal gate around the periphery was lowered, and we were free to infiltrate the scene.

Cool kids continually forked off from the clique to launch into choreographed performances, recitations of found texts, or miscellaneous scenes from Shakespeare’s play. Their blocking traversed the Escalades, multiple conventional stages, a semi-secluded white room, and the spotlit center court. The audience was left to roam the hangar but generally gravitated toward the moving center of interest. More intimate moments, like monologues or the dripping of candle wax on naked skin, were filmed on a phone and broadcast in real time on the Jumbotron. Meanwhile, background players kept on gesticulating from the car stages, covertly making out or tattooing one another in the trunks.

My favorite moment was an eloquent speech by a pianist character about the feat of writing about performance from memory. In the carnivalesque House of Hope, all talents are venerated, even the critic’s! I felt seen. Reading the playbill later, I learned that her speech comprised excerpts from famous critics’ obituaries, and the warm feeling faded. The volume of talents on display (rapping, calligraphic skin decoration, contortionism, poetry, ballet, industry-plant rock and roll) gave the show a consistently high entertainment value. Yet DOOM never felt as sprawling or multifarious as the format might have allowed. The audience was never aggressively divided or engaged with directly (no Sleep No More–style kisses on the mouth). No one knew if it was passé to clap after the musical acts.

And the Romeo and Juliet reenactments felt like unmetabolized content within the show’s multimedia gestalt. Shakespeare’s drama was in this instance presubjectively diffused—most of the leads are double- or triple-cast. There is a dancer Romeo and an actor Romeo, singing and skating Tybalts, etc. Nothing quite gels, and we’re left with a random smattering of horseplay fight sequences and the light pathos of Tybalt’s still-vaping “corpse.” If there are warring factions in the House of Hope, it’s the choreographed skater clique versus the disoriented audience.

DOOM: House of Hope’s mash-up of talents and literary allusions was clearly developed in collaboration with the high-profile cast. But unlike most performance artists working in the collaborative vein, Imhof isn’t anti-object. DOOM instead elevates artifacts of the present, showcasing the glossy, streamlined commodities—UberXLs, phones, vapes, glitter belts—that form our denuded monoculture. When Imhof pairs these objects with powerful affective forces like skater coolness/influence and haptic bass tones, it feels like she’s mobilizing everything we’ve got in 2025 (with the merciful exception of memes).

What can we surmise from this bold collage of the present? This aspiration to mythic stability in an increasingly contingent smart world is echoed in the monolithic (literally, black shiny slab) aesthetics of the objects themselves—it functioned well as a piece of design criticism.

Outside the Armory after the show, I asked my friends if I’d missed anything while I was resting, wearily, in the Mylar-balloon-centerpiece Bar Mitzvah table section. Apparently, at one point, a woman had chained herself to one of the Escalades, declaring, “SUVs have no place in art.” Whether this was a part of the performance or a protestor’s intervention is anyone’s guess, although the explicit environmentalist sentiment seems incongruous with Imhof’s tone. In the Bush era, SUVs were a go-to symbol of gas-guzzling hubris, but in DOOM they felt purely architectural, affording visually interesting level shifts reminiscent of Shakespeare’s balcony sequence. The specter of (titular) climate doomerism haunts DOOM, but it is repressed into simplistic schoolyard chants of “DOOM!”/“HOPE!”/“DOOM!”/“HOPE!” Our ecological future is a topic art seems ill-equipped to deal with. Reducing doomerism to white noise is not the right approach, but I’m not sure what would be.

 

Liby Hays is a writer and artist living in New York. She is the author of Geniacs, a graphic novel about a poet who enters a hackathon, and a codesigner of Conspecifics.

A Very Precious Bonjour Tristesse

Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

Françoise Sagan, who crashed and flipped her fabulous Aston Martin DB2/4 at high speed en route to Saint-Tropez, did not die despite getting her skull crushed beneath her British-made hatchback in Fiesta Red. She did not drown in a yachting accident on the Riviera some four years earlier, nor did she immediately go bankrupt after becoming so consumed by roulette that she personally asked the French Ministry of the Interior to ban her from domestic casinos. Her mutant capacity for indulgence, combined with her other cosmopolitan hobbies (whiskey, morphine, tax evasion), made her so much the poster girl for sixties Gallic glamour that a French newspaper once gave her the topline “un charmant petit monstre”—though a death drive that well oiled could have used something more like what Susan Sontag said about the self-destructive: “Dying is overwork.”

Sagan’s writing seems to mime the choreography of her darker impulses and lives on just as deathlessly as its author did. Her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, published in 1954, is a disturbing little speed read about the motherless seventeen-year-old Cécile, who holidays happily with her father, Raymond, in the South of France. Quickly, the story becomes a nasty chamber play—Cécile and her daddy have this total delicious connection until a stranger threatens to ruin her paradise—and directors from now both sides of the millennium have tried to commit the catastrophe to film. The first adaptation of the book, by Otto Preminger in 1958, stars peppy Jean Seberg as our tricksy prima donna; this May, the director and screenwriter Durga Chew-Bose reanimates her by way of the hypertelerotic Lily McInerny, whose gift for the languid, googly gaze might suggest something about the way this new film is concerned not with the way things move but with how things look.

Tristesse is, to both Sagan’s and Chew-Bose’s credit, an eyeful. This is one of those French stories that lives for the sensuous and elemental—filled with the usual subatomic lustful vibrations of summer, the secret viciousness of young women, beautiful bikinis, buttered toasts. The camera watches dad and daughter pad around barefoot in their seaside rental alongside his sexy mistress Elsa—the coconut-scented bohème—until woman no. 3 in Chanel No. 5 arrives with her chilly-chic hauteur. This is Anne, friend of dead mother, menace to harmony, and here played by Chloë Sevigny. With her best WASP-y restraint, the actress reminds us that she is not from the Lower East Side but from Darien, Connecticut, blinking impassively at the Mediterranean from kitten heels on the veranda. “I knew that once she was there it would be impossible for any of us to relax completely,” Cécile says in the novel. In the film, the scenes that follow should grow tenser, make us sore—instead, the triangular dynamic of the three women grades softly in Cécile’s nisus toward vengeance. The days disappear by a sort of melting process.

Understandable that Chew-Bose, a first-time director but a longtime writer, picked this fable to remake. She may be better known as the author of tremendously sensitive essays during the post-Rookie era of online memoirists, when personal narratives privileged preciousness over persuasion. In Chew-Bose’s parlance—monstrously decadent with her verbs and wildly, even gratuitously, figurative—names “pleat her memory”; her parents’ narratives “oil her rationale.” Grafting this impulse to the screen means every bauble in the movie gets a caress—her camera lavishes crocheted bedspreads, a silver hairpin, one dazzling tomato-and-cheese sandwich. At one point in the movie, a sailboat named simply Images casts off into the water. “Is there anything,” Chew-Bose once asked, “better, more truthful and sublime than what cannot be communicated?”

Her airy puzzling—tender, miasmic, mannered, and broody—sits at odds with Tristesse’s natural vim. Hers is a movie Shiatsued of its evils. Where Preminger prickles, Chew-Bose cocoons. And all that Sagan lived for—her needs for speed, eros, entropy, the ultimate—dissolves into a glamorous torpor. Every stylish writer is at risk of smothering her story, but when it happens, it can’t help but feel like (here’s Sontag again) “a certain coquetry of the void.”

 

Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She has written for Bookforum, The Nation, the Washington Post, and NPR.

Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Clay is gripping the wheel for no reason. He fingers a Valium then puts it back in the bottle. Goes to the movies and stares at the green exit signs instead of the screen. Looks for his friend Julian in almost every scene of the book but when he finds him and their eyes lock nothing happens, Julian drifts off.

Listening to his friends talk, Clay wonders if he’s slept with the person being discussed. Waiting for someone at a Du-par’s diner in Studio City, he wonders if the gift-wrapped boxes in the Christmas display on the counter are empty.

Many of the people his friends talk about are indistinguishable to Clay. His own two younger sisters are indistinguishable to him, mere symptoms of the decline of Western Civilization, baby vipers who ask their mom to turn up “Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage” by the band Killer Pussy, who put a pet-store fish in the jacuzzi to watch it die, who assure Clay they can get their own cocaine, and get mad when he won’t stop to look at the burning wreckage of a car accident near a McDonald’s in Palm Springs in the middle of the night. The McDonald’s, anyhow, is closed due to a power outage from wind.

Clay’s repeated phrase, which is also the author’s, spoken out loud on page one by Clay’s girlfriend Blair as she gets on the freeway, is that people are afraid to merge.

“People are afraid to merge.”

“What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.”

If someone hasn’t already mapped Bret’s borrowed use of a Didion device, to build narrative harmony and compression off repeating melodies, or of Bret’s echo of her boom-bust West and the thematic menace of rattlesnakes and mudslides and Santa Ana winds, someone eventually will. What are the psychodynamics of influence? some people ask. I never ask. Influence is a door that is opened. Didion opened it. He walked through, wearing her scarf and sunglasses. But as Clay tells Blair, who has given him a scarf for Christmas and wants him to try it on, “scarves usually fit all people.” One artist’s tricks in the hands of another, who understands how to use them, will produce something new.

*** 

Less than Zero was originally published in 1985. Like many other young people, I read it that year, at age sixteen or seventeen. Its author would have been twenty or twenty-one. I have a distinct memory that when I got to the end, I threw my copy out a window. The effect of this book on me required a drastic measure, apparently. I had never been to Los Angeles. I had never read a book by this author (no one had—it was, of course, his first). I was upset that he’d foisted on me this bleak world of rich kids in Wayfarers, playing Centipede or visiting an evil pimp in a penthouse, gaping at a dead body left in an alley for them to nudge. I still had some growing up to do, some toughening. Not in life, but in my reading, in my ability to see the value of art that hurts me. The year before, I had run out of the cinema in the middle of Blood Simple, by the Coen brothers. Literally fled up the aisle. But that movie and its sleazy ambiance touched me to the core.

What stayed with me from Less than Zero was Clay’s loneliness. He is eighteen and home on winter break from his first semester of college, and there’s this sense of returning to a realm he has vacated, as if he is forced to see his own life from a new remove, like a person visiting the world after dying. People keep telling him he’s pale, and they mean it literally—he’s been back east, in New Hampshire—but his complexion has another valence as well, that he’s a ghost, which is what allows him to see what the others cannot, to be affected by what leaves them so numb.

***

Rereading it now, Less than Zero is much more comedic than I’d originally understood. This is not a surprise, considering that American Psycho is so subversively funny, not overtly comic but with the deep shadows of a gag built into its core structure. Less than Zero similarly has a deadpan irony baked into most of the scenes. The boys all have these lopped-off and ridiculous WASP names—Derf, Rip, Trent, Spin, Spit, Finn, Chuck, and, of course, Clay. Those concerned that Clay needs a tan rely on a method that isn’t the sun or creams or even pills, but a process of being dyed in some kind of chemical bath. (Perhaps someday, if not today, the bizarre ubiquity of fake tan will seem as ridiculous as when Bret had merely made it up.)

The characters are often drinking champagne, which has a tough job in this novel, a drink meant to bring a special occasion vibe, an adult refinement, to dead dynamics among the bored and the young and the restless. Characters say things like, “What does she know? She lives in Calabasas for God’s sake.” Clay’s friend Trent laments, “I’m just so sick of dealing with people,” and while it seems grave and right for someone in the book to say this, it’s also wonderfully funny. I’m just so sick of dealing with people. Me too, Trent, me too.

Trent comments that his mom feels sorry for their maid, whose family was killed in El Salvador, but that his mom will fire the maid anyhow. At an awkward gathering with Clay’s recently divorced parents, his mother gazes absentmindedly at the small Christmas tree that his father’s maid has decorated, a detail inlaid with just the right etching of acid. Rip goes into a rage in a video arcade when they won’t make change and he only has hundred-dollar bills.

There is casual destruction here and there, as dollops of mise-en-scène. Clay stares at a video of buildings being blown up in slow motion. A woman collapses on a sidewalk and no one seems to notice. A guy named Dimitri puts his hand through a glass window. “After taking him to some emergency room at some hospital,” Clay tells us, “we go to a coffee shop on Wilshire.” Trent tells Clay he had a dream where he saw the whole world melt.

Late in the book, as if exhibiting, finally, some tiny spark of life, Clay’s friend Alana says, “I think we’ve all lost some sort of feeling.” Just after, Rip comes to a similar conclusion. “I don’t have anything to lose,” he says mournfully.

The characters go to real places, like Ma Maison, and places that are not real but, on the fortieth anniversary of this novel, now, in 2025, are uncannily right, such as Trumps, a restaurant to which Clay’s father pilots his new Ferrari. Also now, in 2025, Trent’s nightmare has partly come true: whole swaths of Los Angeles have been incinerated, or washed away. There’s a feeling that we have now but not later, that beauty is fragile and fleeting, and that what happens to us is a portent of what’s to come for everyone. Dreaming that the world is melting has graduated from private concern, and metaphor, to here and now.

***

When I visited Los Angeles for the first time, in the late eighties, not too long after reading Less than Zero, it was June and the sky was leaden and gray, from its famous seasonal marine layer. The city was a foreign planet to me, with none of the provincial wholesomeness of Northern California. It was Mars. I was with college friends. We snuck onto the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel and went into an empty bungalow whose door was weirdly ajar, like someone had left in a hurry. It was maybe 4 A.M. and there was champagne in a bucket, still cold. Food on a dining service cart, also cold.

On that same trip, I was on Melrose, walking behind a woman in a super-short miniskirt with very tan legs and teased bleached hair and a red leather jacket. She had the exact look of the people in the videos I’d seen on MTV, people like Dale Bozzio and Kim Wilde. The woman’s legs were smooth and thin and the color of caramel. If you’re from Northern California, people don’t look like that. Their skin is not tanned to that color. The woman stopped walking and turned to enter a store, and I saw that she had the face of a very old person. It was a shocking revelation, on account of the illogical contrast of her legs and hair and leather jacket under the gray June light. Like I was Jack Nicholson in the moment in The Shining when the beautiful young woman transforms, in his embrace, to a corpse.

“I want to go back,” Clay’s friend Daniel says on one of their many aimless nights, as they have a drink at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Where?” Clay asks. There’s a long pause and Daniel, fingering the sunglasses he’s wearing in the dark bar, says, “I don’t know. Just back.”

Julian, a beautiful hustler lost in the undertow of his pimp, is Clay’s childhood friend. Clay holds on to memories of the two of them playing soccer in fifth grade. Likewise, Clay’s wonder at whether there’s anything in the boxes in the Du-par’s Christmas display is some atavistic grip on childhood. His friends would all know that the boxes are empty. What makes Clay worth caring about is that he’s not sure.

Indeed, a surprisingly traditional aspect of this debut novel is that it’s designed to give the reader empathy for Clay, Clay as the reader’s stand-in, who can witness the nihilism around him from a certain ethical remove. (By the time of American Psycho, Bret had dispensed with this convention, in the creation of a protagonist who requires a more sophisticated reader, one who can navigate moral ambiguity.) Even if Clay seems to his friends to be more or less like them—coked-up and disaffected—and even if he tells the reader that he wants “to see the worst,” poor Clay is somatizing all over the place. He’s nervous and breaking out into cold sweats, suffers insomnia and occasional crying jags. He’s easily thrown, with a fragile core of sentimentality, expressed in italicized sections of some other time, back when he could feel, reminiscences that connect Clay to his grandparents and a Western mythology of homey optimism, Clay as a boy on his grandmother’s lap, Clay hearing her hum “On the Sunny Side of the Street”—in other words, exactly the sort of narrative space that his friend Daniel longs to enter, in his vague desire to “go back.”

I daresay this entire novel is a somatization of Clay’s inner emotional reality. Like those frogs that secrete a hallucinogen that makes people trip, Clay has secreted the poisonous dream of this book so that we can see what he’s up against.

At the end, when he says he’s leaving, it’s such a relief. But Clay’s immersion in a world where nothing matters might already have wrecked him. He’s a ticking time bomb in the hands of his creator.

They all are. What Bret Easton Ellis had made, in this first youthful novel, was a cast that would return, in one form or another, under various guises, in other books. People who, like zombies, and because they are zombies, would be impossible to kill.

 

This essay will appear in the forthcoming reissue of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, which will be published by Vintage in May.

Rachel Kushner’s most recent novel is Creation Lake, a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize. She lives in Los Angeles. 

The End of Roadside Attractions

The UFO Welcome Center in Bowman, North Carolina, which was destroyed by a fire. Photograph courtesy of Jane Stern.

I was fortunate to have traveled America’s blue highways in the golden age of roadside attractions. The year I fell in love with roadside attractions was 1971, when my husband, Michael, and I (newly married and fresh out of college) crisscrossed America, hunting for small-town cafés, diners, and BBQs, compiling a book that would be called Roadfood.

Back then, to review these unheralded mom-and-pop cafés was strange. Foodies (a term that had yet to be popularized) were interested only in eating at gourmet bastions in big cities or abroad. These Continental restaurants were expensive; they served French or northern Italian food and had waiters wielding big pepper mills.

It did not take us long to realize we liked eating and traveling more than we liked what we’d studied, so as card-carrying contrarians with a car and a few bucks in our pockets, we decided that simple American food needed a champion. We spent the next three years on the road, scouting out these places. We drove two hundred miles a day and ate (on average) ten meals a day. When we weren’t driving or eating, our attention was drawn to weird things by the side of the road.

For those of you too young to know what a roadside attraction is, let me explain. Unlike big “fun” corporate endeavors like Disney World or Busch Gardens, a true roadside attraction was a brainchild of an individual with a vision. These people were usually oddball folks who lived in rural areas. Ignited by their own passions or obsessions, they invited the public in to see what they had devoted their life’s work to.

As two oddballs on our own strange quest, Michael and I were the perfect audience to find roadside attractions mesmerizing. They also provided us a wonderful opportunity to stretch our legs and give our stomachs a rest. These roadside attractions were like punctuation points on a trip. Time to take a breath, to pause, to step inside someone else’s strange dream.

A good roadside attraction would get the car traveler excited miles before they arrived. Back then, billboards were cheap and plentiful, and car travelers would start to see seductive come-ons to SEE LIVING MERMAIDS!, COME FACE TO FACE WITH A REAL SASQUATCH, or BEHOLD JAYNE MANSFIELD’S ACTUAL DEATH CAR miles before the actual site. At odds with the often cinematic, flashy billboards, the attractions themselves were mostly humble hand-built structures located in the middle of nowhere.

Some roadside attractions were located a stone’s throw from a highway exit; others required a miles-long jaunt into places not shown on a map. As this was years before the internet or GPS, we did not have Siri telling us where to go. We rolled the dice, and as civilization fell away, we prayed that we would not meet the now-clichéd fate of so many horror movie characters. We were overjoyed when the owner/enthusiast of the roadside attraction welcomed us in. We paid a few bucks or some pocket change and were shown the way into the exhibit.

Having grown up in Manhattan, a short walk from the Guggenheim, the Met, and the Frick, I knew what a real museum looked like. This is probably why I was so smitten by these do-it-yourself collections. They were the complete opposite of the big-name bastions of culture.

World’s Largest Ball of Twine. Photograph by Jane Stern.

The World’s Largest Ball of Twine (Cawker City, Kansas), the Rare Fur-Bearing Trout (South Otselic, New York), and the Coon Dog Cemetery (Cherokee, Alabama) are still as fresh in my mind as crisp tissue paper. Excitement is contagious. Maybe one reason that I fell deeply in love with these curiosities was the heat transferred by the creators. The more personal roadside attractions were run by people with “unique” psychological profiles. Utilitarian verbiage might use terms like obsessive, hoarder, or simply nuts, but where in the DSM-5 would one find a diagnosis for a collection of 800 Used Oil Rags (Davenport, Iowa) or the Tree That Owns Itself (Athens, Georgia)?

Of all genres of roadside attractions, dinosaur parks are my favorite. If you have seen the skeletons of real prehistoric giants at New York’s American Museum of Natural History or at the Field Museum in Chicago, you will need to recalibrate your brain for the roadside versions.

Michael and I stumbled upon Nash-ional Dinoland in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1981. By then, we were veteran road travelers but not so blasé that finding Dinoland did not leave its mark. To this day it remains my favorite roadside attraction.

Exactly how we found Dinoland is lost to me. Perhaps they had a billboard or some signage, but I remember it being only a dilapidated house on the outskirts of a small New England town. There was a rusted pickup truck parked by the front door with DINO DELIVERY WAGON shakily hand-painted on the door.

It makes sense that the house and truck looked weathered, because Carlton S. Nash opened the place in 1930.

Mr. Nash remains a man of mystery. No one knows what drove him to become obsessed with dinosaurs. He was not a paleontologist, just a man with a small plot of brown soil that he thought bore the blurry footprints of what might have been a T. rex or a brontosaurus.

Not being a scientist, he did not investigate his discovery, nor (I suspect) did he care—the muddy footprint was enough to propel a lifetime calling as a roadside dinologist.

At Nash-ional Dinoland. Photograph courtesy of Jane Stern.

Nash-ional Dinoland checked every box of roadside perfection: shabby, weather-beaten, with a hodgepodge of disjointed offerings for sale. The building was listing and in need of paint; broken shutters hung from the windows. Inside, there was a jumbled shop of things to admire and purchase. There was a “bargain table” of five-hundred-million-year-old trilobites selling for “three for a buck,” a “petrified dinosaur gizzard,” and a vintage Dino gasoline sign. Framed faded photos of General Patton, Dale Carnegie, and the German movie director Fritz Lang (all fellow dinosaur fans) lined the wall.

But the singular jewels in this roadside paleolithic crown were the dozens of handmade dinosaurs constructed by Mr. Nash. These dinosaurs (a good two dozen) were located all around the outside of the building. Unlike serious museum dinosaurs, they did not have a bone or skeleton anywhere in their bodies. Nash’s monsters were made of papier-mâché, globs of clay, cement, and whatever he had on hand. To Mr. Nash, these were not whimsical fantasy dinosaurs—they were allegedly the real McCoys, clearly labeled as brontosauruses, triceratops, and toothy T. rexes but each so stunted and strange that even the man-eaters rearing back on their spindly hind legs were as scary as a milk carton. The largest one came up to my waist.

At Nash-ional Dinoland. Photograph courtesy of Jane Stern.

In the hands of Mr. Nash, these beasts were beyond lifelike; they were phantasmagorical. Outrageously hideous, some looked like dolphins caught in a washing machine, others like crazed mountain men who ditched their overalls and grew claws and fangs. Each one sillier than the next, the work of a true obsessive artist who saw no reason to color within the lines. I could look at them forever and never grow bored. The place closed in 2019, after Mr. Nash’s death.

If dinosaurs were one of the main themes of roadside attractions, then Jesus Christ was not far behind. From Maine to California, one found towering crucifixes, statues of Jesus alone, Jesus with his homeboys, Jesus with Mary and sometimes with inexplicable companions like a chihuahua or a pile of cowboy boots. Unlike pint-size dinosaurs, when it comes to roadside Jesus, the bigger the better. Like the huge Christ that looms over Rio de Janeiro, many immense Christian visions can still be found on the road. The world’s second-largest crucifix (fifty-five feet tall) is in Indian River, Michigan, and is dwarfed by Christ of the Ozarks, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a seven-story-tall blazing white statue crafted in a strange hard-edged art brut style.

Photograph courtesy of Jane Stern.

Is there a connection between dinosaurs and Jesus? When it comes to roadside attractions, the answer is yes! Dinosaur Gardens in Ossineke, Michigan, boasts the greatest blending of these two roadside attraction genres. Here, one can find a sixty-thousand-pound “life-size” brontosaurus. Leading you into its rib cage is a staircase. After scaling the staircase, you find yourself in a candy-stripe-painted shrine to Jesus Christ. The place of worship is gaudily decorated with paintings of the Lord with a blond page-boy hairdo alongside baroque crucifixes and painted Bible verses.

Most roadside attractions no longer exist. If families still travel together by car, it is a long shot to think that the promise of seeing the World’s Largest Cheese (Neillsville, Wisconsin) or the Poultry Hall of Fame (Beltsville, Maryland) would peel eyes away from iPad screens. Many of these attractions went out of business because no one visited them; others were probably offered money by land developers. Few people travel the back roads anymore, and highways are speckled with fast food and chain motels. Postcards and souvenirs are things of the past—no one wants a decorative spoon from every state. We feel like we’ve already seen national monuments in photographs. People get excited by Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon only when someone falls in.

I miss roadside attractions. Enormous balls of twine, Jesus in a dinosaur’s stomach, jackalopes, and fur-bearing trout have faded in the mists of time. I especially miss the unexpected insights into the lives of famous people. Wandering through the Roy Rogers–Dale Evans museum in dusty Victorville, California, I compared it to the professionally curated Gene Autry museum in Los Angeles. Autry’s museum is immaculate and filled with silver-clad saddles and rare pioneer artifacts. Roy’s museum also has some fancy saddles but proudly displays a tube of sunscreen he bought in 1955, a poorly taxidermied possum he accidentally ran over, and a broken electric razor that one of his band members used on tour. Only one of these museums still haunts my daydreams. One last memory: The scruffy possum shares the Lucite display case with Roy’s superstar palomino horse, Trigger. Why? Why not? These are America’s purest memories.

 

Jane Stern has published forty-two books and has contributed pieces to The New Yorker, GQ, The Atlantic, and Gourmet. A permanent collection of her work is held at the Smithsonian Institute. 

Friedrich Schiller’s Secret Beloved

 

Photograph courtesy of Alexander Wells.

The small eastern German city of Rudolstadt sits on a curve of the river Saale. All through the summer of 1788, the great poet-philosopher-playwright Friedrich Schiller used to stride around this bend, impatient to meet up with the love of his life, his future wife, Charlotte—but also with her sister Caroline. When he couldn’t see them, he sent love letters, often several a day, and these were sometimes addressed not to one sister but both. They would gather on a bridge across the river. They would swim and sing and talk and read. When the girls’ parents were away, they spent time together in their family home. What happened inside is now unknowable. “You have already become so much to my heart,” Schiller wrote, that formal you being potentially either singular or plural.

Three years later, when Schiller and Charlotte were married and living together in the nearby town of Jena, a young poet named Karl Gotthard Graß became a regular visitor at their house. The painter once wrote Schiller a letter in which he marveled at the lack of jealousy and quarreling between the two women of the household. “I cannot hide my feelings about the love of these two splendid sisters, for each other and for you,” he wrote. “It was often as if [their mother] had only one daughter and you … had two wives.” It was, the painter continued, just like a fairy tale.

***

To get to Rudolstadt from Berlin, you pass through prime Goethe-and-Schiller country. These two friends—Goethe being older, more courtly, and more of a polymath; Schiller being younger, more furiously abstract, and more beloved by his public—take pride of place in Germany’s cultural heritage, especially in this particular stretch of central Germany, which encompasses the main stomping grounds of their Weimar Classicism period as well as the major sites of the younger Romantics, whom they overlapped with and encouraged. Every German student has to read, sometimes even to memorize, the work of Goethe and Schiller. Their names are synonymous with German cultural greatness. Their legacy is a reliable source of domestic tourism coin; it also lends historical glamour to cities that didn’t exactly have the best twentieth century.

And people really are mad for them there. In Leipzig, you can visit a house where Schiller spent a summer, or a café whose hot chocolate Goethe liked, or if you’re as lucky as I was, during an impulsive solo tour around the area, you can walk down Schillerstraße into the Schillerpark and take a selfie with the Schiller bust there, only to get laughed at by beer-drinking youths in terrible Matrix coats. Down in Jena, where Schiller and Goethe and the younger Romantics all Bloomsburied out in the 1790s and 1800s, you can visit Schiller’s garden house, a Romantikerhaus, or the botanical gardens that Goethe helped redesign, which are home to a gingko tree my wife hates because one time for work she had to read a bad English translation of a bad but famous Goethe poem about it. I wandered agog around these various sites, thrilled to finally be doing—after years of study in far-flung Australia and then of semi-integrated expat life in Berlin—some of the properly serious Great Literature stuff that had lured me to Europe in the first place. Goethe and Schiller! Museums, plaques, and busts!!

The city of Weimar has a Goethe house, a Goethe garden house, a house where Schiller spent his later years, and a large bronze statue of Schiller and Goethe together, both holding one laurel wreath while Goethe gently rests his hand on Schiller’s shoulder. (Replicas of this statue have been erected by wistful German émigrés in Syracuse, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.) In its various gift shops, I contemplated books by Schiller, books about Schiller, mugs with cats on them, Goethe busts, Schiller busts, a wine corker with Schiller’s head on it, porcelain plates with Goethe and Schiller’s heads on them, Schiller applesauce, Goethe strawberry and lavender jam, and an A3 facsimile of Schiller’s “Arbeits- und Finanzplan für die Jahre 1802–1809” (Work and finance plan 1802–1809), before settling on a lovely little postcard with the gingko poem, which I mailed to my wife immediately. Saw this and thought of you xx.

Before continuing to Rudolstadt, I sat in a chain bakery and dug into The Robbers, the rebellious play from 1782 that made young Schiller a star (and Coleridge “tremble like an Aspen Leaf”). The tenor is thrusting and vigorous, as with much of early Schiller; it tells the story of a good-hearted man who is forced by tyranny and corruption to lead the life of a righteous outlaw. Like the rest of Schiller’s oeuvre—even the later history plays—it is lit up by a philosophical boisterousness, a lust for liberation and renewal, and a search for ever grander forms of “unity” outside a dried-out, teetering, dictatorial social order. While it might feel “carpe diem” corny today, its spiritedness is genuine and occasionally contagious. But I was having trouble reading, which upset me. Had I fried my brain on the American internet? Had I read too many posts? Still, all the Germans I meet tend to agree that Schiller is tough going, perhaps more admired than actually read. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a big white lamp in the shape of Goethe’s head, its plug unplugged and dangling loose. Where’s my man Schiller? I battled through another two pages of The Robbers, then boarded my train.

Rudolstadt, like many small cities in post-Communist eastern Germany, seems rather unsure how to define itself. They have a picturesque castle belonging to a very minor noble; they were once famous for their porcelain, and for producing a domestic competitor to LEGO. The surrounding region votes far right, but the city is run by independents. It is neither very rich nor very poor. They host a Tough Mudder event and a world music festival. In recent decades, though, they seem to have gambled a lot of their identity on Schiller—and on one saucy chapter of the author’s life. Already at the station, the marketing campaign is apparent. A big sign bids welcome to “Schiller-city Rudolstadt.” The pedestrian tunnel has a drawing of Schiller’s face and the unofficial town motto, Schiller’s Secret Beloved—adopted as part of an enthusiastically Schiller-based marketing campaign in the aughts—next to pictures of Schiller and two women interconnected with Cupid-ish arrows, cartoon hearts, and quotations. Then there are big blown-up photos of three young actors dressed in period garb. They pose in front of a church in one, and in another they look out over a castle, two of them holding hands behind the other’s back. Somebody with a pen has furiously scratched out the faces of Schiller (just a bit) and one of the women (quite a lot) on one photo.

As I approached the town square, I noticed a Schiller bust—beside the bust of two women—and then a city works van with Schiller’s Secret Beloved printed on the side. All the signs were pointing west, toward the Schillerhaus, to something. And so on I went, past the shop advertising open-faced sandwiches with raw pork mince and uncooked white onions—parsley photoshopped on top—and past the popular outdoors shop named “Sport Schart.” Past the bakery that tried to sell me a doughnut called Kameruner, like Cameroon, in the shape of a dinosaur; past the clothing store with a spiffy window display of leopard print, a discount rack featuring outgoing summer styles of leopard print, and a rack of freshly arrived fall fashions—leopard print. I even passed a plaque proclaiming Goethe once stayed there.

I got to the Schillerhaus in the early afternoon. The sun was mild, the leaves were rouging. The house itself sat elegantly understated, three boxy white floors festooned with ivy and topped with a gently sloping orange roof. Inside, a quotation from Schiller had been painted on the wall near the entrance: “All art is dedicated to joy,” it read, “and there is no higher and no more serious task than to make people happy.” All right, then, I thought, do your best. The first room was dedicated to Goethe and Schiller’s first meeting—which technically happened here, although they didn’t get along, as their letters to mutual friends attest. (Goethe considered Schiller immature and overzealous; Schiller found Goethe “an egoist of exceptional degree.”) Someone had the idea of reenacting their meeting using video screens, each containing the head of an actor: Goethe, Schiller, the two sisters, another woman, all talking over each other and attempting to be witty, then falling silent for several seconds. It felt to me, not knowing better, authentic. If you focus on Schiller, you notice him exchanging sultry looks and winks with one sister, then with the other, and then the first again. The actors were doing a great job. I recognized their faces from the photos at the station.

***

It was on a chance social visit to this house in December 1787 that Schiller met these two sisters—Charlotte von Lengefeld and Caroline von Beulwitz. What happened next is a drama that reveals itself primarily in letters, since Schiller did not keep a proper diary and none of them wrote explicitly about the situation in their published works. The love triangle shows up in some biographies of Schiller, and a couple of critics and historians have plundered the epistolary archive in search of the truth. Yet all these chunks of evidence merely orbit around the unknowability of what was really done and felt and said in closed rooms during the late eighteenth century.

Charlotte was younger and more demure; she liked the English language and drawing. Caroline, three years older, was bolder and more radical in inclination—but she had already been married off to a dull businessman. It was a loveless marriage, and he was often away on work trips, so she lived almost completely independently. Both sisters dreamed of traveling widely, although the farthest they would ever get was Switzerland. They read widely and translated—their father wanted them educated beyond their small-town context. But each of them was waiting, somehow, to find a path into the wider world.

When Schiller arrived in Rudolstadt in 1787, he was a famous young firebrand who wanted to liberate the self from social tyranny. His latest play, Don Carlos, was tragic, sensual, enamored of freedom. Yet he had also begun to crave a conventional family life. He had offered a few marriage proposals willy-nilly and seemed unsure whether he wanted a partner in thought and deed, or a woman who would live to serve him.

The three hit it off immediately when Schiller was brought by a friend to the Lengefeld family home—now the Schillerhaus. “Both sisters,” Schiller wrote to a friend, “possess some rapture, but in both it is subordinated to reason and tempered by intellectual culture. The younger one is not entirely free from a certain coquetterie d’esprit, which still gives more pleasure through modesty and unfaltering liveliness than it detracts.” It was decided that Schiller would return for a longer visit the next summer. The sisters’ mother was at court and their father away on business, so the house was often unoccupied. Schiller was put up in a cottage down the river, and the trio saw each other almost daily. They talked about literature and politics and gossip and music. That summer, and after Schiller again left town, an love triangle in letters established itself: hundreds of passionate missives traveled between Schiller and Charlotte, Schiller and Caroline, Schiller and both at once. (What was said between Caroline and Charlotte is lost to time.) Schiller would write to one in boisterous passion, while also inquiring about her sister’s “dainty little feet”; sometimes the women would answer together. On the Schillerhaus Rudolstadt’s top floor, you can stand among three silhouettes and hear actors reading the letters.

Their correspondence is heady, needy, and headlong. Charlotte wrote: “Let me hear from you as often as you can, and desire, so that the course of your spirit will not become strange to me, and so I can follow it.” Caroline wrote: “Nobody has ever known how to stir the sides of my innermost being like you—I have oft been moved to tears by how tenderly you nurtured and carried my soul through bleak moments.” And, to the “angels of [his] life,” Schiller wrote: “To be able to live only in the two of you, and you in me—oh, that is an existence which would put us above all other humans.” (I was beginning to feel bad about that postcard I sent my wife.)

The trio dreamed of continuing their Rudolstädter Sommer indefinitely. Schiller would marry Charlotte, with—it seems—the understanding that Caroline would join them. Caroline proposed to Schiller on Charlotte’s behalf. She also got the wary blessing of their mother, who must have been relieved that at least there would be one respectable marriage. They would live in two houses: one for Schiller and Charlotte and another, next door, for Caroline (and theoretically her absent husband). Schiller wrote excitedly about the prospect of this three-lover life, both to the sisters and to a friend. The wedding took place in 1790. Yet after that the paper trail goes relatively cold, in part because many of Caroline’s letters to Schiller were burned, allegedly by one of his daughters. What was really going on between them: boisterous friendship, love, competition? The lines were blurred. The literary critic Ursula Naumann has argued that it was a genuine ménage à trois, citing one contemporary who believed Caroline and Schiller were sleeping together; a mutual friend also wrote to her husband that, since their own throuple was going so well, Caroline’s situation might also turn out fine. From the letters, it is clear enough that something unfamiliar was being negotiated—something more dangerous and adrenal than simply a powerful man choosing between girlfriends. “Tell me,” Caroline wrote, after Schiller and Charlotte were officially engaged, “what is it between us? I can feel that it is something.” Schiller replied that her letter had been dear to him—that “a new hope has revived my own.”

Ultimately, Schiller and Charlotte found themselves in a rather standard bourgeois marriage. They posted up in Jena, not Rudolstadt; Caroline lived with them intermittently but found herself more and more excluded. Charlotte kept house and raised four children. Schiller wrote and wrote until his death in 1805, at the age of forty-five, having drifted ever deeper into illness, social isolation, and resentment toward younger Romantic upstarts, who constantly mocked him. Charlotte is remembered primarily as Schiller’s wife and the recipient of his poems and love letters. Caroline is remembered rather differently, if at all. She eventually got a divorce, wrote a novel, married a man who loved her greatly but bored her, traveled widely, had a kid (that some historians suspect was Schiller’s), and dedicated her later years to writing, producing the first proper biography of Schiller in 1830. In that biography, she hardly mentions the role she played in his life. Her sister and the great poet—that’s the love story that matters. Perhaps she wanted to keep for herself what she had experienced for herself—“really,” she wrote to a friend after his death, “we were the only ones that knew him.” It is Caroline who was scratched out with pen at the station.

***

In Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer describes the sinking feeling that comes at the climax of a literary pilgrimage: “You look and look and try to summon up feelings which don’t exist.” To this, I can only counter with the Schillerhaus in Rudolstadt, a place about which I had no expectations, and which triggered a number of very real feelings—feelings like, for instance, Huh??? The saucy insinuations posted relentlessly around the city’s various walls, tunnels, work vans, etc., did succeed in stimulating a certain curiosity. That curiosity powered me through the Schillerhaus—its brightly painted domestic rooms, its busts and beds and samovars and pens, its love letters written out in alluring carmine cursive on the walls. This was the Lengefeld family house, not Schiller’s, and it felt that way, for all the Great Poet branding. The sisters’ dresses were hung between the rooms. One little display case held Caroline’s matchbox, her silver spoons, her mug with a landscape painting of Rudolstadt on it, and a handsome little globe—a pell-mell collection perhaps, but also a bittersweet record of a half-free woman’s hunger for the world. The place was elegant, staid, and basically empty. I could only think of these two sisters, of their anxieties and hopes and frustrations, and of the way the young poet’s theoretical love for freedom collided with the thorny world of human coexistence. And I discovered I wanted details—juicy details. Who did what with whom and when? What did it all mean? Was there somebody I could ask?

And perhaps there is nothing so odd about remembering the Weimar Classicists and Romantics via gossip. These people, after all, were scenesters. They said things like “in vino veritas” and meant it. They ran magazines together, they wrote and dreamed and argued together, they slept with each other’s partners and fell out after writing nasty hatchet jobs. Such porous boundaries between life and sex and art were also a matter of program. Schiller and his contemporaries, especially the Romantics that came to prominence after him, were high on the concept of self-determination. But once you’ve liberated yourself, well, how do you live with other people? By what new social codes do you collaborate and talk and fuck and love? It was not just in their work, but also in their messy home lives, that they were trying to work all these things out.

It was a time of vigorous, lurching, experimental sociality. Gender dynamics were being renegotiated, but only partly. (Fichte’s belief in the absolute Ich was only really extended to men, while Novalis’s idealized love for a tween cousin was more absolute ick.) Schiller himself seemed conflicted. He sought out friendships with people like Caroline and published many women in his magazines, but he also resorted to bourgeois patriarchal norms around the home. I did start to wonder, back in the sunny garden of the Schillerhaus Rudolstadt, if the temporary ménage à trois was less a goofy interlude and more a tragic missed moment. Should he—should they—have bloody well gone for it and tried to live together permanently as a trio? Caroline von Humboldt, wife to the Prussian linguist William von Humboldt and a mutual friend, regretted that Schiller had chosen “calm” over “challenges,” while Humboldt himself later reflected that Schiller had never seemed so full of his own great qualities as he was during that year before his marriage, the year of the epistolary throuple.

***

On my last night in Rudolstadt, I sat by the river and leafed through Schiller’s poems. I stumbled across one I initially thought it was the one titled “Ode an die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”), a world-famous piece of kitsch he later disavowed, but it turned out to be “An die Freunde,” dedicated to his friends, and translated into English by Edgar Alfred Bowring. “Yes, my friends!—that happier times have been / than the present, none can contravene,” he wrote, in his ode to the boys, and not to joy:

But, with all the charms that splendor grants,
Rome is but the tomb of ages past;
Life but smiles upon the blooming plants
That the seasons round her cast.

I sent a photo of the river, unsolicited, to a friend back in Berlin. And I got to thinking about what a horror it is to be canonized—to be transformed into a name, a bust, a chore, not someone willful and alive and part of a wriggling, warm-blooded mass. I watched some tiny oval bats dive narrow loops around the bridge; I heard the jackdaws croaking darkly and the church bells ringing dinner. And then I felt my phone—it’s H.!—and there he was, offering up some gossip. “wanna hear something funny?” Oh yes, I do.

 

Alexander Wells is a writer living in Berlin. His work has appeared in The Drift, Poetry, The Baffler, and the Guardian. Since 2020, he has run the Books section of the print monthly The Berliner.