The Paris Review's Blog, page 100

The Review’s Review: Strangers and the Moon

17776 (screenshot), by Jon Bois.

Four years after its first chapter was published on SB Nation in 2017, Jon Bois’s serialized multimedia novella 17776: The Future of Football is still my favorite (and some of the only) “new media” lit online. Told through text interspersed with video and graphics that mix satellite imagery, newspaper clippings, and Telestrated sports-field diagrams, the story follows the sentient space probe Pioneer 9 as it flies over the United States of the future: a land in which no one dies any more, but everyone still loves football. With their newfound immortality, Americans have developed more and more baroque constellations of rules for their favorite game, sending their players on elaborate, millennia-long scavenger hunts across the country. An epic reminiscent of Infinite Jest, it’s a dazzlingly idiosyncratic work of art that is equal parts exercise in speculative game design, history of a dying empire, and fable about the meaning of play, humanity, and technology. But 17776 isn’t just an experiment with form; Bois is a startlingly sensitive writer, and scrolling through his simple, color-coded dialogue feels like looking at the 1967 photo of Earth taken by an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission: lonely, but awe-inducing. —Olivia Kan-Sperling 

The world depicted in the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero’s novella Stranger to the Moon (translated by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean) is one of cruelty and excess, a series of physical struggles and acts of sexualized violence inflicted by the vicious “clothed” onto the “unclothed” they oppress. Told from the perspective of one of the unclothed, this is a hallucinatory read, brief and bizarre, and yet the murky boundaries, pathological masochism, and fascistic pull toward brutality it depicts tap into a frighteningly familiar human need to destroy—one we’ve seen reflected in the political realities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. —Rhian Sasseen

I found a marked-up copy of The Accidental in a pile of books given to one of my sisters by a friend who was moving house. I knew little of Ali Smith before I started reading, but now I want to read all of her books. This one dives swiftly and deeply into several characters’ consciousnesses, each filtering the awful world through a particular kind of brain: an aspiring filmmaker, a brilliant physics student, a fairly bad poet, a writer of imaginary interviews. It manages youthful points of view with both sympathy and sophistication, and zero nostalgia. There is something so special about books that drop into one’s life, as opposed to those one aspires to read. Aspirational books can, and often do, disappoint. Found books hardly do that, and when they are delightful, it feels like a gift from the universe. —Jane Breakell

17776 (screenshot), by Jon Bois.

The Curlews of Galloway

Frank Southgate, Autumn. Waders on the Breydon muds–little stint, curlew, dunlin and curlew-sandpiper, 1904, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Galloway is unheard of. This southwestern corner of Scotland has been overlooked for so long that we have fallen off the map. People don’t know what to make of us anymore and shrug when we try and explain. When my school rugby team traveled to Perthshire for a match, our opponents thumped us for being English. When we went for a game in England, we were thumped again for being Scottish. That was child’s play, but now I realize that even grown-ups struggle to place us.

There was a time when Galloway was a powerful and independent kingdom. We had our own Gaelic language, and strangers trod carefully around this place. The Romans got a battering when they came here, and the Viking lord Magnus Barefoot had nightmares about us. In the days when longboats stirred the shallow broth of the Irish Sea, we were the center of a busy world. We took a slice of trade from the Irish and sold it on to the English and the Manxmen who loom over the sea on a clear day. We spurned the mainstream and we only lost our independence when Scotland invaded us in the year 1236. Then came the new Lords of Galloway and the wild times of Archibald the Grim, and he could fill a whole book himself.

The frontier of Galloway was always open for discussion. Some of the old kings ruled everything from Glasgow to the Solway Firth, but Galloway finally settled back on a rough and tumbling core, the broken country which lies between tall mountains and the open sea. This was not an easy place to live in, but we clung to it like moss and we excelled on rocks and saltwater both. We threw up standing stones to celebrate our paganism, then laid the groundwork for Christianity in Scotland. History made us famous for noble knights and black-hearted cannibals. You might not know what Galloway stands for, but it’s plain as day to us.

We never became a county in the way that other places did. Galloway fell into two halves: Wigtownshire in the west and the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in the east. There are some fine legal distinctions between a “shire” and a “stewartry,” but that hardly matters anymore because both of them were deleted from the map in 1975 when the local government was overhauled. The remnants of Galloway were yoked to Dumfries, and the result is a mess because Dumfries and Galloway are two very different things.

Dumfriesshire folk mistake their glens for dales and fail to keep Carlisle at arm’s length. They’re jealous of our wilderness and beauty, but we forgive them because it’s unfair to gloat. Besides, they have the bones of Robert Burns to console them, and don’t we all know it. Perhaps Dumfriesshire is a decent enough place, but we’ve been pulled in different directions for too long to make an easy team. Imagine a county called “Perth and Fife” or “Carlisle and Northumberland.” Both would be smaller and more coherent than “Dumfries and Galloway.” Now there are trendy councillors who abbreviate this clunky mouthful to “D ’n’ G,” as if three small letters were enough to describe the 120 miles of detail and diversity which lie between Langholm and Portpatrick. Tourism operators say we are “Scotland’s best-kept secret,” and tourists support that claim by ignoring us.

It’s easy to see why visitors rarely come. They think we’re just an obstacle between England and the Highlands. They can’t imagine that there’s much to see in the far southwest, and tell us that “Scotland begins at Perth.” Maybe it’s because we don’t wear much tartan, or maybe it’s because we laugh at the memory of Jacobites and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Left to our own devices, we prefer the accordion to the pipes and we’d sooner race a gird than toss a caber. If you really want to see “Scotland,” you’ll find it further north.

When Galloway folk speak of home, we don’t talk of heather in bloom or the mist upon sea-lochs and mountains. Our place is broad and blue and it smells of rain. Perhaps we can’t match the extravagant pibroch scenery of the north, but we’re anchored to this place by a sure and lasting bond. There are no wobbling lips or tears of pride around these parts; we’ll leave that sort of carry-on to the Highlanders. We’ll nod and make light of it, but we know that life away from Galloway is unthinkable.

My ancestors have been in this place for generations. I imagine them in a string of dour, solid Lowlanders that snakes out of sight into the low clouds. These were farming folk with southern names like Laidlaw and Mundell, Reid and Gilroy, and they worked the soil in quiet, hidden corners without celebrity or fame. Lauries don’t have an ancestral castle to concentrate any feeling of heredity. We’ve worked in a grand sweep between Dunscore and Wigtown and now all of Galloway feels like it might’ve been home at one time or another. I was born to feel that there is only one place in this world, and I can hardly bear to spend a day away from it. Satisfaction alternates between quiet peace and raging gouts of dizzy joy.

Wild birds fly over Galloway. They move between the shore and the hills, and that journey brings them close at hand. I was brought up on a seaside farm where curlews spent their winter days in noisy gangs of a hundred and more. My father ran a mixed business based on sheep and beef cattle, and curlews flowed alongside him in rich furrows by the shore. When spring comes, curlews are blown uphill on warming winds to breed on the moors, and we followed them a few miles inland to pass many hours at work on my grandfather’s hill farm. I heard the birds crying on busy days when the sheep were clipped and the peat was cut.

Unremarkable in flight, obscure in plumage, and secretive to the point of rumor, curlews are unlikely heroes. But then they call over the shore and sing beneath the high-stacked clouds and there is nothing else of value. No other wild bird has that power to convey a sense of place through song. It’s a grasping belly-roll of belonging in the space between rough grass and tall skies, and you never forget it. The curlew’s call became the yearlong sound of my childhood. I hear that liquid, loving lilt and I’m lying in the warm, sheepy grass again, a small boy in too-big wellies, hugged by old familiar hills.

So I thought that curlews were mine. The connection was a live wire, but then I found that the birds had a place in all of us. My entire family would rush to the kitchen door at night to hear curlews passing between our chimney and the wide, dusty moon. We all loved them, so I began to think that the birds belonged only to Galloway. In time I’d grow up and go elsewhere, and that’s when I learned that curlews are loved by anybody who’ll take the time to listen to them. People are devoted to curlews in Wales and Ireland, on Shetland and Exmoor; the birds have starred in heraldry, tradition, and folklore for thousands of years. Everybody is tempted to claim the curlew, and no other bird can boast of such universal popularity.

I wrote about curlews as a teenager when my friends were smoking and chatting up girls. I hunted for more information about the birds through old school encyclopedias, but all I found were dry, papery sentences dull as windblown sinew. I went back to those words again and again, hoping that I could read some flesh onto the bare bones—

Curlew: any of numerous medium-sized or large shorebirds belonging to the genus Numenius (family Scolopacidae) and having a bill that is decurved, or sickle-shaped, curving downward at the tip. Curlews are streaked, grey or brown birds with long necks and fairly long legs. They probe in soft mud for worms and insects, and they breed inland in temperate and sub-Arctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere.

The common, or Eurasian, curlew (N. arquata), almost 60 cm (24 inches) long including the bill, is the largest European shorebird. This species breeds from Britain to Central Asia.

There was so little to go on. I began to write my own encyclopedia entries in the form of short descriptions and reports of encounters with the birds on the hill and the sea shore. I don’t know what became of these projects—perhaps they have survived in jotters and folded pages stowed in the attic. It hardly matters, but the birds called me to stretch my legs and draw lines between known and unknown. Curlews were both, and I clung to them through adolescence and early adulthood. Their calls began to feature in tales of fumbling romance and the pressing growth of responsibility. They grew to fill more than just a blue-remembered childhood. I began to think they were an ever-present fact of life, as dependable as rain and moonlight.

Young people don’t stay in Galloway. They go to Glasgow, and I went with them for a four-year stint at the university. The city was a clashing novelty, but then I graduated and found summer work on a Hebridean fishing boat. It was a dark morning on the bus from Buchanan Street to Uig, and rain lashed against the sweaty windows. An old Hebridean lady had made a fruitcake for the journey and passed it around to the passengers as we slashed our way through Glen Coe. The work was a lunge at something different, and soon I was watching killer whales pass our small boat at dawn against the silhouette of Skye. Here was a fine place, but I was nagged by the knowledge that this was not my home. I didn’t have the Gaelic, and I watched my friends at arm’s length. They were born and raised on the Outer Isles, and I wondered how it would feel to have roots in that shallow, turquoise water. I was just paddling my toes in their world and I began to feel like a fraud. I envied the Dutch and German tourists who gawked at us on the jetty because they had nothing to prove.

The work also showed up my physical weakness and lack of stamina. I slobbered with tears and exhaustion after eighty-hour weeks, and I was forever shamed by the strength and power of men three times my age. We went over to Portree for a drink and one of the boys got into a fight. I was pathetic and fragile, and I ducked outside. There was crashing and swearing, and I growled on the harbor steps like a dog pretending to strain on its lead. I didn’t want to fight, but it was galling to find that I couldn’t if I tried. Soft-handed people like me often say that manliness doesn’t matter anymore. We make it seem dumb and old-fashioned, but I grew up around capable, bull-necked men and there was no hiding from the shortfall. I said that I came back to Galloway because I had other plans. Weakness is closer to the truth.

And it was good to be home. Galloway poured back into my boots like peaty water, but it was hard to find solid footing in this place. I’d studied language and literature, but there wasn’t much use for either in small towns where most of the shops are boarded up and jobs are hard to find. Our glory days are well behind us, and D ’n’ G has slumped into decay. People say the best chance you’ve got of making money in Galloway is to buy a metal detector and spend your days hunting for your ancestors’ gold.

I spent a few seasons drifting around southwest Scotland. I picked things up and replaced them again, I pulled pints and felled trees, and I finally found some cash in freelance journalism. It paid the bills, but this line of work hardly carries much clout in a place where you’re expected to have a one-word job title and just get on with it. People asked “What do you do these days?” I’d shrug and say “All sorts,” knowing that I’d fail to cut mustard.

My Cornish wife and I were married in the registry office in Glasgow. We’d met at university and we moved to a small cottage by the Solway shore where we could listen to curlews flying in the darkness. We assumed that our children would not be far away, but none came, so I leaned back on married life with a shrug. Work was busy and time swirled past. I didn’t mind the absence, and I felt sure that our family lay just around the corner. Years later, we’d recall this place during brusque interviews with a fertility specialist who asked us when we began “trying” for a baby. It was in those days, but babies were one of many plans we had back then.

I returned to curlews in a loose, half-hearted kind of way. I liked the idea of writing a book about the birds, and the sudden collapse they’ve suffered over the last thirty years gave them a glaring relevance. We hardly need scientists to tell us that curlews have been declining across Britain over the last half century. The birds used to be absurdly common, and now they are nearly gone. We’ve lost three-quarters of our curlews in Galloway since the 1990s, and some parishes have lost them all. I was old enough to have seen this collapse in real time. My nagging worries had become a constant ache; this is the latest disaster in a long and nationwide sequence of decline and collapse, but this one really hurts.

I began to examine curlews beneath a microscope. I gathered up mounds of scientific reports and started out on background reading, but the work was hard and I stumbled over the technical jargon. I’m no scientist; I had to launder ideas of ecosystems and biodiversity into something I could understand. People in Galloway aren’t used to thinking about wild birds in isolation. They’re part of something much bigger, and they hardly warrant anybody’s full attention.

Visitors come and tell us that we live in a fine place to watch birds, but we’ve always taken our wildlife for granted. Problems have only arrived here in the last few decades, and we’ve been spoiled by centuries of surplus. We’ve gorged on wild partridges and salmon for a thousand years, and now we are told to be careful with what we have because nature is fragile. True enough, our salmon have gone and our game is going, but we aren’t sure what to make of bird-watchers and ecologists. They come from somewhere else and they usually tell us we’re wrong.

I began to think that a book about curlews would’ve made no sense to my ancestors who’d farmed here and were preoccupied with soils and rain, beasts and grain. The birds were hardly worth noticing in the days of their prosperity, but now curlews have been transformed by their decline. They’ve become figures of tragedy to be studied in desperate detail. Everybody mourns the loss of curlews, but birds have always come naturally to us and we scratch our heads at this confusing failure.

I was besotted with birds. Curlews were my focus, but I’d often get up before dawn to watch black grouse and lapwings displaying in the rushes above the hill pens. I’m glad I made the time for those birds because they’ve all gone now. I knew the last black grouse by name, and I was there to see the final lapwing’s egg. Curlews are the last of a grand dynasty of hill birds that has crumbled into ash during the short course of my life. My generation has arrived at a party which seems to be ending, and it’s getting harder to recall birds as they were in the days of their plenty.

 

Patrick Laurie is a freelance journalist and author who works on farming and conservation projects in Galloway and the northern part of the UK. Find out more at gallowayfarm.wordpress.com.

Excerpted from Galloway: Life in a Vanishing Landscape by Patrick Laurie, out November 16. Published with permission of Counterpoint Press. Copyright © 2021 by Patrick Laurie.

Re-Covered: The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

The Fortnight in September was republished this month by Scribner.

“The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently,” writes R. C. Sherriff in The Fortnight in September, his unassuming but utterly beguiling tale of an ordinary lower-middle-class London family during the interwar years, on their annual holiday to the English seaside town of Bognor Regis. “All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect.”

First published in 1931, The Fortnight in September was the British writer’s first novel, though Sherriff was already known as the author of Journey’s End, based on his experiences in the trenches, and is still today one of the most celebrated plays ever written about the First World War. This had been an unprecedented sell-out success in London’s West End for two years in the late 1920s, after which it moved to Broadway, where it was also a huge hit. But Sherriff had followed it with Badger’s Green (1930), a flop of such magnitude it had all but sent him scurrying back to his am-dram beginnings with his tail between his legs: “A play that, but for the acclaim of Journey’s End, would never have found a place beyond a suburban church hall,” wrote Hannen Swaffer, the drama critic for the Daily Express. “So far as the theatre world was concerned,” Sherriff admitted in his memoir, No Leading Lady (1968), “the Badger’s Green fiasco had proved what most people had suspected: Journey’s End was a fluke. By a lucky chance a small-time writer for local amateurs had hit upon an idea so perfect for the stage that it was bound to be a success whatever way it was written … He had tried again, without the heaven-sent material of his first venture, and put himself back where he belonged.” So Sherriff was surprised, on sending out the manuscript for The Fortnight in September—a story he’d written for the sheer fun of it—when the renowned publisher Victor Gollancz fell on it enthusiastically. “This is delightful,” Gollancz wrote back. “I wouldn’t alter a word.” Critics were also impressed. The Sunday Express deemed Sherriff’s debut novel a “little masterpiece.” Soon enough it was selling twenty thousand copies a month.

The novel’s premise is brilliantly simple. We accompany Mr. Stevens, an office clerk, his sweet but nervous wife Flossie, and their three children—Dick, who works for an auctioneer; Mary, a dressmaker’s assistant; and schoolboy Ernie—as they ready themselves for their summer holiday and take the train from London to the coast. Once there, they enjoy their getaway. Nothing in the story surprises. Nevertheless, it’s an absolute delight from start to finish. Sherriff’s tender observations of the family dynamics, and the simple joy each of them takes in the highlight of their year, prove him to be an unrivaled master of the quotidian. For those readers already familiar with Journey’s End, such an accolade might not be that surprising. The play—which George Bernard Shaw famously hailed as a “useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war”—is not a story about the jingoistic heroics of battle. Instead it takes the reality of life in the trenches as its subject—the death and the destruction, the pain and the horror, but first and foremost, the torturous tedium of it all.

***

The Fortnight in September opens on the evening before the family departs, at their house in the South London suburb of Dulwich, where Mrs. Stevens, who has lived there all twenty years of her married life, awaits the return of her husband and two eldest children for supper. To begin the story here, on this night of family celebration—second only, in their eyes, to the excited anticipation of Christmas Eve—is a small stroke of genius. For the Stevenses, this evening, pregnant with expectation, sometimes feels like “the best of all the holiday, although it was spent at home and the sea was still sixty miles away.”

It’s a testament to Sherriff’s acute attention to the rhythms of the family’s existence that he devotes a full third of the book simply to getting them to their destination, and the journey itself—on which the family embarks early the next morning—provides plenty of opportunity for excitement. Mr. Stevens is haunted, as they make their way to the local station, by the “unreasoning and ridiculous fear … of a passing lady fainting, or accidentally falling down,” for then he would be forced to offer his assistance, a gallantry that could cause them to miss their train. Not that making it onto the first train without any mishap allows him to relax. Instead, he’s newly preoccupied by the question of whether he left the window of the WC open. Clapham Junction, the busy London interchange where they switch trains, provides further opportunity for a page-turning drama of the everyday. Will their trunk make it onto the right train? Have they got the correct platform? Will they find seats for all five of them in the same compartment? Only once everyone is comfortably ensconced on the Bognor train, all children accounted for and the trunk safely stowed in the luggage van, is the reader able to breathe a sigh of relief. Sherriff’s ability to register each and every key change of the day, however minor, transforms the commonplace into something meaningful. Even the family’s modest packed lunch takes on an air of special import: “There was a touch of solemnity in the way that each took their tiny relic of home … cut upon a kitchen table that now lies deserted and alone: each little mouthful seems to contain a whisper of familiar sounds.”

Although the novel is narrated in the third person, Sherriff weaves in and out of the minds of his four main characters, while also regularly stepping back to enjoy the family tableau. Once they reach the sea, not a lot happens—at least, nothing more than the small accidents and strokes of fate that make up the texture of ordinary life. They all delight in their decision to rent a bathing hut. Mary strikes up a passing friendship with another girl she meets on the beach, which in turn leads to a short-lived, rather tame romance with a dashing young actor. And Mr. Stevens runs into one of his firm’s most valued clients, a puffed-up bore, who invites the family to tea at his flashy holiday home. They accept with a mixture of annoyance—that they must don their smartest clothes and be on their best behaviour—and elation, because he promises to send his chauffeur to pick them up in his car. The novel exerts a spell, one that leaves us hanging on these characters’ every word, every shift, however subtle, in their own sense of equilibrium and enjoyment. In attuning us so meticulously to the Stevenses’ world, Sherriff invites our utter absorption in it.

***

Sherriff had the idea for The Fortnight in September while on his own holiday in Bognor, watching the crowds go by down on the seafront, picking out families “at random and imagin[ing] what their lives were like at home.” He was captivated, he explains in No Leading Lady, by this “endless drift of faces” passing in front of him. “[B]ut for a moment, as they passed your seat,” he writes, “you saw them vividly as individuals, and now and then there would be one who struck a spark of interest that smouldered in your memory after they had gone.”

When Journey’s End made its West End debut, he was employed as an “outdoor man” for an insurance office, responsible for traveling up and down a section of the Thames Valley between Putney and Windsor, meeting with clients to renew their policies or investigate their claims. Once the play opened, he would spend the day working, return to the suburban Surrey home he shared with his mother, then take the train into London’s Waterloo station, from which it was a quick walk across the river to the theater. He would arrive shortly before curtain up, and leave again after the interval so as to not return home too late: he had to be up bright and early for work again the following day.

In fact, No Leading Lady reads very much like one of his novels. He devotes just as much attention to the small pleasures he takes in his employment as an insurance man as to his struggles as an aspiring playwright. And he’s just as interested in the people he encounters through his day job as he is in the celebrities brought into his orbit by literary fame. Two of the most memorable portraits in the book belong in the former category; not only are they well observed and obviously written with genuine feeling but it comes as something of a surprise that, of all the famous people in Sherriff’s life, he chooses to write about those ordinary men and women whom less discerning writers might overlook. There’s the sweet-shop owner who’s let her insurance policy lapse, in whose sitting room he waits while she serves the schoolboys who mob her shop after they’ve been released from the classroom—“holding up her hands in comic resignation” she interrupts her discussion with Sherriff to attend to the boys’ clamors for “Auntie.” Then there are the two elderly and fragile spinster sisters to whom Sherriff always tries to offer advice and assistance, whatever they might need, who send him a sweet, lavender-scented note of admiration (“beautifully written, like a page from a Victorian schoolgirl’s copybook—a little shaky here and there, but guided by faint pencilled lines across the paper that had not been entirely rubbed out”) to the theater when Journey’s End opens. Success, it seems, did little to change Sherriff. Even after the unexpected triumph of Journey’s End meant that he had to give up his insurance work—he would have preferred to keep his job, but the theater was keeping him too busy—he took the time to go round and say a personal and heartfelt goodbye to all his long-term customers.

Eventually, Hollywood came knocking, and Sherriff was able to continue earning a more than comfortable living from his pen alone. His screenplay for Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) won him an Academy Award nomination, while those for The Dam Busters (1955) and The Night My Number Came Up (1955) were nominated for BAFTAs. He also continued to write novels, later experimenting with stories with a fantastical bent that nevertheless retain the charming familiarity of setting and character for which his earlier works were adored. There’s The Wells of St Mary’s (1962), a comedy in which a small English village finds first fame and fortune and then murder and scandal when the water of a local well is discovered to have healing properties. And The Hopkins Manuscript (1939), an H. G. Wells-inspired sci-fi tale narrated by a retired schoolmaster who breeds prize-winning poultry. Like Mr. Stevens—and Mr Baldwin, the retired insurance clerk who is the quiet hero of Greengates (1936), Sherriff’s second novel—Edgar Hopkins is a middle-aged, middle-class everyman. Sherriff is not concerned with men who rise to the occasion, becoming heroes in the process, but those whose perseverance is discreet, and whose pretensions are few. The moon may crash into the earth, resulting in the collapse of civilization, but the extraordinary events which befall him do little to change Mr. Hopkins.

No matter their circumstances, Sherriff’s characters remain steadfastly familiar, common or garden heroes (and villains). And it’s this that makes his novels so strangely enthralling. He writes without fanfare or affectation, but most importantly, with sympathy and compassion. However inconsequential, unambitious or even downright foolish they might appear to be, he treats his characters’ lives—their hopes and dreams, their fears and disgruntlements—with the greatest of respect.

The Fortnight in September was republished this month by Scribner.

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the NYR Daily, the Financial Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub, among other publications. Read earlier installments of Re-Covered.

Allowing Things to Happen: An Interview with Tyshawn Sorey

Tyshawn Sorey. Photo: Sharif Hamza.

Tyshawn Sorey is a remarkable figure in contemporary music. For the past twenty years, he has been among the most highly regarded and in-demand drummers in avant-garde jazz, playing with major contemporary figures such as Steve Coleman, Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, and Steve Lehman, as well as veterans like Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Zorn. On albums like Alloy, The Inner Spectrum of Variables, and Verisimilitude—the trilogy of trio records he released between 2014 and 2017—he blurs the boundaries between jazz and classical music, exploring sound textures and patches of silence as well as driving rhythms. Over the same period, Sorey, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, has been developing his oeuvre as a classical composer.

Until recently, you would have had to visit a concert hall to hear most of Sorey’s major classical works. His new double album For George Lewis | Autoschediasms, a collaboration with the contemporary classical ensemble Alarm Will Sound, is the first extended recording of Sorey’s compositions played exclusively by classical musicians and released outside the jazz context. It should introduce many more listeners to Sorey the composer. “For George Lewis,” a single work almost an hour long, is dedicated to the genre-bending composer who was Sorey’s mentor. Out of slowly unfolding drones rise gorgeous melodic passages; listening to the whole piece is a transcendent experience. The second disc offers two versions of “Autoschediasms,” which draws on a tradition of avant-garde music in which a composer/conductor cues the ensemble with hand signals, flashcards, and other means to create a collage of sound, essentially a spontaneous composition.

Sorey and I spoke over Zoom about the relationship between his composing and drumming, music-making during the pandemic, and his recent projects, including a collaboration with the poet Terrance Hayes and a tribute to the legendary drummer Paul Motian, who died in 2011.

INTERVIEWER

Your achievements in either drumming or composing would be enough to fill a career for most artists. Can you talk about how the two practices fit together for you?

SOREY

They inform each other. Just working with a lot of people who are compositionally minded, whether the music is spontaneous or fully notated, has informed my drumming. Because whenever I’m playing drums, I’m always thinking compositionally about how things develop, taking a longer look at things rather than simply playing drums on top of some form. I want to see the whole picture of what’s going on in the music. Why do certain harmonies accompany the musicians in a particular way? Or why does a type of rhythmic information that I’m hearing in a composition make me accompany the musicians in a certain way?

INTERVIEWER

“For George Lewis” is so much a piece about space and time. Much of your music, even on the early albums, has incorporated a lot of space and silence, and yet your drumming is often just the opposite—on the busier side. Have you always liked music with a lot of silence in it?

SOREY

I feel like a lot of contemporary composition has this tendency to be more maximalist, with a lot of material and a lot of activity. And I feel like, if that’s happening, why am I going to come in and crowd that particular sphere of composers? They’re already doing that really well. I’m not going to come in there and do what they’re doing. I want to do something that is fully engaging and interesting to me. So, I decided to create music that deals with that in the opposite direction.

INTERVIEWER

“Autoschediasms” is a piece that features a good deal of improvisation. You had done the first version on the album with Alarm Will Sound in the studio, but the second one had to be recorded virtually because of the pandemic, right?

SOREY

We wanted to do it again, but performance opportunities were obviously being canceled. Alan Pierson, Alarm Will Sound’s artistic director, one day called me out of the blue and was like, Can we try “Autoschediasms,” but with you doing it virtually over video chat? We figured out a way to make it happen using various programs. This was completely new to me. It proved to be a great challenge that cost a great deal of time and effort—you know, setting up things, making sure that people were properly masked, safety restrictions and all of that. So, you have one group of musicians who are in New York City, but they would be in completely different places. One person could be at home. Another group of people could be in a studio booth. Another group of players could be in a big room in a studio or something like that. Everybody was separated in these four or five individualized setups. I’m over here in Philly looking at about sixteen or seventeen screens. When I realized what the setup was going to be like, I had to change my entire game plan of how to do that piece without using batons or using my hands so much because of latency concerns over video chat. So, I came up with a system that involved both color and flashcards as well as new signals that I’ve had to create for the digital “Autoschediasms.” There was a lot of glitching happening. I think two of the screens went blank during the performance, and I couldn’t tell these players what to play or ask these players to do something. But it still worked, and it was fantastic.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve been working with classical players and ensembles for a while. Do you feel like they’re very different from jazz musicians in terms of how they approach playing music?

SOREY

Oh, definitely. I’ve done “Autoschediasms” with a lot of jazz-like players or free improvisers. Those are really rewarding experiences. When I work with classical ensembles, though, it tends to vary. I know with any ensemble with whom I’ve had a very strong rapport, they usually end up being the most successful ones to do it. So, the International Contemporary Ensemble is one. Alarm Will Sound, of course, is another. I’ve done “Autoschediasms” with other classical ensembles—one, for example, that had never improvised. There were some moments that were good, but there were a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of missed opportunities. I guess it’s because the players felt afraid of making mistakes, an attitude that is kind of conditioned in symphony orchestra musicians. It really felt like they were just doing what the conductor told them to do because that’s their conditioning. They don’t understand that it’s a democratic process of music-making that’s involved. I always say that this is a duet between orchestra and conductor. They have to challenge me, and I have to challenge them. Because if you make a mistake, then that challenges me to make it work.

INTERVIEWER

I want to ask you about “Cycles of My Being,” your collaboration with poet Terrance Hayes and operatic tenor Lawrence Brownlee. How did that come together?

SOREY

The three of us only met one time in person in New York, in 2017. We were talking about these killings of unarmed Black men and women. Terrance, at that time, was working on his American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. After that meeting, he sent me an email with some of these sonnets that he’d been working on. It’s all really brilliant, brilliant, brilliant work. Lawrence Brownlee also provided texts for “Cycles of My Being.” What I generally do with any music that involves text is sit with the lyrics before I write music.

INTERVIEWER

What was it like to work with Terrance?

SOREY

He’s just brilliant on every level. The way that he plays with words, these very abstract ways of putting things together—but his work is also very real. It’s almost subliminal, how he deals with words. The way that he approaches form is very, very interesting in terms of the buildup of whatever is going on in the sonnet. Some may have these very interesting formal elements. I’m looking at them like, Wow, I want to do that in music.

INTERVIEWER

The last thing I wanted to ask you about is Paul Motian. I watched the Village Vanguard streamed concert you did with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano. And I thought, Oh my God, are they doing the Motian trio? He’s one of my favorite drummers and one of my favorite jazz composers. I’m wondering in what way he’s important to you, and what the plans are for that project.

SOREY

There will be a record coming next year. Paul Motian is another major force of influence for me, both as a composer and as a drummer. We talked earlier about space. Well, Paul Motian was kind of an expert at that—being able to leave a lot of space and allow things to happen. And when he allowed things to happen, it made him push the music even more in interesting directions. The other thing was his touch.

He’s pulling sound out of the instrument rather than playing at the drum set. He was pulling sound out of the drums by his touch, the attack, the dynamics. He’s a very dynamic drummer. That has inspired me since I began performing music with ensembles in the late nineties. From a compositional standpoint, too, he has a very oblique sense—and I don’t mean oblique in a negative way—of melody and harmony. A lot of notes that he would write melodically would end up in unexpected places. But they’d make sense, somehow. The musicians he had around him—like Joe and Bill, for example—could do so much with one very short, simple phrase that Paul Motian wrote. And he was my type of person. He was always very crass and had a very interesting sense of humor.

INTERVIEWER

I saw Motian perform a lot toward the end of his life, and what amazed me was that, as he got older and couldn’t quite play as fast, he used that limitation as a way of adding space to the music. So every hit would have a lot more value.

SOREY

That’s a totally different kind of virtuosity that I strive for in my own playing. Because everybody talks about virtuosity as being about how fast you can play or how loud you can play or how much technique you have available. There’s nothing wrong with having great technique at your disposal, but how you use that technique is what’s going to make the difference. I’m forty-one years old, I can’t play the same way—all fast and crazy—that I was playing when I was nineteen or twenty years old. I don’t have the same touch. My body doesn’t move the same way. So, the real virtuosity comes with how you respond to those changes. Paul was a master at that. As you said, every note that he played meant so much more, had so much more depth to it. There’s a certain kind of richness that comes with this type of virtuosity, where it’s really about listening. So, when I was writing my music for this Paul Motian trio, I wanted to keep that in mind. The virtuosity is not in how fast you can play or how many notes you can play or how technically advanced everything is. It’s really about how we breathe together, how we move together, how we listen, how we experience each other, what it feels like to play as a trio but not sound like three people. The way I’ve always viewed the notion of trio is that trio means one.

 

Craig Morgan Teicher is the digital director for The Paris Review and the author of several books, including We Begin In Gladness: How Poets Progress and Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey.

Three Letters for beyond the Walls

Caio Fernando Abreu. Photo courtesy of Adriana Franciosi.

First Letter for beyond the Walls

Something happened to me. Something so strange that I still haven’t figured out a way to talk about it clearly. When I finally know what it was, this strange thing, I will also know the way. Then I’ll be clear, I promise. For you, for myself. As I’ve always meant to be. But for now, please try to understand what I’m trying to say.

It is with significant effort that I write you. And that’s not just a literary way of saying that writing means stirring the depths—like Clarice, like Pessoa. In Carson McCullers it hurt physically, in a body made of flesh and veins and muscle. For it is in my body that writing hurts me now. In these two hands you cannot see on the keyboard, with their swollen veins, wounded, bursting, with wires and plastic tubes attached to needles inserted into veins inside which flow liquids they say will save me.

It really hurts, but I will not stop. Not giving up is the best I can offer you and myself right now. Because this—you ought to know—this which could kill me, is the only thing I know that can save me. Maybe one day we will understand.

For now, I am still somewhat caught up in that strange thing that happened to me. It’s so vague, calling it that, the Strange Thing. But what could it have been? A disturbance, a vertigo. A maelstrom—I love this word that spins like a living labyrinth, dragging thoughts and actions into its ever-faster-spinning, concentric, elliptical coils. Something like that happened in my head, and I had no control over the coils’ magnetic endpoints, which swirled out in new spirals so that everything would begin again. Later, everyone was discreet, and I didn’t ask too many questions, either—equally discreet. I should have screamed, and said seemingly meaningless things, and thrown things everywhere, maybe hit people.

I can only remember fragments of what happened to me—fragments so broken that. That—that there is nothing after the that of fragments—broken. But there was the metal gurney, with hooks that clamped around the person’s body, and my two wrists were firmly bound by these metal hooks. My feet were naked in the cold dawn. I screamed for socks, for the love of God, for all that is most sacred, I wanted a pair of socks to cover my feet. Even bound like an animal on the metal gurney, I wanted to protect my feet. Then there was the round spaceship-like machine where they stuck my brain to see everything that was going on inside it. And they saw, but they didn’t tell me anything.

Now I see cold, white buildings beyond the barred windows of this place where I find myself. I don’t know what will come next—it hasn’t been long since the Strange Thing, the disturbance that crashed upon me. I know you don’t get what I’m saying, but understand—I don’t either. The only thing I care about is writing these words (and every word hurts) so that later I can slip them into the pocket of one of my afternoon visitors. They’re so sweet, bringing apples, magazines. I think they’ll be able to carry this letter beyond the walls I see separating these barred windows here from those cold, white buildings.

I fear these others who want to open up my veins. Maybe they’re not so bad, maybe I just don’t understand the way they are yet, the way everything is or has become—myself included—since the great Disturbance. All I can do is write—that is the truth I relay, if I can get this letter beyond the walls. Listen well, I’ll repeat it in your ear, many times: All I can do is write, all I can do is write.

O Estado de S. Paulo, August 21,1994

*

Second Letter for beyond the Walls

On the road to hell I met many angels. Throngs, flocks in flight, phalanxes. Fat, baroque cherubs with their little asses out; shrill seraphim with pale faces and satin wings; stern archangels, swords drawn to confront evil. So on the road to hell, naturally, I met demons too. And the entire hierarchy of the celestial servants armed against them. Weapons of good, weapons of light: no pasarán!

Not as celestial as you’d expect, these angels. The morning ones wear white uniforms, masks, caps, gloves to fight infection. And there are those that carry brooms, pails of disinfectant. They collect their wings and scrub the floor, change the sheets, serve coffee—while others take blood pressure, temperature, auscultate chest and abdomen. Meanwhile, the sneering midafternoon angels wear jeans, black leather, bleached hair, bring candy, newspapers, clean socks, copies of Renato Russo’s cassette celebrating the Stonewall victory, news of the night (where all the angels are gray), messages from other angels who couldn’t make it because of imbroglios, or laziness, or they lovingly feel no need to prove their love.

And when I’m alone, later, I try to watch the purple coloring of twilight beyond the cypresses in the cemetery behind the walls, but the angle doesn’t allow it, so I contemplate the fury of the overpass instead, but it doesn’t matter—ugly or beautiful, everything in life and movement balances. I open windows for the electric angels of the night. They come through antennas: phones, batteries, wires. Sometimes they look like Cláudia Abreu (both of them—my brave sister and the Gilberto Braga actress), but they can have Billie Holiday’s ruined voice, lost on FM, or the deepening creases around José Mayer’s bitter mouth. Men, women, you know—angels have never had a sex. And some work on TV, sing on the radio. In the middle of the night, fed up with ruffling wings, lyres, lace, and cornets, I plummet into the plastic sleep of tubes piercing my chest. But still the angels insist, having come from the Other Side of Everything. I recognize them one by one: against Derek Jarman’s blue background, to the sound of a Freddie Mercury song, choreographed by Nureyev, I identify Paulo Yutaka’s Noh dance steps. Laughing with Galizia Alex Vallauri peeks out from behind The Roasted Chicken Queen, and oh! How I’d love to hug Vicente Pereira and have one more Santo Daime with Strazzer and one more trip to Rio with Nelson Pujol Yamamoto. Wagner Serra pedals his bike beside Cyril Collard, while Wilson Barros rails against Peter Greenaway, with Néstor Perlongher’s support. To the sound of Lory Finocchiaro, Hervé Guibert continues his endless letter to the friend who did not save his life, while Reinaldo Arenas slowly runs a hand through his light hair.

So many, my God, those who have gone. I wake with Cazuza’s suggestive voice repeating in my cold ear, “Whoever has a dream doesn’t dance, my love.”

I wake, and say yes. And everything starts again.

At times they all seem to be coming from the banks of the Narmada River, where the blind singer boy, the ugliest woman in India, and Gita Mehta’s wealthy monk strode. At times, I think that they are all dogs carrying badges in their teeth, their front paws burned by cigarette butts so that they dance better, like in that story that Lygia Fagundes Telles sent me. And at the same time, I think how whenever I see or read Lygia, I am stunned by beauty.

So I repeat, that which I thought was the road to hell is strewn with angels. That which seemed dismally cursed held a thread of light. On this narrow thread, stretched like a tightrope, we all balance. Umbrella held high, one foot in front of the other, fearless dancers at the end of this millennium hover above the abyss.

Down below, a web of wings cushions our fall.

O Estado de S. Paulo, September 4, 1994

 *

Last Letter for beyond the Walls

Porto Alegre. Happy Port—I suppose you found the two previous letters obscure, enigmatic, like those in almanacs of old. I’ve always enjoyed mystery, but I enjoy truth more. And since I think it’s superior, I am writing more clearly for you now. I feel neither guilt, nor shame, nor fear.

I returned from Europe in June feeling sick. Fevers, sweats, weight loss, spots on my skin. I found a doctor and, in his absence, took the Test: That One. After an agonizing week, the result: HIV positive. The doctor had gone to Yokohama, Japan. Test in hand, I spent three days normally, telling my family and friends. On the third night, with friends over, feeling safe, I went crazy. I don’t know the details. Maybe I don’t remember out of self-protection. I was taken to the ER at Emílio Ribas Hospital with a suspected brain tumor. The next day I woke up from a drugged dream in a bed in the infectious diseases ward, my sister entering the room. Then there were twenty-seven days inhabited by frights and angels—doctors, nurses, friends, family, not to mention our own—and a current of love and energy so strong that love and energy welled up inside of me, until they became a singular thing. That from without and that from within united in pure faith.

Life handed me misery, and I didn’t know that the body (“my brother ass,” as Saint Francis of Assisi would say) could be so frail and feel such pain. Some mornings I cried, looking through the window at the white walls of the cemetery across the road. But at night, from the right angle, when the neon lights lit up, Doutor Arnaldo Avenue looked like Boulevard Voltaire in Paris, where there’s a Sufi angel who watches over me lives. In that moment everything felt right. Free of resentment or disgust, just the immense agony of that thing, Life, inside and outside the windows, beautiful and fleeting like butterflies who survive only one day after leaving the cocoon. For there is a cocoon breaking open slowly, a dry, abandoned husk. After that, the flight of Icarus chasing Apollo. And the fall?

I welcome every day. I tell you because I don’t know how to be anything if not personal, shameless, and being so I must tell you: I have changed but remain the same. I know you understand.

I also know that others think only immoral people get this science fiction virus. For them, remember Cazuza: “We seek mercy, Lord, mercy for the cowardly and narrow-minded.” But to you, I humbly disclose: what matters is Dear Lady Life, covered in silver and gold and blood and the moss of time and sometimes whipped cream and confetti from some carnival—revealing her horrific and dazzling face little by little. We must accept it. And kiss her on the lips. Strangely, I’ve never been so well. Armed with Saint George’s weapons. The walls are still white, but now they are the walls of a Spanish colonial house, which makes me think of García Lorca; the gate can be opened anytime to come or go; there is a palm tree, and pink roses in the garden. This place is called Menino Deus, as sung by Caetano, and I always knew the port was here. You never know how safe it is, but—in the words of Ana C., who stops me at the window’s edge—since you can’t anchor a ship in space, it is anchored in this port. Porto Alegre. Happy Port. Happy or not: Ave Lya Luft, Ave Iberê Camargo, Quintana and Luciano Alabarse, che!

I watch Dercy Gonçalvez, on Hebe; I attend Gabriel Vilella’s The Deceased at the Teatro São Pedro; Maria Padilha tells me previously undisclosed stories about Vicente Pereira; I split sushi with the Antônia Bivar actress Yolanda Cardoso; I pray for Cuba; I listen to Bola de Neve; I burst out laughing with Déa Martins; I use all four hands to draw with Laurinha; I read Zuenir Ventura to understand Rio; I wear the red star of the Worker’s Party on my chest (“Who knows?”); I open the I Ching at random: Shêng, the Ascension; I never miss my telenovela Éramos Seis and I am grateful, grateful, grateful.

Life screams. And the struggle continues.

O Estado de S. Paulo, September 18, 1994

—Translated from the Portuguese by Ed Moreno

 

One of the most influential and original Brazilian writers of short fiction of the eighties and nineties, Caio Fernando Abreu is the author of several story collections set and published during the military dictatorship and the AIDS epidemic in Brazil. He has been awarded major literary prizes, including the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction a total of three times. He died of AIDS in Porto Alegre in 1996. He was forty-seven years old.

Ed Moreno is a writer and translator from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a Lambda Literary Fellow and the recipient of a Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference scholarship. His work has appeared in Words without Borders, the Nashville Review, Foglifter, Blithe House Quarterly, and Cleis Press’s “Best Gay” series. He is currently writing his first novel.

“Three Letters for beyond the Walls,” by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated by Ed Moreno, excerpted from Cuíer: Queer Brazil  published by Two Lines Press, 2021, as part of the Calico series. Reprinted with permission from the estate of Caio Fernando Abreu and Ed Moreno. 

Redux: Collapse Distinctions

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

In His Analysands’ Chair, 2000.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. Read on for Adam Phillips’s Art of Nonfiction interview, an excerpt from Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend, Joanna Scott’s short story “A Borderline Case,” and Mark Scott’s poem “Freudian Tenderness,” as well as selections from a 1984 portfolio of Louise Bourgeois drawings.

Interview
Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7
Issue no. 208 (Spring 2014)

Psychoanalytic sessions are not like novels, they’re not like epic poems, they’re not like lyric poems, they’re not like plays—though they’re rather like bits of dialogue from plays. But they do seem to me to be like essays, nineteenth-century essays. There is the same opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions that are then overcome and surpassed, and so on.

Detail from a Louise Bourgeois drawing, ca. 1950s

Fiction
The Blind
By Sigrid Nunez
Issue no. 222 (Fall 2017)

The doctors who examined the women—about a hundred and fifty in all—found that their eyes were normal. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. If the women were telling the truth—and there were some who doubted this, who thought they might be malingering—the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness. In other words, these women’s minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights.

This was the last thing you and I talked about while you were still alive.

Detail from a Louise Bourgeois drawing, ca. 1950s

Fiction
A Borderline Case
By Joanna Scott
Issue no. 123 (Summer 1992)

This is the story of K and B, analyst and patient; specifically, this is the story of their first session together, before K had cured his patient, “dispersed” B, as he’d say, helping him to become “more B than ever before.”

Detail from a Louise Bourgeois drawing, ca. 1950s

Poetry
Freudian Tendencies
By Mark Scott
Issue no. 155 (Summer 2000)

Freud liked to collapse distinctions:
masochism is the continuation
of sadism (“nothing but”), in which
one’s own person takes the place

of the sexual object; so looking
is analogous to touching; is based
on touching, is base in so far forth;
but neither the lingering at the touching

nor the lingering at the looking
satisfies the libido, the lust …

Detail from a Louise Bourgeois drawing, ca. 1950s

Art
Drawings from the 1950s
By Louise Bourgeois
Issue no. 92 (Summer 1984)

 

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The Chorus

As the only Jew in my class, it fell to me to introduce the single Hanukkah song included in the annual winter concert at Randolph Elementary. All I had to do was approach the microphone and name the preceding song (That was “Silent Night”) and say what we were singing next (Now we will present “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah”) and then return to my place on the metal bleachers which had been set up in the cafeteria for the performance. I wasn’t a shy kid, but this task absolutely terrified me, and I worried about it for weeks in advance of the concert. As soon as I knew the names of the songs in question, I would lie awake at night practicing, repeating the words so often their sense dissolved. Sometimes I would wake my parents up and tell them, tears in my eyes, that I just couldn’t do it, that this time I was too frightened, and they would gently remind me that I’d said the same thing the previous year. Benner, my dad would say, you always do great. Benner, it’s important to participate. Now a parent myself, I assume they discussed whether they should talk to my teachers and relieve me of this burden or whether I needed to face my fears, gain experience. I’m not criticizing them, but it’s horrible to separate from a chorus, to address a crowd of elders, and then return to the group and sing, although really I just mouthed the words, afraid my voice would be conspicuous. There is always a gap between songs, traditions, and a child must bridge it (or there will be violence) and that’s what the songs themselves tell us if we listen. I love the popular song where the singer talks about how her tears are hidden by the rain, the song of the individual and collective, lyric and epic, and I’d like to sing it for you now, but I can’t, all I can do is introduce it, reintroduce it like a threatened species into the alders, the poplars between us. That was “The Little Drummer Boy” and this is sense behaving like a liquid, assuming the shape of its container. My Little League pitching coach, Bob Lolly, is the one who first called me Benner. The league was incredibly competitive, overserious. Did a nine-year-old really need a dedicated pitching coach, home and away uniforms, fitted caps embroidered with our initials? (Bob Lolly was a powerful figure for me because he always claimed that he could teach me an unhittable curveball, but that he wouldn’t, because it would damage my developing arm and ruin my long-term athletic prospects.) Our games were rituals in which sons were reduced to tears by fathers: when a kid struck out, an (often beer-drunk) father would tell him to get his head out of his ass, to get in the fucking game, to keep his eye on the ball, etc., and the son would return to the dugout in shame, sit apart from his teammates and cry, rivulets forming in his eye black. But not me: my dad would applaud no matter what, even if I struck out swinging wildly at a pitch in the dirt: Great swing, Benner, you’ll hit it next time! I love you! I’m not criticizing him, but these expressions of support humiliated me, marked me as different. The worst experience of my time in Little League, what more or less ended it, was when all my dad’s siblings flew in from the coasts for my older brother’s bar mitzvah and attended, over my objections, a game where I was pitching. Despite Bob Lolly’s guidance and exhortations, I could not throw a strike. And yet every pitch I threw resulted in wild applause from my people in the bleachers, rattling me more and more, until I was walking in runs, hitting batters, but Lolly wouldn’t pull me from the game, given that my family was visiting from far away, even though we needed the win for our rankings, even though my teammates and their parents in the stands were seething. Finally, he called a time-out and jogged out to the mound and said to me: Benner, I am going the way of the earth and you should strengthen yourself and become a man. The way the Torah is to be sung is inseparable from its sense, that’s why proper cantillation was taught to Moses with the vowels, although some of the original tune has been lost, there’s a gap now—a gap in song is called a rain delay—and you must inhabit it, let your body be the bridge. My daughters, ages five and seven, recently noticed my parents calling me Benner when we were in Sanibel and they found it hilarious. At first my kids only called me Benner as a joke, would say it and crack up, but soon it became a habit and they’d say it without trying to be funny. Benner, can I have a snack. Benner, I had a nightmare, will you stay with me for a while. Benner, where is Mommy. My children aren’t really Jewish—their mother is a nonpracticing Catholic—but we celebrate Hanukkah, we sing Hanukkah songs together, although I often have to make up the lyrics. For some reason I cannot remember words set to music, a fact that has always troubled me, since most people experience music as mnemonic. If I want to learn a song, I have to learn it in two parts, on two tracks, committing the words to memory first and then the melody, which is why I don’t know any songs to speak of, why I’m always speaking of song instead of singing, and how I’ve come to introduce false songs to my children; one day they will discover that the lyrics aren’t timeworn, haven’t circulated. That was “Joy to the World” and this a Torah portion about parallel mirrors sung in the perfect pitch our fathers withheld from us, not because they didn’t want us to have it, but because they didn’t think we could handle it, they feared it would ruin the long-term prospects of our voices, that it would be better for us to discover the secret on our own—or not discover it, not discovering it is fine, too, Benner, it’s really up to you. If you are feeling so crumby about the concert that you want us to ask Mr. Holloman to make another arrangement, we will. We hear you that you’re upset and we’re willing to do that and we’re sure he’d understand. But it’s late—we can’t call him now—and you might feel differently in the morning. What I’ve learned is that the hardest part of the winter concert for you is the worry itself—that once you get up there on the stage you do a great job and you have a good feeling afterwards. But, like I say, it’s up to you. When I was a kid, my dad was way too intense about this kind of thing. There used to be an annual school musical in which everybody had to participate and even though I’d always get a tiny role, often not even a speaking part, just kind of had to skip around the stage in a costume, I’d get really nervous. I wouldn’t have ever thought to share that anxiety with my dad, who would have given me some speech about representing the family, honoring the family, being a man, getting in the game, which for him meant withholding. For him, for Grandpa, withholding was the task that falls to each generation like rain, like tears (rhymes with “cares”) in rain through which the sense escapes, you have to catch it on your tongue, you have to participate, that’s what his father had always said to him. But I understand that—while the introduction just takes a few seconds to deliver, while Hanukkah isn’t even a major holiday—the worry can last ten thousand years, that’s the miracle. Your mom and I are fine with whatever you choose, we’ll be proud of you either way. But you do have to choose.

 

Barbara Bloom is an artist whose highly visual conceptual works and books have been shown internationally.

Ben Lerner is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, as well as several collaborations with visual artists.

The above is an excerpt from Gold Custody , a collaboration between Bloom and Lerner, which will be published by MACK next month.

Wild Apples

Samuel David Colkett, Landscape with Cottage, 1842, oil on canvas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The path to the Oracle was best before dawn, past the pond sleepily switching from frogsong to birdsong, through the dark woods fringed with ferns, up the hill so steep that no matter how slowly I went, I was always out of breath when I reached the top. Three years ago, my parents contracted with a logging company to do what they thought was routine cutting of their two hundred and fifty thickly forested acres in New Hampshire. Perhaps they were thinking of men in picturesque plaid shirts with axes and the careful removal of a few choice maples; instead, a machine of murder arrived. It was the size of a two-story house, leaked diesel on the road, relentlessly tore up everything in its path. For hours, my parents sat frozen in their farmhouse, listening to what my father would later describe as the sound of the trees screaming. At last, the sound broke my parents, and they ran outside and up the hill and put their sexagenarian bodies in front of the giant machine, forcing it to stop. They were left with a lawsuit for breach of contract and two acres so apocalyptically chewed up that, the first time I saw them, I wept.

Yet devastation often uncovers great beauty, and life wants nothing more than to thrive; these are the great and vital solaces of nature. Out of the forest, the machine had ripped a splendid long view of Smarts Mountain a few miles to the east. The summer after the devastation, my father had the felled trees dragged to the edges of the clearing. I bought the frame for a small house, eight feet by twelve, with a tiny porch, and we carried it up from the farm in pieces. My father and a neighbor spent months putting up the frame and finishing the little house with recycled windows and doors, pine boards from a tree my brother had had cut down and milled, a little cast-iron woodstove to heat it all. My father planted lupines near the porch, and all through the clearing the torn up earth was covered in enormous soft-leaved mullein plants with their towering stalks of seeds, purple nettles larger than a grown adult, a thick covering of groundsel, often the first colonist of ravaged earth. The plant gets its name from the Old English grundeswylige, or ground-swallower; and the little plants’ gluttony was wondrous to behold. By this summer, we had a fragile new meadow on a crown of the hill and a tiny house for me to write in, with a cot inside and two hammock chairs on the porch for taking in the view. A few years earlier we’d made an old horse barn on the farm into a place for my family to spend our summers in, and we called it the Barnacle; so we named this new dreamy little cabin that grew out of the ravaged hill the Oracle.

This summer I loved the Oracle until I didn’t; and the difference in love or hate often came down to whether or not I had killed a field mouse in the night and had to deal with a corpse and the stink of death before I sat down to work in the mornings. Once, over a long weekend, I forgot to check the traps, and came up through the dawn to find a stiff, gutted mouse magically moving itself across the floor. I had to sit down in the hammock chair on the porch outside until I stopped shaking, and when I had calmed myself and tried to sweep the mouse into the dustpan, I uncovered vivid black-and-yellow beetles working to bear the gutted mouse away. If murdered mice awaited me, my guilt and revulsion made it hard for me to focus on the imaginary characters of my fiction; but even if the night hadn’t proved me a murderer, I was of very little use to my work. “The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease,” says Henry David Thoreau in Walden, a book that would soon prove to be the borrowed ghost of my summer. For years, the world had been darkening so swiftly that the daily anxiety of watching the apocalypse on the internet and in the newspapers had slowly sapped every last drop of peace from me. The Arctic was on fire, Republicans were actively stealing all branches of government, a coronavirus pandemic was sweeping in appalling waves over every country on the planet. My family and I live in Florida, and when, in early May, we saw that the state would be the next center of the pandemic, we fled north over abandoned highways, nineteen hours straight, stopping only to pee in the bushes and pump gas. Our rationale was that a kind of wary isolation is already built into the way of life in New Hampshire and it would not be a stretch to quarantine there safely, for as many months as we needed to. My boys could run freely in the woods, and we could eat from my parents’ enormous garden even as the world collapsed all around us.

When we arrived in New Hampshire, however, there were no leaves yet on the trees and only cold-loving hellebore blooming in the garden. My husband went back to Florida for work, and I was left alone with my boys and our black dog and the naked shivering trees. I found, day after day, that it was all I could do to hold my children and feed them and make sure they were alive and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Creating anything at all seemed impossible. The work of the soul tends to be sideways, looping, errant. I have put my art at the center of my life for long enough that I am used to these times when my daily practice creates nothing more solid than daydreams; even so, the emptiness can drag me down. The only way to emerge out of these fallow times is to keep marching grimly through them. And so I would go up to the Oracle to work every day and sit over my notebooks, shivering in the chill for an hour, which is the bare minimum I tend to make myself attempt to write. After this hour of wrestling with blankness, I released myself to reading, because close reading is also creative work. By June, I had picked up Walden again, though I’d hated it when I’d read it for a class in college, the swaggering frat-boy bluster of the crowing chanticleer Thoreau, his snobbery, his overwhelming sense of entitlement. I remembered the book as an early piece of performance art, an elaborately crafted lie, because while Thoreau was imagining himself rusticated, his mother still did his laundry for him and many nights he showed up at Emerson’s house to eat a far finer supper than the unleavened bread and beans in his cabin that he made so much of in his book. But some vague echo that remained in me from my first experience of the book recalled it to me this year, insisting that I would find in it something that felt true, correct, urgent. Besides, now I had my very own Walden, even if the cottage there was built by my father’s hands, not mine, even if it was overlooking Smarts Mountain and my pond was down a steep decline along the path back to the Barnacle. This time, I read slowly, only a few pages a day, because I had to put the book down every few lines to think.

I discovered a different book from the one I had thought I’d read; I discovered a love so powerful for Thoreau’s energetic vision that it often took my breath away. I saw the wicked humor in the book, the laughing absurdity of what I’d taken twenty years before to be only tiresome bragging. Thoreau’s sentences have such vigor that they sometimes made my body need to stand up and pace to dissipate their pent energy. I began to use my daily Walden pages as a form of meditation, which I would carry with me after I finished my coffee in the Oracle and reset the mousetraps and called my dog to heel and descended the hill to wake up my children and feed them eggs and set them loose to the farm chores my father planned for them every day: weeding, picking up sticks, mowing the grass. With the boys occupied, I would go for a run in the forest, my eyes borrowed from Thoreau. I would delight in the world wakening to spring; the newborn fawn and doe I startled on a run, the doe groaning and stomping at me before bounding white-tailed away, the fawn bent and trembling, pretending to be nothing more than dried leaves in the ditch. Trillium and columbine emerged, ferns uncurled, the peonies arrived all blowsy and blushing. Time progressed.

When July came, I no longer needed a fire in the wood stove, and the meadow around the Oracle pushed upward gloriously in green, the birds so loud they were deafening in the pale dawn. My dog and I ran every day through the birches and startled a bear and her cubs into a tree. Chicks came in the mail, confused by their recent birth into the light and the immediate return to the darkness of the box they were shipped in. We kept them in the red blaze of a heat lamp in the chicken barn, and each of us went in separately to cradle them in our hands, all in our endless isolation yearning for some kind of intimacy with strangers. The dogs began to disappear for hours into the hills and we could hear them barking at some beast out there, and when we called them they would take a quarter of an hour before they’d rush out of the trees, grinning toothily, and run by us to plunge into the pond, shocking the newts that lay so thickly in the tannic water. Soon, the pond was warm enough for humans to swim in, and floating there in the layer of heat atop the dense cold sublayer became our afternoon ritual, the delicious prize at the end of our mostly failed attempts to work.

It was in July that I finished the first of my slow reads of Walden, and I immediately returned to the first page and started the book over again. When I was a young person, I thought that Walden was a young person’s book, a ferociously oppositional cockcrow designed to “wake [Thoreau’s] neighbors up.” The writer hates the intentional servitude of the yeoman to his daily grind, the way that, with capitalism and its built-in ethos of the hoarding of goods, our houses and things end up owning us. He resists the hard-nosed Yankee ethos he sees all around him, the unquestioning acquiescence to convention that turns potential poets and philosophers into beasts of burden, working too hard to have a chance to sit in leisure and think. This is the obvious intention of the book, the single note hit over and over, sometimes arrogantly, as with his condescending evisceration of the Irishman John Field, “with his horizon all his own, yet he is a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam’s grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels.” But what I also saw now, in my middle-aged isolation from the ever more deeply troubled world, is that this book that first takes the form of a harangue becomes, through each chapter pushing ever deeper into the experience of inhabiting this particular place in time, an exquisite song of praise. Walden is an alleluia of the romantic self. On this third reading of the book, I understood that Thoreau’s great contribution to literature lies in the wild strangeness of his close reading of nature, the intensity of his insistence that if one looks hard enough, one will see through the scrim of the familiar and into the astonishing gift of singularity. Walden Pond is like all other ponds in that objectively little about it makes this pond stand out from all the rest of New England ponds; and yet under Thoreau’s loving attention, Walden becomes only and miraculously itself. Out of the understanding of the singularity of place there comes a parallelism within the beholder’s soul; it is through observation the contours of the nebulous self can come clearer, almost within reach.

The gift of close reading translates into the gift of perspective. Thoreau can look at Walden and see not only the subtle changes in the place as the seasons progress, he can see the layers of humanity upon the land, the past, present, and future existing all at once:

I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water’s edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile of in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this.

Thoreau’s shift in perspective telescopes down, even to the creatures that lie beneath the ordinary concerns of humanity; I can think of few war passages in literature as stirring as Thoreau’s war of the red and black ants. There is nothing so small that Thoreau cannot delight in it. In him, as in the greatest of American geniuses—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson—life is ecstatic and the anagogical arises out of the teeming, living dirt of Earth.

Under the pressure of Thoreau’s prose, my own low vision slowly lifted out of me, away from the slow and internal wildfire of circular anxiety. Up in my cabin, I sat and read and spent hours looking at the clouds in their slow cetacean passing. I went out to the forest on runs measured not by the minute but by the anticipation of what new plant would be emerging in the swales: bird vetch, joe-pye weed, wild raspberry blooming from flower into fruit. The chickens fattened; the roosters tried out their hilariously cracked adolescent crowing. In August, the hornets arrived and I batted their nests away from the beams of the Oracle with the back of a broom, feeling like a hypocrite in destroying these perfect hornet houses, which were far superior to any human habitation, being only as large as necessary, ornamented solely by their own geometry.

Then September came; my runs grew ever longer and hillier. My parents’ garden spat out endless tomatillos, potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes. The dirt roads of my runs became speckled with wormy wild apples, the best of which I held in my hand as I ran, and ate when I stopped, the tart, sharp perfect savor of fruit that felt forbidden for having been forgotten by the humans who owned it, for being earned by my sweat. How I loved those heirloom strains—the blush green and yellow wild apples, like Thoreau’s own that he tasted in the farmsteads all around Concord—that had been left like trash to feed the birds and deer and solitary me. In the lengthening dawns, the roosters woke us with their ever more competent crowing; until one day the renderer came and beheaded all twenty-seven chickens one by one, bleeding them, gutting them, scalding their feathers of, packing them in plastic. So it goes for all of us: from fluffy chick-hood we advance to a crowing, flapping, squabbling prime, then with swift violence we are made meat.

One day, I ran ten miles to Trout Pond, shallow and glistening and, other than the path trod there, endlessly empty of other human trace. When I stepped upon the boulder at the pond, I saw a bald eagle swimming through the water to shore. At the sight of the swimming eagle something stilled at the very center of me; that the great master of the air found itself just now flying through water seemed a phenomenon both natural and wildly unnatural, obvious and yet impossible. I watched the vast bird climb out and shake itself off, and knew this was the best thing I would see for a long time, that it carried a metaphor too deep for me to ever desire to explicate it. My project of isolation and contemplation in the woods was finished. My summer died with the eagle at Trout Pond.

I had one last morning in the Oracle, which in mid-September was again as chilly as it had been in May. I brought Thoreau with me as my new friend. It had been a very long summer of revolutionary words, none of which were mine. When, after a few hours, the coffee was gone and the dog stood and pressed her nose to the door, knowing that down the hill the boys would be stirring, I closed the door and abandoned the little house to the mice and hornets. On our descent, the pond, too cold to swim in any longer, glinted softly through the trees. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” Thoreau writes in Walden. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” We cannot prevent what we live through from changing us deeply; changed, we carry our former selves into the future. We are devastated, but then the plants take hold, and by being devoured, we find ourselves renewed. Life wants nothing more than to live. The best we can do under the terrible pressure of the moment is to resist with all our might the forces conspiring to make us into mindless mules of capitalism, to remove ourselves from the internet, to turn our attention to the singular.

We returned to Florida, taking three leisurely days this time. I arrived to find a garden suffocated by weeds, a hurricane brewing in the Gulf, a yellow banana spider the size of my hand guarding the back door. The pandemic had grown so intense in my county that we glowed a red eye on the online maps of the disease. I was glad to find that Thoreau had dogged me all the way into the subtropics, and even in such humidity was still whispering his half-cracked imprecations in my ear. Look hard enough at the humble things that surround the body, Thoreau crows in his work of generosity and genius. Look at a pond no more miraculous than any other pond in the world, which is to say infinitely miraculous, look at your own ponds whatever shape they take, even this retention pond scooped by man and host to alligators and mosquitoes, look deeply, through time, and we can all—even you, paltry worried creature of the twenty-first century—reach through the general into the particular and then into the stuff of self. Read so closely that the landscape you’re in or the book you’re reading becomes you. It is through such constant, intense close reading that you can touch the edges of your soul.

 

Lauren Groff is the author of five books, including Fates and Furies and Florida, both of which were finalists for the National Book Award. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow and one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and her work has won the Story Prize and appeared in over thirty languages. Her sixth book, Matrix, a novel, will be published in September 2021.

Excerpted from Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau, edited by Andrew Blauner. Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Blauner. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

The Review’s Review: Reproducing Bodies

 

Linus Borgo, Bed of Stars: Self-Portrait with Elsina and Zip, 2021, oil on canvas, 46 x 68″ (detail).

Linus Borgo makes consistently uncanny and gorgeous work, some of which will be featured at Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles this January. My favorite of their self-portraits—deadlocked with Fuzzy FTM Transsexual Amputee Plays with Magic Wand and Poppers (Self Portrait)—is Bed of Stars: Self Portrait with Elsina and Zip, in which Linus lies in a pool of deep blue, star-stamped sheets, an oblique banner of sunlight across his torso and thighs, his body filling the frame, toes nearly poking through the border. It’s a work that questions what it is to reproduce an image, a pet, a body part. Of course, this is the terrain of figurative art. But duplicates also appear within the piece: Linus’s left bionic forearm and its phantom mirror not only each other, but his right forearm; the cat dozing by his ankle complements the stuffed one cradling his elbow; the bedspread underneath him simulates the sky above. The effect is overwhelming, and intensified by meticulousness: blades of hair golden in the sun, creases in the pillowcase, a naval piercing, cursive lettering on a nameplate necklace. In this representation of the self, there is an abundance of selves existing side by side simultaneously. What more could you ask for in a self-portrait? —Jay Graham

Tice Cin’s debut novel, Keeping the House, would be interesting for its subject matter alone—it follows the heroin trade in London’s Turkish communities in the late nineties and early 2000s. But what really sets it apart is its snaking, shifting form, filled with constant interruptions by Turkish Cypriot words, and their English definitions, embedded in the middle of the page. The result is a book filled with as much stop/start energy as the raves its characters attend. —Rhian Sasseen

The albums of legendary indie rock band Superchunk—and the solo projects of their front man and Merge Records co-owner Mac McCaughan—have been a refuge for me since the midnineties, when I swaddled my tortured teenage self in their seminal album, Foolish. For decades McCaughan released his solo material under the moniker Portastatic, but with his 2015 album Non-Believers, he came out under his own name with a clean, eighties-inflected vibe. His follow-up, The Sound of Yourself, is out today. It’s a mature statement from an indie veteran who knows exactly what kind of music he wants to make: mellow guitar rock gently buttered with synth, with McCaughan’s trebly voice swimming in and out of the mix like a melancholy dolphin. The spacious title track is a particular favorite. McCaughan also channels his film scoring work with a few lovely, haunting instrumentals. I’m not exactly sure who this record is for—but it could be for me, entering middle age, looking back on all the music that’s moved me, and grateful to pause for a while in a place I know and love. —Craig Morgan Teicher

I thought of Jeffrey Skoblow’s In a Trance: On Paleo Art while looking at Lisa Yuskavage’s “Master Class” (in her show New Paintings, up now at David Zwirner). The painting stages a mythic discovery-of-art(ifice)-as-porn scenario: a bare-breasted hippie chick kneels before her male counterpart; they’re separated by a painting of fire, placed over his crotch. Behind them looms a green canvas suggesting the cave-art shapes of horned bison, with a swirly psychedelic twist. Skoblow’s meditation on cave drawings, in which he reconstructs from decades-old, hastily scrawled notebook entries his visits to twelve Lascaux-type sites, looks long and hard at that which is “not a sign of anything but itself, that is, it means, ‘I mean,’ ‘I have meaning,’ and connects all who recognize it.” Skoblow’s prose is quiet, strangely secretive, where Yuskavage’s monochromes are shamelessly pop-y. But both invite us into “a ritual landscape … a place to return to (if only in the mind), to take an interest in the minds and bodies of (relatively distant) others.” Both are lushly recursive and metareferential in harnessing their respective media to ask after the origins of mark-making and figuration, to illustrate and illuminate “the muck and mire of human being, the terrifying crazy ooze of our psychosexual evolutionary mud bath.” Who were these early humans? What did they see? And what did they do, to the walls and each other, with language—a new space that introduced relations? —Olivia Kan-Sperling

Lisa Yuskavage, Master Class, 2021. © Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Linus Borgo, BED OF STARS: SELF PORTRAIT WITH ELSINA AND ZIP, 2021, oil on canvas, 46×68”.

Announcing the Winners of the 2021 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged thirty years and younger. Our goal, at the time, was to expand the popular perception of who book collectors are (and can be) by highlighting original collections built by young women, often without the knowledge or help of the rare book trade. By celebrating their achievements, we hoped to inspire potential collectors to look at their shelves differently, to identify patterns and projects, to think critically about what aspects of the historical record they might be uniquely qualified to recognize and preserve.

In this, our fifth year, it is especially gratifying to award the Honey & Wax Prize to a collector who has applied repeatedly, each time with a stronger and more focused collection. In 2017, as a graduate student at the University of Arizona, Margaret Landis submitted a general collection of books about women in science: a reading list that had inspired her in her scientific career. A well-chosen reading list is a valuable thing, but it is not a book collection: a collector pursues not just texts, but objects with material histories of their own. The 2017 submission did not place. 

In 2018, Landis reapplied with some key new books and a new angle, considering the current boom in popular histories of women in science—Hidden Figures, Rise of the Rocket Girls, The Code Girls—in the context of an earlier moment of publishing enthusiasm, when titles like Rebecca Joslin’s 1929 Chasing Eclipses and the 1937 biography Madame Curie were best sellers. Landis received an honorable mention for her 2018 submission, which approached her books not only as narratives on the page, but as evidence of a larger historical narrative. 

This year, the last in which she was eligible to apply, Landis surprised us with a final submission, a deep dive into the legacy of astronomer Maria Mitchell, the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: “Having the prize deadline made me sit down and think about what were the most interesting things I’d found each year, and refine my focus. . . . I was really surprised at how few books in the voices of the women scientists themselves were currently in print, and that was a strong motive to start finding copies of Maria Mitchell’s own articles.” 

Landis’s transformation, from a reader with an interest to a collector on a quest, is one we hope to inspire more broadly. We are delighted to announce the $1,000 winner of the 2021 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize:

WINNER

Margaret Landis (she/her), thirty, an astrophysicist and postdoc at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for “Maria Mitchell Through Time,” a collection of works by and about the pioneering nineteenth-century American astronomer and educator.

“[As] one of the first internationally renowned American astronomers, Mitchell’s life has left a long trail in the print culture of the United States. My collection includes works written by and about Maria Mitchell during her lifetime (or just shortly after), work she would have had access to, and her legacy in print form up until today. . . . What I found were periods of reexploration and reevaluation of Maria Mitchell after her life in both academic and artistic ways.” 

We admired Landis’s multiple and creative angles of approach to an important historical figure, from an 1849 pamphlet chronicling the discovery of “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” to Mitchell’s 1860 Atlantic Monthly piece on fellow scientist Mary Somerville to copies of key books found in Mitchell’s library: “The excitement for me in collecting these is to see Maria Mitchell starting to interact with her legacy during her own lifetime.” The more modern materials in the collection, “from biographies to poetry collections to tarot decks,” reflect the many ways that Mitchell’s legacy, like the trail of a comet, remains visible in print and life.   

You can read Landis’s winning essay and bibliography here. 

We are also awarding five honorable mentions of $250 each:

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Alanna Crow (they/them), twenty-eight, a thanatologist and bookseller in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for “The Soldier’s Memorial: Military Death and Grief from the American Civil War to Afghanistan and Iraq,” a collection of primary sources documenting the experience of American military death and grief through memoirs, photographs, broadsides, postcards, and artifacts.

“My collection is an incomplete history of how soldiers die, prepare for death, and grieve; how they are buried, commemorated, and perceived; the uses and abuses of dead soldiers; and their importance beyond war hawking and militant nationalism. . . . War grief was evident and collective for decades, as opposed to today, when our wars and deaths in combat—or by murder, suicide, friendly fire, accident, homelessness, burn pit–related cancer, or addiction—are nearly invisible to anyone outside the small military community.” 

We admired Crow’s range in this collection: a crippled Civil War veteran’s carte de visite, used to solicit donations; a commercial WWI-era stereoview of a soldier’s body on a French battlefield; an Ohio undertaker’s blank contract “for Funeral Expenses of Soldier, Sailor, or Marine” during WWII; a Marine’s collection of poems named for his friends killed in Vietnam; a mourning bracelet for an American soldier killed in a friendly fire incident in Iraq. In exploring the experiences of veteran and civilian mourners alike, the collection channels their collective grief into an active memorial to those whose lives were shattered or lost in military service. 

Caitlin Gooch (she/her), twenty-eight, founder of the literacy nonprofit Saddle Up & Read in Wendell, North Carolina, for “Collecting Black Equestrian History to Prove We Exist.” Despite growing up on a horse farm and attending trail rides every weekend, Gooch “never saw a book with horse girls or boys who looked like me.” She collects books featuring Black equestrians to share with the children her organization serves.

“Anytime I showed up to a classroom or youth group, there was a shock factor because they didn’t expect me to be Black. Those reactions were the catalyst to me collecting books which featured Black equestrians. . . . I’ve felt the sting of losing history before. My own cowboy culture, growing up on trail rides, has no published documentation in a protected place. Many of the elders have passed. We have no oral recordings or written works of their stories. All we have now are memories. Finding these books, before they are tagged as ‘not available’ or quadruple in price, makes me feel like a warrior preserving a special part of history.”

We loved Gooch’s focus and purpose in this collection: both her drive to preserve representations of Black equestrians throughout history, from the Golden Legacy comic book Black Cowboys to Lillian Schlissel’s Black Frontiers to Julius Lester’s Black Cowboy, Wild Horses, and her commitment to share this often overlooked Black “cowboy world” with a wider audience. Many of the collections we see are being built with an eventual mission in mind, but Gooch’s vision is already being realized at Saddle Up & Read, where her collection is reaching a new generation of readers and riders, and is inspiring a series of Black equestrian coloring books.

Elizabeth Kidder (she/her), thirty-one, an illustrator in Knoxville, Tennessee, for “Small-Circulation Self-Published,” a collection of thematically linked zines built over the past decade, from her student days at Savannah College of Art and Design to her current work in the classroom, where her collection inspires her seventh-grade art students’ final projects.

“On their own time and dime, [zine creators] produce an intentionally limited amount of content that they themselves must find a way to give to the reader. . . . When I think of the ephemeral work I’m doing—building a collection of books that have little if any published record—I know I should feel defeated. But instead, I feel elated, giddy. I know it exists. It’s here, in my hands. The world may not remember, but I do. I wonder if the last worshipper of a forgotten god feels the same.”

We appreciated Kidder’s taxonomic approach to zine (or “small-circulation self-published”) collecting, which showcased what it means to collect an intimate DIY genre characterized by scarcity and ephemerality, and how that makes us question what’s considered “worthless.” For Kidder, the particular limitations of the medium have become the very reasons why these books speak to her at festivals: “Amongst the scores of prints and buttons and stickers selling, [an artist’s] zine would sit, and sometimes they wondered why they’d brought it—it never sells as well, and it’s a little too personal for the event. That is why I buy them.”

Caitlin Moriarty (she/her), thirty, an archivist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for “Out of Date: Twentieth-Century Travel Guides for Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Bloc,” a collection focused on English-language travel guides published by state publishing houses before the fall of Communism.

“Looking past the big international publishing companies, I noticed that starting around 1960, Soviet state publishing houses started publishing guides in English. I was especially curious about why the mid-twentieth century was when this started. Who were the people that were going on a Soviet vacation during the Cold War? . . . Particularly at the beginning, this was the version of itself that the Soviet Union wanted the world, particularly the Western world in the case of the guides in English, to see. Socialist realism imposed on the people and places of the Soviet Union itself.”

We admired the coherence of Moriarty’s collection, which uncovers the history written between the lines of these outdated travel guides: “Some of the major epochs of Soviet history—the Cold War, the Thaw, Stagnation, and Perestroika—can be traced in what was recommended to tourists.” We were especially impressed with Moriarty’s detailed bibliography, which evaluates each book from multiple perspectives: the intended audience, the intended use (practical guide or descriptive essay), and the way the graphic design and format of each guide communicates those aspirations.

Melanie Shi (she/her), twenty-three, of New York, New York, a Yenching Scholar at Peking University, for “Visions of China: Collecting Language Manuals, Sinology, and Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction in Translation,” a collection of midcentury books designed to bridge the divide between China and the West, from both directions.

“While I was first drawn to these books for their visual language, their contents soon revealed a picture of the diversity of the Chinese diaspora, of the visions of Chineseness produced from inside and outside of China proper. . . . Whether [they are] publications designed for a readership of overseas Chinese, studies of Chinese classics conducted by Western scholars, or modern Chinese novels by émigrés translated for English-reading audiences, these texts show that what is ‘authentically’ Chinese is vast, global, and ripe with various interpretations.”

We loved the way Shi’s collection took us on a journey, starting with her interest in discarded Chinese-English crossover books, “not quite East nor West,” that she found on the streets of New York City: How did they end up there, and why did this matter to her? In the process of learning about the network of publishers and Chinatown traders that circulated these volumes, Shi dug deeper into the visual and material aspects of her collection, bringing to light the richness and variation found in the books of the Chinese diaspora in New York. This collection told a story about our private lives with books on a public scale.

The cofounders of the Honey & Wax Prize, Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix, would like to thank our 2021 sponsors: Biblio, The Caxton Club, Swann Galleries, and Ellen A. Michelson. Thanks also to Lit Hub, The Paris Review, Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, and Fine Books & Collections for their ongoing support, and to the documentary The Booksellers for spreading the word about the prize during this lockdown year. Most of all, thanks to the inspiring young collectors who shared their ongoing projects with us! We look forward to seeing where they take you.