The Paris Review's Blog, page 143

Oath

The following is Eileen Myles’s foreword to F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, the first anthology of its kind. F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry will be released by isolarii later this month.

Galina Rymbu and Yes Women group (Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber), MY VAGINA, 2020.

Only yesterday I think it was yesterday I drove here to Long Island from New York City and I stopped at a small farm that sells milk and eggs. The name of the farm is welsh—Ty Llwyd.

The language excited me and I couldn’t stop telling the woman there about my trip to Wales same time she had moved to the states—’bout 1970. She showed absolutely no interest. Yeah, yeah. I was in Russia in 1995 and 2017. I digress. I’m queer, and most recently I’m thinking of myself as a they feminist. I was formerly a they lesbian wanting to suture the two groups dykes and transwomen in particular since there’s a growing sense in the trans community that lesbians and trans women are in opposition and I just don’t think it’s true. But I’m becoming more interested in attaching my transness to my feminism not my female body. I think the female body is every body’s business. Yet so much of the pleasure of this book (and my own work historically and today) is all the iterations of the things that happen to a female body. The pussy in time:

Her vulva resembles a large gray rabbit –

large, a bit fat and gray

with long hanging ears, why

Rabbits are vivid, they are running around the yard I’m writing in. Pussies are vivid. There are two in the house I’m living in. As a writer early on men got their hands on my female work. I remember a guy an editor cutting away at my poem to what he regarded as essential. I think recitations of the female body seemed unnecessary to him as did story and certain rhetorical strokes. It was like when I was buying the eggs

someone once told me

that a poem is a pure thing that doesn’t have a single

unnecessary word

I mean who is licensed to say which words are unnecessary. I remember when I published my first fiction Chelsea Girls a reviewer (male) bemoaned how much it was just my daily lesbian life. On and on. In comparison to works of genius like Knausgaard that aim for a deeper content necessarily?

I often imagine that instead of

books I’m hauling dynamite

What are my instruments. Existence, right. The act of inventory. Rage, paper and pens. The computer I’m writing on. And I will epigraph some future book with this:

write, paws

The simplest line evokes universes of liberation. Because I want

a world of different labor

Female anger is dead serious. Female anger is funny. To put something on a T-shirt doesn’t mean it’s any less true. To think it could be there too instead of brilliantly being in a poem in this book. This small elegant book. So many of my best lines were hatched in the midst of talking to myself, in the day, all day and launching it in the world. Seeing who sings to it like I do:

it’s possible all women make up

a secret organization working under

the guise of an oppressed class

It gets painterly. And

fog around a child’s bed

It’s incantory, complex and dirty.

I love your pubes suggesting

prospective fucking in the semantic rye

and massive beetles under teeth sheets

rooting in gold roots for gold things

everything in this world makes me think of fucking

My friend CAConrad exists a great deal of the time in ALL CAPS.

I’ve only published one poem that way. It was written to be read at Occupy Wall Street where poets had the ideal situation which was to read their work and have each line repeated collectively like the human microphone. I feel this:

I’M PUTTING SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH

SOMETHING THAT’S YOURS, CHECHNYA

ONLY YOURS,

CHECHNYA

I was having a nervous breakdown in 1995 when I spent the summer in Russia. I was going through a breakup and she was with me, she was femme and I was butch and men gave her space and acted like I was invisible even though it was my gig. And I don’t drink and she did. People stopped speaking English once they got drunk and most of the English speakers anyhow were men. Who I met. And I was going through menopause. An episode in a female life

It’s only proper for a sham wedding,

The last lifeboat in the immense ocean

I’m not so much embedding these fragments of your work into mine as I made a pile of some of the things I found in this book and loved here and thought I’d paint the background in. Grass, intentions. Voices on the other side of the hedge. A lawnmower in the distance. Totally bourgeois. So what. I was moved that the first poem in the book was by Lida who then was named later on by Oksana in the middle of the book. I felt tossed into a community. Reading her work (Lida’s) I felt

impending doom eight months later he was killed in Afghanistan

It struck me that he was probably gay and his friend knew it and was trying to fix him before it was too late. He had sucked his friend’s cock more successfully. I hope.

a little boy was riding a bike down the endless hallway

he looked at me with hateful eyes

there are lines that are just so fucking metonymic in their grace.

There are lines like a curse that yodel radiantly out of the toothy mouth of the curser, way too incendiary to ever become cliché:

so die for us, black sun of the pig’s uniform

We’re hopeless as we reach across that gap

will it be read

Starting there, I mean, in the lines going across the page making sound and pictures, accumulating pictures, throughout this book that propose to my mind the anti-monumentality, the wideness of a vision if not female or feeling that way, knowing oneself, someone othered who nobody knows they are looking and recording and it’s in this horizontal of the battered portion of the human race that we’re living closer to the likely truth of the future as opposed to politicians and developers and investment bankers killing each other in the name of family and friends

I have this dream: there’s no more us. Flying out into the light

It’s a recipe, it’s a formula, it’s a spell

2 syllables

how can you lose something from nothing

but that’s just it

I have been invited to witness. To smell the crowd and be charged by history, our desperate pitch. I’m blasted by fragrant stillness. The smell of us inside and out, a vast interior, a bird runs across the lawn, and—fucking shit—

The blue eyes

of the groundmeat saleswoman.

 

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue in New York City. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, Texas.

From the foreword to F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse. F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry is the second work in isolarii, a series of “island books” released every two months by subscription.

The Second Mrs. de Winter

Illustration for a Rebecca paper doll by Jenny Kroik for The Paris Review

 

“The sexiness of [Rebecca] is maybe the most unsettling part, since it centers on the narrator’s being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the memory and the mystery of her new husband’s dead wife.” —Emily Alford, Jezebel

NB: This essay contains all of the spoilers for Rebecca.

 

Rebecca had good taste—or maybe she just had the same taste as me, and that’s why I thought it was good. She loved a particular shade of vintage minty turquoise. The kitchen cabinets were all this color. As were the plates inside. The cups and bowls were white with dainty black dots on them. Not polka dots—a smaller, more charming print.

I loved them. I might have picked them out myself. It made me feel sick that I loved them.

I imagined Rebecca had picked out these cups and plates when she moved into this house, but the cupboards I was investigating, and the very lovely dishes inside them, now belonged to her ex-husband, my boyfriend. Rebecca lived fifteen minutes away.

Of course, her name wasn’t really Rebecca. But grant me a theme. We’ll call him Maxim.

*

Every once in a while, a book will pass through my writers’ group, all of us swept up in reading the same novel. In the early days of my dating Maxim, that book was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. My friend Emily was rereading it to write an essay for Jezebel called “The Nihilistic Horniness of a Good Gothic Read: Ranking the Genre’s Sexiest and Scariest Secrets.” Rebecca ranks number one. Emily’s love for the novel was so persuasive the rest of us soon joined in.

The basic premise of Rebecca is that our narrator, a naive young woman, marries an older, brooding widower and goes to live in his strange and beautiful house, where it rapidly becomes clear that the legacy of his dead wife, the titular Rebecca, is … potent. The narrator constantly worries over whether she can run the house as well as Rebecca did.

At one point, Emily was in the bathtub with a scotch and the novel and somehow still had enough hands to text us:  THIS WOMAN’S ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT THE SERVANTS ARE MEAN TO HER AND I WANT THAT LIFE.

The servants do not like the narrator for the very good reason that she is not Rebecca. Beyond the servants, of course, the narrator is also concerned that she’ll never live up to Rebecca in Maxim’s heart, that in the wake of his great and tragic love, she stands no chance.

Again, from Emily’s bath: EVEN THE DOGS DON’T LIKE HER.

*

I had never read Rebecca before. About fifty pages in I felt stupid because I hadn’t retained the narrator’s name. I flipped back through the opening and still couldn’t find it. Maxim was the husband. Rebecca was his dead wife. Mrs. Danvers was the housekeeper. Jasper was the dog.

WTF, I texted Emily, THE DOG HAS A NAME BUT NOT THE NARRATOR?

HE’S A VERY GOOD DOG, Emily said.

For 410 pages, the narrator of Rebecca is only ever known as The Second Mrs. de Winter—and isn’t that just the whole story?

CAN I TELL YOU SOMETHING HORRIBLE? I asked Emily.

OF COURSE

I’VE BEEN FEELING A LOT LIKE THE SMDW LATELY

OH GIRL

*

The little white house in New York where my Maxim lived was no Manderley, but like Manderley, the house was an issue. The house with Rebecca’s lovely dishes in the cupboard. The house with art on the walls no man would ever pick. The red, floral, calico curtains, which Maxim eventually took down because, despite having sewn them himself, he had never liked the print Rebecca picked (I did) and after that there were no curtains at all. The kitchen where I cooked us dinner and accidentally used a special salt Rebecca had favored but left behind, which made Maxim look up from his meal and ask, What did you put in here?

One afternoon I was working at a desk in the office and, playing with the drawer, found inside Rebecca’s birth certificate. I’d already known we were born a week apart because on our second date Maxim had asked my birthday and blanched when I’d said October.

More than once Maxim returned an article of women’s clothing to me that was not mine.

There were notes in Rebecca’s handwriting on the fridge and photos of her in the house, and this was right and good, because she and Maxim had a daughter, an eight-year-old girl who was funny and sweet and who I was very lucky to know for those nearly two years. I must leave her out of this—she is a still-becoming person—but of course she remains an invisible source of gravity in this story. There were photos of them at Disney World. Photos of them holding their daughter the day she was born.

All of which is to say that Rebecca was everywhere. In the house, and beyond it as well.

Once, playing music in the car, I put on one of my favorite albums, and Maxim grabbed for the dial to turn it off. I had accidentally played the song to which he and Rebecca had walked down the aisle at their wedding. We had eerily similar taste in music.

None of this was Maxim’s fault. I must have felt like a haunting to him. It must have been uncomfortable. I came to recognize and dread the look and silence that came over him in those moments when I accidentally assumed a Rebecca-like posture. I felt guilty, though didn’t know precisely for what.

*

In the most excruciating scene in Rebecca, TSMdW throws a costume ball in an effort to be the kind of hostess and charmer Rebecca once was. She decides she will dress like a relative of Maxim’s, Caroline de Winter, whose portrait hangs prominently in the house and who TSMdW refers to as “the girl in white.” She prattles—extensively, tediously—about what a big secret her costume is and how bowled over everyone will be when they see it. She orders a wig that will curl just so. She orders a white dress. She means this to be a surprise for Maxim.

TSMdW waits til the party is underway to make her entrance and then appears at the top of the stairs, completely transformed into the woman in the painting. “They all stared at me like dumb things,” she says. “Beatrice uttered a little cry and put her hand to her mouth. I went on smiling, I put one hand on the banister.”

And then: “Maxim had not moved. He stared up at me, his glass in his hand. There was no colour in his face. It was ashen white … ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he said…‘What is it?’ I said, ‘What have I done?’ ”

We come to understand that Rebecca once had this very same idea for a costume. “It was just what Rebecca did at the last fancy dress ball at Manderley. Identical,” Beatrice says.

Seeing her at the top of the stairs, Maxim believes TSMdW to be the ghost of Rebecca. He believes this to be a haunting.

The bit that sickens and thrills me most is when, just as everyone else sees she has blundered into a pantomime of Rebecca, TSMdW remains ignorant and continues smiling. She still thinks she is herself. She still believes she is unique.

This doesn’t last for long. As the novel goes on, TSMdW becomes desperate and horrible as she tries to outpace her predecessor’s shadow—but readers have little reason to believe she will succeed. The Second Mrs. de Winter believes she is narrating the story of her own life, but little does she know, the book in our hands is called Rebecca.

*

Often, when we went to restaurants, or on hikes, or to concerts, this would prompt stories of past times Maxim had been to those places. He had lived his whole life in this part of the country and so of course many of those stories had Rebecca in them or around the margins. Still, I came to feel like a verdict had already been passed on every song I might sing, every dish I might cook, every date we might go on—because Rebecca had already made them and sung them and been to these places before. I felt trapped in a rerun of someone else’s life, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

Of course, the only way Maxim could tell me about his life was with these stories and I couldn’t know and love him if I censored his past. So why did it hurt so much to move through these recently vacated spaces? Why did I feel like every date we went on had been used up because he had been here for the first time with someone else? Why could I not get over the feeling that this made our experiences somehow redundant, lesser?

That I felt this way betrays deep insecurity and narcissism in the same instance. Worse, it betrays a belief that to be a first love, or a great love, is the only way to be.

When I confessed to my boyfriend that I felt this way, he said a smart and beautiful thing.

He said, “Who says the first time is always the best time?”

I loved him so much when he said that. And I promised myself I’d stop seeing his past as an intrusion on our present. But knowing you’re being stupid seldom alleviates the stupidity—it only adds a blanketing layer of shame.

Why was I so obsessed with being first?

*

Have you ever watched one of those ensemble shows where they try to introduce new characters several seasons in? Chachi on Happy Days is the most famous example and I am still not over Joss Whedon’s cheeky Dawn Summers retcon. But because I am a child of the nineties, the most memorably painful of these late-stage introductions was Tori Scott on Saved by the Bell. After five seasons of one stable gang, Kelly and Jessie were disappeared from Bayside High without comment. The sixth season opened with an episode called “The New Girl” in which new-to-the-school motorcycle chick Tori takes Zach’s parking spot resulting in a presexual squabble. When Tori agrees to help Lisa organize the Fall Ball, Lisa, full of gratitude, exclaims, “You’re my new best friend!” She starts to walk away, and then, in a strangely meta moment, as if remembering the existence of Jessie and Kelly, turns back to Tori with a face of absolute horror: “You’re … my only best friend?” The show seemed to hope we would forget about Jessie and Kelly, forget about the past, and while there was nothing implicitly wrong with Tori, I felt like, Let’s not pretend we don’t know who the main characters of this show really are. Let’s not pretend we don’t know who counts. I was terrified I would never have enough gravitas to earn a permanent place in Maxim’s life, because I was afraid I had arrived too late to count. I was obsessed with being first because I didn’t want to be a Tori or TSMdW. Because, in my mind, the original cast are always the main characters—everyone else is expendable. I found the very existence of Rebecca threatening because of who it implied I was in this love story. And for more reasons than that besides.

*

I have a low threshold for surprises. Life is mostly surprises, to be fair, but I specifically mean the “you didn’t know this new large feeling was scheduled for today” sort. The “today is the day you are meeting my ex-wife she’ll be here in an hour is that okay” kind of surprise. The “Oh, these five people you are currently shaking hands with at a dance recital are my former in-laws” kind of surprise. All of which is to say, eventually I met Rebecca. In most ways it was uneventful. I found her beautiful. Blonde where I was dark. Quiet where I rambled. Remarkably little passed between us.

On this occasion, I behaved fine on the outside, but on the inside, I thought, “I am not good at this.” It was stupid, but I felt I hadn’t prepared adequately for our meeting.

I suspect you’ll make the same, understandable mistake Maxim made: he thought I was anxious about these meetings because of the usual bouts of awkwardness entailed in meeting a person’s ex, even if (especially if?) that person is the mother of your boyfriend’s child. And sure, it was a little bit that. But that’s not what I wished I’d prepared for.

I had to prepare myself not to understand Rebecca too much.

I am a person who always chooses women. Prefers the company of a woman. I suffer from a myopia that prevents me, in all but the most extreme circumstances, from seeing any hetero breakup as the fault of a woman.

I was very afraid that I was going to like Rebecca.

You’ll think I’m a misandrist or humble-bragging, and both are probably true. But what I’m trying to tell you is this: in my warped mind, the flip side of the coin that read liking Rebecca was disliking my boyfriend. I couldn’t conceive of any gray area.

I didn’t want to meet Rebecca, because if I did, I might see a glimpse of another version of the story of her and Maxim’s marriage, and I was unprepared to know anything at all that might make me doubt the way he had treated a woman.

We are all of us flawed, we have all of us behaved badly—and to expect someone in their thirties to have an immaculate history is unreasonable, I know this. But this was the first time I’d fallen in love with someone who used to be married. Who’d gone through a painful divorce. And in my desire to think of my boyfriend in the particular rosy way love encourages, in the story of his past, I wanted to see him as the good guy and her as the bad. I thought this was the only way I could be a good partner to a person who’d gone through a divorce. I thought this was the only way I could trust him.

*

A readerly confession: during every scene of Rebecca where TSMdW and Maxim hash out their relationship and life at Manderley, I found myself impatient, wondering, But could you say more about Rebecca? Because TSMdW is a drag and Rebecca is fascinating. Rebecca kept up a nautical sex-cabin in which to have affairs. Rebecca took the sailboat out to sea, even in storms. Rebecca organized inspired dinners and parties. She was loud, unruly, sexual, powerful, and charming. Rebecca wasn’t a “good person,” per se, but who cares! She was deeply fucking interesting in ways TSMdW could never be and, more importantly, she got there first.

*

On Valentine’s Day, in an effort to avoid celebrating someplace Maxim had once gone with Rebecca, and to avoid too many grand expectations of romance, I suggested we get drunk at the mall and visit the Mirror Maze, a curtained storefront with a glittering proscenium.

The mall, I swear to god, is called Destiny.

The Mirror Maze was janky but beautiful. We were given loose, crinkly plastic gloves to wear, so when we inevitably touched a mirror, mistaking it for a doorway, we would not smudge the glass. The mirrors were widely framed, slivers of neon color around their edges. Inside there were zones of multicolored lights and zones of black lights. We were reflected everywhere, ridiculous and clinical-looking in our gloves. It was a bit like a carnival’s hall of mirrors, except it was a back-channel mall outlet, swaddled in black cloth. Ambient mall noise trickled in despite the canned pop they played, echoing weirdly through the passages.

We’d had a beer or two before entering and were laughing a lot as we traveled the maze. We held hands until it became clear we’d hurt ourselves if we kept it up. We separated. I went down a hallway, which dead-ended, and then tried to get back to where I’d been. I saw Maxim, walked toward him, and banged into a mirror.

I was legitimately shocked. It’s the sort of thing that you think won’t happen if you know the trick. We were adults, and the maze was a game, but the maze could still fool us. At first, I felt delighted. Then, Maxim’s reflection disappeared. I tried to find a way out of the hallway I’d walked down but clunked into pane after pane of glass. Be reasonable, I thought, even as I panicked. Maxim was nowhere to be seen and I was multiplied everywhere. I willed my own reflection to open up for me, to transform into a door.

In the fourth grade, I used to sneak away with other girls to do Bloody Mary in a small mirror that hung in the teacher’s supply closet. The room smelled of construction paper and tempera paint. The lighting was dim and the mirror very smudged. We chanted and chanted at that supply closet mirror, and I was scared, but I also really wanted to see something. But it was only ever my own scrawny face I saw in the mirror, overfull with desire, wishing something remarkable would happen. I frightened myself.

Eventually Maxim called out to me that he’d found the exit to the maze. I followed his voice and left behind the tunnel of my own reflections.

We went back to the beer hall and had another drink and soon were in the middle of an enormous fight that was mostly my fault.

We had found out earlier that week that Rebecca was going to have a baby with her new boyfriend. I’d asked Maxim if he wanted to talk about this, and he’d said no. I’d pressed, and he’d demurred and so I’d left it. But now, four beers deep, still a little dizzy from the hall of mirrors, still inside the Destiny mall, on Valentine’s Day, he brought it up. Suddenly he was talking about how our plans to move in together would need to be indefinitely postponed until Rebecca had the baby, until Rebecca decided where to live with the baby. We didn’t know, couldn’t know, the how or when of any of this. We would just have to wait until Rebecca had made her choices about where to live, Maxim said, and then we could make our own, in response to hers.

Maxim’s timing was lousy, but that’s no excuse for how upset I got. I cried. I shouted a stupidly elaborate metaphor about being the rattled caboose of a driverless train. I made all of my first-rush feelings known instead of understanding that this was hard for him and this was not the moment for my feelings. But I was too drunk to access fine motor skills of emotional control. On the cab ride back to his place I raked my nails along my forearms, leaving long trailing welts, as if to persuade myself the pain wasn’t all inside my head.

If you’ll let me explain without trying to excuse: I felt like I couldn’t even have one night where I wasn’t asked to stand behind her in line. Like all the important decisions about our life were being decided by Maxim and Rebecca, instead of Maxim and me. Like I was a mall-mirror reflection of a reflection of a girlfriend. A thing diluted beyond meaning. What was the point of me?

I needed to get out of the maze, get out the mall, get out of this other woman’s story. I didn’t want to live inside a book named for someone else.

*

The secret in du Maurier’s novel is, of course, that Maxim has murdered Rebecca. A body washes up, two thirds of the way through the book, soon to be revealed as hers, and this is what prompts Maxim to come clean to his new wife. His confession comes as a surprise to very few readers, I am sure, seeing as Maxim behaves like petulant schoolboy sociopath for the entire first half of the book and always looks funny when people mention the cove.

What’s interesting though, narratively, is that his confession is a misdirection.

The real surprise is still two beats away, and this is du Maurier’s genius.

After Maxim confesses the murder to TSMdW the reader relaxes into his horrific but expected revelation … only to then be jump-scared by the thing they could not have seen coming, which is how gleefully TSMdW responds to the news that her husband is a murderer:

I held his hands against my heart… I did not care about his shame. None of the things he had told me mattered at all. I clung to one thing only, and repeated it to myself, over and over again. Maxim did not love Rebecca. He had never loved her, never, never. They had never known one moment’s happiness together. Maxim was talking, and I listened to him, but his words meant nothing to me. I did not really care.

*

TSMdW does “not really care” that Maxim is a murderer. She is ecstatic, romantically aroused by the news. The Second Mrs. de Winter is relieved Maxim murdered Rebecca because this means he did not love her. Never, never. Which means that she, and not Rebecca (who let me remind you, is dead), comes first in Maxim’s affections.

She is preceded by no one.

What a fucking takeaway.

The murder as a literal act means nothing to TSMdW—but the murder as a metaphor for erasing the past, for expunging her visions of Maxim and Rebecca’s happy history together, means everything.

It’s so deliciously fucked up.

And I kind of understood it.

Because I was trying to erase my boyfriend’s Rebecca. I was afraid of her. Afraid of her primacy, and the sway she held over my life, sure. But more than that I was afraid of knowing her, liking her, allowing for the possibility that she was a good person who was part of a divorce that was, as is literally always the case, to do with two people and not one. I wanted to erase all that from the record. In a warped contradiction, I wanted to keep loving my wonderful, complicated boyfriend, who was who he was because of his past, but I wanted to expunge that past, too. Pretend it had no power over us. I wanted to pretend we could have the kind of blank-slate love affair I was convinced lived at the top of the hierarchy of romance.

It’s only ever been you.

What a stupid thing to want.

God, I wanted it so much.

Most people read Rebecca for the suspense. Probably only a very troubled person would learn things of a personal or moral nature from du Maurier. But I did. Du Maurier showed me that promising a new partner that they will eclipse your past is an act of violence against the meaningful loves that existed before. It’s a fucking bloodbath, and we are the murderers, and we forgive ourselves for it, every time.

When we love more than once in this life, this kind of murder can feel necessary, even virtuous. That’s the idea The Second Mrs. de Winter embraces when Maxim confesses. She is all too happy to become complicit in Rebecca’s murder. Helping Maxim get away with it is what bonds them as a couple. It’s the whole last third of the book. But the thing is, once I got to that part, I wasn’t rooting for them. I didn’t want them to get away with it. I didn’t want to believe in this kind of murder anymore. I recognized myself in TSMdW’s relief, and it was horrible. I didn’t want to be anything like her. And the way to do that, I realized, wasn’t to insist on being first, on being Rebecca—it was to find a way to live alongside her.

*

My friend Emily’s essay, the one ranking gothic novels’ sexy secrets, turned out marvelously. And it taught me that the tension in so many gothic stories comes from the lingering of the past in a present space.

Do you know what thrills me in so many of those gothic novels? When a woman sets fire to a house. Sometimes a house feels too haunted, too complicated, to live in anymore. Imagine the cleansing relief of burning the whole thing down. I’ve been there. I get it.

Burning a house down is powerful on the page because in real life it’s almost never the answer. Eventually you need to find a new house to live in, and all houses have their ghosts. What I’m trying to say is that I have the arsonist urge, but I’m getting better at living in haunted houses. Letting the past hover next to the present without flicking its ears and getting a rise out of it. That’s my work these days. I’m not all the way good at it yet. Sometimes I still spin a lighter between my fingers all night, thumbing the wheel, sparking blue.

But then I remind myself that Rebecca had also kissed my boyfriend, had also irritated him with a love of Americana songs, had also loved him, and that was why, when I kept slipping into her postures, I got scared. Because she had also loved my boyfriend, and then she had stopped. Because I was there loving him, and I never wanted to stop.

I used to think I saw Rebecca’s ghost reflected everywhere, but of course it was only my own face, full of want. I’d been frightened by the Mirror Maze’s reflections, kept turning from what I saw in them and chasing Maxim’s voice instead. As if it were him who could show me a way out, and not the woman I kept turning from, in whose reflection, somewhere, was an opening.

*

In October, Maxim took me to a Jenny Lewis concert for my birthday. Jenny Lewis has sung to me in ways I needed in every era of my life. If I am lucky, she will keep singing me through the rest of it. This was a magical gift.

I should not have been surprised when it soon became clear Rebecca would also be at the concert. After all, our birthdays were a week apart. She also loved Jenny Lewis. Her mother had got her tickets.

“We probably won’t even see each other,” Maxim said.

We saw each other when we first arrived, in the merch line.

We saw each other again in the ladies’ room.

We saw each other again in the beer line.

And honestly, it was fine.

Maybe it was fine because I had by now finished reading Rebecca and resolved to never let myself become TSMdW. Maybe it was because the idea of the two of us circling each other on our birthdays in a concert hall was the sort of thing that would make for a good Jenny Lewis song. Maybe it was because we were in an amphitheater of people who all loved the same music, and I’d given up the teenage idea that other people loving the same band as me threatened my love of the band.

Or maybe it was because Rebecca’s mother came to say hello to me. She said she’d read an essay I’d written and related to it. So many of us had the same story, we agreed.

So many of us are just spinning the radio dials, hoping to fall in love with a new song, wishing for something remarkable to happen. And who’s to say the song you find can’t be just for you even if it’s also for absolutely everyone in the amphitheater? Why would the existence of other loves diminish our own? Diminish anything? Let them make us expansive.

I went back to my seat. I brought my boyfriend an overpriced beer. I whispered that I’d talked with Rebecca’s mother and it was nice. He squeezed me. Jenny Lewis, in a golden gown, her hair unbelievably high, picked up a neon pink telephone, and answered a call that had been a long time ringing.

 

Love Rebecca? Print out your very own Rebecca paper doll.

Read CJ Hauser’s essay “The Crane Wife” here.

CJ Hauser teaches creative writing at Colgate University. Her novel,  Family of Origin , was published by Doubleday in 2019 and her first full-length work of non-fiction,  The Crane Wife & Other Essays, will be published by Doubleday and Viking UK in Spring 2022. 

Staff Picks: Memorials, Maps, and Machines

Bryan Washington. Photo: © Dailey Hubbard.

There are many ways to cross this country. What my gentleman and I did the first summer of our romance, the September after we graduated, was take three weeks to drive along the northern United States in a sedan with four CDs, little money of our own, and no air-conditioning. By the time we drove down out of the Berkeley Hills, I wondered if he still liked me, much less loved me. The matter of what keeps people together, what makes two people a couple, is one of the central questions of Bryan Washington’s extraordinary new book Memorial, and no one writing today can make an unanswered question as satisfying, as delightful, as moving, or as vibrant. Memorial has the kind of premise for which generations of M.F.A. students would offer lesser-used digits: a young man wakes one morning to the reality of living in a Houston one-bedroom alone with a stranger—his boyfriend’s mother. Things aren’t going great with the boyfriend, who has just flown to Japan, where his estranged father is dying. Washington writes with ease, like a juggler who is adding in new objects all the time, except the book ends with everything aloft instead of in hand. In contemporary fiction, there seems to be an idea that only brutality is sophisticated and only evil is art, but basically all of Washington’s characters are capable of goodness and love. In 2020, that is one hell of a twist. I finished Memorial with a shout after several late-night sessions and handed it immediately to my man, who, it turns out, does still like me. It can be difficult to share your life with someone; Washington somehow explains this anew. Memorial, on the other hand, is easy to share. —Julia Berick 

Finally, finally, I got my hands on Danez Smith’s most recent collection of poetry, Homie. Flipping through its pages to see if I recognized any of the titles, I found, for the first time in print, the poem “dogs!,” which I had first seen performed on YouTube at the height of my Button Poetry obsession in 2016. In it, one of my favorite lines of poetry: “i wanted to be the boy who / turned into the bird limp in the / dog’s wet mouth, holding me / toward his human saying I made / 
this for you.” The whole book can be found in this sentiment: an offering. So much of Danez’s poetry is consumed with the glorious act of giving oneself—to a friend, to a lover, to the self. Often, this act is rapturous and self-destructive, but other times it is gentler, subtler. The poems, then, are tributes. The title, Homie (and its subtitle, which is a nod to the Black camaraderie that is the book’s specific focus), gives the bottom line away. Even in a fistfight—as in the poem “jumped!,” which is about punching and being punched—or while laughing at one’s own creative cruelty—as in “how many of us have them?,” which invents its own form inspired by the dozens, the roasting and ribbing among the closest friends—there is always love. Not to give too much away, but I have sent and been sent verses from the collection’s final poem, “acknowledgements,” many times over: “& how many times have you loved me without my asking? / how often have i loved a thing because you loved it? / including me,” it ends, “ … with yo ugly ass.” —Langa Chinyoka

 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Courtesy of University of California Press.

 

“Dictee, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha” was Alexandra Kleeman’s response to the question “What book changed your life?” in an interview with the Financial Times in 2017. “I had no idea a book could make me feel like I was learning English for the first time.” I admire Kleeman’s concision here and have found it difficult to illustrate in a few hundred words just how precise her statement is. First published in 1982, Dictee is partly a memoir of the erasure of language and culture by colonizers—whether that be Japan’s colonization of Korea or the way in which America domestically colonizes the communities it absorbs—but it is also a semiabstract collage of photos, diagrams, maps, and poetry. Whole sections are introduced as if a test at school: “Traduire en francais,” one section starts, and then is followed by a list of seemingly unrelated vignettes. Here is number six: “The sea was calm, we did not feel the slightest of motion. We made a stop of an hour at Calais, where we had luncheon. It was rather dear but well served.” Elsewhere, punctuation is rendered in words: “period,” “open quotation marks,” “comma.” Like the repeating of a word until its sound becomes meaningless, these techniques estrange readers from the text so that passages of linear, more socio-realistic narrative almost feel like a welcoming back into the fold. Cha’s family came to the U.S. when she was eleven, and though Korean was the language at home, she became as proficient in English as she was in her first language. (She was fluent in French as well.) Making a trip to Korea after eighteen years in America, Cha reflects on a violent memory, regarding her brother’s desire to attend a political protest, from the time before the family emigrated. Cha observes: “I speak another tongue, a second tongue. This is how distant I am. From then.” For anglophone readers, Cha induces that same distancing even while reading in one’s own naturalized language. Too often, of course, the colonizing function of language goes about its invisible work without comment, but in Dictee each scene, each image, each poem or letter purposefully refers us back to it. It’s a disquieting effect, and an altogether remarkable one. —Robin Jones

As a result of my staff pick from two weeks ago on the video game Hades, I’ve been devouring as much as I possibly can about its developer, Supergiant Games. This has necessarily brought me to the YouTube channel for Noclip, which produces high-quality documentaries on various facets of the video game industry. Not only does Noclip have a series devoted to each of Supergiant’s previous games (Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre), they have had a longer ongoing project following the production of Hades. As I eagerly await the final installment of that series, I’ve simply been ruminating on how much care goes into these games as well as these documentaries. The depiction of an intimate workplace environment, the dynamic ways in which new ideas spring up, the joy of creating something that ends up being someone’s favorite thing—all of these factors breathe such life into Noclip’s work that I find myself dreaming about the endless potential we humans have through creation in literature, music, visual art, and games. Noclip’s most recent video, regarding the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment—or MADE—in Oakland, brings this potential into the full view of history while at the same time reminding us what is at stake when we abandon our understanding of the past. Ever insightful and profoundly humanistic, Noclip’s work is crafted so that video game fans such as myself can relish in all the industry jargon while people who know nothing about that world can be brought into its richness. —Carlos Zayas-Pons

The first time I heard the Irish singer Róisín Murphy, it was 2005, I was fifteen years old, and her debut solo album, Ruby Blue, had just been released. I was an obsessive reader of Pitchfork back in those days, and their review (an 8.4!) intrigued me enough that I immediately ordered the CD off of Insound. I loved it—the cabaret cool of “Night of the Dancing Flame,” the stylish “Dear Diary,” the glam-rock howl that begins “Ruby Blue.” Later on, when Lady Gaga became a thing, I was always quick to point out that she had completely ripped off Róisín with her look. Flash forward to February 2020. One of my last nights out before quarantine began was a Róisín (and Björk and Robyn) dance night held at a bar near my apartment; it was sheer perfection. I’m thinking of that night often now that her new album, Róisín Machine, is out, and while I’m making due with the makeshift club my roommate and I have turned our living room into, I dearly wish I could be in a room full of strangers dancing to this album. Songs like “Shellfish Mademoiselle,” with its glitchy beat and lyrics sung in a coo (“How dare you sentence me to a lifetime without dancing”), and “Narcissus,” which turns the myth of Narcissus into glittery disco, really should be experienced alongside other people. Some emotions can be felt only on the dance floor—certain unexpected intimacies, surprising moments of communal ecstasy. Róisín Murphy makes music for these moments, and their meaning deepens with each listen. As she announces first on the opening track, “Simulation,” and then later on, in “Murphy’s Law”: “I feel my story is still untold … but I’ll make my own happy ending.” It’s a sentiment that, like her music, bears repeating. —Rhian Sasseen

 

Róisín Murphy. Photo: Adrian Samson. Courtesy of Melt! Booking.

Don’t Get Comfortable

On lessons learned from a long friendship with Louise Glück

Louise Glück © Katherine Wolkoff

My friend Mark texted me at 6:18 A.M. yesterday: Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize! All morning, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done much, since the pandemic hit this horrid election year: joyscrolling.

Such recognition for a life in art! That life had changed mine, too: the minute, twenty-two years ago, that Louise plucked my first book manuscript from the submission pile for the APR/Honickman Prize.

One year after that, in 1999, I met her for the first time at a reading in Santa Fe. I tapped her shoulder and introduced myself. She enveloped me in the warmest, beariest hug—it seemed improbable that such a hug could come from so petite a person. Grasping my arms, she leaned back and took me in: “You are not at all what I expected—who would have thought such a sunny personality could write such devastating poems!”

It was a compliment of a high order, and one that troubled me for days. Was there some split between my self in the world and my self on the page? Louise seemed to me to be exactly herself, everywhere: in life and in art. Confounding, difficult task! So few truly accomplish it.

Louise had a mysterious capacity to change her aesthetic approach and still create poems that were unmistakably hers. I asked her about it once, and she said she would give herself little assignments, when she started writing again, after long silence. With Vita Nova, she thought: I never use repetition or questions; thus, every poem has to include one of each. She might not keep them all in every poem as a book developed, but such assignments—simple and formal in nature—propelled her into a new way of sounding exactly like herself.

After this, I looked for the tells in each book as it debuted: the humor and recorded speech of Meadowlands; the use of fragment and long sequences in Averno; the uncanny and disturbing prose poems in Faithful and Virtuous Night.

In Averno I saw the influence of her work with emerging poets, in her capacity as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, as it was known then. I was a screener for her during these years. I learned that she wanted what was raw and wild, even if it seemed half-baked. She was put off by the obviously, even exquisitely polished: so often such manuscripts felt inert to her. “Send it to me if it feels alive,” she instructed, “even if you think it needs work.” And indeed, each year she would work on such books with the year’s winner and one or two finalists, flying each poet out to Cambridge at her own expense, spending an intensive weekend with the book and the author under her exacting eye. And always, the explicit caveat to the finalists: such work was no guarantee of winning next year—let’s see what you do with the book.

Doing this screening work with her, I once asked what made her pick my manuscript all those years ago. “I didn’t like your book,” she said, without hesitation. I started laughing—her famous candor often had this effect on me, even if it was at my expense. “Why did you pick it, then?” I replied, incredulous. Her eyes widened: “Because I couldn’t quit thinking about it.”

She said that she decided that if she couldn’t quit thinking about a book, even if it disturbed her own sense of aesthetics, it meant that book should win. And that often, her initial reservations would transform into admiration.

Such an approach involves generosity of mind and great self-reflective capacity; it requires patience, and a willingness to sit with aversion: these are great acts of devotion to art. I imagine now that this is the same eye she brings to her own work, the eye necessary to writing books that are wholly new and wholly Glück.

She models vigilance against self-complacency. She has taught me to sense when a signature of style is simply serving as a crutch; to recognize when the familiar is inhibiting the potentially extraordinary. She has taught me: Don’t get comfortable.

 

Read poetry by Louise Gluck in The Paris Review archive

Dana Levin is the author, most recently, of Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. 

Cooking with Qiu Miaojin

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, October 23, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, click here, or scroll to the bottom of the page.

The narrator of Notes of a Crocodile explains: “I lived in solitude. Lived at night. I’d wake up at midnight and ride my bike—a red Giant—to a nearby store where I’d buy dried noodles, thick pork soup, and spring rolls.” Soup is pictured. Photo: Erica MacLean.

The work of the Taiwanese author Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995) feels eerily familiar to me. Qiu was a near-contemporary of mine who died by suicide at twenty-six, and her two slim novels, Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, are experimental mash-ups of letters, journal entries, and social satire about depressed lesbian university students and their tortured, impossible relationships. They offer a shared culture from the late eighties and early nineties—the song “Cherry Came Too,” the films of Derek Jarman and Andrei Tarkovsky—and a shared roster of activities that probably hasn’t changed much for students today: crying, drinking in excess, writing or receiving long hopeless love letters, eating instant noodles, skulking around waiting to run into someone, and spending endless hours analyzing the character of friends and lovers.

In the hands of most college students, this is not the stuff of genius, which makes Qiu’s ambition all the more thrilling. Writing in the journal Asymptote, the scholar Dylan Suher locates her work in the tradition of “what the Chinese call qing, which is passion as a full-blown aesthetic ideology.” The concept has a storied history in Chinese literature, and to write about it using the details of contemporary youthful melodrama—the notes in the bike baskets, the tears over beers—must have been an innovation. The journals and letters that make up the body of each book are convincingly conversational and interior, yet they achieve formal elegance. Rhythmic waves of short sentences form a flood, which lifts up the collegiate sentimentality, as when the anonymous narrator of Notes of a Crocodile writes: “Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn.” Any young adult with a painful crush might recognize the feeling, but not just any young adult writes like that. We respect Qiu’s narrator when she explains that her intention is to take herself seriously, because “the significance of this special experience will disappear from the world unless I recount it. So few dare to articulate their unique experiences and try to distinguish nuances of meaning between them.”

 

Heating up leftovers in order to add them to other dishes isn’t something I do often, but since the narrator of Last Words from Montmartre “cooks” that way, I did, too. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To write about modern schoolgirl qing was clever; to write about modern lesbian schoolgirl qing was radical in the Taipei of Qiu’s time. Queer love in Taiwanese society, Suher writes, was not persecuted or violently suppressed the way it was in the West at the time, but it had traditionally been required to remain invisible. Qiu’s first-person narrators, burning with their life-defining passions, refuse to remain silent. They state over and over again, “I love my own kind—womankind.” They also write about their shame, self-loathing, and feelings of erasure. “I am a woman who loves women,” says the narrator of Notes of a Crocodile. “My world is one of tainted sustenance. From the moment my consciousness of love was born there was no hope of cure.”

 

The thick pork soup, just after the cornstarch went in. The main flavor ingredients here are soy sauce and black vinegar. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The twenty letters from the narrator of Last Words from Montmartre are dated from April 27 to June 17, and they often discuss suicide. Qiu herself died by suicide on June 25, shortly after the work was finished. It is tempting for the modern Western reader to interpret the all-consuming love Qiu writes about as a psychological error, or to dismiss her narrators as obsessive stalkers—territory that their behavior clearly veers into. In Montmartre, the narrator’s resolution to commit suicide in order to somehow eternally wed her beloved Xu callously overlooks the damage to Xu her act might entail. But commenters steeped in Asian literature mention the tradition of suicide as an artistic act, and the influence on Qiu of the Japanese writers Yukio Mishima and Osamu Dazai, both of whom took their own lives. The loss of Qiu’s life was a tragedy, but it’s appropriate to judge her work as she intended, as the product of the intolerable internal conflict she felt as a lesbian in a homophobic culture. Last Words from Montmartre as the ultimate act of both self-insistence and self-erasure is a beautiful, chilling, and unique entry in the canon of world literature.

Notes of a Crocodile—which was published in 1994 and won the China Times Literature Award in 1995, shortly after Qiu’s death—tackles the subject in a more playful form. Again we are reading a first-person narration of private materials and correspondence by a lovelorn narrator, here interspersed with satirical bits about “crocodiles.” These are subjects of a national media “frenzy,” as lesbians were at the time in Qui’s Taipei, a rapidly changing place that was liberal in comparison to mainland China and beginning to tackle the issues of gay rights. Are crocodiles good or bad? To be protected or eradicated? What are their habits? Their shyness is documented—they go out wearing “human suits” so no one will know they are crocodiles—as is their loneliness in love. “If there were an encyclopedia on the subject of humanity, the scientific definition of a crocodile would be ‘a Hula-hoop (or dead bolt, etc.) optimized for secretly falling in love with other people,’ ” Qiu writes. The crocodile works in a bakery, and its favorite food is cream puffs, but it doesn’t dare eat them once the media reports on it, lest people realize it’s a crocodile.

 

For the first time ever, I made perfect cream puffs. The secret is to brush the parchment paper with water before you pipe the dough on. No crocodile tears here. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

This detail again brought me back to my feelings of familiarity with Qiu’s characters. Was I this girl once? Did I know her? In boarding school, my own time of peak social hiding and shame, my favorite junk-food purchase at our little off-campus deli was cream horns (synthetic, but voluminous at five for a dollar). I used to secretly consume entire packages alone in my room, scathingly aware of all the people who didn’t love me, several of whom were girls.

I began searching my memory for when, precisely, I’d been as depressed as Qiu’s heroines or in their kind of love, or when I’d written my own (much less literary) version of that kind of letter or had it written to me, and I realized that the continuum of these feelings is universal but their extremity is not. The specifics, as Qiu puts it, of her own unique experience—fundamentally her queer experience and how it was shaped by her family, her culture, her school, her feelings, her desires, the people she knew, and the things that happened to her—are what make the story meaningful. And specifics are what Qiu evokes so brilliantly with her deceptively simple conceptual novels disguised as letters and journals.

 

A takeaway from this cooking experience: I could be making my life a lot easier by cooking less. This fish made a delicious component when added to a bowl of ramen. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The limitations of familiarity and the importance of specifics were brought home to me even more strongly when I began investigating Qiu’s food. I should say from the outset that I’m not experienced with Chinese cooking, and the nuances of the Taiwanese version of it are accessible to me only via the internet. Nothing I produced could hope to offer an authentic version of a Taiwanese classic, but Qiu’s books offered a wealth of details on the narrators’ diets, a combination of takeout, canned food, and easy home assembly that would allow me to make my own version. Again, it looked familiar but most likely was not. And many of the ingredients—leftover takeout, canned tuna, old cabbage, instant noodles, half a pound of fish paste, or that extra quarter cup of cornstarch to make “thick pork soup” slimy—are not what I’d usually reach for to make a meal. I cooked the food to the best of my abilities, adapting it where I could to make something I’d reasonably eat. My spirits consultant, the wine expert and educator Hank Zona, improved the final spread dramatically by suggesting I pair it with a dry Riesling, a wine that is “misunderstood” but “has become the go-to across the Chinese and Asian spectrum.” The best Rieslings are known to be German or Alsatian, but great versions are now coming out of other cooler climates, especially the Finger Lakes of New York. Zona recommended two “really fantastic” local options. Riesling’s “approximation of more sweetness and body pairs well with heat and spice,” he explained. Riesling is also a great wine to pair with Chinese takeout because it works well with the broad range of flavors one finds in the usual mishmash of a family order.

 

Gussied-up instant noodles are college-student gourmet in Taipei—and Paris, too. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Qiu’s most specific and best cooking directions come in Last Words from Montmartre: “At 6:30 in the morning I boiled myself a bowl of instant rice noodles. I added a small piece of French cabbage (the last of three heads of cabbage that Bunny had eaten, and possibly the cause of death), a third of a can of tuna, half a can of mushrooms, an egg, and the leftovers from last night’s sweet and sour fish.” The narrator goes on to explain that she learned this method of cooking from a friend, who would “put on an air of authority and say, Cuisiner c’est l’invention! Then she’d mix together whatever random things were left in her refrigerator.” I’m not sure this was supposed to taste good, but I interpreted “instant noodles” to be Top Ramen—the best ramen, in my ramen-obsessed children’s opinion. There’s nothing that can go too wrong in a dish based on ramen and topped with scallions and a fried egg. The warmth and salty fishiness of my noodles became downright sophisticated when paired with the Boundary Breaks Dry Riesling #239, one of the two local wines Zona suggested.

Elsewhere in Montmartre, the narrator makes “scrambled eggs with beef and onion and macaroni, and some rice.” Macaroni and rice? I did not try that one. In Notes of a Crocodile, there are “hand-pulled egg noodles topped with vegetables,” “thick pork soup,” and, of course, cream puffs. The narrator doesn’t cook any of these things at home, but I—naturally!—did. Research suggested that at restaurants in Taiwan, hand-pulled noodles require a specialty ingredient unavailable to a home cook (and probably a lifetime’s experience to do it right, too). I used a method recommended on some Asian food blogs: making a simple pasta dough with flour, salt, and eggs, rolling it out and cutting it into strips by hand, and pulling on each strip individually to stretch and lengthen it. The results were uneven, but as with the ramen dish, there’s very little that will ever taste bad about homemade pasta. I sautéed an assortment of Asian vegetables—including watercress, burdock root, and Japanese sweet potato—to top the noodles, flavoring them with garlic, sesame oil, basil, and scallions, which are hallmarks of Taiwanese cooking. This was hardly a recipe, but it was delicious.

 

An assortment of Asian vegetables to add to my hand-pulled egg noodles. I was told that those long hairy things are burdock roots. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The “thick pork soup,” to the best of my internet-detective abilities, seemed to be a translation of ro geng, an iconic Taiwanese dish that involves dried shrimp, fish paste, and a cornstarch slurry to make it glutinous. In this case, either the gulf between Taiwanese tastes and American ones is unimaginably vast or the fish paste called for is a very different ingredient from the shrimp paste I use occasionally in minuscule quantities in Thai cooking. The recipe called for a half pound of fish paste; I experimented with using a teaspoon of shrimp paste rubbed on the pork, and I tried using the recommended amount of dried shrimp, another ingredient that is excellent when balanced properly but can be difficult to work with. From my perspective, neither created a good flavor. The recipe below omits them. I include the directions for adding the thickener at the end, though as a matter of personal preference, I’d skip that step, too. The real revelation on this soup was the technique of cutting the pork against the grain and then slivering it, which makes for an extremely tender consistency.

The last dish, the cream puffs, required something to make them more distinctive. I considered making cream horns, my own favorite crocodile snack from high school, but when I noticed a bubble-tea cream puff at a café in New York’s Chinatown, and connected the dots that bubble tea originated in Taiwan, I made my decision. I infused my pastry cream with “black sugar flavor” tapioca balls and made a super-strong tea to use as the liquid for a glaze. The results were stunningly good, much better than either the Chinatown version or, in my opinion, bubble tea itself. (In Notes of a Crocodile, the narrator pays thirty cents for a cream puff; the bakery one I bought as a model cost $4.55.) I did not try mixing the cream puffs with the Riesling, but perhaps I should have. Cuisiner c’est l’invention!

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

“Inventive” Instant Noodles

a package of Top Ramen, flavor of your choice

1/4 cup oyster mushrooms, sliced

1/4 cup cabbage, sliced into matchsticks

1/3 can tuna

an egg, fried and seasoned

1/2 cup leftover sweet-and-sour fish, shredded and deboned

scallions, to garnish

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Cook the Top Ramen according to package instructions, then turn the heat down to a simmer. Add the mushrooms and cabbage, and cook for two to three minutes, until the cabbage is wilted. Stir in the canned tuna, then top with sweet-and-sour fish, fried egg, and scallions. Serve immediately.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Hand-Pulled Egg Noodles with Vegetables

For the noodles:

2 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

2 eggs, whisked, mixed with 1/3 cup water

For the vegetables:

2 tbs sesame oil, plus more to assemble

1/2 cup sweet potato, peeled and thinly sliced

1/2 cup Japanese sweet potato, peeled and thinly sliced

1/4 cup burdock root, peeled and thinly coined

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup chopped watercress and baby bok choy

1 tbs soy sauce

1 tbs scallions, chopped

1/4 cup basil, chopped

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To make the noodles, combine flour and salt in a small bowl. Add the egg and water mixture, and stir to combine. When the mixture is dry enough to handle, use your hands to shape it into a ball and turn it out onto a lightly floured countertop. Knead for three to five minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic. Wrap in saran wrap, and set aside to rest for thirty minutes.

Add more flour to the countertop, divide the dough in half, and roll it out into two long strips, about a quarter inch thick. Cut thin noodles from these strips, as evenly as possible, making sure they’re well floured and dropped loosely in piles on the countertop so as not to stick together. When you’ve cut all the dough, wait five to ten minutes to let it relax. Then individually “pull” the noodles, working from the center and stretching gently between your fingers. (If you’re planning on storing the noodles and cooking later, dust them well with cornstarch and keep them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator; sticking will be an issue.)

Set a large pot of salted water on the stove to boil. Add the noodles to the boiling water, and let them cook three to five minutes, until they’ve floated to the top and puffed up. Drain and reserve.

Add the sesame oil to a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the sweet potatoes and the burdock root, and toss to coat. Sauté for seven to eight minutes until soft, then add the garlic and sauté two to three minutes, until it begins to release its fragrance. Immediately add the watercress, baby bok choy, and soy sauce, and toss until wilted.

Combine the noodles with the vegetables. Toss, and add additional sesame oil and salt to taste. Serve topped with chopped basil and scallions.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Thick Pork Soup

This recipe is adapted from a post on Chowhound .

1 lb pork shoulder

5 shiitakes, sliced

small handful of enoki mushrooms

1/3 cup bamboo shoots

1/4 napa cabbage

a carrot, sliced into matchsticks

6 cups chicken stock

1/4 cup soy sauce

1/4 cup white vinegar

1/4 cup cornstarch dissolved in 1/4 cup water

1/3 package rice stick noodles, cooked and drained

1 cup cilantro leaves and stems, chopped

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

First, prepare the meat (I had my butcher do this step for me). Slice the pork shoulder against the grain, in three-eighths-of-an-inch slices, cleaning away excess fat and connective tissue as you go. (Cutting the meat properly makes a huge difference in its resulting tenderness.) Cut the slices into strips about three inches long, cleaning away most—but not all—remaining fat.

Next, prep the vegetables. Slice the shiitake mushrooms. Cut the dirty bottoms off the enoki mushrooms, and separate them into individual strands. Sliver the bamboo shoots. Cut the napa cabbage in half, separating the leafier, greener end from the whiter base, then cut the halves into strips about a finger width thick. Cut the carrot into matchsticks.

Bring the stock to a boil, then add the pork one strip at a time so it doesn’t stick together, stirring occasionally. Simmer for ten minutes, then add the mushrooms, bamboo shoots, cabbage, carrot, soy sauce, and vinegar, and cook three to five more minutes, until the veggies are al dente.

The slightly slimy texture is the distinguishing feature of this soup, but people who don’t like that could skip this step: Add the cornstarch, stirring constantly so lumps do not form.

Add the cooked rice noodles, top with cilantro, and serve.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Bubble-Tea Cream Puffs

The choux pastry in this recipe is from Sally’s Baking Addiction .

For the pastry cream:

2 cups whole milk, divided

3/4 cup “black sugar flavor” tapioca pearls, divided

2/3 cups sugar, divided

4 egg yolks

1/3 cup cornstarch

1/2 tsp vanilla

For the pate a choux:

a stick of unsalted butter, cubed

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup whole milk

1/4 tsp salt

2 tsp sugar

1 cup flour

4 large eggs, beaten

For the glaze:

3 bags of black tea

1 cup water

1 cup powdered sugar

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To make the pastry cream, combine a cup and a half of milk with a third of a cup of sugar in a medium saucepan, and bring to a low simmer. Add a half cup of the tapioca pearls, and continue to simmer until the pearls float to the top. Cover, remove from heat, and allow to infuse for an hour.

In a separate, medium-size, heat-resistant bowl, combine the four egg yolks, the remaining half cup of milk, the remaining third of a cup of sugar, and the cornstarch. Whisk until light yellow and creamy. Add the vanilla, and stir to combine. Strain the tapioca pearls from the cooled milk liquid, and reserve the pearls, covered.

Return the infused milk to the saucepan, and reheat to just below a simmer. Add a few tablespoons of the warm milk to the egg mixture, whisking constantly. Continue to add warm milk to the egg mixture slowly, while whisking, until fully incorporated. (This tempers your eggs so they won’t scramble.) Return the tempered mixture to the saucepan, and heat over medium, stirring constantly with a rubber spatula, until the pastry cream has thickened to the correct consistency. You want a stodgy mixture that will “stand” without running or pooling. If it’s at all liquid still, it’s not done. Transfer to a heat-resistant bowl, and cool slightly, then press saran wrap against the surface of the cream, and chill.

To make the pate a choux, combine the butter, water, milk, salt, and sugar in a medium saucepan, and heat until the butter has melted. Bring the mixture to a simmer. Once the mixture is simmering, turn the heat down to low, and add the flour all at once. Stir until the flour is completely incorporated and the dough makes a thick ball. Mash the dough ball against the bottom and sides of the pan for a minute, which gently cooks the flour. Remove from heat, and transfer to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Allow to cool for a few minutes.

With the mixer running on low speed, slowly add the eggs in three to four additions, slowing down toward the end and stopping when the mixture has reached the desired consistency. The dough will look curdled at first but will begin to come together. Pour in the final addition of beaten eggs very slowly. Stop adding when the choux pastry is shiny, thick, and smooth with a consistency appropriate for piping. Leave a few teaspoons of beaten egg behind to use as egg wash.

Preheat the oven to 400. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Lightly brush the parchment with water (which will creates a humid environment for the pastry shells, allowing them to puff up without drying out or burning). Fill a gallon-size freezer bag with the choux pastry, and cut off one corner, forming a hole about a centimeter or less in diameter. (If you have a piping bag and pastry tip of the same size, you could use that instead.) Pipe the pastry onto the baking sheets in swirled two-inch mounds, about three inches apart. Using a water-moistened finger, smooth down the peaks, and lightly brush each with egg wash.

Bake for twenty minutes. Then, keeping the pastries in the oven, turn the heat down to 350, and bake for ten to fifteen minutes more, until golden brown. (Do not open the oven door as the pastries cook or they won’t puff up properly.) Remove from the oven, and transfer to a cooling rack. Allow to cool completely before filling.

To make the glaze, boil a cup of hot water and place three teabags in it, leaving it to steep until very strong. Put the confectioners’ sugar in a small bowl, and add three teaspoons of the strong tea, stirring until combined. The glaze should be thick enough not to run off the pastries but soft enough to adhere. If it’s too thick, add more liquid until you reach the desired consistency.

To assemble, you’ll want to mix about a quarter cup of tapioca pearls, or more to taste, into the pastry cream. If the reserved pearls are still soft and chewy, go ahead and mix them in. (Depending on how long the process has taken, they may have dried out, in which case you should make fresh pearls.) Bring a few cups of water to boil in a small saucepan, and add a quarter cup of pearls. Boil until they rise to the surface, then cover the pot, turn the heat down to medium, and simmer for three minutes. Drain and rinse under cold water for twenty seconds. Mix the pearls into the pastry cream. Cut the cream puffs in half ,and scoop in a few tablespoons of cream. Dip the lids in glaze, and assemble. Serve immediately.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Wine!

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona on Friday, October 23, at 6 P.M. for a virtual literary wine tasting on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. Order (or cook) Chinese food and bring a bottle of dry Riesling, and we’ll discuss the menu for Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, give you tasting notes, and suggest how to pair wines with different varieties of East Asian cuisine.

The specific wines featured in the story are the Boundary Breaks Dry Riesling #239, which is generally available in stores, and The Red Hook Winery’s Seneca Lake Riesling, available for purchase at the winery’s tasting room in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

If you’re sourcing your own bottle, know that the benchmark Rieslings are made in Germany and Alsace in France, but there are numerous excellent Rieslings being produced now in the Northeastern United States and Canada, including the Finger Lakes region of New York, which was our choice for the story. Other cool-climate regions like Austria and Oregon are making fine Rieslings, too. We emphasize that you want a dry variety. On German labels, look for trocken, which means dry. Qualitatswein on the label means just what it sounds like: a classification of a higher quality level of wine. Anyone who would like more specific advice on good Rieslings available near them can email us (hank@thegrapesunwrapped.com).

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York.  Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words .

The Children of the Appalachians

 

Ruby Cornett, ‘I asked my sister to take a picture of me on Easter morning,’ from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

In 1976, twenty-five-year-old Wendy Ewald rented a small house on Ingram Creek in a remote landscape in eastern Kentucky, hoping to make a photographic document of “the soul and rhythm of the place.” As she writes in an essay included in the expanded new edition of Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories By Children of The Appalachians, originally published in 1985, her camera landed on the “commonplaces” of Letcher County. Set in the Cumberland Mountains at the edge of Kentucky and Virginia, Lechter Country is in the rural, rolling, rugged, coal-mining heart of the still sprawling and still vastly misunderstood and frequently mispronounced region known as Appalachia (the correct pronunciation is Appa-LATCH-uh). More than a decade before Ewald’s arrival, the publication of Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, by local lawyer and environmental crusader Harry Caudill, had helped spur John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson to declare war on poverty in Letcher County and regions like it. But Ewald did not intend to photograph “poverty,” or to photograph the place in the reductive way it had come to be depicted. She was interested in the way the people pictured themselves.

She went to speak with a local school principal and, during the years 1976 to 1982, taught photography in three elementary schools, including a surviving one-room school called Kingdom Come, which was heated by a coal stove that the students took turns refilling. She sold Instamatic cameras to her students, “So they would value them as things they had worked for” as she put it, for the price of ten dollars, or its equivalent counted out in odd jobs. In the classroom she guided them toward a way of seeing born out of feeling and imagination, inviting them to photograph around themes of family, animals, self, and dreams. The resulting pictures, made in a mentored creative collaboration and collected in Portraits and Dreams, call up a music of the place only Ewald’s students could hear and access; and thus the book amounts to a reliquary of a magic hour in the children’s own lives, fleeting and resonant.

Ewald’s students in those years were between the ages of six and fourteen. Some had to cross swinging bridges to reach the school bus. They were prone to disappearing into the creeks and hollers for long hours, adept observers of their own environments, and they were particularly attuned to seeing and speaking in a natural, unselfconscious poetry. “The mountains, I feel they have secrets like nobody has ever heard of,” says a boy named Allen Shepherd in one of the book’s accompanying texts, taken from interviews Ewald made with her students. “Hear the squirrels a cutting and a hollering.” Robert Dean Smith: “Spring time makes you just want to slob up in the sun on the side of a hill.”

Children who might not have ever loaded a camera were likely to have learned how to clean a gun. They quickly apprehended the gap that existed between what they knew they had seen, and what the camera saw. They learned how to communicate to the camera, changing the angle or thinking more carefully about what a frame could contain, and what could be left out, just outside the visible. Because they themselves were still young enough to exist on the edges of the adult world, not quite yet key players, they could see clearly the rituals that surrounded them—smoke rising around hog killings, women hugging after church, men descending a dirt road as they departed the coal mines. One girl photographed the vases of flowers set on a linoleum floor around the casket of an infant—“my sister’s baby’s funeral.” In the background, a woman is seen bottle-feeding a baby on her lap. As the critic Ben Lifson writes in an introductory essay to the book, “They seem to have walked up to their subjects and stopped when they saw them clearly and whole.”

Mary Jo Cornett, Mamaw and my sister with a picture of the cousin that died, from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

Ewald invited them to learn to see themselves through pictures by and of others, in the photo books she brought to the classroom. Prior to the classes, photography had entered the children’s worlds primarily through newspapers, the photos adorning seed catalogues and record album covers, and the family pictures hanging on their walls. Ewald caught them at an age when they were unconsciously beginning to work out their own relationship to those family pictures—how they fit in, who they might become. Ewald’s student Freddy Childers made a portrait of himself with his brother Homer, who has a disability; and also a portrait of himself holding a framed picture of his oldest brother Everett, who had committed suicide after returning home from Vietnam. Hovering around Ewald’s students were the images of those who had passed on and the mysteries of the world of the grown-ups who carried those stories without sharing them. “He’s not a guy you can walk up to and express yourself to, but he’s not the hardest guy to live with either,” Gary Crase said of his father. In Mamaw and my sister with a picture of the cousin that died, by Mary Jo Cornett, the sister in question bears an uncanny resemblance to the enlarged photo of the cousin, a vivid encounter with memory and history.

Russel Akemon, ‘I am lying on the back on my old horse,’ from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK

But Ewald also encouraged the children to see themselves as characters in their own self-portraits, often leaving the frame open to reveal their wider world. Russell Akemon lies casually on the back of “my old horse”; in another, portrays himself hunched against a tall haystack, nearly enveloped by it. Denise Dixon’s blond wig helped transform her into Dolly Parton in one photo and a movie star in another, pouting and swooning in a nightgown with a snake around her neck, rumpled sheets and wood paneling visible behind her.

It is in the dreaming that they perhaps are most free. When Ewald guided them to illustrate their subconscious, the classes would first sit together in the darkroom and confess their scariest dreams. In Scott Huff’s The planes were crashing on my head, model airplanes shower him as he cowers, covering his head, standing on a dirt road with a basketball hoop in the background. The crudeness of their props and costumes—goggles for astronauts, barn roofs and rock faces and crooks of trees to help show floating, falling, death—makes visible the contours of the imagination. Denise Dixon slips pantyhose over the heads of her baby twin brothers and photographs them in matching outfits on a patterned chair— Phillip and Jamie are creatures from outer space in their space ship, the photograph is titled. In grainy black-and-white, with the intentional blur of movement, these photographs have the mystic quality of the work of their Kentucky counterpart Ralph Eugene Meatyard. “Sometimes when I’m in bed, I get lost on dreams,” writes Darlene Watts. The children’s photos are enigmatic and narrative but they also have the most ephemeral quality of all: the ability to capture a time before the dreams are forgotten.​

Allen Shepherd, ‘I dreamt I killed my best friend, Ricky Dixon,’ from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

Like kids anywhere, they drifted into other things. Denise Dixon got wrapped up in playing basketball and cheerleading. Others grew up fast, quit school, got jobs in the mines or at the local Pizza Hut; they got married, set their sights on college. Ewald went on to work with students around the world, and to start the project Literacy Through Photography, which is still housed at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In 2008, when Ewald began to reconnect with her Letcher County students (a reunion documented in additional material included in the book as well as in the film Portraits and Dreams currently streaming on PBS) she met her students in their forties, in the midst of the adult world they had once observed together. Many had returned to the mountains they’d photographed in their youth. They were engineers, teachers, parents, meat-processing workers, and miners. Some had fallen on tough times. One student, foraging for a living after getting laid off from work, was incarcerated briefly for a robbery. Several had resumed photography. Looking back, they, too, were struck by how the photos they had made then revealed their innermost thoughts, rather than the outward surfaces. “We were all poor, but we didn’t know it,” writes another student, Sue Dixon Brashear, who made photographic books during her own time as an elementary schoolteacher. “Didn’t care one bit.”

In 2018, looking back at the photographs he’d made—of a favorite chicken, of his father pulling a mule—Willie Whitaker, who’d become an operations manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, wrote to Ewald. He was working on a poem about his mother milking a cow, a memory from childhood, but the emotion, he confessed, had become “almost burdensome.” For him the pictures were portals, not necessarily straight to the past but to a map of half-forgotten forked roads. “I always wonder once we lost our innocence would it be possible if the chicken was still alive, dad and that mule were still alive, would it be possible to recreate those photos?” he wrote. “Would we over-stage them? Would I be satisfied with Dad turning around the way he did?”

 

Here, in excerpts from four sections of Portraits and Dreams, are some of Ewald’s Letcher County students’ words and pictures.

Ruby Cornett, ‘Daddy at our hog killing, Big Branch,’ from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald

Darlene Watts

When you’re in love you do funny things like lay your books in the refrigerator. I think it sounds nice, but when it comes to marrying, I don’t know. Marriage seems to suit everyone else. In some ways, I guess it would suit me too, but I worry that I won’t be able to get along with my husband—not suit him. I’d like to have a perfect marriage, but that’s hard to come by these days. I know one thing, when you get married, you can’t lay your books in the refrigerator any more because your husband would get mad. He usually acts like he’s the boss, and I don’t like anyone to boss me around all the time. Sometimes I like to be free.

When I see all the pretty clothes, I think I’m lucky that I’m a girl. But sometimes I want to be a boy because I want to do some of the things boys do—like go hunting and fishing. I know some of the boys at school do the things girls do. My neighbors 
say that girls and boys are different because girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks.

Around here girls can get jobs in stores, or be a nurse, or run a restaurant, or babysit. I guess there should be more to choose from, so we wouldn’t have to go off, say to Indiana, to get a job. There’s lots of things I’d like to be, but I can’t be them all.

Freddy Childers, ‘Self-portrait with the picture of my biggest brother, Everett, who killed himself when he came back from Vietnam’ in ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

Delbert Shepherd

I put my chickens in a place where they can keep dry. I feed ’em corn and water ’em. I feed the little ones corn bread. I clean out a place where they can run around. Inside the hens is a hen bag that makes eggs everyday.
The first time I saw a chicken killed,
 I felt like it was right sickening for somebody to do that to an animal. It didn’t seem right that people wanted 
to have them around and then kill them, but I’ve learned it’s for food. At first I couldn’t eat the animals that I’d seen killed because I was scared. I’ve learned to try it and if I like it, it’s all right, but I just think about somebody killing me. I think of what it must feel like. I think if I were a chicken, after they’d picked all my feathers off, they’d hold a paper bag over me and light it. I’d come out all in pieces—my legs, my neck, back, my breast, ribs, but it helps you to understand the
 way you’re put together, the way God made you.

One of my friends fights chickens a lot. He fights big roosters. He buys these roosters that can’t stay with another rooster. They think they’re the boss, and when he puts two of them together, they try to kill one another 
to be the winner. Two boys each bet a dollar on one of the roosters. They’re professional fighters, just like humans are boxers, but it’s more like trying to kill one another—a killing match. They outlawed it because they thought it was being cruel to animals and I think it is.

You watch animals play and all of a sudden it comes naturally to you. You love them. You get attached to them, and you can’t separate.

Birds communicate to birds. Dogs communicate to dogs. When a dog barks, it’s trying to tell you something. You can’t understand it, but a dog understands you. Animals are smart. If they weren’t, a cat wouldn’t know how to climb a tree. A duck wouldn’t know how to swim.

Animals are smarter than people. They’ve lived out in the mountains so long, they know the way. They can go anywhere they want to. People can’t. It took years and years for them to discover the wheel.

Animals can find food and protect people from enemies. They can sense danger that we can’t. In the dark of the night they sense it, when it’s right in front of them. Dad says it’s more fun to hunt the animals than it is to kill them. He likes to watch their reactions, how they move. Where there’s mountains, there’s a lot more animals. They like higher places where hunters can’t find them, and they know when you’re in the mountains.

Greg Cornett, ‘Gary Crase and his mom and dad in front of their house on Campbells Branch,’ from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

Dewayne Cole

My father grew up in Daisy and my mother grew up on Turkey Creek. They went to school together. My mother’s just about like any other mother. She does everything for me. She gets me up every morning and that’s hard to do. She cooks for me. Cleans up my bedroom. Fixes me things to eat. I like her a lot. She has brown hair and black eyes. She’s fat and short. I’m about as tall as she. I like the way she looks.

Dad works in the coal mines. Mom works in the kitchen and I work at books. My brother Bobby is just in the first grade. He’s all the time botherin’ you. And I’ve got one brother that’s just in the last year of school and one that’s already married. He works in the mines. His wife works in the kitchen and watches TV and listens to the radio, but she cleans up after him. He’s a mess.

Our house sure wouldn’t be any fun without my mother around, but I’m close to both Mom and Dad. My dad and I go hunting, work together. We build things. We’re making a grease rack now, where he can work on his truck. We just about do everything together. I feel about my mom the same as I feel about my dad. When
 I have problems, he’ll help me. My family works hard. They feel good about it, but they don’t like to have to work all the time.

I don’t feel too good about my dad working in the mines. It’s dangerous. He’s been hurt five or six times. A big hook on a cable cut him right through his forehead. He could stick four of his fingers down in under his eye. He stayed in the hospital for two weeks.

My mom doesn’t like to talk about my dad getting hurt. My mother thinks sometimes that something’s happened to my dad, but if he gets hurt, somebody always comes over and tells us, while they take him on to the hospital. Families here think about each other. They know everybody and every place. Anybody gets hurt and you know about it in a few minutes. News up here goes around fast.

The same old thing, day after
 day. You don’t hardly notice things until they’re gone. The mountains 
are big and I feel good in them. I can go anywhere. Nothing bothers me up there except now they’re tearing the mountains up with bulldozers getting the coal out and making new places for houses. They’re destroying them. They’ve killed almost everything that’s up there. I’d like to plant trees and set animals out because soon there won’t be anything to look at. It’ll just be a plain old place. It makes me sad because I don’t like to see anything destroyed, and the people that are destroying it are mostly from the big cities. One man came in here from California. He set the woods on fire because he wanted to burn a big place off where he could set his equipment. I don’t like people from the cities. I don’t like the way they talk and the way they dress. I just like seeing normal people around.

Denise Dixon, ‘Self-portrait reaching for the Red Star sky,’ from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald (MACK, 2020). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

Denise Dixon

I like to take pictures from my
 dreams, from television, or just from my imagination. I like those kind of pictures because they’re scary. If I didn’t know how I took them, I’d be scared by them. My twin brothers, Phillip and Jamie, pose for me. Sometimes they’re good at having their pictures taken but they get tired.

I made a long dream with Phillip and Jamie which comes from TV shows I’ve watched. I told Jamie to lay down and then I put all this makeup on him to make scars and scratches on his mouth down through his nose and on his hands. I put wood on top of him 
like a house fell on him and I told him to act like he was dead. I took some
 in the graveyard above my house. For one I told Jamie to grab a hold of the gravestone and start screaming. For the other I told him to kneel down. I told him to bow down like he was sad. 
I took the picture from the foot of the grave that had just been filled.

I always think about what I’m going to do before I take the picture. 
I have taken pictures of myself as Dolly Parton and Marilyn Monroe and then there was the girl with the snake around her neck. She was supposed to be a movie star, but really it was me. For some I was dancing in my bathing suit while the music was playing in 
the basement. I told my girlfriend, Michelle, how far away to stand and
 to take the pictures when I said. I like people in action, and I always look for a certain time to take a picture of it.

Denise Dixon, Phillip and Jamie are creatures from outer space in their space ship, from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

 

Rebecca Bengal writes fiction, essays, and long-form journalism and lives in New York City.

The Language of Pain

Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, Hoofd van Medusa, ca. 1617, oil on oak, 24 x 44″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

On September 14, 2011, we awoke once again to the image of two bodies hanging from a bridge. One man, one woman. He, tied by the hands. She, by the wrists and ankles. Just like so many other similar occurrences, and as noted in news­paper articles with a certain amount of trepidation, the bodies showed signs of having been tortured. Entrails erupted from the woman’s abdomen, opened in three different places.

It is difficult, of course, to write about these things. In fact, the very reason acts like these are carried out is so that they render us speechless. Their ultimate objective is to use horror to paralyze completely—an offense committed not only against human life but also, above all, against the human condition.

In Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence—an indispensable book for thinking through this reality, as understanding it is almost impossible—Adriana Cavarero reminds us that terror manifests when the body trembles and flees in order to survive. The terrorized body experiences fear and, upon finding itself within fear’s grasp, attempts to escape it. Meanwhile, horror, taken from the Latin verb horrere, goes far beyond the fear that so frequently alerts us to danger or threatens to transcend it. Confronted with Medusa’s decapi­tated head, a body destroyed beyond human recognition, the horrified part their lips and, incapable of uttering a single word, incapable of articulating the disarticulation that fills their gaze, mouth wordlessly. Horror is intrinsically linked to repugnance, Cavarero argues. Bewildered and immobile, the horrified are stripped of their agency, frozen in a scene of everlasting marble statues. They stare, and even though they stare fixedly, or perhaps precisely because they stare fixedly, they cannot do anything. More than vulnerable—a condition we all experience—they are defenseless. More than fragile, they are helpless. As such, horror is, above all, a spectacle—the most extreme spectacle of power.

What we Mexicans have been forced to witness at the beginning of the twenty-first century—on the streets, on pedestrian bridges, on television, or in the papers—is, without a doubt, one of the most chilling spectacles of contemporary horror. Bodies sliced open from end to end, chopped into unrecognizable pieces, left on the streets. Bodies exhumed in a state of decay from hundreds upon hundreds of mass graves. Bodies tossed from pickup trucks onto crowded streets. Bodies burned on enormous pyres. Bodies without hands or without ears or without noses. Disappeared bodies, unable to claim their suitcases from the bus stations where their belongings have arrived. Persecuted bodies, bodies without air, bodies without fingernails or eyelashes. This is the very essence of horror. This is a more current version of a kind of modern horror that has shown its atrocious face in Armenia, in Auschwitz, in Kosovo.

In the case of Mexico at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, horror is intimately tied to a misnamed war—the military conflict escalated by President Felipe Calderón in 2006 as he tried to legitimize a contested election victory. It has been called, and still is, the drug war, the war on drugs; but we know other, more truthful names: the war against the Mexican people, the war against women. The war against the rest of us. While this state of siege may have become more visible after the 2006 elections, the war as such actually began decades earlier. The historian Adela Cedillo persuasively argues that there is a link between the Mexican dirty war unleashed in the seventies against those designated enemies of the state and the emergence of drug lords who became accomplices, when not directly participating, in counter­insurgent strategies designed to reinforce the hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), in power since 1929. Indeed, the first drug war was waged in Mexico, and it all began in the Golden Quadrilateral region comprised of the states Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Durango. Right there, in neglected areas of Mexico with little state presence, violence was used against the poor, especially against the rural poor who had responded favorably to, or had organized themselves into, guerilla movements, such as the 23rd of September Communist League. Secret Service documents attest that the PRI machine reacted quickly and massively against any kind of social mobilization, generously employing counterinsurgent forces, who were in turn allowed to take part in drug trafficking networks as a form of payoff. Contrary to official interpretations of twentieth-century Mexico as a place of stability and peace, which Mexican history often favorably compares with the emergence of military dictatorships in South America, Cedillo maintains that pervasive violence and state repression constitute the very heart of Cold War–era Mexico. It was in those years, in the second half of the twentieth century, that the “deep state” emerged and grew, and a new system of power, one in which drug trafficking played a fundamental role, was consolidated. To be clear, this is not the story of a state that was somehow infected or tainted by an evil external force, but the story of a state that became so by suppressing any trace of the bloody secret wars that married counterinsurgency and drug trafficking. When Felipe Calderón declared his war on drugs in 2006, he lifted the veil of the gruesome, inescapable violence that had been integral to the lives of many in the poorer parts of the country. Now it was the urban middle class’s turn to experience it. Now we would all be on the front lines. We would face a horror created by a state that had fully submitted to the economic interests of globalization and colonialism; a state that had done nothing more than repeat the famous gesture of Pontius Pilate, the betrayer: that metaphorical hand-washing of those unable, or unwilling, to bear responsibility for their actions. The neoliberal Mexican state thus turned its back on its obligations and responsibilities, surrendering before the unrelenting, lethal logic of maximum profit. This came to a head during Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s presidency (1988–1994), when fundamental land and labor rights granted by the Mexican Constitution of 1917 were restructured under what is known as the Salinas Reforms. I call this state, which has rescinded its responsibility for the care of its constituents’ bodies, the Visceraless State.

State is a verb, not a noun; state, like capital, is a relationship. In a unilateral move in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Mexican state, administered by an enthusiastic generation of Ivy League–educated technocrats convinced of the supremacy of profit above life, withdrew protection and care for the bodies of its peoples, thus creating, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, “the open.” Right there, on that atrocious stage, the bodies of all Mexicans were transformed from vulnerable—a regular mode of the human condition—to helpless—an artificial state caused by torture. In its indifference and neglect, in its intricate understanding of the political and even the public, in its indolence, the Visceraless State thus produces the eviscerated body: those chunks of torsos, those legs and feet, that interior that becomes exterior, hanging.

In a lucid essay about what is wrong with the world today, the humanist Tony Judt compares the level of aggression and neglect that people suffer at the hands of the totalitarian state to societies where state insufficiencies allow impunity and violence. The latter, without a doubt, is the case in Mexico. A telling clue was revealed in one of the former Mexican president Vicente Fox’s on-air interviews. “Why should I care?” he said, directly referring to a dispute involving TV stations, but indirectly betraying his ideas about social well-being and the role of the state in social and cultural matters. “Why should I care?” said the then-president of Mexico in a cynical tone, chilling even today. With such a careless phrase, he solidi­fied the tone of Mexico’s particular form of contemporary horrorism.

In close complicity with the members of the executive and judicial branches of the Mexican government, the fierce businessmen of our postmodern, globalized society—the narco—have conspired, with organic if not filial speed, to form a Pontius Pilate state. A product in some cases of the inequalities and hierarchies of an economic system based on dispossession and extraction, the narco has strategically and successfully worked for decades to validate itself as an essential entity in our everyday lives. The corridos and narco novels of this early period often presented a sympathetic portrait of men who grew up in poverty only to become Robin Hood types that provided for their communities when society was not able to or not interested in doing so. Newspaper articles and the media also contributed to a larger cultural imagery of the narco as the B side of the state. In Los cárteles no existen (The cartels do not exist), Oswaldo Zavala argues that cartels were and are so intrinsically enmeshed in the state machinery as to become a part of it. Government corruption along with the narco’s signature executions demonstrate what was once easy to deny: drug lords are businessmen prepared to go as far as necessary—which frequently means that space where the human condition ends—in order to ensure and, above all, increase their profits.

Over the last several decades of the twentieth century, we Mexicans have been forced to witness the reduction of the body to its most basic form: as a producer of capital through both the maquilas and other transnational companies. The bare body has emerged, too, when the narco and the state—the narco state—have used the unilateral and spectacular violence of torture against the population. Mouths gaping, hairs standing on end, cold as statues, truly paralyzed, we have done the only thing we could do in the face of such horror: part our lips and mouth wordlessly. As Cavarero recalls, even Primo Levi argued that the most important witnesses, those who have returned alive from an encounter with horror, are usually incapable of articulating their experiences. I insist: This is horror and nothing but horror. This is why it exists. This is its very root. On the other end of the spectrum, however, lies suffering. And where there is suffering, there is voice. Those who suffer have faced horror and come back. The language of pain allows those who suffer, those who acknowledge their suffering and share it with others, to articulate an inexpressible experience as an intrinsic criticism against the sources that made it possible in the first place. When everything falls silent, when the gravity of the facts far surpasses our understanding and even our imagination, then there it is—ready, open, stammering, injured, babbling—the language of pain, the pain we share with others.

And this is the importance of suffering, for where suffering lies, so, too, does grieving: the deep sorrow that binds us within emotional communities willing and able to face life anew, even if it means, or especially when it means, radically revising and altering the world we share. There, where suffering lies, so, too, does the political imperative to say, You pain me, I suffer with you, I grieve myself with you. We mourn us. Yours is my story, and my story is ours, because from the start, from the singular—yet generalized—perspective of we who suffer, you are my country, my countries. Hence the aesthetic urgency of expressing, in the most basic and also the most disjointed language possible, This hurts me. Edmond Jabès was right when he critiqued Theodor Adorno’s dictum: It isn’t that after horror we should not or cannot write poetry. It’s that, while we are integral witnesses to horror, we must write poetry differently. Can writing demand the restitution of a Visceral State? Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who confronted the atrocities of the military dictatorship in Argentina, and like the Arpillera movement in Chile, which tried to challenge Pinochet’s horror, and like the relatives of the disappeared in Mexico, who tread on this land of open graves searching for their loved ones, claiming both justice and restitution? Can writing keep us company—we, the broken ones still alive with rage and hope? I believe writing can, indeed. At the very least, writing should. As demonstrated by the brave journalists who have lent ears to the voices of hundreds of thousands of victims, writing gives us the tools to articulate the mute disarticulation we face on a daily basis. As we write, as we work with language—the humblest and most powerful force available to us—we activate the potency of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing.

It is impossible to grieve in the first-person singular. We always grieve for someone and with someone. Grieving connects us in ways that are subtly and candidly material. I am not yet sure which group I should join, where to envision myself, on whose shoulder to cry. I know that pain frequently finds its own allies. A long religious tradition, far from the most rancid institutions of conservative Catholicism, testifies to some of the most politically effective uses of social suffering in our history. Remember, for example, the Mexican independence movement, which was led in the early stages, between 1810 and 1815, by the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe—an era when the insurgency was able to gather widespread support. Remember, among so many examples, the Tomochic Rebellion, inspired by Teresa Urrea, la Santa Niña de Cabora, a saintly figure from northern Mexico who voiced the pain and frustration, as well as the hopes, of so many right before the eruption of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Remember, in short, so much.

On July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, my younger sister, was the victim of a femicide. Soon after she was pronounced dead, the Mexico City police had gathered enough evidence to issue a warrant of arrest against an ex-boyfriend who never stopped stalking and threatening her, and who, to this day, has not paid for his crime. My sister, a brilliant architecture student at the UAM Azcapotzalco campus, thus ceased to exist. She was twenty years old. Even now, thirty years later, the immensity of this fact obliterates me. The war, this variously named war that still tears us apart, began, for me, on that date. Grieving, too, began its long, mercurial, transformative work. From utter denial to unleashed rage, from emotional numbness to bouts of self-destruction and depression, grieving reshaped me from the inside out, bringing me together with others. So much has happened since, but it was right after the paralysis of my first contact with horror that I chose language. I wrote before my sister was mercilessly murdered, but I truly began writing, and writing for her, when my missing her became physically unbearable. I did not write to avoid pain, just the opposite. I wrote, and write, to grieve with others, which is the only secular way I know to keep her alive. I do not want to avoid suffering. I want to think through and with pain, and to painfully embrace it, to give it back its beating heart with which this country—these countries—still palpitates. When confronted with Medusa’s head, precisely at that moment, because that’s when we are most at risk of becoming stones, right there, say it: Here, you and me, you and them, we together, we are in pain. We grieve. Grieving breaks us apart, indeed, and keeps us together.

—Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker

 

Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning writer, poet, translator, and critic. She is the recipient of the Roger Caillois and Anna Seghers prizes, and she is the only two-time winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. A 2020 MacArthur fellow, she is currently a distinguished professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Houston.

Sarah Booker is a translator and doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and translation studies. Her translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Asymptote, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others.

From Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country , by Cristina Rivera Garza. Used with permission of the Feminist Press. English translation copyright © 2020 by Sarah Booker.

Ice Pick: An Interview with Katharina Volckmer

 

Author photo: Jean-François Paga

When Katharina Volckmer and I first met over Zoom, her in London and myself in Baltimore, I couldn’t stop talking, not unlike the narrator of Volckmer’s debut novel, The Appointment. The novel is bracingly frank, acerbic; some might call it transgressive, though I don’t think that’s the right term. The novel’s titration of wit, directness, and erudition made me feel a bit like the narrator: full of nervous, excited, voluble energy. I said that if Volckmer didn’t like any of the questions I’d prepared, she could skip them. She wryly offered to “do a Klaus Kinski on me,” alluding to the German actor’s notorious hostility in interviews. Our conversation could not have been more unlike a Kinski interview: Volckmer was measured and patient, generous with her time and humor. This is not to say that our conversation was comforting, which makes sense, as Volckmer’s work refuses comfort. Elsewhere, she noted, “We cannot spend our lives wearing woolly socks and drinking tea and expecting books and art to broadly reconfirm what we think already—I’m much more in favour of thinking of art as some sort of ice pick,” recalling Kafka’s notion that “we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

The Appointment, out this month from Simon & Schuster, is reminiscent of a Bernhardian monologue, one half of the conversation between a German patient living in London and her Jewish doctor. Over the course of her appointment, the speaker “tests the ice,” demarcating the boundaries of the sayable and the unsaid. Superficially, the novel offers a garrulous tide of sentiments that many might find upsetting (we begin with the narrator’s Hitler sex fantasies). But it is also deftly subtle, never binding the narrator to a determined gender identity or to a specific historical or national inheritance. At once sexy, hilarious, and subversive, the book is also acutely sad. Desire, in this novel, takes many forms: the desire to be heard, the desire to be otherwise, the desire for a different past and a different future.

It was not lost on me that my meeting with Volckmer staged, at least formally, the conversation in the book: Volckmer was born in Germany; I am Jewish; the structure of an interview begs confession. But there the similarities stopped. We spoke, on this recent September evening, about identity and desire, the inheritance of the Holocaust, the difficulties with which German readers might receive the book, the impossible definition of a “trans novel,” nestbeschmutzers, Tolstoy, and form. “Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping,” French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote in Heidegger and “the jews”; Volckmer’s novel comes out limping in the finest sense, ice pick aloft, frozen sea shattering.

INTERVIEWER

When people ask you to sum up the book, how do you sum it up? Because the only way I’ve been able to do so is to say something like, It starts with a Hitler sex fantasy and goes on from there. But that part is so peripheral to the novel.

VOLCKMER

For me the easiest has been to say it’s about identity. It’s obviously about gender identity. One of the questions I often ask myself is, What is it about your identity you can possibly change? Is there anything you can really change about it? Or is there nothing you can change about it? Obviously you can’t change the fact of the language you’re born into or the geographic location you’re born into. And she’s trying. She doesn’t want to be German necessarily, she doesn’t want to live with that burden and that guilt. But the only thing she can really change is her gender, that’s something she can do. And she decides to do it with a Jewish doctor. The original title for the book was A Jewish Cock. That’s the point where she tries to mix these two aspects of her identity, her gender and her national identity. Obviously it’s slightly absurd because she thinks, “If I get a Jewish cock I won’t be as German anymore.” But for me the book was about exploring what things you can permanently change about yourself and what you can’t, and some of the sadness that comes with that.

INTERVIEWER

Could you speak a bit about Dr. Seligman? He’s very reticent. How do you see that character both in silence and, simultaneously, in dialogue with the narrator?

VOLCKMER

To me, he’s always been as important as the narrator. He’s very present and—I’m going to keep saying this until someone does it—I’d love to see it on a stage because it’s quite theatrical. His presence was also important because a lot of the stuff she says I didn’t want to be spoken into a void. It’s always her feeling her way along that fine line of the stuff she can say and the stuff she can’t say. Even though he’s silent, and it’s technically a monologue, it’s got strong elements of a dialogue. I hope it has. Of course, it also makes her at times less secure. If he was talking back it would be no different, but there’s an opacity and she has to work it out by herself.

INTERVIEWER

Do people have different readings of what kind of doctor he is?

VOLCKMER

They do, and I find that quite strange. They often think he’s a psychoanalyst. Some people get it, and understand that he’s obviously not. We talk a lot to our doctors, we confess to them. They probably are the people we do this most with nowadays, even though we have to credit the Catholic Church with this brilliant invention.

INTERVIEWER

I’m teaching a queer literature class right now, and I’m imagining teaching this book. I’m imagining how students would respond and the questions they would ask. I think one of the first questions students would ask is, How do I make sense of this person’s identity? At one point she uses the phrase “people like me.” And I paused over that and thought, What does she mean by that? I thought, at first, the phrase referred to her gender identity, and the reason she’s visiting Dr. Seligman, her desire for “a Jewish cock.” But I wondered, too, if she’s referring to something about being German, about a certain national inheritance, or financial inheritance, or the secret we learn at the end of the novel—how these things are not separable for her.

VOLCKMER

I think that’s people who are different, right? She struggles with the identity she’s born into on many levels. One of them is the gender she’s been assigned at birth. She was raised as a woman, but that’s not who she feels that she is. For me, that’s very important and that’s also why her love story doesn’t work. And obviously Dr. Seligman knows about her gender identity, right? She’s not hiding that from him. But she’s hiding it from the reader in the beginning while hiding her other secret from Dr. Seligman. So there are both of these things going on at the same time and in many ways it’s a confession. It’s the first time she has this space where she’s comfortable enough to talk about her body because he already knows. To him, she doesn’t have to explain that part of herself anymore, and that made it very interesting to me to create this space. But the book has been criticized for that. Some felt that if you talk about the Holocaust, it has to be the center of the book. Because the body is considered something slightly vulgar, or inferior, or not as important. But I think you’re guilty with your body, too. It’s not only your mind. And it’s your body that does the thing, and it’s your hands that pull the trigger. I think if you want to explore identity, you can’t do that without exploring your body.

INTERVIEWER

Speaking about the materiality of the body, I found myself wondering if is this a trans novel. I don’t know what a trans novel even is.

VOLCKMER

I don’t know that either. I think, at the moment, some things have become unhelpfully binary. I know that we need certain identities and categories for certain things but sometimes I struggle with that as well. I think it’s hard to always expect people to label themselves and to always have this answer ready. I find it interesting sometimes when you talk to people who are bisexual, which is something that a lot of people struggle with. I once heard someone say, It comes in waves, it’s not the same every day. And I quite like that explanation, it comes in waves, because I think a lot of things come in waves and forcing people to be constantly in the same place and same identity, to wake up and feel the same, is unhelpful. I personally don’t really understand gender, I find it hard to always relate to. Something I try to explain to people is that, for me, it’s my perception of people as much as it’s my perception of myself. When I look at people, I can see something feminine, I can see something masculine, I can imagine them in a dress, I can imagine them not in a dress. I find that beautiful. I think there’s so much beauty in not labeling something and just letting it breathe. And the thing I don’t understand about the transphobia debate—there a lot of things I don’t understand about the transphobia debate—is that even if you remove gender in the way we are accustomed to it, you gain something. I think by living rigidly in these structures, people deprive themselves of so much. But people are scared. They’re terrified. It makes them angry, it makes them so angry. And I don’t quite understand why.

INTERVIEWER

The book is going to be published in Germany next summer. Do you have any expectations for how it will be received?

VOLCKMER

I think it can go both ways. Some people will definitely be upset. I know this. There’s this term, nestbeschmutzer, for someone who kind of dirties their own nest. It famously was used for Thomas Bernhard. I think there’s an element of that. And there’s also this hierarchy of languages because to many Germans, the fact that you gave up good German language in order to write in English, which they consider slightly inferior because it doesn’t have grammar, is problematic. There are lots of popular writers in Germany who come from places like Georgia or Ukraine and they write in German and people love that because … they’ve seen sense, you know? But to give up German to write in English, that in itself I think people find upsetting. And of course, there’s the text itself.

INTERVIEWER

But to be in the same company as Bernhard!

VOLCKMER

I guess it’s the same in other countries as well … people can’t really laugh about themselves. They immediately get quite defensive. My parents are going through a really interesting process whereby my dad’s reading the book and translating it for my mom. They find it all very funny and have been very supportive, but they’re also like, What’s wrong with our bread, you know? That’s the one thing, they’re like, No, that’s not funny. We know you’re a vegetarian, and German food, yes, okay, but … not that joke, no, not funny. It’s going to be an uncomfortable read for a lot of Germans, I think, and not just because of the joke about bread.

INTERVIEWER

Comparing the monologue form, it seems that one major difference between your work and Bernhard’s is that there’s space in yours. It’s not just one paragraph.

VOLCKMER

Yes, and it’s not just once sentence. I don’t like things that are formally overwhelming. I quite like things that are on some level readable. Somehow there’s something soothing about paragraphs, right? I do love Bernhard. I love Bernhard for how strict he was as a writer. I love watching interviews with Thomas Bernhard. There’s one called Monologe auf Mallorca in which he says that some writers waste sixty pages until they reach the garden gates, right? So descriptive… I’ve always admired all the things he doesn’t allow himself to do.

INTERVIEWER

Growing up, and going to a Jewish elementary school, it was always impressed upon us that in Germany they learned that painful histories can be dealt with, and can be dealt with well. Seeing it described in your book as “hysterically non-racist” was a compelling description.

VOLCKMER

This whole concept that we have of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—a German term for coming to terms with the past, particularly World War II—is wrong in a sense. I feel like we’re always looking for the point at which we can be comfortable with our history, where we can say that we’ve dealt with it, and I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it because you’ll never be able to do that. There’s never going to be a point of comfort or of being at peace with it. It’s not like doing your laundry. The mere fact that Germany lost the war meant that they were no longer in charge of their history books … so obviously they had to face that fact. But I think the way they like to present it and the way it actually was are quite different. For instance, when my father when to school in the fifties and early sixties, they didn’t mention the Holocaust. It wasn’t until the student revolutions, the Eichmann Trial, the Holocaust film, all of these things were mentioned. And I think they still haven’t gone as far as they could have. There’s also what some people refer to as the second guilt, the almost total failure in bringing people to trial who were responsible for these crimes. That is in itself really shocking.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a narrative, something they tell themselves and I think the problem is that many people—once again—think in terms of solutions. They want to reach a point that is finite and, if you really think about it, that’s always very sinister. I’m also really interested in the history of the guest workers—how these people were treated. There were twenty-six million forced laborers, prisoners—thirteen million in Germany itself, the rest in occupied territories. That established a hierarchy of thinking about how much people were worth, beginning with French people being the fanciest, and Jewish and Soviet people being the least human. And this hierarchy is still very much in place in many ways, if you think about the ways in which the later generation of guest workers and their descendants have been treated. I keep thinking that there must be stories of people who used to be forced laborers and returned as guest workers. Or if you think about the fact that since 1990, 187 people have been killed in Germany by neo-fascists. I’m really interested in the continuities of these things. There’s this big myth of hour zero. We started from scratch in 1945. You wish! You wish. They were so smart when things started happening in the United States with George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests—the first reaction was, Oh, we don’t have this kind of racism here. And I was like, excuse me… What? But again, they found it much easier to point fingers, and to say look at America and how racist they are all and their problems. And I think there is—I’m going back to the Holocaust—I think there’s always been and continues to be an inability to mourn for those victims as our own people. They were othered, even in that process. Of course, all countries in the West have dirty histories, they all do. But it’s not a competition. I think we should stop thinking of getting to that place of comfort.

INTERVIEWER

Thinking again about inheritance, are there writers you return to?

VOLCKMER

There’s a new German translation of War and Peace, which is brilliant. I love the way Tolstoy structured it, among many other things. It makes it very readable. I find it quite overwhelming, and I’m totally in love with that book. Even the epilogue. People say it’s boring, but no, you need the epilogue. If you don’t read it, you haven’t understood anything.

I think Russian—I’m really bad, but I started learning Russian, a few years ago, without much success—there’s stuff that you can do in German, that you can do in Russian, that you can’t do in English, because all of the cases and the grammar. Russian is so condensed as a language. I don’t want to wind you up with the Nabokov thing, but didn’t he say that about Tolstoy? That you can read it in English, but you’re not going to read Tolstoy. I always admire Tolstoy’s love, right? He wrote from a point of love and that’s important. I can’t think of another writer who knew the human soul like he did. To me the most important scene is when Bolkonsky sees the sky. And his death, the two scenes. I don’t know how he does it, but I’m quite overwhelmed. My only explanation is it’s because he writes from a position of love. He doesn’t hate his characters. Apart from Napoleon.

INTERVIEWER

It’s an interesting question. It’s very clear to me when a writer hates their characters. How do writers love their characters? Is it so important?

VOLCKMER

I think it’s important because otherwise you’re going to be arrogant and the characters will not reveal as much. A part of them will always remain closed off if you don’t treat them with devotion. That’s something I don’t like when I read fiction, when writers are being condescending or arrogant toward their characters. I always find that quite jarring. I think you have to be modest in front of them. And that’s what Tolstoy does brilliantly, I think, like no one else.

 

RL Goldberg is a Ph.D. candidate in English and humanistic studies at Princeton.

It’s Time to Pay the Piper

Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

Pied Piper illustration by Kate Greenaway

It’s time to pay the piper. We gather around the old wooden table. No one wants to pay, but it’s time. It’s one thousand o’clock. Everyone is here. The living and the dead. My grandparents, my mother, my father, my sons, my husband, the rabbis, even the president. You are here, too. Your teachers, your neighbors, your long-lost friends. Everyone you know is here. We put what we can on the table. Everyone must add to the pot. My sons leave wildflower seeds, my husband leaves a rose-colored pendulum, the president mutters and leaves ash, the rabbis leave ink marks scattered like sewing needles, my father leaves his stethoscope. I leave this essay. I leave my favorite broom. My grandfather leaves a small black key. My grandmother leaves her radiance. My sister leaves her hair. “I’m not paying,” says my mother. “I’ve paid enough.”

The earliest known version of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is not a fairy tale, but a stained glass windowpane from a church in Hamelin, Germany, that was destroyed in 1633. Only a shard remains, which my nine-year-old son, Noah, pulls from his pocket and holds up to the light. It’s the piece of glass with the piper’s magical flute. The flute is bronze, and the light catches what’s left of the piper’s hands. Noah adds the shard to what we’ll use to pay the piper.

We miss the old sky. We think if we pay the piper now, the wildfires and the wind and the virus and the floods will swirl back into their wellspring, but the piper is missing. In a large dark sack, we drag our payment through the streets calling the piper’s name. Our heavy debt. Our hands are blistered and hot but we must pay the piper. We look for his red and yellow striped scarf and the pipe that hangs from it. We should’ve paid him long ago, when he emptied our town of rats “who bit the babies in the cradles … and made nests inside men’s Sunday hats, / And even spoiled the women’s chats / By drowning their speaking / With shrieking and squeaking,” as Robert Browning writes. We should have paid him before the sea levels rose and the polar bears thinned. We should have paid him before the first man was shot for the color of his skin, before the first wire barbed. But we didn’t pay the piper, so the piper made a new song for the children that promised “a joyous land … where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew.” We didn’t pay the piper, and so the children merrily followed him into a mountain, and a disappearing door shut fast when the last child was inside. Now there are no more children.

Now there are no more children, except for one hobbling boy left behind, who couldn’t dance into the mountain fast enough. There is always one hobbling boy left behind, to describe the song the children followed. He is the poet. And there is always one rat left behind to describe the song the rats followed. The rat is the poet, too.

On Rosh Hashanah we blow the shofar one hundred and one times. The blasts alternate between broken howls and long moans. According to the Talmud, the shofar should be a ram’s horn because it is hollow and recalls Abraham’s near sacrifice of his only son. It recalls Abraham’s blind devotion, which blurred only when an angel showed him a ram whose horns were caught in a nearby thicket. Abraham was ready to overpay the piper, but paid with the terrified ram instead.

The shofar we have is broken. My sons take turns blowing it, but all we can hear is silence. It is a beautiful silence. One day, when there are too many of me, that is the song I will follow into a mountain. We add the broken shofar to the missing piper’s payment.

“Do you ever feel like you’re dreaming while you’re awake?” asks Eli, my seven-year-old. “Sometimes,” I say. “Do you?” “Of course,” says Eli. “We are always dreaming. I am a dream and you are a dream and Papa is a dream and Noah is a dream. Our house is a dream and the earth is a dream.” I add Eli’s words to the piper’s payment. Into the sack it goes, instantly doubling its worth.

When the piper arrives in Hamelin he seems to have walked from his “painted tombstone,” like an ancestor rising on the “Trump of Doom” (or Judgment Day) to rid the town of a plague. “There was,” writes Robert Browning, “no guessing his kith or kin.” He is the Godot we barely had to wait for and then when he arrived he was the Godot we didn’t pay. Or is he God, or Guru, or Go? What was his name?

I do not consider myself a follower even though I have followed things up trees, into rivers, and across bridges. I have listened carefully. I have taken notes and memorized. I have followed instructions, and I have been obsessed. I have been indoctrinated as often as I have pulled up roots and left behind a trail of soil. Once, when I was nine, I was about to follow my father into a mountain when my mother held me back. “Your father,” she said, “is brainwashing you.” I had never heard that word before, but it sounded like “bewitched” and I liked it. “Look,” said my mother. And I looked. My father dipped my brain into a bucket, and sloshed it around in lavender suds. The water was cool and fresh, and it felt like heaven. He folded my brain over a clothesline to dry in the motherless sun. Over my father I was gaga. Over my mother I was un-gaga. “See?” said my mother. I didn’t see. Ideology is made out of appetite, and sometimes we are hungry to be famished. For a long time I followed my father’s hum. It never wasn’t love. All over my heart are still-glittering flecks from that song I followed. If the piper ever comes to collect payment, I’ll put the glittering flecks in the sack, too.

Not once have I seen my son Noah walk in a line with his schoolmates without falling behind or straying, without looking up at the clouds or studying the ants. For better or for worse, I remind myself, he is the poet.

How do we choose what to follow? Or what not to follow? How old is this song we’re now following, with its cracked notes and strange ways of stopping and starting? Are we, I wonder, like lemmings to the sea? “That’s a myth,” says my husband. “What is?” I say. “Lemmings to the sea,” he says. “Lemmings don’t march blindly to their deaths.” “But it’s an idiom.” I say. “If it’s not like lemmings to the sea than what is it like?” The news is on. The same president who added ash to the piper’s sack is rising in the polls, or pretending to rise in the polls. “Like humans,” says my husband. “Like humans to the sea.”

In 1958 Disney made a documentary called The White Wilderness to prove that lemmings commit mass suicide by jumping off seaside cliffs. But lemmings don’t. The documentary shows hundreds of lemmings jumping into the Arctic Sea, except they are not jumping and this is not the Arctic Sea. The filmmakers purchased lemmings from children, brought them to the Bow River, and placed them on a turntable to create the effect of a frenzied death march. The lemmings are falling but they do not want to fall. What is happening is not what is actually happening. The film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary.

I wonder what it must feel like to be one of those lemmings. I wonder what it feels like to have been caught and brought to a precipice to perform the myth of yourself. Or maybe that’s exactly what we are doing day in and day out. Maybe what we are doing is performing the myth of ourselves on a cliff to the tune of a missing piper’s song.

If you see the piper tell him we have his payment ready. I’ve added the dreams of a lemming and my favorite orange sweater. This sack is getting heavier and heavier. Tell the piper we don’t know how much farther we can carry it while calling for him by a name we’ve never known. It’s now one thousand and one o’clock. It’s now later than we ever thought.

 

Read earlier installments of Happily here.

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia. 

 

Redux: The Things between Me and Time

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.

Grace Paley.

This week at The Paris Review, the clock is ticking. Read on for Grace Paley’s Art of Fiction interview, V. S. Naipaul’s short story “My Aunt Gold Teeth,” and David Rokeah’s poem “Between Me and Time.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, to celebrate the students and teachers in your life, why not gift our special subscription deal featuring a copy of Writers at Work around the World for 50% off? And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more.

 

Grace Paley, The Art of Fiction No. 131

Issue no. 124, Fall 1992

INTERVIEWER

What were you doing before you became a published writer?

GRACE PALEY

I was working part time. I was hanging out a lot. I was kind of lazy. I had my kids when I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven. I took them to the park in the afternoons. Thank God I was lazy enough to spend all that time in Washington Square Park. I say lazy but of course it was kind of exhausting running after two babies. Still, looking back I see the pleasure of it. That’s when I began to know women very well—as co-workers, really. I had a part-time job as a typist up at Columbia. In fact, when I began to write stories, I typed some up there, and some in the PTA office of P.S. 41 on Eleventh Street. If I hadn’t spent that time in the playground, I wouldn’t have written a lot of those stories. That’s pretty much how I lived. And then we had our normal family life—struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times. Uses up whole days.

 

Bertrand Planes, Life Clock 2, 2006. Photo: Neologico / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...).

 

My Aunt Gold Teeth

By V. S. Naipaul

Issue no. 19, Summer 1958

One morning she took the train for the county town of Chaguanas, three miles, two stations and twenty minutes away. The church of St. Philip and St. James in Chaguanias stands imposingly at the end of the Caroni Savannah Road, and although Gold Teeth knew Chaguanas well, all she knew of the church was that it had a clock, at which she had glanced on her way to the Railway Station nearby. She had hitherto been far more interested in the drab ochre-washed edifice opposite, which was the Police Station.

 

Photo: Gabo2013 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...).

 

Between Me and Time

By David Rokeah

Issue no. 29, Winter–Spring 1963

The things between me

and time:

My daily forgetfulnesses.

Leaves of the fall that lose themselves in the wind.

Desert sand. Its haste that evades the eyes.

The black complaint of the sea

that lasts longer than night …

 

And to read more from the Paris Review archives, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-seven years’ worth of archives. Or, to celebrate the students and teachers in your life, why not gift our special subscription deal featuring a copy of Writers at Work around the World for 50% off?