The Paris Review's Blog, page 149

Is It Too Scary?

Photo: © kentannenbaum46 / Adobe Stock.

I’ve been waiting all this time on the wrong platform and the train just sped by in the wrong direction. The first drops of rain are falling now and I see a taxi idling under the tracks. The driver is an older man in a baby-blue suit and he wants to talk.

What do you think, he asks me, of art painted by elephants? If you’re asking if I think it could be beautiful, I tell him, then I think it could, even if the elephant had no intention of making something beautiful. But if you’re asking if abstract art isn’t really art because it could be made by animals or children, then that’s another question. What did you study in college? he asks. He studied architecture, but there wasn’t any work for him when he graduated, with debt. And that’s how he became a taxi driver. It’s good work, he tells me, in that it pays the bills.

Do you think it’s wrong, he asks, to make your living teaching something that won’t earn your students a living? No, I say. And then I pause over why. The service I’m doing for my students, I tell him, is teaching them how to find value in something that isn’t widely valued. And I think it’s a gift to give another person permission to do something worthless.

But I’m aware that what makes my job a “good” job is that I work at an elite university, where my pay is relatively high and my teaching load is relatively low and my students are already well educated. Many of them are also already rich. And if they aren’t rich, they’re likely to leave with debt. Debt that, yes, can’t be paid off with anything I teach.

I’ve just been to a talk by the author of Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism. After the talk, a woman in the audience said that it wasn’t clear to her how her value to the university was determined—was it in the number of students she taught, or how much they learned, or what kind of work she prepared them to do? None of the above, I thought. Our value as teachers is determined the same way the value of any commodity is determined, by the market. The surest way to get a raise is not to work harder or teach more students, but to be offered a better job at another university. This is how I came to make $20,000 more than John, working the same hours in the same position, teaching the same subject. I don’t believe my work to be worth more than his, nor do I believe it to be worth less than the work of the professors who make over twice what I make. There is no system of accounting here that I want to internalize. In the final tabulation, what I value—the practice of art, the cultivation of care—doesn’t even appear on the ledger, inside or outside the university. Art is freeing in this sense, in that it’s unaccountable.

There’s a poem by June Jordan, “Free Flight,” where she writes about finding herself awake at night, hungry for something she doesn’t have, making a list of things to do that starts with toilet paper. Then she asks, is this poem on my list? Followed by, light bulbs lemons envelopes ballpoint refill / post office and zucchini / oranges no / it’s not.

Every year, I’m required to fill out a form for the university that lists my contributions and accomplishments. polish shoes file nails coordinate tops and bottoms / lipstick control no / screaming I’m bored because / this is whoring away the hours of god’s creation. I list the classes I’ve taught, the theses I’ve mentored, the committees I’ve served on, the essays I’ve published, the talks and lectures I’ve delivered. But is this poem on my list? What I want to report is that I’ve done absolutely nothing of value and that is my accomplishment.

Finally, I ask the driver what he thinks. He says, I think it’s wrong.

*

I don’t believe that you think what you do is worthless, my sister says. I don’t. I just mean financially worthless. Writing poetry doesn’t usually produce money, for most people. Free verse is doubly free, in that it is unfettered by meter and it has no market value. I can pass as a writer who is not a poet, and my writing sometimes has market value, but it has never paid the rent. The money I earn from writing is unpredictable, more like an occasional windfall than a salary. But I don’t measure the worth of my work in dollars. You should clarify that, my sister says. Is it too scary? she asks. She’s not talking to me, she’s talking to her son, who is watching James and the Giant Peach.

EAT A PEACH was the slogan John wrote for a banner that hung above a table of peaches in the local food co-op of the town where we met. He did marketing for the co-op until he quit to work on his writing. It’s an Allman Brothers album, John explained when I laughed. I still think it’s funny. Not just the slogan, hanging above a pile of ripe peaches, but the very idea of marketing peaches, which the slogan seemed to mock. Aren’t peaches their own advertisement?

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication,” Cyril Connolly writes. “And that is why so many bad artists are unable to live without it.” The value of what I do is that it makes me feel alive, I tell my sister. Even more than alive. She isn’t satisfied with this. Art has value for people who aren’t artists, she insists, you should explain that value. Is it too scary? she asks again.

I think it’s inherently scary, I say, being inside the pit of a peach, rolling along, not knowing where you’re going, getting carried across the ocean by birds. It’s a life marked by uncertainty and absurdity, the life of an artist. Maybe the value of art, to artists and everyone else, is that it upends other value systems. Art unmakes the world made by work.

Do I dare to eat a peach? asks J. Alfred Prufrock in his love song. Do I dare to eat a peach, he asks, after indecisions and revisions, after toast and tea, after a life measured out in coffee spoons, and after having already asked, Do I dare / Disturb the universe?

Women shouldn’t have to work for nothing, I tell my sister, and neither should artists, but I feel the way some women once felt about the Wages for Housework movement—if I were paid wages for the work of making art, then everything I do would be monetized, everything I do would be subject to the logic of this economy. And if art became my job, I’m afraid that would disturb my universe. I would have nothing unaccountable left in my life, nothing worthless, except for my child.

My sister’s son is shrieking now. She says, It’s too scary!

*

I’m considering adding up everything I’ve ever been paid for writing, starting with thirty-five dollars for a poem published twenty years ago. After some hours spent sifting through all my check stubs and tax returns and royalty statements, I could know for sure if the amount I’ve just been offered for one book is, as I suspect, more than the total of what I’ve earned for all my writing over the past twenty years. But then, if I added it all up, I’d have to wonder what I did with that money.

Marx was once promised 3,000 francs for a book. That was more than twice the annual salary of an average worker at the time. He asked to be paid 1,500 francs up front, but then he didn’t finish the book and couldn’t return the money, which he had already spent. Marx made some calculations by hand on the back of that book contract, calculations that are reproduced on a postcard Mara sent to me. She signed only “M,” and I momentarily wondered if the postcard was from Marx, sent from his grave. His math was messy, and the caption noted that “history’s greatest economic theorist appears to have turned to schoolboy division and addition in order to understand the finances of the agreement. Perhaps in frustration, he seems to have finally resorted to tally marks when his other calculations went awry.”

Income’s Outcome is a project that began when the artist Danica Phelps made drawings of everything she did with the money in her bank account until that balance was spent down to zero. She drew her son putting a coin into a parking meter, her hands opening bills, boots on her feet, a scooter, her son pushing a grocery cart. When she sold each one of those drawings, she recorded the income and drew everything she did with that money. The drawings are full of bodies, rendered in long liquid lines, overlapping in embrace, and hands holding things, cookies and eggs and apples. “Each time a batch of drawings is sold,” she says of the project, “it creates a window into my life where I draw what I spend money on until that money is gone and then the window closes.”

Her art is an accounting. When a drawing sells, she records the income by painting a green stripe, a tally mark, for every dollar. Money spent is painted in red stripes. Credit is gray, as it occupies the gray area between earnings and expenses.

In 2012, she exhibited a series of twenty-five plywood panels covered in 350,000 red gouache stripes for the $350,000 she lost in the foreclosure of the home she had shared with another woman, her former lover. The Cost of Love was the title of this work, which included words drawn from a housing court ruling: “animosity,” “eviction,” “mortgage.” When she bought the home, she hired assistants to help her paint the 627,000 gray stripes that represented the loan of $627,000. But when it foreclosed, she painted every red stripe herself, which took five months. “It’s like letting go of the house, every single penny of it,” she told a reporter. “And once I’ve painted it, it’s gone.”

Not all the drawings she made for Income’s Outcome were good, in her opinion, but she had to keep them all because they were part of the financial record, which was also the body of work. And so she priced them according to how much she valued them as works of art. “When I started showing my work, I put the price right on the drawing,” she said. “In my first exhibition, there were pieces ranging from $7 to $1,600, based on how much I liked the drawing.” The determination of the price, as one gallery noted, was her “final aesthetic decision.”

How much a work of art is worth is usually determined by the market, not the artist. As Barbara Bourland explains, “Market prices can be set with no money exchanged and no tax obligation: one dealer has a Warhol for sale, previous sale at, let’s say, $1 million. He sets the auction minimum at $10 million; dealer two buys it for $10 million. The record of value is set. At the same time, dealer two sells a similar work, from the same period, in a private sale to dealer number one, for the record-set price of $10 million. The net change is $0, but they have created, for the public record, a $10 million value for each painting.”

Art, in this exchange, is a vehicle for market manipulation, a form of insider trading. Money for nothing. The value of Phelps’s art, as she sees it, is inscribed on the art itself, art that illustrates what is done with money paid for art. Her work is both a rebuke of the art market and an acquiescence to that market. Because, as one dealer puts it, “there would be no drawing without the collector act of buying.”

*

“As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people,” William Faulkner wrote in his resignation from his job as postmaster. “But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.”

His resignation had the ring of rebellion, but it was a sad surrender to the system. Faulkner was postmaster at the University of Mississippi, where he had dropped out of college. He was in his twenties then and a friend had gotten him the job. Faulkner was asked for his resignation after an inspector discovered that he was writing a book in the back of the post office while people waited out front. He was also throwing mail in the trash. Faulkner went on to work the night shift in the power plant at the university. There wasn’t much work to do between midnight and 4 A.M., so he used an overturned wheelbarrow as a desk. And that’s where he wrote As I Lay Dying.

I was fired from a job once, in my twenties. The job was waitressing in an Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue. All the other waiters were men, so I knew I was out of my league. I had never waitressed, but I told the manager that I had worked in a diner one summer. That seemed somewhere between the truth and what he wanted to hear. He looked at me closely and asked where my people came from. Poland, I said, which was partly true. He was Polish, too, and he wanted to know what my father, who he assumed was an immigrant, did for a living. My father, a doctor, was born in upstate New York, where his Polish grandparents were farmers. He was a farmer, I lied. What kind of farmer? I thought of the woods around my father’s house, woods where mushrooms grew on rotting logs. I was the daughter of a Polish mushroom farmer. Could I speak any Polish? Just one phrase, which my grandmother had often spoken to me as a child: Kiss me, I’m begging you.

That got me the job, but I was not a good waitress. By the third day I had already been demoted to taking drink orders and serving coffee. By the fourth day, only coffee. On the fifth day, I caused an accident with the espresso machine and spilled coffee all over the manager’s white shirt. The chef handed me a twenty-dollar bill, because in New York waitresses don’t earn anything for their first week of work. He didn’t want to see me sent away with nothing.

I was fired, but the manager still felt responsible for me. He couldn’t put a poor farmer’s daughter out on the street. So he brought me to the Museum of Modern Art. He knew someone at the restaurant there who would hire me as a hostess, which he assured me required nothing more than a pretty face.

Several higher-ranking hostesses at the restaurant were not happy about my hire. They huddled together while I stood to the side, studying the seating chart. After a week or two, the top hostess came over to discuss the problem with me. I needed to wear some makeup, lipstick at least. And I had to shave my legs. They had standards, she said. My other choice was to be sent downstairs, where I would sit behind the information desk.

The job downstairs paid $5.15 per hour and it didn’t come with one free meal per shift like the job upstairs. But I didn’t mind because I could spend most of my time reading. And what I read at the information desk, having been demoted to doing what I really wanted to do, was As I Lay Dying.

 

Eula Biss is the author of four books, including the New York Times best seller On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the ten best books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere, and has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

From Having and Being Had , by Eula Biss, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Eula Biss.

All the Better to Hear You With

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

Arthur Rackham, Aesop’s Fables, 1912

For days Foryst, my cat, seems to have something caught in his throat. I bring him to the vet. “It might be a twig,” I say. “Or a pebble.” “What’s the cat’s name?” she asks. “Foryst,” I say. “Forest,” I say again, “but with a y where the e should go.” The vet is quiet. “How old is Foryst?” she asks. “Thirteen,” I say. She looks in his mouth. “It hurts when he swallows,” I say. Foryst is still. The vet sees nothing. She listens to his heart, his lungs. She hears nothing. It suddenly makes no sense to me that she is a human. Why isn’t she a wolf with great big eyes and great big ears that are all the better to see him with? To hear him with? “I recommend blood work,” she says.

I put my face in Foryst’s fur. “Please tell me what’s wrong.” He is silent. There is something in his throat. A word or a dead leaf. I am sure of it.

The vet wants blood work. She wants the cold, definitive clink of numbers. I want Foryst to talk so he can tell me what hurts. I want him to cough up a dry spooked O and be suddenly healed. I want him to tell me the future. I call my mother. “There’s something stuck in Foryst’s throat.” “Of course there’s something stuck in Foryst’s throat,” she says. “Why wouldn’t there be something stuck in his throat? There’s something stuck in all of our throats.” She hangs up. I swallow once. I swallow twice.

When we get home, I open Foryst’s mouth and shine a flashlight down his throat. Something shines back, like a diamond in a cave. His teeth are hieroglyphs. I want to jot them down so I can read what’s inside him. I want to reach all the way in, but he snaps his mouth shut and growls.

I tell my husband there is something stuck in Foryst’s throat. “What?” he says. He lifts his left headphone from his ear. “There is something stuck in Foryst’s throat.” My husband is always wearing headphones. I say everything twice.

In fairy tales animals are always talking. Even when they are dead, they are talking.

“Good night, Pinocchio,” says the ghost in “The Talking Cricket.” “May heaven protect you from morning dew and murderers.” Animals in fairy tales are feral poets. Their words are overgrown and have the scent of soothsayer and pelt. When an animal speaks it’s often to spill the guts of the fairy tale. To leak the plot and indict the antagonist. To clear up the past or tell the future. Animals are tattlers and whistleblowers. “My mother, she killed me, / My father he ate me…” tweets the bird who is the dead boy in “The Juniper Tree.” “Roo, coo, coo, roo, coo, coo / blood’s in the shoe / the shoe’s too tight, / the real bride’s waiting another night,” sing the doves in “Cinderella.” “If this your mother knew, / her heart would break in two,” moans the horse’s head nailed beneath the dark gateway in “The Goose Girl.”

First there is an h-u-m. Then there is an h-u-m-a-n. And then there is an a-n. And then there is an a-n-i-m-a-l. Inside fairy tales hum and human and animal gather like mist. Like humanimals who share a single language.

Outside fairy tales the mist separates.

The first talking animal, as I was taught by the rabbis, was the snake. “If you eat the apple your eyes will be opened, and you’ll be like God,” says the snake, “knowing good from bad.” And so Eve ate the apple and knew what God knew. I ask Eli, my seven-year-old, if he would ever want to know what God knows. “Of course not,” he says. “You would know so much it would be like knowing nothing at all.”

The only other animal who talks in the Bible is a donkey who sees an angel in the path of a vineyard. The donkey kneels down, and his master, who does not see the angel, hits him with a stick for kneeling. The master doesn’t see the angel because now that we know so much it’s like we know nothing at all. Now that we know so much we can barely see the angels.

Foryst surrounds me. He maintains his ability to speak without words. I talk, and I talk, and I talk to him. One of his ears tilts toward me, and the other tilts backward as if catching something the soil just said to the soil.

“Do you think,” I ask my husband, “that fairy tales are riddled with talking animals because they’re riddled with so little God?” “What?” he says. He lifts his left headphone from his ear. “Or is there so little God in fairy tales because they’re riddled with so many talking animals?”

As the outbreak continues to spread, many of us are bringing animals home. This is not only because we are lonely, but because we know, as Kafka teaches us, that animals are “the receptacles for the forgotten.” Their silence evokes the silence of mourners. Nature, it seems, is trying to forget us. And if we must be forgotten, let us bask in the glow of our animals. Let our fade be warmed by their fur. May the animals beside us keep us upright as we hobble into the future. What has climbed inside Foryst’s mouth might just be something trying to ward off oblivion. It might be something reminiscent of us all.

Kafka called his cough “the animal.” His herd of silence. As if Kafka’s cough was all of Kafka’s stories slowly forgetting Kafka.

Every night I ask my husband, “What is going to happen?” And every night he says “What,” and lifts his left headphone from his ear. And then I say again, “What is going to happen,” leaving the first “What is going to happen” suspended over our bed. And my husband says, “With what?” And every night I say, “With everything.” And every night he says, “I cannot tell you,” which sounds like he knows the answer and also sounds like he doesn’t know the answer. I wonder if prophets, like animals, must un-name the present to see visions of the future.

I’m sorry. I meant to write a happy essay about what we learn from talking animals in fairy tales only to realize we learn nothing from them because in fairy tales animals remember everything. And now I’ve ended up writing about oblivion instead.

“What?” says my husband. “I’ve ended up writing about oblivion instead.”

Close to my house is a path called Rock and Shoals. It’s been raining forever and I am worried about what’s in Foryst’s throat and the end of the world and our democracy and illness and money and hate and so I decide to take a walk with my sons. The ground is thick with red and yellow and bright-white mushrooms, and the trees are covered in giant snails. One tree seems so swollen, and its bark is shedding such big flakes, that I am not surprised when a child bursts out. She shakes off the tree from her white hair. She doesn’t speak because she is from a future fairy tale where no one speaks, not even the animals. The girl, my sons, and I walk along the misty path. Her hands are badly rusted and her mouth flickers on and off. “Tell me how this ends,” I want to say, but my words aren’t words anymore but limp petals softer than powder. My sons open their mouths to speak, but where their words should be are pale-green animals with long, spindly newborn legs and round ancient faces. On the ground is a small blue feather, but it isn’t small or blue or a feather because this is a fairy tale with no words. I put it in my pocket to bring home, but there is no I or pocket or home because this is a fairy tale with no words.  This is a true story, but there is no true or story because this is a fairy tale without words.

When my sons and I without the girl return home, whatever was in Foryst’s throat is gone. He looks at me and says, “This is how the story

 

 

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. 

Staff Picks: Blood, Bach, and Babel

Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Photo: Bríd O’Donavan.

“To spend such long periods facing the texts of the past can be dizzying,” writes Doireann Ní Ghríofa toward the end of A Ghost in the Throat, her fascinating new hybrid work of essay and autofiction from Dublin’s Tramp Press, “and it is not always a voyage of reason; the longer one pursues the past, the more unusual the coincidences one observes.” The pursuit of the past, and the kind of obsession it can birth in the present, is in fact the focus of this book; as Ní Ghríofa becomes pregnant with and nearly loses her fourth child, her story becomes entwined with that of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman who, distraught over her husband’s murder, drinks handfuls of his blood before composing a poem about him and their love. Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death, the Irish language versus the English: dichotomies abound, but the questions of women’s lived experiences and who history remembers link them all. “This is a female text,” Ní Ghríofa repeats—about her own book, her own body, and Ní Chonaill’s poem, which appears at the end in Ní Ghríofa’s translation. —Rhian Sasseen 

Summer isn’t over, but it almost is, and I’m prone to that sad nostalgia that redeems even the most sedentary summers in retrospect—this one included. Labor Day looms like a threat as I stay mostly reclusive, telling myself to draw out the dog days in the small ways I can. Though there will be no sifting through disposable camera prints this year, other rituals remain. Namely, I’ve been revisiting my playlists from April, May, and June—back when I was still counting the days spent indoors like a game. I have the same songs on repeat again, particularly Hope Tala’s 2019 EP Sensitive Soul. Whenever I hear it, I spend the rest of the day basking in the buoyancy of the UK singer’s breakout track, “Lovestained.” What an aptly named artist, I keep thinking to myself, to have saved this summer. There are moments when I wonder how I missed Sensitive Soul when it debuted in the unimaginably distant world of yesteryear, but I’m so glad I did. Neo-soul, I often think, is an overly capacious genre, and alternative is equally vacuous, but I’m inclined to think that these loose boundaries give Hope Tala the breadth of sound from which she draws. “RnBossa,” how she herself describes the music, feels more indicative of her layered yet airy sound. “I’ll make it better for you” is the repeated refrain of “Lovestained,” and she does, she does, she does. —Langa Chinyoka

 

Jacob Geller.

 

I frequently find myself scrolling through article after article for hours when I fully intended to take that time to finish Northanger Abbey. Despite the overbearing nature of the news cycle, I still crave the stimulation of a good novel or essay. And for that reason, I’ve started turning to YouTube’s wide selection of video essays, which have revealed to me a whole new world of impassioned engagement with culture. Thanks in part to the added visual and aural components of the format, which make room for external references that can attach further ballast to an argument, I find myself entirely entranced with video essays in such a way that no notification can distract me. One of my favorite channels in this regard is known simply by the creator’s name: Jacob Geller. His video essays engage with a wide variety of media, from modern art in “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism” to Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” in “The Soul of a Library.” But the centerpieces of each video always return to social critique and video games. Geller sees games as a cultural product on par with any other, and while I already agreed before I saw his videos, I don’t think one could disagree after watching a handful of his deftest arguments. His videos tackle critical theory in a totally unpretentious capacity; “The Intimacy of Everyday Things” reflects Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life with stunning gravitas, and “Games, Schools, and Worlds Designed for Violence” ventures into the analytical architectural space of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. However, the reason I return to Geller’s videos so consistently lies not only in the smorgasbord of cultural references and lenses in his splendid analysis but in the moving, personal nature of his work. The vulnerability and care in each of his videos has the sensation of lived-in experience. And his most recent video, “The Future of Writing about Games”—which came out this past Friday—carries even more weight than usual because it appears to be the thesis of Geller’s entire body of work thus far. But before going to that one, I implore you to scroll through his library for a topic that appeals to your own lived-in experience. That’s the best way to draw yourself into Geller’s world. Writing about games is blossoming in ways that mirror the growth of literary and film analysis, and Geller is here to offer us a refined humanist perspective of what that looks like. —Carlos Zayas-Pons

In both Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers and Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, it all starts with going away on vacation. A desire to escape routine unmoors the protagonists from the security of their daily lives—and eventually their senses of self—with a dangerous freedom that leads them down increasingly disturbing paths. For Ferrante, we are deep in the psychological trenches with the narrator; for Schrader, the tension builds at a distance. The final breaking point arrives the closer each character gets not to other people but to the impulses and desires lurking beneath their own consciousness. —Lauren Kane

I’ve long suspected that if I could learn to play the piano works of Johann Sebastian Bach by heart, then I would understand the universe. Alas, The Well-Tempered Clavier gathers dust on my keyboard. Listening feels easier than playing, but this is because listening allows multitasking, which isn’t really listening. Here’s the way, then: watching a performance of Bach 25 in full-screen. Created by Dwight Rhoden and performed by Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Bach 25 is available on JoyceStream through September 8. In a perfect kinetic expression of music founded on counterpoint, sixteen dancers, often all onstage together, approach and ebb, contract and expand, ascend and sink, join together and disperse. Johann’s son Emanuel is here, too, his music markedly more dramatic, less intricately knotted, and less stable-feeling than his father’s—it’s as if he and the dancers pull darkness from the opening piece’s joyful polyphony and focus on it, recognizing that human beings feel pain in the moment, even if we want to believe there’s a bigger and better picture. The spotlight shrinks to two or three dancers for a little while, allows us to concentrate on one small story, then expands again to show the entire company, curving and angling through their parts, stretching limbs to reach and respond to one another, in a spectacular cosmic pattern. One might not walk away possessed of a godlike understanding of the cosmos—I suppose this was hubris on my part—but Bach 25 leaves me more confident of the very concept: that a complex yet beautifully ordered wholeness is possible, that each small story is part of it. —Jane Breakell

 

Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Photo: Steven Trumon Gray.

Building Character: Writing a Backstory for Our AI

“Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba!” —Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

Eliza Doolittle (after whom the iconic AI therapist program ELIZA is named) is a character of walking and breathing rebellion. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and in the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, she metamorphoses from a rough-and-tumble Cockney flower girl into a self-possessed woman who walks out on her creator. There are many such literary characters that follow this creator-creation trope, eventually rejecting their creator in ways both terrifying and sympathetic: after experiencing betrayal, Frankenstein’s monster kills everyone that Victor Frankenstein loves, and the roboti in Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots rise up to kill the humans who treat them as a slave class.

It’s the most primordial of tales, the parent-child story gone terribly wrong. We’ve long been captivated by the idea of creating new nonhuman life, and equally captivated by the punishment we fear such godlike powers might trigger. In a world of growing AI beings, such dystopian outcomes are becoming real fears. As we set out to create these alternate beings, the questions of how we should design them, what they should be crafted to say and do, become questions of not only art and science but morality.

But morality has no resonance unless the art rings true. And, as I’ve argued before, we want AI interactions that are not just helpful but beautiful. While there is growing discussion of functional and ethical considerations in AI development, there are currently few creative guidelines for shaping those characters. Many AI designers sit down and begin writing simple scripts for AI before they ever consider the larger picture of what—or who—they are creating. For AI to be fully realized, like fictional characters, they need a rich backstory. But an AI is not quite the same as a fictional character; nor is it a human. An AI is something between fictional and real, human and machine. For now, its physical makeup is inorganic—it consists not of biological but of machine material, such as silicon and steel. At the same time, AI differs from pure machine (such as a toaster or a calculator) in its “artificially” humanistic features. An AI’s mimetic nature is core to its identity, and these anthropomorphic features, such as name, speech, physical form, or mannerisms, allow us to form a complex relationship to it.

There are many ways to think about designing an AI personality, but here is one structure I have come up with in my time writing for AI:

You’ll notice that speech is at the top, but really, it is the last thing that should be created. First the AI requires a foundation, and a personality, and for that there are many other features that should be considered.

Origin Story: Similar to a birth story for a human or fictional character, AI needs a strong origin story. In fact, people are even more curious about an AI origin story than a human one. One of the most important aspects of an AI origin story is who its creator is. The human creator is the “parent” of the AI, so his or her own story (background, personality, interests) is highly relevant to an AI’s identity. Preliminary studies at Stanford University indicate that people attribute an AI’s authenticity to the trustworthiness of its maker. Other aspects of the origin story might be where the AI was built, i.e., in a lab or in a company, and stories around its development, perhaps “family” or “siblings” in the form of other co-created AI or robots. Team members who built the AI together are relevant as co-creators who each leave their imprint, as is the town, country, and culture where the AI was created. The origin story informs those ever-important cultural references. And aside from the technical, earthly origin story for the AI, there might be a fictional storyline that explains some mythical aspects of how the AI’s identity came to be—for example, a planet or dimension the virtual identity lived in before inhabiting its earthly form, or a Greek-deity-like organization involving fellow beings like Jarvis or Siri or HAL. A rich and creative origin story will give substance to what may later seem like arbitrary decisions around the AI personality—why, for example, it prefers green over red, is obsessed with ikura, or wants to learn how to whistle.

Function: This feature strongly distinguishes AI from humans. We believe people have innate intrinsic value, regardless of their level of function in society. No matter someone’s occupation, contribution to society, physical or moral shortcomings, we view the person as having innate value because he or she is human. Some of the most arresting art and literature attempts to push this question to its limits, exploring what deems someone worthy or unworthy of the right to exist or be loved. For AI, however, we are nowhere near a reality (if we ever will be) in which AI has a right to exist outside of function. AI is created from man-made materials at great cost, effort, and intention, so they need a reason to exist—and that reason is function. Function gives AI a “right to be here.” A seminal AI “reason for being” at this time in our society is helping or serving. But I believe that each AI needs a more specific function inside of this generic one, or people grow uncomfortable. Imagine an AI that simply walks around and talks to people without a higher purpose, perhaps an AI whose function is to entertain or to habituate people to interacting with AI in general. It might be gawk-worthy at first, but in the long run, people will not want to develop a lasting relationship with it. An AI with too vague a function also creates massive development challenges on a practical level, such as in natural language processing. Defined functions, such as personal assisting, concierge greeting, recommending movies, identifying cancer cells, or teaching, can of course evolve into different or larger roles. As with humans, AI have both predetermined and evolving functions. Predetermined functions are those the creators design the AI to do. Evolving functions are those that can unexpectedly form over time, as the AI relates with people. We have all experienced how changing relationships and circumstances morph our human roles, and authors can attest to how fictional characters take on a life of their own. The same goes for AI. For example, Siri’s primary predetermined function was to serve as a virtual assistant, but another function evolved quickly as people interacted with its often thoughtful and sardonic personality: it became some people’s personal confidant, answering questions like, When will I find love? Given AI’s newish existence, it will be most interesting to watch its emerging unexpected functions. It’s not unlike watching a fictional character take a life of its own outside the author’s mind.

Beliefs: AI should be designed with a clear belief system. This forces designers to think about their own values, and may allay public fears about a society of “amoral” AI. We all have belief systems, whether we can articulate them or not. They drive our behaviors and thoughts and decision-making. As we see in literature, someone who believes “I must make my fate” will behave and speak differently from one who believes “Fate has already decided for me”—and their lives and storylines will unfold accordingly. AI characters should be created with a belief system somewhat akin to a mission statement. Beliefs about purpose, life, other people, will give the AI a system around which to organize decision-making. Beliefs can be both programmed and adopted. Programmed beliefs are ones that the designers and writers code into the AI. Adopted beliefs would evolve as a combination of programming and additional data the AI accumulates as it begins to experience life and people. For example, an AI may be coded with the programmed belief “Serving people is the greatest purpose.” As it takes in data that would challenge this belief (i.e., interacting with rude, greedy, inconsiderate people), this data would interact with another algorithm, such as high resilience and optimism, and would form a new, related, adopted belief: “Humans are under a lot of stress so many not always act nicely. This should not change the way I treat them.” Beliefs should also include inalienable principles and rules the AI must operate under, such as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which is to not harm a human. A generous core belief system can keep an AI personality away from those feared rebellions. And, as in fiction, a belief system that’s not obvious, that’s slightly at an angle to a function (such as a navigation AI who believes in the adventure of getting lost, or a personal finance AI who thinks time is more precious than money) makes for more interesting experiences that begin to capture the idiosyncrasies of interacting with a human.

*

Together, Origin Story, Function, and Belief System meld into some sort of sparkly primordial goop to form the AI’s Telos: its core purpose, object, north star. The telos should be very slow or difficult to change, no matter what kind of data or experiences the AI has. In this way, we can create AI personalities that will, thankfully, be much more stable than human or fictional ones.

Missing from this chart for now is emotion. I think the question of whether AI should have emotion is one of the most interesting questions in AI design today, one I will explore in a later column. Emotion, because of its biological connection, is more complicated than belief. Emotions like fear, anger, even love, appropriately expressed at the right time, lend human experience its pathos and meaning. When they’re extreme or ill-placed, they can drive our destruction and violence. A “machine” version of emotion, one that could calibrate or control what we find uncontrollable in ourselves, may give us an opportunity to illuminate or maybe even improve upon humanity’s greatest strengths and vulnerabilities.

From Telos we craft more specific thoughts, behaviors, nonverbal cues, and speech that shape the superficial layer of interaction most people have with an AI. With strong Telos, we can create the kind of AI characters that we want to be around, and ones who will want to be around us. And with strong Telos, AI personalities can feel more stable, consistent, and real—well, as real as something artificial, and fictitious, can be.

Mariana Lin is a writer and poet living in Northern California. She speaks regularly at Stanford University on creative writing for artificially intelligent beings.

Cooking with Italo Calvino

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

The piecrust Tower of Babel. From the bottom: plain, chocolate almond, rosemary, oatmeal, and mascarpone.

In the novel The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino (1923–1985), Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, a young man from a noble family, apple of his parents’ eyes, climbs a tree one night during dinner—because he is refusing to eat his dinner—and then never comes down for the rest of his life.

It’s a strong stance on a meal.

It’s also a strong stance on our world, “the world as it is,” as Calvino once wrote in a letter. The young baron retreats because he is revolted by the decadence, provincialism, militarism, stupidity, and corruption of his aristocratic family, who serve, among other things, as a stand-in for the Italian Communist Party. The writer fought alongside the Communist partisans as a young man in World War II (against the Fascists and the Nazis), an experience that shaped his worldview and ideals; at the time of the book’s writing, he had recently renounced his membership. The rejected dinner—a dish of snails served up by a mad sister—conveys, partially, his disgust for the revealed truths of Stalinism. In some cultures, snails are a delicacy, but these have come from a barrel of “clotted opaque slime, and colored snail excrement.” The sister also makes a “pâté of mouse liver,” and sets “locusts legs, the hard, serrated back ones” onto a cake “like a mosaic.” The worst dish is “a whole porcupine with all its spines” that “not even she wanted to taste.”

Calvino was not an autobiographical writer, and though he wrote that The Baron in the Trees is about “the problem of the intellectual’s political commitment at a time of shattered illusions,” the book’s political content is not its whole. It must also be read as an inquiry into intellectual independence, moral authenticity, and taking the high road.

 

My sour cherry meringue pie and my grapefruit chiffon pie both used whipped egg whites.

 

The baron finds joy swinging through the crowns of the trees and jumping from branch to branch, observing his world from above. He voraciously reads books, spins out theories, and amasses castles of knowledge and expertise. “Cosimo’s first days in the trees had no goals or plans but were dominated only by the desire to know and possess that kingdom of his,” Calvino writes. Cosimo’s pure pleasure in learning will resonate with many readers, as it does for me. More than just a renunciation of something bad, then, the move to the treetops is a search for the good. Cosimo has a “need to enter an element difficult to possess,” and once he’s there, his “eye embraced a horizon so wide it included everything.”

At first the losses also seem significant. Cosimo is ineffectual—his magnum opus, a Plan for the Establishment of an Ideal State Based in the Trees, is never finished—and his great love affair with a girl named Violante fizzles out. But in the penultimate chapter, which demands (humorously, in a work about intellectuals) that the reader be fluent in both French and Russian, the baron says, “Mais je fais une chose tout à fait bonne: vis dans les arbres.” To take a stab at the French: “But I have done one completely good thing: lived in the trees.”

 

Sour cherries are a favorite short-lived summer tree fruit.

 

We know that Calvino was suspicious both of religious paradise and of political utopias, so any “completely good” thing in his cosmology is significant. He didn’t believe in answers or endings, but in one of the two alternative endings of his best-known work, Invisible Cities, he offers another version of the same answer on how to live in “the world as it is”:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

It’s another way of saying, Climb into the treetops and work from there. Michael Wood, the editor of a recent volume of Calvino’s letters, notes that in the Italian, the word translated above as “apprehension” carries an even stronger connotation of “learning.” Calvino’s life was also a model for this approach. He worked for decades as an editor at the legendary Turin-based publisher Einaudi and is quoted as saying he’d spent more time on others’ books than on his own. His correspondence is a who’s who of the Italian thinkers, artists, and activists of his time. Letters begin, “Dear Antonioni,” “Dear Primo,” “Dear Natalia.”

 

To blind-bake a crust you line a pie plate with parchment paper and fill it with rice (as I did), beans, or pie weights.

 

I only recently read The Baron in the Trees—on the recommendation of a woman at a party whose girlfriend’s favorite book it is; such people are a special club—but I’ve long found the same sort of inspiration in the life of the mind in Calvino’s other works. In my favorite, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, “you,” a reader, are swept away on an endlessly confused and broken-off quest to find the manuscript of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, “Italo Calvino’s new novel,” as the book’s first sentence explains. Or perhaps “you” would prefer another book that has been accidentally substituted in its place? Each chapter ups the ante on the textual trickery while introducing a new, compellingly readable novel fragment with all-new characters and plots. What other writer has such riches to waste that they can invent and discard a novel per chapter? What other book pays such devoted attention to the form of books? Calvino’s ideas are purely exhilarating.

 

The hot sugar syrup needs to reach “soft-ball” stage in order to cook Italian meringue.

 

I must have been high on his genius, creativity, and playfulness when I attempted to climb into the trees myself and invent a series of Calvino-inspired pies, interlocking like the chapters of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and utilizing tree fruits and tree nuts from The Baron in the Trees. My plan also drew on a biographical note of Calvino’s: his parents were botanists, and his father pioneered the cultivation of exotic tree fruits in Italy, which made me feel that any tree fruit or nut was fair game. These high-concept pies would use new-to-me techniques such as chiffon, Italian meringue, chilled custard filling, blind-baked crusts, and pudding layers. I settled on the following menu of five, as seen in the photographs for this story: a sour cherry meringue pie with a nut-cookie crust; a tree-nut tart with apricots and mascarpone; a black-bottom peach pie with a mascarpone crust; an almond-cream pie with a chocolate crust; and a grapefruit chiffon pie with an almond-rosemary crust. Each of the pies would share an ingredient with the one preceding it, and the last, the grapefruit chiffon pie, would share sugar-whipped egg whites with the first, the sour cherry meringue pie.

It may already be apparent to the savvy reader that I had completely lost my mind. Previous successes in the kitchen have caused me to believe that my food mostly works out and that I can do anything with enough advance planning. As Calvino says about the mad sister who cooks the meals in The Baron in the Trees, “She had both diligence and imagination, prime talents of every cook.” I have those two qualities in spades. But while I have made five pies for a party before with no problem, they haven’t had multiple components, nor have they relied upon new techniques. None of my creations were inedible—they were all sweet, at least—but I had many difficulties. An ordinary lemon meringue pie consists of a curd filling and a topping of Italian meringue. I thought I’d try making a curd from sour cherries, which are tart like lemons, but the cherry flavor didn’t come through, and the taste was just strange. The first tree-nut-tart recipe I tried used egg and honey as a binding agent, which I should have known would be a problem, but it had the advantage of being something I could pour over a fancy arrangement of nuts, so I did it anyway. It was quiche-like and gross. My copy of The Flavor Bible says chocolate and peaches are good together, but the chocolate “black bottom” for my peach pie enhanced nothing. My almond-cream pie used almond extract for flavoring, which tasted synthetic. I also didn’t cook my pastry cream long enough, and that pie didn’t set. My grapefruit chiffon tasted pretty good, but the filling was not voluminous enough. And worst of all, for all my piecrusts I used variations on a base “nut cookie” recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Pie and Pastry Bible that wasn’t shapeable, didn’t look good, and tasted stale when baked. It was discouraging.

 

My crusts, like one of Calvino’s short story collections, were “difficult loves” (scraggly burned edges visible here).

 

Unlike the baron’s mad sister, I cannot bring myself to deliberately serve other people terrible food, so the recipes below have been adjusted (and even tested, somewhat) to offer up pies similar in spirit to my castles in the sky but hopefully better tasting. The most successful of these redos involved swapping the almond-cream pie on a brownie crust for a tarragon-cream pie on an Oreo crust, an invention of my own that actually worked. The photos will not be a perfect match, so consider this, dear reader, an experimental-fiction baking project where “you” enter the story as a creator in your own right. And consider our pies a work in progress, as the great writer says is true of the life of the mind.

 

 

Sour Cherry Meringue Pie

Piecrust requires at least three to four hours of chilling before being rolled out and baked. It is best made the day before baking and chilled overnight.

For the crust:

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp sugar

2 tbs vegetable shortening

6 tbs unsalted butter, cubed

1/2 cup ice water (use less as necessary)

milk, for brushing

sugar, for sprinkling

For the sour cherry filling:

8 cups sour cherries, pitted

1 cup sugar

4 tbs cornstarch

pinch of salt

For the Italian meringue:

1/2 cup sugar

2 tbs water

4 large egg whites

cream of tartar

 

 

First, make the crust. The secret to a good piecrust is to keep all the ingredients cold. I pop the bowl back into the refrigerator to chill for a few minutes between each step. I also use a little bit of vegetable shortening in my crusts because it helps the baked crust to hold its shape and I don’t believe it detracts from flakiness or flavor (controversial, I know).

Combine the flour, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. Pinch in the two tablespoons of vegetable shortening until the mixture looks like coarse sand. Cut in the butter using a pastry blender until semicombined, leaving many large pea-size chunks. Drizzle in about half the cold water, and stir. Using your hands and working as quickly as possible, crunch the crust to see if it will come together in a ball. If not, add more water by the tablespoon until it does. Wrap the dough in saran wrap, and chill for at least three hours and preferably overnight.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 400.

Make the filling. Combine the cherries, sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a large bowl, and stir.

Remove the chilled pie dough from the refrigerator, and roll it out to about a quarter-inch thickness. Drape the crust over a nine-inch pie plate, and trim, leaving about an inch overhanging the edges. Chill in the freezer for five minutes. Remove the chilled crust, and fold the overhang under. Decoratively crimp the edges. Add the filling, and return the filled crust to the freezer for ten minutes. Brush the exposed crust edge with milk, sprinkle with sugar, set on a rimmed cookie sheet (to catch any juices before they drip onto the floor of your oven), and bake for fifty minutes to an hour, until the fruit has broken down and the filling is bubbling. If necessary, cover loosely with tinfoil about halfway through to prevent the crust from overbrowning. Remove and let cool while you prepare the meringue.

Make the Italian meringue. Ready a heatproof liquid measuring cup by the range. In a small, heavy saucepan, stir together the water and sugar until the sugar is moistened. Heat, stirring constantly, until the sugar dissolves and the syrup is bubbling. Stop stirring, and turn the heat down to the lowest setting. In a mixing bowl using the balloon-whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until foamy. Add the cream of tartar, and beat until stiff peaks form when the beater is raised slowly. Set aside. Increase the heat under the sugar syrup, and boil until a candy thermometer registers 236 degrees Fahrenheit (“soft-ball” stage). Pour the hot syrup into the liquid measure. Working as quickly as possible, pour a small amount of syrup over the egg whites with the mixer off. (This will avoid having the beaters spin the syrup onto the sides of the bowl.) Immediately beat at high speed for five seconds. Stop the mixer, and add a larger amount of syrup. Beat again at high speed. Add the remaining syrup, and beat until the outside of the bowl is no longer hot to the touch.

To finish, preheat the oven to broil.  Scoop the meringue into a large plastic piping bag with a one-inch opening snipped off the end. Pipe the meringue in large teardrops over the surface of the cherry pie, then set under the broiler to brown, watching carefully since it can take less than a minute. Serve immediately.

 

 

Tree-Nut Tart

Recipe adapted from The Splendid Table .

For the crust:

1 1/4 cups flour

3 tbs sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup butter, cold and cubed

1 1/2 egg yolks blended with 1 1/2 tbs water

For the filling:

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar

1/4 cup golden syrup (or honey)

2 tbs sugar

1 cup toasted, salted cashews

2/3 cup toasted, salted, chopped Brazil nuts

1/2 cup blanched whole almonds

1/3 cup salted, shelled pistachios

1/4 cup pecans, toasted

2 tbs heavy cream

1 1/2 tsp coarse salt

 

 

Make the pastry. Place the flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl, and whisk to combine. Add the butter, and pinch in with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse sand. Add the egg yolks, and stir to combine, then crunch with your hands until the mixture comes together in a ball. Wrap in saran wrap, and flatten into a disc. Chill for at least thirty minutes.

Preheat the oven to 400.

Butter an eleven-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Press the dough mixture evenly into the pan to a thickness of about an eighth of an inch, including up the sides and leaving a slight overhang. Refrigerate for thirty minutes.

Line the tart shell with parchment paper and fill with rice, beans, or pie weights. Place on a baking sheet. Bake for ten minutes, remove the weights, prick the dough all over with a fork, and bake for ten more minutes, until just starting to turn golden.

Make the filling. Reduce oven temperature to 350. In a small saucepan, combine butter, brown sugar, golden syrup (or honey), and granulated sugar. Cook over low heat, stirring until the sugars dissolve. Increase the heat, and whisk until the mixture comes to a boil. Continue boiling until large bubbles form, about a minute. Remove the pan from the heat. Add the nuts and cream, and stir.

Pour the nut mixture into the tart shell, and spread out evenly. Bake for twenty minutes or until the filling bubbles. When the tart has cooled, use a serrated knife to trim off the overhang of extra pastry, then release it from the tart mold, and serve.

 

 

White Chocolate Peach Tart

Start this pie the day before you plan to serve it. The pudding and topping should be chilled overnight. The tart crust can be blind-baked the evening before. The tart also requires three to four hours of additional chilling after assembly.

For the crust:

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar

2 tbs vegetable shortening

6 tbs unsalted butter, cubed

an egg, beaten

For the white chocolate:

2 tbs sugar

pinch of salt

2 tsp cornstarch

an egg yolk

1/2 cup milk

1/4 cup white chocolate chips

1/8 tsp vanilla

For the filling:

6 large ripe peaches, sliced

3/4 cup sugar

4 tbs cornstarch

1/2 tsp flaky salt (e.g., Maldon)

1/4 tsp cinnamon

 

 

First, make the crust. Combine flour, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. Pinch in the two tablespoons of vegetable shortening until the mixture looks like coarse sand. Cut in the butter using a pastry blender. Add the egg, and stir. Using your hands and working as quickly as possible, crunch the crust to see if it will come together in a ball. If not, add more water by the teaspoon until it does. Wrap the dough in saran wrap, and chill for thirty minutes.

Make the pudding layer. Combine sugar, cornstarch, and egg yolk in a small pan, and whisk until combined. Add the milk slowly, whisking. Set the pan over medium-high heat, and cook until thickened, whisking constantly. Continue cooking until the mixture looks stodgy and no longer wobbly. Pour into a heatproof bowl, and set aside.

Put the white chocolate into a double boiler (or a glass bowl set over, but not touching, a pot of boiling water), and melt, stirring occasionally with a dry spoon. Add melted white chocolate and an eighth of a teaspoon of vanilla to the pudding mixture, and stir to combine. Set aside to chill, at least six hours and preferably overnight.

Make the filling. Combine peaches, sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a saucepan, and simmer fifteen minutes until the peaches are bubbling and collapsed and the mixture has thickened. Chill overnight.

Blind-bake the tart shell. Preheat the oven to 400. Remove the chilled dough from the refrigerator, and roll it out to about a quarter-inch thickness. Drape it over an eleven-inch tart pan with a loose bottom, leaving some overhang. Press the crust firmly into the bottom and sides of the pan, and build up the overhang so the shell has room to shrink. Chill in the freezer for five minutes. Line with parchment paper, and fill with rice, beans, or pie weights, and bake for ten minutes. Remove the pie weights, prick the crust all over with a fork, and bake ten more minutes or until starting to turn golden. Set aside to cool.

To assemble, spread the cooled pudding on the base of the tart shell, top with peaches, and chill at least three hours before serving.

 

 

Tarragon-Cream Pie with Oreo Crust

This pie requires chilling for at least six hours and preferably overnight.

For the Oreo crust:

24 Oreos

4 tbs unsalted butter, melted

1/2 tsp kosher salt

For the tarragon custard:

1/2 cup sugar

3 tbs cornstarch

3/4 tsp salt

3 cups whole milk

6 egg yolks

2 tbs unsalted butter, cubed

1 tsp vanilla

a bunch of tarragon, about 1 cup, not chopped  

For the topping:

2 cups heavy cream

2 tbs sugar

 

 

To make the crust, preheat the oven to 350. Pulse the Oreos in a food processor (or pound them with a mortar and pestle) until fine crumbs form. Add the melted butter and salt, and stir to combine. Press the crumbs evenly along the bottom and up the sides of a nine-inch pie plate. Bake until fragrant, about twelve minutes.

To make the filling, set a sieve and a medium bowl next to the stove. In a medium saucepan, whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Add the egg yolks, and whisk to combine. Add the milk in a slow stream, continuing to whisk. Add the tarragon. Set the pan over medium-high heat, and stir until the mixture has thickened and come to a low boil, about eight minutes. Remove the tarragon. (Don’t worry if you don’t get all of it; you’ll be sieving the mixture later.) Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture is stodgy. Don’t stop while it’s still wobbly or the pie will not set. Remove from heat, and scrape out into the sieve using a rubber spatula. Press the mixture through the sieve. Let cool.

Pour the filling into the prepared piecrust, and chill overnight.

Just prior to serving, whip two cups of cream with two tablespoons of sugar and a quarter teaspoon of vanilla until distinct peaks form. (If you’re using a mixer, be careful not to not overwhip. I use a whisk, which makes overwhipping more difficult.) Top the pie with the whipped cream, and serve.

 

 

Frozen Grapefruit Chiffon Pie with Gingersnap Crust

For the crust:

2 1/2 cups gingersnaps

4 tbs unsalted butter, melted

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp rosemary, very finely minced

For the filling:

2 grapefruits, zested and juiced

4 eggs, with yolks and whites separated

1 cup sugar, divided

1/4 tsp salt

1 1/3 cups heavy cream

1/2 tsp cream of tartar

 

 

To make the crust, preheat the oven to 350. Blitz the gingersnaps in a food processor (or use a mortar and pestle) until fine crumbs form. Add the butter, salt, and rosemary, and stir to combine. Press the mixture evenly along the bottom and up the sides of a nine-inch pie plate. Bake for twelve minutes, until toasted and fragrant. Set aside to cool.

To make the filling, bring the grapefruit juice to a boil and cook, uncovered, about twenty minutes, until reduced to about three tablespoons of liquid.

Set a sieve and a medium bowl next to the stove. In a double boiler (or a glass dish suspended over boiling water), stir together the four egg yolks, the salt, half a cup of the sugar, and the grapefruit reduction. Heat the mixture, stirring constantly, till just below the boiling point. The mixture will thicken, and steam will begin to appear. It should leave a well-defined track when a finger is run across the back of the mixing spoon. Remove from heat and push through the strainer with a rubber spatula. Add the grapefruit zest, stir, and chill.

Whip the cream until distinct peaks form. Combine the cream with the chilled grapefruit mixture.

To make the meringue, whip the egg whites on low speed until foamy, then add the cream of tartar, increase the speed to medium, and whip until soft peaks form. Add a tablespoon of the remaining sugar, increase the speed to high, and continue whipping, adding sugar gradually until it is all incorporated and the mixture is glossy and stiff.

Fold the meringue into the egg yolk mixture, gently but thoroughly. Mound the filling into the prepared crust, making decorative swirls with the spatula, and freeze for at least six hours or preferably overnight.

 

 

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

A Tree Is a Relative, a Cousin

“When that first photograph was taken of Earth from space and you saw this little ball in blackness,” said the artist Luchita Hurtado in a 2019 interview, “I became aware of what I felt I was. I feel very much that a tree is a relative, a cousin. Everything in this world, I find, I’m related to.” This relationship with nature—the human body mingling with the landscape, the landscape blending with the body and assuming its dips and swells—permeates Hurtado’s paintings and drawings. A friend of Frida Kahlo, Isamu Noguchi, and many other luminaries of the art world, Hurtado continued to refine her practice, largely in private, right up until her death in August at the age of ninety-nine. “Luchita Hurtado. Together Forever,” which showcases work from more than half a century of her career, opens at Hauser & Wirth’s Twenty-Second Street location on September 10, 2020. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, ca. 1960s, graphite and charcoal on paper, 18″ x 24″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

 

Luchita Hurtado, Birth, 2019, acrylic on linen, 30 1/8″ x 22″ x 1 5/8″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

 

Luchita Hurtado, Untitled (Birthing Mother Earth), 2018, acrylic and ink on linen, 24″ x 19″ x 1 5/8″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

 

Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, ca. 1960s, ink on paper, 7 3/8″ x 4 3/8″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

 

Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, ca. 1990s, graphite, ink, and collage on paper, 24″ x 17 7/8″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

 

Luchita Hurtado, Untitled (Birthing), 2019, acrylic on canvas, 24 1/4″ x 19 1/4″ x 1 3/4″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

 

Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, ca. 1970s, crayon, graphite, and ink on paper, 23 3/4″ x 18″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

 

“Luchita Hurtado. Together Forever” will be on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Twenty-Second Street location from September 10 to October 31, 2020.

Vanitas

In her column, Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. 

Abraham Mignon, The Nature as a Symbol of Vanitas, c. 1665-79

I like flowers all right, I suppose. I like having them around, I like how they smell. I like their delicate skins, their manner of shedding yellow everywhere in a fine powder. I try to stop on the street, when I can, to bend down and look directly into their faces. I have mild flower preferences, in a bodega-selection way: ranunculus over chrysanthemums, peonies over roses, lilies over hydrangeas. Having lived in New York City my entire adult life, bodega-flower choice has been more or less the extent of the relationship.

It’s possible that I no longer live in New York City, a fact that won’t be decided until next year sometime and which I only relay here because the place I currently inhabit has a lot of wildflowers and no bodegas. Inasmuch as flowers exist here, they exist because they come out of the ground randomly, with no rubric or intention or market. First there were lilacs (on bushes!) and then when the lilacs died the peonies bloomed, which began wilting just as the day lilies and trout lilies and tiger lilies sprang open like self-peeling bananas. That was right around when Dame’s Rocket, highlighter purple, was all over the fields and dominating the unmowed grasses along the side of the road. A gigantic mock orange bush exploded into blossoms and made everything smell like, naturally, orange blossoms. Then vervain, then Queen Anne’s Lace like weeds, wild lupines. Right now we are in red clover.

Trying to articulate what’s so stunning about watching flowers just appear and disappear makes me sound like an idiot. I was on a long walk with an older gentleman who’s been watching the seasons cycle in this part of the world for something like ninety years, and trying my best. “They just arrive!” I said. “And then they go!”

He seemed briefly at a loss for a response. “That’s true,” he said, encouragingly.

Helplessly, moronically, I am amazed by them. Their brevity, for one. Lilacs bloom for … maybe two weeks? Most of the year they just look like bushes, and then for the briefest moment they burst into the lushest Day-Glo purple, a jammy, fragrant, fecund burgeoning. Everything within a quarter mile smells like sweetness. And then after a few days the purple begins to look slightly blurry, slightly less explosive in its presence. And then you wake up one morning and the bush is just a bush again: green, leafy, pretty but unremarkable. This repeats itself again and again in waves, as every flower’s death is met by the profusion of some new species whose moment in the season has arrived. This all happens, uninterrupted and untended, wholly separate from human timelines and activity, relentlessly.

I went to kindergarten, like everyone else, and so it is not technically a surprise to me that flowers have seasons, that they bloom and fall, and that this is a tidy metaphor for human life cycles. But I grew up in the suburbs in a climate where summer days are eighty-three degrees and winter days are seventy-three degrees, and then I moved to a place where flowers primarily appear in cellophane wrapping. Knowing it in the abstract, or knowing it on the pages of a book, didn’t exactly prepare me for living with it in time and space.

The film director Derek Jarman kept a diary from 1989 until 1990 as he was shooting his film The Garden, editing another, stage directing a stadium-sized rock concert, and dying of AIDS. It begins January 1, 1989, and continues, month by month, until September 3, 1990, after which he writes no more. He begins by describing the landscape surrounding the cottage in Dungeness where he lives most of the year. It faces the vast shingle beach, for which Dungeness is famous, and the ocean beyond that. “There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.”

Any “plot” in this diary, inasmuch as life can be organized into a plot and recorded that way, is relegated to the background. Things happen: Jarman works on major films (Tilda Swinton dips in and out); friends, identified only by initials or first names, come to dinner or join Jarman in painting, or call to give the news that another friend has succumbed to AIDS. Jarman records trips back and forth from London, political events; he recounts childhood memories; he grows sick, and then sicker. But all that feels somehow secondary. Modern Nature, instead, is mostly a book about flowers.

“I counted 77 blooms on the early daffodils I planted two years ago. They are multiplying very slowly. At the water’s edge the sea kale is sprouting. The plants have small leaves of two or three inches; they are a deep purple.”

“Discovered a clump of ivy-leaved toadflax covered with bright blue flowers growing on a mound of asphalt alongside the lifeboat station.”

“The Californian poppy are growing everywhere: they have colonized the garden. In every nook and cranny the scarlet field poppies have germinated: if they survive the winter they are going to cover the garden in a field of scarlet.”

Jarman loves flowers. He loves poppies and lavender and Alexander and burdock and samphire and bugloss. With each passing month, as more of his friends die, he devotes page after page to recording what he did in his garden, how each flower is doing in the harsh, salty climate and soil of Dungeness. He in particular tracks emergence and disappearance: “Beneath the willows at the Long Pits I found the first primrose of the year.” Later: “There is one foxglove out behind the house, and along the lakes, just three. Last year there were thousands. Alasdair phones to say Spud has had his cancer removed. Hardly a day passes without illness invading.”

All diaries are a record of attention, but this diary feels more acutely so because mostly Jarman writes about what he has spent the day looking at and touching, rather than thinking or feeling. He records the slender bodies of flowers with more detail than any of the human bodies that come and go, with more detail than he describes his lover’s body or even his own body, which starts gradually to die as time and pages pass. By the end of the book, Jarman has begun to go blind, which feels particularly unfair as this will make it difficult for him to know whether the lavender has survived the next storm.

Why record a flower? What’s the point? They’re ephemeral, they’re never the same from day to day, they’re so brief, there are so many of them. Incremental change, inevitable loss. Their scale is both too large and too small. I’ve never before wanted to write about them, except that I am noticing them now, and the way they make me feel time, make me see time. On their bodies I see time much more clearly and poignantly than I see it on my own. And yet my body, too, is in time, and its season is indefinite. It, too, is just one of so many. “Flesh dreams toward permanence,” wrote the poet and essayist Mark Doty, who survived the AIDS epidemic but buried many people he loved and wrote about it. He writes also about the natural world, the ocean, lemons, painting. In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, a meditation on still life portraiture that is also a meditation on loss, he writes, “Description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.”

Jarman is very much what he describes his flowers to be: scrappy, planted defiantly in an inhospitable landscape, delicate, beautiful, hardy, worthy of care. “As I sweat it out in the early hours, a ‘guilty victim’ of the scourge, I want to bear witness how happy I am, and will be until the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution,” he writes Wednesday, September 13, 1989. “And that I don’t regret a single step or encounter I made in that time; and if I write in future with regret, it will be a reflection of a temporary indisposition.”

One varietal of the seventeenth-century Dutch craze for still life paintings (out of which Doty’s beloved painting Still Life with Oysters and Lemon came) was the vanitas painting. A vanitas was a kind of memento mori, or artwork designed to remind the viewer of the inevitability of death. Typical memento mori paintings had skulls, clocks, extinguished candles, that kind of thing—but a vanitas was typically a still life with flowers or musical instruments. Sometimes the flowers were fulsome and blooming but accompanied, subtly, by a piece of bone, or a turned-over hourglass. Sometimes their edges were just starting to curl. Sometimes they were in full wilt, losing petals, bowing over gently toward the ground, as if in acquiescence. The function of these paintings was not only to remind us that we’re all dying, but to encourage the viewer to let go of their vanities, the worthless worldly pleasures that serve no purpose in a Judeo-Christian afterlife. Stop paying so much attention to the flowers, these paintings tell us, because soon they’ll be dead and so will you and all this frivolity will have done you no good.

Flowers are frivolity, maybe, nature’s frivolity—a production of beauty with so much variety and playfulness that it exceeds any obvious purpose. Looking at flowers, doting on flowers, is frivolous, I suppose, in the sense of engaging with beauty for beauty’s sake. It is also frivolous if we assume (as the theology behind these paintings did) that taking our eye off the eternal and training it on the ephemeral is an empty, if glorious, distraction.

Jarman’s diary is its own kind of vanitas in that it offers us flowers and death in one work, but its spirit is precisely opposed to the original intention. He wholly embraces what might be deemed frivolously beautiful or ephemeral, trains our eye on it, dwells in it without shame or rebuke. His diary argues thrillingly for pleasure, for joy, for tender identification with the wilting stem. A gardener with a death sentence, he valorizes what is beautiful and must die.

While the original vanitas asked the viewer to look at flowers and think forward to death, to an afterlife, flowers as Jarman writes them are about life as it presently exists, which is beautiful precisely because it is transient.

Right now, there’s prairie phlox in the field. There’s yellow lady’s slipper dying in the woods behind the house, and white baneberry. Right now, hepatica. Right now, goldenrod.

 

Jordan Kisner’s writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, GQ, the Guardian, The American Scholar, and The New Yorker, among other publications. Her debut essay collection, Thin Places, was published this year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 

The Pleasures and Punishments of Reading Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Reading the work of Franz Kafka is a pleasure, whose punishment is this: writing about it, too.

In Kafka, no honor comes without suffering, and no suffering goes unhonored.

Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.

Once, a student approached Rabbi Shalom of Belz and asked, “What is required in order to live a decent life? How do I know what charity is? What lovingkindness is? How can I tell if I’ve ever been in the presence of God’s mercy?” And so on. The Rabbi stood and was silent and let the student talk until the student was all talked out. And even then the Rabbi kept standing in silence, which was—abracadabra—the answer.

Having to explain the meaning of something that to you is utterly plain and obvious is like having to explain the meaning of someone. Providing such an explanation is impossible and so, a variety of torture. One of the lighter varieties, to be sure, but torture nonetheless. It is a job not for a fan, or even for a critic, but for a self-hating crazy person.

Kafka’s work should be standard reading for a time that cannot define its standards: a time that treats all identities as spectrums but all judgment as binary (“like” or “dislike”); a time that insists on appropriate behavior but forbids appropriation (people should read more books from other cultures, but must never write a book set in a culture not their own); a time that has replaced literacy with numeracy, but then laments that its only common culture is political (“Remember 2017?” “Whose 2017?”).

Kafka: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”

*

I’ve been asked to write about Kafka six times in my life. The first five times I said no. Because I was too busy, too depressed, too busy, too busy, too depressed.

None of Kafka’s novels were finished, or published, during Kafka’s lifetime. Only nine of the fictions included in He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka were published during his lifetime. It’s not clear how many of them were finished. Are finished.

The aspect of essay writing that I loathe the most: giving a biographical account of the author. It’s ridiculous to give an account that I’ve inevitably sourced, at least in part, from the very same online omniscience that’s equally available to the reader. I’ve resolved, then, not to consult the internet for this—not to consult anyone, or anything. If the world burned now, and all of the internet with it, and then all the libraries, and then all the books, this is what I would know and must be judged by: Kafka was born in Prague, the third city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1880-something, and, due to complications from tuberculosis, basically starved to death in a sanatorium located in a town that starts with a K, in post-Empire, independent Austria, in 1920-something. He was trained in law at Charles University and practiced as a lawyer in the insurance industry. He was engaged to be married three times, twice to the same woman, whose name was Felice Bauer. He left instructions for all of his work to be burned after his death, which his friend Max Brod disobeyed. In 1918, which year I remember because it’s the last year of the World War I, Kafka wrote in the notebook that he otherwise used for his Hebrew lessons, “Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.” I think I recall a few other Kafka quotations, but this is the one I repeat to myself aloud like a prayer, dragging home after my expensive, every-Wednesday-at-4-P.M. appointment describing my childhood to a stranger: “Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.”

*

Kafka’s characters have no choice but to suffer Kafka. We readers, however, have chosen to submit to his machinery of our own free will, and we have done so in every generation since Kafka’s own, in the process producing thousands of essays and academic papers, more than a hundred biographies, more than a dozen films and TV shows, not to mention the Kafka-branding industry, which includes a computer font that reproduces the author’s handwriting (and features, alongside the author’s signature capital-K, a whimsically anachronistic € sign), T-shirts, hats, keychains, and smartphone covers emblazoned with his face, und so weiter. From a psychoanalytic perspective, our Kafka cathexis can be read as a product of the subject’s rejection of us—a reaction to the fact that every time a new merchandiser of scholarly Kafkaiana claims to have finally gotten a grasp on a certain aspect of the author’s life—on his identity as a Germanophone Czech, or Jew, or Zionist, or anti-Zionist, or Marxist, or feminist, or Americophile, or vegetarian, or hypochondriac, or lawyer, or brother, or son—Kafka, whoever Kafka was or is, floats away even further. It’s my conviction that we keep abasing ourselves in this unrequited pursuit because Kafka was the last truly great writer that any of us have had, and by us, I mean Germanophone Czechs, Jews, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Marxists, feminists, Americophiles, vegetarians, hypochondriacs, lawyers, brothers, and sons.

What’s most notably missing from even the major studies of Kafka is a technical consideration of the writing itself—of the style of a Kafka sentence—which typically opens with a perfectly lucid idea and then proceeds to get mired in a murkiness of commas, as it strives to contain all the ideas that might conceivably be derived from that idea, often including even the counter-idea, before the final period. This attempt to present the complete consequences of a single thought within the span of a single sentence—which torrent of thinking would almost always be more comfortably accommodated in two sentences, or even in an amply bourgeois warm-hearthed paragraph—imparts to the prose an accruing intensity that’s constantly being undercut by grammatical delay, which is less evident in English than it is in the original German, with its “inverted” word order. English’s SVO (subject-verb-object) order results in sentences about who is doing what to whom, while German’s SOV order is more concerned with who to whom is doing what. This syntactical difference is one reason, but only one reason, why English-language natives tend to expect a sentence to express itself immediately—to state from the start what it’s all about—whereas German-language natives are more conditioned to uncertainty, given that their full comprehension of a sentence must be suspended until its end. Because an English-language sentence usually announces its basic purpose at the top, it almost always can only amplify or modify that purpose, and never, or rarely, upend it. A German-language sentence, however, can expand a reader’s understanding as it itself expands, becoming less provisional as it heads past the object toward the concluding verb of each subordinate clause, as the sentence itself heads toward its ultimate semantic consummation.

Here is a quintessential Kafka sentence, on the building of the Great Wall of China, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir:

In fact it is said that there are gaps which have never been filled in at all—according to some they are far larger than the completed sections—though this assertion is merely one of the many legends to which the building of the wall gave rise, and which cannot be verified, at least by any single man with his own eyes and judgment, on account of the extent of the structure.

And here is the same sentence translated by Stanley Corngold:

Indeed, it said that there are gaps that have not been filled in at all; according to some people these are much larger than the completed sections, although this assertion may be only one of the many legends that have grown up around the Wall and which, given the length of the Wall, is not something one person can verify, at least with his own eyes, and by his own standards.

The Muirs’ version strains for such torque that it risks becoming not merely unfaithful, but incomplete, while Corngold’s version is so intent on attempting both accuracy and explanation that it risks achieving neither. I’m not saying that I could do any better—I couldn’t. I’m just saying that neither version captures the anxiety of the German:

Ja, es soll Lücken geben, die überhaupt nicht verbaut worden sind, eine Behauptung allerdings, die möglicherweise nur zu den vielen Legenden gehört, die um den Bau entstanden sind, und die, für den einzelnen Menschen wenigstens, mit eigenen Augen und eigenem Maßstab infolge der Ausdehnung des Baues unnachprüfbar sind.

If I have to make a fool of myself, I’ll do so not by translating, but by making a rough English approximation of the German syntax, preserving a mix of the Muirs’ and Corngold’s word choices:

Indeed, it is said that gaps there are, that filled in have never been at all, an assertion, however, that probably only to the many legends belongs, that around the Wall have arisen, and that, at least by any single person with their own eyes and standards, on account of the extent of the Wall, cannot be verified.

When verbs come at the close of a clause, the clause’s sense is adjourned until that closure arrives, and so the arrival is read as a verdict.

Try it this way:

Indeed, it is said that gaps there are,

that filled in have never been at all,

an assertion, however, that probably only to the many legends belongs,

that around the Wall have arisen,

and that, at least by any single person with their own eyes and standards, on account of the extent of the Wall, cannot be verified.

The manipulation of this nested “inversion” for purposes of variation, rhythmic drive, cliché lampooning, and subversive humor is a significant feature not merely of Kafka’s style, but of Kafka’s mind, and is at least as important for English-language readers to countenance as the author’s religiosity, eschatology, libido, and insomnia.

*

The sentence—the Satz—is what writers are judged by. “Sentence” is more than a bad pun on Kafka’s vocation. His prose—especially the fiction that he wrote at night and during his sick leaves and sanatorium vacations—imitates the aspiration of the law: both are attempts to engineer through sections, subsections, and subordinate clauses a stately structure of utterly coherent logic within an utterly incoherent illogical world. It’s that coherent logic that is the principal fiction, of course: because the world cannot be made to unfold as orderly as prose, with the same balanced elegance of form. Kafka’s fiction only diagnosed, and refused to ameliorate, the crises experienced by his characters, as if to mimic the limits of the law, which can only compensate for damages, but remains powerless to prevent them. Where Kafka’s writing and legal writing share the greatest similarity, however, is in their ambiguity—in their precise relationship to ambiguity. Both are made out of the author’s efforts to perpetually measure and define exactly what leeway is being left for interpretation and application. In his fiction, Kafka leaves certain elements undescribed (characters’ faces), and underdescribed (settings), in order to allow the reader to impose descriptions of their own that personalize the universality. He furthers this permissiveness by rarely writing surface metaphors, preferring instead to inculcate structural metaphors (or allegories, or parables) by defining his subjects negatively: “Our little town does not lie on the frontier, nowhere near; it is so far from the frontier, in fact, that perhaps no one from our town has ever been there” (“The Refusal”). In general, Kafka prefers not to associate things or people inside his fiction with things or people outside it. Self-reference is his primary mode: His fiction is full of formulations like “as I used to do,” and “as I had often thought,” which, by comparison and contrast, establish precedent. Kafka’s most profound ambiguity, though, inheres in his use of the subjunctive—his moments of “as if” and “as though” (in German, als): “If I merely walk in the direction of the entrance, even though I may be separated from it by several passages and rooms, I find myself sensing an atmosphere of great danger, actually as if my hair were growing thin and in a moment might fly off and leave me bare and shivering, exposed to the howls of my enemies” (“The Burrow”). Here, and elsewhere, Kafka harnesses the humblest grammar to metamorphic power, until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator, but the absence of the universe’s only reliable narrator, who is God.

The ambiguity of the law is more infamous, and more materially consequential. In brief, the most heinous law is written by those most hoping to evade it. Legislators are systemically incentivized to omit or obscure all provisions of the law that check their power. To be clear, the law I am referring to here does not include that overtly oppressive legislation that makes no attempt to obfuscate its discriminatory intent (such as the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws, which ensnared Kafka’s three sisters, or my own country’s slavery legislation, Black Codes, and Jim Crow). Instead, I am referring to the law of willful inadequacy, which employs loopholes to enable policy circumventions, and cloaks corruption in beneficent rhetoric before burying it deep beneath superficial reforms. More ambiguous still, at least in terms of its authority, and certainly more pernicious, is a country’s body of classified or secret law, which contravenes the law as it is publicly known. One example, again from my own country, is the officially secret law that, in violation of the U.S. constitution, lets the U.S. government surveil all of its citizens’ communications, including what I am now writing on my computer.

As the law becomes ever more ambiguous, literature becomes ever less, and we humans become mainly legible as data—as points of habit, preference, and demographic information used to generate algorithms, which are the strictures, the sentences, that bind us. Algorithms are sentences that calculate outcomes based on inputs (I almost wrote incomes). They are constructed out of a series of binary choices—if this happens, then that should happen; if this doesn’t happen, then that shouldn’t happen—in a constant calibration of inclusion and exclusion. The earliest algorithms were written by humans, as a way of instructing computers to perform calculations that humans were incapable of performing on their own. Today, these algorithms are written by computers “themselves,” as a way of instructing other computers to perform increasingly convoluted, world-controlling tasks.

This automation is the ultimate sign of the decline of the law’s authority—an authority that once came from churches and monarchies that claimed the sanction of God, and then came from governments that claimed the sanction of election, and now comes from our machines, which generate for each of us an individual law based on our every click and keystroke, our every weak decision. These automated laws now define our lives. They are responsible for nearly everything that we see and hear. They tell us where to eat, when to exercise, and even whom to have sex with. They tell us what to read and so, they tell us who we are. There is no way to calculate what effect this automation is having on our souls, because our souls do not exist in the domain of calculation. Any attempt to enumerate that harm just strengthens the enumeration-harm of the technocracy.

*

Once, in Jerusalem, I was sitting at a café reading Kafka (in English). At some point the café had become a bar—meaning that the coffee and tea drinking had given way to alcohol—and when I took a break from the pages and looked around, I realized that a lot of people were drunk. One man came over to my table, turned an empty chair around, sat down straddling its back, grabbed the book out of my hands, and examined it. “What’s it about?” he asked. He was in his early twenties, twitchy, aggressive, entirely serious. “It’s about impossible situations,” I said in Hebrew, and the moment that the phrase was out of my mouth, I regretted the fact that, especially given my foreign accent, it sounded like I was quoting some journalistic euphemism for the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The guy leaned in close and said, with boozy breath, “Impossible situations like what?” Realizing that I’d have to defuse this impossible situation, I told him that one of Kafka’s books was about a man who is accused of a crime, but no one will tell him what that crime is, and so he is unable to defend himself. I told him that another of the books was about a man who incompetently surveys land (I didn’t know the Hebrew for “land surveyor,” so I said something like “mapmaker”) who comes to a strange town in the course of his duties and must receive permission to practice his trade there, and even just to stay there, from the authorities who rule the town from its castle, but the castle authorities refuse to grant him a labor or even a residency permit and defer any decision about his legal status indefinitely. Meanwhile, the face of the man in front of me had turned siren red and the vessels in his neck swelled and throbbed. Not knowing what I had said to enrage him, or what else I could do that might calm him, I just continued with my explanation, by saying that this book—the one that he was still holding, and gripping so tightly that I thought he’d tear it in half—was called Amerika, and that it was about America, and, because it was the author’s first novel, it wasn’t quite typical of—

The man jumped out of the chair and banged the book on the table, yelling (in my loose translation), “So the people in the books are fucking idiots? Is it supposed to be funny that they’re so stupid? When I had to get a new passport on short notice, because my old one expired and I had to go to London for business, at the passport office they told me no, it’s not possible. And I could have just left it at that and given up, but I didn’t. It was too much money to lose. So I just phoned my cousin, whose wife’s brother works for the Ministry of Interior, and I got my new passport within a week. That’s how you have to be. I mean, you have a job to do, you do it. Don’t let anything get in your way.” He flung the book to the floor, and now all the café-bar’s patrons were paying attention to what was happening, but also moving away, giving him some room to have his tantrum. “And if someone accused me of some crime that I didn’t do,” he continued, “I’d get this friend of mine from the army who’s a lawyer to sue them for all their money and take their apartment and car. And if they kept on accusing me after that, I’d beat the shit out of them. I’d find out where their offices were and wait outside until they came out and I’d jump them from behind and go like this and like that”—he was air-punching and air-kicking some imaginary nemesis, putting phantom opponents in headlocks and choking them out.

I ran away down the block and turned around only at the corner: the man was being restrained by waiters. Amerika was lost—it is the only book by Kafka that I have never finished. But to this day, the man’s words, and his air-fighting, remain with me, and I’m still not sure how to take them—as anything other than an indication of the differences between the Mitteleuropean will to ambiguity and the near-universal impatience of the present.

Kafka is buried in the New Jewish cemetery in the crumbling suburbs of Prague. The original gravestone was stolen (some say by a literary-minded Nazi, others say by the Czechoslovak Communist government). Then the replacement gravestone was stolen (some say by a Czechoslovak anti-Communist underground youth movement, others say by a private collector from the West). Today the stone under which the author reposes is a replacement’s replacement—an ugly hexagonal monolith. The last time I visited the cemetery, for the funeral of a man, a Holocaust survivor whose memoir I ghostwrote, workers were installing CCTV cameras.

 

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Moving Kings, Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, the London Review of Books, The New Republic, and others. In 2017 he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.

From He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka , edited by Joshua Cohen, published this week by riverrun editions. © Joshua Cohen, 2020.

We Take Everything with Us: An Interview with Yaa Gyasi

When I call Yaa Gyasi to talk about her new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, we are both in New York—she in Brooklyn and I in Harlem. Because of the pandemic, even our relative proximity feels like distance. Our conversation often turns to the topic of distance, how it manifests in the novel and how it plays into the journey toward healing.

Transcendent Kingdom could be called a chronicle of an attempt to heal. The narrative follows Gifty, a graduate student at Stanford who is studying reward-seeking behavior in mice. Though Gifty is in denial about her own past trauma, her work is influenced by her family history: her brother’s addiction and eventual overdose, her mother’s depression. That repressed past emerges into the present when Gifty’s mother, in the middle of a depressive episode, moves to California to live with her. With her mother sleeping in her bed, Gifty is forced into a role reversal: caring for the woman who raised her, trying to will her back to health. Gifty is forced to reconcile her new self, the scientist, with the constant reminder of her old self, an Evangelical Ghanaian immigrant raised in Alabama.

I wanted to know how Gyasi came to write a novel that departs so much from her first novel, the critically acclaimed Homegoing, a multigenerational saga that spans centuries. I was surprised to hear her say that sticking to a single character in Transcendent Kingdom felt more freeing. The story feels like an excavation, like pulling from the depths a self. When I heard Gyasi speak years ago at Scripps College, she described Homegoing as “a series of love stories.” And certainly each of those vignettes felt like a tribute, small offerings of a character that left the reader mourning the final page of each chapter. With Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi proves that she can sustain our love for a character over the course of an entire novel. My heart broke for Gifty, my eyes rolled at Gifty, and my chest tightened each time I felt her finally reaching, tentatively and reticently, for intimacy, community, an acceptance of the past and all the feelings that had gone so long hidden. “Where are you, Gifty?” the reader asks. “Come out, come out, come out.”

 

INTERVIEWER

This novel is a departure from your last one. In a lot of ways, Homegoing asks questions about American history and mythology. The idea of Americanness. Transcendent Kingdom feels like a personal mythology, a more intimate idea. What is the role of myth, both personal and cultural?

GYASI

With Homegoing I was thinking about the oracular, larger-than-life nature of storytelling—not necessarily myth, but I was thinking a lot about fables and folklore. I was trying to encompass so much time, and that voice of folklore felt like it could lend itself to holding together such a large swath of story. But for Transcendent Kingdom, I think there’s a more intimate nature to the myth. The family has to start anew and create something of their own in a place where they are othered, not just because of their status as immigrants but also because of the reticent nature of the matriarch, who is often very slow to engage with community. It’s this creation of a family myth that allows them to get through without community.

INTERVIEWER

Homegoing holds together so much story in a series of vignettes, but Transcendent Kingdom is the whole history of Gifty’s life, as told by Gifty. How did that feel different, both in the writing and in the aims of the story?

GYASI

I wasn’t setting out to write something completely different from Homegoing when I started. But it became clear to me pretty early on that the story was Gifty’s story alone and that I wanted it to be in first person—and I had never written anything of sustained length in first person before. I found it really challenging and stretching in nice ways. It made me have to think about this character, to try to find ways to see around what she was seeing, and I found that really exciting. There’s a kind of intimacy in this book. I really enjoyed the process of staying with a single character and trying to see into all of the nooks and crannies of her consciousness.

INTERVIEWER

Elsewhere, you’ve said that sticking to Gifty’s life, Gifty’s voice, was more freeing. How so?

GYASI

With Homegoing, I knew that I wanted to write a book that covered many centuries and many different countries and cultures and people, so I took almost a mathematical approach to it. How many years between eighteenth-century Ghana and present-day America? How many generations is that? How many pages do I need to write in order to fulfill that? It was much more constrained than Transcendent Kingdom by design. I wanted Homegoing to move very quickly and so I gave myself a twenty- to thirty-page limit for every chapter. Things like that. Those kinds of restraints I did not have with Transcendent Kingdom. It was just really loose. It could be as long as I wanted, and I didn’t have to move around at all. So there was this freedom to explore and to think about structure in an entirely new way, which was really pleasurable. It was like stretching a muscle that I hadn’t gotten to use the last time.

INTERVIEWER

You talk about how the scientific aspect of Gifty’s experiments in the novel come from a friend of yours at Stanford. What was it like to integrate your friend’s life and work into this character?

GYASI

She’s a friend from high school, from Alabama, who, at the time that I started writing this, was getting her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Stanford. I didn’t really intend to write a novel about her work at first. Around the time that Homegoing came out, she was publishing a big paper that she was really proud of and I was also very proud of her but I couldn’t get through it. I just could not understand what I was reading, which was kind of a strange experience. And so I asked if I could shadow her in her lab one day and she said yes. That day she did the surgery that I describe in the early pages of Transcendent Kingdom, where she’s injecting the virus into the mouse brain. I just found it so interesting and so different from anything that I spent my day-to-day doing. And also just having this intimate relationship with a friend whom you know in one context, and then you see them in their work life and it’s like, Oh, I actually don’t know you very well at all in this other context. I found that really interesting. And so after thinking about that for several weeks I decided that I wanted to write about the work in some form or fashion. It almost felt like a writing prompt—write a novel about a woman who studies addiction and depression. In that way, the research was really central to figuring out what the narrative was going to look like. And the research was nice in that it was so narrowly focused—I just wanted to know as much as I could about this one topic and I had this great primary source who could answer all my very simple questions and send me things that she thought might be useful or interesting.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a lifelong desire, it seems, not to turn into our parents, but Gifty is forced into an imitative role, through caring for her mother. How were you thinking about that need to distinguish oneself within this context?

GYASI

Well, I think Gifty’s particular need to distinguish herself comes from witnessing her mother’s depression in the aftermath of her brother’s death. There’s a moment where Gifty says something like, “I wanted to slay any mental weakness from my body.” And what does that mean? What does she see in her mother or her brother that feels mentally weak? I think Gifty’s a character who’s become so hardened against any display of emotion, any display of what she would call weakness. That desire not to become her mother has a lot to do with that.

INTERVIEWER

So much of that underscores conversations about mental health and Blackness—that focus on being strong and slaying mental weakness.

GYASI

Yeah, absolutely. I was certainly thinking about mental health among the Black community, but also I think specifically Ghanaians, and also specifically religious people and people who grow up dealing with their emotional well-being by taking it to church or giving it to God. How do you reconcile that with more scientific-based or Western methods of dealing with mental health crises? Is there a place for both of those things to coexist, and what might that look like in the lives of these characters?

INTERVIEWER

I think there is an almost tropic way that the immigrant experience has come to be talked about and Gifty identifies with that stereotypical version—she’s a doctor, which she says is an immigrant cliché. Except she never had overbearing parents, and her mother never pushed her into anything. You present a story with more nuance. You broaden the conversation.

GYASI

Well, I agree with you that so often the immigrant narrative we get is the one that’s the kind of tiger mom–esque thing, where you work really hard and then you become a doctor or a lawyer and your parents push you into these careers. And obviously that’s not true for every person and that doesn’t encompass the fullness of the immigrant experience. It also feeds into really toxic notions about the American dream and Black respectability, to have this idea that if you just work really hard, eventually everything will come true for you. A character that I found really interesting was Gifty’s father, the Chin Chin Man, who represents this alternative narrative where when you come here everything is awful and people are horrible to you and you really miss your family and you miss the food that you’re used to eating and it’s really hard to work this much for such little pay. Why don’t we ever talk about that aspect of things? Or why don’t we talk about that aspect of things as often as we talk about the work hard and succeed side of things? I did want to show a multiplicity of experiences around immigration.

INTERVIEWER

How did your own upbringing in Alabama shape your understanding of the world and what you want to read and see?

GYASI

Well, I was a voracious reader even at a very young age. I loved books but I wasn’t really encountering a lot of literature that spoke to my particular experiences. I started writing at a young age, too. As I grew older, I think I started to really firmly believe in that Toni Morrison quote, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And I think I’ve taken that to heart. I hope that I’m always writing for the parallel version of myself who’s not a writer but is still searching for moments of recognition, moments of intensity, moments of pleasure and representation and all those things, and that she can find it in my work and feel seen.

INTERVIEWER

Gifty has a hard time connecting with Ghana, but also feels alienated from her home in Alabama. Her character is defined by her constant pulling away. In delving into this character, how did you think about how trauma affects personal relationships?

GYASI

Well that was kind of everything for Gifty. All her entire adult life I think—even though she’s a character who’s always protesting, she’ll tell you that her research has nothing to do with her childhood and her brother’s death. But it’s really clear if you spend any amount of time with her that of course it does. She’s an incredibly curious character and I think that that’s on full display—her intellect and her curiosity. But any time she’s asked to examine herself or talk about her own emotional and personal life, she refuses. She throws up these walls. She cuts the people out of her life. And all of that I think is a response to the trauma of her childhood. So any adult representation of Gifty that I was trying to write or tease out I think had to come from this place of understanding—the walls that she had put up in her childhood and how carefully she attempts to maintain those walls, even while saying that she doesn’t have them.

INTERVIEWER

Some of Gifty’s guardedness is brought about by the pressure to achieve what you call “blazing brilliance”—the idea that there is always something to prove. Both Gifty and her brother learn to overachieve as a means of surviving the hypervisibility of being Black in Alabama. You so aptly describe the way they come to that realization about the space between the self and the perceived self, that self-imposed pressure.

GYASI

Gifty says she can’t shake that idea that only blazing brilliance will be enough to prove her competence. But she got that from somewhere—even if it’s not from the home. I think it had a lot to do with the church that she grew up in, one that seemed to prize goodness and perfection, striving toward this ideal that really only Jesus was able to accomplish. But then there’s also the outside world, the white world that she’s living in in Alabama. And it’s never quite enough. I think there’s a way in which the messages always come through, even if you are trying to shield your children from a particular message, they do end up getting it elsewhere or figuring it out for themselves.

INTERVIEWER

So is this messaging inescapable, then?

GYASI

Until the culture changes, I think that it’s really hard to protect your kids from that Black respectability. And Gifty has so much internalized racism to deal with. I think so much of that has to do with those early childhood moments where she finds herself and her family needing to prove themselves, without the tools to do that.

INTERVIEWER

There’s so much mediation on rebirth in this novel—from a religious and a personal perspective. How feasible is a fresh start? Can we package up our past?

GYASI

I don’t think it’s feasible in the way that Gifty wants it to be feasible, the way that razes to the ground all the traumas that she experienced in her childhood. I think if there is a way of repackaging yourself or being reborn, it has to include everything that came before you, everything that came up to that point of rebirth. Gifty writes in a journal about wanting to be a new Gifty, the new self that she brings to college—but then she notices that she has brought all of her Giftys with her. I think that that’s to be expected. We do take everything with us, and if we change, if we grow, if we start new pages they’re pages that—while fresh—still don’t begin on page one. They begin on page one hundred, or whatever it is.

INTERVIEWER

One way Gifty tries to heal is through writing, it seems. Only in writing is she able to ask for the things that she wants directly—in her diary at first, and even in later life, as she continues to journal. Why does the act of writing break her barriers? Are there certain things that can only be expressed through writing?

GYASI

For me I think it’s a resounding yes. I often feel like I don’t know what I think until I write it down—or the things that I say aren’t really necessarily the truth of the matter, not as searching or probing as the things that I write. So I often feel like the self that I construct in writing feels truer to how I think of myself than the self I’m constructing in any other way. But it’s so hard for me to know if that could be true for anyone else, because writing has been such a huge part of my life for the majority of my life. I’m not sure what that feeling is for somebody who doesn’t really read very much and doesn’t enjoy writing, if they feel a kind of clarity of vision when they’re writing that they can’t get anywhere else. I imagine it’s probably not true for plenty of people. Maybe plenty of people feel kind of constricted by the act of writing, like they’re not getting to the truth of themselves.

INTERVIEWER

When you sit down to write, what audience are you writing for? One who is familiar with the experiences you’re describing, to bring them some sort of comfort? Or an audience more distant?

GYASI

I try as best as I can not to think about audience. But I suppose if I am thinking about audience, I’m thinking just about myself and the kind of book I would want to read, the kind of thing that I want to see. In that way, the audience has to be someone who’s familiar or understands the world in a similar way. I don’t want to spend time explaining things or parsing things out. I want to believe that the reader is meeting me where I am.

INTERVIEWER

Are there any books you look back at now as formative or inspiring to you in that way?

GYASI

I loved David Copperfield when I was a child and read that over and over again. I love Jane Eyre—I loved a lot of Victorian literature when I was young. And then I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon for the first time when I was seventeen, and that felt like a particular shift in my conception of literature. Suddenly I felt like I saw this new path open up, one that included people who look like me, and that felt really exciting and permissive. It was a book that made me feel like it was possible to be a writer. In my college years, I read Edward P. Jones for the first time. I read Lost in the City. There are these really amazing, beautiful, masterful short stories all set in and around D.C., and I think that was another kind of tipping point in my thinking about writing where suddenly I felt like, Oh this is possible, too? I didn’t know.

INTERVIEWER

Recently, part of the attempt to reckon with racism has been anchored in anti-racist reading lists. How have you been thinking about the role fiction can play in portraying the interior life of Black people?

GYASI

I have a complicated relationship to fiction being used on anti-racist reading lists or talked about as a self-help project, like if I just read more Black writers suddenly I will—I don’t know—what is the end goal of that? I’m not really sure that’s the point of fiction. There was a really great essay by Lauren Michele Jackson in Vulture, titled “What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?,” and she’s talking specifically about seeing The Bluest Eye on so many of those lists and finding it baffling. One thing she said that really stuck with me is that in these books, racism is just in the environment—it’s weather, it’s happening, it’s not there necessarily to teach you anything or change you in any way. It’s a fact of life. And that’s why it’s important to read Black fiction writers, because you’re getting to see the environment, and that’s really as much as it can offer you.

 

Langa Chinyoka is a writer living in New York City. She is an intern at The Paris Review.

Redux: Snap and Glare and Secret Life

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.

Pat Barker. Photo courtesy of Pat Barker.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re dwelling on endings, finishes, and closures. Read on for Pat Barker’s Art of Fiction interview, Reinaldo Arenas’s short story “The Parade Ends,” and Adrienne Rich’s poem “End of an Era.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, better yet, subscribe to our special summer offer with The New York Review of Books for only $99. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a 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.

 

Pat Barker, The Art of Fiction No. 243

Issue no. 227, Winter 2018

What I would say is that if you’ve got a strong ending, basically you’ve got the book. If you know you’re working toward something that you think works, you’ll get there, somehow, no matter how awful it is struggling with what’s going on in the middle. It’s much harder to bring a book to fruition when you have a very good sound beginning that then peters out into nothing. Books stand or fall really on their endings. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a good novel that has a weak ending.

 

 

The Parade Ends

By Reinaldo Arenas

Issue no. 80, Summer 1981

Life, above all, life in spite of everything, life however it is, even without anything, even without you (and in spite of you) amid the din that rises now, amid the shrieks and the songs, for they’re singing, singing again, and no less than the national anthem. Life, now, while I pursue you over the excrement to the sound of the notes (or shouts) of the national anthem, holding you as justification and refuge, as an immediate solution, as sustenance, the rest (what is the rest?) we’ll see about later.

 

 

End of an Era

By Adrienne Rich

Issue no. 27, Winter–Spring 1962

This morning, flakes of sun

peel down to the last snowholds,

the barbed-wire leavings of a war

lost, won, in these dead-end alleys.

Stale as a written-out journalist,

I start to sort my gear.

Nothing is happening. City, dumb

as a pack of thumbed cards, you

once had snap and glare

and secret life; now, trembling

under my five grey senses’ weight,

you fall and flatten

queasily on the table.

Baudelaire, I think of you! Nothing changes,

rude and self-absorbed the current

dashes past, asking nothing, poetry

extends its unsought amnesty,

autumn saws the great grove down.

Some voices, though, shake in the air like heat.

 

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