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Redux: The Hands Applauded

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.

William Gass, teaching at Washington University, 1974. Photo: Washington University Magazine.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about hands and handwriting. Read on for William Gass’s Art of Fiction interview, Anne Enright’s short story “Pale Hands I Loved, beside the Shalimar,” and Anne Sexton’s poem “Two Hands.”

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William Gass, The Art of Fiction No. 65

Issue no. 70 (Summer 1977)

I think it must have been very enjoyable—in the old days—to form letters with your quill or pen and hand. I, for example, still have an old typewriter. An electric takes away from the expressiveness of the key. It was very important for Rilke to send a copy of the finished poem in his beautiful hand to somebody, because that was the poem, not the printed imitation.

 

 

Pale Hands I Loved, beside the Shalimar

By Anne Enright

Issue no. 157 (Winter 2000)

I had sex with this guy one Saturday night before Christmas and gave him my number and, something about him, I should have known he would be the type to call. For once, I was almost grateful that Fintan answered the phone. I could hear him through the sliding door.

“Yes, she’s here. She’s in the kitchen, eating dead things.” Then,

“No, I’m not a vegetarian.” Then,

“I mean dead as in dead. I mean people like you.”

I said, “Just give me the phone, Fintan.”

 

 

Two Hands

By Anne Sexton

Issue no. 60 (Winter 1974)

From the sea came a hand,

ignorant as a penny,

troubled with the salt of its mother,

mute with the silence of the fishes,

quick with the altars of the tides,

and God reached out of His mouth

and called it man.

Up came the other hand

and God called it woman.

The hands applauded.

And this was no sin.

It was as it was meant to be …

 

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Robert Stone, Chronicler of America’s Decline

Robert Stone. Photo: © Greg Martin.

Robert Stone is one of the most powerful and enduring writers of the late twentieth century (also called sometimes the American Century), and in the latter aspect is now thought by many to have come to an ignominious end. Stone’s work chronicled both the peak and the decline of a great many aspects of U.S. world dominance, as practiced abroad and reflected at home. In recounting the struggles of the particular individuals who peopled his imagination, he also told us the story of our time. Stone was an artist, not a reformer, but he had a very unusual ability to engage his fiction with the most urgent social issues of his time and ours, while living in the midst of them, and to do so without artistic compromise.

When Stone mustered out of the navy in the late fifties, the United States had perhaps reached its zenith in terms of economic success and dominance, political hegemony worldwide, and a vibrant and vigorous culture, ripe for exportation in multiple embodiments: from serious literature and high art to B movies, pop music, and Coca-Cola. It seemed a national moment free of self-doubt—although a considerable dysphoria would soon begin to express itself, as the social upheavals of the sixties began. Stone, who did not begin the world from a position of privilege, was quicker than most to see the shadows cast by the rising American star. In his work, he would repeatedly portray those bright aspirations set off by a surrounding darkness that was likely in the end to devour them.

Stone’s novels each capture the zeitgeist of a particular period. A Hall of Mirrors slashes into the underbelly of American racial anxieties as the civil rights movement, and resistance to it, get underway. Dog Soldiers somehow captures the whole spirit of the Vietnam era while barely setting a scene in Vietnam. A Flag for Sunrise delves into the dark side of the Monroe Doctrine, following the most corrupt machinations of American influence into the bloodiest crannies of Central America. Children of Light stages the cocaine-fueled, illusion-rich culture of eighties Hollywood. Outerbridge Reach swings the nineties boom-and-bust stock market cycle by the tail, shaking out its scariest social consequences. Damascus Gate discovers the sinister side of the U.S. engagement with Middle Eastern politics in general and Israel in particular, among other things, as one must always say of any Robert Stone novel—a great many other things. Stone’s fictions are all human stories, first and foremost, driven by characters invested with remarkably rich and dense inner lives—characters we are compelled to recognize as our close cousins. There but for the grace of God (or just good luck, if you prefer) go we.

*

Bob Stone sometimes described himself as a “slothful perfectionist,” though his body of work conveys perfectionism more than sloth. All of his fiction—multifaceted and with unsuspected depths—repays multiple readings, and handsomely. There is little in even the best of contemporary fiction that can claim this quality; however brilliant on the first read, it is not likely to offer fresh insights on a second. The reward Stone offers to the reader is much larger than usual, though he was genuinely hard to please and often found it hard to please himself. He was a conflicted, sometimes tormented personality in both life and art. His disposition was choleric at times; he suffered fools with very small patience, and he confronted the world with the bright, acidic irony of an extraordinarily perceptive, bitterly disappointed idealist. Although Stone was never an autobiographical novelist in the relatively narrow sense that writers like Richard Ford, Saul Bellow, and Ernest Hemingway are, some variation on his own qualities usually gets projected onto at least one major character in all of his novels (Rheinhardt in A Hall of Mirrors, Holliwell in A Flag for Sunrise, Walker in Children of Light) or sometimes the Stone personality is split between two protagonists (Converse and Hicks in Dog Soldiers, Browne and Strickland in Outerbridge Reach, Brookman and Stack in Death of the Black-Haired Girl). His unusual personality, his restlessness, and his ambition for his work caused him to lead what his widow has called “a hell of an interesting life.”

*

Stone borrowed the title of his fourth novel from a poem by Robert Lowell, and used the entire poem as the epigraph of his first:

“Children of Light”

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones

And fenced their gardens with the Redmen’s bones;

Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,

Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night,

They planted here the Serpent’s seeds of light;

And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock

The riotous glass houses built on rock,

And candles gutter in a hall of mirrors,

And light is where the landless blood of Cain

Is burning, burning the unburied grain.

Enigmatic, quasi-impenetrable, rich with half-realized, tormented thought, it is not Lowell’s best-known poem, nor his best, but it did serve Stone as a sort of chthonic treasure map for his extraordinary exploration of the grandly ambitious, vexed, and troubled American society we all have shared with him.

Born to a single mother, decades before such situations became socially acceptable, Stone was raised an outsider. Throughout his hardscrabble childhood, he and his mother were each other’s sole allies in a struggle against forces out to separate them for their own good. Young Stone spent time in orphanages when his mother could not keep him; he also logged a good deal of time on New York and Chicago streets. His conflicted relation with the American dream has to do with the fact that it was never his by entitlement.

Stone’s life and work reflect the evolution of America’s sense of itself—from the naive ebullience of the fifties to the tenebrous uncertainties of the post-9/11 twenty-first century—and in this process, Stone’s novels were always just a little ahead of the curve. His childhood left him with the street kid’s hardwired alertness to threat, a preternatural sense of trouble on the way, before it has quite crested the horizon. His first fully realized fiction (an oral performance) was composed to outwit Child Protective Services. He spent four years as a very small boy in a Catholic orphanage in Manhattan, plus a few months in a Booth House shelter in Chicago; these experiences gave him a sense of how such institutions can warp personality. A three-year hitch in the navy he began at age seventeen was a different sort of institutional experience, and in some ways corrective of the ones he had before.

At the end of his military service, Stone returned to New York for a brief run as a newspaperman and college student. Within a year he married, dropped out of school, went with his wife to New Orleans and then to California, where he took up a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and began writing his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. During those early West Coast years he fell into the orbit of Ken Kesey, who was then beginning his experiments with LSD. Stone partook with enthusiasm, while resisting the cultish qualities of the Kesey circle. By 1964 he was back in New York with his wife and two children working at various short-term jobs while he finished the novel.

After A Hall of Mirrors was published in 1967, the Stones moved to London where they lived for four years, during which Stone went to Vietnam to gather material for his second book, Dog Soldiers. In 1971 he returned to the United States with a teaching career, first at Princeton and then at Amherst College. Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award in 1975, and the publication of A Flag for Sunrise in 1981 consolidated his reputation as a significant voice of his time.

By midlife, Stone had assimilated into the mainstream of American society as much as serious artists ever do; he was a respected novelist, a college professor, the head of a prosperous middle-class household—quartered in Westport, Connecticut; Block Island; Key West; Sheffield, Massachusetts; and Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The Stones always divided their time among two or more residences, while Stone himself incessantly traveled all over the world, for outdoor activities, research for his books, journalistic assignments, and representation of American letters in other countries, sponsored by various avatars of the U.S. Information Agency. His book contracts grew ever more lucrative as his reputation expanded with the big novels of his peak career, especially Outerbridge Reach and Damascus Gate. Still, he could never entirely shake the financial anxiety his insecure childhood had instilled in him and was always eager to pick up a little extra income through teaching and journalism—distractions from fiction writing that he often seemed to welcome. Dependent on alcohol from his teens, Stone embraced most recreational drugs that came his way, and by the end of the twentieth century his alcohol and prescription narcotic use had begun to wear down his remarkably strong constitution. In the early aughts he rallied; there were several more books he wanted to write and for that he needed to take better care of his health than had been his custom. For a time, he returned to full strength as a writer. Then damage from the smoking habit he’d broken in the eighties caught up with him, and he died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in 2015.

Stone’s formal education was incomplete; he was to all intents and purposes an autodidact, and despite the many years he spent in academia, he trafficked very little in received ideas. His outsider’s instincts gave him a longer view of the world of which he had become a part. Each of Stone’s novels confronts a peculiarly disturbing problem of the period in which it is set. His technique of splintering his own personality into several different characters allows him to surround each issue with a circle of penetrating views. A Robert Stone novel is an artistically closed system in which the social issues of a given period play out in an experimental form.

*

I became a devout admirer of Stone’s fiction in the early eighties. We were very slightly acquainted then, and during the nineties got to know each other better. During the last fifteen years of his life we were close friends. We shared, among a few other things, an addictive personality and a vocation for letters. In both cases, his were much stronger than mine.

 

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of fourteen previous works of fiction, including All Souls’ Rising (a National Book Award finalist), Soldier’s Joy, and Anything Goes. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Goucher College.

From Child of Light , by Madison Smartt Bell. Copyright © 2020 by Madison Smartt Bell. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Quarantine Reads: ‘The Waves’

In our new series Quarantine Reads, writers present the books they’re finally making time for and consider what it’s like to read them in these strange times. 

An extended self-quarantine resembles, in many aspects, any religious-minded circumscribing of the daily round—a meditation retreat, a monastic cloister, a ritual purification. There is the same restraining force, liminal and protean, keeping one within the enclosure—not quite mandatory, not quite voluntary, but a volatile mixture of superego, conformity, altruism, and the anxiety of social sanction. There is the withdrawal from social life, the distillation of most personal interaction to the telegrammatic and unavoidable. There is the ascendance of repetition—the same cycle of meals, the same rooms, the same window, the same orbit of light from that window. And within that tightened repetition, unintentionally noticing, finding yourself incapable of ignoring, certain physical tics and emotional reflexes, patterns that were previously subliminal. Brushing a chip in the wall paint as you round a corner, lifting yourself just barely but entirely off your chair as you pull into the kitchen table, discovering the tonic thrum of the refrigerator under the clicking of the kitchen clock, the uniquely personal sound and resonance of your spoon scraping, inadvertently but consistently, on the chipped bottom of your bowl. Both retreat and quarantined life become microcosm magnified to macrocosm, like the map drawn to the same scale as its territory in Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science.” The most minor elements of the daily routine flower to monstrous proportion—I have known, in the midst of a retreat, the consumptive, totalizing desire for just one extra bread roll; the tattooed memorization of the flowering, spidery cracks on a poorly plastered ceiling; the gnawing curiosity about what lay beyond the finite universe to which I had confined myself. And above all, there is the imperative to focus obsessively and intentionally on reflexive actions that were, in the previous life, unnoticed, the white noise of bodily existence—in the case of a meditation retreat, it is one’s breath; in the case of the coronavirus, touching one’s face moves from compulsive background to neurotic foreground. Every touch is monitored, assessed, brooded over.

And alongside this radical shift in scale, there emerges a deepening capacity for interiority, as if cloud cover had burned off a valley floor, revealing in sharpness each tiny aspect of the scene, diorama-like. It becomes easier and more natural to follow internal trains of thought; the inner monologue grows louder, more assertive; and the inner vision vivifies, leaning asymptotically toward eruption, tangibility. It is a paradoxical state, both heightened and diminished, murky and transparent, perfectly captured by V. S. Naipaul in his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival. He frames it, fittingly, as a variety of illness, a childhood “fever,” writing:

A great tiredness, not unpleasant, a tiredness with the little delirium that—alas, too rarely—had come to me as a child with a tropical “fever,” this fever associated with the chill of the rainy season, the season of extravagant, dramatic weather, of interruptions in routine, of days off from school because of rain and floods, and the coughs and fevers to which they gave rise. How often, as a child, having had my fever, I had longed to have it all over again, to experience all the distortions of perception it brought about: the extraordinary sense of smoothness (not only to one’s touch, but also in one’s mouth and stomach), and, with that, voices and noises becoming oddly remote and exciting. I had never had fever as often as I would have liked.

The “distortion” extends both outward, to the touch, and inward, to the sense of the body itself. A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand.

It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption. The opening of the first monologue describes the strong spectral presence of the novel itself, lays down its own gauntlet: “‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’” I have read the opening pages at least a dozen times, but have not yet been able to string together the unbroken attention required. There is no better opportunity than this moment to try again, for The Waves is itself about this estranging and revealing state. The characters, in a ring, each take turns to talk to themselves, speaking to their interior landscapes with total clarity, and with all the hallmarks of extended isolation—the simultaneous telescopic intensity and dazed distance, the noticing of sensation and reflex as if they were new, numinous. Goes the round of private proclamation: “‘A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,’ said Susan, ‘notched with blunt feet.’ ‘The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,’ said Rhoda. ‘And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out of the grasses,’ said Louis. ‘Stones are cold to my feet,’ said Neville. ‘I feel each one, rounded or pointed, separately.’ ‘The back of my hand burns,’ said Jinny, ‘but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.’” The descriptions of the exterior world are, fittingly, given to a disembodied third party, with a suprahuman eye—a bracing blast from the outside, to which we will eventually and inexorably return. For now, though, we are given the time to explore the close, feverish, interior world of The Waves.  

 

Matt Levin is a writer living in Uganda.

Never Childhood to a Child

On reading Marianne Boruch during COVID-19

“Never childhood to a child,” Marianne Boruch says, and I think of my daughter when she’s sad, how she wanders around the front yard with her hands in the pockets of her coat. The distance between myself at the kitchen window and her out in the yard. Never childhood to a child. Going to the door and calling out will only annoy her. And yet, she will allow herself to be watched—she knows I’m watching—so long as I make no attempt to close the distance.

 

 

Peter Orner’s most recent book is Maggie Brown & Others. Read his short story, “Ineffectual Tribute to Len,” in our Spring 2019 issue.  

America Infected: The Social (Distance) Catastrophe

 

Still from Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950)

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky… A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.

—Albert Camus, La peste (1947)

The plague that gave Albert Camus’s novel its title is the plague but it is also, as Stephen Spender put it in his 1948 New York Times review, a “Social Catastrophe.” In that sense, The Plague is a political allegory with a large cast of quasi-allegorical characters—the perfect prototype for a disaster movie.

Camus started writing The Plague under German occupation. The novel was published in 1947 when he was thirty-four and already, thanks to The Stranger as well as his writing for the underground resistance newspaper Combat, a cultural icon—the Humphrey Bogart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

French critics mostly read The Plague, which, after many deaths, ends by defining “plague” as “just life, no more than that,” as a metaphor for the human condition. It was also understood as an allegory of the German occupation, with France separated from the West—although the references to crematoria and concentration camps scattered throughout have intimations of something more.

Topical when published, this complex and absorbing account of how a range of men (and only men) cope with the awesome irrationality of pestilence, “a laboratory for studying attitudes,” in Spender’s phrase, now addresses our moment. It not only concerns mass death in an isolated city, but for three years, we have lived with a president obsessed with quarantine and contagion—not to mention a cable news network that two decades ago began warning of leprosy being spread by illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The novel is rich in incident. Camus’s protagonist and secret narrator Dr. Rieux notes the effect of the plague and quarantine on Oran’s residents, including the early holiday atmosphere produced by the closing of shops and offices. Gas rationing had its upside. The enforced idleness produces a city where “traffic is stopped to give a merry-making populace the freedom of the streets.” This, however, gives way to a sense of abandonment and isolation.

When not stockpiling toilet paper and keeping their social distance, Americans have been comforting themselves by streaming Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s naturalistic homage to technocratic efficiency in combating an Ebola-like pandemic. The Plague, too, was imagined as a movie, acquired by MGM as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. This was embarrassing for Camus, who cancelled the deal. The designated adapter, Richard Brooks, turned his script into Crisis (1950), in which Cary Grant plays a morally conflicted American doctor compelled to operate on the dictator of an unnamed Latin American country. The specter of a plague, in Crisis, is mutated into a revolution. The real, if unacknowledged, movie version of The Plague would be Elia Kazan’s atmospheric Panic in the Streets, released shortly before Crisis, during the summer of 1950, one month into the Korean War.

Panic in the Streets, officially derived from two stories published in Dime Detective, was an experiment in Hollywood neorealism, shot on location in New Orleans, America’s most racially mixed, exotically Caribbean city, characterized by fluid camerawork, the use of non-actors, and overlapping dialogue. Pneumonic plague—a lung infection not unlike that produced by the coronavirus—comes to America and, for much of the movie, only Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) is willing to call it such: “We have 48 hours! After that we’ll have the makings of a plague!” It’s a movie—all action, no reflection—but at the same time a tale of animated corpses, haplessly running from a sentence of death.

Camus’s Plague and Kazan’s Panic are both set in port cities open to the world and feature dedicated medical protagonists who struggle against apathetic authorities. The Plague evokes the mood of a quarantined town whose citizens realize that “they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment.” In Panic, Dr. Reed aside, the people of New Orleans have no such consciousness. Camus evokes a sense of solidarity: “once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all [were] in the same boat… No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny.” Kazan, following the exigencies of a Hollywood movie, plays to audience fears, which he allays by constructing an individual hero.

Army medic and government activist, Dr. Reed wears a uniform. He also shares a surname and a career path with the nineteenth-century public health hero who instituted quarantines against yellow fever and cholera, officiously informing a skeptical meeting of New Orleans city fathers, “One of the jobs of my department is to keep the plague out of this country.” In telling people that which they don’t want to know, he’s an Ibsen-esque “enemy of the people”—a self-described alarmist who, like the martyred Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, turns out to be right.

In orchestrating a man hunt for the criminal plague carriers, Dr. Reed enlists another professional: the tough New Orleans cop (Paul Douglas). The grumpy (and Trumpy) policeman hates doctors and has irrational dislike of civil servants. Nevertheless, the men bond in battling dithering politicians and nosy reporters for control of the situation. (The Plague has a journalist as well, a visiting Parisian who first tries to escape Oran and later, as the novel’s resident romantic existentialist, comes to embrace his fate. There is also a new newspaper, the Plague Chronicle, which is initially meant to provide information and soon devolves into a vehicle for ads promising new, infallible antidotes.) Kazan, a former Communist but not yet an informer (who two years later would name and effectively blacklist eight former comrades), saw Panic as an allegory: “The Doc was a New Dealer and the policeman a Republican. That was the way we thought, the remnants of my former political training: everybody representing some social political position.”

What then, in this equation, was the pneumonic plague? It is not, as in Camus, spread by rats, but by people—namely foreigners and criminals. As the earth beneath Oran’s houses was “purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails,” diseased undocumented aliens and their gangster sponsors emerge from New Orleans waterfront dives to pollute the nation and more. (Dr. Reed’s authority extends into international waters.) In The Plague, the disease leaves “as unaccountably as it had come.” Panic in the Streets ends with a cathartic ritual cleansing as the infected criminal and major carrier (Jack Palance) is shot down while scrambling, climbing, fighting, running from the police, and demonstrating a will to escape—and, as implacable as any virus, contaminate the free world.

Given this enemy, Dr. Reed’s emphasis on army control, use of professional informers, advocacy of preventive detention, and press management provides an unavoidable metaphor. As J. Edgar Hoover told House Un-American Activities Committee in spring of 1947: Communism “is a way of life—an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the Nation.”

What was in Kazan’s mind? The Internal Security Act of 1950 prohibited entry or settlement of immigrants—like Kazan—who were or had been Communists. Panic in the Streets was released to excellent reviews, albeit not from the Daily Worker, which deemed the director’s “neo-realist” use of locations and actors to be ersatz and his movie’s premise a “mighty cheap” gimmick. The reviewer could hardly miss the movie’s coincidental illustration of Attorney General J. Howard McGrath’s recent warning that in America Communists were “everywhere—in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.”

Although our president was initially paralyzed, perhaps by his own pathological fear of contagion, and thus denied the seriousness—if not the reality—of coronavirus, Panic in the Street’s open xenophobia might provide him with a useful model. It might yet. In the meantime, The Plague furnishes an appropriately absurd scenario for Trump and his audience, which is to say, us: somehow Oran’s municipal opera house is given license for weekly performances of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. In, what for me is the novel’s tragicomic highpoint, Camus describes a performance—just as Eurydice is taken back to Hades, the actor playing Orpheus “chooses this moment to stagger grotesquely to the footlights, his arms and legs splayed out” and, refusing to act in bad faith, collapses on stage in the manner of a plague victim.

The orchestra stops playing. The audience rises and slowly begins to exit (“like worshippers leaving church when the service ends”) then, seized with panic, stampedes for the doors, “pouring out into the street in a confused mass.” This hasn’t yet happened in Mar-a-Lago, but Iran got a taste when Iraj Harirchi, the head of the government task force on the coronavirus, began showing symptoms on TV. In the theater of our mediated lives, our hitherto diffident president’s televised admission that he has taken the test for COVID-19 is the first instance of such authenticity. Trump claimed to have tested negative. In future weeks, however, we may well notice his septuagenarian political rivals coughing into their elbows, if not seeking tests.

As states have begun postponing or canceling their primary elections, it’s only a matter of time before Trump fully realizes that his worst nightmare is a blessing in disguise. Quarantine may be an existential condition in The Plague, but it is a practical weapon in Panic. The movie’s key moment comes when Dr. Reed’s wife gives him justification to take the law into his own hands: “If there’s a plague here, you’re the most important man in town…” He is the leader. No one need vote, no election required.

 

J. Hoberman is the former senior film critic for the Village Voice and the author, most recently, of Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan.

Eighteen Theses on Rachel Harrison

The following essay is the poet and critic Maggie Nelson’s response to “Rachel Harrison Life Hack,” the first full-scale survey of Harrison’s work, which appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 25, 2019, to January 12, 2020.

Installation view of “Rachel Harrison Life Hack” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020). From left to right: Dinner, 1991; I Like What’s Nice, ca. 1995; Leaktite Luck, 1995. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

1.

Look, you’re going to be confronted with the remains of a dinner Rachel Harrison had twenty-eight years ago at Flamingo East in the East Village. (No, the restaurant isn’t there anymore.) First the dinner became leftovers in ziplock baggies and then it became leftovers spawning maggots in ziplock baggies and then, after complaints about flies, the baggies went into Ball jars. And here they are.

It’s pretty gross, without a doubt. You might be forgiven for feeling as though the crudeness were at your expense in some way, but I would encourage you to let go of this feeling. (The feeling that some kind of joke is being played, but with no clear object or vector, may recur; my advice is to float in this feeling, allow a degree of surrender to it.) For Dinner surely started, like all of Harrison’s work, as a gesture or experiment of interest to her, one whose reasons may have been inscrutable even to herself. Think about it: she bagged this food one night twenty-eight years ago, with no foreknowledge of this moment we now share together. It was, you might say, an intuition.

2.

Harrison’s work doesn’t just rely on intuition. It showcases it, elevates it to a category of ontological fascination. Why, why, why? you might ask, in front of a Harrison sculpture; eventually your own questioning may turn into a kind of music—the music of thinking—playing alongside hers. Your thinking may or may not have content; it is unlikely to land upon answers. Indeed, Harrison’s sculptures are remarkable for their capacity to stir up the primal agitation at the root of cognition and analysis, the whir of thinking.

 

Rachel Harrison, Cindy (detail), 2004, wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, drywall, and wig, 72″ x 37″ x 31″. Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg; courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander / IMAGING4ART.

 

3.

A big exhibition of Harrison’s work fruitfully showcases, over and over again, the force of intuition exposed to the force of time. No doubt Dinner has meant many different things over the past twenty-eight years, and will mean altogether different things in twenty-eight more. Dadaist stunt gives way to meditation on the longevity of plastic, or to the tendency of all organic matter to break down into repellent murky strands. Eventually some other species may note that a species called human beings once ate something called food, which they preserved for unknowable reasons in plastic and glass. “This one was arugula,” the person guiding me through the show says, face straight as a horse.

4.

Re: I Like What’s Nice (ca. 1995)—we’ve all probably mucked up a nice lady from an advertisement at some point or another, even Martha Rosler. As with any standard Barbie decapitation or détournement, there’s some sadism in the house. It looks like Harrison reprinted the photo, then lobbed a big piece of mud or shit at the vaginal area, though I’ve been told it’s “a very old baked potato,” in which case it may have been more placed or arranged. The piece reminds me of Sarah Lucas’s Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992), but it feels more like a violation than a revelation or distillation—like, maybe this nice lady doesn’t even know the blob is there; maybe the joke is at her expense. Or maybe she’s in on it, and her serenity is a form of bravado: This is my big brown mound, so what? The piece feels hostile and breezy, if something can feel breezy and hostile. I think Harrison’s sculptures can.

Elsewhere, a young John Davidson comes in for similar treatment. This time it’s as if someone’s thrown a mop from afar and speared his forehead: artist as Zeus, pop-cultural figure as mortal plaything.

 

Installation view of “Rachel Harrison Life Hack” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020). Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three inch sphere?, 1996/2019. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

 

5.

“Part ridicule and part homage,” a critic once wrote about Harrison’s relation to Willem de Kooning. I’m thinking about this phrase while looking at Circle Jerk (1989). At first I feel like an idiot because I realize that I never really thought of Dan Flavin’s light sticks as phallic before, even when he installed a yellow fluorescent at a forty-five-degree angle and dedicated it to Constantin Brancusi and his “endless column.” But for some reason I’ve always found critiques of phallic imagery kind of cheap. Why does the phallus own certain shapes, certain angles? Maybe Harrison feels this way, too; maybe that’s why her title both summons an invisible circle and also names her own sculpture as a jerk.

I like Harrison’s claim on jerks of all kinds, including the jerk of abruptness. Abruptness makes up part of the rhythm of thinking, especially Harrison’s.

6.

Circle Jerk. I end up thinking for some time, as I often do, about Harrison’s title. Can one jerk make a circle? Is art the phantasmagorical circle? If a circle jerk is a closed unit of homosociality, what does it do to its circuitry to make a sculpture that both disrupts it and also makes its own contribution to the ritual? How does the ritual of art, its inner cycles of scorn and praise, satire and homage, change when the jig is up, the inner sanctum disturbed? “Women can’t have heroes,” Harrison says. I agree.

 

Rachel Harrison, detail of Voyage of the Beagle, 2007, fifty-seven pigmented inkjet prints, 16″ x 12″ each. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

 

7.

When Harrison made the “Voyage of the Beagle” series (2007), she also made boxes of postcards of the images. For some reason I ended up with several of these boxes, with which I lived vividly and strangely for years. They sat in my front desk drawer, ready to be deployed as missives with gifts or as stand-alone thank-you cards, but whenever I went to use one, it felt radioactive, unsendable. Its meaning, once untethered from the pack, seemed to fall somewhere between indecipherable and offensive. A carved Indian bust outside a shop, a cartoonish head asphyxiated in plastic wrap, a Statue of Liberty replica with purple lipstick who looks like she’s just swallowed a worm, a Jesus mannequin with puffs of dark hair adhesived to its chest—each seemed to herald a messy and bewildering significance that fell apart in isolation. They belong all together, I would end up thinking, putting the box back in the drawer. I still think that.

8.

Many elements of Harrison’s practice are not communicable, save in concert. This is true of much art that, like Harrison’s, depends so profoundly on the genius and originality of its tone, and on the total trust the artist puts in it, and that we in turn put in her.

Tone, in art, is no small thing. In fact there are days on which I think it is everything. Eileen Myles once said that poetry is where “lots of citizens get the real and irregular news of how others around them think and feel.” How we get this irregular news has a lot to do with our apprehension of others’ tone.

 

Rachel Harrison, Alexander the Great, 2007, wood, chicken wire, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, mannequin, Jeff Gordon waste basket, plastic Abraham Lincoln mask, sunglasses, fabric, necklace, and two unidentified items, 87″ x 91″ x 40″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds, 2007; courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Jean Vong.

 

9.

Harrison’s tone feels utterly idiosyncratic—some improbable combination of jaunty, caustic, rangy, and rapt, running asymptotic to the more usual sounds of satire, insubordination, insouciance, and absurdity. Often I feel as though she’s driving a car—a pretty fast car—right alongside these categories, but somehow she remains in an outer lane, a fugitive from their certainty or recognizability.

10.

I don’t know how into Dogville (2003) or Lars von Trier’s films more generally Harrison is, but its summoning here feels exactly right, and has illuminated some things about Harrison’s work, or at least my response to it, that might otherwise have remained muddy to me. The first is the Brechtian quality of Harrison’s sculptures, which I might have otherwise described as having a certain coldness. But cold isn’t, wasn’t, the right word, just as Brechtian distance isn’t really chilly. Her emphasis on presentation, artifice, plinth, packaging, and palette returns everyday objects to us in a way that inspires analytical thought. But—and this is key, I think—Harrison’s sculptures don’t think for us. They are more like an allegory, or a theater, of thinking.

 

Rachel Harrison, 2 a.m. 2nd Ave., 1996, wood, papier-mâché, acrylic, three broomsticks, and five laminated black-and-white photographs of Johnny Carson, Carroll O’Connor, and a priest, 73″ x 41″ x 29″. Collection of Patricia and Frank Kolodny; courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Oren Slor.

 

11.

Harrison: “[My work] is often about directing my thought process externally, because in my head the thoughts are going so fast. At what point can I see them? At what point can I have a conversation with forms and myself and the objects that I make that is without language?”

Does a conversation without language inherit the formal qualities of speech (syntax, rhythm, intonation, the simultaneous delivery of sound and meaning), or does it, can it, move into another realm entirely? In Harrison’s case, no matter how literary or literary-ish the gesture, I tend to think it’s the latter. She says she likes William Carlos Williams’s edict “No ideas but in things.” I do, too. But what it means to find an idea in a thing, or to find ideas only in things, has never been self-evident.

This is one of the reasons I find Harrison’s work captivating: she may focus on things and ideas, but she preserves a quality of puzzlement—maybe even secrecy—about their relationship, or their potential relationships. Because when we see a thought, it may become something else entirely.

12.

Dogville is a brutal movie and von Trier is known as a brutal director. I don’t know enough about Harrison’s feelings about her own work to know if she would disavow or welcome the apprehension of brutality in it, but I feel it there decidedly. I feel it in its aggressive ugliness, its diffuse mockery, its employment of cultural figures as props, its impulse to deface, distort, or otherwise render gruesome (cf. Amy Winehouse), its refusal to give its audience what they want, to even pretend to reckon with what they want.

I like this aspect of Harrison’s work. I like brutal edges in work by women who don’t feel compelled to apologize for or justify them as there solely to critique a brutal society or species that could be otherwise.

 

Installation view of “Rachel Harrison Life Hack” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020). From left to right: Gray or Roan Colt, 2004; Cindy, 2004; Nice Rack, 2006; Valid Like Salad, 2012; 20 × 24″ (for CDL), 1999; Untitled, 2012; Brownie, 2005; Hoarders, 2012; Huffy Howler, 2004; Alexander the Great, 2007; Warren Beatty, 2007; Springs, 2017. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

 

13.

Dogville, like many von Trier films, opts to focus this brutality on women. By re-creating Dogville’s streets to use as a staging ground for her sculpture in her 2019 survey at the Whitney, Harrison defangs von Trier’s alleged misogyny in a most unusual way: she out-Brechts him, stages her own show on his stage, and returns the question of brutality to the province of the abstract. She moves us into Sculpture Town.

14.

“Are you a feminist?” asks an interviewer. “Woof,” answers Harrison.

 

Rachel Harrison, All in the Family, 2012, wood, polystyrene, chicken wire, cement, acrylic, and Hoover vacuum cleaner, 93″ x 34″ x 34″. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; purchased with funds contributed by the International Director’s Council, 2012; courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: John Berens.

 

15.

As the history of Dada makes clear, brutality, especially abstract brutality, has tremendous energy. Often it is the energy of collision. Mary Ann Caws (among others) has noted that while surrealism focuses on swinging doors, communicating vessels, and bridges stretched across the abyss, Dada has more to do with a simple, abrupt encounter, “the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophy, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers,” as Tristan Tzara put it. Harrison’s use of juxtaposition seems more in touch with this unsolemn meeting of yes and no on the corner than almost any contemporary artist I can think of. In Dogville, that street corner is literalized. Woof.

16.

Despite, or alongside, the Zen-like quality of Dada, there often runs a current of nihilism, including of the homicidal or suicidal variety. Sometimes this nihilism has to do with guns. Think of the Dadaist Jacques Rigaut’s meticulously planned (and executed) self-administered bullet to the heart; think also of André Breton’s contention (unrealized) that “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” (“Anyone,” Breton adds in “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” “who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.”)

This current of nihilism or violence has been present in Harrison’s work for some time, via its excavation of America and Americana; in 2015, it became literalized, when actual bullets were fired into her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, by an ex–security guard who spray-painted and shot several pieces of art in the After Picasso: 80 Contemporary Artists exhibit before taking his own life. After defacing the art—including sending a bullet into the forehead of a framed drawing of Al Pacino in Harrison’s 2012 sculpture Valid Like Salad (a new, tragic echo of Davidson’s mop in the head)—the ex-guard, Dean Sturgis, sat in a folding chair and shot himself in the head (a new, tragic link to Circle Jerk).

Whatever urge toward defacement, whatever hostility toward art qua art, whatever exploration, however lighthearted, of American breeds of masculinity, celebrity, and sociopathy may have been at play in Harrison’s work (in 2007, she titled a show “If I Did It,” after O. J. Simpson’s much-maligned memoir)—all must now sit uneasily with the legacy of Sturgis, whose bullet holes serve to remind us that our everyday includes mortal threat and terror as much as it does remote controls and air fresheners.

 

Rachel Harrison, Untitled, 2012, colored pencil on paper, paper, 19″ x 24″. Private collection; courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: John Berens.

 

17.

The pathos and beauty of much Dada writing, such as Tzara’s, was that it wanted to access the energy of collision and violence—to enact it, even—without being bogged down by language’s representational, argumentative, and communicative burdens. But language does not shed such burdens easily. In this sense there is a kinship between Harrison’s desire to stage a conversation between forms, herself, and the objects she makes “without language” and Tzara’s lauding of art as “the only construction complete unto itself, about which nothing more can be said.”

In the face of such aspirations, I sometimes wonder, as a writer, what the hell I’m doing here. “Language is forced on art,” Harrison has said. “Is that really best for art? Is that really good for art? Does that make art happy?” Probably not; so often, the errand seems designed for fools. But then I remember Harrison saying “I’m not afraid of stupid,” and I smile.

18.

Part of not being afraid of stupid is staying interested in the stupidity, or the gullibility, or just the plain humanity, of ourselves and others, which brings me to Perth Amboy. Perth Amboy is the town in New Jersey where, in 2000, Ramona and Marcelino Collado said they saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary appear in their second-story thermal-pane window. Hundreds of people subsequently pilgrimaged to the site to see and touch the spot, suddenly made holy. Harrison was among them: she photographed the window from below, capturing the rainbow constellation of handprints left behind on the glass.

A Wall Street Journal article from the time quotes a nun who made the journey: “I went to see for myself. I didn’t see Our Lady’s image in the glass. But what moved me was the people’s desire to be attuned to God’s presence in their lives.” Amid all its comedy and shrewdness, Harrison’s work feels to me motivated by a related desire: to be attuned, not to God per se, but to possibility, wormholes, collisions of spheres, profound eccentricity, the seam between farce and enigma, all of which permeate our mental and physical landscape, if and when we let them.

To find these qualities in thermal panes, pinups, bullet holes, olive cans, velvet pants, the disintegrating scraps of a dinner from long ago—to work relentlessly, over many decades, to find innovative ways to stage them for us, so that we, too, might go along for the ride—what can I say? I went to see for myself, and it moved me.

 

Rachel Harrison, Huffy Howler, 2004, wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, Huffy Howler bicycle, handbags, rocks, stones, gravel, brick, one sheepskin, two fox tails, metal pole, wire, pigmented inkjet print, and binder clips, 84″ x 84″ x 30″ inches. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2008; courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Jean Vong.

 

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts. Her next book, The Myth of Freedom, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reprinted from Rachel Harrison Life Hack , by Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and distributed by Yale University Press. © 2019 Whitney Museum of American Art.

Staff Picks: Spines, Spaniels, and Sparsity

Still from Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return, 1979.

I first learned of the filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger through her association with Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize–winning Austrian writer about whom my colleagues are probably sick of hearing me ramble. Ottinger has directed a few stagings of Jelinek’s plays, and Jelinek herself appears in Ottinger’s 2007 film Prater. But Ottinger is worth seeking out on her own merits. She uses a punk sensibility and a sense of heightened theatrics to create radically feminist films that are wildly stylish—and wildly stylized—in their approach. As luck would have it for those of us in New York, Metrograph is showing a series of her films this weekend. I’ve seen only Ticket of No Return, her 1979 masterpiece depicting one woman’s quest to drink herself to death in West Berlin (it’s much funnier than it sounds), but I’m eager to see more, including 1981’s Freak Orlando, Ottinger’s carnivalesque take on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. —Rhian Sasseen 

My last real outing before pandemic panic overtook the city was to Smoke Jazz & Supper Club, a music haven for Morningside Heights locals and Columbia students alike. When I was newly legal, the venue felt like something of a Narnia on the Upper West Side, a passage out of the quiet uptown streets and dirty dives into the world of adult New Yorkers. Two grinning doormen usher you through opaque velvet curtains and into a dark bar where you can order an overpriced Negroni and watch your music humanities professor pluck the double bass. As with any local jazz bar, the small stage is full of world-class musicians, featuring, on my latest visit, the Eric Reed Quintet—with Josh Bruneau on trumpet, Chris Lewis on saxophone, Aaron Seeber on drums, Clovis Nicolas on bass, and, of course, Reed on piano. Lewis was a standout, his sax melodies both crooning and conversational. Seeber exuded the expected high energy of a young percussionist; Reed, however, kept him in check, conducting a measured, rhythmic dialogue among piano, drums, and bass. As Broadway shuts down amid bans of large gatherings, Smoke may yet provide musical respite: on weeknights, crowds are sparse and relaxed, concerned only with jazz and what to order the next round. —Elinor Hitt

 

Paul de Vos, Three springer spaniels on the hunt for partridges, 1604–1679, oil on canvas, 69″ x 89″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In the ur-Hemingway novel, Hemingway (or Robert or Jake or whatever), back from some campaign or other, gets a good shave and a handful of papers to sit with at the bar. Imagine being able to escape the orbit of a news cycle. When Emily, the editor of this sturdy magazine, sent around a news item earlier this week, I was initially reluctant to click. But rather than bitter news, the link contained a hilarious and wonderful departure. In 2018, as part of the Glass Handel project, the actress Tilda Swinton staged her pups playing in stunning Scottish landscapes to Handel’s Rompo i lacci, from his opera Flavio. It is at once Real Art and a joke on pet obsession. With relatively little sleight of hand, Swinton and her partner, Sandro Kopp, have created a doggy dance to the music of time. Along with a new appreciation for Handel, I found myself dwelling on the beauty of dog play, their parallel role in our universe, at once undeniably part of and undeniably immune from it. They leap for toys as though their lives depend on it—but they don’t. The seawater tossed from their tails is the calligraphy of joy. They look at the camera, operated by Tilda presumably, like she is their Prometheus—and she is. They are puppies one moment and adult dogs the next. Another clip going around the office is of an old-timer in Italy addressing the conditions removing pasta from the shelves. “There wasn’t this much panic when World War II started,” he complains. I’ve been thinking about my own wartime poet, W. H. Auden, whose “Musee des beaux arts” is timely: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” But especially: “Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life.” —Julia Berick

Having recently devoured Ottessa Moshfegh’s prodigious My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I was hungry for more. So I picked up her 2015 novel Eileen, whose eponymous lead is a genuinely repulsive person: she lives in filth, consumes only gin, revels in the ritualistic cleansing of her bowels, and gleefully describes herself as “ugly, disgusting, unfit for the world.” And yet despite these noxious traits, Eileen is driven along by a growing sense of longing and lust (for Randy, her coworker at the prison, and later for the new teacher there, Rebecca Saint John), which finally places her in a position of authority at the book’s grim close. Moshfegh’s portraits of the dark underbelly of human emotion have never been put to sharper, more satirical use; along with the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation—who, while physically beautiful, sets out to uglify herself through a gradual process of wasting away—Eileen seems an inverted study of the ways female desire and sexuality are so often perceived as gross and dangerous. The painful contortions both characters go through as they seek to relate to their bodies are a reminder of the heavy load of consciousness women bear as they move through the world. Structured around Eileen’s longing to leave X-Ville (each chapter follows a single day in the week leading up to her departure), the novel is, in its bones, about the desire to escape—not just a town but the grotesque visions and ideals that cloak the self. —Camille Jacobson

Working from home necessarily places you in confrontational proximity to all those books you’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten around to. However, in the case of the short story, being stationary by a bookshelf filled with those taunting spines is a blessing. I believe that, with the exception of an interconnected book-length project, it is perfectly acceptable and perhaps even preferable to pick up and put down collections at will. The short story as a form asks us to engage with a style or voice as it unspools in a capsule; the narrative arc is crafted with purpose, and you need not read one after another after another to understand the artistry of the writer in question. So with my shelf stretching out before me, I’ve dipped into The Stories of Alice Adams, The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (edited by Jhumpa Lahiri and presented in a gorgeous hardcover edition far too cumbersome to be read on the subway), and Sontag’s Debriefing; I’ve also embraced the excuse to spend time rereading my beloved Cheever. As you wait out whatever’s happening outside, allow yourself the messy, noncommittal pleasure of picking up, putting down, and getting acquainted with your personal library. —Lauren Kane

 

John Cheever. Photo: Nancy Crampton.

The Return

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November and January. It returns through March, and then will again in June.

I’m aiming my camera at a bench on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado. The red-brick path is lined with outdoor shops, galleries, and breweries. Boulder Bookstore. The clouds draw their curtain, a gray weight. The Flatirons are weighted, too, diagonal slabs of sandstone towering like three growing spikes on a graph.

Eighteen years ago, I sat on this bench.

I wait for strangers to step out of the frame. They pass or linger in lace-up boots and parkas, jeans and huddled laughter—all intruders, because while I stand on this brick street in winter, it’s really a long-ago afternoon in June.

In “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf asks, “Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?”

Maybe we go back to places not to ask questions, but to realize we don’t have them anymore.

*

That day in June, my father—who’s been gone for three years now—sat next to me on this bench and said something about how it must be hard to leave a place so beautiful. I looked toward the Flatirons: “There’s too much sadness here.”

I’m back in Boulder because I want to show my daughter, now eighteen, where she was born, where she lived as an infant, where she began. I want to try to explain who I was here.

I think we harbor our longings for places we’ve left because we miss who we were in them. I’ve lingered in door frames and driveways, felt the pierce of pulling away from a past self. The hardest part is knowing what I can’t take with me. Because after enough miles and enough passed exits, something dissolves, like light in a room when the sun turns down.

I’ve always thought I realized a place only after I left it. But maybe it’s this, the return.

While I wait to take the photograph, my daughter stands beside me. I have told her the bench’s story. She steps closer to me as the sky grows darker, the air colder.

*

For one summer in my late twenties, I lived in a small, two-story house on the banks of the Eagle River in Colorado. A friend coaxed me there, told me she and her husband needed help with the resort-town rent. I settled into their corner room upstairs. One afternoon, not long after I’d arrived, I pulled into the gravel drive and stepped out—I can still hear the crunch of tires against the stones—toward a very tall, bearded man. The fourth roommate. Later, he told me it felt like he had been standing there waiting for me to come home. The summer unfolded. I waited tables at a bar in Vail, and he wired condominiums in the valley.

Seasons come and go, and that summer ended with a phone call from a university offering me a job. I delayed my departure until late August, when the bearded man and I lingered in the gravel drive. He snapped a photograph—my head thrown back in laughter. After I drove thirty minutes down the mountain, I realized I had forgotten my makeup bag. I turned back and found him standing in the drive, weeping. As I stepped out, he rushed over and picked me up. He thought I had changed my mind. He thought I had come back.

But I left. Again.

A year passed, me in Texas, him in Colorado, by that time Boulder, but we never turned away, our approach toward one another like the pull of a river. One day, I found two letters from him in the mail. I drove back to Colorado.

The bearded man and I lasted four years. Four months after our daughter was born, he woke me one morning to say he was going, for good. His sudden absence loomed like the Flatirons. I’d drive every street, looking for nothing but the blue of his truck. I’d leave questions on his voicemail. He never answered.

*

I should have come back to Boulder years ago. When I left, I left lonely and aching and lost, but when my daughter and I returned, I returned to images I had forgotten, like the photos of her at six months that slipped from a book last week. When I looked up at the balcony of our old apartment, I heard the click click click click of my daughter’s swing in the living room. When I turned down one street, I saw my friend, Charles, in his black coat, sitting across from me on the patio of the Hotel Boulderado. I drove near the trail I used to run along the foothills. Saw myself laughing as I ducked into the Sink for a pint. Setting the infant seat down in the upstairs ballroom of Boulder Bookstore while I pulled paperbacks from shelves. I passed the day care where I picked up my daughter that day in June after the bearded man stepped onto an elevator, after I moved to a window in the courthouse to watch his blue truck pull out of the parking lot. He left town not long after. No idea where he might be now.

*

That June, as I sat on this bench with my father, I studied the graph of my life before me—I would raise my daughter on my own. My father patted my knee. We were looking at the Flatirons when he said the words, “It must be hard to leave such a beautiful place.”

*

Finally, the street empties.

“The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past,” Woolf writes.

I left Boulder a long time ago, and eventually, the sadness left me. I had to come back to see the the beauty, the best part of this place. She huddles against me, so much taller than I, her long blonde hair a swirl in the wind. I snap the photograph.

 

Read earlier installments of  The Last Year  here.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by the Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.

Poetry Rx: Poems for Social Distancing

In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. It’s back after a short hiatus, with Claire Schwartz on the line.

© Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets, 

I feel overwhelmed by the ambient anxiety in the air right now. My hands are raw from washing, and I can’t stop refreshing the news. How do we continue to move through our lives when a virus is spreading, events keep getting canceled, and the only way to greet our loved ones is with an elbow bump? Are these the end-times we keep bracing for? I wonder if you might have a poem that reminds us how to stay close to one another while we’re all “practicing social distancing.” Or a poem that will be nice to read when we’re all quarantined? 

Thanks,

Lonely COVID

Dear Lonely,

These days feel like … a lot. For you, a poem, that refuses the overwhelmingness of enormity, calling us back to the possibility of our life-size actions, June Jordan’s “On a New Year’s Eve”:

Infinity doesn’t interest me

… and let the powerful lock up the canyon/mountain

peaks the

hidden river s…

let the world blot

obliterate remove so-

called

magnificence

Lonely, I think so many of us would answer to your name these days. The prospect of being shut up in our own discrete spaces, the events planned to bring us together canceled one after another—it does feel lonely-making, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing: in many ways, the virus does not promote social distance so much as it exposes the distances that already characterize our societies. People who continue to go to work while sick are evidence of the lack of paid sick leave. People not seeking medical care when they’re ill are a direct result of our lack of universal health care in the U.S. Conferences frantically seeking options for remote participation reveal how too many of us have ignored the calls for more accessible options that people with disabilities have been making for years. Jordan writes:

it is this time

that matters

it is this history

I care about

the one we make together

awkward

inconsistent

Every avoidable harm is also an instruction for how we might better care for one another. Social distancing is isolating, yes; it is also an act of connection. It is a commitment to our communal well-being, to diminishing both the harm your body may experience and the harm it may cause. How else can we care for one another? Text your friends to check in on them. Pressure your elected officials to make hand sanitizer and medical care available to people who are incarcerated or living in shelters or otherwise vulnerable. If you’re able, donate to your local food pantry to ensure that students usually dependent on food in schools have enough to eat if their schools close. Building a world that cares for all of us is an act against loneliness, and when the virus subsides—as it eventually will—let’s continue to build that world. We’ve needed it all along.

—CS

 *

Dear Poets,

I graduated college seven months ago and every day I feel like I’m sinking deeper into nothingness. I haven’t been able to get a job in my chosen field—journalism—and almost all my friends have moved away from my city. I’m working a barista job that I love but it doesn’t feel like a future. My father urges me to follow my passion, but I look inside myself to find it and come up empty. I avoid returning the messages of loved ones and mentors because I’m so ashamed of what I am—I can’t let them see. I don’t try meeting new people—how? I try to write for myself but everything I write is such dreck that it makes me ashamed that that’s all I can create. Is there a poem for this emptiness and shame that feels so singular and so isolating?

Yours,

Nobody

 

Dear Nobody,

Who are you? Joan Didion says that she loves being small and a woman because people underestimate her, and consequently she finds herself in all kinds of spaces where she wouldn’t be allowed if they knew what she was capable of. That is to say: I don’t think Nobody is the worst person to be, so long as you focus not on how others perceive you but on the wideness of possibility that comes with not knowing exactly who you are. I want to offer you a poem for reconnection with yourself, Kabir’s “Untitled [I talk to my inner lover],” translated by Robert Bly:

          I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?

We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants—

perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother’s womb.

Is it logical that you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?

When I was little, I wrote fan letters to a constellation of people held together only by the random gravity of my love: Michael Jordan, the Queen of England, my great aunt, Yo-Yo Ma. I recently wrote a fan letter to a poet I adore, and it was a beautiful reconnection with that child-part of myself who loves without any self-consciousness, who writes only to testify to what I love, who puts something in the world without expecting a response. In the matrix of measurements that adulthood can feel like, it can be rare to take direction from your interior compass.

Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew,

and that’s why everything you do has some weird failure in it.

You may not have your dream career—and believe me, I feel your frustration there—but career aspirations are just one form your questions take in the world. Don’t deny yourself what you have. Let yourself love the job you love without holding it up to a future where it falls short. Face the people you love thinking not of how your face looks to them but of how beautiful their faces look to you. Allow yourself the freedom of not-knowing for a while. Move toward what you love without judgemnt. Follow your curiosity. You’ll make your path by walking it.

—CS

*

Dear Poetry Rx,

When I was a child, blissful as could be in the ocean, my parents would stand on the shore frantically waving their hands, urging me to come in closer.  Any time they looked away for a moment, I stole another length of sea and happily drifted a bit farther out. Now, at thirty-two years old, I have found myself moving back into my mother’s home, of all places, for a myriad of reasons (health issues, career change, finances, et cetera). While I am grateful for her welcoming me back, it is hard to not feel like I have failed in my quest for independence, adventure, and distance. I need a poem to remind me that the girl who had no fear of sharks or riptides still lives inside me. That as stuck as I may feel, the ocean and all the faraway land masses still call to me, just as loudly as they ever did. That even if there is no shoreline in sight on the other side of the water, one most certainly awaits. That above all else I still have my feet.  

Sincerely,

Sneaky Swimmer

 

Dear Sneaky Swimmer,

When I read your beautiful letter, I thought immediately of Adélia Prado’s “Lesson,” translated by Ellen Doré Watson, whose blissful opening scene reminded me of yours:

It was a shadowy yard, walled high with stones.

The trees held early apples, dark

wine-colored skin, the perfected flavor of things

ripe before their time.

Clay jugs sat alongside the wall

I ate apples and sipped the purest water

The lines I love most:

Then my father appeared and tweaked my nose,

and he wasn’t sick and hadn’t died either;

that’s why he was laughing, blood

stirring in his face again,

he was hunting for ways to spend this happiness

These lines teach me something about what poetry can do—hold what will be against what has been so that the past is made present again, this time shimmering with the veneer of loss. And in gathering the past and the present, the lesson promised in the title emerges:

I always dream something’s taking shape,

nothing is ever dead.

What seems to have died fertilizes.

What seems motionless waits.

The girl who stole another length of sea isn’t gone; she’s becoming. What sent you home is the same current that you rode out into the ocean, all those years ago: you’ve always known exactly where you needed to be. You are still swimming. The tide came in. It will go back out, and you’ll drift far from shore once again.

—CS

 

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us!

Claire Schwartz is the author of bound (Button Poetry, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Apogee, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Artifacts of the Analog Era

Covers of The East Village Other

As I pack the FedEx box addressed to the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, New York—a nonprofit study center for “objects created as part of social movements by the participants themselves: posters, flyers, publications, zines, t-shirts and buttons, audio recordings…”—I am holding a poster that says FUCK COMMUNISM and suddenly find myself in tears.

My collection of printed matter from the sixties and seventies has followed me across decades and miles, from East Coast to West. By packing these items off to this worthy repository in my native city, I am letting go of those miles, those years, and these fragile things on yellowing paper. “Imagine no possessions,” says John Lennon. “Does it spark joy?” says Marie Kondo. But this personal downsizing is more elemental than any kind of tidying up.

These items are handcrafted artifacts of the late twentieth century’s analog era—a road I followed, and in some small ways contributed to making. Now, in the early twenty-first century, that road tapers off into the digital ether, leading who knows where.

So I feel compelled to take one last look at a few of my treasures before sending these things off.

 

1) KOUFAX AND WARHOL IN ’68 (bumper sticker)

The backing still attached, this bumper sticker never stuck to any car’s bumper. Who created it, and where, or how it came into my possession is a mystery. In the midst of the turbulent and historically decisive 1968 presidential race (think back, now: Humphrey/Muskie vs. Nixon/Agnew), the bumper sticker nominates one of baseball’s idiosyncratically great pitchers and a culturally disruptive artist as a winning ticket. Its juxtaposition captures a certain kind of countercultural cool. Seen through the windshield of its time, or in today’s rearview mirror, this automobile ornament is a sociopolitically perverse provocation, as well as a kind of litmus test for hipness: either you smile or you don’t. And if you don’t know who Koufax or Warhol are (Sandy’s still with us) or were, well … anyway, I’d be happy to vote this ticket today.

 

 

2) JOIN THE JURY (8 ½ x 11 leaflet, two-sided, offset printed on yellow paper, dated September 1970)

The trials of the Black Panther Party, and the deadly federal government campaign against them and all of those involved in what we referred to at that time as “The Movement”—which included progressive causes from antiwar, civil rights, and feminism to gay rights and environmental activism—reached a crescendo in the fall of 1970 when this flyer was printed and handed out in a time of physical peril for activists.

Earlier that May, National Guard troops and state police shot and killed students participating in nationwide antiwar protests at two universities, Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State, Mississippi. After a long, hot summer, with the war in Vietnam raging and Richard Nixon at the midpoint of his first White House term, the stark, no-nonsense design and layout of this leaflet captured the urgency and danger in the air. It’s promoting a rally in downtown Manhattan at the Federal Courthouse where the Panther 21 were on trial for conspiracy, allegedly to bomb department stores and police stations and to murder police. Among the accused was Afeni Shakur, mother of Tupac. The leaflet urges supporters to gather and “join the jury.” A year later, the actual jury voted for acquittal.

The leaflet’s rough quality is typical of printed agitprop handed out on the streets for myriad causes and events during this time. The silhouetted photo image of Panther Party members at the top in an action pose, identifiable by the shapes of their Afros and iconic berets, the cut-and-paste typewriter text (typesetting was too expensive), and the use, probably, of Letraset dry-transfer lettering for the main message (JOIN THE JURY in Helvetica) are examples of the handmade nature of political activism of this precomputer era.

It also displays the patient dedication required to spread the word in the days before the easy click-throughs of social media. I learned to use a mimeograph, or ditto machine, forcing ink through a stencil (the citrusy, stinging scent!) to make copies, as well as how to ink the rollers and adjust the collators of the offset machine housed at the Come!Unity Press, “a 24-hour open access print shop run by a gay anarchist collective.” My first published poem came off a Gestetner machine in the back room of the Tenth Street headquarters of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, an SDS-affiliated street gang.

Leaflets were our social media. Handing these things out on the street, you could be clubbed over the head by the cops, or photographed by police intelligence officers who would later add those photos to your file. To my mind this leaflet is a grim reminder of what a police state feels like, or at least felt like before so much of the surveillance became digital.

 

3) Berkeley Barb (pages from vol. 19, no. 1, issue 439, Jan 18–24, 1974)

There is a deranged quality to this issue of the Barb, the first of the independently published periodicals known as the underground press, which emerged in the mid-’60s. Its front page features a story by A.J. Weberman, a “Dylanologist” who attacks Bob Dylan for being a capitalist who is “conning his fans.” The story is illustrated by the photocopied image of a check from CBS Records to Dylan for $149,000 that was “intercepted by agents of the Dylan Liberation Front,” copied, and then sent along to the legendary singer-songwriter, in total violation of federal postal laws.

Weberman’s page-one rant is nearly equaled in hallucinatory tone by an adjacent piece about Gorf, a new play by poet Michael McClure that is somehow about “a purple flying cock and balls.”

From the sex ads in this edition’s last few pages, it appears that the Barb had been overtaken by genital obsession; from “We would like to handle your business,” to the promised “nude encounters,” these ads were a major revenue source for the underground press, and a source of internal staff conflict as the women’s movement increasingly asserted its role in the progressive left.

 

4) FUCK COMMUNISM (5 x 32 printed poster, color)

This poster was created in 1963 by the late Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist, who is widely acknowledged as “the father of the underground press” (“I demand a paternity test!” he liked to say), as well as one of founders of the Yippies.

Kurt Vonnegut, in his foreword to Krassner’s book, Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, wrote that the poster “created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein¹s e=mc2.”

I took this from the wall of the underground newspaper East Village Other’s office in its waning days. I started there as a staff writer shortly before it folded in 1971. I always enjoyed how the two words created a clash of contradictory value systems, a kind of Zen/Kabbalistic thought exercise. The unique mind and personality of Paul Krassner—a friend of mine for nearly fifty years before he passed away recently (a Krassner bio documentary is in the works)—is neatly expressed in this poster.

The poster typography and design was by John Francis Putnam who collaborated with Krassner on the concept. Putnam was a regular contributor to The Realist, best known for his “Modest Proposals” column. They created the Mothers Of The American Revolution, a fake organization cited on this poster, and used the letterhead for “occasional correspondence with parties of differing political opinion that would most likely not communicate with The Realist itself.”

Krassner sold the poster through The Realist and it became “one of the most financially successful and culturally memorable pieces of the magazine’s history,” according to Ethan Persoff’s Realist Archive Project.

 

5) East Village Other , vol. 5, no. 2, December 17, 1969, by Art Spiegelman

Before winning a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman was a regular contributor to EVO as one of the resident comics artists that included R. Crumb, Spain, Trina Robbins, Kim Deitch, Al Shenker (Yossarian), Gilbert Shelton (“The Furry Freak Brothers”), and many others.

This cover shows two cartoon characters, one of them saying something to the other that, though the massive dialogue balloon takes up most of the cover space, is wordless, visually complex, abstract, and possibly inspired genius—or maybe it’s just chemically induced gobbledygook, or maybe it’s criminally insane. Whatever it is, the other guy, cringing slightly backward, responds, “Yeah, right!”

The cartoon says, in the best EVO graphic style, what can never be actually be verbalized—that the whole thing about being hip, or being stoned (it used to be the same thing) is that it’s incommunicable. Except through the artist. And it was EVO’s unstated philosophy that when it came down to certain choices—personal, political, cultural—it was important to always side with the artist, no matter how bizarre or dangerous the artist’s conception appeared to be.

That’s always been my first interpretation of this cover. Another is that the counterculture was full of seemingly coherent sociopaths, bullshit artists, and outright con men using psychedelic pop culture lingo to proselytize, promote, propagandize, rabble-rouse, confuse, intimidate, seduce, and swindle. Many of them came through the EVO office, where the staff regarded counterculture proselytizers such as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, John Lennon, Germaine Greer, and Timothy Leary with healthy cynicism. EVO’s comics artists were often the best at taking them down a notch. In Spiegelman’s cover we see someone spinning a story meant to be profound while his listener responds skeptically. That’s exactly the kind of conversation I often overheard at EVO.

 

6) East Village Other, vol. 3, no. 36, August 9, 1968, by Spain Rodriguez

Comics artist Spain Rodriguez’s vision of a sword-carrying black woman in a flowing cape commanding a steam-punk flying machine is unrivaled for cool, elegant power and sensuality. It stands as an early realization of an African American super-heroine in comics. The colors capture the New York City night sky at dusk (or is it dawn?) in the sultry summertime, which is when this issue was published. And the indicated sound effects (“Flump, flump” “Sree, sree”) bring the city to life. Billboards on the skyline below advertise villains (“Nixon”) and heroes (“Spain”).

Spain’s “Trashman” comics were brilliantly inventive and his style was—and continues to be—widely imitated. The poster for the 1990 movie, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, based on my stories, was inspired by his work.

One note about the bit of dialogue in the artwork: “Man, this is some jive fuckein’ shit.” In the EVO offices in the latter years, the only correct way to pronounce the word “fucking” was the way it is spelled here. To this day I can still hear their voices, the eccentric assemblage of staff members like Coca Crystal, Yossarian, Roxy Bijou, Jaacov, Zod (all gone now): “Fuck-een.”

 *

What to make of these printed things, created by various mechanical means of applying ink to paper, some by way of technologies now nearly extinct? They are objects you can touch, witness the texture of their age and use. Imperfect, ephemeral, not made to last, yet surviving like parchment scraps of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even as the type fades and the paper cracks into the brittle future.

Printed matter is meant to speak for itself. To those who encounter these materials within the archive at the Interference Center, perhaps they will say a little about their time—and perhaps they will say a little about me.

 

Rex Weiner is a journalist, editor, and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. He is a cofounder of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop, and his The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane: The Long Lost Rock n’ Roll Detective Stories, was recently published by Rare Bird Books.