The Paris Review's Blog, page 2

At the Shakespeare Festival

Photograph by David Schurman Wallace.

 

A HEY, AND A HO, AND A HEY-NONNY-NO

The old people are going apeshit for the mariachis. My dad and I are sitting on a bench in the plaza at the bottom of the hill, killing time before the next play. We were hoping to do a little reading, but then, under the light of a half moon shaded by trees, the musicians appeared and started playing a promotion for the reopening of a nearby Mexican restaurant. A crowd appeared from thin air: the ranks of the silver-haired and still-fit, the perennial window-shoppers of this cultural oasis, who show more enthusiasm for this advertisement than for any of the Shakespeare plays we’ve been to so far. They take a lot of pictures on their phones of the brass-buttoned musicians, who put in their work. They try to clap along. A couple even dances for a song or two: a dip, a twirl, more applause. Romance never dies—its definition only degrades.

For several years when I was growing up, my family drove to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In Ashland, the main drag of olde-time, small-town storefronts fold into the surround of rolling evergreen hills; an actual babbling brook, complete with footbridge, runs through it. Ashland is a certain kind of cultural haven for those who mute their wealth tastefully under their shawls. With a complex of three theaters at its heart, it hosts a ninety-year-old institution dedicated to spreading the word of the Bard all summer long. As a child, I was always soothed sitting in the darkness, where everything felt perfectly in order. One scene stitched into the next, the actors hit their lines, and together we headed toward marriage or death.

It began as a nostalgia trip. My parents hadn’t been since before the pandemic, and for me it had been even longer. A combination of COVID and wildfires had threatened to bankrupt the festival, so we agreed it was time to both support and take stock. And my parents are getting older—who knows if we’ll ever do it again. On our drive, we see the dead skeletons of trees still left after the burning, with new greenery coming up in their shadows.

My dad, cheerful enough but fatigued, maybe, from the day’s first show, says that we can just park him anywhere, that he’s going to finish reading tomorrow’s play, August Wilson’s Jitney. I linger with him near the town’s fountain. Ashland is supposedly known for its famous Lithia water. I examine the sign: the natural spring source can poison you (“contains elevated levels of Barium—daily consumption is not recommended”). The town’s founders hoped the water’s alleged healing properties would create a tourist destination, but the water tasted awful and its mineral residue clogged the old pipes. You can still get some at the fountain in the square. I’d describe it as yeasty-tasting with an unpleasant smell. For subsequent tourists, Shakespeare would have to do. People come to be healed in a different way now, to enter the high church of Art, if only to stand around in the back pews for a few minutes.

The band plays on, and my dad tunes it out. We don’t speak. I feel a bit like a Thomas Bernhard character, wallowing in my low opinion of my fellow man. Nothing in particular against mariachis, but this scene is just bulk storage on these people’s devices, never to be looked at again. There’s a Ren Faire energy here now, but without the benefits of the Renaissance. A snatch of trumpet melody from the musicians, just playing their part, becomes another input into the scroll-in-progress. Who will miss all this when it’s gone?

 

FIRST DAY

One pleasure of Shakespeare is that every era projects itself into him. As the critic Harold Goddard wrote more than seventy-five years ago in The Meaning of Shakespeare (God, if we could name our books so confidently now …), “One by one all the philosophies have been discovered in Shakespeare’s works, and he has been charged—both as virtue and weakness—with having no philosophy. The lawyer believes he must have been a lawyer, the musician a musician, the Catholic a Catholic, the Protestant a Protestant.” In some sense it doesn’t matter what we say about Shakespeare—he gives us an occasion to talk about ourselves. What, then, is the meaning of Shakespeare in the Rogue Valley, a little liberal enclave in the forest?

We arrived in the evening, met my aunt, a therapist who also traveled up for the festivities, and had dinner (along with the best margarita in southern Oregon, some say). Everything in Ashland is encased in the amber of the upper-middlebrow: there’s one fancy hotel with an oddly Palm Springs–esque restaurant, several bistros with so-so food and elaborately-named beers (“Drink Me Potion” Fruited Sour), boutiques where men buy sun-shielding hats and women buy comfortable sandals, and places for people to “nourish themselves with artisan pastries and Direct Trade coffee,” as one bakeshop puts it. The Shakespeare fanfare isn’t too ostentatious around town; the knowing have been coming for years to stay at the Bard’s Inn and the Stratford. At the gift shop, my mom looks for a wacky T-shirt to buy my nephew and complains that the merchandise has become too standardized with the Festival’s logo, presumably an effort to build its Brand. Even if kitsch has been mostly ousted, you can still buy a I READ PAST MY BEDTIME throw pillow or a surplus prop from last year: “take a piece of LIZARD BOY set home with you / $5.00 each.”

The complex of three Shakespeare theaters, including a full reproduction of Shakespeare’s own Globe (a sign in faux-Gothic script proclaims it “America’s First Elizabethan Theatre”) is up a decently steep hill. The complex is efficiently run, with ticket-takers, impromptu music, and restaurants where tired patrons can be easily deposited after their journey in the dark. My dad’s leg is hurting him, so we decide to try out his wheelchair. Over the last few years, both of my parents’ ability to walk long distances has declined. Pushing my father in a wheelchair, even a temporary one, marks the time gone. (The infinitely kind ushers are ready with the kind of chitchat that alleviates some awkwardness—”So sporty that your wheelchair is red!”—and this both soothes and aggravates me.) Being temporary, the chair is also flimsy, not suited for an old public sidewalk, with little wheels that constantly risk lodging the chair in ruts or grooves and throwing my father to the ground. More than once I think I see him putting his head in his hands in what looks to me like a rare sign of emotion.

Filing into the matinee performance of Julius Caesar, what makes the biggest impression on me is the audience. They are old. At least two phones, full-volume ringtone, go off during every performance. As the play progresses, eyes close, postures slouch.

It’s a fairly boilerplate production, except it has an all-woman cast. Maybe because it’s a play so often taught in schools, there’s a temptation to stick to what people know. Brutus is mild, and Caesar has been dressed in white fatigues, a cape, and a red beret, some cross between Las Vegas magician and Hugo Chávez. In a play about empire and insurrection, images of contemporary politics are bound to figure. It’s one of the ways we speak our time into Shakespeare, draw his political imaginary into our own. It leads us back to the particular in the universal, even at the risk of an insipid flattening. (I have attended Shakespeare in the Park and seen the Stacey Abrams sign in a backdrop window, a flourish they repeated the following year when she wasn’t even running for office.) Trump as Caesar, sure. But Caesar is also a figure of illness; he has epilepsy, “the falling sickness.” His body is always betraying his immortal ambitions. Perhaps a little Joe Biden rattling around in there too? But no one goes there. Maybe the production’s limpness—my eyes glaze over during the choreographed fighting and dancing—is in the inability to find a coherent liberal narrative in a play that suggests assassination might be desirable.

Regional theater, man. You want it to continue to exist, but you don’t always want to be the one who has to sit through it. Part of the problem with reading Shakespeare is that performance rarely equals the text. If you see enough plays, you know the standard tactics that productions everywhere use to keep the audience “in it”: shouting as a substitute for passion, leaning heavily on Shakespeare’s bawdy puns (this year we’re spared the actors jerking off in pantomime), enlisting the audience to clap along. The text often gets tweaked to make sure we stay oriented, a bit like bowling with bumpers. The next day, when an actor shouts “Give me a break!” in reply to a fatuous speech, I’m fairly sure the line isn’t one of Shakespeare’s.

I’m disappointed most by the performance of Cassius, that slippery arch-plotter, another of the yellers. Her eyes wide, her teeth bared, she stands firmly planted to deliver her lines. The flip side of Shakespearean universality: there are so many characters who don’t let us understand why they do what they do. When Cassius tells the story of saving Caesar from drowning (“Help me, Cassius, or I sink!”), isn’t there a mysterious hurt there when he says, “Cassius is / A wretched creature and must bend his body / If Caesar carelessly but nod on him”? Caesar is obviously a father figure, striding over us like a Colossus. Set aside the Freudian thing for a moment. Cassius wants power, of course, but there’s more. There’s compassion inside Cassius’s story, the near-tenderness by which body raises body, and the speech shivers to life. It’s a complex feeling to recognize the frailty of your enemy. Even the strongest of us become helpless, often before we realize it. There’s an image from another epic inside Cassius’s speech: Anchises, the father of Aeneas, carried on the back of his son as they leave the burning ruins of Troy. We all swim in the waters of time, and we don’t know when our bodies or minds will give out. Suddenly, we find ourselves carried.

After one of the plays, we squeeze the wheelchair into an elevator with a man in a gray T-shirt. In the way people do when they want to banter in an elevator, he looks at us and says, “It’s like Groucho Marx said about the woman who told him she had ten children: ‘Lady, I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.’ ” I’m not exactly sure how this relates, but I think about it. I keep thinking about it for a while.

 

SECOND DAY

I spend most of the morning  reading As You Like It in the hotel breakfast area over a plate of powdered eggs. Nobody said I wasn’t a procrastinator. For the matinee, we see Fat Ham, a loose adaptation of Hamlet that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022. It takes place at a cookout—the family business is barbecue—where the would-be prince is visited by his father in a white sheet with eyeholes. Hamlet is queer, Ophelia is queer, Laertes is queer. Loose reimaginings of Shakespeare can work: Where would the nineties teen romcom be without them? It does surprise me when the lead bursts out into a full rendition of Radiohead’s loser anthem “Creep.” Bizarre, but weirdly effective. The actors sell everything as hard as they can.

At Caesar, an older man—silver-haired in a purple polo shirt, still vigorous—had been sitting behind us, discoursing to his two women companions. “When they talk about ‘woke,’ ” he said, “it means that they feel defensive. They feel bad about themselves, and then they want to take it out on other people.” Maybe, though when I watch these modern renditions, I feel the drip of self-satisfaction more than anything. As long as I’ve been going to see Shakespeare, he has been a harbor for the politically correct. This says something about liberal politics and its seizure of the canon, sure, but it also says something about the playwright’s essential generosity. Call it the “dyer’s hand,” that ability to remove a singular interpretation and let all the dueling voices echo and intertwine. Diversity is inside the plays from the beginning—anyone might inhabit the words and infuse them with their own voice. But in Fat Ham, a direct monologue about inherited intergenerational trauma lands with the thud of received wisdom. The strange friction of Shakespeare’s thinking about fathers and sons is reduced to a formula.

The play winds up with a happy ending (and a drag show to boot), as the characters ask us if we deserve better than tragedy. We’ve been doing this, too, as long as Shakespeare has been performed, perhaps most famously in a 1681 revision of King Lear by Nahum Tate: Cordelia marries Edgar, and everyone can feel good on the way home. I think there’s still something more subversive in Shakespeare’s protean originals. Isn’t Hamlet a little on the side of madness of revenge? Maybe “not to be?” is more than the rhetorical question that we take it for. I’m still waiting for the production that tells me that suicide is painless.

 

OUR ARDEN

It’s a nearly perfect mid-May evening when we head back up the hill to As You Like It, and I put my back into it. My mother is going with my aunt to a cabaret performance of the musical Waitress. Even at the Shakespeare festival, musicals tend to do a better job of filling the seats. In the theater, it’s another similarly aged audience, with the exception of three millennial jackals that sit behind me and talk through the entire performance. They laugh heartily at the jokes and stage-whisper about how the actor playing Duke Senior looks like Will Forte.

The court of Duke Frederick is minimal. All white benches and backdrop, the nobles and courtiers in white too. For me, there’s only one way to interpret this: the Apple Store. The corrupt court, then, is another boomer nightmare: What’s wrong with my phone? (And why can’t I stop looking at it?) When the play reaches the forest of Arden, a vast carpet rolls down the back wall of the theatre and across the stage floor: soft green shag, bright cartoon flowers. We’re in the hippie sixties, the summer of love, a common choice for productions of As You Like It, which has the most songs of any Shakespeare play (five, perfect for some Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young–style riffs) as well some appropriately one-with-nature rhetoric: “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

Who really knows why Duke Frederick usurps Duke Senior? Why is Olivier determined to put down his brother Orlando, our naïve “hero” so quickly upstaged by Rosalind, his female counterpart? Family antipathy is no more logical than family love—because both ultimately evade our understanding, we accept the comedy’s “unrealistic” twists. Jaques, the play’s melancholy dissenter, is dressed up as Leonard Cohen, in a black suit, black fedora, and sunglasses. Sixties-appropriate, I suppose, but misses the swirl of cynicism that Jaques injects into the would-be Utopia. Everyone knows the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, or at least the first lines. One might forget: the subject of the rest of the speech is about growing older, as Jaques outlines the seven acts of man’s life. I’ve heard it argued that the speech is really a bit of banal conventional wisdom. But it still ends with force:

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As the speech ends, Orlando bursts in, desperate for food after carrying his old servant Adam into the forest with him. In the play, Adam is the true father figure, true to his name, the first man. He has rescued Orlando from his family strife, and now Orlando repays him, making him his family. Apocryphally, this part was played by Shakespeare when As You Like It was originally performed. Adam, though he goes into twilight, is not childish. He lacks neither eyes nor taste, at least for now. After the play, I push my dad home, holding his weight as we move slowly downhill. We all go to bed early.

 

THIRD DAY

We catch August Wilson’s Jitney for the final matinee. It’s easier for audience and performers alike; it’s skillfully done, and done straight. It’s a bright, hot day, the start of summer, and we take a cab to an extremely early dinner at a farm-to-table restaurant that theatergoers love. My dad, who has finished his reading, expresses great admiration for it. My aunt asks which of the plays was my favorite. I offer some tempered criticisms of each, or they seem so to me, before adding a self-deprecatory caveat: “But I’m a snob, of course.” Everyone agrees, leaving me chagrined. My family, very reasonably, has enjoyed their time here. The quotable chestnuts of Caesar rang out, and Fat Ham thrilled with unexpected song and dance. Since when was it no longer enough to simply sit in the dark and let speech ebb and crest in the mind?

For the next few days, driving home and at my parents’ house, I have a series of dreams. That I’m back in school again, but that I can’t read. That I’m running down a long, dark corridor, with someone coming up behind me. I think back to Julius Caesar. It’s easy to forget how turbulent the play is, especially its first half. Omens and apparitions, strange fires in the sky. A lion walks through the Capitol. While we’re in Ashland, we’re all resting in a dream. A peaceful one, and peaceful perhaps because of its broken relationship to everything beyond these forested hills. The theater has a promise we can’t entirely reach; it bores us, it disappoints us, it can hardly compete with the rush of time. I could complain, but the actors were still there, delivering beautiful lines, upholding something even as it slips away. The darkness there still gathers something difficult, elusive.

During Caesar, I turned to see how my father was doing. I couldn’t tell if his head was slouched because he was looking at the iPad of captions that had been provided for him, or if he had dozed off. I turned towards the rest of the audience, and surely many were resting out there, silver-haired sleepers, soothed by iambic pentameter. I hoped they were having good dreams.

 

David Schurman Wallace is a writer and editor living in New York City.

A Little Ghost, Barbara Guest, and Me

FROM PRABUDDHA DASGUPTA’s portfolio Longing in THE SPRING 2012 ISSUE OF THE PARIS REVIEW.

I don’t love being stoned, but I love being stoned in museums. Cannabis makes me quiet and uncertain, or chatty and self-conscious, which winds back to quiet and uncertain. Alone in a museum, however, the mind’s defenselessness—what divides me from all other objects is, it turns out, as sturdy as a sheet of wet tissue paper—no longer seems dangerous. I drift from room to room, pleased to dissolve into the art.

So, I took a low-dose edible upon arriving at the Museum of Modern Art on a September afternoon two years ago. I was there on assignment to write a poem about a piece in the permanent collection; I’d chosen a collotype by Eadweard Muybridge. As it wasn’t on display, I had an appointment in the photography department. A curator ushered me into a large room, all beige and white. In the center of the room stood a large table and a single chair, angled toward the window, which took up almost the entirety of one wall and looked out onto West Fifty-Third Street. The collotype, sleeved in plastic, lay waiting on the table. Woman Dancing (Fancy), one plate from Muybridge’s massive Animal Locomotion project, shows a woman in diaphanous white twirling across a black background.  For an hour I took notes sober, and then, after my thoughts went wispy, for an hour stoned. Across the street, grass sprang from low gray clouds. A roof garden. A pleasant vacancy resolved: done here. I would wander the galleries, I decided, until the edible wore off.

Down a flight of stairs, through an archway, I saw black rotary telephones arranged on plinths. The gallery wasn’t crowded; people moved through it like migrating animals, undistracted from loftier destinations. “Dial-A-Poem,” the wall text, blown up, sans serif, read. I lifted a receiver, thinking of my grandmother, who taught me to dial on her rotary phone. I’d loved the swing and catch, how you had to wait for each electrical pulse to send. It made a game of communication. In 1968, the artist and poet John Giorno created Dial-A-Poem, catchily and accurately named: call a telephone number and listen to a poem read by its author. Giorno got some of the best minds of his generation to contribute: John Ashbery, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka … the famous names roll on and on. This room reincarnated a MoMA exhibit, phones randomizing through two hundred poems, from decades earlier. Giorno died in 2019. Now, in my ear, he theatrically elongated an introduction: “Diiiiiaaaaal a Poooome‚” “poem” converted to defiant monosyllable, and “Baaaaarbaraaaa Guest.” Then a woman’s tailored voice took control. People used to apply more drama to enunciation: they both sounded like minor characters in All About Eve or The Philadelphia Story. “Door bells,” Barbara Guest said, divorcing the compound with a pause.

The poem was simple, startling, one minute long. In the words, I recognized the perfect encapsulation of a thought I hadn’t known to think. The experience reminded me of the first time that words in another language became more than sound to me. In the wake of comprehension, I felt starved for more sense. I wanted to listen to it again and again. Wonder is an astonishment that births delight, and then curiosity.

It’s impossible to hold the whole of a poem in your head the first time you hear it. At best, you may hang on to a phrase; if you’re lucky, a whole crystalline image. I hastily typed two lines of this one into my Notes app: “I wish to change the filigree of our subjects” and “beware of intimacy it is only a footbridge.” Guest read another poem, none of which I retained. A pause, like a radio tuned to nothing. The next poem, by someone I’ve forgotten, started. It didn’t matter.

***

Those lines kept their power even after the return of sobriety—even in the B train’s orange envelope, where I first tried to search for the poem’s text, with no luck. I blamed Google’s turn toward uselessness, and the rickety connection on the subway. I’d try again at home. But there I also had no luck, though I tried all the tricks I knew for sifting truth from trash. “I wish to change the filigree of our subjects” ended up in the poem I wrote, which emerged as a headlong tumble, a manic attempt to diagnose and describe the relations between stillness and motion, dance and language, love and violence. When I’d chosen the collotype, I hadn’t known that Muybridge had killed his wife’s lover, and in the poem I made into lyric my entirely prosaic discomfort over the fact that I’d devoted hours of attention to the work of a murderer when my own brother had, two years before, been murdered. I did wish to change the filigree of my subjects: if not to escape the death that governed my thoughts, then at least to dodge the repetition of its old ornaments.

All autumn, I kept telling people about this Barbara Guest poem I’d heard and couldn’t find. Her poetry wasn’t entirely new to me. In graduate school, she’d been the lone woman to appear under “The New York School” on a syllabus. The author of more than twenty poetry collections, many essays, a biography of the poet H.D., an experimental novel, and several plays, she was overshadowed in the classroom discussion by her male contemporaries, Ashbery and the ineradicably popular Frank O’Hara. My obsession might have ebbed into a more reasonable appreciation had I been able to find the text of the poem anywhere. But it couldn’t be found online, nor did it appear in The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, which I read straight through, in case the poem, or at least some of its lines, appeared under a different title. Nothing. No doorbells. Or door bells.

At first, I read like a student hunting for a suitable quote to squash into an essay, clock ticking down to deadline. Then I simply began to read. In Guest’s poems, the thoughts, impressions, images spring into being the way that God creates in Genesis, unapologetically strange and fully formed: “I am talking to you / With what is left of me written off, / On the cuff, ancestral and vague, / As a monkey walks through the many fires / Of the jungle while a village breathes in its sleep.” Some of the poems hew closer to an O’Hara-esque “I do this, I do that” reportage of turbocharged perception, whereas others draw together fancifulness and the habit of turning matter into metaphysics in the way that a great Ashbery poem does. She interpolates The Tale of Genji and Gertrude Stein as well as the pains of, presumably, her own life: “I am in love with him / Who only among the invited hastens my speech.”

And, throughout, there is art as subject: both the making and the thing made. In these poems, she writes of how “an emphasis falls on reality” through the artist’s way of seeing. If she begins envious of “fair realism,” then soon enough there is no reason for envy, as the real world conforms to the imaginative vision and a “drawn” house becomes real enough to move into, among “the darkened copies of all trees.” There’s a symbiotic grace here, a sense that art and reality are so intertwined that what the poet sees can be reported as calmly as any journalistic observation. A relaxed confidence pervades stanzas like “if I spoke loudly enough, / knowing the arc from real to phantom, / the fall of my voice would be, / a dying brown.” Thus these lines, in context, appear wholly natural yet still surprising. The force that binds and propels the poems never strains after intelligibility. This is the way, in Guest’s imaginative universe, that poetry should be: “Respect your private language,” she instructs in one essay. In her tenacious respect for her own, Guest reminds me of Anne Carson; both are so blithely unconcerned with making sense to anyone but themselves that it isn’t clear they understand the extent of the faith they place in a perfectly personal logic. (The truest believers don’t recognize an alternative to belief.) Guest’s poems, like Ashbery’s, often develop via sound, image, and coincident gesture, and, as with Ashbery’s, meaning seems not irrelevant, exactly, but subsidiary to the primary pleasure, also the primary purpose: language. Gorgeous sentences abound, but the line—“that nude, audacious line,” in Guest’s words—is the star. Compact phrases delight, one after another: “I impart to my silences / operas”; “this pharmacy / turns our desire into medicines and revokes the rain”; “the Church of // Our Lady cried Enough”; “It is the hour for decisions and I am going to take a little nap.” It’s possible to read Guest’s work with no attention to a poem’s larger significance and still feel the distinctive bliss of illumination. As if summoned from another world, a density of ideas and feelings takes shape and then passes, quick as a cloud. Even writing itself renews when the classical Muses return to an earth that is “no longer fragrant” and loose birds in a bedroom near “that old shawl in the corner.” Guest portrays the inspiration that dislodges poems as a dizzying, unrestrained, inexplicable, profane miracle: “The room fills now with feathers, / the birds you have released, Muses, // I want to stop whatever I am doing / and listen to their marvelous hello.”

***

The search for the text of “Doorbells” (“Door Bells”?) became a minor quest running parallel to my real-life commitments. MoMA did not have any texts for the Dial-A-Poem exhibit. Nor did they have digital audio recordings to share. The Dial-A-Poem hotline still exists—at +1 (917) 994-8949—so my best friend and I called and called in an attempt to record the poem so I could transcribe it, but after dialing 103 times and then hanging up before dozens of excellent poems had time to get going, I conceded that this was a flawed strategy. Also, a transcription would offer only the words, and a poem stripped of its line breaks is a mutilated creature. I emailed the John Giorno Foundation, which provided the audio recording. Progress! I could slow it down, replay, get all the words as close to right as possible. Then I located pages in the Barbara Guest archives at Yale University that I thought might be the right poem—right title, right year. These pages had not been digitized or transcribed, so it was merely a list in the online catalogue: three typewritten drafts, box 53. My first impulse was to take the train to New Haven to check for myself, but, after lecturing myself on practicality (I mean really, a whole day spent working toward the possibility of solving a problem I’d created, irrelevant to my life), I settled for requesting a scan from the reference librarians. I waited. And there, at last, it appeared in my inbox as a downloadable PDF: the fulfillment of desire, the end of the quest. “Door Bells,” after all.

Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke Library and the Barbara Guest Estate.

I’d thought I would feel more triumph. As soon as I opened the PDF, my usual mode of textual engagement took over: it was just another poem. It was like starting to date a long-term crush. The fantasy simulacrum collapses, and then a new relationship must begin based on what’s actually there—a realism, fair or not.

 

***

Door Bells

How yellow is the river this day
of double images quietly I reverse
and levelling with the water I write
a yellow line and lo the door bell appears
wearing a yellow cap and we eye each other
its square to my circle then our speech
begins of belldom which becomes rather like
a tinkling toy slightly itching sonata
we communicate this way gently for an hour
until irritation begins when I wish to change
the filigree of our subjects which had
begun to scratch Silence is so rare
indeed it is I say to the doorbell
who had responded several times too eagerly
montages do not resemble ice cubes and
rain has changed the yellow river.
A gloomy hall is open there is nobody
and the other entrances are closed for
the evening how much loneliness prefers its own
company that at the bottom of the day or the painting
beware of intimacy it is only a footbridge
you are forcing me on it with your metal heart

“The poem begins in silence,” Guest wrote elsewhere, and I read this poem as a disputation with noise, with everything that interferes with the poet’s hearing the poem. That extra space between door and bells emphasizes the threshold’s precarious gap. The bell is embodied, autonomized, but of course a bell rings when a person rings it, and so the poem also engages, obliquely, the problem of human companionship, which a writer both craves and resents. Other people distract the poet from the writing; more dangerously, they may make it impossible to achieve the state of mind—the inner silence—required to write. Still, it is a “gloomy hall” that contains no open doors to other rooms and other lives, and “loneliness,” after all, is Guest’s choice over neutral “solitude.” But if intimacy connects us to others, then how far does that connection extend, and where does it take us? Is the reason to beware intimacy that it cannot take us as far in art as loneliness? Or is the problem that it’s “only a footbridge” rather than a place to arrive? For a writer, for any artist, I think, work and the rest of life, all the love and pain and obligation of personhood, necessarily conflict. The tension Guest enacts here never resolves. It just reiterates. Sometimes you sit with loneliness. Sometimes you obey the metal heart.

I do not know why Guest never included “Door Bells” in a book. Maybe she wrote it for Giorno’s project and never considered it outside that context. (The other poem she read, “Passage,” appears in Moscow Mansions.) Was it discarded or just forgotten? Guest died in 2006, so I can’t ask. She left behind a vast body of work, including a recently released collection of her prose, Meditations, which includes her strange, gifted, koanic essays on writing. A poem, she writes in the essay “Wounded Joy,” is a text that creates a gap between what’s expressed and what can never be expressed that does not attempt to hide this gap from the reader. We are supposed to hear the silence of what cannot be said: “no matter what there is on the written page something appears to be in back of everything that is said, a little ghost. I judge that this ghost is there to remind us there is always more, an elsewhere, a hiddenness, a secondary form of speech, an eye blink.” The poet must neither draw it out nor send it scurrying into the ether. To let it be—that is the crux of the poet’s task: “Leave this little echo to haunt the poem … It has the shape of your own soul as you write.”

***

I cared an inordinate amount about locating this poem. I attributed this to my tendency toward what a poet friend, Jameson Fitzpatrick, calls Rococo plot: harmless flourishes, small dramas, that bedazzle the everyday. The plotter’s drive is to make life, above all, more narratable. Once I invented the dilemma, the story demanded gratification. Rococo plot is a relaxed manifestation of Bovarysme, the term (derived from Flaubert’s tragically deluded Emma Bovary) for daydreaming oneself away from the boredom of reality. Emma’s demise comes via romantic novels, and discussions of Bovarysme treat falling under the influence of literature like taking fentanyl. (An internet-era version of the diagnosis is main character syndrome.) But, as T. S. Eliot noted, this “human will to see things as they are not” is just that: human.

But this answer, the first that came to mind, didn’t seem to quite account for the work, unglamorous and frustrating, I’d done to arrive at the poem. For a while I shrugged off the slight dissonance. Later, I recognized the presence, throughout this hunt, of my own little ghost. I hadn’t meant to write my dead brother into my own poem, but it couldn’t be helped. The grief is no filigree. It’s the form and the subject and the dark matter, too. I’d pursued this quest at least in part because my reality was suffused in a bleakness that I wished to believe was possible to dispel. In working to distract myself from my own thoughts, I also groped after the possibility of understanding and beauty within an everywhere sadness. That now seems the revelation “Door Bells” brought: there is the ineradicable, uneasy coexistence of silence and noise; there is also the ineradicable, uneasy coexistence of art and plain agony. All joy is wounded joy.

 

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collection Grand Tour. 

Making of a Poem: Yongyu Chen on “Outpost”

“This was my desk. Below the window is a children’s playground.”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Yongyu Chen’s “Outpost” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 252.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

I started this poem in late September in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I came back from a long trip in Asia and was waking early because of the time difference. I felt good! I was writing a lot.

I wrote the first draft after a sequence of experiences that felt like experiences already while I was inside them—starting with meeting, for the first time, a friend’s close friend and ending with a walk home on a gray day, after rain, looking at the oak branches on the ground.

It felt like the feeling of wanting to pick up the oak pieces—and noticing it, then making myself do so—did something to the previous experiences. When I came home, I started writing the poem.

How about the second draft? The third? How many drafts were there, and what were the primary differences between them?

There was one continually evolving draft, which became shorter. Over two months, I also started new poems, and a few layered into this one.

I went to a claire rousay concert—it reminded me of an Ichiko Aoba concert I didn’t go to. The title of one of Aoba’s songs, “Imperial Smoke Town,” became a scene with an ironsmith and feathers and an outpost …

I saw my friend, and we sat on the stairs—there were no seats in the café. People walked between us, up and down. We read a poem by Celan together …

Hölderlin was the last, sudden addition to the poem. I was learning about his walk through the mountains and the gun under his pillow in the cold …

While editing, the word free became important. I was writing a lot, and freedom was what writing felt like to me. I was reading Alice Notley, which freed me to write about more things I notice. I thought that there was something photographic about this loosening, which to me meant writing a lot, just writing what happens, and knowing a lot of it won’t work and that what works will work not because of technique, mainly, but through the assemblage of real things indexed in the poem.

The photographer Moyra Davey once wrote that “accident is the lifeblood of photography.” And “My ratio these days is perhaps one usable frame for every five or ten rolls of film.” In the same text, she quotes Garry Winogrand—“That’s really what photography—still photography—is about. In the simplest sentence, I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished, after all?

When I put Hölderlin in, the poem felt finished because doing so felt … like it broke a rule, or inner pattern. He is so historical, graspably real and concrete. That texture finished the poem for me.

The last set of edits were done with the Paris Review poetry editor Chicu Reddy’s suggestions, which tightened the poem. Some of these edits changed or reversed meanings—“No longer remembering” became “Remembering.” Others removed objects which I couldn’t imagine removing, like the hand at the end, on the thigh. I admired those edits because I couldn’t have made them, from within the logic of making the poem. They work on the poem and let its meaning change, if necessary. Or maybe the meaning itself needed to be developed for the poem to work, better. These edits were easy to accept because they were sharp, difficult, and not me.

Are there hard and easy poems?

Yes. This one was easy.

 

Yongyu Chen’s first book of poems, a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize, is forthcoming from Nightboat in spring 2026.

A Lyric Nation: On the Uncollected Dream Songs

From “Six American Days and One Night,” a portfolio by David Bowes that appeared in the Spring 1984 issue of The Paris Review.

The United States is a lyric nation. It has a geography suited to epic, and an expanse suited to epic, but it is organized in a lyric way—organizationally, the United States has more in common with Astrophil and Stella than Paradise Lost. Each state is a lyric, and the nation as a whole is a lyric sequence—or, better, a lyric group. That is to say, the United States is many individual poems that can also be understood as one poem. This organizational feature and the resulting constant tension between individual states and the federal government—that the states seem always, even if at times only minimally, to threaten to pull entirely away from the nation—are, I think, among the several reasons that no successful traditional epic poem, no Aeneid, has been produced in the United States (the exception that proves the rule being Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, both traditional epic and anti-epic at once). But John Berryman’s The Dream Songs is an epic.

It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic.

But The Dream Songs also, of course, features a hero, as epics traditionally do—Henry. In his note included with the complete edition of The Dream Songs, Berryman described Henry, and The Dream Songs as a whole:

Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work … The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (nor the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.

Henry, of course, is no Odysseus, though he more closely resembles Odysseus than all other epic heroes, with the exception of the unnamed protagonist of Dante’s Commedia (indeed, Henry strikes me as a combination of both heroes, but sitting in an armchair, sometimes a desk chair, at the end of a long day, talking, sometimes singing, sometimes shouting, in an otherwise empty room). Henry is an unheroic hero—a heroic hero has in-narrative effects upon the physical world and the people in it; Henry, for the most part, does not. When he does, the reader must take his word for it that he does; he, rather than the narrative of the epic, describes the effects he has. He is, in other words, a twentieth-century white American male, not especially remarkable, the sort of person who doesn’t establish or recover a nation, or parley with angels, or explore hell, but the sort of common person of whom nations are constituted, to whom angels were once commonly believed to minister in small ways, of whom hell was once commonly believed to be full. Henry is a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled. He does not mourn the disappearance of those beliefs; he has held on to the beliefs he could.

The Dream Songs has no narrative, however, although it features a hero, and it is this lack of a binding narrative that prevented me, and has perhaps prevented others, from recognizing that The Dream Songs is an epic. Just as the United States is an amalgamation of states, The Dream Songs is an amalgamation of lyrics; just as the stories of the states do not melt and vanish into the story of the nation, the lyrics that constitute The Dream Songs do not melt and vanish into it. The states, considered together, give one the idea of the United States, but the single entity that is the United States floats just beyond that idea, whole thanks to the addition of an ineffable element; the individual Songs, considered together, give one an idea of The Dream Songs, but the single entity, the epic, is something more, whole thanks to the additional consideration of Henry as an entity—he is the cover that binds the pages of the book together. And he makes the expansion of the epic with the Songs in the book you are now reading, or hearing, possible.

The Dream Songs is an epic, then, of a representative twentieth-century American mind, and it is important that it is understood to be the mind of a white person. To contemporary readers, Henry’s use of verbal blackface might be off-putting, but it is essential. With Henry’s verbal blackface, Berryman externalizes the racial anxieties of the white, midcentury American. And he seems to do so consciously. As seen above, in his introductory note to The Dream Songs, Berryman made a point of indicating that Henry is white—he wanted his readers to keep that in mind; in the context of the introductory note, he did not allow whiteness to be a default position—and, in his own life, Berryman refused academic jobs in the South because he didn’t like how black people were treated there. I do not here suggest that Berryman was perfectly enlightened with regard to issues of race, but I do believe he recognized race relations as a—perhaps the—central problem for white Americans, the obstacle that the epic hero must think his way through, and I believe he worked to think his way through toward justice.

***

In a 1968 interview with Berryman, Catherine Watson wrote, “Not all the songs about Henry are in the books, Berryman said, but ‘if there is a third volume, it will not take him further. It will be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones.’ ” Berryman understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form—although his remark does suggest that it has an established beginning and end; note the phrase, “fit those poems in among.” Only Sing collects 152 possible additions to the epic, each of which is worth reading for its own merits.

Berryman seems to have realized that the Songs he hadn’t included in his complete edition of The Dream Songs would one day be published. In reference to his then unpublished material, he said in a 1967 interview with Elizabeth Nussbaum, “Why should I publish it? I have little need for fame and money at this point. Anyway, somewhere there’s an assistant professor waiting to become an associate professor—and here are my manuscripts.” Apparently, Berryman often contemplated facilitating such an academic transition; he mentions it in other interviews, as well as in Dream Song 373:

will assistant professors become associates

by working on his works?

Although he wondered, he didn’t object. It is often difficult to know whether a deceased author’s unpublished work ought to be published; I think it almost always ought to be, but I can understand why other people think otherwise. However, with regard to Berryman’s unpublished work, there is considerably less ambiguity than one might find with other writers.

And it seems to me the work ought to be published not only because the Songs are good—some of my favorite Berryman poems are in this book, among them “For Louis MacNeice” and the Song beginning “Grim Pilgrims gather: ‘Thanks.’ I give thanks too,” both of which are elegies for friends who were also poets—but also because Berryman is a central poet of his generation. He seems now to reach more readers than his contemporaries, with the possible exception of Elizabeth Bishop. I have seen more people, strangers, reading The Dream Songs in public than any other book of poems. Also—a fact less noted among poets than it ought to have been—every season finale of the HBO show Succession, including the series finale, is titled after a phrase from Berryman’s Dream Song 29.

***

At the beginning of John Haffenden’s introduction to the volume he edited of late poems not included in Berryman’s final books (that volume, currently out of print but not difficult to find used or in libraries, is titled Henry’s Fate), one encounters the following sentences: “This volume of poems, written between 1967 and 1972 … represents only a fraction of Berryman’s unpublished and uncollected work. There are several hundred unpublished Dream Songs, and as many more miscellaneous poems.” Although I had first read Henry’s Fate over a decade ago, it wasn’t until reading it again in 2023 that I realized the “several hundred unpublished Dream Songs, and as many more miscellaneous poems” hadn’t yet been collected, and upon that realization, of course, I tweeted about it, expressing a wish that somebody would collect the unpublished Songs and poems. Soon after I posted that tweet, Christopher Richards, who had edited my memoir, emailed me to suggest I edit a volume of unpublished Berryman myself. The idea first seemed absurd to me, then terrifying, then possible and absurd and terrifying, and I set about trying to make the idea a book. In December of 2025, that book, Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Two of the Songs from the book appear in the Summer 2025 issue of The Paris Review.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. In November of 2023—on the anniversary, although I didn’t know it at the time, of the date on which Berryman wrote Dream Song 29—I flew to Minneapolis for a daylong visit to the Andersen Library Reading Room at the University of Minnesota. There, Erin McBrien, then the interim curator, located the boxes of Berryman’s unpublished material and patiently answered all my questions, and I photographed each of the manuscripts of the unpublished Dream Songs. The next day, I flew home and began transcribing the Songs. Doing so, I made no effort to Americanize Berryman’s spelling—he studied for two years at Clare College, Cambridge, and often favored British spelling—and I left the entirely idiosyncratic spellings and words untouched (one example of the latter: the word sieteus in the poem beginning “Hearkened Henry,” which perhaps ought to be she tells, but is, in fact, sieteus in Berryman’s typescript). I corrected only obvious typos. Once the Songs were transcribed, I had to determine how to arrange them, and I settled upon ordering them alphabetically according to first line. I could not organize them chronologically, because most of them hadn’t been dated by the poet and I didn’t want to guess—my goal was to impose as little of my own will as possible upon the organization of the Songs. However, I have made two exceptions: there are two short sequences of Songs among the Songs collected in Only Sing, one titled “Four Dream Songs,” and one an incomplete group of Songs, each of which is titled “Idyl.” Each group I placed alphabetically according to the first line of the first poem in the group. Although it was Berryman’s practice, when collecting the Dream Songs into books, to group the Songs in numbered sections, I haven’t done so, as to do so would be to impose the will I’m trying to minimize. These Songs are put together in the way that I hope best allows—or at least allows as well as any other way—readers to “fit [them] in among” the already existing Songs, so that each reader might expand the epic according to their own wishes, thereby laying claim to their particular sense of what The Dream Songs is.

 

Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in December.

Shane McCrae’s most recent full-length book is New and Collected Hell, and his most recent chapbook is Two Appearances After the Resurrection. He teaches at Columbia University.

Stolen Goods

Berlin’s historic Kaufhaus des Westens (Department Store of the West) with its front gate up. C.Suthorn, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The border opens, and people from the West bend down from the tailgates of their trucks and give presents to their poor sisters and brothers from the East: Christmas is coming, and they’re giving wrapping paper away for free in the joy of reunification. But now here they come, the evil sisters from the East, the well-educated girls who took piano lessons at home, who know Faust’s final monologue by heart, and they stuff the West into their pockets, they slip sunglasses from Schlecker into their sleeves and music cassettes between the buttons of their jackets, they tie sweaters they haven’t paid for around their waists and even walk around the store with them on, while these things that don’t belong to them slowly absorb the heat of their bodies. Well, that’s just outrageous, these young ladies don’t know what gratitude is (clearly they were completely ruined by the Russians), they come along and just toss cheese, sausage, and coffee, even champagne bottles and chocolate, into their shopping bags, maybe they pay for the three rolls at the top, but then they stroll out of the shopping hall, which is called a supermarket nowadays, with all those other, stolen things bouncing around underneath, and those girls don’t even blush. At home they practice drawing in perspective, but on the Ku’damm they put on expensive fur hats and then leave the store with alabaster faces. These same girls used to have to line up at dawn to get hold of even one copy of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss—and now that they can buy any book they want, they start stealing! The factories in the East are so dilapidated that those people can be happy if someone buys them for one mark: if you want to be able to afford expensive underwear, you have to work first, work until you turn old and gray, until you turn black if you have to, don’t just stuff a bra down the front of your pants until you have a belly, nothing is free anymore, Christmas is over, but they don’t listen, those brash young things, they drive out of the hardware store on riding lawnmowers, right past the salesman, and even give him a friendly nod, if we’re not careful, they’ll rob the West blind. Anno 1990.

Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.

From  Things That Disappear , to be published by New Directions in October.

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. Her most recent novel, Kairos, won the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Kurt Beals is an associate professor in the department of Germanic languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. He has previously translated books by Anja Utler, Regina Ullmann, and Reiner Stach.

Intrigue on the Slopes of Bardonecchia

Illustration by Sean Donahue.

When one’s boss says, “We’re goin’ to Italy in January,” one is not in a position to disagree. There is Italy: beautiful. There is the gentle coercion: “We’re goin’.” There are the professional considerations: one’s boss. And there is the mysterious magnetism of the occasion itself: Some sort of conference? For international journalists? And we’ll be skiing the whole time?

“It’ll be a team-building thing,” the boss told Our Journalist over the phone. Something more was said about “networking with the foreign press” and “footing the bill for our airfare,” and Our Journalist soon found himself committed to attending the Ski Club of International Journalists’ seventieth annual meeting.

The boss’s name is Ryan, and he has a way of making things happen. “Inviting Chandler to Italy, so it’ll be the four of us,” he texted a few days later. The fourth person is Valen. They are all young American journalists, and they work for the same magazine. Ryan is the managing editor, Valen and Chandler are contributing writers, and Our Journalist is a modest copy editor. He has gently placed commas into Valen’s and Chandler’s articles.

“Families That Ski Together, Stay Together,” reports the website All Mountain Mamas. Psychology Today declares that “real rewards come when we leave the bunny slopes, both on skis and in life.” Time magazine calls skiing “a Ridiculously Good Workout.” This trip was shaping up to be a real professional and personal boon.

The Ski Club of International Journalists is as real as you or me. It exists not only in the fantasies of frustrated Swiss radio hosts and overworked Kazakhstani investigative reporters but in the Nock Mountains of Austria, the Karawanks of Slovenia, the Mangfall Alps of Germany, and other magnificent alpine ranges, where for seventy winters journalists from all over the world have gathered to ski and drink and bask in conviviality.

As do NATO and the International Olympic Committee, the Ski Club of International Journalists (SCIJ) has as its official languages English and French. As with Aspirin and deconstruction, a Frenchman may be held responsible for this peculiar invention. It was 1955, a tense year. It was the year of the Bern incident, in which a mustachioed Transylvanian sculptor attacked the Romanian embassy in Switzerland. It was the year of the Geneva Summit, in which top leaders from the USSR, the USA, Britain, and France convened in an attempt to soften the international tensions of the Cold War. The year of the Warsaw Pact, in which the Soviet Union and seven Eastern Bloc countries pledged mutual defense. And the year that Gilles de La Rocque, playing his own humble ambassadorial role, convened the first meeting of SCIJ.

Gilles de La Rocque was a journalist of aristocratic origins. He liked to hike and ski. He has been described as romantic. His forehead was high, his nose broad, and his frame in photographs looks slight but sinewy. He sometimes wore a cravat. He fought against the Germans. And after World War II ended, he began working for a daily newspaper in Paris. But his ambitions exceeded the press box: he had a talent for diplomacy, and a disdain for the Iron Curtain dividing Western and Eastern Europe, and these traits collided to create an idea.

“It’s some kind of Boy Scout idea,” La Rocque would say two decades after SCIJ’s founding. The idea was to get journalists from both sides of the Iron Curtain together and put them on skis: Yugoslavs and Swedes, Bulgarians and Brits, all gliding down the same white hill, bridging their countries’ ideological rifts, chipping away at that East-West barrier …

“Mountains bring people together,” La Rocque believed. And they did. From 1955 on, all around Europe the journalists went, to the resorts of Méribel and Zakopane and Bayrischzell and Bad Gastein, talking and skiing under the auspices of SCIJ. Club membership was not individual but, like an intergovernmental organization, a matter of nation-states. Each “Member Nation” would get one captain and one vote in the General Assembly (GA), where club matters would be decided. SCIJ would also be overseen by a kind of executive branch: an International Committee (IC) comprised of a club president and a secretary-general. SCIJ rules on term limits have changed over time, but IC members are currently allowed to serve two three-year terms.

The first SCIJ meeting included eight Member Nations, or national teams: Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland, West Germany, and Yugoslavia. Soon enough, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic joined, along with the Brits and Americans. Russia was added in 1960, four years after Team USA. Russia did not always behave. In 1977, its SCIJ team was led by Kremlin officials. The Kremlin’s skiers reportedly spied on their peers.

Nonetheless, SCIJ prospered and grew, during and after the Cold War. It welcomed more nations into its arms. Individual membership reached a thousand. Members roamed the earth, skiing in Québec and Utah and Kazakhstan.

Today, SCIJ has demographics in some ways akin to Italy’s: the old far outnumber the young. In 2024, the average SCIJ member was fifty-five years old. When Our Journalist and his colleagues joined in 2025, the average age went down to fifty-two.

Joining SCIJ is simple. You shell out sixty euros for the membership fee, four hundred euros for the meeting fee, and answer yes to the prompt “More than 80% of my professional compensated activities are from journalism” on the online registration portal. “Journalism” and “80%” are to be understood capaciously: certain members seem to derive their income primarily from flying airplanes, or from practicing law, or from “the industrious nature of my grandparents and parents.” In exchange for the privilege of participating in SCIJ, attendees are expected to write light touristic dispatches about their time at these gatherings, e.g.:

For one surreal, suspended week on an island … borders and age gaps and ideological differences faded into a whipped cream wonderland of camaraderie. (Scott Newman, 27 Rouge; SCIJ 2023, Canada)

We, of course, had a good selection of regional cheeses, but do not think of sophisticated wine-cheese pairings and tastings. Despite being in France, we were usually indulging ourselves in Belgian beer. (Aylin Öney Tan, Hürriyet Daily News; SCIJ 2019, France)

Customs regulations prevented bringing turkey from the US, but the hotel did a commendable job of roasting two large birds. (Leah Larkin, Tales and Travel; SCIJ 2012, Turkey)

Each year, a different Member Nation accepts the responsibility of hosting SCIJ in their country. This year it was Team Italy’s turn. On January 26, 2025, SCIJ celebrated its seventh decade in the Italian alps, in the Susa Valley, in the town of Bardonecchia.

 ***

Our journalist’s journey to Italy passed pleasantly. He spent part of it catching up on the SCIJ WhatsApp chat, to which he’d just been inducted:

“Dutch pea soup is on its way to Turin.”

“German Currywurst just passed the border to Bella Italia!”

“Oysters and champagne arriving from France!”

“Some Turkish delight to please the sweet tooth!”

The bus then rattled from the airport to its terminus in Turin, and Our Journalist shuffled out to look for the rest of Team USA. He found them by the train station, unloading their gear from a different bus.

Ryan and Valen looked up and grinned.

Valen wore a long dark coat and her hair touched the coat’s fur collar. Ryan was tall and blond and Californian; he had a trim handsome beard and a tan face. Our Journalist hugged his colleagues.

There was an older gentleman with them too. He was dressed formally, in a gray blazer, a white shirt, and a red silk tie patterned with sunflowers. His hair was cut close to his head, his cheeks were stubbled gray, and he bore a certain jolly heft. He told the Americans that he was Bulgarian.

“Let’s fuckin’ go!” said Ryan, as the last of the bags came out of the bus. He put his hands on his hips and sighed happily. “Should we sit down somewhere and have a beer?”

The group found a café inside the train station, and everyone ordered a local IPA.

“What was your name again?” Our Journalist asked the Bulgarian.

“I am Tihomir,” he declared. “But friends call me Tisho. Like … piece of paper for blowing nose.”

The Americans nodded.

“What is your name,” said Tisho.

“Noah,” said Our Journalist.

“Noah. Like the coffin.”

“No,” Our Journalist said, “like the ark.”

Tisho, it emerged from their conversation, was primarily a lawyer. He had a legal column in a newspaper and sometimes wrote reported pieces. His latest article was about Bulgarian expats in Munich who paid steep prices for imported Bulgarian cabbage. Bulgarians preferred Bulgarian cabbage.

“Do you like the Bulgarian State Women’s Choir?” Our Journalist asked. The choir was one of the few things he knew about Tisho’s country.

Tisho frowned. “I prefer Ray Charles. Ray Charles came to Bulgaria.” He smiled. “Tina Turner came to Bulgaria.” He smiled wider. “Rolling Stones”—he scowled and scrunched his face—“do not come. They are my favorite.”

Tisho fell silent and looked at his bottle of beer. His eyes narrowed. “This beer says rock and roll,” he muttered. This realization seemed to unlock something in him. He rummaged in his backpack and extracted a large green can and set it on the table. It was beer.

“Bulgarian,” he announced with satisfaction. He picked up the can and splashed some into each American’s glass. Then he filled his own. The waiter didn’t seem to notice.

“That’s very kind of you,” said Ryan.

“It’s nice,” Our Journalist said after taking a sip.

“I’m nice too,” said Tisho.

Our Journalist agreed. There was a pause.

“So how big is the Bulgarian team?” Ryan asked.

“I am the only one,” Tisho said.

“What?”

Tisho shook his head sadly. “We’re in a very … difficult place right now. You will see.”

And here we must clarify: mountains can, but do not always, “bring people together.”

It was 2019, and the Bulgarians were in the hole.

The issue of the debt had begun in Val d’Arly, France, on a trip organized by the Belgian branch of the Ski Club of International Journalists. Four members of SCIJ Bulgaria had, with what some considered insufficient notice, canceled their trips to the French Alps after initially committing. This put the hosting Belgians in an uncomfortable position—they had already paid for the hotel rooms and buses. One of those Belgians was a man named Bruno Schmitz. The Bulgarians, he and certain members alleged, owed SCIJ sixteen hundred euros. The Bulgarians, other members alleged, did not; they had canceled well in advance. In 2023, Bruno Schmitz was elected as SCIJ’s secretary-general, whose duty it is to manage club finances. In his new role, Schmitz made debt collection something of a priority.

The debt sowed discord. So did some unsavory social media posts and text messages that may or may not have been related to it. What those posts and texts were certainly related to was the leader of the Bulgarians, Alex Bogoyavlenski.

“I like our Bulgarian friends,” Bruno has noted. “Alex, however, is a bit difficult.”

Alex had been the first Bulgarian to cancel his trip to Val d’Arly, citing “personal problems.” He vociferously refused to pay arrears for so doing. “I think Alex would prefer to take the money and burn it in front of us rather than pay up,” one SCIJ member would later tell Bruno. In 2023, further problems accrued: certain members of the Ski Club of International Journalists asserted that Alex Bogoyavlenski was, in fact, not a journalist. It must be admitted: Alex’s username on Instagram is thelazyflyer. He has three titles on LinkedIn: first “Commercial Pilot,” second “Digital Marketing Mastermind,” and then “Aviation Journalist.” He flies Boeing 737s and Airbus A220s for Bulgaria Air. There was talk of banishing Bogoyavlenski from the club.

 ***

“There’s so many schisms I could tell you about,” said a slight British woman.

“It’s part of the pleasure of SCIJ,” said a Canadian.

It was Welcome Night at the Villaggio Olimpico, the hotel in Bardonecchia that was hosting the skiing journalists for the week, and we were all getting acquainted—reporters from the Financial Times, editors from Agence France Presse, hosts from Radiotelevisione italiana. The hotel was reminiscent of a provisional hospital someone had forgotten to tear down. Inside, its walls were cold and white. Outside, it was painted a queasy green.

“Might one of those schisms have to do with Bulgaria?” asked Our Journalist.

The Brit’s eyes twinkled Britishly.

“You’ll see,” she said. It was time for dinner.

The skiing journalists filed over to the hotel cafeteria with their glühwein, ducking between swarms of swaggy Italian teens and tweens dressed in black. In the dining hall, there were chicken legs and roasted potatoes and big plastic pitchers of wine. Our Journalist sat across from a tall rosy Belgian who was, it emerged from their conversation, a lawyer, not a journalist. He was excited about the recent American elections.

“The average American … is so ignorant!” he said. “The average American … has no idea of history!”

Our Journalist glanced to his right. Tisho was off at a different table, concentrating on pouring wine into a plastic water bottle.

“The average American …”

Our Journalist looked to his left. Over in the lobby, a woman from SCIJ Italy had begun distributing ski passes and goody bags from behind a counter.

“… knows nothing of the world!”

Our Journalist excused himself to collect his goodies.

He thanked the woman behind the counter and peeked in the bag. There were 650 grams of salami, 466 grams of Parmigiano Reggiano, and a black notebook labeled PARMIGIANO REGGIANO.

“You accuse me?!” someone was shouting.

Our Journalist looked up from his salami. Hey, it was Tisho.

“We already gave you your pass!” hissed the Italian woman. She thought Tisho was trying to bamboozle her into giving him an extra bag.

“I got pass but not bag! You accuse me?!” Tisho touched his chest proudly.

“Take it and get out of here!” She flung the bag on the counter.

Tisho scowled. He was not satisfied.

“Apologize to me!” he said.

The Italian woman ignored him.

“You apologize to me!”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry. Now please leave.”

Tisho swiped the goodies and stomped away. I insisted on my rights and got them, he thought.

***

Rumor is a river that runs two ways. Alex the Bulgarian stood accused, in essence, of refusing to repay a debt and of being a fraud. But it was said by other skiing journalists that the current president of SCIJ, a middle-aged Canadian named Frederick Wallace, was the one who was not a journalist. It was said that under his tenure six thousand euros in club funds had been spent with a suspicious lack of documentation. It was said that he was trampling on justice in his treatment of Alex Bogoyavlenski, who in fact had “over three-hundred authored publications and media projects in the past two years.” (Alex’s words.) And it was said that the Bulgarians were not really in debt: The Belgians had actually run a raffle at SCIJ 2019 to recoup their losses—and succeeded. The Belgians, it seemed to some, were thus after not sixteen hundred euros but revenge for the cancellation. It did not help that Wallace was currently serving a third term, in defiance, some believed, of current club statutes. SCIJ had come to seem like “the president’s fiefdom,” as one club member would put it. (“I have no comment,” the president told Our Journalist when asked about the intricacies of the Bulgarian Case.)

Adding to the Bulgarians’ rue was the fact that they had helped Wallace win his first presidential election so many years ago. That was in 2014. That was in Switzerland. That was a mistake. I gave him good advice, Alex Bogoyavlenski would remember of those days. He seemed like a reasonable guy. He had a business plan. Now Wallace had turned against him.

The issue took on a curious midcentury flavor. “I remain totally disgusted from the action against Alex; it is against all of us from the East,” one of Alex’s countrywomen messaged a German SCIJ member who’d cast doubt on the Bulgarian leader’s professional bona fides. Alex’s defender continued in an ominous vein: “It takes me efforts to abstain from comparison with German history.” Even some Westerners saw what this Bulgarian woman saw: autocracy. “This is the behaviour of a dictatorship, not a club of journalists,” a British member wrote in a SCIJ Facebook group.

 ***

The Americans headed up to their rooms after the first night’s dinner. They were weak and woozy. The pitchers of wine had been unlimited, the chicken sat uneasily in their stomachs, and they’d met a dizzying number of international journalists. They stepped out onto the balcony for some alpine air.

The voice seemed to come from above, and it sounded like …

“Tisho, is that you?” said Ryan.

“Where is that from,” said Tisho.

The Americans looked up to the floor above and saw an open window.

“We’re down here,” said Ryan.

A single hand crept slowly from the window overhead.

“We are … serving life sentence up here,” said Tisho. This seemed to be his way of saying he didn’t like the hotel.

“Tish!” said Valen.

“You have … balcony-terrace?” Tisho’s hand withdrew.

“Yeah!”

“I do not,” he said with a hint of envy. “I will come see what is there.”

Tisho shuffled into the Americans’ hotel room a few minutes later. His tie was loose and he was holding a plastic water bottle full of red wine. He looked around unimpressed. The accommodations at recent SCIJ gatherings had been rather more glamorous.

Our Journalist had heard about last year’s trip to Kazakhstan at the welcome dinner. The international journalists had been lodged at the Royal Tulip Hotel, a palatial resort with gilded columns, crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and a casino. It was there that SCIJ’s General Assembly had met to adjudicate what had come to be called the “Bulgarian Case.”

On account of his debt and pugnacity, Alex the Bulgarian had not been invited to the 2024 SCIJ meeting. Alex did not care. He had flown alone to Kazakhstan. He had shown up at the Royal Tulip Hotel and sat amid the General Assembly. He had defended himself valiantly against the allegations: pilot and journalist are not mutually exclusive professions, he had argued. He had then observed his clubmates’ own deliberations on The Bulgarian Case.

“Forget about the debt from SCIJ Bulgaria,” a merciful Dane proposed.

“We cannot forgive the debt,” said a merciless Kazakhstani.

“We should have had this conversation last year,” said a weary Croatian.

Eventually, the issue was resolved through a kind of deferral: a group called “the Committee of the Wise” was formed to determine, conclusively, what had happened. Later that year, this committee recommended that the Bulgarian debt be canceled. But this was only a recommendation, and it was in Bardonecchia, at the meeting of the General Assembly, on the third day of the seven-day trip, that all would be decided.

***

“C’mon!” screamed Our Journalist. His fellow Americans kept collapsing on the ski slope. The slope was called Baby 1.

It was their first full day in Bardonecchia, and they needed to practice. Chandler was from Phoenix, Arizona. Valen was from San Diego, California. They had never skied before. Valen had scarcely seen snow. Our Journalist had to whip Team USA into shape before the SCIJ 2025 race. It was just four days away, and the week’s main event. The rest of the week, club members were free to ski as they pleased.

There was a race every year, and the club members approached it with gravity and resolve. The Italians were known to wear matching red jackets. The Kazakhstanis were known to wear matching blue coats. Injuries had been sustained in the quest for speed and glory. A Dutchwoman had once sustained a concussion; a Slovenian had busted a knee; an Irishwoman had broken an arm.

“I wanna see less pizza and more hot dog!” screamed Our Journalist.

Chandler put his skis in parallel position and spun around and collapsed. Valen was in the snow trying to get up. Our Journalist turned sharply and tumbled too. Little Italians zoomed by.

Bambini, Our Journalist thought. When he was a bambino himself, he had learned to ski at Appalachian resorts dusted with artificial snow, on the meager mounds of Virginia and West Virginia. Italy was something else.

After a few more runs on Baby 1, they tried Baby 2. It was slightly steeper.

“Lean more on your back leg!” Our Journalist called across the snow. He wasn’t sure he knew what he was talking about. “It’s like you’re sitting in a chair!” Chandler grazed a small child.

They decided to take a break at Harald’s Ski Restaurant, at the bottom of Baby 2. They ate lukewarm cheeseburgers and drank pints of beer under long timber beams.

“My skis keep getting crossed,” said Chandler.

“One of my legs is better than the other,” said Valen.

“You guys are doing great,” said Our Journalist.

They returned to the slopes and spent four more hours hurtling downhill. They needed the practice. And it would feel good to celebrate that evening’s Nations Night after a long hard day of skiing.

Nations Night is an old SCIJ tradition, a chance to drink, dance, and share one’s cherished native cuisine with fellow skiing journalists. “The Slovenians and Croatians make a very rich Nations Night,” Tisho had approvingly told Our Journalist back when they first met: It was a standard to which one wished to live up,. But every American, it soon became clear, had forgotten to bring foodstuffs from back home. This was bad optics for Team USA.

A few hours before the party kicked off, Ryan and Our Journalist recalled the words of a subeditor for the Times of London: “We just bring whiskey cuz no one wants to eat British food.” Here was an idea. Following an après-ski dinner, they set off into town to procure some American hooch.

They wandered through the snow and streetlights of Bardonecchia. The grocery stores were closed. The liquor stores were closed. It was time to get resourceful. They walked into a bar.

 “Posso comprare tutta una bottiglia di Jack Daniels?” Our Journalist struggled to say.

The barman was somber. “I ask,” he said, and ducked into the back.

He returned. “Non è possibile.”

“What if we pay a premium?” said Ryan.

“I ask,” said the barman. He ducked away again.

The barman was grave. “Sessanta euro.”

 “We’ll take it,” said Ryan.

They walked back to the hotel, out of the cold, into the warm bosom of Nations Night, and were whopped by a musky, dark, magnificent smell … the many cured meats of Europe and Eurasia … fermented milks and fermented grains … raw mollusks and salted cod … goat cheese and anchovies and sausage and wine … a thrilling blend of sounds and deep stenches … the French cracking oysters … the Swiss melting raclette…the Kazakhstanis slicing some kind of dried animal leg … the Canadians pouring maple syrup on snow… an Italian DJ playing Linkin Park’s “Numb” …

The Americans began serving up shots at the Team USA table.

“I looove Jack Daniels,” a German woman moaned in a baritone. “I looove Jack Daniels.”

Our Journalist looked elsewhere. Tisho was over in the corner, seated solo behind the Team Bulgaria table.

Tisho acknowledged him with a tired nod. “Bulgarian grappa, from grapes,” he said. He lifted a tall thin glass bottle. “It’s natural.”

Our Journalist drank a cup. Tisho was less energetic than yesterday, but he was as bighearted as ever, and Our Journalist’s presence seemed to animate him.

“Bulgarian salami,” Tisho continued. He gestured toward a dark pile of meat-sticks on a plate. Our Journalist thanked him and chewed on one.

“It’s delicious,” Our Journalist said.

This seemed to uplift Tisho even more. He suddenly picked up the plate and stood and began calling out into the party, “Come! Bulgarian salami!” There was light in his eyes.

***

The day after Nations Night found the international skiing journalists a slightly haggard and crapulent bunch. Still, the club members had political responsibilities to fulfill. The General Assembly was tonight, and upon its unfolding Bulgaria’s fate would depend.

Despite the austerity of its decor, Bardonecchia’s Villaggio Olimpico hotel was rich in special features. Its basement held a pool and a discotheque; its ground floor had a “Lounge Bar.” Close by the lounge was the theater, and in the theater the General Assembly of SCIJ was about to meet.

The journalists trickled in, finding their places among the yellow plastic chairs. Everyone sat with their respective nations: the Italians were with Italians, the Czechs were with Czechs, the Canadians were with Canadians. The Bulgarian was alone.

Tisho was wearing a blue polar fleece, gray utility pants, and brown ankle boots. He was slouched and quiet. The Americans took their seats behind him.

Exactly eight minutes before the General Assembly was set to convene, a message appeared in the SCIJ WhatsApp chat. It read, in part:

Dears,

Here’s the official Statement of SCIJ Bulgaria regarding today’s General Assembly … Have a good meeting everyone! 

It was from Alex Bogoyavlenski, the exiled captain of Team Bulgaria.

A statement had been sent to the phones of all SCIJ members: “SCIJ Bulgaria has been seriously harmed,” Our Journalist read in the first of its ten declarations. Its language was mighty. It described “unscrupulous pressure” and “controversial cases.” It described a “witch hunt” and a “gross violation” of SCIJ ethics. And it mentioned a devious quid pro quo, proposed by the president and secretary general, to dissolve the “nonexistent Bulgarian ‘debt’ ” in exchange for “the exclusion of the two most inconvenient members of the Bulgarian Club, one of whom is its Chairman, from all subsequent international meetings.”

Our Journalist set his phone down as the Assembly got underway. The first major item of the night’s agenda was Austria. This was a big night for Austria, whose SCIJ membership had lapsed in 2014 because their sole members at the time were doctors, not journalists.  The General Assembly would soon vote on whether the country should be reinducted into SCIJ, bringing the club’s total number of Member Nations to thirty-two, the same number as NATO. “Austria’s involvement will strengthen our global community of journalists who share a passion for skiing,” a SCIJ leader from Turkey was saying. “And now we ask the Assembly to accept Austria.”

Jacopo the Italian led the vote. “Against accepting Austria as the thirty-second member of SCIJ?” The hands stayed down. “In favor?” The hands shot up. “Everyone,” he said. “So we welcome Austria as the thirty-second member of SCIJ!”

“Whoo!”

“Austria!”

“Yeah!”

It was soon a Croatian member’s turn to address the Assembly. She was speaking on a less unifying subject—the quantity of articles that members do or do not produce about SCIJ.

“What’s the problem? So what’s the problem?” she asked. She was standing in front of a PowerPoint slide, and she was not smiling. “Here are the numbers by the countries. Take a look at it. Please.”

An Excel spreadsheet was glowing onstage. It showed how many articles members from each Member Nation had written in recent years. The audience gazed on dumbly. The French and Danes, the spreadsheet revealed, had not produced a single piece about either the 2024 meeting in Kazakhstan or the 2023 meeting in Canada.

“I’m a parrot,” she said bitterly. “I sound like a parrot. Year by year. Reminding you that you have to produce.”

A muttering gradually bloomed in the auditorium: What the fuck was this?

“Take a look again,” she insisted. “We had a 54 percent return from the Canada meeting. We were on the almost-exotic island in Canada. We were skiing there with all the indigenous people, and we got just 54 percent.”

The muttering grew to a rumble.

“That is all,” the Croatian woman said at last, deflating the balloon of discontent. Some applause broke out, loose and leaky. She glared at the audience. “What a sad clapping.” She returned to her seat.

The mood was already sober, and the Bulgarian Case drew near.

“Anyone want to say something?” said Jacopo the Italian.

Another Italian rose and accepted the microphone. His head was mostly free of hair, and he was wearing a gray wool sweater over a blue button-up. He was a slight, older man, and his voice quivered with feeling.

“For us, the debt of the Bulgarian team does not exist,” said Mario the Italian.

Tisho faced the Americans. “Mario è un amico,” he said.

It is difficult to describe how good this made Our Journalist feel, to see Bulgaria and Italy shaking hands—forgetting the battle of the goody bag.

A grizzly Englishman—defender of Alex, critic of Frederick—followed Mario.

“This issue is tearing this club apart,” he said through his gray beard. “This issue needs to be put to bed. It is a festering sore.” He enjoined his colleagues to vote yes on the Committee of the Wise’s report, and he received some applause.

There was time yet to speak before the vote, and it was Our Journalist who now stepped to the front of the General Assembly. He was dressed formally, in a white dress shirt and a silk tie patterned with flowers.

“I’m on Team USA,” he said to his international peers. “Many of us are new here. We are not so familiar with the conflict. But we have read the report.” He was overexcited, trembling—yet he pushed on.

“I think if this organization is really about ameliorating tensions between the East and the West,” Our Journalist said, “it’s very much in the spirit of SCIJ to accept that there’s been a conflict and we ought to simply resolve it in a spirit of forgiving and mercy. And so”—he was reaching the end of his speech, the climax, the point; out of ideas but full of spirit—“we very much stand with the Bulgarians.”

He walked back to his seat exhilarated.

Tisho turned around to face him. “I was not expecting that,” he said quietly. He reached out to shake Our Journalist’s hand. “Thank you, America.”

Our Journalist looked at Tisho. His eyes were blue and wet.

Tisho turned back to face the stage. Here came the vote.

“So, who is in favor of the Wise Committee report?” Jacopo asked.

Fourteen hands lifted.

“Who is against the report?”

The air was void of arms.

“Abstention?”

And now something strange happened, something Our Journalist did not quite understand. Nine hands stretched up to abstain, and one of them was Tisho’s.

The Americans whispered to each other. Why was the Bulgarian not defending his country? Why not vote yea?

Partly out of principle, it turned out. To vote to “forgive” a “debt” is to acknowledge that said debt exists in the first place. This the Bulgarians would not do.

“We cannot agree with the fact that Bulgaria has old unpaid bills,” Tisho later told Our Journalist.

***

Our Journalist’s legs were shaking. He bounced up and down in his ski boots.

“You look nervous,” said a Turkish journalist, who was filming Our Journalist on his iPhone.

“I’m always nervous,” said Our Journalist.

He was also feeling feeble. Two days earlier, not long after the General Assembly had adjourned, he’d been struck by what the Italians call the virus del vomito invernale, the winter vomiting bug. He’d spent a night lying on the cold blue tiles of the bathroom floor, wrapped in a blanket, vomiting and shaking madly at sea. He’d spent forty more hours prone in the hotel room bed, groaning and cursing his lot. This was his first venture back out into the snow.

“Uno,” intoned the starter.

Our Journalist peered down the slope. It had been used in the 2006 Winter Olympics. By professionals.

“Due.”

Shame, he thought. He wiggled his skis into position.

“Tre.”

He had heard but not heard; it did not seem quite right. But the starter had said it: “Tre.” He could feel the starter’s pity. Was he stupido? Why just standing there?

He slipped thru the gate and threw himself downhill—all wrong—legs spread too wide standing too tall poles jerking out like wings or oak branches—not even fast dared not speed up weaving thru flags red blue he’d topple down bust his knees and skull balls elbows—sun bent down the mountain—quick dark shape some freak chasing him almost bailed from fear—just his own shadow fanning huge behind—can’t see shit in the shadow planting poles icy patch wobbly chicken legs—

What a sad clapping. He’d made it to the end. The end! A group of SCIJ members were applauding temperately.

A middle-aged Italian announcer was also waiting at the bottom of the slope. The announcer had a perverted dimension to his personality. If someone skied well, he called out their time in Italian; if someone skied poorly, he called out their time in English and Italian. This was to ensure, it seemed, the broadest possible audience for shame.

“One minute, nineteen seconds!” he shouted cheerfully in English.

It was faster than Chandler and Tisho, but slower than almost everyone else.

By the end of the competition, Kazakhstan had earned four gold medals to emerge as the winner. Italy had earned three, Slovakia two, Canada one. America and Bulgaria: none.

***

But Bulgaria had succeeded in other respects.

Its opponents had been silent during the General Assembly: no Belgian had stood up to slander Alex. No Canadian had yelled for Bulgaria to pay its “nonexistent ‘debt.’ ” No one had even raised a hand against the Wise Committee’s report—a majority had been in favor.

Tisho seemed happy enough with these developments at the final dinner party of SCIJ 2025, held at a restaurant in an old stone farmstead. Small bites had been arrayed atop white tablecloths—anchovies, mortadella, insalata russa, zucchine alla scapece—and chairs lined the dining room’s edges. Tisho was sitting alone against the wall in one of these chairs, contentedly sipping a Campari spritz.

Our Journalist ordered a spritz of his own. It had been a long week. He joined Tisho. They clinked glasses and sipped and looked at their fellows: Frederick and the Italian DJ who’d played Linkin Park’s “Numb,” Valen and the German who so loved Jack Daniels … Our Journalist could see why one might return to SCIJ year after year, seeing the same faces, making new memories, fighting old fights … Tisho himself had been coming for two decades.

And already a new SCIJ trip was in the works: a video screened during the General Assembly had shown the international skiing journalists their next destination, the mountainous microstate of Andorra. They beheld lush green valleys and bustling modern cities; ferns and bicycles; happy diners in restaurants and happy nurses in hospitals. The video had been narrated, often with an avant-garde disconnect between image and text, by a soothingly British AI voice, which said things like “Andorra is one of the best destinations in the world to live … We have never had an army or war … Furthermore, every corner of the country is connected by high-velocity fiber optic.” Yes, the journalists would return to the slopes.

It had been two weeks since SCIJ 2025 ended when an email appeared in the inboxes of the international skiing journalists. Although it was laden with apologies and filled with allusions to “intensive efforts,” the email had a stark message: the 2026 SCIJ meeting in Andorra was canceled. The email read, in part:

Dear colleagues and friends of SCIJ,

… The Andorran stakeholders abruptly terminated negotiations on February 10th after imposing a February 21st deadline for a signed contract. This withdrawal came despite our team’s intensive efforts to meet these challenging timeframes while maintaining our organization’s high standards … Rest assured that we remain committed to … organizing a successful 2026 winter meeting at a new location.

Sincerely,

Frederick Wallace

SCIJ President

The news was not well received. The SCIJ WhatsApp chat caught fire.

“This is shocking!”

“It’s such a shame!”

“A thorough clarification is necessary, if we want SCIJ to survive.”

Team Andorra sent their own thorough reply. It read, in part:

Dear Colleagues,

We regret the distortion of facts by Mr. Wallace, his lack of seriousness in recent months, and the negative impact his actions have had. We now feel compelled to provide our version of events.

Mr. Wallace and Mr. Shmitz [sic] visited Andorra for the required site inspection, with all expenses covered by the Andorran team, including a four-star hotel with a spa, all meals (some in the country’s finest restaurants), ski passes, and travel connections.

Since the fall of 2024, we have been requesting a draft contract to formalize the agreement.

We asked to have it before their visit to Andorra, and they failed to deliver.They promised to bring it to Andorra, and they failed to deliver.They said we would receive it in Bardonecchia, and once again, they failed to deliver.

This entire situation has led us to lose trust in his word.

We do not rule out submitting a future bid to host the event, but as long as the current president remains in office, we do not wish to risk experiencing such a negative situation again.

Frederick was curiously silent in the face of this message. (He declined, once again, to comment.) His second-in-command, Bruno Schmitz, was less reserved. The Belgian issued a response to the Andorrans’ response:

Andorra wanted to host us in a 4-star hotel. It is true. But it would be the same hotel that all SCIJ members would be hosted [in] the year after.

Andorra brought us to two nice restaurants. It is true. But we did not ask for that.

Do you think that we are happy of this situation for us? And that we enjoy being without a meeting for next year? Do you think that the coming year will be easier for us, at the IC that way? Who is losing the most in all this?

I wish you a very good day. Now I must go back to my job as a journalist.

 

Noah Rawlings is a writer and translator.

Objects of Art and Virtue

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

 

From Barbara Pym’s novel The Sweet Dove Died, originally published in 1978 (NYRB Classics):

‘We specialize in porcelain and bronzes and small objects—you know the kind of thing.’

‘Objets d’art et de vertu,’ she murmured, with a delightful accent.

‘Exactly.’ Humphrey bent towards her admiringly to refill her glass with the hock he had chosen as being particularly appropriate to the occasion. That this exquisite creature should have been exposed to the contaminating presence of the dealers, for the sake of some trifling little Victorian flower book, hardly bore thinking of and filled him with horror. A book sale was certainly no place for a woman; had it been a sale of pictures or porcelain, fetching the sort of inflated prices that made headline news, or an evening sale—perhaps being televised—to which a woman could be escorted after being suitably wined and dined—that might have been another matter altogether.

 

In Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man (Soft Skull), a parable of professorial discontent in which a weather-related microaggression has spawned intradepartmental discord:

After Harold bungled this first encounter with Dolly, which had haunted all their consequent encounters, he’d begun to defensively consider “the weather,” especially in moments when he felt bad for other reasons. People thought that mentioning the weather was thin and amateurish, he thought, shortly after a story he wrote that contained a line about the winters in his hometown got rejected by a major publication, when in reality it was actually one of the best subjects to talk about. In our disparate and degraded culture, Harold thought, staring at the rejection email, where we no longer have anything in common, making reference to the weather is a gesture toward something we share, something that transcends petty differences. Mentioning the weather provided a frame to commiserate, share gratitude, tell a story; on that fateful day, Harold considered, the snow had fallen on both Harold and Dolly the same.

However, mentioning the weather had proved fatal. Dolly, perhaps because of the lack of snow where she was from, Harold supposed, or something else, had decided to engage him in a perpetual, strategic conversation-dance to which he did not know the moves. Each of her phrases seemed carefully calculated based on some outside arithmetic: she said one thing but meant another, and the whole time Harold thought of snow.

 

From Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child, a horror story set in seventeenth-century Denmark, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken (New Directions):

There was a scream. And a refinement. The finest pattern cast by the sun through the grill of the confessional. And through the towns religious processions went, and chorused wonderful song. The year passed, and the years passed. And I was a wax child. I did not age. I lay in the ground and saw it all. 

 

From John J. Lennon’s The Tragedy of True Crime (Celadon). Lennon, who killed a man in 2001 and is still in prison, has profiled four of his fellow inmates who have also committed murder. One of the men he profiles is Robert Chambers, who ended up in solitary confinement for long periods:

While in SHU, you could receive semi-­contact visits in a booth. You could kiss through caged squares, big enough for pursed lips to fit through, and hold hands through slots. Or someone could pass you balloons of drugs. Sometimes Shawn Kovell came to see Rob. Other girls came, too. He tried to avoid having his mom visit him in the box. He got three showers a week, one rec hour a day. But they’d drape you in cuffs and shackles and chains every time you’d leave your cell, so sometimes Rob didn’t even bother. Plus, sometimes guys would randomly sling concoctions of shit and piss at you when you were walking down the tier. The cellblock carried an offensive stench, a mix of the worst human odors. Solitary in the summer was dangerously oppressive. No cell fans. They took all your property and bagged it up for when your SHU time was over. So the cells were pretty bare. But back then, Rob received a lot of subscriptions and fan mail. He kept a stash of dope to sniff. He read, did push-­ups, jerked off, slept a lot. At a certain point, it started to feel like home.

 

From Amie Barrodale’s debut novel, Trip (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as the narrator and her husband wait to drop their son off at what might be a camp, or a program for troubled teens:​​

A television showed the weather, satellite images of an approaching hurricane. I asked the receptionist where the other campers were, and she said, “The patients are in group.”

It was not what I’d expected. Trip didn’t need to be at a place with patients. I wanted to put a stop to it right then, but I was so angry with Vic that I sat there thinking that he would do anything to hold me back professionally, and that if he wanted to play chicken, we’d just see who would blink. I was thinking this kind of ridiculous stuff when a woman called Trip’s name.

Salt Statues

Photograph by Mariana Enriquez.

Carhué Cemetery
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 2009

The concrete Christ designed by Francisco Salamone, severe like all his works are, emerged some time ago from the ultrasalty waters of the flooded Epecuén Lagoon. Now people leave offerings to it, partly in thanksgiving that the flood didn’t reach the town of Carhué, partly to pray that the town of Villa Epecuén will once again become the successful tourist resort that it was for decades, before it turned into the ruin it is today, a town haunted by trees so dry and salt-coated they look like they’re made of ash. White trees, ghost trees, triffid trees with their roots exposed, trees that look like spiders on an endless march.

I remember photographs of that Christ on the cross. The water had risen to cover his feet, and all around him were dead, half-submerged trees. The trees are still there, but the crucifix was moved a few meters closer to the city; it’s now on a wooden platform that you access by a ladder from the beach in front of the lake.

The Christ was once in the cemetery, which has also reemerged from the floodwaters; I can see it in the distance. A cemetery that’s low to the ground, pretty modest for Buenos Aires Province, where even the graveyards of remote towns have domed mausoleums that look like small cathedrals.

It’s cold. Our host and guide—I’m traveling with Paul, my husband—is the son of the man who built that platform for Salamone’s Christ.

The town is modest, with a certain Patagonian ambience, the charm of the plains, but there is something in the air and the people here: it’s the almost-palpable residue of collective trauma. What happened was more or less this: the towns of Carhué and Epecuén, in the province of Buenos Aires, are on the coast of the Western Chain Lagoons, a closed hydrological system—meaning one without drainage—made up by the Alsina, Cochicó, del Monte, del Venado, and Epecuén Lagoons. Several streams empty into this system, and, basically, the water didn’t have anywhere to go, it had no way out. For a time—paradoxically—the lagoons started to dry up; then the streams were directed in a way that would maintain the water level. The anthropologist Alejandro Balazote, a specialist in the social impact of flooding in the region, explains in his 1997 paper “Aguas que no has de beber”:

The Florentino Ameghino collector channel was built in 1979, is 92 kilometers long, 30 meters wide and 2.5 meters deep. The project cost $30 million. The lack of complementary regulation work meant that in periods of high rainfall, such as those that occurred in the early 1980s, flooding began to occur, though the first floods had occurred in 1977. As a solution, a “plug” was built in the Ameghino channel at the Huascar stream, but the force of the currents that flowed through the channel repeatedly destroyed it. […] The system of chained lagoons is endorheic, since it lacks any natural or artificial outlet. Because of this, water removal only occurred (until the pumping system was set up) through evaporation or soil absorption. In just a few years, we went from a frightening lack of water to an excess, with tremendous social, environmental and economic consequences. But this was due not only to the change in rainfall patterns, but also to a lack of foresight on the part of the agencies responsible. From 1980 to 1985, no work was carried out to regulate the flow of the Ameghino channel.

In 1985, when nearly five million hectares of Buenos Aires Province flooded, Epecuén Lagoon overflowed, completely covering the tourist town that had existed since 1921. That town had been frequented by your run-of-the-mill sightseeing tourists, but it also attracted crowds because of the supposed healing properties of its water, which contained almost three hundred and fifty grams of salt per liter, an enormous amount that makes the lake one of the most saline in the world.

Most of Epecuén’s inhabitants resettled in Carhué, a town about twelve kilometers away. Villa Epecuén has almost entirely reemerged from the water by now, and its remains are like twisted white stalks, the trees and buildings all corroded by that miraculous salt. More than a bombed-out city, which is the most common comparison for these ruins, Villa Epecuén looks to me like a city devoured, a city chewed to its bones.

Our guide takes us to the cemetery, and the route leads us across and down the beach. He tells us that when the water was still high, he used to kayak to the domes and crosses that rose above its surface.

“I was never scared,” he says proudly.

Those crosses and domes aren’t there anymore. In a crazy, incomprehensible move, the Carhué authorities decided to destroy everything above the water’s surface; they made the cemetery disappear. When someone looked at the lagoon, they would no longer see those macabre domes and crosses rising from the water. There were some who opposed the action, but they were in the minority. Our guide, for example, was against it. Plus, he thinks that it was done in secret (he talks about it as though it had been done secretively). However, other inhabitants assure us that the population agreed, and there is even mention of a referendum.

“I remember how you could hear the pounding at night when they were knocking down the mausoleums and crosses,” says our host.

“They knocked them down at night?”

“Yes, it was night, but you could hear everything. Out here, just imagine … I heard that noise with my dad while we were building the platform for the crucifix.”

Who knows what madness made those people decide that the monuments emerging from the water needed to be destroyed.

The cemetery had been in existence since 1890, and back then it had large monuments, sumptuous mausoleums, the kind that were common among the rich families of the Pampas. The flooding began on November 10, 1985. On November 17, Villa Epecuén was evacuated, and no one knew if the water would reach as far as the cemetery. It did.

They started to evacuate the cemetery in December, but by then it was only accessible by water. People were asking anyone who would dare to get their dead family members out of the flooded city. Those “extractors” worked to get the coffins out, and then the coffins were taken to warehouses or stored in trucks or even in the garages of houses. It wasn’t easy to find space for those bodies in the overcrowded neighboring cemeteries.

“But why didn’t they want the cemetery monuments to be visible?” I ask.

Our guide shrugs. “It was a tough time. Coffins were floating up. Some people thought tourists would stop coming because … because, well, the water had lost a little of the salt concentration with the influx from the other lagoons, and, to top it off, if people thought the water had bodies floating in it …”

The water receded between 2007 and 2008. Now, in 2009, the town can be accessed and cleanup can begin. New complaints have also surfaced. Questions about how this destruction was allowed to happen. How to preserve what remains.

At the cemetery entrance, a municipal employee takes down the names of everyone who goes in. He doesn’t say why, but he’s keeping a record. He is very friendly and his demeanor is apologetic, but he insists, asking for first and last names and an ID number. We plan to take pictures but we don’t mention that, and he doesn’t explicitly forbid it.

The cemetery is still surrounded by water, but we can tell that cleanup has begun. The paths are clear, and a few families have revived their graves with flowers and tributes (there will be many more in the months to come). Like the ruins of Epecuén, like everything the corrosive water touches, the cemetery is bright white and barren.

The mutilation of the niches and mausoleums is obvious. Whole levels are missing, knocked down with hammers (to talk about this, people use and repeat the verb bajar, meaning “to lower” or “to take down”). Why did they think the place would never reemerge?

Everything that was iron is now rust. The ashen trees don’t look solid, and it seems strange that the wind hasn’t blown them away. There’s something that looks like cloth hanging from some of the crosses, and I don’t know if it’s an effect of the salt or petrified muck; it looks like they’re wrapped in shrouds. All the shorter graves are intact, though moldy. Are they all empty? There’s no way to know. Almost none of them have plaques or metal photos; maybe the salt has torn them off and swallowed them. All that remains is concrete and marble.

Everywhere you look there are pieces of statues, and no one knows which tomb or mausoleum they belong to: headless virgins, wingless angels, handless Christs. The passages through niches with bricks exposed are full of debris, and you can’t walk down them. This is the fallout of the nocturnal demolition that was carried out by boat. Some of the destroyed statues must have been atop mausoleums, around the domes. Now they’re crushed amid the rubble. One little angel has its whole body but is missing its arms: twisted iron rods protrude from its shoulders.

We move through the area quickly. We want to see the Salamone slaughterhouse, a building from the thirties that’s near here. The problem is that everything is closed off because Roland Joffé, director of The Mission, is filming scenes for his movie There Be Dragons—specifically, a sequence that takes place during the Spanish Civil War.

We can’t get close.

Our host, however, has a secret weapon: his maternal grandfather, Pablo Novak, the famous, last, and only resident of Villa Epecuén. This man, who is over eighty years old, lives in the abandoned town in a well-equipped house with his dogs. His friends visit him there. He doesn’t want to leave, and besides, he’s famous now: at least twice a year he receives journalists and guides them through the ruins, which he knows by heart, remembering exactly what was in each place, where the pools were, where that hotel was, the restaurant, the bakery …

Don Pablo is royalty and he does what he wants, so he takes us to the movie set (the crew members already know and adore him), where we watch the arrival of catering, and then, with some apprehension, a few explosions: What if they damage Salamone’s monument to the bovine pampa, with its huge capital letters that read MATADERO (“slaughterhouse”) and its tower shaped like a knife handle? Does it really look like a building from the thirties? It reminds me more of a set piece from Flash Gordon.

The slaughterhouse, of course, is spectacular. There, surrounded by stunted trees with visible roots that make them look like crawling bugs, the feeling is not so much that you’re on another planet but that you’re in a different time. Maybe a postnuclear future, a sort of ancient future.

We go to drink some maté at Don Pablo’s house. He tells us that when the cemetery flooded, coffins floated up to his house regularly. “Like little boats,” he says.

“You weren’t scared by that?”

“Why would it scare me? It wasn’t pleasant, I’ll give you that. I just went and let people know that another dead person had come, that’s all.”

“What people?”

“The firefighters.”

Of course. One of Don Pablo’s dogs, named Patacón, wags his tail. Don Pablo doesn’t want to relocate to Carhué. He has lived and worked in Villa Epecuén his whole life; his family, he says, helped build this town, and he wants to live out his old age four blocks away from the ruins. There’s no convincing him otherwise, his grandson assures us. And why try? The man doesn’t seem sad or melancholic. He keeps busy. He doesn’t want his legs to stiffen, he says, and that’s what will happen if he sits down with his daughters in Carhué to watch TV.

People bring him croissants, invite him to lunch, and he rides around on his bike like a teenager. Smiling, his cap always on, Don Pablo is a guardian. He is the joyful spirit of lost summers.

 

This essay is adapted from a chapter of Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez, to be published by Hogarth in September. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

Mariana Enriquez is the author of the novel Our Share of Night and three story collections, A Sunny Place for Shady People, Things We Lost in the Fire, and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize.

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today. Her translations have won numerous prizes, including the National Book Award, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times.

Kevin Brazil

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I’ve never liked my name: Kevin Brazil. I don’t hate it; that would be going too far, and besides, if I really did hate my name, I would have changed it by now, as I still vividly remember discovering you could, when I was fifteen, from a boy in school who said he had always hated his name, Martin Young, and was planning to change it as soon as he turned eighteen, the legal age at which you can change your name in Ireland, which is where I am from. I wonder if he ever did.

When I say I don’t like my name, I mean that it doesn’t appeal to me. Aesthetically, visually, acoustically. There are too many consonants, which make it pointy, sharp, angular. I don’t like the sounds of the letters v and z. To me, they are the sounds of threats, buzzing insects, or high-speed cars—va-va-vroom!—and I find moving at fast speeds scary, not exhilarating. I disliked all these things long before I learned that in countries outside Ireland—France and Germany, in particular—the name Kevin is the object of a unique mockery for being a name given to working-class, banlieue-inhabiting, former East German white-trash boys whose equally trashy mothers, probably called Cindy or Chantelle, were influenced by American popular culture in the nineties, specifically the Home Alone movies starring Macaulay Culkin. There are entire books published in France about the shame that comes with being called Kevin. German even has a word for the stigma associated with my name: Kevinismus.

But this is all a little superficial. When I say I don’t like my name, what I really mean is that I don’t think it’s my name. I don’t feel like someone is referring to me when, in the middle of a conversation, they say, “And what about you, Kevin?” When someone calls me Kevin, I don’t feel anything at all, not even the icy emptiness of alienation. Just—nothing. And it’s funny because I myself know the power of calling someone by their name. One thing I like to do when I’m flirting, especially over text, is to suddenly refer to someone by their name in the middle of a conversation. “Now, Leo, I think you can do better than that …” It’s intimate, the verbal equivalent of staring into someone’s eyes. Guys really respond to it; I can see it working. It really makes them like me, at least for a while. Try it yourself—I imagine it works the same on women, but I am and always only have been a homosexual, so I wouldn’t know. But when guys do it to me? Even during sex, whispered in my ear? Nothing. I actually dislike it. It makes me feel like they are speaking to someone else, in love with someone who isn’t me.

Those are just some of the issues I have with Kevin. Where to start with Brazil! I’m so practiced with dealing with questions about my surname that I’ve developed a whole bit: “No, I’m not Brazilian, unfortunately! You see, Brazil is the English transliteration of an Irish surname, Ó Breasaíl. Most Irish names have English equivalents. Irish is an older language than English, the oldest vernacular in Europe, don’t you forget it! During the English colonization of Ireland, Irish names were transliterated in English—imagine a census in the seventeenth century, an English soldier writing down the names of the peasants whose land he has stolen. Ó Breasaíl? Sounds like Brazil. Kevin is also originally an Irish name, Caoimhín, which is pronounced ‘qwee-veen’ and ended up in English as ‘Kevin.’ Not only did colonization by the English lead Irish people to lose their names, but eventually, due to legal discrimination and the Great Famine, it led to the death of the Irish language itself, and we also lost the ancient meaning of those names. You see, Irish names mean something. Caoimhín, a.k.a. Kevin, means ‘handsome and generous.’ And Kevin was a very famous saint, known to be kind to animals. Not me, really—I’m too much of a control freak to be generous, and I can’t stand pets. Ó Breasaíl—my surname could mean two things. I’ve researched this quite a bit. Either ‘from strife,’ so my name would mean something handsome and generous that has come from strife. Or it could refer to the land of ‘Hy-Brasil,’ which in Irish mythology is a mythical island on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Sort of like our Atlantis, but Irish people have their own separate and unique mythology that we learn about extensively in school. The Salmon of Knowledge—look it up. The second meaning is the one I prefer. Handsome and generous and from a mythical magical land—that’s who you are talking to!”

That’s what I might say on a date, to fill an awkward silence at a party, to stall, to entertain. I’m just not sure if all of it is really true. The etymology of Kevin—that’s true. The transliteration of Irish names into English: true in a general sense, but it’s also true I like to emphasize colonization and famine to play the victim; it gets people on my side, either by making them feel I’m in solidarity with the oppressed of the world or by making them feel guilty, which can be a surprising short-circuit to affection. Hy-Brasil, that definitely does exist in Irish mythology, but I’ve never seen any mention of it being relevant to the name Ó Breasaíl, which is just a rare and obscure family name in Ireland. And that whole spiel about Irish names “having meaning”: that’s about vaguely implying that, by virtue of being Irish, I am the kind of person whose language has some vestigial organic connections to the land and so am a living repository of ancestral wisdom, to double down the effect of solidarity and/or guilt.

This whole bit is just a way of deflecting from the reality that I just don’t feel any connection to the name I have been given. It’s also a way of deflecting the guilt that, in saying I don’t feel any connection to my name, I’m accusing my parents of something. I’m not! I love my parents; I really do. This isn’t a setup for the well-worn trauma plot of a family memoir. My dislike of my name has nothing to do with any choice my parents may have made, which is a point in itself about the limits of parenting, and a sad one. You can do everything right, and your child will grow up feeling something so primal as a permanent and deep-seated disconnection from his name.

It’s strange: something as personal as our name is given to us by someone else. I mean, it’s literally as personal as it can get. The very thing that distinguishes us from other people, the word that makes you “you,” is chosen for you without your consent by other people, unless we later decide to change it, most commonly through religious conversation or transitioning. And these experiences are often associated with being born again, being saved, becoming who you always were, finally being seen—all this should indicate that there is, in fact, something at least unusual about allowing someone else, even the most loving parents, to choose your name for you. The name you are given: It’s a roll of the existential dice, a sign we really are thrown into a world against our will, and we have to make our own meaning within it. Except we rarely do make our own meaning in life, do we? It’s not like I’ve been brave enough to choose my own name. And who among us, apart from a few rare cases, does have a unique name? Even a name as comparatively unusual as mine is in fact shared by other people.

I’m not above googling myself—although I swear I do it only for professional reasons—and it was after I had published my first academic book and wanted to see if it was available online that, in searching for “Kevin Brazil academic,” I first discovered there was another Kevin Brazil. Like me, he is a professor at a university. Professor Kevin Brazil, it turns out, is a specialist in palliative care at Queen’s University Belfast who, according to his website, researches “quality care for family carers and patients as they near the end-of-life.” Who was this older Kevin Brazil who had the same job as me and had devoted it to the one thing I am terrified of: death?

That was the first discovery that made me think that the significance of my name might have nothing to do with its etymology or what it says about me but rather that it might lie in the coincidences I had just discovered. Was it by chance that I had something in common with the first other Kevin Brazil I had ever come across? Do names in some way determine the course of our lives? And not in the ways we know they do—sociologically (see Kevinismus), ethnically (see Caoimhín), and how people read our gender and sexuality (see flirting; all above)—but in some other, less immediately obvious sense, pointing toward the combination of chance and fate that shapes how we make any meaning out of our lives. Rationally, logically, and objectively speaking, I shouldn’t have had anything in common with this randomly selected person just because we shared the same name. And yet here I was wondering: If I had been born another Kevin Brazil, would my life have been all so different? Or, deeper horror: Would it have turned out the same?

I  put aside these questions about Kevin Brazil for many years, until once again I found myself googling myself—again, for purely professional reasons. As someone who barely uses social media because, honestly, I’m afraid of it, I’ve always wondered what impression of me someone would get if they searched for Kevin Brazil on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). Well, it turns out they would discover that Kevin Brazil has published many research papers (about death), given many online lectures (about death), and posted about winning many awards (for research into death). Professor Kevin Brazil was back in my life, and I soon got bored trying to find the few tweets about me and more interested instead in the question of what I could (legally) learn about this Kevin Brazil, and by extension anyone, by investigating everything they had made public about themselves. And not just online: There are traces we leave in the electoral register, tax returns, land deeds, so on. Public records are what enable private investigations, as every biographer knows; Kevin Brazil would never have to know Kevin Brazil was investigating Kevin Brazil.

I never got around to answering that question because it was while searching for details about this second Kevin Brazil that I got sidetracked by the discovery that there was a third Kevin Brazil living in Ireland. This Kevin Brazil, at the age of fifty, was convicted in court of sexually abusing a twelve-year-old boy in 2020. Four days after receiving a suspended sentence for this crime, he sexually assaulted another young boy. By the time he was eventually sentenced to eighteen years in prison, police investigations determined that this Kevin Brazil had committed over thirty acts of sexual abuse against young boys over the course of his life.

Reading about this Kevin Brazil was an upsetting experience. It was disturbing for me to search through newspapers online and read sentences like “Kevin Brazil sexually assaulted the boy while taking him on drives in his car.” Worse were sentences like this: “He said before he met Brazil he was a happy child. He said the depression now impacts on his family life and means he cannot live in the same house as his partner and their children.” Or this:

The victim said that he did not deal with the psychological effect of what happened to him ‘at all well’. He said that had he not had to endure what Brazil did to him, his life would be different now.

He said he had great difficulty interacting with people one on one. He said he feels threatened by gay males, something he feels bad about because he knows the vast majority of the gay community are good people.

This Kevin Brazil came to embody the fear I had absorbed growing up that as a gay man I might also be in some way a pedophile or that I would be exposed to the danger of being abused by a pedophile. I was not sexually abused as a child. But shortly after I turned eighteen, I discovered that the coach of my swimming club had abused other members of my swimming team. Many years later—in therapy, where else—I realized that the fact I had spent much of my childhood unknowingly surrounded by the sexual abuse of other children had left me with a deep skepticism as to whether we can ever really know anything about what is happening to us and an equally deep cynicism about most (but thankfully not all) people’s motives.

While this skepticism and cynicism might be all my own, that I grew up surrounded by sexual abuse is sadly something I share with many more people than those who share my name. Thousands upon thousands of children were and still are sexually abused in Ireland. In the aughts, the Catholic diocese in which I grew up, Ferns, was believed to have the highest rate of clergy accused of sexual abuse in the world. I hate this about Ireland; I hate this about the church. It is one reason I will probably never feel at home in the place where I was born.

I thought that the story of this Kevin Brazil would be the most unsettling I could discover through the chance coincidence of a name. But there are many ways in which doppelgängers can disturb our sense of self—or at this point should I say quadruppelgängers, because when searching for stories about the third Kevin Brazil in online databases of newspapers, I discovered something strange in the local paper of the town where I grew up, the New Ross Standard. Kevin Brazil appeared in far more stories than I would have expected: in reports on school plays, pantomimes (I was a moderately gay child), parades, and most often, in reports on my success as a swimmer, for I won many competitions and got so far as representing Ireland at the Youth Olympic Games in Paris in 2003. I also discovered that in 2002, one year before the crowning achievement of my teenage years, Kevin Brazil from New Ross had been charged for smashing a car window while under the influence of alcohol. I had never done that. I thought this must have been a mistake—a typo in the newspaper?—but further searches revealed it to be true: that in the small town in which I grew up lived someone with the exact same name as me, someone I never knew existed.

New Ross is a small town, population about eight thousand, and my father had grown up in the town, as had his parents, my grandparents, and the generation of Brazils before that. My father had six brothers and sisters, all of whom I had known growing up—seeing them once a year at Christmas as children and then not at all—most of whom still lived in the town where they were born and whose children, my cousins, I also had met, albeit a long time ago now. My sister lives in New Ross, my parents ten minutes outside it, and as a small town, it’s not a place where it’s easy to live in secret or anonymously. And yet when I asked my sister whether she knew about this other Kevin Brazil, she, like me, had no idea.

So I looked him up on Facebook, and there he was. Kevin Brazil, living in New Ross, his profile picture a child having the time of their life in what I eventually recognized was a swing in the town park. I’ve swung in that swing. I have no children of my own, but as recently as last Christmas, I pushed my niece and nephew in that swing, and they were as happy as Kevin Brazil’s own child had been (and could be?). All I know, from the newspaper reports and this profile, is that this Kevin is seven years older than me, seems to have a child, was arrested at twenty-two but was released on probation, and lives in a street that was mostly council housing and known as a “rough part of town.”

I didn’t love the town in which I grew up, but I didn’t hate it either. It was a town in decline—there’s no doubt about that—affected by global trends in deindustrialization, drug use, and migration that made its difficulties far from special. I knew that this made it the kind of town into which two near identical people could be born and end up having what we euphemistically call “differing socioeconomic life outcomes.” I knew it’s the kind of town to make you wonder what causes those kinds of differential outcomes; I just never would have thought it was the kind of town in which someone could have the exact same name as you and you would never even know they existed. Unless the fact of that quiet and unknowing alienation is part of what explains those “differing life outcomes.” It certainly explains why my reflex was to assume that my life was somehow better than that of this person I know almost nothing about.

I wonder if this Kevin Brazil knows about the other Kevin Brazils. Maybe (unlike me) he volunteers at a care home for older people; maybe there he got chatting with a nurse who told him about the research of Professor Kevin Brazil. Or maybe he volunteers for a charity supporting prisoners (again, I do not), where he met the criminal Kevin Brazil, who by now could be approaching the end of his life and is part of a study conducted by Professor Kevin Brazil, and maybe they all have crossed paths or are at least aware of each other’s existence. But I doubt it. I imagine instead that Kevin Brazil is content, still living in the town where he was born, taking his child to the park every day after school, swinging his child on the swing.

 

Kevin Brazil is the author of Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? His fiction and essays have been appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, and The White Review.

A Snake Hunt in God’s Country

All photos courtesy of the author.

The middle of nowhere, a hole-in-the-wall, flyover counties—even the U.S. Census Bureau defines rurality as a type of absence: “all areas not classified as urban.”

An anarchist friend recently told me that a place is only called rural if people don’t give a shit about it. (You’ll never hear Aspen or the Napa Valley described as “rural.”) Much of my life as a writer is spent seeking a better definition, one more devoted to fullness than negation, which is what sent me recently to a rattlesnake hunt, which was also a craft fair, gun sale, horseshoe tournament, and chicken BBQ designed to raise funds for the volunteer fire department of the unincorporated village of Cross Fork, Pennsylvania, near where I grew up.

For the nonhunter, like myself, the snake hunt is more pageant than sport. Eastern timber rattlesnakes—distant, misunderstood, definitely not a metaphor—are rounded up in the mountains and brought down so that people can safely look at them. After the weekend, the snakes are released unharmed. To view them, or so I’ve assumed, is to reset one’s sense of wonder, to deepen one’s sense of what, exactly, is so often flown over. It’s also a great excuse for day drinking.

Cross Fork lies in Potter County (motto: GOD’S COUNTRY) in North Central Pennsylvania, hemmed in on all sides by state forest, which covers almost half the county and much of the counties to the south and west. In late June the foliage in the folded hills is many shades of green—Kelly, pine, pickle, kelp, even the green of nuclear ooze. My wife, Noelle, and I took the drive from Pittsburgh on shoestring roads, the temperature dropping. We passed the turn for my hometown, a little to the west, and kept going.

Cross Fork has neither the Christian propriety of the Midwest nor the belly-up exploitation of Appalachia. It’s a third type of country life: a camp town, ragged and self-referential, where generations of mostly white, mostly working-class people go for a weekend, or for their lives, to exist rurally. (In Pennsylvania, a “camp” is a cabin.) With the state land impeding the sprawl, the camps are so close together that, in the evening, the smoke from the campfires rises and converges until it resembles an enormous centipede marching down the creek.

At the turnout into town, a narrow-paved road that becomes gravel, we saw the sign for the snake hunt, followed by one that listed the types of fun we weren’t allowed to have:

NO TAILGATING
NO TRUCK PULLS
NO TENTS – TABLES
NO COOLERS
NO FIREWORKS
NO NUDITY
NO BROADCAST MUSIC

Noelle had found a similar Facebook post, by Deb’s Cross Fork Inn, from a year prior, announcing that the community had decided to ban “tailgating, burning of fires, any explosives.”

We crossed the narrow bridge over the creek, where families were pointing out fish below, and pulled our Subaru, the only one in town, into Kinney’s, the gas station/deli/gift shop/bar. There was a run on ice cream and snake-hunt shirts. “I gotta ask,” I said to the lady at the checkout, “about the NO NUDITY sign.”

I think the lady was Mrs. Kinney. She said, “Girls getting in the backs of trucks … for money.”

Outside, Noelle said, “So, like stripping?”

“Or maybe hooking.”

Noelle said, “Sex work,” but agreed, maybe.

The road outside was busy with four-wheelers and side-by-sides—pricey, off-road go-carts dragging comet tails of dust. We crossed the road to Deb’s, a dim, low-ceilinged bar/restaurant with mismatched furniture and a prominent sign reading NEXT TIME BRING YOUR WIFE. A golden retriever lives in the bar or at least spends a lot of time there. I surveyed the crowd. No one had taken the wife advice but me. Camp guys had cleaner shoes than locals. Snake hunters already wore their knee-high leather boots. I’d forgotten my camo hat. Noelle said she had to find the bathroom and asked me to order her a white wine. I told her I wouldn’t do that—men were already staring at me. Only in Pittsburgh am I redneck-adjacent. I thought of Gary Snyder at the Maverick Bar in Farmington, New Mexico, tucking his ponytail under his hat. He writes:

That short-haired joy and roughness—
____________America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

Authenticity might not be real, but the feeling of it is, and every time I leave the city and head north, I get to brooding about identity and pretense and my place in the world. Plus, on the drive in, I killed a fawn. We were heading up a narrow road with a roadcut on one side and a cliff down to a river on the other, and we rounded the curve to find it flopping near the centerline. I turned around. I had a hammer and a tire iron. The fawn was still alive, its spine twisted, blood in the nose. I saw its big doe eyes blinking (or did I? It was becoming hard to tell) and tried to find a safe place to stop. There was none. I wasn’t about to be the dumbfuck who gets myself run over trying to kill a dead deer. I said, “Close your eyes,” lined up the tires, and drove over its neck.

We turned around again. The fawn was: Very Dead. I pulled my camera from the car, thinking about you—the omnipresent, urbane reader in my mind—but another voice from inside said: Nobody wants to fucking see that. Which is funny because at Deb’s there’s a wall of Polaroids of dead animals. Fish, deer, elk, bears, coyotes, foxes, minks, fishers, bobcats, and rattlesnakes, which have become a sort of symbol for the town.

The bartender brought us drinks. “Hey,” I said. “I gotta ask about the NO NUDITY sign.”

She was the youngest woman in the bar. She said, “Some girls would go around with a hat collecting twenties. Then they’d get into the back of the truck with a spotlight. But last year they had to shut it down because someone blew up a porta-potty.”

She added, “Not, like, with their butt. Like really blew it up!”

The explosives killed the party; the strip show was collateral damage. She said, “It definitely took the fun down a few notches. But the same lady can only win so many times anyway!” We looked around the bar. There were hardly enough women to field a contest.

Outside, Noelle said, “If you pay a woman twenty dollars to show you their tits, it had better be your wife.”

***

I wanted to write about the Cross Fork Snake Hunt without too much hand-wringing about rural conservatism. My logic:

1. The Gadsden flag/snake hunt/Christianity juxtaposition is a little too obvious.

2. Snakes can’t vote.

3. There are far more interesting things to say about the history and culture of Potter County, such as the failed utopian community started in the wilderness by Norwegian violinist Ole Bull in 1852; the failed Austin Dam, which broke free in 1911, killing seventy-eight of the town’s three thousand residents and making a hero of the local brothel madam, Cora Brooks, who called downstream to warn the locals; the failed business empire of John Rigas, founder of Adelphia Communications, one of the largest cable companies in the U.S., centered in the county seat of Coudersport, which went bust after Rigas was convicted of two billion dollars’ worth of fraud in the wake of the Enron scandal, leading, locally, to major job loss and an empty marble-columned office building in the middle of the county; a fascinating three-way divide, where rain from a single cloud might end up in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Saint Lawrence Seaway; and Cherry Springs State Park, a mountaintop meadow surrounded by deep woods, above which are some of the darkest skies in the Eastern U.S. On a clear night, with the ocean of the hills on the periphery, the sky resembles the acne on God’s broad back.

But—there was a mobile Trump store among the craft vendors at the snake hunt. A shining tractor trailer from New Jersey with a side that opened to reveal a wall of T-shirts printed with the past five years of right-wing memes. The only people I saw wearing these shirts were two boys, about ten years old. One was volunteering at the chicken BBQ in a shirt that said, FUCK YOU TRUMP WON.

The snake pit was tucked into the shade of two maples next to the live band and the gun sale. I’d wanted to visit the snake hunt for years and was embarrassed to see that it didn’t have any of the gladiatorial aura I’d imagined. Just two aluminum bleachers framing the ten-by-ten sandbox, roofed with a plastic canopy and fenced in by waist-high chicken wire. I’d been imagining something unlikely. A literal pit, something sunken and dark. Mattie Ross, King Aelle, Hell. But we needed them on the surface, in the open, to see. If not, why catch them at all?

A familiar story: even as early Americans made the rattlesnake their symbol, they sought to wipe it out. Snakes, coyotes, wolves, crows, salamanders—settlers turned group hunts of unpopular creatures into festivals, celebrations of conquest with prizes for the largest catch. The eradication of rattlesnakes was rooted more in religious fervor and hindbrain fear than in any actual threat. The eastern timber rattlesnake is as chill as it is venomous. “Don’t tread on me” is the base requirement for avoiding being bitten, and experts speculate that most bites stem from handling. Nevertheless, I found two fantastical early-twentieth-century newspaper articles in about as many minutes from upstate Pennsylvania, one about a snake attacking a girl under a tree and another about a rattler slithering into a baby’s pram in the night to swallow it whole. In other states (hello, Texas), rattlesnakes are still rounded up and killed under the guise of public safety. But by the time the Cross Fork Snake Hunt was established, the pendulum in Appalachia had swung. Wanton killing combined with resource extraction had almost extirpated the animal.

The Pennsylvania state game commission issued a protection for rattlesnakes in 1972, allowing only a short, controlled hunting season. Soon the roundups were catch-and-release.

There are supposedly two thousand timber rattlesnakes in the state, four of which were already in the pit by that Saturday morning. One was stretched out across the sand, four feet long and wrist thick. The rest were coiled against the fence, the rattles rising and falling like the night song of bugs. Alongside them in the pit, the snake master lounged in his tall leather boots and camo hat. (“Snake master” is my term, not his.) Sometimes a snake would crawl over his foot as he leaned on the fencepost and made small talk with the onlookers. He said they were like people, some more aggressive than others. They didn’t seem like people at all.

Growing up with the name Jake meant that as a kid I felt a deep, cosmic connection with snakes. I spent summers catching garter and rat snakes and saving them from my grandmother, a woman with such ophidiophobia that she had nightmares about them several nights a week. She demanded they be killed on the spot and carried around an ice chopper to do the job. Since then, I’ve spotted rattlesnakes along hiking trails and spent time in their presence, watching their tongues tasting the air for life. I’m no noob, but standing over the pit, the snakes’ most obvious, most snakelike features were once again novel. They really, totally had no legs. They really rattled with their tails. The black and forked tongues, the black and slitted pupils, the infinite repetition of black and tan, the deadly coil, head hovering in tension.

They were beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that each year an award was granted for prettiest snake. I asked the snake master about the criteria, and he said: “Women choose.”

By noon, more hunters had come down from the hills, queueing near the entrance to the pit. They were easy to tell by the fact that they were carrying buckets with rattlesnakes inside. One bucket said WARNING: VENOMOUS SNAKE. Another said HOME DEPOT. The older hunters kept their snakes in canvas sacks knotted shut, the snakes curled inside like enormous bagged dog turds. I saw one hunter standing off from the rest. He was predictably big and leathery. “How d’you do?” I asked.

He pointed to the snake being measured on the table. “I got one, about fifty inches.”

I asked, “Where’d you find him?”

He said, “Up on the mountain,” pointing to the green ridge past the creek. I felt a delicious thrill.

When a snake arrives, the snake master dumps it from its container into the sand. He takes it by the tail and encourages it to slither into a clear plastic tube. (You can drink beer anywhere at the festival; behind us, two drunk bros were chanting, “Tube that snake, tube that snake!”) Then, he lifts the snake, pinching the tube around its body with one hand and cupping it so that it flows in two low arches between his hands. The snakes are then weighed and measured with their head—and fangs—safely stuck in the tube. After that, the petting begins.

“They’re a very clean snake,” he said. “They don’t stink.”

Children were crowding the stanchions as if waiting for an autograph. I stood from my seat, hurried to the edge of the pit, and reached over them as he brought the snake by. What had I expected? Something fishier, maybe—cool to the touch, slippery, gross. But the skin was soft and worn, like an heirloom stuffed toy, with scales that weren’t any sharper than the petals of a marigold.

“They used to call them velvet-tail rattlers,” he said.

The belly was even softer (the constant exfoliation?), velvety and warm to the touch, the blood hot and hyperactive in the summer weather. The weight of the belly drooped over my hand. Each striation of muscle was distinct, its own. I thought of “Indigo,” Padgett Powell’s essay about seeking the endangered eastern indigo snake. When he finally finds one, he looks at the biologist and says: “Can I have sex with it?” It’s imperative to say that I did not want to fuck the snake, exactly, but I get the sensory appeal. I just kept touching it, reaching over children and women, until the snake master carried it past.

I looked around and noticed something else. It was all women and kids around me. Each man at the stanchions had taken a half step back, arms folded, watching with a performed aloofness. It made me sad for them, and embarrassed for myself. I thought: Fellas, is it gay to touch a snake?

The snake master’s name was William Wheeler Junior, president of the Keystone Reptile Club and the man responsible for all five of upper Pennsylvania’s snake hunts. His father had started the Cross Fork Snake Hunt fifty-three years ago. “My dad was bit twenty-eight times,” he said to the crowd. Mostly before he’d quit drinking. “I’ve been bit eight times that required antivenom.”

He held up a mangled finger to the crowd and said, “Today’s the thirtieth anniversary of my crooked finger. Nineteen ninety-five, they hauled me out of here in a meat wagon.”

Around the pit he’d displayed photos of his wounds. Swollen, elephantine hands with deep, necrotic pits at the center. He said his assistant Cody got bit two years ago, and the antivenom cost him four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. “That’s Obamacare for you!” he said.

I learned later that it wasn’t always gay to touch a snake. The keystone event of the weekend had once been the sacking contest, in which a team of two (drunk?) men entered the pit with five live rattlesnakes and raced to put them in a sack. The state was concerned for the snakes’ well-being and eventually shut it down. Wheeler told us, “They used to have sacking contests with black snakes, too. They’d get two women on a team, and they’d be trying to sack them, and you know how big them things are, and they’d be biting them, blood running down their arms.”

He was doing all of this—the storytelling, the weighing and measuring, bullshitting with the snake hunters—while high-stepping over rattlers and eating a soft pretzel from a plate on the table where he measured the snakes. I watched this man tube a snake, measure it, drop it, rip a hunk from the pretzel, cram it in his mouth, answer a question while chewing, and lift another serpent with his bare hands.

Then, he said—and I still can’t believe this is true: “When you’re up here in God’s country, you’re truly in the territory of the snake.”

***

No party planner could coordinate the ease with which the snake festival slipped into its after-party. People just hit a natural angle of repose, at which point the crowd began to tumble, slowly, from the festival grounds into the road and parking lot and bars. We made our way to Jeff’s Bar, where, near the door, in what used to be a closet, is a diorama of taxidermied wildlife encased in Plexiglas. Snakes coiled, fawns bedding in Styrofoam moss. They’d hung paper snakes from the ceiling, and the same country band from the festival was playing another set.

Among the crowd were three notable drunks. One was short and old and wearing a leather vest covered in patches from previous snake hunts. He was trying to light cigarettes backward and staring through his dirty glasses, seemingly unable to recognize anyone’s face. People kept trying to check on him, but no one took away his beer. The next day, he apparently woke up, drove into the mountains, and caught the winning snake: a fifty-seven-inch black phase rattler, a monster by Pennsylvania standards, earning him a wooden plaque.

The second notable drunk was the largest man at the festival, dancing alone and yelling at no one with the type of belligerence that size permits. The other large men (this was a bar full of large men) kept checking him over their shoulders. There were definitely some guns in the room, and the singer from the band was making things worse by razzing the guy, saying, “I didn’t know that Coors Light could even do that to a man. Someone hurry and get him another fifteen.” We were all relieved when he stumbled outside with a group of sunburned friends.

The third was the man renting the cabin next to ours. He was from the Pittsburgh suburbs. So was the guy at the end of the bar, and the one in the camo buying rounds of shots. Our neighbor said he’d been coming up to the snake hunt with his son-in-law for seventeen years. He worked as a Pittsburgh city bus driver.

I asked if he he’d ever hit anybody.

He said, “You mean like cars, or individuals?”

“People.”

“One time,” he said, “I pulled up to a stop and right when I did, one of the tires just fucking blew, man. Whoooosh! It sent a trash can screaming into this old lady and knocked her over and her legs were all bloody and she was crying and everyone was acting like it was my fault, you know? Like I blew out the tire on purpose, or something.”

And he said, “Hey man. You guys smoke?” and went outside to his buddy’s van.

The son-in-law had a fade and a thick gold chain. I asked him about the nudity signs. He looked at Noelle for a second. Then for a few more. He said, “They used to have … a titty contest. There’d be like three hundred people in Deb’s parking lot, doing truck pulls and shit.”

“The bartender at Deb’s told me somebody blew up a porta-potty.”

“That happened a bunch of times.”

Somehow, time passed, and by the time we made it to Deb’s, the old heads were done for the night. The bus driver was dancing around the bar in a raccoon-skin cap, and two people were passed out at tables. Now the youth were out, and they were remarkably coded: square-toe pull-up boots, Zyn rings in their jean pockets, new boxy Carhartt tees, gold chains, mullets, retro nineties shades sitting backward on their heads, like a prey species camouflaged with a set of false eyes. Some of them could not be more than seventeen years old. You could tell by the way they cradled their beers. They stood in circles in Deb’s with a clear resignation on their faces. There would be no huge party, no pallet fires, and probably no tits. I found something sad about it. They’d grown up hearing these stories from their uncles, and now, the people of Cross Fork had moved on.

One kid rushed in to Deb’s, started whispering to his friends, and soon they were all outside. We followed and found, on the road, in the half dark under the only streetlight in town, the big drunk from Jeff’s Bar. He had a silvery snake in each hand, whipping them back and forth across the gravel so that they hissed and rattled, their tongues popping at the end of each snap.

Not really. He was actually wielding two towing chains. But I was several beers deep, and each action seemed meaningful and linked. The guy was screaming, “Let’s goooo!” He was hulking at the shoulders, enormous and animalistic, conducting the chains back and forth with a terrifying sort of ease.

He kept yelling, “Come on, you pansies. Come on, you fucking pansies.” His voice was howling and pained. Everyone drinking in the parking lot was committed to ignoring him, their backs turned, heads lowered. Tradition is forged by change, and I thought, This here is a man against time. But it turns out he didn’t want to pull trucks but rather shiny new side-by-sides.

It turns out he was from New Jersey.

 

Jake Maynard is the author of the novel Slime Line. He works at a plant nursery in Pittsburgh.