The Paris Review's Blog, page 3

The Taste of Pencils

Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. Photograph by Christopher Michel, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

I remember the taste of Mr. Bubble. I know the flavor of Milk-Bones. While I’ve forgotten so many details of my life and days, even if they’re implicit in my brain, it seems to me I’ve never forgotten a taste. In sixth grade I discovered a pleasurable combination of shrill taste and buzzing sensation (shrill and buzzing both technically characterizing sound, the faculty of whose perception seems to warrant extra adjectives) in the three-way interaction between a particular kind of metal, my braces, and tongue. The crimped metal band holding a pencil’s eraser (the unpainted silver kind, not the gold or Dixon Ticonderoga green) produced the effect, and since I spent a good deal of time at that age sitting at a desk, I savored the phenomenon frequently and without anyone noticing, because it’s socially acceptable—even a teacher-approved sign of concentration—to have a pencil in one’s mouth. The taste in my memory of early adolescence is an indescribable metallic sensation and the attendant flavors of a pencil—cedar, No. 2 graphite, rubber eraser.

The metal band is called a ferrule. In looking it up I found countless websites dedicated to pencils and their appreciation, even names for different effects produced by sharpening them, e.g., “collar creep,” which is that annoying thing where the wood extends to the vertex of the sharpened tip on one side.

Once a thing takes root and spreads on the web, you can pay a reputation-management service to get rid of it. A huckster with a Massachusetts accent will tell you that not only can he eliminate undesirable search results, he can also append the word genius to your name. Or award-winning. Rusty points out that once the desired result is achieved there’s every chance these unscrupulous people will then undo it just so you’ll pay them to fix it again, not to mention that they deepen the original damage in the process of assessing what to quote you for initially fixing it.

What aspirational criteria would I hitch to my name?

“kate colby” “looks & brains”

“kate colby” “pronoiac”

“kate colby” “good enough”

“kate colby” “well-slept”

I closely followed two professional adventurers’ recent competition to be the first to reach the South Pole solo and unassisted. They hauled all their gear in sleds and couldn’t even accept a cup of tea at the research station through which they passed. I followed the younger man’s progress on Instagram. Every night he posted a photo and an account of his day. He listened to music and podcasts along the way and got a satellite call from Paul Simon after plugging the motivational power of Graceland.

He carried bespoke protein bars from a nutrition lab that carefully assessed his caloric and nutritional needs. His synthetic garments were engineered to withstand unimaginable temperatures and wind speeds. How does this endeavor qualify as “unassisted” when these men were at the mercy of technology, biochemical research, digital entertainment, and thermal innovation? If they were naked and barefoot and born free of nutritional needs, maybe then I’d grant them authenticity.

The professional adventurer with the flashy social media presence got to the South Pole first. Now he posts about dreaming impossible dreams while hawking bespoke mattresses.

 

This essay is adapted from Paradoxx, forthcoming from Essay Press in September.

Kate Colby’s books of poetry and prose include I Mean and Dream of the Trenches. Her writing has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, Lana Turner, Literary Hub, and The Nation. She is an editor at Red Nun Press. 

Horseshoe Crab Diary

Photograph by Grace Byron.

July 6, 2024

My obsession with horseshoe crabs started small. D. and I went to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge on a bird walk. The two women next to us turned out to work at an independent competitor to the massive plushie company Squishmallow, and I listened to them talk about the qualities of superior felt as D. watched an egret scarf down an eel across the marsh. Both of us grew up in the Midwest, but it’s D. who loves birding and camping. I enjoy nature as much as the next woman, but I love the feeling of returning to a solid bed surrounded by four sturdy walls. It wasn’t until we walked back to the nature center, stocked with stuffed animals both real and fake, that I came alive. Eagles, hummingbirds, owls, and mice, all lined up in glass cages and offered as stuffies, intended for kids below the age of ten. I idly wound up a small, plastic horseshoe crab and watched it race along the linoleum. Then we turned the corner into a boardroom and discovered a small exhibit on the crabs, a series of nightscape photographs depicting hordes of the ancient critters scampering under streetlights on the beach. The four-hundred-million-year-old hard-shell survivors mating, spawning, and molting on the beach at night under the streetlights, unbothered by the dawn of new technology.

The strange, spiderlike crabs looked uncanny, with shells like the backs of stingrays. Their barnacles and the years of life they’d spent living underwater, chowing down on tiny fish and algae, lent them a gray-green hue. Like Paleozoic monsters, alien crustaceans knocked out of time and space. They inspired the same fear and delight that walking in the woods once did when I was a child: the fear and delight of discovery.

Most people come to horseshoe crabs through their interest in birds, not the other way around. The crabs’ tiny blue eggs are key to the migration patterns of birds like red knots who feast on the translucent orbs. But because the crabs are harvested for medical research, red knots are quickly becoming an endangered species, with their numbers dwindling by over ninety percent in the past forty years.

Unlike humans, horseshoe crabs  have a natural ability to fight pathogens due to the special clotting ability of their blood. Ever since biomedical companies discovered this trait, they’ve bled the horseshoe crabs en masse in order to further their research. Many vaccine breakthroughs have occurred due to the help of these oceanic close cousins of arachnids.

New York does not allow the harvesting of horseshoe crabs for research, but nearby states, like Maine, do. While around ten to thirty percent of those in custody eventually die, bleeding isn’t usually what kills them;  it is the wear and tear of captivity. Those let back into the ocean are often lethargic and more susceptible to disease. All of this, even though there are now synthetic options that replicate the endotoxic qualities of horseshoe crab blood. It sounds like the premise of a cheesy horror movie: an innocent alien species harbors the cure to a deadly disease set to wipe out a more aggressive species. In essence, it’s extraction.

During horseshoe crab season, between May and June, there are a few small festivals held in their honor. It’s easy to anthropomorphize them. Even more so after I see the little stuffed animals in their likeness. I want to take one home. I want to hold one, to cradle something from the deep.

 

May 18, 2025

I dragged D. and a few of my friends out to Broad Channel Park. We walked past a few laminated signs detailing horseshoe crab life cycles, food webs, and calls for more protective legislation before stumbling on a series of tables manned by rangers and wildlife specialists. A poster decorated brightly with clip art welcomed us to the Annual Horseshoe Crab Festival. Information surrounded us: hastily written handouts, screeching chatter, petitions.

One woman in sunglasses with a tiny slate-gray horseshoe crab plushie taught us how to handle the creatures.

“When you get down to the beach, you’ll see them. You want to grab them by the shell on both sides. Never by the tail—that’s how they sense things and flip themselves over. Never by the hinge, ’cause when they close, that can hurt.”

She motioned to a lanky, twenty-something guy a table down.

“You can do it with a ranger over at that station if you want to try it out first.”

We walked over to the murky tank and peered inside at the living horseshoe crab. The bored worker just said, “When you get down there, you can handle them.” Perhaps he was tired from the stream of children. He figured we were adults; we could handle it without a test drive.

The thing they don’t tell you—or only refer to obliquely, maybe due to the throngs of children in attendance—is that the hordes descend during high tide and full moons because the crabs are mating. The “season” is a euphemism for their fertility ritual.

Dozens of well-meaning families and amateur naturalists crowded the small patch of sand. Some scanned the horizon for birds, desperate for a new sighting to mark on their Merlin app. When we got to the edge of the pebbly water, we could make out dozens of stone-colored crabs attached to one another head-to-butt, like half-moons washed up on the shore. They were mating in a frenzy, even if it looked more like a huddle.

I waded into the water to get a better look at the crabs. Up close, they’re a bit like mechanized stingrays, with legs lurking underneath. A horseshoe crab’s underbelly looks like a giant bug, as spiderlike as their arachnid classification would suggest. They use their legs to swim and scuttle around on the sand, leaving strange marks in their wake.

As I watched the crabs mate, they looked almost entirely immobile, shifting only with the current. The males were smaller than the females, and sometimes multiple males attached themselves to a single female. (“That’s their sex, not their gender. We don’t know their gender,” one ranger joked. I looked away, naturalist humor notwithstanding.) Under the clear sky, my friends and I chased the crabs around, each wondering who would dare to pick one up first. It was me. The crab I picked up seemed worse for the wear. Its little legs were still as I lifted it out of the water, and a large portion of its shell was missing. I shivered, trying not to think about the fact that I may have just picked up a carcass. I gently set him back in the sand.

Before we left we waded out onto the concrete beneath the highway so that D. and Ashe could try to spot the elusive red knots.

“Is that one?” I asked, pointing to a few bare trees in the distance, right above a group of fishermen drinking Corona.

“Maybe,” D. said. “Maybe.”

I had done what I needed to do: I had held a horseshoe crab. Afterward, we drove to Roll-n-Roaster, a diner in Sheepshead Bay, and drank black-and-white shakes with roast beef sandwiches. A triumph.

Photograph by Grace Byron.

June 9, 2025

On a gray, drizzling evening in early summer, we made our way over highway bridges and past the fading neon signs in Canarsie.

“We’re going horseshoe crabbing,” I said.

“But we’re not”—Agnes looked around—“crabbing, are we?”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

There is not a great verb to describe what we were doing on the overcast beach just as high tide began to lap against the shore. Monitoring? Helping? Observing?

I had decided to try and volunteer—or at least tag along—during a horseshoe monitoring session with the NYC Bird Alliance. The goal was to count, tag, and check on the population during high tide. This time we’re at Plumb Beach, and it’s Ashe and Agnes, who both have cars, accompanying me.

There are, of course, important reasons to monitor horseshoe crabs. They are protected from being harvested for medical purposes in New York, but many other states have refused to enact the same policies; some people even make use of them twice, once for medical research and once for bait.

I settled on “volunteering,” and we marched past the porta-potty and over the sand, toward a dozen or so volunteers congregating around a short, clear-voiced woman in tiny glasses and a bright red coat, with wisps of silver hair tied back behind her head. The more data the group logged, she explained, the more accurate their reporting on horseshoe crab population trends would be. All of this is important for grant writing; the nonprofit world thrives on numbers. (Of course, the mood around funding for scientific research was sour; jokes were made by the amateur naturalists about the current administration’s anti-vaccination policies.)

Ann Seligman often works with the NYC Bird Alliance. (Her email sign-off is simply “Horseshoe Crab Aficionado.”) My friends and I were late to the party that night, and she pointed this out. “I’m about halfway through my spiel,” she told us. She was exactly how I imagined a wildlife teacher at the University of Vermont would be. Apparently, her neighbors have complained about the fishy smell of her car in their shared garage. She showed off a small souvenir her husband gifted her: a special kind of knife that helps untangle fishing wire.

Agnes and Ashe waited behind, picking up trash as Ann gave us the outline of our night. She kept checking her watch, waiting for the precise moment of high tide: 7:29 P.M. Using two white pipes connected into a square, we prepared to survey the number of horseshoe crabs present that night at random. The pace at which we had to stop and check for critters was a bizarre math problem that I couldn’t quite follow. Meanwhile, two volunteers carried clipboards to note the number of horseshoe crabs in the sample field. I looked around. So far there weren’t so many. As requested, we looked around and grabbed the numbers of those already tagged.

“Alright, we still have a few minutes,” Ann called out. “But get ready.”

Ashe and Agnes were nowhere to be found, off looking at birds with sketchbooks in hand.

Meanwhile, Ann told everyone a story about a man who stuffed a turtle in his pants at JFK, hoping, apparently, to smuggle the beast onto a plane. “The crazy thing was that it was the most common species,” she paused, as if waiting for us to jump in. “A red slider!”

Then we were off.

Magically, the crabs started washing ashore almost exactly at high tide. Just a few at first, around 7:34 P.M., several singles and one or two mating pairs. We watched one couple, walking on the beach, try to pick one up by its tail. A volunteer ran over and stopped them. Ann shook her head.

The volunteers who were selected to put down the white square and take notes were way ahead of us. Their step count determined how far they were supposed to tread between samples.

Our objective was simple: to watch. We were allowed to turn over capsized crabs, stuck by the tide, and we could take pictures of tagged crabs, but there were almost too many people here for the work we had to do. It seemed more people wanted to commune with nature than were entirely necessary. Nonetheless, we walked dutifully over the jetties and dunes, logs and rocks, plants and shells.

“The crabs we tag are often found in Long Island,” Ann said, “like city kids going to the ’burbs.”

Soon we saw dozens, and then dozens more. During the whole walk we must have seen hundreds. They came ashore in every mating variation possible. Threesomes, foursomes, sixsomes. Orgies of spidery crabs crawled and attached. We saw dead crabs too, sometimes just empty shells or amber-y molts, washed ashore motionless like sacrifices to the gods.

The surf bubbled up around the flotsam and jetsam, stranding little barnacled crustaceans at our feet. Foolishly I had worn hiking boots instead of the sandals I had originally decided upon. We carried on, smiling, our legs wet, stepping over the female crabs digging deep in the sand while males approached them from behind.

Ann picked up a crab and showed us its legs up close. Some of their limbs weren’t for mobility; they worked like claws to bring food close to their mouths, located in the center of their bodies. Agnes dropped a sea snail into the beast’s mouth, and we watched the crab devour it in seconds.

We came across the bloated corpse of a raccoon floating back and forth, caught on a capsized log. It was beautiful, in death, the mirage of its white-and-gray fur, the slight remnants of its bandit mask.

There was plenty of death, in all its majesty: a dead rat with giant teeth that looked like it had been struck by lightning. A man-of-war gently spreading its translucent tentacles near the shore. Of course, there were also many live crabs. Their shells littered the beach. I almost asked if we were allowed to take them with us, but I thought better of it. Another time.

A few crabs needed to be flipped, and some we just watched crawl along the sand, making indents on either side where their shells hit the ground. When orgies formed, they looked like crop circles, as alien as nature can appear to the human eye.

When the indigo night fell and we scared away the oystercatchers, Ann told us we were going to tag some crabs.

“Go pick some up! Females if you can.”

She was heavy. I picked her up and ran back toward the group, setting her down with a clunk so we could measure her shell. I couldn’t bring myself to use the drill, but Agnes had no such fear. She got to work, setting the tag in the little hole and returning the crab to the water.

“Does it hurt?” someone asked Ann.

“I don’t think so. One time we set a crab down, and he immediately went back to mate.”

We aligned the crabs one by one along a ruler before tagging them, measuring the length of their murky, gray shells. The drill crushed through the exoskeleton with ease. It doesn’t take much. Ann assured everyone the crabs were fine, even as a few of us flinched in horror. The tag didn’t need to be wrapped around or tied on; it fit exactly in the hole. They looked so fragile trying to scurry away from us. So cute.

In a Bookforum review of Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories, Adam Jasper writes, “Cute is the kind of porn you can enthusiastically consume in public.” Enjoying nature can easily turn into consumption. We walk through the woods looking at birds in order to catch them all, like these animals are Pokémon. Collecting pictures and rummaging for mementos. This is different from witnessing, the act of taking things in without judgement. I cannot say I am overly familiar with the latter mode. Still, our expedition on the cloudy beach felt alien enough to me that, despite taking copious pictures, I couldn’t consume the experience. I had to live it.

After we tagged fifteen crabs, it was time to head back.

“I feel bad that I didn’t get to talk to you,” Ann said, pulling me aside before returning to her work.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I got to see it all happen.”

She was trying to help a horseshoe crab tangled up in fishing line. Time for first aid.

We returned to Roll-n-Roaster to order sandwiches, chicken tenders, fries, and a black-and-white shake. Halfway through our meal, D. messaged me to say they had locked themself out in the rain while doing laundry. So we hit the road again, back to the other side of Brooklyn, where only raccoons rummage around after midnight.

Drawing by Agnes Walden.

 

Grace Byron’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Bookforum, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Herculine, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in October.

The Man in the New Boots

Photograph by David Blakeman.

It was about an hour before rider check-in when I realized I didn’t have a cup. This was a problem because my old buddy Joshua was fond of telling me about how he had watched a hoof strike between his legs and seen the fate of countless future generations pass before his eyes. My wife was already worried about the microplastics in my balls, so I knew I had to take precautions. The problem was that my mom had somehow forgotten to save my old jockstrap from high school.

“We could stop by Dick’s,” my sister suggested. “So you can protect your nuts.”

But we were already several weeks deep into the local Little League season, and Dick’s was fresh out. We headed instead to the Walmart off the 101 and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. The sun hung high on a late winter afternoon in Phoenix.

“You know, you had an uncle who was a bull rider,” my mom said, staring out the windshield.

Nobody knew why I was doing this, so there was a felt need to make sense of things.

“Which side?”

“My mom’s side.”

“Her father’s side were all rodeo clowns,” my dad said.

“Doesn’t make a difference,” my sister said flatly. She looked out at the blue glow of the McDowells, still wet from the weekend rain. “Mom’s adopted. You don’t have any of those excuses in you.”

***

Here’s one way I might explain all this: there are these cave paintings of bulls, in shades of apricot, tallow, and flint, that I look at on my phone when I have trouble falling asleep. Usually the artists gather the animals together in rows and herds, “flowing in long strides down some run of time through the silence of the mountain’s hollow,” as Guy Davenport once described the paintings. Occasionally, though, one creature is pared off from the rest, and it is only in these situations that man enters the picture. In what is likely the earliest image of a man and a bull, in the Chauvet cave paintings, the head of a bison merges fluidly into the lower body of a woman, as though the two beings had for a moment melded wills, or come together in a perfect ride.

Seventeen thousand years later, at a cave in Lascaux, France, Paleolithic man painted a bull—an aurochs, extinct now, that had shoulders as tall as a shooting guard—with its flank speared and a gash pouring blood. Directly in front of it, lying on the ground, is a man with his arms out and his legs stiff. The man is pretty clearly dead. The angle of the spear indicates that he attacked the bull from behind, yet somehow he wound up in front of the bull’s horns.

How does a man who approaches a bull from behind wind up dead on the opposite side of it? Ask an archaeologist, and you’re bound to get some fustian explanation of the origins of Greek fertility rituals. Ask any rodeo fan, though, and you’ll get a straighter answer: Seventeen thousand years ago, man discovered bull riding. And man got bucked.

***

At Walmart they were all out of cups, but they did sell adult-size jockstraps and children’s shin guards, in hot pink. I took a chance.

“Put this in your purse,” I told my mom, reaching toward the back seat to hand her what was in my estimation not only a passable but in fact superior model of protective equipment. She recoiled from this new perversion of all sense and meaning.

“I don’t want to hold that.”

“Just until I get inside and can get changed.”

“Why don’t you put it in your pocket?”

“I don’t want the bouncer to pat me down and think I’m some kind of pervert.”

“Well, what’s he gonna think of me?”

We drove north up Pima Road. When my grandparents moved the family here in the sixties, they lived not far from Pima’s south end, which ran like a mullion between the reservation and the suburbs. In Phoenix my grandfather traded in the habits of an Indiana farm boy for pearl-snap shirts and string ties and a pair of oxblood cowboy boots, which I donned for the occasion. My dad wore green ostrich-skin boots that were still too big for me.

***

On either side of Pima today, the desert tolerates hutches of country clubs built atop sagebrush and greasewood, but as we drove farther north into the small enclave of Carefree, the developments broke up and the sun came busting through through like a lost dog. At the Buffalo Chip Saloon and Steakhouse, I signed a legal waiver releasing the Mercer Rodeo Co. of any liability upon my injury or death. I was told to return to the ring in an hour, at which time I could be suited in the helmet and vest they peeled off the corpse of the previous rider. I was told I could not know my place in the lineup in advance because “we can’t control what the steers do.” I was told I could not drink until after my ride.

I walked over to the bar and sat there with a club soda and watched a looping highlight reel of bull riders getting their shit rocked not fifty yards from where I was sitting. A man nearby saw me watching the TV and said: “Are you going to do that?”

“I am.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you must be.”

“Yeah.”

“I think you must be crazy to do that.”

“I guess so.”

He asked if he could buy me a drink. I told him I couldn’t drink right now. He said: “Did you lose some kind of bet?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you trying to get laid?”

“No, sir.”

“You must be crazy then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” he said. “Don’t break a leg.”

***

The first bull riders in North America were vaqueros: mestizo ranch hands hired to work the haciendas of the Spanish aristocracy. The vaqueros transformed traditional Spanish fiestas into charreadas, which showcased their flair in horsemanship. Among the games they played was the puerta de la muerte, in which a rider leapt from a saddled horse onto a wild one, still celebrated in Mexico to this day; the carrera de gallos, in which one rider lassoed a rooster, then attempted to evade other riders who chased him, now unfortunately an artifact of antiquity; and the jaripeo, in which the vaqueros took the Spanish tradition of bullfighting and elevated it from the foreplay of teasing a bull with capes and swords to the passion of riding one bareback until it either got tired and threw you off, fainted, or died.

When the American cattleman Richard King assembled his famous King Ranch in Corpus Christi, Texas, he imported vaqueros for their unmatched expertise. With them came the jaripeo. It traveled north with the cowboys, until it reached Colonel William Frederick Cody on the North Platte River. Cody incorporated bull riding into a show he described as “America’s National Entertainment, the Real Thing! No Imitation About It, All True! All Honest!” The bucking competitions were probably the only truly authentic element of the show.

For some reason the lowly jaripeo, never the main event of Mexican roundups, became a fixation for Americans. Maybe it had something to do with a Puritan lust for self-sacrifice. Maybe it was the superego of Manifest Destiny, reminding us that we might bridle the country but will never tame it. Maybe it’s that it’s goddamned insane to ride a bull, and America is full of crazy people who for no earthly reason see that sort of thing and want to try it themselves.

***

In the bathroom stall the sound of my belt buckle hitting the tile floor announced to all present that there was a pervert in the room. I slung on my shin guards and jockstrap and did a few squats. I gave my groin a few good knocks and was satisfied.

Outside, the sun had begun to settle behind the hilltop that cradled the ring. This whole saloon burned down ten years ago in a fire that the local paper described as “suspicious.” The only thing that survived were the clapboard stage flats that line the south side of the ring and give the place its Old West charm. These were now slightly obscured by posters from the rodeo’s sponsors: Cowboy Channel, RFD-TV (“Rural America’s Most Important Network”), and a conservative political action group with the slogan BUCK BIG GOV. The crowd gathered on the bleachers was a mix of North Valley libertarian types—less Wranglers and a Colt .45 and more stretch denim and a Glock—and bachelorette parties that took costly Ubers up from Scottsdale. By nightfall all five hundred seats were filled.

Behind the bucking chutes, I got acquainted with the rodeo clowns—beautiful men who distract bulls with their torn denim skirts, oversize suspenders, and jeweled belts—and a gruff bunch of steer handlers. The only other novice rider was a twenty-year-old from Miami named Raúl. Raúl had a thick mustache and a racing hat and looked like he knew a thing or two about cheap thrills.

“They say to me to tuck your chin, straight back, and just ride that thing,” he told me, swirling his hips. “Ride it till you can’t no more.”

The other riders were all cowboys, men with the bark on. This was not a sanctioned event in the Professional Bull Riding circuit, so they were relieved from the mandate to wear protective headgear. There was $2,500 on the line and a rowdy Tennessee blonde in row no. 3, and these guys weren’t trying to hide face. In Minoan society, the horns of a bull were thought to be potent reservoirs of fertility, and men and women sought favor by attempting to throw themselves between the horns of a wild bull. At the end of the festival, the king, dressed in the hide of a bull, made love to his queen in a field surrounded by his subjects. The cowboys were jonesing to know which steer they were gonna pull in the lineup. Sidewinder. Tornado. 2 Beers. Freebird. High Deductible.

I was given a Bauer hockey helmet and a thick leather vest and told to suit up. When a good-hearted handler saw me struggling with my chin strap, he stepped over to give me a hand.

“Let these pussies tighten their own helmets,” someone shouted from near the chute.

“Remember when it was my first time?” the handler called back. “You did it for me.”

“I was too nice to you,” the voice said, softly.

We trotted out into the ring for prayer and the national anthem. We took a knee in the freshly turned dirt. The cowboys removed their hats and bowed their heads. The preacher commended us athletes to Christ, and a woman named Jan from Wyoming sang about the land of the free and the home of the brave. Then it was rodeo time.

***

At least twenty people have died in bull-riding competitions since the early twentieth century. The first man killed was in Arizona in 1922. That was back when cowboys poured a bisulfate of carbon they called High Life on their steers to elicit a good buck. When a radio announcer asked the crowd for a volunteer steer rider, twenty-five-year-old Frank Stephens of the Big Sandy River Valley raised his hand. Nobody asked him why. He shortly found his skull fractured beneath the weight of his mount and died in the ring.

The most notorious incident in the history of the sport was in 1989, when the legendary Lane Frost rode Takin’ Care of Business at the Cheyenne Frontier Days, the biggest stage in rodeo. Frost, twenty-five, successfully rode the bull for eight seconds, but after dismounting, the animal turned on him and drove him face down into the mud with the iron stump of its horn. Frost died of massive internal bleeding before his body left the ring. Nobody knows why the bull did that, but it earned him an early retirement. Public health researchers have since found evidence suggesting that protective equipment may mitigate the harmful effects of bull riding.

As the first few riders got bucked and rolled on the ground, dodging successive mortar rounds of hooves, I reached down into my pants and tugged my sagging jock up from between my legs till it fit snug. I cinched my belt a couple of notches tighter to hold everything in place and felt a sharp pain in my abdomen, then belched.

On Friday I ate a stick of beef jerky while waiting for my flight to Phoenix to take off from JFK. Saturday morning I ate a machaca burro. Sunday I grilled six steaks at my in-laws. Monday was Saint Paddy’s, so I had the obligatory corned beef, sourced from a Kroger syndicate that plastic wraps its meat on Styrofoam so it looks like an organ donation. Tuesday my dad smoked a whole brisket (beef). The average yield a butcher can expect from a well-fed steer is around five hundred pounds of boneless, trimmed beef. I had the keen realization, standing beside the cattle in the lineup, that after a lifetime of wanton consumption, it was only fair to give the victim a chance at payback.

The earliest indication that man felt guilt for killing and consuming bulls is the ancient Greek ceremony known as Buphonia. The ritual involved a member of a royal family killing a bull while it fed on grain, then throwing his ax aside and fleeing the scene with a face haunted by remorse. According to the philosopher Porphyry, the ax was then carried to a court and charged with murder, whereupon it was thrown into the sea. The crowd would then consume the meat of the slain bull to absolve the murderer’s conscience by taking on his guilt.

My steer’s name was Babyface. He was a stocky thing with gentle eyes and a hide like black velvet. A patch just above his tail was pale as charcoal ash, and his horns, blackened at the tips, looked like cauterized ivory. Despite his complexion, his sleepy features reminded me of Watteau’s Pierrot. He flipped his tail pleasantly as Raúl was thrown between his own steer’s horns face-first into the mud.

***

I can’t tell you why I wanted to do this, but I can tell you exactly when I made the decision to do it. I was filling up my mother-in-law’s Hummer at the Shell right off the Piestewa Highway a few days after the ocotillos bloomed. My wife and I had just decided we were going to try to have kids. I know what you’re thinking, but that’s not exactly it. I don’t want to ride a bull before I have a kid. I want to make a bunch of money and buy a house and a Subaru before I have a kid.

But I was standing there pumping midgrade octane into the H3 and staring at the McDowells and thinking about how I knew the pump number where I was standing, knew the name of the mountains I was looking at, knew the hard smell of the gasoline and the flaming blue of a passing attendant’s uniform—knew these things exactly, the way I had always determined to know the world—and suddenly I thought I should probably ride a bull. Or, more accurately, I suddenly found that I was going to ride a bull, as I had already reached for my phone and called Buffalo Chip and got my name on the list before any normative notion of whether I should do this crossed my mind. It was a kind of fait accompli accomplished by my unconscious, the type of action one associates with creatures of lesser intelligence. It cost forty dollars, and I signed a waiver—anyone can do it. At least, anyone can try.

***

I heard the loudspeakers announce that our next athlete was “the man in the new boots.” I was immediately handed a frayed polypropylene rope with a bell at the end of it and hurried across a catwalk toward the opposite bucking chute. The chute boss was roughly my age and had a silky voice and glass-prism earrings and a leather rodeo jacket with white stitching over the heart that spelled out 2023 FINALIST. I gave him my rope, and he looped it under Babyface’s torso, then helped me lower myself onto the steer. Smell of pine and cedar coming off that rosin-smeared rope as the chute boss heated it up. Babyface’s hide shirred where the handhold pressed into his back, and golden manure poured out of his ass. I put my gloved right hand under the stiffened lace and let it rest on the matted wool padding while the chute boss shook down the bell between the steer’s legs. Smell of asafetida and ammonia rising from the floor of that chute. “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox” (Proverbs 14:4). Babyface pinned my left leg hard against the steel cage.

Announcer said, “You can always tell them new riders by their new boots.”

Chute boss said, “Put your legs under his shoulders. That’s it. Boots forward.”

ZZ Top on the loudspeakers said, “Cuz every girl’s crazy ’bout a sharp-dressed man.”

God to Job said, “Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Will he spend the night at your manger?”

“He’s gonna go left, then he’s gonna do a one-eighty,” a cowboy said. “He does it every time.”

“Who wants an eight-second ride?” the announcer asked.

“WAAAAAAA!!!!” the crowd said.

A perversion is a turn from a previous path to meaning. It is the betrayal of an exact course.

“Left, then one-eighty,” the cowboy said. He held out his hands and clenched them like, If I could bend your body to this fate, I would.

“You’re gonna nod when you’re ready, okay?” the chute boss told me.

Why did the hunter at Lascaux ride the bull?

“Okay?”

Why did the artist paint him?

“All right, we gotta go,” a clown said.

“Time’s up,” my wife said.

“Hold it,” the chute boss said, looking at my grip. “Move your dick up.”

“What?”

He reached his hands between the steer’s horns.

“I said scoot your dick up. Closer to your hand.”

I shifted my groin forward, and the friction against the hide caused a telltale shine of pink to pop out of my pants. I looked at the chute boss, and his face said, Pervert. I nodded my head.

 

Chandler Fritz is a contributing writer for County Highway. He works at The New York Review of Books.

Without Your Love

Screenshot from the trailer for Paper Moon (1973).

The other night, Richard and I watched Paper Moon (1973) on Kanopy, directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The film is brilliantly shot, written, directed, and, most transportingly, acted—by Tatum O’Neal and her father, Ryan O’Neal.

Tatum was eight at the time of filming. The first shot is her face, filling the screen, as she stands beside her mother’s grave, in the grainy light of black-and-white, dust bowl Depression America. The first shot is Tatum’s face, and in a sense the movie is a biography of that face. Tatum’s character is called Addie, and she quickly hooks up with a grifter named Moses, played by Ryan, who may or may not be her father.

There’s a softness about Ryan O’Neal. It’s in his eyes. He has a light touch. If he placed his hand on you, the hand would ask how much pressure you wanted. He has the eyes of a dog wondering if it’s time to go out, and this yearning helps him pull off his grift of selling Bibles to grieving widows he finds in local obits. He’s not great at this work. Addie is a natural, Addie with the genius of little girls before they learn about their gender assignment and lose all hope for their lives.

Think of the fierce and implacable Lyanna Mormont, the child ruler played by Bella Ramsey in Game of Thrones. Think of the hunter Arya Stark, played by Maisie Williams in the same show. Think of Beth Harmon, the chess whiz in The Queen’s Gambit played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who can work out whole games in her head by visualizing them on the ceiling.

Tatum’s eyes are the film’s camera, a silent-movie camera. She takes in all the information needed for the plot. In nearly every shot of her, she’s watching something and planning her next moves. You can see, almost frame by frame, how much Bogdanovich learned from studying Hitchcock—who of course started as a silent film director—and how little dialogue is necessary when montage creates the narrative. There’s not a single line of exposition in the film. We don’t even learn how Addie’s mother died. We’re plunged immediately into the middle of a situation—no analysis, no summary, no backstory—and because it’s a great love story about a lost man and an abandoned child, and because it’s a great road movie with adventures along the way, it will always never arrive.

The past few days, I’ve talked to people about the film, saying I thought it was pretty much a perfect movie, in love with its characters and its movieness. People kept saying Madeline Kahn’s role was memorable. She plays Trixie Delight, a sexy broad without talent who Moses picks up at a carnival. She’s a package deal, meaning that wherever she goes so does her “maid,” Imogene (P. J. Johnson), a fifteen-year-old Black kid whose family has no money to feed her. Kahn plays a scheming bimbo with a heart of lead, a cliché in a movie that has no clichés except this one. The girls gang up ingeniously to ruin her chances with Moses and free themselves from her. Does anyone want Trixie to continue on in the film?

When Richard and I hit the Play button on Kanopy, I didn’t know we were in store for a work of art as tender as it is beautiful. It was made in the seventies, during a gallop of creativity in film, and set in the thirties. Watching it now, more than fifty years after it was made, the seventies feel as distant from us as the thirties felt to the makers of the film, and yet none of that is distancing, because great works of art, made specific by their time, are independent of their times. They are paradigms of the way pleasure and freedom, more than anything else, drive the making of art. When you are transported, it’s not back in history—it’s to the glass case holding the Grecian urn.

Bogdanovich applied what he learned from Hitchcock’s storyboards and camera angles and bent them to create an entirely different sensibility. Bogdanovich wants to love things and to recapture a past that isn’t real. He’s willing to slather on the schmaltz. Hitchcock is a shark doing stand-up comedy. All he wants is to sustain suspense.

From the first shot of Tatum, staring out against a forlorn sky, and from the second shot, looking down at the coffin in her mother’s grave, I felt a rush of pleasure. It was the pleasure of giving myself over, the pleasure of receptivity, and it’s mysterious where it comes from and why you can’t always feel it. I see myself as a person who wants always to be seized, wants a seat by the footlights. Apparently not. The sensation of being a reed, open at both ends, is sudden, not a trend.

Is there a perfect time of receptivity that allows you to enter a movie, or thoughts about the world, or feedback about your life? Does a work of art—or new information—enter you because it mixes with thoughts that have already been laid out, like ingredients for a meal you hadn’t planned to cook? Do I wish receptivity was more available? Maybe. And maybe it feels so good because it interrupts the other parts of life. What are “the other parts of life”? The parts where you are anywhere but in the moment.

 

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Notes on Another New Life column for Oldster Magazine, and her Substack is Everything Is Personal.

Death at the Zoo

Jumbo the elephant. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Zoological Society of London.

We begin the essay with an uncited photograph from history. Roland Barthes speaks of photographs of children from history, their innocence and morbidity. To look at an old photograph of children is to look at children who are long dead. But the same is true for archival photographs of zoo animals. What do you see when you look at this photograph? A grouping of children in Victorian dress on top of a very large elephant, with a man keeping the whole contraption at a standstill. From what can possibly be read of the expressions of children from a grainy photograph, they look expectant, excited—the child zoo feeling. The elephant’s expression is far more inscrutable. Exhausted, possibly. Or just present. So present that photographs of this famous elephant from history always emphasize how much its extremely mammoth body fills the entire frame, or has been herded into a small enclosure (in fact, anything large began to be called jumbo because of the dissemination of his absurdly large likeness in advertisements). Why does John Berger begin with a photograph of Jumbo the Elephant giving rides to children at the London Zoo? Perhaps to situate the Eurocentric nineteenth-century zoo attitude, a narrative of colonialism and alienation from labor (absent while present), a story of tragedy and absurdity, the only possible tonal registers for the history of capitalism. Below is a much clearer photograph than Berger opens with, and the expressions on the faces of the one female chaperone and the children, and the familiar male zookeeper, are far more squinted and uncertain, but it’s unclear whether that’s due to the extremely large animal they are astride or to the even-less-familiar performative moment of photography.

Let me tell you a bit more than John Berger does, a story of Jumbo the Elephant, the most famous elephant in history. This is cobbled together from various reports, including David Attenborough’s 2017 documentary. The details often conflict. A male African bush elephant, his mother was killed by ivory poachers and big game hunters around the year 1860, somewhere near the Sudan–Eritrea border. Her tusks were hacked off the carcass to sell. The baby calf was captured and imported first to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, then transferred to the London Zoo, exchanged for one rhino, one kangaroo, one possum, a jackal, a pair of eagles, and two dingoes. The young elephant had to be nursed back to health upon arrival by his keeper Matthew Scott, pictured, who would sleep in his cage. He had a rotten tail and hoofs, his hide was covered in sores, as Scott writes in his autobiography, “I thought I never saw a creature so woebegone.” He was put to work giving children rides on his saddled back around Regent’s Park, a favorite of Queen Victoria’s children. Children would pay a fee to feed him currant buns. Jumbo lived for about twenty-five years, spending his life in captivity, first the zoo, later transferred to the circus, due to his fits of grief and rage becoming even more unmanageable as he reached mating age. (Grief and rage over his mother’s death? His relentless labor ferrying children? The claustrophobia of his small enclosures?). Scott would also prod and thrash the elephant, to try to tame his aggression, which he deemed adolescent. Jumbo broke his tusks by ramming against the walls of his cage at night, and when they regrew, he would grind them against the stone enclosure, in despair. There were night terrors, calmed only by a bottle of whiskey shared with his human companion and keeper. This repetitive self-mutilating behavior is referred to as stereotypic behavior, repetitive gestures exhibited by humans and other animals in distress, including in the caged conditions of zoo animals, such as also pacing around and around in a circle, which for elephants can accompany a quasidance that the filmmaker Chris Marker names “Slon Tango” in a four-minute film, part of his Bestiaire series, a long-sustained shot of an elephant in the Ljubljana Zoo ambulating around its enclosure, making seemingly syncopated steps to Stravinsky’s “Tango.” But Chris Marker’s eye here, as usual with his animals, is gentle and compassionate, there is a pathos to the slowness of the lumbering backstep of the Lithuanian soloist. For Tom McCarthy, in his dense, acrobatic Artforum blurb, the most important Marker motif is memory—perhaps, he theorizes, the elephant is actually remembering a historical past of a courtship ritual, or perhaps just a dance he’s choreographed for the duration of captivity, and he references, as so many inevitably do, the mythical newspaper article that apparently inspired Nabokov to write Lolita—the ape in the Jardin des Plantes who picks up a piece of charcoal to execute a sketch of the bars of his cage. Still to this day, zoos sell drawings or paintings made by their animals, who, the gimmick suggests, are really artists, although the labor of their constant work is, as with so many artists, made invisible by their gallerists/keepers. For the elephants picking up a brush, painting eases their anxiety, which is a feature of captivity, but one that can be remedied with a form of occupational therapy, or so the zoo’s own literature suggests. At the Cincinnati Zoo, the “brush in trunk” package comes with a custom canvas, with two photographs of your elephant (your elephant) creating the art, for the price of only two hundred dollars, plus thirty dollars for shipping across the United States. There is a list, at other zoos, of animals who paint—apes, inheritors of the late chimpanzee artist Congo, whose colorful expressionist paintings are collected by the filmmaker John Waters, but also a variety of other animals including giraffes, sea lions, rhinos, and hippos, as well as lizards, snakes, and penguins.

What am I performing here? Something like a bestiary. A collection—that was the Victorian zoo language. When in 1882 P. T. Barnum purchased Jumbo for his collection, one hundred thousand children wrote to Queen Victoria to protest. But not only was Jumbo’s aggression seen as a possible danger, there was also concern that a mature elephant’s erections would be too much for a Victorian crowd. He was shipped off to America with Matthew Scott, in a crate that barely fit his six-ton body, plied with alcohol to calm him. He was photographed arriving with his trunk waving out of his crate, promenaded to Madison Square Garden to be exhibited. I am still of an age to remember the Ringling Brothers Circus, before the elephants were retired—in fact I am roughly the age John Berger was when he wrote his treatise on looking at animals at zoos, also finding myself at middle age with young children, taking them to zoos, despite my ambivalence. My aunt would take us, as well as to the popcorn movies, and we would eat pink cotton candy. I remember weeping while watching Dumbo in the theater with my aunt, a story of a young elephant, with his ears for flying, who is taken from his mother and forced to be a circus performer, inspired by Jumbo. At the Ringling Brothers Circus, I can remember seeing in the ring, the circle of elephants. Jumbo was only in the circus for three years, making P. T. Barnum millions. Famously he died being struck by a train in Ontario, Canada, while being shuttled by Scott to his boxcar, although there is still a mystery as to the circumstances. Was it an instant death, due to his tusk becoming lodged in his brain, or is there truth to the story Barnum gave the press, that he was trying to save a smaller elephant, Tom Thumb, from the oncoming train? Was he always dying of tuberculosis and Barnum paid off Scott so that he didn’t hurry his charge along the tracks? Jumbo’s hide was mounted and exhibited for a four-year tour, then sent to Tufts University, where Barnum was a trustee, where it burned in a fire, and his eleven-foot-tall skeleton was donated to the American Museum of Natural History. “If I can’t have Jumbo living, I’ll have Jumbo dead, and Jumbo dead is worth a small herd of ordinary elephants,” Barnum said to the New York Times. According to Jumbo’s postmortem report, his stomach was revealed to contain “a hat-full of English pennies, gold and silver coins, stones, a bunch of keys, lead seals from railway trucks, trinkets of metal and glass, screws, rivets, pieces of wire, and a police whistle,” the souvenirs of a life in captivity, and from snatching coins from the children. An important early memory for the artist Joseph Cornell was seeing Harry Houdini at the Hippodrome with his parents. I don’t know this for sure, but I like to think it was in 1918, when he would have been fifteen years old, and Houdini disappeared Jennie the elephant into a huge cabinet (the illusion is difficult to explain, but basically Jennie took her sugar, sauntered into the front of the cabinet, and then twelve men pivoted the cabinet so that when it opened it appeared empty, because of a black interior curtain. This section of the bestiary is beginning to feel like a huge cabinet to fit the elephant. Turn it around and around and eventually all the elephants will disappear.

During the Second World War, a majority of the animal inhabitants of Japan’s Ueno Zoo were killed in secret by their keepers, either by starvation, strangulation, or blows or spears, or poison, specifically strychnine, which produces a slow, painful death, first muscular convulsions then ultimately death by asphyxia or exhaustion. But three remaining Indian elephants—John, Tonky, and Wanri—known by children throughout the empire—were starved to death, when the poison did not work, which took up to four weeks, despite repeated efforts by the elephants to perform tricks to get treats. A children’s picture book, Faithful Elephants, which literally translates to “poor elephants,” written by Yukio Tsuchiya and published in Japan in 1951, depicts the army as requesting that the Japanese zoo poison their large animals, because they were worried that they would escape and harm the public in the case of a bomb detonating nearby. Tsuchiya has said she wrote the book so that children would know the grief caused by war. But what really happened in the summer of 1943 is less clear—there are reports that the governor of Tokyo ordered the slaughter of the large animals at the zoo for propaganda reasons, to shock the residents of Tokyo into supporting the realities of war. Besides the elephants, twenty-four residents of the zoo were executed, including bears, lions, a leopard (poisoned), polar bears who couldn’t be starved and so were strangled by wire. A memorial service was held for the animals by government officials, attended by the governor himself, as well as hundreds of school children, who were the designated audience. The animals were mourned as martyrs for the country. The animals went to their death so the people would know the inevitability of air attacks. It was a death by honor. In the children’s letters originating from all over Japan, they were upset and furious with America and Britain for causing these beloved animals to have to be killed. The proper nationalist feelings were stirred, as so often is the case with a nation’s feelings toward the animals they feel they own. See another zoo celebrity, Knut the polar bear in Berlin, satirized so memorably in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, his rejection by and orphaning from his also captive mother at birth representing his generational alienation from her maternal past as circus performer and from his grandmother, a Russian émigré writing of her experiences in the minor language, just like Kafka’s lecturing animals. Knut the polar bear became the cause célèbre symbol of our climate crisis, the unnatural environment of the zoo a reminder of global warming, superimposed while at the Berlin Zoo by Annie Leibowitz on the cover of Vanity Fair with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was on a glacier lagoon in Iceland. The real Knut died at the age of four having suffered a seizure and drowned with a splash into his pool while people watched. The theater of heartbreak and mourning that unleashed—with fans leaving the stuffed animal versions of him near his cage. He was taxidermied and put on display at the natural history museum, enshrined in a bronze statue, the typical process of mourning for revered zoo animals that also helps to ease the real, hidden, loss for the city, that of touristry and ticket sales. It’s not easy to make a successful animal statue, especially of a polar bear. In nineteenth-century Paris one trained to be an animalier, as Rodin did with Antoine Barye. There is the marble sculpture by François Pompon, assistant to Rodin and Camille Claudel at the Musée d’Orsay. How does one get the fur right, the tones of the white fur the nature writer Barry Lopez began to refuse to photograph and that Tawada imbues with such painterly surrealism. Pompon also eschewed realism and went for the intuitive, essential nature of the polar bear. Colette admired the “thick, mute” paws. After my first zoo report, about the melancholy and strangeness of monkey cages, was published, someone wrote me: “I wonder if that melancholic quality is part of what appeals to children about zoos—they have so few opportunities for indulging their own melancholia, especially girls, so much pressure to have everything unicorns and rainbows.” This felt profound to me, especially since this writer is the author of a forthcoming biography of Anne Frank, the iconic melancholic young girl, meditating upon her adolescent feelings, set amidst her attic captivity. I wonder if the zoo is a place where young children can feel these intense feelings of sadness and mortality, including the deep formal mourning for zoo animals that are extinct, or have died in the conditions of their captivity.

Chris Marker’s elegiac memory film, Sans Soleil, is like a menagerie, occupied by so many animals and their funerals, from a shrine to missing cats to the death of the panda at the Ueno Zoo, most likely the death of Lan Lan in 1979, along with her “groom,” Kang Kang, a special gift from China to the people of Japan, who might have delivered the first giant panda born in captivity had she lived one more month. The female narrator, reflecting on a letter that the Marker alter ego Sandor Krasna wrote her, meditates upon the funerals for animals in Japan, with the same chrysanthemums as are customary for the funerals for humans, a day of mourning for all animals that died that year intensified by the panda’s death, which was experienced with more grief than when the prime minister died at approximately the same time. Perhaps this day of mourning for the dead panda, and the ritual of weeping, brings about a catharsis as Aristotle describes in his poetics on tragedy. “I’ve heard this sentence: ‘The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner.’ What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if they were trying—in order to understand the death of an animal—to stare through the partition.” The juxtaposition of daily life and the passage of time in Guinea-Bisseau and Tokyo in Sans Soleil, first the Japanese children laying flowers at the funerary scene at the Ueno Zoo, then a cinematic gunshot from a B-film, seemingly the poachers aiming toward the giraffe in Africa, who first runs around, staggers, then crumples to the ground, the almost ecstatic horror of the spurts of blood flying out. A quick shot of a chrysanthemum flower juxtaposed with the unmourned face of the dead giraffe, being picked at by vultures. Only banality, the ephemerality of time, interests the traveling documentarian Sandor Krasna. “On this trip I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.” So is the giraffe then a metaphor, or some elegiac statement about different attitudes toward animals and mortality, or both? All animals in Chris Marker’s films are political, writes Tom McCarthy. There was an outcry at the Copenhagen zoo where Marius the baby giraffe was euthanized by a rifle, publicly dissected, then fed to lions. He was healthy but genetically unsuitable for captive breeding programs, apparently. The children didn’t cry, newspaper reports read. They were curious and asked questions. During the most recent pandemic, when zoos were closed to the public, there was an ambient paranoia about what might happen to the animals without paying customers, including from one German zoo who threatened that the animals might have to be fed to other animals if they couldn’t afford food. The last on the food chain would be their twelve-foot-tall polar bear. This somehow parallels the abovementioned fear about large animals running free during the European world wars. Germany shot many of their large animals in advance of air raids. Those not shot were killed in other ways, such as the elephants at the Berlin Zoo. The London Zoo killed all of their poisonous snakes at the beginning of the Second World War. The Antwerp Zoo killed some of their large animals during both world wars. The hoofed animals slaughtered because of the food shortage. Others froze to death. The Egyptian temple, housing the giraffes, collapsed. Sebald describes the Antwerp nocturama in the opening pages of Austerlitz, his lists of the nocturnal animals also like a bestiary, reminiscent of Borges’s imaginary creatures, which Sebald cites throughout his works, including Rings of Saturn. His only lasting memory of that zoo is of a raccoon washing a piece of apple over and over again. I wonder if Sebald knew of the tragic story of Rembrandt Bugatti, younger brother of the automobile manufacturer, who would spend days at the Jardin des Plantes, studying the animals he watched there as the subjects for his bronze sculptures, like his walking panther, the beauty of his carved muscles. This was around the same time Rilke was studying his panther at the same Paris zoo for hours, his exhausted vision from the passing bars, at the advice of Rodin, who was known to carry a small carved model of a panther in his pocket for inspiration. It is most likely that the poet and the animalier were together, in front of the panther cage, forming their own imagined bonds with the animal, if the dates line up correctly (1904 for the panther sculpture, between 1902 and 1903 for Rilke’s poem). Both found solace from their financial troubles and bouts of depression standing at that zoo, watching the animals. The sculptor volunteered as a paramedic at an Antwerp hospital during the First World War, and would spend his time off at the zoo there, in companionable silence with the animals. After his friends were slaughtered due to food shortages, he himself committed suicide.

***

In Sans Soleil the Marker alter ego tells us, through his distanced address, that he has spent his days in front of the TV, “that memory box.” For me over the past year it’s the laptop. Has it really been a year since I’ve been to the zoo? My zoo feelings have been memories, usually historical memories that are not mine, from what I’ve gleaned from reports read online and in books. The zoo narrative this year in New York City was the Eurasian eagle-owl Flaco, who escaped his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo when someone cut his stainless-steel netting. He lasted nine months eating rats and pigeons while being spotted on Manhattan high rises and in the park. There was a debate about his survival in the wild, whether he should be captured again, a narrative of captivity only complicated when he died from injuries colliding into a building, and was found with high levels of rat poison in his system as well a severe affliction of pigeon herpes (please ignore the comments about this, that assume Flaco was doing something else with the pigeons, other than eating them, to get herpes). I only viewed the crowded memorial service at Central Park online, with crayoned drawings of the owl, signs proclaiming FLY FREE FLACO! even in death. I am reminded of the funerals for birds my children would hold in Prospect Park, during summer camp, although  not aware the birds have most likely died in such number because of rat poison, feral cats, or perhaps the intense heat. Children are instructed into the lives of animals usually through the death of insects, although they are not as aware that those are disappearing as well. The history of the zoo is now also footnoted with its relationship to natural and manmade disaster. It was only this spring that I became aware that our local zoo had been closed since the flooding last September because of damage to the electrical grid. Twenty-five feet of water in the basement. None of the four hundred animals apparently were harmed and they got to stay in their habitats. Were those inside just in the dark, without electricity? The person cutting my hair, who has two children the same age as mine, informed me of the closure. How was I not aware? We had withdrawn into our private family unit, alienated from the natural world, locked into a pattern of work and school, just as John Berger predicted. As I write this it’s now Memorial Day weekend. The zoo is opening up again. Look, there are new baby baboons.

 

From Animal Stories, forthcoming from Transit Books in September.Kate Zambreno is the author, most recently, of Drifts; To Write As if Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert; The Light Room; and a collaborative study on tone in literature with Sofia Samatar. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, they are a Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at NYU.

Sims Diary

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

Friday, May 2, 4 P.M.

It’s been a while since I visited the household that my Sim shares with Rian, the Sim I made for my partner, Ryan. In the game we live with our two youngest kids, two dogs, a cat, a cow, and a number of chickens. I’ve been nervous: even though she’s on the Long setting for lifespan, it seems like she’s heading toward death. To keep her alive, I’ve been playing with our older kids and grandkids. They moved out as Young Adults to live on separate lots nearby. Sometimes I get them to invite me over for dinner.

But everything at our house seems to be as I left it. I’m holding Fiona, the cat, and our son Fielding is holding Rye, the puppy. There’s a purple onion on the grass. Rian’s Chatting on the computer in our bedroom. I direct him to work on the garden, where some of the plants need to be Watered and Sprayed for Bugs. In this world he’s a stay-at-home dad. I work two days a week as a Creator of Worlds, the highest tier in the Author track of the Writer career. Would I have chosen a different career if my real job had been an option? Luckily it’s impossible to say. My Sim Goes to work two days a week and spends the rest of the time hanging out with her family and Writing on her computer. She’s very good at Writing—she’s already Published a Bestseller. I love whoever maintains the game’s patterns of capitalization; their work is imperfect and I imagine a series of interns, each of whom thought their summer job in tech would be something else. Maybe like the person assigned to fact-check my last piece about The Sims: “okay, i’m seeing this character referred to as the Grim Reaper more frequently than Death but both seem fine. also, i can’t confirm that in Sims 2 he can show up at Sims’ houses and eat a sandwich.”

Billie, the adult dog, is sick. I don’t have work for a few days, so I take her to the vet. I make enough money between my job and the royalties from all the books I’ve Published that I don’t think twice when I Spare No Expense at the clinic. Billie is instantly better and we Go home.

I notice that I’m walking with an elderly hunch. I’m a whole life stage ahead of Rian because I made myself first. Rian came into being one night while Ryan and I were on the phone, dating long distance; he hadn’t yet moved back to Nashville. At the time I didn’t have the Cats & Dogs or Cottage Living expansion packs, each $39.99 at full price, so Ryan didn’t have the option to make Rian good with animals. Instead we made him an Angling Ace, Family-Oriented, and Romantic. I moved him into the house next to mine. Soon he was sleeping over. I Read books after we WooHooed, and he did woodworking projects in his underwear. Often he woke up Flirty. It didn’t take us long to Get Married.

Rian still hasn’t Tended the garden by the time Billie and I get home. He’s Playing Chess against himself. None of the kids have done their homework. I tell them to Breeze Through it and start cooking Pasta Primavera until I see that the Grim Reaper is in my chicken coop. He’s a young adult and has a tablet, like a cloaked and dusty consultant. He’s looking between his tablet and a chick named Goats that I don’t remember and didn’t name. Maybe he hatched while I was playing with other households. The game will suggest names for them if you don’t bother, which is why the other chick is named Condor.

It’s disconcerting to see the Reaper with Goats. I didn’t know chicks could die for reasons other than neglect, and Goats seems to have all his needs met, even to be quite happy. Still, it’s too late for me to Plead. Goats disappears without an animation; I learn of his death through a blue notification in the corner of my screen. And then the Reaper turns toward Dolly, a chicken, who is in fact old: I imagine she’s the one he came for, and maybe Goats got in the way.

Ryan opens the front door, home from work, in a suit like a real-life businessman. Daisy, our real dog, gets off the bed to go see him. I close my computer.

 

Friday, May 2, 5 P.M.

Ryan wants to lie down for a minute before we leave the house. I open The Sims again with him beside me. I notice as Rian watches me Cook that he’s wearing a blue hearing aid I didn’t give him. I enter the Create a Sim interface to change it. While I’m there I ask Ryan if he wants me to give Rian Top Surgery Scars, which I only recently realized were an option. Ryan says yes. Arm hair? Yes. Chest hair? Yes. Leg hair? Yes. Back hair? No. I look at tattoos and try an outline of a heart on his left bicep. I don’t like it, but Ryan thinks it’s hot.

Gigi, our last chicken, is dying. I go to the computer in Rian’s and my bedroom and resume writing Poems Lovelier Than Trees. The game will auto-name your books, like your chickens, if you don’t bother. I’ve only once named a Sims book after something I was actually writing. In the game it turned out to be a Bestseller.

 

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

 

Saturday, May 3, 1 P.M.

It’s raining again. I’ve been working on a writing project I put aside for a month or two. Ryan is watching softball and waiting for the stabilizers to dry on the table that he and my landlord are building in the garage. I sit between him and Daisy and open The Sims.

It’s the middle of the night. Our kids are Afraid of the Dark and convinced there’s a monster under Fielding’s bed. It’s true that tentacles are reaching out from beneath the mattress. After a few hours I get up and Spray it like they want me to. I should have Sprayed it earlier. Now they’re going back to sleep, but it’s already six in the morning. They’re going to be tired at school. I sit down to Write.

I finish my book. It’s Excellent, so I Sell to Publisher at the mailbox and walk out to the chicken coop to Kiss Rian. He’s eating some leftovers and talking to the new chickens I Bought. We end up Flirting on the bench.

Our house is built in the traditional style of Henford-on-Bagley, with stone walls and a thatched roof. We bought it premade and I’ve been remodeling it in bits and pieces. I want to give myself a writing area in the attic, but I can’t add windows and the ladder’s not working. I end up adding a new window beside my desk in the bedroom instead. It looks out at the waterfall.

Gus and Fielding come home from school. They’re both straight-A students. I thought that Rian and I would be less hardcore about academic achievement with this second round of kids, but it still feels important that they do their homework. Unlike with Sue, Eva, and Amie, our first three, we don’t make Gus and Fielding do anything else for enrichment. No mandated instruments, science experiments, or art. Gus likes to Go Fishing.

I finish another Excellent poetry book. This time I go to the mailbox and Submit to Literary Digest. You can only do that once a week; if accepted, publication in the Digest makes you more money than your Publisher alone. I haven’t written a Bestseller in a while and I’m not sure why.

I Write another book in the morning.

Rian and I try to WooHoo in our bed. Rian seems ready to go, but I don’t like that our pets keep coming into the room. Instead we WooHoo in the cowshed out back. It’s not good; in my old age, this kind of thing is uncomfortable. I’m instructed to avoid strenuous activity for the next several hours, or else I might die.

Rian wants to Have a Baby again. This makes sense with his Family-Oriented Trait as well as his Big Happy Family Aspiration. After I completed the Painter Extraordinaire Aspiration, I briefly decided I also wanted a big family, but after a few days I switched to Bestselling Author.

I don’t think Sims have genitalia, or their genitalia have never been revealed to me. You can choose whether they pee standing up. When we made Rian, we decided to lean toward veracity and check the box indicating he couldn’t impregnate other Sims. We can still use the computer to Have Science Baby for a thousand Simoleons. We’ve done it three times. Twice we had twins, Amie and Eva and now Gus and Fielding. Each time I’ve named them while Ryan’s been asleep. Recently Ryan rolled over and suggested we have another kid, but I said no. There’s already enough toggling involved in gameplay. I do regret that I didn’t make my Sim look more like me. We made Rian look like himself, and it would have been fun to see our children.

When I close the game, it’s been three hours for me, two nights for my Sim. It’s rare that I play for so long and I almost never open it during the day. The rain is slowing down. Ryan and I go for a walk in the park by my house. The light is jarring, even when mitigated by the trees. It takes me a while to regain my depth perception and for the world not to feel too bright.

 

Tuesday, May 6, 7 P.M.

Our friend Shoshana and I make a Sim in Shoshana’s image. Shoshana names her Ershna. Ershna doesn’t quite look like Shoshana, but she does look like a person we might know. The question, I tell Shoshana, is whether you make your Sim as you are or as you’d like to be. My Sims are always Geniuses. My Sim is also a Bookworm, which is a boring Trait—she wants to Read and Analyze, which is not so fun to watch. Shoshana takes this into consideration and eschews Genius in favor of Self-Assured and Snob. She makes Ershna very muscular. Ershna Likes Fitness, Cooking, and Carnival Beats.

Ryan comes over from his apartment with Daisy. He says, “Why play The Sims when you could go for a walk?” We go for a walk. Daisy tries to kill a possum.

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

 

Wednesday, May 7, 10 A.M.

In the office kitchen, I tell two coworkers my favorite Sims story:

My friend Rene Duplantier once googled himself to see if his music came up. He found that anything about him was obscured by Sims 4 wikis devoted to a ghost townie, Claude René Duplantier Guidry, who comes premade with the expansion pack The Sims 4: Paranormal Stuff. Claude René bears a striking resemblance to my friend Rene, and the pack was inspired by New Orleans, the city where Rene grew up and was living at the time. Rene was freaked out. He posted in the r/Sims4 subreddit, “Why is Guidry’s middle name also my name?” Someone claiming to have worked on The Sims 4: Paranormal Stuff said it was a coincidence. My friend Rene commented back about the distinction between Creole and Cajun names, but no one from Electronic Arts, the company that distributes The Sims, responded.

A few months later, a friend of Rene’s found himself at a dinner where a woman mentioned she was descended from someone named Claude René Duplantier Guidry. Her family was aware that a Sims NPC had his name. I don’t know if they ever communicated with Electronic Arts; my friend Rene has no further information. But if you google him, his and Claude Rene’s pictures appear beside each other.

My coworkers say, “Whoa.”

Some Sims players claim the first version of the game was much harder. Sims lost points on their Needs meters (Hunger, Bladder, Social, Fun) faster and needed more supervision to take care of themselves, stomp their cockroaches, and go to work. They didn’t get weekends. The game was meant to critique nineties-era American capitalism: needing to consume to live, needing to work to consume, and struggling to live while working so much. Some fault Electronic Arts for the game’s gradual loss of acidity and eeriness—what some would call reality. Gone are the piercing cries when a Sim catches on fire. Gone are the creepy prank calls, the frequent burglaries, the sense of isolation, and the random demotions after professional games of roulette. The Sims 4 is much easier and much more of a fantasy, unless you intentionally make it harder through mods like Health Redux, in which you can send your Sim through rounds of chemo.

 

Wednesday, May 7, 7 P.M.

Ryan and I go out to dinner with our friend Sara. She’s never played The Sims. We talk about how sad she will be when her dog Gigi dies: “It will be like someone cut off my leg and threw it in the ocean.” Gigi was found abandoned in a house without food or water. Her first two adoptive families returned her to the shelter. Gigi has been known to scale fences and walls that separate her from Sara. I imagine Sara would scale walls too.

We decide I will make a Gigi. At home I do it: Sarah and Squeegee. Squeegee is Loyal, Smart, and Playful. Sarah is a Self-Assured Dog Lover who Hates Children. She wears athleisure and has a big TV.

 

Thursday, May 8, 10 P.M.

Ryan has to stay up late doing work. I text Shoshana and decorate Ershna’s house. I paint her study dark green and give her a nice desk, a huge bookcase, a big kitchen, and a game table where we can play cards. She doesn’t have the option to be an academic, as she is in real life, so I get her a job as an Assistant Dishwasher. I make her a garden, but she doesn’t Like gardening. Her Fun meter goes down every time I ask her to Plant something. Shoshana texts, “good for me.”

I Hire a gardener, but Ershna still needs to do the Planting. The gardener comes by and throws his hands in the air. “Guess there’s nothing for me to do,” he says. The issue is that Ershna is supposed to be doing the Simple Living challenge, which requires her to go to the grocery stand or live off the land. The land so far only has basil, lilies, and pomegranates.

 

Friday, May 9, 9 P.M.

When we get home from dinner with our friends, I open my computer and watch Lisa from Blackpink on YouTube. Ryan says, “I think you’re spending too much time on your computer at night, when we could be spending time together.” I close my computer.

 

Saturday, May 10, 8 P.M.

Shoshana comes over. Ryan and Daisy fall asleep on the couch while Shoshana and I play with Ershna. Shoshana re-wallpapers her living room. We enter Create a Sim because we forgot to configure her romantic and WooHoo preferences and to give her outfits other than Everyday, in which she wears a crop top and cargo pants. Without direction, Ershna has been putting on a full face of makeup to go to sleep. Shoshana gives Ershna a Cold Weather outfit: a red shirt, a brown sweater, a big green coat, and a beanie.

Rian calls and asks to come over. Ershna agrees. They play cards and make dinner. Ershna goes to sleep. The next morning we find Rian staring at the unlit firepit in her yard. Shoshana clicks on the mailbox. “There are taxes in this game?”

Shoshana is surprised Ershna has a Culinary career but decides it’s better than Freelancing. I encourage her to send Ershna to the Fair to meet some people, but Ershna Goes to work before Shoshana can get her to Take a vacation day. I show Shoshana how we can tell Ershna to Leave Early, but Shoshana’s cursor hovers closer to Work Hard. Shoshana clicks it. She looks sheepish. Later she does tell Ershna to Leave Early, but by then the Fair is almost over.

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

 

Thursday, May 15, 8 P.M.

As I load the game, I have the sensation that my Sim will soon die. I Write poetry and name the book after a writing project I have on Google Docs. It’s a Bestseller.

I’m bored of hanging around the house. While the kids are at school, Rian and I Travel to Amie and Sue’s lot. There are two buildings, one for each of them. Amie and her husband Gus live in the bigger one, which has a room for their two infants, Karla and Courtney. The game named them. Karla cries in my arms and I don’t enjoy it. Rian and I Travel to town. I hope Ershna and Trout will be there, but the square is empty and I’m in a bad Mood.

I Exit my game and switch to Eva and Rosa’s house in Brindleton Bay. They live with their two dogs in a beautiful house by the shore. It’s full of fossils and crystals they dug up in the sand. Eva and Rosa walk through their rooms and feel Focused and Inspired. They have the perfect life. I’m bored and tired.

I switch control to Amie and Sue. Sue Proposes to his new girlfriend, who left her job as a Creature Keeper to Move In with him. I buy them a llama. Karla and Courtney Fuss and Cry and Sue can’t seem to leave them in their cribs, but Picks them Up and Puts them Down on the floor where Sprig, the dog, naps with them. It’s cute but I wish they would grow into Toddlers, when they can start acquiring Skills.

Back at my house the toilet breaks. Rian Repairs it. New weeds grow every night.

I close my computer and fall asleep. I dream of a house with an interior grid. I am trying to place a sofa on the floor, but it can only fit in one square or another, and neither is quite right.

 

Friday, May 16, 12 P.M.

I google “sims mod spirituality.” I google “sims mod political reality.” Neither quite gives me what I’m looking for. I want my Sims to Meditate, Understand, and Glow with Enlightenment, but these options do not exist.

I’m wrong! The Sims 4: Spa Day comes with a Wellness Skill. Sims can become Zen Gurus. I can buy the pack for $19.99.

I tell Ryan I think I need to step back from The Sims for a few days. Ryan says, “I didn’t say it.”

I leave my computer closed and read on the couch while Ryan watches softball and swipes on his phone. He says his TikTok has been showing him stuff about new parenthood and babies ever since we’ve been going to appointments at the fertility clinic, wanting to learn about our respective capacities before Ryan pursues a hysterectomy. A few months ago we visited his friends and their baby in San Francisco. When they talked about baby care, which they made look so fun and intuitive, I thought of how hard it is to care for babies on The Sims. I thought of The Sims, too, as I looked at the city’s strange foliage and blossoms, closer to graphics in the game than anything I knew in real life.

 

Saturday, May 17, 10 P.M.

Recently I received an email in a newsletter from John Paul Brammer about a reality show, Marriage or Mortgage, which aired in 2021. In the show, which I haven’t seen, a realtor and a wedding planner vie for the attention of each episode’s featured couple, trying to convince them to spend their savings on either a wedding or a down payment. The show did not give the couples any extra money to spend.

I asked Ryan if he knew about the show. He said yes and that it had been filmed in Nashville. I felt a pang for the featured couples who ended up opting for weddings; housing has gotten even more expensive over the past few years.

In the evening we go to a pre-wedding party for one of Ryan’s high school friends. The party mostly seems like an event for the bride’s parents and parents’ friends, maybe to accommodate those who can’t make it to the wedding later this summer, a plane ride away. We eat and listen to five short toasts, two involving poetry. At home Ryan shows me a TikTok of a microwedding in Italy. I say, “You want to get married in Italy?” He says no, not the part about Italy; the part about “microwedding,” which means twenty-seven people. I shake my head. “That would just be my family.”

I tell Ryan I think we could do something like the party tonight. We could have a space, even a yard, and invite people we know to come say things they might want to say. I think we’ll be all right as long as we feed them and give them somewhere to sit. Ryan nods.

My Sims’ weddings have never been very important to me, but I have a sudden urge to give Sue and his fiancée a beautiful simple wedding at our house. I want there to be toasts, and I want to buy decorative objects—more than just the wedding arch: white pillars, shrubs, candles, curtains of flowers I can hang from the walls.

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

 

Sunday, May 18, 8 P.M.

I open The Sims twice in fifteen minutes to organize this wedding I allegedly want, but each time I’m exhausted by the quantity of choices and clicks demanded by the experience and am subsequently distracted, first by Daisy, who wants to play, and then by Tavi Gevinson’s Fan Fiction, which I begin to read while the game loads a second time.

What is actually necessary for a wedding? Food. Tables, chairs. Alcohol? A stereo. A microphone? A yard. A tent?

 

Monday, May 19, 6 A.M.

I wake up to an email from the Nashville Banner telling me that members of the Tennessee Human Rights Commission have been laid off without the reassignment they were promised when the legislature dissolved their department. The office of the attorney general was supposed to absorb the board’s now-former thirty-two-person staff, along with their duties: investigating discrimination in housing and workplaces, which the THRC has done since 1963. Theoretically these duties will now be performed by the staff of Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, quiet collector of trans adults’ health records and defendant of Tennessee’s ban on hormone therapies for transgender minors, as named in Supreme Court case U.S. vs. Skrmetti. I say to Ryan again, “Should we think about moving?” It is not so much this event in particular as how little it surprises me; that I am so accustomed to our state government empowering itself to antagonize its constituents. We have said we will leave if Ryan can no longer access his care. Over the weekend we learned that his clinic’s website had been taken down. He still doesn’t want to move. He says, “I’ve figured it out so far.” But my imagination of our future here feels more and more like a fantasy, our financial plans operating in an alternate reality in which schools would be safer and better funded by the time we had a child, pregnancy less dangerous, the wetlands reprotected, Ryan’s rights more secure.

I go downstairs to use the spin bike in the gym at Ryan’s apartment complex. The instructor on the screen looks at me blankly and says, in a monotone, presumably intending to motivate me: “No one’s going to care about you as much as you do.” She seems taken aback by her own statement. She says, “Well, I care about you.”

 

Tuesday, March 20, 6 A.M.

I dream of an active shooter in my workplace. I hide in my office, and when I emerge the mother of a client tells me to read a book called Rise, or maybe Risen; it is orange and was written by a woman, maybe a nurse. We learn there have been no gunshots, that the shooter threw white ribbons through the halls. Later in the dream Ryan and I buy an ugly house and I use the Build dashboard in The Sims to fence our yard and choose a red brick for our external walls. I don’t want to play The Sims anymore.

At night I go to pottery class. I had stopped taking it because it was so expensive, but César, the teacher, still let me come by and do my own projects while my friends did their pottery. I wove, sometimes I wrote, sometimes I sewed. I bit the bullet on the last day of sign-ups for this term, and today, the first day, César seems happy when I tell him I’m enrolled in class for real. I throw eight bowls and a vase. This time around I only want to make practical things: things from which I can eat or drink, that can hold enough to be useful, and I want to get better about asking César for advice. I’m certain that one day he’ll be famous, internationally renowned, more than he already is. He makes giant pots and sculptural pieces, confident children and babies swaddled in blankets that make me think of Moses and migration. Most recently he put together a wall of two hundred and sixty vessels, differently glazed but identical in form. My friend Pete helped him get them all done. I met Pete in pottery class last spring and asked if I could set him up with my friend Katie. Now Katie takes our pottery class too. We say Ryan should join so we can rename it Love and Pots instead of Skill Building with César Pita, but Ryan gets bored with these kind of activities.

While I work I think of the new expansion pack, Businesses & Hobbies, which came out this spring and costs $39.99. I considered buying it. It’s cheaper than pottery class, and I bet my Sim would be better at ceramics than I am—that she could buy a wheel and a kiln for her house, and soon all her things would hold water. Sims can now make vases, attend or teach classes, and open their own small businesses. I’m confident that a pottery business in The Sims would be easier and more lucrative than a pottery business in real life, that progress would be more linear and more characters I don’t know would show up to buy my work.

But buying a game to do something so tactile feels almost sick, more disturbing than using it to have sex or exercise or adopt a pet. It feels on par with having my Sims play video games, which I will not let them do under any circumstance. They all Dislike playing video games. If they autonomously choose to Play Video Games, I send them to do something else.

 

Devon Brody is a writer living in Nashville.

Drake, in Search of Lost Time

Image generated by Sora, August 4, 2025.

Disappointment has a placid surface—the word is buttoned-up, its gesture to an inner world prioritizing mild description over emotional urgency, an indication simply that what one wished for went left, fell short. Admitting disappointment in others, in circumstances, can be a moment of quiet devastation, but to describe something as “disappointing” is a means of forestalling tears, putting them on the other side of a line. In pop culture, Drake is disappointment’s mouthpiece and its walking embodiment—it’s almost all he talks about and all one seems to hear about his music and persona. At his best, he is disappointment’s major-label poet, if you’re still willing to go there with me now that his utter ubiquity and industrial-strength productivity have, in the last decade, evacuated what remained of those early days of critical respect. Just as disappointment doesn’t often bring more than a few tears to the eye, Drake’s songs don’t, or don’t let themselves, go loudly to that part of the spirit that cries out for something more. Almost every song, always mixed to a streaming-optimized sheen, is a litany of feelings that are ever so slightly bitter, muted, a half Xan’s worth of narcotized. Psychological and calculating but only rarely soulful, just ceaseless solipsism cut sometimes by the urge to seduce or make music for women to dance to, all delivered with the charming evenness of the lounge singer whose chief pleasure is to give you what you came for.

Unfortunately, I love it. This multialbum monologue of someone who has decided in advance to never break down—“I’ll probably self-destruct if I ever lose, but I never do,” et cetera—who gets rejected by women, colleagues, idols, “the culture,” and, in rare moments of real lucidity, himself, has burrowed so deeply into my nervous system that instead of compulsive counting to make it through long train and elevator rides, I rap or sing these songs to myself, over and over and over, without end, with minor regret.

Without end because the songs are deeply, miraculously sticky; with regret because not only does Drake’s hermetic world feel like a retreat from the real one, but he is also difficult to defend from any angle besides pleasure. For example, Drake is a man of the people, or he tries to be: he’s rapped and sang in at least three or four black Anglophone dialects and dabbled in French, Arabic, and Spanish, too, as the mood, or market, strikes. But it’s hard to be a man of the people and also completely neurotic, so when the diss track that, through its own series of familiar national chauvinisms, went stupidly viral by eviscerating his obvious desire to Represent and Belong, he bowed out of the drama with a deflated, byzantine response (“The Heart Part 6”) that presented himself more as a private mastermind, planting fake info and pulling all kinds of secret strings, than a public icon who can count on the love of a congregation. The ubiquity of “Not Like Us,” however, feels like beating a cheesy joke even when the horse is dead, to paraphrase Earl, and at most like a simultaneous release and containment of oppositional political energies that have had almost no expression at a national or international level. (Only one person was arrested for their political views at Kendrick’s halftime show, and it wasn’t Kendrick.)

In other words, popular discourse has made it difficult to process Drake’s continued success—but I suspect there is something important there to process. Take “Texts Go Green,” the polyrhythmic, Afro-house masterpiece from Honestly, Nevermind and the purest and most sublime distillation of his late bitterness, its greatness and immaturity locking talons and plunging through the air of a vague narrative about a woman who left him and wants him back, even though he’s so over it. “If I come around you, can I be myself?” he begins. Then, after a series of small, trollish reversals, another late-Drake trope—“Well, don’t wanna make something from nothing, that’s where I be / Well, keep getting nothing from something, how’s that fair to me? / I’m thinking something for something, that’s what I need”—this song about moving on from the person least able to move on peaks, or maybe valleys, with the mini-refrain “I feel like everything these days leads to nothing,” getting straight to the center of a global structure of feeling that most of us can easily identify, whether we accept it or rage against it. On a leaked song, “Like I’m Supposed To/Do Things,” about a woman visibly flirting with Drake while he tells his more important romantic interest that she has nothing to worry about, he sings “you know I don’t ever change / Right here for you always.” How can she, we, believe him? But he seems, temporarily at least, to believe it, and in his total, momentary conviction, something sad and troubling seeps in—future hurt, disappointment, a hookah cloud of doom.

Reading through Proust in the past year, whom I think I’ve been drawn to out of a desire for momentary immersion in scale and duration, I’ve noticed a similar, resonant cloud of doom hovering inside the narrative’s baroquely described salons and aesthetic reflections. The resonances between Drake and Proust are many, not least of which the notion that money and competition are the drivers of life and that jealousy is the content of love. Drake’s love songs—or rather his relationship songs, since the love they speak of is almost never offered or secured—suggest that for his moneyed set of international, trips-to-Dubai, clubbed-out, bottle-serviced celebrities and hangers-on, love is all power and bitterness, back and forth, like that, forever. Just like In Search of Lost Time, the narrative trajectory of Drake’s albums shows us an arriviste filled with hope and enthusiasm for a world of art and success who finds himself  increasingly shaped and embittered by that world’s ruthless quest to produce the outsider. And, like Drake, Proust’s narrator is best enjoyed against his own grain, since his diagnoses of society’s ills don’t stop him from embodying the worst of them.

Meanwhile, his productivity is as incessant and anxious as Spotify or Netflix, perfect for a moment when life presents itself as a nonchoice between total grind or total despair. He’s a disruptor from the least semi of U.S. peripheries who suggested a slightly new model of popular rap masculinity only to install a mostly familiar misogyny, a numbers-obsessed winner whose latest turn to shilling for a sports-betting company, as diagnosed by Kieran Press-Reynolds, shows a man who can’t help but keep his finger on the depressing pulse. Proust, too, liked to gamble: according to Hannah Freed-Thall (“Speculative Modernism: Proust and the Stock Market”), “[B]y the start of the First World War he had managed to squander about a third of his fortune on stocks.” I thought of Jean Moreau in La baie des anges (1963): “What I love about gambling is this idiotic life of luxury and poverty,” neatly summarizing the thematic poles of mainstream hip-hop as well as the rough seesawing of pleasure and pain that quick millions seem to produce. “Don’t know how to express my love … that’s why I American Express my love for you,” a dead-serious joke (“Search & Rescue”).

So, the volatility of value is Drake’s great subject, to use Hannah Freed-Thall’s phrase, and, in our new age of widespread gambling—which has led to increases in bankruptcy, debt, and domestic violence—his voice is the codeine soul of a pitiless economic machine that produces desperate losers and paranoid, precarious winners. “Is there more to life than all of these corporate ties and all of these fortunate times and all of these asses that never come in proportionate size?” Herein lies the emotional core of this music, which is always just offstage, always outside the world and the people in it. Nothing really feels good. Nothing is dependable, fair or just.

Dionne Osborne, Drake’s vocal coach, who worked with him “to bring out that natural, dark, strong color in his tone,” says that part of his success is because the “average person” can sing his songs. And it’s true—you can sing them in an inside voice. What’s also obvious is the racial character of this averageness, this inside-ness, with its mild melisma and smooth legato, the great middle of a black North American pop-cultural mixture, all flavor and “accessibility.” If rap has historically been the music of the “streets,” a variously constituted inside-outside of the neighborhood, the car, the club, Drake has elaborated, in a thousand impossibly catchy ways, a kind of noiseless, black-but-not-bound-to-it, IMAX inwardness that colors even his club songs with Canadian bro-next-door energy, its references to threats and violence almost always delegated to associates and hired hands. When he “talks tough,” his references to threats and violence are always a degree removed, delegated to associates and hired hands even as he assures us he’d rather do bad all by himself. But he can’t—the brand must be protected. His domain is the boardroom, the restaurant, and the adult megamansion, “walls, doors, and floors that only I can afford,” where not a single freedom dream makes its presence known or its history felt.

This is the real reason why, for all his obvious ties to the traditions of black music, Drake has, to his constant chagrin, never fit easily into its inherited critical categories: He’s too measured, individual, dot-like, singing to an absent woman in Marvin Gaye’s former studio about male-pattern jealousy and drinking too much (“Marvin’s Room”), whereas Gaye sang about lovemaking and saving children from environmental destruction in a voice a mother can love (my mom doesn’t like Drake). While Nas or Jay-Z gets endless narrative mileage from reflecting on the dense lifeworld of New York City Housing Authority housing, Drake’s music is organized more by the drama of arrival than the complex nostalgia of origin—“To keep it real, I wasn’t really gangsta ‘til now / I was livin’ on a cloud, I was quiet as a mouse / I was in a club gettin’ lost in the crowd / Wasn’t doin’ what I wanted to, I’d do what was allowed,” he raps in the agitated, twilit account of his career called, fittingly, “Away from Home.”

If, as Olly Wilson writes in “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” black music tends toward maximal timbral differentiation, “contrast of color,” which suggests a rich and complex social world through which the music works, Drake’s music pops up smooth, buffed, knock-kneed, and upright from the Drake brain trust that gives you Drake first and a narrow slice of the social world second. And, yet, this has always been the vector through which his music sings its way toward downbeat truths that express a global feeling of immiseration. People just don’t love you back; you can’t figure out a way to do the right thing. It’s not that he believes his personal drama is of world-historical importance and that his belief makes us believe, as some early criticism suggested, though he may indeed believe that. The drama of his music resonates because we know, no matter how often we find ways to believe otherwise, that our individual quests to find enduring romantic love and social acceptance are doomed to fail precisely on the grounds of their individual character. That he elaborates this point through the language and forms of black diasporic music suggests that something of that tradition is still active in his music’s structure of feeling, even though it has become historically possible for him to make these songs without ever alluding to history itself.

***

What am I getting at? I’ve been thinking about romantic love, the kind that puts you in touch with youthful dreams and can, therefore, come to feel increasingly juvenile as disappointments pile up. Reading it, the cartoon I held of In Search of Lost Time—a madeleine-eating kaleidoscope of nostalgia and baroque aesthetic modernism—gives way to the real story of a brutal, racist, misogynistic, and bitterly precarious world of socially anxious desirers being squeezed to psychosis by history and form. In the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, men are fools, dogs, and dandies, while women are kept, used, disdained, or discarded when they aren’t cutting everyone to pieces sotto voce in various salons. The people who serve them are depicted in so many ways as vegetable- or animal-like, fossils of a class of subhuman simplicity. Drake’s music increasingly summarizes a similar world of total antagonism and hierarchy, even if the sets have a slightly different character. So, if Drake “speaks” to our moment, to history, so late in his career and at so urgent a time, it might be because in a singularly (un)appealing way, he gives catchy, dramatic, revealing form to what Zoë Hu, in her treatise on misogynist Andrew Tate, calls a “narcissistic, childlike understanding of love … consecrated or menaced by a powerful, imaginary audience.” This is the hall of mirrors of fame, Instagram, and digital streaming that pressure-cooks the world of this music and sometimes permits stupid, amazing poignancy to lift off into low orbit.

For those of us who still find something to think about and sing along to in his music, the real melancholy of Drake—which comes more precisely into view outside its depressing, hermetically sealed loop of transactions, streams, and grievances—is that no amount of individual success or striving can heal social wounds. The drama of Drake becomes a kind of realism, and the stretch of retaliations against erstwhile collaborators on last year’s “Family Matters” is a sad confirmation of the borderline’s suspicion that our friends’ smiles conceal deep, abiding hatred and conspiracy. Even worse that, at thirty-eight years old, which Drake is at the time of this writing, one can’t count on time to make good what’s been lost or damaged, that winning when you ain’t right within is the most pyrrhic of victories, to paraphrase Ms. Lauryn Hill, whom Drake has sampled twice without learning from her lessons.

***

When I couldn’t sleep last week, I watched Godard’s Changer d’image (1982), a short work made on commission by French television to commemorate Mitterrand’s election—a disappointing “victory for the left”—where he investigates the impossibility of depicting change in images. Years after the militant experiments of his Dziga Vertov group, the Godard in this video, down on possibility and sitting with his back to us for ten minutes looking at a screen, strikes us with his desperate frustration. Here he is, in the closing moments:

There is so much to show, show the resistance. Show the resistance of the image to change. Myself, I believe that I am only the image, and I am not ready to change just like that. On the other hand, I think that in between the images we can change, that’s what we need to show, this in-between. It reminds me of when I was little, of my grandfather driving around using only the first gear. We were little in the backseat, and every one of these Sunday drives was awful. From the back, we’d cry out, “Change, Grandpa, change!”  [screeching imitations of a car struggling to proceed] “Change, Grandpa, change!”

As Godard shrieked, I felt another obvious braid grow, Drake and Proust pulling the same scalp while Zionism was further degrading the world and AI companies were trying to drill semiotic fluid out of the general intellect. In pain, I cried out, in my inside voice, “Change, Drake, change! Change, world, change!” Change time, change history, change the order of things. Surprise me! Be different, I’m begging, so we can have some real love, some real peace, before it’s too late. Then I think, Who am I talking to? About the records of a completely doomed brand-cum-person and the world he’s making up to survive himself. I’m interested in coping mechanisms, since I’ve needed a few. I suspect I also have to justify my pleasures to myself, to God, now and forever, because they so often feel insane, indecent. I know, you know, what all this is about. Doesn’t really change things. The culture industry changes pain into money, which is no crime, though it seems worth thinking about the nature of the pain, the cost of the procedure.

 

Benjamin Krusling is a writer and an artist. He is the author of the collection Glaring. Fear of God Essentials is forthcoming from Nightboat in 2027. His poem “pray for paris” appears in issue no. 249 of The Paris Review.

The United States vs. Sean Combs

Sean Combs in 2010. Photograph by John Seb Barber, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

A Great Villain Is a Great American

Prisons are American tourist attractions, and criminals who become fugitives or inmates our outlaw heroes—Al Capone, Alcatraz, Charles Manson, Sing Sing, Angola, Luigi Mangione, O. J. Simpson, Diddy, né Sean Combs. A collective underdog fetish means that the image of a civilian outwitting, outrunning, or confronting “the man” is enough to negate his trespasses. Maybe achieving the apotheosis of success in the United States requires becoming a convict, being threatened with or facing real incarceration and exile, doing time, paying dues, and making a grand comeback. At that finale you can sell that story to restore your fortunes, dignity, and maverick glory. Combs is the latest public figure to go from celebrated to disgraced to tentatively redeemed in some eyes by a show trial and the masculine compulsion to cheer when men get away with terrorizing women. The rapper Jay Electronica stood outside of the courtroom with his two Great Danes on the day the verdict was delivered, and announced, “I’m just here supporting my brother.” He looked half-ashamed, half-deviant about it, like he was both courting and afraid of backlash. Others call Diddy’s comeuppance a legal lynching, insinuating he’s a survivor of a because-he’s-black character assassination, since other powerful, abusive men have yet to be held accountable. It’s a truly American malfunction, this belief that the once oppressed should have the freedom to become as evil and ruthlessly decadent as their oppressors. This is what is sold to the public as prestige, and imitations of it exist at every stratum. With this in mind, Diddy’s story could be construed as a bootstraps tale—from Harlem to Howard to Hollywood endings. His recent downward spiral might be just another buoy, one that will help him ascend anew.

Hip-hop music understands this about the American subconscious, taps into these delusions of impunity for material, and dresses its best emcees in rap sheets, threats, beef, high and low-level street violence—sometimes actual death and martyrdom. Even the so-called success stories who sell the genre out to the mainstream cannot be too clean—they better be rumored to run a trap house, attract a harem of groupies, and defy the legal system if they expect to maintain credibility. As the wealth of those at the top has increased, their criminality has grown reckless and entitled, blasé even, but no less compulsory. Now it’s tied more to contracts, NDAs, and designer drugs than to desperation to break through; they run media companies, liquor brands, parts of the NFL.

In June 2022 Diddy was granted BET’s Lifetime Achievement Award and thanked, among others, Cassie Ventura, his on-and-off girlfriend between 2011 and 2018, for holding him down in the dark times. That same year, he dressed as the Joker for Halloween. He was so creepy and persuasive in his white face and sleaze that many didn’t know it was him in the costume; it felt like a mimed confession of his true attributes. In 2023, New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, presented Diddy with the coveted key to the city. The key was returned the following summer, after news began circulating that Combs had abused Ventura. In September of 2024, Combs was taken into custody by the Southern District of New York and held without bail on RICO charges of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion and transportation to engage in prostitution. He was considered a flight risk and a threat to potential witnesses. His loyalists formed a hush harbor. This month, he was acquitted of the most serious charges and cheered on by many who seem to feel vicariously acquitted themselves ready to get back to a White Party or freak-off; when he’s released from prison, it seems likely he’ll be offered a hero’s reentry, a new lease on cultural domination and indiscriminate sexcapades, a new deal, as if he’s some kind of New Age abolitionist. Villainy was good for business. 

The Business

Ruined and impeccable women are the muses of the entertainment industry, the subjects of enduring torch songs, the abject heroines in courtroom dramas. They are the stars of Diddy’s quasi-downfall, forced to testify in the pursuit of conviction for crimes that are considered more sophisticated and substantial than the cycle of unchecked domestic violence he inflicted on them. When you hear rumors about how a rapper’s mistress or baby mother died suspiciously, seemingly at the hands of a phantom hit man, but the autopsy lists pneumonia or aneurysm, when you wonder if the arm candy’s new red-carpet bangs are covering bruises, you keep quiet and wait for injustice to prevail. Without realizing it, you are part of the choir that keeps a culture of muses and their handlers in business, in vogue, in demand, thriving, posturing excellence as an excuse for grotesque decadence. Making it in or adjacent to Hollywood, we’re expected to believe, is predicated on passing this coward’s etiquette off as cool. Be careful what you wish for is an insufficient warning. It’s more appropriate to ask, What’s wrong with you that you ever wished for that?

When surveillance footage of Cassie Ventura being dragged through a hotel hallway and kicked and beaten by Combs began circulating in the late spring of 2024, then made the evening news, a lot of people had to either remain silent or feign surprise. There were his close celebrity friends, never to be heard from in association with him again; his staff, quieted by fear that they were next; his current rotation of women, busy dealing with their own incidents. And then there were the defenders—his fans, made up of incel-esque members of the manosphere who believe that he was entitled to his bouts of anarchic rage; the women who center powerful men no matter how extreme their abuses of that power become; and the rap industry fundamentalists who believe that being an infinitely ruthless OG is more important than the women, children, and artists you destroy along the way.

The culture at large is emerging from a stupor that Combs helped induce. If Diddy’s empire was crumbling, who would bully all the king’s men into a nonstop-party lifestyle well into their fifties, and who would ensure there were always women to entertain them? What would mainstream hip-hop culture become in the absence of a long-reigning tyrant? The stakes were the integrity of iconography in the context of black music. A new semiotics would be necessary if evil and glory had become contingent on each other within a music that was meant for testimony. A space for marginalized groups to vent creatively, constructively, had become bent on silencing them. If Sean Combs had spent that past several decades antagonizing women and colleagues unobstructed, had lured everyone from Biggie to Mase to Cassie to Usher to Justin Bieber to Kim Porter, the mother of four of his children, into his lurid lifestyle and then held them captive there using money, status, and surveillance footage from the cameras rigged in all his homes and at all his parties, was he black entertainment’s closest approximation of Jeffrey Epstein, able to control creative trends using a makeshift sexual blackmail? Perhaps this was even part of his job description as head of a record label.

And whose apprentice or protégé had he been? His father, Melvin Combs, was an informant killed in a drug deal gone wrong when Diddy was just two years old. His mentor and rumored lover was Clive Davis, who used his own label, Arista, to help fund Bad Boy Records after Diddy dropped out of Howard University. Half-open secrets make it easier to control artists in a genre built in part by submissive, neurotic men imitating masculinity as seen in the Mafia, secret societies, and global cabals. Hip-hop’s aspirational energy can thus be channeled into hubris that leads to self-sabotage. And were the mainstream emcees who enacted that sabotage just a bunch of closeted or otherwise compromised men inventing a culture of violence and misogyny to deflect from their shame? Do men who love women kick them through hotel hallways, or is that the behavior of men who resent the fact that they have to pretend to love what they merely envy, that they do not get to be feminine and beautiful in that way themselves? This is the lifestyle we’ve been selling to one another back and forth, one that can squirm out of accountability for itself at every turn, just like the men installed to run it. “If I ruled the world, I’d free all my sons,” a 1996 Nas hook sung by Lauryn Hill promises, ominously. His peers who pretend to rule the world free no one.

Sean Combs attends the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute benefit gala celebrating the opening of the Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between exhibition on Monday, May 1, 2017, in New York. Photograph by Evan Agostini/Invision/Associated Press.

The Women

Chatting with a veteran casting agent, I learned that circa 2005, Cassie attended her auditions and callbacks with her father. The deliverer of this detail recalls thinking it swell, an advantage—here was a young, beautiful aspiring singer/actress who would not fall prey to lecherous men and their rotten promises; she had a father figure, nature’s bodyguard, looking out for her. A couple of weeks later, in another glimmer of Hollywood serendipity, I met someone at lunch who knew Combs. She had been close to the Jane Does who were by then testifying in the federal case against Diddy, but had herself emerged unscathed and unaware of the side of him now being revealed. A woman at the table asked her bluntly, “Did you grow up with your father?” No, she replied, undermining the implication that Diddy reserved his violence for fatherless men and women who would treat the blows as signs of devotion and make him their spirit daddy. The conjecture didn’t hold up to reality—the girl with the hyperinvolved father turned out to be his primary victim for years, while another without that so-called privilege had been spared. Some will say that certain women’s personalities provoke these men; I maintain that what provokes them is their own insecurity and the resilience of the women they think they’ve trapped.

I was in Miami visiting a friend who had just become a father for the first time, on the weekend that Diddy’s Miami house was raided. That city felt more like a muse for a true crime conspiracy than usual for those days. I speculated darkly, as more information came out about what was in that house, that Diddy might be a descendant of Eldridge Cleaver, who had announced his plan to rape white women as revenge for slavery, as if this were some kind of rigorous ideology. It seemed there was a method to Diddy’s use of women as accessories, that he had been deliberate about it. Yoko Ono screams, “Woman is the nigger of the world,” and some are outraged by her use of the hard-r version of the slur, and some join her and make it a chorus of punk-erotic distress. Diddy did not discriminate; he seemed to direct his intentional violence at women of any race, creed, or gender. During her somewhat frazzled testimony, Diddy’s former assistant Capricorn Clark recounted an afternoon when he had Cassie come into the kitchen and then barked mechanical orders at her as if she was a canine—stand up, sit, go, come back, et cetera—and she followed each one without saying a word. He told Clark that she didn’t have a man because she couldn’t be house-trained like Cassie. Then he dismissed Cassie from the room.

What each woman who was subpoenaed and forced to take the witness stand at Combs’s trial admitted to at one point or another, even beyond having been beaten or raped or held hostage or passed around by him among male escorts, was that she was in love with him, or loved him deeply, or was deeply in love, or wanted his love, or was jealous of other lovers, or could be a better lover, or called him Love, or traded love for danger, or chose unconditional loyalty to him in hopes love would follow. What makes women marks, in part, is other women, the formation of a humiliation-ritual assembly line made up of those willing to be the on-demand replacement if the abuse gets too harsh or frequent for the one before her, waiting and maybe even longing for that moment, flaunting the threat of being the untainted understudy, quiet in the face of the principal’s plight or reluctant to speak up, fearing for her own life or because she’s financially and emotionally dependent on their beloved abuser, groomed into believing that codependency is unconditional love. If the father in the home is a wannabe mafioso or minstrel kingpin, does that count as the patriarch most mean when they preach about how growing up in traditional households can deter a woman from dangerous men? Or is it that many heads of household manage to keep families together the way abductors keep all their hostages in one place?

“After the jury left, the judge did Diddy a favor and kicked everyone out except for his family so that he could share a private moment with them. In his hands were two self-help books, the first being The Happiness Advantage, the second The Power of Positive Thinking,” a reporter tells us from inside the courtroom the day the verdict is delivered, the Wednesday before Fourth of July weekend.

In this courtroom sketch, Sean “Diddy” Combs reacts after he was convicted of prostitution-related offenses but acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges that could have put him behind bars for life, Wednesday, July 2, 2025, in Manhattan federal court in New York. Elizabeth Williams via Associated Press.

How Do You Feel about Your Wide-Eyed Boy?

Toward the end of the eight-week run of the U.S. v. Sean Combs, I had reason to be in New York and decided to attend a day of the proceedings. I made no formal plan, had no credentials ready, and all the friends who had seemed eager to accompany me when I’d proposed the idea backed out in terror or apathy the morning of, wishing me luck. It turned out it was a pilgrimage I needed to make alone. I was ushered in after passing through the line of news anchors, told to turn in my phone and laptop, which I’d assumed I would use for notes, and sent inside. Jane Doe, who had been with Diddy all the way up until his arrest and whose rent he still pays every month, was on her second week of testimony. The defense shared and narrated text messages between Jane and Combs, some that made him seem almost levelheaded as he weaponized therapy jargon and told her he didn’t want them to be “toxic,” good energy only. They bickered about his “fantasy called voyeurism,” which is how he’d introduced freak-offs, now called “hotel parties,” to her, and then they made up by throwing them. She sent him glowing reviews of how close she felt to him after hotel nights, and then expressed everything from hesitation to utter refusal the next time he proposed one, only to acquiesce again to keep the peace. He’d chased and beaten her one night in particular, broken down doors in the home he paid for, but this was mild compared to what he’d subjected Cassie to. Jane seemed both entitled, aloof, and still in some semblance of romantic love or infatuation with Combs. She cried softly while reading their make-up texts aloud.

He sat in the courtroom in a yellow sweater that made me think of the I Ching line “yellow is the color of the mean,” and also of the allegory of the canary in the coal mine: Diddy might be the first one alert to his own slow suffocation in a group where everyone could be next. During a short break, he made a heart with his hands, aimed at the gallery, and carried one of his self-help tomes like a talisman. He deployed every psychic defense except stoicism and overt remorse. After several mind-numbing hours of Jane, likely the least endearing witness in the trial, her overt mixture of subtle fawning and resentment making it seem as though she were still working out the breakup on the stand, attempting and failing to incite pathos at every turn, one riveting moment arrived. She described Combs getting high during a hotel night and writing a love letter to Cassie. There’s that bastardized word again. Love, that “dangerous necessity,” sold out to compensate for longing or ego woundings, or as cover for despair, nostalgia, trauma bonds, or pernicious lust. Nonetheless, this was the most human interlude of this particular day of the trial, an account of an aging abuser reflecting on or deferring to a past victim in the presence of a new one and trying to revise that dysfunctional communal history, his image, and his self-regard. The benefit of being mean and evil in the Delta blues style is that whenever you’re in a good or generous mood, it’s so appreciated, so refreshing, that it’s conflated with a heroic act, even if that act betrays you to your face. Jane’s eyes went flat as a bell with no tongue and the court adjourned. She wasn’t finished testifying, but the details had become excessive, people were growing hostile toward her and you could feel that; everyone needed a break.

I was one of the first in line to retrieve my electronics with the floppy cardboard ticket I’d been given on my way in and escape into the Chinatown sun. Diddy’s son King Combs, twenty-seven, was ahead of me and had already retrieved his devices. As he passed the line, which was still short at this point and made up of only those of us who refuse to loiter in lobbies at a time like this, he gave a long, hard, unabashed stare, assessing me specifically. I realized I was conspicuous, wearing all white. Another person in line noticed the encounter and giggled. King Combs was strutting like a cool kid in between classes in high school who might be handing out invitations to a party he’d be throwing that weekend. I was the new kid—maybe he wanted to know if I had a father at home, or saw my equanimity as approval of his dad. Or maybe all men assume every poet of industry is one line away from giving it all up to be a glorified groupie. This assumption has always helped me when I’ve played into it to get more of the story. This time, the Art Ensemble of Chicago album People in Sorrow flashed in my mind, accompanied by a pang of equal parts empathy and revulsion. The show would go on, King Combs would spend his cultural inheritance ensuring it, just as I would spend mine documenting, writing, lyricizing the intervals where logic and integrity fail us all. He would host the parties until his dad made it home. Young Diddy, looks just like his daddy.            

I practically ran outside and in the direction of Canal Street to find the 6 train that would take me to Fred’s apartment, where I could debrief the day in peace. I passed a coconut stand and bought one, which was cracked open for me by the vendor and furnished with a striped plastic straw, memorable because it felt absurd to go from the monasticism of the courthouse to being a pedestrian in the middle of commerce and chaos, bootleg designer bags and tropical fruit and the exhilarating stench of end-times gluttony. I contemplated the day’s indifference to this contrast, its effortless accommodation of excess, while accelerating to the pace of someone being chased. I had, for the duration of that walk of shame and shine-on, the double-mind of a lucky fugitive. Maybe none of it matters. Maybe we need our jesters more than we need justice. Maybe women are masochists, all of us. No—too much tenderness toward nihilism in that concession, too much of the old way of being a woman. Show trials are effective at shielding the powerful because they ensure disorientation or over-orientation to pathologies, until it’s tempting to throw up our hands and let disorder sneak out and conquer the next batch of sympathizers. A sense of futility overrides purpose when petty details like text messages are emphasized, displacing a larger, more malevolent agenda. And what is that? That rabid domination mistaken for love is turning black music into a safe house for psychopathy, and the songs themselves advertise that broken home as if it were a resort full of video vixens, and fanatic tourists flock toward it, and it’s a maximum security prison.

“I’m coming home, baby,” Diddy celebrated in the courtroom after the jury returned his lenient verdict. He was found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution and exonerated of all other charges. He’s still in prison, being held without bail until his sentencing, on October 3. There are rumors that Trump is “seriously considering” issuing him a pardon and was waiting to see if his second appeal for bail was denied or not. It was just denied. Witnesses and their lawyers wrote to the judge frantically the day the verdict arrived, expressing fear that he would retaliate if released before his sentencing, that his history of violence should not be overlooked in deciding whether to offer him bail, that he could be a flight risk. The conviction is so light compared to what it might have been that between time served and the fact that he’s already rumored to be the kind of inmate whose bed the others fight to make each morning, he really could be on his way home before long. The prosecutor, Maurene Comey, who also worked on the Epstein case, was terminated from her position on July 16, for “failing” in the two cases. Some people accused her of throwing the cases on purpose to protect the elites that Diddy and Epstein hosted like fancy butlers for their respective cultures; it’s hard to say what happened. Her practice will need a new home.

Home is a feeling, an equilibrium, and a way of being seen on your own terms. Sean Combs now plays a leading role in the center of an American crime drama where heroism and criminality are one and the same. He joins the ranks of Frank Lucas and his own father and surpasses them and other Harlem hometown legends, and he never even had to take the stand or appear on television as an inmate, no perp walk. This is the first phase of Combs’s redemption arc. I’m convinced he’ll spend it on the same antics we now understand in exhaustive detail, but with a messianic, faux-Zen twist; reminders that he still knows where the tapes are vaulted; and more unintelligible declarations of what he calls love. While being held, he’s joined some therapy groups for domestic abusers and is clearly trying to signal rapid rehabilitation. And who am I to mistrust the sudden gentleness of monsters? I’d looked into his son’s eyes and seen a soul, a tortured trickster child who both does and does not know better than to act like his father’s trial is a private club, a main attraction, the inverse of the parties that he’d been attending all his life, but with similar cultural impact. Everybody wanted to get in. He’s not wrong.

Home is also where if loving you is wrong, we don’t need to be right, where it’s righteous to defend the sins of the father. I’ve been home a long time and never quite there. Had a musician father in the home and never quite there. His absence bothered me, but never enough to send me careening into the arms of one of his understudies for longer than it took me to assess them as wannabe gangsters without the loot to show for it. What bothers me most is that what society hopes will protect women from malignant men is other, more reasonable men; it’s that habit of facile idealism that sustains our addiction to the lore of crime families. Home, and in this case, decency, cannot be impersonated. The Nas song, a true hip-hop standard, and in the tradition of half-radical black transfer-of-power anthems, does not speak of freeing any daughters. Some consolation. Perhaps we’re no longer this culture’s children. On the way from the courthouse, I couldn’t wait to get to the train, to the home with a father in it who was not my own.

 

Harmony Holiday is a writer, a dancer, an archivist, a filmmaker, and the author of five collections of poetry, including Hollywood Forever and Maafa. She is staff writer for Los Angeles Times’ Image and 4Columns. She is currently writing a biography of Abbey Lincoln for Yale University Press, a memoir on music, and a new collection of poems. 

A Duel or a Duet: On Graham Greene

Graham Greene. Unknown photographer, public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have the luxury of having no known biography. Greene, having written about his life and having had his life extensively written about by others, remains near when one reads his work—not insistently dominating or distracting, as some writers may prove to be, but as a presence often felt and at times caught by a side glance.

The first moment appears in Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape. In a chapter about Brighton Rock, which Greene called a labour of love, he explains the original inspiration for the novel with a reminiscence about the first film he saw at age six—a silent film about a kitchen maid turned queen, with live music played offscreen—he writes, “Her march was accompanied by an old lady on a piano, but the tock-tock-tock of untuned wires stayed in my memory when other melodies faded … That was the kind of book I always wanted to write: the high romantic tale, capturing us in youth with hopes that prove illusions, to which we return again in age in order to escape the sad reality.”

The second moment appears in Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant by Leopoldo Duran. In 1983, Father Duran accompanied Greene on a journey to Spain for the filming of his novel Monsignor Quixote. At a Trappist monastery, Father Duran noticed an elderly monk, Father Juan. “I saw him, standing discreetly apart, at the entrance to the porter’s lodge, learning on this walking stick, chin in both hands, and totally absorbed by these people and the strange things they were doing … With seventy years’ experience of Trappist rule behind him, Father Juan did not want to go to heaven without seeing how films were made.”

To say that these two moments encapsulate Greene’s work for me is an irresponsible cliche: the point of literature is not to be put into capsules, a trick good only for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Rather, the two moments provide a home key whenever I read Greene’s work. There are multiple pairings of twos in both scenes: a duel or a duet; who can say which is the more apt noun here?

In the first, the heroine, a kitchen maid and a queen within one being, offers a fairytale setting for some confrontations: reality versus fantasy, past versus future, entrapment versus freedom—variations of these appear in many of Greene’s novels. But a more interesting pairing is the beautiful image of a silent woman on the screen and the old lady plinking-plonking off stage: which of them is more dramatic, more romantic, more illusory and yet more permanent? And of course, in that same passage, there is also Greene the author (in his mid-seventies, going by the publication date of the book) and Greene the six-year-old boy. The mature man feels the young boy’s emotions—in Greene’s own words, “to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony.” The younger self, in carving into his memory feelings he’s not yet capable of articulating or even understanding, is nevertheless an equal partner: here is the source of a writer’s sense and sensibility, like the initial vibration that makes the sound; what comes after are echoes and reverberations.

In the second moment, again the illusory cinematic art appears. Father Juan, with his seventy years of Trappist history, must never have watched a film, and there he stands, witnessing what would remain a mysterious process to most audiences in the cinema. The clash and the harmony between the holy and the secular, believing and make-believing, faith and entertainment, the pending death of Monsignor Quixote—a fictional character, whose Sancho in the novel is an ex-mayor, a communist—and the pending death of Father Juan in the not too distant future: one has a sense that one enters, at that moment, the quintessential Greene land.

There is defiance that comes only with youth and inexperience, the refusal to accept life as it is: no one says a kitchen maid cannot also be a warrior queen; no one says a child cannot have the emotions that would put the world, which is often indifferent, to shame. There is also a defiance that comes with old age when the world seems no longer new: surely there is still something more to ponder, even if you’ve lived close to God in a Trappist cell for seventy years. And those who understand both kinds of defiance, one suspects, will be the right readers for Greene.

***

There are different ways to talk about Greene’s work. We can focus on the amphitheater of history, where wars, revolutions and colonial intrigues play impersonal gods to the mortals. We can scrutinize the mundane settings waiting for major and minor human dramas to happen—the streets and alleyways of Brighton and Saigon, the unaired offices of London ministry buildings, the manicured suburban gardens, the well-lit casinos and much-visited seaside resorts, the jungles and rivers of Africa and South America. We can also step away from those external settings and enter the interior landscapes of many of his characters, some of them with God on their side, others without; some have time on their side, others not; some with friends or loves or even enemies on their side, others not. But all of them have memories and dreams on their side—a blessing, even if it sometimes masks itself as a curse. And all of them, it seems to me, are only half of a duel or half of a duet, their partners sometimes visible and other times invisible.

In “A Day Saved,” an unnamed narrator follows an unnamed man, with a detailed plan to kill him and yet with the horror that he knows nothing about the man, not even his name. This seems a classic Greene dilemma, where one man’s despair and (partial) knowledge and another man’s innocence and faith in the ordinary (if he takes a flight instead of a train, he will save a day) constitute the quicksand for the reader: surely we are in a worse situation than the two characters; there is no choice for us but to be both of them at the same time. “A day saved … Save it from what, for what?” We may as well ask ourselves every day, for the rest of our lives, without knowing the answer.

In “The Basement Room,” a child—temporarily orphaned (his parents are out of town)—and the butler of the house, whom the child loves genuinely, are set on a course from page one to betray each other in the most fatal manner, and nothing will help them or save them. All the same, for as long as they go on being gentle and tender towards each other, we readers hold on to wishful thinking: of course, life will not take their sides, but perhaps—just perhaps—because of that, they will end up on the same side, two partners in a perpetual duet rather than being pitched against each other in a duel. But wishful thinking neither saves the butler nor the child nor us.

***

Is there any fundamental difference between a duel and a duet? In each, a connection predates the actual event. What comes­ after—understanding or misunderstanding, agreement or disagreement, harmony or dissonance, conversation or argument, life or death—may surprise us, but it is because human relationships are by nature surprising; what comes after may feel inevitable, and that too is what human relationships are about.

I started to read Greene when I was a young writer; twenty years later, he remains among a handful of writers I reread. His work keeps one’s mind on tiptoe. Illusions beget disillusions but also hopes; hopes beget illusions but also clarities.

As I was writing this, I looked for Ways of Escape on my bookshelf, wanting to revisit the cinema scene with the six-year-old Greene. It would be like a return to the home key, I thought, but among over twenty books by Greene (a few in duplicates) and still more about him, the one book I was looking for was absent! So much for the wish to see my previous annotations in the book and to have a duet with my younger self. And that missed connection, I must admit, is surprising and inevitable, like a tree standing inconspicuously and yet meaningfully in Greene-land.

 

This essay is adapted from the introduction to a new selection of Graham Greene’s stories, Duel Duet, to be published by Vintage Classics this month.

Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books, including the story collection Wednesday’s Child, which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, and the memoir Things In Nature Merely Grow. Her honors include fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations, and a Windham Campbell Prize, among others.  

My College Diary

I didn’t black out my diary like this—my process involved underlining parts I wanted to keep—but this gives a sense of how much is missing.

I kept a typed diary in college. It started three weeks into freshman year and ended three days into senior year. Over 1,079 days, I typed 76 entries, totaling 21,975 words.

Here, I’ve edited it down to 43 entries and 2,286 words. I edited only by deleting. I retained grammatical errors, such as incorrect comma usage, but I fixed typos and standardized the word-level style—italicizing books, etc.

An erasure poem is made by blacking out words in a poem. Memory is a mode of erasure that blacks out most of life. A diary is an erasure of memory—everything not written is blacked out. This post is an erasure diary where the smallest unit of erasure was the sentence. I erased 89.6 percent of the original. I feel wonder, thinking back to my college self, who did not anticipate this happening to his private diary.

2001

9/26

Today I had lunch with Veska and Catherine at Third North. I know that nothing really went wrong but I always feel disappointed when I don’t have a lot of fun with Veska.

9/29

After work I watched Gattaca on my computer. What a great movie, really moving.

10/3

Jessica thinks that I don’t like her because I don’t talk to her but I think she is really nice and interesting, I am just like this. Veska told Jessica that I don’t talk to her either, so remember, like in the handbook… they think I DON’T LIKE THEM, they don’t NOT like me. People that is.

10/18

After writing class I kind of just drifted away from Kevin and Vivick even though we were walking the same direction. I don’t know, I just have this thing where I think people don’t want to be my friend.

10/20

I’m going to walk real far and listen to my tapes then my CDs tonight. I just want to get away from all this.

10/31

Halloween. Went to my classes, went to work. Came back, did homework and study. Wrote a poem and short story. Now I sleep.

12/04

Already December, my life is slipping away. I talked to Veska today. She came to check out a book. We talked. It was nice.

 

2002

[I made no entries that year]

[end of freshman year]

 

2003

1/13

Adam and I’s first day in London we walked around Oxford street for a while then went to a high-class shopping mall called Harrods. We saw Buckingham Palace, saw some funny stores (BRB, Buybest, Hobgoblin Musix) and saw Big Ben. After a while it became like a job going to landmarks and taking pictures.

1/17

We headed out at 2 p.m. and once we reached Victoria Station we were bored. Adam told me that he felt trapped because there was nothing to do, but the day before I had told him that I felt trapped—I wonder if he didn’t listen to me, or forgot, or what, but Geri does the same thing.

1/18

I got really depressed tonight—almost out of nowhere. I was happy, in the airport I felt good, even after the 8 hour flight and even without coffee I felt good. We went outside and it quickly became obvious that New York is one of the worst cities in the world.

1/19

I woke up and tried to be upbeat, but just couldn’t. When I woke, I felt as if I had horrible amounts of gas or something—it was that kind of feeling—most of the day I laid in bed, never quite falling asleep. Geri read beside me and when I opened my eyes to look at her, she would look back and I wouldn’t know to talk or turn away or what. I tried keeping the blanket over my eyes to avoid that.

4/22

While my dad’s lawyer made his case, the judge thumbed through the dictionary-thick packet of evidence for my dad’s case that my dad’s lawyer had put together. He thumbed through it as if it was a specialty magazine that he once had a brief interest in. The sentence came and it was 70 months in prison.

[…]

My dad joked and laughed. “I can finish the lasers now!” He smiled and laughed later and pretty soon was talking about how the pigeons in the park had really fat necks.

4/23

I sort of wish I could spend a year in Vietnam.

[end of sophomore year]

5/24

On the phone, I tried to start telling Geri about my day, but my voice sounded flat. I tried to be happy but it was horrible—my mood plummeted and I ran some tears too. I felt like ending my life. It was so sudden.

[…]

I know I love her because when I’m with her I don’t feel unproductive, (as I do without her when I’m not creating art or work) I just feel happy and lessened of the burden of having to create. I love that Geri never complains when she’s with me.

5/26

I started White Noise by DeLillo and am enjoying it.

5/27

I’m going to write a novel.

6/5

Geri and I got into an argument again last night. We were fine for about an hour but then she wanted to know why I didn’t want to go to her house in MA and I was joking—I said, “Because the carpet is ugly, it’s brown.” And she said that only one room had brown carpet and the other rooms had blue carpet, and I said, “The second worst color,” referring to the blue carpet, and she seemed to be offended by it. That put me in a mood and I just couldn’t talk anymore.

[…]

I haven’t written anything since my story about the kid confessing to his parents his dream of being a grocer.

6/16

It’s hard to believe that I can find someone to be with that would stay with me for 8 months.

8/11

Dad came out and hugged Mom and I. He looked really happy. He said that he was reading before we came. He said that everyone inside gambled. His stomach was still fat but his skin color looked very healthy.

[…]

When we left, Dad hugged Mom and he must have grabbed her ass, because a guard called him over. Dad said that the guard said, “Don’t grab her ass.” Dad said: “What’s ass?” The guard laughed and said, “Don’t grab her ass.”

9/30

Geri and I broke up. At first, she broke up with me, then she wanted back, and I said no, but then I said yes, and then we fought again and broke up again, and then we got back again, and then I broke up with her and then she wanted to get back together and I said okay and then she said that no, she wanted to break up, and again she wanted back and this time I said no, we better just stay friends.

[…]

Rachel read my novel but she didn’t say anything about it. This is weird. Adam hasn’t said anything either. Neither has my brother.

[…]

Mom said that she received a letter from him where he expressed his love and that he was changing into something less business-like and more human. She said she cried for an hour after she read it.

10/5

My moods change so quickly now. I can be so depressed and lonely and then 2 or 3 hours later be happy and all that.

[…]

Tonight I was happy writing my novel and I didn’t worry about friends.

10/9

This is the worst feeling. But I like it. I like to sleep with this feeling. In some weird way, I look forward to lying down, having the lights off, and trying to cry, of thinking sad thoughts, of crying.

10/18

I hung out with Adam, Mike, Kevin, the Singaporeans, and even Veska and Victor and Alan and Jessica once. I had forgotten.

10/25

Tonight I read an Amy Hempel interview in the Paris Review which led me to read Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison, which I am still thinking about now […] Geri emailed me and said that I showed disinterest in her, and she wants to know if it’s because I think she wants to go out with me or because I don’t like her at all even as a friend. I don’t know. It’s confusing and I don’t want to think about it.

[…]

I also received a second letter from my dad. He wrote “love, Dad” for the first time ever. He said he loves me for the first time ever.

10/26

After finding Mary Robison’s email address on Google, I emailed her this long email talking about Rachel and my novel and her novel.

11/3

I workshopped my latest excerpt of my novel today. They liked it.

11/9

I spent last night and tonight completely alone (Friday and Saturday). Each day I went to write in the computer lab, wrote for about 2 to 3 hours then did some homework then went to St. Mark’s Bookshop. I ate tonight at the weird Italian/Japanese place.

11/10

I woke up at 1, got to work at 2. I worked until 7 and left to Third North computer lab. While there, I wrote till after 9. Then I worked on Reporting stuff until 11:45. Then I bought some eggs and instant noodles. Then I went back to the dorm. At the bus stop I gave a guy over 2 dollars and he talked to me about war and his Iranian psychiatrist.

11/14

It’s weird, the less I pay attention to her, the nicer she is to me. I guess it’s not that weird.

[…]

So then I saw that Singapore kid who has real big muscles. He said he weighs 160 pounds. We talked on the bus. He waited for me when he got off the bus and he said he was getting take out and he asked me if I wanted to come and I said I wasn’t eating but I’d come anyways and he said I was a good guy. I felt good then, very very good. So we talked and I told him about my novel and he was really interested, but all of a sudden he had to go buy toilet paper so we said bye.

11/24

I’ve noticed that Matt in my class always leaves class really fast and during breaks he doesn’t talk to anyone, he just looks down at his papers. I feel sad about this.

12/2

I haven’t talked to Rachel in a long long time. The last time I saw her she was walking down Lafayette towards Canal and she tapped my shoulder and waved at me, but wasn’t smiling. She had a weirdly neutral face.

[…]

I want a girlfriend with social anxiety.

12/5

Today in Reporting, on my break I went and bought a sprinkled cookie. When I came back, Rachel was checking her email. I sat there. She asked me, “Why don’t we hang out anymore?” I said, “I don’t know.” What does that mean? I don’t know.

12/13

I’m worried about what will happen when I’m done with this novel. Will I try to hang out more? But with who? The novel is my life now.

 

2004

1/21

I went to dinner with Rachel. We went to Congee Palace. While we were there, she said, “This was fun.” I think she said that a few times. And back in my dorm, when she was leaving, she said it again. “This was fun.” She said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”  I lent her two Lorrie Moore books and Mock Orange’s “First EP” (which I’ve been really into). Writing all this makes me happy.  =). Makes me realize everything that I appreciate, that I derive joy from, pleasure from. Writing. Music. Little relationships.

[…]

I think I really like Rachel. I’m just still having trouble BEING with people.

[…]

AJ said that my novel was making him crazy. The 2nd person voice. He also asked why I didn’t write about Asians. Ha.

1/30

I saw Rachel tonight. At midnight at the bus stop. She said she was sick. We talked some. But on the bus, we sat in silence for some. It was awkward, for me, at least. After, I felt sad. Before, I was so happy.

[…]

I also talked with Tara during the break. She said she’s written to Lydia Davis too, other than Lorrie Moore. Thinking back on it, she’s a really cool person to talk to. She listens and asks questions and is interested in me. She said that she thinks i’m a writing freak.

3/30

Sometimes I get this slow, life-furling moment, where I unfocus my eyes and just know that someday I’m going to end my life, that someday I just won’t be able to take it anymore. It’s an awful knowledge. Only a little bit comforting.

[end of junior year]

8/24

Today I met Tara in the street! I didn’t recognize her at first. She waved to me though, then we did a really, really tentative going towards each other, not going towards each other, thing. Finally, I took off my head phones. She was with her dad. He had glasses and a lot of nice white hair. He was small.

9/1

I sent Tara an e-mail while at work today. I read “The Lovers” by Joy Williams. I found it somewhat like Raymond Carver. I liked it a lot. Was funny, mysterious… I find that I like stories that have a lot of irresolution in them.

9/2

Tara replied to my e-mail ultra terse. It was about three short sentences.

9/3

I yelled at my mom tonight for about half an hour. She asked me if I was in the library when Dad called earlier. I got mad at that. Because she said a few weeks ago that she wouldn’t ask me “Where are you?” anymore. I overreacted. I felt like shit after. I got so angry and frustrated. I wrote three e-mails, called her back twice to “get things straight.”  I felt so awful. I was crying in the library on the second floor inside balcony area. This other Asian kid was looking on the Internet. I’ve seen him at the library before.

9/5

I almost got hit by a bus today.

9/7

Tomorrow is my first day of classes.

9/9

I’ve been eating canned tuna. And bags of pecans and almonds. I’ve been using my big earphones.

 

 

Tao Lin is the author of ten books. He is active on his blog/newsletter.