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March 7, 2024

Announcing the 2024 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prizewinners and Presenters

Photograph of Moira McCavana by Mara Danoff; photograph of Caleb Crain by Peter Terzian.

We are excited to announce that on April 2, at our Spring Revel, Moira McCavana will receive the George Plimpton Prize, presented by the 2020 winner, Jonathan Escoffery, and the Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Caleb Crain by Jhumpa Lahiri. Both prizewinners were selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors.

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent and recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Isabella Hammad, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jesse Ball, Emma Cline, and the 2023 winner, Harriet Clark.

Moira McCavana is the recipient of a 2019 O. Henry Prize, and her work has appeared in Guernica, The Drift, Harvard Review, and The London Magazine. Her debut short-story collection, Electrodomésticos, was published by Sarabande Books in February. “Every Hair Casts a Shadow,” which appeared in our Fall 2023 issue (no. 245), is narrated by Inma, the owner of a failing shoe shop in Barcelona. The Paris Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

“Every Hair Casts a Shadow” leaves most of its mysteries intact. Moira McCavana traces disparate characters in their obscure movements through grief. One believes her dead son communicates through trivia questions on a television game show. Another takes an interest in a younger man, her only employee in her failing shoe store, who charms her “by asking about my parents despite my age.” The young man shows a touching kindness to their few customers: “I watched Víctor’s silhouette sit the man down on the bench, remove his shoe, and gently extend the man’s foot out before him, nestling it inside the metal measuring device,” writes the narrator. It is only in the story’s last line that we learn about the “you” to whom the story is addressed.

Established in 2023, the Susannah Hunnewell Prize is awarded to a writer for an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous year and is given in memory of the Review’s beloved former publisher, who died in 2019. Hunnewell first joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s editorship, and later served as Paris editor before taking on the role of publisher. Among her contributions to the magazine are some of the finest interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, Emmanuel Carrère, Harry Mathews, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Caleb Crain, a longtime contributor to the Review, is the author of two novels, Necessary Errors and Overthrow, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, n+1, and The New Yorker. Of “The Letter,” Crain’s short story published in our Summer 2023 issue (no. 244), Simpson writes:

Caleb Crain’s haunting story is a meditation on young love, time, and what we’re unable to undo, in a contemporary retelling of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” It opens with a handwritten letter arriving extremely late to an urbane protagonist, Riley. It takes him a while to recognize the penmanship, which belonged to an old lover, one important enough that the man he lives with now knows his name.

“He’s the one with the toothbrush,” Riley’s partner says.

“They all had toothbrushes.”

“The one who moved his toothbrush in early.”

Crain makes use of old-fashioned tropes of fiction (and life)—a recovered letter, a return address, handwriting—to evoke the way we live now. Riley had dated the letter-writer before he “understood that he had a type.” When they broke up, a quarter century before the story begins, “they said they were going to remember each other for the rest of their lives, but Riley hadn’t known then that it was true. It could just have been a polite thing to say.”

“The Letter” is a story about unrequited love that would seem, as James’s does, to argue against the existence of such a thing. But, as modern love stories are less concerned with staying together than with how we’re able to or fail to help each other along the way, Riley’s regrets are for the generosities he couldn’t receive or give.

We hope you’ll join us at the Revel to celebrate McCavana and Crain. We’ll also be honoring Tobias Wolff with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature, which will be presented by Geoff Dyer. Held at Cipriani 42nd Street, the Revel gathers writers, artists, and friends to raise a glass to the very best writing—and to raise crucial funds that enable the Review to continue publishing the most exciting work by contributors at all stages of their careers. Tickets are now available online.

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Published on March 07, 2024 05:30

Announcing the 2024 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prize Winners

Photograph of Moira McCavana by Mara Danoff; photograph of Caleb Crain by Peter Terzian.

“Every Hair Casts a Shadow” leaves most of its mysteries intact. Moira McCavana traces disparate characters in their obscure movements through grief. One believes her dead son communicates through trivia questions on a television game show. Another takes an interest in a younger man, her only employee in her failing shoe store, who charms her “by asking about my parents despite my age.” The young man shows a touching kindness to their few customers: “I watched Víctor’s silhouette sit the man down on the bench, remove his shoe, and gently extend the man’s foot out before him, nestling it inside the metal measuring device,” writes the narrator. It is only in the story’s last line that we learn about the “you” to whom the story is addressed.

Caleb Crain’s haunting story is a meditation on young love, time, and what we’re unable to undo, in a contemporary retelling of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” It opens with a handwritten letter arriving extremely late to an urbane protagonist, Riley. It takes him a while to recognize the penmanship, which belonged to an old lover, one important enough that the man he lives with now knows his name.

“He’s the one with the toothbrush,” Riley’s partner says.

“They all had toothbrushes.”

“The one who moved his toothbrush in early.”

Crain makes use of old-fashioned tropes of fiction (and life)—a recovered letter, a return address, handwriting—to evoke the way we live now. Riley had dated the letter-writer before he “understood that he had a type.” When they broke up, a quarter century before the story begins, “they said they were going to remember each other for the rest of their lives, but Riley hadn’t known then that it was true. It could just have been a polite thing to say.”

“The Letter” is a story about unrequited love that would seem, as James’s does, to argue against the existence of such a thing. But, as modern love stories are less concerned with staying together than with how we’re able to or fail to help each other along the way, Riley’s regrets are for the generosities he couldn’t receive or give.

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Published on March 07, 2024 05:30

March 5, 2024

Dead or Alive

Girl buried with a crown of ceramic flowers, Patras, Greece, ca. 300–400 B.C.E. From the Museum of Patras. Photograph by Fred Martin Kaaby, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

What do you have to give up in order to feel alive? To answer this question we need to have some sense of what aliveness might mean to us, of what we have to do to feel alive, and how we know when we are feeling this seemingly most obvious and ordinary thing (at its most abstract we might be wondering, as a kind of guideline, what our criteria are for feeling alive). It may seem odd to think that feeling alive is not only an issue—is something that needs to be assessed—but requires a sacrifice of sorts, or is indeed a sacrificial act; that to feel alive involves us in some kind of renunciation. It is, of course, glibly and not so glibly true that in order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one’s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself, the anaesthesias of everyday life that can seem to make it livable. At its most minimal, after all, it is not unusual for people to feel profoundly ambivalent about being fully alive to the climate of terror and delight in which we live. In order to answer this question you would, of course, need to have some sense of what aliveness means, if anything. How do you feel alive, and how do you know if you feel it?

Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay “Art as Technique” of 1917:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war … And art [through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life … The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

It is, perhaps, an ironic inevitability integral to what Shklovsky proposes that art as a process and practice of defamiliarization is now all too familiar to us. Whether or not we agree with Walter Pater’s remark that “our failure is to form habits,” when Shklovsky invokes the whole idea of recovering the sensation of life, he reminds us—and clearly we need reminding—that the sensation of life can be lost. And he implies, without making this as explicit as he might, that we also want to relinquish or even sometimes attack the sensation of life; as though, as I say, in psychoanalytic language, we are ambivalent about the sensation of life and can happily, as it were, dispense with it.

So the point of art being, as we say, “difficult” is that it resists our easy appropriation of it. We can’t use it to consolidate our prejudices, or reinforce our assumptions and presumptions. Art of any value requires the kind of attention we don’t give to the taken-for-granted, that we don’t give to all those things we think we know. Art, in this sense, unsettles and disrupts preconceptions, it waylays our anticipation, and it does this by increasing the difficulty and length of perception; art resists and sabotages our familiar habits of perception. The wish, the drive to familiarize, Shklovsky suggests, is insistent, the insistent as second nature. And the implication is that this drive to familiarize is like a drive towards death, towards the death-in-life that contemporary reality was felt by some people to be (we take note, needless to say, that this essay by a Russian critic was written in 1917).

It is entirely understandable that when Freud proposed in 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that there was a death instinct, a “destructive drive” that was continually at war in us with a life instinct, it was met with, and continues to meet with, considerable skepticism (the idea of a death “instinct” might seem like a contradiction in terms). And yet clearly—as is evident in the work of Shklovsky and Freud and many others—there was in those times and places in Europe a strong sense of the deathliness of modern life. And it is not incidental that the aesthetics of defamiliarization and the anxiety about human destructiveness has stayed with us; is, indeed, part of our sensation of life. If these are analogous to death—familiarization and destructiveness—if these inclinations are what we are up against, for whatever reason, what then is life, what is a sensation of life or a life instinct? These, after all, are matters of life and death.

***

Science, of course, helps us with our familiarization. By providing descriptions of so-called laws of nature, through the promotion of causality as an abiding principle, in the development of deductive and inductive logic, in its by now familiar methods of verification and falsification, our realm of familiarity—of what we can claim to know and take for granted—has increased exponentially in the last four hundred years. Indeed one definition of progress would be the extending of the empire of the familiar. And one of our more familiar forms of familiarity—or rather, one of our taken-for-granted means of familiarization—has been the art and science of generalization, of the abstraction called categorization. Though much parodied, and mocked and critiqued—by, for shorthand, let’s say Borges and Foucault—our capacity for generalization, for making links, for finding things in common between disparate phenomena, has been our supreme habit and talent; for preferring sameness to difference, abstraction to what Blake called “minute particulars.” What, as we shall see, the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls “the fascist state of mind” is the militant, paranoid imposition of sameness (on the self and on others), the terror of difference requiring its abolition. Indeed psychoanalysis, I take it, is useful as both the symptom and the cure for our will to generalization.

It is, indeed, one of the by now familiar paradoxes of psychoanalysis that the theory and clinical practice most committed to the singularity and individual history of the individual speaks only in generalities. Whether psychoanalysts speak of the unconscious, of development, of the self as either centered or decentered, of symptoms and diagnostic categories, and even of psychoanalytic technique, the always somewhat eccentric, idiosyncratic—indeed genetically unique—individual is inevitably described as an example of something apparently more or less already known; the individual is described, that is to say, in relation to a set of putative norms, the normative standards that must inevitably organize any given culture, and that operate both consciously and unconsciously on behalf of the people that comprise that culture.

In psychoanalytic writing, the individual is in a category; psychoanalytic theory doesn’t, and can’t, dispense with categories but simply tries to make them more inclusive. The people who turn up in psychoanalytic case histories or clinical vignettes may be more like characters in novels or short stories than simply allegorical characters, but they are there as representative people; even if what they represent is not quite as clear as it might seem. If the individual in psychoanalysis is not being fitted into a pre-existing description, he will simply become the pretext for a new category, adding to the stock of available psychoanalytic reality (on the whole you can’t have a diagnostic category of one). So-called human nature as it supposedly is, or supposedly should be, is the measure. And what makes the individual an individual is the ways in which she deviates from, or improvises within, or modifies the available norms of so-called human nature as we have come to describe it; how she becomes the exception that proves the rule, and also, of course, how she abides by the rules in her own particular way. It is always, to put it simply, the compliant and the non-compliant self that is being assessed. Psychoanalysis is inevitably alert, as what Barthes called “a science of the singular,” to what creates distinction in both senses—what renders someone or something distinct, somehow separated out, differentiated from the run-of-the-mill; and what impresses us as unusual, out of the ordinary, as we say. Psychoanalysis, unavoidably perhaps, strikingly draws to our attention the very different allure of the language of sameness and the language of difference, each with their different kinds of reassurance, inspiration and divisiveness.

So we might say, by way of oversimplification, that for character we go to fiction and poems and plays; for explanations of and generalizations about character we go to psychoanalysis. And in this sense—in the overriding commitment to generalization and the prediction it supposedly makes possible—psychoanalysis is no different to medicine, or indeed to many contemporary sciences. Descriptions are required that by definition do not solely fit the individual case. The individual who is broadly speaking the same as other people is the individual who is of interest to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts write about people who seem to speak the same language; what Freud was to call the language of symptoms; what Lacan would call the unconscious structured as a language. And in this sense psychoanalysis reflects in its theorizing, if not always in its clinical practice, a familiar everyday experience; we notice all the time how easily and often we are aware of what Lacan calls the “absolute otherness” of other people, and how often enough other people are also felt to be somehow more or less similar to oneself.

We do, after all, share a language, through our upbringing and education as members of any given culture; and yet, as Lacan suggests in writing about James Joyce, we also to some extent are able to invent the language we use, giving it our own distinct idiom, our particular rhythms and vocabularies. Everyone, in any given society, uses the same language, but slightly differently; we can improvise within the given system of the language we inherit. Language is a sometimes surprisingly flexible regime. Joyce is clearly both exemplary and representative for Lacan for how we can do new things with words; and this has something to do with aliveness. “One chooses to speak the language that one effectively speaks,” Lacan writes. “One creates a language in so far as one at every instance gives it a sense, one gives it a little nudge, without which language would not be alive.” A little nudge seems a minimal thing; choosing and creating a language seems rather grandiose in its ambitions. And notably it is the idea of aliveness that Lacan has recourse to.

We are not all, as common sense will be keen to tell us, James Joyce. But what common sense is, by the same token, reminding us is that language that is or seems alive can be, or sometimes seem, a comparative rarity; aliveness in language may be in short supply and so we may wonder what it is in ourselves that might want to deaden language; or to put it the other way around, what the fear of aliveness in language may be a fear of. And yet a nudge is not itself a grand or dramatic gesture; a nudge, we could think, might be well within most people’s range. And so, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we could surmise that there is a defense against nudging, against giving the language even a slight nudge. There is a defense against aliveness in language. And the study of literature, we might say, is always broaching this conflict between the aliveness and deathliness, or deadliness, of language.

But in Lacan’s view, language would not be alive without these nudges—without these idiosyncratic twists and turns that each of us can to some extent make. And we should note here that he writes of the aliveness of the language, not of its users, and this is stranger than it might at first seem; language, after all, is neither alive nor dead; the aliveness that it has comes from us, it is our aliveness. And this aliveness is associated for Lacan with, to some extent, and however limited and circumscribed, choosing the language one speaks, creating a language by giving it a little nudge. In this description our aliveness—and presumably our deadness—is in our language. That is one place we can both find it, and think and talk about it.

It is worth wondering, for example, what kind of aliveness and what kind of deadness we enjoy in language. We can find it there, in language, among other places. And this aliveness is somehow precarious; not to mention the fact that Lacan is using here a language he has always, as a psychoanalyst, been averse to—the language of existentialism, the idea of choosing a language. As though to talk about aliveness in language—and you could think he has been talking of nothing else in his promotion of what he calls “full speech”—has slightly undone him. There is then the language we are possessed by and that possesses us—man is the animal, Lacan writes, with his familiar melodramatic panache, captured and tortured by language—and now, in late Lacan, there is the language we can create and choose. Lacan should have said at this moment, if he wasn’t so determined to be fascinating, that we can have this both ways: we can use language and it can use us, and the point and not the problem is the contradiction. But as I say, when Lacan starts talking about aliveness in language, things begin to open up, and aliveness becomes a term of art for him.

For Lacan it is through Joyce’s unique and exceptional talent that we can see this. I want to suggest then in this essay that our aliveness—here for Lacan linked with something about individuality, or singularity, and something about language—can be peculiarly difficult for us to be fully alive to. If aliveness is an issue for us, then deadness, and all the less binary alternatives to aliveness, must also be exercising us. What aliveness and its alternatives might be may perhaps be among our abiding preoccupations, among what Borges calls our “essential perplexities.”

***

Describing the idea, “reduced to its essence,” that prompted his novel The Wings of the Dove, Henry James wrote in his preface to the New York edition that it was

of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world; aware moreover of the condemnation and passionately desiring to ‘put in’ before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived.

James writes of his doomed heroine’s wish to “wrest from her shrinking hour still as much of the fruit of life as possible;” of her “passionate yearning to live while she might.” If the project is to achieve “however briefly and brokenly” the sense of having lived, then this sense may be hard won and even perhaps fleeting (and if you have a fleeting or fugitive sense of having lived, how much can you trust that sense?). James’s heroine in the novel, Milly Theale, is confronted, as we are as readers, with the salient question of what it is, or might be, to have the sense of having lived. And what it would be to live fully, and in Milly Theale’s case, and not only hers, to live fully in the light and dark of forthcoming death. The question of how we would know if we had lived; of what, as it were, our criteria might be for this. What do we have to do, and to have done, what has to have happened to us, that would give us this enigmatic sense of having lived, or as having lived as fully as we might? What do we take the fruit of life to be if we want as much of it as possible, reminded as James knows we must be of the fruit Adam and Eve ate in the garden (which of course gave them less life and not more)?

There is the suggestion here that the sense of having lived, that life itself, may be a strangely elusive thing. Indeed, later in the novel, the hero, Merton Densher, reflects on this strange elusiveness of life that seems to haunt and drive the narrative: “Life, he logically opined, was what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess.” The implication here being that life might get away from him, that it can somehow escape us; that even though we are to all intents and purposes alive, we have to arrange to annex and possess life as though it is something we must colonize, or claim, or appropriate. That life has to be invaded and subjugated as though it is a foreign country, not somewhere we are already living in. Life as elsewhere, something we have to get to, or find, or seek out. But life is presented in The Wings of the Dove—a novel whose key terms everything and nothing are threaded through the book—as an obscure object of desire. The sense of having lived, and the sense of living—both of which might seem to be self-evident—are the object of James’s skepticism in this book. If we don’t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?

It would be odd to say—though, as we shall see, Freud did say it—that we also want less life, that it is our deadness that we also desire. That we also do not want to live or to have lived. Clearly both Lacan in his celebration of Joyce (and language) and James in his presentation of Milly Theale are promoting aliveness and the sense of having lived as both questions and, more optimistically, objects of desire, if not actually the object of desire. But it is of course as a question that it perplexes us—what might stop us giving language a slight nudge?—a question not answered, I think, by lack of talent. And what might stop us feeling we have lived, or are indeed living? And how do we know what this would be? Where did we get our ideas about this from?

Indeed, what the nudge of language—the choosing and creating of our language—and the sense of having lived have in common is the sense of having to satisfy what is taken to be an essential individual need; partly of making my language and my life my own, whatever that might mean. But also something that could be described as meeting a demand, as though some authoritative figure—what Lacan would call the Big Other—has said, “You must make your own language, as far as you can, you must have the sense of having lived, as far as you can.” And a moment’s reflection will show us that these particular demands, made on us and made on ourselves, when they are not inspiring may be a lot of other things; they may, for example, be puzzling, or tyrannical, or absurd. And one thing psychoanalysis can be particularly useful for is providing a language for, a way of talking about, our personal and cultural ideals; both their provenance and their history, and how and why we have come to value them as we do.

Most of us probably want to be able to use language in our own way and not merely conform to it as though it were a regime; and most of us, enough of the time, want to live, and to have lived. And yet, of course, these ideals, and ambitions, and aspirations are of their time and place; and are things only a language-using animal would be preoccupied with. We assume that animals and plants are just living and not wondering what they are doing. We may wonder when and for whom the question of whether one has lived began to be a preoccupation; and indeed when and how language as something we use and are used by became of interest (and it is of interest, as I say, to find Lacan, long a promoter of the idea that we are the victims of and victimized by language, here, in his later work, speaking up for the alternative view; as though wanting to be free of it). It is not incidental historically that both Lacan and James, in their very different ways, and from very different cultures and personal histories, are speaking up for what we have learned to call individualism (or more benignly, idiosyncrasy, or eccentricity).

The term individualism was clearly coined reactively to an earlier notion that it was possible to be a member of a society without being considered, or needing to be considered, an individual. Psychoanalysis as a modern invention can’t help but trade in ideas about individualism; about how you might begin to describe what an individual is, and about what the allure of individualism might be, and about the individual’s freedom to find loopholes in her culture’s normative demands (one of the normative demands is for the individual to be normal enough: that is, recognizable, identifiable and describable). Psychoanalysis is clearly about how the modern individual fits and doesn’t fit and misfits into their culture (the new psychoanalytic patient, one might say, is the casualty, for all sorts of reason, of his culture). In psychoanalysis the originality of the individual, his individualism, is taken for granted—each person’s appearance, character and history is, to us, significantly different and distinctive—but there is nothing original, in psychoanalytic terms, about what makes for this originality; the preconditions for each person’s originality are generic—originality is a function of uniformity and conformity. What distinguishes people from each other comes out of an apparently recognized common condition, and a recognized common constitution (sometimes called human nature, though human nature seems to take a dazzling variety of forms). We take it for granted now, in other words, that there are rules for, and criteria about, what a person is and can be in any given culture (the parameters of what it is possible for a person to be are largely set).

We may have a strong sense of the distinctiveness of each person, but it is all too easy for individuals to disappear in theory. This essay is about how some psychoanalysts have tried to hold on to something unprescribed and unprescribable about people in the unavoidably abstracted and generalizing language of psychoanalysis. And how notions of aliveness and deadness have tended to figure in some of these accounts. As though describing what aliveness might be—how, as it were, we might recognize it, what makes for aliveness—has become a peculiarly modern preoccupation. When Freud famously wrote that the individual wants to die in his own way, he was speaking of, perhaps ironically, possessive individualism.

***

In a comment on his paper “The Use of an Object,” Donald Winnicott writes that “in this vitally important early stage the ‘destructive’ aliveness of the individual is simply a symptom of being alive, and has nothing to do with an individual’s anger at the frustrations that belong to meeting the reality principle.” The theory that Winnicott is commenting on in his paper is of course of interest here. But for the purposes of this essay I want to point out what he is trying to get to with the phrases “vitally important,” “destructive aliveness,” and “a symptom of being alive.” It might be a sign of aliveness, he suggests, to want to try to destroy things and people, and this destructive aliveness is a symptom of being alive, being alive having its own symptoms. How do we know if the child, and later the adult, is alive? They have a destructive aliveness, in Winnicott’s view. But aliveness here, again, is not something self-evident; we go on describing what Winnicott calls the symptoms of being alive, the intelligible signs. He thinks he is doing empirical science here, simply describing in a new way something that already exists. He doesn’t say, and he wouldn’t, this is what I want aliveness to be, these for me are signs of life because this is the kind of aliveness I want, this is the kind of world I want to be alive in. He doesn’t assume too rigorously, as Freud did, that perception is distorted by wish.

How does the psychoanalytic subject as scientist do science? Wishfully, both despite and because of his psychoanalytically informed sensibility. But the question I am using Winnicott, among others, to ask is: Why would anyone be interested in aliveness; or, indeed, in whether they have lived? What is an interest in aliveness an interest in? What makes this word come into play? How has it come about that we need to know whether we are alive? And what might be the consequences of such knowledge, were we to have it? In what sense, to ask the pragmatic question, does aliveness and the knowledge of being alive, and of having lived, get us the life we want? The implication of all this is, of course, that we might be unconscious, we might be radically unaware of how dead we are and want to be. When Freud writes that protection against stimuli is more important for the individual than receptivity to stimuli, he is making us think about precisely this.

When I was taught in school that, as the critic F. R. Leavis insisted, D. H. Lawrence was on the side of life, I knew, as an adolescent, what this meant. Now I think Leavis’s formulation is inspired for all the questions it must beg. Apart, of course, from the obvious but pressing one: If you are not on the side of life, what are you on the side of? All of Winnicott’s writing is organized around the idea of aliveness—of what is supposedly on the side of life—and we need to see both what he is using the word to do, and why he might have needed to import this particular term into psychoanalysis, which had been able to do without it. Aliveness, as opposed, so to speak, to life, doesn’t, needless to say, figure in any of the available dictionaries of psychoanalysis; and in its very ordinariness it has never become a technical term in psychoanalysis, nor part of the jargon of the profession. So what does the idea of aliveness add to psychoanalysis—and so to our lives if we happen to be interested in psychoanalysis?

When, for example, Winnicott writes in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment that “here is but little point in formulating a True Self idea except for the purpose of trying to understand the False Self, because it does no more than collect together the details of the experience of aliveness,” he is telling us that his definition of what he calls the True Self, the non-compliant self of spontaneity and desire and singularity, the self committed to play rather than adaptation or, indeed, to compliance, involves no more and no less than collecting together the details of the experience of aliveness. And these details of the experience of aliveness are everything the so-called False Self is not. This experience of aliveness—essentially in Winnicott the experience of noncompliance—is for Winnicott something essential. Without it he says there is only a sense of futility, of one’s life not being worth living.

The details of the experience of aliveness are something like a sustaining accumulation of spontaneous, uncalculated, and unrehearsed experiences that nurture a person’s sense of possibility and pleasure. They are clearly, for Winnicott, things we need to collect. So he devotes a lot of his work to understanding and describing the preconditions for the seclusion, overprotection, or even sabotage of the True Self. Aliveness, the more fully alive self, in this story is something we are duly protective of and perhaps unduly frightened of (and for). Our aliveness is assumed here to be something very vulnerable and precarious. And if our aliveness is not robust—not something we can really take for granted—then what is it? Or rather, what is it like? If the details of our experience of aliveness need to be collected—with the implication of gathered up and stored and looked after—it must be because we might forget about them, or discard them, or not take them seriously.

It seems strange that we could forget our aliveness—our being alive—and yet this is what Winnicott is inviting us to consider. We haven’t taken on, or taken in, or realized the vital significance for our ongoing lives of these experiences of aliveness. And indeed there may be an ordinary sense in which we need to keep in mind what or who does actually make us feel alive; and how unwittingly keen we might be to not feel alive, and so forget about it all. We don’t have to take it for granted that aliveness is the thing—that it is some kind of essential be-all and do-all of our lives—but we can consider it; and consider what not considering it involves us in. Aliveness may become an issue, culturally and historically, when we feel that there is so much in our private and political lives that we cannot bear to be alive to. If we have become, if we have made ourselves, great familiarizers and generalizers, we have been actively and determinedly narrowing our minds.

***

Freud was alert to the paradoxes of certainty; the ways in which certainty narrows the mind often in the name of truth and liberation. From a psychoanalytic point of view, what the individual is always suffering from, one way and another, is anxieties about exchange, and the dependence it inevitably entails. The problem, as Winnicott once put it, of being isolated without being insulated. Insulation, immunity, purity are the preoccupations of the self under threat. “An enquiry which proceeds like a monologue, without interruption,” Freud writes in The Future of an Illusion, his 1927 text about religion, “is not altogether free from danger. One is too easily tempted into pushing aside thoughts which threaten to break into it, and in exchange one is left with a feeling of uncertainty which in the end one tries to keep down by over-decisiveness.”

Over-decisiveness here—a simulated sense of conviction—is a version of familiarization; when I am being over-decisive I am saying to myself and others, “I know what I think and I know what I’m doing;” which the psychoanalyst can redescribe as someone in an omniscient state of mind to deny the unconscious. A monologue without interruption is a world without other people; and interruption in Shklovsky’s terms is the only cure for familiarization. What Freud is describing here as the uninterruptible monologue is an anxious and determined refusal of the complexity of one’s own mind and the minds of others. Because the obvious question here is: What is this uninterruptible monologue in the service of? What is it a self-cure for? In the terms of this essay it is a self-cure for defamiliarization, a self-cure for aliveness. Exclusionary in the service of survival, it is essentially self-starving.

In a commentary on this already quoted passage of Freud in his paper “The Fascist State of Mind”:

An enquiry which proceeds like a monologue, without interruption, is not altogether free from danger. One is too easily tempted into pushing aside thoughts which threaten to break into it, and in exchange one is left with a feeling of uncertainty which in the end one tries to keep down by over-decisiveness.

Christopher Bollas emphasizes that a person is forever haunted by what he is excluding. But this picture of impermeability—of an anxiety about violation—is what Bollas calls a “simplifying violence;” it can even be, he writes, an attempt to “recuperate from one’s own destruction of the humane parts of the self in the interests of survival.” One’s aliveness, one’s being alive, can depend on the vitalizing effect of conflict; in the wish, in a fascist state of mind, to abolish conflict, the individual kills off his aliveness. It is integral to the dynamic of the fascist state of mind, Bollas writes, to “empty the mind of all opposition.” One of the traits of what he describes as “intellectual genocide” is “categorization by aggregation”—I am calling it more simply generalization—which he refers to as “the moment when the individual is transferred to a mass in which he loses his identity. It may be ordinary, ‘Oh, but of course, she’s a Freudian.’ It may be permissible, if dicey: ‘Well, of course, she’s ill,’ or ‘Well, he is a psychopath.’ Or it may be an extreme act of lumping together: ‘He’s a Jew.’”

What we see in these examples is the diminution of difference, of singularity; the dehumanization of individuals if what we take the human to be is something beyond a certain point ungeneralizable, uncategorizable; what Bollas calls aptly the act of lumping together both devitalizes people and apparently familiarizes them. What is lost in this categorization is the individual and idiosyncratic details of aliveness; details that virtually by definition cannot be generalized or categorized. Like Lacan’s idea of the nudge given to language to make it distinctively alive, aliveness and idiosyncrasy go together. Once again it becomes a question—though its binary quality should make us suspicious—of how we tell the difference between aliveness and deadness; as though we take it that this, fundamentally, is the repertoire.

In what Bollas calls “the ordinary functioning parts of the mind,”

it is rather like a parliamentary order with instincts, memories, needs, anxieties, and object responses finding representatives in the psyche for mental processing. When under the pressure of some particularly intense drive (such as greed), or force (such as envy), or anxiety (such as the fear of mutilation) this internal world can indeed lose its parliamentary function and evolve into a less representative internal order.

The image is that in a state of emergence—greed, envy, anxiety and of course desire—a gross autocratic oversimplification of the self takes over; and the paradoxical fact is that we then deaden ourselves in order to survive; survival, that is to say, is preferred to aliveness. So aliveness, we might say—to use a more traditional, less Darwinian, vocabulary—is to do with flourishing, living our fullest life. But when survival is the project we can only do it by deadening ourselves; deathliness makes life viable. In Bollas’s terms, parliamentary democracy of conflict and conciliating and compromising rival claims is a picture of aliveness; fascism is a desperate and murderous deadening.

What then might be the preconditions for not deadening ourselves, or not needing to deaden ourselves? Clearly one of the preconditions must be, absurd as it might sound, knowing the difference between aliveness and deadness in ourselves; and having good reasons for wanting and desiring aliveness as a value, as an object of desire.

When we are talking about the sensation of life, or the sense of having lived, or collecting the details of the experience of aliveness, we are trying to give an account of something surprisingly elusive; something, consciously at least, most of us would want to celebrate and encourage despite, as it were, all the evidence to the contrary. There is on the one hand the confident assertion of where life and aliveness is—in defamiliarization, in language, in idiolect, in spontaneity, in surprise, in the life instincts—and then in counterpoint to this the question of why any of this occurs to us, or needs to be articulated. For animals, life is the living of it, the surviving of it, for the requisite time. But for us, life is sustained, or not, by words about life; life as something we can live or something we might find we are not actually living, or might turn out not to have lived. As though it may not always be exactly death we fear but the death in life we might find ourselves living or having lived. As though one could live a life that could turn out not to have been one.

When you are dying, like Milly Theale in James’s novel, you could have the sense in retrospect that you haven’t lived; but what about if you are young and not yet apparently dying but are wanting to live and to have lived, what can you do? What, if anything, is it possible to do to ensure that you are actually living? In the absence of any hard-and-fast information and advice—and in the absence of any kind of consensus (or shared criteria) about what it is to live and to have lived—all we can do, if we are interested, is ask these questions and see what, if anything, we want to do.

From On Giving Up by Adam Phillips. Forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March 2024.

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of many books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored and On Balance. He is also coauthor, with the historian Barbara Taylor, of On Kindness.

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Published on March 05, 2024 07:15

March 4, 2024

The Institute for Illegal Images

Alien Embrace, ca. 1996. Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The Institute of Illegal Images (III) is housed in a dilapidated shotgun Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, which also happens to be the home of a gentleman named Mark McCloud. The shades are always drawn; the stairs are rotting; the door is peppered with stickers declaring various subcultural affiliations: “Acid Baby Jesus,” “Haight Street Art Center,” “I’m Still Voting for Zappa.” As in many buildings from that era, at least in this city, the ﬁrst ﬂoor parlor has high ceilings, whose walls are packed salon-style with the core holdings of the institute: a few hundred mounted and framed examples of LSD blotter.

The III maintains the largest and most extensive collection of such paper products in the world, along with thousands of pieces of the materials—illustration boards, photostats, perforation boards—used to create them. Gazing at these crowded walls, the visitor is confronted with a riot of icons and designs, many drawn from art history, pop media, and the countercultural unconscious, here crammed together according to the horror vacui that drives so much psychedelic art. There are ﬂying saucers, clowns, gryphons, superheroes, cartoon characters, Escher prints, landscapes, op art swirls, magic sigils, Japanese crests, and wallpaper patterns, often in multiple color variations.

Balancing this carnivalesque excess, at least to some degree, is a modernist sense of order. This announces itself principally through two core features of the blotter form: repetition and the grid. Many frames house full “sheets” of blotter: square or rectangular pieces of cardstock, printed and often perforated according to an abstract rectilinear grid demanded by the exigencies of blotter production. These grids are made up of individual hits or tabs, generally a quarter inch square or so and numbering anywhere from one hundred to four hundred to nine hundred units per sheet, depending on block size and design. While some sheets are illustrated with a single image that cloaks the entire grid, many assign the exact same ﬁgure to each hit, resulting in sheets that loosely resemble Andy Warhol’s canvases of Campbell’s soup cans. Other framed exhibits contain mere fragments from larger designs, sometimes nothing more than a single, hairy hit, perhaps the last extant example of a run from the eighties that has otherwise been literally swallowed up.

How to refer to all this paper? Users have called the stuff “blotter” or “tickets,” while police have used terms like “paper doses.” These days such pieces are often known as “blotter art,” a term that in many ways reﬂects the III’s own efforts to reframe this illicit ephemera into aesthetic objects (which is why I will stick to the more neutral “blotter”). There is another factor: over the last few decades, the blotter format has become a genre of popular art and a perfectly legal collectable. Though formally resembling their illegal forebears, editions of so called “vanity blotters,” undipped in LSD and frequently signed, are produced for collectors and casual fans rather than drug traffickers—who nonetheless can and do dose such wares when they need or want to. Though ignored by the larger art world, the vanity blotter market keeps on trucking, despite (or because of) the low cost of entry and a lack of critical valuation or collector apparatus.

I am interested in meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a “meta medium.” I add the meta here because, phenomenologically speaking, LSD is known to stage fantastic visual performances that, for all their novelties, recirculate images and motifs drawn from the history of art, the modes of fashion, the icons and architectures of religious myth and esoteric tradition, and the advertisements, comic books, design styles, and signage of commercial modernity. Here, for example, is part of an experience report included in R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston’s The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (1966). S, a forty-year-old editor and former medical student, took two 125 microgram doses, staggered one hour apart. Later,

S is told to look at the ﬂowered fabric on the couch on which he is sitting and to relate what he sees there. He perceives a great number of faces and scenes, each of them belonging to a different environment and to a variety of times: some to the American Gay Nineties, some to the nineteen twenties, some later. There are Toulouse Lautrec café ﬁgures, Berlin nightlife scenes and German art from the late twenties and mid-thirties. Here and there, a “Black Art” appears and he recognizes the world of Felicien Rops and drawings like those of the artist who has illustrated Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft. There are various Modigliani ﬁgures, a woman carrying a harpoon, and persons such as appear in the classical Spanish art of the seventeenth century. Most interesting to him are “paintings” like those of Hieronymus Bosch . . .

1:00 p.m.: S imagines a number of additional cartoon sequences including a rather lengthy one set in Harlem that has to do with “a Negro making a cartoon about how a Negro would make a cartoon about a Negro making a cartoon about Negroes.”

Here LSD is already a media machine, a “reality studio” or animation shop cranking out video mixes that sample from visionary art, bohemian styles, and astrological symbolism. While we can’t know what signiﬁcance a Black artist in Harlem held for S, we should recognize the crucial and deeply psychedelic element of recursion that characterizes his ﬁnal vision here, a self-reference across scale that not only recalls the fractals or paisley designs that mark acid perception but embeds the framing and production of imagery into the imagery itself—imagery that, for perhaps signiﬁcant reasons, not infrequently resembles cartoons.

LSD’s particular and peculiar relationship to technical mediation is historically situated. First synthesized in 1938 but not tasted until 1943, acid is essentially a creature of the postwar era. As such, it enters the human world alongside an explosion in consumer advertising, the rapid development of electronic and digital media, new polymers, and a host of increasingly cybernetic approaches to the social challenges of control and communication. For many of its early enthusiasts, acid was like a cosmic transistor radio. As Lars Bang Larsen writes, “Hallucinogenic drugs were often understood as new media in the counterculture: only machinic and cybernetic concepts seemed sufficient to address vibrations, intensities, micro speeds, and other challenges to human perception that occur on the trip.” To paraphrase Timothy Leary, LSD seemed to “tune” the dials of perception, altering the ratios of the senses, “turning on” their associational pathways and gradients of intensity. These vibrating modulations in turn catalyzed transpersonal peaks that bloomed as insights, revelations, satoris, “groks.” The actor and author Peter Coyote, who was a member of the visionary Diggers collective in the Haight during the sixties, wrote that ingesting LSD “changed everything, dissolved the boundaries of self, and placed you at some unlocatable point in the midst of a new world, vast beyond imagining, stripped of language, where new skills of communication were required . . . [because] everything communicated in its own way.” Similarly, Marshall McLuhan, the pop media prophet of the era, told Playboy that LSD mimes the “all at onceness and all at oneness” of the new electronic media environment. All this set the stage for a kind of technical mysticism that recalls the media theorist Alexander Galloway’s notion of “iridescent” mediation: “communication as luminous immediacy.” Alan Watts, commenting on the question of how often to take LSD, also turned to media metaphors, arguing that when you get the message, you hang up the phone.

But what if the medium is the message? In other words, what if the self-referentiality of acid consciousness—which can nest chains of Harlem cartoonists like Russian dolls, or loop the act of seeing back into the seer—also absorbs the material medium that delivers the LSD to your nervous system in the ﬁrst place? Of course, the primary medium of this consciousness is the LSD molecule itself. But unlike macroscopic drugs like cannabis, LSD is so small and so powerful that its consumption almost always requires an inert housing—the water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string, or pieces of paper that transport the drug from manufacturer to tripper. In the law, this vehicle is described as the “carrier medium,” an object impregnated with drugs, one that can be sold, seized, presented as evidence, and dissolved into the hearts, minds, and guts of consumers.

When you print images onto a paper carrier medium, you are adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission. Hence, a meta medium, a liminal genre of print culture that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubble gum card, and the communion host. This makes blotter a central if barely recognized artifact of psychedelic print culture, alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comix, but with the extra ouroboric weirdness that it is designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It is produced to be eaten, to blur the divide between object and subject, dissolving material signs and molecules into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic, and cognitive immediacy.

***

But there is something vital to establish ﬁrst about the overall LSD trade, and we might as well hear it from one of that industry’s most important students, the Drug Enforcement Agency. In a report entitled LSD in the United States, which came out of the San Francisco Field Office in 1995 and is available on the internet, the authors make the following crucial observation:

In contrast to the trafficking of other drugs, in which profit is the sole motivating factor, LSD trafficking has assumed an ideological or crusading aspect. The influence of—and probable distribution by—certain psychedelic generation gurus has created a secretiveness and marketing mystique unique to LSD, particularly at the higher echelons of the traffic. Their belief in the beneficent properties of LSD has been, over the years, as strong a motivating factor in the production and distribution of the drug as the profits to be made from its sale.

Bear in mind, this isn’t written by some bangled Haight Street nostalgist but by the DEA, and in the nineties to boot, decades after the era of hippie idealism was put on ice. The message is clear: as a criminal enterprise, acid is its own kettle of ﬁsh, its ﬂuids dosed with more than market forces. Similarly, while blotter takes shape in response to illegal commerce and the pragmatics of smuggling, it can never be reduced to the business of trafficking or “branding” because the acid trade was and is about more than money. Full stop.

The countercultural drive to the turn on the world is perhaps best captured by historian Christian Greer’s notion of “psychedelic militancy.” With this term, Greer reminds us that many psychedelicists were not lazy hippies but conscious combatants in the emerging culture war; as such, their desire to propagate LSD was as idealistic and even messianic as it was wild and hedonistic. As Greer’s own work shows, while psychedelia’s most militant days lay back in the sixties, the current of psychedelic militancy continued to animate the subcultural milieu at least into the eighties, which is basically the same era that blotter became the dominant carrier medium for LSD. Such idealism does not cancel out the proﬁt motive, but nor does it entirely dissipate into it. After all, the intensity and commitment required for cultural militancy are also useful values in criminal enterprises. In fact, by continuing to function as a dangerous outlaw zone while other facets of the counterculture were “co-opted,” the LSD trade paradoxically helped keep such higher motives alive. Whether they were ignited by gnostic revelations, a partisan belief in cognitive liberty, or a mischief maker’s desire to keep the inﬁnite game going, the individuals and networks who kept and keep LSD circulating throughout the world were and are not just selling things but also dreaming dreams. Blotter reﬂects this imaginal and communicational excess, its images and designs marked by the same magic the drug provokes in so many of its celebrants. You can call such enchanted trafficking a “crusade” if you want, but to judge from its icons, it is a curiously undogmatic one, at once lowbrow and sublime, beautiful and satiric, pragmatic and metaphysically aware.

***

A photographer, sculptor, and former art professor, as well as a deep and crusty bohemian with subcultural affiliations from freak to punk, McCloud began collecting acid blotter around 1980, and mounted the ﬁrst gallery show of the stuff, at the San Francisco Art Institute, in 1987. The aim of that show, he says now, was to demonstrate “the beautiful lesson that comes with eating art that changes your mind.” McCloud’s fanaticism and informed curation later helped develop the market for signature and vanity blotter. But his collecting mania also gave him access to the secretive acid underground, where McCloud himself would eventually set up shop, designing, printing, and perforating new blotter sheets used for the illegal distribution of LSD.

By producing printed artifacts in the gray margins of a black market, McCloud opened himself up to two frightening arrests and one major jury trial, which resulted in an acquittal based in no small measure on the designation of his holdings as art. But his blotter making also gave him unparalleled access to other blotter makers, which enabled him to signiﬁcantly expand his collection, and to understand it and those makers more thoroughly. Today the Institute for Illegal Images, which has no actual institutional support, and is in many ways indistinguishable from a hoard, stands as one of the most singular and extraordinary countercultural archives in existence—a ramshackle hall of paper mirrors that mediate and superimpose cosmos and commodity, consciousness and crime.

In the late seventies and early eighties, which were also the years when blotter rose to dominance as a distribution medium, McCloud made his cultural home in San Francisco’s hippie-mocking punk milieu. In other words, blotter became big at a time when psychedelia was no longer a visible part of popular culture. But here’s the secret: Acid never disappeared. Though no longer a countercultural icon, LSD became a subcultural fuel by the end of the seventies, melting into a variety of often highly regional scenes of weirdness and exuberant transgression, including disco, funk, and the freakier edges of punk and post punk. LSD deeply scrambled the DNA of groups like Devo, Black Flag, and the Butthole Surfers, whose ﬁrst 45 cover was printed on Nick West’s machine in San Francisco. In other words, even as psychedelia faded, acid just went further underground, and many blotters from the golden age of the eighties carried the new weirdo iconography: demented clowns, J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, Zippy the Pinhead.

In 1983, McCloud won the second of his two NEA grants and purchased the building that currently houses the Institute of Illegal Images. When he moved in, he decided to more emphatically preserve his growing blotter collection by encasing the LSD papers in picture frames. “That changed everything,” he says. “Within the frames, they became more than the sum of their parts. They glowed together.” The frames also helped him keep his hand out of the cookie jar.

McCloud lived across the street from the artist David Ireland, who helped the sculptor land a spot on the artist board at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). In 1987, with the twenty-year anniversary of the Summer of Love coming up, McCloud suggested that SFAI mount a show drawn from his blotter collection. The board agreed. There were ﬁfty pieces or so in the show, which was called “The Holy Transfers of the Rebel Replevin”—a replevin being a legal maneuver to restore illegitimately seized property. In later years, McCloud began to amass full sheets of undipped street blotter, but the Holy Transfer exhibits mostly consisted of single hits and four ways (large, perforated units meant to be torn or cut into four smaller hits): pyramids, stars, ﬂying saucers, soccer balls, and the like. Any LSD in the material had been intentionally burned away through exposure to light and air, which deconstructs the magic molecules. Magnifying glasses were provided to appreciate the detail.

In an essay that appeared in the show’s fanciful catalog, the New York art critic Carlo McCormick, who covered the cultural fringes of downtown and beyond, underscores the kaleidoscopic quality of these objects. What acid blotter “is” depends on what lens you are bringing to the table, or the gallery. From a sociological perspective, McCormick saw McCloud’s show as an “illicit history” of subversive images—the sort of icons that magnetize subcultural identities, like hippie buttons or biker insignia. He also underscored the economic logic of printed blotter, a rare example of a commercial art form aimed entirely at a black market. Since the quality of acid is rarely known by the purchaser beforehand, McCormick suggested, the presence of tiny labyrinths or golden dolphins on the hits reﬂects the same “ﬁne art of persuasion” that applies vibrant swirly waves to detergent boxes. Plenty of LSD was (and is) distributed on blank white cardstock, but the pictures brashly announce that this is no ordinary piece of paper, even if, as always, the advertising was sometimes false. At the same time, it is not quite accurate to think of blotter images as brands or trademarks—the relationship between these signs and the psychoactive signiﬁed is more playful and open-ended than in the case of, say, M&Ms or Advil. Along with announcing the presence of goods, the images also function as a kind of insider promise, a knowing wink or a Masonic grip. McCloud calls them “symbols of a secret society.”

McCormick also offers up the notion of blotter as a folk art. There are good reasons for this designation. As with other aspects of the youth movement, psychedelic commerce possessed an organic, collective, and DIY quality that reproduces and sometimes explicitly mimics aspects of more traditional folk cultures. That said, the anonymous craftspeople behind blotter art were, like most LSD users, white, college educated, and drawn from the middle or upper class. Like McCloud, they were often refugees or defectors from privilege, and their work reﬂects an elite or at least educated understanding of art traditions, media politics, and social critique. These were not the sort of structurally marginalized populations, of color or not, who are usually associated with outsider or folk art. But acid has a way of scrambling categories, a point McCormick makes in his conclusion: “Those unable to acknowledge the LSD prints as ‘art,’ but willing to credit them as ‘craft,’ or ‘folk art,’ would beneﬁt greatly if they all re-examined such a cultural hierarchy after taking some LSD themselves.”

On that note, a selection of works from McCloud’s Institute of Illegal Images:

Bunny Birthday, ca. 1976. 2⅗ x 2⅗ in. One of the first full-color blotters, possibly removed directly from an illustrated book.

Gilfeather, Crazy World, 1977. San Francisco, California.

Horus, 1979. San Francisco, California.

Father of LSD, ca. 1984. San Francisco, California. This is one of the first pieces that McCloud decided to commit to a frame.

Japanese Crests (reissue), ca. mid-eighties. Single-hit with gold flake trim, ⅜ × ⅜ in.

Fritz, Surfing Swami, ca. mid-eighties. San Francisco, California. Image drawn from Ram Dass, Be Here Now (1971).

Rx, ca. 1991.

Mark McCloud, Through the Looking Glass, 1995. San Francisco, California.

Stevee Postman and Jon Hanna, LSD 60, 2003.

Tina Carpenter, Anonymous Bosch Flower Power, 2021.

Patrick Turk, Reincarnating no. 2, 2021.

1XRUN, Tales of the Tube, 2022. Licensed reproduction of Rick Griffin’s cover art from Tales of the Tube (1972).

Adapted from Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, out from MIT Press in April.Erik Davis is the author of six books, including High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies and Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Information Age. He writes the Substack publication Burning Shore.

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Published on March 04, 2024 07:26

March 1, 2024

Prince and the Afterworld: Dorothea Lasky and Tony Tulathimutte Recommend

Photograph by Allen Beaulieu, distributed by Warner Bros. Records. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the afterlife and if it’s real. It’s always been hard for me to completely believe in it. I can be skeptical about everything, particularly mystical things. Perhaps because I had learned early on in school that having a spiritual side meant you weren’t as intelligent as other people, and intelligent was what I most wanted to be. The unspoken/spoken law of most academic settings is that to know better is to know that real knowledge has nothing to do with faith. (This is, in part, what my poem in the Review’s Winter issue is about.)

Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy” is one of my go-to anthems when I want to think about the purpose of life and what it means to believe beyond plain knowledge. Prince has always been a kind of spiritual guide to me. One of my first poetry chapbooks was named Alphabets & Portraits. For the epigraph, I chose the opening lines of his song “Alphabet St.” as a reminder of what miraculous things poetry can do (“I’m going down to Alphabet Street / I’m gonna crown the first girl that I meet / I’m gonna talk so sexy / She’ll want me from my head to my feet”). These days, the opening monologue of “Let’s Go Crazy” gets to me especially:

Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today
To get through this thing called life
Electric word life, it means forever and that’s a mighty long time
But I’m here to tell you, there’s something else
The afterworld, a world of never-ending happiness
You can always see the sun, day or night
So when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills
You know the one, Dr. Everything’ll Be Alright
Instead of asking him how much of your time is left?
Ask him how much of your mind, baby
‘Cause in this life things are much harder than in the afterworld
This life you’re on your own
And if the elevator tries to bring you down
Go crazy, punch a higher floor

The song’s upbeat rhythm and the salaciousness of his dig at that overpriced therapist always get my blood pumping when I’m down. I love the possessed elevator in the song, ready to bring you down to hell (or to a life full of low vibrations, which could be the same thing). Who doesn’t strive to “punch a higher floor” daily? When I hear Prince’s encouraging words, I too want to rise above all the bullshit of existence.

But really it’s Prince’s idea of the afterworld that speaks to me in these sad, wintry days. As he sings: I’m here to tell you, there’s something else.” There’s something else, he says, with conviction.

I want to believe him. I want to believe him with a faith so huge it is beyond knowledge. I want to understand how in six words (“Electric word life, it means forever”) Prince tells me everything about being alive and also maybe all about dying. The cool blue David Lynch tone of those two words, electric and life, both bound together by language. Both freed by it, too. An electricity like the endless stream of life and love, just as Jack Spicer writes of in his poem “A Book of Music”:

No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.

Spicer was right about love. Prince was right, too. What an electric word life is. What an electric word love is, too. And if there is an afterworld, then it must be full of love and almost nothing else.

To go crazy for love. That’s what Prince challenges us to do these days in his gleaming song.

—Dorothea Lasky, author of “ Mother ”

Return of the Obra Dinn, a 2018 indie video game by Lucas Pope, sounds a bit boring when you summarize it, which is to say, it’s literature. You play an insurance investigator for the East India Company in 1807, on board a ship that has mysteriously reappeared after vanishing five years earlier. Your task is to find out how each passenger died or escaped. Helpfully, your magic pocket watch lets you visit the instant of people’s deaths at will, so you get to walk around inside these frozen moments like they’re life-size dioramas, using observation and deduction to fill out your ledger of casualties, a process best described as forensic Moby-Dick sudoku. Obra Dinn’s retro one-bit graphics are done in a careful pointillist black-and-white (though the “black” is more of a Pullman green), and the abstraction this introduces is more tantalizing than obfuscating, making it feel more like you’re investigating a hazy memory than a crime scene. The game will have you distinguishing between nineteenth-century English accents, googling what a bosun does, identifying various hats, and reflecting on just how many stupid ways one can die at sea. Obra Dinn should do plenty to quell your appetite for a historical Lovecraftian maritime murder mystery—though if you end up hungry for more death, a brilliant homage can be enjoyed in Color Gray Games’s 2022 game The Case of the Golden Idol.

—Tony Tulathimutte, author of “ Ahegao ”

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Published on March 01, 2024 08:36

February 29, 2024

Fixer Upper: Larry McMurtry’s Library

Photograph by Colin Ainsworth.

Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There are scented candles burning somewhere. There’s a coffee bar selling things at New York prices, and while I wait for what will be a bitter, strong, iced $5.50 Americano, I see them: maybe 1,500 antique books, lined up in a custom black bookcase that’s about twenty feet tall.

In their latest show, Fixer Upper: The Hotel, the home-and-lifestyle reality stars Joanna and Chip Gaines renovate and redesign the Karem Hotel in downtown Waco, Texas, into what they name the Hotel 1928. (The original hotel was built in 1928.) The Gaines family struck gold in the 2010s with their house-flipping show Fixer Upper, and they eventually outgrew HGTV to form their own network, Magnolia. What’s not to like about the duo? Joanna Gaines looks like a movie star, and she’s unreasonably charming. And Chip is a dang goofball! Their dynamic onscreen is instantly recognizable, harkening back to classic sitcom marriages—loud, foolish husbands with extraordinary wives. Joanna barely bats an eye when Chip shows up in the first episode in a bellboy uniform just for some fun. The pair decided that their hotel lobby needed a library, and upon Joanna’s request for “a ton of books,” Chip purchased around 300,000, the entire collection of Larry McMurtry, the Texan writer who died in 2021. McMurtry spent a lifetime collecting books—more time collecting than writing, even. He opened a used-and-rare bookstore called Booked Up in Washington, D.C., in 1971; by the eighties, he had amassed enough books to outpace Georgetown real estate and expanded to stores in several cities out West. In 1986, he opened several locations of Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, where he eventually condensed his vast collection.

Chip Gaines’s parents grew up in Archer City as well. In the third episode of Fixer Upper: The Hotel, Chip takes Joanna on a roadtrip to take a look at the books. In a tone just this side of menacing, he says to Joanna, “We’re gonna see … this amazing bookstore that I bought,” a combination of understatement and confession. (Gaines purchased both the books and the two remaining storefronts in Archer City.)

After some standard husband-wife “Babe, what did you do” dialogue, Joanna concludes, as she wanders the stacks and stacks of the store, “I think this is the coolest thing you’ve ever bought in your entire life.”

Photograph by Colin Ainsworth.

And so these books would eventually come to Waco. When I talk about Waco with people from outside of Texas, they recognize the name from the siege of 1993, when FBI agents stood off against David Koresh’s cult at their compound for fifty-one days and dozens of cult members were killed in a fire. My own memory of Waco is colored by the two Baylor University athletic scandals of my childhood: the murder of a varsity basketball player by one of his teammates, and the systematic cover-up of multiple cases of sexual assault by the university’s then football coach, Art Briles. Today, thanks to Chip, Joanna, Fixer Upper, and the Magnolia network at large, people now fly into Austin to drive to Waco to see the Magnolia silos, shop at Magnolia Market, and wait in long lines to peer at various flipped houses in and around town. Something I cannot overstate: the flipped houses are just houses. The stores are filled with Magnolia products, sure, but the products are just used to stage the houses Chip and Joanna flip. Washed-out, Instagram-friendly dishware, gold-plated mirrors, dark wooden furniture that would clash only with light wooden furniture, all of it is of the same piece—boho, modern farmhouse, Southern chic, a revolution in style and decor, whatever you want to call it. And yet people come from all over the world simply to see these things, and then find themselves in Waco, Texas, which is still, more than anything, just on the way to the next city.

I stop in Waco en route from Austin to Dallas, curious to see the hotel and to check in on McMurtry’s books. It’s two days before Christmas, and downtown Waco is as dead as it’s ever been. There’s vacancy at the Hotel 1928, but there will be none in a week, on New Year’s Eve. Inside, away from the ghost town and the parking lots, old people and millennials waltz through the historic-turned-new hotel holding up their phone cameras. I can’t really tell who’s staying here and who’s just passing through like me—sightseeing, maybe stopping by in hopes of grabbing lunch at the rooftop restaurant, where, I discover, there’s a three-hour wait for a table. (A rooftop, one has to wonder, overlooking what?)

The library is tucked away on the bottom floor: two symmetrical staircases descending from the ground level, dim lighting, plenty of deep armchairs and couches for theoretical reading. The books on the shelves are primarily antiques. In the show, upon her visit to Booked Up, Joanna clarifies that she’s less interested in the books from the past few decades. “For the hotel, I want the antique style … these are like, seventies, eighties, nineties. Those are early 1900s, and that’s what I want for the hotel.” She goes on. “The vision,” she says, for the library, is decidedly “darker, moodier.” She does a good job for the camera, performing the appropriate level of awe at the sheer mass of the collection, but she makes it clear to the audience, and to Chip, that what she needs out of McMurtry’s collection is simply eight thousand old-looking books.

There’s a handful of people lounging around the hotel. There’s another bookcase in the back corner, and a small desk with one of McMurtry’s typewriters and a plaque commemorating the collection in the opposite corner. There’s a sign imploring people not to touch the typewriter, which I feel cosmically extends to the books, so I just sit for a while on one of the leather couches. This is, I realize, the paradox of antique books generally—the fear of touching them, of disturbing the museum, which seems to preclude the notion of reading and of books altogether.

In his book Books, McMurtry details his long life as a book collector and seller. He coins his own term, bookman, one that reminds me of my grandfather, who had his own collection and rare-books business after he retired, primarily focusing on books about West Texas. My grandfather would go to book shows around Texas, and he’d sell some, but he’d always buy more, never putting any real money together; this seemed to be the general practice of all the old Texas bookmen at these convention centers. McMurtry describes buying full collections, too, often sight unseen, but he also notes that even those purchases can be long and emotionally tangled for both buyer and seller. “Sometimes, frustrating as it is for the bookseller,” he writes, “it can be a long while before a collector—or his or her children or grandchildren—decides to let the books go. And whether the offer is a thousand dollars or a hundred thousand, money is seldom really the decisive factor in a purchase of long-held books. The drama of release belongs to the owner, and it can involve a long overture.”

The point, then—even if no money is really made, and it really isn’t, ever—is that the cycle continues. You could argue that what happened to McMurtry’s own collection was the more or less same. These books were for sale and someone bought them. But I think something fundamentally different is happening here: The books are ripped out of that bookselling economy, taken from Archer City and from the would-be customer, to achieve that darker, moodier tone Joanna was looking for.

In the library, I get as close to the shelves as I can and tilt my head to read the spines. There’s a copy of Moby-Dick just over the railing of the stairs. I look down over the library to see if taking it off the shelf is kosher. I don’t see anyone with a book, but I also don’t see any security or anyone telling me I’m about to do something wrong. I grab it and flip through it, still conscious that someone might be watching, and when I really realize that no one is paying attention, it occurs to me that I could walk out of this hotel with this book right now: Larry McMurtry’s personal copy of Moby-Dick, or at least, one from his bookstore, could be mine. I text a couple of friends this idea before I put the book back on the shelf.

Joanna said she needed eight thousand books for the library, but what’s here could only be two thousand, if that. I go to the gift shop and ask the clerk, Sharon, if she has any insight.

Sharon seems to be a native of Waco, or at least of this part of Texas. She’s an older woman with dyed hair and a loud voice. She asks me if I’m a local, and when I say that I’m from Austin she says that counts. When I mention the collection, she’s excited to talk. “They [Chip and Joanna] want you to take a book from the shelves, to sit for a while and read.” She says that when things are slower in the store, she does so herself. There are some books in the gift shop, though bizarrely none by McMurtry; I point out a book of Emily Dickinson poems above the crewneck sweaters, and Sharon says she’s grabbed that one often. “You know,” she says, “women weren’t authors back then.”

Sharon goes on to give me a fairly condensed history of the Gaineses’ work in the city of Waco. The flipped houses, the castle (“Oh, you haven’t seen the castle??”). She gives the party line about Chip being from Archer City, the sentimental value the collection has to him.

Where are the rest of the books? At the corporate offices, it turns out. “You wouldn’t believe how many books,” Sharon says. She describes the bookcases at the corporate offices as “basically as long as a city block,” and that they’re completely full. “You know,” she says, “they want to save history.”

On my way out, I’m greeted by the other art installation in the library: a portrait of one of history’s saviors … the white knight we apparently deserve.

Photograph by Colin Ainsworth.

A few days later, I went west from Dallas to Archer City. The drive there, like many in Texas, feels like watching the the American city dissolve. Further and further out, less and less around, the Texas countryside coming more and more into focus. McMurtry, I would argue, is concerned with leaving Texas, and then returning: Woodrow Call’s long trek back from Montana in Lonesome Dove; Danny Deck’s deathless drive back from California in All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers; the return of Emma’s children to Houston in Terms of Endearment. All of which recalls McMurtry’s own departure from and eventual return to Archer City.

When I arrive, as I come upon the single stoplight in town, I first notice the theater, familiar from Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, which was based on one of McMurtry’s novels. The town is deserted. There’s a closed visitor center with brochures on a magazine stand outside that look like they’re twenty-plus years old.

I make a quick detour to try to visit McMurtry’s house, which is unmarked, using a twenty-year-old Architectural Digest article as my guide. The green roofing, the portico design, the cracked driveway, and the numerous add-ons come together to feel like a West Texas castle, one that wouldn’t take kindly to Fixer Upper finishing touches. It’s adjacent to a country club. I walk onto the putting green to try to get a closer look when a man practicing his chip shots asks if I’m looking for the porta potty. “No, I’m just out for a walk!”

I drive around the corner to the Dairy Queen that McMurtry apparently frequented. There’s a booth with a few plaques commemorating his work and legacy. There is something more lively in this display than in the entirety of the Magnolia library with its books sitting idle. Wow, I think before I scarf down a Reese’s Blizzard and get back in the car, this is where he ate ice cream. There’s a certain aimlessness to all this looking for McMurtry that seems akin to his work. A genuine Texas phenomenon: to stand directionless in a town and wonder how to make your way out.

Photograph by Colin Ainsworth.

I make my way, finally, to Booked Up, which is just down the block from the single stoplight, in the center of town. There’s only so many places it can be. Booked Up used to take up even more square footage, some three or four storefronts, and a hundred thousand more books. Today, there’s just Booked Up No. 1 and No. 2, across the street from each other. Both are locked and have been since McMurtry died in 2021; you have to wonder, for all the Gaines’ famous fixing-up, about what will become of these still-empty storefronts. I can peek through the window to see that Booked Up No. 1 looks as if it’s been robbed. There are tables, chairs, and shelves all empty and dusty. It’s a strange terrarium, a ravaged-then-untouched wasteland. The shelves in Booked Up No. 2, though, are half-full, half-empty. I can barely make out what any of the spines on the books say, but there are thousands in there, abandoned or, I suppose, waiting to be saved. I push one of the doors, just to see, and it doesn’t open.

Colin Ainsworth is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

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Published on February 29, 2024 08:40

February 28, 2024

Good Manners

Hebe Uhart. Photograph by Nora Lezano.

Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas, which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review, where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months. Read others in the series here.

Yesterday I was riding the 92. The bus was half-empty and a woman of about sixty or seventy caught my eye. It was difficult to get a sense of her age, or her social class. Could she be poor? No, but she didn’t seem rich either, nor did I pick up on any of that visible effort the middle class put into their appearance: dressing neatly, in complementary colors. Her clothes reminded me, more than anything, of someone trying to go incognito. She didn’t come off as a housewife; I decided she had the look of a government inspector. She sat down beside me.

“Señora, I’m getting off at Pueyrredón,” I said, so I wouldn’t have to get up if her stop was before mine.

“Works for me,” she said, “I’m getting off at Laprida.”

She settled in beside the window as though she owned the seat and was allowing me to sit next to her. The bus driver was a young, pudgy guy, but agile. He drove expertly and very fast, which I noticed when we passed another 92 (they tend to run two or three at a time, the drivers amusing themselves by racing). He changed gears smoothly, as though he’d been born at the steering wheel. “Whoa!” he said suddenly. I asked what happened. My neighbor, looking straight ahead at nothing in particular, said, “She shouldn’t have passed on the the right.”

Her tone was cold and dry and I felt ignorant. I hadn’t noticed anyone crossing.

“She pulled it off,” the driver said. “What a brave girl—sometimes girls are brave.”

I didn’t know what to say, because it isn’t every day that a bus driver speaks. I also didn’t understand why the girl had been brave for crossing.

“Yes,” said my neighbor the inspector, “But she could end up in a tree.”

This sounded a lot like a prophecy, or a desire that the girl end up in a tree. The driver cracked a smile—he found something funny in the statement. A woman got on the bus; she greeted the driver, he returned the greeting. I wanted to feel worthy of my seat, so I said something about their civility—I wanted the inspector woman to accept me. I referred to their greeting as an old-fashioned custom.

“It’s good manners,” she said, without looking at me.

It seemed that good manners, to her, were not about doing polite things to make life more pleasant but were things of divine origin. The driver spoke again: “There’s a traffic jam. Someone double-parked.”

“That’s not allowed,” she said.

He spoke to her even though he didn’t care much about good manners. I would never have known where and how tvo park.

“There it is. Over there, at Bazterrica Hospital,” he said.

She replied yet again. I felt a growing need to say something to him, partly to appear less ignorant and partly to take advantage of the rare opportunity to talk to a bus driver. So I said something that I immediately regretted: “Sir, do you like it when people greet you?”

I regretted asking because I figured the woman was going to dislike my question.

“When it’s one or two of them, have at it, but when it’s about a hundred I start thinking they want something,” he said.

“It’s good manners,” the woman insisted.

I wanted to ask the driver another question so I could join their conversation, but even as the questions formed in my mind, they already seemed trivial. Despite knowing I was headed toward being ostracized, I said, “How often do you take this route every day?”

“Four times.”

He answered me curtly, even though he wasn’t the curt type. Evidently, he was speaking only with her. I had another question up my sleeve: Where did the 92 come from and where was it going? I genuinely would have liked to know. But it seemed so irrelevant (and my seatmate’s silence ever so deafening) that I kept quiet. Her silence made me feel like I was six or seven years old again, playing with a nutty girl I knew back then: every time I went to do something—swing in the hammock or take off running—the girl would stomp her foot angrily and say “No!” It made me feel like I was perpetually in the wrong. Everything I did or stood for was—to that girl—bad. But things were different now. I no longer felt thrashed, like a wind-beaten plant, by that uncomfortable feeling. I had built up my defenses. When we got to Pueyrredón, I avoided every possible show of good manners: I got off the bus without saying goodbye to either of them.

Anna Vilner’s translation of “Good Manners” will appear in a forthcoming collection of Hebe Uhart’s crónicas, A Question of Belonging, to be published by Archipelago Books in May 2024. The original Spanish version was collected in Uhart‘s Crónicas completas, published by Adriana Hidalgo.

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Published on February 28, 2024 07:27

February 27, 2024

My Friend Ellis

Photograph by Ben Ross Davis.

Twice in his life, Ellis made a contract with himself. He’d promised he would give himself five years and by the end of them, if he still wanted to kill himself, he would. Both times he’d made this contract, he still wanted to die at year five. But since, for a few months during each five-year span, he had a break from his compulsive ideations, he told himself it meant that the clock had reset and the contract was void. That, and he didn’t want to kill himself, not really.

I met Ellis in New York when I was twenty-six. He was the soft-spoken cybergoth—black mesh top, bleached-blond hair shaved to a perennial buzz—who always danced by the speaker stacks at warehouse parties. The angles of his jaw and his heavy brow lent him a harsh beauty.

He told me about his suicidal thoughts the first time we had dinner. We didn’t know each other well, really at all, so his pain alarmed me.

“I’ve had them ever since I was young,” he added.

“Me too,” I said.

I had my first suicidal thoughts in fifth grade. During some terrifying barrage of insomnia, I woke up, went down to the knife drawer with the idea that I’d know what to do. But once I got there, I was stupefied. I didn’t know if I should hack or slice or stab—and how long would this take? The fantasy I’d had in my mind did not pan out. I got tired and confused and eventually went back to sleep.

Had Ellis already sensed I would say this?

I saw that we were the only ones in the restaurant—it was new, with neon sculptures on the walls and tepid noodles. My vision condensed into a tunnel around this person, this stranger sitting in front of me. It was cold, even indoors, so Ellis had kept his jacket on: black, military style. When the food arrived, I saw a chance to break eye contact. I did not.

He looked back at me, head slightly bowed, showing me the crown of his hair. What I saw was an intimacy I couldn’t refuse.

Our shared suicidal ideations would become the foundation of our friendship. Outwardly, he was fastidious. He worked as a data analyst for a hedge fund. Yet he had an instinct for aesthetic precision and an artist’s tendency toward self-mythology. As a staunch environmentalist, he read mostly e-books or books from the library, easily upward of eighty a year, mostly novels, ranging from Jean Genet to the Broken Earth sci-fi trilogy. He went to Equinox seven days a week. Fearing the wasted energy of “decision fatigue,” he stuck to his routine, always: Soylent for meals at home or macrobiotic dinners at Souen in SoHo. Dinner rarely went on for longer than ninety minutes, and if you arrived late, he’d be waiting outside the restaurant reading a book—a soft rebuke. His robotic habits found their ideal complement in industrial techno. The way he danced at raves looked like an exercise routine—repetitive, with slight variations that visualized the music. He didn’t take drugs. The endorphin rush people often associate with weight lifting would be enough to carry him through to sunrise.

In Ellis, I detected a libidinal drive to service—such as his determination, during dinners, to fill other people’s glasses before his own—which made him a master; he had the power, at any moment, to withdraw that service. He was a strange and gentle man. He was endlessly moved by the Hudson River. He adored cinema verité and slow cinema, often spending overcast afternoons alone at MoMA in those dark, hagiographic theaters that ban popcorn or drinks.

This solitude came with a shadow. During group dinners, I would look over and catch his face, expressionless, with his hazel-green eyes opened wide, as if staring inward at a place I couldn’t reach. It terrified me. I’d zoom back in to the group conversation and then glance at Ellis a second later. By then, he would have changed his expression to pleasantly neutral, which is how I knew he’d caught me noticing.

I smiled when he laughed, especially at things no one else in the group found funny. His sense of humor was as unpredictable as his attention; he would sometimes abruptly leave a conversation. I would be talking and suddenly see the spark in his eye snuff out. It always stung, no matter how many times it happened.

It’s not so uncommon for young, sensitive boys to fantasize often of suicide. We met regularly at Deluxe Green Bo, in Chinatown, where we talked about our suicidal ideations as though commenting on the evening news playing from the mounted TV. We had an unspoken agreement that, following these disclosures, we would not need to convince each other out of our ideations or say the other’s feelings were wrong. We’d hear the other person out, acknowledge it, offer one of the basic services of friendship: witness.

Over dumplings, we distinguished the varieties of the suicidal impulse: fatigue, boredom, the death drive, panicked helplessness, deluded martyrdom, a relief from pain (acute, nagging, or numb), or out of revenge. Most of these weren’t serious impulses. Some, we intellectualized. For instance, Ellis sometimes told me that his ideal model of suicide would be the truest form of altruism where, like a plant, he could offer himself entirely to other people’s sustenance until he was stripped for parts and used to death. (Category: deluded martyrdom.)

He really was in a lot of pain. I should say that Ellis felt suicidal in full knowledge that he had no reason to be. He understood that he had close friends, a supportive family, a successful career. He once wrote to me that the sixth grade was the first time he conceived that killing himself might be “a good idea.” Years later, he would be diagnosed by a university psychologist at Columbia with major depression. In emails, he wrote of his depression to me like the arrival of monsoons, whose floods he knew came with the seasons and required him to drop everything to make room once they arrived.

During the worst months, he could ideate on suicide more than fifty times an hour, reaching up to five hundred times a day. Depression was wired into his brain. In times when he could not push forward for his own sake, he did so for others. There were, I know, times when I needed him more than he needed himself, and perhaps he chose to stick around to convince me to stick around. We had this thing where each time we parted, all he said was “Hang in there.”

***

To love someone who is depressed, even if depressed yourself, is to take on the delusion of embodying, in your very presence, a reason that compels someone to stay alive. These were the implicit stakes of our friendship.

I relished my routine moments with Ellis. At raves, he would always hover around the speaker stacks with earplugs in so he could get the best possible sound. Whenever I showed up to the party, I knew I would find him in that spot. In the morning, after the party was over, the sun would show brilliantly over the subway gratings in Bushwick’s warehouse district, and we’d walk back home saying barely anything to each other. Even boredom was steeped with radiance. What infused these otherwise unremarkable walks with meaning was my idea that, one morning, he might not be there.

I tried to be entertaining and funny around him. I knew he liked the way I danced, so at parties, I would at least try to dance well, even if I was tired or bored or wanted to sit down. He never asked me, or expected me, to play this role, but I performed it dutifully, out of gratitude, out of faith, out of foolishness, out of frivolity. My mind fixates on the times when he seemed gripped by physical mirth. Like when a techno track he’d recognize would come through the speakers, and his body would collapse into urgent, childlike glee. Or the carnal look on his face when he dipped his body in a hot tub—he appeared so fully human, reacting to this fleshly sensation.

I mostly just wanted him to feel better. For years I kept a clipping of “Poem of Regret for an Old Friend” by Meghan O’Rourke, which I’d cut out of a magazine the week that I’d read it and taped onto the inside of a floor-level cabinet where I kept my laundry detergent. Every time I wanted to read it, I had to crouch. I imagined its opening lines to be about forgiving, or at least trying to make peace with, a friend’s suicide:

What you did wasn’t so bad.
You stood in a small room, waiting for the sun.
At least you told yourself that.

In my apartment in Bushwick, I thought of someone longing for sunrise that could never come too soon, and instead choosing sudden darkness: the relief of final rest. Sometimes I wondered if loving Ellis meant allowing him to choose that final rest. I did not want to keep him in this life, just for me, if it only made him suffer. I could at least allow him, if he chose, to close in on himself fully and finally. I could release him from my dependence, maybe assure him that he could be proud of me if he left me alone, that I’d somehow been made better because of the joy and struggle of our trying friendship, that I could at last be fine on my own.

Years later, I’d moved out of that Bushwick apartment and was living in Berlin. Ellis visited for a month. I would sit in the kitchen of his sublet going on about my problems and preoccupations as he cooked me lentils or soliciting gossipy updates from him on the New York scene. The forks, the metal fridge, the glasses, and backsplash tiles all seemed glaring, dazzling, frenzied with lazy sunlight. His last week in the city, we had lunch at an organic café. As he approached the entrance, I saw he was wearing a bucket hat and sunglasses, because it was summer, and the summers in Berlin can be so generous. Over lunch, we talked about some people we both knew, the science fiction he was writing. We spent the entire afternoon there, reclined against large pillows. Sometimes my mind drifted out of the conversation just so I could stare at Ellis and think of how strange he still appeared to me after all these years. He was facing the window, so his pupils, peering at me from his peridot eyes, narrowed to a prick. After this, Ellis would go back to New York, and by the time the darkness of winter came, our lunch would be but a memory of one sunny afternoon when the restaurant’s open windows were stormed with light that warmed our backs.

Before we got up to leave, I asked him how he was, and he said he was less depressed than usual since he was in Berlin, a city he loved. And then, because I knew I might not see him again for a very long time, I decided to tell him.

“I say this because I love you: If you ever wanted to kill yourself, you have my permission.”

He looked at me, reached over and squeezed my knee. “I hope you wouldn’t say that, because it would mean you’ve given up on yourself.”

***

In time, I found a sustained and unremarkable happiness. In my mid-thirties, I regarded my former suicidal ideations with curiosity because I could not remember how they felt. It’s almost cruel the way the mind forgets pain. Can forget anything, really, including the suffering of others.

After the pandemic, I moved back to New York to study journalism. I had won a scholarship. I went out less, spending my weekends writing, alternating between stints at my desk and walks in the park, and I no longer saw Ellis weekly, dancing by the speaker stacks.

Over coffee one day at MoMA, our conversation—about the exhibitions, the books he was reading—hewed to the surface, which made me impatient. I don’t remember a single thing he said. Now that I was an editor at an art magazine, I must have found the sound of my own voice more interesting. It had been a long time since I texted Ellis during an attack of suicidal panic. I now saw him only a few times a year.

One evening in September, Ellis attended a reading I gave at Blade Study, a small gallery downtown. I hadn’t seen him for several months. He came up to introduce me to a woman with a broad smile. “This is my girlfriend,” he said. I tightened my face to hide any surprise or embarrassment. I hadn’t even known he was in a relationship. They had been together for almost a year.

I went outside to find him before he left, as people were making their way to the bar. These were new friends, who didn’t know me back when I still lived in that bedroom in Bushwick with no windows, where mice ran inside the walls and I lay in bed until sundown, staring at the ceiling. I glanced around. I couldn’t find him. Where was this man, who taught me to court boredom, or how to trust happiness that isn’t guaranteed? He was here, somewhere, present in his absence. Somewhere in this city, I knew there was a man who carried with him, in every room he walked into, a witness of my pain, and in every room I walked into, I carried my witness of his with me. I stared at the crushed cigarette butts littered beneath the gallery’s window ledge. Eventually, I gave up looking for him. I caught up with the others down the street.

An adapted excerpt from Mean Boys: A Personal History , out from Bloomsbury this April.

Geoffrey Mak is a queer Chinese American writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Guardian, and Artforum, among other publications. He is cofounder of the reading and performance series Writing on Raving.

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Published on February 27, 2024 08:39

February 26, 2024

July Notebook, 2018

Jacques Hérold. From a portfolio in issue no. 26 of the Review (Summer–Fall 1961).

Parable of the Movie

“I like your movie. I can tell that horror is a big influence.”

“Thank you, yes, I love horror movies.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean horror movies. I meant horror.”

“Thank you again. The feeling of horror itself also happens to be one of my biggest influences.”

“You’re welcome. But I didn’t say anything about a feeling.”

“I beg your pardon, but what kind of horror is neither a movie nor a feeling?”

“Me.”

“But we just met. You didn’t influence my movie at all.”

“Well then. I take it back.”

The sound of the wind rustling the leaves in the part of the country from which he hailed eerily resembled the opening chords of the song “Do It Again” by Steely Dan.

A call about the job I applied for. I am invited to come in for an interview.

Parable of the Worm

Inoculated against the fact that their king was a worm, they watched his tense face as he devoured their kin, passed them through his gelatinous digestive tract, and shat them out, dropping them in a pebbled pile behind him. They cheered wildly, wiping tears from their cheeks.

Let there be commerce between us.

“There’s something,” she agreed, “suspiciously lordly about the way he sniffs the earth and licks his cloven foot. But it’s a mystery.” Several seconds passed. She fanned herself.

“It’s a mystery,” she said again.

Plants are so self-referential.

“One thing on which I’d like to think that we can all agree,” he said, furrowing his brow and gently blowing at the steam billowing off his matcha latte, “is that plants are witchcraft.”

“Of course,” I say in the job interview, wearing a light blue shirt and new gray blazer, “my preferred method of writing is collaborative.”

“That’s good,” my interviewer says, “because for this job, collaboration is essential.”

We’ve been watching The Sopranos for the first time. I read a literary critic’s skeptical take: that the show is merely asking whether a sociopath can be a good person. It’s a bad-faith reading by someone who hates the medium. Not interesting. The Sopranos isn’t about that. It’s about what happens to the rest of the world—not you—when you die: it goes on, until the network cancels the run. And it’s persuasive.

I notice tonight that I habitually steal little moments to check my pulse.

For how long has this been going on?

Dream, 7/18

“Sometimes I just sit with a petri dish and wait a week.”

Sounds like laughter in the third movement of the Jupiter symphony.

How much baby’s breath would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck were into that kind of thing?

As I continue to be ravaged by the blunt object that is a series of years on Earth, I am surprised to find that I have more occasion to use the word than than then.

Parable of the Tick

Tonight I see what looks to be a tick on the dog’s eyelid. I get a pair of tweezers from the bathroom and kneel to remove it. He looks at me askance but lies there in his beatific patience. I smooth the fine yellow fur on his head and apply the tweezers to the tick and clamp down.

But it is not a tick—just a little black growth above his eye. A stream of blood trickles down his snout, but he doesn’t flinch. I gasp. He leans forward and licks my hand—to ease my parasitic fret, to forgive me for hurting him—with blood in his fur. I burst into tears.

Love is hell.

I receive a call informing me that I got the job. I’ll begin in August.

Why does this feel sad?

Parable of A. J. Soprano

Spoiler alert.

After unsuccessfully trying to commit suicide by tying a cinder block to his feet, putting a plastic bag over his head, throwing himself into the family pool—the prelude to perhaps the most piercingly moving scene of the entire series—A. J. is still, with a persistence approaching the divine, a complete asshole.

The fly on the engraved mirror—resting on the back of its wings with its legs in the air, its reflection hanging from the glass as if about to launch off into the room—is sleeping, or spoiled?

Daniel Poppick is the author of The Police and of the National Poetry Series winner Fear of Description.

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Published on February 26, 2024 07:52

February 23, 2024

Philistines

Welcome to Disney World! Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man.

We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to get confused between: Is this a theme park of Italy or is it just lovely and pleasant.

There is a REAL Florida out there that is TRULY historic. I madly drove out to find the REAL Orlando, forgetting my phobia of freeways. After almost getting killed (horns blasting at my side, cars swerving out of my way), I did find the real Orlando. It is situated on several lakes lined by turn-of-the-last-century Victorians and bungalows. I went to the history museum. The number one industry in central Florida is cattle. Has anyone in Florida ever seen a head of cattle? No. But maybe that was before Disney.

I went to my first theme park. Not Disney World but another theme park we noticed from the side of the road. Our small children were foaming at the mouth to go to theme parks, they were in the promised land, their dreams were all coming true: theme parks. This one looked maybe more palatable to me than Disney World. It was called the Holy Land Experience. It was founded by a Messianic Jew and meant to replicate Jerusalem in the year A.D. 66. The buildings were ocher-colored like the desert sand with a roseate glow, amid papyrus groves and palms. The background was the I-4 freeway and the giant Mall at Millenia across the street.

You’re directed to a tent among the palms where an Alec Guinness look-alike wearing the garb of an ancient priest starts giving a scholarly lecture on the difference between the tribe of Levi and the Levitical priesthood, whatever that is, nonchalantly tossing off pedantic theological distinctions. You start thinking that the guides must be scholars or priests in real life, because they seem very learned and sad. They shuffle about in their flowing robes throwing bits of food to the birds, looking as if they just stepped out of the Bible. The gift shop sells books that have titles like Three Views on the Rapture: Pretribulation, Prewrath, or Posttribulation. Ha!

Then, in the tradition of theme parks everywhere, a booming narration begins from a recording. But unlike at theme parks everywhere, this recording is reciting Hebrew prayers and explaining the prewrath version of the Rapture—whatever that is.

The next show is in the “Scriptorium” and deals with cuneiform texts, Babylonian tablets, Hebrew scrolls, and other biblical antiquities. What about the poor sapsuckers who got roped into this thinking they were going to Disney World, more or less, now trapped in the Scriptorium discussing the condemnation of Spanish rabbis in fifteenth-century Oxford?

It was sort of ike an old-fashioned wax museum. The brochure calls it a “highly-themed” (translation: you’re in a theme park), “climate-controlled walk-through experience.”

Doors and gateways opened electronically at each new chamber while the booming prerecorded narrator intoned about the bondage of religious traditionalism, the early reform movement that produced the daring first translation of the Latin Bible, and other things like that. Again I pitied the sapsuckers who came to ride on little trains and see life-size stuffed animals, instead stuck in the Scriptorium discussing the bondage of sin.

At the end there was an incredibly cheesy finale inside a replica of the Hagia Sophia with sleazy portraits painted on velvet of religious figures and plush curtains electronically rising in successive waves, accompanied by the booming prerecorded baritone narrator quoting scripture, with the Ten Commandments written in neon on the ceiling (in Hebrew), culminating in an explosive tribute to Jesus Christ.

The high-tech epilogue involved a careening computer room meant to simulate modern times while the omnipotent voice still droned on about the word of God. This led to the gift shop. Mad rush to the gift shop to buy Bibles and prewrath explanations of the Rapture. The cashiers, who also appeared to be preaching, were dressed in the flowing robes of monks.

I asked one of them if the workers here were theological scholars or had religious affiliations. She said they were Christians. But your founder is Jewish, I mentioned. He’s a Messianic Jew, she pointed out.

“So do all denominations work here?” I pursued.

“Oh yes, we have everything—Christians, Jews—so long as they’re Christian.”

The children were richly satisfied. For some reason, children love theme parks no matter what they are about, even if what they are about is Babylonian tablets and outraged Spanish rabbis in the fifteenth century.

We ate lunch at the Oasis Palms Café. Two guys dressed as Roman soldiers cruised by, looking like something left over from the set of Spartacus.

“Mom, would you want to have Slime poured on your head?” asked one of my daughters, then age four. We were taking them to a place where this might actually happen.

MGM Studios, supposedly the least crowded part of Disney World, celebrates the film industry, according to my husband. The Disney film industry, to be more precise. Contradictory to the buildup from my husband, it was the most crowded place that I have ever seen, aside from Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras Day.

It all starts in the parking lot. The parking lot itself is so crowded that you lose hope of ever fully traversing it. Then you come to a tram. Even at the tram there are waves and waves of lines.

Eventually you arrive at the entrance gates on the little tram. Finally you enter the park. Well the upshot of it all is this: After about six hours of waiting in really long lines for the dorky, anticlimactic and in some cases sort of quaint little shows, my husband said we could leave. My heart rose and I headed toward what I thought was the exit.

I noticed even more dense crowds forming. Barricades appeared. I darted quickly out into the street to leave. I was stopped by officious Disney guides saying, “You can’t be here right now.”

Why not? Because the parade was starting. The one where Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and other characters come through. A screeching girl chattered inanely on a loudspeaker about it.

“You can’t be here right now,” they said repeatedly with stern yet scary affectless expressions.

“Well then where am I supposed to be? I’m trying to leave this place.”

“You can’t be here right now,” said officious people in red jackets tensely.

Behind the barricades the dense crowds surged. The officious Disney people kept harassing me. Security people told me to leave the street, so I had to press into the crowd behind the barricades.

The crowd surged like a giant wave covering me. I took a step through a solid mass of people. When my feet left the ground one of my shoes was gone. I cowered down to retrieve it.

“Is this your bracelet?” asked a man pointing to a crushed shard on the ground.

Now, when you’ve been to Mardi Gras Day every year as a small child you know what it’s like to get trapped in a mob. But it isn’t an angry mob. This was an angry mob. It wanted Mickey. It wanted Daffy. It wanted the flesh from my body. Finally I surged through to the back.

I told my story again to a couple of Disney people standing under an official gazebo. “I’m trying to leave this place,” I said, “and I’m trapped.”

“Go that way,” said officious people in red coats. “Try over there,” they said vaguely.

One of them took pity on me and volunteered to escort me to Guest Relations—which sounds like a euphemism for something ominous. It was adjacent to the entrance/exit, and I sat there forlornly. They wouldn’t let you broadcast an announcement to search for your lost family, otherwise there’d be a hysterical stream of announcements constantly drowning out Mickey and Daffy.

After experiencing stark anxiety and regret for a while about how I might never see them again, lost in Disney World—they showed up on their way out from the parade. They loved it, they adored it, they saw Daffy, they saw Goofy, everything was peachy.

I went back to the hotel and healed. I read while drinking espresso at outside cafés in the sun. They went to another theme park the next day but I sat that one out. I waited for them at the dock of the little harbor built to look like Italy, which indeed it does, and Florida healed me. It did. It was the weather, the sun, the green. Can the blue sky be fake? Theme parks make you exist in a questioning netherworld of reality.

Nancy Lemann is the author of Lives of the Saints, The Ritz of the Bayou, and Sportsman’s Paradise. “Diary of Remorse” was published in the Fall 2022 issue of the Review.

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Published on February 23, 2024 08:50

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