The Paris Review's Blog, page 36

Philistines

Welcome to Disney World! Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

1.

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.

2.

“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.

Cooking with Franz Kafka

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

In Franz Kafka’s first published story, “Description of a Struggle,” the narrator is sitting in a drawing room at a rickety little table, eating a piece of fruitcake that “did not taste very good,” when a man walks up to him. The man is described as an “acquaintance,” but we soon realize he is a double, or another part of the narrator’s self. The acquaintance has fallen in love and wants to boast about it. “If you weren’t in such a state,” he scolds, “[you] would know how improper it is to talk about an amorous girl to a man sitting alone drinking schnapps.” The comment seems to threaten an unchecked appetite. What would the lonely, schnapps-drinking man do if tempted by the girl? The struggle that follows, metaphorically speaking, is between the sides of the protagonist’s character—on one side, the man who desires to stand apart from society and guard his creative self, and on the other, he who wishes to fit in and reap the pleasures of fruitcake and amorous girls.

Photograph by Erica Maclean. Fruitcake batter, from Kafka’s “Description of a Struggle.” The protagonist consumes it sitting at a tiny table with “three curved, thin legs … sipping my third glass of benedictine.”

The tension in Kafka between appetite and its fulfillment is a crucial aspect of the writer’s work. Kafka’s characters are often hungry—the performer from “A Hunger Artist” has made starving himself into an art; Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis slowly stops eating and wastes away. But their hunger is often not for the foods of this world. Gregor refers to himself as hungering as for “an unknown nourishment.” The hunger artist’s last words are a confession that fasting was not difficult for him because, he says, “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” Instead the characters seek the deeper forms of sustenance—emotional, societal, sexual, spiritual—and don’t find them.

Pretzels like these, crusted with salt and caraway seeds, are a reward of belonging to the power structure in Kafka’s The Castle.

The authors of the book Kafka: A Manga Adaptation agree on the centrality of hunger to Kafka’s work. The Japanese brother-and-sister duo Nishioka Kyōdai chose it as the unifying theme for their collection, along with what they call “power and economics.” The book was published last November by Pushkin Press, in a translation by David Yang, and its flat, emaciated characters, with their blank faces and all-black button eyes, display the condition of people in Kafka’s world, starving for something good. But why, and what? It’s the manga artists’ view that the food on the page is telling, and they often devote full panels to it. Despite Kafka’s extremely unappetizing imagination, food appears regularly in his stories and novels—and looking at it, and cooking it, might tell us something about what the characters really hunger for.

In The Metamorphosis, the food is controlled by Gregor’s family. His father, mother, and beautiful young sister, Grete, spend most of the story seated at a table outside Gregor’s room, eating. Gregor, in his grotesque new form, is not allowed at the table. Yet he finds himself on the morning of his transformation to be “much hungrier than usual.” Terrible as his metamorphosis is, it frees him from work and from being useful to his family, suggesting that he is showing a more authentic self. Incidentally, Kafka in his lifetime refused to specify what kind of creature Gregor was and forbade any drawing or representation of him. The Nishioka manga respects this and depicts the story from Gregor’s perspective without ever drawing his body. This absence opens the realm of possibility—we don’t know what Gregor’s transformation truly means, only how it is perceived by himself and others. An unknown winged creature longing for an unknown nourishment could be anything, including an angel.

Photograph by Erica Maclean. Food-grade lye, a caustic ingredient necessary to make the crunchy pretzels from The Castle.

The Metamorphosis contains many indelible food scenes, including an early one when Gregor’s sister, Grete, who at first seems like she might be able to relate to him in his new form, brings him an assortment of dishes to try. He can’t manage the “dish filled with sweetened milk with little pieces of white bread floating in it” that was a favorite treat before, but he is drawn instead to an assortment of grotesque and rotten foods. He finds himself “sucking greedily” at cheese he’d “declared inedible two days before” and then quickly, “one after another, his eyes watering with pleasure,” consuming the rest.

Photograph by Erica Maclean. In The Metamorphosis, the family’s lodgers are fussy eaters and take a critical attitude toward the meat-and-potatoes dinners they are served.

This promising avenue, however, is choked off by his sister’s increasing disinterest in him and by his family’s wholesale rejection of his new self. Later, when he tries to leave his room, his father throws apples at him. Kafka writes that “the little, red apples rolled about on the floor, knocking into each other as if they had electric motors.” This weaponized and surreally mechanized food does Gregor terrible damage. One apple sinks into his shell and leaves him “in a complete derangement of all his senses.” The Nishioka manga spends a page on the apples alone, depicting them on a wood floor whose hand-drawn grain has a creepily uniform and unnatural appearance that is also suggestive of the machine-made.

Kafka’s connection between work and technology as the forces promoting our alienation and misery seems prescient. The machine-apple is a minor note in The Metamorphosis, but we see machines everywhere in the writer’s oeuvre, from the torture machine of “In the Penal Colony” (which also serves food!), to the bureaucracy on display in The Castle. Bureaucracy itself, in this novel, can be seen as a kind of metamachine for work, and the castle’s functioning is eerily similar to that of the modern corporation.

Moreover, the structure of The Metamorphosis suggests an absent ideal, wherein Gregor could be his authentic self—perhaps doing meaningful work—and also be included in the social order and at the family table. The Castle suggests something similar. Its hero, K., flounders in endless, abstract application to work for the invisible powers that run the mysterious castle. Getting such work will also allow him to settle in the village outside its gates and lead a family life. However, K. constantly sabotages his own efforts. When he gets a taste of a forbidden fruit, like the cognac he steals from a castle official’s sleigh, he barely partakes of it and lets it dribble away.

One element of the brilliance and ongoing power of Kafka’s work is the intensely packed and folded layers of its symbolism. No symbol is ever just one thing; the fruitcake of “Description of a Struggle” is a lure to taste the fruits of corruption; the apple in the sophisticated later work is both fruit of the family’s participation in the machine and a placeholder suggesting the absent nourishment that Gregor longs for. I wondered what would happen if I made these foods—would they be doubly delicious, both alluring and sustaining, or as grotesque as the rotten food spread and as absent of flavor as the fruitcake?

I chose to make the sausage and potatoes served to the lodgers in The Metamorphosis, depicted in a panel of the Nishioka manga being carried by Gregor’s mother and Grete in faceless and stylized lockstep, surrounded by more sinister wood grain. This was the food of exclusion, served to three men who have disturbed the family home and taken Gregor’s place. I made a German apple cake, also from The Metamorphosis, with the apples visibly embedded, as they were in Gregor’s shell. Other snacks were caraway seed–encrusted pretzels crunched by an official in The Castle—a symbol of power and its tasty reward. And lastly, of course, I made a fruitcake.

Rarely have the results of any cooking experiment been so definitive. I did quite a bit of experimentation—there just aren’t perfect recipes for old-fashioned, technique-driven things like fruitcake and pretzels on the internet. But post-experimenting, with refined recipes, I produced classic, simple foods that were almost unbelievably good. For my meat and potatoes dish, I used high-quality sausages of a few varieties, including some from a Polish butcher near my house in Brooklyn, and I bought a biodynamic sauerkraut from a health food store to mix with the roasted potatoes. A sheet pan plus oil, salt, and pepper makes this one of the most delicious three-ingredient meals on earth. My apple cake was also simple but outstanding. Most cakes require a painstaking emulsion of liquids in order not to break the batter. For this one, the recipe instructed me to mix all the dry ingredients together with the softened butter, making a batter that was more like cookie dough, and pat it into a tart pan with the bottom of a glass before arranging the apples on top. The tender, pillowy results made me wonder why anyone makes cake in any other way. And the flavor was mysteriously ambrosial—various tasters guessed honey, almond, or marzipan—despite my using nothing more than the most standard flour-butter-sugar mixture.

Photograph by Erica Maclean. “No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor’s flesh, so it remained there as a visible reminder of his injury.”

The pretzels and the fruitcake were not simple but were even more satisfying. Pretzels are made from yeast dough, which is tricky to time, and they aren’t easy to roll out and shape without some experience. Once the pretzels are shaped, the authentic kind are dipped in a bath of a food-grade lye solution that gives them their leathery brown skin and flavor. They’re then sprinkled with toppings and painstakingly dried out in the oven. My recipe below is the culmination of much trial and error, but once perfected, my pretzels were addictively salty and crunchy and gave me a bizarre food high. Pretzels, in the modern world, are underrated.

There are no happy endings in Kafka—you can have either your soul or the fruitcake. In one of the several fragmented sections in “Description of a Struggle,” titled “Proof That It’s Impossible to Live” one character tells another that “one day everyone wanting to live will look like me—cut out of tissue paper, like silhouettes, as you pointed out—and when they walk they will be heard to rustle.” I’m not sure this is true of us; there is a stubborn animality to us that persists, despite our new technologies. But it is true of our things, evermore shoddy and false and disconnected. Take my fruitcake. The internet is full of fruitcake recipes. I tried several and never found one that made a cake you’d want a second piece of. So then I went offline, making elements myself, such as candied fruit peel, and choosing the fruit and nut assortment based not on a recipe but on what I could find that was made in the smallest batches and least industrially. The dried fruit, I thought, should be tart, boozy, and pretty; the nuts should be rich and fresh, and the batter should be just enough to hold it together. Working in this vein, after many tries, I made a wildly good cake that I personally couldn’t stop eating. In my book, if not in Kafka’s, it was not absent goodness but goodness itself.

Pretzels with Caraway Seeds

For the dough:

1 cup plus 2 tbsp warm water, 110 to 115°F

2 tsp light brown sugar, divided

1 1/4 tsp active dry yeast

1 1/2 cups white flour

1 1/2 cups bread flour

1/2 tsp salt

For the lye bath:

4 cups water, room temperature

2 tbsp food-grade lye

For the topping:

2 tbsp coarse sea salt

1 tbsp caraway seeds

In a small bowl, combine 1/4 cup warm water and 1/2 teaspoon brown sugar. Add yeast and stir to dissolve. Let sit five minutes until yeast is foamy. (If it doesn’t puff up, discard and use different yeast.) Once the yeast is proofed, in the large bowl of a stand mixer, stir in the remaining 1 1/2 teaspoon brown sugar, both flours, and salt. Add the yeast mixture and 3/4 cup warm water. The dough should be soft and pliable. If it seems too stiff, add more water and knead using the dough hook attachment for five minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic. Place in a lightly oiled bowl, covered, and set inside your microwave with the door slightly ajar so the light stays on. (This mimics a proofing box and is a trick for raising bread in colder climates. If you’re in a warm climate, the countertop is fine.)

While the dough is rising, which can happen in less than forty-five minutes, prepare the lye bath. Lye is a caustic substance and could damage your skin and eyes, and there are many warnings and safety guidelines available on the internet about working with it; I recommend these. It’s essential that you use food-grade lye, available on Amazon, which makes the pretzel’s hard, blistered skin. Lye is also corrosive to containers, so you want a nonreactive plastic container for the following step. Tupperware-style plastic containers say which kind of plastic they are on the bottom, and you want number two plastic (HDPE, or high-density polyethylene) or number five plastic (PP, or polypropylene). Taking all relevant safety precautions, fill the container with water, add the lye, and use a silicone spatula to stir to dissolve.

Prepare to shape and bake. Set out a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and butter it liberally, otherwise the lye-dipped pretzels will stick to the paper. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Set a small bowl of water on the countertop where you’ll roll out the pretzels. Combine the salt and caraway seeds for the topping. When the dough has doubled in size, cut it in quarters, then shape each quarter into an even log, knocking out as little air as possible. Cut each log into fifths. Cover the unused dough with a damp towel and prepare to roll out and shape. The objective is twenty long, thin rolled strands of about fifteen to eighteen inches each. However, the rolling can be challenging since the dough quickly gets stiff and overworked. Starting with your thumbs in the center of the ball, quickly and smoothly press down while rolling the dough back and forth on the countertop. (I didn’t need to flour my workspace, but it might depend on your dough.) You want to coax the dough into shape before it loses too much air. No pinching, pressing, or pre-shaping, or it will become hard to work with. As the dough strand lengthens, flatten your hands until you’re using both palms to roll, and you can really apply a lot of pressure. If the dough becomes too tough and springy, set it aside for five minutes to rest.

When the dough strand has reached the desired length, twist it into shape. There’s a good tutorial on shaping with photos available here. In brief: Take a rope of dough and make a U shape. Cross the arms over once, then cross again in the same direction to make the twist. Then bring the arms down to the belly of the U, dab each one on the underside with a little bit of water, and press them firmly to create the pretzel shape. Cover and let rise again for twenty minutes. Then uncover and let sit for fifteen more minutes to form a skin. Ideally, at this point you’d freeze the dough for at least twenty minutes to make it easier to work with during the dipping process, but I ran out of time, and it was fine.

When the pretzels are ready, dip each one into the lye bath for thirty seconds, using a slotted spoon or tongs, then place the pretzel on the greased parchment. When all pretzels are dipped, sprinkle with the topping. Bake for twenty-five minutes, then rotate the pan and bake for forty minutes more. (The steam created during baking will neutralize the lye and make the pretzels safe to handle and eat.) The timing is less important than getting the dough completely dry and crisp. You can determine doneness by tapping the pretzel with your finger or by sacrificing a pretzel to test and breaking it. If they’re browning too quickly but aren’t yet crisp, remove them from the oven and allow them to cool while reducing the oven temperature to 300°F. Return to the oven and bake ten more minutes and check. If still not done, continue baking, checking every five minutes until crisp.

Sausage and Potatoes

3 sausages, German style, cooked or uncooked

4–5 large white potatoes, peeled and cubed

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

1 cup sauerkraut

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Arrange the potatoes on a sheet pan, drizzle generously with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and toss with your hands to combine. Arrange the sausages on top of the potatoes and bake, uncovered, thirty minutes, tossing occasionally, until the sausages are cooked through and the potatoes are crispy and browned. If your mixture includes cooked sausage, it will puff up and burst, but that’s fine. Five minutes before the end of the bake time, add the sauerkraut to the tray and toss to combine. Serve warm.

Fruitcake

Fruitcakes are better with age, and many of the ingredients suggested here are better made over the course of several days. Start at least two weeks ahead of the time you wish to serve or gift your cake.

For the fruit and nuts:

2 cups high-quality* mixed dried fruit: apricots, large golden raisins, dried pineapple, red and green candied cherries

2 cups rum

3/4 cup soft, chewy Medjool dates, chopped

1/4 cup mixed candied peel, chopped (use only if homemade, otherwise substitute crystallized ginger)

1 1/2 cups chopped nuts (recommend a mixture of pecans and pistachios)

*NOTE: The key to a delicious fruitcake is delicious dried fruit. You’re looking for a combination of tart, sweet, juicy, and pretty in your fruit choices. The types of fruit you use matter less than choosing fruits that will look and taste the best.

For the batter:

1 stick butter, room temperature

1 cup dark brown sugar, packed

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 tsp cinnamon

1/8 tsp allspice

1/8 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp baking powder

2 eggs, room temperature

1/4 cup golden syrup

1 tbsp cocoa powder

1 1/2 cups flour

2 tbsp water

Chop the apricots or other larger dried fruits in your two cups of fruit mixture. (I like to leave the colorful candied cherries whole for visual appeal.) Place the mixture in a covered, nonreactive bowl and cover with the two cups of rum. You want the fruit to be fully submerged. Cover and let sit for eight hours or overnight or even longer. (You are not soaking the dates or the candied peel.)

When it’s time to assemble the cake, preheat the oven to 300°F. Grease a nine-by-four-inch loaf pan. Place the butter and brown sugar in the bowl of your stand mixer and whip until fluffy and well-combined. Add salt, spices, and baking powder and whip to combine. Add the eggs, one at a time, scraping down the bowl between each addition, followed by the golden syrup. Add the cocoa powder and flour and stir until just combined. Add the water, the dates, the nuts, and two cups of the fruit mixture, scooped out of the liquid but not drained, and stir until combined. (The fruit will swell up with soaking, so you may have more than two cups. Reserve for another use.) Spoon the batter into the pan and bake for forty-five to seventy-five minutes, until a tester entered into the cake comes out clean. Eat immediately.

German Apple Cake

Adapted from Bon Appetit.

1 stick butter, cut into pieces, room temperature, plus more for greasing the pan

1/4 cup breadcrumbs

2/3 cup sugar

1 tbsp lemon zest

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 cup flour

1 egg, fork-whisked

1 tsp vanilla

3 medium, firm, tart apples, such as Granny Smith

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a nine-inch loose-bottom tart pan and dust with breadcrumbs, tapping out the excess. Whisk the sugar, lemon zest, baking powder, salt, and flour together in a large bowl. Then make a well in the middle and add the egg, vanilla, and butter. Stir until the dough comes together in large clumps, then knead gently with your hands until it comes together in a mass. Flour your hands a little if the dough is too sticky.

Gently press the dough into the prepared pan, flattening with the bottom of a glass or measuring cup and using more flour if it sticks. Peel, quarter, and core the apples. Place them cut side down on a cutting board and make thin, parallel crosswise slices in each quarter, taking care not to cut all the way through, so the apples stay in one shingled piece. Arrange the apples in concentric circles over the entire surface of the dough, trimming to fit if necessary (you may have some extra pieces). Bake forty-five to fifty-five minutes, until the apples and crust are golden in color. Check after thirty minutes to make sure the cake is not browning too quickly; if it is, cover with a piece of tinfoil. Cool and serve.

 

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

Stopping Dead from the Neck Up

Gustav Klimt, Tannenwald, 1901. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Today we are publishing a previously unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was hailed as a promising short story writer and poet in the generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; a longtime editor at the Partisan Review, he was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (Some of Schwartz’s poems and letters were published in the Review in the eighties and nineties.) The poem below was discovered without a date, but is immediately recognizable for its recasting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from an alcoholic’s perspective. This riff is made poignant by the fact that Schwartz’s later years were characterized by mental illness and alcoholism. He died, largely isolated, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1966.

Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know.
I bought it several weeks ago.
It stands there stolid on the shelf
Making me feel lower than low
Reminding me how I am low,
Making me think of Crane and Poe.

My fatlipped mouth must think it queer
To stop without a single beer,
To stop without a single beer
The deadest day I ever spent
In boredom and in self-contempt,
Sober, sour, discontent.

My fingers have begun to shake,
My nerves think there is some mistake.
The only other thought I think.
Is how I failed to be a rake,
A story which should take the cake.

The booze stares at me like a brink.
But I must wait for five, I think.
Long hours must pass, before I drink;
Long hours and slow, before I drink.

 

The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.

The Review Wins the 2024 National Magazine Award for Fiction

Illustration by Na Kim.

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2024 ASME Award for Fiction, marking the second year in a row that the magazine has received the honor. The three prizewinning stories are Rivers Solomon’s “This Is Everything There Will Ever Be,” a disarmingly warm portrait of “just another late-forties dyke entirely too obsessed with basketball, dogs, and memes”; “My Good Friend,” Juliana Leite’s English-language debut, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, a story written in the form of an elderly widow’s Sunday-evening diary entry (“About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report”) that turns into a story of mostly unspoken, mutual decades-long love; and James Lasdun’s “Helen,” in which a man writing about his parents’ upper-class milieu in seventies London—the time of the IRA’s mainland campaign in Britain—stumbles upon the journals of a family friend, a woman who lives in what the narrator calls a “state of incandescent, almost spiritual horror.” All three stories will be unlocked from behind the paywall this week, and you can also listen to Rivers Solomon’s story on our podcast here. Enjoy!

Reading the Room: An Interview with Paul Yamazaki

Courtesy of Stacey Lewis / City Lights.

Paul Yamazaki has been City Lights Bookstore’s chief buyer for over fifty years, responsible for filling the shelves of the San Francisco shop with the diverse range of titles that make City Lights one of the most beloved independent bookstores in the United States. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 and once a hangout for Beat poets, today the bookstore and publisher specializes in poetry, literature in translation, and left-leaning books relating to social justice and political theory. Yamazaki was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community and has mentored generations of booksellers across the United States. This interview was compiled from conversations held between Yamazaki and friends of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

INTERVIEWER

What a joy it is to be here with you today at City Lights on this foggy Saturday in San Francisco. Walking in the front door, I feel like I instantly know where I am. How do you choose which books to put in the browser’s line of sight, how to signal what the bookstore stands for?

PAUL YAMAZAKI

It’s all about developing a conversation between the books. When they’re placed side by side, they talk to one another. Our goal when you walk in is to make sure that, right away, you see books you haven’t seen in other spaces and you see books you already know, in a slightly disorienting way. Right now I’m looking at Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and Mike Davis grouped together—what a great party to be invited to.

INTERVIEWER

City Lights was founded here, by Peter Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as the country’s first all-paperback bookstore, and it maintains a dedication to progressive politics and modern literature. Please describe this eccentric corner building in North Beach.

YAMAZAKI

City Lights, since its inception in 1953, has been at 261 Columbus Avenue, which is at the corner of Columbus and Broadway in the northeast quadrant of San Francisco, at the intersection of three distinct immigrant and migrant communities. To the south is the Chinese community, and to the north, the Italian immigrants established a community. To the east was the international district, which was a community of many types of itinerant professions, including seamen, theatrical performers, saloon keepers, prostitutes, and prospectors of all types. The cultural, class, and racial diversities of these communities contributed to the fact that there was a range of housing types at various affordability levels in the neighborhood, which provided cheap rentals for writers and artists.

The other important institution that was close to City Lights was the San Francisco Art Institute, whose faculty and students were important contributors to the bohemian flavor of this part of San Francisco. Every building on the block between Broadway in the north and Pacific on the south burned to the ground during the 1906 earthquake. Our building, 261 Columbus, was one of the first buildings to be completed in the reconstruction. It’s somewhat hyperbolic to say there isn’t a right angle in the building, but it’s metaphorically so. You’re walking through the same doorways that legends like Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima walked through. There’s a resonance there. Imagine this space in 1953—350 square feet, filled with magazines and books and people.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve expanded several times since then.

YAMAZAKI

Yes, City Lights now takes up three floors. It feels bigger than it is. There are eighty feet of frontage with generous window displays; they provide the main rooms with glorious light. We have changed some things, but the feeling is the same. The ceilings are twenty feet high, with tight stairways and exposed brick walls. It’s astounding that we haven’t lost anyone to those staircases over the decades! The lower level is a subterranean world, with alcoves and archways that make it feel like it’s in another century. At one point, that basement was an evangelical church. There’s an iconic photo of Lawrence Ferlinghetti here in front of a twenties sign from the church days—“I am the door.” Serendipitous psychedelia. Originally the ground floor was a travel agency run by two Italian brothers. The space that used to be a separate building next door was a topless barbershop.

INTERVIEWER

What guides your curatorial decisions?

YAMAZAKI

It’s a dynamic process. Each bookseller investigates their own subjectivities and their own responses to the texts while still understanding the context of the institution, how we arrived at this point. For example, people are surprised by the fact that we don’t carry most current bestsellers—we could sell many copies, but from our perspective, they are not consistent with our values.

INTERVIEWER

Instead, you have Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition on display.

YAMAZAKI

My faith in the reader is profound. Our role is to bring them to a new door, to a new room. We are trying to choose the best of what’s out there. How do we arrive at the best? Reading and conversations with other readers, other booksellers. If a book comes into your hands and you find yourself moved by it, ask, How did this find me? Answers to that question will always be fruitful and will always make you a better bookseller. People presume from our fairly healthy selection of critical theory that we are a highly educated, deeply knowledgeable staff. I can testify that this is not the case. But we are curious.

INTERVIEWER

How many titles are you considering in a given year?

YAMAZAKI

At least fifty thousand. There is no way that we could encompass all of that. Even if we could, it wouldn’t lead to a very interesting bookstore. I’ve been at state bookstores in Beijing, and they do that, and it’s fascinating. It’s intimidating, but it leaves it up to the reader to navigate. What we do as booksellers is create an environment where there’s a framework for that sort of navigation. I’m awestruck by buyers of bigger stores like Elliott Bay, which is nearly twenty thousand square feet. I don’t think I could buy for even a five-thousand-square-foot store. I have an almost obsessive quest for excellence in detail and execution.

INTERVIEWER

What are the factors that go into the buying decisions you make?

YAMAZAKI

For a buyer in a store, I think it’s helpful trying to envision where a book will be in the store: How is it going to fit on your shelves? Will it be face out, spine out? Will you display one copy, five copies? How many linear feet do you have to fill in the particular area where it belongs? Our most conventional shelving is poetry—A to Z—but almost everything else is distinctive, not just in naming, but in how the books are in conversation with each other. Should we arrange it regionally, break continents down by country? There are many legitimate approaches. What we excel at is that we are able to have this shimmering conversation. You can only put in thirty-three thousand titles. We carry 1.3 copies per title. It is so easy to get into a backlist buying frenzy and make it very tight to shelve. That section is already at 120 percent capacity. My colleagues are ready to kill me because it takes them ten minutes to shelve two books.

INTERVIEWER

And you have to be mindful of the browser’s experience when the shelves are that tightly stocked.

YAMAZAKI

Because there are so few face-outs, you have to be willing to explore, to invest time and curiosity, and hopefully you’ll be able to come back and start to get a sense: when you see a colophon for a certain publisher, does that excite you? Is there a conversation happening in this section which intrigues you? You’ll be able to create your own personal library in this bookstore that is forever changing. It will be part of a constantly shifting display. The surface of the ocean always looks the same. If you look at it closely, it’s always changing.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think in terms of what will help keep the store in business?

YAMAZAKI

You develop an internal map of measurements. I like to compare what we do to preindustrial navigators. We’ve always said, “I have a feeling about this, a feeling about that,” but now we’re combining our micro-observations with a bit of empirical knowledge. Now you can look at productivity per linear foot. We need to explore strategies for becoming fiscally sustainable while recognizing that the real goal is to guide our readers to a more expansive horizon. If you offer that portal, even if their initial impression might be that what you’re recommending is arcane or dense or difficult, if your assessment of the book is accurate, you will find a reader—not just a reader but a delighted reader.

INTERVIEWER

City Lights has taken notable risks in publishing, famously putting out Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems in 1956.

YAMAZAKI

A poem like “Howl” puts complexity directly in our faces. It’s hard to put ourselves back sixty-seven years ago to see the level of courage that Allen had to write that poem and put himself out there. And for Lawrence to publish it. It’s still a challenging poem, all these years later. We’ve never been looking for comfort.

INTERVIEWER

Is that generative discomfort part of City Lights’s legacy?

YAMAZAKI

If we look at the streams of art and literature through the three hundred years of the development of capitalism, our task is to challenge those notions of authority, to challenge those strictures. The artists who have brought points of vision and beacons of hope within a capitalist system have always been problematic. The challenge to the reader, then, is how to parse all of that? How to develop your standards of aesthetics and morality? I feel very strongly that those cannot be received, they must be developed.

INTERVIEWER

Looking around the store, I wonder which books mean the most to you? Which ones do you go back to again and again?

YAMAZAKI

The Man Without Qualities I’ve started at least two times, but I never got past 750 pages. The book I reread the most is Moby-Dick. I would love to reread Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel I Hotel. Karen is one of the most gifted writers of this century. She never approaches a story the same way, which is one of the reasons, I think, that she’s not better known. I Hotel is ten novellas, each approached in a different way and yet each of them still tells the story of a small group of Asian American radicals in the late sixties. Of really significant books written in the twenty-first century, I think it is one of the most underread.

INTERVIEWER

Why do bookstores matter?

YAMAZAKI

We are about the process of discovery. There has never been a year where there hasn’t been something that has threatened our existence as an industry or made life as booksellers challenging. Some of the most exciting and challenging bookstores are no longer with us. I’m thinking of Midnight Special in Los Angeles, St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York, Hungry Mind in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Cody’s Books in Berkeley. Not to be able to go to those stores any longer, at least in my topography, makes the world much smaller.

Three Lives in the West Village of New York City and the Green Arcade in the Hub neighborhood of San Francisco were the two jewel-box bookstores that bracket the continent. They were both wonderfully expansive and deep—Three Lives still is!—despite what many of us would think of as confining spaces of six hundred to eight hundred square feet.

INTERVIEWER

And yet we’ve also seen a lot of stores open in recent years.

YAMAZAKI

Yes! To see Word Up or Mahogany—or the changes at Point Reyes or East Bay—those are amazing stores that give me hope. Any time I walk into a store that has relatively new leadership I feel delight. Each store has its particular environment. It’s hard to articulate. The world disappears except for those eight hundred square feet. Each store has its own way of embracing you, embracing the reader, and creating a sense of the universe expanding. For anybody curious and interested in printed matter, the more bookstores you go into, the more you’ll realize how many different ways there are to be curious. That helps us set a foundation to be more knowledgeable about the world we inhabit. At a great store you can look at twelve well-selected, serendipitous linear inches and find a universe.

 

From Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale, to be published by Ode Books in April.

Porn: America Moore, Chloe Cherry, Bianca Censori, Maison Margiela

Screenshot of Baz Luhrmann’s movie for the Maison Margiela Artisanal Collection.

America has a perfect round ass. We watch her mount a McMansion staircase from a low angle, the framing as deliberate as it is haphazard. The camera is handheld. America has been ironing; the green polo shirt she was pressing, however, looks like it was made from the kind of polyester blend that’s spared wrinkles no matter how badly you treat it. She carries the green shirt in one hand. With the other she grips the metal railing for balance. Her stilettos click loudly on the terra-cotta tile. Each step is measured. In the background, a sparse but funky beat.

The home in which America Moore performs is Mediterranean, or maybe Tuscan. The walls are a luscious cream with butterscotch undertones. Iron balusters with rounded knuckles adorn a winding staircase spanning at least three floors. The statement windows flanking the staircase are tall, narrow, and arched. The camera struggles to compensate for the sunlight beaming through them, resulting in blown-out portions of the image. America disappears momentarily behind a support beam that’s been drywalled over and painted the same tea-stained-paper shade as the walls. There’s a potted fern at the edge of the frame.

The action between America and her costar remains contained to the staircase, though we catch glimpses of a living room suite beyond the fern. Two cream sofas with wooden feet are arranged opposite each other, creating a conversational setup. Between them is an oval coffee table placed on a rectangular area rug that’s an ebony shade of brown. In some frames, in which just a corner of the rug is visible, it could be mistaken for soil strewn on the tile floor. It’s difficult to discern the material of the coffee table, as one of the decorative objects resting on it produces a glare that obscures most details. Perhaps it’s polished mahogany. The configuration of furniture positioned to face the table includes a Biedermeieresque upholstered stool the performers also avoid, though it is perhaps the piece that would best accommodate a scene. We know America doesn’t live here. Most likely someone has rented the house for the shoot.

—Whitney Mallett 

As in the teen TV drama Euphoria, whatever plot there is in porn is insubstantial. Personally, I always let the pool boy say his lines to the bored housewife because I enjoy this artifice in the same way I do the lead-up to a real kiss: no matter what’s said, I know what’s going to happen. Chloe Cherry does, too. Every day at 11:11 and whenever Cherry finds a penny on the ground, she repeats a mantra of gratitude: “I am wealthy, I am healthy, I am thriving, I am rich, I am famous, I am loved.”

Cherry was born not with that SEO-friendly nom de plume but under the Christian name Elise, in the famously Amish region of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Souvenir shops in Lancaster are stocked with bonneted, faceless dolls, which the Amish give to little girls because, per tradition, “all are alike in the eyes of God.” This is the material culture against which the contrarian Cherry chose to exaggerate her already giant facial features: eyes, teeth, cheeks, lips.

Cherry starred in an adult parody of Euphoria before joining the actual show as the streetwise, dope-sick sex-trafficking victim that brought her from Pornhub to HBO. She says this had nothing to do with her casting. This frictionless self-invention through porn reminds me that women are magical, sex work is work, and life is a gift. The camera adores Cherry not because she’s pretty and skinny but because she has an unbeatable attitude, and she’s better than any of her peers at showing it a good time. Perhaps work can love you back!

One gets the sense watching Cherry that she is at once laughing and fucking her way to the bank, her good humor evident in the impishly titled She Is Sunburned but Still Horny, a film she wrote and produced herself. When Cherry is cumming she often mimics ahegao, an expression of pleasure derived from Japanese hentai, crossing her eyes in a heavenward gaze and letting her long tongue drape from her mouth. It looks so good on her, even though it’s not the immediate physiological expression of an orgasm, but rather a reference to cartoons. Is all sex acting? No, but great sex is. Are the stakes of sex higher—is sex realer—when the camera intervenes? Definitely, yes. What’s a nympho to do in this world? Live her best life.

It should be said that Cherry makes some rookie errors on Euphoria, her TV debut. Her emotional range is restricted to one doe-eyed, vacant stare, an incredulous look whose function is to seduce. She’s incredibly good at making that face, and it’s fun on the show because Euphoria is a poor vessel for realism. A heroin addict who never nods off, Cherry as Faye cannot help but break the fourth wall: It’s me bitch, the chick from Naughty Book Worms Vol. 57. When we watch Cherry play a hooker on HBO, we are in fact watching her get off on how easily fame can come to hot girls who fear nothing. Which is also what she’s getting off on in, say, Two Cocks are Better Than One.

—Signe Swanson

The best thing to happen so far in 2024 is Kanye West’s January 6 Instagram birthday tribute to Bianca Censori: a (since-deleted) series of posts showing his “super bad iconic muse inspirational talented artist masters degree in architecture 140 IQ” wife in an array of outfits that occasioned the Page Six headline “She’s enslaved to him.” (Actually, most of Censori’s styling seems to be done by her longtime best friend, Gadir Rajab, and the article concedes that “not all think Censori is under West’s mind control, with some noting that she is an adult and can think for herself.”) The main styling concept for Censori seems to be, simply, “no pants this year,” but yes to gimp masks, full-body tights, and small strips of black tape. West himself has been favoring all-black outfits that say “POLIZEI.” People are so mad! A couple of weeks later, West posted a paparazzi photo of Censori getting into a car, wearing a camisole that said “WET” (since revealed as a Yeezy product—twenty dollars). The paparazzi pic is a genre with which we’ve mostly lost touch; instead, we see celebrities on Instagram, the medium with which West’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, is synonymous. But all of Censori’s best outfits—memorably, the purple pillow held strategically over her midsection on one outing in Italy; or the stuffed animal she clutched to similar ends at a party in Dubai—would be aesthetically and sexually impotent were they presented to us within her home. Their impact comes from the fact that she actually wore that, in public! Never mind that West, of course, turned out to be the one directing the photographers waiting outside that tanning salon. At a time when our image culture is saturated by the uberpornographic yet wholly unsexy selfies of the Kardashian-Jenners, “real” moments of direct-to-consumer domesticity staged in their mansions, Censori’s papped pictures shows us that the erotic actually requires exteriority.

I thought of Censori and West while watching footage of John Galliano’s 2024 Margiela couture show, a thirties-inspired spectacle presented on the last day of Paris Couture Week this January. If the collection itself, which hinged on the ultratight corsets also favored by the couple, was a thesis on clothing-as-fetish-object, the runway show, like “WET,” was an homage to streetwalking. The evening began with a black-and-white film interlacing a series of soft-core vignettes (bondage via corsetry, a street chase following a passion-fueled jewelry robbery), out of which the first model seemed to literally stumble, appearing before the audience, breathless, as the film’s thief-protagonist. The models who followed walked jerkily, as though filmed in the low frame rate of an old silent movie. This was a runway fantasy situated not in the past, but within film itself. Galliano’s primary inspiration was Brassaï’s voyeuristic photography of Parisian nightlife; in the show’s faux-speakeasy setting, the insistently anachronistic glare of the audience’s own cameras rendered every onlooker a street photographer. Surrounded by iPhone screens, the models’ prosthetically cinched waistlines recalled not so much the century past as the surgically enhanced hourglasses of the Kardashians. It was these moments—in which the contemporary was made to appear in the past, and vice versa—that gave a real edge to what might have otherwise have felt like a cute historical cosplay. Like West, Galliano tells us that fashion requires a crowd. It does not take place at home. Although his show was billed as “a walk through the underbelly of Paris, offline,” it reads as a canny commentary on the present articulated through outmoded technologies, as well as a reframing of the “social” medium as explicitly “public.” Both the Margiela collection and West-Censori’s styling project were meant to be sexy, which they are. But they’re exciting because they seem to signal, finally, a cultural shift: not only out of the 2016-era suppression of sex but back into the world, back into mediation, and away from false interiorities and intimacies of all kinds. At least, that’s my fantasy. 

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

My Year of Finance Boys

Sg1959, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the hedge fund analyst knew me better than I knew myself. It was his job to predict distant developments, covert motives, hidden risks, and shortly into our brief relationship he turned his powers of divination on me. After I told him I was writing a novel about finance, he suggested that I’d been drawn to him partly for mercenary reasons: that I was, in a word, dating him for research. He took it in stride—he lived and breathed all things mercenary—but he did issue a polite warning.

“Never put anything I tell you in writing,” he said.

I’d like to think that, in his predictive genius, he also knew I would eventually ignore this warning.

***

The hedge fund analyst, whom I’ll call Jake, was the last in a string of finance boys I dated during a peculiar if productive period of my life. Almost as soon as I’d embarked on my novel about finance, I’d begun scanning dating apps for Patagonia vests and Barbour jackets. I wanted investment bankers, private equity associates, traders. I maintain that my motives were not as Machiavellian as Jake would go on to imply. I’d decided my novel would treat the technicalities of finance lightly, and I was already doing research sufficient to my purposes: auditing finance classes at the university where I was a graduate student, reading textbooks, conducting interviews. But Jake was probably right that my creative and libidinal impulses became, for a time, precariously interfused.

My interest in finance men as romantic material was as mysterious to me as my interest in finance as material for a book. I’d never earned enough for money to be anything but a source of panic. I had no idea what a derivative was and thought bear and bull meant the same thing. The distinction between a 401(k) and a Roth IRA was lost on me and in any case irrelevant because I had neither. And yet at some point during my years in New York, I became curious about the world of finance, then dazzled by it, and then—as my interest concentrated itself on the men who operated its levers—transfixed. Maybe the political convulsions of 2016 had awakened my class consciousness and spurred me to learn more about the people who shuffled the world’s capital. Maybe, as I neared thirty, I’d grown tired of financial precarity and subconsciously begun a search for a mate who would ease my misery. Maybe I saw in these men an obscure point of recognition. All I knew was that my curiosity would persist until I satisfied it.

There was no shortage of finance guys on my dating apps of choice, and they made themselves readily discoverable. On Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, they often cited their employers and alma maters, and the moment I saw “Deutsche” or “Wharton” I swiped right. But even on Grindr, where a profile might be limited to a single mirror shot and a headline reading “Hung vers,” they were easy to spot—they had a signature, beguiling blandness. As I studied their neat haircuts and plain handsome faces, as I read their hyperminimalist messages (“Good u”; “Not much”) and inspected their skimpy bios (a Statue of Liberty emoji, a weightlifting emoji, sometimes a string of airport codes and accompanying travel dates), I tried to imagine my way into their evocatively dull lives. Seventy hours a week spent at a trading desk absorbing cold light and thin filtered air, lunch at Sweetgreen or maybe Dig, an interlude of bench presses and selfie replenishments at Equinox, dinner with the Bowdoin ’08 crew at Westville, an hour lying in bed messaging with the likes of me, then porn, then sleep. For reasons mysterious to me I thrilled to the idea of this moneyed monotony. I swiped some more. I asked when they were free.

On my very first outing, I had the fortune or misfortune to have many of my preconceptions confirmed. His name was Andrew, he worked at Goldman Sachs, and he was, to my jubilation, supremely boring. He’d gone to prep school in New England and college in California and now lived with roommates in the West Village, though he had his eye on a one-bedroom in a glass monstrosity in Tribeca. He was tallish, blond, inconspicuously good-looking, and responsibly dressed: the kind of person who lives in your memory only as a pleasing, gleaming outline, devoid of eyes.

He described his life in a white-noise murmur. He told me about a presentation deck he’d recently been tasked with putting together. He told me about the challenge of assessing new markets. He told me about his fraternity days, his weeks on Fire Island. He told me about his life’s dream. He wanted to clamber up the ranks of investment banking, he explained, and then start a company of his own. “I went to the Harvard of California, and now I’m at the Harvard of finance,” he said. “I want to do something unexpected.”

We were well into our second drink before it dawned on me that our date was not going especially well, and that we would almost certainly not meet again. I alighted upon this fact as if returning to the present, which raised the question of where I’d been. Andrew probably wondered the same thing. I’d mostly smiled at him and said little. I can’t imagine that I was emitting palpable pheromones. My interest in him was intense, but it was strange and abstracted, and very likely he saw me as a strange and abstracted person. But this didn’t bother me, and the fact that it didn’t bother me offered me the first clue as to the utter bizarreness of my experiment. I didn’t want to date these men, or at least not Andrew; I simply wanted to soak in their flavorless presence. I’d conjured a fantasy of a finance boy, and here he was, in the flesh, as radiantly banal and enthrallingly uninteresting as I’d expected him to be. I felt as if I were staring into a void whose howling depths could power not just one novel but a hundred.

After we said goodbye, I walked for a while through Midtown, staring up at the kind of corporate towers in which I imagined my fantasy finance boys worked. Everything in my aesthetic education had taught me to find these buildings ugly. They were cold, faceless, feats of commanding presence that conveyed nothing so much as absence, nullity given form and made brilliant. The more I stared up at them, the more I saw in their synthetic, frictionless surfaces echoes of Andrew’s synthetic, frictionless life, and the more I understood the novelistic challenge before me. I might be enchanted by the void I’d sensed in Andrew, I might be tickled by the idea of being such a vacuum myself, but a vacuum wouldn’t carry a novel. How to imbue an outwardly dull person with vibrancy? How to locate color and flair in a life of hollowness and obliterative efficiency? Why should a reader be interested in these finance boys? Why was I interested? I went back into the field.

There followed several months of what Jake would go on to call research. I had a fling with a former investment banker who now operated an Airbnb business that appeared to be illegal. I had a fling with an M.B.A. student who went to great pains to deepen his voice and who once showed up to my apartment at midnight with a twenty-ounce coffee. I had a fling with a McKinsey consultant who fired off work emails during our dates and who, I’m pretty sure, decided to break things off after he noticed that my bathroom ceiling was covered in mildew. I had a fling with a veep at Morgan Stanley who ended his days by watching My 600 lb. Life.

In each of these men I saw the same enigma. Something about their jobs seemed to have drained them of personality, blunted their curiosity, thinned out their speech, as if the drama of being a person had been shrunk to a matter of market efficiency, as if after thousands of hours of sitting in conference rooms and hunching before Bloomberg terminals they’d mistaken their spreadsheets, pitch books, white papers, and cash flow statements for materials out of which to assemble a soul. It didn’t occur to me then to wonder if I might be projecting this blankness onto them, or to wonder what purposes of my own such a projection might serve. All I told myself was that I had to go further. I went back on the apps. And then I met Jake.

On our first date he took me to a “speakeasy” in the Village, and I put that word in quotes because the whole bar was in quotes: conspicuously nondescript entrance, bartenders dressed in vaguely steampunk outfits pouring ingredients from brown glass medicine bottles, hazardously dim lights and lurid red accents meant to evoke, I supposed, the glamour of Prohibition. Jake bought us drinks and asked about my life with a clipped precision that made me feel as if I were sitting for a first-round interview. I waited for his eyes to glaze over at the mention of my writing, but to my surprise he listened attentively.

“I love that,” he said. “That’s fascinating.”

I shrugged. “You sit at a desk and type,” I said. “It’s all in your head. From the outside, there’s really not much romance.”

Jake had gone to law school and put in a few years at a corporate firm, but he’d soon left for his current hedge fund, believing finance to be infinitely more engaging than the law. He loved ideas. He was delighted to be on a date with a fellow “intellectual.” He was hungry for book recommendations, though it became clear that his literary tastes tended toward the subgenre of TEDx: Daniel Kahneman, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Yuval Noah Harari. And yet of all the finance boys I’d gone on dates with, Jake presented the most serious challenge to my preconceptions. He had a fitful, furtive, vaguely paranoiac demeanor, and the more he drank, the more his eyes shone with a searching, apprehensive need. He was a person, in other words, intensely so. Three hours later we were back at his apartment.

All evening Jake had courteously answered my questions about his work, but now he deflected. He didn’t want to work in finance forever, he said. He’d organized his life according to a program of delayed gratification. He’d opted for an “inexpensive” apartment ($1,800 a month) so that he could focus on paying down his law school loans and funding his 401(k). He hoped to land enough sensational deals now to obviate the need for full-time employment and pave the way for an early semiretirement. He opened his laptop and showed me a dream house he’d recently spotted on Zillow: a glass-and-concrete mansion perched on a bluff in the Rocky Mountains that was going for $26 million. The house wasn’t to my taste—it seemed like the home of a Dracula decked out in Patagonia—but I certainly understood the fantasy. I too entertained scenarios in which I sold a book for a mint and escaped to some beautiful, terminal destination: a place whose austerity would complement the austere labor, the unromantic sitting and typing, that had gotten me there; a place whose solitude would give outward form to the solitary headspace in which I worked; a place where I could assume what I suspected was my natural state and be alone.

Jake shut the laptop and looked at me with daunting candor. “I’ll see you again,” he said, “right?”

I knew at once that Jake was asking of me something more complicated than I’d been prepared to give to any of my other finance boys, and for a moment I hesitated. But then I said yes, and when he asked me the same question after our next date I said yes again, and by the end of the month he was calling me his boyfriend.

I enjoyed having a “hedge fund boyfriend.” I told my writer friends about him and luxuriated in their reaction, a pleasing mixture of disgust and titillation. I thought about him while I sat writing alone in my room, and the mere fact of my connection to him, to his scrubbed professionalism and lofty salary, seemed to take the sting out of the bleakest aspects of my life: the mice that were forever darting out from under my kitchen cabinets, the roaches that were forever scurrying out from under my drying rack, the money that was forever disappearing from my checking account. When I walked through the city with Jake at my side the corporate buildings overhead seemed less alien. I felt like a participant in their ugly force in a way that I never had before. I besieged Jake with questions. I looted his bookshelves for finance explainers and investing guides and took notes. I studied his clothes and replicated his drink orders. I felt buoyant, like I’d stepped outside of myself, into that zone of nonself where, as a fiction writer, I most loved to be. If I never took the gradations of our relationship too seriously, it was because I never thought of myself as doing anything other than playing.

Very soon, however, Jake and I encountered our first point of friction. Jake liked to go to upscale restaurants, but he did not, despite his awareness of the vast difference between our incomes, believe he should pay for me. Between my graduate teaching stipend and my freelance work I made about $40,000 a year. I couldn’t keep dropping seventy-five dollars every time we went out to dinner.

“I’m wondering,” I said to him one night, “if maybe we can introduce some variety into our hangouts?”

Jake looked at me, all curiosity.

“Maybe we don’t always have to go out to dinner?” I said.

“What would you like to do instead?”

“Maybe we could eat more casually?”

The light of understanding shone in his face. “It’s too expensive,” he said.

“Maybe?”

He nodded. “I’ve actually been thinking,” he said, “that dating you could have an incidental benefit for me. I’ve been trying to spend less money anyway.”

A chill settled on my skin. I didn’t love the idea of my poverty being an “incidental benefit,” but I’d been reading his books, writing down things he said, clocking his mannerisms and persuasions. I was aware that dating him had an “incidental benefit” for me too—and that in my case this benefit might in fact be the primary one—so I said nothing.

“Tonight,” he said, “we’ll go somewhere cheaper.”

Somewhere cheaper turned out to be the restaurant extension of a famous cheese shop. No single item on the menu was in itself particularly expensive, but the dining approach was “small plates,” and by the end of the meal I’d been confirmed in a long-held theory: that there is no class enemy more fearsome than a restaurant serving “small plates.” My half of the bill: seventy-five dollars.

There emerged other points of friction. On any given night Jake drank enough for three people, and keeping up with him had put me in a state of perpetual hangover. Our sexual chemistry, never robust, soon waned. Jake also took it for granted that he was smarter than me, which I didn’t mind; in many respects he was. But I’d grown tired of his habit of subjecting me to longueurs about behavioral theory and defenses of his centrist politics. His grinding work stress often thrilled me, from a novelistic standpoint as well as an erotic one, but at times it could be genuinely disturbing. One night before going to sleep he saw a belittling email from his boss—from what I could tell, it either concluded with or consisted entirely of the words “Google it”—and immediately he got out of bed to draft a reply. I told him to wait until the next day, but he ignored me, and when I got up to pee at four in the morning he was still out in the living room, in his underwear with the lights on, staring at his phone.

By far the biggest difficulty, though, was our growing mutual awareness that Jake cared about the relationship much more than I did. When his parents came to town he told me he wanted me to meet them; I gently declined. He proposed trips we could take together; I brushed him off. The more time we spent together, the more glaring the imbalance became. He looked at me moonily, pawed at me puppyishly, made abortive efforts to engage me in conversation. But I was cold and I was only getting colder. I’d withdrawn from him at some point, disappeared somewhere, and he was struggling to pull me back.

The problem, I knew, was that my writing was finally going well. The time I’d spent immersing myself in the lives of my finance boys had unlocked something. I’d landed on a vocabulary, a pitch, a momentum by which I could transform my rough outline and inchoate ideas into a living, breathing document. I woke up each morning in my apartment eager to get to my desk. All my energy, my attention, my interest and lust for life were reserved for those hours in front of my laptop. I somnambulated through my meetings with students, my dinners with friends, my nights with Jake. I was happy, and to protect my happiness I presented the world with a flatness of expression not unlike that of so many of my finance boys. What I’d said to Jake on our first date was true. It’s all in your head.

It was in this state of contented disengagement that I met up with Jake on what would turn out to be one of our last nights together. We went to dinner with a friend of his from law school. The friend was cheerful, animated, solicitous: he seemed to detect the frigidness between Jake and me and did what he could to inject the evening with warmth. But I looked at the menu and saw the same preposterous prices. I listened to Jake hold forth on various topics with the same heedless, patronizing egoism. I looked out the window and envied the passersby. I knew it then: the experiment was over.

When we returned to his apartment Jake and I had our first full-on fight. I don’t recall the particulars, but it was essentially a recapitulation of my familiar complaints—yet again he’d talked over me, yet again he’d shown insensivity by taking me to a restaurant beyond my reach. But even I knew my grievances were arbitrary, disconnected almost totally from the base truth: I’d lost interest in him.

He apologized, defended himself, apologized, defended himself, but the more he talked, the more he seemed to see the conversation’s futility. Eventually he put his face in his hands, bent forward, and began to sob. His crying had a programmatic, theatrical quality, and I suspected that he was simply pretending, that if I pried his hands from his face I’d see no tears. But this did nothing to diminish my pity. Fictional tears are no less desperate than real ones; pretending has a sadness all its own. If my time as a fiction writer, if my year of play-dating finance boys, had taught me nothing else it had taught me this.

I should mention here that the reason Jake and I had gone out to dinner was that it was his birthday.

***

Our parting was amicable. We agreed to remain friends. Jake said he hoped he could still bother me for book recommendations, and I said I’d be disappointed if he didn’t. But a few days later, after the pangs of nostalgia and regret had largely abated, I returned—with a deliberation that enlivened me but had also begun to frighten me—to my novel.

I wrote ferociously, developing a plot around a finance student who flunks out of investment banking in part because of the weight of his imposter syndrome and his stubborn self-alienation—his inability to square the performance of a self with the work of being a real human being. Yes I was interested in capitalism, in class, in money’s outsize role in politics, and yes these were serving as the thematic buttresses for my book. But my fascination went deeper, and now I looked it in its strange face. The hollowness I’d sensed in my finance boys, I saw, that I’d sometimes invented where it didn’t exist, was really my own. And the emptiness I’d attributed to the world of finance was really the emptiness of the world I knew best.

In Jake’s mind the life of a writer had a color, a vibrancy, a flair. But to me it was an almost inhumanly cold endeavor, and I treasured it not despite but because of this. I never felt freer, never more powerful, than when I was hovering in the thin ether of pure sentience, a nonself in a nonplace, driving my characters to delight and destruction, orchestrating their financial ruins and romantic paroxysms from the safety of my anonymous omniscient perch. I thought of my time in that nonplace as my “real life,” and when I was in the grip of it I had little to offer the three-dimensional world or the people around me. The book, I knew, would take years to finish, and I resigned myself happily to an extended stay in that zone of detachment. Why I craved this detachment, and whether my desire for it was the cause or the effect of my decision to be a writer, were questions I couldn’t then answer, and still can’t.

***

Almost exactly a year after our breakup Jake surprised me with a text: Would I come to his birthday party? I hadn’t spoken to him in months, and I’d quit my habit of seeking out men in the field. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still harbor some residual curiosity. I imagined the crowd, felt my skin tingle, and said yes.

Jake had since moved to a freshly constructed tower in Midtown that, from the street, I would have taken for an office building. I rode the elevator to the top-floor event space he’d reserved, hung my jacket on a rack, and walked into a room that looked like a vast operating theater. Double-height ceilings, blinding white walls, lights so bright I found myself squinting. The crowd was modest but respectable: thirty or forty people, some standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows, others queuing at the bar, where two shirtless muscle boys poured drinks. I spotted Jake, but he was holding court among friends, gesticulating wildly to titters of delight, and I decided to visit the bar.

There I ran into Jake’s law school friend, who caught me up on everything I’d missed. Apparently at some point in the past year Jake had become very rich. I assumed some phenomenal deal had gone through. “We used to be at the same level,” the friend said, “but now—now.”

Once I’d retrieved my drink the friend guided me toward a circle of very tall, very beautiful gay men. To judge by the Teflon sheen of their faces every one of them had undergone Botox. They introduced themselves and then promptly resumed their conversation, which concerned shoes. They took turns placing their feet at the center of the circle and basking in remarks of approval. I looked back at Jake, but he was still regaling his friends. I heard one of the beautiful men say “Bottega Veneta” and walked away.

At the far end of the room, glass doors gave out onto a terrace. When I stepped into the fresh air I saw that the swiftly dropping temperature had kept everyone else inside: the lounge chairs were empty, the railing clear. I walked to the edge and laughed at myself for coming. I was several tax brackets beneath the next-poorest person here; I was an ex a few years away from being forgotten. But as I looked out at the city, twinkling beneath me like the disgorged contents of a great jewelry box, I felt a familiar, transcendent, dissociative sense of play. No one here except for Jake and the law school friend knew anything about me. I was as inconspicuously good-looking and responsibly dressed as anyone else. I could easily pass for an investment banker, a private equity associate, a trader: a presence that conveyed nothing so much as absence. The breeze quickened, my teeth chattered; I felt weightless and dizzy. Always playing, hiding, playing, hiding. After a few minutes I went back inside and made to leave.

When I approached the coat rack, however, I was presented with an unexpected obstacle. For Christmas I’d asked my parents for a Barbour jacket. Apparently my time performing a self—any self—was far from over. The obstacle was this: there were several other Barbour jackets hanging on the rack, all the same shade of dark green. I had to dig in several pockets before I could identify mine.

 

Daniel Lefferts is a writer living in the Hudson Valley. His debut novel, Ways and Means, was published by Abrams/Overlook in February. 

Ash Wednesday

From “Longing,” Prabuddha Dasgupta. From the Spring 2012 Issue of The Review.

I like the ashes on Ash Wednesday. I am at best a lapsed Catholic though it would be more accurate to say that I never really began, just that I was raised against the backdrop of already-faded-Catholicism and its associated traumas, now transmuted and passed on in their mysterious ways to me. I inherited also the pining and the predilection that many Americans have for certain things to do with Ireland. In San Francisco, I used to drink afternoons after I got off work at an Irish bar in Noe Valley, the Valley Tavern, or a different Irish bar downtown, the Chieftain, or sometimes come to think of it an Irish bar on Guerrero with big windows where my friend Graham and I used to like to watch the rain. San Francisco is a more Catholic city than most people think, and more Irish too. More Irish American, which is really what I am talking about: girls in red school uniforms and tennis shoes outside the Convent of the Sacred Heart, looking forward to football games Friday nights at St. Ignatius, the high school by the church where my feet were washed as a kid on Holy Thursday. The gold beads strewn on the street after St. Patrick’s Day parades, orange-and-green bumper stickers for a united Ireland overlaid with 49ers insignia. There are things like that everywhere, I know. But then there is the way the fog rolls in in the afternoon, bone-chillingly damp, and the washed-up light on the pink facades in the Richmond, the looming lonesome palm trees lining the meridians. And the illuminated signs for old-school strip clubs as you drive into North Beach and the Tenderloin—or the one I always liked that read JOEY’S ICE CREAM ESPRESSO SAUSAGE WASH AND DRY. Now I have lost the thread of religion. Really I am just watching the movie of my childhood again. I have a memory of dust motes floating around in a shaft of light and trying to catch them in my hands, one long afternoon, or maybe many afternoons, or never. It’s just an image.

The ashes are an image too—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Images like those that appear in Cheever’s journals, which are essentially liturgical, always marking the coming and going of Lent and Easter, because that is what gives a year order. He makes lists: “The calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones.” I meant to say something about sacrifice and self-denial, but I am also just making lists of things I have seen. Another year has gone by and it has not been an easy one. Many times I think of those Irish bars in San Francisco, their promise of interior and quiet and calm, and the allure of darkness in the afternoon. Cheever writes about the way the impulse toward self-destruction can be, at the beginning, as small as a grain of sand. “Do not drink. Do not et cetera, et cetera.” So there is something about self-denial after all. Last February, this time, I was driving south from Mendocino, past surf motels with vacancy signs. California feels washed out this time of year, eucalyptus bark stripped off all the trees, the sensation of erosion present. Yet there is effulgence too, even in this season, when it rains or is supposed to. One year in the hills north of the city: remarkable yellow blooms coating the hills like a carpet and everything brown for once astounding green. In “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot’s writes of those “who walked between the violet and the violet / Who walked between / The various ranks of varied green.” I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—a phrase that comes to mind, strangely, all the time, though I must remind myself of its coda: I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. (Are you, after all?) I picture a valley between two steep jagged cliffs, maybe I saw one in an illustrated children’s Bible, and between the cliffs in shadow, a long stretch of grass on a long road with no clear end, but it is after all a vibrant endless green.

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor at The Review.

Fun

Photo by Kelly from Pexels.

When I was another boy, I was the boy next door. He was Jase, short for Jason: generic, but with a nickname just off enough to seem real. My lover—I call him Famous, which he is to me—became Jase’s best friend, Chris, a name that needs no explanation. Jase and Chris weren’t quite boyfriends, not like we were in real life, in which we worked very hard to be boyfriends. In real life, we had to stay below the radar of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We had to figure out what domestic meant, as in home and as in argument. We were known to many for being adorable and codependent. IRL, we were gay. Because the way we were identified became an identity. Maybe that’s how it works, for me anyway: I don’t seek out identity but consider my position and articulate it like a mime feels their box.

Online, I could shake it off altogether.

Jase was just a body organized around his lickable ass, thick and juicy. If you could smell over the internet, you’d get high off the fumes. He did not have mammoth pores on his nose, like real me, or baroque ingrown hairs. He did not lose his erections. He was either unavailable or rock hard.

I claimed I was nineteen and that Chris had just turned eighteen. We were maybe six years older, and mid-twenties is a long haul from teens. We did not live in San Francisco—too fruity. I said somewhere near Santa Cruz. Lying close to the truth helped me feel convincing.

I was catfishing the catfishers—these two low-rent pornographers from San Diego County. I imagined them living in a condo. They knew how to build a website. It was called SaggerBoyz. It promised skaters, surfers, swimmers, and plenty of sagging, all in the typeface of a beach café. The homepage was Tw!nk of the Day, a big new image with the archive below, and the rest of the site was divided into scrollable grids of clickable thumbnails in the categories of skater, surfer, swimmer, sagger. The images ranged from sneaky shots of brunette dolphins in Speedos taken by some craven attendee at a high school swim meet to full frontals of sun-bleached blonds looking with shock at their newly arrived erections.

The experience was one of anticipation. The photos took forever to load via dial-up onto our iMac, so it was a bummer if, for instance, you thought you were getting a detailed hairy crack but it was just shadow. The images appeared bit by bit, some sections thin glimmers, then suddenly a chunk, a nice bit of clavicle. We ate snacks, smoked cigarettes, and listened to the Moldy Peaches during the interminable wait.

I’m not sure exactly what we wanted when we submitted our photos. To be objects rather than subjects. To be worthy of the grid. To be legitimate. As a couple, we were illegitimate. Famous only had a British passport and had overstayed his allotted time in the States in order to be with me. He could not leave for fear they wouldn’t let him back in.

As an individual, I felt illegitimate. In high school, my mixed-race friends and I referred to one another as “half.” But half-what, which half did that mean? I was half-everything that gay men forbade on their Craigslist personal ads: fat, femme, Asian.

Online, using far fewer words than I did in live conversation, I could be an easier person to like. I could emerge, as someone else, from shame. I cropped out half my big forehead—“an eight-head,” as the dig goes in Do the Right Thing— and half my brain. Offering myself up through a limited selection of angles, I could expect to be told what I was: a good looking boy, so fuckable. You look like fun.

Jase and Chris did not need to pass, they just were so boyish they blended in. Jase and Chris should be imagined skating away, and not just for the ass, but the departure, sailing towards their own horizon, not paying attention, turning their backs. The currency of Jase and Chris was in their elusiveness. Their allure was how they presented a challenge. But of course their corruptibility. And complicity. After all, they supplied these two men with a selection of graphic images.

These uploaded in horizontal bars, a too-slow striptease until finally there it all was, laid out for the two webmasters to behold—shaft and sack and, underneath, enough fuzz to make a man purr. My thick buns. Chris’s cakes. My furry legs. Twenty toes. The canine faces. Two puppies. Noses like snouts. Hoodies unzipped, falling open. Two trails to adventure. Mouths agape. What pervert wouldn’t want to wipe his ugly, impertinent cock all over Jase and Chris until they reeked, then send them out onto the streets. The world shall know they are objects.

Our emails were taciturn and confident. We’re buddies. Always together! Thought you might like these pix we took. They witnessed us shoot our wads onto the deck of my board, anointing the grip tape. Jase and Chris did not know every word to all of 69 Love Songs. They had never heard of Pierre et Gilles or Jean Genet. It wasn’t exactly catfishing, because it was our actual faces and bodies, and if it was deceitful, it was a gift. We were naked before them. They could believe what they wanted from those pictures. I hadn’t really considered they could do what they wanted with them.

***

The first known publication of the word fun, as a noun, was in 1699, in the first edition of A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, credited to the author B. E. Gentleman. The word fun was defined as “a Cheat or slippery Trick,” as used by disreputable types who speak in cant, or coded jargon used within a socially marginal group. The full title of the glossary was: A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew in its Several Tribes of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves, Cheats, et cetera: Useful for all sorts of People (especially Foreigners) to secure their Money and preserve their Lives; besides very Diverting and Entertaining being wholly New.

Prior to this, the word made its way into print as a verb—also meaning to cheat, cajole, trick, or deceive—in the sheet music for the ballad “Poor Tom the Taylor”: “For she had fun’d him of his Coin; oh then he could have kill’d her.”

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the evolution of fun within a couple of decades, though still classified as a “low cant word,” to mean “light-hearted pleasure, enjoyment, or amusement; boisterous joviality or merrymaking; entertainment.” By the time of my youth, this was the most widely used sense of the word, perhaps carrying over a residual slumming-it connotation, as in “Girls Just Want to Have …”

As fun came to be used as a synonym for sex, it retained a seedy, debauched quality. Are you looking for a little fun? says the television streetwalker into the blackness of the idling car. Eventually some gays on apps would separate themselves from hardcore cruising: not looking for fun—an amusing way of managing expectations.

***

We were unpaid sex workers. We were gaining something, I guess, by giving it away: a feeling of desirability, and the exchange of a particular type of desire, as if speaking in our own slang.

I had to think like the webmasters, which was actually pretty close to thinking as myself. I should look like a boy who might have bullied the webmasters when they were younger yet turned out to be gentle and amenable. Jase, a little tough. Chris, a little untouchable. Yet the men had access, even power. They could shoot a load onto the screen.

I think Famous was just indulging an exhibitionist streak, while for me it may have been a little more complicated, hence all the subterfuge around our identities. Unsure who I was, I could become a sex toy, a means to gratification. Exhibitionism was a way to disappear.

I figured my own self-vanishing was theirs, too. Jase would not remind these guys of struggle, oppression, self-hate, and AIDS. I did not think I could make contact with them as a self-possessed young gay man with ideas and opinions. That wouldn’t be sexy, I thought, not their sexy, which was not about a queer utopia, but the frisson within repression. Their sexy must stay in high school, continuing to seek the contact they never made.

***

In 1972, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis published an article titled “Homeovestism: Perverse Form of Behaviour Involving Wearing Clothes of the Same Sex” by G. Zavitzianos. If I’ve matched his identity correctly with a Washington Post obituary, this Zavitzianos was born in Corfu, Greece, studied in Paris, then taught at places including Georgetown University while maintaining a private medical practice and writing poetry.

His “homeovestism” article is composed of just two case studies: both twenty years old, one female and one male, both apparently a little too aroused by wearing clothes that adhere to gender conventions. The approach and vocabulary of the article are obviously pathologizing. The shrink sees them as, I don’t know, criss-cross-dressers. “In both patients,” he surmises, “homeovestism stabilized a precarious body image, relieved castration and separation anxiety and maintained regressive object relationships.”

The boy was “probably an unwanted child,” Zavitzianos says. His mother couldn’t deal, and he was raised by his sister and in fear of his older brother. At the age of three, he began to wear his mother’s and sister’s dresses. His sister encouraged this, and by the age of six or seven it was a regular thing. He preferred the company of girls, in which “he had the tendency, because of the persistence of primary identification, to become like them, to think the way they did, to imitate their gestures, manners, etc. He could no longer feel that he was a boy. When he was in the company of men, it was different. They inhibited him because he was afraid of them, but when he had a homosexual relationship, he felt at ease, because his feelings of inferiority and of dissatisfaction with his self-image disappeared.”

He had an intense relationship with his dad, “who was attached to him narcissistically, spoiled him continually, and promised him a marvelous future if he would love and listen to him.” The boy, dependent and ambivalent, often hated him. As he hit puberty and hit the showers, he saw two athletic types wearing jock-straps and “got the impression that the jock-straps covered very large penises.” His own, he felt, was not. He tried to masturbate wearing one in front of the mirror. This made it easier to get hard—his covered dick he could imagine being bigger—but he had trouble reaching orgasm. “Since puberty, he had always worn underdrawers similar to those that his father and older brother wore, which was an indication of his admiration for them and his desire to be like them. Here, then, we have a case of male homeovestism since the patient is using clothing of the same sex for his perverse behaviour. When he looks at himself in the mirror wearing this apparel, he reacts with an erection.” The mirror, in Dr. Z’s analysis, facilitates a simulated homosexual incestuous relationship in which, wearing his athletic-supporter, the boy becomes his own omnipotent father.

When having sex with a girl, the boy kept looking at her feet. But they were too small, apparently, for him to “overcome his castration anxiety,” so he gazed at his own (“and not at his penis.”) He wanted another dick to grasp and grind against. When he engaged in homosex, he could look at another penis. And:

When he sees handsome men, he stares at them as if he wanted to ‘take in’ their beauty and power. His glance finally falls to the genital area as if he wanted to ‘absorb’ the penis. At times he feels as if he wanted to steal it. He is dissatisfied with his own face and body and feels that if only he could get a good penis everything would change in him like magic. Sometimes he buys clothes, usually shirts, like those of the men he admires, so that he can feel a little like them.

He may have had a strong exhibitionist tendency—a component of homeovestism, the doctor tells us—but this was mostly repressed: “He compromises by a hippie appearance.”

In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, published three years later, Warhol writes: “So today if you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it’s probably not your fantasy but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it, and so he went and bought that look you both like. So forget it. Just think of all the James Deans and what it means.”

What does it mean? I know gay men in this model became known as clones, a term that Wayne Koestenbaum has pointed out “subtly derides a gay male’s nonreproductive sexuality: it defines homosexuality as replication of the same.”

***

The undies that I purloined from my dad, when I was maybe fifteen, were see-through white bikini briefs that he’d been forced to purchase on a trip to Paris because he’d found himself short on clean underwear and they were “fast-drying.” Everyone in my family agreed they were funny. The bunchy elasticated waistband was annoying. But they were as sexy as I could get.

When I was maybe thirteen, I had tried to shoplift a set of tiny briefs—with a torso-to-thigh photo on the box—from JCPenney. The security guard had no time for my excuse, which was that I nabbed them for my father who was in great need. When my dad showed up, looking not needy, the head of security knew I was a liar, but did he really have to go through with all the paperwork? It seemed prejudiced considering the loot had a retail value of seven dollars or something.

My dad and I were forced to go to an antishoplifting workshop, like traffic school, because the law was: If you could afford to pay the fee, and had the time to attend the session, the incident would be wiped from your record when you turned eighteen.

“Permanent record.” We heard this warning all the time when I was a kid. I never imagined anything good could possibly go on my permanent record.

I wish upon all adolescent homeovestites your success in shoplifting underpants more skimpy than any you’d be willing to purchase openly, so you won’t have to resort to pilfering your dad’s French fast-driers. Which I was wearing in spite, not because, of the fact that they belonged to my father. They were so skimpy, I figured, he was unlikely to notice their disappearance. They were the kind of item destined to slip down the back of a chest of drawers or washing machine.

The fabric was silky. My nub bent over like a defensive slug. I wore them under my shorts on a walk behind our property, through the former orchard, past the Boo Radley house, into the construction zone. There were already gently winding streets, looking like a new track for go-kart racing. The incipient houses lined up like naked adolescent androids: boxy, two-story frames. The name of the development was meant to sound French, like a type of wine. The homes were already selling, and progress seemed to be going apace, although weirdly there never seemed to be many construction workers around. The sounds the few guys emitted fell into a mellow rhythm, not obstreperous like the pneumatic drill from some movie about a dynamic metropolis.

The reverberation from a single hammer bounced off the hills. As if it belonged to the last of the gold-rush prospectors, still loony for gold. But really, I imagined at the end of the hammer there’d be a burnished, hairy arm and at the end of that arm a tawny laborer just into his twenties with vocational muscle and a willingness to molest me just to shake the routine.

I’d wait until the men broke for baloney sandwiches, which they chomped over legs akimbo, then slink by soliciting a wolf whistle but earning nary a glance. On other occasions I wore nothing beneath my shorts but a condom hanging loosely off my dick. I struggled to keep it affixed while walking. I pictured the drooping cap of Dopey, the seventh dwarf, squirming down there. I thought, If they are not elves or gnomes, just tiny miners off to work, why are they adorned in those baggy hats that seem to allude to arcane powers, like some Deadhead wizard beanie? Anyway, I felt positive that with my sheathed dick I emanated desirability and the builders could tell that underneath my clothes I was dissolute and free. Why no catcalls, then, no following?

I sat upstairs in my choice of the unfinished houses. The builders were on another site uphill so I could climb this one’s exposed stairway unobserved and claim my concrete corner. To amble through the shell of this typical two-story was like feeling one’s way through a floor plan in 3D. In just a few months, the walls would be plastered, insulated, and wallpapered, and eventually there’d be a piano upon which would sit frames, and in the frames would be photos of the people who called the place home. The first family to live in this boring house in the bend of the road. Each member of the family would be represented atop the baby grand, some appearing more often than others (only one of the dad).

The photographers will have been hired by church or school. Each will have been selected as the best of the options provided, though the person in the photograph will have liked none of them very much at all. The mother and daughters would say, I hate that picture of myself.

Then the daughter would get the one-time treat of a portrait taken in a proper studio in the shopping mall, with additional fussing reflected in the price. This photographer takes the teenage girl by the chin and points her face at three-quarters toward the future, like a mermaid figurehead on a great American ship.

As a result of this posing and titivating, with not a hair askew, plus the subsequent retouching, in which the edges are blurred like the start of a dream sequence, the sitter would be sure to look frosty and beautiful. Another effect was to depict the sitter in double, facing forward and hovering behind herself in silhouette. Despite how it sounds, this will make the girl look not crazy, but important.

Even my family, disinclined to bells and whistles, eventually capitulated, but the double-portrait commission was literally two of us: my sister’s face in the foreground and mine sideways behind. I never saw anyone else do it this way, and I suspected it was a little cheap of my parents, and also seemed to miss the point, which surely was narcissism.

The quality of production in the most elite cases was indicated by a gold signature in the corner: at a tilt with flourish, both reliable and Hollywoody. I was under the impression that the actual Alain F. Milner shot each of these photographs personally until some sagacious acquaintance explained that it didn’t matter who took the picture, Alain F. Milner was the name of the chain.

In the unfinished house, the decoration would be brand new and deliberated over by wives who would go through catalogs saying that one. The interior would involve a lot of white. You were obviously a more refined person if you were able to maintain a domicile vulnerable to the ravages of a spill. There would be no stains. The kitchen would be spotless and shiny, and the enormous, gently humming refrigerator would be stocked full of victuals for famished teenagers to heartily consume after school, before they did or did not play the piano upon which were displayed their photographs in frames.

I took pleasure in knowing that the family moving here was unaware I occupied the spot where they planned to put a wing-backed chair. My toes explored the boundaries of rooms whose measurements the husband and wife knew by heart. But I knew the actual space more intimately than them. I made contact first, and it was with the concrete skeleton under the thick carpets that would lie servile beneath their feet. I was touching the bones. Imagine their faces if they knew I sat there smoking cigarettes in the stairwell, dangling my scrappy legs over the edge, where an external wall would be. I could look out through the whole of it, when they’d suffer the limitations of viewing only through window frames.

I decided to leave behind the condom for the construction workers to find as an invitation or clue. I pried the thing from my crotch and tossed it to the floor, where it splat despondently. The texture was powdery. I pushed myself up, swanning around in a proprietorial manner then juddering forward on the balls of my feet with a sense of jazzy superiority. My fly remained open. For the present it was I who lived in this house. I knew it prenatally. I was more at one with it than they would ever be, because I knew it not as something foreclosed, but a potentiality.

I was insatiable for the sound of the hammer to stop, for the worker to lay down tools and wander bow-legged to this site on the bend, first enraged by my presence, engorged and veiny. I had never really shot a load. The cum just leaked out, usually when I was lying prone and picturing the one from Wham! who wasn’t George Michael. He’d be wearing his white tennis shorts. I had a sticker of Wham! on my bedroom door, the outside edge of which had lately found itself at the mercy of my groin, rocked back and forth on a hinge that creaked its disapproval. I was only vaguely aware of the possibility of really gushing, whether through atavism or word of mouth. It was like there was an orchestra forever tuning in my testes.

I pictured the sheet music on the piano. I needed something prescriptive like that. I imagined being forced by the hammerer. Did that mean I was thinking about being raped? Is that what it would take to relieve this immense pressure? I did not know what it is to surrender. In the meantime, if I could be an unwilling participant, maybe I wouldn’t feel ashamed.

When would I be ready to spew forth, viscid and sticky? Splatter all over this rudimentary floor. Something held me back. If only I could contribute my semen to the agglutinant that would keep the plush carpets in place. Or better still, me alongside the tanned hammerer . . . tomorrow or the day after—for he certainly does not seem to be coming over today. Only we would know the extra ingredient in the adhesive. A part of us would be a part of what glued the house together.

***

Years later, I found my glue. Famous and I made glue all the time. Why did we want other men’s eyes on us? Because we were gluey, we did not just stick together, other things stuck to us, too. The literary scholar Steven Connor has written of how childhood is like the sticky side of tape, whereas adulthood is akin to the gloss on the reverse. When we’re kids, we’ve got our last two meals on our face and bits of sandcastle in our hair and who-knows-what beneath our fingernails. Adults don’t like this. It’s a faux pas just to have a bit of oat milk foam on your lip. We were not ready to gloss over, to turn away from the world.

So we sent the photos. In the ones of Chris, he could be thirteen years old, looking at his photogenic penis as if he’s been given a trophy. As if it was his essence, somehow, his identity. Mine, delicious, but photographed sinewy, like beef jerky.

I figured if they were going to put the photos up on their site, there’d be some discussion, maybe compensation, certainly an ID check. What would we do? There was no Jase—just a Jeremy, older, with an Asian last name. Chris was actually an English scofflaw with no work visa who couldn’t give his real name.

Turns out we didn’t have to worry. They just threw the photos up. Jase, broody, his thick head and soft belly. Chris, looking inappropriately young. The other boys were off-guard, horsing around or showboating. We looked maybe a little too sensual and artistic. Still, we passed, blended into the grid. I wondered how many people were slowly loading the photos, if they waited for the complete image, left it open while they masturbated. Anyway, we’d gone public, if not exactly with consent. After too much coffee, I began to fret about my permanent record.

When I had to be at work at the video store (quite Jase) or the community college French class (not Jase at all), I burned to get home and take more Polaroids, send them to the two guys. It was just me who wrote the emails and just one of them, Paul, who responded. He’d refer to the other guy, Danny, as if he was in charge. I’d created a separate Hotmail account with an address that used the word woodpusher. Paul mentioned in an email we should visit them in San Diego County, they’d fly us down, we could sit in the hot tub with them.

IRL, we were becoming more like Jase and Chris. I took to wearing a striped polo over a long-sleeve T-shirt, puka shells around my neck, a FUCT Skateboards cap. All very Jase, meaning an attempt at Josh Hartnett. It felt fake but real, and it felt good, and hot, but also kind of half-assed, like how Dr. Z’s young man compromised with “a hippie appearance.” We still had to look indie enough to stay credible with friends. We couldn’t go the way of Abercrombie & Fitch. Famous had not long ago experimented with Rocky Horror–ish weirdo femme looks, painting his nails and eyes and lips and hair, wearing mesh and making video self-portraits smoking sad cigarettes. But somehow as Chris he was perfect. The ten pounds the camera puts on remade him into everybody’s all-American just-eighteen dream.

I had no idea at the time about Dr. Z’s diagnosis, thankfully. It would have fucked me up. Or rather taken away the feeling that I had the right to be fucked up in my own way. I had started considering my gender in variations like a snake eating its own tail: Was I, for instance, a femme boy’s mind trapped in a woman’s soul trapped in a butch boy’s body? This went nowhere, but that was totally cool, because the permissive culture of San Francisco allowed me to send some ripples through my gender, and to laugh at my reflection.

So why was it that what was turning me on was the imagined condo, the hot tub invitation? Suburbia had become my fetish. How could I be a truly hip San Franciscan if my fantasy life wasn’t Radical Faeries or fisting, but SoCal surf camps and stolen fumbles between the two-car garage and the kidney-shaped pool?

A lot of us spend the first part of our lives with our heads down. As we surmised that we were unable to be fully dimensional beings, we acquired another layer, some kind of fakery. When I was Jase, even as I leaned in, I chafed against that layer. With time, I came to respect it, live alongside it, a part of me.

Around the time I conjured Jase, I had mostly abandoned contemporary fiction. I found new novels too often rang false. I liked old novels because I didn’t have to decipher their authenticity—they were too far removed from my own experience.

Contemporary porn, on the other hand, I admired very much. We watched Dink Flamingo’s Active Duty series, in which military boys, or those pretending to be, tug on their cocks boastfully, and gradually succumb to each other’s curiosity. Were the dog tags authentic, or provided by Dink? Did it matter? There was an insatiable anticipation to the parts of these videos where the pair (or trio) sits on the couch or bed together, becoming increasingly horned up from their own and the other’s hesitation.

My other favorite studio was Defiant Productions. It delivered straight skaters. They looked stinky. The armpit bushes and greasy hair were throwbacks to a raunchier homosexuality, yet made safe by the fact that the dirty boys were supposedly not gay. If gay men had become epilated and wholesome, and gay bars ice cold and all of it telegraphing disease-free, the skaters made it possible to indulge the grungy, bruised, and scraped, the ripe, foul, and filthy. As if straight guys didn’t already have enough privilege, they were now the ones entitled to be unclean, too. At some point, Defiant adopted the slogan “the best in horny, all amateur, skater boy action, proving that you don’t have to be gay to have hot man on man sex!”

***

One morning, I brought up the SaggerBoyz site as usual, and there was Chris, his familiar blue hoodie and checked shirt falling open, his pale penis hogging the foreground. His dick was chewing up the scenery. He was Tw!nk of the Day. I went hot in the soles of my feet and my cheeks, which is my first reaction when someone has undermined or offended me. I was envious. Jase may have been on a clickable grid—skater section—but Chris was the homepage.

Yo Paul, I emailed later. Saw Tw!nk of the Day, so cool. –Jase

Hey Jase! Yeah! he responded. Don’t forget to log on tomorrow. It’s going to be YOU.

Aw, man—but Chris is better. So hot! –Jase.

Yeah, Danny thinks he’s great. Gets him off! But I like you. Very handsome! –Paul

I checked SaggerBoyz the next day, and again, for maybe a week or two. Jase was never Tw!nk of the Day.

Why the empty promise—was I being strung along, unaware I was only a pimp for the truly marketable Chris?

Soon enough, Famous insisted we go camping. We needed to get away from screens. And out there we breathed in redwoods and heard brooks babble. We drove home smelling of campfire. We listened to Cat Power. We noticed boys on the freeway, drivers and passengers, that looked like real saggers, with a girlfriend or a group of other dudes or their families. An arm steering the wheel, or leaning against the window, headed towards front lawns, towards condos and hot tubs, their heteronormative lives, our homosexual fantasy.

I stopped checking SaggerBoyz, and the Hotmail account. We left behind the names Jase and Chris. But we had taken in their beauty and power, absorbed them, like a happy version of homeovestism. Not long after that we began having group sex with other fags, who had also taken in and absorbed the essence of handsome males they have seen. Like Dr. Z’s case study, they bought similar shirts to the men they admired. We took those shirts off. We learned a different form of surrender. It felt real, and enough, and we had fun.

 

From SLUTS: An Anthology, edited by Michelle Tea, to be published by Dopamine x Semiotext(e) this April. 

Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of Gay Bar, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, and the forthcoming Deep House.

Ananda Devi and Callie Siskel Recommend

John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, a novel about an interpreter at the International Court of Justice, I found myself underlining every page. Perhaps the identity crisis of the narrator—“I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable”—had transferred to me. Or perhaps the clarity of her sentences left me defenseless. I was instantly immersed. Like all of Kitamura’s fiction, Intimacies is about the psychic effects of inhabiting another person’s mind. The novel explores the narrator’s complicity as she voices the words of a war criminal and the personal crises of those around her. Can channeling others shape (or erase) our sense of self? And how does private grief deepen or prime a precarious selfhood? Even when she interprets the words of a victim, she concedes “the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.”

My poems in the Winter issue of the Review grapple with the boundary between self and other, image and reflection. I wrote “Echo” not long after finishing Intimacies. Echo, whom the goddess Hera silences, is left repeating the last words of the object of her love, Narcissus. The effect is a kind of trailing-off, a depreciated self. Though Kitamura’s narrator also feels depreciated (“I realized that for him I was pure instrument”), the novel’s stunning end reconstructs the first person. Intimacies is that rare novel that, fittingly, reverberates in your mind.

—Callie Siskel, author of “Narcissus,” “Echo,” and “The Concept of Immediacy”

I came back from London on a miserable winter day, feeling fluey and gray, filled with an end-of-year, end-of-era angst that I saw reflected in the heavy skies and the mountains looming, gloaming, above Geneva.

Close curtains and shutters, doors and windows, pour a glass of wine and go straight to bed, I told myself. Play Scrabble against the computer. Do the Guardian crossword. Forget that the world is breaking apart at the seams. Forget that it will probably only get worse. Forget the novel by Velibor Čolić that you have just read, which conveys, with so much harsh, unflinching poetry, the stink and putrefaction of a soldier’s life.

And then. Walking into the house warmed by a chimney fire, I was told by my husband that I had received yet another book in the mail, this one from the U.S. I opened the parcel with a sigh, but was still intrigued, as I was not expecting anything from there. And so, it came out, a beautiful, textured orange-and-gold slip case from which peeked an orange-and-gold spine: Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. A new illustrated edition, from the Folio Society. I took a moment to caress the case and marvel at its sensuality. The book slid out. The cover illustration was dreamlike: two male profiles, facing opposite directions, a river curving in between, a hilly and domed city filling the top of their joined head. Dark clouds above. Another distant city below. I was enchanted. The pages of the book were like silk. I glanced at the various illustrations, all as beautiful, as evocative, and read the first sentence:

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.

Oh wonder! The winter blues (ice blues!) dissipated. The skies cleared. All my senses were ablaze. I opened the card accompanying the book: “ ‘Dear friend’ doesn’t even begin to describe this friendship of ours that’s so much more than friendship! ‘My dear author’? ‘The aunt I never had’? No, the truth is that I like best the word that you used some years ago: complice. Ma complice, chère Ananda, c’est toi.” 

The gift was from Jeffrey. Jeffrey Zuckerman, my translator, the one who gave my novel Eve Out of Her Ruins its wings, and who translated “Ice Blue,” published in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review. I was moved to tears. And my mind opened out to the possibilities offered by these invisible cities. The breadth of Calvino’s imagination as he recreated a world of possibilities and impossibilities. Calvino, whose work I love but have neglected to reread in recent years. He writes,

Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

Reading this, I glimpsed a possibility for a novel that I had been toying with in my mind for some time. Not only was Jeffrey’s gift a book by a marvelous writer, but it could also provide a key to a future book of mine.

But most of all, Calvino swept me along and aloft as I read him, to the top of crystal towers or to the bottom of a city, where the depths have the smell of the dead. We need to delve deeper to catch a glimpse of the faintest of lights above.

—Ananda Devi, author of “Ice Blue”