The Paris Review's Blog, page 37

A Winter Dispatch from the Review‘s Poetry Editor

Illustration by Na Kim.

In her Art of Poetry interview in our new Winter issue, Louise Glück expertly captures the psychodynamics between older poets and their perennially youthful students: “The younger person is reminding the older one of the early ferocity of their vocation,” she observes like a practiced analyst, while “the older person is a representative of stubbornness and persistence and sometimes a kind of majestic fatigue.”

Glück may not have assumed an air of majestic fatigue when I was her student in college three decades ago, but my classmates and I certainly all vied, often without success, to impress her with our ferocity. She was wry, unfazed by the world’s peculiarities—as I imagine she was in the first workshop she ever taught, at Goddard College in the sixties. “Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there,” she tells her interviewer, Henri Cole, “which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young.” I like to imagine the future Nobel laureate looking up from a page where some student had bared their soul to see others baring their bottoms out the window.

You can eavesdrop on the kind of advice Glück would give young writers, at once metaphysical and down-to-earth, in this issue: “Always, one thing to do, if you’re stuck, is to ask a ques­tion in the poem,” she reminds us. “A question shifts the mechanism of the poem.” For more insights into how poems happen, you can read our Making of a Poem feature with Farid Matuk, whose poem “Crease” you’ll also find in the issue. (“That near rhyme of love and of was tricky for me,” Matuk confides.) Or check out our Making of a Poem with the translator Aimee Chor, who brought Nadja Küchenmeister’s “feathers and planets” to our pages: “The English is in some ways very unlike the German,” Chor notes. “Wäscheständer does not sound like laundry rack, and quark is not really the same thing as cream.”

Also in our Winter poetry mix: more laundry, in Alice Notley’s “The Answer Is Awe”; three poems by Callie Siskel, another student of Glück’s; “defective goods” in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “Water Becomes Water,” translated by Eleanor Goodman; a dead bird on a doorstep with “something / Moving inside of it,” brought to us by Dorothea Lasky; leporine fisticuffs, courtesy of Angela Ball; and an unsettling posthumous contract signed by Harryette Mullen, which concludes (hint hint) with the speaker’s promise “to pay tribute with offerings that confirm my commitment and extend my status as a faithful subscriber.”

 

Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.

My Brush with Greatness

Joan Collins in Drive Hard, Drive Fast (1973). Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It was 1990, and the man I loved had died. I was out all the time. I just couldn’t stay inside, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit for a spell. A new shop opened on Broadway, a bakery that was also a café in the low eighties or maybe the seventies, on the east side of the street. You could sit there with a coffee and maybe—after God knows how long—you would also buy a muffin out of obligation and shame.

The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience.

In the spring of 2002, Geoff Dyer published a piece in The Threepenny Review called “The Despair of Art Deco.” It’s a wonderful piece about nothing, really, meaning it’s my kind of writing, in which for seven pages or so Dyer recounts a recent visit with his girlfriend to South Beach, Miami, where he plans to write about the art deco hotels that attract visitors. Instead, he sees his first dead body, or at least the soiled socks of a woman who has jumped from a balcony to her death on the sidewalk, careful to avoid landing on anyone.

Earlier on the visit, Dyer and his girlfriend are asked to take a photograph of a couple standing in front of the house where Versace was gunned down. The patch of sidewalk has become a site of what I would call “dark tourism.” Dyer doesn’t call it that, but he understands there is some attraction people feel to standing in proximity to where something gory and grisly has taken place, in order to feel the double thrill of not yet being dead and also being reminded that every life goes in only one direction.

Another afternoon, walking on his own, Dyer comes upon the recent suicide. A passerby tells Dyer the dead woman was seventy-two, and he says that the heat of Miami makes people crazy. Dyer considers that Rome is just as hot and people there don’t routinely pitch themselves from balconies onto the pavement. In Miami, Dyer suggests, perhaps the despair of art deco causes people to jump, the despair that rises off architecture that always looks better from the outside than the inside.

What was I writing in the notebooks I carried to the bakery-café? I was writing dreck. I wasn’t writing dreck in my published work, but this was years before I’d meet Richard and together we’d establish better guidelines for writing in notebooks than I had at the time. The dreck I was writing was about one piece of the sadness rising off me or another. In these awful entries, I’m clutching at the damp hankie of my life. I’m not so much sad about being in the world without a man. I’m sad about facing starkly my troubling personality in the unshaded world without a man. I knew this was not a fit subject for writing, but I didn’t stop writing the dreck. I don’t think I even tried.

One day Joan Collins paid a visit to the bakery-café, and the excitement still lingers in my mind. Joan in the bakery, a streak of glamor, like the façade of an art deco hotel, sent to lift us from our forlorn existences. According to Dyer, part of “the despair” of art deco is that it includes a wash of shabbiness as well as of brilliance, and you could say the same thing of the glamor of Joan Collins or the glamor of anyone looked at close up.

The visit was not a surprise. We’d been primed for days and perhaps weeks by the usually irascible boss. He was her devoted fan. There were pictures of Joan on the walls. Suddenly, we had a purpose as props in the bustling café. Did he instruct us to give Joan space and allow her radiance merely to fall on us? I hope so. I don’t remember. Let’s say he did. In this moment, all of us are joined with the boss in his wish to host Joan beautifully. All of us want him to be happy.

Joan pulls up in a town car. Paid for by the boss? He escorts her into the bakery-café, and ushers her to a table, showing her around a bit before she’s seated. It’s the period just after she has ended her run in the prime-time soap opera Dynasty, and Joan will be a little at loose ends for a while after the towering success of her scenery-shredding portrayal of the vixen Alexis Carrington. She was great, snarling, and camping. It’s her crowning achievement as an actor. By the way, Joan was born in 1933. She’s ninety as I write. She’s still working. Go Joan!

In the bakery-café, she is full-wig and fake-eyelash swish, her vowels so sweetly plummy bees suddenly circle her head. She looks fragile. There’s a tottering tilt to her bearing. What am I doing here? she might have been asking herself. Who is this man who loves me? What is my role here? What is my role in life in general?

Do we, the rabble, stay back and stare courteously? Does Joan leave with a box of rugelach? Does she stay long enough to make the boss happy? Can anything make any of us happy?

Yes. This memory makes me happy. While Joan is with us, the boss is gracious and Joan is gracious. They pull me out of myself, and I write a different kind of entry, thinking about all of us gathered there, thinking about the sadness of the boss. Somewhere, there’s a jaunty, outward-looking piece I attribute to Joan. Some kind of exchange is set in motion, each side a site of tourism for the other. We inject the glamor of our humdrum realness into Joan as she wafts the despair of her fading stardom onto us—the despair, like the despair of art deco, that always includes the wish to show a good  face and can, in this case, brighten your point of view rather than prompt a leap to your death.

Joan is gallant to have come and generous to have taken the time to sit in front of her mirror and create for a fan the Joan Collins, with her sexy overbite, that slides into the world. At this time, she’s between marriage number four and marriage number five. She won’t marry again until 2002, when she weds Percy Gibson, who is thirty years her junior. Go Joan!

After a while, the bakery-café has to close. Probably, we are the cause. It takes a few years. I’m sad when it’s gone.

 

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Streaming Now column for LIBER: A Feminist Review, and she writes the Everything Is Personal Substack.

Essay on the Sky

Praia Brava, 2015. Photograph by Isaac Katz.

Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine?

Mountains uplift, spray down to water, cream’s reddening, blocks it off to the right.

Bastions, mirth, huge extensions, structures of no hand, silver too is penetrant.

[Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 4, 2004]

 

At this time of day (the day has experienced enough and gone through transformations, travels even), a glow from the sky embraces the neighborhood, and as it goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, takes in the whole city in its look, and that glow is comforting. One realizes it is raining lightly, and the rain too takes part in the glow that several angled clouds have hooked into lower down.

[São Paulo, Brazil, February 24, 2005]

 

All day not really a cloud in sight—a still blue sky one could see and not feel threatened by. The day would not go very far, not splinter into challenges and excitement. Then, suddenly, they move in and begin to change the sky’s outlook. One large, potato-shaped cloud hovered over the tree line. Much later, at dusk, an out-of-focus cloud echoed the land’s bared curve.

 [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 2, 2006]

 

A bit of sunlight touched the sky’s lining, and there was sun setting in the sky, but mainly it was a sky full of clouds. Their textures could be made out overhead and extending far into the distance, over the water and other islands’ darkening outlines. Much farther out, the sky lightened. Out there, white clouds instead of gray, and the mind’s imagination of a clearing for travelers by boat. The full moon half appeared through banks, a lemon sherbet over mountains along ocean edge. Then it disappeared from view. Later, while the moon itself remained hidden, its light could be seen projecting high into the sky against cloud shapes, stage-lighting a place known as heaven.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, Brazil, April 2, 2007]

 

There are so many things to see in the sky. There is the distant, silent, plane, almost invisible. There are the twin white moths that come circling one another. There are the buzzing propeller planes, with their reminders of gas and death. Mainly, there is the infinite blue, streaked with white cloud material. Our senses tell us it is infinite, and the feeling it gives us is of a moment that does not end and that connects to centuries before and possibly centuries ahead.

[Amagansett, New York, June 24, 2007]

 

A long, almost straight line veers gently upward, just above an indistinguishable band of cloud in the distance that hovers above the sea: their extensions seem endless to the left and right. A thin, dark blue band sits on top of sea’s horizon, separating it from the sky; the rest is gray at this hour, just past sunset. The sky would be deliriously light, were it not for the gathering clouds. The clouds had touched the mountain tops earlier, but even now, with the sky filling and lowering, there seems to be a light center, far out at sea; there always seems to be this light center somewhere. The receding grounds of landmasses, successively more defined against the sky, are classic shapes, remembered from other trips. The center’s color is an almost cream, just barely color, that confirms distance and a sense that there is another place there.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, March 18, 2008]

 

Today the clouds kept threatening to intervene; they did intervene, in fact, but no rain ever fell from them. In the morning, the sky was a sharp brightness, which effected the classic energy weariness known as the beach. Later, the sky accepted that today would be a mixed pattern, and it relaxed the tension between rain and sun. Both tendencies were allowed to coexist. The clouds flattened into languid strips, while a healthy swath of clear light once again dominated the central stage. I noticed the sky’s personality even at night: its great blankets of different grays, a seeming presence that dominates the lack of light.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, March 19, 2008]

 

In the morning, haze gives a comfortable feeling to the sky. It evens out texture, making the mountains that sit on top of the sea, the sea itself, and the few hovering clouds all feel made of one substance. The clouds in the morning are like hats. They hover just on top of the mountains; nowhere else in the sky are they visible. The sky’s color is an open, light blue. Yesterday, in the evening, the blue was like a memory of blues from childhood blankets or teacups, from someone else’s childhood.

On our afternoon walk on a long, hard beach, about two and a half kilometers each way, we saw the typical sharply rising mountains, surrounded by sky, clouds, and the flat plane of the sea stretching out toward mountainous islands and beyond. On the way back, an elaborate display of clouds was suddenly visible above the facing mountain. Against all we’ve been taught, it did appear to be a large figure, with arms outstretched, as though welcoming us to its bosom. It looked like a mother, like my mother, but when I looked more closely, of course it did not. I thought of the figure in the sky as welcoming us to death. That is, that death need not be so cold. It is cold, literally, and it is the end, but we could learn to welcome it, as it seemed here to be welcoming us.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, March 20, 2008]

 

Today, we went to a beach named Fortaleza to take the boys swimming. It was crowded, and there was that ancient sense that people come to the ocean in the summer for everything and nothing: for relaxation, for food, for exercise, for diversion, for sex, for comfort, to pass the time before dying. The swimming, and everything, was a little too crowded. But looking up, we could see a sky that was like an epic; it would need an epic poem to recount every incident, the scale from minute to sweeping, the diversity of textures. It was a canvas on which was written the whole of human life, from the beginning to the end, even though the end has not yet come. A mottled field seemed to cover the entire sky, and over that, or in addition, there were long striated stretches that seemed to serve as natural demarcations, as rivers, or cliffs in the sky. Then there were spirited puffs that seemed to stand up from the mountains, sharply, as if in emphasis of some rising natural force. Far above, one perceived an entire other layer of life, immobile in comparison with the rapidly moving present down below. All this played out like a movie, a detailed backdrop to the daily routines enacted on the beach, a changing commentary, easily read, if only one stopped long enough to look up, instead of habitually looking to the earth.

In the afternoon, I saw a cut of light against the turgid darkness of preparatory banks. It was the sun of the ocean, which seems to play every afternoon, no matter how cloudy the day. It breaks the sky somewhat, brakes it, causing it to open and let in a reminder that tomorrow starts all over again, the color gradations of the successive islands receding into the distance.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, March 21, 2008]

 

Today is much hazier. A uniform quality to the sky, occasionally broken by tumults of sun. A threatening gathering is taking place in afternoon, prepared to coexist with the mountains that run down to the sea, sail- and motorboats, the endless curling waves, and even the tiny people sprinkled at beach’s edge. As we woke this morning, we thought, Isn’t it great how every day begins brand new and fresh, with absolutely no baggage in terms of light and weather.

And now, above the receding grays of mountain islands, the sky has taken on a dramatic elaboration, directly in the center, with strands of light blue and jagged shards of bright white. As time passes, the sky changes, the first and most accurate clock.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, March 22, 2008]

 

I am almost becoming overwhelmed by the responsibility of responding to the sky. The more I pay attention to it, the more there is to notice. There is almost not enough time to write it all down, particularly as it constantly shifts. In fact, the sky is never not active. The myth that the sky becomes black at night is easy enough to disprove. Only look up at night and you will find it full of incident, albeit of a subtler nature than that with which it is colored during the day. There are infinite shades of gray and darkness, clouds are visible, and the lights continue to change, depending on the celestial bodies. Stars create elaborate punctuations and phrasing, causing some to postulate on their arrangements. Then there is the moon. We were walking on the long, hard beach one afternoon, when suddenly we spied, just next to a mountain, the enormous, evanescent full moon appearing in the blue sky. Sitting on the beach at night, with the full moon by now high in the dark sky, its light reflected on the ocean waters, one’s whole being was taken over by something that does not have a name.

I remember thinking that the most important thing for me, in order to write about the sky, was to have access to an open stretch of horizon line, where sky meets sea. A big, open sky is important, as one could have in the western United States. But the actual line of contact between elements is the trigger that enables these observations. Back in New York, I seldom even notice the sky and rarely feel it. When I do, it is as a bright color that is reassuring, as if to tell me there are other skies, and actual horizons, somewhere.

The other day, one small cloud made one small shadow on the top of one small mountain.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, March 23, 2008]

 

I never thought I’d be able to notice the sky in New York, but lately I have been. I was very sick with flu last week, and in the midst of my torment, I was able to look out the window and see the patterns there. Now that I’m better, I go every morning to Twentieth or Twenty-First Street to look at the morning action. This morning, on Twenty-First, I looked up. The sky this week has been the crystal blue of a Frank O’Hara poem, but today it had the special detail of fantastic cloud illumination, seemingly uttered, or stuttered, across the entire sky in repeating pattern. Then, a grander pattern revealed itself: quadrants of the sky, visible up between building towers, had different overall effects: some more wispy, others precisely outlined. A plane appeared, flying through this background decor, making a statement, as did the straining, decorated building tops, which were suddenly given meaning by the fantastic delicacy of the sky.

[New York, April 18, 2008]

 

Always in the distance, there is action, a strip of horizon visible between islands and promontory edge, and there we see the day’s performance, which, at the end, is always something full of light. Looking up, one can see, quite close, the indistinct shapes of fluff, while farther out, over the horizon, there are extended shapes that stay, as if solid, for long periods of time, although, of course, after a few minutes, they have changed, weakened, blended into other forms. Then there is the light play, sun’s dynamism hitting solid form, that gives meaning, if there is any, to the day’s entire occurrence. We can look out and imagine a drama that has some unexplained connection with activities that have haunted us during the dailiness we have lived through, not realizing that now it is ending. And even now, looking out, there is the aftermath, or conclusion, of the statement, a blending together of earlier statements, a new arrangement and fusion, which does not quite take the place of what came before, being weaker, but which, being more subtle, has its importance at the dinner table, after dark has fallen.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, December 29, 2008]

 

In the morning, a huge cloud hovers over the island. The light comes through, everywhere filtered, the sun not yet. The morning comes up, and it is light. The ocean reflects the light; at the horizon (blessed horizon!) there is hardly a difference, but it is there: that place, that strip, where sky and sea meet that offers an actual escape, whether it be by heart or by oar. Blue is a gash, coming through white feathers; the clump still resting on top of humped island. Behind, the scenario is repeated; another cloud sitting, barely touching a more distant landmass. Amazingly, there are those who never see the sky, even though it is right there, above and around them their entire lives. The sky is the deepest thing we can see into. It provides all answers, if there are any, and escapes. It is the present, the future, and also the end, into which we all can escape, when the desire is there.

There is a story in the sky today. It is a complete narrative, an Iliad perhaps. Had one the time and ability, one could look at the variations, striations, larger themes, subcategories, embellishments, epithets, the appropriateness of detail; one could read the whole story. But one can also read the whole story simply by taking it in, can catch all the subtleties in one long glance.

Now the grayness is an infinity of color. On this, the last day of the year, one can yet see the sky breaking through out there, at horizon distance, and higher, above the landmass. There is Tiepolo’s fantasy of shades of lightest blue, palest pink, bright white, highlighted by darker grays in pattern upon pattern. Sky now is clearly a darker color than sky. Horizon there always welcoming, always light in tendency, extension, and the possibility of a new life, or imagination.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, December 31, 2008]

 

This sky is one I’ve never seen before: completely black. But black of day, not night. It cannot be anything but ominous, though someone I love thinks it beautiful. Its darkness scares me; only a thin crack of light showing above distant mountains, the ocean still invisible. How can anything break through that blackness? Won’t it remain black all day? Won’t it remain black forever? On a morning before dawn—waking up with doubts, loss symbolized, sleep punished, everything impossible and mistaken, the comma an obstacle, separating each thought from the next—can this thick, murky black ever lighten, ever show again a day of possibility, in which reason and intuition and human caring can once again rise? After a few minutes’ difficult meditation, a slight break in the black. How beautiful, my companion murmurs. A slight glimpse of ocean’s moving (its sound always present in the black). And now, thank God, the sky has begun its ascent. The day will rise. Pale shell colors showing, illuminating familiar emerging shapes of islands, creams, merging through strips—shapes now natural, not evil—to blues, alleviating, rising, turning into normality of day, with bird sounds, shapes of trees and plants near sand.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, January 3, 2009]

 

Lie on your back. Look straight up. When you are free from working, free from helping others, free from all obligation, that is all you need to do to be entirely happy: lie down on your back on the earth, the grass, the sand, and look up at the sky.

[Praia Brava, Brazil, March 18, 2009]

 

There is always that possibility of escape. It is there—look!—at the horizon, and there too in the deep space straight overhead. Why is it that we cannot really look at the sky in the city? We see it, of course, but it is like a pasted backdrop to our dreams and worries. Outside the city, we are free to really look at the sky. (One of the only places this can occur in the city is on a rooftop, where we are closer to the sky, and fewer impediments obstruct our view). On the beach, or in a field, we look up, and that’s when we are able to travel. It can even happen under a tree, for a tree is no impediment to seeing the sky—rather, it provides an appropriate decorative scrim, through which particular sections of blue each equal the unlimited expanse.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, March 20, 2009]

 

I feel I should give up on this project—how can someone think anyone will be interested in reading about the sky, without any reference, no underpinning? If I were to write about paintings of clouds, or descriptions in literature, then that would be considered significant. I could fill a book with examinations of other people’s ideas. But this is exactly what I do not want to do. I want to be free from underpinning.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, December 28, 2009]

 

Light rain and the singing of cicadas—various tonalities, screeches, raisings of volume. It could be raining for real, but the sky above and far out over the water is not only open, opening, but fresh with the openness of day’s end. The pinkness stains sky’s midsection, amid blotches of light gray with bluish tints. It is the openness that impresses most, allowing the cicadas’ and waves’ constant crash, flatness of water stretching under sky’s late play, and the way trees hug the land, moving down mountains to reach the water; they stand out there, visible at edges, against sky. There is a certain heat, but the breeze lifts and dispenses with it, and the mind too dispenses with whatever has been weighing on it.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, December 24, 2011]

 

I should think it time to stop this piece. I realize I won’t ever get anywhere, just as the sky, too, never gets anywhere. It changes, and the changes can have effects, but the sky itself is a canvas, or screen, on which spectators map their expectations and fears. I am trying to live without fears, or memories—where memories mean anguish or remorse. But still I want to study the sky: that is, look at it and think the thoughts I am free to think when looking at the sky. So I will not stop. I will keep going, looking up, trying to find it above trees, between buildings. Great light breaks through cloud layers at day’s end. Blues seen though gray massings remind one of paintings. The shift across the sky, from left to right or up to down, seems architectonic, though in fact it is completely random. Light from a solitary opening has expanded to become the salient theme of this moment, as the ocean surface picks it up, refracting it in myriad shifting reflections of that theme, amplifying, seconding, quietly adding to its easy statement in time.

[Praia Brava, Ubatuba, December 31, 2012]

 

I can remember what I saw. A tumbling, sexy, mass, topped by a launched fruition. Entirely different in texture, outlook, and presentation. They were working in concert—great, bubbling bundles ensured the gigantic spray above them. To the left, another massive bundle, this one with a topping-off, almost glass-ceiling-like, but not. Irregularities in the form of fluff, like locks and strands escaping from a by and large uniform coif.

[Captiva, Florida, August 8, 2015]

 

I love the last-minute gestures. Just when you thought it was all over, settled down peacefully for the night, no, another drama emerges, asserts itself. There is a slate backdrop, and above that a dark tumult. It rained heavily earlier, has stopped now for the most part, and now there is this gigantic looming cloud just overhead. Most of the sky is like a monochromatic expressionist painting. It stretches lavishly the whole extent of the sky, from left to right, as though we are at a theater, facing an enormous stage.

Now, the entire darkness does not extinguish: a sudden cream display, and even more, more red; in addition to that last dance on the left, a sudden new blast of activity, dead center, stops the heart with its passionate plunge. In the second it takes to register, it is already fading, leaving that more substantial play of red, stretched on the left, to continue fading, slowly, gradually, as a day fades, and eventually leaves.

[Captiva, August 8, 2015]

 

There it is, so wide open, the sea a gaping mouth, while above is almost entirely clear, straggling graffiti of no discernible meaning, an emerging billow attacking from the right. As for the rest, it is pure. The only fact of import is straight ahead. There, etched as delicately as an afterthought in the background of a French Rococo masterpiece, dazzling uplift—turbulent support, seemingly cavalier spreadings, yet bumped in the center. A mountainous background suddenly achieves foreground status, while the main figure, notable for its hieratic lift, after feigning resistance, acquiesces, giving itself another triumphant highlight, as the background once again dissolves.

[Captiva, August 9, 2015]

 

Sometimes it is reflected in the water—lighting effects the grandest stage designer would be incapable of mimicking. Only in painting, perhaps, is there to be found a technique, or techniques, capable of such subtlety of differentiation, of texture, of mass—and also of the drama inherent in effects of lighting. There are long, epic sweeps—covering the dimensions of a civil war—that extend into uproarious billows of cultural information (the histories of ball gowns, or uniforms, or varieties of cuisine, depending on class and social education). While straight ahead, in the deep distance, on the thinnest strip of landmass imaginable, the darkness indicates heavy rainfall. Other strips, fabulations, spread out toward the edges.

[Fish House, Captiva, August 10, 2015]

 

Again there is this thing of compressed, activated forms backgrounded by diffuse, flowing dispersions into space that feel Turneresque but with a simpler, more contemporary philosophy of color. This is plain, nothing could be simpler, yet within this scope, the variation is endless. A giant puff illuminates space, its purpose to sit there on high and be a light-collecting object. Suddenly, there are hundreds, an army on the horizon, massing, growing, evolving, while their dedicated spray, above, extends, twisting, conjuring vast manifestations of galactic thrust. Dancers huddle at edges, hunched in doglike posture, seated, awaiting a signal. Slate blues against whites at farthest margin. Mirror vastness in concert connection.

[Fish House, Captiva, August 11, 2015]

 

It is as if the apotheosis has finally been achieved—a gigantic, robust, complete, yet infinitely delicate curvature in the sky, a heralding, an announcing, and yet simply itself, refraction interlocking with other depths occurring at increasingly rapid rates, threatening to bring one to the brink, yet simultaneously an overarching, extending placidity, while to the right, massive dynamics indicate offstage drama, all as if for eternity, and maybe it really is eternity, to experience it now, the gentle plashings, voices, and two dark sentinels, stark silhouettes against the effulgence, to whom all of this is of no significance whatsoever.

[Fish House, Captiva, August 21, 2015]

 

Timpani highlight that insane effulgence: a sexual merging of two pinkish forms at center, and leading to the right a lengthy strip of incident, exploding into a mountain of purple and pink. Layers and stories going higher and higher, topped by a palace or mesa, this crashing of strings and brass, and as if that weren’t enough, highlighted by timpani, a sudden exploding inside all that wet, pink, lush form.

[Fish House, Captiva, August 24, 2015]

 

Great migration from right to left above and beyond in ripples, individual masses, while below a fiery center ore is surrounded by spreads of darkness, and suddenly, above, a pale crescent, muffled by soft, pinked brushes, enveloping and enveloped by a distant, gray, immutable landmass.

[Solebury, Pennsylvania, May 27, 2020]

 

Vincent Katz is a poet and translator. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul, Southness, and Swimming Home, as well as The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, which received the National Translation Award. 

The Frenchwoman from Indianapolis

Janet Flanner, ca. 1925. Berenice Abbott, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Here is Norman Mailer in his fine black boots, high-cut and shiny and very snug on the ankle, like something you might pick out if you were the prop master for an expensive production of Richard III. Sweating a bit under the TV lights, he seems to be doing an imitation of a scowl, as if to gesture toward his reputation as a guy who goes around scowling. He sits angled toward the host, Dick Cavett, who bends slightly away from him, as do the other two guests. One of them is Gore Vidal. Like Mailer, Vidal is doing an impersonation of himself. He strikes various languorous attitudes as the camera begins to roll, reclining deeper into his chair as Mailer leans forward, toying idly with his glasses and smiling as Mailer yaps and bares his teeth. A cat and a dog.

Compared to these two, both positively radiant with the excitement of showing off, the third guest seems to have been invited on by mistake. She is, basically, an old lady. She wears white gloves and a neat skirt suit, with a scarf knotted at her neck. She doesn’t say much at first, waiting patiently as, according to the description on the YouTube clip, “the infamous feud between novelist Norman Mailer and writer Gore Vidal comes to a head in a battle of wit, sarcasm, and condescension with the audience and Janet Flanner”—that’s her—“(reluctantly) in the front row.”

This is all wrong. First, if you have come to this old episode of The Dick Cavett Show to witness an invigorating exchange of white-hot barbs, you are in for a disappointing half hour. It’s not so much a mighty clash of intellect as two exceptionally vain men seizing the opportunity to come out with bons mots they have been practicing in the mirror for weeks beforehand. These include zingers like “intellectual cow.” It never really rises above this level and is often even more mortifying than that—five minutes in, Mailer affects an air of fascination as he wonders if Muhammad Ali “came out of a good (bleep) or a bad one.” He repeats this a couple of times, his delight in himself so childlike it is almost touching. Second, the suggestion that Flanner is a reluctant participant, in fact barely a participant at all, is inaccurate. She is evidently having fun, making droll remarks and winking at the audience; she, at least, is aware of the silliness of what is unfolding. She maintains her good humor for a solid fifteen minutes as the two men toss their dignity to the far winds, finally interrupting Vidal just as he is about to respond to Mailer’s accusation that his work smells of “intellectual pollution.”

It’s very odd, she says, that the two of you act as if you’re the only people here. “Aren’t we?” Mailer burbles. She gestures to the audience and says, “They’re here.” She points to Cavett—“He’s here.” She points at herself, doing a funny little mime of indignation—“I’M HERE, and I’m becoming very, very bored.” The audience bursts into laughter and applause. She blows a kiss at Mailer, and the applause increases. Mailer’s shoulders shoot up even higher, and he can’t rid his voice of a disconsolate note as he assures Flanner that he wouldn’t hit her, because she is “intellectually smaller” than he is. Flanner laughs uproariously.

Her writing is like this too: sharp, fearless, and always informed by an awareness of her audience, whom she never talks down to but addresses with the assumption that they are as smart as she is. The pleasure that comes from reading her prose is often accompanied by a kind of relief that here, finally, is an actual adult.

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Flanner reported on European affairs for The New Yorker from 1925 until just before her death in 1978. She is most well-remembered for her column Letter from Paris, in which she (mostly) wrote about the city where she lived for much of her life. She could write about anything: murder trials, Josephine Baker, Ulysses, the death of one unimaginably grand old woman after another, the death of Monet, of D. H. Lawrence, the impact of the Wall Street crash of 1929 on French jewelers, the Ballets Russes, Edith Wharton, the buildup to World War II, and the evacuation of Paris. She had the outsider’s ability to register cultural shifts that might have escaped people who had lived in Paris all their lives, but her dispatches also clearly communicate the extent to which she was a part of that culture. She went to parties with Isadora Duncan and knew Picasso. Her circle of friends: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Toklas, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes. She was especially close to Stein and Toklas and seems to have been one of the only people standing between Toklas and outright destitution at the end of her life (in her profile of Toklas, she describes her attempts to keep the old lady in the style she was accustomed to: “She thought the best was none too good and, as a matter of fact, sometimes not good enough. One November, I troubled to find her a fresh peach, vainly hoping she would not notice its flaws”).

Her editor at The New Yorker was Gardner Botsford. In his fantastic memoir, A Life of Privilege, Mostly, Botsford writes that Flanner spoke “completely fluent, strongly accented French. She sounded like a Frenchwoman from Indianapolis.” For twenty years after the war, Flanner lived at the Hotel Continental. Every afternoon at five thirty, she would come down to the bar and take her usual seat at a horseshoe sofa overlooking the Tuileries, where a dry martini would be waiting for her. Then, writes Botsford, her guests, both invited and not, would start to arrive: “friends, petitioners, gossips, visitors from New York, political aspirants, bearers of tidings, bearers of manuscripts … Before long, the places on the horseshoe sofa would be filled, and late arrivals—carrying their first chapters or second acts in their briefcase—would have to wait their turn on little gilt chairs that Henri [the barman] had forehandedly lined up against one wall; every time a postulant on the horseshoe sofa left, the person at the head of the line would take his place, and all the others, in unison, would move up one notch.” At the end of each evening, she would retire to her tiny room on the top floor and start turning “all she had heard downstairs, all she had read, all she had reported, all she had thought during the day and during the week” into one of her “letters.”

Most of Flanner’s Paris dispatches have been collected in one volume or another, as have her letters to her partner of many years, the publisher Natalia Danesi Murray. The best of her writing, though, can be found in Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings, 1932–1975, published in 1979, a year after her death, and now out of print. It’s become a commonplace to praise a reporter’s “gift for the illuminating detail,” which, for conflict reporters in particular, usually means a paragraph of densely factual information with a sentence at the end describing a child’s discarded shoe—reminding us that war is not about statistics but human lives, et cetera. Flanner’s way with details is different: she had the confidence to allow them to speak for themselves, laying one fleeting image on top of another to show us that how people queue for the opera, or handle loose change, or tie their shoes, or speak to their children is as important, is more important, than what they look like after a bomb has been dropped on their house. In “Paris, Germany,” published in The New Yorker six months after the Nazi occupation of France, she turns a description about what time Germans eat lunch into an acute observation about the thickening atmosphere of greed and spite that hangs over the city:

The Germans, since the middle of June, have steadily advanced through the Paris shops, absorbing, munching … all the chic, charm, and gourmandise of Parisian merchandise. In order to save for themselves what little they themselves have allowed to remain in the city’s stores and warehouses, the Germans have just decreed that all the big Paris shops and department stores must close from noon till two o’clock, hours in which French employees normally go out for lunch and shopping, but also hours in which the Germans are housed in their garrisons or Speiselokale, eating their slowest, largest meal. Under the new ruling, the empty-handed French go back in to work just as the Germans, digesting, come out to buy again.

She ends the piece with a scene of German soldiers going swimming at Biarritz, marching row by row into the sea under the eye of their commanding officer, plunging under once, marching out of the sea, putting their boots back on, and filing off across the sand in lockstep. Flanner understands that elaboration is unnecessary, that the scene is striking enough to stand alone. She ends with: “These are the boots, this is the system, marching around half of France.”

In a short piece about a new production of Norma in Rome starring Italy’s newest diva, Caterina Mancini, she includes not only the information that Mancini has phenomenal range and “can sing E flat above a high C … and usually does, just for fun” but the detail that a member of her large family always accompanies her to the theater and that “she recently turned down an offer to appear in Il Trovatore in the provinces because no relative was free to go along at that moment.” In a 1949 dispatch from the Ligurian coast, she provides a thrilling breakdown of the relative conspicuousness of different sorts of wealthy Italians: the Milanese textile families are “the most obvious millionaires in all of Italy,” the aristocrats of Turin are models of restraint, the rich Genoese are “the most ornate; recently, the sunburned wives paraded on the beach in silken décolletage, blazing with jewels.”

The problem with quoting from her work like this is that it imparts no sense of the cumulative force of her writing, the way her patient layering of detail flowers into a world. I have raked over her profile of Adolf Hitler several times, trying without success to extract a neat set of quotes that would give some indication of what makes the piece so remarkable—she manages somehow to portray him both as a flesh-and-blood person with likes and dislikes, who once had parents and who was once a baby, and as the terrifying animating spirit of a country going mad, a poison that has leeched into the water supply. Same thing with Flanner’s dispatches from the Nuremberg trials, or her profiles of Bette Davis and Thomas Mann. Perhaps it’s enough to say that no one writes like this anymore, and that I wish they would.

 

Rosa Lyster lives in London.

Too Enjoyable to Be Literature

Photograph by Jane Breakell.

I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature.

Two years later, practicing for final exams, we were given a page of prose to translate from English into French. I was a lazy student, barely keeping up, and I dreaded these exercises. I turned over the sheet of paper and was staggered to see that the passage was from Tender Is the Night.

On the shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stood a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade, and before it stretched a short dazzling beach. Now it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; in 1925 it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April; only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water-lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.

Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade? The bright tan prayer rug of the beach? I looked up at the lecturer, a scornful Frenchwoman in her forties. A sardonic smile crossed her face. I put down my pen and lowered my forehead to the desk. Did she think I was regretting all the classes I’d missed, the afternoons I’d spent down in the city watching Westerns and Bergman movies, or drinking and shouting in the beer garden with the architecture students? She was right: I hadn’t a clue how to translate these images—but faced with the impossible task, I was struck dumb for the first time by their depth and richness. She couldn’t have known what a gift she’d handed me. My boxed-in ideas of whose writing could be taken seriously had just been blown sky-high. She probably thought I was panicking, about to cry, but I was taking off my hat and bowing low. I was humbled, freed, and giddy with jubilation.

 

Helen Garner is an Australian novelist and nonfiction writer whose books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, and The Spare Room. Her Art of Fiction interview appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Paris Review.

At the Britney Spears House Museum

Photograph by Emmeline Clein.

[image error]Besides Britney, bottled water is Kentwood’s biggest export. Across most of Louisiana, this town is more famous for the water than the woman. “Why are you going to the water bottle town?” the man sitting next to me at the bar asks. I’m in New Orleans, on Carondelet Street.

I’m eating at an oyster counter near my grandfather’s former office. Not his favorite, the Black Pearl, where he used to eat a dozen daily on his lunch breaks, grading each one on a scale of 1–10 in his notebook. He died at the start of spring this year, smack in the middle of Carnival, the ambulance stuck in parade traffic for an hour. When I tell the man next to me I’m going to Britney Spears’s hometown to see her house, he says he saw her perform before she became Britney Spears, when she was still Britney from Kentwood, at a concert called Louisiana Jukebox. She was there with her mother, answering audience questions after the show. A childhood friend of my mother’s was there, too, and had incidentally emailed me about it the night before. It was disturbing, she remembered; Britney was so young, but her “song was so sexual, and in person, she looked like the girl next door who every man wants to devirginize.”

The next morning, the drive through St. John the Baptist Parish is mostly swamp. Highways on thick stilts through the cypress glens; the long, low bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Two men fishing, smoking, laughing. Once you cross into Tangipahoa Parish, you’re mostly on dry land, which means Bible billboards and fast-food spots.

On the off-ramp into town, I see the water tower emblazoned with the Kentwood logo, familiar from plastic bottles. I drive down the town’s main street, past buildings with drooping awnings and wilting, cantilevered roofs, an abandoned white brick structure that reads “Kentwood Glass” in faded, sky-blue letters and a boarded-up bar called Sip Some Daiquiris. I stop at a red light next to This & That Pawn Shop, across from a café called The Cafe, which does appear to be an accurate moniker. It’s the only one in town. I knew Kentwood would be small—the cottage industry of Britney documentaries all describe it as a sleepy town, and a denizen of a Britney message board I’ve browsed periodically for years returned from their own trip here only to post that the area had a “southern gothic vibe” and note, appalled, that “there is NO WALMART, MCDONALDS, or HOSPITALS.” A visiting reporter once observed that Britney was forced to “travel an hour to shop at her nearest Abercrombie and Fitch.” I pull into a spot at the Sonic for sustenance and Diet Coke. Britney was repeatedly followed here and photographed and the resulting images posted to gossip sites. I remember scrolling the zoomed-in shots of Britney and her sister fingering fries, avoiding the camera’s eye. Britney had one hand on the wheel, the other headed for her mouth. Thanksgiving 2010.

Remember Britney begging us for a sign? She asked us to hit her in the same song, and we might have taken her too literally. I wonder who she was serenading: God, an ex, or us, her future fans, styling ourselves saviors? When directing a Rolling Stone reporter to their home in Kentwood in 1999, Lynne Spears, Britney’s mom, told him to “turn right when you pass the Burning Bush.” A neighbor had lit a hedge on fire in their yard. At the time, Britney was sleeping in her parents’ bed because an ardent fan had recently climbed through her bedroom window. After her album went platinum, Britney went to the bank and took out $10,000 in $100 bills. At Christmastime, she drove down the town’s main drag, rolling the window down and handing out hundreds to everyone she saw. Messy messiah or prodigal daughter? Trading home’s plastic water bottles for the pop of dom in a dark club, coming home to perform financial miracles.

Burning bushes, Britney-flooded tabloids, baptism by Blackout album: all these signs can feel a bit heavy-handed here in the bayou, where I drive by a house on stilts sitting smack in the middle of a lake, its roof painted yellow and emblazoned with the words JESUS HEALS THE HEARTBROKEN in blood-red letters. It’s hard to hold on to rationality on an average day, and this is the first time I’ve been to Louisiana for anything other than a funeral or a wedding in months. Other messages I’ve received on this journey: JESUS HAS THE ANSWER, BAD BOYS MOW, TRUST YOUR GUT, FAUX PAS REPAIR HERE, APOCALYPSE WEAPONS AVAILABLE, IN JOY YOURSELF. I will—I’m on my way to a shrine.

***

Photograph by Emmeline Clein.

On a residential street a few blocks from The Cafe, the blinds are drawn on a one-story red-brick and yellow-wood home, but Britney seduces from the window, staring wide-eyed from a poster pressed against the glass. A sign on the door to the Kentwood Historical and Cultural Museum tells me to ring the bell, so I do. (There is some confusion because Britney is the centerpiece of what is officially termed the Kentwood Historical and Cultural Museum. Hence one irate Google review: “I expected an exhibition of spears and arrowheads from early indigenous tribes. Imagine my surprise to travel 4000 kms and discover this museum is about a female popular music artist!!! Oh well … i bought a lock of blonde hair instead.”) A brunette woman in a hot-pink polo shirt answers the door and asks me if I’m here to see Britney.

The tour takes about twenty minutes and begins with Britney’s wings. The tour guide, Britney historian, and museum proprietor is named Fay, and she tells me these are the wings Britney wore onstage during the Femme Fatale tour in 2011, donated to the museum by her parents. They look like they must be at least six feet tall, a white feathered mass mounted on the bubblegum-pink walls, pocked with cubic zirconia that catches the light. Britney might be both femme fatale and angel, but traces of her literal body remain here on her wings. They’ve gone beige at the bridge, where her back once sweat under spotlights night after night. The next four rooms are filled with Britney’s belongings, Britney photos and fan-made illustrations, tour equipment, framed magazine covers and platinum record awards and family portraits, limited edition Britney soda cans and Barbie dolls, life-size paperboard Britneys, local newspaper clippings, a sign that once stood on the edge of town announcing Kentwood as the Home of Britney Spears, and congratulatory notes from Kentwood officials. The ephemera seems infinite. As she recites the litany of Britney lore she’s been retelling for fourteen years, Fay’s voice bends toward boredom, but she swerves into tenderness at certain anecdotes. She tells stories of fans who arrive at her door like pilgrims, armed with indulgences, and present her with their taped-together poster boards and glitter-drenched collages, love-lined dioramas.

Photograph by Emmeline Clein.

Fay tells me that this museum is a collaboration between Britney’s family and her fans and is filled with donations from her parents and the devotees who visit, bearing gifts, as well as the ones who can’t make it to Louisiana and mail in their offerings. The museum’s centerpiece is a room within a room, a glass wall protecting it from the rest of the house, from our sweaty fingertips and heady breath. It is a reconstruction of Britney’s childhood bedroom, the one immortalized in a 1999 David LaChapelle cover shoot for Rolling Stone. It’s not a replica but a reconstruction, using Britney’s original belongings, down to the uprooted carpeting from the room she spent her childhood in—all donated by her parents while she toured, growing up on the road. One of the photos from the shoot is taped to the glass so her fans can encounter the uncanniness of the re-creation. I stare in at an angle, standing next to a life-size cutout of the starlet with a milk mustache, posing for a Got Milk? ad.

In the image taped to the glass, teenage Britney leans against a white desk, appearing ambushed by baby dolls. They line the wall at her feet, sit above the desk hutch over her head, recline next to her cocked hip. They wear Victorian dresses, beady black eyes aglow in the flash. Our adolescent idol is much less covered up, in a white bra and boy shorts underwear, a shrunken cardigan open over her midriff, bright white high heels on blue-gray carpet. The reporter referenced her “honeyed thighs” in the first sentence of this profile. She was seventeen, straddling adolescence, and dressed in a schoolgirl uniform skirt. Her parents donated every item of furniture, stuffed animal, doll, and desk tchotchke in the photograph to the museum.

In her 2023 memoir The Woman in Me, Britney writes that those dolls in the photograph, now housed in the museum, were her “prized possessions” as a girl. She recalls coming home from a tour to find her baby dolls abducted: “When I saw the empty shelves, I felt an overwhelming sadness.” She doesn’t mention the museum in her book, and I wonder if she knows that in this former funeral home turned mausoleum of another sort, her looted childhood lives on.

Jamie, Spears’s father, isn’t the “meanie” he’s made out to be, Fay says, and she’s known the Spears family for years, used to make the bows Britney wore in her hair. In a 2008 MTV documentary I rewatched last night, filmed during the early days of Britney’s conservatorship, Jamie stands in his kitchen in a white tank top, cooking his daughter breakfast. “Making my baby some cheese grits, Southern girl’s breakfast of champions,” he says, stirring. In the next scene, he’s talking with two other middle-aged men, and everyone agrees that no one can speak to Britney without going through one of them first. Famously—now infamously—Jamie had, just before this documentary’s filming, forced Britney into the conservatorship that was overturned in 2021. He took her belongings out of her bedroom, much like he ripped Britney herself out of girlhood and into the hot spotlight, where she was forced to grow up fast under our gazes, and then snatched her off the stage and shoved her into a hospital room lit fluorescent, locking her in a conservatorship for over a decade. Fay’s insistence on his innocence, his good intentions, hang in the stagnant air between us (also the AC is broken). Britney’s stuffed animals sit in a neat row. A snow-white bear wears a baby blue NSYNC T-shirt. The porcelain dolls glare at me. Fay comments that she needs to clean—there’s a dead bug on the rug.

Photograph by Emmeline Clein.

Turn left out of Britney’s bedroom, and atop a display case, a yearbook is open to a full-page portrait of Britney and a boy, respectively voted most beautiful and most handsome in their high school class. Britney’s name is spelled wrong—two ts. Near one of her signed posters, there are two official-looking documents, decked out with government seals. One is a Tangipahoa Parish Council Proclamation declaring July 10, 1999, Britney Spears Day. The other is a fake-seeming military document deeming Britney a patriotic participant in something called Operation Southern Watch—which, I learn later when a well-informed friend reads a draft of this and directs me to Wikipedia, was an “an air-centric military operation conducted by the United States Department of Defense from Summer 1992 to Spring 2003” over southern Iraq. The nature of Britney’s participation remains unclear.

In the next room, which is painted almost the same shade of fuchsia as Fay’s shirt, we come to the contributions from fans. A full quarter of the room is taken up by a replica of the concert stage from Britney’s HBO special, handmade by a fan named Randy, down to the light fixtures and spinning central platform, with a Britney doll standing center stage. Fay turns out the overhead lights, and the stage glows red; plasticine Britney smiles, haloed by tiny bulbs. A collection of Britney calendars are taped to a room divider, which stands next to a wall covered in concert merch, laminated VIP tickets, and a collage of photos of Britney onstage. Fay tells me a young fan sent all this in and that his mother called after he wouldn’t tell Fay why he was sending in his prized possessions to tell her that her son was dying of an inoperable brain tumor.

In this mausoleum of Britney’s lost innocence, there is also the indisputable detritus of love. These cramped rooms are overwhelmingly, disorientingly tender, held together with tape and yellowed concert tickets and simple, true care. Every time I try to fly I fall / Without my wings I feel so small, Britney sings. But her wings are here, and they’re huge. They fit her perfectly.

Almost tearful and trying to be surreptitious about it, I crouch to the ground to investigate a large framed poster, which is covered in disposable camera photos of Kentwood restaurants’ marquee displays from the weeks leading up to Britney’s departure for Los Angeles to become a Mouseketeer at age eleven. At Kentwood Donut Shop, which must have had only two T’s on hand: CONGRA ULATIONS BRITNEY. The then-manager of Sonic stands next to their sign, which reads BRITNEY SONIC’S FAVORITE MOUSEKETEER. At Buddy’s Seafood: BRITNEY SPEARS DISNEY OR BUST. Next to this is a craft project Britney herself made, a framed collage of her friends and family, photos with captions drawn in loopy, meticulous marker cursive. BFF.

Leaving, I drive ten minutes out of town and stop outside the gated estate Britney has owned since 1999, the year of Louisiana Jukebox, “… Baby One More Time,” and her Rolling Stone debut, posed like one of her baby dolls in her childhood bedroom. In that 2008 documentary, she’s filmed in the studio recording songs for the album Blackout. Singing into the mic, she wears a beaded choker with her two sons’ names on either side of a pendant and accuses us: You want a piece of me. There’s a moment during this recording session when she looks directly into the camera and wonders why she didn’t move back to Louisiana after she had children. In my idling rental car, wondering whether anyone is home in that big McMansion on the hill, I hope she does some day and finds the word carved into the wrought iron of those gates, the name she gave this place: Serenity.

 

Emmeline Clein‘s debut collection of essays, Dead Weight, is forthcoming from Knopf in February. Her chapbook Toxic was published by Choo Choo Press in 2022. 

Recommended Readings for Students

Yu Hua in Paris, 2004. Courtesy of Yu Hua.

The new Winter issue of The Paris Review, no. 246, includes an Art of Fiction interview with the Chinese writer Yu Hua, the author of novels such as To Live, Brothers, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. We asked Yu to contribute a syllabus to our ongoing series, and he obliged with a list of recommendations that he’s provided to his students—but, as he says in his interview, remember not to be narrowly focused on reading lists: “Literature is not the only thing in my life. I encourage my students to think this way, too. Recently, I told one of them, ‘Let’s meet this afternoon to talk about the story you wrote,’ and he said, ‘Professor, I’m going clubbing tonight.’ I said, ‘All right, have fun.’ ”

 

I am a professor of creative writing at Beijing Normal University, and with few exceptions, most of my students have no experience writing before enrolling in my course. We begin with short stories before transitioning to novellas, a literary form uniquely popular in China—works of fiction between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand Chinese characters. Julio Cortázar’s “The Southern Thruway” and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach are both excellent examples.

When recommending literary works to my students, I base my suggestions on two principles. The first is to avoid works that are already extremely well-known in China, which most of my students will have read during senior middle school or high school. (The Old Man and the Sea, which I ask them to reread, is an exception to that rule.) The second principle is to tailor my lists to students’ individual writing goals.

I have one student whose mind is filled with strange and unusual thoughts; I advised her to read “The Southern Thruway” three times and then search for a scene from everyday life to use as a starting point from which her own narrative could gradually expand, so that the magnification of the narrative would be dependent upon real-life details, which can allow the writer to reveal the vastness and complexity of human nature. I also asked her to read Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” three times, as an example of how the literature of the absurd can actually arrive at the real more quickly. In other words, our starting point is “the real” and that is where we ultimately return—even if “the real” to which we return has become completely unrecognizable.

Another student of mine has a talent for writing fiction that plays with structure and form. I assigned him Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Judge and His Hangman and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” so that he could see what a good story with a conventional form looks like. Moreover, Dürrenmatt’s detective fiction is completely different from Poe’s. When Dürrenmatt writes about the murder case, he seems to be casually jotting down the details and atmosphere of the moment, while Poe’s narrative is extremely focused, always revealing at least one razor-sharp detail.

I also recommend collections by individual writers to my students, often using my research funds to purchase books for them. One example is The Stories of John Cheever, a collection of sixty-one stories that he personally selected; another is Yejian gushi (Midnight stories) by Su Tong, which features forty-three short stories from different stages of his career. I don’t require my students to read all of these stories. If the work connects with them, I tell them to keep reading. If not, I let them know it’s okay to give up. If the emotional connection isn’t there, it isn’t the student’s fault—it’s simply not yet the right time.

When I assign McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, I tell my students that the goal of literature is not individuality but universality. It is precisely that sense of universality that allows us to read works from different eras, different countries and cultures, and still have an emotional response. This novella is particularly well suited to demonstrating how a writer can begin on the individual level and arrive at the universal.

When it comes to writing fiction, Yasunari Kawabata was my first real teacher. I recommend his story “Onsen yado” (Hot-spring inn) to show my students that you can write a literary work populated exclusively by secondary characters, devoid of any main protagonists. Halldor Kiljan Laxness’s “Saga úr síldinni” (Black carp), which has also not yet been translated into English, is also an important piece of writing, and from it I hope students can understand that novels don’t have a monopoly when it comes to expressing “the epic”—short stories can do that too.

I tell my students that the most important qualities for a writer to foster are their powers of imagination and observation. João Guimarães Rosa’s “The Third Bank of the River” is a representative work when it comes to literary imagination—not a wild and unbridled imagination but one rooted firmly on the ground. There is nothing remarkable or unbelievable about the way Rosa tells his story, but it turns out to be anything but quotidian.

When it comes to masterpieces of subtle perceptiveness, there is also William Trevor’s “A Bit on the Side.” His observations about the finer details of life are revealed in his characteristically calm narration—almost like the serene surface of a perfectly still lake. But once that balance is disturbed, the end is near.

Whenever I recommend “The Moor” by Russell Banks, my students love it. One wrote: “The way Russell Banks used such a limited narrative space to express the passage of time in such a heartbreaking manner truly touched me. As the narrative moves forward, the way in which ‘my’ memories of Gail transform and the way in which those supposed lies ‘I’ told Gail all converge as ‘time passes by, never to return again. While those lingering vestiges I see before me are everything I have.’ ”

“The Moor” is Russell Banks’s only work of fiction to have been translated into Chinese; I first encountered it in a collection edited by Haruki Murakami, titled Birthday Stories. It was only last November that I learned about Banks’s passing on January 8, 2023. After getting over the initial shock, I was overcome with sadness. I met Banks at the Jerusalem International Writers Festival in May of 2010, and he was a very warm and gracious man. He told me there were two things he hoped to do before he died—one was to visit China. I asked when he planned on visiting, but he didn’t respond. Paul Auster, who was standing beside him, jokingly answered for him: “Sometime before he dies.”   

                                                                          

Recommended Readings for Students

 

Short Stories

Halldor Kiljan Laxness, “Saga úr síldinni” (Black carp)

Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool”

William Trevor, “A Bit on the Side”

Joao Guimarães Rosa, “The Third Bank of the River”

Su Tong, “Watermelon Boats”

Marguerite Yourcenar, “How Wang Fo Was Saved”

John Cheever, “Goodbye, My Brother”

Russell Banks, “The Moor”

Gabriel García Márquez, “Tuesday Siesta”

Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”

Bruno Schulz, “Birds”

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”

O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi”

 

Novellas

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel

James Joyce, “The Dead”

Anton Chekhov, “The Steppe”

Guy de Maupassant, “The Ball of Fat”

Yasunari Kawabata, “Onsen yado” (Hot-spring inn)

Ichiyo Higuchi, “Child’s Play”

Julio Cortázar, “The Southern Thruway”

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Judge and His Hangman

François Mauriac, A Kiss for the Leper

 

Translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry.

Qishu: Han Song’s Hospital Nightmares

Digital artwork of a science-fictional surgery room by alan9187, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Hospitals play a big role in Yu Hua’s life and fiction—his parents were both doctors, he grew up in and around hospitals as a child, his first job was that of a dentist, and hospitals would later frequently appear in his work as sites of violence and trauma. Yu Hua first made a name for himself in the eighties with a series of dark, violent, experimental short stories, but over the course of his career, his writing became more conventional, earning him a broad readership and fame in the process. But what if Yu Hua had gone the other direction? What if he had gone darker, stranger, more experimental? If one is looking for someone to inherit the lineage of Yu Hua’s early experimentalism today, I would point them to Han Song’s Hospital trilogy, which not only shares a fascination with the medical setting but also presents an unflinching look at the violence lurking just under the surface of the everyday. It is no coincidence then that, during a recent interview I conducted with Han Song when he was speaking of his formative influences, he told me: “I was particularly fascinated by Yu Hua at that time and even imitated him.”

Comprised of three full-length novels, Hospital, Exorcism, and Dead Souls, the trilogy begins in a fairly conventional manner. Yang Wei, a forty-year-old government worker who moonlights as a songwriter, is struck down with a bout of debilitating stomach pain after checking into a hotel in C City during a business trip. The pain is so horrific that Yang Wei passes out, awakening three days later to find two female employees from the hotel taking him to the hospital. From there, Han Song takes us on a Kafkaesque journey where the protagonist undergoes countless tests, procedures, and operations. He is sent from one wing of the hospital to another, waiting in long lines, vying for the attention of any one of the mysterious doctors who inhabit the hospital, and yet seemingly unable to get any information, let alone a diagnosis. The longer he stays in the hospital the more lost he becomes, until reality itself seems to unravel around him and he descends into a labyrinthine nightmare of the strange.

Translating the trilogy has fully consumed, even haunted me, since 2020. Reading it is a challenging experience and certainly not for everyone. The series contains frequent descriptions of pain, rape, murder, suicide, and cannibalism, but even more disturbing, in a way, is its unconventional use of language, unusual structure, and shifting perspectives (Hospital is written in third person, Exorcism in first person, and Dead Souls in second). It contains dense references to medical terminology, scientific history, Buddhism, Christianity, Japanese pop culture, and classic literature and philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kafka and Sartre, with plenty of veiled references to the political reality of contemporary China along the way. The series is categorized as “science fiction” by booksellers in China and abroad, but that is misleading. For a while, I described it as a mash-up between science fiction, horror, suspense, social realism, and avant-garde literature; think a hallucinogenic David Cronenberg film written by Franz Kafka and set during a Chinese politburo meeting. But I’m not sure if even that description does the series justice. Over the past three years, as I have slowly worked through the translation, my understanding of the series has evolved. I am always discovering new layers of meaning hidden within the book’s devilishly complex narrative.

Of course, one reason for the literary transpositions presented through the series might be found in China’s current censorship standards. With a long list of “sensitive” topics that Chinese writers are forced to avoid, the “cultural no-fly zone” for writers and artists in China has become increasingly expansive. The fact that a series like this was published at all is due in large part due to the brilliance of Han Song, who has contorted his critical vision to the point it is unrecognizable to many readers (and Chinese censors). But if readers peel away the façade of absurdity, they will quickly find uncanny reflections of and critical insights into the reality of China today. Calls to “tell the good hospital story” will certainly remind readers of Xi Jinping’s instructions to “tell the good China story”: the violence and hospital uprisings echo the Cultural Revolution; references to hospital “reform” echo Deng Xiaoping’s Reform Era; and although the word China is seldom mentioned in the entire trilogy, “the hospital” can be read as a stand-in for the Chinese Communist Party or the nation itself. This is not dissimilar to what Yu Hua—and other writers like Ma Yuan and Can Xue—did in the eighties with their own experimental fiction. But Han Song has taken things much further. The violence is pervasive, the hospital is all-consuming, and its permutations never end. This calls on readers to take an active role in decoding the novel to reveal its litany of horrors and flashes of the sublime.

At times, I have wondered if the whole thing was composed by an AI program gone haywire. Perhaps it is best to describe it with the Chinese term qishu, which is alternately translated as a fantastic, strange, or wondrous book. Han Song has spoken about the influence of Studio Ghibli films on his work and his attempt to render their marvelous, unbridled imagery in a literary form. Having finally completed my translation of the final volume, I increasingly think of the trilogy as a dream, or a nightmare, taking place on a deep subconscious level; it is meant to be experienced more than intellectualized or analyzed. But for now, Han Song’s hospital continues to haunt me.

 

Michael Berry is the author of Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign and the translator of novels by Yu Hua, Wang Anyi, Fang Fang, and Han Song. His interview with Yu Hua appears in our new Winter issue, no. 246.

The Darkest Week of the Year: Fosse’s Septology

Hans Gude, From the western Coast of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

1.

This past fall, Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In December, I attended a traditional Norwegian brunch and live stream of Fosse’s Nobel lecture at the Norwegian consul general’s residence in New York City.

At the time, I’d only read Melancholy, Fosse’s 1995 novel about a grandiose and possibly ephebophilic painter who ends up in the asylum. I had no idea, at the time, how intensely Septology, his recent seven-volume epic, set over the seven days leading up to Christmas—the same seven days, in the liturgical calendar, as it so happened, that I’d end up reading it—would hit me. That it would serve as a guidebook, a religious text, a light over the darkest week of the year.

Septology follows Asle, an aging painter and widower living in Dylgja, on Norway’s western coast, as he prepares for his annual Christmas exhibit in the nearby town Bjørgvin. He lives alone, doesn’t drink or smoke, and is a practicing Catholic. His social circle is limited to Åsleik, his neighbor and friend; Beyer, the gallerist who shows his paintings; and Ales, his long-deceased wife, with whom he still speaks every day. Each volume starts with Asle contemplating a painting he’s just painted, a blank canvas with two strokes forming a cross; each volume ends with Asle praying the rosary.

Every Christmas, Åsleik invites him over to his sister’s house for Christmas dinner. And every year, Asle declines, choosing to spend it alone, in his house he got with Ales, since “even if Ales has been dead a long time she’s still there in the house.”

Only this year he thinks he might accept Åsleik’s invitation to Christmas dinner at Sister’s. He spends the seven days, over the seven volumes leading up to Christmas day, deciding.

2.

The night Septology starts, it’s Advent, and Dylgja gets hit with the season’s first snow. The morning of the brunch, I throw on the lone suit I own (a funeral suit) and take the M15 bus down Second Avenue to the Norwegian consul general’s residence. On the way, it starts snowing; it’s the season’s first snow. It’s also the first week of Advent.

My task for the brunch is simple: write about the food, the speech, the vibe. We’re in a high-rise showroom-clean apartment with wall-spanning windows overlooking Fifty-Second Street from twenty-three flights up. There are two screens set up for the live stream at one end. A long table with plates and silverware and steaming carafes on the other. The deputy consul general, Aslaug, a native of the same fjord Fosse’s from, explains that the food is traditional Norwegian Christmas fare drawn directly from the book itself: smoked, salted and cured, Christmastime lamb ribs.

In the lecture, which Fosse delivers in Nynorsk, with a full-screen translation in maybe eighty-point font going on a screen adjacent, emphasizes writing as a way to express the unsayable. I lurk in a corner, holding too many notebooks, along with the 667-page copy of Septology his American publisher, Transit Books, is giving out, chowing down on the surprisingly salty and chewy, almost fishy tasting, lamb racks, which are lain on focaccia slices in spiral strips, like wet jerky.

After the lecture, which Fosse ends by thanking God, I meet Jarrod Annis, who works on Fosse’s books at Transit. We’re back around the table for another round of focaccia-toast lamb ribs and coffee. Septology, it quickly becomes clear to me, is more than just business for him: The first volume, he tells me, was the last galley he nabbed off the shelf before leaving a bookselling job at the start of the pandemic. He read the books after fleeing the city, while bunkered in a farmhouse, as the last storm of the season coated everything white (a detail he writes me in an email a week or so later; Fosse seems to invite these mystical-seeming readings in his readers). On a personal note, he adds, Fosse’s work sustained me through the pandemic and the last year of my father’s life, so it will be embedded in my consciousness for a good long time.

It’s not till I get this email that I understand the somewhat cryptic way he described Fosse back at the brunch: “I don’t think Fosse is for everyone, in the way I don’t think acid is for everyone. If you’re someone who deals in those highest spiritual concerns, it’s for you. If you don’t, you might get hung up by the simplicity of the prose.”

Rather than take the bus back uptown, I walk. The snowfall feels novel. I notice, for the first time, Christmas tree and wreath and ornament vendors lining the sidewalk. I start reading Septology that night.

3.

I often say, about what makes a story good: Give me a narrator reckoning with their most dire, urgent, life-and-death concerns. Tell me the stories you would tell if you were about to die. Septology follows this ethic to a T.

Writing in a single, unbroken sentence, Fosse, over seven volumes, employs the billowing, Bernhardian mode of leading the reader through a scene in which little happens absurdly slowly while folding in repeating and slightly altered and obliquely connected thoughts and memories, tagged with “I think.” These folded-in thoughts oscillate between direct insights about God, about art, about Advent, and those most traumatic and formative memories a person might look back on from the moment of death: a boy who dies, falling into the fjord, shortly after Asle and his sister were mean to him … a time he was touched by a pedophile … how his sister died … how his grandmother died … the first time he blasted a cig …

Fosse moves in such a repetitive and measured manner, almost telegraphing the memories he delves into, the riffs he returns to, so as to illuminate the quintessential movement we look to fiction for: the toggling between the private/unsayable and the public, in-scene, real-time world—lending the private unsaid thing the intimacy of secret-sharing, and the world the narrator is moving through a heightened, shared significance (the Bernhardian “I think” consists in never saying; only you, reader, and I are thinking this). No other artistic form is capable of this level of private, silent intimacy—including drama, Fosse’s first form (in his Nobel lecture, he addresses this: Expressing the unsayable in a form consisting entirely of dialogue, which is to say, speech, might seem impossible. “In my drama the word pause is without a doubt the most important and the most used word”).

4.

On December 17, the third Sunday of Advent, I learn that my sister is coming back stateside for Christmas. And that my other sister will be joining her and my mom, in California. I consider trying to get a last-minute ticket out to join them. Then decide I won’t, that I’ll bunker in place, keep reading these pages.

This Christmas marks thirty-three months to the day since my girlfriend, Kyra, died. I’ve spent the Christmases since alone, bunkered in my poorly insulated apartment in deep South Brooklyn, refusing to leave for anything. I spent last year’s reading all of Emmanuel Carrère, lighting candles, and writing—a portrait of Kyra.

On the nineteenth, my friend Nico asks what I’m doing for Christmas, invites me to a Christmas dinner.

I tell him I’ve got no plans, that I should be down.

Maybe I won’t spend this Christmas alone after all, I think. I’ll see what Asle does.

5.

What’s most affecting about Septology is how little Fosse says about those most unsayable things. His narrator will see something that reminds him of his wife—“that pan always reminds me of Ales and it hurts so much every time I see that pan, yes, tears come to my eyes, to tell the truth”—and then he’ll immediately deviate, repeating the refrain “but I don’t want to think about that now,” sometimes adding, “it’s too terrible.”

It’s those moments—of witnessing someone go right up to the point of what they can say and then stopping when they realize they can’t. There’s a humility to living with this understanding, that there are things you can’t say, things you can’t even think or reason about clearly but that you simply know.

For Fosse’s protagonist, belief is completely private and beyond reason. Asle’s faith is one of someone trying to understand the inexplicable loss of a loved one. For Asle, God—or any object of belief—is metaphysically real if and only if you put words to your belief. Like how he speaks to Ales still, how he believes he does yet needn’t explain it: he knows he’s her angel and she is his, since “for an angel to exist you have to believe it does, and you have to have a word for it, the word angel, and if you don’t believe that God exists, well then God doesn’t exist.” When I read this, I think of what Jarrod said—that Fosse is either for you or he’s not, you either get it or you don’t, and no one can convince anyone else of anything they don’t want to believe anyway.

6.

Come midweek, or volume six, we find Asle sitting in his chair, completely silent and still, staring out at the Sygne Sea. Next to the chair Ales always sat in, “constantly thinking that Ales had to be back soon now, seeing the empty chair and thinking that Ales was still alive and about to come home.”

Asle wavers on whether he’ll go out on the boat with Åsleik, to Sister’s, whom he’s never met but whose house is filled with Asle’s paintings and who makes the best lamb ribs Åsleik’s ever tasted—“he has no idea how she always manages to give those lamb ribs of hers that exact special flavour.”

He follows through on an idea he’s been considering all week: to quit painting; he’s painted all he needs to paint; he can’t stand to be surrounded by all these pictures anymore. He drives his remaining paintings to town, to Beyer, for what will be his final show. His personal collection is reduced to one: his portrait of Ales.

On the day before Christmas Eve, he decides he’ll take the boat out to Sister’s after all, “since if I stay home alone all I’ll do is lie in bed, I won’t even get up, yes well maybe get up to get myself some water if I’m thirsty and food if I’m hungry, other than that I’ll just lie in bed in the bedroom without even turning the light on and I’ll keep it as dark as I can.”

He needs to give Åsleik’s sister a gift. He paints one final portrait, of her, and boards the boat while the paint’s still wet.

On Christmas Day, with the final fifty pages of Septology to go, I hop on the boat—the 6 train downtown—to meet my friend Nico for Christmas dinner.

7.

On the boat ride over, Asle thinks of Ales, imagines her close to him, that she’s still with him. By this point, we’ve gone through how they met, their early times living together, becoming artists together, and it’s only now, at the end of the seventh of seven volumes, that Asle allows himself to relive and tell the moment she died. The moment she stops breathing, that the doctor said she’s resting with God now.

And as I read this I pass Astor Place, where Kyra lived that first Advent we started, pass Bleecker Street, where she moved later and lived that final year, and it’s cathartic, and I think how I’ve spent these past thirty-three months alone with Kyra, in silence, wondering what her life and death meant, wondering if painting means anything anymore in the face of that darkness, trying and failing to find a light within it, and as I approach Canal Street and zip up my parka and prepare to disembark, Åsleik docks and they set foot on shore and they walk to Sister’s house—she’s got the Christmastime lamb ribs going, Asle gives her the painting, she showers him with praise about how much she loves his paintings, how she’ll never sell a single one no matter how financially strapped she gets, and Asle asks if he can take a nap before Christmas dinner, and he’s shown his room and sets his suitcase down and lies down, and then he hears a knock at the door, and he says come in, and it’s Sister, whose name is Guro, and she’s carrying a wine glass, and she comes in:

And she laughs and she sits down on the edge of the bed … and she drinks a little wine and she puts her free hand on my belly

And you’re a widower, she says

and I nod

And you’ve been one for a long time, she says

and I nod again and then it’s silent and she slowly moves her hand farther down towards my fly

Yes, I say

But my wife and I are still married, I say

You can’t be married to someone who’s dead, Guro says

and she rubs my fly up and down and she opens it and I take her hand away and I see her blush and then she says she really should go downstairs and check on the food … and I see the woman named Guro leave the room and she shuts the door behind her—

And from there it goes into a direct transcription of his prayer, of his thoughts and praying the rosary, alternating between English and Latin; like every volume ends, it goes from the Lord’s Prayer into Pray for us sinners now in the hour of death, and a few more beats pass, and this time it ends in Latin, Ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora, and I sit with this ending for some days, unsettled, because I still can’t make sense of these Christmas nights the book has led me on, what it means for Asle to have finally painted her portrait, to have stayed inside every Christmas and then to finally accept the invitation out across the water, to live again, to let some things breathe rather than hold everything so close—so I return to reread the ending, and this time I Google Translate the Latin, and that last line, Ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora, there’s no period at the end, it’s simply pray for us Sinners at this hour—not of death, just at this hour—and the book ends, because they’re not about to die, they’re still here, at this hour; they’re about to eat dinner, he’s about to try Sister’s Christmastime lamb ribs, and we sin and we ask for forgiveness, and whether that’s what the book means to you, or meant to Fosse, or is supposed to mean, it means that because that’s what it meant to me—because I’ve come to have faith that it does.

***

It’s a dimly lit Chinese spot on Delancey I’ve walked past before but have never been inside. There’s just enough room for all of us to fit in the circular booth in the back if we squeeze. We squeeze. It’s a good group. Seven of us. An acquaintance, seated on the opposite end of the booth, orders for everyone.

We eat a chili oil cucumber sesame salad, scallion pancakes, soup, and steamed and fried dumplings. The dishes just keep coming, more than anticipated. Right when we think we’ve eaten all we can, they bring out the finale: a whole fish. Eliciting groans almost. Like we couldn’t possibly. Only, Acquaintance insists: This isn’t just any fish. Eating this type of fish, around this time of year, brings good luck. But only if everyone eats some. Even just a bite. I serve myself a piece. I take a bite, and the flavor hits me. I say, Holy shit. You guys, you’ve gotta try this, it’s something about the sauce, or how they marinated it—it’s the best fish I’ve ever tasted.

And we all have a bite, for the ritual, agreeing about how good it is, unable to figure out how they managed to give it this exact special flavor.

 

 

Sean Thor Conroe is a Japanese American writer. His debut novel is Fuccboi.

How to Rizz (for the Lonely Weeb): Derpycon

My first brush with Derpycon lore—and by lore I mean its legally enforced code of conduct—was a scroll through its extensive weapons policy.

“LIVE STEEL,” the website went, “is defined as bayonets, shuriken, star knives, metal armor—including chain mail.” Studs on clothing constituted a fringe case, subject to approval by convention staff. This precaution was not due to fear of terrorist attacks but to the preponderance of weapon-wielding anime characters, a popular costume choice among attendees. The rules, I imagined, had been set in response to years of disastrous horseplay, yaoi paddle hazing rituals, and airsoft-gun-as-ray-gun mishaps. Thankfully everyone on the registration line ahead of me had gotten the memo, and their cardboard scythes buckled innocuously.

Derpycon was billed as a three-day, all-ages, “multi-genre” anime, gaming, sci-fi, and comics convention for nerds of all stripes. It boasted “panels, concerts, video gaming, cosplay, vendors, dances, LARPs, artists, and so much more.” The branding this year aligned the convention with the conventional definition of derpyness, meme-speak for bumbling or awkwardness, rather than the more controversial Derpy, a cross-eyed background character from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Any catering to the controversial “brony” (adult male fans of My Little Pony) set would have surprised me. Instead, images proliferated of mishaps: someone running late for the train with a slice of toast in their mouth and “under construction” imagery (the convention’s mascot is the Derpycone). The provisional or half-baked aspects of the con would therefore feel on-brand. The press pass I received contained a charming illustration of a blushing man struggling to stop a train with a large wooden beam in his arms.

While Derpycon serves many fans, its clear focus is the otaku, or zealous consumers of Japanese popular media. I’d count myself among them, although my own relationship with J-pop became complicated during art school. Like most young illustrators—likely including more than a few teens here in attendance—I first learned to draw in an anime-influenced style that my professors, considering it juvenile, forbade. I adopted it both to spite them and hedge my bets commercially, with mixed success. Now some illustration clients request the anime/manga aesthetic while para-academic institutions still shun it, and AI does it exponentially better than I ever could.

When these conventions started, much of Japanese animation could only reach the U.S. via a niche VHS pipeline, but today the look is arguably the most popular figurative aesthetic worldwide. The casual fanbase is much larger, and the convergence with fine art and high fashion is pervasive, yet the otaku world retains some vestige of insularity and self-consciousness. (Hence the pejorative weeaboo or weeb for its more dedicated constituents—the kinds of hardcore fans lining up sheepishly beside me for weapons inspection.)

Using NijiJourney to recreate the Derpycon press pass in an anime style.

Having made it past registration, I gazed around the tasteful nonspace of New Brunswick, New Jersey’s Hyatt Regency hotel, where Derpycon has been held for three of the last nine years it has taken place. The mob of attendees was distributed throughout the lobby, gently clustering in enclaves over the variegated marble flooring and taking group photos along a glass-sided staircase connecting to the upper mezzanine. In the snack café section to my left, I could pick out a few people dressed as characters from Western media: a Nurse Joker (from The Dark Knight), a Lord Farquaad drag king (from Shrek), and a family of Sims with green plumbob mood indicators above their heads. Despite the heft of its haunch-thighs, a heavyset blue furry had squeezed itself onto a folding chair to pick at a school lunch–style pizza alongside its friends. There were still no bronies, as far as I could discern.

Though I was a lone wolf, I didn’t feel out of place. My own (self-invented) costume transposed cat ears onto a black-and-white laplander hat—which I sought out for the bootleg Vivienne Westwood logo on the side—worn by Shinichi from the manga Nana. I could easily have been a lesser-known character from one of those manga franchises who loses their cat ears when they lose their virginity.

My hat on Aliexpress.

I killed some time drinking a four-dollar Diet Coke and looking over Friday’s schedule on my phone. A number of panels were being held in conference rooms in the mezzanine throughout the day, with names like “Win, Place, Waifu?? Horse Racing in Japan” and “What’s With the Mask? A History of Kigurumi.” At 2 P.M., the “Artist’s Alley” and “Dealer’s Room” of vendors would open to provide a shopaholic diversion. The basement level would hold retro gaming contests into the wee hours. Based on how many attendees were loitering, I doubted it would take long to run the gamut of this programming. I needed a knowledgeable friend to follow around, but a chasmic awkwardness kept pushing me away from my fellow con-goers, like the repellant end of a magnet.

Worksheet I created for my students when I taught a manga/anime-adjacent art class.

It was then that I spied a lone girl laying a hand-painted sign next to one of the hotel’s teetering decorative cairns that read “Let’s be SCHOOL IDOLS.” Resisting my derpyness, I approached to ask her about it.

“Last year,” she confided, “we completely overran the masquerade competition with Idols”—an idol being a Japanese form of commercial entertainer with a fawning parasocial fan base—“so this year they made a separate event for us.” The sign would be part of her friend group’s Love Live! choreographed dance routine at 8 P.M. Like most people in my immediate purview, she was wearing mass-market cosplay garb and a candy-colored wig. These polyester clothes—color-blocked due to the constraints of animation—usually exist stylistically somewhere between school uniform, maid, and babydoll. The most uncanny element of a cosplay ensemble is always the human face, which appears shrunken in contrast to the superstimulus of anime proportions. (E-trailers for cosplay attire now use face filters on models to mitigate this effect.)

Eager to catch the idolatrous vibe, I headed to the next area. On the other side of the lobby’s central hub, one could purchase the signatures of voice actors from English dubs of anime. A voice actor’s signature seemed beside the point to me—perhaps they should have been recording a custom voice memo? But a good number of Derpinas were queuing up, wallets in hand. To the left of the Corellia Temple Lightsaber Guild sign-up desk, I spotted a figure clothed in a babushka, a faux ceramic rabbit mask, a matronly skirt, a leather apron with hatches attached (reminiscent of a utility kilt), and a henley finely misted with blood—they were clearly dressed as Huntress, one of the killers in the multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight, which I’d developed a casual fascination with during quarantine. I walked up to them excitedly.

Huntress’s appearance in the game is signaled by her eerie Russian folk lullaby; this IRL Huntress told me they’d been using the lullaby recording to scare people in CVS. Desperate to extend our conversation and cement our pop-cultural bond, I tried to describe one of my favorite new DbD killers—the tumorous one with the vagina dentata that embodies the repressed doubts of a utopian community. Do you know it? … But Huntress reached the front of the signature line, so I slithered away.

Rounding the corner, I passed by the station called Cosplay Repair Smith, which was advertised by a styrofoam mannequin head on a PVC pipe affixed to a battered wheeled trunk. Pop-out compartments overflowed with a disorganized array of glues, tapes, hairdryers, hairsprays, barrettes, makeup brushes, screwdrivers, and scrap fabrics, all of which could ostensibly get your One Piece look back in one piece.

My hat hadn’t taken much damage, so I headed up to the mezzanine level to check out the conference room presentations—I had particularly high hopes for “MECHA or Mechanically Engineered Chassis Happen (to be) Awesome.” The mecha subgenre, in which humans wear giant robot suits, is always ripe for transhumanist interpretation—there’s even a journal called Mechademia. One of its writers identified the allegory implied by teen pilots longing for agency and stable identities in the form of sturdy mechanized suits, while another likened mecha to the postwar investment in tech that extends seamlessly from the body. During lockdown, I would sometimes pretend the house I was stuck inside was my robotic exoskeleton, hence my interest in the talk.

Unfortunately, when I walked in, Derpycon’s mechademic was launching into a lore dump of more than a hundred Battletech novels. “Six hundred years is an absurd amount of history to familiarize yourself with, so just focus on the Era that fits you best. Star League Era 2571–2780. Succession Wars 2780–3049. Clan Invasion 3050–3061 …”

The other presentation room was holding a seminar on grooming cosplay wigs. I find the idea of combing hair unpleasant, even on lime green pigtail wigs, so I left quickly.

Nearby, a room labeled Meme Central seemed empty, despite their website promising a slideshow showing everything “from Steamed Hams to those whacky (sic) G.I. Joe ‘historical’ advertisements.” I asked multiple staff members when it would open, giving them the inaccurate impression that I was meme-starved. They were going to ask around.

The next stops on my itinerary were the Artist’s Alley and the Dealer’s Room: in the former, people could sell original fan art, with a strict prohibition on merchandise; in the latter, they could sell merchandise, with a strict prohibition on unlicensed reproductions. Confusingly, these two groups were in the same room, the largest the Hyatt Regency had to offer. But despite the plethora of stalls, most of the Dealer’s Room vendors weren’t offering anything more than the mangas and plushies you can get in the otaku section of Barnes and Noble. More compelling were several walls of gacha capsule machines. They’re similar to the coin-operated bubblegum dispensers outside of barbershops and dollar stores, only the capsules are larger and the toys higher quality. I was stuck deciding between the figurine series of the reptile YouTuber @WANIVSPBAO, tempura-fried yōkai (traditional Japanese demons), and plastic cups of multicolored reproduction popcorn. Like many otaku collectors, I’ve always enjoyed the antisublimity inherent in miniaturization. Nothing overwhelms; everything can be understood, patiently recreated, and added to the dollhouse.

Like the Dealer’s Room, the Artist’s Alley catered primarily to fans of mainstream Japanese franchises. These digital prints and tchotchkes featured the same characters and franchises as the merch, just produced in small batches, with spit glue. There were little Pokemon in succulent garden dioramas that spilled out of Gameboy shells, laser-cut Pokemon earrings, and custom plushes of less popular Pokemon. The prosaic digital paintings of backlit Pokemon inspired a familiar heaviness in my heart—wasn’t this exactly the kind of mood lighting that AI image generators would excel at?

The best use of Pokemon intellectual property was a taxidermist selling shadowboxes of Pokemon cards with real bugs glued inside of them, standing in as the creatures. A “Leavanny” featured a walking leaf bug, one of the most immaculately camouflaged species in the world. A cicada shell from a poorly-timed breeding cycle benefited from the rebrand as a “Shedinja.” Its final form was the green-and-yellow winged “Ninjask,” fanned out in its fearful symmetry.

“What most people don’t realize,” the vendor commented, sagely, “is that Pokemon are bugs.”

The vendor, who had a warm, avuncular manner, turned to attend to a customer buying a cluster of skunk tails. “My nephew and I got these from the swamps,” he added—showing us city slickers just how rural Jersey can get. I moved on.

On my way out of Artist’s Alley, I asked the woman selling pride-flag crochet hats what the peach checkered one was, hoping it represented a sexuality I hadn’t heard of (a type of gastrogender?), but no. Everything adult-oriented would be outsourced to the twenty-one-plus Shenanicon.

My energy had begun to flag. I wanted to talk to the Mario Kart banana peel, but she slipped away. In an attempt to recharge, I took inappropriately large handfuls from the Puffin promotional candy bowl while the well-to-do suburban furries around me scoffed.

My last big stop was the Gaming Room, where at least thirty CRT TVs from the not-so-recent past were lined up on long, black-clothed tables, hooked up to gaming consoles inside of wireframe animal cages (as an anti-theft measure for rare older games, an attendant told me). This area had been subcontracted to another gaming convention, “A Videogame Con.” They were holding off-the-books tournaments of multiplayer classics (Mortal Kombat; Mario Kart; Super Smash Bros) over the course of the weekend. I’m reminded of a time when I inexplicably wanted to join my school’s Game Design Club, and watched a number of presentations by game developers. I learned that the frenetic visual flair of many of these titles is influenced by a “cursed problem in game design,” namely that weaker players in multiplayer fighting games could always gang up on stronger players, requiring the games to incorporate elements of randomized chaos to deter such strategies.

There was also a gorgeous array of maximalist Japanese arcade rhythm games and pinball machines towards the back of the room, schlepped from Maryland by an organization called Save Point. I find rhythm games (most famously, Dance Dance Revolution) to be among the most dazzling interactive design objects ever made. Like opera, they are an attempt at Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthesis of all art forms. At their most effective, these games calibrate the eyes, ears, and reflexes into a 999-b.p.m. flow state of ordered chaos. Most follow the same formula—the player hits buttons as notes float in sequence across the screen—but the rhythm games here had novel modes of interaction, each providing satisfying haptic feedback when you hit or hold a note appropriately. Loveliest of all in this room was Taiko no Tatsujin, a ceremonial drum rhythm game. This cabinet featured two chubby taiko drums mounted on decorative stands. An impatient Chainsaw Man asked to play alongside me. We confidently lifted our mallets together, and the adorable drum-dog mascot goaded us on as the Vocaloid song I’d chosen launched into its frantic groove.

Museca cabinet during play.

Around six thirty, back in the lobby, the mob energy was beginning to wane. I had abandoned any pretense of making friends by this point. I was kicking back for a while in the lounge area to check my email when a man with a working TV as a head and a blue pinstripe suit asked me to take his picture. He told me he was screening The Amazing Digital Circus, which turned out to be a YouTube series in which a denture-headed AI ringmaster tortures a bunch of people trapped in wacky-PoMo avatar bodies. I remembered a friend who’d been fired from Netflix telling me that the only platform Netflix fears is YouTube, which made sense—Circus was the only new Western series I saw con-goers stanning. Biting back my illustrator’s hatred for AI of all kinds, I took his photo, before running away.

Returning to the taxidermist’s table, I was surprised to find that no one had bought any of the Pokemon “cards.” I liked their insinuation that nature really is a magical world of pocket monsters (and that the world, by extension, is a massive multiplayer game). The vendor hadn’t sold the bats signed by famous actors who played vampires either. But one item was missing from earlier this afternoon: the creepish little leech and syringe, mounted on a blood-splattered piece of card stock.

“Yes, the leech. Every con we sell a few leeches. I don’t know the reason,” he said. Maybe it was because they weren’t Pokemon, or maybe it was because deep down, they were.

After some more dawdling, it was finally time for the day’s culminating event: the Derpy Idol Showcase, which the girl with the sign had told me about earlier. At 8 P.M., the crowd filed into the Regency’s ballroom in an orderly fashion, and I was reunited with all zero of my new friends. The lights dimmed, the lip-syncing track came on at 999 b.p.m., and in an instant, fake idols turned real.

The idols take to the stage.

The performance was an imitation of the poised Japanese superstars, lip-synching to their songs and donning their matching outfits. I didn’t think the dances were too different from TikTok dances, in their moves or affect. I wanted to see something stranger than a suburban teen talent show. But evaluating things on a barometer of obscurity is my own tic, and I admit: the show was well-done. The girls’ poise and charisma was impressive and the choreography they’d practiced in the parking lot well-rehearsed. This is New Jersey excellence! I, Montclair-born-and-raised, told myself. The high-pitched polyphonic vocals bubbled with girlish exuberance over a raging beat. (Grimes was once a cosplayer too, if that isn’t obvious.)

After the performance, I decided to leave Derpycon, forgoing the “How to Rizz (For the Lonely Weeb)” seminar at 10 P.M. This is a crowd where DM stands for Dungeon Master, I thought to myself, pithily. But I’m a nerd, too. My excuse is that it’s in my blood: one of my ancestors, Commodore Mayo, was credited with inventing the character of Uncle Sam as a figure of speech in one of his naval logs. I just wish my grand-uncle had the foresight to make him cuter, have different colored eyes (one blue, one red), and carry a scythe.

 

Generated with NijiJourney.

 

Liby Hays is a writer and artist living in New York. She is the author of Geniacs, a graphic novel about a poet who enters a hackathon, and a codesigner of Conspecifics, a research-practice kawaii streetwear brand.