The Paris Review's Blog, page 41

A Pimp with a Heart of Gold

Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack (1979).

I watched the 1979 film Saint Jack on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, Freevee. Because the commercials often lurched on midsentence, I concluded that Freevee doesn’t pay people to insert the breaks between scenes. The deduction was sound, but being human, i.e., desperate for meaning, I nevertheless read intention into the placement of some of the ads. At the end of the movie, for example, when the main character must choose between collaborating with an occupying power or forgoing a fat check, Freevee broke to a spot for a skin serum by Vichy Laboratories. Unfortunately, the synergy didn’t last. The next commercial featured the socially conscious rapper Common, of the too-resonant baritone, shilling T-Mobile from a barber chair—a rich text, to be sure, but one without much relevance to Saint Jack, which is set in Singapore in the late sixties.

Based on Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name, the film is the director Peter Bogdanovich’s Vietnam movie as well as his Casablanca, a wartime melodrama about a raffish American trying to make a buck on the periphery of the conflict. A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event. Saint Jack is laid-back, even chill. Applied to heavy material, this attitude usually produces a comedy, but Saint Jack, while full of funny moments, achieves something serious: the sublime.

Retrospectives of Bogdanovich’s career tend to describe it as his “loosest” film, a departure to the now for the director, whose interest in the visual style and genre tropes of Hollywood’s studio era, as opposed to those of the French New Wave, had distinguished him from his New Hollywood contemporaries. Shot on location by the minimalist cinematographer Robert Muller, with Cassavetes’s regular Ben Gazzara as Jack Flowers, and local non-actors , including prostitutes and madams, filling out the supporting cast, Saint Jack definitely looks like a gritty seventies flick. It brings to mind the Golden Era in other ways, however. Besides the shadow of Casablanca, there’s the film’s breezy script. Snappy dialogue could have upset Saint Jack’s lo-fi equilibrium, but fortunately we’re in Gazzara’s capable hands. As our weary yet amiable hero, a stoic drinker who takes all vicissitudes in stride, he gets the lion’s share of the script’s great lines—the trick is that he delivers these naturally, never “making a meal,” as film people say. He rarely gives the sense that Flowers is inventing a joke or a bon mot on the fly; usually, Jack seems to be repeating himself (it’s all the more to Gazzara’s credit that Jack never actually does). On the one hand, this chestnut effect is satisfying because it’s realistic: for Jack, clever patter isn’t an end in itself but a tool, like his warm smile or his impeccable manners, that he deploys to make bread. On the other, Jack is a wise man. He repeats himself because that’s what gurus do.

Saint Jack is not an ironic title. Flowers, improbably, is full of grace. When the gangsters arrive to shut down his bordello, he offers himself up at the front door to give his employees time to escape. The gangsters tattoo obscenities on his arms and deposit him in a ditch. Back at the brothel, which is now destroyed, he has a drink and a laugh and then goes straight to a tattoo parlor to get his new ink covered up. The tattooist asks him what he wants. Jack scans the room’s posters for two seconds before asking the man to garland his arms. What’s remarkable about Jack isn’t that he accepts his fate but that he accepts it immediately, without pitying himself or weighing his options. I was reminded of wu wei, the Taoist ideal of effortless action, which is something like a flow state that encompasses all one’s activity and not merely a discrete task like writing a movie review or playing a tennis match. Jack’s wu wei gets thrown into dramatic relief in the final act, when, for the first time, he agonizes over a decision.

The critic Vincent Canby praised Saint Jack’s “low key” approach, but he wasn’t a fan of its lightly demarcated timeline, complaining that “either the movie’s editor or Mr. Bogdanovich … hasn’t found a simple way to indicate the passage of time. One result is that the narrative, which is primarily what movies like this are all about, sometimes becomes hopelessly muddled in trivial confusions.” I suspect that Mr. Canby was distracted. While Saint Jack is episodic, it proceeds chronologically, and while each jump forward occurs without ceremony, without the slow dissolve or new haircut for which Canby pined, the plot is nevertheless precise, propelled by ensuant disasters and anchored by the annual return of an accountant (Denholm Elliott), a decent and ingenuous Englishman (so different from the sarcastic, patrician variety on the local scene) with whom Flowers forms an odd-couple attachment. More to the point, the relaxed temporality is deliberate. It helps create what the kids call “a whole vibe.” Jack, who never forgets a face or a name, is always surprised by how long it has been since he last saw someone. “I don’t know where it went.” To a red-light expatriate in an equatorial city where the path of the sun barely changes, one day feels much like the last.

Repetition may be humanity’s oldest portal to the spiritual. It’s cheaper and easier to come by than psychedelics. It does for Saint Jack what it does for meditation, penance, or ritual: establishes strange rhythms that evoke a contemplative mood. It also makes an argument. Compare the trio of British cynics who represent their colonial remnant to the three ebullient American GIs whom Jack runs into on the street. Their dispositions are different, but they’re after the same thing: booze and sex.

As a procurer of local women for foreign men, Jack is an agent of  the ravening West. How, then, is he also a saint?

To transcend life’s cruel terms—want, pain, incoherence—one must first accept them. This paradox is a tenet of every religion that venerates saints, including the syncresis underlying Saint Jack. The disreputable Flowers manages to live an exemplary life by hitching his dignity to his sense of humor and his sense of decency. He can’t be fulfilled, but he can drink. He can’t attain wealth, but he can be his own man. He can’t bring peace, but he can obstruct those who would prolong war. He can’t save a dying friend, but he can see to his funeral. He can’t end the exploitation of women, but he can broker sex tourism in an upstanding way. Why does the last sentence sound funny? For several reasons, but the relevant one is the mismatch of ambition: the aim is modest, but the degree of difficulty is high—think about what it would take to be a virtuous pimp! Saint Jack says it’s possible. This is its extraordinary claim: that you can be good no matter where you find yourself, that rendering unto Caesar needn’t mean forking over your soul. Is this true? I doubt it, but I’m a man of my time. I believe science. I think correct thoughts. Here are a few more of them. The soul is something we tend to sell piecemeal, and pimping would cost Flowers more of his than Saint Jack admits. Its depiction of the trade is rosier than hagiography demands. This sentimentality reflects some boring old junk like chauvinism and orientalism but also a faith in the ethical potential of unbridled libertinism, peculiar to the seventies, that’s worth refurbishing, however hazardous it seems. Saint Jack’s condemnation of the war hasn’t aged a day. Certain complicities take your whole soul, that’s true.

Liam Sherwin Murray is at work on his first novel. His story “Supportive Husband” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245.

Syllabus: Unexpected Dramaturgy

LYNN NOTTAGE IN REHEARSAL FOR THIS IS READING (2017) AT THE FRANKLIN STREET RAILROAD STATION IN READING, PENNSYLVANIA, 2017.

In an interview in the Review‘s new Fall issue, the playwright Lynn Nottage describes the way one of her classes at Yale would open: with a trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. “Most academics and practitioners weren’t acknowledging the different forms of theater happening all over New York City, and how those forms were in conversation with the way we as playwrights make our work,” she tells Christina Anderson. Her class also visited vogue balls, megachurches, trials, and wrestling matches. “What I’ve witnessed is that, by the end of the course, all the students, even if they began as very naturalistic, structurally conservative writers, are making work that is more playful, inventive, and open,” she says. We asked Nottage to provide us with a syllabus of sorts—and she sent a reading list of plays that can also teach us to look at drama and narrative structure from a similarly wide range of vantage points.

 

As a playwright, I’m interested in what happens when I enter my craft from differing perspectives, as an anthropologist, an athlete, an activist, a con artist, a criminal, a prosecutor, an exhibitionist, an archivist, a visual artist, a musician, a mystic, or a healer. What can we learn about dramatic structure and storytelling from observing the way theater, and performance, occur outside of a traditional theatrical setting? I’ve gravitated toward the following plays for their ability to raise this question, to engage unexpected dramaturgy, and to bend and twist the architecture of narratives to arrive at a piercing truth.

Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker

Well By Lisa Kron

Forever by Dael Orlandersmith

Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moisés Kaufman

Indecent by Paula Vogel

The Christians by Lucas Hnath

Is God is by Aleshea Harris

School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play by Jocelyn Bioh

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz

Saved by Edward Bond

The Lily’s Revenge by Taylor Mac

Art by Yasmina Reza

 

Lynn Nottage’s plays include Ruined, Intimate Apparel, Sweat, and Clyde’s. She is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 

The Church Van

1990 Plymouth Voyager. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Every Sunday morning would start the same way. Grandma Gayle, after her overnight shift as a nurse’s assistant, would walk into the room catty-corner from hers, knock, and yell, “Grandson!”—though Grandman’s yelling barely registered a decibel. So she would gently nudge my side and remind me that we had to get going. If there was time, bath; if not, shower. I’d make my dash to the kitchen, where Grandma would have prepared the kielbasa sausages fried, eggs fried, and cheddar cheese melted on a bialy or bagel bought from the deli up the street and accompanied by Tropicana Berry Punch in a glass. Church wouldn’t start for four hours, at least. But we started early—my grandma, grandpa, and me getting into the 1994 Plymouth Voyager, normally parked in the back lot of their home, which was wedged between where Brownsville and East New York meet. We traversed every borough to pick up congregants; on Sundays, the Voyager served as the church van.

The bottom half of the Voyager must once have been a pristine teal, but it had faded into an odd mixture of light blues and grays. The top half was covered in homey faux wood paneling. The seating legally accommodated seven but in actuality the church van would fit as many people who did not mind sitting on laps and on the tan carpeted floor, or squeezing into corners. The cassette deck remained unused. As we got going, 1010 WINS would blast through the stereo with a crackle and a burst of static, a narrated mapping for Reverend Gayle, my grandpa, pastor of the church in the Bronx not far from Gun Hill, who would drive this first leg. Plus, a dissonant, semi-melodic mumble of hymns from Grandma, seated in the front passenger seat, as Grandpa—ever the nervous driver—would intermittently and suddenly press his right foot on the brake. Grandpa and I never understood what Grandma was trying to sing, but it always prompted Grandpa, after two minutes, to yell, “Marlene, ’top ya noise!”

This first leg of the ride was relatively smooth because it was short and still within a part of Brooklyn that Grandpa felt comfortable navigating. After fifteen minutes, Grandpa’s duties as church van driver would be passed on to “Uncle Robbie”—Dad’s best friend, my godfather, and Grandpa’s right-hand man—whom we picked up first. Grandpa would shift to the front passenger seat, Uncle Robbie would take the wheel, and Grandma would become my seat partner, which I appreciated because she usually packed candy to freshen my kielbasa breath. And Grandma would nearly cradle me in the front row.

Quickly, Uncle Robbie’s voice would add to the sounds of 1010 WINS, Grandma’s singing, and Grandpa’s audible aggravation: “Ya don’ kno, where ya go, mi headed to Ellis!”—our last stop in Brooklyn before drove more hurriedly to the other four boroughs. Add to the church van sounds the shocks, which were shocked that they ought ever to be used, every passenger feeling every pot hole, speed bump, unexpected slam on the brakes. Once we got to Ellis—another relative, this one related speciously by blood—she’d enter with so much bluster that I’d lose my seat and so would Grandma. Ellis’s first name, Josephine, had been replaced by her title, “Missionary,” which came with no official duties—it was just an honorific to sate her clamor for attention, prestige, and honor in our tiny church. Because more pickups were imminent, I sat on a hump in the back right-hand corner that covered the indent of the right rear wheel, just before we waded through the ever-present traffic on the RFK Bridge going toward the Bronx.

“Ellis!” Grandpa would exclaim every Sunday.

“Yes, Rev,” she’d respond to Grandpa.

“You ugly!” he’d joke.

“Not as ugly as you!” she’d say back, the only kind of response that would put a stop to Grandma’s humming, 1010 WINS, and the clamor from Uncle Robbie, and bring about a brief break for laughter.

The hump became the seat on which I’d learn about the old country, a gloss descriptor for the countries from which they all came: Missionary Ellis from Cuba, Grandma and Grandpa from Jamaica, Uncle Robbie from Guyana. But that hump-seat was where I learned about how they examined their new country. It’s where I learned how to talk smack, how to not smack while chewing on Grandma’s mints, how to sell wolf tickets, how to pray, how to accept tough love from congregants who would fix my tie, how to pretend to hate the worldly things our church would make into sins, like drinking, partying, playing cards, and watching movies.

When Chrysler discontinued production of the Plymouth Voyager in 2003, I received no notification—no eulogy for the defunct vehicle—but I thought fondly of that one: the boxy church van with its diminutive stature accommodating far more people, experiences, hope, dreams than it was ever built to do, and which taught me far more than I ever expected to learn.

 

Caleb Gayle is a professor at Northeastern University, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and the author of the book We Refuse to Forget.

Postcards from Elizabeth Bishop

Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.

Elizabeth Bishop delighted in the postcard. It suited her poetic subject matter and her way of life—this poet of travel who was more often on the move than at home, “wherever that may be,” as she put it in her poem “Questions of Travel.” She told James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979 that she seldom wrote “anything of any value at the desk or in the room where I was supposed to be doing it—it’s always in someone else’s house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.”

Since her death in 1979 and the publication of her selected correspondence, Bishop has become known as one of the great modern-day letter-writers. And yet inevitably something is lost when an editor transcribes a letter to prepare it for print: the quality of the correspondent’s hand (or the model of her typewriter), the paper used, cross-outs and typos, and everything else that fixes the letter in time and space. When it comes to a postcard, or a letter composed on a series of postcards (something Bishop enjoyed doing), we get none of the images, and even more is lost.

But what exactly? “What do we miss by not seeing these postcards?” Jonathan Ellis and Susan Rosenbaum ask in the catalogue for the exhibition of Bishop’s postcards they have curated at the Vassar College Library, on view through December 15, 2023. Vassar, which is home to Bishop’s papers, has published print and online catalogues of the exhibition. The print catalogue includes the curators’ richly suggestive introduction, front and back images of the exhibition’s sixty-three items, and appendices.

The answer to the curators’ question is: quite a lot. There is always some dialogue between the front and back of one of Bishop’s postcards. Take the one to Merrill commenting on her restless habits of composition. The front of the card (“the nicest left of my postcards from the Eastman Museum,” she says) is a reproduction of the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study of a goat. Bishop doesn’t point out the analogy between her unsettled ways and the ambling goat. She knows Merrill will get it.

Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.

But more often, the dialogue between the front and back of the card is explicit, and it plays with the difference between Bishop’s reality and what the postcard pictures. In the middle of one summer, Bishop sent the painter Loren MacIver an image of a stag in an icy stream, thinking “it might make you feel cool … to look at it.” Another postcard to MacIver features a photo of the University Inn in Seattle. The hotel is her “home away from home—temporarily, at least,” while she is teaching for a term at the University of Washington. Lest MacIver get the wrong impression of her circumstances, Bishop corrects the sunny image by drawing a line on the photo and noting that snow is currently falling into the swimming pool.

Postcards began circulating in the late nineteenth century, at first in Europe. These cards carried the address on the front; on the back would be an etching of Salzburg, say, or the Tower of London, and space for a short, handwritten message. A simple but consequential redesign was introduced around 1900: the address was moved to the back of the card, the image to the front. With new visual technologies revolutionizing print media, postal rates falling, and the frequency of mail delivery rising (up to twelve times a day in Paris!), the craze for the postcard took hold. Like other consumer crazes, it seemed to many commentators to be a feminine delirium.

Bishop’s own interest in the postcard began early in her life. In “In the Village,” a short story about her childhood in rural Nova Scotia during the First World War, she describes her mother’s collection of postcards. (Gertrude Bishop must have been one of those women caught up in the postcard craze). The child in the story is thrilled—“how beautiful!”—by her mother’s glitter postcards. “The crystals outline the buildings on the cards in a way buildings never are outlined but should be,” Bishop writes. Compared to those sparkling pictures of distant cities, “the gray postcards for sale in the village store” were a disappointment. “After all,” Bishop reasons, speaking from the little girl’s perspective, “one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full size, and in color.” Notice how young Elizabeth’s sense of reality has been subtly undermined by a taste for postcards. Now reality looks like a representation—a superior one “full size, and in color,” but a representation all the same.

Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.

Bishop sometimes made greeting cards of her own with crayons and (in tribute to her early enthusiasm for it) glitter. She made her own collages, using, for example, a cigar-box label to create a Christmas card. Ellis and Rosenbaum compare her camp creativity to the collage art of John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Ray Johnson, and Joseph Cornell. The rectangular frame of the postcard was for her a container something like one of Cornell’s horizontal box constructions. Underlining that association, the Vassar exhibition includes a postcard of one of Cornell’s works that Bishop sent to MacIver in 1977.  In “Objects & Apparitions,” Bishop’s translation of a poem by Octavio Paz celebrating Cornell’s work, Cornell’s boxes are called “cages for infinity.”

Postcards are, in their way, a species of propaganda. Whether they show grand public buildings, statues of military heroes, or clichés like a pot of Boston baked beans, they help to constitute a quasi-official discourse, a common image-repertoire that defines what we are supposed to find admirable, interesting, amusing, and so on. Bishop did not disdain popular images of this kind; she enjoyed them, even as she mocked them. That combination of participation and parody is expressed in a souvenir photo postcard that Bishop and her girlfriend Louise Crane posed for at a carnival in France in the early days of their romance. The young women’s faces, poking through a painted sheet, are joined to the burly bodies of two boxers taking swings at each other. While Crane stares coolly at the camera, Bishop makes eyes at her.

Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.

Numerous postcards in the exhibition play with gender norms and suggest queer subtexts. Bishop once sent Merrill a card that wished him, in Greek, “Many Happy Returns on Your Name Day.” Like many of the cards she collected, she must have found this one in a junk shop or used bookstore (0r the Greek tea room she mentions on the card?) and picked it out thinking of Merrill, who spoke Greek and had had, she knew, more than one love affair with a Greek man. The sentimental card pictures a man’s cuff-linked hand shaking a pale, ambiguously gendered hand within a decorative ring of violets and roses. “I’m either congratulating you on yr. engagement,” Bishop types on the back, “or asking you to marry me … I think.”

The cigar-box label that Bishop scissored and sent as a Christmas card to the Brazilian journalist Rosinha Leão pictures a gartered and bewigged eighteenth-century courtier labeled with the words “Our Aristocratic Friend.” This is most likely an affectionate reference to Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop’s upper-class Brazilian lover, who had introduced Bishop to Leão. Another postcard in the exhibition, this one addressed to Lota, is a reproduction of a Victorian painting by James Collinson of a showily dressed young woman—Ellis and Rosenbaum identify her as a prostitute—who turns to the viewer with a wily smile while holding an empty woman’s purse. Bishop wrote nothing at all on the card but twice underlined the title The Empty Purse. What exactly was she saying? It seems to have something to do with money and sex.

Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.

The postcard is an object as much as a message, and sending one, for Bishop, was like giving a gift—it was an expression of attention and care in the form of a four-by-six-inch keepsake. Unlike a letter, which typically suggests a chain of communication, most postcards don’t call for a response. In this sense, the postcard has a one-off, standalone quality not unlike a poem’s.

And if Bishop’s postcards are sometimes like poems, are some of her poems like postcards? The first postcard in the exhibition is a photograph from the 1910s, of Cumberland Road in Great Village, Bishop’s grandparents’ home in Nova Scotia. Elm-tree branches arch in a canopy above the road like guards of honor. Bishop never sent the card to anyone. Or we might say, because she kept it among her papers, that she sent it only to herself. She inscribed on the back, as if it were somehow helpful simply to say aloud—for herself? for posterity?—what she knew very well: “I drove the cow to pasture up this road.”

Compare that postcard to “Poem,” from Geography III, the last collection of poetry she published. The subject of “Poem” is a landscape painting of Great Village by George Hutchinson, her great-great-uncle. “About the size of an old-style dollar bill,” the oil painting is small and rectangular. We might think of the painting as the front of a postcard and Bishop’s poem, describing and meditating on it, as the message on the back.

Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.

The poem goes into considerable detail to describe the painting’s representation of Great Village, which was the scene of some of Bishop’s earliest and most powerful memories. In order to get at the reality she recalled, Bishop had to do her best to render the painting’s version of it. This means heightening our awareness of the artist’s medium. Thus the wild iris is “fresh-squiggled from the tube” (as if a first squirt of oil paint were the same thing as a flower blooming), and the “tiny cows” are “two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows.” “A specklike bird is flying to the left,” Bishop notes. “Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?” This attention to the painting’s materiality emphasizes the artificiality of the image, its status as a representation. Rather than make the reality of the scene more remote, it awakens Bishop’s memories and brings her closer to her own experience of the place.

How does that work? And what does it have to do with postcards? The poem and the painting both are pieces of correspondence. What matters for Bishop is an exchange between people: the way the painting triangulates her and her great-great-uncle’s relationship to a “loved” place, preserved by a manifestly artificial and not particularly valuable image. “Our visions coincided,” she says. Then she corrects herself: “ ‘visions’ is / too serious a word—our looks, two looks.” The art of the postcard, for Bishop, was an art of “looks”—shared glimpses and jokes passed from hand to hand, time-stamped, and postmarked.

 

Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art.

Lifesize Dioramas: At Carolee Schneemann’s House

Photograph by Hannah Gold. Carolee Schneeman’s house near New Paltz.

In 1965, a stone house near New Paltz was slated for auction. A cousin of the owners, a young and broke painter, begged them to let her buy it with her musician partner. She feared the house, which was limping along, would be torn down. Soon after the artists purchased the house, the painter heard a voice in her dreams: Take a chisel to the concrete stucco, and you will find golden stones beneath; use a crowbar to peel up the linoleum flooring, there are chestnut boards below; hammer at the drop ceilings, there are wide beams above. The painter did as she was told, and found what she was promised. The house began to breathe again. The painter lived in, or perhaps with, the house for more than five decades, long after the musician departed. There were other lovers, and a series of cats—some of the cats were reincarnations of the previous cats. She made films in the rooms and worked in a studio on the second floor. She became, in time, famous. Four years ago, she died in the downstairs bedroom.

This is the story, anyway, as told by the painter, who was known to take creative liberties. Carolee Schneemann named herself. “I made it up,” she said of the surname, “I wanted a big masculine German name.” She was born in 1939, if not 1934. Her birth certificate seems to have been altered with one careful pen stroke, closing off the four into a nine. Census records concur. Still, even last winter, at her first retrospective in the U.K., the Barbican’s Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, the museum materials showed not just the factual date, but the later date, the one Schneemann used when she told her life story.

Last December, I saw the house myself. Rachel Churner, the director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation, picked me up at the station and drove me to Rosendale, New York, where Rachel Helm, who caretakes the house, met us. There was snow on the ground, and we stomped what we could off our boots before the Rachels began my tour. Helm pointed first to the exterior stones Schneeman had uncovered, and then, inside along the walls, the horsehair insulation, coming unstuffed like a child’s favorite plush toy.

The house was built, I learned, in the 1750s. One of three on the street, it was constructed when the French Huguenots made a deal with the Lenape. The Huguenots designed these houses with sloped entries to the basements for livestock to enter—the animals’ body heat would rise, helping to warm the rooms above. In the 1820s, the town became the cement capital of North America, and the industry supported the community until the early twentieth century, when Rosendale cement fell out of favor. The town grew quiet. The house expanded upward and sideways, a patchwork of extensions and renovations, and there was a farm on the property—the farm failed. Finally, the young Schneemann, along with pianist and composer James Tenney, purchased the house.

On the first floor, I saw low-ceilinged rooms enlivened by bright colors: paisley or other swirling patterns clashed joyously; two vibrant shower curtains hung paired on the rod. Directly beneath, along the tub’s base, Schneemann had installed tiles with images of male knights and pages upside-down—“to castrate them,” Helm said.

By the bookshelves upstairs, Churner showed me the notes and indexes Schneemann made in the backs of her books—one listed each reference to cats. On a short stretch of peeling gold wallpaper hung Schneemann’s thermometer collection, and through the next door was the winter bedroom, painted a dusty lilac, a shade Schneemann considered shadow-proof. I recognized the deeply recessed windows from Fuses, one of Schneemann’s most famous works.

In the film, the artist and Tenney have sex in the winter bedroom, as the cat Kitch watches. “No one else had dealt with the image of lovemaking as a core of spontaneous gesture and movement,” Schneemann later wrote, and Fuses does chronicle sex as a kind of improvised choreography, with pauses on the bodies in repose, the camera slowly scanning Tenney’s pubic hair the way one might capture the details of a larger painting. In the mid-sixties, of course, this exposure was radical, and the reception of the film, now in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Smithsonian, was mixed: it was alternately degrading, liberating, and even educational.

The purplish hue of the winter bedroom, immortalized in Fuses, recurred in the houses’ palette alongside deep yellow, seafoam green, and the bluer end of periwinkle. The downstairs bedroom is floral; the wallpaper was a wedding gift to one of the nineteenth-century tenants. In spots where the design had faded, Schneemann matched the bosc-pear hue with paint and penciled a partial restoration of the branches. Most surfaces throughout the house reflected this level of care: she’d also rubbed paint into the shower’s grout, dyeing it a pleasing blue, and the bathroom wall is decoupaged, as is the kitchen backsplash—the former appears in Fuses. The latter is composed of sesame seed, tamari, and Chiquita labels, alongside images of painted food, all sealed in a clear coat of green. Beneath the backsplash, Tenney constructed a cabinet, designed around a single vintage drawer that Schneemann had found on a city street. Tenney also built the kitchen table, a boxy J shape, around a stone pillar in the center. “And for him to do carpentry was such a big risk because, you know, his delicate little fingers,” Helm said, rolling her own in the air, as if on a piano.

Walking through the house with the Rachels felt dreamlike; there was something kaleidoscopic about the rooms, the sort of adulthood a child might dream of, in which walls are canvases, and treasures found while walking (feathers, shells, pebbles, nests) are proudly displayed. But it wasn’t juvenile at all; it was skillfully executed, a creative work accomplished by an artist over decades.

Alongside the artist’s found treasures are the rodent offerings of her feline housemates—Schneemann was adamant that the cats were not her pets: Kitch the cat, not Kitch her cat. I spoke to Alexa Punnamkuzhyil, who once looked after the final cat, La Niña, when Schneemann was away. Punnamkuzhyil is actually allergic to cats, “but you don’t say no to cat sitting for Carolee Schneemann.” She recalled the feminine energy of the house, the way the dangling crystals on the candleholder refracted rainbows on the walls, and Schneemann’s instructions, Punnamkuzhyil says, “to not disturb any of La Niña’s scatter pieces or any artwork she might make while we were there.” Artwork by La Niña (conceptualized by Schneemann), was even in a gallery show after Schneemann’s death.

Now, La Niña lives elsewhere with a former employee of Schneemann’s, and her artworks, like most of the possessions on the ground floor, have been cleared out, because of coming construction—just structural things, for now. Everything has been photographed and could be restored 1:1, Helm told me as we stood in the kitchen, then frowned at the thought, wondering if this kind of preservation would be too shrine-like.

It’s slippery, this history making that the Foundation engages in—it was the Rachels who told me that Schneemann’s public birth year is fudged, and there were occasionally beats of silence after I asked a question, during which the Rachels would look at each other before answering me, maybe wondering which narrative to let stand. “Well, that’s the story … ” they said more than once, trailing off.

Now, they are deciding how to convert the house into a functional space for an artist residency—an intention Schneemann had for the house after her death. Some of the specifics of the residency were made clear by Schneemann: no painters were to attend, so as to not compete with her legacy (somewhat comically, creators of Schneemann’s better-known media, such as sculpture and performance art, are permitted). But other choices are still open questions, specifically around preserving the house while adapting it for the residents: “What can you stabilize and keep secure?” Churner asked, “What’s precious and what’s utilizable?” The Rachels grimaced as we discussed last year’s auction of Joan Didion’s belongings; they’re both attached to Schneemann—especially Helm, who was close to the artist in the later years of her life—and want to avoid the pitfalls of fetishization.

The house is also a historic site (Schneemann registered it in the nineties) so possible interventions, even if they are desired, will be limited. Residents, of course, would need a bathroom and kitchen, but the current rooms feel like life-size versions of the artist’s wooden-box dioramas, much too precious to be worn down by regular use. The Rachels, therefore, are proceeding very slowly, crafting the epigraph in Schneemann’s story with a care reminiscent of the grout-painting, decoupaging homeowner herself.

Schneemann, in a late interview, explained that she prioritized the preservation of her home over that of her work. “It’s my muse, it’s my container, it’s my source of dream and function,” she said. “The house is my work and all my work is from the house, and my identity for the core of my life is this house.” Such was her attachment that Schneemann wanted to be buried in the yard, but local regulations prohibited it, as the land is a marsh and there wasn’t a space far enough from the building—the cats, however, have graves outside. Schneemann died in her bed downstairs, surrounded by the floral wallpaper she’d so lovingly maintained, and by friends and lovers, La Niña on her chest.

 

Hannah Gold is a writer based in Brooklyn. She coedits Berlin Quarterly and teaches writing at Columbia University.

In the Beginning

Photograph by J.D. Daniels.

I don’t remember learning to read. There is a story in my family: I am still a small child, my mother carries me in her arms as she stands in line at the bank, the bank teller sees my long golden hair and says, “What a pretty little girl.” I say “I am a boy, Janice,” and Janice screams and faints.

This was in the seventies in Kentucky, the years of The Exorcist and The Omen, the era of demonic children on-screen. Janice, primed by horror movies to see the supernatural in everything, was unable to imagine a less exciting explanation. It was impossible that a child so small could have read her name tag.

It is not lost on me that this myth of learning to read frighteningly early is, at the same time, about my indignant insistence that I am a boy. Nor is its brimstone whiff of my family’s demonic flavor lost on me. When my mother’s brother Charles Edward died, she told me, “He was the devil, John David, and you are just like him.”

***

You know the line everybody has to repeat about how Kafka says a book must be an axe to break up the frozen sea within us? That must be one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard. I don’t have a frozen sea within me. I have burning magma.

As I reach out my hand for the illustrated children’s Bible I want to write about, I feel molten fear. I open the book. I can’t read its first page without rushing to the bathroom in a panic to shit my brains out. How I wish I could shit my red brains out, but my brains are with me always, even unto the end of the world, such as my brains are: hot, crackling, searing, electrified. If it isn’t fear I feel, I’d like to know what it is. Pain? Desire? Awe?

***

Fifteen years ago my mother—deaccessioning books from her crowded shelves, simplifying her retirement in Fort Myers, Florida, not knowing that, in 2022, flooding from Hurricane Ian would simplify her life far beyond the level of austere calm that had been her aim—fifteen years ago my mother airmailed me a cardboard box of my old children’s books. I sat on the floor of my office, gratefully, greedily reading them all. And, when I had finished, a child again, with all of childhood’s attendant terrors, I smashed my office chair into splinters and screamed until I vomited.

There was a blue book in that cardboard box that hadn’t ever been mine: a brand-new copy of Love You Forever, a famously moving book and a famously confusing and upsetting one, too. Being a mammal is all about confused boundaries: at one time, you lived inside your mother’s body. It was confusing.

I read the book. A mistake. I make a lot of them. This is what I remember. A woman has a child, a son. She sings him a song about how much she loves him. She sings it to him when he is a baby, she sings it when he is a sullen teenager. When he grows up and moves away, she drives across town, in a bizarre scene that the reader is apparently expected to take in stride,  and breaks into his house to watch him as he sleeps, and to sing him the song. When she is too old and weak to sing to him, in a terribly moving and upsetting scene he sings their song back to her. When his mother dies, he sings the song to his own infant daughter. A tale of love and doom.

***

Also in the box: A Child’s Book of The Bible, “retold by Michael J. Pellowski, edited by Malvina G. Vogel,” 1980.

I have a speech I used to give—don’t worry, I’m not going to give it now—about how I can’t stand it when writers are asked about their influences, as if anyone could possibly have accurate access to that information, or, possessing it, would dare to be honest. But I have had recent luck in not beating ‘em but joining ‘em, and so today I’d like to besmirch or implicate myself in the common practice of influence naming.  It was the stories in A Child’s Book of the Bible, like “The Handwriting on the Wall” in the Book of Daniel, that made me want to be a writer.

The fingers of a man’s hand appeared on a wall opposite the king … the floating hand wrote four strange words on the palace wall. Then the mysterious hand vanished. Where did the hand come from? What did the words mean?

Neither King Belshazzar nor his astrologers and soothsayers can understand the message of this magic writing. The queen says, in the King James Version:

There is a man in thy kingdom, in whom is the spirit of the holy gods; and in the days of thy father light and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, was found in him; whom the king Nebuchadnezzar thy father, the king, I say, thy father, made master of the magicians.

And that man, of course, is Daniel. How silly I feel every time I mistype his name as “Daniels.” He can read magic writing no one else can read (can he read a bank teller’s name tag?), he has the spirit of the holy gods, he has light and understanding and wisdom, he is the master of the magicians. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Tell me, who’s that writing? John the Revelator, David the king, Daniel the prophet in the lion’s den.

Pellowski and Vogel have Daniel tell the king: “It was the hand of God you saw. It was God who wrote those words.”

Vittore Carpaccio, Vision of St Augustine, or St Augustine in his Study. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Every year I find it harder to write. I don’t need it to be easy, I only need it to be possible. Phantasmatic pneuma—that’s what the art historian Norbert Wolf calls the medium through which the death of Saint Jerome was transmitted to Saint Augustine as he sat writing. It’s a high bar for a writer: vision, telepathy, prophecy. Wouldn’t it be easier just to stack one word on top of another? Maybe so, maybe not.

“Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”

Deep in my heart I have a belief that writing is a magic prophecy that God carves into a wall, or a vision of an intoxicated Pythia writhing and barking on the floor of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, not anything I can build with my own hands. What to do? For a long time, I sat around waiting for lightning to strike. Then I spent a decade climbing hills in thunderstorms, waving a seven iron over my head. It works.

William Blake told me: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Well, partner, now let me tell you something. I took your road of excess. Are you trying to convince me that this here is the palace of wisdom? What a dump.

Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” What happens after the beginning? Nothing. Fear is all there is.

***

In the beginning, the evening and the morning were the first day: opposites coexisted, contradicting but without canceling out. I grew up on a pretty street with block parties and volleyball games, with weeping willows and tulips: I grew up on a street where X and Y, the twins on the corner, carried flea-market butterfly knives and once tried to force a neighbor’s visiting cousin at knifepoint to suck a dog’s dick, until Big Merlin shamed them into stopping. Big Merlin died last summer of pancreatitis, which is how Kentuckians pronounce the word alcoholism.

A peaceful street, a street at war. The good object and the “bad” object are the same object. Are you my mother?

Like the king her father before her, and like her five brothers, my mother had a teeny-tiny drinking problem. As for me, I am of the Ozzy Osbourne school: my drinking problem is I have one mouth. Am I my mother? (I am a boy, Janice.)

Also in the box: Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman, 1960.

Photograph by J. D. Daniels.

Short answer is: Yes.

A mother bird, feeling her egg about to hatch, leaves the nest in search of something to feed her almost-newborn. “He will want to eat.” While she is away, her egg hatches. “Out came the baby bird! ‘Where is my mother?’ he said. He looked for her … He did not know what his mother looked like. He went right by her. He did not see her.” He meets many animals. “The kitten and the hen were not his mother. The dog and the cow were not his mother. Did he have a mother?” The baby bird sees a broken-down car. “Could that old thing be his mother? No, it could not.” Yes, son, it could. It isn’t, but it will be, and you will sing to her. He sees a boat, he sees a plane. He has moved on from projecting into the natural world to the built or made world, which is less and less like him but crucially present. We are born to adore, so he attempts to adapt using materials ready to hand.

Shades of Robert Anton Wilson, who writes:

We read of a baby giraffe whose mother was accidentally killed by a jeep immediately after birth. The neonate, following hard-wired genetic programs, “imprinted” the first object that roughly fit the giraffe archetype—the jeep itself. He followed the machine around, vocalized to it, attempted to suckle from it, and, when adult, tried to mate with it.

Similarly, Konrad Lorenz tells of a gosling who accidentally imprinted a ping-pong ball and spent his adult life, indifferent to female geese, attempting to sexually mount ping-pong balls.

“The baby bird saw a big thing. This must be his mother!”

Photograph by J.D. Daniels.

Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been nothing but people running up to me and saying, Mother, Mother! Here I am, Mother! And I feel confident that other people could describe my behavior in the same way.

“ ‘Where am I?’ said the baby bird. ‘I want to go home! I want my mother!’ ”

Photograph by J.D. Daniels.

This is surely one of the great children’s-book illustrations of our time: balanced on a tooth, a mouth within a mouth. Shades of Robert Bly’s The Teeth Mother Naked At Last. But it is not her mouth, it is your own. The breast that nourishes me is the same breast I fear will devour me in reprisal.

Of course, in the end his mother returns and feeds him. Nothing ever happens here in Galilee. My mamaw told me: “I used to think life was just one thing after another, but now I know life is just the same thing over and over.”

***

I haven’t done my usual amount of reading this year, of children’s books or of any other kind. This year my girlfriend had chemotherapy, immunotherapy, thoracic surgery, and two collapsed lungs. When she was in the hospital, I drove to visit her twice, most days. I got to know that curve in the arching expressway turnoff ramp where you have to shift from fifth into neutral to make the drop and then back into third to accelerate up and into the high turn, real Formula One antics, but just as you feel like Mario Andretti you’re at the merger where some tourist is parked, stationary in highway traffic, too terrified or incompetent to merge onto Storrow, and you shout out the window as you hit the hole and rip past him, “Let your balls drop, shit-dick,” and no one hears you, but all the same pretty soon you’re yelling it every day, even when there’s no car to yell at, shouting at a ghost. Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been nothing but shouting at that ghost. Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been nothing.

For months, for cancer months, I was so tired I could fall asleep just by closing my eyes. It was like working on the assembly line when I was a teenager: our OSHA-mandated-ten-minute-break whistle went off, and I crawled up on my table, and three seconds later I was asleep. I could sleep with my cock slammed in a door. I could sleep on a flight of stairs.

For fifty-three days I emptied the blood out of her Atrium Express Mini 500 Mobile Dry Seal Drain, out of her lung and into the bathroom sink. I wiped her blood off the tiles of the bathroom floor. I held her in my arms when she cried, I rocked her to sleep. Am I her mother?

***

The pastor of the Heart of Fire Church in Fern Creek, where I grew up, if I ever did grow up, once helped me and my mother move a truckful of boxes of my books: children’s books, yes, sure, and other books, too. I think I was twenty. I had dropped out of college. My apartment was on top of a corner store where, as I was soon to learn, I could rarely pick up bread and milk without some cat in line hammering on me to pay for his groceries, too: “I see how it is. You’re just a player hater. You just hate a player.” No, I’m just trying to buy this deviled ham.

When we were finished and my mother wrote the pastor a check, he looked down at it, then back up at her. “Don’t cheat a blind man, sister,” he said. “I can’t read.” After he left, my mother cried all day.

 

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, n+1, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.

Paul Bowles in Tangier

From left, Paul Bowles and Frederic Tuten in Tangiers in the eighties. Photograph courtesy of Frederic Tuten.

I immediately found a taxi in front of my hotel, which I thought meant good luck for the venture ahead. The driver smiled. I smiled. I gave him the directions in Spanish, then French, and finally I gave him a slip of paper with an address. He smiled. We drove slowly up and down hilly streets and then into a valley of people selling carpets and kitchenware; a mosque towered above us. We passed a man walking with a live lamb draped over his shoulders. It was my second day in Morocco, and I was not yet used to such biblical scenes.

Ten minutes later, I saw the same spread of carpets and the same array of pots and pans, the same mosque, and I gestured to say, What’s going on? He shrugged and gave me another of his wide smiles. I was not reassured, thinking of stories of kidnapping and worse that supposedly happened in Morocco, stories I had admired written by a man I had admired since I was sixteen and whom I was on the way to meet. But then, finally, I arrived safe and free, ten minutes late and lighter by thirty dollars—with tip.

Paul Bowles was already there, waiting for me on a bench at the American School’s entranceway. He was very thin, slight, in a beige jacket, gray trousers, and a narrow, quiet tie, and was smoking a cigarette in a holder.

“I hope you had a good ride,” he said.

“Fine. There was a cab waiting at my hotel. The Hotel Villa de France,” I added, with a certain pride, because Matisse and Gertrude Stein had once stayed there. “It took only forty minutes.”

“Oh!” he said. “You could have walked here in less than ten. But then, I suppose, you’d have to had known the way. That’s a good hotel,” he added, “or at least it was forty years ago. Is the place still run-down?”

“A mess, but lovely,” I said. I had loved breakfast there on my first morning—a pot of coffee and a full glass of fresh orange juice and toast wrapped in a linen napkin—on a table set among flower beds and under a jasmine tree. It was a luxury I had never enjoyed before and that I now dreamed of enjoying for the rest of my life.

“Be sure to set aside some water because it shuts down citywide every few days or so, and the electricity, too.”

I thanked him. But I had already been forewarned and that morning filled up my bathtub with cloudy water.

“We have a mutual friend,” I said.

He smiled. “Oh! Yes?”

“Susan Sontag. She told me that she had once visited you here in Tangier. She asked me to give you her warmest regards.”

“She sent me a collection of her stories some while ago.”

“I, etcetera, I think it is,” I said. “It came out a few years ago.”

“Yes, that’s the one. Have you read it?” he asked, with a slight incline of his head.

“Well, not all the stories,” I said.

He smiled. “Why did she bother to write them?”—his voice like a creaking door.

His cutting words about a mutual friend shook me and made me think the less of him, and I went on guard. But I was also pained because Bowles was one of my earliest heroes.

I had admired him since my teens, thirty years earlier, when, in a dark apartment in the Bronx, I had first read his The Sheltering Sky and dreamed of the day when I would travel to exotic places and have adventures packed with danger and meaning. Outside my Bronx window was a road and, beyond that, an elevated subway. Within walking distance was the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, divided by a muddy stream they called a river. Except for excursions into Manhattan, I had not traveled anywhere outside of the Bronx, although one day my cousin took me on a day trip upstate. I was fifteen, and for the first time I saw a cow.

I later made up for my provinciality and had since traveled to South America and Europe and was now living in Paris trying to write my next novel; it had been ten years since I’d published my first: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March. It had had some critical success, and on the strength of it, I had gotten a Guggenheim grant to write my second book, a novel about the Belgian comic strip character Tintin. I had heard from Sontag that supposedly well-meaning friends had little faith that I’d ever finish another novel and they said that I had gone to live in glamorous Paris to cloak my failure.

“I don’t think that,” Susan said. “But you should know.”

I tried to shrug it off, but it stuck with me. I had done other writing in the years following the first novel, starts and stops, one about a fascinating eighteenth-century mountebank, Count Cagliostro, who had an unwitting role in the French Revolution and about whom Alexandre Dumas had written a five-volume series. I must have written a hundred pages before I gave it up and went to a novella about windows.

It took me a long time—but that’s another story—before I understood that my fits and starts in writing had no aesthetic grounds but were the result of my ever-increasing drinking, which had started as drinking to get the writing machinery in gear, and after a while the gears were in full motion but not to write, only to drink.

In the meanwhile I wrote, slowly, my Tintin novel. There was a nagging feeling that whatever else I wrote, it was still not my second novel, and in my generation, only the novel mattered, and the bigger, the better, the more important, the more American. I had never shared that feeling. I wanted the writing to be trim and tight and evocative. In a Paris Review interview, Georges Simenon said he was influenced by Cézanne, who in three strokes, he said, created the essence of an apple, the essence of apple.

***

When sometime in the spring of ’81 I received the letter from the School of Visual Arts, in New York, asking me if I would like to teach a summer writing class with Paul Bowles in Tangier, I knew immediately I wanted to go. His was the kind of tight and evocative novel that I most admired. His was a life set apart from the ordinary, the competitive, the “literary.” Was he not also someone who had left his country?

I had a good reputation at SVA, where I’d moonlighted, teaching a literature class for more than fifteen years called Civilization and Its Discontents. The school thought that I would make a good team with Bowles, who had conducted the class the previous summer with small success.

Writers had landed in Tangier from afar to study with him, mostly young Americans from the States and a few expatriates living in Europe. Some had come for the lure of his writing; some had never read him, but many came for his fame as a proto-Beat character, a friend of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and other romantic renegades who had visited him in Tangier decades earlier. Whatever their reason for wanting to work with Bowles, many students were disappointed by Bowles’s formality and personal reserve and, most importantly, his uniform coolness to their work. SVA thought I might enliven the atmosphere and take down the classroom chill.

I had been nervous to meet Bowles because I had admired him for so long. I was nervous, too, because the situation was awkward. I did not know how SVA had proposed to Bowles the idea of my coming and with what tact or how he had reacted, so I was concerned that he would dislike the new situation and, by extension, dislike me, so on the morning of our first meeting I went right to it.

“I hope you don’t mind my sharing the class with you, Mr. Bowles,” I said.

“Not at all,” he replied. “I have no idea what to do. I’ve never taught before, and I’m not even sure that writing can be taught. And please, call me Paul.”

“Neither am I,” I said. This was true, but I also wanted to share a common ground, wanted to please him.

I had brought my copy of The Sheltering Sky for him to sign but felt that it was too soon to ask. An old Mustang came up, and Bowles waved. It had come to take him home, and I understood that our meeting was over. I was flustered, and I blurted out, “I admire you, Mr. Bowles.”

“Admire me? Why would you do that?” he asked, seemingly taken aback.

I wanted to tell him that I carried The Sheltering Sky with me wherever I moved. I wanted him to know how much I admired his life, which he’d invented on his own terms.

“Because I do,” I said, feeling foolish.

In a few days, we settled into a workable routine. We met at 10 a.m. in an airy room at the American School. We sat side by side at a desk on an elevated platform. In the workshop mode, the students commented on and criticized the work under discussion. Then it was my and Bowles’s turn. Paul lit up a cigarette filled with kif and stayed silent while I began to make my remarks.

I tried to find merit in even the most terrible pieces. My point was to encourage what was best in the work and where I thought it could be improved upon. In short, I was little interested in plot, arc of the narrative—all that could come later—but I wanted to find specific entry points that would open the writer to seeing his or her whole story freshly. I also made a point of saying that writers grow at different paces and that the most important thing was to keep writing. No one could ever have imagined that the author of Cup of Gold, one of the worst novels on the planet, was to be the author of such great novels as In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath.

Bowles was always polite, reserved, but nothing the students wrote pleased him or ever met with his approval—though he never expressed disapproval—thus leaving everyone disappointed. Everyone wanted his approbation, of course. They had come for that, for him, after all. I was just the sous-chef; he the chef. Whatever good I may have found in their work mattered less than his coolness to it.

Bowles saved his few comments to indicate where a semicolon or a paragraph or a tense change was needed: “On page four you say, ‘He thought to buy her flowers.’ But surely you mean, ‘He had thought to buy her flowers.’ Or I imagine you had meant that.”

Once in a while, when a word seemed inexact or inappropriate, he would dwell a bit on the writer’s need to find the mot juste. He never spoke of the story as a whole, never measured the degree of its success, never addressed the writer behind the effort.

He was far away from us all. The kif he smoked throughout the class fueled his distance. But ill at ease in doing what he felt ill-equipped to do, and pinched as he was in class, Bowles welcomed students to his apartment.

“Come for tea,” he’d say to almost anyone who asked to see him.

I was amazed that he was so broad and indiscriminate with his invitations. I should not have been surprised though, having earlier learned from him that over the years young people from all over Europe and the States would just show up at his door.

“What do you do, Paul, then?” I asked, somewhat appalled by the prospect of strangers knocking at my apartment door in New York or anywhere on the earth.

“I let them in, of course. What else can I do?” he asked, with an air of fatality.

You could have tossed them out, I wanted to suggest. But his sense of real or pretend resignation extended to everything. The world revolved as it did and as it would, and he had no part in its turning. People barged in at his door, and he couldn’t refuse them. But the truth was that he was lonely for company. The recent winters in Tangier, he told me, when he’d had few visitors, were especially bad. He could count them on a hand and tell you who they were. “A Swiss couple and then, in March, a Dutch painter.” He was lonely for his native language, as well. It was obvious that he was distant from contemporary American idiom. Sometimes, he stopped to ask a student what a phrase or a word meant in a story because it was foreign to him.

“You say here, ‘it’s the bomb.’ That’s odd.”

Of course, the students were amused, and his lapses gave him a bit of color.

“Why don’t you come back home?” I once asked.

“To live where and to do what? And where would I get kif? And anyway, how could I afford it?” I knew his rent was fifty dollars a month in a well-kept building. It even had a garage for his car.

By his account, he had no money, living on interest and some funds he was vague about—maybe he drew in four or five thousand dollars a year, he said. “Where else could I live on that?”

I had no answer.

“Besides,” he said, “it’s cold in New York.”

“Paul,” I said, “there are hundreds of people in New York who love your work, and I’m sure that there are tons of people to help you live in the city.” I thought of all the beneficence bestowed on writers by patrons, how Peggy Guggenheim sent Djuna Barnes a monthly check for rent, how Nancy Cunard lavishly supported James Joyce. I was sure there’d be rich people to take care of Bowles well into his old age. But I did not say all of this, feeling instinctively that he was not someone who would react well to the idea of being a ward of a patron, however glamorous the bestower. In fact, I realized that this was my fantasy.

***

On my second week in Tangier, Paul asked me to come to tea, and I kept finding excuses to postpone. I was afraid to visit him, thinking that no sooner would I walk through the door than the Moroccan police would burst in and arrest us all. He smoked kif all day long. In class he’d empty out a cigarette, finger in the kif, stick it in a holder, and smoke away, quietly, inhaling like an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat in a B movie.

I had been told that the police were rough with foreigners who used drugs, often entrapping them, especially the young who had come from Europe and America, and then putting them in prison where they were beyond the protection of their embassies. Bowles had never been arrested for smoking kif, but I was certain that were I with him chez lui, I’d be arrested and sent away to the most depraved prison and stay caged there forever. A fear that was, in part, thanks to Bowles himself, who, from the week I arrived in Tangier, fed me stories of dreadful police-doings.

Here’s one he relished: A middle-aged, conservative British couple on holiday motoring in the Maghreb mountains were stopped at a police barricade and their car searched. One of the policemen produced a package of kif, saying he had found it in their trunk. The couple denied ever possessing or knowing of such an item.

“Someone put it there,” the husband insisted, stopping short of an accusation against the two policemen and feeling assured that his word on the matter was sufficient. One of the policemen answered: “We are not happy. Make us happy.”

The couple was slow to get the point, but when they did they were irate—framed and extorted, they were, an outrage—and they told the policemen that they would be reported to the proper authorities. Husband and wife were arrested on the spot and hauled off to jail, where, finally, someone from the British consulate came dutifully to visit them.

It was a local matter; there was nothing really the consulate could do. But somewhere it was hinted that they could have avoided all that trouble at the onset by giving the policemen just a few pounds, but now they would have to get a Moroccan lawyer and go to court. Perhaps that lawyer could find a way to help them, in any event.

The lawyer suggested certain payments, emoluments to soothe the feelings of the arresting officers and to prepare for the goodwill of the presiding judge, and then, of course, there were his own fees. Having felt a bit of awful jail life and sensing that the outcome of the trial might not be based on their honesty and good word, they reluctantly let their lawyer take care of matters as he had suggested, and everyone who was involved, and some who were not, found their pockets heavier. Yet for all the soothing and the paving of kind feelings, the couple received a sentence of two years.

I was shocked. “Why were they sent to prison after they finally paid them off?”

“To teach them a lesson,” Paul said, smiling.

“How can you stay in such a scary place?” I asked.

“Who said I don’t like to be frightened?”

Always in a jacket, perfectly creased brown pants, and a quiet tie, Bowles was trim and neat, a dapper gentleman, soft-spoken, restrained, and by contrast, fond of wild, excessive people. As I later learned from Paul that his wife, Jane, had been. She’d loved drinking and making scenes in Tangier bars, like Parade. Bowles once suggested I go there. I did. It must have once been a glamorous little hole-in-the-wall with its narrow bar and tall zebra-print stools, but now it was a leftover stage set. It depressed me, and I wondered why Paul wanted me to go there. I didn’t tell that to Paul. He seemed pleased that I had made the expedition, as if I had gone to some shrine. “Jane sometimes fell off those stools drunk,” Paul said. “Sometimes I’d have to go and bring her home.” I felt he relished the memory, as one would of an errant child whose antics, however annoying, always amused.

How did he ever write with her around? I wondered. But then I thought, Maybe she fed an emptiness in him, or maybe he wrote to escape her. Then I thought, finally, What do you know about the mystery of couples?

One day it was clear that if I again postponed visiting Bowles, I would never again be invited to tea and that our relationship would sour. Not that he would make me feel that directly—his indirectness was iceberg-scale—and, liking him, I didn’t want any ill feelings between us. I said that I wanted my girlfriend, Dooley, to meet him and that when she arrived in a week we’d set a date, and we’d both come for tea.

At the start of Ramadan, Dooley and I walked six flights up the newly washed Italian marble staircase to Bowles’s doorway. I was still out of breath when he opened the door.

“Why didn’t you take the elevator?” he asked. “Was it not working?”

“Yes,” I said, “but Dooley is frightened of elevators.”

“So was Jane,” he said, regarding my companion kindly. Paul’s longtime friend and protégé of many years, Mohammed Mrabet, was also there greeting us in faulty Spanish and crippled English.

Tired suitcases stacked high in the corridor stood as totems of Bowles’s travels. I fancied his beige living room, which gave off the glow of the desert at dusk. I felt immediately comfortable. Except for the Moroccan-style banquette, it was exactly like my friends’ Greenwich Village digs in the fifties: a living room with scatter rugs frayed at the edges, a low table for tea, a canvas sling chair. Everything orderly and clean but with the dusty patina of yesteryear. I can’t imagine it ever having changed since the day Paul moved in some forty years ago.

I had read about Mrabet and that he and Paul had been close for more than thirty years. Mrabet was a street urchin of fifteen when he met Paul. Illiterate, he was a natural-born storyteller, and Paul had tape-recorded his stories, transcribed and translated them, and aided in their publication. We settled down to drinking mint tea and exchanged pleasantries. Mrabet suddenly said, “Paul is my Papa!”

“Oh, that’s great,” I said.

“I am married. I have three or four children. I’m a no gay.”

“Oh,” Paul said laughing. “He chased Alfred Chester around the apartment threatening to kill him because he called him my sexy cowboy.”

“He was a big stupido,” Mrabet said. “Paul knows many stupidos. But you’re not one. You’ve never come to bother him.”

Paul laughed. “Because he never comes.”

While we were drinking tea, Mrabet opened a green cloth bag and took out a load of kif, and he and Paul set about to separate the seeds. They started to smoke as they worked. Mrabet offered Dooley some hash. She smoked a bit and seemed staggered. “I feel like I’ve gone through a wall,” she said.

“Do you have anything to drink other than tea?” I asked. I was hoping for a big glass of scotch.

“No. No alcohol,” Mrabet said. “Kif,” he said, with a big smile.

“I have an allergy to all drugs,” I said, “all except alcohol.”

Everyone laughed warmly.

It was such a friendly moment. I felt for the first time since meeting Paul a degree of familiarity and comfort. I liked Mrabet. I liked that Dooley seemed so happy to be there. She too had read The Sheltering Sky and felt, as I had, a deep connection to the characters’ rootlessness and interior isolation. But she had promised that she would never mention this to Paul on first meeting.

“I don’t want to gush like all the others,” she said. “Like I’m sure you have.”

But before we were to leave, Mrabet disappeared into a back room and after a few moments emerged, holding out before Dooley a necklace of assorted trinkets on a string. Paul looked at me amused. It was made up of blue and green beads, waxy shells, glass rings, and pieces of bone. It was the kind of necklace a kid of six makes at summer camp.

“This has great power, much baraka to protect you. Also, to make your enemies sick and stop them from making bad magic against you,” Mrabet said.

Dooley managed to ward off Mrabet without his taking too much apparent offense. He slowly raised the object before my eyes: “Well, what about you—will you buy it for your woman?”

I was foolish enough to ask its price. Bowles whispered to me, “Don’t encourage him.” Mrabet wanted somewhere near $280—the friend’s price, because Paul liked me.

“Oh, that was just some trash he found in the street,” Paul said. “He’s always trying to sell people things—just don’t pay attention.”

Mrabet sulked. He walked us to the door and at the last moment lifted the necklace before Dooley’s eyes. “A hundred dollars,” he said.

***

We were invited back to Paul’s a week later. He said he had something special in mind for our visit. Dooley and I had hardly walked in the door when Paul said, “We’ve got to leave soon. Mrabet has been waiting all morning.”

We were hustled into Paul’s waiting Mustang, Mrabet behind the wheel. Mrabet was smiling, happy, humming. We sped out of the town and into hills and countryside. There were roadblocks and car inspections every so often. The police always did that during Ramadan, searching the cars for alcohol, but we went some way without being stopped.

At our first barricade, Paul and Mrabet gave each other looks as we were waved ahead by the police, and I kept thinking about the story of the two English people. Except that now there really would be kif in the car and our arrest perfectly legal. By Moroccan law, everyone found with people carrying drugs were subject to arrest, whether they were in possession of drugs or not. Finally, trying to sound casual, I took the courage to ask whether they were holding.

“Of course not,” Paul said. “Not in the car.”

“Why? Did you want to smoke?” Mrabet asked. He was pleased at the thought of my smoking kif, trying, as he had, to get me to stop drinking alcohol—a disgusting, fattening thing and also forbidden by the Koran. If I were in his care, he would get me in good condition in three months. A little work each day on his farm and I’d be a new man. He brightened at the mention of his farm.

We were still a little way from Mrabet’s farm, Paul said, for that was where we were going and that being the little surprise he had in mind for us. We drove some half hour, slowing down at the next police barricade, where we were waved on before our coming to a full stop. Paul and Mrabet glanced at each other nervously, and I was sure by their nervous glances that they were carrying kif and that we were just lucky not to have been stopped and searched.

“The police are not interested in us,” Paul said. All the same, there was a nervous edge to them both until Paul suggested they make a brief detour before we got to the farm. Mrabet was all for the detour.

We turned off the road to a narrower earthen one and drove five or six more minutes before bringing the car to a halt on a grassy flat. Asking us to wait a moment, they got out and walked some way before stopping at a tree. They pulled at some branches and sped back to the car. I know I wanted to laugh, and Dooley couldn’t help herself and giggled. But I think they were too busy to notice because they now sat filling two empty cigarettes with the kif from a little pouch they had stashed in the tree. They smoked for a relaxed few minutes, chatting and smiling. Soon their earlier nervous edge vanished, and they were happy.

We returned to the main road and then to a dirt lane that took us to a hilly piece of land. Mrabet beamed. At last, we had arrived at his farm. There was no cultivation, no house, no building of any kind that I could see; no animals domestic or wild, just a field the size of six weedy tennis courts that ended at a ravine. Of course, there was nothing much yet, Mrabet explained, but this was just the start, and he’d expand the property as soon as he had the money to buy the land adjoining his, which—and for who knows how long?—was still available.

Paul gave me a stern look, which at the time meant nothing that I understood. Following Mrabet, we all walked toward the ravine, where at the edge rose something like a mound of sticks and branches. A lean-to, actually, so poorly constructed that I could see a large man sitting, half asleep in it. Or perhaps he was stoned on kif or meditating on the sole cloud floating high above the wide spaces in the roof. He crawled out after Mrabet helloed, standing very tall, elegant in his long, yellow djellaba, being at least four inches above my six-two, and he made several dignified bows to the group.

He was the guardian of the farm, Paul explained, whose duties apart from minding the land and the shed was to shepherd a goat, who was now wandering below us in the ravine. Mrabet was upset with the man and took him aside to berate him for the vagrant goat and for who knows what else. For being asleep on the job, Paul suggested. But the two soon seemed to patch things up, and the man went down into the ravine to retrieve the goat.

“He’s a big stupido,” Mrabet said.

“It would be a good idea,” Paul suggested, “to pay the man occasionally. Maybe then he would sleep less on the job.” Mrabet was paying the guardian fourteen dollars a month to manage the estate, and Mrabet owed him back wages, Paul said. Of course he would pay him, Mrabet said—but the man was already living on the land for free, and “with these people,” he said, in a lowered voice, “you should not give them too much of everything at once.” He took me by the arm and led me away to a stunted tree at the ravine’s crumbling edge.

“Over there,” he said, waving to the land beyond the ravine, “is free land, cheap, only four thousand dollars.”

“Are you going to buy it, Mrabet?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, extending his arm to the terrain beyond, “then I have all this for my farm.”

The problem was the money. That he did not have the money was the problem. But Paul did. Would I ask Paul for him, explain to Paul how valuable the land would be when it was cultivated and had many goats. Unless, of course, I myself would lend him the money, which he’d pay back in a few years as soon as the farm showed profits. I apologized for not having the money. I did not have it, actually, not even two thousand or a thousand or five hundred. But I would have loaned it to him, expecting never to get it back, for the clear joy his prospective domain gave him, the selfhood of his estate. I was so happy for him, in fact, that a few minutes later, I took Paul aside and asked him to lend or just give Mrabet the money outright.

“Why not, Paul? Think of how happy it would make him.”

“He doesn’t understand these things,” Paul said. “He doesn’t understand the idea of principal and income.”

I didn’t press Paul. Bertolucci’s film of The Sheltering Sky was yet to be made, and although Bowles’s short stories were reprinted, he had not, he told me, yet received any money from the publisher, neither royalty nor advance.

***

The following spring I wrote Bowles from Paris, asking what I could bring him when I returned to Tangier. “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes,” he wrote back on a postcard.

I remembered his telling me how hard it was to get the American Kellogg’s cornflakes, that those he bought at the tiny European market in Tangier were made in Germany and tasted nowhere near the ones he loved. I went to Fauchon near the Madeleine and bought two large boxes, flown in from the U.S., and carried them with me to Tangier that June, the second summer of our teaching together.

Perhaps because he was so pleased, later that month, after our teaching chores were done, Paul brought me to hear a trance musician play his deep reedy flute at the home of Paul’s old friends, a dying Frenchman and his wife.

Paul’s driver on call was a Moroccan with extremely long legs, whose djellaba rose above his ankles. We drove to Old Mountain, where in the colonial days the rich Europeans in their villas partied nonstop. We parked on an earthen side road and walked toward the house. Paul stopped to point out a small cottage that he had once rented. It stood on a cliff’s edge facing the Mediterranean, so that from his window, sky and sea merged into one vast blue slab. “That’s the cottage where I wrote Up Above the World,” he said.

“Oh. Because the cottage is so high up on the mountain here?”

“No,” he said smiling. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high,” he said. I had seen him smoke kif but had never seen him high, perhaps because that was his natural condition, to stay quietly high and up above the world.

We walked farther until we were met by our host, a woman in her late fifties, who drew us into a circle of six seated on a knoll a few yards from the house. She was grief-stricken and could hardly speak. She asked Paul in English, “How does anyone ever get over this loss? How did you, with Jane?” Paul did not answer right away. He took her arm and finally said, “We survive.”

Her dying husband lay in a wide stone-and-glass tower about twelve feet high at the cliff’s edge facing the Mediterranean. His wife slid open a window to let the music in, to soothe him, along with the morphine, in his dying. Sitting cross-legged on the grass, the musician played away on his thick wooden flute. Very odd how after a while everything but the music started to melt away. Me, too, melting, until I was only an atmosphere without body, and only a weaving low woody sound was left of the world.

I don’t know how long it was until Paul took me by the arm and led me away from hearing range. He had seen my eyelids fluttering, opening, closing, and he said he knew that I was on the way to a place deeper than normal sleep, to some terrible place, from which maybe I would never return. Perhaps he should have left me to go there to find what that meant. He walked me back to his waiting car, and we drove away. We were silent for a long while. Then, as we came close to my hotel, he said, wistfully, “I would like to have five more years, even three.”

“Of course, Paul,” I said. “You’ll live forever.”

 

Frederic Tuten has published five novels, among them Tintin in the New World. His memoir, My Young Life, and two recent books of short stories, The Bar at Twilight and On a Terrace in Tangier, are swimming in the world. He is also the coauthor of the cult film Possession.

Toyota Yaris

Photograph by Sarah Miller.

In 2007, I bought a brand-new red two-door Toyota Yaris off a lot at a Toyota dealership in the Inland Empire. I think it was about $13,000. I tried both the automatic and the manual transmission. The automatic had no power and because I was often getting on to the 110 freeway, whose on-ramps were about as long as the average hallway in a one-bedroom apartment, I thought the manual would be “safer.” I use quotes here because this car was tiny. If anything ever hit me while I was in that thing I would not be alive to write this. Luckily, nothing ever did.

I remember that as I headed into the dealership to sign the papers, I asked the salesman if I should maybe just try the Toyota Scion, what the heck, and he got very angry and started yelling at me that those cars were fucking garbage and that I should just buy the Yaris I said I had come to buy so that he could finish selling me this car and go sell another one, as God intended, more or less. “Why would you come here to buy a Yaris and walk out of here with another car, a stupid car, a car for A CHILD?” he shouted. I found all this charming, for some reason. I bought the car. I tried haggling. He made fun of me. “You are terrible at this, why try, go home and work and make five hundred dollars, don’t try to make it from me, you will never win. Also this car will make you money because you will never think about it.” And so I got a Yaris and the man was right. That car did what it was supposed to do, which was that it got me around and I never thought about it.

When I bought it, in my mid-thirties, it was one of the only good decisions I’d ever made. My boyfriends were mostly no good or not right. I was so bad with money it was a joke. When I hadn’t made a mess of my career, the economy stepped in to help. I did have good friends, and then later on I had a good dog, and this car made those things better. That might sound weird. But it never failed at getting me from one friend to another, or at getting me and that good dog around to various adventures. In that way, the rare sound judgment I had used in purchasing this car was compounded by the ways it was able to make the better parts of my life easier. The car took care of me and after a while I realized that I wasn’t as bad at taking care of myself as I thought I was.

I liked how it was so small from far away that you felt like you could just pick it up and kick it and it would definitely score you a field goal. There was never anything wrong with it. The air conditioner kicked ass. I would fill the thing up with gas and then just forget about it for a long time, especially since living in Los Angeles I didn’t commute and all I did was drive back and forth from Highland Park to Silver Lake. One day it started to act weird and I took it into the shop. I found out that this car had something wrong with its transmission, and so five or six years into owning it I got a brand-new transmission and then it was like a brand-new car all over again.

A friend of mine and I did have to push this car down a hill while we were trying to jump-start it, and it did indeed also have to have its entire passenger side replaced, which cost about $4,000 at a time when I think the car may have been worth $4,500. But the insurance company let me do it and I had the car for seven more years, into my early fifties. I would’ve had it longer except I took it to the Toyota dealer in Hollywood to fix my air conditioner and he said that was all that was wrong with it, but actually there was something else huge wrong with it, which honestly I couldn’t even tell you. If I had understood anything, then it wouldn’t have happened, although I’m not going to blame myself for not knowing anything about my own car, because I am not a mechanic, I’m just someone who wanted to drive a car around and not think about it. At any rate, thanks to Hollywood Toyota, my car died in the summer of 2021 in Roseville, California, in the middle of an industrial park. It was towed to the Toyota dealership in Roseville and they said that it was completely fucked. I don’t know why and I don’t want to know. I only know that that car was perfect and it was taken from me too early.

I have a Chevy Bolt now. It is a stupid car. It’s an automatic. Automatics are so uncool. I don’t give this car a lot of thought, and that’s good. When you look at it, you think, “Oh, you’re small,” but not “You’re so tiny it’s amazing that you can move but you do anyway.” It doesn’t care about me at all. When I got into my Yaris, I felt that it was greeting me. The Bolt is silent. That’s fine, and it’s good at doing its job, but we are not friends. 

 

Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in California. She writes a Substack.

New Movies, Fall 2023

Janet Planet (2023). All photos courtesy of New York Film Festival.

Annie Baker’s Janet Planet is a film that reminded me of what it is actually like to be a child: the boredom and fascination of learning to play a tiny electronic keyboard; the experience of faking illness so diligently that you kid yourself; those self-invented witchy rituals that offer the promise of control. Set in a crunchy Western Massachusetts town and mysteriously infused with the grain of an eighties family photo, it follows Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), an eleven-year-old with a wise, anxious face and a T-shirt down to her knees, and her single mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), as their household is disrupted by three visitors. Like Fanny and Alexander, one of Baker’s favorites, it’s a film framed by theater—there’s a culty open-air production with puppets and masks, a dollhouse with mismatched inhabitants. It also contains a scene with some of the best dialogue I’ve heard outside an Annie Baker play (while you’re here: you must read our excerpt of Infinite Life in issue no. 238!), in which two female characters have the kind of argument that only the closest friends can have, while tripping on MDMA.

—Emily Stokes, editor

The Curse (2023).

By 8:27 P.M. on Thursday, October 12, the night of the New York Film Festival’s 8:30 P.M. premiere screening of the first three episodes of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s new gentrification/reality-TV satire, The Curse, we were still standing outside Alice Tully Hall, at the front of a barricaded queue. To our right was a man in all black and Bluetooth headset, whom one of us assumed was famous and the other mistook for a security guard until he asked, somewhat conspiratorially, “Orchestra left or orchestra right?” We told him we hadn’t picked up our tickets yet. Past the security line, our companion disappeared into the crowd; we noticed that someone else’s companion, standing in line for the bathroom, was Eric André. Once we were seated, in orchestra left, the festival’s artistic director, Dennis Lim, began speaking to us from the stage. “Everything about The Curse screams cinema to me,” he said, by way of explaining why exactly NYFF had decided to screen several episodes of television. (The remaining seven episodes will be shown at Film at Lincoln Center in chunks, starting later this month.) “Emma Stone,” he continued, “is not just one of the best actresses of her generation but one of the bravest,” possibly in reference to the time she played an Asian American woman in a movie called Aloha (2015). In The Curse, her character, Whitney—the daughter of an eviction-happy slumlord—is the cohost of an HGTV-style show in development, Flipanthropy, on which she and her husband, Asher (Nathan Fielder), convert foreclosed buildings in a small New Mexico town into carbon-neutral reflective-glass Passive Houses and subsidize rent, sort of, for the local community. Asher is the official recipient of the titular hex, after he gives a little girl (Hikmah Warsame) selling soda in a parking lot a hundred-dollar bill (it’s all he has in his wallet!) for some good-Samaritan B-roll and then, when he thinks the cameras have stopped rolling, asks for it back. “I curse you!” she says—a TikTok trend he takes for black magic. When Whitney finds out, she—the head on the other side of the white-guilt coin—panics, telling Asher they need to find the girl and repent so that Flipanthropy’s “good karma” can be restored. Together, they also attempt to avoid a news reporter’s probing questions; court a local Native artist, hoping she’ll agree to serve as their cultural sensitivity consultant; try to conceive a child, even though or maybe because Asher, like Whitney’s father, has a penis approximately the size of a cherry tomato; while they’re having sex, with Asher fully clothed and kneeling at the foot of the bed with a vibrator, address an imaginary man named Steven (only he can give Asher permission to come); open a café called Barrier Coffee that is supposed to offer jobs to locals but instead exclusively employs people with Australian accents; celebrate Jewish holidays, since Whitney has recently converted. Nothing about it felt especially brave, and we agreed that, taken on their own, the first three episodes don’t really go beyond bloodless self-parody. There’s something of an awkward power struggle between Safdie’s penchant for oversaturation and Fielder’s abject earnestness—together they pack in so much stuff that Whitney and Asher, even as self-abasing caricatures, end up feeling mostly unspecific. But there are some real signs of life in the third episode, including a scene in their bedroom in which the two engage in a giggly protracted struggle to remove a tight sweater that Whitney is wearing and, at her insistence, attempt and fail to re-create the moment for an Instagram video (“This is so us!”). It’s almost touching to see them have fun together, and to see their efforts quickly devolve into desperation and anger at not being able to summon it again. When they learn that the family from the parking lot has been squatting unknowingly in one of their properties, there’s another suggestion that a shift in power or perspective, or the introduction of a new dynamic, might be in store. But by this point it was almost midnight, and we were so hungry. When we got out, we headed to the twenty-four-hour Flame Diner on Ninth Avenue. They’d replaced the reflective-Helvetica menus we’d been so fond of with a design that felt truly timeless.

Left: September 23, 2023; Right: October 12, 2023.

—Amanda Gersten, associate editor, and Oriana Ullman, assistant editor

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023).

Joanna Arnow’s first feature, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, which she wrote, directed, edited, and stars in, is an appropriately scalding portrait of the way many of us live now. Her character, Ann, is working a corporate job with the baroque pointlessness of an I Think You Should Leave sketch, but without the cleansing outbursts of manic rage. She’s in a sub/dom relationship with an affectless older man (Scott Cohen) who has to be badgered into bossing her around. Her parents (played by Arnow’s own parents) are adorable but maddening; the most moving moment of the film might be her father’s impassioned, despairing rendition of “There Is Power in a Union,” presented without further comment. On the basis of the film’s subject matter, I expected something intimate and loose, in the tradition of Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, or of its great forerunner Girlfriends, directed by Claudia Weill. Instead, Arnow’s film has the bleak, intentionally alienating precision of Roy Andersson’s existential vignettes, the scenes linked by sensibility and the relentless pursuit of deadpan punch lines rather than narrative momentum. The discomfort in the auditorium was palpable during a scene in which Arnow is costumed and gagged as a “fuck pig,” among other degradations, though a bit in which she slowly rolls away from her boyfriend in bed after he admits he’s a Zionist drew startled, knowing laughter. Without putting too fine a point on it, the film proposes a relationship between the forced humiliation of contemporary work and the slightly more freely chosen one of romantic relationships. Does the hopelessness of one’s professional future engender a concurrent longing for sexual abasement? Maybe, for a generation steeped in gig work and screen-mediated social anomie, it’s kind of all just the same thing.

—Andrew Martin, editor at large

Priscilla (2023).

Sofia Coppola’s Elvis is soooooo hot. Hotter even than Robert Pattinson as a vampire, and so bad; hotter and, in a way, badder than Christian Bale as a serial killer. The fact that Jacob Elordi (the evil quarterback from Euphoria) is so insanely hot and good at throwing chairs is definitely the best part of Priscilla—and its biggest problem. The thing about Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s young bride and Coppola’s heroine, is that she just wasn’t all that hot, or charismatic, or complex, or talented. Cailee Spaeny’s most interesting attribute, playing opposite Elordi (6’5″), is her height (5’1″). That sixteen-inch differential might be the film’s only real source of tension, both visually (the slow shots of Graceland at golden hour get old quickly) and emotionally. Though both are wonderful actors, the script—which tells the story of a fourteen-year-old fan’s abusive marriage to her pop-star idol—gives Spaeny and Elordi little beyond the kind of canned married-to-a-bad-man plotline of which there are as many examples in media as there are Elvis impersonators in Vegas: both the drug-addled King of Rock and the doe-eyed Priscilla are little more than a progression of convincingly inhabited costumes.

Even a boring woman deserves a life of her own, but does she deserve a biopic? This is, to Coppola’s credit, an interesting aesthetic problem: a question of finding a force to counter a fundamental imbalance—in age, sure, but also in magnetism and narrative agency. Priscilla’s half-hearted attempts at self-assertion do little, dramatically. A better answer might have been found in Priscilla’s passion for passivity, a love that could easily have been as willful and perverse as her husband’s cruelty and carelessness were pathetic. But Coppola doesn’t let the driving force behind the real Priscilla’s life—her submission to desire—drive her story; in fact, no one seems to be driving here at all. We get a two-hour movie with as little movement as a dollhouse, and a woman as cinematically inert as that metaphor suggests.

At the age when Priscilla met Elvis, I loved Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, and The Virgin Suicides in a way that I rarely love anything now. Rather than teaching me the joys of emancipated, divorced adult womanhood (or midcareer female filmmaking), Priscilla did the opposite: this tale of a teenage crush gone on too long mostly made me yearn for a time when I found it easier to lose myself in fantasy. And for Jacob Elordi to punch the wall again. One has the sense that Coppola feels the same way.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

Kurt Vonnegut’s House Is Not Haunted

Kurt Vonnegut’s house. Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

In my earliest childhood memories—the big blur we will call the gear shift between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a distant star. Fuzzy, soft, a blurred edge that feels so far away in the way that childhood always feels so far away. Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a small upstate city between the rivers Mohawk and Hudson. Home of the perfect 12345 zip code. The location of the General Electric Power headquarters. Girls wearing low-rise jeans to rent VHS tapes at the Hollywood Video on Balltown Road. Street names: Brandywine, McClellan, Union, Glenwood Boulevard, Nott, Van Vranken. A white clapboard church hovering atop a hill on a rural route—I used to take modern dance classes there. An ice-skating rink next to an Air Force base where the pilots flew to Antarctica, always flying so low when they went over my house. NXIVM ladies planning their volleyball trips to Lake George. My parents knew the exact address of where the Unabomber’s mother and brother lived, in a historic district called the Stockade. And as for me, I do not remember when I first registered that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, a small hamlet in Schenectady County, named after the Dutch expression aal plaats, which means “a place of eels.” (There were no eels that I am aware of.) I think it was in high school. I think my hair was cut short. I think it was when I was a virgin. I think it was when I got a job as a bookseller at the Open Door on Jay. I think I was probably sixteen.

I already loved Kurt when I found out that for a few years after World War II he lived an eight-minute drive from the house I grew up in. As a teenager in Schenectady, I read not all but most of his books. It was because of my father, who also loved Kurt. He gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it was the first time that I fell in love with a novel, because it was brutal and hilarious and weird and terrifyingly sad. Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be … In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.”

Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five and a guy who will live in a human zoo later in the novel. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut did not own a lovely Georgian home. He was there, in Schenectady, because he got a job at General Electric’s corporate campus, working in the publicity department. Working at GE got him into writing science fiction. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he said in an interview, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.” During his time at GE, he wrote Player Piano, his first novel. His thing is that he wanted to just do that full time. Write books. But he wasn’t ready to do that full time yet, thus the job. So Vonnegut moved into the house, not far from the GE campus, in Alplaus, a middle-class hamlet on the Alplaus Creek and Mohawk River. 

In August, I decided to drive to the house for the first time. I did this with my father, because he was the one who gave me Slaughterhouse-Five, and also because he’s now semi-retired and agreed in advance that it would be “funny,” and “cool,” to accompany his twenty-seven-year-old daughter on a “reporting trip” four miles down the road from his house. “Did you know he lived in Schenectady before you moved here?” I asked my father. “No, I don’t think so,” he responded. Out the window: my former elementary school and preschool, the Chinese Fellowship Bible Church, anonymous corporate campuses, new housing developments that when I was a kid were huge, empty fields.

Vonnegut’s house, which I found by googling “Vonnegut’s house Schenectady NY,” is set directly overlooking Alplaus Creek, on a quiet side street. It is kind of in the woods. Lots of big trees on the street. The houses are old but not old. None of them are big. A few of them have big campers and ATVs out front, and the occasional snow mobile. Old cowboy boots used as planters and wind chimes. Vonnegut’s house is red, slightly set back from the road. It has seen better days, but it is kind of charmingly shabby, overgrown with plants spilling out of the gutters. No plaque. It is not marked in any way. There is a camper parked in front, empty water coolers lying on the front porch, and an early aughts VW bug in the driveway. It remains a private residence. When my father and I showed up, we basically hid behind the camper for a few minutes. He narrated the scene out loud. “Alplaus, New York,” he said, “where the state bird is the mosquito!” I sat there in silence on account of being shy. 

Thus: I failed to stop my father from talking to the pink-haired teenage boy who saw us basically hiding behind his parents’ RV.

Thus: “Do you know that Kurt Vonnegut used to live in this house?” my father said to the teenage boy with pink hair.

“Uh, yeah,” he said.

“Do you have people stop by your house all the time asking about Kurt Vonnegut?” my father continued.

“Sometimes,” the teenage boy responded.

The boy’s father came outside, probably because he saw him chatting with a strange middle-aged man and his sullen adult daughter. The boy’s father was a man named David Lovelady, from Liverpool, England. He was very friendly. Excited to talk to us about Kurt Vonnegut’s house, shepherding us onto his front lawn and introducing us to his three chickens. David did not know he had purchased Kurt Vonnegut’s house until he and his wife had basically closed on it. He had found out that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, and when he googled it, he was delighted to discover that not only had Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, but he had lived in the very house that David and his wife had just bought!

His wife, Gail, came out; so did the rest of their kids. They asked if we wanted to see inside. The thing about the house, they told us, is that it was not haunted, because ghosts are not real, but also a copy of Player Piano, sitting face out on a bookshelf, kept falling on the head of one of their kids and as a result the family had this inside joke about it being Kurt’s ghost. Obviously, I wanted to see the haunted bookshelf so they showed me the haunted bookshelf. It looked pretty normal. Also facing out was a stuffed animal gnome holding a coffee cup that said “Best Mom,” and a book about raising chickens. I cannot stress enough that the house of Kurt Vonnegut is now just a completely normal house where people live and is full of completely normal things that appear in completely normal houses. Which to me makes a lot of sense. Vonnegut in my opinion is a charming and scrappy weirdo. He is not the kind of person you think of as living on some kind of grand estate. 

Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

David asked my father and me how we even knew the house was here. I told him I probably learned about it at the bookstore I worked at in high school, people would occasionally come in and ask about it. How in the early 2010s you still had a handful of people who did not know about the magic of Google Maps and therefore you had to physically give them directions. I tried to remember what this was like. To have once been a girl, age sixteen, telling people to “turn right onto Freeman’s Bridge.” To drive past the abandoned Alco factory that is now a casino where I was once forced to see a U2 cover band. The ice cream place, Jumpin’ Jacks, where they show fireworks on the Fourth. The banquet hall, the Glen Sanders, where we had my senior prom.

My father and I decided we had stayed long enough at the house. Our hosts were headed off on a trip to the coast. They (the Lovelady clan) suggested we go down the street to an old general store where Vonnegut had rented some office space, so we did that and took some more pictures. This part was not interesting. It involved my father and me doing some reconnaissance for about five minutes and then deciding we were done. Additionally, I was criticized for not taking iPhone photography in landscape mode. So we drove home, back to the house where I grew up. I logged on to the internet and I did some research about when Vonnegut left Schenectady. The answer was basically: as soon as he could. He moved to Cape Cod in 1951 to write full time, decamping to the village of Barnstable to a similarly unassuming but lovely small house.

He was not a very ostentatious guy. Of all of the places he lived, the most regal was a brownstone in Turtle Bay, a slim white home down the street from where E. B. White also once lived. Apparently he (Vonnegut) once almost burned down the house because he was obsessed with smoking inside. This to me is almost a comforting thought—Vonnegut carelessly lighting cigarettes inside of his abode. This makes sense to me, that he lived a little messily and not for show, because he is the kind of person who wrote beautifully and hilariously about being a person. He wrote science fiction novels that were not corny or ridiculous or dorky. Just in a way that feels extremely human, which, if you are writing all the time about outer space, is a triumph. 

 

Sophie Frances Kemp is a writer in Brooklyn, originally from Schenectady, New York. She has published nonfiction in GQ, Vogue, and The Nation, and fiction in The Baffler and Forever. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.