The Paris Review's Blog, page 47

Sentences We Loved This Summer

Bonner Springs City Library, Bonner Springs, Kentucky, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0,

A passage about LA (“ellay”) from Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel narrated by a mountain lion:

the bright world below the park at night is a blur to me when I try to look out over it

but if I get close enough to a creature’s eye I can see what it sees and in the owl’s eye I see ellay clearly

more lights than I could ever count stretch out into the darkness and don’t stop stretching

I’m scared of how far they go

—Spencer Quong, business manager

From the fifties travel book The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, by Ithell Colquhoun:

Slender-legged colts stepped down the opposite bank to drink; they pawed the water nervously, seeming to want it muddy before tasting it. Perhaps they were not thoroughbreds, but they had a wild grace now seldom seen in English fields. None the less, I was thankful that the wide expanse of the current divided me from them, for I regard any horse as a psychotic with homicidal tendencies and prefer to avoid close quarters.

—Jane Breakell, development director

From the rollicklingly pleasurable Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, which genuinely had me laughing out loud:

Looking back, I don’t know anyone he’d actually been wrong about—except of course me, but then as we know I am totally incomprehensible to everyone including myself.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

The fourth sentence of Jack Skelley’s stoned-but-hyperactive The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker:

Anyway, I’m hearing this music in my head as I’m walking down the Mallway, and I see this paraplegic in a wheelchair, and he’s glaring at me with all the hatred he has, and the wheelchair motor is making this horrible screeching grinding sound, like some dentist drill piercing my skull, and I’m walking past this table set up by these right-to-lifers with all these pictures of unborn babies staring out at you utterly forlorn, and I’m just absorbing all this kind of stuff, and I’m thinking this is America and it doesn’t really feel too safe or good or anything anymore, because these Mall walls could come crashing down any minute in the slightest California earthquake—not to mention the inevitable nuclear holocaust, which I dreamed about again last night—the blast so loud it woke me up.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

Two sentences from Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist:

My childhood needed many secrets and secret places to lend depth to my loneliness but at heart I was totally prosaic about my suffering and its attendant strategies of goodness and solitude; it was like standing in line at the bank for x number of years.

My misfortune was that I lacked Jack’s love; Jack’s cock was the toothpick that stabilized my club sandwich of being and nothingness.

—Amanda Gersten, associate editor

From Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan, a coming-of-age memoir and a portrait of rural West Virginia:

The people worked in restaurants so that tourists could laugh at their accents. They were paying for something that was given for free. The people from here didn’t have to run a river to prove that it existed. They didn’t have to climb a mountain just to climb it. It was enough that the river was a river and the mountain was a mountain and inside of them were mountains too.

—Anna Rahkonen, intern

From Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the type of book that heightens your sense that it is summer, and you’re living it:

You came to Venice, you saw a ton of art, you went to parties, you drank up a storm, you talked bollocks for hours on end and went back to London with a cumulative hangover, liver damage, a notebook almost devoid of notes and the first tingle of a cold sore.

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

From Gayl Jones’s The Birdcatcher, about a love triangle featuring a murderous artist:

He was silent, observing me.

“There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t do for you; you know that,” he said.

I heard the “almost.” Does every woman hear the “almost”?

—Izzy Ampil, intern

From Note-Book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, found in a lovely used bookstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts:

The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.

—Andrew Martin, editor at large

“Practice Tantric Exodus”: Tuning into Burning Man

Photograph by Dustin Faulk.

Last Friday afternoon, the first in a series of downpours began in northern Nevada just as Burning Man was preparing to wrap up. Life in Black Rock City, the temporary settlement created for the event, ground to a halt as the hard-packed desert clay turned into a particularly sticky species of mud. Wheeled vehicles from bedazzled bikes to fire-breathing art cars instantly became useless. For approximately two and a half days, festival organizers forbade travel into and out of the city. Burners were asked to conserve food and water, and to live out their espoused principle of radical self-reliance.

As the lockdown dragged on, news reports from Black Rock City were limited and at times sensational. (Rumors of an ebola outbreak on Saturday were quickly debunked.) Social media commentary on the waterlogged festival was, predictably, infused with heavy doses of Schadenfreude. But one source struck a slightly different tone. 

BMIR 94.5, a radio station which surfaces annually for the festival, quickly adapted its programming to the shifting conditions. The station—located in a DJ booth in the makeshift city—allowed walk-up studio guests to mingle with on-air callers from the “default world,” as attendees dub the universe beyond the Black Rock City gates. Over the long weekend, I periodically tuned in online from New York, listening for the vibes.

Every ten minutes or so, BMIR played a series of prerecorded PSAs. Some were earnest exhortations, if slightly surreal: “Please do not climb on art. There are muddy, unsafe conditions on playa and very limited mobile emergency services,” one message went. “Also, refrain from entering the man.” (This refers to the towering wooden effigy ritualistically set aflame at the conclusion of every festival.) 

But most bulletins were conveyed with a bit more panache. A lisping voice, sounding like a certain Scottish actor, delivered ground transportation updates. “Well hello there, this is Con Seannery with information about the Burner Express: All buses have been postponed until further notice!” 

Another recognizable character provided more general encouragement. “Patient we must be to create safe conditions for the departure,” X-Rated Yoda periodically announced in his swampy accent. 

Sometimes, PSAs were vocalized by a couple of self-described buttholes.

“Dude, it’s Butthole Steve!” Butthole Steve intoned over a shredding guitar riff. “I went wandering around on the playa last night without any gear to keep me warm or dry, and now I got trench foot on my butthole. It’s gotta be amputated! So stay warm, stay dry, don’t wander around without the right gear … or else you’ll end up like me: Butthole Steve without a butthole.” 

Butthole Barb took to the airwaves over the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music. “Hi, it’s Butthole Barb and I just came down to BMIR to complain,” she whined, “because I have been looking forward to Burning Man all year long and I can’t believe the man burn is canceled for tonight … ugh!” 

Still other announcements were more existential. Accompanied by eerie organ music, a deep voice—could it be Con Seannery?—recited the following verses of William Blake: “The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife / And yet forgives the Butchers knife.” 

Once these bulletins ran their course, DJs looked for ways to pass the time on their live broadcasts. During a Sunday-afternoon set, DJ David Cooper, a professional comedian and radio host in the default world, phoned his mother on air to reassure her that things on the playa weren’t as bad as they were being made out to be in the media. Then he quizzed her about her sex life on live radio. Why, for instance, is the vibrator kept on her husband’s side of the bed? 

“He knows how to operate it,” she replied, chuckling. “I’m challenged when it comes to those mechanical kinds of things.” 

“That’s gatekeeping,” said a cohost, who went by the playa name Red Scare.

After saying goodbye to his mom and thanking her for being a good sport, Cooper returned to the nitty-gritty of life in Black Rock City. “Don’t eat too much fiber because those portapotties are gonna eventually become full,” he advised. One of his cohosts pointed out that sanitation trucks had recently been seen servicing the portapotties. “Okay, good,” Cooper said. “Eat your fiber. No need to take Imodium. We are all clear.” 

“Also, be kind to the porta-potties!” the cohost said. “You can have a dick, but don’t be a dick.” 

Above all, Cooper added, “Don’t be a Diplo,” referring to the electronic musician who, along with the comedian Chris Rock, escaped Black Rock City while the gates were still closed on Saturday. (A “fan” happened to pick them up after they trudged six miles through the mud on foot, according to Diplo’s Instagram.) Other celebrities waited to leave with the hoi polloi. “Channing Tatum stayed put because he’s a frickin’ national treasure,” one guest noted.   

Between studio banter, PSAs, and station identification—“BMIR, the voice of the meow”—DJs spun thematically relevant tunes. Isaiah Rashad rapped “Stuck in the Mud.” The Carpenters sang “Rainy Days and Mondays.” Once the gates to Black Rock City finally opened and cars began queuing up for what would be an hours-long exodus, Iggy Pop droned, “I am a passenger / and I ride and I ride.” 

On Monday morning, one cocksure studio guest gave departing burners a pep talk. “When Woodstock got rainswept, people danced in the mud and helped each other out,” he said. “We got that Woodstock spirit! We don’t want to ruin that story by having people do a kind of Mad Max exodus.” 

“Practice tantric exodus,” he went on. “If you ask the road for consent and it gives you a green light and the road says, ‘Yeah, daddy, hit this shit,’ then you’re going to have a great drive home.”

 

Ben Schneider is a freelance journalist and erstwhile burner based in New York. 

Dark Rooms

Ntozake Shange at Barnard College in November 1978. From the Barnard College archives, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

 

The following three short essays describe Ntozake Shange’s experience with psychoanalysis. After the success of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, she struggled with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and drug addiction. Her mental health challenges continued for decades, and she was remarkably open about them and diligent in seeking help through psychoanalysis and traditional talk therapy. Characteristically, Shange’s complicated emotional landscape is rendered with tenderness and beauty, which is particularly important given our collective recognition of the importance of mental health care. In this, too, Shange was ahead of her time.

—Imani Perry

Editor’s note: Except where a change was necessary to avoid errors that altered meaning in the work, Shange’s original handwritten notes and misspellings are how they appear in her archives. The editor aimed to maintain the integrity and urgency of Shange’s writing style, and to publish her work as she left it.

The Dark Room

When “For colored girls …” was at the height of its controversy/popularity, I found myself wearing very dark glasses and large hats so that folks wouldn’t recognize me. I couldn’t ride elevators, up or down. If someone figured out who I was, I calmly stated that I was frequently mistaken for ‘her’. I’d had other occasions in my life, when I was the only African-American in a class or banished to the countryside that my family loved so much, when I’d been known to disassociate, to refer to myself in the third person. Then, I was ‘Paulette’. Now, Ntozake repeating the pattern of the girl I’d gleefully left behind. This was very troubling. I’d just become who I was and was in the frenzied act of ‘disappearing’ me. Now, I confess to discovering many, many roads to oblivion, but I rarely recounted these episodes with warmth or a sense of well-being. So, I did what I thought troubled writers did, I went to my producer, Joseph Papp, to seek counsel. To my alarm, Joe recommended against analysis or other therapies, “because, then, my writers can’t write anymore’. Well, writing I was, living I was, living I was not, even though I wasn’t always a strong supporter of my own perceptions. The ability to write in isolation for hours about anything and enjoy it is a gift, but it is not life. Even, I knew this. I could not hide in a dance studio, either. My presence was unavoidable , yet unbearable.

Off to find a shrink , I went. I was looking for a wizard, some magic, some chant, or breath that might make being me something to look forward to in the morning. I have the capacity to sleep for four days at a time, if I am so inclined. At one point I refused to get up and live my life among the living because my dreamlife was so much more interesting. Wizards I did not find. I did find that finding the right shrink/ analyst is as important a decision as finding a soul-mate. Anyway, to make a long story less long, I’ve been involved with overseven mental health care workers in the last twenty years. The overwhelming period of time spent with three: one psychiatrist, and two analysts. I lost one analyst to the Emergency Room which he saw as a challenge. Four years of quasi-sane mourning passed before I was able to seek out another with whom I have been working for nearly a decade.

 

 The Angriest Patient

With his help and astounding patience, I have lost my title as “the angriest patient ever encountered during all my years of practice” to become the 1991–93 Heavyweight Poetry champion of ‘The World”, as you see, a much healthier management of violent proclivities. In all seriousness I’ve learned to feel what I see. What I’ve been blessed to conjure in words is no longer two steps removed; my body is not a hindrance to my spirit, but a manifestation of it. I am still crazy,but not so afraid with that part of me. I can even tell jokes to my ‘crazy’ person and realize that to be one of my saner moments.

I’ve dressed up as a ‘guinea girl”, the ones who stole all the basketball players at my school just to prove that I could be one. That was a session to remember. I’ve felt what I swear to be electricity in my body. I’ve known the ocean and intense heat. All this actually while on the couch. Talk about terrified. Try being the Atlantic Ocean all by yourself in an eight by twelve room with ancient fertility statues placed like buoys on what I guess I took to be signs of land ahead. I don’t know to this day. I’ve talked in tongues. I’ve only been able to do some sessions inSpanish, or a mixture of French and Portuguese. I don’t know why. I know that is all that would come out. Sometimes, I sleep. Other times, Paulette speaks. Her voice is different from mine as Zaki. Sometimes, I want to knock her out, but since we can only use language as a tool or weapon or doll or whatever I need, I learned at least to talk to her, if I am not wildly gesticulating in some recollection of a dream; legs flying, arms of a flamenco dancer, long Balanchine neck I could never actualize outside my ‘dark room’ where things, me, memories float out of syllables and become benign or empowering, as they must because they are never without meaning.

Joe, my ‘Art-Daddy’ as I called him was wrong about one thing, not many, but one. Psychoanalysis has made me a finer writer, a fuller person and a funnier one to be sure. I’ve found characters I would literally shun to be beauteous. I’ve been able to take on the persona of someone puzzling to me with no need, not a desperate one, to figure her out. I have/ am plumbing the primordial depths of me, not without trepidation, but with a magic I thought I could pick up somewhere in the night. My analyst’s Anthony Molino. He’s a poet. He lives in Italy and like a guardian spirit, with me.

10-9-97

Houston, TX

 The Couch

Though long before I’d come to know myself as ‘Ntozake’ or, a writer, I had wanted to be a psychiatrist. This no doubt had something to do with my parents’ involvement with hospitals, sick people, poor black people, and me, following along to wards, living rooms, boarding houses, examination rooms, and dark rooms where X-rays were read or where violently mentally disturbed folks were sequestered. My father as a surgeon, excised with delicacy what was malignant, diseased, out of tune with the body, while my mother, as I understood it, assisted individuals or families to get in tune with society as a whole, to make ‘living’ work for them as opposed to against them without necessarily challenging anything about the world as we know it. Both these approaches left me wanting. What if what was wrong couldn’t be seen or couldn’t be excised? What if life as some soul knew it wasn’t worth living without some violent catharsis? I credited Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines, Tubman and Anthony with what ever legitimacy I had, and they were not the sort who ‘fit’ in. I’d seen “Snakepit”, in all its simplified black and white depiction of living in our world with a pained contorted mind and spirit. I was caught somewhere in between the institution and slavery and the loose cells of The Bastille. Surely, there is some where more peaceful than The ER or the Settlement house. My ultimate answer was the analyst’s couch, but before that I had tolearn to live with myself madly for a while longer.

I saw things. I was not delusional or schizophrenic, I apparently could reach areas of my unconscious as a child that never left me which turned out to be as much a burden as a blessing. I had visions. I wasn’t playing. I was laying on the grass or upside a great tree, listening and seeing historical figures, artists, people I didn’t know dancing with me, taking me to salons in Paris or roadhouse in Alabama. I was daydreaming, I imagine, but I never diminished those episodes to anything less than my ‘real life.’ That’s why journalists have such a hard time fact-checking stories on or about me. I will tell them an anecdote which is impossible to chart in any methodology. They ask me did something happen and I’ll probably say ‘yes’ because I remember my dreams, both night and day, as authentically as I experience my daily life. Before I started menstruating, this issue of truth was very much alive. What I believed or felt I could not prove to anybody in a reasoned fashion. That’s why I knew instinctively that I should not argue or debate because at, a certain point I, knew my ‘truth’ was simply mine and not a collectively recognized reality. Yet it could not be a lie because I thought/felt it. The only place I know where anybody else believes this is the psychoanalyst’s office. There, it is enough to paraphrase Marie Cardenal to find ‘the words to say it’.

That’s why I dance. I can’t always find the ‘words’ to say it. I’ve come to believe there are words as we know themfor some things; that the body has a grammar for these constructs which are not beyond articulation, but of another terrain. I’m becoming trans-lingual so that I may speak myself. Maybe I was a passionate gopi girl at Krishna’s feet, I don’t know, I do know that my body extorts from me what hangs silent in the air. That’s why psychopharmocology can only take me so far. I need my body to talk to me. My analyst watches all these gestures of mind and body, listens as closely to my muscle burns or prone attitude turns as my dreams.

Most of my characters have visions and dreams with which some of you are acquainted. Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday visit Sassafrass. Indigo speaks with the spirits of the moon and the Ancestors. Everybody, even, The Magician, in “Spell#7” opens their interior world to the whole of the audience, thought no one else in the scene itself is aware of Allega brushing her hair or Maxine collecting gold chains that bound her in resistations of The Middle Passage. Liliane, actually, has an analyst. No. He’s not my analyst, he is Lili’s. Sean, the debonair photographer in “A Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion” needed an analyst.I didn’t give him one. I let him suffer. He didn’t have visions, couldn’t talk to spirits, shoot the breeze with his own myths, memory weighed too heavily. An example is simply that my father hadda monkey/ he liked better than me”, from the mouth of a grown man who is still that little boy. Did that ‘happen’ to me? Not in the material world/. But, living with my being i know now that if I ‘know’ about it, it happened to me, belongs to me now. I was not here during The French Revolution, but I can describe Marat’s bath and exude Charlotte Corday’s 1 rage and naivete. Just as I named Crack Annie’s daughter, Berneatha in honor of Hansberry’s Beneatha. There is no doubt in my mind that Walter Lee woulda smoked everything in that house away and pledged the money to Beneatha’s African boyfriend to get himself in on some wild Dallas-Chicago-Lagos drug deal. Was I conscious of this? No. Can I discuss all this eccentric personal peculiarity now? Yes. Without heart palpitations? Yes. Without clammy palms? Yes. Without blinking an eye? No. All of this is very precious. I must keep my eye on my self/s. I’ve learned this on a yearly, hour byhour disciplined manner. It was not easy. I was not happy. I was not always careful. It costs a lot. What do I get in the end? Do I get better? How will I know when I get there? I could get coy. Answer, Beckett knew what detained Godot, but we don’t know that. I know I don’t know that. Anyway, I have a hard time explicating “le texte’. The characters never die. The stories never end for me. That’s why like Rapunzel I go unravel my loose ends with my psychoanalyst. Nothing is wrong. No one else knows. A pin could drop, but usually what’s falling away is not so piercing, not so singular, only the shreds of living I must make space for somewhere in myself/s who is not only the writer and, therefore cannot continue to find herself whole solely on blank pages.

One of Simon Bolivar’s houses was hexagonal, seated on a cliff in such a way that from any point, he could feel/ see land and peoples who would be free. When I lie nestled on the couch in the room of no color and all colors, I am in that house. I am on that cliff. I am one of those people.

© 12.21.97.

Houston, TX

These essays will appear in Sing a Black Girl’s Song: The Unpublished Work of Ntozake Shange, to be published next week. Courtesy of the Ntozake Shange Revocable Trust and reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 

Ntozake Shange (1948–2018) was an American playwright and poet, best known for her Obie Award-winning play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.

Wrong Turn

Williamsburg Bridge. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC0 4.0.

I was in an Uber Pool (I guess they’re not called that anymore) with some stranger, both of us going to Brooklyn from Manhattan. Our driver crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, took the first exit, and then followed its loop all the way back onto the bridge, going in the opposite direction, reentering Manhattan. I wasn’t paying attention. My co-rider looked up, at the skyline that was supposed to be behind us, and said something. “Are we going the wrong way?” Our driver laughed. Yes, he had made a wrong turn.

This was a very time-consuming “wrong turn.” We had to go all the way back over the bridge, then get off somewhere in the Lower East Side and find a way back onto Delancey, which isn’t simple, since U-turns aren’t possible, there are so many one-way streets, and there’s always traffic. My co-rider wasn’t done asking our driver questions. What was he doing, instead of watching for the exit? He laughed again and pointed to a phone that was mounted to the left-hand side of his windshield, away from the GPS, which was mid-dash.

“What is that, a gossip website?” she asked. I looked at the small screen (phones were smaller then), making out a pink-and-purple layout; tiny photos of celebrities; text moving upward, ticker-like, in another language, maybe Korean; hearts and sparkles and whatever animating everything. It would be impossible to make out one headline, much less read these articles, and drive, I thought, and I guess that was being proven. Our driver was still smiling, pointing as if we could see the miniaturized information, as if we could read the foreign text and recognize the faces.

I knew from his wordless gestures that something huge had just happened to one of these celebrities, and he was too excited by this event to care about anything else. I was not as mad about the tardiness the detour had caused as I was about the indifference toward it, the way this guy was so elated by some gossip, or, more likely, the way in which he had received such gossip—in the middle of one of those maneuvers that make his job obnoxious, like taking the first exit off a bridge—that he could forget about the exit, about us.

It was a moment that resonated with me more than it had to because it felt like the beginning of some next phase. Already, I was disappointed by a lot. When I was in college, professors would talk about “cocktail parties,” as in “something overheard at” one, and I imagined that once I was done with my academic duties, I could apply all the theories and metaphors I’d learned to conversations, creating a context of higher education that would carry me through networks and nightlife and dependent relationships.

But then I was at cocktail parties, and there was never not some playacting aspect to them. Here we are, at a thing that was meant for people who had more to offer, when people could offer more. We’re worth only what we can promise later, now, I am told, in so many ways. It’s all potential, anticipating some later engagement. The real action happens on the highway, in cars heading home to outer boroughs, during a recap of everything that was missed while we were being handed champagne flutes—and come on, champagne flutes? It’s all a joke, isn’t it, that we’re even here?

In my therapist’s office, I try to stay on topic, but of course it comes down to this, to the crossroads of writer’s block. I’m not even a writer, I whine; I just went to school for it for six years, tutored, taught classes, took writing jobs, edited others, published, and then, you know.

Is it something you’re feeling about yourself, or about the world? she asks, I think, although I’m not really listening. I’m looking at the Dunkin’ cup I’m holding, which is marked with red-and-green lettering for Christmas. The exact hues—holly berry and evergreen needle—represent two of the only plants that keep their color in winter, in a certain part of the world (this part). I point to the cup. “This was a choice,” I say to my therapist, who knows I am hijacking, making the session into a presentation, so I stop myself. I never even say the word Christmas anymore, by force of habit, but those colors aren’t meant for some other holiday.

Everything can’t be so weighted, or else the words all sit too heavily on the page, each sentence a sign, a headline, a quote. “You can’t use quotation marks when your subject is thinking,” an old boyfriend once said to me. “That just looks like an echo.” Because the way letters look does affect the way we read them, obviously, and that goes beyond typefaces, colors, the religions those typefaces and colors reference, the contexts in which the words are read. We can think punctuation, like a set of double quotation marks, is simply too much like the comic strip code for quivering or resonating: short, concentric, semicircular dashes on each side of someone or something. (Thought, in a comic strip, is in a cartoon cloud, and it is connected to its thinker by a dotted line instead of a speech bubble’s pointed tail.)

What do greeting cards say on the inside these days? They still exist, at least in the Duane Reade across the street, but I never open them up. In another era, it was always a joke about aging, about needing a stud, about getting uncontrollably drunk because it’s your day to, about how this card is all you’re getting, not a prostitute as pretty as the one pictured on it. Now, maybe they are all blank, although I doubt that, because writing is everywhere, all the time, filling up the bubbles that are tethered to our brains.

I’m addicted to reading gossip, too, especially when it gets close to my life, threatening to destroy it. I pictured that Uber driver steering me, this stranger, and himself right into oncoming traffic and never breaking his smile, already having escaped into this little world I couldn’t translate. He could have been reading a set of codes simply for the pleasure of decoding. Sparkle, heart: newness, love, nothing more than that, like the words season’s greetings or a cold red and a colder green on the outside of a steaming coffee cup. “Sometimes,” reads the inside of a card about friendship or something, “it’s all you need.”

 

Natasha Stagg is a writer, brand consultant, and editor. She has published two books with Semiotext(e): Surveys and Sleeveless. She lives and works in New York City.

A version of this previously unpublished essay will appear in Artless: Stories 2019–2023, which will be published by Semiotext(e) in October.

Apparently Personal: On Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds at left, with a GIrl Scout camp friend at Lake Tahoe, California, ca. 1956. Courtesy of Sharon Olds.

Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and made her debut as a writer in 1980 with the poetry collection Satan Says. Since then, she has established herself as one of the most read, most decorated, and most controversial North American contemporary poets. “Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands,” Michael Ondaatje has said. She became particularly well known after she refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

The way I discovered her was through a poem on a particular penis, which came as a recommendation from a Finnish Swedish colleague: “Read Sharon Olds’s ‘The Pope’s Penis’!” How reading this little poem about the Pope’s sexual organ became contagious, I don’t know, but the fact is that at almost the same time, I got a text message from another colleague, who wrote that she was sitting in a waiting room somewhere reading Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis.” And here I must grab hold of you, reader, and shout, as though by international chain letter: Read Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis”! Let’s quote it in its entirety:

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

The poem is an introduction to certain motifs—the body, darkness, the desire to confront, imagery, et cetera—which often appear in other equally unsettling, gripping variations and combinations elsewhere in her poetry. For example, here, in this extract from “Self-Portrait, Rear View,” in which the poem’s narrator is standing in a hotel room and, in another mirror and another light, catches sight of her fifty-four-year-old backside, “once a tight end”:

                                                 I flutter
the wing of my ass again, and see,
in a clutch of eggs, each egg,
on its own, as if shell-less, shudder, I wonder
if anyone has ever died,
looking in a mirror, of horror.

It is in part the directness and mercilessness of her texts that have made her controversial. Does she exploit her own family for poetic purposes? Does she unjustly expose her parents and children? Perhaps it is the heartbreaking quality of her poems that has both won her so many prizes and afforded her poems the opportunity to appear in Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, alongside articles with titles such as “5 (Doable) Ways to Increase the Love in Your Life.” She herself says in an interview with Salon that the reason she is able to touch so many people is that she is not an “abstract thinker.” She is concerned with the day-to-day, with life, with looking at it, with letting observations and feelings flow down her arm and out through her pen, onto the paper. It’s life that is important, and these poems help you to see that.

It’s also true that life would not have been the same without these poems. Sharon Olds is one of the most powerful examples to show that cautious writers who don’t dare to write what they really want to, for fear of reprisals, are not what we need. In “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure,” she writes:

As soon as my sister and I got out of our
mother’s house, all we wanted to
do was fuck, obliterate
her tiny, sparrow body and narrow
grasshopper legs.

Personal, offensive poems? She says herself, in interviews, that she prefers the description “apparently personal.” “I have never said that the poems don’t draw on personal experience,” she says. “But I’ve never said that they do.” It’s a paradox: the words apparently and personal are obviously contradictory: personal indicates that we are being drawn into someone’s intimate sphere, having secrets whispered in our ear; apparently in this context suggests “false, not genuine, pretend”—something looks personal, but do we have proof? Does it annoy us, to feel that it’s only “apparent” that Olds’s poems are personal—that is to say, coming from a real person? Does not the word also have something magical about it—”to make something appear, become visible”? Is that how it can be read? That the personal appears? I would like to say yes! But we can’t be certain that what we discover is Sharon Olds’s personal. It could just as easily be our own. Perhaps we will never know. We only feel it, as a slight pressure on the solar plexus, as a boom in our heart, as a sudden lift out of our own good skin.

 

Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson.

Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her most recent book is Evil Flowers. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.

Kari Dickson is an award-winning literary translator from Norwegian into English.

MEN NOT ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT

Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond, Hampstead Heath. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.

It was the full-body ache of our hangovers and the cigarette smoke stagnating in our hair that compelled us toward the pond. We were sat in the debris of a house party, on a sofa that had recently doubled as an ashtray, when Janique said we should go for a swim. I suggested the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, which is free of men and harsh chemicals. 

There are five ponds in a row on the eastern edge of Hampstead Heath. They run (from south to north): the Highgate No. 1 Pond, the Highgate Men’s Pond, the Model Boating Pond, the Bird Sanctuary Pond, and, finally, set slightly apart from the others and sheltered by trees, the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. It is accessed by a long path, behind a gate with a sign that reads WOMEN ONLY / MEN NOT ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. There are two holding pens off to the side of the path, one for chaining bicycles, the other for chaining dogs. There is no pen for young children, who are not (unlike dogs and bicycles) allowed past even the first gate. As we walked through the park, I regaled my North American companion with the pond’s lore: 

The women’s pond is “a transporting haven” with a “wholesomely escapist quality” (Sharlene Teo). To swim in its “clean, glassy,” (Ava Wong Davies) “velvety water” (Esther Freud) is to “enter a new state” (Lou Stoppard)! (All of this comes from the 2019 essay collection At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, in which every piece contains the verb to glide.)

We arrived at the meadow, which, I assured Janique, is a haven of nakedness. On this particular afternoon, as we sat in the sun to change, I noticed that I was the only person who was actually naked. 

As we made our way to the water in our swimming costumes (the women are forbidden from swimming nude, or in our underwear), we heard the distinct voice of a veteran lifeguard, shouting to a group, changing on the dock: “GIRLS! GIRLS! Don’t change over there! There’s a pervert who hides in the bushes wanking and we don’t want to give him anything else to juice over!” 

I turned to Janique and offered a nervous smile. I had failed to mention the pervert, but she seemed unfazed. On the dock, the girls had wrapped themselves in their towels and were heading sheepishly into the shower block to finish changing. We lowered ourselves into the murky water. 

The Ladies’ Pond is meant to be taken in pairs, in breaststroke, at a leisurely pace. This is not true of the Men’s Pond, which seems always to be filled with companionless swimming caps darting about in a splashy front crawl. Our pond is slower, a place to chat and to listen: 

“It’s eighteen degrees in the pond today … it was twenty last week.” 

“Have you got those special swimming shoes for winter?” “No, not yet.”

“Oh yeah, you just pop one in and shove it over.” “I didn’t think it was that easy.”

“And you know what she was about to fucking do! She was about to leave that beautiful Greek island holiday and fly back to Gatwick, at God knows what hour, to cycle on a FUCKING LIME BIKE to that cunt Simon’s house for a FUCKING HOUSE PARTY and he DOESN’T EVEN FUCKING LIKE HER.”  The outraged woman’s companion made various sympathetic mewing sounds. We pushed on.  

“Have you ever flown somewhere for a man who doesn’t love you?” Janique asked, once we were out of earshot. “Yep,” I replied.

For a while after that, we swam in silence. Two upturned Band-Aids float past. They were followed by an elderly woman swimming quickly. Her hair was kept dry by a plastic bag from Ryman, the popular chain that sells stationery. The bag was rigid, poking high above the water like a pharaoh’s crown. She had fastened it to her scalp with duct tape. 

The girls reemerged as we swam back toward the dock. There were three of them:

“I’ve decided I’m going to get my first ever bikini wax when I go back to uni.”

“Do they wax your ass?”

“That’s not a bikini wax, that’s an ass wax, they’re different.”

“I have such bad body hair.”

“You can’t have bad body hair.” 

“Yeah you can, I do. I told my mum and she said, ‘I’ve never had that problem!’ Like, thanks, woman.” 

“Well, I’m getting my mustache lasered off.” 

“Do you wax your pits?”

One craned her neck to sniff her right armpit. “God, I stink.”

Janique and I added ours to the queue of joggling heads trying to exit the pond—treading water, inching forward, waiting patiently for the woman ahead to disengage completely from the steps before grabbing on to the rope-covered railings. A perfect round bottom whooshed out of the water in front of me. Attached to it was a graying HRT patch, which was just about hanging on.

We padded to the shower block to rinse the algae off of our bodies. Tiny dots of it collect in intricate constellations across your breasts; bikini tops catch the stuff like a net. In the showers, postswim conversation was gentle.

“Ooh, I’ve got a ticket to see that lovely Mark Rylance in a play tonight.” 

“Beth, did you pack that thermos full of tea?”

“We were thinking of going away once Ben’s settled into his new school.”

A voice interrupted from outside. “Mary, did I leave my swimming leg in there?” The showering women hushed. Sure enough, there was a prosthetic leg leaning against the wall, underneath the towel hook.  “Got it! It’s right here!” Mary grabbed the leg and the chatter resumed. 

As we left, the woman at the kiosk called up the path to a group of new arrivals.  “ALL RIGHT LADIES, JUST TO WARN YOU, WE’VE GOT MAINTENANCE GOING ON—THERE’LL BE SOME MEN COMING IN. THAT’S RIGHT, THERE’LL BE MEN IN OUR POND.”

 

Molly Pepper Steemson is a writer, editor and occasional sommelier from London.

Passionate Kisses: The Soundtrack at CVS

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0.

I seem to find a reason to go to CVS several times a week. Sometimes these reasons are medical, but much of the time, I am tracking down some household item or another—especially when I need something faster than it can be delivered, or I don’t want to be party to the low-level violence of same-day delivery, and I don’t feel like subjecting myself to the psychic keelhauling of a Target run. There is a unique air of desperation to most CVS locations. This is probably because CVS, as a health-care company stapled to a convenience store chain, blends the special emotional terroirs of the hospital and the gas station snack aisle. It could also be because the stores are often seriously understaffed, presumably in part due to the corporation’s recent move to slash pharmacy hours at thousands of locations. The decor is what you might call austerity-core. It is both corporate-loud (garish displays of next season’s decorations) and minimalist-clinical (pilled gray carpeting, fluorescent lights). People in pain and in search of relief, people picking up the prescriptions they need to live, and people who really want a soda all stalk the aisles.

The one unalloyed delight of CVS, though, is the soundtrack. One of the first things you notice once you start paying attention to the in-store music is how much whoever is in charge of programming loves Rod Stewart. “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, sugar, tell me so,” Rod demands as you ponder the locked cases of flu medicine. “Young hearts, be free tonight,” Rod bellows while you compare the prices of soap. Sometimes he hides behind an additional layer of mediation, as in Sheryl Crow’s version of “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” a song also notably covered by Rod. These are not the sexiest Rod songs. In fact, they are the songs where he sings from a place of impotence or regret. His lover threatens to crush him; she is too impossible to talk to; love will tear them apart. Like the shoppers whose attention the in-store loudspeaker announcements periodically try to seize, she is to be guilted, cajoled.

Big feelings reign on the CVS soundtrack. Sometimes they are overheated. Other times they are gushy, like the Sixpence None the Richer cover of “There She Goes,” the heroin anthem by the La’s, jacked up a treacly minor third from the original. (There are lots of covers on the playlist.) The emoting has a tendency to ambush you. Earlier this week I was picking up trash bags when, all of a sudden, I heard the distinctive plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink of the sad-sack opening guitar riff to “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. The song depicts a couple, secure, or maybe trapped, in a bubble of self-sufficiency: “We don’t need anything or anyone.” While Rod sometimes sounds like he is delivering his come-ons with a campy wink, “Chasing Cars” contains no prophylactic against its own sentimental excess. It is an almost unbearable song to hear in CVS, regardless of the circumstances that bring you into the store. “If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lay with me and just forget the world?” the chorus goes. Here?

The basic experience of shopping at CVS is one of doing something desperate at worst and banally unpleasant at best while swimming in a warm bath of muted musical intensity. No other retail chain is so committed to the power ballad as a musical form. A Spotify playlist of “CVS BANGERS,” apparently sourced from hard-won knowledge, features a stacked lineup: Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”; Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight”; the Cars’ “Drive”; Toto’s still-inescapable “Africa.” One song on that playlist that I absolutely have heard in my local store is Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”—the nineties adult-alternative equivalent of a power ballad, a spoken/sung tale of a marriage crumbling under the weight of too much gender. Some philosophers claim that the emotions artworks evoke are really “pseudo emotions”; we feel them at one degree of remove. I can think of no better support for this thesis than the experience of listening to Paula Cole in CVS. The hopes of young love, the disappointments of middle age, the curdling resentment that ensues: I feel some inkling of it all. But mostly I’m just tapping my foot as I wait to pick up my prescription.

If you spend enough time shopping at CVS and listening to CVS-inspired playlists, you may begin to wonder if some rogue programmer is introducing subversive material into the mix. One Kinks song in the rotation tells of local cultural institutions being turned into supermarkets, and then parking lots. Domestic frustrations figure prominently. On the subreddit dedicated to the store, where overworked employees compare notes, one of the most discussed and most reviled songs is Mary Chapin Carpenter’s very nineties cover of Lucinda Williams’s “Passionate Kisses.” It’s a song about wanting more than the basic necessities—in other words, more than convenience store stuff. The chorus is a question: “Shouldn’t I have all of this, and passionate kisses from you?” Desperation creeps in as the song lopes along. The last verse finds the singer shouting, “Give me what I deserve, ‘cause it’s my right.” The consensus among CVS veterans seems to be that all this is “vapid and irritating,” if unintentionally funny at times. One employee reports that a coworker with an unrequited crush on her manager stares wistfully at the object of her affection for the duration of the song whenever it comes on. Another shares a vignette: “I vividly remember being violently hungover on a cold winter morning in New England, passionate kisses playing loudly in the background as someone’s grandma slowly searched her purse for coupons, fluorescent lights inescapable as I prayed for a swift end to my existence. Hell is real and I’ve lived it.”

Hell is other people’s music. But whose music is the CVS soundtrack? The store’s music vendor is Mood Media, formerly Muzak. While that company made its name with what we’d today call original content—light instrumentals composed for background listening—it eventually pivoted into the playlist business, curating “channels” of already-existing vocal pop music for their clients. It’s easy to imagine each major chain laying claim to its own channel to create its distinct emotional climate, whether they use Mood or one of its few competitors. Trader Joe’s is peppy and lightly eclectic: Motown, tasteful eighties hits. H&M is corporate hipster: late-period Jens Lekman. Ditto Urban Outfitters, which used to put out a yearly mixtape: “Halloween Head” by Ryan Adams, “Slow Me Down” by Emmy Rossum. Breezy yacht rock diffuses through the faux-Egyptian catacombs of the Cheesecake Factory. Whole Foods is largely silent.

CVS’s musical identity is harder to pin down. It is not subcultural-aspirational like Hot Topic or Starbucks back when it sold CDs. Functionally, it comes closer to the genre-agnostic mishmash of feel-good tunes that play in most supermarkets. And yet the feel-good tunes resonate differently in CVS. The anonymous employee on the subreddit is surely right that the store’s music produces its effects by way of contrast: earnest voices singing about tenderness lost or gained over sparkly guitars, piped into an impersonal, overlit, understocked place where absolutely nobody wants to be. The whole situation is a perverse joke.

CVS is the negative image of the club or the theater. There is no coordinated pulse of the crowd, just individual people shuffling around. The music is inflicted on you against your will rather than offered up as a kind of gift or “experience.” But the existential emptiness of this setting allows the music to sound with a special liveliness. In the wasteland, you can better hear what the pop song wants from you. The pop song demands your investment—positive, negative, ambivalent, it doesn’t care. It refuses to be ignored, and it won’t settle for a minor role as a manipulator of moods. In the harsh fluorescent light, we can hear the pop song say, “Give me what I deserve, cause it’s my right.” Who are we to refuse?

 

Mitch Therieau is a writer in California.

Early Spring Sketches

Hubert Robert, detail from “Fire at the Paris Opera House of the Palais-Royal.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC0 2.0.

Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a writer in Korea during the thirties, when the country was under the rule of the Japanese empire. His poems, stories, letters, and essays, written in both Korean and Japanese, are celebrated as some of the finest Korean literature of his time, and bear wide-ranging influences: the Chinese classics, the general theory of relativity, and Dadaism and surrealism, both of which he is credited with introducing into the Korean literary lexicon. He wrote during a period when Koreans could be jailed without trial on the basis of mere suspicion of thought crimes, and, shortly after being imprisoned in Tokyo by Japanese authorities in 1937, succumbed to tuberculosis in a hospital at the age of twenty-seven. 

Nearly ninety years after his death, Yi Sang is perhaps best remembered for his intricate poetry, which features striking, complicated images. In the poem “Crow’s Eye View: Poem No. 15,” he writes, “I sneak into a room with a mirror. To free myself from the mirror. But the me-inside-the-mirror always enters at the same time and puts on a gloomy face. He lets me know he is sorry. Just as I am locked up because of him he is locked up shuddering because of me.” Like many of his contemporaries, Yi Sang also contributed guest columns to newspapers. These writings, collected under column titles like “Early Spring Sketches” and “Miscellany Under the Autumn Lamp,” offered incisive, humorous, and compact observations of life in Seoul in the thirties. He captured the grace and chaos of urban existence among anonymous fellow city-dwellers going about their daily routines.

The pieces that follow come from the column “Early Spring Sketches,” which was serialized from early to late March 1936. Encountering Yi Sang through these sketches offers a glimpse into a luminous spirit whose disillusionment with the modernity of his era didn’t culminate in despair but rather, as the poet John Ashbery once wrote, “broke into a rainbow of tears.”

—Jack Jung, translator

 

Uninsured Fire (March 3, 1936)

The building next door is engulfed in flames. The sky above is murky, filled with furious flurries of snow and plumes of smoke that resemble blobs of ink vomited out by squids. It is rumored that the burning structure is a large factory that stored various chemicals. From the raging bonfire, rainbow-colored smoke billows out intermittently, akin to coughs. The chemicals are exploding.

It may sound mean, but I believe there isn’t a person in the world who doesn’t enjoy watching fire. So, I find myself in the backyard, arms crossed, enthralled by the fiery glow as its warmth caresses my face. It’s not entirely unpleasant; for a moment, I revel in this ecstasy.

The factory’s poorly constructed barracks ignite, rapidly engulfing the entire building. When the fire’s insatiable tongue begins licking at the neighboring slum houses, which resemble crab shells, the firefighters finally arrive. Their arrival brings entertainment. In a three-pronged attack, the firefighters direct their hoses at the fire, creating a grand spectacle atop the roofs. Their efforts seem futile. Helplessness permeates the scene.

Where I stand, the fire’s heat is barely tolerable. It must be much more challenging for those firefighters, who are so close to it that they appear to have entered the inferno. Yet the fire intensifies with each passing minute. After futile attempts to tame the flames with their hoses, the firefighters descend from the roofs, still gripping the tips of their hoses as if they can no longer withstand the heat. What did they hope to achieve with their feeble jets of water? Nevertheless, the firefighters redirect their hoses and begin spraying water on the slum houses near the fire. The residents, with their blackened laundry poles and chimneys, rush to salvage their furniture and belongings. The firefighters resort to tearing down the houses.

Presumably, their aim is to halt the fire’s path, which is fueled by the strong northwesterly wind. However, the unaffected slum residents likely feel victimized. They bear witness to their furniture and possessions being ruined through the demolition and water spray.

People hustle in the narrow alley near my home, bustling in and out. Curiosity piques my interest, and I decide to investigate. Drawer cabinets, coat hangers, tin spoons, tax-payment reminders, a violin, a fox-fur scarf, a worn-out mat, high heels, and a coal stove clutter the alley. These odd remnants have been discarded, forming a market-like pile. Bedclothes soaked in water lie ruined and unsightly.

It is then I realize the fire might reach my dwelling. I quickly return home, finding my mother trembling, clutching and pulling dirty blankets in confusion. A sudden laughter escapes me as I ask, “Where will you take that bundle after wrapping it like that?” We live in a small rented room, so even if everything were to burn down, our loss would be minimal compared to losing an entire house.

Through the western window of our room, I glimpse the fire’s bright light. It appears that this place will also succumb to the flames. Well, I think to myself, if it is meant to burn, then let it burn. Embracing my inevitable nihilism, I retreat to the backyard to continue observing the fire.

Despite this, I ponder what I should rescue from my home if the fire were to consume the entire neighborhood. I draw a blank. Does this imply that I am indifferent to everything that is going up in smoke? My mother, on the other hand, continues to hold sentimental value for her tattered baby quilt and the bug-infested cabinet.

I wonder if there is a place to go with these discarded rags and scraps once they are taken out to the street. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to go. Perhaps a family member or a friend could offer us shelter, but finding someone who would accommodate my entire destitute family without hesitation is highly unlikely.

Disappointingly, the fire is extinguished before it reaches our vicinity. I feel a sense of anticlimax after expecting such a grand spectacle. Simultaneously, an indescribable desolation settles within me. I later learn that the factory had fire insurance. Despite losing their alcohol bottles, they will receive substantial compensation. Fire insurance proves to be a more benevolent deity than any other. 

Ill-tempered thoughts without any basis in reality emerge—“Damn it, everything should have burned down!” In such a mood, I don’t even consider the consequences for my mother. I yearn to be a bare-bodied individual with no possessions, not even a single penny to my name. Of course, there is no chance that the fire insurance god would compensate me in any way …

 

The Generosity of Cities (March 20, 1936)

The extent to which the generosity of cities will continue to dwindle remains uncertain. I once heard a disturbing tale. It was said that in Shanghai, deformed infants, often already deceased, are discarded into trash cans. Each morning, the sanitation workers arrive whistling. Upon discovering one of these grotesquely deformed infants, they never react with shock. They simply set the infant aside and proceed to collect the trash. To them, the sight of a deformed infant is not unusual, but they recognize that it is not waste. It is not within their job duties to care for it; whatever befalls it is not their concern. At first, I questioned the authenticity of this tale, but it seemed plausible enough. It’s challenging to fathom just how depleted and barren the generosity of cities has become.

It has been nearly a year since my family relocated to this row house. Under the same shared roof, multiple families reside in separate compartments. Mr. Park, Mr. Kim, Yi Sang, Mr. Choi—names inscribed on plaques of varying sizes that hang on each compartment’s front door. Yet no one really knows anyone else. Each person’s occupation remains a mystery to the others. Unmarried older individuals like me enter through the front gate, while wives and grown sisters use the back door. The husbands typically depart in the morning or midday and return in the evening or at night through the front gate.

Most of the women stay at home. In the evenings, they gather by the water pipe to wash rice. Unlike men, they’re not reticent around one another. They openly share stories, some revealing secrets best left untold. They chatter about the shortcomings of others and weave tales of domestic drama. This act of storytelling eventually discloses their husbands’ professions, subtly undermining their men’s dignity. Still, their air is eerily calm.

From my home’s restroom window, I can see Room No. X of the second row house, which was briefly occupied by a young couple last summer. They argued constantly. As autumn arrived, the husband abruptly left. The young wife subsequently became a favored hostess at a local café, a merry spinster. Perhaps realizing the row house wasn’t conducive to finding a new husband, she eventually moved on as well. The room now stands vacant. Unsurprisingly, there are no rules of etiquette in these row houses obliging residents to greet or bid farewell to neighbors when they move.

Upon the couple’s departure, the neighbor, who’d been subjected to their incessant squabbles, expressed relief, comparing it to having an aching tooth extracted. During that period, another young couple lived nearby. Both were overweight, and they’d lost their baby due to a miscarriage. They began to shed their excess weight, the loss of which surpassed the weight of their deceased infant. I later discovered they lacked the funds to raise the child had it survived and to maintain the mother’s weight during pregnancy.

When the weather turned colder, a family of four siblings moved next door to us. The two brothers attended B Technical School, and the two older sisters attended W High School. Each evening, the siblings’ popular music grated on my father’s traditional sensibilities. Oddly, I’ve never encountered the brothers, and my sister has never conversed with the sisters.

On New Year’s Day, the neighbors opposite us prepared white rice cakes. I hoped they’d share some with us, but we received not a single slice. We decided to keep our panfried leftovers to ourselves, having initially planned to share. We didn’t consider the household of siblings when cooking, because they hadn’t prepared any holiday food. We felt irritated, suspecting they anticipated receiving food from us and rice cakes from the other neighbors. Of course, I could have been mistaken about this. As winter gave way to spring, a young woman living at the end of our row house transitioned from being a primary wife to a concubine. Although no sympathy was extended to her, people still found it in themselves to scorn her potbellied husband. Yet nobody took any action. Debt collectors began visiting our home in growing numbers. One day, the landlord arrived with a bailiff and placed repossession notices on all our belongings due to overdue rent. Nobody witnessed it; the four siblings next door were at school, and the neighbors across might as well have been sightless. I thought it was a blessing in disguise; it would have been more humiliating if the entire neighborhood knew our plight.

“Hello—” 

“Who are you looking for?” 

“Is this Mr. X’s house?” 

“No!” 

“Then where is his place?” 

“How should I know that?” 

After this conversation occurred at our door between me and a stranger, my father advised, “It’s best not to inform them, even if you know.” 

“Why?” 

“They’re likely debt collectors, which would be a shameful revelation for Mr. X.” So, how much more will the generosity of this city wither and dry up?

 

Antique Obsession (March 24–25, 1936)

Some artifacts were excavated from a grave, apparently crafted and used by the peoples of the ancient Silla or Goryeo kingdoms. They were likely used to present food, such as bean sprouts and boiled beef, or to pour wine. In essence, these wares were probably instrumental in the everyday sustenance of these ancient societies. However, I struggle to understand the excitement surrounding their excavation. Why are these broken objects so highly valued? Watching the same fervor over wares from the Yi Dynasty, which only ended a few decades ago, is even more puzzling. 

While we should respect the achievements of our ancestors, objects like these household wares seem worthless, yet people seem to crave them. Compared to the technical sophistication and progressiveness of a glass dish, this excavated earthenware appears to be crudely made. The obsession with antiques seems to me as an extreme form of laziness I wish to expunge from our society.

Occasionally, someone I know boasts about their acquisition. “Look, I’ve managed to buy a Yi Dynasty jar cheaply, come and see!” More often than not, they’ve overpaid for an object of minimal aesthetic value. It is indistinguishable from an item you might find in the kitchenware section of the Mitsukoshi department store. There might be some value in it, but it is inconsequential.

It goes without saying that jars and pots were not initially intended to possess aesthetic value. However, occasionally, an object emerges from a grave that demonstrates a blend of artistic elements, albeit being amateurish and likely crafted for practical use. After being buried for a long time, and as our times and cultures have drastically shifted, such an object may now seem remarkable, skillfully made, and even highly artistic. To mistake it as purely artistic and to rave about it demonstrates profound ignorance.

I once visited a museum where countless excavated artifacts were displayed chronologically and categorized meticulously according to their purpose, style, and other classifications. Seeing the clear and straightforward arrangement of the gallery, I could finally appreciate the beauty and value of such artifacts.

The value of antiques likely lies in archaeological interests. The sense of beauty one might feel for them probably stems from our deep longing for our ancestors. We must foster the study of history in order to understand our past. The significance of antiques truly shines when we use them to learn about the lives, folk culture, and folk arts of a certain period. However, when antiques are hidden away, their context obscured, their purpose ceases. 

Viewing many artifacts from a similar period with a shared purpose and style allows us to gain concrete historical knowledge about that time. In contrast, examining a single artifact, like a bone fragment from a Pithecanthropus, only leads to vague speculations about the past. Some collectors obsessively gather antiques, storing them in their bedrooms out of fear that others might discover their value. In the context of archaeological interests, such behavior is detestable, and their stingy notion of private ownership of ancient artifacts is reprehensible.

However, collectors who hoard artifacts might be considered good citizens compared to those who purchase artifacts cheaply only to sell them for a significant profit. These individuals believe their actions to be virtuous, yet I believe it disrupts our currency system.

An acquaintance once told me, “I was recently deceived into buying this item. Nevertheless, I didn’t lose much because I managed to sell it off immediately at only a slight loss. I avoided disaster.” Essentially, he bought a forgery at a high price, discovered its inauthenticity, and sold it to someone else for a slightly lower price. He views this as a success story.

It’s hard to fathom the mindset of someone who intentionally forges an item of such little value that it wouldn’t even serve as an ashtray. It’s disturbing to think that such deceptions pervade the antique world. I’ve heard of a collector who bought a famous sword for a fortune only to discover it was a forgery and held a funeral for himself. A counterfeit jar or dish is passed from one deceived individual to the next, with each new victim becoming the next deceiver. This cycle could endure for centuries. Eventually, people might start valuing these forgeries as historical artifacts, saying their origins are in our ancestors’ days.

I would urge these eccentric collectors to shatter every insignificant dish they see (excluding those with genuine aesthetic value). Yet if I were to advise them to donate their antiques to a museum, they would likely berate me as a lowlife for my audacity.

 

From an Empty Space (March 12, 1936)

One cold day, when ice still held the world in its grip, I stood alone in the yard of Deoksugung Palace. In warmer weather, this place would be teeming with people lounging on the dry grass, but that day, there were none. I couldn’t fathom why this expansive area was left vacant. I contemplated the ground, imagining it might be bored. Perhaps it yearned for more than just blooming plants, trees, and peculiar rocks and stones. Instead, it might have preferred the company of houses and bustling crowds. It could have yearned to shape itself into long, thin, winding paths nestled between structures, transforming into streets bustling with life. It might have wished to feel the rhythmic steps of couples strolling hand in hand, the rumbling of vehicles traversing its surface. At least that was what I imagined the ground might desire on that winter day.

Then, it occurred to me that this ground might be a special restricted area during winter. In my embarrassment, I hurried toward the Daehanmun gate of the palace to leave. As I walked, I heard the distant murmuring of people. Yet the grassy yard was still empty, save for an old caramel wrapper tumbling in the wind.

Suddenly, I noticed numerous couples in winter coats, not on the barren ground but merrily skating on a frozen pond where goldfish usually swam. I marveled at this newly discovered gleaming space. Puzzled, I wondered about the fate of the goldfish. Could they survive in the freezing water beneath the ice? The countless scratches from skate blades obscured any view beneath the surface. If it had been transparent, I might have spotted a flicker of a goldfish tail. But how deep was this small pond? If it was completely frozen, the fish must have perished. If there was still flowing water beneath, how disturbed must they have been by the unfamiliar noise of the skaters, the source of which they could not fathom? The enjoyment of this wondrous space demanded that the skaters remain ignorant of any distress the fish might be experiencing.

Later that day, as I reclined in a chair on the second floor of my home, I surveyed the evening city and mourned the absence of empty spaces in this twilight world. Then, I spotted an impressive empty space far superior to the humble pond at the palace: a construction site encircled by wooden planks, each bearing a sign for “XX Insurance Company Construction Site.” Once overgrown with weeds, it had transformed into a true wasteland as they withered and faded to sepia. In the heart of this bustling city, where there’s hardly space enough to drive a nail, such a significant empty space seemed like a miracle. 

Perhaps it had been untouched by human or animal footprints for a long time, or at all. A few dogs played there, their shadows stretching in the twilight. It was a genuine empty space. In truth, our world lacks such spaces. Paved roads, muddy fields, forests, and rocky mountains are not empty; they are properties owned by someone. If we follow this logic, we can’t even plant a single blade of grass without an owner’s permission. We can only enjoy leisurely walks because the world still generously grants silent consent. So, in a world devoid of empty spaces, I was thrilled to discover this construction site, imagining myself lying there, stretching my legs, and enjoying a cigarette. But then, I realized that it was merely a construction site awaiting development, for XX Insurance Company’s profit. Its unique feature was that, instead of having a bare concrete floor, the pavement was was carpeted in dried weeds.

Spring arrived. A solitary plant in a pot in my modest room greeted the season and began to blossom. I had used this little pot of dirt as a holder for my ink bottle throughout the winter. Seeing it bloom, I removed the ink bottle, cleared away the scattered dry leaves, and watered it with a jar of clean water. I felt a sense of joy, for in this world, this small patch of dirt was my only empty space. However, this round and flat space was far too small for me to stretch my legs and enjoy a cigarette.

 

Jack Jung, who translated these sketches, studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a cotranslator of  Yi Sang: Selected Works, which won the 2021 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. He teaches at Davidson College.

Alejo Carpentier’s Second Language

Alejo Carpentier, 1979. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those of us who never systematically studied a foreign language, but who had access, thanks to translation—a miracle we take for granted all too easily—to distant cultures that at times came to seem close to us, or even like they belonged to us. We didn’t read Marguerite Duras or Yasunari Kawabata because we were interested in the French or the Japanese language per se, but because we wanted to learn—to continue learning that foreign language called literature, as broadly international as it is profoundly local. Because this foreign language functions, of course, inside of our own language; in other words, our language comes to seem, thanks to literature, foreign, without ever ceasing to be ours.

It’s within that blend of strangeness and familiarity that I want to recall my first encounter with the literature of Alejo Carpentier, which occurred, as I’m sure it did for so many Spanish speakers of my generation and after, inside a classroom. “In this story, everything happens backward,” said a teacher whose name I don’t want to remember, before launching into a reading of “Viaje a la semilla” (“Journey to the seed”), Carpentier’s most famous short story, which we would later find in almost every anthology of Latin American stories, but which at the time, when we were thirteen or fourteen years old, we had never read. The teacher’s solemn, perhaps exaggerated reading allowed us, however, to feel or to sense the beauty of prose that was strange and different. It was our language, but converted into an unknown music that could nonetheless, like all music, especially good music, be danced to. Many of us thought it was a dazzling story, surprising and crazy, but I don’t know if any of us would have been able to explain why. Because of the odd delicacy of some of the sentences, perhaps. Maybe this one: “For the first time, the rooms slept without window-blinds, open onto a landscape of ruins.” Or this one: “The chandeliers of the great drawing room now sparkled very brightly.”

Although our teacher had already told us that everything in the story happened backward, from the future to the past, back toward the seed, knowing the trick did not cancel out the magic. The magic did come to an end, though, when the teacher ordered us to list all the words we didn’t know and look them up—each of our backpacks always contained a small dictionary, which, we soon found, was not big enough to contain Carpentier’s splendid, abundant lexicon.

Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language? We discussed something like this, dictionaries in hand, while the teacher—I don’t know why I remember this—plugged some numbers into a calculator laboriously, perhaps struggling with his farsightedness.

I reread “Journey to the seed” just now, and I again find it extraordinary, for reasons I presume are different. But I get distracted by the melancholic attempt to guess which of those words I didn’t know back then: embrasure, denticle, entablature, scapulary, daguerreotype, psaltery, doublet, gnomon, balustrades, licentious, gunwads, matchstaff, epaulet, sentient, décolleté, tricorne, taper, tassel, calash, sorrel, benzoin, sophist, crinoline, ruff, octander …

To read Carpentier entailed, first of all, listening to him—listening to him the way we listen to a song in a language very like our own but that we don’t understand entirely, enjoying the echoes and contrasts, and then translating him. Translating before we knew how to translate, or even that we were translating. Translating him into our own language. For someone who grew up with the Spanish of Chile, reading Carpentier was, of course, to travel to the island of Cuba, but above all it was to travel to the island of Carpentier.

***

The foreignness of his own language was clear to Carpentier from the start, as the son of a French father and a Russian mother. Throughout his life, he affirmed the official story that he had been born in Havana, but a few years after Carpentier’s death, Guillermo Cabrera Infante leaked the juicy tidbit that he had actually been born in Lausanne, Switzerland (a bit of gossip that was never disproven, perhaps because it was supported by a birth certificate).

The hypotheses about this lie—or, to put it more kindly, this slight displacement of the truth—are numerous, of course. Carpentier probably wanted to minimize his foreignness, for reasons unknown, though it’s fascinating to contemplate the possibilities. Listening to him in interviews on YouTube, any Spanish speaker would agree that this is a person who speaks the language with unusual dexterity and mastery, with his guttural pronunciation of the r as the sole, though conclusive, mark of his foreignness—and so it wasn’t hard to believe this new version of his biography, which presented him to us as a Cuban whose mother tongue was not Spanish, though he mastered the language very quickly, with extraordinary proficiency, when he arrived in Cuba with his parents at four or five years old.

There is no disputing that Carpentier was born on December 26, 1904, which is not relevant in and of itself, of course, except for readers who are interested in astrology. But I mention it because that is also the birthday of Esteban, one of the protagonists of Explosion in a Cathedral, who in fact becomes a translator—significant, since the book is often understood as a novel about the “translation” of the ideals of the French Revolution to the Caribbean. Although we later come to realize that the beautiful and terrible initial section foreshadows Esteban’s importance, the figure of that orphaned, sickly boy seems, in the first chapter, less relevant than his cousins, Carlos and Sofía, with whom he lives as one more brother in a big house in Havana.

The novel opens with these three teenagers in mourning after the death of their father, a well-to-do plantation owner who had been widowed years before. Instead of returning to the convent where she has been educated so far, Sofía chooses to stay home with her brother, Carlos—who is destined, or more like condemned, to take over the family business—and her cousin, whom she tries to care for and protect. The three young people cope with their pain even as they discover the joys of this shared life, “absorbed in interminable readings, discovering the universe through books.” Grief becomes, as well, “a fitting pretext to stay aloof from all commitments or obligations, ignoring a society whose provincial intolerance tried to bind existence to ordinary norms—to appearing in certain places at certain times, dining in the same modish pastry shops, spending Christmas on the sugar plantations or on estates in Artemisa, where rich landholders vied with each other over the number of mythological statues they could place on the verges of their tobacco fields.”

They are distracted from this intense and entertaining life of seclusion by Victor Hugues, a trader from Marseilles of indeterminate age (“thirty or forty perhaps, or maybe much younger”), whose seductive irruption on the scene opens up a promising space attuned to revolutionary idealism and enthusiasm. Rounding out the group is Doctor Ogé, a mestizo physician and Freemason and a friend of Hugues’s, who tries to help Esteban as he is in the throes of an asthma attack. There is a crucial scene in which Sofía refuses to give her hand to the doctor, betraying racial prejudices that are typical of her class and time (“No one would trust a negro to build a palace, defend a prisoner, arbitrate a theological dispute, or govern a country”). But Victor Hugues replies categorically, “All men are born equal”—and it turns out that Ogé not only treats Esteban’s asthma attack, but also cures him completely. This miracle leaves an indelible mark on the characters’ values and prospects, especially Sofía’s and Esteban’s; the latter, now free of illness and faced with the racing speed of history, dares to embark on a different life.

I don’t want to give anything away here about the fate of certain characters who go on to engage directly with the changing and bloody era in which they live. Perhaps it will suffice to say that Victor Hugues and Esteban set out for France, from where Hugues—a historical character adapted by Carpentier from diverse and elusive sources—returns to the Caribbean in a position of power, on his way to becoming the “Robespierre of the Islands,” while Esteban, after discovering Paris and feeling “more French than the French, more rebellious than the rebels, clamoring for peremptory measures, draconian punishments, exemplary retribution,” and moving to Bayonne to translate ineffective revolutionary pamphlets, also returns to the Caribbean, having now become the narrator whom, almost without realizing, we met in the novel’s preamble. Increasingly disillusioned and guilt-ridden, Esteban finds the appreciative contemplation of nature to be practically his only consolation. As for Sofía, her marriage seems to set her up for riches and insignificance, but widowhood and her later reunion with Hugues turn her into the surprise protagonist of the novel’s last stretch; her decisions, motivations, and fate have for decades fed an interpretive debate that is today perhaps more urgent than ever.

***

“I think I am one of the few Cubans who can boast of having visited almost all of the islands in the Caribbean,” said Carpentier in an interview in which he emphasizes that none of those islands is like any other. That cult of the specific inundates each of the minute and vivid descriptions that abound in his work. The beauty of Carpentier’s prose can never be emphasized enough, and in this novel it rises to incredible levels, especially in the descriptions of marine landscapes: “Esteban saw in the coral forests a tangible image, an intimate yet ungraspable figuration of Paradise Lost, where the trees, still badly named, with the clumsy and quavering tongue of a Man-Child, were endowed with the apparent immortality of this luxurious flora—this monstrance, this burning bush—for which the sole sign of autumn or springtime was a variation in tone or a soft migration of shadows …”

This exuberant prose, which is proudly and decidedly baroque, still manages not to compete with the story. We are carried forward, it seems to me, at a fluctuating speed, and we even, at times, laboriously change ships; the pace is remarkable, as are the pauses, the tricky overall tardiness that opens up emotional spaces and unsuspected storylines. The narrative inhabits us, so to speak. At times, we don’t really know what we are reading, and, more importantly, for long stretches we forget that we are reading. Carpentier works his style in such a way that it is still possible to read this book as a historical novel, even as an adventure tale, although of course he problematizes the idea of adventure (“Esteban knew well the tedium the word adventure could conceal,” the narrator says at one point).

It’s possible that a pessimistic reading of the novel, one that is grounded in the brutality it relates so bluntly, might be more persuasive than one that fully validates the idea of progress. The world of this novel is—much like our own, in fact—complex, protean, ambivalent, filled with characters who fluctuate between feeling fascinated and repulsed by the present, between heroism and mediocrity, between opportunistic conformity and radical idealism. It occurs to me that, as much for Spanish-speaking readers as for English-speaking ones, the shift in the English title is useful. The original title, El siglo de las luces—which would be “The Age of Enlightenment” in English—is ironic in a way that hangs over the book like a disturbing shadow, while the actual English title highlights the crucial recurrence in the novel of a painting called Explosion in a Cathedral, inspired by a work by François de Nomé, which depicts a halted movement, an “endless falling without falling,” and, along with the repeated references to Goya’s The Disasters of War, gives the novel a constant and powerful visual counterpoint.

Because it was first published in 1962, the novel was initially read, naturally, in light of the Cuban Revolution, with Carpentier already en route to becoming an emblem of a successful revolution, as he was until his death. I don’t think that the novel, in and of itself, allows for some of the unequivocal expert readings it was subjected to: there are critical commentaries that seem to understand it as a collection of the author’s badly disguised opinions, which is particularly unfair given its complexity, ambition, and reach. Does this novel express a real hope in revolutionary processes, or rather a radical skepticism? “Esteban’s journey is not circular but spiral,” notes Roberto González Echevarría in his stupendous book Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, a particularly illuminating reading that attends to the nuances of Explosion in a Cathedral’s striking monumentality.

***

Italo Calvino once stated that classic works of literature are those that have never finished saying what they have to say. Explosion in a Cathedral is one such novel. Especially to us, who in a way inhabit the future that it foresees or prefigures. Read today, some sixty years since its original publication, at the end of a pandemic, amid wars and totalitarian governments and a radical climate crisis, a novel like Explosion in a Cathedral continues to accompany us, to question us, to challenge and move us, and ultimately to help us in the arduous and terrible exercise of reading the world.

Contrasting the world of the novel with the present could open many a debate, and I imagine them all as vibrant and impassioned. What happens to us when we realize that there are others for whom we are the others? Do we ever truly become aware of such a thing? Is it possible to change history without violence, without thousands of innocent dead? What does this novel have to tell us about colonialism, globalization, feminism, human rights, the rights of nature, transculturation, migration, war?

Perhaps the irrational wish that Spanish were his mother tongue led Carpentier to build his astonishing version of that language, which takes on, even for Spanish speakers, a music that is old and new at the same time, one that allows past, present, and future to coexist. Literature, at the end of the day, is a complex form of consciousness that allows us to imagine what we would be like if only we spoke more languages. And, of course, that includes imagining what we would be like had we learned the languages that were wiped out in our own lands and in the territories of neighboring countries, the languages that were savaged and erased to create the illusion of monolingualism. Perhaps if we respond to the challenges raised by this novel, if we undertake the countless discussions it permits and induces, it will help us become more humble, less dumb, less deaf.

 

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

From the foreword to Alejo Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral, to be published in a new translation by Adrian Nathan West by Penguin Classics next month.

Alejandro Zambra’s latest novel, Chilean Poet, was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year in 2022. He is the author of Multiple Choice; My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; and three previous novels: Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai. He lives in Mexico City.

Megan McDowell is the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other awards, and has been short- or long-listed for the Booker International prize four times. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Lifelines: On Santa Barbara

Diana Markosian, The Arrival, from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

I lived in Moscow during the summer of 1992, just after I graduated from college. The attempted coup by hardline communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev had failed, the USSR had collapsed, and Russia was officially open to the West. Religious organizations were flooding in—including the one I’d signed up with at my university. We were there to teach English using a simplified version of the Gospel of Luke, a strategy I didn’t question back then. Most of my students wanted to learn American slang. One young man brought in a Sports Illustrated he’d purchased on the black market. He asked me to read aloud phrases he’d highlighted, then repeated what I said, copying my accent and cadence. Those were my favorite sessions.

What a time to be there, amid the influx of Westerners shopping in the dollars-only markets. Not the people I was with. The mission organization believed, rightly, that we were guests in the country and should live as the locals did. We waited in breadlines, milk lines, egg-shop lines, pretending that for us, too, times were hard. But there was no ignoring the imbalance between our dollar and the ruble. I hired a cab to take me from my hotel—the Hotel Akademicheskaya, a mile from Gorky Park—to the American embassy. The total cost was 300 rubles. For me it was the equivalent of about thirty cents; for a Russian, it was tantamount to spending $300 on a twenty-minute car ride. A bottle of Fanta was forty rubles, or about four cents. Imagine spending forty dollars on a bottle of soda. Still, in the tiny apartment where we were sharing a meal, one of my students pulled out bottles of Fanta and said, “I am sorry it is not Coca-Cola.”

I was reminded of this lost world in June, when I saw the photographer and filmmaker Diana Markosian’s “Santa Barbara” at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm. The show opens with a placard displaying Markosian’s words:

When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.

What follows is a series of rooms containing staged photographs, archival family images, and a few stray objects: a cherry-red rotary phone, a scalloped glass ashtray. (A photograph depicting these items, along with a small radio, is titled The Lifeline.) But the show’s centerpiece—the vehicle through which we watch the narrative unfold—is a short film dramatizing the journey Markosian’s mother, Svetlana, took from Moscow to America. Actors play the central roles. In one scene, Svetlana (played by Ana Imnadze) tries to buy bread at a crowded market; in another she has a violent argument with her estranged husband, Arsen. According to Jonathan Griffin’s 2020 profile of Markosian in the New York Times, her parents came to Moscow from Armenia to finish their Ph.D.’s and separated before Markosian was born. Arsen was an engineer, Svetlana an economist. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Arsen resorted to selling counterfeit Barbie dolls on the black market in order to survive.

Diana Markosian, Lifeline from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

Interspersed with these scenes from daily life are clips of Svetlana in a darkened room watching a daytime drama called Santa Barbara. The show aired in Moscow from 1992 to 1999 and starred Robin Wright, A Martinez, and Dane Witherspoon, among others. It was the first American television series to air on Russian television. Millions of Russians tuned in, caught up in the fantasy world of the forever-feuding Capwell and Lockridge families. The private yachts and palm-lined streets, elegant dinner parties in mansions overlooking the Pacific—here, then, was the American Dream.

Svetlana gets caught up in that dream. She registers, in secret, as a mail-order bride and becomes engaged to a man named Eli, who lives—where else?—in Santa Barbara. In the middle of the night, Svetlana wakes her children Diana and David, ages seven and nine, and tells them to pack. They leave the next morning without saying goodbye to their father, who has remained present in their lives despite the separation. The children will lose touch with him for the next fifteen years. 

Eli, played by actor Gene Jones, is waiting for the family at the airport in California. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he turns out to be a very old man, nothing like the photograph of the middle-aged man he’d sent. “When you came and saw him, what did you think?” the actress playing Svetlana asks the real Svetlana, who is middle aged now. The two women sit across from one another at a small dining table: the younger “Svetlana” in costume, the real Svetlana wearing a sleek black dress and pumps. 

“That was actually a little shocking,” the real Svetlana says. “I was definitely expecting different than I saw.”

Eli is a kind man. He and Svetlana make a noble attempt to love each other. One moving scene depicts the two of them in bed with a book open between them, Eli helping Svetlana practice English.

“I have confidence,” Eli says, enunciating the words.

“I have confidence,” Svetlana repeats.

“I am confident,” Eli says. 

“I am confident,” she repeats.

“But I was unhappy for a long time,” Svetlana says to her daughter in a recorded telephone interview, clips of which play in voice-over throughout the film. 

“Do you think he felt it?” Markosian asks.

“Of course he did,” Svetlana says.

Diana Markosian, The Pink Robe, from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

***

Markosian’s film, scored by the composer Nils Frahm, is twelve minutes long. I watched it five times. Markosian collaborated with Lynda Myles, one of the scriptwriters on the original Santa Barbara, to write her own screenplay. I expected the film to feel like an episode of the soap opera. But it resists melodrama and heightened emotionalism. Eli is portrayed neither as villain—preying on a younger woman with no means—nor as victim of a femme fatale. Svetlana, too, refuses the victim role. In one of the voice-overs, Markosian says, “I’m trying to understand you, Mom.” “You need to love me,” the real Svetlana replies. “You don’t have to understand. I don’t need understanding.”

When I got home from Stockholm I pulled out the videos I’d recorded in 1992, my own chronicle of that world: interviews with my students, walks through the streets (everything in some stage of demolition, it seemed), standing in line for morozhenoe, ice cream. A weekend trip to Irina’s dacha in the countryside, where I drank a delicious Egyptian flower water and was sick for a week. A trip to Sergiyev Posad to see the Orthodox churches. (“You must not call it Zagorsk,” our guide said, referencing the town’s Soviet-era name. “Never again Zagorsk.”) Dinner with Vladimir and his wife, Olga, and their son, Paul. Vladimir was a professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute. We corresponded for several months after I left. Here’s an excerpt, dated December 12, 1992:

Now the economic situation in Russia is very hard. In this year the prices have grown more than 100 times and our salary have grown only 20 times. We see that in future will not be better than now and we think about the future work in the foreign countries in the field of my profession. Now Russia does not need the persons of my profession. Therefore I am obliged to change the field of the work, to do the commercial work, or to look for the work in my field of work in the foreign countries. 

Such hard-won democracy, overcoming czars and dictators to finally—finally—begin the long road toward a stable democracy. And now, just across the Baltic, a madman was attempting to turn back the clock: the day I saw the Markosian exhibit in Stockholm, Vladimir Putin launched an attack on the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine, injuring twenty people, five of them children. 

***

Markosian auditioned sixty men for the role of Eli. Each actor was asked to draft a mock letter to Svetlana, attempting to convince her to come to Santa Barbara, as the real Eli had done. The actors then read their letters on camera. Some of these letters are displayed alongside photographs of the various actors, with clips of their audition reels playing on a loop.

I am an attractive man—not extremely handsome—but I think attractive enough to please you.

I am a good Christian. I love God and his rules.

Svetlana Dearest, Thank you for the lovely letters and the photos. You are always in my thoughts, and I can’t wait to see you in person. We have written each other for a long time now, and I feel that each letter draws us closer together. If you will take the last—and biggest—step to me, I promise you won’t regret it.

Watching the actors audition for the role of Eli—one more distillation of the distance between fantasy and reality—I thought about my own summer in Moscow. How we pretended to teach English when in fact we were trying to make converts; how we playacted poverty while our students and their families suffered. I thought of the distance between the glitzed-up, televised version of the American Dream Svetlana put her hopes in, versus her experiences in America, but also the way these intersected. After all, Markosian went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia. “It was a small little world and I changed that for you,” Svetlana says to Markosian in voice-over.

“Do you feel like our story is like a soap opera, Mom?” Markosian asks.

Svetlana is silent for a moment.

“It’s life,” she says, finally. 

 

Jamie Quatro is the author of Fire Sermon and I Want to Show You More. Grove Press will publish her novel Two-Step Devil in summer 2024 and her story collection Next Time I’ll Be Louder in 2025.