The Paris Review's Blog, page 54

Trespassing on Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s house, The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts. Margaret Helminska, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I work in a blue-chip gallery, and it’s not unusual that I’m asked if I grew up in Newport when I say that I’m from Rhode Island. It often feels like a loaded question, more social barometer than casual inquiry, and it’s clear that my response will either indicate our mutual class affiliation or amplify the differences that I already know exist between us. Sometimes I can see the flare of pleasure that people feel when they say “Newport,” the word conjuring, as it must, visions of sailboats and private beaches, country clubs and rocky cliffs thrashed by the waves of a restless Atlantic. I always sense that there’s a secret on the other side of the inquiry, but I guess I will never know exactly what it is; I grew up half an hour west of Bellevue Avenue in a modest split-level ranch that my father built. I’ve seen only small slices of those gated houses, the quick flashes of stone and shingle that are revealed through a break in the trees.

In high school I had a friend named Vanessa whose mother was a nurse at Newport Hospital. We would sometimes catch a ride with her and walk up and down Thames Street, where we shoplifted scented lotions from Crabtree & Evelyn and searched diners and parking lots for the town’s seemingly nonexistent boys. I don’t remember that we ever once considered spending an afternoon following Cliff Walk, the coastal path that wends its way past Newport’s eccentric archipelago of Gilded Age mansions. We liked looking at things we couldn’t afford, but only if we could fit them into our pockets, only if we could take them home with us to scrutinize within the privacy of our own bedrooms.

I briefly moved back to Rhode Island following the collapse of my first marriage. It was the summer before I turned twenty-seven, and I spent three months hiding away in my childhood bedroom, grief-damaged and humiliated by the task of trying to figure out who and how I was supposed to be. My husband and I had managed to stay married for only four years, the last of which I spent watching from the sidelines as he enjoyed an unexpectedly rapid and very public rise as an artist. His newly minted success introduced a host of newly minted problems, and I drifted through most of that winter and spring weeping in the utility closet at the boutique where I worked and asking him where I fit into his life so many times that I eventually didn’t fit into it at all. By that July, we were completely estranged. I was living with my parents when his art dealer sent me a copy of The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s 1920 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel that lays bare the punitive cruelties of a leisure class as expert at collecting things as it was at discarding people. Partially set in the Gilded Age Newport where Wharton herself had summered from the late 1870s through the turn of the century, the book lifts a curtain’s edge on what once happened inside those hedgerow-protected compounds. I never asked the art dealer if he was suggesting that I was a May Welland or an Ellen Olenska, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe he was telling me that all bad marriages are exactly the same, that it makes no difference where you live or what you have, because even glamour cannot temper the pain of being left.

I fell in love with Wharton during those lonesome months; I found fragments of myself in The Custom of the Country’s Undine Spragg, in The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart, in Summer’s Charity Royall, each one of them unable to foresee that folly follows when we expect too much. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that the author who wrote with such precision about what transpires inside the unhappiest of homes had herself lived in a succession of them. Raised by a rigid society mother who was by turns remote and overbearing, Edith Newbold Jones was twenty-three when she married Teddy Wharton. The union helped her escape the control of a family that found her literary aspirations inconveniently vulgar, but so ill-matched were Teddy and Edith that Henry James once said that the marriage was, in retrospect, “an almost—or rather an utterly—inconceivable thing.” The young Mrs. Wharton soon realized that her new husband was a professional vacationer plagued by alcoholism and manic depression, a man who found his equilibrium indulging in the communal “watering hole amusements” that she went on to pillory with brutal accuracy in her novels and short stories. It was at Land’s End, the couple’s cliffside Rhode Island home, that Edith understood that she’d consigned herself to a new kind of domestic subjugation: a sexually and intellectually dissatisfying quasi-union that withered incrementally under the pall of Newport’s convivial excesses. “There are certain things one must possess in order not to be awed by them,” she wrote in 1900’s “The Line of Least Resistance,” a story, set in Newport, about a dissatisfied wife and her rich but gormless husband. One is left to wonder whether the line refers to objects or to women.

***

Wharton’s writing frequently draws parallels between the claustrophobia of an overstuffed parlor and that of marital suffering, and it is often through a rejection of architectural convention that her heroines express their hunger for freedom. (Think of would-be divorcée Ellen Olenska setting up house in her bohemian West Twenty-Third Street apartment.) In the late 1890s, Wharton, fatigued by the disorganized ostentation that she felt was transforming Newport into a “Thermopylae of bad taste,” began examining the relationship between architecture and psychology, ultimately developing a philosophy that called for the union of symmetry, classical proportions, and elegant utility. She outlined this trifecta of principles in her 1897 book, The Decoration of Houses, and later realized them in the construction of the Mount, the Lenox, Massachusetts, compound she codesigned following the sale of Land’s End in 1901.

Lenox, which lies in the shadow of the Berkshire Mountains, had already established itself as a summer enclave for wealthy New Yorkers by the time the Whartons purchased their 113 acres of lakeside farmland, but for Wharton the area retained a vestige of “hideous, howling wilderness,” as one unnamed traveler had described it two centuries prior. The outskirts of the land were still populated, albeit sparsely, by insular pockets of the “Swamp Yankees”—local vernacular for New England mountain people—that haunt the pages of Summer and Ethan Frome.

Wharton found in the countryside a respite from New York’s surveillance, relief from Newport’s extravagance, the freedom to choose her own company, and material. It was on Hawthorne Street that Wharton’s friend Ethel Cram was fatally injured by a horse kick to the skull, an event that served as the impetus for her 1907 novel, The Fruit of the Tree. One can drive past the train station where Wharton received out-of-town visitors like Henry James and English novelist Howard Sturgis. The steep decline from the town square was the site of the deadly 1904 sledding accident that inspired Ethan Frome. Kate Spencer, an assistant librarian at the Lenox’s public library, was injured in the accident; visiting the library this past fall, I found myself imagining the hours Wharton must have spent quietly studying her young friend’s scarred face and limping gait, searching her for evidence of the distance between public and private pain.

“It was only at The Mount,” Wharton recalled in her 1934 memoir, A Backward Glance, “that I was really happy.” The two primary—and parallel—themes that run through its pages are the histories of her writing and of her homes, mutually informative and enmeshed passions that surface even in her earliest recollections. The Mount is presented as the site that allowed Wharton to consolidate her power as a novelist, a house on a hill from which she could regard, from a slight distance, the life she was born into yet was savagely critical of.

In 1980, nearly a half century after the memoir’s publication, a cache of three hundred letters written by Wharton to a protégé of Henry James’s named Morton Fullerton was brought to market by a Dutch bookseller. Dated between 1907 and 1915, the letters—long thought to have been destroyed—offer proof of an extramarital affair with Fullerton that began at the Mount when Wharton was forty-five. Though the painful longing and ecstatic satisfaction that ricochet through these private missives is predictably missing from the memoir, the experience clearly inflected her recollections of the house and shaped the novels she wrote there. “You told me once,” she wrote to Morton in 1908, “I should write better for this experience of loving.”

Regardless of the revelations borne out by the affair, it was only after discovering that Teddy had embezzled nearly fifty thousand dollars from her trust to fund a Boston apartment for his mistress and the pleasure of several chorus girls that Wharton brokered a deal for her escape. She let go of the Mount to let go of the marriage, leaving in 1911, after handing the deed to Teddy in exchange for her freedom. By the time her boat arrived in France, the house had been sold.

***

The Mount, a gleaming white H-shaped jewel dressed in candy-striped awnings and marble balustrades, is located two miles from Lenox, and accessed via a winding, wooded driveway. Incorporating elements of French, Italian, and English styles and built into the side of a large hill, the building is a master class in visual harmony. I visited this past fall with my second husband, my first time there since the eighties, and joined a late-afternoon tour group that convened under the golden light of a slowly dipping sun. Outside the house, our tour guide, a fifty-something woman with a no-nonsense bob, sensible shoes, and a large yellow service dog, pointed out Wharton’s devotion to symmetry, evident not only in the labyrinth of formal gardens that bloom in the summertime with phlox, lilies, hydrangea, and dahlias, but also on the building’s facade, which features a set of dummy windows that compensate for an architectural imbalance. I thought it an unusual gesture, though I soon realized it wasn’t so for Wharton; inside the house are false doors, decorative panels that feign access to nonexistent rooms, and strategically placed mirrors that offer the illusion of depth. I was reminded of Lily Bart’s fatal reliance on artifice and of my own desire, all those years ago, on reading the novel for the first time, to believe until the very end that she might actually survive in spite of it.

Our group of eight included two teenage boys, a woman nestling a small curly-headed poodle to her breast in a baby sling, an elderly couple, and a man who did not once remove a pair of wraparound sunglasses. We entered the house through a grotto-style front hall finished with stucco walls and a terra-cotta-tiled floor, and then went up a staircase to a vaulted-ceilinged gallery on the main floor, outfitted with a series of arched doors. From there the rooms unfold enfilade, redirecting traffic flow away from Edith’s private rooms, the places Henry James referred to as the Mount’s “penetralia.” In her lifetime, Wharton was frequently accused by both friends and critics of an impulse to reveal much about the lives of others while giving away very little about her own, and the latter is evident in the way she policed her personal spaces. “It shall be born in mind,” she once wrote, “that, while the main purpose of a door is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.”

In Edith’s bedroom, the two young men in our tour group, who had at some point produced what looked like a photographer’s light meter, began running the device over the room’s bed, a vase of flowers, a mirror, an empty bureau, a disconnected telephone, and a small stack of books. I watched the lights on the device flicker anemically, emitting yellow and green flashes in short bursts that seemed to indicate nothing at all. “Is anyone here?” one of them asked. “Are you here?” They were not looking for Edith Wharton—just her ghost. “They shouldn’t do that!” I said to my husband, loud enough for everyone in the group to hear. “The House of Mirth was written in this room!” By this point my spoilers had begun to fatigue our guide, a nice woman whom I had unfortunately made an enemy of with my repeated interruptions and various usurpations, with my impulse to anticipate future turns in the tour’s script without concern for how it made either of us look. She didn’t seem to mind when my husband and I opted to linger in Wharton’s room so I could look out through the window at the forest and the lake, and no one said a word when we decided to break off from our group and head out on our own.

Walking the property’s grounds, I thought about what it means to be allowed entry into a stranger’s Eden, how impossible it is for the dead to protect themselves from the violence of our curiosity once we are allowed access to their private spaces. I thought of the hours I’d spent scouring passages from The Life Apart, the secret erotic diary the author kept for the duration of her affair with Morton Fullerton and the only place where the author was ever able to address her own carnal appetite. From the sentimental little hill of the family pet cemetery, I looked out to the mountains at the view that inspired Wharton to revisit a short story she’d written in French many years before. It was 1910, and the writer’s turbulent relationship with Fullerton had reached its inevitable conclusion. Provided with the distance to compare an unhappy marriage with the thrill of elicit erotic distraction, Wharton began to write Ethan Frome, coding herself as the title character, her husband as his infirm wife, and Fullerton as Mattie Silver, the servant with whom Ethan is in love. Wharton so often wrote about herself that we don’t need to pry to find all the things she never meant for us to see. There is a short passage in Ethan Frome that I return to, sometimes, when I feel my curiosity becoming caustic, when my fascination turns invasive, when I begin to run my ghost meter over someone’s life just because I can. “I had the feeling,” the narrator states, “that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.”

 

Alissa Bennett’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Vogue, Ursula, and the New York Times. With Lena Dunham, Bennett cohosts the podcast The C-Word, a show that examines and dismantles the mythologies culture erects around public women. She is currently writing a film about the life of Edith Wharton.

Nam Le and Nancy Lemann Recommend

Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The pandemic seemed like a good time to read the ninety-odd novels of Balzac that comprise The Human Comedy. (Which you can get on your Kindle for ninety-nine cents, by the way.) I was definitely obsessed with Balzac in my first youth. Some lines and ideas of his were then emblazoned on my brain: the ruthless mastery an artist must have over his material to boldly cut and shape it; “the impetuous courage of the South;” the “tenacity of purpose which works miracles when it is single-minded.”

Once, in my first youth (I probably got the phrase “first youth” from Balzac), I was having dinner with my brother, Nick Lemann, and about a dozen of his friends, all journalists like him; I was sitting right smack in the middle of the table, and I was, as I recall it, the only girl. They kept talking about politics, of course, and I wasn’t interested in politics at all and still know nothing about them, so eventually I fished out a Balzac novel from my purse and started pointedly reading it in the middle of dinner at the table, amid their conversation. It was like saying, You can be interested in politics, I am interested in Balzac. 

I have no regrets about it. I was making a point! The scene is emblazoned on my brain. It was the only way I could assert myself in that context! It got their attention.

—Nancy Lemann, author of “Diary of Remorse” 

Read Nancy Lemann on opera and The Palace Papers.

There’s a moment in the Ken Burns documentary series Muhammad Ali when—it’s ridiculous to say, four hours in and after however much (kinetic, absorbing) footage of boxing—I was suddenly shocked by how hard Ali was punching, and getting punched. It’s the “Thrilla in Manila,” the third and deciding fight between Ali and Joe Frazier, and it’s maybe 120 degrees in the ring under the TV lights and totally, unventilatedly humid under the metal roof. We’re in the ninth round or so and both men are already swollen and sagging and staggering, and then some new footage slides in, archival this time, of the two wearily trading punches, and in grainy sixteen-millimeter Technicolor it’s as if a screen’s been yanked off: you’re riding Ali’s shoulder (these shots were taken from the apron, just outside the ring) and everything you thought you knew about the speed and weight of punches at this level (even these subpar, exhausted punches), their impact against flesh and bone, needs to be scaled up about a thousand percent.

What happened? How does this archival footage feel so real? It got me thinking: all the proximity offered by our modern cameras—extreme zoom, hi-res and -frame rates, 360-degree angle capabilities—works to a counterpurpose: it makes mastery look easy, plausible. Or is that the deeper purpose? To make the average Joe believe that they too could do that—take that punch, hit that forehand, drive, or curveball?

I was reminded of a passage by the great art critic Peter Schjeldahl, one of his last:

One drunken night, a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room.

I love this shock, this awe, from someone whose whole life is art and artmaking. I love the idea that consummate skill remains inaccessible, even to the consummate expert looking at it or for it. You’re either in it or you’re not. 

So what about writing? It’s hard to imagine any literary critic being judo-flipped by a superb writer in quite the same way. By the whole of a work, sure, or by an organized effect, but not by whatever’s the technical equivalent of a painter painting a basic line (or a boxer throwing a punch, or a violinist playing a note). A word is a word is a word: identical, replicable, accessible, whether put down by a master or a novice. And the putting down of words seems fairly shut off from the kind of sensory epiphany that might shake up your sense of the whole shebang—no way could I take that punch, control that brush or bow.

Still, writing takes no less skill than anything else. For me, the Ali footage was stunning access to what may as well have been God-mode, and it shares with Schjeldahl’s moment more than just a glimpse of mastery in full flow: of what you think you know but you don’t. What if, I wonder, we could access the mastery of the writer Alis out there? What if we could shunt ourselves—shock ourselves—even for a moment, into a real embodiment of the intensity and risk and artistry of their talent at work? What would it feel like? What might it change? Would it matter? Should it? 

We can only imagine.

—Nam Le, author of “ ”

“Then Things Went Bad”: How I Won $264 at Preakness

Photograph by Tarpley Hitt.

There’s a shortage of good signs en route to the Preakness Stakes, the annual horse race in Baltimore best known as the Kentucky Derby’s older, less attended sibling. By good, I mean the useful types that tell you where to go. There are plenty of other kinds: ads stationed outside delis; DIY posters offering lawns, driveways, and other car-size surfaces as extremely pricey parking options; at least two hotel-related banners on propeller planes; and sandwich boards affixed to roving scalpers, which read, counterintuitively, I NEED TICKETS. The result is a ring of confused, directionless traffic around the track, where it’s easy to forget that everyone has come for a spectacle essentially premised on speed.

The lack of organization at the Preakness is appropriate; horse racing is America’s least centralized sport. There is no MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL for this game. There is a panoply of jockey clubs, trainers groups, state racing boards, owners associations, and veterinarian organizations. The racing rules change from state to state. The racing seasons change from track to track. Even the kind of race a horse runs may fluctuate with the weather. This tradition of casually maintained chaos is almost a point of pride. In 2020, when Congress passed the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA)—a modest attempt to standardize antidoping rules across the industry—it was met with three years of bitter infighting, five federal lawsuits challenging its constitutionality, and most recently, an exquisitely melodramatic public letter from the U.S. Trotting Association that opens with a Thomas Paine quote. That is to say, it’s in the spirit of horse racing that, this past Saturday, as I approached the venue, I had no idea where to go or who was in charge, and neither, seemingly, did anyone there.

The venue was Pimlico Race Course. Of the many contrasts to be drawn between the Derby and the Preakness, most land in the former’s favor. The track is one of them. The Kentucky Derby is run at Churchill Downs—a 147-acre complex in Louisville whose 170,000-person capacity, hexagonal twin spires, and $121 million Bush Jr.–era renovation make it one of the largest, most recognizable, and most opulent race courses in the country; Pimlico isn’t even the nicest option in Maryland. It’s the second oldest racetrack in the U.S. and doesn’t look a day younger, though parts of it technically are. The original clubhouse—a “Steamboat Gothic-era” “rambling wooden Victorian confection,” as one Baltimore Sun article put it—burned to the ground in a 1966 electrical fire, leaving only a horse-and-jockey-shaped weather vane behind. The newer clubhouse, built a few years before the fire, seems to take most of its architectural influence from high school gymnasiums and the DMV. It is also, however, awesome, if you like these things more for the money and big fast animals than for the antebellum theatrics.

The clubhouse was white, brick, and not entirely full. Live racing attendance has been on a downward slide since the Reagan administration, and the pandemic and the rise of online betting platforms have only sped up the process. In 2022, Pimlico’s owners—a company formerly known as the Stronach Group, now operating under the dubiously pronounceable name 1/ST—made a play for younger audiences by setting up a music festival just off the track. This sounds like a good idea, and last year, with Megan Thee Stallion headlining alongside Lauryn Hill, it may have succeeded in bringing the median age of attendees down by a decade (in 2021, it was sixty-five). This year’s bill featured Sofi Tukker—a dance music duo comprised of a girl named Sophie and a guy named Tucker, which broke out seven years ago with a single called “Drinkee”—and Bruno Mars, an artist with fifteen Grammys and, based on the turnout, maybe as many fans. Between Friday and Saturday, racetrack and festival, this year’s event drew just 65,000 people—barely a third of the 182,000 who came out in 2019.

As far as I was concerned, fewer people was a plus. I’d come mainly to eavesdrop and maybe make some money. Both goals turned out to be somewhat optimistic. I like to think of myself as a gambler, but it’s one of those semiflattering self-assessments that holds more water in theory than in practice. In theory, I love fast payouts, their stereotypical accessories (casinos, croupiers, the outfits croupiers wear at casinos), and pretty much every movie about those things. In practice, I follow sports and stocks absentmindedly at most and, during various stretches in Vegas, lost more money at the in-house Starbucks than at any card table. I am a sore loser and constitutionally cheap, meaning most of my bets are low in value, long in odds, and cashed out quickly.

Photograph by Tarpley Hitt.

As far as eavesdropping, the acoustics seemed best suited for minding your own business. Even with the lower turnout, the place sounded packed. I’d hoped to hear gossip about the eight horses that had died at Churchill Downs since April, or about the return of the disgraced trainer Bob Baffert, who was suspended from last year’s Triple Crown races after his Derby-winning horse, Medina Spirit, tested positive for pain meds in 2021. It wouldn’t have hurt if guests had thrown in some sad musings about the declining state of the sport. But the audible conversation proved a little more literal. “I’m wearing my big hat,” a woman in a big hat said to her boyfriend, “for good luck.” The food vendors trailed lines of men in identical beige caps; they all read MAGE, for the Kentucky Derby winner who would be running later that night. “I called my investment manager the other day and told him to put everything in money-market funds,” one guy told the MAGE men. “He says to me, ‘Those only yield five percent.’ And I say, ‘Exactly.’ ”

At the ticket windows, would-be winners barked long lists of bets—exactas (on the first- and second-place finishers in a single race), trios (on the first three finishers in a single race), and daily doubles (on first-place finishers in two consecutive races), as an MSNBC presenter gestured at racing stats for TV cameras nearby. “That’s the election guy,” one girl announced to her group. It was. If Steve Kornacki was giving good advice, no one could hear it. But few cared about Preakness stats anyway. The goofiest part of horse racing is how short it is; from starting bell to finish line, a race lasts all of two minutes. If everyone came just for the main event, they’d be headed home as soon as they parked. The Preakness program is stacked instead with undercards boasting smaller purses and cryptic names (the $200,000 “Dinner Party Stakes”). It gives the day a predictable rhythm: twenty minutes of research, betting, and crab-cake buying; ten minutes of finding a clear view of the finish line; one minute of watching; thirty seconds of screaming variations of “COME ON, NUMBER NINE!”

It’s easy to get swept up in this cyclical game to the point where its harsher realities barely register. During the sixth race, for example, a horse was rounding the home stretch when it stumbled. The jockey fell to the dirt. But the bay colt—a Bob Baffert horse named, with unfortunate foresight, Havnameltdown—kept running without a rider. There was something off about his stride; he was lagging from the pack with a visible limp. As he galloped, you could hear the onlookers’ uncertainty from the pitch of the cheers. The upbeat roar became a more somber howl. It passed quickly, though. The front-runner won and the shrieks came back. The crowd streamed out to the betting windows. Havnameltdown, I found out later, had broken his left forelock so badly he had to be put down.

The lack of clear signage, which characterized the clubhouse as much as it did the parking lot, had some upsides. It was never clear which areas were off-limits. My media pass mostly got me access to the press pit—an enclosed, standing-room-only dirt patch with a sole seat reserved for NBC. But no one stopped me or my boyfriend, whom I’d passed off as a photographer despite his lack of a camera, from wandering into the winner’s paddock, where owners posed for pictures next to overheated horses; or into the member’s clubhouse, where two older men were picking a fight with a group of frat guys for taking too long to place bets.

The downside was that it took us well into the eleventh race to realize that we’d missed out on a whole other half of the grounds. Between sprints, backstretch workers would lower a bridge across the dirt so that guests could cross from the grandstand to a series of tents at the center of the track. This was where you found the music festival, though the combination of electro swing and direct sunlight kept me from staying long. It was also where the VIPs and private parties were set up. The entrance to those tents was unmarked, but also unguarded. Anyone could walk in, grab some broiled salmon, and watch the race mere feet from the starting gate. This was a notable level up. Gayle King was chatting by the simulcast screens. At one point, Odell Beckham Jr., I learned from pictures later, was standing near where I chowed on shrimp cocktail. The tents were equipped with giant ceiling fans, perhaps thanks to one of the event’s sponsors, Big Ass Fans. The hats seemed bigger here, and their wearers, having paid for the open bar, drunker.

Photograph by Tarpley Hitt.

We had been betting all day, picking horses based on a feigned grasp of what racing statistics mean and occasionally on whichever horse’s name seemed to say more about its owner (I’m the Boss of Me, Bipartisanship, Taxed). This, it turned out, was not a good strategy. We had exclusively lost money, but a woman in a plush horse-head hat was having better luck. She was gripping a fresh wad of fives, mimicking club music (“oontz oontz oontz”), and pretending to rain the bills over her friend’s matching hat. I was tired, sober, and down ninety dollars. But the twelfth race, of thirteen, was about to start, and here was a reminder that not only was winning possible, it was very fun. A decision was made; we would give betting one more go and give up any pretense of expertise. We bought a one-dollar Superfecta (a bet on the first four finishers in a race) and played it safe; we picked the program’s recommendations and “boxed” them, meaning that we paid a dollar for every possible place combination of the program’s chosen four—the unremarkably named Nagirroc, Kingfish Stevens, Funtastic Again, and Circle the Drain—for a total of twenty-four dollars.

The starting bell rang and the contenders leapt from their stalls. Horses do not need signs to know where to go; some miracle combination of training and having a heel dug into their side gets them moving right on cue. That does not mean they always go in the way that you’d like. By then, we had seen enough races that the commentator’s unintelligible narration, delivered in the pauseless monologues of an old cattle auctioneer, seemed to reveal itself as a series of recognizable words strung into sentences. Specifically, I could decipher “Not a good beginning for Circle the Drain”—enough to understand that our selection seemed poised to suck. Nagirroc and Funtastic Again were leading the pack, but Circle the Drain and Kingfish Stevens seemed stoned on slow juice. If they didn’t place, neither would we. But at the final quarter-mile mark, Kingfish Stevens broke out from the pack, gaining on the top two by just a few feet. At the half-mile mark, Circle the Drain surged up along the rail, overtaking horse no. 8 (Wonderful Justice) and horse no. 2 (Fadethenoise), squeezing between horse no. 3 (A Western Yarn) and horse no. 6 (Moonstrike), and finally, pushing past horse no. 4 (Top Recruit) until he was tied with Kingfish Stevens. In roughly twenty seconds, our piece of paper with four semirandom picks was worth $264.

We cashed out and ran off to beat the postrace rush. The roads were absolutely carless. We watched the actual Preakness from my phone; a Baffert contender, National Treasure, finished in first place. The day marked Baffert’s eighth Preakness win and, counting Havnameltdown’s collapse earlier, at least his seventy-fifth horse death. “This day was like a roller-coaster,” Baffert told the Los Angeles Times. “Started out great. Then things went bad.” The badness didn’t seem to weigh on him too long. “We get rewarded for how hard everybody in my team works,” he said. “To me, that’s mainly what it’s about.”

 

Tarpley Hitt is a freelance writer and an editor of The Drift. She is currently at work on a book about Barbie. 

Game 6

Rachel B. Glaser, Buzzer Beater, 2023.

On Monday night, the Miami Heat beat the Boston Celtics in definitive fashion in Game 7, winning the Eastern Conference Finals on Boston’s home court. It was a Heat fan’s fantasy. Caleb Martin played like a sleek god with magic powers. The three-pointers looked easy. With few shooting fouls, the game flowed swiftly and without controversy. For a Celtics fan, it must have been a slow nightmare, beginning with Jayson Tatum’s ankle roll in the first possession and ending with the starters on the bench, resigned to a nineteen-point loss. It was the opposite of the chaotic Game 6 of the series, which was one of the most thrilling and heartbreaking games I’ve ever seen.  

Game 6 began with the Celtics continuing their momentum from their win in Game 5. They looked skilled and confident. Jaylen Brown hit his first five shots. The Celtics led for most of the game. Miami’s Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo had a rough shooting night, but Caleb Martin, Gabe Vincent, Max Strus, Kyle Lowry, and Duncan Robinson kept them afloat. Watching with my husband and our friend, I spoke with conviction about an ambiguous injury I was sure Jimmy was dealing with. I wondered if someone had kidnapped his daughter and ordered him to throw the game. “Get the ball to Caleb Martin!” I yelled, though a few weeks ago that name meant nothing to me. 

Jimmy came alive in the fourth quarter. The Heat were trailing by two with sixteen seconds to go. In what seemed like the last possession, he was fouled while shooting a three. The clock stopped at 2.1 seconds, but after the Celtics’ challenge and the replay, the refs put more time on the clock. Jimmy made all three free throws, putting Miami up by one. The Celtics had the ball with three seconds to go. Derrick White inbounded it to Marcus Smart, who missed a three, and with a tenth of a second left and Max Strus trailing him, White looped around to the basket, grabbed the rebound, and in one deft motion, banked the ball in. It was a stunning, gutting loss. How could the Heat possibly recover? White’s putback replayed in my mind in the hours after, and the next day, and the next.      

I don’t like roller coasters, or scary movies, but man do I love the frenzied, fish-flopping-on-land feeling of the last minutes of a painfully close playoff game. It is an experience of great art that creates an agonizing giddiness I’ve never felt from anything else. If a game is close when the fourth quarter begins, it’s like being given a decadent dessert. A perfectly ripe fruit. Suddenly everything feels crucial. How many fouls does Player A have? When will Player B get their shot back? 

As the twelve minutes dwindle down, the excitement builds exponentially. The anguished fan alternates between faith and defeat with every play, shouting “No more threes!” and “Drive to the hoop!” They curse at Player A, who has just shot an ostentatious stepback three. But the ball goes in, so the fan thanks God for the player and their cold-blooded nerve, their pipe dream of a shot. 

“There’s still a lot of game left,” the announcers say around the four-minute mark. At three minutes to go, there is a suspension of all other goings-on in the world. All that is happening is The Game. At the two-minute mark, the fan becomes delirious. Any mistake is criminal. Every whistle fills the fan with hope and dread. Time dissolves from the game clock, ushering us into the frantic joy and misery of the final minute of the game. We’ve reached the verdict, the reveal, the sweet gooey center, the sublime moments when randomness and fate wrestle between ads for ketchup and hair loss treatments. 

The commentators are enraptured. Something triumphant or ridiculously annoying is about to occur. Though nothing is needed of the fan, the fan feels as though they must concentrate. If they could clear their head and believe in their team, it might help! Too much is being asked of the team! And of the players! And even of the fan! All is being decided by an erratic bouncing ball, a fickle rim, a slippery floor, and exhausted players. Some fans rock back and forth on the couch, trembling and cursing. Others leave the room in distress to sit in their closets and wait. 

Player A must stop Player B at any cost! But not that way, or that way, or that way. Whistle! Foul! Free throws! Possible flagrant! The feet shifted! The arm was slapped! The face was elbowed! I worry about the future mental health struggles of whatever player is at the free-throw line as millions of eyes wait to see if the ball will go in. How terrifyingly stark and simple the game has become. One might stop and wonder why it feels so holy when the ball passes through the hoop and slips down the woven net. Does it have to do with birth? Sex? Death? Miracles? What is this cult we’ve all succumbed to?

The player scores both free throws, but there are enough seconds left for one more play. In the final tenths of a second before the backboard lights up, the ball is tipped in! Team A wins! It’s horrifying or glorious, depending on who you’re rooting for—or maybe you don’t care either way because your team was eliminated weeks ago, or your friend is making you watch the game, or you just wanted to feel alive again, to hang precariously in the balance. A playoff basketball game is one of the purest forms of physical drama. It’s a war where no one gets killed. A dance that throws people to the ground. A puzzle that shifts with every inch of motion.

The Finals start tonight, in Denver. My friends all seem to think the Nuggets will take the series in four or five or six games, but I’m done ruling the Heat out for anything. Maybe they’ll win the championship and the Super Bowl, and solve the debt crisis, and write a Bond movie! Anything can happen. Caleb Martin could score fifty! Nikola Jokić could break the record for most assists in a single game—thirty! If we’re lucky, we might get to squirm and sweat in that terrible, wonderful fourth-quarter limbo.

 

Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the story collection Pee On Water, the novel Paulina & Fran, and two books of poetry. She is writing a series of dispatches about the NBA Finals for the Review. View more of her NBA art here.

A Coiled Spring

Courtesy of Mary Gaitskill.

Before my father died in 2001, I knew that I loved him but only dimly. I didn’t really feel it, and to the extent that I did, I experienced it as painful. When he was dying I almost didn’t go to him. When I was trying to decide whether to go, someone asked me, “Do you want to see him?” And I said, “That’s hard to say. Because when you’re with him you don’t see him. He doesn’t show himself. He shows a grid of traits but not himself.” Still, I decided to go. The death was prolonged. It was painful. Because of the pain, the “grid” that I referred to—my father’s style of presentation—could not be maintained. A few days after I arrived, my father lost the ability to speak more than a few words at a time. But his eyes and his face spoke profoundly. I saw him and I felt him, and I loved him more than I thought possible. I was stunned by both the strength of my feeling and my previous obliviousness to it, and by my realization that, if I had not come to see him, I would never have known how real my feeling was or how beautiful it was to say it and to hear it said.

I recall that, at the time, I had a mental picture of this experience that looked like one of those practical joke containers disguised as a can of nuts or something; you open the lid and a coiled cloth-covered spring leaps out at you—it felt that startling. This image was followed by another mental picture, an image of human beings as containers that hold layers and layers of thought, feeling, and experience so densely packed (“the body remembers everything”) that the (human) container can be aware of only a few layers at a time, usually the first few at the top, until and unless an unexpectedly powerful event makes something deep suddenly pop out, throwing some elements of the “self” into high relief and disordering others, hinting at a different, truer order that was there all along.

My father wanted to stay at home and so he did; he suffered in his own bed almost up until the end. There was only one hospice worker coming in a couple times a day to give him care plus morphine, which wasn’t strong enough and to which he became quickly accustomed. My sisters and I didn’t realize until quite late that we needed to keep upping the dose; he couldn’t speak by then, though he grimaced in rage and pain.

One of his few visitors during this horrible time was a minister named Amory Adamsen. He was a minister with some kind of half-assed training as a counselor. Before my parents separated, my mother requested that they try counseling. I think she requested it because she’d been going to AA meetings for years and had the lingo down cold; she probably thought she’d be seen as this reasonable person while he’d be seen as a mad, pawing bear, and she’d have official permission to dump him. But my father would agree only if it was a Christian counselor, even though he wasn’t a Christian, and so Mother came up with this Adamsen person. All I knew about him was that (according to Mother) he considered my father the “least introspective person” he’d ever met and that he’d also quite avidly read my novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, which is about, among other things, a girl being raped by her daddy. He even came to a reading of that book I somewhat cluelessly performed in Lexington (on Mother’s Day!); he gave me his full pious and slitty-eyed attention while my poor father wandered the aisles. Now here he was at the house with my father upstairs dying. Apparently, he and my dad had kept up contact long after my parents’ separation, going to basketball games over the years. Although the prick hadn’t returned my father’s last call about a game, here he was, smiling at everyone, hugging, dispensing comfort, looking around. He told my father he was sorry about missing the game, which I do not think my father gave a fuck about at that point. He told him he’d sure enjoyed getting to know him. Then he mingled with my uncle and his wife, with me and my sisters. He kept singling me out with his eyes and finally asked if he could talk with me privately, that he had something to ask. So we went upstairs, shut the door, and he revealed that what he wanted to know was: Did my father really sexually abuse me? He said that he knew just how rude and inappropriate it was to ask, and he added that if I was offended, he was so sorry, he’d just drop it. I said that whether I was offended depended on why he was asking. If it was just curiosity, yes, I was offended. But if it was a moral concern and had something to do with what kind of prayer he wanted to say, that was different. He allowed that he was curious and that he knew it wasn’t his business and he was sorry. I maybe should’ve hit him and walked out of the room, but just so he would know, I said my father never did anything like that, what I wrote was fiction. Amory said he knew it, he knew my father was very moral, he was no sex pervert. I said, “Well, actually he was, but only a little, no more than average, really.” This confused the moron, but he got over that and said that even though he knew my dad was innocent, there was always this tiny question in his mind, and he was glad to finally put it to rest. He went on to declare, however, that even if I had said yes, my father raped me, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference, that he liked my dad a lot and would’ve made no judgment. We talked about how awful molestation is and how much of it there seems to be. He said my dad had worried about me. For example, he had always wondered why I didn’t get married and was concerned that I might be a lesbian. I told him that I was in fact getting married. He seemed disappointed. He went into my dad’s room to pray at him and I went downstairs to tell my sister Jane about this idiotic conversation. My sister said that although she had been planning to ask Amory to speak at the funeral, after hearing this, no way. We both decided not to tell our mother, who was easily upset about the subject of my writing just generally. Naturally Amory Adamsen wound up speaking at the funeral. I didn’t stay for that event so at least I didn’t have to listen to it.

 

Mary Gaitskill is the author of several novels and story collections, most recently This Is Pleasure. The Devil’s Treasure: A Book of Stories and Dreams will be published in August by McNally Editions. You can find our Art of Fiction interview with Gaitskill in issue no. 243.

Our Cover Star, London: An Interview with Emilie Louise Gossiaux

Courtesy of Mother Gallery.

The cover of our Summer issue, online next week and on newsstands June 13, features a drawing of a dog perched on its hind legs, midmotion—so much so that she appears to be almost sliding or dancing off the page as she reaches for a leash (or is it a length of ribbon?). The first thing I noticed about the cover—besides its chic abundance of white space, which seems to beg me to spill coffee or red wine on it—was the dog’s smile. Her eyes are closed almost beatifically, and her mouth is curved in that upside-down rainbow that anyone who has ever loved a dog will recognize. This is a cover that, appropriately for summer, will bring you joy. The canine in question is London, the guide dog of our cover artist, Emilie Louise Gossiaux. Gossiaux and I chatted on the phone about her unique relationship with London, her especially tactile drawing practice, and human-animal connection. 

 

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about our cover star, London. What kind of dog is she and how long have you had her?  

GOSSIAUX

She’s a blond English Labrador retriever. We will have been together for ten years in August. When she’s at home, she’s very silly and playful. She likes to snuggle a lot and rub against you. Indoors, I let her be the center of attention—she needs to say hi to everyone. But when she’s outside and working in her harness she’s very motivated and serious. She doesn’t care about other dogs or people—she’s just focused on the two of us. Our relationship is like a marriage. It took time to get to know each other’s quirks and how best to communicate, but after a couple of years, we became completely interdependent. I take care of her and she takes care of me. Now she’s thirteen years old and semiretired. Commuting to my studio in Queens is too far of a journey for her. But she still really loves working when she can. 

INTERVIEWER

When did you start putting London in your artwork?

GOSSIAUX

In 2018, when I was in my second year of grad school. The vet had called to tell me that they’d found these tumors on her gums—they had to remove six of her teeth and thought she might have mouth cancer. I was beside myself, sobbing on the phone. While London recovered from the surgery and I waited for her biopsy results, we spent a week in bed, and I started making drawings of her in my sketchbook, including one of us dancing—it was of a memory from when we were younger and she and I would come back from the studio and I would put on music and she would put her paws into my hands and we’d celebrate another day of work and being home again. In the end, she was totally fine—it was just a bad gum infection—but I wanted to create a monument to her, so I made a sculpture called Dancing with London. First I built a base for her body with polystyrene foam, then I carved it away to shape it, and I layered papier-mâché over that—CelluClay, a paper-pulp mixture. When it dries, it’s very, very strong, like stone.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

I wonder if there are many monuments to dogs out there …

GOSSIAUX

I haven’t seen any, except for the Balto statue in Central Park.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve made many drawings of London since then, including the one on our cover, London with Ribbon. Can you tell me about that ribbon?

GOSSIAUX

That drawing is a detail of a larger work called London, Midsummer, which features three Londons, each holding a red ribbon that looks like a leash and dancing around a Maypole that resembles my white cane. In this joyful dance London is very much in her own body—it’s a celebration of nature. The drawing is partly about coexistence of animals and humans, but it’s also about autonomy. One of the things we don’t usually think about is how dogs and other animals have agency and emotions—we don’t own them. I like to let London roam around in my imagination so that, when I draw her, her personality comes to life.

INTERVIEWER

What is your drawing process like?

GOSSIAUX

It’s a very tactile experience. I use something called a Sensational BlackBoard, which is basically a plastic sheet that has rubber padding on top of it. When I put my paper over the pad and press into it with my pen, it raises up the line that I’ve drawn. At the same time that I’m drawing a line, I’m able to feel it with my other hand. That’s why I work so quickly and simply; I really don’t take my pen off the paper. It’s blind contour drawing—literally. I draw very quickly so I can get the image from my mind down on the page as fast as possible—the one on your cover took maybe five minutes. But I’ll sit in front of a blank page and meditate on it for about ten minutes before I start, to map out the drawing before I put my pen on the paper.

I’m touching the paper, feeling its size and imagining it in front of me. I can already see the line drawing I want to make—the action that the London in that drawing will be performing—as well as the mood I want the picture to have. I gather up all that energy and I let myself feel it emotionally, too. And that’s when I start to draw.

I like to make multiple drawings at a time because sometimes I’ll finish and think, No, that doesn’t really quite capture what I’m seeing in my mind. Or sometimes I’ll make little mistakes and want to redo the picture—but then I’ll go back and end up enjoying the mistake. 

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

How is the process of sculpting different?

GOSSIAUX

What I like about drawing is that it’s so immediate. It always feels like I’m discovering something about the piece that I’m making. The process with clay is much slower. You can’t rush it—the clay has to dry before you can build with it—but you also have to maintain a balance of wetness and hardness as you work. I take it one step at a time, like with drawing, only slower—building a leg, then a torso, then an arm. 

INTERVIEWER

What are you working on right now?

GOSSIAUX

I’m on a residency at the Queens Museum, which will end with a solo show that opens on October 22, for which I’m making a large installation based off of the same drawing, London, Midsummer. There will be three human-scale sculptures of London holding ribbon-leashes and dancing around a Maypole that looks like my white cane, and high-relief murals of trees on the walls around it. The Maypole is going to be fifteen feet tall, and the London sculptures will be five feet—my height.

 

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

Diary, 1994–1999

I don’t read my old work anymore. After a decade as a writer, I know exactly what it’ll make me feel—compassion, some pity; maybe there will be a phrase that I’ll admire, ­­­­but mostly I’ll feel self-loathing. Last year I came across my diary from a summer when, five years after having arrived in Oklahoma as a refugee from Iran, I was determined to win a national championship in Tae Kwon Do so I could get in to an Ivy League university. It was the summer of 1994, and I was fifteen. I kept the diary because I was lonely, weighed down by money worries and shame of being Iranian, desperate to perform my Christian faith. I was anorexic and addicted to Tae Kwon Do, which I practiced for six or seven hours a day. Writing in the diary was a self-soothing mechanism—I wrote down every kind word anyone said to me.

Reading it now, I feel gentler toward my old self, a version of me now nearly three decades in the past. I read her entries like I might read a daughter’s. Maybe when I’m seventy, I will read my forty-year-old self with similar compassion. The most interesting parts of the diary come at the end. After that summer, I returned to the diary in 1995, 1997, 1998, and twice in 1999, and in each entry I seem appalled by my voice in the one before it until finally I give up and stop writing in it altogether. There was no chance of sounding anything but stupid to the Dina of the following year, though she was the audience I was most eager to impress. The penultimate entry, from February 1999, during my sophomore year at Princeton, reads: “Note to Junior Dina: Don’t read this crap anymore.” Then, a few months later, scribbling a final entry on a locker clean-out notice: “I’ll always be a stupid kid. Good thing I realized that now.”

 

The following two pages are from a later entry, August 2, 1994.

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a book of creative nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee, which won the 2020 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis and was a finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Nayeri is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, an O. Henry Prize, and the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Granta.

“The British Male!”: On Martin Amis

Amis in Léon, Spain, 2007. Photograph by Javier Arce. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

To be British is a very complicated fate. To be a British novelist can seem a catastrophe. You enter into a miasma of history and class and garbage and publication—the way a sad cow might feel entering the abattoir. Or certainly that was how I felt, twenty years ago, when I entered the abattoir myself. One allegory for this system was the glamour of Martin Amis. Everyone had an opinion on Amis, and the strangeness was that this opinion was never just on the prose, on the novels and the stories and the essays. It was also an opinion on his opinions: the party gossip and the newspaper theories, the Oxford education and the afternoon tennis.

The British male! Or at least the British bourgeois male, with his many father figures, both real and acquired. From certain angles, in certain photos, Amis looked like Jagger, and so he became the Jagger of literature. He was small, true—I feel a permanent pang of camaraderie at his line in The Pregnant Widow about a character who occupies that “much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—but he was also hypermasculine. It wasn’t just his subjects: the snooker and the booze and the obsession with judging all women “sack artists.” It wasn’t even just the style: an inability to leave a sentence alone without chafing at every verb, the prose equivalent of truffle fries. It was also the interview persona, all haughtiness and clubhouse universality, however much that could be contradicted in private by thoughtfulness and generosity of conversation.

But most of all, his British maleness was in the purity of his comic perception of the world. He practiced a very specific form of oral literature—anecdote, putdown, punchline, alcoholic joke: monologues from the ruined-dinner table. This morning I picked up an old copy of Money taken from my parents’ house and there they were, the riffs: “You just cannot park round here any more. Even on a Sunday afternoon you just cannot park round here any more. You can doublepark on people: people can doublepark on you. Cars are doubling while houses are halving.” Or: “I should have realized that when English people say they can play tennis they don’t mean what Americans mean when they say they can play tennis. Americans mean that they can play tennis.” Or: “This guy had no future in the frightening business. He just wasn’t frightening.” A novel by Amis is an apparatus for each line to find its best exposure. ” ‘Yeah,” I said, and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”

This vision of the world as comedy is why the Amis novel that still seduces and alarms me most is Time’s Arrow, his first experiment into Europe. That novel famously tells the life of Tod T. Friendly in reverse, beginning in a postwar American suburb and ending with him transformed into Odilo Unverdorben, one of the psychopathic doctors at Auschwitz. This means that appallingly touching things happen in the camp: gold is carefully placed back into Jewish mouths; smoke becomes a corpse, which becomes a living person, who is then beautifully reunited with their family. Ghettos are dismantled. Meanwhile, everything is narrated in a tremulous high style: there is, for example, the shoe, in an antechamber to the gas chambers, “like a heavy old bullet thrown out of the shadows, and skilfully caught.” Naturally, our narrator is delighted by this beautiful arc of history, always tending towards improvement—“A shockingly inflamed eyeball at once rectified by a single injection. Innumerable ovaries and testes seamlessly grafted into place. Women went out of that lab looking 20 years younger.”

Of course it’s appalling; of course it’s tasteless. But the novel reaches the kind of discovery that’s possible only by way of that mythical vehicle the English Comic Novel—wherein no evil is approached directly and all ethical judgments take place within aesthetic terms. Now, I deeply dislike the so-called English Comic Novel. It is a terrible vehicle: broken down and leaking and inadequate, hopelessly limited as a means for investigating the apparently real. But Amis, strapped into that vehicle forever, somehow had the talent and the intuition to make such limit cases his constant terrain. And what I love about Amis is how—so British, sure; so male—he recklessly drove the English Comic Novel into that insane and treacherous territory, and beautifully smashed it to pieces.

—Adam Thirlwell, advisory editor

I can’t remember hating any book, before or since, the thoughtless way I loathed The Rachel Papers, from the moment my worst ex-boyfriend, a blond aspiring novelist and provocateur, began to read it out loud at me in college. He saved special relish and aggression for the masterfully farcical scene in which the narrator, after using their last condom to cheat on his girlfriend, is caught short when she appears and wants to fuck—he must surreptitiously fish one of the already sodden, shriveled things out of the grimy wastepaper basket and wrestle it back on in order to oblige. Somehow I felt each sentence as a personal attack—the florid snideness, the rollicking physicality—and for years after getting rid of that boyfriend the novel stayed with me, images and phrases coming back unbidden and familiar and savage as vomit: “a fine double-yolker” of a pimple, “beady dread,” “greasy permissiveness,” “yobs” with “faces like gravy dinners,” stomachs laced with “worms of dirt … like baby eels,” naked women smelling like “boiled eggs and dead babies,” youthful “teeming breasts” and older ones “so flaccid you could tie them in a knot,” “dentures clicking like castanets,” a “gash of sunlight” falling “athwart the bed.” It took me some time to register how much more there was to Amis—to that novel, and to his later, stranger, more ambitious books. But this week, even my initial disgust at Rachel is mutating in retrospect. How many contemporary English writers, in those callow days, impressed me only with dullness or mild embarrassment? And here was a mind whose smallest spewings on a page could cause me physical anguish, spike their enlivening way into my everyday perceptions—no wonder so many lesser writers strove to imitate him, from my ex to Jacob Epstein, who apparently resorted to copying out whole passages of Rachel to stuff inside his own debut. Not to mention that the book that so undid me was, by the time I got to it, already some thirty years old—as pungent then as it must have been when the twentysomething enfant terrible had published it in 1973. Age hadn’t withered him; I’m sure death won’t remove his sting.

—Lidija Haas, deputy editor

Fucked for Life: Bladee’s Paintings

Benjamin Reichwald and Jonas Rönnberg, OCB Dinitrol, 2023. Photograph by Olivia Kan-Sperling.

This summer, we’re launching a series called Overheard—which is more or less about what it sounds like. We’re asking writers to take their notebooks to interesting events or places; they’ll record what they see, but mostly what they hear. In the first of the series, Elena Saavedra Buckley goes to a TriBeCa gallery opening for an exhibit of collaborative paintings by two Swedish hip-hop artists, and surveys the scene.

 

The art show I was going to was risky to google, because it was called Fucked for Life and took place in the basement of a gallery called the Hole. It had been raining, and the humidity followed us downstairs, where the low-ceilinged room felt like the hull of a ship. The paintings reminded me of more focused, imaginative versions of the kind of thing your friend’s stoner older brother might make in his room—they had barely shaped demonic faces at their centers, orbited by tagged abstractions and blooms of neon, all lacquered and dripping. Some sat in ironic-seeming ornate gold frames; others hung against long stretches of loose fabric layered with graffiti, which had been made the day before and seemed to be releasing damp chemical wafts. 

This was the private opening of new collaborative paintings by Bladee and Varg2, whose real names are Benjamin Reichwald and Jonas Rönnberg—two Swedish artists affiliated with a Nordic brand of underground hip-hop that’s been gaining steam since the mid-aughts. The two collectives at its center are the Sad Boys—helmed by the fairly famous Yung Lean—and Drain Gang, which was started by Bladee. I didn’t know much about Varg2 before this weekend; he’s a techno producer who used to go by just Varg until a German metal band of the same name sent him a cease and desist. (He then released an album called Fuck Varg.) But I love the warbling, auto-tuned, alabaster Bladee—the second e is silent—who raps as often about Gnosticism and demons as he does about weed and being depressed. He has obsessive Zoomer fans like the rest of Drain Gang, though his are made especially rabid by how difficult he is to grasp. You can barely see him from behind his hair, hoodies, sunglasses, and blasted-out photo edits; one comment on a recent music video reads, “i don’t think i’ll ever get used to seeing high quality footage of bladee,” and a four-second clip of him saying “Drain Gang”—just the audio!—has 132,000 views. He says he was once struck by lightning in Thailand. 

None of these rappers have become household names, but Bladee has gone from posting his songs on SoundCloud to designing capsule collections for Marc Jacobs and Gant. Are the paintings, priced at an average of ten thousand dollars (and which Bladee’s fans bemoan on Reddit for costing “1460 hamburgers”), evidence of an evaporating underground ethos? Visual art isn’t much of an artistic stretch for these two, nor is working side by side on the same canvas, as they did for these pieces. They both came up as taggers, and Bladee made the merch and promo images for Drain Gang before his work with big designers. Even his use of language feels painterly; in “Real Spring,” he sings: “White light shines towers up in gold / Hawk flies low, strikes like my pose / Three stars dance over the globe / Life unfolds, faith comes unfroze.” That’s Hilma “as fuck” Klint, I think, recalling something I read recently: that the paintings of that notoriously mystical, also Swedish artist had in fact also been made collectively—by as many as thirteen artists in total, in “a realm inhabited by a plurality of spirits.”

After their rapid laps around the room, some attendees congregated in the middle. One group of twentysomethings was talking about visiting Australia. “Don’t go,” one guy said. “It sucks.” His friend offered a defense: “You know, what’s crazy about Australia is it’s a place where animals have had so long to evolve.” “Kangaroos are descended from deer,” she said. There was some confusion about whether this was right before they pivoted to the true nature of kangaroo pouches, which is sort of the Godwin’s law of Australia 101–type discussions. “I thought there would be hair in there, but it looks like an access point to their insides,” she said. It’s actually somewhat difficult to find pictures of the pouches online; I’ve tried. This group struggled to google them. Others discussed summer itineraries, plugging their plans (Marseilles, Bermuda) or reminiscing on unsuccessful past trips (Dublin, where the only thing to do other than drink, reportedly, was spend ninety dollars on orange blossom water at the Joyce-themed pharmacy). A sliver of the floor had become slippery in the damp conditions, nearly sending many extremities into the paintings, and one woman predicted that her friend would sooner save Bladee’s work than she would her. “Save the paintings,” she said. “It’s like ‘Save the whales.’ ” 

There were infantry waves of outfits. The straight couples in all black came first, the men asking the girls which paintings were their favorite and the girls shrugging in response—“the buyers,” as someone later called them. The youth followed, wearing many kinds of camo, low-rise trousers, unflattering glasses, and contextless outerwear. The most out-of-place accessory present was a Park Slope Food Coop tote bag, lugged by an affable and exhausted GQ photographer who had been following the artists around all day. Of course, there were a lot of tactical pants. The best of those, in leather, were worn by Ecco2K, another Drain Gang member, who also wore a balaclava topped with what looked like black hair from a troll doll. I wore a taupe Calvin Klein chiffon slip dress and black Tecovas cowboy boots, with—and I was not alone in this choice—a giant windbreaker, my attempt to step into the Drain Gang headspace. At one point, a girl approached me to say that she used to own earrings by the same designer as the ones I was wearing, but that her ex-girlfriend had stolen them. When I told her to buy them for forty dollars on Depop, like I did, she said that the same ex got her banned from the site. 

“How does someone get banned from Depop?” I asked. 

“She gave me a necklace for my birthday that had her blood in a vintage Balenciaga vial,” she replied. (Bladee, describing the concept of “drain,” has said: “​​Everything me and my bros do is connected to that concept—we might drain some blood for good fortune.”) Post-breakup, this girl listed the necklace on Depop, after which the ex-girlfriend reported her to the company for hawking biohazards. 

“So now I can’t scalp anymore,” she went on. “My ex kept saying I was ‘the epitome of a scumbag.’ ”

“I think my feelings would have been hurt if you had tried to sell my blood,” I said, smiling weakly. She looked a little guilty. And then Bladee arrived! 

I felt maternal toward him, this rapper two years my senior, who was wearing a relatively unassuming fit: black crocodile dress shoes, crinkled jeans, a plaid shirt and gray hoodie, Oakleys, and a black cap. He accepted such feelings with a boyish affect—he kept fiddling his long brown curls into a small ponytail under his chin. I remembered how sad he’d seemed on some of his most beautiful tracks, like 2018’s “Waster”: “Just running through the days, running through the pain … Sorry, Mom, I know you hate to see me this way.” Most of the feeling came from the situation, though, since standing next to one’s paintings on a wall is an inescapably childlike position. Every object becomes a macaroni necklace, every gallery a school gymnasium, every wall a refrigerator. A woman gave the artists two bouquets of yellow roses while they shuffled around the room, up and down the stairs, as the attendees quietly egged each other on to go say hi.

My conversation with Bladee and Varg2 was brief; I approached them upstairs, near the rosé station. Varg told me about the buildings they had been tagging downtown. Bladee was sweet and relaxed. We discussed af Klint—“I’m a huge fan,” he said. After spending most of the trip in a friend’s studio to prep for the show, he was leaving New York in two days for Stockholm. “It just turned to spring there,” he said, though he wondered whether he should stick around until the rain quit. “But it’s so expensive,” he said, giggling. He gets it. 

There was a private dinner at Lucien planned for after the opening. It was funny to imagine Bladee eating food, especially leaky bistro stuff like moules frites; it’s possible he snacked at the gas station that appears in the “Obedient” music video, but he seems like a breatharian to me. Other attendees were going to a “Caroline Polachek party.” I decided to leave for a birthday at a bar in Brooklyn. Some friends had brought two bouquets of flowers for the birthday girl and boy: orange lilies and some kind of violets. That made four bouquets for the night, the two from earlier and these ones—vibrating symmetrically in two boroughs, two drops of paint folded into loose canvas to make two mirrored pairs across the river; a plurality of spirits. There is a section of a Jonathan Williams poem called “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me,” in which he quotes John Clare: “I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down.” I’m not sure if those fields, where we go when we make our art, are very accessible through the underbellies of Manhattan galleries. But I do think people like Bladee go to them often, and always with their friends. That’s real spring. 

 

Elena Saavedra Buckley is an editor of Harper’s and The Drift.

The Playoffs: A Dispatch

Rachel B. Glaser, Ref Huddle, 2023.

These years, the only basketball I watch is the playoffs, but I take them very seriously, because they’re so fleeting, dramatic, and sublime. I love the ever-changing narratives. The pregame handshakes. The postgame interviews. The controversial tweets. The stupid commercials one can’t help but memorize. I love when a player “gets hot” and their teammates keep funneling them the ball. The rarely seen, silent green siren that flashes when a coach uses their challenge to dispute a call. The sudden announcement of a technical foul and the way the mood shifts during the single, solitary free throw.

I love catching glimpses of the players’ tattoos of babies, ancestors, dates, signatures, playing cards, angels, lions, phantoms, and crosses emitting sunbeams.

I like when the refs touch each other in any way, but especially when all three of them put their arms around one another, huddling to discuss a difficult call. I like watching endless replays of fouls, trying to decide whether something was a block or a charge, or who touched the ball last. I like when the commentators disagree with the refs and when the broadcast cuts to the former ref Steve Javie in some NBA warehouse in New Jersey, standing in front of TV screens, calmly hypothesizing what the refs are discussing.

I love the emotions, which in other sports are often hidden under the players’ helmets and hats. Jamal Murray’s arms outstretched in joy as he backpedals after nailing yet another three. Jimmy Butler’s and Grant Williams’s noses touching while they scream at each other like two feuding angelfish. Robert Williams’s head in his hands on the bench.

I love when the play-by play commentators mention Kevin Love. “Love has grabbed the ball.” “Love’s effect cannot be overstated.” I’m entertained by the exaggeratedly dull way the stadium announcers say the names of the opposing team’s players. Though my friends complain about the commentators, I’m soothed by the familiar voices of Doris Burke, Reggie Miller, Jeff Van Gundy, Mike Breen, Kevin Harlan, and Mark Jackson. It feels like Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson have been in conversation for hundreds of years. Tuning into a game relaxes me. It’s like visiting a pleasant realm, one simpler than ours. I like the golden color of the courts (though not the Nets’ floor, which looks like old newspaper). I like the endless stats. The records, which are always being broken. The vintage video montages. I track the league as dynasties rise and crumble, players are traded from team to team, logos evolve, stars retire, and jerseys are lifted into the rafters.

***

In 1995, when I was in junior high, my brother showed me an issue of Sports Illustrated with Dennis Rodman on the cover—his hair dyed red, posing in shiny short shorts with a parrot perched on his hand. I read the interview with interest—we both loved hair dye and Pearl Jam!—and I’ve been watching NBA basketball ever since. I love expressive, emotive players. I love teams who have great passing, enthusiasm, and confidence. I like when they seem like a family. The teams I’ve loved most are the late-nineties Bulls, the mid-2000s Pistons, the late-2000s Bulls, the Russell Westbrook/Kevin Durant Thunder, the 2010s Grizzlies, the Kawhi Leonard Raptors, and often whoever LeBron was playing for.

For the last few years, my favorite player has been the Miami Heat forward Jimmy Butler, so it’s been a thrilling time for me. All season, whenever I asked my basketball-obsessed friend Seth how the Heat were looking, he’d say, “Not so good,” though he wanted them “as far away as possible” from his Celtics in the playoffs and said they were “capable of beating anybody.” But I’d heard Miami had had some injuries, so when they lost to Atlanta in the first game of the play-in tournament, I thought their season was probably over, and even if they won the second play-in game, they’d have to face the number-one seed, Milwaukee. I cringed, imagining the gloating texts I’d receive from my Buck-wild father-in-law.

After Jimmy’s forty-seven-point game in last year’s playoffs to force a Game 7 against the Celtics, you would think I’d have more faith in him, but nearly everyone was predicting a Bucks/Celtics Eastern Conference Finals, and I was no different. The Heat played magnificently against the Bucks, winning in five games, and becoming the fifth number-eight seed to ever beat a number-one seed in the NBA playoffs. The Heat then beat the Knicks in six games, and they are now one win away from beating the Celtics and appearing in the Finals for the first time since 2020.

Throughout the playoffs, there has been much focus on the fact that there are nine players on the Heat roster who weren’t drafted into the league, including Caleb Martin, Max Strus, Gabe Vincent, and Duncan Robinson. All have played fantastically. The Heat’s starting center, Bam Adebayo, has looked unstoppable. And leading the charge, with grace and swagger, is Jimmy Butler. I love his tenacity. His sly, gleaming eyes. His swishes, passes, rebounds, smirks, smiles, overall demeanor, and especially his steals. He had six of them last week in Game 1 against Boston. I love how he takes over a game’s second half, unleashing his miraculous will. If the Heat win tonight, they will be facing the Denver Nuggets, first-time Western Conference champions.

***

Last night in Los Angeles, the Nuggets completed their four-game sweep of the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals, even after LeBron’s thirty-one-point first half. The Lakers had some impressive moments throughout the series, and just to have made it past the Memphis Grizzlies and the Golden State Warriors in the first two rounds is an incredible feat, but the Nuggets always seemed in control. Though I love the combo of Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray, their magical passes, and the team’s fun vibe, I was surprised to realize, midway through Game 1, that I was rooting for LeBron again, no matter how silly he looked arguing with the refs or how many threes he missed. In Game 2, when he blew the breakaway dunk, I felt bewildered. How could this be? It was almost as if he were aging, and had always been, and I had too, and one day everyone living would die! But it was just one play, and he is still amazing, even if he never wins another championship—he already has four.

LeBron’s postgame interview last night, in which he seemed to mull over retirement amid suspicions he wants the Lakers to sign (his old teammate) Kyrie Irving, has strangers fighting on internet comment threads. Nuggets fans are retweeting clips of Jokić’s shot-clock-beating overhead three. I just crossed out the potential Western Conference Finals Games 5, 6, and 7 on my calendar, and can now make plans those nights. It’s all part of the collective NBA experience. We are millions of people watching the same moments, feeling elated, defeated, bored, anxious, sentimental, disappointed, and stunned, as we witness the inevitable play out in forty-eight-minute games over a two-month stretch, like we do every year.

 

Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the story collection Pee On Water, the novel Paulina & Fran, and two books of poetry. She will be writing a series of dispatches about the NBA Finals for the Review.