The Paris Review's Blog, page 61

Cooking with Florine Stettheimer

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

The painter and poet Florine Stettheimer should have been easy to cook from. Her poetry, commercially published for the first time in the 2010 collection Crystal Flowers, has a section devoted to “comestibles”—including airy tributes to ham, bread, and tomatoes with Russian dressing—and her paintings often portray food. She was born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York in the late eighteen hundreds, part of a social circle that included Neustadters and Guggenheims, and she held salons that were a Who’s Who of the New York art world. (Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, and Leo Stein were regulars.) Stettheimer did not oversee the cooking, but part of her work’s deliberate feminine aesthetic involved recording the parties, personalities, dishes, outfits, interiors, furniture, and floral arrangements that made up her life. On one canvas, Soirée, a plate of salad and pitcher of cocktails adorn a table in the foreground of a drawing-room scene, where assembled luminaries gaze at Stettheimer’s paintings-within-the-painting. These were unorthodox choices for a woman artist of her time—many others made strenuous efforts not to seem too overtly feminine.

The artist Heidi Howard painted a portrait of me while I cooked from Florine Stettheimer’s work. Notice the stuffed peppers, left, and Baked Alaska, right. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Yet perhaps this femininity was also subversive. Today’s art world is reevaluating Stettheimer in the wake of the publication of Crystal Flowers and a 2022 biography by Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer, published by Hirmer. Bloemink situates Stettheimer as a surprisingly modern figure whose “female” topics—furniture and domestic interiors, flowers and frills, diaphanous fabrics, social events, her family, social narratives—were presented both unapologetically and with a wry, critical distance. Through the witty, effervescent tone of her poems and the originality of her painterly technique, she transformed her subjects into baubles for the artist’s gaze—and in so doing, de-gendered them. The following untitled poem is representative: “Mary Mary of the / Bronx aerie / How does your V garden / Grow? / with beans and potatoes / peas and tomatoes / and shiny bugs all in a / Row” is representative. Stettheimer’s choice of wording and image show the poem to be about making art, not salad. The “V garden” is cheekily abbreviated; its rhyming food is aesthetic and playful.

To cook from Stettheimer’s work, then, would be to acknowledge that her interest in food was not literal. In the section “Comestibles,” rhyming ditties, light as meringue, are entry points into discussions of sex and desire. Stettheimer went about this with a frankness unusual for the time period, and with a dollop of irony as well. A “comestible” is alimentary but not elementary; the fancy and fanciful word removes food from the cupboard and makes it more like art, if a bit unconventionally. In one poem, Stettheimer writes: “You stirred me / You made me giddy / Then you poured oil on my stirred self / I’m mayonnaise.” A frothy crush comes to a gluey and unsexy end in a mere four lines. Another untitled poem runs, “You beat me / I foamed.” In the next lines, its subject is “drowned” in sweetness and “parceled” out. She concludes, “You made me hot – hot – hot / I crisped into ‘kisses.’” Here, Stettheimer puts a lover’s attempts at mastering her into her oven and bakes them into female pleasure.

Stettheimer’s sophisticated soirees demanded sophisticated ingredients. I used crayfish tails in the salat Olivye inspired by her poems. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

In order to re-create Stettheimer’s fare, I needed to transform such dishes into something visual and concrete, which seemed beyond the purview of mere food and was complicated by some of the work’s details. Despite Stettheimer’s adulthood in Manhattan, the food her poetry suggests is the stodgy fare of the old world, a reflection of how her family ate. At their homes and country homes, Bloemink wrote in her biography, they consumed elaborate several-course meals, served on fine porcelain. In the “Comestibles” section of Crystal Flowers, there are grandmotherly stuffed peppers and a family staple, the gross-sounding “chaud-froid,” a gelatin sauce made from a reduction of boiled meat. Stettheimer described it as follows: “You are hot / You are cold / Your black beauty spots / Enhance your creamy whiteness.” I considered making dramatic banquet-style versions of these dishes but have not had success in the past with making jellied meat look (or taste) edible. And there were price considerations—I needed veal and crayfish for a salad inspired by the “V garden,” and I couldn’t produce old-world banquet food at new-world prices. The Stettheimers served champagne every night in the family drawing room; I could afford only Crémant d’Alsace, a French sparkling wine produced in the traditional champagne method but in a less expensive region for growing grapes. My spirits consultant Hank Zona found me a good-quality vintage Crémant from Domaine Albert Mann that had a thematically appropriate painting on the label.

Crémant sparkling wine for the drawing room on a budget. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

And so I turned to the artist Heidi Howard to make my Stettheimer-inspired food into something more. Howard’s style of portraiture documents social spaces, as Stettheimer did, and they are interested in depicting the passage of time in painting, as Stettheimer was. Howard explained to me that portraiture opens up “a new painted space” that creates a conversation between the painter and the sitter, and that offers a more flexible way of existing collaboratively. We decided they would paint me in my kitchen, along with the dishes I’d chosen, the cookbook I’d used, and even the Crémant d’Alsace wine. The profusion of these domestic details, down to my Christmas tree in the background, evoked Stettheimer.

Our time together passed quickly. Howard brought a sixty-inch-by-forty-six-inch prepared canvas to my kitchen. While they painted, I made two old-world dishes that were inspired by the Ballets Russes. I took “Black-Swan Effect Stuffed Peppers,” from the cookbook Summer Kitchens by Ukrainian food writer Olia Hercules, a recipe that swaps the usual meat in the filling for vegetarian-friendly apples. The “black swan” in the title is a reference to the ballet Swan Lake, where a small change (in the coloration of a swan from black to white, as with the swap from meat to apples) makes a huge difference. Second, the vegetables in Stettheimer’s untitled poem about Mary in her Bronx aerie, and the mayonnaise from the other poem quoted above, reminded me of the Russian dish salat Olivye. In its modern incarnation this is a depressing Soviet-buffet standby made with beans, tomatoes, peas, cubed potatoes, cubed ham, and plenty of mayo, but it has roots as an elegant czarist concoction with more elevated ingredients, and this was the direction I aimed for.

The artist Heidi Howard, at right, was inspired by Stettheimer’s subversive takes on floral arrangements and domestic interiors. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

I took artistic license for dessert. The poem that begins “You beat me / I foamed” and ends “I crisped into ‘kisses’” implies meringue, a material that has some of the glossiness, shine, and plasticity of Stettheimer’s beloved cellophane, which she often wore and painted herself wearing. I made piped-meringue kisses, flavored with freeze-dried raspberry powder and pulverized rosemary. And since the chaud-froid’s hot-and-coldness and mysterious black spots reminded Howard of a Baked Alaska (later revealed to have been a challenge on an episode she’d recently watched of The Great British Bake Off), I made one. In place of the usual sponge-cake base, I used a layer of Russian-style walnut cake.

As I’d suspected, turning Florine Stettheimer’s airy comestibles into food-on-a-plate meant losing something of the artist’s spirit. My stuffed peppers were excellent, but humble. The rosemary-raspberry meringue “kisses” tasted delicious, but after several errors with the piping bag, I wound up with a prudishly small quantity of them, not enough to make anybody “hot – hot – hot.” My salat Olivye was banquet-worthy—I had never made one before, and was surprised at the painstaking demands of its assembly and seasoning. In the end, I forgot ingredients and ran out of time, but the recipe below has been adjusted. An attempt to make my own mayonnaise by hand was an abject failure—I should have known that all the Modernist women bought Hellmann’s.

A Baked Alaska makes for a dramatic tableside presentation. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

It was the Baked Alaska that best channeled Stettheimer’s spirit—despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was a sticky, flaming, melting mess. Here was a dish, finally, that seemed to transcend mere food and generate a symbolic presence. The painter often depicted herself with huge, vaginal flower bouquets hovering near her genitals, which were simultaneously art-historical in-jokes and a transformation of the vagina’s creative power from vessels for bearing babies to sites of aesthetic production. My dessert was about the same size as the arrangements and had a similar firepower.

To make a Baked Alaska, you line a bowl with plastic wrap, fill it with layers of ice cream, insert a sponge-cake layer as a base, and put it in the freezer to set. Just prior to service, you whip up a pot of sugar and egg whites, decant the frozen Alaska, slather it with the meringue (attractively!), and then set it on fire. The fire is best produced by pouring a ninety-proof alcohol into half an eggshell nestled in the pillowy meringue atop the Alaska, quickly spooning it all over the sides, and then dropping a match into the eggshell. (You could use a kitchen torch instead, but the burnt alcohol imparts a necessary final touch of flavor.)

My Baked Alaska was a giant dome of creamy white, encrusted with sticky little points of wet, uncooked meringue. It was heavy to carry to the table. I had to use more than one match to get it going (messily dropping burnt matches into my meringue), and when it caught fire it flamed aggressively for several minutes, crisping and blackening the final product and truly creating the “beauty spots” of the poem. I thought it stood in well for one of Stettheimer’s blooming vaginal-symbolic arrangements.

When my guests and I cut into it, the following lines about “chaud-froid” applied:

You are delicious

You are a dream

You are full of softness

Full of delicacies

Marvelously blended

I gloat over your perfections

And voluptuously destroy you—

You wonderful hot-cold thing

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Russian Salat Olivye, Imperial Style

You stirred me

You made me giddy

Then you poured oil on my stirred self

I’m mayonnaise

—Florine Stettheimer

Mary, Mary of the

Bronx aerie

How does your V garden

Grow

With beans and potatoes

Peas and tomatoes

And shiny bugs all in a

Row

—Florine Stettheimer

 

Adapted from The Russian Tea Room Cookbook by Faith Stewart-Gordon & Nika Hazelton.

For the salad:

1/2 cup each of the following items:

crayfish tail, cooked and cubed

veal, cooked, seasoned, and cubed

kidney beans, cooked

potatoes, cooked and cubed

green peas, cooked and cubed

tomatoes, chopped

hard-boiled eggs, cubed

For the dressing:

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/3 cup sour cream

1 tsp Dijon mustard

2 tbsp pickles, chopped

1 tbsp capers, drained

1 tbsp minced parsley

1 tbsp minced dill

In a large bowl, combine all the elements for the salad. Combine all the elements for the dressing in a small bowl and whisk to combine. Add dressing to taste. Toss, season, and serve.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

“Black Swan Effect” Stuffed Peppers

Your sharpness

Brings tears to my eyes

And only

When I have dug through

To your inner softness

I breathe freely once more

—Florine Stettheimer

Adapted from Summer Kitchens by Olia Hercules.

For the filling:

2 tbsp butter with a splash of oil

1/4 of a fennel bulb, grated

1 large carrot, grated

2/3 cup white or brown rice, cooked

2/3 cup corn kernels

1 green apple, cored and diced

1 tbsp thyme leaves

For the sauce:

2 tbsp butter with a splash of oil

1 onion, thinly sliced

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 large ripe tomatoes (or one 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes, pureed in the blender)

1/2 cup heavy cream

3/4 cup vegetable stock

Salt

pepper

a little sugar

To assemble:

4 large bell peppers

salt and pepper

chopped parsley and dill to serve

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

To make the filling, heat the butter and oil in a large frying pan over medium-low heat. Add the fennel and carrot and cook until soft, then stir in the rice, corn, apple, and thyme. Season generously with salt and pepper. The filling should be very well seasoned, almost on the verge of being over-seasoned, as it will also serve as seasoning for the peppers.

To make the sauce, heat the butter and oil in a medium frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for five minutes, stirring frequently, until it begins to soften. Add the garlic, turn down the heat to low, and cook gently for three more minutes, to mellow the flavor. Grate in the tomatoes, discarding the skins, or add the pureed tomatoes, and cook for fifteen minutes, stirring from time to time. Add the cream and the stock and stir. Season with salt, pepper, and a little sugar if it needs it. The sauce should be silky and luscious.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Cut the peppers in half, seed them, and stuff with the filling. Pour half the sauce into a baking dish that will snugly hold all the peppers. Arrange the peppers in the dish and pour the rest of the sauce on top of them. Cover the dish tightly with a lid or foil and cook in the oven for thirty minutes. Take off the lid or foil and cook for another ten minutes or until cooked through and golden. Do not overcook. Serve topped with parsley and dill.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Rosemary-Raspberry Meringue Kisses

You beat me

I foamed

Your sweetest sweet you almost drowned me in

You parceled out my whole self

You thrust me into darkness

You made me hot – hot – hot

I crisped into “kisses”

—Florine Stettheimer

 

4 large egg whites, at room temperature

1/2 tsp cream of tartar

1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp superfine sugar

1/4 cup powdered sugar

1/4 cup freeze-dried raspberries, bashed into powder

1 tsp rosemary, very finely chopped

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a tray with parchment paper and assemble a piping bag fitted with a large cake tip (I used one with a fifteen-mm round opening).

In a mixing bowl, beat the whites until frothy. Add the cream of tartar and beat at medium speed while gradually adding two tablespoons of the superfine sugar. When soft peaks form, add another tablespoon of superfine sugar and increase the speed to high. When stiff peaks form, gradually add the remaining superfine sugar and beat until stiff and very glossy. Gently fold in the powdered sugar, raspberry powder, and rosemary.

Fill the piping bag with the mixture and pipe into “kisses.” Bake for one hour, then turn off the and leave inside to cool for one hour more.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Walnut, Orange, and Pistachio Baked Alaska

You are hot

You are cold

Your black beauty spots

Enhance your creamy whiteness

You are delicious

You are a dream

You are full of softness

Full of delicacies

Marvelously blended

I gloat over your perfections

And voluptuously destroy you—

You wonderful hot-cold thing

—Florine Stettheimer

 

For this recipe you will need an old-fashioned, five-pint metal dessert mold or other deep bowl with a nine-inch round opening.

For the cake layer:

4 large eggs, separated, at room temperature

a pinch of salt

1/8 tsp almond extract

1/2 cup superfine sugar, divided

1/3 cup flour, sifted with 3/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 cup walnuts, toasted and finely chopped

For the meringue:

4 large egg whites, at room temperature

1/2 tsp cream of tartar

1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp superfine sugar

1/2 cup powdered sugar

To assemble:

1 pint orange sherbet, softened

1 pint pistachio ice cream, softened

1 pint vanilla ice cream, softened and mixed with 1/3 cup orange marmalade

2 tbsp rum, vodka, or other alcohol, 90 proof or above

1/2 of an eggshell

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

To make the cake layer:

For best results, make the cake layer the day before you intend to assemble the Baked Alaska. Set a baking rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a nine-inch springform pan with wax paper covering the bottom and coming slightly up the sides, and grease the paper.

In a large bowl using a wooden spoon, stir the egg yolks vigorously with a pinch of salt for thirty seconds. Add the almond extract, stir, and reserve. With an electric beater, whip the egg whites at high speed until soft peaks form, add three tablespoons of the sugar and continue to whip at high speed for two minutes. Add two tablespoons more of sugar, whip until stiff peaks form, add the remaining sugar and beat three minutes longer.

Fold the whipped egg whites, flour, and walnuts into the egg yolks as gently as possible, working quickly but in small batches. This process should take about two minutes altogether.  Fill the pan, distributing the batter evenly, and bake for twenty to twenty-four minutes, until the cake turns pale beige and tests done with a skewer. Remove from the oven and let cool.

To make the meringue:

In a mixing bowl, beat the whites until frothy. Add the cream of tartar and beat at medium speed while gradually adding two tablespoons of the superfine sugar. When soft peaks form, add another tablespoon of superfine sugar and increase the speed to high. When stiff peaks form, gradually add the remaining superfine sugar and beat until stiff and very glossy. Gently fold in the powdered sugar.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

To assemble:

Line a nine-inch bowl or dessert mold with plastic wrap. Fill with ice cream in three even layers, leaving an inch or two at the top for the sponge cake. Insert the sponge cake and return to the freezer.  When it is time to serve, invert the frozen Alaska over your serving plate and remove the saran wrap. Using a rubber spatula, cover with meringue. Nestle the eggshell on top of the dessert and fill with alcohol. Tableside, just prior to service, quickly spoon the alcohol over the sides of the dessert and drop a match into the eggshell. When the flames have subsided, remove the eggshell, slice, and serve.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

 

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

My Royal Quiet Deluxe

Matthew Zapruder’s Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter and a typewritten draft of a 2018 poem. Photographs courtesy of Zapruder.

When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. It didn’t even need a new ribbon. It made a satisfying, well-oiled clack.

I lugged it to the house I was living in on School Street, in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had moved from California back to the same weird little valley where I had gone to college, to go to graduate school for poetry. Thankfully I did not yet know that a manual typewriter was a writerly cliché. For a while, the typewriter just sat there in the corner of my room.

I was still toiling away, writing a lot of poems the way I used to: choose a subject, and try to write something “about” it. Use a computer. Those poems always felt labored and ponderous. No matter what I said, the thoughts in them were never new. Nothing was being added by my writing. I had already figured it out, and mostly it was banal and obvious. Death is sad. The city, if you have not been informed, is lonely at night. In it, other people are mysteriously uninterested in me, which is sad and lonely for me, and for them, whether or not they know it.

Occasionally I would try to let things go completely, and exert as little control as possible over the language. Those poems were a mess, and I would stare at them afterward with bored incomprehension.

My bedroom on the second floor of that house on School Street tilted alarmingly. A row of poorly sealed windows looked out onto the street and other crooked little houses. A giant morning glory had taken over the backyard, and I marveled at how its purple flowers would open to admit the pollinators, and then close in the afternoon and die. The next day new flowers would do the same thing.

Winter came, and a cold wind constantly blew through the room. Sometimes flakes of snow would somehow appear inside. A ring of frost on the lip of a glass. I was growing more and more frustrated with the destabilizing ease with which I was able to continually write and erase words on a computer. Things were always happening too fast, and changes were being made and unmade with alarming frequency. The poems, in their clean, professional fonts, looked so much better than they were. More often than not, I couldn’t stop myself tinkering long enough to figure out what felt right and true to me. I desperately needed to slow down.

My new existence felt barely tethered. I thought nothing in my life mattered, and I was willing at a moment’s notice to alter it. This made me careless and cruel. An equivalent lack of responsibility manifested in my writing. I was always willing, recklessly, to change anything in the poem to make it more musical, more strange, always skating along the edge of irrelevance. While this makes one an awful boyfriend, friend, brother, or son, I think it is an excellent place to be as a young artist. It hones one’s skill and teaches the line between intuitive meaning and pointless weirdness.

When I gained a small audience of fellow poets in graduate school—who became friends who deeply mattered to me, and whose work I read, too—something began to change. It would be a long time before I’d come to understand how much these connections meant, in life and in writing. But their presence affected me deeply as a writer. Not only was I finally in a place where other people were serious about poetry, I began to think about them while I was writing. I was able to imagine them moving through the poem. I would move things around and imagine what the effect would be on my readers. And I moved through their poems too, marking where I was baffled or uncertain, always considering the possibility that things could be in a different order. On the one hand, I felt a growing freedom and understanding of the composition process, which could sometimes feel dizzying. On the other, there was the actual, physical presence of readers who gave direction to that freedom.

***

In a desperate attempt to get away from the limits of my own emotions and experiences, I began walking around the quaint little town, along streets canopied by trees full of blossoms, in a permanent unhappy daze, gathering lines and transcribing in my notebook whatever I heard in my mind. What I saw became words, not just to describe what I was seeing. I was also collecting stray thoughts, memories, observations, jokes, comments, questions, strange bits of language on signs or the sides of passing trucks; whatever I saw, overheard, and thought, with no discrimination. Each house seemed to emanate a friendly, familial light. I told myself I wasn’t writing poetry, just lines, most of which were not particularly promising, but I kept collecting.

I didn’t realize it at the time, because I was only vaguely familiar with surrealism, but like those misunderstood idealists I was trying to maintain a more or less constant dream state while I was awake, so that many lines would come to me and bridge the gap between reality and the unconscious. I was also obsessed with a particular group of artists, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), whose most famous member was Wassily Kandinsky. They operated in the space between figurative art and abstraction, and their gorgeous, colorful canvases shimmered with the twin energies of representation of the world and the intimation of all that was beyond mere representation.

I wanted my poems, like those paintings, to reflect and engage with reality while also pointing always to something beyond it, something I did not truly understand or grasp but could feel was there. I desired the presence of both worlds in my work, and had no idea how to summon either, much less both. Out of desperation I began setting my alarm earlier and earlier and getting up just to assemble those lines, along with others that I had written earlier and cut out of poems that were not working. Most of the lines were not good. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, other than retype them and try to move them around, again and again, until something felt like a poem.

I signed up for a workshop with James Tate, whom I worshipped. The feeling was not mutual. We both suspected I could not write any good poems, and the evidence appeared weekly. It was early spring and, I remember, very cold. Winter dragged on. I brought in poem after poem, and like the weather they just got worse. One week I read with a growing sense of dread as I heard my voice in the room, and Jim looked at me for what seemed like a very long time. Then, with one hand ceremoniously turning the paper over in the air, he placed it with exaggerated care back on the table, facedown, saying just one word: “No.”

In rearranging these lines, I wasn’t writing poems exactly, just trying to connect things from different times I had walked around to see what suggested itself. I was looking for anything that meant something. I searched through them for clues or signs, a faint suggestion of a scene or situation.

I did this for many weeks without much success. Then, without warning, I realized that the lines were collecting themselves into a scene, like in an auditorium when an orchestra is warming up before the performance. Those disorganized sounds become the real performance, the one that happens before the official one begins. The audience rises and applauds. Guided by something nameless, I kept writing and putting things together with a new instinct, or maybe an old one that had at last emerged. The poem felt in some way both lighter and, for the first time, essential, though (or perhaps because) I couldn’t say what I was doing.

I brought the poem to class, but strangely, for the first time, I did not care what anyone said. After I read it, Tate looked up at me, and gave an enigmatic “Huh.” Then he spoke for a long time about what he liked. But I did not really listen. I had already learned something about writing poetry, something that could never be forgotten.

***

In that little room overlooking School Street, surrounded by snow, I began to type many versions of whatever poem I was writing, over and over again, on the Royal Quiet Deluxe, which was not quiet at all. Each time I was done I would yank the poem dramatically out of the platen and stare at it, maybe making some marks. If I wanted to see what the change would look like, I’d have to retype it, even if it was just a single word. The process was slow, meditative, hypnotic. I could work for many hours like this. The sound of a typewriter is unmistakable. It resonates in a room, timelessly, through doors, into the world. The sounds dominated my skull entirely. I began not to think about but to hear how necessary each word was or wasn’t: if I skipped something to avoid typing it for the fiftieth or hundredth time, and then when I read it, it sounded fine, I would never look back.

I also had a secret, immutable rule. If I ever mistyped a word— horse for house, ward for word, vary for very, or find for fine—I would have to keep it. It was a pact I made with myself, to trust my unconscious, that what seemed to be an error was actually a sign. Occasionally I would accidentally place my fingers on the keys incorrectly and type an unpronounceable word or string of gibberish, which I would then have to try to decipher.

The poems changed, becoming more focused. There are at least fifty and up to several hundred typewritten versions of each of those poems in boxes somewhere. It was when I came at last upon very simple poems, short ones by Vasko Popa, by the Greek poets Yannis Ritsos and C. P. Cavafy, and by the Poles Wisława Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert, that I started to see the possibilities of a simple, clear narrative that allowed for both worldly and dreamlike events. I wrote that way for a while, imagining a reader, and being as deliberate as possible. I was also writing for myself, to find out what I would say. I was like a child, finally hearing the stories I had wanted all along.

The combination of gathering lines constantly by hand and returning to them to see what emerged was both elongated and focused by using the typewriter. Plus it was just fun to pound the keys hard and hear the satisfying clacking sound. I was, at last, working.

 

An excerpt from Story of a Poem: A Memoir, forthcoming from Unnamed Press this April.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts and Father’s Day, as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose. In 2000, he cofounded Verse Press, now known as Wave Books, where he is editor at large and edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. 

On Novocain

From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.”

Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength.

This guy had white hair and arms the size of my legs, and he put the pliers on me and wrenched and wrenched and wrenched, and despite the Novocain, the pain was like a hundred Hitlers gnawing on my nerves, gnawing them right down to the roots and then just sinking Nazi teeth up to the hilt in my brain. There was blood everywhere. I was making horrible sounds out of my throat, and the dental surgeon was saying just hold on for one more second, saying it through gritted teeth, and I was writhing in my chair with tears pouring out of my eyes.

Then it was over and he was wiping the pliers on his white coat and I thought, I never knew something like this could happen in America, and he said, “I’m going to write you a prescription for Percocet.”

There was a nurse there who said, “Maybe that’s not such a good idea, this patient is a recovering addict,” but the dental surgeon just ignored her and wrote the prescription and gave it to me.

I drove off. The Novocain was still strong, and once the actual brutal wrenching had stopped, I didn’t feel too bad. They’d given me a pamphlet about the dangers of dry socket. It said not to eat solid food. I thought, Well maybe I’ll get the prescription filled but I won’t use it.

It was surreal standing there at the CVS waiting for Percocet. I’d been clean for seventeen years, three months, and twenty-two days. No alcohol, no marijuana, no cocaine, no heroin, no Percocet, no Oxy, no Vicodin, no Ecstasy, no amphetamines. Nothing.

I took the bottle directly home and gave it to my wife. The amber bottle glowed in the sun. I put the Protocol into action.

The Protocol is what recovering addicts are supposed to do in a situation like this.

Give the medication to a friend or family member. Tell them to hide it and not to tell you where.

Even if you ask.

Take the medication only if you really, really need it.

You will probably lie to yourself about how much you need it.

Do you really need it? No.

No.

Okay, but

Take the medication exactly as prescribed.

Stop taking it while you are still uncomfortable.

Then tell the family member to flush it down the toilet.

I was in my office on the second floor of my house writing an email when the Novocain started to wear off. It wouldn’t be crazy to refer to my house as a mansion, I reflected just before the Novocain wore off. Things have gone pretty well for me since I got clean, I reflected before the Novocain wore off, looking around my spacious office. This place sure is a long way from the bare, metal shelf beds at the Cook County Jail on Twenty-Sixth and California. Or even from the relatively plush jails in the suburbs. To say nothing of the jails in Baltimore. At least the Cook County Jail didn’t smell like piss.

Then the Novocain wore off. I called my dad and said, “What the hell?” He chuckled. “I didn’t want to scare you,” he said. “You mean you knew it was going to be like this?” I was holding my face when I said it. My voice was a little muffled. I was maybe crying a little. “Yeah,” he said. I went down and told Lauren and she left the room and went to wherever she’d hidden the bottle and came back and gave me a pill.

I went and sat in front of my computer and played Slay the Spire. I felt the Percocet come on. I remember my dentist, the regular one, the one with the soft hands, saying once when I had a root canal that he didn’t prescribe opiates because he’d read somewhere that they didn’t remove the pain. They just made it so the pain didn’t matter.

That dentist understood nothing. It’s like saying there’s no point in flying to Florida to escape the winter, because it’s still winter in the place you left. It’s like saying there’s no point in cutting off this gangrenous limb, because the limb will still have gangrene after you cut it off.

When the Percocet wore off, I thought, Okay, I just needed a breather, I can deal with the pain by myself now. It’s not like it’s going to kill me. So I didn’t take any more Percocet the rest of that day, or that night when I couldn’t sleep because of the pain, or the day after. I ate my meals through a straw. I picked pieces of bone out of my gum.

“Is that normal?” Lauren asked, watching me hold up a sliver of bone from my gum.

I developed a kind of stoop. The pain wasn’t in my back. It wasn’t in my limbs, but I walked around stooped over. Unceasing pain makes you stoop. It makes you tired. You can feel yourself getting older. Those seconds and minutes you used to skip over, now you have to go all the way through them.

It’s a scientific fact that there’s no way to know exactly how long a single second is. It’s not like an inch. You can’t lay a second next to another second and see if it’s the same size. The truth is that seconds might be all kinds of different sizes. Ordinarily this is an abstract, philosophical kind of truth about the difference between time and space, but when you experience extended chronic pain, this truth loses its abstract quality and you understand that all seconds are not the same size and that there are long seconds, and there are longer seconds, and there are Very Long Seconds.

The next morning I asked Lauren for another pill. The bottle said to take one every four to six hours. I waited the full six hours before asking her for the next one. It wasn’t like I looked idly at the clock and thought, Wow, it’s been six hours already, time for my next dose. No. I was getting up from my chair at five hours and fifty-eight minutes. I was asking her at five hours and fifty-nine minutes. I had calculated that it took her approximately forty-five seconds to leave the room and come back with the pill. I gave her fifteen seconds extra. If she took sixteen seconds extra, it wouldn’t have been okay. I would have said something.

And it was as if all this time, inside my skull, a calloused old scabbed-over eyelid was slowly rising. There’s an eyeball inside my skull, and when it opens, my other eyes, my outside eyes, the eyes on my face, grow dim. This eyeball in my skull is made to see just one thing. It has only ever seen one thing, and now the ancient long-closed lid was slowly rising, and then it was up, and the eyeball was looking at the thing it was made to look at, and the thing was still there inside me, and the thing was the first time I ever did heroin.

That night, sitting next to Lauren watching a TV show while on Percocet, I felt no connection to her. It was as if all the nearly invisible connections, all the little threads that connect our nerves and memories and feelings to the people around us, all those fine filaments of perception that had slowly grown back over years of recovery—it was as if they’d all snapped, and I was floating in outer space. Sitting there next to her on the couch floating in space. In high orbit. Orbiting the eyeball inside my skull.

The next day, I stopped taking the Percocet. I was still uncomfortable. I was still in pain. It was no longer quite as bad, though, and as I was sitting there around four hours after the last dose, I thought, I have to stop this now.

I called my wife and I watched as she dumped the rest of the pills into the toilet and flushed it.

Okay. Breathe. I’d followed the Protocol; I was still clean.

Still recovering.

But the whiteness, the whiteness of the first time I did heroin, the whiteness of the memory disease, that whiteness, after so many years, when it filled the eyeball in the center of my skull … there was a second when my vision dimmed.

And it was like when all the sound goes out of a crowded room. And you can hear yourself breathing. And you think, Things aren’t what they seem. Houses, marriages, children, careers, can vanish.

The whiteness is real. It’s under those other things. Those other things are made of it—and look! Their outlines are starting to blur. They’re starting to turn white …

For the next couple of months, I went to more NA meetings than usual. The eyelid in my skull closed up again. It had only been open for a couple dozen hours, after all.

Call it the Pain Medication Paradox. That’s one aspect of the problem of addiction, a problem that has nothing to do with a stigma, nothing to do with anyone’s attitude. And maybe you’ll say, Well then, if it’s such a problem then just don’t take pain medication. Paradox solved.

Sure. How about you get a molar extracted, an extraction with “complications,” as the surgeon later described it when I went back, an “unusually difficult” extraction, how about you go through one of those and then you don’t get pain medication?

Pain is horrible. It’s inhumane. Literally dehumanizing. I was walking around like an ape on the second day. And opiates are still the only thing that works. We haven’t invented anything else that works. Should addicts be denied pain medication? Forced to writhe on the floor in pain for the crime of being born an addict? Is that progressive? Is that modern? Is that humane?

Okay, you say, so give the addicts pain medication if and when they really need it. Follow the Protocol, just like you did. You’re okay now, right? You just celebrated your twentieth year in recovery.

Yes, but what if things had been a little bit different for me? What if—on one of the innumerable occasions when someone offered me a drink—at a wedding reception, a Christmas party, an airplane ride, a dinner, a literary reading, a basketball game—what if on just one of those occasions, I’d reflected, Hey, I never really had a problem with alcohol. My problem was heroin, not alcohol, and I’ve had a long day, a hard day, a stressful day. Surely I can control my use of alcohol after twenty years, come on! Just one drink, just one little drink …

Or what if after being clean ten or fifteen years, I just decided to stop going to NA meetings? My wife has never seen me on dope. My daughter. My colleagues, my friends—none of them have ever seen me on dope. Why not stop going to meetings so much? There’s so much to do, life’s busy. It would be so easy to stop …

Or what if I got depressed? What if I just got depressed—depressed about the political situation, the climate, the state of literature, the state of the arts, the fact of death, the distance of my youth, hurtling away from me at lightning speed? I can barely see it anymore, a green blur in the distance. What if I finally just got really bummed out about the nature of time? And, like normal people when they get depressed, I stopped doing some things for a while. Took a little break. Stopped meditating, stopped exercising, stopped keeping my daily recovery journal, stopped reading recovery literature, stopped talking to recovering addicts …

What if I’d fallen prey to any of the innumerable things that cause recovering addicts to drift away from recovery? What if I hadn’t gone to a meeting in one or two or six or twenty months before walking into that dental surgeon’s office? What would have happened?

I can tell you what would have happened. It happened to a friend of mine. Call him George. He’d been clean for over ten years, stopped going to meetings. Things were going good for him. He didn’t need to go to meetings anymore. A year or two later he had some kind of medical procedure and took Percocet, and when the Percocet ran out, he found some dope and now he’s dead. Like the five addicts who will die as you read this, if you’re reading fast.

Let’s go further and imagine that I’d never really gotten into going to meetings at all. If that mysterious thing that I write about in my memoir, White Out, had never happened to me, and I’d never really given up trying to get high. Like millions of other addicts who are exposed to recovery but for whom, for whatever reason, that mysterious, maybe even mystical thing, never happens, and they never grasp that the only way out of addiction is also out of yourself.

A thousand little things, a thousand considerations of the most rational, the most progressive, the most reasonable kind can prevent a person from taking that step out of themselves, out of everything they know and are, out of the skull with the single interior eyeball, out of their mind. And if you don’t go out of that mind, you die.

As long as there’s a really effective way to stop pain, there will be addicts, and as long as there are addicts, many of them will die. That’s the kind of problem addiction is. And the Pain Medication Paradox is only one aspect of it. There are many others.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against the “Beat the Stigma” campaign. I wouldn’t be opposed to a new “Just Say No” campaign either. I’m for Suboxone treatment centers, halfway houses, twelve-step meetings, decriminalization, recriminalization, all of it. I’m not against doing anything or everything that helps. But don’t fool yourself. Addiction is a public problem. But it doesn’t have a public solution.

It has only private solutions. Unobjective solutions, nonscientific solutions. Solutions that speak in the first person.

 

From the foreword to  White Out , to be republished by McNally Editions this month. 

Michael Clune is the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of Gamelife, Writing Against Time, American Literature and the Free Market, and A Defense of Judgment.

Announcing the 2023 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prize Winners

Photograph of Harriet Clark by Joshua Conover; photograph of Ishion Hutchinson by Neil Watson.

We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson. 

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Jonathan Escoffery, Eloghosa Osunde, and the 2022 winner, Chetna Maroo.

Harriet Clark’s slanting, beautiful story “Descent,” which appeared in our Summer 2022 issue (no. 240), is narrated by a young girl caught between her mother—imprisoned for her part in a botched robbery intended to finance revolutionary struggle—and her grandmother, whose grief encompasses a cruel resentment. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Clark is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and was a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford. She is at work on her first novel. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

In “Descent,” Harriet Clark deftly tells an enclosing story about the wish for resurrection. An eight-year-old girl, “a great stayer,” knows departure as a fact of life. She and her grandfather simulate disappearance and recovery in a game they play with her in the trunk of the car. A silence is kept in honor of a felled deer. Strange cats attack the old man. Clark somehow manages to give us each character’s interiority: “if my mother told this story she might say that one day her father disappeared.” Clark ends where she began, with a conundrum, this time inflected with the grandmother’s harsh language: “To want to go home was to wish a man dead but I did want, very much, to go home.”

The Susannah Hunnewell Prize, which honors a writer for an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous calendar year, was established in 2023 in memory of Hunnewell, who joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s tenure. She remained associated with the magazine for thirty years, serving as its Paris editor and later as its publisher from 2015 until her death in 2019. She also conducted some of the most beloved interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Harry Mathews, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and Emmanuel Carrère. 

The prize’s first winner, Ishion Hutchinson, published his essay “Women Sweeping”—a moving illumination of the artistry that infused his grandmother’s work and life, by way of Édouard Vuillard’s painting of his own mother sweeping—in our Spring 2022 issue (no. 239). Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections, Far District and House of Lords and Commons, and a forthcoming collection of essays. He is the recipient of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Mona Simpson writes:

She was the house, Henry James said of his mother. And so it was with Vuillard’s mother and Ishion Hutchinson’s grandmother, a “short and solid-built” baker. Sounds of “jubilation” hiss from the kitchen as the narrator witnesses the honor and pleasure of his grandmother making a home. “The interior does not simply belong to her, it is her,” Hutchinson writes of Vuillard’s mother. For a disenfranchised people, owning a house was, and still is, the ultimate achievement. By herself, Hutchinson’s grandmother earned what Mr. Biswas strived for in Naipaul’s novel: “legally owned property.” How? “Through baking.”

This question and answer form a refrain, as the narrator watches her measure flour and sugar with empty Betty and Carnation cans and eats the bits (“bun bun”Harr) left on the tin baking pans after black cake and coconut drops are removed to sell. There’s something quietly radical in Hutchinson’s association of his Jamaican grandmother with Madame Vuillard, and in his valorization of what is traditionally women’s work. The narrator was able to go to the good school on the island; Vuillard attended the same school as Marcel Proust. How? We are not told. But at the end of the essay, Hutchinson reveals his grandmother’s guarded secret, her vulnerability, her shame, and her wish, along with her pride.

Tickets are still available for the Revel, which will take place on April 4 at Cipriani 42nd Street. We hope you’ll join us to celebrate Clark and Hutchinson, as well as the inimitable Vivian Gornick, who will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. We’ll also be marking the seventieth anniversary of the Review, which was founded in Paris in 1953. Since then, the magazine has evolved the contemporary canon, publishing a spirited mix of emerging and established voices. That exhilarating encounter between different styles and generations also reliably makes the Revel an excellent party, and all proceeds help sustain the magazine. We’d love to see you there.

 

Three Favorite Lyricists

Three white-tailed deer. Courtesy of National Geographic. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I began listening to Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s Full Moon Mystery Garden after I took two road trips through Death Valley, the first literal (in California) and the second figurative (in a hospital). So when I heard him say “On a mountain under full moon / I could say goodnight and mean it” and then “Another night I’m in the magic mirror / Another night engaged in seeing signs,” it felt like, well, a sign. Symbols, like mirrors, are roads to the other side; I have always been obsessed with looking for and in both. Though both of my trips actually happened, their allegorical affinity made them each less real, and harder, somehow, to return from. Seeing yourself through reflections can be a way of playing dead, of getting lost where you are not; in Full Moon Mystery Garden, it is also a way to get found.

The album’s sigillic scenery is almost too familiar: black cat, black polo, moon, mountain, mirror. But Wicca has an uncanny ability to show us what are basically gothic stock images under a strange new light, reanimating them. If similarly symbolically-hyperactive Bladee’s falsetto makes incantations out of normal nouns, Wicca’s hoarseness brings the otherworld to earth: rural Pennsylvania; Providence, Rhode Island. That’s magic, I guess—or music. Wicca’s older work is equally lyrically brilliant, but more claustrophobic: words are exchanged in bedrooms, in clubs, over text, in bad relationships. Now, he’s alone in a car looking out, “the twilight on repeat.” The album, which has four different songs with the word moon in the title, drives you along a kind of psychogeographic cul-de-sac, a looping map of road signs that seem to occur in too many places at once—the same way certain American towns all look the same, the way they all have a Main Street, a Crescent Street, and trees at their edges. Ex–emo teens will recognize the landscape. The album’s frequent refrain—“In one mile, turn left on Garden Avenue”—is spoken by a female GPS. Though he knows what road he’s on (“Dark Region Road”) and where he’s going (the “portal through the pines,” “Hickory Grove”), he still needs directions: a voice from elsewhere, an image out there that lets him recognize what he already knows. Funny how another person’s words can lead you gradually back to a place where your self and your world coincide—to life. “The meadow isn’t that far away,” and the mystery, meanwhile, is here.

I was on a back road by myself
In Waverly Township
Totally immersed in where I was and what I felt
Amazing how a simple drive
Can open my eyes
To what is out there

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

This week, I’ve had Caroline Polachek’s new album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You on repeat. On the album’s cover, Polachek crawls steadily into the alluring mirage that is the unknown. I’ve been transfixed by the album’s twelve songs and the images she so deftly conjures through her clever lyricism. Fire, dirt, blood, and skies abound in her “mythicalogical” audiovisual tapestry, but some of my favorite moments on the album arrive when she attempts to draw the blinds on desire. It’s the shape-shifting molten rock under the volcano, and not the smoke, that she wants to get to. Desire invariably molds us, no matter how much we want to do the molding ourselves. 

“These days I wear my body like an uninvited guest.”

“I fly to you / Not just somewhere deep inside of me.”

“How does it feel to know / your final form?”

“I forget who I was before I was the way I am with you.”

—Alejandra Quintana Arocho, intern

“I think Mengistu Haile Mariam is my neighbor,” begins “Asylum,” the opening track on billy woods’s Aethiopes, which is not even his most recent album.

Whoever it is moved in and put an automated gate up
Repainted brick walls atop which now cameras rotated …
Avocado tree hang over the property line
I watch from as high as I can climb …
My mother sent the gardener to look for me
But the sky is a great place to hide

They might not have actually lived next door to each other, but woods spent part of his childhood in Zimbabwe, where the former Ethiopian president Mengistu Haile Mariam fled at the end of the Ethiopian Civil War. The factual truth of anecdotes like this one, interspersed throughout woods’s lyrics, is irrelevant; the figures that populate them always seem to originate in a place of real memory. The prolific Brooklyn-based rapper conceals his face in music videos and interviews not because he’s playing a character, like the late MF DOOM, but as a measure of privacy as he shows extreme vulnerability.

His lines often construct claustrophobic, almost dystopian worlds, and then swiftly move into moments of tender innocence that still occur inside them. Featured on the rapper Navy Blue’s “Poderoso”:

Afternoons wander the catacombs, tomes line the rooms
Every room a tomb, every shelf hoarding doom
I kissed her in the stacks under the biblioteca
Just once
Tasted like sweet peppers and blunts, peppermint gum

It’s comforting to me that the subjects of billy woods’s work, more than two decades into his career, are often children—I grew up in Brooklyn, and the memories I have of it from my childhood contain physical attributes and facts that also cannot be confirmed, located, as they are, in so many places that no longer exist. His music seems to show that, deep into the game, your oldest iterations of selfhood are still with you. As for his visibility, by the end of a woods album, you feel he’s given up so much that you have to respect his keeping something all his own. I don’t know what billy woods looks like, but I know who he is in some important ways; they’re the same ways I can know myself without looking in a mirror.

—Owen Park, intern

I Love Birds Most

Photograph by Kate Riley.

Given a space to inhabit unobserved, I will immediately convert it into a physical representation of the inside of my brain. My annual trip to the old Zillow listing for the farm I bought eight years ago leaves me stunned every time: it was once the kind of house one could list on Zillow! Now it is mine; I have filled the walls with pictures,hung the surplus ones on the ceiling, crowded every surface with dioramas and precarious unidentifiable objects that look like chess pieces from outer space. There is nowhere to sit in the house except on the floor with the dogs (and, every hatching season, with the emu chicks who run figure eights around the obstacle art). Like my brain, it’s a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

My house, the physical building, is an arranged marriage of two old farmhouses that were dragged from different parts of the country and clumsily conjoined. I decline to speculate on which side is holding up the other. There is a secret spiral staircase, accessed through a cupboard door, with ludicrously uneven treads; the wavy glass windowpanes cast distorted shadows. The two halves of my house must have each accommodated entire families, but the current inhabitants between them, in descending order of population, are: eggs, birds, dogs, me. 

Every morning around eleven, having done the farm rounds and broadcast feed to the loyal birds, I commence with the small-scale batch production of objects that promise but do not fulfill utility. I tend to work compulsively and repetitively, making hundreds of variations of the same thing until I exhaust my supply of the necessary materials or my own fascination with it. There are blown-out, intact eggshells equipped with antennae or working motion sensors; eggshells hinged to open like boxes, or with latched hatches, lined with poppy red flocking; emu egg dirigibles rigged with ball chains, hanging from the kitchen rafters. Over the  past six months, I’ve manufactured thousands of one-inch hollow resin spheres, each kitted out with some combination of magnets, O-rings, and fishing tackle and beads. Each one of them is perfect, and the only people who see them are the bewildered tradesmen who need access to the circuit breaker in my kitchen.

I love birds most for the combination of complexity and stupidity they exhibit: their deep-seated, unplumbable impulse to perform elaborate, apparently pointless procedures. The contents of my house demonstrate that it is an impulse I share.

Kate Riley’s story “L. R.” appears in the Winter 2022 issue of the Review.

Things That Have Died in the Pool

Photograph by Isabella Hammad.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.

I looked at the objects in the house

the titles of the books

strange incandescence from the windows

 

Thursday, May 21, 2020

I feel, what is the point of anything

going places    seeing people    doing anything

just ways to pass the time

 

Friday, May 29, 2020

I woke too early again—5:30. Stayed in bed until 6. Deep itchy dry cough—hopefully just allergies / recovery from smoking at the weekend. It is the weekend again! Time slips by so quickly during lockdown. L. cycled to see me yesterday—I like him when he is my friend. He seemed pleased I am involved-ish with someone although I also detected a bit of jealousy. But mostly goodwill. He said his relationship is stable and suggested somewhat lacking in passion but who knows if that’s true. I think he feels I fucked up what happened between us and that I wasn’t trustworthy. But I know he was also seeing someone else at the time so I don’t really feel guilty. He & I would not have worked together.

            I like Annie Ernaux, I think I’ll read all her books. The premium on honesty & exactitude. Hard to know exactly what you are aiming for in writing—the achievement of certain effects, the creation of “beauty” (?)—but as close as possible to honesty—if not truth—is a clear and actually radical-feeling goal

            Today I will speak with J. about Prashad & Benjamin’s Critique of Violence.

            I dropped coffee on the stairs & I don’t think the stain will come out. I tried over several days, putting mum on video call to help me. I will offer to pay for a cleaner.

            lurid imagination

 

Saturday, May 30, 2020

I slept longer last night but only because I slept a bit earlier—around 11. Woke at 6:30 again / 6:15. Tired. Z. came for dinner. She is reading my manuscript and will drop it off on Sunday. Nervous and looking forward to her thoughts. So tired it’s unbearable. Will I spend my whole life sleepless like this? I used to be able to sleep long. Now I am too light, I am made of nothing, I rise too easily.

 

Monday, June 8, 2020

thinking about A. & Q.

from Z. to do:

– creative summary of Hamlet before rehearsal

– cast list earlier

– Gaza coastline end of Chapter 2. Lifeguards

– arabic in arabic script

– one of the cast from Gaza

– getting her passport renewed

 

Monday, June 15, 2020

Read Jacques Rancière.

                                    Hamlet is a dead man from Act One.

Look up map of Bethlehem & camps.

Simone de Beauvoir The Mandarins

p. 275 “The truth of one’s life is outside oneself, in events, in other people, in things; to talk about oneself, one must talk about everything else.”

Where Russian mass spectacle overtly ideological and affirmative, Dada group (at least in early phase) all negating, anti-ideological and anarchist.

 

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Dreamt I went to Amman & didn’t pack any shoes—didn’t plan what to pack at all—got there—opened bag—tons of Converse, for some reason

            invited S. & T. over thinking I. & I. were out—they came back, had to hurry everyone out & round the corner

            something about Teta

everything feels porous                      Majed     Jihad

            Jenan        Ibrahim      Wael      Mariam      Amin      Faris

what circumstance shows Mariam excluding Sonia from Ophelia

            Sonia watching Jenan—having recently read those lines

Jihad saying something

Sonia unsure if he is joking

repetition

play after play

                        —This rehearsal itself a performance

this exhausting thing where I have to be invisible all the time

the outrage I seem to cause when I take up space or assert myself

I woke up very early that morning and sat outside with a young man cracking olives on a brick to get them ready for curing                  smoking narghile

Amin says—I had a dream about you

there is so much sky here

                                                            Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments, 1993

restless trees

                                    incarnation

murderous heat

everyone on their phones

later correct thought about Faris—that she should give misogyny so much leeway

argument amin & wael

 

Thursday, July 9, 2020

                                                special crumbling plaster

                                                —ask Jess E.?

visual pleasure

patchwork of quotations                                 hunger in the eyes

                                                                        swedish woman

[ dreamt about Randa ]

                        oppression turns you into a collective subject rather an individual self present

                        actor in possession of your body

illusory Genet thing: power of Pals

                                    & lack of power of Isrs

[ deconditioning of impulse ] ——————————– *

[ email theater person ]

burning city

soon to be darkness

 

Monday, July 13, 2020

Struggling to concentrate on Sonia.

Liberation exists in desire, not identity.

The feeling of running from a burning building.

Death nibbles at everything—everything will disintegrate but we will go first—human bodies are weaker than concrete walls

 

Friday, August 21, Andros, Greece

Sitting on shared balcony upstairs, looking down, or across, at the sea. Still quite amazed I am here. S., T., C. Everyone is very considerate, understanding, easygoing. Interesting that I usually expect some pettiness or neuroticism or selfishness or irritation to react to—so that I feel the least easygoing in some respects, even though I am very easygoing. Like, I didn’t like the music N. played at dinner the other night; the others didn’t even notice.

            Greece reminds me of Palestine.

            First few days especially I couldn’t concentrate on complicated reading; starting to come back to me. Because just a body in the heat, under the sun. S. & T. are both so brilliant & so attuned & knowledgeable; makes me want to know more, read more; they are of course older than me but still.

            Plans for future—uncertain … visit Athens for a week, come back to Andros? I will go to see the house with Riccardo that he says is beautiful and €350 a month. I will be lonely but I will write. It is better to be lonely somewhere beautiful. When N., M.’s friend, visited with his sister he only said being stuck on Tinos all lockdown was wonderful. But I can’t help thinking he must have been lonely. T. said he seemed a bit intimidated by us and maybe he did, his gestures were very careful, they didn’t talk much. Dinner conversation was all pleasantries, which was perfectly pleasant.

Things that have died in the pool:

2 dragonflies

a bat

a butterfly

a lizard

several wasps

2 (?) crickets

 

Friday, August 28, 2020

Last day at the villa on Andros—the end of summer rustling. I am ready to go although I regret not writing, thinking more while here. I will move to Athens tomorrow for at least a month.

            Yesterday went to see the little house in the mountains above Korthio—a village called Kochilos—ancient little house with staggering view—but I’m not sure I want that level of isolation if I don’t have a car but I did / am thinking about it. T. got grumpy from the drive and C. was jokingly on his side, getting annoyed at S. for both his enthusiasm and his imperfect directions—who took their annoyance with a smile. I felt a bit isolated and retreated into myself. At a very windy beach I entered the water feeling strangely on verge of tears. Why? Because it was my fault we went on the long drive at noon, instead of having lunch first? I climbed over the rocks under a big fallen rock round the corner of the beach & sat in a stony inlet protected from the wind. Lost my sunglasses in the sea when I went for a wee. Sat on the rocks under the cliff & finished Lord Jim with the sea rough and dramatic seething on the rocks and between them.

            I am the opposite of my boisterous self at the beginning of the trip. Maybe I am getting ready to be alone & write.

 

Sunday, September 6, 2020, Athens

Dreamt about E. On a boat, at night, in a storm.

            Sitting on balcony reading A. Chee (I like it) & hearing a sound like an azan, a ways off—a mournful chanting. Maybe a Greek Orthodox church?

            Sky is very blue, stinging blue. Getting sensitized to my surroundings. Being observant makes me feel peaceful.

Thoughts about NOVEL: bring the abortion up front.

Maybe this morning I should trawl through Hamlet looking for a title.

Edward Said on Lord Jim:

            “Neither man, whether hearer or storyteller, truly inhabits the world of facts”

 

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Question: Why is it that whenever I begin to approach my work I feel the beginnings of fear? I start to feel depressed? And yet when I’m not doing it I feel dissatisfied.

 

Saturday, September 26, 2020

Amin’s brother’s story

a love too new, too strong still, in its first violence

a lot of people dinging out of elevators

 

Friday, October 2, 2020

In my new flat in Exarcheia—Kallidromiou. Big 2-bedroom, 1970s, marble sink, old shutters. Ancient fridge, malfunctioning oven, balconies front & back.

            Everywhere I stay there is building work across the way. Sitting at desk in back bedroom I see through the balcony doors a man with a handsaw on the 3rd floor a few buildings back.

E. called me yesterday & again spent an entire hour talking nonstop about his ex-wife. I called him a chronic interrupter & it briefly seemed to give him pause.

 

Wednesday, October 7, 2020

Struggling to write

 

Thursday, October 8, 2020

Grief                give me 40 days I need 40 days

Joan Didion: “the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself”

Henry Miller: “The ancient Greek was a murderer”

phantom seas of blood

to be free of time & space      to be in mythic time    to be free of context               in Greek time

falling into history

meditate

dreamt of Qais, somehow, renting a beautiful flat in a very dangerous neighborhood

Rilke: “the questions … like locked rooms” … again

murmur in the blood

Sonia is unrefined & unfinished         still second order

unbearable freedom    marriages like public shelters

Lenin: “Ultra-leftism is an infantile disorder”

 

Sunday, November 8, 2020

Comical? That he left on first day of quarantine / lockdown, & when I got in the taxi to take him to the airport the driver asked, looking shaky, if we were husband & wife. He said no, at which the driver explained only one of us could be in the taxi then. So I got out & we said goodbye on the pavement.

Hanging her laundry outside and something falls, a string vest, onto the awning of the flat two floors below.

I felt inexplicably happy.

Strange dream             swimming       a woman said, you don’t have any jewish friends & yet you have jewish lovers     an eavesdropper looked at me, shocked; I said, she misspoke—I am palestinian, she meant to say israeli, not jewish

 

Friday, November 13, 2020

NO MORE SMOKING—ruins concentration in the mornings.

Reading Baldwin, Another Country, first chapter I have a feeling of dread & anger about male violence.

 

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Dream: in the French quarter in Athens, where J.R. stayed; gated community, residential, everyone speaks French.

            as lightning freezes motion

someone turns up with a microphone, puts it in front of his mouth, one man & then another, some of them praying wearing baseball caps & backpacks in the heat, sheikh takes over, wearing sunglasses, gives the khutba

على هذه الارض تحت القبة الزرقاء

I’m sorry, he said, seeing the expression he’d brought to her face

 

Monday, November 30, 2020

Returning to writing, reflection. Went back to sleep after being woken by reversing truck bleeping & accidentally slept until 10:45. Went to illegal dinner of 7 people at a journalist V.’s house in the neighborhood. I met her first—or saw her first—when I went to look round her flat, as she is staying there temporarily & it belongs to friends of I.L.’s. But it’s a sublet (and they were overcharging) so it wouldn’t work for my residency application. Then I met her again at my neighbor S.’s house for brunch a few weeks ago & she recognized my eyes (I’d been wearing a mask). I recognized her curly hair but only after she said it.

            At dinner: V., S., S., a journalist who used to live in Palestine, a Greek Romanian woman D. and her partner, Australian. I forget his name. Was nice. I felt the journalist was performing a lot, cracking jokes. Funny how American journalists who have lived in the Middle East often have a similar vibe. Weathered, knowledgeable, insecure.

I dreamt about A. That I waved at him from across the street in Jerusalem but we didn’t actually meet. Later I found out from a policeman who was also an Oxford porter and also an American don that A. had covid. And that E.’s mother was a billionaire, and her neighbor was in the Greek secret police.

The problem of obsessing over originality—divorcing technique from its proper aim—empty virtuosity. The problem of the West post-Reformation

jinn are made from fire

angels from sunlight

iblis a jinn

shaytan from moonlight?

The Bible: demons love water & search for it. Luke 8:29–33

“I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play”

 

Wednesday, January 6, 2021, Athens

How to write about that feeling I was reminded of last night at the end of Hurdle: a sheerness of desolation & sadness produced by structures of injustice; the quiet wail of the soul; boys jumping on blocks of concrete

 

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Seem to be fighting something off. Sleeping long hours. Dreamt about being unable to wake.

 

Friday, January 22, 2021

Still strange chest pain. Sleeping 9 hours a night. Want to finish story & send to A. although I don’t think he’ll like it. Haven’t smoked in almost 2 weeks.

 

Sunday, February 7, 2021

I got ill again—sinus, ears—even though I haven’t been smoking just tiredness—a busy week. Chose a flat to buy in Neapoli, offer accepted—started teaching—and then had one particular night of terrible sleep that did me in. Read that M.A.G. who I met when he was O.’s roommate has been arrested and I just felt so angry. Then questioning my anger. Wrote novel today but still feel stuck in the voice. Repetition of the “I.” Need to read some first-person narratives that relieve the pressure of the I—variation. Have started The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez & enjoying.

             I can’t believe that almost a year has passed since I was lying on Q.’s sofa trying to prepare for PalFest before I flew to Jordan & they announced the cancelation, the circulation of the virus …

            I am currently sitting in my spare room at the back, west-facing; I am grateful for this view. Like being on a ship. I see the skies alight in the afternoons, cracks of sun behind clumps of soft cloud, crowding together; the buildings, far enough away.

 

Saturday, February 13, 2021

I am tired of this flat. This is the longest I have remained in one house for years and years. I hate the temporariness, I hate the things on the walls, the crappy Ikea beds. Maybe I should think of it as—the temporary place where I will finish my novel. Hard not to feel divorced from the novel—written by a former self. To write about duende and the ecstatic experience of art-making—when I cannot access that. Is this because the pandemic makes time feel so uncontained; unlaces the compartments we allot our time into, so that one thing bleeds into another & destroys (or dilutes) concentration? Everything is diluted, that’s it.

            Went to the beach twice this week. It felt good to be in a different environment, to swim in the shocking cold. A pretty effective antidepressant.

            The balcony doors of this flat feel flimsy; they let air and creatures in.

I think I am despairing less than some others currently—why? Am I bored of despair?

The environment where they do the performance is crucial. Basically I need to go around the West Bank imagining places to put on plays.

 

Friday, April 9, 2021

Passage of time is frightening. It is already spring—I have still not finished my book or achieved very much.

            I feel increasingly concerned by qu. of living an ethical life—at least that’s where my thoughts often go. Revelation last year partially induced by conversation with L. and then expanded by analysis that ethical behavior begins with ethical behavior toward the self. i.e. self-respect is a moral issue. This seems to solve something for me.

            Another revelation is my cynicism. A tendency toward satire, against the humanist proposition of the fictional endeavor—perhaps a zeitgeisty anti-empathy moment in public discourse fuels this—but which also runs contra to my real-life behavior, my hopes from people I meet, & so on. This has also come out in conversations with C. re: faith, & my lack of it—not only in a “higher power” à la ten-step programs but faith in anything larger, metaphysical, not trapped or deterministically conditioned by systems.

everything is so overwhelming—thoughts pass through me—constant feeling that my thoughts aren’t good enough

Z. called thinking it was my birthday. Loved talking to her—we talked about the importance of remaining flexible, not just inheriting opinions or saying “it’s settler colonialism” & mic drop, that closes the debate—& the Nathan Thrall piece in the NYRB

                                                                        nothing more compelling than a love story

                                                                        —but why? The ultimate in human connection, the                                                              ultimate form of it

do a story in numbered paragraphs

            the idea of learning from lovers

                                    (I am always seeking to learn from lovers)

 

Wednesday, April 21, 2021, Athens

woke up with anxieties of uselessness

slowness

a parcel of eggs

pg. 43 Coetzee In The Heart of the Country:

“Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going”

 

Friday, May 14, 2021, Athens

dreamt about Gaza      was a journalist watching Hamas getting ready in a field—ready, essentially, to be slaughtered

            every “town” was next to another town—no space between—more like neighborhoods

            Very cramped, everyone’s house led to another’s house

 

Friday, May 28, 2021, Athens

The day of my first vaccination. Enjoying staying at B.’s—woke up this morning thinking about how miserable I would feel if I was living on my own at the moment. Now—I have company and I can rest. Post-cease-fire. Trying to return to dreaming state of mind. The war increased my phone addiction—I feel like I need a detox.

Contemplating going to Brown in the fall. Have to think about what I want to teach—on archives? Benjamin, Carlo Ginzburg, Saidiya Hartman.

 

Monday, June 14, 2021, Amman, Jordan

I have been here almost a week. Flew in last Monday night arriving at 4:20 a.m.; M. came & picked me up & drove me to N.’s place in Abdoun. Really lovely to see all of them—N., T., M.—although I have felt quite tired and useless, not sleeping well, rising tired, not working well. Still, it’s nice and hot and reassuring to see friends. Cigarettes and hash from last night are heavy on my lungs.

My head isn’t really in the novel yet. I know I have to get there—by reading and thinking.

 

Wednesday, June 16, 2021, Amman

Now at S.’s in Dabouq / Sweiseh. Dreamt of R.

Book: who do I write this for?

Hegel in Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss: Hegel got the idea from the Haitian slave revolt.

 

Friday, June 18, 2021

To fight the fight but also to fight against the fight.

Winnicott’s object to be used.

“Palestinian violence seeks to maintain sanity for its people through the insistence that the self exists even as the oppressors seek to deny it”

 

Tuesday, June 22, 2021, La Marsa, Tunisia

first impressions:

            The cucumbers are whitish and hairy. The larger ones are quite bitter. The seawater seems a bit dirty. The air is misty, the horizon meets the sky in a bluish haze, blurred out. Buildings are low, white; small windows, splashes of blue like in Sidi Bou Said, then majnuni trees bow over garden walls and flood a corner with color; domed entranceways, everything designed to keep out the heat.

            People are calm, not like in Bilad al-Sham. No need to cover up, dresses and shorts fine. Everyone worn-out and shushed by the heat.

 

Thursday, June 24, 2021

Still sore from yoga yesterday. Explored Marsa Corniche. Hot & salty air, humid. Saw a black cat with a face like J.S. It was approaching so I gave it the stink eye.

            Tomorrow, Friday, I will start writing in the morning. In the afternoon maybe see Z., & then dinner in Sidi Bou Said with M.

            Now an orange cat that reminds me of E. Playing hot and cold, friendly eyes, wanted food but got the message, sitting farther down the wall ignoring me.

Merleau-Ponty: “Our thinking cannot be separate from the bodies in which it takes place.”

Jacques Lacan: “We desire the desire of the other.”

 

Sunday, June 27, 2021, La Marsa, Tunisia

Saw M. for lunch—all other Sunday plans dissolved because people are a little flaky. Seems I might need to leave for Paris on the 7th, not the 13th, as Tunis is going on France’s red list. I have to find somewhere to stay. I am at Y.’s from the 13th.

            I like Tunis—although it does feel a little dull. Everything calm, fine; hardly any harassment—less than Greece, anyway. Everything is a tad placid.

 

Some thoughts Saturday morning, Paris

Will be nice when I live in my own place, responsible for my own things, taking mercy on others when they break something of mine.

How particular the French are.

Paris is cramped and expensive.

Sophie Toscan du Plantier—dangerous to be female. That’s why they are so protective of us.

The playground as a first social space, the place of particular kinds of fantasies. Cartwheeling, skipping rope—none of which I did, actually.

 

Saturday evening

Walked toward Shakespeare & Co. but never made it, spoke to A. & walked home again. Some rain.

            Suddenly I have a pang—I’m not as hardworking as a million others—one thing at a time, finish this book & then read & work on the syllabus, read many things, you don’t need to be anything but what you are—

            My exhaustion is so intense, that’s the problem, there’s a kind of deadline on this now since I’m going to Brown—I’ve lost the adrenaline & impetus of pre-Covid life only slowly returning to it

            —but also don’t lose sight of your subject matter, recent events

            —think of Simone Weil’s heart beating across the globe

            —perhaps some feeling of fear is good for getting your ass moving—I assiduously & obsessively made notes & filled notebooks for The Parisian—but remember I also want to be happy, I, like everyone else, will die soon

I liked the rain today, it reminded me of London       ugly English rain

Kanafani: “Man is a cause, not flesh and blood passed down from generation to generation like a merchant and his client exchanging a can of chopped meat.”

 

Tuesday, July 13, 2021, Paris

dreamt             spaceship hovering above Dublin. Someone went to investigate with an air bicycle. I said, I had a Gaza dream about a spaceship—it looked just like that; square, lights, filling the sky, not moving. Feeling among us in Dublin that this was inevitable; we would all go up there.

A man pursuing me, my friends weren’t dead, just hiding.

            O.T. [the writer] was living in the building, he had copies of The Recognitions and something else I loved. I told him I had trouble concentrating on reading.

            I killed the pursuing man, he wouldn’t die quietly, I slashed his throat—I think he stood in for H. because I told him I loved him & he said he was sorry and then he said he loved me too.

 

Wednesday, July 21, 2021, flight, Paris→Athens

Picasso Rodin—saw with M.

Lots of paintings of lovers kissing or fucking, war & sex—the two great topics

also the Courbet at the Musée d’Orsay—L’Origine du Monde—I think I actually blushed when I saw it—& then I watched M.’s reflection in the glass of the other painting on the perpendicular wall, waiting for him to move so I could look at it properly. And then we sat on the grass, or lay rather, in the garden of the museum.

            Beside me on the airplane someone’s sister watches a Lara Croft movie on her phone    glass shatters in slow motion as Angelina Jolie dives through a window

            But returning to Rodin

also why am I always dropping things

chronically      I am so clumsy

            Rodin—engaging with the human form again—somehow a delight and a surprise to think again of the human creature in a skin

            this funny animal we are with 2 legs and 2 arms

 

Isabella Hammad’s story “Getrude” appears in the winter issue of the Paris Review.

Oil!: On the Petro-Novel

Oil fields near San Ardo, California. Photograph by Eugene Zelenko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In a letter dated June 1, 1925, Upton Sinclair announced a revolutionary experiment: the petro-novel, a new category of fiction inspired by modernity’s most vexing paradoxes of fossil-fueled life. “This oil novel,” Sinclair predicted, “will be the best thing I have ever done.” Over the next ten months, that story poured out as a “gusher of words” to become the great American novel of petroleum power. By turns ardent family saga, scintillating potboiler, and anti-capitalist tirade, Sinclair’s 1926–27 tale warrants its exclamation mark. Oil! is an energetic tour de force whose plot goes everywhere. From ivory towers and gated estates to bleak frontiers of slow death, the book shows how a thirst for crude created new democratic dreams of freedom and their opposite. Through it all, the novel anticipates how the wreckage unleashed by big oil might lead to a greener, more inclusive world yet to come. It remains one of the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed.

Today the earth is on fire, and fossil fuel corporations keep raising the heat. Recent years have been the warmest on record, sparking waves of mass migration and accelerating die-offs, with no real cooldown in sight. In a way, we’re all to blame. Climate experts agree that the extreme weather of our time comes from human energy use. Northern countries like the U.S. have burned eons of accumulated hydrocarbons since the twentieth century’s dawn—too much and too fast for the planet to absorb them again, leading to a carbon cycle that’s perilously out of whack. But vowing to scale back and buy less, to burn less, won’t kill the flames. The truth is that twenty-five fossil fuel giants are responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions now, and a huge fraction of U.S. workers already live hand to mouth while energy earnings soar. Dismantling these institutions and their pyromaniacal profit-motives will require concerted action. It will require new intimacies across economic, racial, and gender lines. And it will require alternatives to very old habits of thinking that make it hard to conceive a world without oil. To avert a dead-end future for humans and our planetary kin, we must reimagine who we are, and in no time flat.

Oil! is the novel that best illuminates how we got here and that leaves the blueprint for a more equitable future out of its ashes. At its core is the story of a whole new kind of society being born through the early twentieth century, when elites learned how to control a petroleum-powered system of production; that system allowed a few white men to get rich quick by exploiting everyone else below them. It’s a system that has turned the world into the private landfill of oligarchs who have taken our land and labor and would now, in a final move, take a habitable future from us as well. But the novel shows that the story of oil isn’t a tale for all time. We can contest an unsustainable system of energy and work that took hold not long ago, when deep-pocketed corporations combined to let the world burn. A hundred years after fossil capitalism kicked into high gear, the question at the heart of Sinclair’s novel remains: How may we transition to a postcarbon democracy now? Oil! provides an outline for this urgent mission, the unmet demand on which all future life depends.

***

Sinclair’s novel is not called Oil; it’s Oil! Between June 2, 1926, and March 7, 1927, Sinclair published the novel unadorned—as just plain Oil—for readers of the Daily Worker, the national newspaper by the Communist Party USA. Only afterward did he learn that Walter Gilkyson had scooped him by publishing Oil in 1924, a novel prophesizing that “the wars that were fought in the past … will be fought for oil in the future.” Sinclair’s gimmick—the exclamation mark—let him skirt copyright protections for the text while also expressing his novel’s central narrative strategy. Instead of representing oil as a self-evident thing, Sinclair imbues it with a kaleidoscopic range of associations that reimagine it on visionary new terms: he suggests new language and material relations that readers might bring to life. The mark advertises oil’s potential for sparking extreme emotions: the freedom of the road, the euphoria of flight, the vertigo of sudden social transformation. As if bypassing language itself, the titular black column looks like a graphic insignia of a blowout or an oil gusher. Embossed on the first edition’s cover, Sinclair’s diacritical mark appears as a swollen line that echoes a derrick in the foreground. To read Oil!, it would seem, is to burn with the concentrated power of hydrocarbons themselves, as in chapter six’s “amazing spectacle” of overflowing oil. There, skyrocketing crude ignites into a “tower of flame,” the narrator writes: “the burning oil would hit the ground, and bounce up, and explode, and leap again and fall again.” A veritable exclamation mapped on to the world, the spectacle of gushing crude hints at how oil could convert into language and vice versa, how a lexical mark might become charged with the incandescent radiance of things.

As the action unfolds, Oil! slams on the brakes and develops a more counterintuitive approach—a poetics of the slow burn. Working to question the era’s subjective speed thrills, Sinclair teaches us bit by bit to see oil capitalism’s sheer scale and corruption, with attention to the gaping inequalities at its core. Early exuberance on the road shifts into uglier feelings of creeping dread, moral outrage, and anxious alarm as the novel follows oil’s tentacular spread. The hero’s gradual process of revelation is recapitulated by the reader as they go along and glean a more conscious understanding of oil—an understanding that, Sinclair hoped, might lead to more militant opposition to the fossil-fuel industry once the covers close.

***

The years surrounding Sinclair’s birth in 1878 represent one of the most decisive transitions in human history: it was the first decade fossil fuels provided more energy to societies than did traditional photosynthesis. Animating this transition was a shift from industrial economies of coal to the newly unlocked power of oil and natural gas. Countries like the U.S. were burning carbonized sunlight at an accelerating clip. In 1880, global oil production reached 4 megatons per year; by 1900, it had exploded to 22.5 megatons, and it quadrupled to nearly 100 megatons in 1920. This imbalance in the carbon cycle created the illusion that wealth could expand without limit—without needing larger factories or labor forces, stockpiled gold reserves, or overseas territories. Sinclair’s work brings attention to the toxic underside of these visions of prodigal growth: adulterated soil, smoldering skies, and dispossessive battles that erupted everywhere oil came to light.

Sinclair’s most influential bestsellers track a history of the planet’s escalating energy burn, now measurable as parts per million of atmospheric carbon (ppm) that linger in the air at this very moment. The Jungle (published in 1906, when the level of carbon in the atmosphere was 298 ppm), King Coal (1917, 302 ppm), and Oil! (1926–27, 309 ppm), constitute a loose trilogy of industrial energy novels, each examining an associated modern fuel system—respectively, cheap food, cheap coal, and cheap petroleum. Moving in an arc through the years of exponentially concentrated carbon inputs, together the three books trace modernity’s freedoms back to the violent capture of fuels, machines, and laboring bodies. The whole story of U.S. growth is recast as a tale of doubled exploitation: of caloric or mechanical fuel stocks, and of workforces battered in the era’s developmental storm. We see something, here, of the rationale behind the first energy systems studies in the nineteenth century, when physicists reduced all things to their potential for work. But against a scientific desire to foster more productive, and thus profitable, relations of labor, Sinclair lays bare the strange and bitter fruits of industrialized life.

In this suite of fictions, Sinclair gropes toward an account of how conflicts around energy created both civilization and its barbaric underbelly. Consider The Jungle, Sinclair’s first success. Below its immediate concern with the meat industry’s filth, The Jungle unfolds as a fable of energization. It reassembles the base material ties that bound cattle, chickens, and pigs with workers, who, like livestock defiled by food production, were degraded in the process of fueling modernity. On a surface level, The Jungle identifies the exploitation of human bodies with that of animals on the killing floor. Both feature within a coordinated energy system that benefits a capitalist class of profiteers. King Coal extended this approach by turning to America’s fossil economy. Unnerved by the violent suppression of a 1914 coal miners’ strike in Ludlow, Colorado, when a Rockefeller-owned coal company summoned state militia and paramilitary forces to their side, Sinclair represented miners’ attempts to contest elites by banding together, blocking extraction sites, and disrupting energy profit flows.

This radical imaginary of fuel was shaped by powerful exposés on corporate greed. Of particular influence was Ida M. Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904, 297.5 ppm), which showed how the Standard syndicate rose to dominance through the “ruthlessness and persistency” of its owner John D. Rockefeller. Tarbell’s book made Standard a bête noire of the political left, and it animated Sinclair’s thought. His energy fictions, however, are unique in two respects: their attention to the specific materiality of fuels like coal and oil, and how the production, consumption, and representation of those fuels shaped class conflicts around them. After a string of lukewarm successes in King Coal’s wake, Oil! marked a return to form. Namely, it revived King Coal’s coming-of-age script, which followed a privileged youth, Hal Warner, from juvenile irresolution to a more mature understanding of coal capitalism’s harms. Oil! traces the maturation of James Ross Jr., aka Bunny, aka “the young oil prince,” the sensitive heir to an energy fortune who grows to renounce his class commitments while meeting the era’s have-nots. Oil!’s opening in 1912 also identifies it as a creative child of another work: Tarbell’s History. In 1911, the U.S. government ruled Standard Oil in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and broke it into thirty-four regional companies—a liberal democratic victory that Tarbell’s bombshell spurred. But retrenchment followed. Out of Standard’s split was born a revenant era of collusion between a few oil oligopolies that swallowed or squeezed out the last independents. It was a stunning counterformation that, for Sinclair, raised a larger creative question: How might a work of fiction provide an alternative to oil capitalism that works like The History of Standard Oil could not?

***

To truly answer that question, it helps to understand how Sinclair recast conventions of fiction-making in general. Strictly speaking, all modern novels are oil novels. Choose your favorite story and you’ll find petroleum powering plots and shaping subjectivities. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925, 305 ppm) casts its hero’s gleaming car collection as a sign of nouveau riche aspirations, while Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1927, 306 ppm) turns the meandering movements of aircraft and automobile into twin allegories for personhood as Clarissa Dalloway’s stream of consciousness finds an echo in London’s incessant hum. Gasoline and diesel, desire and subjecthood: once you pay attention, it’s hard to miss how hydrocarbons beat beneath literature’s rising pulse, covertly animating its fictions of being and belonging, personal development and social transformation.

There are good reasons why oil poured into literature at this time. Between 1900 and 1930, global oil production surged some 300 percent amid a vogue for petroleum-powered motoring. Oil’s inroads on the streets were flanked by its expanding embrace over the seas and skies. And these mechanical marvels were supplemented by an avalanche of cheap petro-goods, including fertilizers and pesticides, vinyl records, and a thousand plastic products that saturated middle-class households in northern nations like the U.S.

Here’s the catch: novels rarely represent oil as actual oil. When writers refine petroleum into art, it floats off into the realm of what is generally known without being thought about much, if at all. As capitalism’s Ur-commodity, oil remains what Karl Marx called “a thing which transcends sensuousness”: something magically divorced from the sweat, grit, and blood that conjured it forth. Cooked over millennia from ancient algae, oil collects deep underground before faraway workers harvest it. The Anglo-American novel may be ill-suited to represent realities at this scale, as Amitav Ghosh suggested in an influential review of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt quintet (1984–89, 344–353 ppm). What’s clear is that the industry has worked to perfect its own disappearing act. Sites of petro-extraction are scrupulously screened from view, and recovered crude circulates without a trace through a grid of pipelines, terminals, refineries, and gas pumps. That grid reaches collective consciousness only in instances of specularized disruption; for every oil rig explosion or pipeline protest that makes the news, 101 million barrels go without saying each day.

That’s why Oil! is such an astonishing read. It’s one of few fictions to thematize oil culture and to lay bare what Marx called “the hidden abode of production,” where workers transform crude into a refined resource for capitalists. Published in the exact window when little oil became big, it dramatizes how oil flooded U.S. society only to fade from view. Moving beyond the terrible deeds of one corporation or another, à la Tarbell’s History, Sinclair uncovers a massive web of social, cultural, and economic conditions that typified the oil era: not only new class relations but desires, routines, assumptions, and affects that made the industry difficult to reform, and that Sinclair sought ultimately to reinvent.

***

Oil! is about the rise of the Los Angeles area where Sinclair lived from 1915 on. Edward L. Doheny (the model for Bunny’s father, James Ross Sr.) first discovered petroleum in LA in 1892. Thirty years after, the region exploded into a global petroleum center that gave the twenties their roar. In early 1920, oil operators opened a reservoir in Huntington Beach, and shortly after there was a world historical discovery in Long Beach, near Sinclair’s home, that spawned a forest of derricks. Soon Southern California would vie with Texas and Tulsa as the nation’s leading oil zone. The sorcery of petrodollars turned dry farmland into meccas for finance and banking, manufacture, real estate, and entertainment. In 1927, The New Republic observed that “this steady, speedy growth is the one most important thing to understand about L.A. … It creates an easy optimism, a lazy prosperity which dominates peoples’ lives. Anything seems possible; the future is yours and the past?—there isn’t any.” For many, oil marked a terminus to history—it was a forever era of unlimited growth.

But not for all. In The New Republic’s disavowal of the past, we see a negation of racial and economic populations that had historically enabled California’s development, including Indigenous, Black, Asian, and Hispanic communities left out in the rush. Many felt the region’s petro-development as a curse, as thousands of people found themselves displaced and penniless in speculative financial scrambles. While oil sparked collective hopes of transformed life, it deepened disparities between workers and owners on the ground. And while it inspired omnipotent fantasies of annihilating space and time on the road, it made everywhere look the same. Sinclair shows how the region’s neatly manicured suburbs, shopping centers, and picture palaces were enabled by wastescapes like nowhere on Earth—and how oil optimism often proved to be cruel.

Over the first half of Oil!, Ross Sr. (called Dad) acquires a slew of oil wells around LA (“Angel City”) and sells to opposed nations in World War I, thus catapulting his son into the good life. Bunny cavorts with the hoi polloi as big oil transforms the nation’s every aspect. The tide of petro-influence flows from oil’s hidden sacrifice zones to the loftiest civil institutions. Thus Bunny’s education at Southern Pacific University (a thinly disguised University of Southern California) unfolds as an exercise in oil refinement, as Dad’s fortune gets cleansed—refined—through Bunny’s schooling. Over the second half of the novel, Bunny encounters more and more workers trampled by petro-culture’s spread. Each fresh oil strike results in a more massive labor strike, just as petroleum “storage tanks” expand alongside the jail “tanks” for insurgent workers. It’s a brutally mounting class conflict, a dialectic of creative destruction that turns Bunny into a prodigal son. Though he’s forced to become an adult petro-subject—an individual defined by oil-based labor, leisure, and movement—he renounces life as a commercial oilman like his father, and works to advance another world beyond oil capitalism’s reach.

Oil! begins with petroleum’s signature thrill ride. “The ground went in long waves,” the narrator begins, “a slow ascent and then a sudden dip; you climbed, and went swiftly over—but you had no fear, for you knew the magic ribbon would be there, clear of obstructions, unmarred by bump or scar, waiting the passage of inflated rubber wheels revolving seven times a second.” In this tableau of freedom, the two Rosses barrel down the highway along as if transcending time, space, and social attachments. Note the invisible infrastructure of Sinclair’s prose: its syntactic cabling of semicolons, commas, and dashes mimics the feeling of the road itself. Sinclair is coyly inviting readers to join in petroleum’s pleasures, though the larger point seems clear: history and context seem to vanish in oil’s thrall. “The past is past,” Dad tells his son, “or shall we say that the passed are passed?”

Such speed won’t last forever. After stopping for gas, the Rosses move though a newly manufactured landscape of roadside motels, diners, and shopping centers before reaching a political boss’s back room. We come full circle here: when Dad greases the boss’s palm to get a public road built up to his oil field, it’s to show that sovereign petro-freedoms depend on crime and corruption. Oil kings make the law for others, not for themselves. It’s the first of many escalating transgressions that Dad is forced to make. Though he’s a benevolent man, he gets caught in the compulsory workings of an oil game that will seal his fate for the worse.

All roads lead back to the oil field: petro-modernity’s turbulent contact zone where human and nonhuman systems meet. Its most iconic image is the blowout, which Sinclair’s contemporaries represented as a free gift of nature: an orgasmic flood that rises without human hardship and that promises freedom from work and want to all in its radius. That fantasy inspired Sinclair’s working title, “Flowing Gold,” and it animates Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation of the novel There Will Be Blood (2007, 383 ppm), when Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview, betrays a rare half smile when gushing crude comes into open sight. Yet the novel redescribes the blowout as a spectacle of ruin for the lower-class communities forced to sell their land and labor. Through a sequence of increasingly grim eruptions, it becomes clear that oil spells disaster for workers who “stagger … to stop the flow” in harm’s way. So the novel gets “greasy” as love of oil converts to creeping hate, and as Bunny’s feelings of freedom and filial devotion become tainted by crude actualities at modernity’s base.

***

But aversion remains an attachment, and mixed feelings get us nowhere. In our warming world today, there’s much to revile about the stuff: we know that burned carbon will soon slam the door on a habitable multispecies future. Yet the urgent need to transition from oil has been blocked not least because there remains much to love. Petroleum has supplied an aspirational middle-class dream of the good life that, however residual, lingers in the pursuit of spacious suburban homes, long summer road trips, and a towering mountain of plastic gadgets. Like a bad romance of catastrophic dimensions, it’s a dream that persists even as the tides swell at our feet. We may know this in our bones, just as surely as petrochemical remnants build up in our bodies. But we’ve yet to abandon the rituals and relations that oil has helped materialize.

This impasse suggests that oil is more than just a liquid compound or a set of commodity relations. It animates a broader cultural system: a grid of forms and feelings that makes oil seem desirable, indeed inevitable, even when we scorn its ills. This system has fostered a shared sense of helplessness as today’s climate emergency mounts. Many understand that the time horizon for averting the worst outcomes means making big, systemic changes to how society is produced. But amid petro-culture’s continued dominance, it’s hard to imagine any action except shrinking one’s own carbon footprint—and fine-tuned consumption choices, we may feel, aren’t enough to make corporations keep oil underground.

Consider Sinclair himself. On June 23, 1921, the Shell cartel struck a 114-foot gusher not far from his Pasadena home. That discovery launched the entire California oil rush (represented in Oil!’s “Prospect Hill” chapters). In the throes of oil mania, Sinclair’s wife, Mary Kimbrough, acquired two land lots and met with other landowners to fix a joint price. Yet these “communal meetings” disintegrated into heated arguments about who merited more of the takings. The episode sparked Sinclair’s idea for an “oil novel” about how petroleum corrodes democratic norms. But the irony remains: what inspired Sinclair’s critique of oil capitalism was also an occasion for personal profiteering. The windfall became complete in November 1926, when Sinclair typed “The End” just as Kimbrough cashed in her land.

In this anecdote we see the strange double binds at the petro-era’s core. Given its importance as modernity’s lifeblood, how could one not want what oil has enabled, even when lamenting its dire effects? As you read, watch for Oil!’s celebration of the open road and its delight at goods like “lovely tar,” which sometimes eclipse Sinclair’s critical aims. It’s a procedural problem that Oil! never resolves, but rather that converts into a source of ongoing fictional intrigue. How to more properly hate oil, in other words, becomes both an ideological impasse and a literary plot. The central chapters trace a hulking oil “machinery” that turns crude into a foundation for life as usual. Its gears go from the nation’s homes, offices, and universities to its citadels of governance and far-flung locations of culture.

The work of this machine can be distilled down to a word: refinement. Literally, refinement names crude’s conversion into a suite of fractionated goods, as illustrated when Bunny visits his father’s refinery to see how “black and greasy” crude transforms into innumerable colors and consistencies. The scene, Sinclair’s largest addition to Oil!’s single-volume edition, underscores the novel’s abiding fascination with refinement. From a single cache of hydrocarbons, the narrator explains, “you got gasoline of several qualities, and kerosene and benzene and naphtha.” But refinement begins only in the processing plant. It continues when oil becomes culture—a suite of fractionated feelings, desires, experiences, and attachments rooted in hydrocarbons. The relentless nature of this process extends the technique of continuous distillation, which eliminated time between refinement cycles and revved up petroleum production to new economies of scale.

Of special significance are emergent mass media forms that “manufacture culture wholesale”: nationally distributed newspapers, magazines, films, and radio broadcasts. It’s a biting critique of the petro-culture industry, and above all of the Hollywood studio system. Historically, Hollywood’s development coincided with the California oil trade. Beginning as a minor shooting location in 1910, Hollywood was synonymous with commercial filmmaking by 1930. Production crews came for the region’s ample sunshine and shooting locations and grew thanks to the virulently anti-union conditions fostered by the oil lobby. And vice versa: major motion picture studios were vital to petro-capitalism’s growth. As cinema became big business, narratives and newsreels about class conflict vanished, and representations of oil worker strikes declined in favor of big, splashy melodramas that celebrated the nation’s high-energy existence. In an era when many people went to the movies weekly, this transition represented a cultural sea change.

In the novel, Sinclair shows how film and oil came of age together. Just as a few studios start to dominate film development, publicity, and ticket sales, a few oil oligopolies push the last independents aside. Dad is forced to partner with the aptly named Vernon Roscoe (modeled on Harry F. Sinclair of Sinclair Oil) to create a consolidated chain of oil fields, refineries, and gas stations. The alliance is embodied by Roscoe’s affair with the starlet Annabelle Ames. But the ties that bound oil and cinema find fullest illustration in Bunny’s romance with Viola Tracy. As Bunny’s petro-fortune grows, Vee’s fame mounts through a wave of pro-oil films, the last of which features an autocrat who gives “one of the biggest of Roumanian [sic] oil fields … to an American syndicate.”

There’s a clear parable of power here: modern media emerged as a vital handmaiden to oil’s legitimation. When we go to the movies or pick up a magazine, we unconsciously consume oil—once a resource for film stock—as refined art and culture. Within this parable, however, the novel embeds another allegory of love—for Bunny cannot help but pine after Vee even long after he understands that she’s in cahoots with big oil. She remains a charismatic presence to the end—a object of ruinous devotion he’s learned to disclaim but can’t quite let go of. The attachment shadows his later feelings for Rachel Menzies and Ruth Watkins, and it uncannily connects him with Roscoe. It’s possible to love what hurts us long into adulthood, Sinclair shows, and abhorring oil’s harms doesn’t necessarily issue in new conditions of living.

Thus Oil!’s refinement plot moves beyond the initial commodity chain linking Dad’s oil fields to gas stations, factories, and homes. We cannot understand oil’s taken-for-granted nature, Sinclair suggests, without understanding how it gets further diffused into so much modern art, entertainment, and news. That’s why the novel never defines what oil is, much less depicts it as an inherently evil thing. Far from an essential substance, oil names something like a process: a web of material and cultural relations that unfold in time. There’s solace in this view. By writing a novel that assembles myriad genres bound up in oil’s construction, and by representing those constructions as constructions, Sinclair makes a claim for fiction as a master genre to contain them all. Oil! tells a more “wholesale” story of how culture gets manufactured from oil—and, in the process, it gets us outside the machine.

***

At times, Oil! is haunted by significant silences and distortions of its own. In conceiving a “great” and “American” petro-novel, Sinclair struggled to represent realities of race and empire that his subject forced him to confront. Explicitly, oil workers appear as “all white Americans,” while Sinclair ignores antiblack hiring practices that produced an exclusionary workforce. Throughout the novel, non-white people remain on the symbolic side of the road and outside the fold of U.S. petro-culture. The same goes for the wider world. While charting the global drama of petro-violence in World War I, when oil became a prime resource for fueling ships, airplanes, land craft, and munitions, the text leaves out a significant slice of the planet. Oil! details Romanian and Russian petro-conflicts while remaining mostly mute on of black and brown struggles in Mexico, Trinidad, and Venezuela. Mosul, in modern-day Iraq, appears as depopulated land. Sinclair’s myth of white oil blunts his attention to petro-modernity’s wellsprings throughout the Global South, and it blinds him to racial struggles at home.

What Oil! rightly intuits, in the end, is that oil capitalism is an unsustainable juggernaut: a system designed to feed on stolen labor, life, and land until everything burns. It’s a system in which new middle-class dreams of the good life go hand in hand with increased lower-class suffering and levels of ruling-class excess. It demands collective change. Sinclair never actively advocates a transition from oil per se. Yet the entire narrative bends in that direction. One way forward involves the path of reform. Having wandered across modernity’s mineral landscapes, Bunny commits to “overthrow capitalism by the ballot,” believing that democracy can be wrested from corporate oil owners and their shills. Only should this mission fail, Bunny says, will “direct action” follow. The pronouncement threads the needle between Sinclair’s socialism and the more revolutionary ideals of the Daily Worker. “Boring from within,” and delaying full-bore insurrection, becomes the novel’s theoretical creed.

In practice, however, everything leads to more radical conclusions. Take the Teapot Dome affair in which Dad gets snared. Between 1921 and 1923, Edward L. Doheny became embroiled in one of the nation’s most sensational scandals before the Watergate affair: he was charged with presenting a $100,000 bribe to President Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, in exchange for rights to Navy oil lands in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills and Buena Vista in California. Oil! hews closely to these details. Dad/Doheny’s reputation gets tarnished while the worst get off unscathed. For Sinclair, the episode illustrates the petro-era’s accelerating death spiral, as the criminally rich shove their last well-meaning associates aside to take what’s left from the rest. Like Joe Gundha, the roughneck who falls into one of Dad’s oil shafts, the nation seems poised to drown.

Or erupt into flames. While abroad in chapter twenty, Bunny learns of Paradise’s incineration in “the worst oil fire in California history.” The episode recalls the first blowout’s “masses of flame” in a catastrophic mode. “Enormous oceans of flame” pour out of Paradise, flowing “over the earth, turning night into day with the glare, turning day into night with thunder clouds of smoke; rivers of blazing oil rushing down the valleys.” In this scene of roiling oceans and earth, underground crude consumes the world that it’s spawned, converting into climate and weird weather. Sinclair alludes here to the 1926 California Union Oil fires, then the industry’s worst ecocatastrophe. In Oil!, that fire signals an eviction from Paradise and a portent of civilizational doom. Everything calls for more urgent action. Each detail serves as an indictment of Dad’s mantra that “the world has got to have oil.” Having oil might mark the end of all things, and a society conjured by gushing crude may leave a blown-out world in its wake.

***

Through the heat, Oil! offers hope for our troubled times. The final chapters trace the growth of visionary counter-publics from below. In the Oil Workers’ Union, the Young Peoples’ Socialist League, and the Industrial Workers of the World, we see Oil!’s outcast dreamers, drifters, and rebels coalesce into a more powerful whole. Their attempts at organization show that the workers most oppressed by big oil have an untapped power to block its survival. By virtue of their location at the industry’s front lines—manning oil wells, refineries, and transport nodes—they’re poised for strikes and disruptions that can thwart business as usual, thereby forcing owners and elected officials to accept democratic demands. This insight makes Sinclair into an aesthetic “organizer” like Bunny’s beloved friend, the political organizer Paul Watkins. It’s an undertaking that culminates in Bunny’s proposed labor college—an institution dedicated to teaching the lessons about oil that, in effect, the novel itself has provided for its Daily Worker readers. To be founded near “Mount Hope,” the college evokes a greener world beyond oil capitalism’s maw, a “valley of new dreams” where a revitalized labor movement might emerge after its defeats in the twenties. In it, we’re invited to glimpse a future where energy could be owned and controlled publicly, by all, and we’re asked to foster such a world after reaching the novel’s end.

The future is here. It’s not over the horizon, but imminent in the pulse of your blood and the words you’re using now. Entrenched systems of domination work by appearing permanent, unbending, but that is only oil capitalism’s illusion. Today’s extractive economy has left a few wealthy men at top of the heap, dictating life and law for everyone else while weakening the ground beneath our feet. At a time when intervening in the climate emergency tends to stop at adjusting one’s personal carbon footprint, Oil! teaches us to think bigger about collective change. It invites us to see who profits from our every act of combustion, and who loses. And it reminds us that the system set up to benefit the profiteering class doesn’t follow from the chemistry of the earth. A small subset of humans shaped it not long ago. We can reshape it now. The brief, surreal epoch of fossil-fueled civilization will surely end, but a just and timely transition can’t unfold from above, and private market work-arounds won’t get us free. A truly mass movement is needed, as Sinclair predicted. His Old Left commitments remind us that those who work to live aren’t just victims of oil but political subjects with vested interest in its defeat.

We can’t know how a post-petroleum world will look or feel, but we know that we must build it now. There’s time to avert the worst-case scenarios here and now, in an era that rivals the gilded-age disparities of Sinclair’s world of the twenties. We inhabitants of fossil modernity’s twilight are acting on a planetary scale by what we do—or fail to do—at this moment. Our decisions matter. Our dreams, stories, and actions matter to the world we’re imparting. Will we do better than those that lived through the dawn of the oil age? Can we embrace the possibilities for transformation that an earlier era left unfulfilled? The answers will determine how all future generations tell our story, and shape the outlines of a world for which we have no name.

 

Adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Oil! by Upton Sinclair, to be published in April by Penguin Classics. 

Michael Tondre is an associate professor at Stony Brook University and the author of The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender.

Gaddis/Markson: Two Letters

William Gaddis and David Markson. Courtesy of the estate of William Gaddis.

Although William Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions, is now regarded as one of the great American novels of the second half of the twentieth century, it was panned upon its publication in March 1955. Among the early few who recognized its greatness was the future novelist David Markson, who read it shortly after it came out, was so impressed that he reread it a month or two later, and then decided to write Gaddis a fan letter. Too depressed by the book’s reviews, Gaddis filed away the letter unanswered. Markson proselytized vigorously on the novel’s behalf over the next six years: he talked the publisher Aaron Asher into reissuing the remaindered novel in paperback, and in his own first novel, Epitaph for a Tramp, Markson included a scene in which the detective protagonist is poking around a literature student’s apartment and finds in the typewriter the conclusion to an essay: “And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—” Learning of Markson’s efforts from another fan named Tom Jenkins, Gaddis finally answered Markson’s 1955 letter: “After lo these many (six) years.” They would continue to correspond and saw each other occasionally until Gaddis’s death in 1998.

Markson opens the exchange with a canceled salutation to a minor character in The Recognitions who receives a long, rambling letter, and he continues with allusions to other characters, books, and topics in the novel, rendered in Gaddis’s style.

—Steven Moore

717 Greenwich Street
New York City
11 June 55

Dear Dr. Weisgall William Gaddis:

Christ. Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ. What I want to know is, outside of perhaps The Destruction of the Destruction of the Destruction, what the hell is left to write? Or read, I mean Chrahst! This drunk staggers up to a sandwich man in Times Square, seeing: Filth in our food, spit in Pepsi Cola, free circular … and lurches off screaming: “Jesus, now there’s nothin left to eat even!” Which is how you make me feel. Of course there’s always the chance of Otto’s Return (to Sorrento?) or, say, They Survived: The Saga of Mr. Inononu and Mr. Schmuck, or even Daddy Was a Monk, by the Bildow baby’s baby (as told to of course Max), but why bother? I mean, Chrahst!

But thanks anyhow.

I get it: the method and the matter, although sometimes less of the matter than I might, lacking certain knowledges; but when where the matter is, as it were, foreign, the patterns are there, and more’s the pity if all the expansion can’t be followed. But then hell, you do explain everything, one time or another, in literal terms: I mean Valentine does actually tell him [Wyatt] he’ll eat his father, and his father does actually tell him that when a king is eaten there’s sacrament, and he does actually say his father was a king; or if you miss the poodle running in circles, can you also miss the uneven teeth and the shape of the ears, or lavender used as a “medium”? (Forgive this: I’m merely trying to indicate awareness of more than the literal.) It’s a remarkably great book, and if there have been two (which I know of) which came before it, the step you’ve taken beyond them is this: that you not only relate present to past (act to myth, I mean Chrahst) but also present to present, reducing things so delightfully to absurdities, yet destroying them not. (I might say “a little always sticks,” or would that be pressing it?) And what in hell am I doing telling you what you’ve done, when all I want to say is … (My, your friend is writing for a rather small audience, isn’t he?) … all I want to say is that if I didn’t write the book myself in another life then you wrote it for … (O Doctor, how the meek presume) … for me. And so thanks.

Listen: what I mean is, there are “moments of exaltation” in discovery, also. And obviously I don’t merely mean that I “get it.” There are things like, say, Anselm, after raving, suddenly: “A duet … sung by women, women’s voices,” or … say, Esme, alone … or for Christ sake even poor old Mr. Feddle and that faked dust jacket. And God God the laughter, and where were you when the … Oh the hell, I just thought you would be pleased to know that someone knows what Gaddis hath wrought.

Thanks.

Does this make any sense? I don’t write to “authors” (although I must admit I’ve been known to scribble authors’ inscriptions in friends’ books—bibles only—and damn it no matter how far beyond it all a guy thinks he is, you do manage to have him squirming at times). Anyhow, nothing is intended here. Probably there is a customary way: Dear Mr. Gaddis, I just loved your gorgeous book and I think Mithra is so charming and … I ask you, if Rose was mad, is rose madder?

Do you know Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano? It is the only other thing I know outside of Joyce with so much “amplifying experience” tied together so well. (The terms are difficult to avoid; I mean much more than that.) Anyhow I don’t know many better compliments than the comparison. Or do I sound like the reviews: this book must be compared to Ulysses BUT. God, how they are unaware of the self-devastation of their own ironies, or for that matter of their ironies themselves. Must be compared but: and oh, the militant stupidity of that piece by Granville Hicks [in the New York Times Book Review]. What a charming bloody situation it is when you have to accustom yourself to the profound subtleties of their unawareness in order to know which books are probably worth reading. But what the hell, a work of art is more than a think of “perfect necessity”; it is also an undeniable fact. It exists. Est ergo est. And damned few other brands can make that statement.

In the Viareggio [a bar in the novel]:

—Willie Gaddis? Who doesn’t know him?
—If you can call my mother Jocasta, and me narcissistic …
—That book. He used to run into Harcourt Brace twice a week screaming about this great conversation he heard last night, he had to get it in.
—Listen, your mother still slips a toothbrush into her purse before she goes out to the bar.
—Well, a couple hundred pages, but I mean Chrahst, so the guy’s read everything, I mean why bother …
—My mother …
—I know this guy, says it’s the best book in years. Symbolic for Christ sake. I mean anything that’s a little obscure …

Listen, listen, listen: this could go on forever. You done good, which is all there is to say. If you are ever around I would very much like to catch you for a drink or two (above Fourteenth Street) but that is neither here nor there. But you’ve heard the bells, ringing you on, and what else matters?

With much admiration,

David Markson

 

New York City 3, New York
28 February 1961

Dear David Markson.

After lo these many (six) years—or these many low (sick) years—if I can presume to answer yours dated 11 June ’55: I could evade embarrassment by saying that it had indeed been misdirected to Dr. Weisgall and reached me only now, but I’m afraid you know us both too well. In fact I was in low enough state for a good while after the book came out that I could not find it in me to answer letters that said anything, only those (to quote yours again) that offered “I just loved your gorgeous book and I think Mithra is so charming …” Partly appalled at what I counted then the book’s apparent failure, partly wearied at the prospect of contention, advice and criticism, and partly just drained of any more supporting arguments, as honestly embarrassed at high praise as resentful of patronizing censure. And I must say, things (people) don’t change, just get more so; and I think there is still the mixture, waiting to greet such continuing interest as yours, of vain gratification and fear of being found out, still ridden with the notion of the people as a fatuous jury (counting reviewers as people), publishers the police station house (where if as I trust you must have some experience of being brought in, you know what I mean by their dulled but flattering indifference to your precious crime: they see them every day), and finally the perfect book as, inevitably, the perfect crime (the point of this last phrase being, for some reason which insists further development of this rambling metaphor, that the criminal is never caught). So, as you may see by the letterhead on the backside here, I am hung up with an operation of international piracy that deals in drugs, writing speeches on the balance of payments deficit but mostly staring out the window, serving the goal that Basil Valentine damned in “the people, whose idea of necessity is paying the gas bill” … (a little frightening how easily it all comes back). But sustained by the secret awareness that the secret police, Jack Green and yourself and some others, may expose it all yet.

This intervention by Tom Jenkins was indeed a happy accident (though, to exhaust the above, there are no accidents in Interpol), and I was highly entertained by the page-in-the-typewriter in your Epitaph for a Tramp. I of course had to go back and find the context (properly left-handed), then back to the beginning to find the context of the context, and finally through to the end and your fine cool dialogue (monologue) which I envied and realized how far all that had come since ’51 and 2, how refined from such crudities as “Daddy-o, up in thy way-out pad …” And it being the only “cop story” (phrase via Tom Jenkins) or maybe second or third that I’ve read, had a fine time with it. (And not that you’d entered it as a Great Book; but great God! have you seen the writing in such things as Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder? Can one ever cease to be appalled at how little is asked?)

I should add I am somewhat stirred at the moment regarding the possibility of being exhumed in paperback, one of the “better” houses (Meridian) has apparently made an offer to Harcourt Brace, who since they brought it out surreptitiously in ’55 have seemed quite content to leave it lay where Jesus flung it, but now I gather begin to suspect that they have something of value and are going to be quite as brave as the dog in the manger about protecting it. Though they may surprise me by doing the decent and I should not anticipate their depravity so high-handedly I suppose. Very little money involved but publication (in the real sense of the word) which might be welcome novelty.

And to really wring the throat of absurdity—having found publishers a razor’s edge tribe between phoniness and dishonesty—I have been working on a play, a presently overlong and overcomplicated and really quite straight figment of the Civil War: publishers almost shine in comparison to the show-business staples, as “I never read anything over a hundred pages“ or, hefting the script, (without opening it), “Too long.” The consummate annoyance though being that gap between reading the press (publicity) interview-profile of a currently successful Broadway director whose lament over the difficulty of getting hold of “plays of ideas” simply rings in one’s head as one’s agent, having struggled through it, shakes his head in baleful awe and delivers the hopeless compliment, “… but it’s a play of ideas”—a real escape hatch for everybody in the “game” (a felicitous word) whose one idea coming and going is $. And I’m behaving as though all this is news to me.

Incidentally—or rather not incidentally at all, quite hungrily—Jenkins mentioned from a letter of yours a most provocative phrase from a comment by Malcolm Lowry on The Recognitions which whetted my paranoid appetite, I am most curious to know what he might have said about it (or rather what he did say about it, with any thorns left on). I cannot say I read his book which came out when I was in Mexico, 1947 as I remember, and I started it, found it coming both too close to home and too far from what I thought I was trying to do, and lost or had it lifted from me before I ever resolved things. (Yes, in my case one of the books that the book-club ads blackmail the vacuum with “Have you caught yourself saying Yes, I’ve been meaning to read it …” (they mean Exodus).) But I am picking up a copy for a new look. Good luck on your current obsession.

with best regards,

W. Gaddis

 

Gaddis’s letter to Markson will be published by New York Review Books in The Letters of William Gaddis in November 2023.

William Gaddis (1922–1998) was born in Manhattan and reared on Long Island. The Recognitions was published in 1955 to largely negative reviews, though it found an underground following. J R, his second novel, and A Frolic of His Own, his fourth novel, both won the National Book Award. 

David Markson (1927–2010) was born in Albany and lived in New York City until his death. His novels include Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block, Springer’s Progress, and Vanishing Point.

What Is This Video? Three Recommendations

Detail from the title sequence of Peter Chung’s Æon Flux.

What is this video? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. They get stuck; they struggle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the process—children are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title—“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”—from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White sets the video’s banal footage to Arvo Pärt’s solemn “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,” complete with periodically tolling bell.

The video’s appeal is its constant oscillation between tragedy and, well, bathos. At first, the video seems like a funny TikTok—grand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, silly suburban fish situation. Ha. But then it goes on for almost eight minutes? Just as Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” becomes a gorgeous and resigned dirge when slowed down (recommend), something about the dilation of time changes the tonality of White’s video. It creates space for an aesthetically sensible movement between the video’s contradictory tonal cues. This extension of time allows for multiple and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. You can really feel this circulation when you’re watching it—feel the way your own feeling turns into its apparent opposite, and back.

I’ve returned to this video repeatedly since I first saw it last year. It has a total of 110 views as of February 1, at least ten of which are mine. Sometimes I notice the way the tumble of the fish’s bodies looks like a Renaissance etching of sinners tumbling into hell; sometimes I notice the bearded man’s camo pants; sometimes I notice the confused pathos of the man who leans out to touch the knot of disoriented trout—and I feel, like him, the terror of the fish, and sadness for them. Like the fish, I feel the force of the cues at play—for them, it’s water pushing one way; for me, it’s the music’s command to FEEL! PATHOS NOW!, which also has the ironic overlay of saying how silly it is, to feel that. But I resist: I don’t like being told what to feel, and if I do feel something like mourning, maybe I’m a fool. Maybe those feelings are out of scale, out of tune with the world as it actually is. Or maybe when I see this situation as ridiculous, and I’ve accepted a certain kind of banality, that’s when I’m out of tune with the world as it actually is. Maybe this tube leads to death. Or maybe it leads to another slightly larger holding tank that is just fine.

— Kirsten (Kai) Ihns, reader

Barn sour, an equestrian term, describes a domesticated horse who doesn’t want to leave its home. A barn sour horse will resist being taken from its stable, often violently. If they are forced out, they might bolt back home, throwing their rider off their back, sometimes trampling them. The term has been taken as the name for a mysterious sound-collage artist from Winnipeg, Canada. I came across Barn Sour’s tape horses fucked over the head with bricks in late 2019, on which sparse harmonies on a detuned piano are dubbed over recordings of manic laughter and guttural glossolalia. It is just under nine minutes long, incredibly disturbing, and absolutely mesmerizing. It was released under two pseudonyms, one of which is C. Lara, the name of a real racehorse. The other is James Druck, a long-dead fraudster implicated in a scheme to kill show horses in order to collect insurance money. (James Druck’s daughter, whose childhood horse was among the horses killed, is also the inspiration for a central character in Jay McInerney’s novel Story of My Life.)

I feel like I’m watching scenes from a horror movie on a deteriorating VHS tape in a large, cold, empty house: the gruesome images are hard to make out; I can’t tell if the fuzziness is making the experience more or less fascinating or nauseating. Most of Barn Sour’s releases have titles invoking an esoteric reference to equine terminology. Soap & Glue, their compendium album, released by Penultimate Press this year, takes its name from two products historically made from ground-up horse parts. It’s a suitable name for the album, which is full of reworkings and rebludgeonings of their previously released material—but also because it is billed as Barn Sour’s final release, their death, their body of work ground to a pulp. Join them for a final foal-y à deux before they trot back to their barn for good.

—Troy Schipdam, reader

While visiting my hometown this winter, mildly jet-lagged, I started waking up at 4 A.M. To kill time before the sun rose, I’d watch an animated sci-fi show from the early nineties. Æon Flux—which aired between 1991 and 1995 as a series of six experimental films on MTV’s late-night showcase for indie animators—is perfectly suited for the borderland between dreaming and consciousness. In the iconic title sequence, an insect lands on a woman’s cheek and crawls into her open, pupilless eye only to be captured in its lashes, as in a Venus flytrap, when the lids snap shut. The eye reopens and the pupil swivels into place, bringing its prey into focus. Many of the elements that earned the show its cult following are there in the intro: hallucinatory images, biopunk body augmentation, a bit of eroticized violence. Set in an ultramodern dystopia, Æon Flux follows the titular character, a femme fatale–type (slicked-down black hair, violet irises, bondage gear) who works as an assassin for the resistance. We quickly learn that Æon is a morally ambiguous antiheroine traveling between two competing societies: the anarchic Monica and the technocratic police state Bregna, ruled by an Aryan-blond despot (and Æon’s nemesis-lover) called Trevor Goodchild. Æon is frequently killed and reincarnated before the credits roll.

Æon Flux is a masterpiece of visual storytelling. Its early episodes are free of dialogue and instead rely heavily on clusters of impressions and shifts in perspective. Influenced by Egon Schiele, the French cartoonist Moebius, and manga artists like Kazuo Umezu and Osamu Tezuka, the creator and director Peter Chung’s style is defined by expressive lines. He prioritizes evocative character design—elongated, sinewy figures, angular architecture—over surface detail. The series is a combination of fetish content, classic sci-fi, and, according to some fan theories, Gnostic symbolism. In one episode, the body of a soldier is reanimated so his belly can be used to gestate a godlike being with an iridescent halo. In another, a woman’s shattered vertebra is surgically removed, allowing her to rotate her body a full 360 degrees, and replaced with a device that reseals her spinal column with the push of a button. Late in the series, Æon clones her own body in a biotech laboratory, and, in a campy allusion to Narcissus and his reflection, she kisses her surrogate self as she emerges from a pool of water.

Consuming a nonstop stream of images like this for a few hours each morning, under my parents’ roof once more, left me feeling delirious and impossibly old. But Chung’s characters, with their contortionist acrobatics and cyberpunk experiments, also plucked the string inside me that tethers me to my kid self, the one who read books about dystopian futures, kissed girls in their bedroom once their parents had gone to sleep, and tried to decide what they wanted to do with their body.

—Jay Graham, reader