The Paris Review's Blog, page 68

Announcing Our Winter Issue

Friends sometimes ask me why I still bother going to the theater. It’s a fair question. Most of the time, I’ll mention a play only to complain about it at length—the pretentious set design, the hammy performances, the man in the audience who laughed very loudly to show that he’d understood the joke. Does any other art form have such a low hit rate? Yet I persist, because of the few plays that manage, in some way, to alter me—and on those rare occasions when they do, the years of disappointment only heighten my elation.

Our new Winter issue is not actually devoted to the theater, but several of the pieces we chose do capture the same miraculous thrill I experience when plays go right. There is, for instance, Isabella Hammad’s “Gertrude,” in which a London actor finds herself part of a troupe putting on Hamlet in the West Bank. You’ll also find an excerpt from Old Actress, a new play by Lucas Hnath. It’s set in the living room of a woman who is struggling to memorize her lines for a production of a play called Death Tax (also by Hnath) and who has enlisted a younger and far less successful actor to help her learn them. On the page, the script’s dialogue looks worryingly avant-garde—the punctuation and spacing are a copyeditor’s nightmare. But read aloud—my deputy, Lidija, and I tried it, surreptitiously, in my office—it is almost eerily naturalistic, such that you wonder why some playwrights pretend people speak in perfect paragraphs.

As Colm Tóibín tells Belinda McKeon in a new Art of Fiction interview—in which he also discusses the uses of trauma and his hatred of the pluperfect—writing a first draft can feel as alarming and adrenalized as any live performance. In preparing to write the part of Nora Webster  in which Nora thinks she’s seen her dead husband, Tóibín spent several days alone at his County Wexford home, reading other works in which ghosts appear. Then, one morning, he got up early and put Beethoven’s Archduke Trio on repeat. “I knew it could only be written in one go,” he says. “I had to get every moment of it down as though it were happening in real time.”

Reading certain short stories can feel like watching a dangerous solo sport; I’m drawn to the ones that stay on course even as they remind me how easy it would be to crash that Alpine A522. So it is with Sophie Madeline Dess’s troubling “Zalmanovs”; Addie E. Citchens’s brilliant, unruly “A Good Samaritan”; and Avigayl Sharp’s “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant,” a bravura portrait of frenetic self-absorption.

Also in this issue: an Art of Poetry interview with N. Scott Momaday, our 2021 Hadada Award winner; portfolios by Lily van der Stokker and Mary Manning; and poems—selected by our new poetry editor, Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy—by C. S. Giscombe, Timmy Straw, Cynthia Cruz, and Victoria Chang. What’s nice about reading is that you don’t need a ticket, you can do it in bed, and there are no shoddy performances. As Jung once said, in the theater of dreams, the dreamer plays every role.

 

Summer 1993: Walter Gieseking, Debussy’s Préludes I & II, EMI (La cathédrale engloutie)

Claude Monet, “Rouen Cathedral,West Façade, Sunlight,” 1894. Licensed under CC0 2.0.

I’m living in East London, in Cadogan Terrace, at the far end of Victoria Park. I work as a copytaker at the Daily Telegraph, typing in stories dictated over the phone. (This was a very long time ago.) Sometimes it is crown green bowls, sometimes it is a yachting regatta in Pwllheli. Sometimes it is a massacre in Bosnia. On a whiteboard are names we might find hard to spell: Izetbegović. Banja Luka. Srebrenica.

I bicycle to Canary Wharf down Grove Road. The last of a row of terrace houses is in scaffolding, then gradually uncovered to reveal a concrete shell. For a long time I thought this was just the way houses looked beneath the skin, but this is, in fact, Rachel Whiteread’s House, which will go on to win the Turner before being demolished by the council.

Whiteread makes casts of the space enclosed by ordinary objects, using the object as mold. (This generally destroys the object. Space repays the violence inflicted by the objects which imprison it.) Whiteread will go on to create Water Tower, a resin cast of a water tower, and Nameless Library, a Holocaust memorial in Vienna, of which more later.

I have bought a small blond upright piano for £900 despite my low pay.

Now that I have a piano I can redress my shameful ignorance of musical theory: I have Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, Rosen’s The Classical Style, a few others. Someone mentions the ninths in Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral). I have no idea what a ninth sounds like, but now, you see, I have a piano; I play the fragment of score in the text.

An octave sounds very clean and simple and reassuring and self-confident. Debussy’s ninths in La cathédrale engloutie are in fact tacked on to octaves, or rather, it’s as if he took two notes at the interval of a second, with that unapologetic jangling clash, and then intensified the dissonance by adding the same two notes an octave away. It is a bit of a stretch for the hand (at least for me), and the effect (at least for me) is of the octave striving to be something more—discarding simplicity and ease for effortful dissonant ferocity.

I think it would be good to learn a piece that is not part of my mother’s repertoire. My mother was a prodigy, lavishly instructed in childhood and adolescence, graduate of a conservatory; I had had a few months of lessons at age 9. The only pieces I knew were the ones I had heard my mother play; I would sight-read laboriously through them, trying to replicate the pieces I had heard. But now I have a piano; here is a chance to confront my neuroses.

I buy the score of Debussy Préludes I at Foyles and begin to tackle La cathédrale engloutie.

Reporters call in under fire. Reporters call in, shouting copy over the roar of a football crowd. James McGrath calls in racing copy. Bruce Johnston calls in copy on Berlusconi. Derek Pringle phones in sensible copy on cricket. Imran Khan calls in copy with a slighting aside on the sporting prowess of Derek Pringle.

There are intervals worse than a ninth, intervals impossible to span with my size of hand.

The piece is difficult but not impossible for someone with patchy musical training and much experience of tackling impossible pieces unassisted.

(I am working on a novel (Op. 97? 98? 99?), a novel that will one day be destroyed by the publication of my “first;” it’s hard to write about this time.)

(I had done a doctorate in classics at Oxford, and now the mind had been submerged in a series of dull jobs while trying to write a book.)

I don’t know how the piece is supposed to sound, so this is different from learning pieces my mother played. Also, as I work on it, I am identifying intervals mentioned in my book on harmony.

Thanks to our friends at Wikipedia, I now know things about the piece I did not know when I was learning it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_cath...)

Debussy wrote pieces inspired by images; in this case, he took inspiration from the legend of a drowned cathedral which emerged from the sea on clear days. The piece covers a wider range of the keyboard than is common, going right down to the dull thick sonorous notes at the bottom and high into upper octaves, and the score, for the person learning by sight-reading, reinforces this sense of venturing perilously beyond firm ground and shallow water (for me, at least, the octave immediately below middle C does always feel like the safe shallows at the beach, the octave above like the safe flat easily traversable sand)—these notes are not on the barred lines of the basic bass and treble clefs, but above and below, on short lines like rungs of a precarious ladder. What I mean is that, though they become straightforward to sight-read with practice, something of the sense of going to the bottom of the sea or up to the stratosphere lingers from the very early days when one first deciphered these notes.

Debussy gives the impression of tumbling waves—not just the rise and fall, but the confusion and foam—first by arpeggios in the bass with dense chords floating on top, then by runs of double octaves in the bass (these are not straightforward for an amateur), with slightly thinner chords above. There is a very beautiful passage where the cathedral emerges from the waves. I would play this passage in moments of despair over my book.

At some point I thought that I would like to hear how it was supposed to sound. I went to the Barbican and listened to a recording by Walter Gieseking, which I then proceeded to buy. And play. Incessantly.

The CD was the sort of CD that justifies the existence of CDs, a CD whose liner notes included three different takes on the career of Gieseking, one in English, one in French, one in German.

“Best remembered today as the subtlest of miniaturists, Gieseking in life was a great hulk of a man (six foot three in his stocking feet and tipping the scales at more than fifteen stone) whose repertoire embraced everything from Handel to Schoenberg and whose confidence was rarely matched by modesty…”

“Gieseking subirait-il une sorte de purgatoire? Cela n’aurait rien d’extraordinaire. Il a construit au disque une sorte de Panthéon du piano… ”

“Technische Übungen mache ich nie. Ich halte diese überhaupt für gänzlich überflüssig…” [1]

It will be obvious that Gieseking’s rendition of La cathédrale engloutie showed just how botched my version of the piece had been. It should be obvious that intervals that are unmanageable for a woman who is five foot five in her stocking feet are likely to present less difficulty to a man who is six foot three. The whole time I was listening to this piece—which was, of course, the first I played on the CD—I was ravished not merely by the extraordinary control of tone, the delicacy and fluidity, but by the contrast between this thing of glory and my own lumpen efforts. Yes.

Charles Rosen (Notes on the Piano) talks about the way recordings have changed attitudes to performance—it is as if the recording is the definitive version of the piece by which live performances are measured, a deadening alteration if the performance is to be something new and fresh in the concert hall. He naturally does not have in mind the galvanizing effect on the amateur who hears a work for the first time as a piece of music rather than a succession of more or less difficult passages strung together. The curious thing was—and this has happened many times—that understanding how a passage might work as a phrase, hearing it played at, I will not say the right, but at a defensible speed, somehow made the piece more playable. Intervals that ought to have simply been outside the reach of my fingers became just barely possible once I knew how the passage worked musically.

I then listened to the CD all the way through. It has to be said that I listen to music as a writer—that is, one who was made to read short stories in school and remains baffled by the form. It seems as though a writer’s short stories nearly always show a disheartening uniformity of style (Carver has a recognizable style, Munro, Hemingway, Beattie). Sometimes the uniformity is transcendent (Lydia Davis!), but one way or another there’s an awful lot of uniformity. Composers tend not to work that way. The Préludes are all recognizably Debussyan, yes; but in each he takes a particular idea and explores it in a way that is all the more intense for the brevity of the form. There is an “Hommage to S Pickwick, Esq., P.P.M.P.C.”  There is “Général Lavine—eccentric.”[2] “Brouillards.” “Feuilles mortes.” “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir.” (I think most people would agree that the sort of writer inclined to write something along the lines of “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir” would be unlikely also to come up with something Dickensian. When I say “most people would agree” I mean not that this is necessarily right but that this is the impression given by the corpora of short stories that come our way.) So each time I listened to the CD, to the dazzling stylistic versatility Gieseking brought to the pieces, gave me a way of thinking about how writing could work.

Months went by. Crowds gathered around Whiteread’s House. House was demolished. The president of Rwanda was assassinated. The name Juvénal Habyaramina went on the whiteboard. A reporter called in from Kigali; people were being hacked to death with machetes. I asked if he was all right and he said he thought so.

Years went by. Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial was unveiled in Vienna in October 2000. Nameless Library shows a cast of a cube of shelves of books with the spines facing in. We don’t know the titles or authors, we can’t see a page.

It seemed to me that most of the time, when we read a book, when we can see the page, it’s immediately perspicuous: if our eyes have access to the text they have access to meaning. Most of the books we encounter are in the clear light of English, or some other language we already know. But maybe we don’t always want that. At some point, when The Last Samurai became my first book to be published, I went to Amsterdam to publicize it, and went to the Van Gogh Museum. All these pieces of paint and board and canvas had once been in a room with a poor crazy guy, just as the pages of my book had once been in a room with a poor crazy girl. Later, in London, I came across a lot of Dutch paperbacks at Waterstones, including the letters of Van Gogh: Vincent Van Gogh: Een leven in brieven. And I somehow had to have it, though I did not know a word of Dutch. It seemed as though the meaning rose from the text like the drowned cathedral sortant peu à peu de la brume:

 

eindelijk de Sterrennacht, in de nacht geschilderd onder een gaslantaren.  De hemel is blauwgroen, het wateris koningsblauw, de grond is mauve. De stad is blauw en violet, het gaslicht geel en de weerkaatsingen zijn roodgoud, afnemend tot bronsgroen. Op het blauwgroene veld van de hemel de Grote Beer, die groen en rozeschittert, een schittering waarvan de bescheiden glans constrasteert met het krachtige goud van het gaslicht

 

We see a lot of words that are a little like words we know, mainly color words, a few others. So we think we get Starry Night, night, under, gas lantern, blue-green, water, royal blue, ground, mauve, city, blue, violet, gaslight, yellow, red-gold, bronze-green, blue-green, field, of the sky, the Great Bear, green, pink, contrasts, gold, gaslight.

And because we think we can make these out, we can work out a few others from context: de and het must be the, een must be a, en must be and. The reader who knows some German will pick out more words: eindelijk = endlich = finally, Hemel = Himmel = sky, and so on, and this too is moving, the fact that intelligibility always depends on the accidents of where we began and where we have been is suddenly out in the open. (And maybe it’s even more moving for a reader with a Dutch surname that was brought to North America 400 years ago, a reader whose native language is an accident of beautifully accomplished assimilation.)

For the English reader, it’s as if these words for color don’t simply pick out the colors picked out by our words, it’s as if they pick out the colors of Van Gogh, the colors seen by that crazy guy. So it’s moving to see these words that are different from ours, and different, often, in having a diphthong where we have a simple vowel, blauw, groen, rood, goud, and even more so when these are part of a compound (blauwgroen, bronsgroen). So there’s the feeling that it is nice to leave them there, and maybe that we don’t want to decipher—it’s nice to have this marker of distance.

Years later I discovered a website which presented the letters of Van Gogh in facsimile, transcription, and translation, and it turned out this magical letter had in fact been written to his brother in French. That did not necessarily lessen its likeness to a cathedral sortant peu à peu de la brume.

This seems to take us a long way from Gieseking’s recording of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie. But these were some of the reasons the piece mattered to me then and matters now.

 

 

[1] “Would Gieseking undergo a sort of purgatory? There would be nothing surprising in that, for he constructed on records a sort of Pantheon of the piano …”“I never do technical exercises. I consider these in general to be completely superfluous …” (Neither of these lines is anywhere to be found in the English, nor is much of the English to be found in the French or German.)

[2] First 11 bars “Dans le style et le Mouvement d’un Cake-Walk,” bar 12, pp, “Spirituel et discret.”

 

Helen DeWitt is the author of The Last Samurai (unrelated to the better-known film with Tom Cruise), Lightning Rods, Some Trick, and The English Understand Wool. She lives in Berlin.

Forbidden Notebooks: A Woman’s Right to Write

Alba de Céspedes pictured in the Italian magazine Epoca, vol. VII, no. 86, May 31, 1952. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Forbidden evokes, to my English-speaking ear, the biblical fruit whose consumption leads to shame and expulsion from Paradise. Eve’s story is not irrelevant to a novel like Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook, in which a woman succumbs to a temptation: to record her thoughts and observations. Valeria Cossati’s impulse to keep a diary leads not so much to the knowledge of good and evil as it does to the self-knowledge advocated by Socrates and serving as a cornerstone of philosophical inquiry ever since. In Valeria’s case, it also leads to solitude, alienation, guilt, and painful lucidity.

The Italian title of Forbidden Notebook is Quaderno proibito—literally translated, “prohibited notebook.” Forbidden and prohibited may be interchangeable in English, but the latter lacks the romance that might soften the former (as in “forbidden love”), and connotes instead legal restrictions, interdictions, and punishment. The word prohibited comes from the Latin verb prohibere (its roots mean, essentially, “to hold away”), which was fundamental to legal terminology in Ancient Rome. It is the word de Céspedes chooses to describe Valeria’s notebook, and to interrogate, more broadly, a woman’s right, in postwar Italy, to express herself in writing, to have a voice, and to hold opinions and secrets that distinguish herself from her family.

The act of purchasing the eponymous notebook, along with the ongoing dilemma of how to conceal it, drives the tension as the novel opens. Having purchased it illegally and smuggled it home, Valeria hides it in various locations—in a sack of rags, an old trunk, an empty biscuit tin. But she always runs the risk of it being discovered by her husband and grown children, all of whom laugh at the mere idea that she might want to keep a diary.

As soon as she buys the notebook, Valeria is anxious and afraid, but she is also armed—for although acquiring a diary throws her into crisis, the quaderno is both an object and a place, both a literary practice and a room of one’s own. In lieu of walls and a door, pen and paper suffice to allow Valeria, albeit furtively, to speak her mind. Thematically, I would call this book a direct descendant of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking treatise and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It’s just that Valeria does not consider herself an author but rather a traditional homemaker. Her writing is surreptitious, and she must lie to tell the truth.

De Céspedes was herself a writer and a diarist; Forbidden Notebook fuses these forms and disciplines. The diary was for her (as it is for so many writers) preparatory ground not only for her artistry in general but for a series of searing first-person female protagonists who are at once invented and real. Melania Mazzucco quotes from de Céspedes’s diaries in her introduction to the 2021 reissue of Dalla parte di lei (From her side). Already in that novel published in 1949—which is also concerned with women’s rights and roles—de Céspedes is experimenting (as the title clearly suggests) with an intimate first-person female narrative. Three years later, in Quaderno proibito, the diary commands center stage.

The private becoming public, the individual subject dividing, and the writer becoming her own reader and vice versa—the diary, an elusive, elastic container, straddles all this and more. Diary writing may be the most private of forms, but when placed within the context of a novel or when it serves, as it does here, as the structure of the novel itself, this form of confession—dating back, at least in the Western tradition, to Augustine—contradicts its very nature.

From Petrarch to Gramsci to Woolf to Lessing, all diaries and notebooks, whether intended for publication or not, whether invented by their authors or not, whether framed as (or within) novels or not, are dialogues with the self. They are instances of self-doubling and self-fashioning. They are declarations of autonomy, counternarratives that contrast with and contradict reality. The form of the fictionalized diary has always been especially appealing in that we get to know the character not only as a person but also as a writer. This additional authorial persona is especially provocative in light of the fact that female consciousness has struggled to find its place in history and in the literary tradition.

In her diary de Céspedes confides, “I will never be a great writer.” Here I take her to task for not knowing something about herself—for she was a great writer, a subversive writer, a writer censored by fascists, a writer who refused to take part in literary prizes, a writer ahead of her time. In my view, she is one of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked.

Whether or not we choose to read Forbidden Notebook through a feminist lens, it is a radical novel. Freshly translated by Ann Goldstein with her signature energy, it blazes with significance. Women’s words are still laughed at, still silenced, still considered dangerous. De Céspedes vindicates, artfully and ardently, a woman’s right to write—a right that must never be taken for granted. Ironically, the harshest condemnation in Forbidden Notebook is generated by Valeria herself, who both speaks and threatens to cancel herself out at the same time.

I discovered de Céspedes when I was researching for and assembling The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, an anthology that featured forty Italian authors who were writing short fiction in the twentieth century. I included one of her short stories in that volume and was curious to read more of her work. An Italian friend suggested I read Quaderno proibito, and I was lucky enough to find a used paperback copy at my local flea market in Rome. Mondadori has recently reissued a few of her books, but even seven years ago it was hard to find her titles in Italian bookstores and very few people mentioned her work. She was one of those amazing authors and literary figures that most people had stopped reading and had largely forgotten about. I have kept a diary for decades, and I also teach a course on the diary as literary practice and form, so reading this novel was doubly exciting for me.

 

Jhumpa Lahiri teaches creative writing and literary translation at Barnard College. A writer in both English and Italian, she is the author of Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

This is an adapted extract of the foreword to Ann Goldstein’s English translation of Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, forthcoming from Astra House in January.

Cooking with Intizar Husain

Photo by Erica Maclean.

The novel Basti by Intizar Husain begins with children in the fictional village of Rupnagar— which means beautiful place in Urdu—shopping for staple foods like salt and brown sugar. Trees here breathe “through the centuries,” time “speaks” in the voices of birds, the world is new, and the sky is fresh. From a distance, elephants look like mountains moving. For the children, including the novel’s protagonist, Zakir, one source of information about the world is the town shopkeeper, Bhagat-ji, a Hindu; Zakir’s father, Abba Jan, a Muslim, is another.  Bhagat-ji tells them that elephants could once fly and are hatched from eggs. Abba Jan, who is referred to as Maulana, a respectful term for a man of religious learning, tells them the earth is shaped from the expanding ocean and the ocean’s water came from a single pearl. Together their voices weave a tapestry of life that will be torn asunder in 1947 by the partition of India.

Ingredients drawn from the work of Intizar Husain had the lushness and beauty of his descriptions of Zakir’s childhood village. Photo by Erica Maclean.

“Partition set in motion a train of events unforeseen by every single person who had advocated and argued for the division,” writes the historian Yasmin Khan. The intention of local leadership and the British Raj was that the two new states of India and Pakistan would allow for Hindu and Muslim self-rule in Hindu- and Muslim-majority areas. But loosely organized violence against minority populations on both sides led to the mass migration of ten to twenty million people to the countries run by their co-religionists, with an estimated 500,000 to three million killed. These killings occurred with what Khan calls “indiscriminate callousness” that included widespread disfigurement, mutilation, and rape. Conflict between India and Pakistan is ongoing to this day. Most scholarship, Khan argues in her book The Great Partition, has largely viewed these events as historically and culturally isolated, but she makes a compelling argument for locating it within “wider world history.”

The main narrative in Basti, which I read in a translation from the Urdu by Frances W. Pritchett, starts two decades after Partition, with Zakir abruptly recalled to his childhood memories by “the sound of slogans being shouted from outside” in Lahore. Zakir is an adult; his family has left the paradise of Rupnagar for the promise of Pakistan. It’s the early seventies, a time of political turmoil between the western and eastern halves of the country that led to further sundering and to a war with India. (East Pakistan became Bangladesh during this period.) Zakir has become a professor, but the buildup of violence closes the university, casting him adrift into a world of memory, history, and myth. “The rain poured down all night inside him,” Husain writes. “The dense clouds of memory seemed to come from every direction.”

In Zakir’s childhood memory, his aunt calls out to his cousin “ ‘Daughter, how long are you going to swing? Come and do some frying. Make a few fritters.’” I fried tapioca balls. Photo by Erica Maclean.

What follows is a lyrical, formally experimental novel that refuses to stay put in the past or present. Zakir inhabits a phantasmagoric city wracked by violence, where a changing cast of characters ebbs and flows through the cafés at night. Their voices, alongside religious lore, create an ambiguous terrain where political certainties vanish. The narrative point of view elides most information about the conflict and reduces all politics to indefinite “slogans.” This was controversial among some of Husain’s contemporaries, who were “attached to a politically activist concept of literature,” as the Pakistani writer Asif Farrukhi notes in his introduction to the NYRB edition of Basti. Critics objected to the book’s lack of a “clear political perspective” and “resolution,” Farrukhi says, or claimed that it was too nostalgic and negative. But Husain identified polarization as the engine of tragedy, and he declined to participate in it. When one character asks, in sorrow and bewilderment, “Yar, was it good that Pakistan was created?,” Zakir remains silent. Another character replies, “I know one thing, in the hands of the wrong people, even right becomes wrong.”

 

A mango tree in the school grounds is a landmark in Rupnagar. A Hindu friend who stays in India writes wistfully to Zakir about it as an adult. My tree-fruit lassis were in its honor. Photo by Erica Maclean.

Zakir is not comfortable in his new home; he cannot grow attached to it. Other characters feel the same way. His mother dreams of the locked room full of the family’s treasures that they left behind in their house in Rupnagar when they fled for Pakistan. In a café, Zakir’s friend Afzal tells him about his grandmother, whom Afzal’s family could only convince to leave by telling her their former home was flooding. Repeatedly, she says, “My child, the flood must have gone down, let’s go home.” When Afzal tells her they’re never returning, she looks at him, says “All right,” and dies. Old social structures, too, cannot be rebuilt in the new place. Husain spills little ink on the British, the original disruptors of local structures.

Some of the losses were culinary. The new land is rootless and anti-sensual. The characters in Basti drink endless tea, but they don’t eat much. Most references to food are located in the past: in Rupnagar there were fritters and ginger chips and dishes of rice cooked in milk. In nearby Bulandshahr, where Zakir goes with a young woman whom he loves—he will lose her during Partition—the neighborhoods “are known by their atmospheres.” Zakir first holds her hand in a place where “the lanes in which huge cauldrons of sugar bubbled on big cooking stoves were so full of smoke and wasps that it was hard to walk through them.” In the present day, by contrast, even the foods are displaced. In Lahore, Husain several times mentions jalebi, a kind of fried dough soaked in sugar syrup that is popular with “Easterners who came out of Meerut” during the war. Like most political details, the significance of the Easterners to the war effort is left vague. But Zakir observes that “the city’s snack-sellers are tired of the Easterners. They eat different kinds of sweets, they take marijuana, they demand jalebis along with their snacks.” Set loose from place, time and history, such foods are stripped of their power and sensuality.

A simple recipe for papaya lassi produced a unique, smoky-flavored drink. Photo by Erica Maclean.

Reading Basti cast my experience of Indian cuisine—which I make frequently—in a new light; I began to think more clearly about regionality. My treasured sources are two cookbooks published in the eighties by Julie Sahni, a Brooklynite from India. In Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking, she explains that the countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka occupy “the clearly bounded Indian subcontinent.” The prefaces to her recipes include notations on the dish’s place or people of origin, and emphasize the shared cultural threads that run through the particular region. The recipes in her books feel unified, but there is also value in knowing that the regions of Bengal and Punjab, frequent sources of her wonderful recipes, are now split into East and West territories—Bengal in Bangladesh and India, and Punjab in India and Pakistan.

Sahni writes that she loved jalebis as a child, and notes that in North India they’re served as a breakfast treat accompanied by scalded milk. Photo by Erica Maclean.

I decided to make jalebis along with a spicy tapioca and peanut croquette, a “snack” that Sahni suggested as a good accompaniment for them; in her mix-and-match way, the croquette and the jalebis are from different regions. And because trees frequently appear in Basti as Husain mourns rootedness, I chose to make two lassis from tree fruits: a mango version inspired by a mango tree in Rupnagar, and a papaya one inspired by a papaya tree mentioned in Lahore. Sahni’s book specifically suggests the light and salty papaya drink is a good chaser for jalebis (in her version spelled jalaibees).

I struggled to execute some of Husain’s food, but the croquette mixture turned out well. Photo by Erica Maclean.

The cooking process channeled Husain’s vision in unexpected ways. Basti is a profoundly sorrowful book, in which Zakir finds that the most authentic response to violence is to “take up the trust” of defeat. No kitchen disaster could compare, but I was roundly defeated in my attempt to make jalebis. Made correctly, the snack is a spiral of fermented, fried dough, briefly soaked in an orange-colored sugar syrup. It is supposed to be light, crispy, and very sweet. On my first try I missed the note about fermentation, and on my second try I still failed to understand that the syrup, not the dough, was supposed to be colored. The unfermented dough was floppy and difficult to pipe, and it didn’t really crisp up. The fermented version had a delicious raw batter and handled better, but once fried it still didn’t absorb the syrup as I might have wished. I’ve often struggled to execute Sahni’s more complex recipes, which often hit you with an additional sauce or lengthy second simmer just when you think you’re done, and this was no different. I was fortunate that the potato croquettes were the other type of Sahni special—wildly flavorful, unique in taste and texture, and fairly accessible to the American home cook. The finished balls were spicy, nutty, pillowy, chewy, and herby. I forgot to flatten them into the correct shape, but that was a minor flaw. My lassis were also hit-and-miss. The papaya drink called for buttermilk instead of yogurt and had an unexpected salty, smoky melon flavor that made it the star of the day. The mango drink was refreshing, but the mango wasn’t very ripe, and the results were less sweet and flavorful than the restaurant versions.

In addition to my user errors on the recipes, I broke things while cooking from Basti to an unprecedented extent: a blender, a vegetable peeler, and a Pyrex measuring cup I’d thought to be indestructible, lost to a round of boiling sugar syrup. I also destroyed two reusable plastic piping bags by squeezing too hard, and put the quarter-inch round piping tip used to make the spirals through the disposal (ruinous to the tip, questionable for the disposal). The disasters were so comically many that they seemed like a pointed message on the fragility of the things we take for granted—not our Pyrex, but our political structures and our peace.

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Crisp Jalaibees in Sweet Syrup 

Adapted from Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking by Julie Sahni. 

Note: This recipe requires you to start fermentation twenty-four hours in advance.

2 ¼ cups flour
¼ cup chickpea flour
¼ tsp baking powder
2 tbsp plain yogurt
½ tsp turmeric
1 ½ cups hot water
½ tsp powdered saffron threads
Several drops of orange gel food coloring, if desired
¼ cup rice flour
2 cups of sugar
Peanut or corn oil to fill a frying pan to a depth of 2 inches.

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Mix two cups of the flour with the chickpea flour, baking powder, and yogurt. Add the hot water and mix to form a paste. Cover and set aside in a warm place for twenty-four hours to ferment. (I put mine in the microwave with the light on, which provides the necessary warmth for fermentation in a cold Northeastern climate.)

When ready to make the jalaibees, stir in the remaining quarter cup of flour and the rice flour. Heat the sugar with two cups water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Add the saffron powder and turmeric. The syrup should be a bright and synthetic-looking orange; if it is still pale in color, add in some orange food coloring. Set aside.

Heat the oil over medium heat to a temperature of 350°F. (Do not be tempted to use less than the full two inches of oil, or you won’t have enough oil in the pan to maintain a consistent temperature.) Fit a pastry bag with a quarter-inch round writing tip and fill with the dough. When the oil is hot, squirt the batter into the hot oil in a swift, spiral movement, about three turns to make a spiral of four inches in diameter. Make three or four such circles. Let them fry for two minutes until lightly browned. Turn and fry for another half minute. Remove the jalaibees with tongs and press them flat in the syrup. Let soak for fifteen to thirty seconds. Remove and set aside to drain on a wire rack. Repeat with the remaining batter in the same way. Reserve the oil to use for the next dish.

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Fiery Hot Tapioca and Peanut Croquettes

Adapted from Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking by Julie Sahni.

6 tbsp tapioca pearls
8 hot green chilies, finely chopped (or fewer, to taste)
½ cup fresh coriander, leaves and stem, finely chopped
½ cup roasted, salted peanuts, chopped
3 medium size potatoes (about ¾ lb), boiled, peeled, and coarsely mashed
½ bunch scallions, green and white parts, chopped
¼ tsp ground asafetida
Peanut or corn oil, enough to fill a skillet to a depth of 2 inches

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Place tapioca in a small bowl and rinse three or four times to wash away excess starch. Add enough water to cover the tapioca by an inch and let soak for twenty minutes. Drain, rinse, and drain again. Put in a bowl.

Add the remaining ingredients except for the oil, and mix thoroughly, kneading the mixture with your hands. Clean your hands and moisten them slightly to prevent the mixture from sticking. Pinch off one-inch round pieces of dough and roll into a smooth ball. Press the balls lightly but firmly to flatten them slightly. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a skillet until very hot, about 375°F. Add six or seven of the patties at a time and fry, turning them, until they turn golden brown, about three minutes per side. Drain on paper towels and continue with the rest in the same way.

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Mango Lassi 

Adapted from Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking by Julie Sahni.

1 ¼ cups plain yogurt
½ tsp lemon juice
½ cup mango pulp
⅓ cup cold water
4 tbsp honey or sugar
9-10 standard size ice cubes
Put all ingredients in a food processor or electric blender, and whiz until frothy and combined.

Papaya Lassi
Adapted from Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking by Julie Sahni.

Heaping ½ cup ripe papaya, cut into chunks
¾ cup buttermilk
2 tbsp honey or sugar
¼ tsp coarse salt
Pinch nutmeg
¼ cup water
4 standard-size ice cubes
Put all ingredients in a food processor or electric blender, and whiz until frothy and combined.

Photo by Erica Maclean.

 

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

Does It Have to Be That Way?: A Conversation with Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman in 2019. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan.

In September 1852, when he was twenty-three, Tolstoy published his first piece of writing, in a Saint Petersburg monthly. Although it garnered praise, he was upset that the magazine had changed the title to “The History of My Childhood.” “The alteration is especially disagreeable,” he complained to the editor, “because as I wrote to you, I meant ‘Childhood’ to form the first part of a novel.”

Like Tolstoy, Elif Batuman always intended to write fiction. One of the essays in her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a collection based on her experiences as a grad student in the Stanford comparative literature Ph.D. program, had originally been pitched to a magazine—and accepted, Batuman thought—as a short story. “I had changed things to protect people’s identities,” she told me earlier this year over Zoom, “but then had to unchange them so they could fact-check it; the alternative was not to be published.” The piece appeared in print as “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation.”

Batuman approaches much of her life and work as a reader on the lookout for clues. Her autobiographical debut novel, The Idiot, follows a young Turkish American woman named Selin through her freshman year at Harvard as she studies elementary Russian and linguistics, falls in love with an inscrutable math-major senior, and stress-tests the capacity of the former to explain the behavior of the latter. Selin compulsively overreads everything and everyone she encounters, as if gathering evidence for a case that may reveal itself only in hindsight. Batuman’s second novel, Either/Or, published this year, picks up where The Idiot left off, covering Selin’s second year at Harvard, and serves as a reckoning with all the previously gathered clues. As the title suggests, it aims to explode the supposed distinction between an ethical and an aesthetic conception of the good life. It’s a paradoxical and seriously funny contraption, a bildungsroman that relentlessly deconstructs its author, the social world around her, and the very concept and value of fiction itself.

Speaking with Batuman about Either/Or feels a bit like watching someone ride a motorbike along a tightrope. At one point during our conversation, she took out a pen and paper to trace her argument through Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and de Beauvoir. She expects from any book, her own included, nothing less than a real-time experiment in how we should think and live.

 

INTERVIEWER

A lot of critics remarked on the lack of sex in your first novel. There are plenty of sexual episodes in Either/Or, some of them very uncomfortable. Were you reacting to that criticism?

BATUMAN

It hadn’t occurred to me to put sex scenes in The Idiot, as it was closely based on my life. And so at first, that response from readers was kind of jarring. I felt like, Oh, the New York Times is upset that I didn’t have sex within my first year of college! I thought, I’m so different from these people—I don’t understand them and they don’t understand me. But then I started to remember. In my personal mythology, freshman year played a big role—my first love, this crush I had—and I didn’t really think about what had happened next. Hearing those questions from readers about why there was no sex—that they were frustrated and waiting for some consummation—I started to think about that second year, and I remembered that I had felt exactly the same way. I felt like I had failed completely by not having had sex, and I wasn’t living a full life, and I had to get it over with. I did read Kierkegaard that year, and Nadja by André Breton, and I think The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is also about how to live an aesthetic life. I thought I had been very childish, putting off this thing, and that was why I had all these problems. So in Either/Or I wanted to write about that feeling, and to show where it led me. Because it doesn’t lead to great places, necessarily, that you want to spend time in.

INTERVIEWER

There is an anger that comes through in Selin’s voice in Either/Or that wasn’t there in The Idiot.

BATUMAN

I just realized that this thing they’re upset about, I was upset about it, too. I was really upset. And that caused really horrible stuff to happen to me. Now I’m even more upset and able to articulate that. #MeToo helped me do that, and Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was hugely helpful in that respect. And, yeah, I was angry.

INTERVIEWER

What made Selin’s voice a better conduit for that than, say, nonfiction written in the first person?

BATUMAN

One thing I got from being able to write as Selin was that she’s not trying to explain anything to anyone yet. She’s just in constant outrage, like, I can’t believe it’s like this, WTF?! It’s a much more open place to write from. Her voice lends me this mode of questioning. I kind of got into the Selin groove, especially toward the end of Either/Or, where I felt like that voice was letting me do cool stuff that I’m not able to do when I’m in my own annoying Elif persona.

INTERVIEWER

To me, your profile of the filmmaker Céline Sciamma in The New Yorker felt very connected to your fiction. It read almost like a manifesto about what artistic form could and should be.

BATUMAN

I do feel that that piece and the novel are in some kind of conversation. I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire in the middle of working on Either/Or. I’d written a lot, but it wasn’t shaped at all and I was struggling with it. Watching the movie, and then hearing her give a talk about removing conflict from narrative, was so exciting to me. I felt a kinship between what she was doing and what I wanted to do.

Something I’ve thought about from talking to both Céline Sciamma and Lindsay, my partner, is that everyone tries really hard to be straight. It’s a huge amount of effort, certainly for a lot of people. Tolstoy writes about this in The Kreutzer Sonata, about how you have to learn to have these sexual appetites. When the character’s fifteen, his brother takes him to a brothel, and he’s like, Wait, you’ve got to be kidding me. Then he writes, Everyone I respected was treating it like a good thing and the most important thing. That was an influence on Either/Or, too.

So everyone is trying to be straight, but some people just aren’t physically capable of it. Céline and Lindsay both knew from an early age that that was not what they were going to be, that they were different. As a result, there was so much bullshit they saw through—they weren’t part of what Céline calls “straight culture.” I wasn’t like that—I was able to feel the things you were supposed to feel.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that being in a relationship with a woman changed your idea of the possibilities of narrative. Can you say more about that?

BATUMAN

It made me see how limited those possibilities were by much of what I took to be universal, especially about the novel as a love story, and it made me see how much bigger they could be—that a novel could be about anything and anyone. I grew up reading these classical nineteenth-century novels, and I liked the ones that had girls in them, but there are none that are not about what man is she going to find, or whether she is going to find a man. That’s the thing that happens in your life. To be in a relationship with another woman automatically makes it not about that. It’s not just that instead of finding Mr. Right you’re finding, you know, Mrs. or Miss Right—it actually does change that power dynamic. Part of the inexorable, doomed feeling of these great novels was tied up for me with the idea of that inescapable inequality and how we’re all locked into it, how children are born into this power structure. Adrienne Rich writes about interrogating how all these things became so closely identified—creating new people and narrative and personal fulfilment and physical pleasure. Why should all of those be the same thing? They don’t have to be. I found that really eye-opening.

INTERVIEWER

I know Either/Or began as a book of essays. How did it become a novel?

BATUMAN

Increasingly, throughout 2017, after The Idiot had come out, I was getting the feeling that I’d been sold a bill of goods about the personal not being political, and about a literature person not being a politics person. I started to see that that idea was already present in The Idiot, when Selin is talking about the government majors, the gov jocks, and how they’re going to be our rulers. I was reading second-wave feminists for the first time. I had a kind of crisis of faith in the novel. I was thinking about the effect fiction had had on my life. I was realizing that despite my best intentions, I had been depoliticized, and that novels had played a role in my getting steered onto this track of romance and the personal.

At the time I was working on the book proposal for Either/Or, it was right at the beginning of the Trump administration, and my friends were getting more involved in protests. I remember a day when everyone was going to JFK to protest the immigration ban and I was like, No, I really want to stay in and work, I feel like I’m going to get somewhere on this proposal. Then I realized—this is how it happens. I started to feel that the annoying leftists who drove me crazy when I was in school were actually correct, and that the novel is an instrument perpetuating the status quo. I did not want the revolution to happen tomorrow, because I’d finally amassed the capital I needed to write a novel, and I wanted to write my novel! Writing a novel takes forever—of course you don’t want the revolution to happen tomorrow.

So I was thinking, Is this the end of novels for me? When Kierkegaard’s Either/Or assumed this central role and became the title of the book, then I could see a way through it; half the book would consist of this novel set twenty years ago, and the second half would be essays, written from the present, about how the novel screwed us all over. I spent a long time trying to get that to work, but the novel got too big to be half a book. And then I got more interested in the puzzle of how to go into the past and look at it from a place of empathy, and imagine that I’m actually there, and remember that I’m just as dumb now as I was then, I just have better information—the puzzle of how to have both perspectives at the same time.

INTERVIEWER

You seem to have very direct access to that past self.

BATUMAN

For The Idiot, I’d still had some of those college emails. For Either/Or, I had some of the scenes written already that were from the first draft of The Idiot. And I think I had diaries.

INTERVIEWER

Does email still play an important part in your writing life? How long do you spend every day writing emails?

BATUMAN

It’s now gotten to the point where it’s a chore and I feel horribly intimidated by my email. But I used to really like it, because it was like a combination of a letter and a diary. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to write letters by hand, and sometimes you would spend all this time writing, and then you’re like an asshole, somehow, if you’re trying to keep a copy of your own letter. And what would you do, use carbon paper? You know, there weren’t even digital cameras. So it felt like you were always writing this stuff and then losing it. And there was something about having everything, all of your letters, time-stamped, so that you could go back to them, that felt very nourishing to me. It made the project of writing letters feel more like a collaborative diary with my friends. When I was in college, you still couldn’t order a pizza online. You couldn’t apply for a driver’s license. You couldn’t do anything legal or practical. It was just for recreation.

INTERVIEWER

Did you always feel the need to keep an actual diary, too? There’s that journal entry the Review published from when you were eleven.

BATUMAN

Yeah, I kept diaries constantly when I was a kid, in little notebooks, from age five. Even before I could write, I dictated them to my aunt. It makes me think about what I needed the novel for. It was a survival tool for me, because I was hearing so many contradictory stories about what the world was, and how it was. I was so aware from a very early age of competing interests, and that no matter how good everyone’s intentions are, things can end up badly. As a kid you don’t have a whole lot of power or dignity. You’re just bouncing back and forth like a football—always being called on to say which is better, Turkey or America, who do you love more, your mother or your father.

Then you read a novel and see that there’s a plane where all these different voices can be, in some way, reconciled. There’s a place for a writer, especially someone like Tolstoy, to see and recognize everyone’s intentions, and to juxtapose them with humor and generosity, and to transform this panic-causing and potentially annihilating conflict into a delightful product to delight people with. I thought, What a magical feat that is, and it really helped me conceptualize my own life.

Now, when I look back, nowhere in this did I think, How can I change things? I just wanted to grow up and write novels that would help other people accept how messed up everything is, and comfort them for it as much as these books have comforted me. That’s what made me think that writers are all people who got into reading as children, when you actually don’t have any power. And that this thing that was a great coping mechanism for a kid is maybe not the most efficient way to channel effort and thought into changing the world.

INTERVIEWER

It saves you as a child but deforms you as an adult.

BATUMAN

It’s like how all of psychotherapy is recognizing that the tools and mechanisms that helped you survive a potentially life-threatening or difficult time are no longer serving you. You’re still doing them anyway, even though you don’t need them anymore. One thing I realized as I was writing Either/Or, which was at one point going to go into the essays that didn’t make it in, was about Kierkegaard’s childhood and Kant’s. I read this great book about the childhoods of Western philosophers. All their childhoods were horrible, abusive, they were all beaten either at school or by their parents, or they were orphaned and destitute. I started to get this feeling that Kant’s categorical imperative, and perhaps the whole edifice of Western philosophy, is a series of coping mechanisms created by traumatized children to process and create order in the world, and now we’re all kind of stuck using those as adults. I was disappointed by philosophy as I studied it in school, especially this supposed conflict between the ethical and the aesthetic life.

It was in this context that I really liked Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity—she slices through this idea in like ten pages, in a tiny part of the book. You can’t actually be like Kant and make one rule for everything and just follow that, because then you’re out of sync with the world. You can’t be like Nietzsche and decide you’re going to live an aesthetic life and be truly free, because you can’t be free while other people around you are not free. It’s like you have the day off and there’s no one to play with, because everyone else is still at school. The only way out of that is to strive in all things to free yourself and to free others at the same time, which is both aesthetic and ethical. A big part of it is operating on an ad hoc basis. You have to go through each situation and decide what counts as freeing yourself and freeing others. And you have to know that you’re going to be wrong, but you have to be okay with being wrong and accept that all you can do is make the best choice that you can. That just seemed like a much more enlightened viewpoint to me.

I also got really into Alice Miller when I was in this period of reading about childhood, and she has interesting analyses of Proust, Kafka, and James Joyce in terms of their biographies—what they were able to tell the truth about and what they weren’t. She really goes into it with Proust and his mom. And she doesn’t actually say this, but it starts to feel as you’re reading that the reason these writers change facts is because they can’t bear the possibility of accusing their parents any more than they already are. There’s another book, Lennard Davis’s Factual Fictions, which shows how the development of fiction itself was intimately connected with the need to avoid libel and slander laws. If that’s what it is, then couldn’t we be moving away from it?

INTERVIEWER

Do you think you might revisit these subjects and the essays that were going to be in Either/Or, or turn them into other nonfiction books?

BATUMAN

I might. I have a lot of books that I’ve started and left unfinished. Another project I was trying to work on alongside Either/Or was called “Swan Park,” which was going to be about my changing experiences of Turkey and my understanding of my Turkish identity, so far as I have it. I wrote a lot but there was something missing—I don’t know if it was the voice or some kind of structure. Then I thought, Maybe if I thought about the Turkey book as being from Selin’s point of view, that’d free it up and make it easier to write.

I also have a lot of passionate ideas now about early childhood, about childhood trauma as a grossly neglected public health threat, and about childism, which is this theory that all the different kinds of discrimination and oppressive power structures we have are in some way a legacy of the oppression of children by adults. It’s an idea that we all live through and internalize those things, and they cause us to identify power with good on some fundamental level. This is much more true for people who grew up under an abusive parent or caretaker, but even a nonabusive relationship is still a kind of trauma. It’s almost like we’ve all been through this cult. I was reading about cult deprogramming and it’s the same as regular psychotherapy in undoing this programming that we get in order to survive our families as children. I’ve been thinking about writing a book about that.

And I’ve been rethinking Russian novels a lot. I have so many ideas about the way things are and how they could be better and how we could be thinking about them differently, what questions we need to ask, but it’s hard to find the right way in. I’m wondering whether Selin’s point of view is going to let me do that, or whether revisiting the Russian novels will.

INTERVIEWER

Like in Parsifal, where only the spear that caused the wound could heal it?

BATUMAN

Ha! I was just thinking that so many of the building blocks of how I learned to think happen to come from those novels, so those are what I have—and because a lot of people read them, they’re sort of a comprehensible language. My ideas about the importance of childhood in determining world events and war and perpetuating oppressive family structures were really informed by rereading War and Peace. I’ve thought a lot about The Kreutzer Sonata and Tolstoy’s conversion. When I was first learning about Tolstoy in college, I remember his conversion was this punch line. Like, he decided that novels are evil, so he’s going to wear a peasant shirt and be friends with Gandhi. Almost like he’s trying to spoil the fun for the rest of us. He’s trying to end the big Anna Karenina party the rest of us want to have, because he decided it’s immoral. But now it actually seems to me like he was struggling with serious questions about the novel and about aestheticizing different forms of injustice. It all makes a lot more sense to me now than it did then. Maybe that’s an angle through which I could get into my own ambivalence about the novel. I could revisit Tolstoy’s conversion and his confession.

INTERVIEWER

Get into it in the sense of writing about it, rather than in practice, by going to farm somewhere?

BATUMAN

That’s the plan, but then again, who knows. I did this residency upstate this year that was all international writers, and it was idyllic. It made me want to just, like, buy a big house in the countryside and start a commune for writers where everyone grows their own vegetables. When I was a kid, I felt like I couldn’t wait until I could just live alone in an apartment in New York City. And now I live with my partner and our cats in an apartment in New York City. And it’s great. But it does start to feel kind of isolating. You know, writers all have the same issues. And we’re all sitting in these rooms, alone, reinventing the wheel. And I just wonder, To what extent does it have to be that way?

 

Maria Dimitrova is a writer and editor in London.

Lil B Death-Ritual Potlatch: A Week in Austin, Texas

Day One

Productivity experts say that people shouldn’t sleep in the same area they work in, but what is bad for productivity is good for me. I wake up on the cheap, stained mattress I have next to my work area. To the right of the mattress are a lamp I bought because it looked like it belonged in a private investigator’s office, six guitar pedals, my guitar, and my laptop. There’s also my wooden desk, the drawers of which are filled with guitar picks and bug spray. I usually spend all day here drawing, playing with Photoshop, recording music, podcasting, watching stuff on YouTube, and staring off into space. I’ve lived in this apartment for four months, and in Austin for twenty, but I feel like I’ve lost track of time. In Austin, it’s easy to do that.

On the mattress I watch Lawrence of Belgravia, a documentary I’ve been avoiding because I don’t want the images of people I admire tarnished by knowing too much about them. It’s about Lawrence Hayward, the front man for the English eighties and nineties bands Felt, Denim, and Go-Kart Mozart. Lawrence (who goes by just his first name) never did anything not great, but at what cost! The doc shows him burning through bandmates and spiraling into homelessness and addiction before ending up, in his fifties, in a London council flat designed by Ernö Goldfinger. There’s a wonderfully OCD quality to Lawrence, who at one point explains his preference for white shirt buttons and at another specifies the only kind of guitar pick his band members are permitted to use. In the film, he intently studies the books and LPs that have inspired his songwriting: we see him examine the bindings, the liner notes, an image of Lou Reed. Why, he wonders, hasn’t he achieved stardom? It’s clear that some personal idiosyncrasies have hindered his progress. He talks about how great it would be to have his own private jet, but he refuses to own a phone or a computer. “Nobody has ever made any money on the internet,” he says, which makes me respect him even more. Out-of-touch people are the people I respect most these days.

Day Two

Today is the publication day of a book I wrote with my friend. I can hardly keep my eyes open; I’ve been working nonstop. I have a podcast episode to release about the history of American utopian experiments, and I have no idea how I’m going to ship all these books. I haven’t bought any shipping supplies because I didn’t think I would sell any copies. When you don’t live in a major-market city, it can be difficult to gauge public interest in what you’re doing.

I celebrate by going to the Raising Cane’s by UT Austin. This is a fried-chicken chain that exists primarily in the Southwest. I come here today because I have a fond memory of eating here with my friends after a cryptocurrency convention. I eat an entire The Box Combo—four chicken tenders, Texas toast, crinkle-cut fries, coleslaw, and a fountain drink—in ten minutes, then go smoke outside. I watch the gradient sky shift to pink in the fast-food parking lot.

Day Three

I go to the Austin Film Society to see Fire of Love, a new documentary about the volcanologist couple Maurice and Katia Krafft. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in ages. I’ve developed a recent fascination with islands, volcanoes, and exotica, and the film’s archival footage is right up my alley: analog shots of molten lava, flame-resistant silver suits, and dances with annihilation.

The beauty and power of volcanoes lie in their inhuman, grandiose capacity for eruption, their indifference to culture. My Twitter mutuals the philosophers Thomas Murphy and Ed Berger have used plate tectonics as an analogy for what they see as a much-needed strategy of cultural “defluencing.”  Defluencing is a tactic designed to introduce evidence of slow, imperceptible “macrotrends” into discourse, which essentially means jamming Twitter feeds by sharing floods of historical documents or pictures of mountains. I think, with exhaustion, of the countless shortwave cultural developments of the past year, some of which I myself have been swept up in. I imagine the waves of discursivity that are constantly washing over me being replaced by something slower. In Austin, I can sometimes simulate living in a kind of eternal, psychedelic seventies, or at least how I imagine that decade to have been: a hazier, slower period of time. I order one of the Kraffts’ books from my phone and swear off reading about particulars, namely contemporary figures or celebrities. Instead, I imagine bubbles of molten BBQ sauce and the upwelling of hot continental rock.

After the movie my friend Anson and I go to the Yellow Jacket where all the chain-punks hang out doing blow. After we get some food, we walk over to see the band Boris play a show off of 7th Street and since we shown up late, they let us watch the end of the set for free. Nice thing about Austin is they still let you do that.

Day Four

Austin is characterized by a humid subtropical climate, according to the Köppen climate classification. I believe that this contributes to its lack of exportable culture: the climate contradicts the Texan geography, which makes strong local branding impossible. Today it rains; I walk to the park multiple times.

Day Five

Some friends of mine are making a feature-length movie called “Rats.” Supposedly the rapper Lil B will be in it, and from what I gather the setting is central Texas circa 2009—strip-mall youth culture and puffy skate shoes. I am to be an extra, so my girlfriend and I drive out to Pflugerville.

Lil B doesn’t show, so he is replaced by a Soundcloud-type guy I’ve seen once before. The set has been painted bright pink; the actors and extras are in Day-Glo patent leather, sweating out of the edges of their clothes in the sweltering heat. Apparently one of the extras is a guy they found working at a head shop who was willing to smoke meth on camera. I get into position and have to pretend like I’m talking to my girlfriend; nearby, another couple breaks up and two elderly women eat snow cones.

The event has BBQ catering. I pile it on high because I love BBQ. I sit down at a table with two of the actors. One is a minor league baseball player and the other is a character actor in his sixties who used to be a sportswriter for the San Antonio Express–News. We talk about football, and then how pitchers used to get Tommy John surgery and it would end their careers. A guy at the table next to us is apparently a local Texas legend: an electric-blues guitar player who won a Grammy in the early nineties and keeps boasting about how great his body is for his age. He snaps at the costumers whenever his hair isn’t perfect. He’s super fried, very out of touch. He has his eyebrow pierced.

The party scene involves the crucifixion of the sportswriter. He has gashes all over his face and is dressed as a cop. People are playing Nerf ball, chasing each other around with super-soakers. The sportswriter is helped up on top of a large wooden cross. Everyone plays and dances around the actor on the cross while he howls and moans. It’s giving Texas Chainsaw Massacre death-ritual potlatch. I wander around on a 2000’s silver Motorola flip phone.

After the scene ends, I smash a watermelon and feed it to Larry, the pig who lives on the property where we’re shooting. Then we head home, driving by flat yellow fields and listening to Terry Allen.

 

Barrett Avner is a musician and the host of the podcast Contain . He is a co author of The Spectre of Finance Punk , a burnout philosophy-fiction inspired by the works of Leibniz, Laruelle , Seth Putnam of Anal Cunt, and Vito Acconci, mixed with buddy humor. It also includes a DVD.

Shopping Diary

Camille à la ville paper dolls. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0.

September 14

I am in my mobile mall, which is my phone’s WiFi hotspot on the NJ Transit. Paynter Jacket Co. is this British couple, Becky and Huw, who make chore jackets in micro-batches. When you purchase a jacket, you also buy its journey, from sourcing the cloth to cutting the pattern to meeting with Sergio, who serges the jackets together in Portugal. I already have their perfect chore jacket from a micro-micro-batch, a Japanese tiger-print patchwork.

The latest is a Carpenter Jacket, so, not a chore jacket at all. So different! I dither between Elizabeth and Linden about the wash – “vintage” as though I’ve owned it for generations versus “dark rich,” stiff and authentic. 195 pounds sterling plus 30 pounds sterling for shipping is GBP 225, USD 260 and change, says the internet’s calculator. It will arrive in November so I get to have it twice, now in anticipation, and when it arrives. 

At Princeton Junction, I get on the Dinky to Princeton University ($3 one-way). I go directly to Wawa to get a coffee (free, all September, for “teachers”).

September 17

I get a refund from Tracksmith and buy more running clothes for the exact amount of the return, zero ouroboros dollars.

 

September 19

I hopscotch from Canvas to Interfolio to Proenza Schouler archives. I add to cart Leather Overalls in Brown Rust from the Proenza Schouler Archive Sale. They wither in the cart.

 

September 21

I fill my spice cupboard from the Diaspora Co. Spice Sale. An aspirational purchase: Adrianne [sic] who works at the sweetgreen near me has my custom bowl order memorized. 

 

September 23

Bought myself a hotel room in Princeton (Expedia, $104 + tax + $50 hold on my credit card, which will go away), for a night during student conference hell week. Even though I haven’t actually lived there for several years, Princeton still thinks it’s “Home” on my Apple Maps. 12.5 mi run, bought new audiobooks – Kate Atkinson x 2, Mating, Less ($36 total, including 1 Audible credit). Back in New York, I make myself a double vax appointment (free) for the Omicron booster and the flu, take a short subway ($2.75) to the Wall Street Walgreens. Le Labo Wall St., I clock it en route to the vax, and double-back to spritz myself in free samples of Tabac 28 scent ($375 plus tax for 100 ml), which makes me smell exactly like I’ve been secondhand smoking.

 

September 25

I window shop online and IRL: the flannel shirtdress ADRIAN by G.Label by Gwyneth Paltrow ($525 exclusive on Goop); the vintage Comme des Garcons x Dr Martens collab loafers ADRIEN ($295 on The RealReal); the Acne Studios bag named ADRIENNE ($1450, previous season, sold out). I buy only one namesake: YO ADRIAN.

 

September 30

In Soho I accompany myself into R13 to try on tartan jeans I don’t want ($595) and fall in love with $1k overalls I really don’t need. They puddle at my feet like a ballgown, and I leave them on the floor as though I’d disapparated. 

 

October 1

I buy gum on Amazon ($44.99, but the price fluctuates, depending on how many times I open the window). I also pre-order Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost, because this offsets my gum purchase to myself, like carbon offsets. Of course I shouldn’t be buying books on Amazon at all, but I believe in local bookstores too, I do I do I do.

I get so wet in the rain that I spend half the run contemplating the warm clothes I’ll buy on my way home – I reroute my run to up the West Side Highway and through Central Park so I can stop in lululemon, but by the time I get there it’s stopped raining, so I just go to the subway and go home and shower and tutor to make money to spend again.

 

October 2

Raining. I hate using DoorDash, use it so rarely that I have to login every time, but tonight, if I want a salad after yoga ($121 per month, unlimited membership) because of this continuous Sunday night tutoring, and the DoorDash adds nearly the cost of the salad in surcharge. It is my father’s birthday and I’ve bought him nothing.

 

October 3

Because of the tutoring, because it is a Teaching Monday after a Friday payday, because I am delirious after three solid hours of two different seminars of two dozen sulky first-years, I buy sneakers I unnecessarily tried on and coveted last week. Cycle of unnecessary shopping becoming rationalized into necessary purchase. I want a uniform. Everything I buy will be the last thing. 

My mom texts me an article about uniform shopping, “what if you buy yourself a uniform, a capsule closet,” she suggests. But what if I have claustrophobia.

 

October 6

Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel! Somehow I had pre-ordered two copies of Getting Lost while ordering gum, so now I feel smug because they’re going to be sold out. Also bought Chris’s book at his reading, gave him mine, and because I have had to buy more of my own books to replenish my supply, I have lost money twice.

 

October 7

It is my book launch so to prepare I go to the running store, stare at a wall of Honey Stingers ($1.50/waffle) and Nuun Hydration Tabs ($7/tube). I buy the pair of Saucony Endorphin 3 Pro ($225/pair) that I need for racing.

 

October 9

I don’t buy the “very best turtleneck for women,” even though it is on sale for friends and family this weekend only. 

 

October 15

We need a microphone for a book party event and it is my job. At the Guitar Center underground in the infinity mall that is also the Barclays Center, I make friends with Andrei, who is doing a balletic juggling of customers, a DJ mix, he is dealing with easily six customers in the store and two on the phone, his booming voice, he is caring for each of us and remembers exactly what we are looking for, he is the maestro of the guitar center. I wait for 30 min and then 45. As I am just about to rent the mic for $15 I ask offhand if it hooks to Sonos, which I know the space has, but Andrei does not know. He sends me upstairs and somehow across the street to Best Buy, where they do not know what I am talking about, they’ve never heard of Sonos, and they’re not having this conversation. When I return, the floor is empty, Andrei is gone; where is Andrei. But in three minutes flat Other Andrei hooks me up. He sells me a $99 plus tax mic and speaker that I can return the next day, he assures me, minus a 15% restocking fee, so it’s like renting the $15 mic after all. You’ve saved my life! 

Everyone at the event says I should keep the mic. I can keep it in my car, I think, and automatically convert my trunk into my electronics closet. But the next day, I haul it back ($85 returned to my credit card).

 

October 18

I am in Charlottesville, Virginia, where my friend cannot come to the book talk, because she has just had a needle inserted into her vagina. I walk for two hours on an increasingly slowing aching leg and see a camera shop, where cameras stare back at me from the window. I’ve wanted a camera since high school. I held the heft ($270, refurbished by hand). It’s a great price, I tell myself. I will be Cam Jansen. 

 

October 24

EZ-Pass zaps me, automatic refill ($185)

 

October 28

Spending this week shopping for pain solutions. Two weeks out from the marathon, of course having weird taper shin pain, and because it’s concentrating on one side, not two, I’m fully allowing myself to luxuriate in the drama of freaking out. I’ve been told “pain on both sides is good, pain on one side is a problem.” Four legs good, two legs bad, what’s one leg? Physical therapy for the stress tension mounting in my shin, but that probably broils from my hip, certainly from my stress. 

Runner friends recommend Finish Line Physical Therapy, which has dogs and Normatec compression sleeves; and Custom Performance, which gives me a free T-shirt and also has Normatec, plus anti-gravity treadmills and a cold plunge you can use the week of your appointment, all week, just go into midtown and take off all your clothes. I buy Icy Hot Max Strength Pain Relief Cream with Lidocaine Plus Menthol, 2.7 Ounces ($8.69), T-Relief ($9.99), KT tape ($14.69), Advil Dual Action Caplets – With Acetaminophen + Ibuprofen ($10.19). 

 

October 29

Perfect sweater on the LES, white elbow patches and thumbholes and natural wool, I don’t try to fight it ($350 but it’s handmade in Japan, undyed, all-natural, no-waste).

I meet my friend Lindsay at an art gallery (free), for the last day of the Peter Sacks show— Peter was our professor, and a polymath, a professional swimmer and a poet and a critic and now, primarily, an artist. He takes scraps of fabric from everywhere — gingham, lace, quilts, a corner of a five-dollar bill — and layers them together on the canvas to create a palimpsest that repurposes everything into new shapes, ships. 

Lindsay and I have a little natural wine crawl, Moon Glow, Buvette. A lanky blond walks by in a sweater I recognize from the Internet, the Warm & Wonderful red sheep sweater that is the iconic Princess Diana sweater, I think, oh wow, they actually bought the Diana sweater, which is when I realize it’s a blond Diana wig, and it’s a perfect Diana costume.

 

October 30

I don’t buy or make a Halloween costume but I do “add to cart” the flagship yellow raincoat from Stutterheim Raincoats, “Swedish Melancholy at its Finest,” that never goes on sale except today only, code YELLOWEEN ($427 on sale, handcrafted and quality controlled). It is raining, and it is going to rain. 

 

November 1

I order the kneepack the orthopaedic surgeon tells me to ($18). I refill on KN-95 face masks ($18.75 plus shipping for a 7-pack in pink).

 

November 2

Refill Pure Barre class pack ($240 for ten). Refill Wawa coffee ($1.91) plus hazelnut nondairy creamer (free).

I stare at a sheer shirt ($426, converted from AUD) while I tutor late at night, which costs exactly as much money as I make.

My parents have ordered a dumpster’s worth of fake Lego-like bricks, or “Lego-Compatible Brick Sets” (I have no idea how much they cost, and don’t want to ask). They’ve published this series of books, “Learning Math Using Lego Bricks,” and the dream is to get officially sponsored by Lego but until then, they have to find faux-Legaux, first from Ohio, then from China, then I think from Ohio again? It’s better not to know what my parents are building in the basement with thousands of tiny pimply plastic molds.

I find my father a Seinfeld Lego set and purchase it for him for his birthday, exactly a month late. 

My friend Chris is living in James Merrill’s apartment for the month on residency, and he takes me on a midnight video tour. He has found a horrifically perfect board game called SYNTACTICS in 8-point Helvetica font. It’s a Ouija-Scrabble-Scattergories Turducken of a game (sample answer: The duck didn’t swim because it was chicken). I deep-dive it on ebay and Etsy and it’s not even much of a dive, just a light skim, it’s not even more than thirty dollars. I keep diving to a vintage 1970 board game, The $ale of the ¢entury, the inevitable decline and fall of the 1890s Game of Playing Department Store. I need them all.

 

November 3

The good news is I don’t have a stress fracture, so I pick up my marathon bib and free shirt, and buy a jacket, and socks, and a present for my baby niece, the carbon emissions offset purchase of the jacket and socks. 

I buy a green juice which costs $10 and I have a $10 bill, and buying things in cash these days makes me feel like I’m getting it for free.

 

November 4

I buy a ton of new eye makeup ($75, but that includes the brushes) because I haven’t purchased eye makeup since 2018. 

 

November 5

I treat myself to pre-race neuroses: pre-dawn sweatpants and sweatshirt I’ll ditch to Goodwill in Athletes’ Village ($28), thermos ($14.95), analog alarm clock ($10), Tylenol Extra Strength gel caps ($8), Teddy Bear Super-Crunchy peanut butter ($5.99), Ezekiel 4:9 Food For Life Sprouted Flax Bread ($7.99 on sale) (is it stale if on sale) (does frozen bread grow mold).

 

November 6

I celebrate myself by bribing myself. I tell myself during the marathon I will get this necklace I’ve been staring at, a Tracksmith Gold Eliot Chain ($600). It’s scary hot for November, because the planet is too hot. I do make it through, by chugging through gallons of water and Gatporade (free, at the sponsored water stations), and I chug the “flow”-brand liter of water (free, in my swag bag), and yet I do not pee for days.

 

Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them. Her latest collection of poetry, Our Dark Academia, was published by Rescue Press.

The Last Furriers

Still from unreleased film courtesy Ann Manov.

One of Werner Herzog’s lesser films is about fur trappers in Siberia: big men who sled for eleven months of the year in pursuit of sables, the small and silky martens that live east of the Urals, burrowing in riverbanks and dense woods, emerging at dusk and at dawn. Russian sable—barguzin—is one of the most expensive furs in the world. The trappers make their skis by bending birch with their own hands, the same way trappers have for a thousand years. They see their wives for only a few weeks a year. They seem to have no inner life, neither anxieties nor aspirations: no relationships besides those with their dogs, no goals beyond survival. “They live off the land and are self-reliant, truly free,” Herzog tells us: “No rules, no taxes, no government, no laws, no bureaucracy, no phones, no radio, equipped only with their individual values and standard of conduct.” The film is called Happy People.

***

There was a year in which I tried very hard to make a film about the decline of the fur industry in New York City and Connecticut, and all I ended up with was a fox’s foot, a holographic poster for vodka, and a hard drive full of footage that, had I ever finished the film, would have been strung together as an incoherent montage of fragmented memories.

I remember eating General Tso’s chicken and drinking sugary deli coffee while people paid in thousand-dollar rolls of bills and tipped in edibles. I remember watching a woman get fitted for a blue leather catsuit, and the way she laughed into three mirrors when the tailor told her to unhook her bra and bend over. I remember a Greek furrier with slicked-back hair and a camouflage bandanna who shooed a family out, shouting, “I don’t want your money!” He told me they were “Gypsies.” I remember asking a sweet salesgirl with plump hands about parties where people wore two or three furs and tried to sell them through the night.

I remember sitting in what seemed like a storage unit out on a weedy section of Connecticut Route 10, amid unused pizza boxes and a jukebox and blow-up guitars and ten thousand holographic posters of a tiger. The owner was an attorney of uncertain penchants: “In Boston, some Italians got me into garbage law,” he kept telling me. He was trying to get out from pizza and out from music and out from law and into vodka. He looked panicked and vaguely taxidermic. When I asked why he didn’t want to be a furrier, he said he didn’t want to be like his father in any respect.

I remember Fred, out near New London, a town of salt-whipped, faded Victorians that in its whaling days was the richest in America. Women kept coming in with their dead mothers’ coats and being told they were worthless. Fred told me that even if fur were to become popular again, there was simply no one left who knew how to sew it. I remember two Greek brothers in New Britain who’d grown up in a dirt-poor tobacco village. After years of struggle, they’d bought a store with a cherry-red, mid-century marquee, a store that now had trash piled up in front of a sign that read “95 Years! Sorry We’re Closed—Forever!” In an online “Immigrants Hall of Fame” entry, one brother had written about how he had “achieved the American dream as a business owner.” He now worked at a Jos. A. Bank in the Boston suburbs. A little badge on his LinkedIn profile photo read #opentowork. When I asked the other brother about the decline of the fur industry, he looked away and said, “It hurts. It hurts!” When I asked him about my generation, he said, “Good luck!”

I remember a bald Greek man in Adidas track pants with big, naked-looking eyes, like a deepwater creature, who hobbled on his cane. In the dark of the fur freezer, with minks and sables and leopards all around us, a column of light scattered on his round face, he told me that one must learn how to make fur, how to sew for that many hours, as a small, small child because, “After seven, it is difficult to sit in a chair.”

And I remember, now, Pascal’s pensée: “All of man’s misery derives from a single thing: his inability to sit alone in a room.”

***

Still from unreleased film courtesy Ann Manov.

***

Until a few years ago, the only person I’d ever known who wore fur was a French professor I’d had in college, a woman who showed up to a three-student seminar on surrealism in a dim room in the math building wearing stiletto boots and carrying a Coach handbag and saying that she’d just gotten back from Paris. She chain-smoked Parliaments and put heavy cream in her coffee, and she had red hair and a figure like a woman in a fifties movie who’s going to do something terrible. When the weather hit fifty, she donned a honey-colored mink that went down to her feet, which were always in heels. Everyone in Gainesville, Florida, a town nick-named “the swamp,” swarming with sorority girls and gargantuan flies, seemed utterly perplexed by her. She tended to see men who were two decades younger and owned boats. She was the first adult I’d met who seemed happy to be alive.

During my second year at Yale Law School, two men I had loved in improbable ways died within a week of each other, and I fell sick for two weeks. By the time I emerged, all the leaves had shed from the elm outside my window and the sky was as pale and chill as steel. I bought a $120 mink coat from an eBay seller in Texas. I had gotten through my first two winters in a cold climate with a cheap puffer from a portfolio company of the Authentic Brands Group, but the pocket lining had worn through and I’d lost my keys while riding my bike, and I hated the suffocating feeling of it, the rigidness of the synthetic shell. But while I’d imagined, I guess, that I’d look whimsical and charming in a cropped, dark brown fur, I looked ridiculous with its large shoulder pads, and generally conspicuous amid Yale’s sea of North Face and Canada Goose.

When I looked up where I could get the shoulder pads removed, I was surprised to find that there was a furrier on my block, between the liquor store and the all-natural bakery. It was called Joseph’s Furs of Distinction, and when I called the next morning, a man with a deep voice grunted to come at one o’clock. When I hit the buzzer, a burly man named Tom came to the front. No one else was there, and it didn’t look like anyone had done anything there in a long time.

Tom knew a lot about the coat—he knew that it was prewar, because of the big, square label sewn in the lining; he knew it was from Maine; he knew it was made from female minks—and he refused to take out the shoulder pads. I stood in front of the full-length mirror with him behind me, feeling pathetic. “The whole form will collapse,” he kept saying. “No.” Improbably, an old woman came in and asked, whispering, if he had seal hats. “No,” he bellowed back at her: “No seal, no polecat, no ocelot”—he’d had to dump it all with the “new laws.” I asked him what it was like being a furrier, and he said it was terrible at parties, because of PETA. On the wall was a huge poster of van Gogh’s painting At Eternity’s Gate, the one of the old man crying into his hands.

Tom was kind of scary, but I liked him. He had nothing of the servile, doglike happiness people in service jobs are often required to display, nor the “imposter syndrome” deservedly haunting my peers. Unlike me, he had never had to type into a resume “Skills: Microsoft Office Suite.” He had never had to have a practice interview or go to a career-planning session on how to leverage an unpaid internship. He had never had to question anything, really: he—like most furriers, I imagined—had been born knowing how he would end up, the way a fledgling doesn’t agonize over flying.

So I liked that my fur coat—and Tom, I guess—seemed like a part of the past: a relic of a disappeared world of luxury. In the life I’d soon be graduating into, there were no more three-martini lunches; there was Barry’s Bootcamp—as the refrain went at Yale Law, “It’s a pie-eating contest where the reward is more pie.” The average weekly hours requirement at a corporate law firm is 53 percent higher than what the American Bar Association, in 1962, considered the possible human limit of work. My peers were not, as in the old images of Yale, men in seersucker smoking cigars while the world burned. They were sycophantic. They were box-tickers. They were terrified.

***

Almost a year later, six months into COVID, having quarantined in New York with a boyfriend almost entirely ground down by his corporate law job, and just beginning my own last year at law school, I was afraid that my life was about to end. I impulsively signed up for a film workshop. For my project, I had to choose a “local topic.” I chose furriers.

I found it surprising that furriers still existed at all in New Haven, much less New York, a preposterously high-rent city largely colonized by multinational brands catering to the professional class’s homogenized bohèmitude (Madewell), virtue signaling (Patagonia), and all-abnegating health culture (Lululemon). The fur industry is still really in the hands of tiny business owners, mostly old Greek guys who marry one another’s sisters and are constantly smoking cigarettes on 30th Street and come into work when they want to and have customers whose grandmothers their grandfathers dressed. Even the factory that makes Thom Browne’s and Marc Jacobs’s and The Row’s furs—where they have photos of Mary-Kate Olsen on the wall (“I love her because”—sotto voce—“she doesn’t give a fuck”) is just a couple seamsters with garlic hanging above their sewing machines for good luck.

Though it had been blocked by an unlikely coalition of Black preachers and Hasidic Jews, and then held up by COVID, it seemed inevitable that a fur ban would eventually pass in New York City. On the poorly buffering government stream, I’d watched the seven-hour-long City Council hearing on the ban, during which at least one elderly furrier broke down in tears. The councilman who’d proposed the law, a man who spent much of the hearing sipping water from a Mason jar, was, somehow, the representative of the Fur District. I asked one furrier how that was possible, and he told me that the point was to drive the furriers out of business, raze the buildings—with their annoyingly low rents and their obsolete architecture of storage-factory-showroom stories—and replace them with towering, glassy Jenga sets of Chelsea condos. Fur itself would be replaced with faux fur: a petroleum product that pollutes rivers in China, is sold by gigantic fast-fashion conglomerates, and is thrown out after a season.

When I explained my film to acquaintances who wore understated leather accessories and ate meat without compunction, they were outraged: fur was animal cruelty!

***

Still from unreleased film courtesy Ann Manov.

***

Unfortunately, I kept wanting the furriers to be something they weren’t. I wanted them to talk to me with compound adjectives about the mystery of the past and the misery of the present; I wanted them to be like a Sebald narrator, like the orphaned first children of “History.” I was grasping at straws. I filmed a gray-haired man in his smock flipping a board of skins, then a burly one in a wifebeater tossing fox skins into piles, his hair stark and thick against his wrists and sternum. When I forgot to hit record, I made one shop owner repeat to me that these were dark black minks, these were medium blacks, and these were light blacks. I couldn’t see the difference.

But really, nothing about furs was quite as impossible as I wanted it to be: I probably could have seen the difference between those furs if I had bothered to shine a flashlight on them. I remember asking one furrier whether it took a long time to stretch the skins before nailing them: “Nah, like a minute.” Well, I asked, how long did it take to make a coat—weeks? “A couple of days. Maybe two.”

The interviews mostly followed the same line: a recitation of filial pieties (“My grandfather was a very honorable man”); the catalogue of types of fur (“Fox is more for taller women”; “Beaver is very warm”; “Sable is the height of luxury!”); the decline since the eighties (“It’s not what it used to be!”). I wanted them to dissertate on the extinction of magic in the crucible of modernization, but what I got were just small-business owners frustrated that they didn’t have employer-provided health care who liked sports and checked their iPhones while I pulled focus. There was one who had gone to law school, and another who had gone to engineering school, before coming back to fur—but their only explanations were: “It’s nice to make a customer smile!”

The only furriers who seemed to think of the film as anything other than the school project of a college kid wanted it to be an infomercial. I was disappointed when a guy with a Long Island accent and a gas-blue suit showed me around, instead of his cousin who spoke bad English and dressed like a hunter, but of course they wanted to look nice on camera. I liked that few furriers used social media, or advertised at all, but everyone wanted me to help them make an Instagram account.

The primary concern of most of my interviewees was that their children be set up well, and since all of those children had left the moribund fur trade to become lawyers or businessmen or doctors or pharmacists, they were, of course, quite pleased.

In a sense, I was disappointed to find out that everyone was fine.

***

After an eight-hour day spent doing interviews at the fur shops, I’d come home to the sterile, ice-white one-bedroom apartment where I lived with a boyfriend who spent seventy hours a week at his AllModern desk with three monitors. He didn’t want children, and enjoyed reading the weekly Times real estate feature The Hunt. So, while my boyfriend worked, I’d stay up all night, blowing off my job and editing my film.

But despite all the B-roll of coats and rabbit-fur kittens and marked-up mannequins that looked like maps of military campaigns, despite the hours and hours of interviews, I was having difficulty piecing everything together. Secretly, I was somewhat disappointed the fur ban hadn’t passed: it meant that I didn’t have a “narrative.” Lying on my stomach on the rug, below the gray AllModern couch that was slightly too shallow to lean on and the AllModern coffee table, I realized that the true story of my film was much more banal than any post–Frankfurt School thesis on the homogenization and loss of mystique in post-Fordist America. The truth, a truth I quailed at as I attended my friends’ weddings, as job interviewers espoused their family-friendly work-life balances, was that I didn’t want to be a furrier. I just didn’t want to be myself.

I thought with sadness of one furrier’s daughter, in her visor and turquoise polo in a lonely senior-condo recreation center, and of her brother, lost in a wasteland of cons and schemes. I didn’t really care how many hours the son said it took to pull the thread out of Persian lamb, or how, the daughter said, those tall, slender ladies, as her father measured them, liked to bend over and kiss his bald head. I was concerned by the eerie unspoken question of why neither of them seemed to know a single person in the world, of the sense that these listless and unsatisfied people, full of recrimination and half-formed regret, truly existed only in a past recalled in improbable and disconnected detail. They were the end of the line.

I thought of another scene, at a fur factory in Astoria. I’d been there for hours, but it was a fruitless day of filming. I’d seen everything already: I knew how fur storage worked, I knew how to make a coat, I knew everyone was Greek and everything was ending. But I didn’t want to go home. The furrier insisted on buying me lunch. As I ate the Caesar salad and Diet Coke he had ordered for me (confidently and without asking), sitting at an aluminum table near a Thom Browne bomber, he started to proselytize on three interrelated topics: the beauty of the Orthodox Church, the importance of family, and when I mumbled something defensive, that if my boyfriend didn’t want to give me children, I needed to leave him.

As I cut away the footage that bored me, there was almost nothing about the fur industry left: just a hoarse-voiced man recounting meeting his wife at a Greek dance in Astoria (“She asked her friend, ‘Who’s the blond?’ And that was that”), grinning as the sun began to fade. A loud, red-nosed man, spilling out of his straining jeans, asked me whether I had children; then, suddenly quiet, he whispered “You’ll be fine … You’ll be fine.” A man so hairless and pale, so shrunken by age that he seemed almost mummified, gasped at me: “Are you marry?”

In that moment, I was shooting the Byzantine icon above his sewing machine: Saints Constantine and Helena, on either side of the True Cross, three golden halos radiating against a greenish sky. I didn’t know what the icon depicted, though; for the furrier, it was a sacred image, one he likely kissed in reverence, but for me it was a mere prop, along with the greasy, flimsy lamp, the rounded steel of the scissors, the half-faded pencil of the order cards. But because I was filming the icon—wrists shaking slightly— you can’t see him in the shot: only two stumpy legs in Adidas, in the corner of the frame, frail arms gripping the sides of his chair, his cane to one side. And because I was intent on filming the icon, and because I was ashamed, you can hear no response from me.

“Oh!” he wailed, after my silence, as if in pain. And he offered to make me a beautiful coat for my wedding.

 

Ann Manov is a writer living in New York.

Remembering Rebecca

Rebecca Godfrey photographed by Brigitte Lacombe, NYC, 2002.

I met Rebecca Godfrey in New York City in the spring of 1999. In my memory our meeting has something to do with her first book, a novel titled The Torn Skirt; perhaps she wanted to hand me a galley, or perhaps she’d already sent me one and I’d read it; I’m not sure. What I remember for certain was how surprised and intrigued I was by her, almost on sight. She had a wonderful face of unusual dimensions, a beautiful face, but with something better than beauty, visible especially in large eyes that were somehow ardent and reserved simultaneously. It was raining and I remember her looking up at me (she was quite small) from under her umbrella in a shy, expectant way that made me feel shy and expectant too.

The quiet restaurant we had planned on was closed and so we walked around for some blocks looking for just the right place—which turned out to be a bubble tea shop where we were the only customers. We talked about writing and music; she spoke (matter-of-factly, as I recall) of working on a second book. But more than anything we said, I remember her presence, the pleasure with which she dipped her long spoon into the fluted glass for more sweet tapioca bubbles, the directness of her gaze, the way she listened intently and spoke softly. She was thirty-two years old but she had an aura of impossible youth. Her presence was not exactly big. It was enchanting; I’m thinking of the words Nabokov used to describe a character in the story “Spring in Fialta”: “something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable.

***

I blurbed The Torn Skirt when it was published in 2001, calling it a “hot book,” by which I meant like a hot hot hot diary entry, urgent and hormonal and romantic as heartbroken suicide pacts are romantic. But after that first meeting, I didn’t see Rebecca again for a long time. In 2005, I think she sent me a copy of her second book, Under the Bridge, an account of a real-life murder in British Columbia, her home turf. It received several Canadian prizes, including the Arthur Ellis Award for Nonfiction, but (I’m sorry to say) I didn’t get around to reading it. In 2008 she married Herb Wilson (who she met through the writer Paul La Farge) and moved to Pittsburgh, where he was getting a degree in philosophy; their daughter, Ada, was born there in 2009. We spoke on the phone and emailed a little during that time; I’m pretty sure she got me invited to Santa Maddalena, a writer’s retreat run by her mentor and friend Beatrice Monti in Tuscany. It wasn’t until she moved upstate to Red Hook (in Dutchess County) in 2011 that, because of interest plus proximity, we began seeing each other a lot.

By then we were both living very differently than we had in 1999: she was deep into motherhood, creating a community for her family, and working at Columbia, where by all accounts she was an excellent and beloved teacher (several of her students have gone on to secure book deals, including Madelaine Lucas, Mandy Berman, and Naima Coster). Such abundance is great but certainly challenging. My life, on the other hand, was sliding into interesting chaos; my marriage had broken up and I felt I was losing another relationship, with the children I had fostered. But I was writing well, learning how to ride horses, and planning to take a temporary job farther upstate for a year. I believe Rebecca gave me another copy of Under the Bridge at this point, but again I didn’t read it, mostly because I was not in a frame of mind to read about a girl being beaten to death.

Still … being around Rebecca during this time was an unalloyed pleasure. I enjoyed going to her place, a rented farmhouse up on a gentle hill overlooking a shaggy green meadow on one side and an orchard on the other. I remember going there for dinner with her and Herb; I remember dancing for and with Ada, who had grown to be startlingly beautiful. I remember a couple of lawn parties with writers Rebecca and Herb had known in the city, who had also migrated north; I remember an ambiance of ease and spacious charm. I remember just sitting with Rebecca, looking out on the meadow, talking about anything and everything. The quality I had seen in her eyes that night in 1999 was still there: the directness and intensity with a lingering shade of enchantment, now grounded and darkened by maturity. To quote her friend Leslie Jamison, she used “the space of conversation to talk about things that mattered the most—art, love [and] anguish.” We had both experienced anguish since our first meeting, and Rebecca had maintained a bittersweet lightness in the face of it.

Fast-forward seems like the only possible transition here:

In 2012 I put my stuff in storage and went up to Geneva to teach at Hobart and William Smith. In 2013 Rebecca went to the American Academy in Rome as a visiting artist to work on a new book, a novel based on the life of Peggy Guggenheim. That was the year I returned from Hobart, got my stuff out of storage, and moved to Brooklyn. I would sometimes take the train upstate and spend the night at Rebecca’s place, to do horse research for the book I was finishing and really just to enjoy myself in the haven of what seemed to be a beautiful life. In 2014 my marriage miraculously reconstituted; in 2017 we found a rental house upstate and began to plan a more permanent life there. Rebecca was busy with her projects—not least the spectacular curation of a local gallery show titled Girls in Trees, featuring work by over thirty-three writers and artists, including myself, Nick Flynn, and Sharon Olds—and attending to Ada’s development and accomplishments, her drawings, her nascent fashion sense, her participation in a school play.

Then, in 2018, came the shock that cracked the ground: Rebecca was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. She was given six months to a year to live. She was terrified. She was more and more often in horrific pain. She was heartbroken for Ada, who was at that point nine years old. Rebecca was fiercely committed to living as intensely as she could, and for as long as humanly or inhumanly possible. She wanted this for herself, for her work, and most of all for her daughter.

She threw herself into the Guggenheim book with just as much energy as she was forced to spend on medical treatments. Her community rallied for her: former students drove her to and from Manhattan for treatments; neighbors brought food, cooked meals; everyone contributed on GoFundMe. And she rallied back, still having dinners, still going out, still summoning the verve to snarl about someone who’d just published a book about Peggy G. that sounded like crap!

It was at this point, out of concern for her legacy, that her agent negotiated a reissue of Under the Bridge; it was at this point, too, that I finally read the book, with the idea that I would write an introduction. When I did, I was stunned. While I had liked Torn Skirt, nothing in that novel had prepared me for this. Under the Bridge is a profound study of the seismic contradictions of adolescence, its poignancy, chaos, and sheer natural force, its mystery of cruelty and innocence. It is written in a matter-of-fact yet poetic and even oracular voice. Weirdly, I found myself occasionally forgetting who had written it; I would look at the author photo and feel amazement. I’m not sure why this was—I think she had so seamlessly joined the book’s various voices with the unfolding of its events that it felt almost as if the story was telling itself. Or, as I put it in my introduction, “as if I were instead reading about something we might call ‘fate,’ such a stark drama of good and evil that it stopped mattering who the author was.” It is possibly the most passionate introduction I’ve ever written, and I meant every word.

It was great to see Rebecca’s happiness with the reissue, to interview her onstage at McNally Jackson (she looked low-key amazing in a Chanel dress), and to attend the readings she did with her friend Gary Shteyngart (they both read from the book) and the celebration hosted by another longtime friend, the Brigitte Lacombe rep Janet Johnson. The party was held outdoors, on the lawn of Janet’s small, exquisite property in Dutchess County, and there was so much goodwill and warmth. When Hulu optioned Under the Bridge as an eight-episode series, it was like the completion of a dream. It was everything that Rebecca wanted, marred but also heightened by the looming obvious, which everyone was still hoping could somehow be elided.

Rebecca died on October 3, 2022, at the age of fifty-four. I can’t know what she was really feeling during those last four years, but from the outside, it looked like wildly varied highs and lows, negotiated with sheer, determined will. For a while the treatments worked and she was very much herself, working and living hard, traveling to LA to collaborate with the writer-director Quinn Shephard on the adaptation of Under the Bridge, to meet with Hulu executives, and just to enjoy the shit out of the place. Also for enjoyment, she traveled, alone or with Ada, to Europe, almost recklessly taking as much as she could and giving as much as she could, too. Her friend the writer and producer Stephanie Savage remembers one of those trips this way:

Last September we went to Baden-Baden and the South of France. At first it started as a joke about “taking the waters” [there] but then we were like, Why are we laughing? … She was in a lot of pain, on many meds. Her mobility was not good. But we visited the thermal baths. And the water was warm and healing. A few times I held onto her. She was so slight I was worried the currents would pull her away.

Through it all, wherever Rebecca was, she worked on the book about Peggy G. like a fiend. (When she died, it was almost finished; she left such extensive notes that Knopf plans to publish the novel posthumously.) At the end, in her final days, she was dictating passages from her hospital bed, and, according to Savage, “ordering her coffee from Sant Ambroeus.” When I went to see her, there were so many friends coming by that, due to COVID restrictions, I had to wait almost all day to get in. She knew she was about to die and she was in a lot of pain. But she still wanted to gossip, to admire my nail polish and the view of the East River. The only time I saw her cry was when she talked about Ada.

***

When you miss a person you don’t miss their CV or their accomplishments, however much you might appreciate those things. You miss something indefinable that you feel only in their presence. All the things I’ve written of here are very real. Rebecca’s achievements have been rightfully celebrated in obituaries in the New York Times, Kirkus, and the Globe and Mail. I value her work highly and consider it important. I admire how she conducted her life. But to tell of it does not quite convey what I found most lovely about her. For several weeks after her death, images flashed through my mind, images of very small moments: Rebecca with her glass of bubble tea, her eyes full of life; Rebecca carrying a tray of appetizers across her lawn at a garden party; Rebecca and Ada visiting my favorite horse with me in the rain; Rebecca standing on the sidelines of a dance party, her face in an expression of private bitterness; Rebecca slipping me some colorfully wrapped pieces of marzipan candy as she walked past in bright sunlight.

That last one happened when she was sick but in a period of respite. We had just sat down in the big Adirondack chairs outside her house when she said “Oh,” got back up and went inside. Returning to her chair, she slipped me two or three of the candies like she was passing a note in high school, not looking at me. Such a tiny thing, this gesture! I wish I could convey how delicious it was, what subtle playfulness and hospitality it showed. That quality is something that can be glimpsed in at least one photograph of Rebecca taken in the nineties, in which she’s wearing a Ford-Dole campaign T-shirt and reaching into a bag of chips. It’s so touching to look at now, so her. So lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable.

Rebecca Godfrey in New York, summer 1996. Photo: Chris Buck.

 

Mary Gaitskill is the author of several novels and story collections, most recently This Is Pleasure.

Kickoff: The World Cup

Qatar Airways. Wikimedia Commons, LIcensed under CC0 4.0.

The World Cup kicks off today in Qatar. To many people the entire extravaganza is one giant laundromat, a sports-wash of global proportions, designed to rinse clean the dirty laundry accumulated during the gulf state’s decade-long preparation for the event. An estimated six thousand five hundred migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka were reportedly killed during the stadiums’ construction in the last ten years. To memorialize them, the Danish team will wear subdued colors and hold black in reserve as its third strip. Yet despite Qatar’s grim politics and dubious human rights record, particularly with regard to LGBTQ rights for both residents and visitors (criticism vigorously rejected by Qatar’s rulers as “slander”), FIFA projects that five billion of us on this dying planet will feel compelled to watch.

This is my sixteenth World Cup as a sentient soccer being. In my lifetime, I’m discounting the 1950 event in Brazil—I was four months old and kicking, but not goal-ward—as well as the 1954 tournament in Switzerland, when either my parents kept it from me or we didn’t have a TV, or we did but it didn’t show the games. I’m also skipping the one in Sweden in 1958, when I might or might not have watched seventeen-year-old Pelé score twice in Brazil’s 5–2 victory in the final over Sweden; my memory isn’t speaking loudly enough on that one (see V. Nabokov, goalkeeper for Trinity College, Cambridge, circa 1919–22). No, the World Cup began in joyful delirium for me around when Philip Larkin insisted it did for sexual intercourse in general—“between the end of the Chatterley Ban and the Beatles’ first L.P.” My twelve-year-old self sat stunned, alone (no one in my northwest London family had any interest in football), and perfectly happy, as the Battle of Santiago raged, players from Chile and Italy kicking one another up in the air, landing a few punches, and creating a mayhem that required police intervention on four occasions. The English referee of that game, Ken Aston, is the man who went on to invent yellow and red cards.

Fourteen of my World Cups I watched or will watch on TV. The other two I watched in person—in England 1966, the only year that England won, and in the U.S.A. in 1994, when I traveled the country covering the games, sugar-high on Snickers and Coca-Cola (two of the event’s primary sponsors), for The New Yorker. What I remember most from that monthlong soccerpalooza, aside from Diego Maradona’s brilliant play during a Faustian effort to recapture his lost youth, unfortunately with the help of an ephedrine cocktail, is an enigmatic sign held up by German fans before their country’s game against Bulgaria at Giants Stadium. It read simply, it’s not a trick, it’s germany. The packed stadiums were secured by overzealous security personnel stripping fans of anything that could conceivably be transformed into a weapon. As one of the guards told me, “You can throw a pretzel and you can hurt someone.” In contrast to the raucous crowds inside the stadiums, the cities beyond were more or less devoid of any kind of soccer atmosphere or activity. In Chicago, where the tournament began on June 17, the very day that OJ led the police down an LA highway in his Ford Bronco, it was all Michael Jordan 24-7.

Enough about the past. We are about to step into Qatar’s balmy winter, average 70 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit, with high humidity to be dispersed by serious AC in the outdoor stadiums. Of the more than two hundred national teams that set out on this journey four years ago, only thirty-two remain, eight groups of four, the top two in each group to move on to the knockout stage. The games will run for almost a month, culminating in a final on December 18.. As is almost always the case, Brazil is favored to win, followed by Argentina, France, England, and Spain, and you never rule out Germany. All these countries have lifted the trophy before, and wouldn’t it be great if someone else crashed the party? After all, Croatia (population 3.8 million) made it to the semifinals the last time out, and the ageless midfield genius Luka Modrić still runs their show. There is always Kevin De Bruyne’s Belgium (population 11.5 million) or, for a real long shot, Africa’s best hope, Senegal.

Let’s talk about the “Group of Death.” This is the sobriquet pulled from the Big Book of Soccer Clichés to what is supposedly the toughest group to scramble out of and into the round of sixteen. In Qatar, based on current world rankings, that is Group B, which features Iran, Wales, and the U.S.A., along with England. One might think it would have to be Group E, which foregrounds two former winners, Spain and Germany, although admittedly alongside two weaker teams, Costa Rica and Japan. But, no, B it is, and it’s already been group-of-deathed to death.

Iran powered through the Asian qualifying groups to make it into the finals, and they are ranked number twenty-three in the world, not bad at all, but the lowest ranking of the teams in Group B. And nine places below the good ol’ U.S.A., which has a genuinely competitive team this time around, with a tranche of young quality players, like Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, and Giovanni Reyna, all of whom operate at the highest levels of the top European leagues. However, Qatar’s location across the Persian Gulf should provide a lift for the Iranian team: as recently as April, the website Iran International reported that all kinds of transport deals had been struck with their Middle Eastern neighbor, including upwards of four hundred flights, to bring one hundred thousand Iranians across the water on a journey that takes barely an hour and has the potential to transform Iran’s matches into something akin to home games. But there’s a problem: the team may yet get booted out before the first whistle sounds, and even if it doesn’t, a pall will hang over Iran’s games. The current uprising in Iran is a real test of FIFA’s knee-jerk pusillanimity. Soccer’s governing body already let Iran slide into the tournament by turning a blind eye to the fact that Iranian women, while not officially banned, have effectively been denied entrance to domestic soccer matches for forty years. In August, to mollify FIFA, five hundred women, including the families and friends of the players, were sold tickets to watch Esteghlal Tehran play Mes Kerman. The status of the Iranian team and the number of people who will cross the Gulf (all men?) to watch the games are both in flux. (The last time Iran played the U.S.A. in a World Cup, in France in 1998, in what Wikipedia insists is commonly referred to as “the mother of all games,” Iran won 2–1. In a pregame gesture of something less than love but more than terminal enmity, the Iranian team gifted white roses to Team U.S.A.)

Even if they emerge unscathed from Group B., the U.S.A. won’t win the tournament. As we know, Americans generally have a tough time with losers. Will the TV and streaming audience stay in their seats? It’s worth asking, because the atypical shift to winter in western Asia means the World Cup now falls smack in the middle of the NFL season and the climactic conclusion of college football, a stern test of the durability of American exceptionalism and soccer’s ability to compete with the concussive beat on the gridiron. But there’s so much worth watching for: it’s twilight of the idols time for the two dominant geniuses of the last twenty years, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and who doesn’t want some graceful valedictory moment from each of them? Ronaldo rising at the far post to head back across the goal and into the net; Messi curling a free kick into the top corner with his magic left foot. Then there’s the likelihood of surprise, a player emerging from relative obscurity into clouds of glory as Pak Doo-ik did when he scored the only goal in North Korea’s 1–0 victory over Italy in the 1966 World Cup: the elephantine memory of the fanatic holds fast to such moments. One caveat: Yuval Harari has identified the World Cup as a rare spot on the map where globalism and nationalism happily hold hands, but if your preference is for club over nation (as mine firmly is: Tottenham Hotspur before England), then you will watch in a state of anxiety, akin to that of a helicopter parent at a youth game, lest your club’s most vital players get injured while playing abroad.

The spectators who make up the crowd will emerge from their hotels and the thousand “Bedouin-style” tents, luxury and otherwise, pitched in the desert, or disembark from cruise ships berthed in the gulf, and enter the booze-free stadiums. The infinite air conditioning will hum, perhaps singing its own song the way it does in Warren Zevon’s “Desperados Under the Eaves.” Will the crowd have enough lung capacity to overcome it? Or will we ask ourselves, remembering the insane racket generated by thousands of deafening three-foot horns in South Africa in 2010, Où sont les vuvuzelas of yesteryear?

As for farewells, I have a friend who gauges his mortality by counting how many World Cups he thinks he has left.

 

Jonathan Wilson‘s new novel The Red Balcony will be published by Schocken in February 2023.