The Paris Review's Blog, page 96

Nancy with the Laughing Face

Lauren Williams, Amanda Gersten, Olivia Kan-Sperling, and Lauren Kane, members of the Review’s editorial staff, on the office fire escape. Photos: Elias Altman

The writer and artist Joe Brainard, who once put together an exhibition of 1,500 tiny collages, knew the importance of the little things in life: seashells, matches, expensive sweaters that are, as he put it in “The Outer Banks,” a poem first published in the Review in 1981, “the kind of plain you pay for.” His relationship with the magazine began in 1966, when he and his partner, the New York School poet and editor Kenward Elmslie, coauthored the comic “The Power Plant Sestina,” published in issue no. 38. Brainard’s contributions to the Review also include the cover art, “Pansy,” for issue no. 61 (Spring 1975) and the portfolio “Amazing But True,” in issue no. 53. In one of our most beloved house ads, he dressed Ernie Bushmiller’s comics character Nancy—who graced more than a hundred of Brainard’s works between 1963 and 1978—in a Paris Review tee. 

Joe Brainard’s ad for issue no. 54, Summer 1972. Nancy © Andrews McMeel Syndication for UFS. Used by permission.

To celebrate Brainard and the Review’s new design, which draws from the issues of the seventies, we are offering Nancy tees and sweatshirts, and several other items besides. Brainard, who died at the age of fifty-two in 1994, always felt strongly about clothes. Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he hoped to become a fashion designer—a local newspaper proclaimed him a “budding Dior” (and quoted his mother, Marie, as saying: “Joe thinks it’s terribly unfashionable when I wear anything other than spiked heels”). We hope he would deem our Nancy clothing, in the very best sense, the kind of plain you pay for.

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You can preorder our new merch here!

The Review’s Review: En Garde

Umar Rashid, F Anon Is Me (Fanonisme as an answer to the scourge of colonialism) However, sometimes it is difficult to get to the ringleaders atop the pyramid and one must be satisfied by dispatching proxies. Ultimately, a wasted effort. Or, red woman on a horse, 2021. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas. 72 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches. Photo: Josh Schaedel

For the past few months, I’ve been avoiding museums. Even the smallest among them overwhelms me, a side effect, I assume, of the simultaneous overstimulation and sensory deprivation of life (my life) during the pandemic. It’s not their fault, really, and galleries are hardly the solution, but when I visited En Garde / On God, Umar Rashid’s first solo show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles earlier this week, I felt the exhibition to be a kind of relief. In a series of large-scale paintings (and one sculpture), Rashid meticulously documents artifacts belonging to the fictitious Frenglish Empire (1658–1880), a portmanteau ushered in by the consolidation of French and English colonial powers. Together, the works read as something of an oblique but determining taxonomy, like the consequential false memories of a bad dream. Missionaries take the form of conversion therapists, white Jesus and black Jesus share the same lowrider, and everyone seems as if they might be on the verge of losing their heads. The show is up until December 18, and images of Rashid’s older works, belonging to the same narrative, are archived online. —Maya Binyam

I’m feeling like it’s been a while since this column has done something meta, so I’m recommending the UK magazine The Happy Reader as an excellent source for recommendations, both in their print issue’s Snippets column and their newsletter. From Denton Welch’s 1945 novel In Youth Is Pleasure to Stoicon (a convention for Stoics held annually in Toronto) to maxims overheard in Paris, reading their breezy appreciations is like skimming through a feed curated by your coolest friend’s algorithm. —Lauren Kane

The guitarist and living jazz legend Pat Metheny is a sort of guilty pleasure of mine, like listening to Rush—both are sometimes a bit too cheesy for their, and my, own good. But when the mood’s right, nothing else will work. I’ve been swooning a bit over Metheny’s latest, Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV), a live trio recording featuring the keyboardist James Francies (who seems to have twenty hands and at least as many keyboards at his disposal) and the drummer Marcus Gilmore, one of my favorites. They tackle old and new Metheny songs, with synths and effect-heavy guitar washing over Gilmore’s crumbly rhythms. Nothing here will surprise Metheny fans, but that’s part of what makes this disc so delicious. —Craig Morgan Teicher

I recently visited the Met’s phenomenal Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition, an in-depth look at the global impact of surrealism in the twentieth century. Works by the usual suspects—a painting by Leonora Carrington, a sculpture by Dali—are included, but so too are wide-ranging examples from artists active in South Korea, Iran, Greece, and more. My particular favorites include the U.S. poet and artist Ted Joans’s “outographs,” a series of ghostly-looking photos with the subjects’ faces cut out; photographs of members of the Cairo surrealist collective al-Fann wa-I-Hurriya (Art et Liberté) by the Egyptian artist Georges Henein; manifestos from the Montreal-based Les Automatistes; and the 1954 Colombian film The Blue Lobster, featuring contributions from a young Gabriel García Márquez. With a firm emphasis on the politically revolutionary potential of surrealism and its various outgrowths, it’s a thought-provoking, creatively invigorating way to spend an afternoon. —Rhian Sasseen

Beaver Moon

In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Not long ago at the big museum across the river, a little lost, I ended up in the Egyptian realm. I entered a closet-size space, its high limestone walls carved with hieroglyphs. Vultures, tall dogs, fish, bare feet with high arches, serpents, urns, owls, half-moons, eyes. These symbols, familiar and unfamiliar at once, arising, like all symbols, all myths, all language, out of our confusion and our fear, our grasping for sense and pattern, our wonder. “Wonder is ignorance that is aware of itself as ignorance,” Robert P. Harrison writes in an essay called “Toward a Philosophy of Nature.” Standing in the museum, I felt the charge, the fluttering, stirring hush that certain places bring when you can sense a long-gone presence—not ghosts, exactly, but some residue of human energy and effort. I felt the hands with their chisels, the dust and pressure, and line by line the shapes coming into being. Rising up those walls, the signs of our inexhaustible efforts to understand and make ourselves understood.

A quivering feeling between my ribs and shoulder blades—this is where that hush registers in me. I felt it also, years ago, in a wrecked stone church in County Wexford, Ireland. We’d left the village and walked to a field. Thick mist hung low, softening edges and beading on our eyelashes. In the deep, heathery November light that I love: a tilting fence way off, brown cows on the other side of it, heads bent over the tuffets of damp grass, that saturated Irish green you read about, even at this late moment in the year. In the air the smell of peat smoke, bricks of decayed plant matter pulled from bogs and burned in hearths, a tangier, higher-pitched smell than wood smoke. We were quiet as we moved toward the church’s wreckage in the corner of the field, up a gentle slope. “I played here as a boy,” my companion said. “It was ruins then, too.”

Moss softened the stone. Lichen, almost glowing, did the slow work of turning it to sand. I felt bodies gathered there in congregation. Time moved in all directions; a shivery heat reached in and touched me. No roof, just endless gray sky, the sun up there somewhere, and the moon as well, as they were in ancient Egypt, in seventeenth-century Ireland, as they were long before there were words for things like time and love and fear.

You know this hushed feeling, too, maybe, your body aware of the human scenes preceding yours, the others before, with their beating hearts, their laughter, their thighs, and the others to come after, into the vacuum of your eventual inexistence. This occasional experience has made me curious: What would it feel like to arrive in a place without a human history? No ghosts, no gardens, no ruins, no smell of smoke from chimneys, nowhere to buy a packet of nuts, no knob to turn for a glass of water. What did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin feel when they arrived on the moon?

Were they focused, I wonder, on the rock they stood upon? Its dust, its night light, its contours, crevices, shadows, the way their bodies felt bouncing in their spacesuits? Or did they gaze out toward the planet where they were born? Somewhere, way off, their shoes in rows in the closet dark, their mugs quiet in the cabinet, shirts folded in the drawers. Somewhere a river one of them threw rocks in as a boy kept moving. Somewhere light played in the eyes of the people they loved. They were further from home than any human had ever been. The charge they must have felt.

“Aching for the unknown is our nobility: a marvelous striving without aim,” the folklorist, poet, and hiker Hans Jürgen von der Wense writes in A Shelter for Bells. Yet there is an aim: to land in someplace new, press up against our limits. The vibrant flutter I felt in the ruins, and looking up the wall of the hieroglyphs, is erotic—it touches the storeplace of the deepest vitality. And it’s antithetical to language. Awe is mute.

“Magnificent desolation,” said Aldrin on the moon.

Nature reminds us of eternity, and therefore of death. Everything is here when we arrive, in constant motion. Tidal swells, grass in the wind, robin on the poplar, sunset, eclipse. And we sense it will all go on, a party that does not end with our departure. The anguish! And the reassurance. The distant moon and stars remind us of our smallness, our impermanence, and also how alive we are right now.

I spent some days in the mountains recently, out of sight of road, house, chimney smoke. Instead: sky, trees, moss, rock. At night: stars, moon. I felt moments of fear—these mountains are more powerful than I am—but there was a trail to follow, a warm sleeping bag in my pack, dried mango and jerky when I was hungry.

Michael Collins was the Apollo 11 astronaut who did not trot around on the moon’s surface. He stayed in the spaceship and traveled solo to the shadowed other side: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

I am it.

How to return from that? How to express what no other human being has ever experienced? I walked into a crumbled church and felt my soul caressed by time and long-dead human hands. It turned me on. Hard to explain. When Collins moved into the moon’s shadow, did the “God knows what” touch his soul?

This is a paradox of travel, of wandering and coming home: our sense of the world is widened, we are embraced by the new, yet opened to how much is the same. Go as far away as you can from what you know: different smells, colors, sounds of syllables, different songs, dances, prayers, tastes, light. And still, always, people eat and sleep and try to love while gravity enacts its pull, and there’s the moon. Returning can be the hardest part of the journey. People say, How was your trip? And you say, Good, I had a great time, the mountains were—there was this shaft of light one morning that—this old man with a skull ring sat next to me on the bus and—and your companion’s eyes have glazed; you know they’re elsewhere. Your life was changed by a shaft of light and you cannot explain it. In this way, after being taken up in the wide hands of the world, we are alone.

That must be truer still for those who travel to the moon. What was it like? Questions from everyone who hasn’t been and will never go. “Returning to Earth brings with it a great sense of heaviness, and a need for careful movement,” Aldrin said, speaking, I have to believe, about more than gravity. Post-moon, parts of his life collapsed. He wrote of depression, alcoholism, divorce. How amazing to have this sublime view of the planet, to touch the glowing moon. And how isolating. “Every journey begins as an infatuation and ends like a love,” von der Wense writes. “And what we have gained is a dark mark chalked on our heart, which has grown wider by an inch.” That dark mark, chalked with moonrock on the heart, widens it, yes, and leaves a scar.

Here on earth it is November. It gets late earlier now. Day routs the shadows and night gathers them back in with broad black-feathered wings. The Beaver Moon glows, reminding us that its longevity is not ours to know. But in secret heated moments we can feel the throb of our aliveness, sensing the aliveness that came before and will come after, the hushed mingling of souls, marking the heart that tries and tries to speak our ageless and ongoing bewilderment.

 

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Summer Solstice. Her previous columns for the Daily are Winter Solstice, Sky Gazing, Summer Solstice, Senses of Dawn, and Novemberance.

Dreams in First-Person Shooter

Still from accompanying video (below), edited by Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman.

A few weeks before our unit’s operation started, Lance Corporal Loya and I stood over a wadi, waiting for each other to throw our cameras down into its dusty, hollow trench. Wadis—the streams or natural ravines that farmers in the region often used as irrigation canals—were our generation’s rice paddies; they were everywhere in Helmand Province. When they weren’t wet, it was comforting to climb inside them—womblike slits in the ground to curl up in and shoot out of. They were the last thing some of us would see before dying. Like feudal tendrils etched across the fields, the wadis in the Sangin Valley were fed by the Kajaki Dam, which provided the area with a (very) limited source of electricity. It was also the main source of water for all the nearby poppy fields. This was September 2011, and guys were already talking conspiracy theories about how the pharmaceutical industry was behind the war, how they were funding the whole thing with the aim of getting us hooked on opioids once we got back to the States all fucked up and traumatized.

I looked down into the wadi where, amazingly, there crawled a tiny desert crab—“shit crabs,” we called them, because everything was shit—and, as a matter of compulsion, I crouched down to get a shot of the little guy before we disposed of our cameras.

“We’ll say we dropped them while we were getting shot at,” I said, standing back up.

“I dunno,” Loya said. “Both of us? That seems fishy.” Loya was the other combat photographer for the First Battalion, Sixth Marines. He was a very spiritual guy, in the sense that in high school he would drop acid and take ecstasy in the deserts of El Paso, and he felt the presence of God with such assuredness that he could convince you, too.

“Maybe one of us should drop ours, and the other should get theirs crushed by an MRAP or something.”

We wanted to break our clunky DV tape recorder cameras so we could get issued the new digital ones that the Marine Corps had just transitioned to. That was how the military worked: you couldn’t get new shit unless the old shit was broke. Ours took forever to export and the footage looked all grey and washed out. We wanted the new digital cameras that made the war pop, to bridge our cinematic dreams of combat with the real thing, and render flat the things that were trying to kill us. They came with night vision infrared; with the click of a button we could turn the world inside out, and make evidence-based war porn the way it was supposed to be seen. To enhance the footage, we even toyed with adding fake muzzle-flash F/X, even though, 95 percent of the time, we didn’t have a clue where we were getting shot from. We didn’t want it to look like we were just shooting into an empty cliff wall, or a mound of dirt, or a house (which, most of the time, we were).

It’s not like we were real journalists anyway; we were propaganda stooges. Loya and I had both enlisted in 2008 as Combat Camera, a small division of the Marine Corps that consisted mostly of guys who’d seen Full Metal Jacket a couple too many times, and didn’t want to have to actually kill anyone. There were usually one or two combat photographers with each infantry unit, so probably ten or fifteen of us total in Helmand Province when we were there. Our main job was to show the benevolence of our troops abroad: building schools and wells, et cetera. Sometimes we’d shoot stuff for Civil Affairs or Psychological Operations as propaganda for the Afghans to come to our side—photos of us playing soccer with some kids that they’d drop from the sky onto a village we were about to invade.

Usually, the purpose of Combat Camera, once you were on the ground and actually filming stuff, was not entirely clear. If you needed to get an interview with someone, their first question would usually be, “Where’s this video gonna go?” I often wouldn’t have the answer. If you were lucky, your video would get broadcast on AFN, the American Forces Network, a news station created by and for the military. AFN was mostly seen as a joke or just ignored as it played in the background at mess halls on air bases in Bagram, or Italy, or Kurdistan. “Today, airmen with the Eighteenth Wing stationed on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, got a special treat,” I once had to narrate. “A volleyball match between Japanese police officers and air force MPs. What started out as a serious competition soon turned to laughs, as Okinawan locals joined in on the fun …” You wouldn’t know America was at war if you were tuned in to AFN.

Most of the footage just got shuffled into a database so that some colonel working at a desk in Quantico could get a glimpse of what the war was looking like on the ground. If it was deemed suitable for public release, it would get uploaded onto the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service at DVIDShub.net, where you can find an endless stream of Christmas and Thanksgiving shout-outs from soldiers and sailors wishing their families back home a merry Christmas and happy holidays from Afghanistan.

If our footage ever did make it to the civilian news it was usually when there was a firefight, but everything had to be super whitewashed—no images of casualties, no marines cursing, no smoking, et cetera. We had to look professional.

But Loya and I had a side hustle going on. We were filming something besides the fake war we were supposed to be recording and the real war that no one cared about: our own, alternate movie war. And with the switch to digital, anything seemed possible. What we wanted most of all, what we thought would elevate our secret war movie, was to capture, just once, the enemy getting gunned down in crystal clear, 4K high resolution—a real Bigfoot, UFO type of moment. Most of the war footage we had seen was too localized, not expansive enough. You could never see the bad guys until it was too late, after they’d been killed and left as carnage in the gray and dusty archives of Google Street View: War.

We’d sit around stoned, imagining the heaps of awards we’d receive, the praise from both the military and civilian world, for capturing the “brutality of war” in such an “unvarnished” and “candid” way. “Visceral,” it would be called, “psychedelic.” And our bravery would be lauded as well, for never putting down the camera, for running ceaselessly into the fire. “The brave ones shot bullets, the crazy ones shot film”: we loved that corny slogan from Vietnam, from the glory days of journalism, back when you could actually make a difference just by photographing a napalmed girl or an executed VC. Now there was no difference to make. Pro-war, anti-war—it didn’t really mean anything anymore.

And yet: if our eyes were beginning to become one with our technologies of 24-7 documentation—we had drones and surveillance blimps hovering in the sky that could see through walls, and biometric-analysis tracking systems that catalogued people via retinal scan—and if we were Marines with the gall to film through the scopes of our rifles, then surely something real, something incredible and also educational about war and dying that we hadn’t already seen in the beheading videos they showed us in boot camp, would get captured through the steely lens of our holy death cams. For ComCam kids, the camera was an extension of our rifle, a kill-shot camcorder that doubled as both weapon and cataloger. We dreamed in first-person shooter.

We were eighteen when we enlisted, horny yet abstinent, vile yet pure, impressionable and impenetrable at the same time. You can’t tell an eighteen-year-old nothing, unless it’s something like “Getting shot at is better than sex.” The videos we watched growing up opened a door to the hidden parts of reality, but also distorted it. Internet porn taught us how to fuck while heightening the act to the point of pastiche, so that when we started doing it for real, mimicking the words and sounds and movements, it felt less intimate, less authentic than when we were alone in our rooms. We weren’t just desensitized, we were transubstantiated into a new design, a new frame of looking, feeling, believing. Things happened in videos of real life that could not be explained—a weird blip in the night sky might be a UFO, or it might be an effect of autoexposure. It was hard to process, and left you feeling sort of removed from it all the more inundated you got. The more the world was documented, the less sense it started to make.

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Stills from accompanying video (below), edited by Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman.

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In the end, the only deaths we’d capture were of our own guys, which we never wanted to happen but also secretly needed to happen. To show the cost of war there had to be an actual cost. The stakes of war were such that people you knew would have to die—this came with the cinematic baggage we each brought with us.

One of our first KIAs was not a KIA at all, but a suicide. It happened a couple of months into the deployment, not long after Loya and I were issued the new digital cameras we’d been pining for—we ended up not having to break the old ones; our commanding officer heard that other ComCam guys were breaking theirs, and intervened by switching everyone out. Lance Corporal Laight had a speech impediment, and he kept falling asleep on post. He’d been in Afghanistan before, so he shouldn’t have been fucking up the way he was. After getting hazed by Marines who were technically his juniors, he left a note on his iPhone and shot himself with his M4. His squad leader had chewed him out the night prior to his death.

I remember they didn’t give Laight a memorial while we were in country. One of our duties as Combat Camera was to film memorial ceremonies, where the chaplain would stand up and read off a few Bible verses—they lumped everyone into Christian services—and someone would play “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band. After we put the packages together, we’d send the videos home to the families.

I was pissed that Laight didn’t get a memorial, because I liked him—he was a goofball and had the face of a little kid, and his presence had a weird, comforting effect; you thought that if he could make it through the deployment, anyone could—and it seemed like they were trying to sweep his death under the rug, or like he didn’t rate a memorial because he hadn’t died the right way. Suicide was so common in the Marines that it became a chore; anytime someone did it, we’d have to sit through a PowerPoint presentation about not killing ourselves, how to spot the signs, ask for help, etc.

After filming a memorial for another guy, who’d died from a sucking chest wound around the same time as Laight, I got called into the office of the Company “Top,” First Sergeant Argon. He had a lazy eye and thought my job as Combat Camera was totally useless: “I could teach a monkey to do your job,” he told me once. He was very intimidating, especially because his lazy eye made it nearly impossible to tell if he was looking at you or not.

“You’re going to the dam,” Argon said.

We’d be on the next convoy through the Sangin Valley, up the rocky slopes riddled with IEDs to the crown jewel on the hill that was, although we didn’t know it at the time, the sole reason our unit was in Afghanistan.

“Why, First Sergeant?” I asked.

“Why do you think? To film something.”

They never told us anything. Secrecy was a currency in the Marine Corps: the higher up you were, the more you knew, and in order to maintain the hierarchy you had to keep the lower-enlisted in the dark.

“Hey, you lazy-eyed fucker,” I wanted to shout. “Why didn’t you give Laight a memorial?”

It wasn’t till we got back to the States that I realized why that would have been a bad idea. If he had killed himself because of how his squad was treating him, would his family really want to see a video of the same guys commemorating him? When we had the final memorial ceremony, back in North Carolina, for all the guys that had died during our deployment, Laight’s photo was up on the stage with the others, and I imagined the pain and confusion his parents must have felt sitting there packed into the assembly hall, enveloped by a sea of his camouflaged killers.

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Loya and I had heard rumors about the dam, and when we got there, after an hour-long ride through abandoned villages and bazaars, we saw that they were all true. The dam was a theme park, a cathedral, a cinema. The views were from another world: you could see the whole war from its rocky slopes—all the mud huts and hamlets our unit was occupying. It was like a Universal Studios ride through a different time, back when Kabul was called the Paris of Central Asia, and Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, used the dam as a resort. He’d bring women to go swimming in its many pools, and get them drunk on wine. It was the only place in our area of operations that had actual buildings as opposed to mud huts, and the chow hall was fully staffed with Marine cooks who had steaks and other goodies flown in to the base. There was supposedly a haunted hotel somewhere around there, where an entire company of Soviet Spetsnaz had been overrun and flayed alive by the mujahideen. Marines would get high on hash and go swimming in the dam’s turquoise waters when the place wasn’t under mortar attack, then explore the hotel.

But the dam was impossible to film. It didn’t look right on camera. You couldn’t capture the weight of it, nor the faint, always present sound of rushing water that crushed everything and expanded it at the same time. Filming at the dam was like holding a camera up to a movie screen.

The first thing Loya and I did, after getting some shitty panorama shots of the place for the intel folks, was seek out our friend Wahid. Wahid was the personal Afghan translator of a colonel who worked at the dam. Like all the interpreters (terps for short), he was working for a visa to the U.S.—an interminable process that you might not outlive, unless someone higher up intervened on your behalf. Wahid’s hope was that the colonel would show his thanks by pushing his paperwork to the front of the pile. And, unlike the other terps, Wahid had already been completely Americanized by U.S. forces. He’d been on nine consecutive deployments with a host of different units ranging from Blackwater to Special Ops. He was also an asshole, and the most anti-Muslim Muslim I’d ever met. He ate pork in front of the other terps, much to their chagrin, and derided the prophet Muhammad. Some months later, after I’d gotten hit with shrapnel from a grenade, he wouldn’t stop flicking me in the head where my bandage was, talking about how many times he’d been shot.

“Americans are fucking pussies, man,” he said. “I’ve been shot twice on two different deployments. Where is my Purple Heart? Where is my PTSD?” We would come back to the States mythologized as traumatized heroes, overmedicalized and treated with kid gloves, free college, and pancakes at IHOP on Veterans’ Day, while Wahid would remain merely a collateral fixture of the place he came from.

We found him serene, almost glowing, in what looked to be an old bomb shelter. He had his own room with a TV, a beautiful rug, and a giant hookah in the corner. The three of us got high and watched live performances of Alizée, the French Britney Spears, who he was obsessed with, off his hard drive. The other terps came and watched us, and Loya started dancing.

“My mom always knew I was going to be a dancer,” he said. “When I was in the womb, I’d always start kicking anytime she played music.”

Then we did the thing we always did for Wahid: romanticize America, building it up to the sublime. The women, we’d tell him. “They’ll sleep with you the first time you meet them?” he asked. “Oh, yes,” we said. The food, the drugs. You wouldn’t believe it. You’re gonna love it. We’d all get so drunk when we got back, we’d die. This was the happiest moment of our deployment.

The next day, they had us film the Afghan engineer who ran the dam, a short man in typical Afghan garb, except for the fancy Warby Parker–esque glasses he wore, which made him stand out. Rumor was that the poor guy kept getting kidnapped by the Taliban and other militias on his way home from work. They would snatch him up and use him as leverage in their attempt to hold sway over the region. Most of the time they’d let him go after a couple days, and he was probably getting a few kickbacks from the various groups as they tried to get him on their side.

There were a bunch of Army engineers putting around, shaking hands with him before the tour started. Then we walked through the innards of the hydroelectric dam, which was like a dementia-ridden brain where antiquated pieces mixed with new ones. The Army guys would stop every now and then and tell me to get a shot of them talking with the guy. It didn’t matter what was being said, just so long as I had B-roll of them gesturing and pointing at stuff. After ten years of trying to fix it, the dam was still broken. It was missing seven hundred tons of cement that U.S. and British forces had been trying to transport there, but we’d kept getting ambushed and blown up by IEDs along the way.

The dam was meant to be our supreme “Sorry for invading you, look, we’re here to help” act of benevolence. It had been built by the U.S. during the Cold War in the fifties, bombed by the Soviets when they invaded in the eighties, left broken for years, and then bombed again by the U.S. immediately after 9/11—and now this unit was trying to fix it. The U.S. military had already thrown close to a billion dollars at the project by the time we got there, most of which had gotten funneled to the Taliban.

The Army guys did the usual song and dance with the engineer, and even drove to his house to sit down and eat some fish that he’d caught in the Helmand River (“shit fish,” someone commented). We met his family, and I filmed the whole thing, like some kind of weird sitcom. It reminded me of detainee reunions, where we’d release the people we’d wrongfully detained and I’d take photos of them being greeted by their families upon their return. I’m sure if the Taliban had Combat Camera, they’d do the same thing for the engineer when they returned him.

When I was done filming the engineer, Loya, Wahid, and I got lost in the dam some more, and sat staring at its rushing water for hours until the moonlight played holochrome with its reflections. We never wanted to leave.

When I got back to the Company, First Sergeant Argon looked at me like I was a fool. I had lost track of how long we were gone; we had been at the dam for over a week when it was only supposed to be a couple days. He told me they didn’t need my bullshit video anymore, that whoever had wanted it—probably in order to get more funding—had already left. Some State Department official. Like most of our footage, it would get archived and then eventually lost.

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Twelve people from our unit were among the hundreds of coalition forces who died trying to fix the dam during the course of the war. I don’t know how many civilians we killed, but I personally saw four who were either caught in the cross fire or mistaken for Taliban. There’s no way to know the number for sure: war is one of the last untouchable spaces where data can never be trusted—especially if it’s our data.

Wahid finally made it to America about a year after Loya and I got out of the Marines in 2012. Within a couple years he hated it and wanted to go back to Afghanistan. He was bogged down by student debt, and didn’t have many friends. American Gen Z students didn’t talk the way Marine grunts did, and the rednecks he lived near thought he was either Mexican or a terrorist. Eventually he was back to praying twice a day like he did when he was a kid, before he was “corrupted by the Marines,” as he’d say.

After the Taliban took over again this past summer, his family had to go on the run. The Taliban knew about Wahid and his work with us, and were leaving death threats. His family were among the thousands trying to flee from Kabul Airport in August. They were almost killed by the suicide bomber who took out 180 people, a few of whom were Marines born after 9/11—the American news kept emphasizing that, as if the war had still been about 9/11 by the time us millennials were there.

“The U.S. abandoned my family,” Wahid texted me.

“That’s what we do,” I replied. I wasn’t trying to sound callous, but he interpreted it as such, and blocked me for a bit.

***

Now I miss the old mini-DV tape cameras. They made the real look dirty, and maybe that’s how it should look. We’ve gotten too comfortable with the real. But I suppose that documentation, like everything, goes in phases. Once you can see the phases, the world loses meaning.

In my Trazodone dreams I’m at the dam—still broken—with Wahid and Loya, and the engineer is there too, and so is crazy Laight. We’re all watching Alizée and waxing lyrical about finally coming to America.

***

Miles Lagoze’s 2019 documentary, Combat Obscura, was made from footage shot during his deployment to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in 2011. The video below was created to accompany this essay using footage that didn’t make it into the feature-length film, as well as propaganda material produced by the Department of Defense. It was edited by Lagoze and Eric Schuman, who co-produced Combat Obscura.

 

Miles Lagoze is a Marine veteran, writer, and filmmaker based in New York. His memoir, about filmmaking and his time in Afghanistan, will be published by One Signal/Simon & Schuster in 2022.

With Cherries on Top

You may notice that we’re looking a bit different today. Last week, we sent the Winter 2021 issue to Prolific, our new printer in Canada, and it looks a bit different, too. The design was inspired by the minimalism of older issues of the Review—among them no. 56, published in 1973, which I have been carrying around for the past few months. The table of contents is enticing: poetry by Anne Waldman and Alice Notley; “Emmy Moore’s Journal,” featuring one of Jane Bowles’s “odd, half-unworldly, off-kilter heroines,” as Lydia Davis put it in our anthology Object Lessons. But I am possessive of my copy for another reason. This summer, when our designer, Matt Willey, first visited the Review’s Chelsea office, he and I were immediately drawn to issue no. 56 as an object. We liked the book’s trim size, small enough that you could hold it open in one hand, and the type, which though not big was surprisingly legible, dark and fat. The paper felt intimate—textured in a way that seemed to ask to be dog-eared, or even scribbled on. And we loved the cover, which featured a geometric artwork by the American conceptual artist Mel Bochner.

The irresistible image on the cover of the Winter issue, chosen by our art editor, Na Kim, is a painting by the British artist Rose Wylie. It’s beautiful and also inviting, just like our favorite paperbacks. While of course we hope you will display it on the shelf alongside the rest of your archive, we want you to have no qualms about stuffing it into a pocket or handbag, and cracking it open wherever you happen to be.

Issue no. 238, Winter 2021. Cover art by Rose Wylie.

Subscribe to receive your copy of the Winter issue in December.

My Father’s Mariannes

Lester Sloan in Paris. Photo: Aisha Sabatini Sloan

My father is lingering a bit too long on the subway platform. The doors of the train are about to close when I grab him by the lapels and pull him onboard. I must be shouting, “Dad, come on,” because when the doors slam shut my ears are ringing with the sound of my own voice, and everyone on the train is staring at us. I feel flush with shame. We ride in silence.

I’d surprised my father with two tickets to Paris, a chance for him to be a stylish photographer in his favorite city again. To put on a new suit and tie and retell his favorite stories. To hit the streets after a good rain, when the cobblestones refract the light like so many scattered gems.

But he is in his late seventies. He walks more slowly now, has trouble remembering the last time he took his insulin. His arthritis has made it harder for him to negotiate the f-stops on his camera. I become the parent on the trip, and my concern becomes monotonous: Dad, watch out, you’re going to bump into someone. Dad, don’t follow her down the alley, that’s stalking. Dad, don’t put that glucose strip on the table.

So far our days have been beset by unexpected detours. My father wanted to stand in the middle of Hotel de Ville and reminisce about the summer we spent there watching the World Cup on a giant screen in an enormous crowd. He wanted to echo the sound of a passing siren by shouting “tambourine, tambourine” into the wind. I trailed behind him as he followed a woman with his camera because she was wearing red shoes, and, Oh look, that looks so good against the graffiti.

***

We emerge on the streets of the Marais, a storybook neighborhood. Boutiques emit a tungsten glow. Everything is cute, which is to say, expensive, but also a little bit edgy. One store has a sign out front that reads, “Juliette has a gun.” It is almost dinner time, and we aren’t entirely sure where we should be.

We are arguing when a woman approaches. She is petite, and wearing purple. Her silver hair is curly. We keep bickering until she says, “Fantastique,” and we swivel our faces to her. She is not quite smiling at us; it’s as though she’s centering us in the frame of her gaze, like a director. I am not as fashionable as my father, but today I’m wearing a long, brown coat, which I bought for a job interview. “Vous-êtes Americains?” she asks. She has her finger on her chin. After a short chat, she says, “Come with me.” Her name, she tells us, is Marianne.

Lester Sloan. Photo: Aisha Sabatini Sloan

This is not the first time my father has been approached by an admiring stranger. He is, in his own way, a fashion icon. When he began working as a photojournalist, he wore suits on his assignments as a survival tactic. He lived in the era of respectability politics. How else was one of the only Black men in the press corps going to board Air Force One with Ronald Reagan? While his experiences as a journalist were riddled with racism, he was also frequently invited into people’s homes, fussed over and flirted with for being the most elegant man in the room. To this day, he will put on a fedora just to go to the grocery store.

Over the years, my father has met all manner of Mariannes. Sylvias. Beatrices. Women, often older than him, who begin as strangers and soon become guides, docents to the unknown. A painter in the south of France. The sister of a French director. One Marianne took him to a tango parlor, and to a flea market with singing Charlie Chaplins. She pulled a wad of cash from her wallet and suggested they take the Orient Express as far as the money would go. She later married Picasso’s son.

On one VHS tape I found at my parents’ house, a blond woman sits at a restaurant, feeding table scraps to a small dog sitting on her lap. The woman is talking to the waiter, and she keeps gesturing to the camera and rolling her eyes. My father is filming, presumably with one of those massive, over-the-shoulder video cameras. At one point, the woman picks her nose, in what seems like an attempt to get my father to stop recording. She juts her chin toward the camera and asks, “Why are you filming?” She speaks first in French, then translates into English. “It’s my job,” my father says, trying to make his English sound French. “I am… journalist.” “For who? The news?” she asks, making her lips puff, sounding incredulous. “Newsweek magazine,” he says. She turns back to the waiter and rolls her eyes again, translating the encounter back to French.

That video was taken during my father’s first trip to Paris. After he turned off the camera, he says, he told the woman that he’d come back to the restaurant later and if she was still there, they could have dinner. When he returned after meeting a friend, there she was. The way he tells it, the blond woman, once she decided that he was, indeed, a journalist, became obsessed with showing him “the real Paris.” They ventured into the night together, and she knocked on an unmarked door, which opened to a nightclub. The next scene on the VHS tape is of a woman and a man, under blue and purple lights, singing a very earnest rendition of “Memory” from the musical Cats.

“Turns out, her brother was a filmmaker,” my father explains. “He made that film Diva, and Betty Blue.” As my father’s stories go, this one is a classic. It hits all the notes. Somebody didn’t believe he was who he said he was? Check. He had to prove himself? Check. Somebody wanted to take him on an adventure? Check. That somebody was related to somebody famous? Check. The famous person was a director whose work can be analyzed to better embellish the anecdote? Perfection.

Over the years, I’ve watched both films repeatedly, Diva in particular. My favorite scene involves a mailman on a motorcycle riding down the stairs of the Metro, trying to escape a policeman who is chasing him on foot. The motorcyclist rides the wrong way along a people mover, past shiny red subway tiles, as electronic music plays softly in the background as if in approximation of river water, like a song by Pharoah Sanders, and people jump to get out of the way. In my imagination, my father’s first trip to Paris was laced with a similar air of mystery and danger, with secondary characters as compelling as those in the film: the Buddhist, the woman in a trench coat, the opera singer in the silver dress.

Now, on the streets of the Marais, it takes only a brief glance and shoulder shrug between my father and me to confirm that we will, indeed, follow this Marianne. As we pass the Musée Picasso, she relays stories about people she knows who may or may not have slept with James Baldwin. We follow her past a gallery, around a corner, into her apartment building, and up the stairs. We sit down around a small dining table. She gives us a soda to split and shows us a book she has written, as well as a few by her late husband. I look down at one cover and realize that he shares a last name with my wife’s great-aunt. “Might they be related?” I ask. “It’s possible,” she says. She is orbiting us, collecting things from around the apartment and placing them on the table as though assembling an altar of items that might connect us more concretely to one another.

A friend of Marianne’s comes over, and he’s not in the mood to hang out with spontaneous Americans, so we promise to come back the following day for lunch.

The sun is pink in the gray sky. A tiny, off-leash dog is padding slowly down the sidewalk, a good half block away from its owner. No one is in a hurry. The world feels blissfully quiet.

Photo: Aisha Sabatini Sloan

The next day, we go to the Musée Picasso. We are feeling lighter, laughing more. I take a video of my father as he stands in front of a wall featuring the gently rotating shadow of a Calder mobile. Afterward, we wander over to Marianne’s apartment. She is in a bit of a rush. She tells us that she is sorry, she doesn’t have time for a long lunch. She has a house outside the city, and her neighbor there is giving birth, and she promised to feed this neighbor’s cat. Perhaps we’d like to join her?

Soon, Marianne is driving us on the freeway, moving slowly alongside fast French semis, en route to an ancient village. After getting out of the car, a bit nauseous, we walk into what feels like an Olivier Assayas film. There is a beautiful garden. The cat wanders languidly over to greet us. Marianne opens the door to her house and invites us inside.

It’s evening. My father sits talking with Marianne in the living room, and I wander around the house, looking at the pictures on the refrigerator, noticing the David Hockney book on the shelves, laughing that we have the same taste. I can’t remember whether or not there is a fire in the fireplace, but my father gets sleepy, and soon he is dozing on the couch. “You will stay over, no?” Marianne asks, catching my eye. “I can make beds for you upstairs.”

She and I make tea together in the kitchen as she tells me how she met her husband and knew instantly that she would marry him. Marianne’s late husband, is, in fact, a distant relation to my wife. We confirm this when I recognize one of his daughters in a photograph—the daughter had recently gone on a trip with my mother-in-law. Marianne speaks of the plays she used to put on at La MaMa in the Bowery when they lived in New York. “I took a class at La MaMa in graduate school,” I tell her, remembering the small class, the cacophonous room, imagining the ghost of her life overlapping with the ghost of mine. She seems unfazed by the growing number of coincidences.

She tells me about her grandchildren, her nieces and nephews. She describes the rhythm of her days now that she is getting older. She complains about the emptiness of French TV. She is eager to come visit Detroit after seeing a documentary about it the other day.

“You are sweet with your father,” she says, after a pause. “It’s nice to see. It makes me miss my own father.” The comment takes me by surprise.

***

Later, my dad and I go into town to get some Chinese takeout. Back at the house, underneath a beautiful red and blue abstract painting, my father and Marianne get into one of those non-argument arguments about politics. We drink wine, eat the salad she has made to accompany the meal. We call my mother to assure her that we are safe, and put Marianne on the phone. She walks us upstairs, shows my father to his room on the second floor, and then me to mine, in the attic. I sleep underneath a shelf full of old issues of Granta magazine, amid my wife’s distant cousin’s papers and books.

When I wake up early the next morning, I look out the window and listen to the birds. The moment feels strangely comfortable, ordinary. Here we are, quite at home inside my father’s most recent adventure.

On a bulletin board downstairs, I notice a photograph of Eugène Ionesco. One of my favorite children’s books growing up was by Ionesco: Story Number 2. In it, a little girl asks why her father is on the phone, and he says, “It’s not a phone. It’s cheese.” He teaches her that nothing is what it seems: “The music box is called a rug. The rug is called a lamp. The ceiling is called floor. The wall is called a door.”

Later that morning, Marianne takes us to the train station. An onlooker would think, from our tearful goodbye, that we have known each other for years. My father and I board the fast train back to Gare du Nord. We stand in line for coffee and croissants. My dad says, “What should we do now?”

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections The Fluency of Light, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Borealis, and Captioning the Archives. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at University of Michigan. Her column for the Daily, Detroit Archives, received the 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary.

 

You can hear a version of this essay on Episode 22 of the Review’s podcast, which is out today.

Redux: Backwards and Upside Down

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

BLAISE CENDRARS, CA. 1907, PHOTOGRAPH BY AUGUST MONBARON.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re looking in the mirror. Read on for Blaise Cendrars’s Art of Fiction interview, Shruti Swami’s short story “A House Is a Body,” Sharon Olds’s poem “I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror,” and Melissa Febos’s essay “The Mirror Test,” paired with a selection of photographs by Francesca Woodman.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Blaise Cendrars, The Art of Fiction No. 38
Issue no. 37 (Spring 1966)

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. “The world is my representation.” Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors.

UNTITLED, 1975-6, BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH, 4 ¾” X 4 ¾”.

Fiction
A House Is a Body
By Shruti Swamy
Issue no. 225 (Summer 2018)

She stood in front of the mirror. He had changed her, she wanted to see it. Her features were the same, but they had a different meaning now, she looked older and sour, and she saw the lines on either side of her mouth and traced them with her finger. The lines of her mother, her mother’s sourness. Oh God. And then she turned away from the mirror with a clenching, a balling up, for once her tears began to form she would not be able to stop them, for days she would live in a red and swollen mind, stuffed up as if by cold, eyes leaking in betrayal.

SELF DECEIT #1, 1978, BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH, 3 ½” X 3½”. FROM THE SERIES “SELF DECEIT,” 1978.

Poetry
I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror
By Sharon Olds
Issue no. 96 (Summer 1985)

Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that
woman on all fours, her head
dangling and suffused, her lean
haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and
ass narrow and pale as a deer’s and those
breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth like plummets, when I
swayed from side to side they swayed, it was
so dark I couldn’t tell if they were gold or
plum or rose …

SELF DECEIT #2, 1978, BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH, 3 ½” X 3 ⅝”. FROM THE SERIES “SELF DECEIT,” 1978.

Nonfiction
The Mirror Test
By Melissa Febos
Issue no. 235 (Winter 2020)

Here’s the thing: they were calling me a slut before they ever said the word, before I let any boy touch me. They saw the mark on me and though I didn’t see it, I came to believe it was there. People can be mirrors, too. With hindsight, I understand the instinctive shame girls feel at this kind of treatment. The story of us has been revised to include the thing that warrants humiliation. Even when we know it’s not true, or at least not right, a part of us believes it. We are not ashamed of being humiliated, but of what we have become. To tell my mother that they called me a slut would have been to reveal that I was one.

SELF DECEIT #7, 1978, BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH, 3 ⅝” X 3 ⅝”. FROM THE SERIES “SELF DECEIT,” 1978.

Art
Fugitive Photographs
By Francesca Woodman
Issue no. 208 (Spring 2014)

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.

The Review’s Review: Moral Suasion

I am not sure I will ever agree with the viability of the political trajectory traced in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future; I don’t think we are going to survive by successfully convincing an administrative class—through science or terror or moral suasion—to administer the world better until climate collapse is averted. But so what? You don’t read books because they say what you already believe. You read books because they take the problem seriously, take the world seriously, don’t counterfeit the dimensions of the predicament. Or, those are at least some reasons to read books, and The Ministry for the Future is one of very few that satisfy those imperatives for me. Interestingly, his books, including this one, are often classified as “Hard SF,” meaning they are based in careful and arguably wonky extensions of hard science. Yes and no. Certainly they take science very seriously, and Robinson is wildly erudite and engaged in such matters. But Robinson’s books have over the last decade increasingly understood that the underlying problem is not science, and therefore has no scientific solution; it lies in political economy, and a sustained change that might preserve the possibility of human flourishing has to happen there. I think that should complicate the categories a little. In any regard, the book is real thinking and real invention, operating at the scale of the whole, which is really the place to be these days. —Joshua Clover 

Listening: Dean & Britta’s beautiful pandemic livestreams were a light during the darkest days of the pandemic, but as I discovered this weekend, their Quarantine Tapes—culled from those at-home performances—are the perfect thing to play at a dinner party. (Also loving: Dean Wareham’s new solo album, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of LA.)

Reading: Esquire Classic is a relatively inexpensive (four bucks a month) web subscription that opens a world of amazing reporting: Joy Williams, Lynn Darling, Gay Talese, Tom Morgan. Lots of new (old) work by writers I love and tons by writers I had never heard of. (Cue: interesting questions about the ephemeral nature of magazine writing.)

Seeing: Jazz pianist Jason Moran’s weeklong residency at the newly reopened Village Vanguard—an annual tradition—and Gnit, which is playwright Will Eno’s reworking of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: “part horror story, part fairy tale, and part road movie.” And Terraza 7, in Jackson Heights, is not great at updating its events calendar, but it’s still the best club that I’ve been to since getting my J&J jab. —Alex Abramovich

How well do we really know our partners? And—comparatively—how well do we really know ourselves? These are the questions at the heart of Domenico Starnone’s 2019 novel Trust, newly translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri and published earlier this week by Europa. In three sections, each told from a different perspective, Starnone examines the messy, overlapping lives of Pietro, a teacher turned celebrated writer, his ex-lover, and his wife. Before their break-up, Pietro confessed a secret to Teresa, and it is this secret, shaped as it is by a certain carelessness on the part of Pietro, that will haunt these characters for decades. —Rhian Sasseen

 

Read Abramovich and Clover in conversation about rock ’n’ roll freedom, American capitalism, automobiles, and Jonathan Richman versus the Velvet Underground here. 

Roadrunning: Joshua Clover in Conversation with Alex Abramovich

Jonathan Richman around 1972, with Modern Lovers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

What follows is part of an email exchange between Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover about Jonathan Richman’s song “Roadrunner.” Their conversation takes the scenic route, beginning with a materialist definition of rock ’n’ roll and ending by arguing over the Velvet Underground (too ironic? Too elitist?). Along the way, they touch on the nature of influence, poetry versus criticism, art versus revolution, the specificity of rock ’n’ roll freedom, and what it means to drive with no way out.

Dear Joshua,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the talk you gave recently as part of the “Popular Music Books in Process” series. I loved this talk because the definitions of rock ’n’ roll that it points to are so obvious, simple/not simple, and right. Quoting selectively, starting at about the six-minute mark: 

There are ten thousand freedoms but rock freedom is definitely set—in the first instance—in a car, when it’s late outside. It can be ecstatic, it can be boring, it can be adjectiveless, but you have reached escape velocity, faster miles an hour, you have no particular place to go, and you have the radio on.

If you did have a particular place to go, that is to say, if you were not free, where would it be? That may seem impossible to answer but in some sense I think it is schematically clear. It’s important to remember that rock ’n’ roll is truly an invention of massive industrial growth. That provides the key. You are free at the wheel of your automobile because of a complementary unfreedom, which is, to simplify, the person working in the auto factory. When you buy the car you are purchasing their misery. And the important thing is, the driver and the factory worker, one circulating through the world of consumption with its pop songs and Stop & Shops, one immobilized in the world of production with its assembly line … these are not different people, despite what they tell you in Econ 101. They are the same person, it’s just a different time of day. 

I should stop here and say at the outset (as you do in your new book, Roadrunner) that the first version of “Roadrunner” was recorded in 1972—just before “the collapse of manufacturing and industrial profits, the tilt from Boom to Bust, ruination for the postwar compact of Bretton Woods, oil shock and oil crisis, stagflation, the hollowing of the labor movement, final humiliation in Vietnam, and on and on” of 1973. It’s a pivotal moment: peak America. A few years later, Neil Young’s going to release On the Beach: the album has the ass-end of a Cadillac sticking out of the sands of the westernmost part of the nation.

The end of the road.

But, as you also point out, the road Jonathan Richman’s on (Route 128, around Boston) is a beltway—a road with no end:

Even if you are not literally an autoworker, this structural relation, this contradiction, is still 100 percent in place. You are still part of the vast class that has to labor to buy back the very things it produces—at a premium. That spectral freedom of the highway is inevitably purchased with your own unfreedom. The ring road always turns away from the factory, from this truth. And because it’s a ring road, it always turns back toward it, too.

It’s fascinating, the ways economics and culture keep bleeding into each other. Your book looks back, not just to Chuck Berry, but to the Federal Highway Act. It looks forward, not just to Cornershop and M.I.A., but to Long-Term Capital Management, the War on Terror, Tyson Foods, Tamiflu, the Tamil Tigers and, finally, COVID-19. But it’s not really criticism, is it? Here’s a note that I made: “It sounds a lot like music criticism but, in reality, Joshua’s doing theory. Or so he thinks. Because what he’s really doing is poetry.” 

Would you disagree with that? Or are those distinctions now without a difference? I’d love to hear a bit about your method.

Lastly, since we’re discussing freedom in the rock ’n’ roll context, I’m wondering what you make of that old Michael Lydon article in Ramparts; the one where he says that rock ’n’ roll isn’t and can’t be “revolutionary music because it has never gotten beyond articulation in this paradox [the obvious pleasures America affords/the price paid for them]. At best it has offered the defiance of withdrawal; its violence never amounting to more than a cry of ‘Don’t bother me.’” I’m also reminded of the incredible Ellen Willis piece on Woodstock. To what extent (if any) is your book a discussion, or argument, with those perspectives? 

As ever,

Alex 

***

Dear Alex,

You give me too much credit, though that’s not your fault; it may be an artifact of my approach, arguably my hubris. When I started out, I am not sure I had clear-headed plans. I just thought that having to make a book out of a four-minute song was a formal problem asking for solutions that would be interesting or would bomb or both, especially given the constraint that I had no intention of engaging in much of the biographical, autobiographical, or academically musicological. What did that leave me with? History, or my obsessions. These are pretty close together. Since the 2008 economic collapse and the global political ferment that followed, most of my thinking and writing, whether it be scholarly or in more public writing or even in anonymous and collaborative screeds, has been about crisis, particularly the long crisis of American capitalism that I date to around 1973, and about how its transformations—notably toward intense and desperate strategies of circulation for profit-taking—shape how people fight to get free.

I didn’t choose “Roadrunner” because its recording timeline and its image of a person literally circulating through the night allowed me to discuss these things. I chose it because it’s magic. I have felt its magic for a long time but never had a good story about it. And because I couldn’t figure out a path to a book about “Tell Me Something Good,” a song at least as magical. That book goes “Something something—wait! Did you know that Chaka Khan got the name ‘Chaka’ when she joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Chicago?” And I am not sure I know how to tell that story in a way that does justice to Chaka, and Rufus, and the BPPSD, and Chairman Fred. So there I was with “Roadrunner.” And once I set out along Route 128, there was no way for me not to situate it within what is for me the true metanarrative of the U.S. present: the catastrophic trajectory of capitalism.

And the thing about capitalism, you know, it has to expand just to stay even, just to keep functioning, capitalists as a whole have to be able to turn money into more money or they’re out. And that means two things, immediately. One is that it has to dominate more and more of the planet, more and more of our lives. People sometimes complain that Marx’s thought “totalizes,” that it draws everything into its logic, which is … a confusion. The thing that totalizes—the thing that is compelled to draw everything into its own logic, its own circuits—that’s capitalism itself, that’s its inner character. Marx is just narrating that action, he’s not making it happen. The other thing about this compulsion to expand is that, when it can’t do that anymore, it enters into crisis. The end of growth isn’t just a lull, it’s a disaster that we’ve been living through for fifty years and one that isn’t going to reverse.

Okay, so that’s the theory part. The poetry part is finding a language for it. I wanted to find a form—spoiler, it’s basically the run-on sentence—that was at once true to the particular motion of a car going around and around, going past this and that without ever stopping, and also true to the general motion of expansion that wants to go out toward everything, that can’t resist trying to bring in everything. So, a run-on, but increasingly full, not, er, running on empty. Anyway you’re generous to suggest that the book confuses poetry and theory, as it might be the case that it merely confuses style with history.

But if I knew from this history that I would be starting the book near the onset of the long crisis that opens onto the present, I definitely did not know that I would also leap backward into the heart of long postwar boom. I had no idea I was going to go back to the source, and end up proposing my own version of, “Here’s what rock & roll really is, man.” Maybe it is inevitably true that if you have a theory of the end you end up with a theory of the beginning. That’s the ring road. Anyway, trying to get my head around that was exciting and daunting and I loved writing that chapter. But that is also the moment of hubris, inevitably, and of exaggeration. I believe what I said, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself as you go, but let me take at least one step back. Even if you buy my pitch, the limit of this exaggeration is, I make claims only about what rock is. I am a materialist. I don’t think rock does much outside the world of representation, ditto poetry and movies and video games. It is an account of the world in inverted form. And rock became for a while the orienting type of popular music because it got at something vast and true. It knew the terrible thing and still it sang. And I love listening to the truth at 45 rpm, even when it is upside down.

But now let me bring it all back home. I am grateful to be compared to Lydon and especially to the great Ellen Willis, but I should demur. They are among other things reflecting—especially Lydon—on rock’s failures to do what it seemed to promise. To me that’s in par with chiding, I don’t know, Bororo myth for failing to be revolutionary strategy. Like, you don’t say! Blaming rock for failing to play a role in changing the world is akin to blaming Marx for the fact that capitalism is totalizing. Rock just says a truth about the condition of the world, it doesn’t bring it into being. It’s surely true that the generation of Woodstock didn’t make the rev. That’s on them, not on Jefferson Airplane except in so far as Paul Kantner failed to join Weather Underground. And if we fail, that’s on us. But if we succeed, it happens on the Standing Rock reserve, at the John Deere factory, in the streets of Oakland. And then there will be songs.

***

Joshua,

I did not know that about Chaka Khan! But Jonathan Richman at Town Hall was the last concert I saw before New York went into lockdown. The friend I saw him with didn’t like that concert—and it didn’t help that Will Oldham came out and sang at some point. Oldham is sort of Richman’s opposite, right? Everything held at a tremendous distance; a walking definition of irony (although, I would argue, the home recordings he made in lockdown were the opposite of that). Afterward, Dan and I went over to Jimmy’s Corner—the old boxing bar off Times Square, which was closed for most of the pandemic and reopened just a week or so ago. Once we’d gotten our drinks, I did my best to convince him, “No, no. That wasn’t an act. Jonathan Richman’s the most sincere artist who ever lived. There’s so much purity, goodness, and joy.”

Did I convince him? I don’t know. Maybe it was a dumb argument, like the one you and I had earlier this year about the Velvet Underground. The way I remember that is, I’d said “Something, something, ‘Sister Ray.” And you’d said, “Oh, no. Richman and ‘Roadrunner’ have nothing to do with VU.” 

Obviously, this is absurd. There’s the biographical part: Richman saw eighty Velvet Underground shows—he’s the reason that band played so often in Boston. He practically lived with the band. He’s all over that new VU hagiography Apple keeps trying to get me to watch. There’s the musical part. John Cale produced the original recording. When it comes to the chord structure, instrumentation, arrangement, et cetera, “Roadrunner” is pretty much a cover of “Sister Ray,” isn’t it?

You dismissed all that, if I recall, on the basis of you just don’t like—in fact, hate—the Velvets. And so, we started to argue that: You said they were elitists, and the fount of elitism in rock.

I said: “Well, they weren’t elitists. How could they be? Didn’t they sing for the outcasts? Weren’t they outcasts themselves? It’s not their fault that elitist schmucks came in their wake. That’s like Michael Lydon or Ellen Willis blaming rock and roll music for the failures of the sixties. If anything, the anti-elitist position you’re staking out now is as elitist as anything else.”

Unless I’m mistaken, you see VU as arch and ironic—diametrically opposed to Richman’s sensibility—and so, you look past VU and go back to Chuck Berry. I don’t see VU that way all but, of course, you’re not wrong: all roads really do lead back to Berry. Not only is “Subterranean Homesick Blues” the same song as “Too Much Monkey Business.” Another Chuck Berry song (about, you guessed it, going down the highway at night) is the father of “Come Together,” by the Beatles, “1970,” by the Stooges,” and two songs (“State Trooper” and “Open All Night”) off the only Springsteen album that I truly like. He was not sui generis, but who is?—so, of course, start with him.

Moreover, grounding your argument in Chuck Berry sets you firmly in the world of cars (the place where rock and roll freedom, in that first instance, is set). A freedom whose flip side is Fordism and alienation. There’s a difference, I guess, between Berry’s driving songs and “Roadrunner” in that Berry always seems to be going down the open road. It’s still the fifties; the economy’s still expanding; we can still cling to ideas of expansion and progress. Worse comes to worst, we can always go west. (Or so the fantasy goes. In real life, just a few days before the end of the fifties, Berry was busted and imprisoned for violating the Mann Act: specifically, for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines. Which is to say, he lost his own freedom, in part, because he was driving while Black.)

But I can’t help thinking of “Rock and Roll“—a song that makes room for “two TV sets and two Cadillac cars” (albeit garaged), and casts a cold eye on the commodities we surround ourselves with (to make up for all the ways capital fails us) while making bold, explicit claims for the soul-saving, revolutionary potential of … rock ’n’ roll? Lyrically, it’s much closer to “Roadrunner” than “Sister Ray” is. It seems at least as relevant because it’s such a clear example of ways rock does make promises having to do with freedom:

You could dance to a rock and roll station … and it was alright …

She started dancing to the fine, fine music—her life was saved by rock and roll…

To me, that’s the whole kit and caboodle. Just those words, saved and alright. They’re so … loaded. In the Holiness church, Lou Reed’s favorite refrain (“I feel alright”) meant a specific thing: you’d gotten happy. You were possessed, now, by the Holy Spirit.

In that moment, you were free.

Rock ’n’ roll turned some of that on its head. It kept the building blocks, starting with the backbeat. (“I was raised in the Holiness Church,” Lionel Hampton wrote in his memoir. “I’d always try to sit next to the sister with the big bass drum. Our church had a whole band, with guitar, trombone and different drums. That sister on the bass drum would get happy and get up and start dancing down up and down the aisles, and I’d get on her drum: boom! boom! That heavy backbeat is pure, sanctified, Church of God in Christ.”) The songs still had to do with ecstasy (literally, a “standing outside of oneself”). But now, through some weird, self-reflexive trick of the light, rock ’n’ roll itself was the vehicle that delivered us there. Rock itself became the answer to problems that life in industrial society presented. (“I’m gonna rock, rock, rock/rock my blues away.”) It promised and, in theory, it seemed to deliver.

But in practice, the freedoms that rock ’n’ roll offered turned out to be much more transitory. Things are alright, for a while. Then we get older and start listening to Steely Dan. (I’m partial to The Royal Scam myself.)

That’s what Lydon and Willis were getting at, I’d imagine: rock songs do promise something. Maybe something as simple as, “you don’t have to grow old.” And they fail us, and maybe they fail because they don’t know the terrible thing, after all. (The terrible thing being, we do grow old, and the factory awaits us all.)

I still think we’re on the same sort-of side: “Roadrunner” is the perfect song for you to have written about, because it never does make that promise. It describes the things Jonathan sees on that ring road, and the way those things make him feel, and there’s a soundtrack (“radio ON!”), but there’s no destination; just the going around and around and around, staying in that churchy, Velvety back-and-forth I-IV chord progression that never resolves.

As you said in your talk:

I do my best to re-narrate something like the founding myth of rock and roll, which I sometimes call the “ur-story.” And it goes something like this: It’s about freedom. I know that is impossibly corny, but I hope you’ll stay with me out of generosity alone. I think “Roadrunner” is worth a book because it’s the truest telling of this ur-story, this myth. The song is so minimal because it is really committed to refining this inner nature down to its essence. With its two or three chords, and nowhere to go—that is to say, its utter constraint—“Roadrunner” is the freest song I know. Anything could happen next. And doesn’t. 

I guess what I’m saying is, Jonathan does know the terrible thing, He knows, and that’s why he never gets off the ring road. Personally, politically, there’s nothing there for him—so he stays. And he never grows up. Which, to go back to biography, is just what happened: Jonathan never grew up. That’s what I was trying to get Dan to believe, back at Jimmy’s Corner. If ever there was a true Lost Boy, it’s him. If ever anyone was delivered by “Rock and Roll” (the song, as well as the music) it’s Jonathan Richman. But, I am guessing, it came with a price.

Alex

***

Dear Alex,

Welp, I guess we’ve gotten to the part where I alienate all of our readers. Clearly we cannot escape the question of the relation between VU and Jonathan Richman. I have a lot to say, but I hope to think less about which act one prefers (though this would be disingenuous to ignore) than how we think about influence.

 Maybe a good place to start is with “Can I Kick It?” by A Tribe Called Quest. That it has Lou Reed in it is a factual matter; it samples “Walk On the Wild Side.” It is literally in-fluenced: that sound flows in. But, so what? Stuff is made from other stuff. I say this somewhat contra Modernist lore. The double myth of Euromodernism features on the one hand the fantasy of pure originality, of creation ex nihilo: Stein, claiming to be quoting Picasso, writes, “when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty.” And then on the other hand, we have the Eliotic fantasy of “these fragments I have shored against my ruin,” of keeping alight the guttering flame of white European culture, preserving the line of cultural transmission. So there is the authentic origin, and there is preservationist lineage or heritage—and both sides of this Modernist mythos place an undue emphasis on the unremarkable fact of influence.

But this can’t explain something important. “Can I Kick It?” is, you know, much better than anything Lou Reed ever did. Which should not surprise us, nor should it surprise us if it were worse. It’s not such a big deal. Stuff is made from other stuff, as that collagist Picasso knew perfectly well. The problem arises when you move from the mere factuality of influence, from the fact that materials have sources, to its priority. That’s when it risks obscuring more than it reveals.

So in this regard I think it’s unfortunate that people, especially critics, are so stuck on the significance of the relation between VU and Jonathan. On the priority. I think it obscures far more than it reveals about the bottomless and extensive and mysterious character of “Roadrunner.” I also think it’s basically anti-teenager, as if the adjacency of an elder means Jonathan could not have forged this extraordinary thing without some grand inheritance. As a thought experiment, I encourage everyone to take the terms Richman/VU and swap in Rimbaud/Verlaine. Okay, let me leave Modernism behind for the particular of the case at hand.

I would never say that VU and Jonathan have no relation—they have a profound one that I touch on in the book. It’s factual. And it’s of course about automobiles: for a while Jonathan serves as Lou’s driver, using his dad’s car. But it is also about music: Jonathan absolutely takes in all of that sound as part of his knowledge, as he takes in Chuck and the Beach Boys and so many others. This in and of itself tells us very little. When you make a thing, you make it from all that you know, and if it is extraordinary or even unique this is not because it has no history, no influences, arises out of nothing.

This may seem odd, but for me it’s crucial: to say X is influenced by Y is not to say X is like Y. The character of X, its extraordinariness, comes from its relationship to the everything, what it does with it. And that may even be unique, whatever goes into it.

More often it is not unique. Maybe it is just an interesting rehash which by the way I am fine with, I love pop music and I don’t need art to be some durable lasting objet. But sometimes songs are extraordinary, like “Roadrunner.” And if your understanding of musical relation is chord changes, then sure, you can say “Roadrunner” is “Sister Ray.” If your understanding of musical relation is genetic—there was that music, and then it evolved into this music—go for it. And if your understanding of musical relation is subcultural, where this dude knew that dude and the wisdom was passed down, cool. That’s not really how I understand things. My first obligation is to history. There is not one pair, Richman/VU. There are two pairs, Richman/history and VU/history. Now, how do these two pairs relate? That’s an actual question. And I would argue that VU and Jonathan stand in opposite and even antagonistic relations to history, to the world itself.

VU are super-duper into knowing about the world, recognizing it, classifying it, possessing it in mind and in song. They are the exemplars of this German term Besserwisser, a better-knower. They know better. Their fans know better. They discern. They might like fake I-get-the-joke Warhol pop, pop that knows about pop. But they do not care for pop itself. In the heat of the Top 40 moment, they scorn, say, ABBA, a far more influential band, until enough time has passed to ironize and sterilize the taint of pop. Liking ABBA only twenty years later is the surest sign of a bad character, period. Show me the person who in the moment, in 1976 said, in all sincerity, “Rock and Roll Heart is very lovely album, but I like Arrival a bit more, it’s smarter and more fun, they’re my two favorites,” and I will be very pleased to buy this person drinks all night long.

Fortunately for my Venmo, that person basically doesn’t exist because that is the nature of knowing better. Maybe it is simply a weapon of the weak, of the outcast, to know better. I don’t think so. This was certainly not my experience as a teenager who was particularly interested in social class. Knowing about VU, and being really into them, was just a class marker of private school kids. I am not sure I would use the discourse of elitism, which is so messed up these days, but the role of VU as a prestige-conferring taste…I mean, anyone can claim to be an outcast, I guess? Everybody imagines themselves bullied and not the bully. But the Besserwisser sits near the center of an entire worldview that reviles the forty-year-old woman driving around in her Yaris listening to John Denver, who has more good songs than VU by a margin of two.

I really think all of this is present in your inquiry. “Roadrunner” is about driving through the world, and music on the radio is part of that world. “Rock and Roll” is about … rock ’n’ roll. They know all about it. We can discuss the racial politics of Lou Reed saying “and the colored girls go…” in “Walk on the Wild Side,” which I think leaps out as a problem because it happens in the context of a broader racial erasure and by the way he demanded and got 100 percent of the publishing for “Can I Kick It?” But I suspect we can agree that his gesture is a knowing commentary on the mechanics of pop songs. IT’S META MACHINE MUSIC. Oh shit I did not see that coming. Anyway, VU knows how it works. And we listen with the pleasure of that knowingness, if that is something in which we can take pleasure. They know what happens next.

Jonathan does not know, much less know better. I am not claiming he is somehow ignorant. I am not claiming he is a holy fool, that he is free of influence. It’s the stance he takes toward the world, toward what I am calling history. He’s the farthest thing from a Besserwisser we could imagine. No matter how many VU concerts he has seen, he does not know what happens next in his own song, and neither do we, and the song is that not knowing, that capacity to be amazed and spellbound by what you see as you come over the hill even if you have driven this road a thousand times, the exact opposite of a VU song, and that makes the song unbelievably thrilling despite its extraordinary restraint. I just don’t know what to do with people who hear in the downtown art drone of VU and in the repetitions of “Roadrunner” the same thing, whatever the fucking chords are. 

But to insist on Jonathan’s lack of knowing is finally in tension with your claim that he does know the terrible thing, a claim with which I agree! So I contradict myself and here we need a sidebar of a zillion words to deal with kinds of knowing. But the terrible thing he knows is, there’s no right move from the starting position named “teenager.” No amount of knowing dissolves the essential problem. For this holy moment you have no particular place to go. But you will, and soon. You’re gonna have to pay off your own car before too long. Whether you go to work in the shoe factories that for a long time dominated Natick, or go to work in the Factory like Lou Reed, it’s still the factory. Jonathan is just driving around looking for a way out. That’s it, that’s the book. 

Joshua

 

Joshua Clover is the author of seven books, a former journalist, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California Davis, and a communist. 

Alex Abramovich is the author of several books (most notably, Bullies: A Friendship) and the coauthor of several others (most recently, Courtney Love’s forthcoming memoir, The Girl With the Most Cake).

Divorce Does Funny Things

Benjamin Shaw, Aberdeen Quayside, 2003, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The man I was meeting worked on the Brent Field. He was a kind of Typhoid Mary, having worked on the site of several accidents, always escaping unscathed. He was staying in a large, anonymous hotel behind Holburn Junction. The lobby was a columnar space several floors high. Its windows were covered in a kind of mesh, which muted the daylight and cast everything in a cool, neutral gloom. I took a booth, upholstered the same indeterminate shade, and waited for him to appear. There was some splashy abstract art on the walls, and a long, curved reception desk at the back of the room. People were moving about in the shadowy recess behind it, like stagehands in the wings of a theater. No one showed any inclination to come out.

The meeting had been arranged by a mutual acquaintance, and this connection, coupled with the blandly corporate look of the building, made me feel as if I were the one being interviewed. After a few minutes, a man stepped out of the elevator. He was small and powerfully built, with red hair and a full red beard. His cheeks were round and rosy, and his teeth pushed against his upper lip, so his mouth didn’t quite close, giving him a look of breathy suspense. He sat down opposite me and rubbed his hands together, in what might have been an expression of anticipation, or an attempt to get warm. The weather was hot and humid, and the air conditioning was turned up high.

“So you’re the writer?” I nodded shyly.

“I’ve often thought I should write a book.”

“You should,” I said. “Why not?”

This was my default response to a statement I heard at least once a day, sometimes more, and the opposite of what I thought. What I really thought was that if people knew how difficult it was, no one would attempt it, that there must be a conspiracy of silence among authors, since this misconception that everyone had a book in them was so widely held. Usually, at this point in the conversation, the person talking about writing would say he didn’t really have the time, I’d agree that it was time consuming, and the subject would be dropped. But this man surprised me, by pushing three cellophane packets across the table. They were three stories from his life, that I could use, or not, as I saw fit. It had taken him several days to write them up, but he’d found the process curiously therapeutic, so in a way, they’d already served their purpose.

“If nothing else,” he said, “they might give you a laugh.”

I thanked him, and tucked them into my bag. I asked where he was going that afternoon. The Brent Charlie, he answered, with a grimace. Two and a half hours in the chopper. Three, in an oncoming wind. If you had the misfortune to be sat next to a big guy—and for some reason, there were a lot of big guys on the Brent Field—you’d spend the flight perched on the edge of the seat. From the Charlie, he’d fly to the Alpha. He was a plumber, and the role was peripatetic, so over the course of one trip he’d work his way around all four platforms.

“Which one’s your favorite?” I said idly. I was thinking out loud, as I did more and more these days, but he surprised me a second time, by treating the question with more seriousness than it deserved.

“Probably the Alpha. It’s small, there’s not so many guys on it, and it’s just been done up. I used to like the Delta. It’s going through decommissioning just now, so the legs will be cut off in six months’ time. And then the Delta will be no more.”

“Which one’s the worst?”

“The Charlie’s got the most people on it, and only a tiny wee gym. The Bravo’s bad for arseholes.”

His voice was low and sleepy, as if lulled by its own susurration. Some of his sentences petered out into nothing. At other times he’d pause, before picking up where he left off.

“The best rig I ever worked on was the Lomond. The atmosphere there was always good. The Tartan was probably the worst. On the Tartan, the cabins had two bunk beds and a cot, for a fifth person. You had three guys on days, two on nights, and one bathroom between the two rooms. Ten people to a bathroom. It was wet the whole time. I’ve worked on the Claymore as well. That’s a disaster of a rig.”

I wondered if his choice of words was deliberate.

“James said you were on Piper Alpha.”

“I was. Only one trip. I was twenty, and very excited to be earning one pound eighty an hour. It was a massive platform, an old rusting bucket, even then. It’s like stepping off a bus, then seeing it go off a cliff. You think, ‘I was on that place and now it’s at the bottom of the sea.’ There but for the grace of God, you know? You read the names, looking for someone you know. My old foreman Jim McCulloch … he was on there.”

He sighed, and looked past me. A waitress had emerged from the back of the room. She was dressed in a drooping dark tunic, and trousers so long they covered her shoes, so she looked as though she was gliding about on casters. She took our order and slid back across the room, towards the desk. Once she was gone, he started talking again.

“There’s a veneer of safety now. But the way a multinational views safety off West Africa is different from the way it views safety in the North Sea. You see pictures of guys welding with cling film wrapped around their eyes. If someone gets injured out there, it won’t make the news, it won’t affect share prices. Or is that too cynical?”

“You’re asking the wrong person.”

He smiled, displaying large, rounded teeth. Many of the men I’d met looked worn out by the physicality of their work, but this man emitted an air of wholesome good health. He must have been in his late forties, at least, to have worked on Piper Alpha, but in the dim light of the lobby, he appeared almost ageless.

“We’ve had a lot of deaths on the Brents over the years. We had the Chinook disaster forty-five people who’d left the Brent Delta. There were two guys killed down the leg of the Brent Bravo. During the last downturn.”

The man explained that oil companies were expected to deliver nominations—specific quantities of oil and gas—to the grid. Failure to do so incurred penalties. But there is a constant tension between production and compliance. Platforms become fatigued over time. Battered by the elements, their structures need continued maintenance. Routine maintenance often puts operations on hold, and during downturns, companies will deploy quick fixes. In 1999, it was alleged that Shell had a protocol known as TFA: “Touch Fuck All.” Permits apparently came with TFA scrawled across them, meaning workers should leave equipment alone, rather than risk a shutdown. Shell commissioned an internal audit, which corroborated the allegations and recommended immediate intervention. But the auditor was transferred, and the report did not surface again until 2006, shortly before a fatal accident inquiry into the Brent Bravo deaths.

One day, the man said, two workers were sent to the bottom of the Bravo’s leg to investigate a leaking pipe. At that point, there were many leaking pipes on the platform. Many grazes and abrasions in its fabric. The bottom of the leg was a stinking, horrible place. Poorly lit and dank. The men had to stand on a metal grate above a stagnant pool of bilge and patch the leak up with a piece of neoprene and a hose clamp. What they didn’t know was that the clear, scentless substance leaking from the pipe was liquid hydrocarbon, which is deadly when inhaled. As it hit the grating below it began to evaporate, swelling back around them in a doughnut cloud.

The alarms activated and the valves designed to divert gas away from the plant and up toward the flare meant to burn it off kicked into gear. All except one, which failed. The system hadn’t been tested for a while. To test is to touch. The men tried to make it up the stairs but they were too far down. They were asphyxiated in minutes.

Shell pleaded guilty to safety lapses and was fined £900,000, a little less than it earned in an hour.

The man paused and looked out toward the street. People were walking past, pale silhouettes against the mesh. The traffic at Holburn Junction was a faint hum.

“There was another one,” he said. “A few years back now. On the Delta. A man filled his pockets with tools and jumped off the side.”

I stared. My mouth hung open in sympathy with his.

“I’ve heard that story so many times. I assumed it was an urban myth.”

“Oh no. It really did happen. I saw him half an hour before. I passed him in the corridor and said, ‘All right Jimmy, how you doing?’ He never took me on, just walked right past. I didn’t think anything of it. Then they started putting calls out over the loudspeaker, asking him to report to heli admin. I said, ‘Maybe he’s jumped off the platform.’ As a joke, you know? Can you imagine how I felt afterwards? When the alarms went off: ‘Man Missing.’ Then the story came out. He was very money-orientated. He worked a lot of overtime. This is only what I’ve heard, mind. But he was the tightest guy in the world. Money was king. I think that played a part in it. His wife was leaving him, and she was going to get the house. It drove him mad. Perhaps he thought that with killing himself, she wouldn’t get anything. Insurance doesn’t pay out for suicide.”

“Divorce does funny things to people.”

“Aye.” He moved back in his seat to make space for the waitress, as she set our drinks down. “That it does.”

 

Tabitha Lasley was a journalist for ten years. She has lived in London, Johannesburg, and Aberdeen. Sea State is her first book.

From Sea State by Tabitha Lasley published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2021 by Tabitha Lasley.