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The Paris Review Podcast Returns

With our acclaimed podcast, The Paris Review gives voice to the sixty-eight years of our archives. Season 3 launches today, with the release of episode 19, “A Memory of the Species.”

We open with a recording of the literary critic Richard Poirier in conversation with Robert Frost for the poet’s 1960 Art of Poetry interview, from issue no. 24. Next, the Italian poet Antonella Anedda and her translator Susan Stewart discuss Anedda’s poem “Historiae 2,” published in issue no. 231. The American vocal ensemble Tenores de Aterúe then reimagines the poem as a song in the folk tradition of Anedda’s native Sardinia. And Yohanca Delgado reads her story “The Little Widow from the Capital,” from issue no. 236, in which a chorus of Dominican women living in a New York apartment building gossip about their new neighbor’s talents for embroidery and witchcraft.

Listen now at theparisreview.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will arrive every Wednesday in November. And don’t forget to catch up on Season 1 and Season 2.

The Paris Review Podcast is produced in partnership with Stitcher.

Redux: Sick Fish

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.

Samuel R. Delany in his New York City apartment in 1983.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re dreaming of other worlds, and highlighting writers of speculative and science fiction. Read on for Samuel R. Delany’s Art of Fiction interview, an epilogue chapter to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and Margaret Atwood’s poem “Frogless,” paired with photos from Richard Kalvar’s series “Earthlings.”

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
Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210
Issue no. 197 (Summer 2011)

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of yourself as a genre writer?

DELANY

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another. That’s about the closest I come to categorizing myself as one or another kind of artist.

From the series “Earthlings,” by Richard Kalvar.

Fiction
Firelight
By Ursula K. Le Guin
Issue no. 225 (Summer 2018)

Were the mountains gone then, too, that other boundary, the Mountains of Pain? They stood far across the desert from the wall, black, small, sharp against the dull stars. The young king had walked with him across the Dry Land to the mountains. It seemed west but it was not westward they walked; there was no direction there. It was forward, onward, the way they had to go. You go where you must go, and so they had come to the dry streambed, the darkest place. And then on even beyond that.

From the series “Earthlings,” by Richard Kalvar.

Poetry
Frogless
By Margaret Atwood
Issue no. 117 (Winter 1990)

Here comes an eel with a dead eye
grown from its cheek.
Would you cook it?
You would if.

The people eat sick fish
because there are no others.
Then they get born wrong.

This is not sport, sir.
This is not good weather.
This is not blue and green.

This is home.
Travel anywhere in a year, five years,
and you’ll end up here.

From the series “Earthlings,” by Richard Kalvar.

Art
Earthlings
By Richard Kalvar
Issue no. 180 (Spring 2007)

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: Eternal Present

Still from Lil Peep’s “Gym Class” music video.

Curtis Eggleston’s Hollow Nacelle, out last month from Expat Press, is, like reality, both weird and not at all so. His characters—bandmates—wanna blow up… Or at least have a girlfriend, or at least make art. This is a southern California dreamworld, only so, so gray. In prose that is wonderfully straight even when it muses and metaphorizes, Eggleston conjures up the terrifying banality of fantasy, the dumbness of miracles, and lays them flat on the page. Major miracles, as per usual: love, art, friendship. Plus—and without the corniness that sometimes comes with contemporaneity—there’s the (evil? stupid? neutral?) kinds of spells that, for better or for worse, enchant our late-modern world: an Uber-type driver who appears and disappears at will, the mystery of Instagram virality, a rock of black “goth” molly that turns “purple, lustrous” under the iPhone flashlight.

In Hollow Nacelle, magic is in minor stuff: the hypnotic choreography of a fly buzzing around a room, or when “amorphous furniture leans out of itself, gets nervous, returns to shape.” A car pulls up; your crush is inside. It’s when, as one chapter title goes, “bb thinks of lov and then she texts him.” My favorite line of dialogue is “Bro, I watch porn incognito. It’s like, tradition.” I guess I like it because it’s funny, but not even very much so; not super witty or anything, but just a thing to say while fiddling with the radio volume.

In 2016, Lil Peep, right on the brink of blowing up for real, says, between cuts to dimly glowing desert flowers and the sad wings of moths, while wandering around a gray roof overlooking the cloud-covered Hollywood hills: “If you wanna live a dream, I ain’t coming bitch I told you.” He did, though. Until he didn’t. And, through Eggleston’s characters, so do we—living and dying in the downtime between reveries, fits of boredom and creativity, doctor’s offices and wedding parties, sleeping and waking up. Until the book is over, and it all begins elsewhere. —Olivia Kan-Sperling

In the general dooziness of the world right now, I’ve found comfort in midcentury avant-garde composer Morton Feldman. Talking to Tyshawn Sorey a few weeks ago about his recent album pointed me to one of its inspirations, Feldman’s late work “For John Cage,” an hour-long aural meditation on the passage of time. The piece unrolls slowly, like most of Feldman’s work, sometimes passing just a couple of notes between violin and cello for long stretches, sometimes making way for snippets of aching melody. It’s surprisingly not at all tedious, and is in fact quietly seductive. This music brings my heart rate down. I’ve been enjoying the recording by Josje Ter Haar and John Snijders on the hat[now]ART label. —Craig Morgan Teicher

There’s nothing like losing a loved one to inspire a critical look at the idea of strictly linear time, and from there, a flirtation with the idea of parallel universes. Such speculative exercises are usually the domain of sci-fi, but Jai Chakrabarti’s A Play for the End of the World manages to elicit a similar effect while remaining in the realm of literary realism. The novel follows Jaryk, a man who lost most of his loved ones in the Holocaust, after the death of his last surviving friend, Misha. Jaryk travels to India to retrieve Misha’s ashes, and there he takes up Misha’s final project: working with refugee families to stage a play by Rabindranath Tagore. Time gently distorts. It is June 1972 in India, but it is also still and forever July 1942, when Misha and Jaryk were performing in the same Tagore play as soon-to-be refugee children in Warsaw. For a moment, the love between friends, the struggle to survive a relentless state, and the art that aids that struggle bring many lives into an eternal present. —Jane Breakell

Still from Lil Peep’s “Gym Class” music video.

A Holy Terror Dancing with Light: On Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison named one of his hunting dogs Joy Williams or perhaps it was just Joy. She was named after me in any case. Jim was perhaps having a bit of fun, knowing my horror of the hunt. She might well have been a gay and avid associate, reveling in the tristesse of falling birds, but I prefer to think of her as reluctant, anguished about such an enterprise, failing to thrill to it. I prefer to think of her questioning the rightness of it, finding the whole bewildering activity loathsome. She adored Jim, of course, but saw the world differently, like Ahab’s whale who sees a different ocean from each side of its massive head. I prefer to think of Jim taking the hunting dog Joy’s feelings into account, for he thought highly of dogs as well as ravens, loons, horses, bears, dolphins (“certainly as dear as people to themselves”), and all manner of creatures, and would dismiss any philosophy that found them unworthy of grace or our concern.

It wasn’t until the sixth century that the Christians
decided animals weren’t part of the kingdom of heaven.
Hoof, wing, and paw can’t put money in the collection plate.
These lunatic shit-brained fools excluded our beloved creatures.

Who could possibly aspire to a heaven so bereft?

I’ve always loved Jim Harrison’s poetry—so full of itself, so direct and hungry and angered and awed. I think of him as a religious poet in many ways and was surprised that he was excluded from Harold Bloom’s anthology American Religious Poems. It seemed quite the oversight.

Perhaps the work was considered a bit too randy? There were too many mentions of women’s lovely bottoms? Too many rivers and wolves? And shit and whiskey and flies and questioning Our Maker about ancillary matters?

Talked to the God of Hosts about the Native American
situation and he said everything’s a matter of time,
that though it’s small comfort the ghosts have already
nearly destroyed us with the ugliness we’ve become.

Too much about our American way of carnage? In a dream the poet pictures a seven-tiered necklace of seven thousand skulls adorning the Statue of Liberty,

                                          basically
an indigenous cast except skulls from tribes
of blacks who got a free ride over from Africa,
representative skulls from all the Indian
tribes, an assortment of grizzly, wolf,
coyote and buffalo skulls

and imagines

                                        her great
iron lips quivering in a smile, almost a smirk
so that she’ll drop the torch to fondle the jewels.

Or perhaps the poem’s reflections fell prey to poesy’s prejudice against poets who write novels, successful lusty singular novels and lots of them. He was a writer and thus could not be considered a genuine member of poetry’s more constrained and anxious tribe.

I can think of dozens of Jim’s poems that would have fit beautifully in Mr. Bloom’s fearsome canon, but I don’t think the rebuff bothered him overmuch, if at all. Poetry was his soul’s refreshment and true bearing, a way of looking “at the World / and into your heart at the same time.” The poems were a necessity.

His early poems had a dignity and clarity to them, a sense of shy restraint. He described himself then as “a solitary buffoon” who “had been eating the contents of world poetry … without any idea of what to spit out.” He wanted

to be a child who wakes beautifully,
a man always in the state of waking
to a new room, or at night, waking
to a strange room with snow outside.

Years—the years, the years!—brought fame, even riches, not from his poetry but from his novellas, a form at which he excelled, his novels and his screenplays. He wrote well and prodigiously and when asked by one interviewer how, exactly, he replied, “Start at page 1 and write like hell.” Or something to that effect. Blinded in his left eye when a child by a playmate wielding a broken bottle (one would think he’d have an aversion to females after such a wounding), he trained the right to devour the world. (“No words have ever been read with” the left eye, he wrote. “Strangely enough, this eye can see underwater.”)

This was the eye that saw the world as it was—a holy terror dancing with light. The eye that saw the crow with his silver harness, sister bear with her huge head on his shoulder (“Privately she likes religion … I hear her incantatory moans”), tarpon leaping covered with oil flames in an oil refinery’s burning lagoon. The eye that once presented to him the “whole picture,”

                      magnificently detailed,
a child’s diorama of what life appears to be:
staring at the picture I became drowsy
with relief when I noticed a yellow
dot of light in the lower right-hand corner.
I unhooked the machines and tubes and crawled
to the picture, with an eyeball to the dot
of light, which turned out to be a miniature
tunnel at the end of which I could see
mountains and stars whirling and tumbling,
sheets of emotions, vertical rivers, upside-
down lakes, herds of unknown mammals, birds
shedding feathers and regrowing them instantly,
snakes with feathered heads eating their own
shed skins, fish swimming straight up,
the bottom of Isaiah’s robe, live whales
on dry ground, lions drinking from a golden
bowl of milk, the rush of night,
and somewhere in this the murmur of gods—
a tree-rubbing-tree music, a sweet howl
of water and rock-grating-rock, fire
hissing from fissures, the moon settled
comfortably on the ground, beginning to roll.

This eye, the poor one, the bad one that rolled in its milky socket like a moon, was accomplice to his visions of commanding dreams as well as the dreams he dreamed awake. It’s a good eye to have for a poet. Necessary in fact, though many don’t have it and can’t perceive the loss.

Jim described his poems as “flowers for the void,” writing them made him “soar along a foot / from the ground.” The super-masculine tough-guy selves, the reckless gourmands and intellectual wild men of the woods and prairies who populated his famous fictions were only a feather’s breadth remove from the genuinely bold, larger-than-life article. So it is that there is still amazement among his readers that he wrote poetry, that he felt that only in poetry had he found “the right pen” to write what he wanted to say.

Jim spent his fifth and sixth decades in determined excess. He wrote eagerly—in the eighties alone he published three novels—and was well rewarded, yet he was still, even increasingly, aware of the “scythe awake / moving through the dark” that he had pictured as a young man. He feared losing the correction and calm of nature. In “The Theory & Practice of Rivers,” he wrote:

Drowning in the bourgeois trough,
a bourride or gruel of money, drugs
whiskey, hotels, the dream coasts,
ass in the air at the trough, drowning
in a river of pus, pus of civilization,
pus of cities, unholy river of shit,
of filth, shit of nightmares, shit
of skewed dreams and swallowed years.
The river pulls me out,
draws me elsewhere
and down to blue water,
green water,
black water.

His next collection, After Ikkyū, was written in a self-described dark period from which he knew he was emerging. He had studied Zen for years but admitted it had been “in a state of rapacious and self-congratulatory spiritual greed.” Now he was dedicatedly reading masters such as Yunmen and Tung-shan. Yunmen disliked people, particularly the pilgrims who sought him out, and was said to have a strong aversion to vulgarity. Jim probably found this quite remarkable. Yunmen wrote, “A true person of the Way can speak fire without burning his mouth.” Having some success with speaking fire, Jim wrote:

                                                           I was writing a poem
about paying attention and microwaved a hot dog
so hot it burned a beet-red hole in the roof of my mouth.

The Ikkyū he professed to follow was even more of an oddball roshi—overly amorous, irreverent—who apparently looked quite unseemly.

Jim was more contemplative in this period closing in on the millennium, in “Geo-Bestiary” closer to finding the humble song in praise of life, getting down to the serious business of becoming “alert enough to live.” Yet still never too serious, still agile enough to avoid the more ponderous steps of the dance. In writing the beginning epitaphs of thirty-three friends he forgoes all lofty sentiments in his exaltations:

O you river with too many dams
O you lichen without tree or stone
O you always loved long naps
O you orphaned vulture with no meat

even, at times, commencing with asking their forgiveness:

Forgive me for naming a bird after you
Forgive me for not knowing where you’re buried
Pardon me for burning your last book
Pardon me for fishing during your funeral.

Truth is, he was a good friend, the best sort of friend. And so fortunate for Poetry that she had always been his practice. He served her and she offered him the means for paying attention. Poetry was

            this other,
the secret sharer,
who directs the hand
that twists the heart,
the voice calling out to me

Pay attention. One of his mantras. As was: “The days are stacked against / what we think we are.” The modest little book Braided Creek, compiled with his friend Ted Kooser, were the epigrammatic poems included in the letters of their months of correspondence when Ted was ill with cancer. One of the book’s charms is that the individual shards are unattributed, showing that the shape of words that break and heal our hearts need not be owned.

To have reverence for life
you must have reverence for death.
The dogs we love are not taken from us
but leave when summoned by the gods.

Still, I suspect that this was one of Jim’s offerings.

There is a piece in this volume not collected before, “Scrubbing the Floor the Night a Great Lady Died,” about the racehorse Ruffian who, in a match race against the Derby winner Foolish Pleasure, shattered the bones in a foreleg while continuing to run and finish the race. She endured a twelve-hour surgery as vets tried to save her, but when she emerged from anesthesia she thrashed about on the floor of a padded stall as if still running, spinning in circles, her heavy cast smashing bones in her other legs, and she had to be euthanized. It was a tragedy and because the extraordinary filly was the victim of greed and incompetence, it was the purest of tragedies. Jim and his wife and daughter bawled at the news as, thousands of miles away, I bawled with my daughter.

“How could she wake so frantic, as if from a terrible dream?” the poet asked. It was the awareness of immense loss, surely, the theft of her very being.

For she was so surely of earth, in earth; once so animate, sprung in some final, perfect form, running, running, saying, “Look at me, look at me, what could be more wonderful than the way I move, tell me if there’s something more wonderful.”

This was in 1975. So long ago. Reading now for the first time “Scrubbing the Floor the Night a Great Lady Died,” I hear the somber cry that moves across the years, the cry so much like the call of the loon (“lost or doomed angels imprisoned / within their breasts”) and the hawk’s keening wail (“the precise weight of death”).

Nineteen seventy-five. The years, the years … Jim would die forty-one years later at his casita in Patagonia, Arizona. He had at times pictured his death and his death song (or rather the circumstances surrounding his deathbed and his death song), counting again the beautiful birds of his life—the great flocks of snow geese and sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache, the frigate birds of the Pacific and the seabirds of the Sea of Cortez as well as, of course, the aforementioned birds of the soul and the night. He would count and count, and on

      my deathbed I’ll write this secret
number on a slip of paper and pass
it to my wife and two daughters.
It will be a hot evening in late June
and they might be glancing out the window
at the thunderstorm’s approach from the west.
Looking past their eyes and a dead fly
on the window screen I’ll wonder
if there’s a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds.
O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried
me along on this bloody voyage,
carry me now into that cloud,
into the marvel of this final night.

So he had imagined, though his wife, Linda, would die the year before him and his own passing would arrive in the cool and volatile month of March.

This poet, this bawdy, generous, uncommonly devotional man was no Saint Cuthbert—he killed a thousand birds, by his own account, throwing the tiny meats of woodcock and snipe into the vast presentations of many elaborate meals—but for those of us so grateful for his heart’s work, his poems, it’s impossible not to hope that his last vision, as we might pray to be our own, was of birds in untrammeled flight.

Joy Williams is the author of five novels, five story collections, a guidebook to the Florida Keys, and the essay collection Ill Nature. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2021, she received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Williams lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Jim Harrison: Complete Poems will appear in December 2021, published by Copper Canyon.

Illuminate I Could: On Lucille Clifton

Caroline and son. Courtesy of the Clifton family.

What is our relationship to history? Do we belong to it, or is it ours? Are we in it? Does it run through us, spilling out like water, or blood?

I think the answers to those questions, at least in America, depend upon who you are—or rather, on who you’ve been taught to believe that you are. If the history you descend from has been mapped, adapted, mythologized, reenacted, and broadcast as though it is the central defining story of a continent, perhaps you can be forgiven (up to a point) for having succumbed to a collective distortion.

But what if yours is a history the wider world once recorded not as lives and feats but as articles of inventory? Men, women, children listed according to their age and value as property? What if the largeness of those lives—what they endured, yes, but also what they carried, remembered, witnessed, and made—has been hushed up, negated, overwritten, or outright erased? What if the recovery of your full story sheds stark light on the lie of that other, louder story?

There it is: light. It took three paragraphs to creep in as a metaphor, though it runs through the work of Lucille Clifton like life force. Light comes to her. Light speaks. Light emanates from the figures of history and myth, like Lucifer—God’s bringer of light—whom Clifton claims as her namesake, and who in her rendering testifies:

illuminate i could
and so
illuminate i did

If light is what the work of Clifton is intent on spreading, then I’m tempted to think that history as we have been conditioned to accept it is unrefracted, all of a piece, and blindingly white. Whereas Clifton’s imagination is prismatic. It slows down the central story so we can see what it is truly made of: all the dazzling colors moving at different frequencies and, depending upon circumstances, in distinct directions.

In Generations, her poetically terse and emotionally epic prose memoir first published in 1976, Clifton uses the occasion of her father’s funeral to attest to the lives lived and the marks made by the generations of people she descends from. First they are names, dates, and places. Like Caroline Donald—Mammy Ca’line—“born free among the Dahomey people in 1822 and died free in Bedford Virginia in 1910.” To reinscribe these lives into recollected history is to restore history itself to a rightful state of commotion.

Samuel. Courtesy of the Clifton family.

Once named, these kin arrive en masse, brought to life through the rhythm and inflection of voices—like the voice of Clifton’s own father, Sam Sayles, in whose vernacular rhythm Mammy Ca’line is not merely described but rather conjured:

Oh she was tall and skinny and walked straight as a soldier, Lue. Straight like somebody marching wherever she went. And she talked with a Oxford accent! I ain’t kidding. Don’t let nobody tell you them old people was dumb. She talked like she was from London England and when we kids would be running and hooping and hollering all around she would come to the door and look straight at me and shake her finger and say “Stop that Bedlam, mister, stop that Bedlam, I say.” With a Oxford accent, Lue! She was a dark old skinny lady and she raised my Daddy and then raised me, least till I was eight years old when she died.

I hear, in Sayles’s Ohs and his Lues and his exclamations and his insistence, something exultant and—positively—oracular. He is engaged not simply in an act of telling but of creating and consecrating a capacity for belief and understanding in both his daughter and—if we are listening properly—his daughter’s readers. The passage above segues seamlessly into the following capacity-expanding moment, when Clifton’s father signifies how, at eight years of age, Mammy Ca’line “walked North from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830,” at which point she was sold away from her family:

I remember everything she ever told me, cause you know when you that age you old enough to remember things. I remember everything she told me, Lue, even though she died when I was eight years old. And then I knowed about what she remembered cause that’s how old she was when she got here. Eight years old.

Mammy Ca’line’s depth of feeling, knowledge, and loss—in other words, the reality of her personhood—both affirmed and was affirmed by the reality of young Sam Sayles’s selfhood. As a child in grief, he found depth of feeling and knowledge, or generated it, through belief in what Mammy Ca’line, in her own grief, would have been required to find or generate.

These are the lives that America’s dominant history, as defined by aspirational notions of white personhood, has let fall into shadow. These are the stories that have been left unmarked and untended by America’s preferred view of itself, like the graves of slaves on land passed down through the white generations. One of the major contributions of Clifton’s writing is that she has teased out these lives, allowing them to demand their rightful space, to command our full attention, to teach us things about themselves and ourselves.

But it is not enough only to tease out, to separate and disband. Clifton’s purpose is to teach us to see that we are, in fact, moving together and that we are, in fact, part of a large whole. If that whole is unified, unity is not what we have been taught to believe; it is not compliance, not assimilation, not an enforced hierarchy. Neither is it simply escape. What, then, is the vision of America that Clifton is intent upon illuminating?

When you arrange one prism next to another, all those different colors—red, orange, yellow, and so on—rejoin one another, and together they begin to move in another direction.

I take it as significant that Clifton invokes Walt Whitman’s voice alongside the everyday poetry taken from the mouths of her ancestors. In this context, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is no longer a familiar American music but an invitation to a radical reconfiguring of self. In other words, when Whitman’s “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” is sat beneath a portrait of Clifton’s grandfather and great-grandmother, what I am made to understand is this: here in America, and perhaps everywhere, no matter who we have been made to believe that we are, we are—all of us—the children of slaves.

 

Tracy K. Smith is a writer and former United States Poet Laureate. The author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, and four poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, she is a professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

From the introduction to Generations by Lucille Clifton, published by NYRB Classics. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Tracy K. Smith.

Redux: The Subway Back and Forth

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.

Welty, ca. 1962, Wikimedia Commons

This week at The Paris Review, we’re waiting for the bus and descending into the subway. Read on for Eudora Welty’s Art of Fiction interview, Gish Jen’s short story “Amaryllis,” and Frank O’Hara’s poem “Corresponding Foreignly,” paired with a portfolio of photographs by G. M. B. Akash.

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
Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47
Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972)

Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have. And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it. Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

From the series “Nothing to Hold On To,” by G. M. B. Akash

Fiction
Amaryllis
By Gish Jen
Issue no. 179 (Winter 2006)

Amaryllis felt annoyed at Tara, at Uncle Jeff, at herself even, as she found that she had begun to like the ritual of leaving the office. She liked needing to leave the way so many of her coworkers did—all the time it seemed—to bring their kids to the doctor, pick up a birthday cake, something. She liked the No. 7 train and the people on it; she liked waiting at the platform, on the wooden bench facing the ticket booth. The Flushing stop was the last stop of the line. Why did she like even that?

From the series “Nothing to Hold On To,” by G. M. B. Akash

Poetry
Corresponding Foreignly
By Frank O’Hara
Issue no. 69 (Spring 1977)

2
Certain eases appeal to me more than the flowering quinces
and your black pear branches dripping white petals.
I’m not a pastoral type any more, I take the subway
back and forth from beds to days or bed-in-the-day-time
and if pleased am a dirty flower at the end of ragtagging
it. “I hear you were downtown last night. It was just like
old times.’’ What a thing to say in an elevator. I’d feel
rather more assured, though, if we were rolling in a field
screaming above the records and the Japanese lanterns.
I hate the country and its bells and its photographs.

From the series “Nothing to Hold On To,” by G. M. B. Akash

Art
Nothing To Hold On To
By G. M. B. Akash
Issue no. 192 (Spring 2010)

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.

Hunter’s 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.

The Wild Hunt of Odin, by Peter Nicolai Arbo, Nasjonalmuseet

Summer is dead. The last flames of its cremation heat the leaves across New England where I live. The rest of the fire-stained leaves will fall, ashy on the forest floors, ashy on the sidewalks. This is how ghosts speak, the sound of ashy leaves blown by wind or shuffled by feet, and October is when they speak the loudest. Ghosts are white in the imagination, pale blurs, small fogs of body. The moon is also white, but no one thinks it a ghost.

For this haunted moment of the year: the Hunter’s Moon. Bare trees, bare fields—all the better, by moonlight, to spot the prey, take aim, drain blood, skin, sever limb from joint, and slice flesh to store for the cold months ahead. Me, I go to the grocery store; my meat has its skin peeled off before I bring it home. Have you sliced the throat of a mammal? Snapped the neck of a fowl? Put a bullet through the soft parts to stop the light in the eyes of a creature who leaps or flies? Do you know what it is to crouch in brush and wait, hoping the wind does not carry your human scent to the nostrils of whatever beast you’re trying to catch? I don’t. But something stirs in the blood this time of year regardless. Maybe you feel it, too. Maybe you’re able to detect things that normally elude our dulled and faulty senses. As if all of a sudden noses become more alert. May and June have their blooms, the dewy grassy floral scent of spring. Late fall smells earthier: mulch, ash, the turpentine tang of decay, worm chew, slowing sap, flinty night.

October marks a crossroads. The last warmth fades behind us; the apple-skin present invites the teeth; the cold dark looms. Past present future spin and overlap at greater speed. Ghosts travel in these swirling tunnels, the dead whispering alongside us, reminding us, softly, where we’re headed at some unnamed, unknown moment.

Crossing the autumn moor—
I keep hearing
someone behind me!

So wrote Yosa Buson nearly three hundred years ago. Who’s there? What follows us? Death is not the hunter. Time is.

Time pulls open the steel jaws of a trap and sets it tight to snap the leg. Digs a pit in the path, covers it with twigs and leaves and forest soil: a footstep on what looks like solid earth and quick as a car crash you’re smelling dirt at the bottom of a hole with walls too steep to climb. Time has its nets, its ropes, its bow strung tight and its quiver full of arrows. It surrounds us on all sides. We find ways to dodge it now and then, to slow its creep. Drugs, sunscreen, meditation, all the ecstatic pursuits that dissolve the limits of your senses. It can happen in simpler moments, too, in a chair, eating a hard-boiled egg, an olive, soft butter on some bread. “I shall live centuries in the hours,” Mary MacLane writes in I Await the Devil’s Coming. It is a good way to live. To say, I am in your hands, Time, you have me, I am yours. Thus some do learn how to make love with the hunter. It’s possible.

In Northern European folklore there is a spectral horde known as the Wild Hunt. Like time, they fly. The elder of the Grimm brothers, Jacob, describes a pack of spirits, gods, wraiths, horses, hounds, thundering across the sky, harbingering plague or war or death to the poor fool out at night alone who glimpses them. Hunting souls, they “sweep through forest and air in whole companies with a horrible din.” Their legend, Grimm writes, “interweaves itself, now with gods, and now with heroes. Look where you will, it betrays its connexion with heathenism.” Some tales have it that a woman and her twenty-four daughters loved hunting so much, they claimed it was better than heaven. As punishment, they were flung into the air, and all two dozen daughters turned into dogs, condemned “there betwixt heaven and earth to hunt unceasingly.” If you see them, hide.

In Celtic mythology, a roving band of underfolk called the Sluagh, gone-wrong souls of the dead, fly through the night on Samhain, the last night in October, hunting for more souls to join their mob. People once left food and treats to keep the gang appeased, a precursor to trick-or-treating. Gods, ghosts, fairies, heroes crash across the sky, up, look up, time’s up. Time’s up! Few phrases ice the heart as fast. To hunt or be hunted is to know the private smells, the sour tang of fear, its mix-up with desire, the heady musk of the creased places, salted, glandular. “Hunters and undergrowth are intimate,” Ruth Fainlight writes. “The hunt is out, torch-light and screams … terror cannot be disguised … smell is carried by the wind.” Tempus fugit. It flies.

But the verb in Latin, fugere, does not mean “to fly.” It means “to flee.”

Who’s hunted? What’s being chased?

Buson again:

Escaped the nets,
escaped the ropes—
moon on the water.

The ungraspable moon glitters on the surface of a lake. Reach in for it, it scatters, flees, and then returns, reassembling its shimmer, same as if you try to grab a handful of fog. We cannot catch it, though its light is on our skin. (Every month time chews on the moon until it’s gone, and yet the moon returns.) We can’t catch time, either, and maybe we’re the horde who chases, galloping after it, berserk and wild-eyed, more please, more.

The moon, the hunt, the realm between life and afterlife—these bring us to Diana, a triple goddess. Goddess of the hunt with her bow and arrow. Of the moon, often depicted with a crescent crown. And goddess, too, of the crossroads, the haunted in-between, the underworld place where the paths split, where hunters might find themselves, lit by the moon, and face a choice: stay the course, go back the way they came, or veer off someplace new. “We are divided in ourselves, against ourselves,” D. H. Lawrence writes in an essay on The Scarlet Letter. “And that is the meaning of the cross symbol.” Are all ghosts holy?

Lawrence buys into the duality: we have mind-knowledge (self-conscious, rational, guilty) and blood-knowledge (instinctual, sexed, hungering). “Blood-consciousness overwhelms, obliterates, and annuls mind-consciousness,” he writes. “Mind-consciousness extinguishes blood-consciousness, and consumes the blood.” One hunts the other, in other words. “The two ways are antagonistic in us… That is our cross.”

The moon is presumed mute—its silence is the silence of death. But when it does speak, it speaks in the language of shadows. You speak this language, too. It was your first language, our shared first language, the language of the dark. When you can’t scream in nightmares, it is the moon caught in your throat, a bright white rolling marble that garbles the voice, makes it choked and animal. Moonlight smells like chalkboard, like snowcloud, like a rock in the dirt. You can skin it with a glimpse, lay its pelt down by the hearth, and wrap yourself in its furred light. No weapons, no blood. A glimpse as it shifts in time; what a thing to witness, the full moon’s monthly resurrection.

 

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.

Eavesdropping in the Archives: Six Artist Portraits

The following photographs are taken from the archives of Lester Sloan, who was a photojournalist for Newsweek, where he documented the 1967 uprising in Detroit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the O. J. Simpson trial, from the late sixties until the mid-nineties. The captions are transcribed conversations between Lester and his daughter, the writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan. They have been edited for concision. They are offered here in the spirit of an eavesdropped conversation. While this is a work of nonfiction, the stories relayed here are recollections, prone to the vicissitudes of memory over time. Aisha’s questions and prompts to her father appear in bold. Lester’s thoughts are set in a lighter typeface. 

BALLET LESSONS

Hoop dreams. You know where this picture was taken? Around the corner from my mother’s house, I think. No—across the street. The house that used to be across the street from my mother’s house. Where Mr. Ringo’s house used to be. Mr. Ringo was the guy who lived across the street from us, and I used to cut his grass and help clean up his house for extra money, and I always enjoyed that because he had a magazine I’d never seen before. He got National Geographic delivered to his door, and he also had other magazines like Life and Look. But he was a reader of magazines and books. This is such a colorful picture. It is. Think about the control you have to have to dribble a ball, pick it up, jump up, pull your arms up as far as you can to overreach the guy trying to block your shot, put the right arch on it so it’ll go over his fingertips and into the ring of the basket. It didn’t surprise me later on when a few basketball players started taking ballet lessons because they discovered that the body control you need to be a great dancer is the same body control you need to develop as a ballplayer. You look at this and realize it’s possible for a kid from the hood to be Nureyev.

MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV

When I think about this—look at this picture—I think, Here’s the guy who leaps six feet in the air, it seems, and does a pose, but even when he’s sitting on the floor he can do something that draws attention to himself. That one finger seems to be one of the signature motions of his genius. He was just. And I’m sure that—all the ways they could—they could have been holding hands and all that, but this one finger touching draws your eye to—into—the picture, like a street sign or something saying, no standing here or right turn only. Like the Sistine Chapel. Okay, I see what you’re talking about. What do you think? Hmm? What do you think? I see. I see it.

DAVID HOCKNEY AND HIS MOTHER

The Olympic Committee hired me to shoot all the people making posters for the ’84 Summer Olympics, and David Hockney was one of them. What do you remember about David Hockney? He wasn’t full of himself, he was just “Wanna see what I’ve been doing lately? What do you think?” David Hockney was showing you his collages? At the time I thought, This is sorta crazy. Building a narrative with images. His mother was there? What do you remember about that? She was a lady who loved her son and her son worshiped his mother. I didn’t ask, What is the living arrangement here? Is she here all the time? or anything like that. [Both laugh.] Were you a fan of his work? Yeah. I liked that it was ordinary people doing ordinary things. It was sort of like scenes that a baby would create. How so? Their simplicity. It wasn’t a drawing or a painting of Superman, it was just a guy that jumped into the swimming pool. Did you see the picture he made of his mother: the collage? I love it. What do you like about it? It reminds me of pictures I took of my mother sitting on the porch, sometimes by herself, sometimes with Aunt Cora Mae. It just represents a moment. There was a guy in the neighborhood who took care of my mother, and, no pun intended, he would kill for her. What do you mean, “No pun intended”? [Laughs.] Did he? I asked him once, “What’s the deal with you coming around here, hanging around my mother?” He said, “You know, when I was in jail, my mother died, and they wouldn’t let me out to come and see her. So I picked somebody to be a mother to me, and it was your mother.” Well, that’s a pretty full-circle story. That’s what art does for you: it takes you on a journey.

DR. SEUSS

I took your grandmother to visit Dr. Seuss. And we sat in his living room and watched the whales migrate to the south. You could see the whales out his living-room window. He was on the ocean? He lived near San Diego. The ocean was his backyard. Didn’t you have a story about a student who said something about Dr. Seuss? Oh, this was a Black student. He said Dr. Seuss taught him how to rhyme. Rap. Why do you ask? Because some of his books have been called racist. Before white kids started to rap, they said rapping was racist. I don’t think people would call rap racist today. But once upon a time they said that. Do you not believe that Dr. Seuss is racist? I wasn’t a Dr. Seuss fan or anything. I just photographed him. He was cordial. I can’t say that I’ve read everything he’s written. It’s interesting, right? That he could have had that positive effect on your student at the same time as he was doing some harm? Lyndon Johnson was a racist, he called people n*****s and then he passed the Civil Rights bill. People are complicated. Once, I was staying with a friend and he had to run out for a second—I was using the phone and I was looking for a pen and paper, and on the paper was something he had written about a colleague who happened to be Black, and he called him a jive ass n*****. So, when he married [Black celebrity], he was very happy to become the best friend of the American Negro. Ah, the hell with ’im. Is he still alive? Don’t know. This is a person who married [Black celebrity]? Yes. So, can I name this guy? Oh no. Why? First of all, what business did I have reading his mail?

CASABLANCA

It was Rodney’s idea to put the cigarette in his hand. He didn’t smoke it or anything, I don’t think he smokes to this day. The picture reflects the father more than the son, though the son takes good instruction. He was an old soul then. I guess he was about ten or eleven at the time. What do you mean it reflects the father? What does it reflect of Rodney? Rodney was always about the movies. You give him the name of a movie, or a star or an incident, and he will tell you more about the picture than you actually want to know sometimes. He’s—we had a mutual friend who used to refer to Rodney not by name but by “Just like in the movies.” Rodney was a movie fanatic. We were playing that the other day, we were talking about movies, who starred in Shane, and he gave me the name of the star, when the movie was made. That’s one thing about him that never changed. He may have gotten older. Smoking was something, a habit, he may have gotten from watching some of his favorite movie stars. You light up a cigarette and then he’ll mention a movie, and then he was off. What’s his favorite movie? If I were to guess, it would be a movie that—not Humphrey Bogart but, um, I can see the singer in the movie, who was a very famous Black entertainer in New York. Casablanca? Casablanca. Was Rodney like this when you were kids? Rodney was never a kid. He was always Rodney. Even now that Rodney is eighty years old, he’s still a kid. You said he was never a kid. He was never a kid, he was always a character from some movie he had seen, or, even when he was a younger person, he was always living a scene from one of his favorite movies. I remember once I called him, I had a habit of calling Rodney wherever I went in the world. Once, I was in Paris, I was on the Champs-Élysées, and he said, “What are we drinking?” And I said, “Glass of wine, Macs.”

RICHARD PRYOR

That’s at a press conference with Jackie Gleason. It doesn’t really look like him. That’s when he made the movie The Toy. What’d he say about it? He said he made it because he owed somebody a favor. It wasn’t his favorite movie. Think about it. He said, “I’m supposed to be the toy of some white kid.” It’s sorta degrading. Did you take a picture of him during that stand-up act when he was wearing the bodysuit? A line from his own mouth: “I didn’t have to give up a thing to get this TV show.” And he’s standing there with apparently no genitalia. Do you think he seems ashamed? No, I don’t. You know, a lot of this came at a time when Richard Pryor was thinking about his image: “I’m not going to use the N-word again, because it’s derogatory. I’m not going to do anything to bring shame to the race and also bring shame to me.” So it was—I think he was probably questioning a lot of things he was doing and saying. I took that picture when I took a picture of Richard Pryor for the cover of Newsweek. Did you try to search for his TV show in your Maps app? No, I typed it into Google. That’s the Maps app. Well. It told me the year his TV show came out.

 

Lester Sloan worked as a staff photographer for Newsweek for twenty-five years, received a 1976 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, and has worked as a contributor for various publications, including Emerge and NPR’s Weekend Edition. 

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. 

Captioning the Archives, with text by Aisha Sabatini Sloan and photographs by Lester Sloan, will be released by McSweeney’s in November 2021.

The Review’s Review: Nocturne Vibes

Added to “Gen X Soft Club” Are.na channel by Evan Collins.

I love this time of year. It takes a little while to adjust to the shorter days, but soon I settle into and relish the long dark hours. Some evenings I turn out the lamps, except for the dim reddish one, lie on the sofa, and listen to terrifying music. I love to feel my heart pound, my stomach drop, my blood move backward. I remember as a child encasing my head in my dad’s enormous leather headphones and listening to his Hawkwind, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, and Captain Beefheart records in the dark. The padded headphones were a helmet and the spooky eccentric sounds they emitted conjured a nocturnal universe that I soared and tumbled through alone, so alone. Over the years my repertoire of spine-chilling night music has grown and includes Scott Walker, Krzysztof Penderecki, Pan Daijing, Pauline Oliveros, Swans, and Aïsha Devi. A few years ago I splashed out on a ticket for Only the Sound Remains at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Inspired by Noh theater and based on translated texts by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, this musical work by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho was unlike any performance I’ve ever seen. So still, so minimal, so slow, and the auditorium was dark, so dark; cell by cell I was slowly blotted out. It was intensely unnerving yet weirdly consoling at the same time. Last night, after gnawing on some leftover sticky chicken and poking at eye-wateringly astringent red cabbage, I lay down and communed with the spectral sounds of Lichtbogen and Petals (performed here by the unsurpassable Imke Frank) and within moments I was overcome with the same feelings of terror, exhilaration, curiosity, and willful independence that swarmed around me as a small child. Bliss. —Claire-Louise Bennett (Read Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with Lauren Elkin here.)

The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute was introduced to me a couple years ago, when I first learned the word for those muted, rainbow-toned Millennial blobs that stumble through subway ads for app-based services and resonate in the weird bubbles encapsulating the human forms on the cover of the new Sally Rooney novel. Dedicated to “developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s to now,” their site archives and sorts images—music video stills, home interiors, magazine illustrations, product photos—into a dizzying number of distinct “aesthetic categories,” which you can filter chronologically, by “first known example,” or by “end of popularity.”

There’s the easily recognizable contemporary internet aesthetics: Pinterest Mom, Internet Awesomesauce (nyancat), and HyperBling—a pinker revival of the more golden 2000s-era McBling, which, CARI fastidiously notes, is “largely misattributed as ‘y2k’ on platforms like Instagram.” And then there are slightly older categories in minor keys I didn’t know I knew: Indiecraft (buttons, puppets); Paperback Chic (aka Chobanicore); Gen X Soft Club (think Kate Moss or consumer electronics shot au naturel); or Soft Colonialist Wanderlust, which covers the phonographs and hot air balloons that have traipsed off Neutral Milk Hotel album covers and onto, say, the wallpaper of the redesigned MGM Casino in Springfield, Massachusetts. 

The project is not only a rich visual archive, but a categories game, a gleeful exercise in terminological pedantry that reminds us of the shocking fun of language (not to mention consumerism). There is the rare flash of recognition that accompanies matching a term to a thing, the ability to capture and communicate what was previously just it, and the desire to Spread the Word (if only I were able to filter cafés on Yelp by #GlobalVillageCoffeehouse). Ever since I saw my first American Apparel ad, I knew I’d be a lifelong adherent to the Cobra Snake flash photography vibe that CARI calls “Indie Sleaze.” Tonight, consider incorporating https://cari.institute/aesthetics/ into a personality-type party game. —Olivia Kan-Sperling

Empty Wardrobes, the first work of the twentieth-century Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho to appear in English—in a translation by the legendary Margaret Jull Costa and featuring an introduction by Kate Zambreno—is a book about how men betray women, and how women betray each other. After Dora learns a distressing secret concerning her dead husband, whom she has publicly mourned for the last ten years, her life falls apart. What follows is a work that does not hesitate to expose the cruelties and power grabs that lie beneath marriage, and how quickly society discards aging women. “When single women reach a certain age, they’re so … frightening,” says Lisa, Dora’s teenage daughter, at one point. “They wither away, don’t they?” Foolish Lisa! She forgets that she will one day age, too. —Rhian Sasseen (Read Kate Zambreno’s introduction to Empty Wardrobes here.)

Menus of the “Global Village Coffeehouse” aesthetic added to Are.na by Evan Collins.

Never Prosthetic: An Interview with Chi Ta-wei

Author photo by Tang-mo Tan.

By 2100, as feared, the earth is scorched. The ocean is a second sky: humanity has migrated to the sea floor, leaving combat cyborgs to play out war games on the surface. After a childhood spent in quarantine due to a deadly virus, Momo now lives mostly in isolation in New Taiwan’s T City, lit by the glow of her screen. In the tightened grip of capitalism, Microsoft has been supplanted by MegaHard; Momo, a renowned aesthetician, applies a transparent, protective layer to her clients called “M skin,” which, unbeknownst to them, surveils their movements and transcribes their sensations, from the nip of a mosquito bite to the “$#@” of an orgasm. Even though the world of Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes is almost solely populated by women, and queer love is the norm, this is evidently no utopia—the author told me he had no interest in writing feel-good representations of queer life. “I was and am simply too cynical.” Chi’s extraordinary novella was first published in Taiwan a quarter of a century ago, and is at last available in English in a brilliant translation by Ari Larissa Heinrich. At just 134 pages, its scope is dazzling. Now, from the vantage point of the future, its playful and unsettling insights into digital saturation, the traps of consciousness and labor, and the fugitive fabulations of identity and the self, have only grown more profound. 

Chi was born in 1972 and came of age during Taiwan’s sudden moment of social and cultural transformation, and economic boom in the wake of martial law. A prodigious writer, he first garnered acclaim for a series of books he published in his twenties while also working as a critic, grad student, translator, and essayist, including the 1996 collection that contains The Membranes, his longest work of fiction. Two other as-yet-untranslated story collections, In the Realm of the Senses (1995) and Fetish (1998), which meld genres and styles, are set everywhere from distant space stations to gay strip clubs in contemporary Taipei. Alongside writers like Chen Xue, Chu T’ien-wen, and Qiu Miaojin, Chi was at the center of the flourishing queer literature and arts in nineties Taiwan. Since then, he has gained renown as a scholar, and is now an associate professor of Taiwanese literature at National Chengchi University in Taipei. His most recent book, published in 2017, is the monumental monograph A Queer Invention in Taiwan: A History of Tongzhi Literature. The term tongzhi, which Chi described to me as akin to “vanilla ice cream,” is an appropriation of the word for “comrade” and encompasses LGBT+ identities.

  In perhaps another instance of prescience, Momo is exhausted by the intrusiveness of video chat and prefers the “old-fashioned” medium of email. Appropriately enough, this interview was conducted over email, between April and June of 2021.

INTERVIEWER

In your introduction to the 2011 edition of The Membranes, you write that “almost everybody is an android.” What does it mean for you to be an android? Has it changed since you first wrote the book?

CHI

When I was younger, I often felt that some parts of my body did not belong to me. I suffered from serious migraines in school. These migraines, which would almost tear my skull apart, made me imagine that my body would also fall apart. Back then, I happened to consult a couple of very questionable brain doctors, who announced to me and my family that my migraines could be fatal, or could be the result of a brain tumor. It is possible that these doctors were actually con men, for I vaguely remember one of them, years later, was involved in some scandals. But I did not try to—and did not want to—verify what happened to him. I was alive and kicking after I was admitted to college, but the unhappy experience led me to question the integrity of my body.

When The Membranes was first published, in 1996, I gave my email address, which at the time was android@ms4.hinet.net, in the “About the Author” section. I kept using “android” as my username when I started my new life as a doctoral student at UCLA, and got android@ucla.edu as my official email address. I preferred android to cyborg—I knew the former from Philip K. Dick’s fiction, and I felt it was closer, more intimate to me.

But to call oneself an android was really different in 2011, after I had spent eleven years in the U.S. I, at the age of thirty-nine, had been worn out physically and mentally. I really felt myself to be a replica of Frankenstein’s monster, but with inferior physical strength. By calling myself an android, I was referring to my body as an assembly of chunks of flesh from various sources. I was not unhealthy, but I was very hypochondriacal. Before I left the U.S. for Taiwan, I was already trying to shift my academic attention from LGBT+ studies to disability studies. Once I was back in Taipei, I became obsessed with the omnipresent clinics of traditional medicine, which were too numerous and too affordable, especially to those who had lived in the U.S. I spent a lot of time lining up and visiting clinics for acupuncture, cupping, osteopathic manipulation, and herbal medicine. My spine felt very foreign to me. When I wrote “almost everybody is an android,” the images of the fellow patients who crowded the Taipei clinics naturally occurred to me.

I think my statement betrays a desire for universalism. Being queer or a freak or a crip often feels so lonely—especially in nineties Taiwan, which was much less open-minded than it is now. To dispel this loneliness, one might be tempted to say that everybody is queer or a freak or a crip. One wants to recruit more members to one’s camp.

INTERVIEWER

How did the idea of The Membranes first come about?

CHI

Francis Bacon was one of my cultural heroes back then. I was attracted to the violence, madness, and bodies in pain shown in his paintings. When I started to imagine the bodies in The Membranes, I was, wittingly or unwittingly, influenced by Bacon’s style. Throughout the nineties, I, like most boys my age in Taiwan, relied on motorcycles for transportation. I often needed to bring my motorcycle to repair shops, where the technicians would take it apart as if they were anatomizing a human carcass. The insides of my motorcycle really looked like the ribs in Bacon’s paintings.

After the lifting of martial law in 1987, it was extremely trendy for artists and intellectuals to interrogate the memory imposed by the KMT regime, and to investigate any alternative to the official narrative. Meanwhile, problematized memories happened to be common in Hollywood productions, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator series.

The original title of The Membranes, Mo, is actually from my partner’s name in Chinese—his nickname is Xiao Mo. The world of The Membranes is also inspired by Xiao Mo, who used to be a graduate student in atmospheric science, and conducted research on the ozone layer. He talked about the climate disaster often. He told me that humankind would have to live under the sea in the future.

INTERVIEWER

Taking the email address “android” also seems, to me, to be tied to the medium of communication. How was The Membranes written? Did you use a computer?

CHI

The Membranes was enabled by and predicated on my feeling like an android. Donna Haraway writes about how the connection of the human to the machine heightens the human senses. I did not take creative writing seriously until I learned to write on a computer.

In my preface to The Membranes, I emphasized the “HIGH” of creative writing. I did not feel that adrenaline rush on paper, but with a computer I felt that my writing experience was suddenly enhanced and made euphoric. I enjoyed the HIGH a lot back then. The HIGH was not from any substances—I was not even drinking or smoking. It was merely from my own adrenaline. I was only twenty-three. Adrenaline enabled me to finish writing The Membranes in one month. The novel is sixty thousand characters long.

Microsoft promoted itself very aggressively in Taiwan in the early nineties. I learned to write on Microsoft Word in 1993. This was a turning point for me. The transition from paper to a word processor enabled me to focus on the act of writing. I could revise my sentences as many times as I wanted and keep the page neat. Since we had to rely on dial-up to get connected to the internet, I could not get online as often, and as a result I was not yet often distracted by the online world. The Word and I become a circuit, where I feed sentences to Word and Word feeds my sentences back to me to revise. I really felt the computer and I shared a life of symbiosis. I had never felt the same intimacy with paper. I was dependent on my laptop a lot. It was like a pet, which I brought with me everywhere.

INTERVIEWER

Momo spends much of the book in front of her computer, which is her main point of contact with the outside world. Your writing captures the texture of digital life. What impact did the internet of the nineties have on your writing—especially in forging the sort of disembodied intimacies we find in the novel?

CHI

When people talk about the internet now, they generally imagine it involves multimedia, but that was not the case in Taiwan in the nineties. The queer online hangouts back then were mostly on BBS bulletins, which are text-based. People could not exchange pictures with each other, even if they did not mind coming out or revealing their identities. The gay “influencers” on BBS attracted followers with their verbose, sentimental posts, but never with photos. Thus, for gay men to make a lot of new friends, going to the gym to look swole for pics was not necessary—to produce a lot of tantalizing texts on BBS was. I enjoyed immersing myself in these texts, which enabled me to imagine an outside world without visualizing it. The multimedia experience, for me, feels redundant and suppresses the imagination.

INTERVIEWER

The Membranes is rich with references, and Momo’s consciousness and memories are shaped and distorted by the films and books she is shown. What were some of the formative encounters you had with literature and cinema?

CHI

My generation relied heavily on the MTV clubs. The MTV clubs were venues where a patron rents a cubicle to watch a movie on a pirated videotape or a laser disc on her own, similar to the sex shops in the U.S. in which a patron rents a cubicle to watch porn. While it was possible for some young couples to watch erotic films of their choice, and even make out in their cubicles, people like Qiu Miaojin and I chose to watch arthouse movies, mostly from Europe and some from Japan and the U.S. As a gay boy still in the closet, I would certainly enjoy gay porn, but I was more willing to spend my limited budget on a compromise—homoerotic arthouse movies.

I was shaken by some pirated videotapes of films by the gay Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, such as Oedipus Rex, Medea, Teorema, and the notorious Salò. I alluded to him in The Membranes. I also watched and enjoyed Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, which is virtually pornographic, or even more explicit than many porn films. I was so stunned by In the Realm of the Senses that I named my first story collection after it.

When I was in high school, I did not know of resources for queer teenagers. Although I knew about Pai Hsien-yung’s novel Crystal Boys, published in 1983, I was too wary to check it out. I remember very clearly that the local newspapers in my teens often hilariously published surveys showing that most Taiwanese men did not masturbate. The media dramatically downplayed the sexual needs of local men, straight or queer. I saw sex in these films, which render impossible loves possible and forbidden desires liberated. The films were inspiring to me, a boy who was frustrated with the sexual repression of Taiwan. I did not have any gay friends when I was a teenager, as it was virtually impossible for most gay people in Taiwan to come out. I was determined to go abroad to France or the U.S. to enjoy access to the kind of gay life I imagined.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read a lot of science fiction?

CHI

It is natural to presume that I have been an avid reader of science fiction. However, I have to admit that I am far from being one, though in my twenties I enjoyed reading Philip K. Dick, Italo Calvino—I also translated some of Calvino’s novels into Chinese—Jorge Luis Borges, and Chang Hsi-kuo, the author of the City Trilogy.

From time to time, people told me that they would be interested in my writing if it were not science fiction. Sci-fi was considered a ghetto insulated from so-called pure literature. I did not take it personally, since I was not interested in producing realist fiction. Literary realism has been the norm for more than a century in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. There are rules to follow, and nation-states to serve, for those who write in the realist tradition in these Sinophone countries. As a Taiwanese citizen, I have felt insecure about Taiwan, which has been under threat from China. Partly because of this insecurity, I chose to adopt the genre of science fiction detached from present-day Taiwan, and to leave for a temporary but extended life in the U.S.

INTERVIEWER

Does that relate to how you write about queer people—people who are already on the margins?

CHI

I have found queer people and Taiwan to be similar to each other, for the former are and were not recognized in a homophobic society, whereas the latter is not recognized in the global village. During the pandemic, the WHO excluded Taiwan from the fight against COVID-19. But I do not mention the analogy often, for it has become common among netizens in Taiwan.

INTERVIEWER

What does it mean to imagine the future from that perspective?

CHI

I wanted to portray an alternative world where both queer people and Taiwan could be left alone—left alone by the heterosexist world and by the shadow cast by China. To be left alone is my strategy to survive.

Ari Heinrich, my translator, asked me if The Membranes shows a future I expected. I was startled by the question, for I did not really think about a future, a world to come, when I wrote the novel. I was actually imagining an alternative world that offered a shelter for queers, Taiwan, as well as other marginalized entities. I was certain that the alternative world I imagined was detached from the status quo, but I did not think clearly if it was a future that all of us would move toward.

INTERVIEWER

At one point, Momo laments that her job involves intimacy with others—“She could just as easily have chosen a more solitary profession, like a novelist.” Do you feel a tension between wanting to be recognized and to be left alone?

CHI

To seek a literal shelter for peace has been my lifelong obsession. Before I went to college, I was an introverted nerd who only liked books. I was not seriously bullied in my adolescence, but I was ridiculed often enough for my effeminacy, which made me even more fearful of people in general. Because homosexuality was seriously stigmatized during my adolescence in the eighties, when Taiwan was paranoid about AIDS, I did not visit the gay venues. I feared that I would be caught and exposed to my family.

When I started to publish creative writing in the early nineties, I certainly wanted attention from potential book reviewers, editors, and readers. I hoped to sell my books and stories. And, as a newbie writer, I was naturally vain. But I also feared attention. I received letters from those who were curious about my sexuality and private life. In the early nineties, out gay people were extremely rare in Taiwan, but more and more people were interested in gay lives. My situation was complicated by the fact that I was often invited to talk on TV shows and radio. Since I depicted graphic gay sex in my fiction and I could talk about it in public, people found me entertaining. Luckily, I received virtually nothing malicious, but I was bombarded by letters from inappropriately curious women and men. Some female students even virtually stalked me and declared their infatuation. I don’t blame them. I think people were simply confused about themselves and others. I did experience actual sexual harassment from some older men. But I do not need to dwell on the past.

Partly because of these concerns, I avoided writing any roman à clef that might violate my own privacy. Thus I chose to portray women rather than men in The Membranes, for I thought a depiction of men would trigger voyeurism about my private life.

INTERVIEWER

Earlier you mentioned this desire to leave Taiwan, this interest in foreign literature, and the idea that to live a gay life you would have to go to the U.S. or Europe. Your comment surprised me a bit, because your academic work has been on the history of Taiwanese tongzhi identity, and you now teach Taiwanese literature. You’ve written about tongzhi literature as a Taiwanese “invention.” Could you tell me a bit more about what you meant?

CHI

In my twenties, I presumed that queer literature in Taiwan was an extension of American queer literature, for I was taught that so many institutions in Taiwan were imitations of those in the U.S. and other first world countries. If queer literature in Taiwan was a copy, or a translation, then the original was supposed to be in the U.S.

But once I arrived in the U.S., I was expected to do my research on modern Chinese literature, which I mildly enjoyed but had not been enthusiastic about at all. Since Asian studies in the U.S. was so Sinocentric, I was naturally guided—or misguided—into looking for the tradition of queer literature in the PRC.

However, after I left the U.S. for Taiwan, I gradually realized that queer literature in Taiwan was really a local, creolized tradition of its own. It was, of course, subject to some influences from the U.S. and pre-1949 China, but it was not a copy. The two hegemonic states did not offer ready-made models of queer literary history. Therefore, I had to invent the Taiwanese genealogy from scratch. Many smaller countries have their own concocted inventions that are not passed down by bigger, hegemonic countries. Similarly, Taiwan happened to have invented its own tradition of queer literature.

INTERVIEWER

You said you were interested in writing about memory, in part, to interrogate the version of the past imposed by the KMT. How does that tie into your scholarly writing on tongzhi history that had also been neglected and suppressed? What was it about the official narrative that you wanted to challenge?

CHI

My life trajectory was more or less similar to Momo’s in The Membranes. For twenty years, Momo was manipulated by fake memories. Likewise, for twenty years, I was guided by “grand narratives” that, while not fake or wrong, were not relevant enough for me. The grand narratives in question had little to do with the KMT, however. They are, instead, myths such as “the paradigm of queer literature is available only in the U.S. for me, as a pilgrim, to copy,” or “there is no future for queers in Taiwan.” These myths were all decisive to me. I am glad to wake from the past as if from a dream, not unlike Momo’s dream.

INTERVIEWER

Pasolini is, if I remember correctly, the only male character in the book. What led you to create a world of women?

CHI

It was already clear to some readers in Taiwan that most science fiction texts marginalized women. I consciously built a world mostly of women in The Membranes, for I was already aware in the nineties that many science fiction narratives were criticized for their sexist presumptions—many treated female characters as accessories or sex toys for male heroes. I was so embarrassed by the sexism that I decided not to reproduce the male dominance in The Membranes.

INTERVIEWER

You’re a professor now, and when you wrote The Membranes, you were also publishing criticism and articles, editing collections, and studying. What did you find in fiction that you couldn’t find in academia?

CHI

Your question is interesting, and it could be turned into another. Why do I often turn to the academic life and away from creative writing?

I was more confident and composed at university than in the world of fiction writing. I felt vulnerable and unsettled when I wrote fiction—I had to face my dark side. However, the pleasure after finishing a work of fiction is way stronger than that after publishing a book review. The more vulnerable I feel in the writing process, the more intense pleasure I get after writing.

For me, if the process of writing an academic paper is similar to swimming laps in a pool, that of writing fiction is similar to swimming in the ocean. The former seems to be manageable on a daily basis, whereas the other looks daunting, and even life-threatening. Writing fiction, especially when the writer is not using English, involves no certainties.

INTERVIEWER

You are also a translator, so I wondered what the process of being translated was like? Did you work closely with Ari Heinrich?

CHI

Yes, but not in a traditional way. Ari has been a dear friend—after all, he and I are in the same academic field. Several years ago, Ari invited me and Xiao Mo to fly to a yoga retreat in Bali. I believe yoga plays a major role in his process of translation. He wanted to hang out with us there and to start, kind of ceremoniously, to translate The Membranes. We talked about The Membranes constantly, randomly, casually, not in a systematic way. I believe our conversations enabled him to contextualize and weigh the nuances in it. But I seldom, if ever, insisted on how he should translate any part of the book. I refrain from insisting on anything regarding translation, partly because I prefer to fully respect the rights of the translator, and partly because I know my fastidiousness about words tends to get out of control.

I did translate fiction, and I used to enjoy the process. I cannot do it now simply because I need to focus on other tasks. While I could not guarantee my one hundred percent loyalty to the original texts, I was not interested in being disloyal to them. I do not mean that I am well-behaved or ethical—I just know that there are many other occasions for me to rebel other than in translation.

INTERVIEWER

The book feels prescient about many aspects of life that are now familiar—the monetization of everyday experience, and data harvesting, for example. Does it disturb you, the extent to which those things have come true?

CHI

Honestly, I am more disturbed by the electronic devices—computers, smartphones, and so on—in my life than by The Membranes. After all, the devices are connected to me on a daily basis. The texts I have produced are detached from me when they are published. My smartphone is already a prosthesis attached to my body, whereas my fiction is never prosthetic to me. I love how literary texts are detached from their authors.

 

Chris Littlewood lives in New York.