The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

There was a hostility to public life now. Or maybe that hostility had always existed, and what was new was simply the directing of it toward people who had long been exempt. Seamus thought that the whole thing had the absurd drama of a great play. All the Shakespearean misunderstanding and misspeaking, everything doubling in its extremity and consequences until it ruptured into something truly cathartic. Except that there was no catharsis. Just people hardening into the caricatures of their roles.

Hospital kitchens were home to junkies, ex-cons, and old women—people who could never afford the hospitals where they worked.

It was the height of foolishness, academia. You sank down and down in debt, in desperation, in hunger, so that you could feel a little special, a little brilliant in your small, dark corner of the universe, knowing something that no one else knew.

For zack

He liked to listen to Timo read in English and French. He didn’t really understand the French, but he could feel the meaning deep down in the sounds of the words.

all words are onomatopoeias

Linda’s writing wasn’t bad. It was fine. Good sometimes, even, in flashes. But it wasn’t poetry, and he couldn’t bring himself to say that Linda was an essayist more than she was a poet. That her poems were, in the words of a fictional Robert Lowell in an Elizabeth Bishop biopic, “observations broken into lines.”

Yet she had learned—somewhere, here, probably—that a poetic intelligence could be elided with certain tactics. There was a word: Tactics. Emotion. Feeling. Her piece had a lot of feeling and it corresponded to something painful and true in her life. But that did not make it poetry. Autobiography was not sufficient.