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[contextreviews]

An Exercise in Looking

Naomi Washer on Magalie Guérin’s NOTES ON

NOTES ON is an a-chronological studio diary that artist Magalie Guérin re-transcribed twice by hand and now in print. Through that active facsimile Guérin documents her painting process, mapping at once her creative history and the way that history consistently transforms. Personal, professional, and creative spheres intersect like simultaneous layers in a painting. Accumulated entries capture the shifting gray area between self-doubt, self-awareness, and creative breakthrough. A recurring and parallel “character” in this journal is a hat shape—an abstract form that Guérin paints over and over again. Whether anatomical or abstract, the hat shape becomes an anthropomorphic companion as witness/lover/nemesis to the author’s artistic endeavors. Guérin shows us not only that a room of one’s own is useful, but what can happen when it is utilized.—Green Lantern Press, Chicago, 2016.

By the time I read Magalie Guérin’s book, NOTES ON, a transcription of her journals from her years in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was living in a strange place I did not understand, having left my own Chicago arts practice, so I underlined everything in her book that I recognized, which was practically all of it, and asked myself what I’d done.

“I work from a place of loneliness, of thirst—a desire for things to connect.”

I wanted to speak about this book, but every time I opened my mouth, her words came out.

“I have so much to say / or nothing—”

And so here, in this space, I juxtapose her writing with mine. “The format of my writing is inconsistent. It goes from crafted to jagged. But I think that’s the right attitude because it is how my mind operates.” It’s how my mind is operating now, how my mind always operates in writing—dropping in and out of my own storyline.

“My favorite books are the ones I can open at any page and still appreciate. I like feeling welcome to exit and enter at any point.” I read Notes On for the first time before traveling to the annual writing conference in Washington D.C. There, I saw all my Chicago art friends and felt completely over-stimulated for six days. I told my friends, “Not much seems to be working for me. I’m not able to convey what I have to offer, what I yearn for. My efforts are useless.”

When I got home to California from D.C., there was a second copy of Magalie Guérin’s book in my mailbox, so I shipped it to a friend in New York who also used to live and make art in Chicago but doesn’t anymore. The book was about process and art-making and Chicago friends, and I needed someone else to understand what I was not yet able or willing to express.

[I am writing this on the porch of my Berkeley apartment on a warm April night. I am drinking red wine from a crystal glass, I am listening to Joan Shelley, I am wrapped in a green knit blanket. It feels important to document this somehow.]

I moved to California, a place I’d never been, after completing a graduate degree in writing in Chicago, a place I‘d also never been before I made it my own, with its river and bridges and parks and bookstores and theatres, and people who rush fearlessly into the creation of art, unabashedly and repeatedly, through road blocks and setbacks and the battling of seasons.

But I had chosen to leave; to ship my books to an unknown state and drive across the country, leaving my studio, my theatres, my collaborators, because “it is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know.” My books were far away. Alone in the desert, detached from everything I’d ever known and loved and understood, I began to question everything.

If a writer, if an artist, is someone who identifies with her materials (her books, her canvas), is the writer still a writer, the artist still an artist, if she is alone in the desert with no belongings?

“( ART is a way of LOOKING )”

During that time when my books were gone from me, shuttling across the country separated from their shelves, I often wondered how much of my self was true and how much was a mere construction of lines and fragments from my books. I had a vague sense that I had made myself into a construction (felt sure I had done so, had written a book about it for my thesis—a book in which I asked myself: “What is my relationship to ‘reality’? (Is reality in quotes less real?)”), which, in hindsight, is the reason I chose to leave Chicago—feeling the artist’s impulse to continually shape and create new circumstances for living, for production, to mix up and sort through and revise and redesign, to shift the lens, refocus the light, all with the question: is this __________ still a __________ if I __________?

Magalie Guérin does this in her journal with the shape of a hat she continues to draw in differing circumstances—new light, new day, new time, new mood, new boyfriend. “Is the hat shape still a hat shape if I am sick and tired and drawing on the opposite wall and haven’t eaten and am seeing someone new?” Is the writer still a writer with no paper, pen, or books? Is the writer still a writer if I take all her materials away? Is the person still a writer if I take, if I give away?

If a writer, if an artist, is someone who identifies with her materials (her books, her canvas), is the writer still a writer, the artist still an artist, if she is alone in the desert with no belongings?

In California, I didn’t write. I told myself, “Perhaps I haven’t come into my own just yet. I don’t know how my different bodies of work connect together.” Occasionally I was able to muster the energy to submit old work, to little avail: “Got two rejection letters from residencies this week. It’s no surprise—everything is connected.” At first, my life in California felt full with all the time outdoors. I didn’t notice that I wasn’t spending any time within myself. Whenever it occurred to me, I told myself it was healthy—that after I’d been outside myself for a while, I could come back in. I told myself, “The only thing missing from my life at the moment is reading.” That didn’t seem so bad. I was teaching myself how to cook. Like Guérin, “I needed to find a way to do something creative in the evenings. Evenings at home are too hard for me. I blame the bad set-up but I know it’s more than that.”

In Chicago, I taught a college writing class called Lessons in Seeing. We read Lia Purpura’s book, On Looking; I designed experiments, in and outside of class, for students to develop an awareness of what they do and do not pay attention to, how to train their eyes and ears and bodies to take in more, observe more in new and different ways. An art of looking, a practice necessary for all artists, all students, all people. “My work: an exercise in looking.”

I taught writing away from and outside of traditional structures, traditional formats that get in the writer’s way of questioning, and inquiry, and discovery. “I care a lot about the mind at play; that’s what’s interesting to me.” When students asked me about this, I said, “The way I make cannot possibly be different from the way I live.” I said, “I prefer the possibility of failure, the vulnerability of the personal. The personal will always be a little bit corny, but it’s not cold.”

Through discussion, and reading their journalings, I observed what I hoped would happen though I thought it possibly too good to be true—a breaking down of barriers between their student selves, their human selves, their artist selves. I designed a new class, sprung from that one, the following Fall: The Unanswerable Question. Goal: to work through an obsession, to not seek conclusion, to tear down identity barriers—the barriers between life and school.

At the end of the semester, taking apart my studio in preparation to leave the city (is the artist still an artist without her studio?), I noticed objects that reminded me of every single student in the class—the project they’d pursued, the obsession they’d pored over: action figures, Russian nesting dolls, a map of the world, a book on early childhood education in the Victorian era. On the last day of class, I gave out each object, pausing with each student, briefly explaining why the object had reminded me of them, though the explanation was unnecessary—they knew.

Is the teacher still a teacher if I take her studio, her students away?

I have retyped many of these paragraphs from the yellow legal pages on which I originally wrote them, even though “the look of my handwriting annoys me still. Especially when I’m trying to make it nice.” “I’m cutting off parts of old entries as I re-write them, adding some (like this one).” My copy of Magalie Guérin’s book was once again shipped across the country to yet another new place—this time a new-old place, a place in the mountains where I lived before Chicago, and therefore a place I felt sure I would feel at home, would get right with myself, would write every day and be pleased with myself—a perpetual artist residency.

I settle into this small cottage in the mountains, enthralled by its perfection, its too-good-to-be-true light-filled studio and all the space I could ever want for my books. “I’ve never stopped believing that once my real life starts, it’s going to be wonderful.” Mixing and reshaping and constructing a space for myself to question and make and wonder. “It was possible to frame this process as a conceptual practice but in reality, it was driven by fear.”

“My slippery focus—I can almost grab it.” The distraction is strong enough to last six months—the time at which I pick up this review again, and ask myself, once again, what I’ve done.

I know I have a public self who reveals the private when the private has the potential to enlarge our understanding of the world.

Maybe I identify with Magalie because she’s a Libra, and I’ve got a Libra Moon, and Libras are full of indecision, which makes us excellent journal-writers. “Maybe it’s the Libra in me but I find it hard to take a stand—I don’t believe there’s one stable position. It doesn’t seem credible to occupy a space if it’s not going to be yours forever.”

My constant indecision is the thing that keeps me journaling, keeps me writing through my practice, my unknowing. My constant indecision is the stability I seek, is perhaps even the reason I left Chicago, a place I loved so fully and exquisitely that it became too known to me—too easy. Perhaps I felt I’d exhausted indecision there, and therefore run out of grist for my journal-mill.

“What does growth look like, visually-speaking?”

Shortly after I began writing this review, in the early morning, on the couch in my cramped apartment in California, I went to Yaddo for the summer to write.

I wrote nothing worthy. I lay on the couch in my studio with my head in my hands. I posted photos on Instagram with quotes from poems I was reading. Or else I sat at the desk, looking through the sheer curtains out the window to the paths where my fellow residents biked or walked to lunch, or through the woods, and back to their studios, producing what I told myself was surely the next Great American Whatever. I thought, “I’m vulnerable right now—getting rejected left and right. I feel old. Tired too.” I thought, “I’m crippled by a giant pile of desire.” I produced nothing of worth, suffered the strongest case of imposter syndrome I’d ever experienced, and finally, when my residency came to an end, I left.

I would sit in the kitchen late on those nights at Yaddo, drinking beer and wine, eating chips and salsa with other artists, talking about Our Work, talking about the places we lived and the problems we faced, and the relationships we had or didn’t have or wanted to have or hoped we’d never have again with other writers, other artists, other non-creative types. My stint at Yaddo took place during my move from one side of the country to the other. When people asked me what I was working on, I basically told them I was working on me. Privately, I lectured myself: “Shouldn’t an artist be a maker first and foremost? I feel more like a voyeur. I observe my practice more than I practice it. I have to be detached AND I have to notice what has happened.”

It was a dream to be at Yaddo and I had squandered it. I couldn’t find a way to forgive myself—to accept the fact that sometimes the writing doesn’t come. No matter how much you want it to. No matter how beautiful the landscape is. No matter how many artists you have around you.

I thought Yaddo would give me one room to serve as both bedroom and studio, as I did not require any large materials, but I was given both—a small studio next to a large bedroom, with a large desk in both rooms. For a while, I found I could not even go inside my studio—the imposter syndrome was too great. So I stayed inside the bedroom drawing comics that expressed what I wished I could write about but could not. This impulse made no sense, but it was during a time where nothing made sense, so I followed it, which was the only thing I could do.

The day before I started writing this review again (again, again, again), Marina shared a memory on Facebook from December 19, 2013, which was years before I met her but only months before a professor told me to read her chapbook, Russian for Lovers. The post is a quote from Jennifer Moxley’s introduction to the book Commentary, published by Ugly Duckling Presse: “(We recall here that in Latin, vulgare, meaning ‘of the people’ but also ‘to publish,’ was used as a slur against women who were thought to have made their bodies ‘public.’ Thus a vulgar woman is a woman who ‘publishes’ that which men believe should stay private).”

I’m fucking astounded by this. In NOTES ON, Magalie says, “All art is yes—so how do you say no? What do you say no to? How do you turn your private no into a public no? Is FB private or public? What kind of space is it?” My Facebook is full of the public narrative of why I left Chicago for adventure on the West Coast—sand dunes and camping and deserts and canyons—and why I left California for Vermont—green mountains, wildflowers, farms and red barns—and it contains nothing of my private reasoning. The closest my Facebook will get to sharing my private reasoning is when I share the post that this review of NOTES ON has been published online.

“In a way, the journal writer has (to pretend) to be introverted about the content. If Anaïs Nin had published her diaries as she wrote them, we would automatically mistrust the material. Journals are personal—to write thoughts with an audience in mind would undoubtedly change the ‘confessional’ nature of the format.”

Listen: I’m an essayist. I don’t know what is private and what is public; what should be kept only for me and what should be shared. I know I have a public self who reveals the private when the private has the potential to enlarge our understanding of the world. I know the public reason I left my arts practice in Chicago was to save it, but I lost it, because there were unacknowledged private reasons I left Chicago too.

“Admitting that one cares is hard because if it’s not reciprocal, then it hurts.” And so, “my process: covering up and sanding down to reveal, covering up again and sanding down to reveal some more,” both fails and sustains me. I cover up my private reasons, sand them down to reveal the public, cover the public up again and make it private, and sand it down to reveal a new reasoning, a new statement I can hide behind, a new voice I hope is strong enough to convince the audience at a reading that I am fine. But “I don’t have much confidence these days. Every move I make, I question.” Every state line I cross, carrying my books from one apartment to another, every new relationship I start because of what I refuse to acknowledge, pushes me further from where I know I’ll be productive, from the circumstances in which I know I can contribute to my world. “I don’t know what prevents me from engaging so seriously in the one thing I’m convinced I want. It’s so frustrating. It must be self-sabotage.”

In Manhattan on my way to Yaddo, I met up with Marina for coffee, and we talked for several hours about writing and politics and what it means to be a female essayist. We ate these little fried balls of dough with cheese inside, and they were so delicious, and my coffee was never-ending, and I had to pee so badly but our conversation was too fulfilling, and we talked about process and questioning, and the suppression of the spirit of inquiry, and the story lying underneath the story, and I was so grateful for that day, because “I miss having intense studio conversations. Conversations about process, the motivation.” And it made me feel that perhaps I hadn’t lost my arts practice completely—that maybe I’d find it again, maybe it wasn’t gone.

“What is my framework?

What am I really interested in?

What do I care about?”

“The only satisfaction I ever get from my writing is when using the journal format—direct, short, honest.” In my journal at 17, I wrote that all I wanted was to live alone in a cabin in the woods so I could write. This is what I have now, but “I’m afraid my solitude is a curse to the work.” Though it’s only been a few years since I lived in Chicago, I feel very far away from the desire I apparently had to be alone, “without technology or any other means to communicate.” I don’t even remember feeling this. I had to ask a friend to remind me. She told me that I’d said, “I have fantasies of disappearing for a while, so I can stop caring so much and just be.”

“My head, with its editorial tendencies, always wants to cut and rearrange everything I see.” It wants to cut out the span of time I wasn’t writing—chop it up and shorten it, make it just a weekend maybe, a month at the most. But I don’t know what changing my storyline would do for me. “I’ve never quite understood where I belong or where I’d like to be; who I want to be.”

I didn’t know Magalie Guérin while I was in Chicago, but I feel that I have known her, did know her, know her because I and all my friends are her. I feel I am her journal, am her process of questioning, of trusting and doubting, of intentional distraction, of repetition, of repetition, of repetition, of revealing vulnerability and fear for the purpose of uncovering the next step, the next landing, the next shape, the next heart at the essence of our work.

“Failure, yes. Vulnerability, yes.” “If the purpose is to focus attention on a question, then the question is How Do I Live? and always has been.”

I don’t know where Magalie Guérin is right now, but I wish she was in my studio while I write about her journal. I wish Marina was here with us too. I wish Shelby was up in the loft, reading my copy of Magalie’s NOTES ON, underlining the parts that speak to her and calling down the lines to all of us, while Magalie is reading Marina’s Russian for Lovers, and Alexis from Yaddo is showing me where to find the owls, and Rebecca from college is stitching a prairie, and Angelo and I are arguing about epistolary poetics, and Jayita and I are breaking nonsense words apart from sense words. And all the while I am witnessing these scenes from out on my porch, watching this inquiry unfold, watching the privacy I’ve allowed myself to reveal.

Naomi Washer’s writing, dance films, and translations have appeared in Homonym, The Account, Interim, Essay Daily, Crab Fat Magazine, The Boiler, Split Lip Magazine, St. Petersburg Review, Blue Mesa Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia College Chicago, where she earned her MFA in Nonfiction. She is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Ghost Proposal. www.naomiwasher.com

NOTES ON by Magalie Guérin • Green Lantern Press, 2016 • 240 pages

[contextreviews]

Disgovernance and Resistance

Josh Cook on Jesse Ball’s The Curfew

When we read, we read with our memories. Jesse Ball was already an important author in my reading life by the time I read The Curfew, but whereas his earlier books explore more amorphous ideas like our relationship to imagination, the nature of storytelling, and the bounds of reality, The Curfew explores something more direct and tangible. It was like Ball shot an arrow into my memories of political activism and pinned a question that had dominated my thinking for years: how do we intentionally change the world for the better?

The rented yellow school bus was freezing. Frigid February air rushed in through popped interior rivets. I was on my way back to Burlington, VT from New York City where I had joined thousands of people on February 15, 2003 to protest the coming Iraq War. We were supposed to gather in a delineated zone—a cordoned-off area where our Constitutional right to peaceful assembly would not be superseded by the muscular application of local traffic, vagrancy, and other statutes—near the U.N. building where Colin Powell was giving his now infamous speech, but we never got there. Didn't get within five blocks. The streets were clogged with people, and not just in New York. Around the world millions of people were joined in one of the biggest moments of protest in decades all with one clear message: There is no justification for a war with Iraq. We and the people of Iraq will be recovering from that war for decades.

It wasn't my first protest. I'd been to D.C. to protest the exploitative policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. I'd been to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia to protest United States interference in democratically elected governments. I'd stood with a dozen people at the top of Church St. to protest the war in Afghanistan because “terrorism” is a technique and you can't wage war on a technique. More generally, I wrote a political column in my college's newspaper, participated in the poli sci club, organized events, thought, talked, wrote, and voted.

After I graduated, the nature of my efforts to make the world a better place changed. I didn't have as much time or resources for organizing and protesting. Besides, I had begun to wonder whether our techniques for creating directed, intentional social change towards a more just and humanist society were working. Protests seemed to be more about emotional catharsis (which is not a bad thing) than about changing policy. Any progress seemed to be two steps forward, one and a half steps back.

But we did not stop trying. Social media arrived. The undercurrent of violent racism corroding our law enforcement and devastating the African-American community was finally brought to the attention of (some) white people with #BlackLivesMatter. Occupy Wall Street changed the conversation about income inequality in America and opened up new possibilities for protest and social change, from the flashy occupations, to the quiet but powerful Rolling Jubilee. We watched Republicans start to break our system of government because the nation had the audacity to elect a black man as President—twice!—and we watched that same black man, despite the malicious opposition of Republicans, stitch the economy back together, extract us from unwinnable wars, improve our national health care system, end don't ask don't tell, and lay the executive groundwork for major advances in economic, social, and environmental justice. Later, those on the left, the engine for so much of that change, found another piston in Bernie Sanders. By the Democratic National Convention, the Democratic party had adopted the most progressive platform since the New Deal. I started thinking about how we removed the ability of Republicans to obstruct progress and how to keep pressure on mainstream Democrats to make good on their progressive promises.

The problem of social change—of how to improve the world in the ways you want it to improve—might be intractable, and in the end, those who struggle for change might be left with vague adages like “Don't take anything off the table, do what sustains and energizes you, and try not to hurt anybody else, especially those weaker than you.” I've spent the bulk of my adult intellectual and political life thinking about the problem of social change. On November 9th, the problem changed from the intractability of social change to the necessity of resistance.

Books change with the world in which you read them, and images and ideas from The Curfew that once spoke to protesting for social change, now speak to resistance. William Drysdale, the protagonist of The Curfew, is a violin virtuoso who can no longer play. Instead, he finds work helping people compose epitaphs for their gravestones. An oppressive, coup-installed government has banned all performance, music, and dissent and enforces a vague but deadly nightly curfew. The government's will is imposed by secret police. Dissenters disappear in the night. William himself was left to care for his daughter alone when his wife is disappeared. It is a gray, dour, cowed world, but there is resistance. William's friend, Gerard, entices him to a meeting with the promise of information about William's wife, but the larger purpose of the meeting is to spread “the method of disgovernance.”

It's not a movement. It's barely a group. But it is a revolution.

There is tension at the meeting, an “enforced jocularity,” and some contraband, but there are no posters, no agendas, no manifestos, no mimeograph machines or photocopiers. There are no speeches, no exhortations to action, no exchanges of activist literature. No weapons. If the secret police burst in, they wouldn't find a revolutionary cell, but a tedious party. It's not a movement. It's barely a group. But it is a revolution.

Gerard explains the method of disgovernance to William: “It is simple enough to describe in a phrase or two the whole extent of it. Any member of the government, any member of the police, of the secret police are all targets. You live your life and do nothing out of the ordinary. But if at some moment, you find yourself in a position to harm one of these targets, you do. Then you continue as if nothing happened.”

There is no leader to hobble the movement with hubris. No message to be distorted by the mainstream media. No fashion to be co-opted by corporations. No entry point for lobbyists or FBI infiltrators. No one to pressure into erodible compromise. No legislators. No executives. No proposed legislation to be poisoned by riders and amendments or killed in committee before anyone is forced to expose their true allegiance in a public vote. No one to bribe. No one to corrupt. No one to imprison. No one to kill because you can't kill a technique.

Gerard continues his description: “You never go out of your way to make such an opportunity come to pass. Not even one step out of your way. And yet, without exception, the targets must each day place themselves in danger before the citizenry, and cause such opportunities to exist. One doesn't prepare oneself except mentally.” No plans. No materials. No literature. No manifestos. The method is invisible to power because all power can see are random acts of violence. And once the government recognizes the revolution, who can they attack? Everyone? As Gerard explains, it is a “...war with no participants.” In the end, no matter the salary, no matter the other inducements, no matter the promises of protection and the seduction of ultimate power, no one will join the secret police. Tyrants, even the most cunning and most violent, all have the same fundamental and inescapable weakness: Without volunteers, they are just one person.

Once we are introduced to the method of disgovernance we realize The Curfew is filled with revolution. An old woman is shot for pushing someone in front of a bus, someone is nearly hit by a car, another man is killed by a brick, and “[o]ne could assume, therefore, that if a building was on fire then it might well be a police station.”

By reducing revolution and resistance to a fundamental unit that does not have the flaws, seams, and weaknesses of other techniques for change listed above, the method of disgovernance, a technique of random acts of violence, is compelling. All the revolution needs to sustain itself and succeed is to spread the idea and either people have the will to enact it at a level that is effective or they won't. The burden on revolutionaries is reduced to their individual preparation to act, spreading the method, and convincing people to adopt it. Given the intractability of social change and our new urgency to act, the method of disgovernance or some form of it feels transferable to our world.

In most dystopian fiction, targets are relatively obvious. Whether orcs, stormtroopers, or soldiers, we know who the targets are by their uniforms. But in the world of The Curfew, the government uses secret police: plain-clothed officers disguised to observe unobserved, to inform without being identified, to act with impunity and anonymity. You couldn't spot one in a line-up and you certainly couldn't spot one in a crowded train station.

Gerard answers the problem of identification this way: “You err on the side of false positives. Everyone shifts their behavior to simple routines, and the secret police are forced to become visible, simply to do their work.” The secret police reveal themselves when they arrest people, or are out after curfew without fear, or ask questions whose answers would be useful to the government. Their uniforms are woven by their actions. For Gerard, it is better to risk harming an innocent than wait for absolute certainty, but this is just a technique. Anybody can establish their own rubric and make their own decision. Gerard might err on the side of false positives, but nobody else has to.

In America today, some of the “targets” are public figures, individuals who must put their faces and names on their actions, and, as in the world of The Curfew, our targets clothe themselves in their actions. They become targets when they ask for the names of people who worked on climate change for the Environmental Protection Agency or on women's issues in the State Department. They become targets when they assign executive power over departments to people specifically designed to destroy them, cover up potential crimes and collusion, celebrate in Trump what they condemn in Clinton, line up to catch the scraps of wealth from the coming kleptocracy, and take the moment of Trump's tainted, electoral college victory to spray paint swastikas on public spaces. We are awash in targets. Some of them will have security paid for by our own tax dollars between us and them, but some of them will be on our train or across from us at the dinner table.

But the concept of “harm” is trickier for us. In The Curfew, the secret police shoot people in the street, beat them to death, make them disappear. Since the secret police are murderers, most will accept the ethical validity of a wide range of harm. But, as yet, the violence of the Trumpocracy and the existing sources of injustice it will strengthen and maintain, are at one or two removes. It is unlikely that anyone in the Trumpocracy will order the assassination or jailing of an opponent, swing a club, or pull a trigger. Rather, their body count will come from people who lose access to health care and die of preventable diseases, women who are forced to perform unsafe abortions or carry dangerous pregnancies to term, African-Americans murdered by the police because of the absence of law enforcement reforms, immigrants deported back to lethal situations, people of color killed by mob violence and the Dylan Roots that will take making “America Great Again” into their own gun slathered hands, and, of course, the thousands—or perhaps millions—of people who will die from the effects of climate change. One of the primary motivations for organizing resistance to Trump is to prevent, as much as possible, the harm he can do. But how?              

All works of art seek to establish some kind of applicability, whether it is as direct as we see in The Curfew, or more abstract, esoteric, dialectic, or self-referential. Literature argues for its own relevance. In The Curfew, Ball cultivates a comfort with death and violence before introducing the method of disgovernance, creating in the reader an atypical acceptance of random acts of deadly violence.

The novel opens with a violent and confusing scene, “There was a great deal of shouting and then a shot...An old woman was bleeding hunched over a bench. Two men were standing fifty feet away, one holding a gun. Some ten feet from the bench, a man was lying underneath the wheels of a truck, which seemed to have injured him, perhaps irreparably.” Despite the two dead bodies, this opening passage is disconcertingly passive. There was a “shot” and one man was “holding a gun,” but, in the prose, no one “shoots the old woman.” Furthermore, the other man wasn't “run over by a truck” but is simply “lying beneath the wheels” and he isn't mortally wounded or dead, he just “seemed” to be “injured...perhaps irreparably.” This first scene in the book is one of significant violence, but Ball uses a series of passive constructions to dim that violence, so the bloodshed does not feel as visceral as it should.

After this opening, we shadow William Drysdale on his work day. Violence follows him as he goes from assignment to assignment, including: “I was walking under the bridge on Seventh. There was a shout and she came down, hit not twenty feet in front of me.” Furthermore, as an epitaphorist, every job is an assertion of death. His first stone is for a man who died at 92, his second is for a nine-year-old girl who was beheaded by a slate tile thrown from the roof by the wind (or perhaps by a hand at a different target), and his third is for a butcher's father (a person whose day job is the parceling of corpses). He then meets with the parents and widow of a young man who “died in the night, two weeks ago...—There is no body. The body was taken—a political disappearance by the government. His final assignment for the day is with a fisherman who has chosen to compose his gravestone on what he considers his happiest day. It is the fisherman's third stone. Even the most directly affirmative moment in the book is affirmed by death.

In the world of The Curfew, violence is the fundamental unit of resistance, but the violence in our world is very different, especially when considered in light of likely targets and the persistence (at least at time of writing) of other norms, conventions, checks and balances, and laws that ostensibly prevent acts of violence on both sides of governing conflicts. Furthermore, American resistance, even revolution, has decided on a commitment to nonviolent actions, even when oppressors resort to violence. For a whole range of historic, moral, even practical reasons, causing “harm” does not seem like our fundamental unit of resistance. But, as the characters in The Curfew do, we should find a fundamental unit of resistance for our world and build from there.

Instead of harm, our unit of resistance should be refusal: the fundamental “no.” Our method of disgovernance under Trump could be: “Whenever a representative or surrogate of the Trump administration or the Republican Party it now leads asks you something, you refuse.” Don't perform at or attend his events, or serve in his administration, or vote for any of the policies offered by Republicans, or join him for a photo op. Refuse to let them speak at your college and if the administration invites them anyway refuse to attend. Refuse to let them eat at your restaurant or shop at your store. Refuse to let them hold rallies at your venues.

Part of the value of having a fundamental unit of resistance is that it allows us to, as thoughtfully as possible, respond to people who are comfortable acting thoughtlessly. The barrage of legislation and hearings and executive orders along with the constant stream of scandalous tweets and reports, combine to make it almost impossible to respond with any kind of thought to anything Trump and the Republicans are doing. I'm sure that is, at least in part, a tactic designed to overwhelm opposition and, in part, the hubris of believing without doubt or nuance in your own rightness. But, if our basic unit is refusal, we at least have something we can instantly respond with.

Obviously, those of us who are not members of Congress, business leaders, or celebrities in some field, will have few options for directly refusing the Trump administration, but, that to me is part of the strength of a fundamental unit of resistance. It is simply a base. Just like the characters in The Curfew, we are able to sculpt our own actions to our own circumstances.

Resistance is, in essence, a reaction, and one of the challenges we'll face—especially if one of the chambers of Congress is not flipped in 2018—is discovering and discerning what the fuck we should do on the fly. But even though resistance must always be flexible, must be new when the threat is new, must find ways to both respond and be one step ahead, a base is useful. I suspect, over the next months, as Trump establishes his patterns and as those who have studied resistance more than I begin and continue to lay out theory and ideas, this base will grow in sophistication, but we can start with responding to every request from the Trump administration with “I refuse.”

My desk is cluttered with books, unopened mail, receipts, scraps of paper I've written notes on, notebooks, and coffee mugs. My phone notifies me that I have a text from Daily Action or Planned Parenthood telling me who of my elected officials I should call today and why. From the text messages, Make 5 Calls, Flippable, Swing Left, the people I follow on Twitter, and the dozens of emails I get, I'll decide what small action in the resistance I will take today. Maybe it will be subscribing to one of the newspapers working to expose the corruption and malfeasance of the administration or a donation to one of the organizations mitigating its impact, like the ACLU or MIRA or the Southern Poverty Law Center, or I'll support one of the Democrats running for the House in a special election in some way, or I'll badger friends and family in Maine who are represented in Congress by Republicans to make calls, send emails, and visit offices. It may be taking care of myself with a day off social media and a long walk so I don't burn out. It may be working on this essay.

...the method of disgovernance is a lifestyle. Resistance must be as well.

Hiding behind the idea of “harm,” behind all the violence, perhaps even behind Ball's own lyricism, the method of disgovernance makes another powerful statement about resistance, one I was only able to hear after revisiting these ideas and after six months of thinking of myself as part of the resistance: the method of disgovernance is a lifestyle. Resistance must be as well. The term “lifestyle” can be intimidating, but resistance as a lifestyle doesn't mean giving your life to the resistance. We resist, in part, so we and other people can live around idiosyncratic sources of joy. Consider “reading as a lifestyle,” for example. As readers, we still go to work, have dinner, get drunk, binge watch TV, and fritter away our lives on social media. We still sleep, go out on dates, miss the train, forget our keys, and get a bagel in the afternoon after swearing that salad at lunch was enough. And yet, we make time to read, to visit the bookstore, talk to booksellers, rate books online, research reviews, and maybe even join a book club. We do other things during our day, but no day feels complete if we haven't done at least a little reading.

I don't know if we'll be able to prevent the rise of fascism in the United States and I have even less faith that we will be able to prevent Trump from doing irreparable harm to our world, but we must fight nonetheless. We must turn the world of our experience to the problem of resistance. For me, that world is quite often books, and from The Curfew I've built my fundamental refusal. And no day feels complete if I haven't done at least a little resisting. 

Josh Cook is the author of the Kirkus-starred novel, AN EXAGGERATED MURDER, published by Melville House in March 2015. His fiction and other work has appeared in The Coe Review, Epicenter Magazine, The Owen Wister Review, Barge, Plume Poetry Anthology 2012 and 2013, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in the 2011 and 2012 Cupboard Fiction Contest. His criticism has appeared in the Huffington Post Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Fiction Advocate, Bookslut, The Millions, The Rumpus and elsewhere. He is a bookseller with Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA.

The Curfew by Jesse Ball • Vintage Contemporaries, 2011 • 194 pages

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Maybe She’s Born With It

Shelby Shaw on Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary

“How many versions of this essay will I save? Command Shift S.”

The eternal risk of losing yourself begins when you throw your value into the ranks of another’s hierarchical desires: Here I am, what do you think of me? We are all in this changing room together but nobody fits into any of the clothes they’ve pulled by their own eye’s appraisal. To see ourselves in the self-portraits we paint from the impressions of others is to learn to see the angles we cannot see of ourselves alone. Like stepping before the fitting room’s paneled mirror, creating a triptych of yourself without ever having to look yourself in the eye. Seeing our flaws as if we are an other.

Why do we bother with being bothered about our appearances at all? We are only as valuable as our own opinions of ourselves. Nobody will see the price tag after it is cut off, but a comment from someone else will always remain priceless. Snide, respectful, envious, disdainful: The other is the eternal scorecard in the game of risking the loss of ourselves. The other dictates the rubric by which we measure ourselves.

By risking the loss of yourself, I mean to risk being rejected. By risking rejection, I mean to risk being wrong when you believe somebody cares about you. By risking being wrong about believing somebody cares about you, I mean to risk being appraised as less valuable to someone than you thought you were originally. Risk is a gamble and you must always be ready to lose.

When I have gambled with my value by misinterpreting the close proximity of him standing next to me, or catching his glance from across the room, or reacting to his kindness as if it were interest, I have safe-guarded my doubts and brushed them aside into an internal lockbox.

The thing about lockboxes is that they’re stupid: You can pick up the whole thing and walk off with it—who cares if you picked the lock first or not? A lockbox makes it convenient to identify and carry items worth stealing. The proof is in the fool.

I carry my value as a secret that appreciates interest and loses shareholders with every interaction I have and don’t have, with every message he sends me and with every one I don’t receive. Every time I recall a flirtatious throbbing or slap-happy interaction, I chastise myself for remembering how every memory erodes with retrieval; like buying a knock-off Italian product with a Made In China label unhidden on the inside. My value is an assessment of whether I think I am foolproof to others—even when I do not hide the fool from the proof, from the others.

Through the rejections of third parties we learn what it is about ourselves that is less than the popular opinion, or our very own single-channel, first-person perspective. We learn by our disagreements with subjection what it is that deviates us from the standard, from the norms of what others desire and seek. A subject can become any object if the former submits to the qualities prescribed by the latter’s definition, if a subject can remold itself like plastic.

Areas of your life to consider appraising include: The price of your self-worth. (does not require others) The price of your reputation. (does not require facts) The price of your desirability. (does not require feelings)

I do not know the price point of my value. Lily Hoang does not know the price point of her value. We do know the suggested retail price of A Bestiary new, in paperback is $16.

The other is the eternal scorecard in the game of risking the loss of ourselves. The other dictates the rubric by which we measure ourselves.

The unraveling of A Bestiary in the memoir format is laid out by memories, aphorisms, facts, and text messages. Like a deeply abridged email chain with herself, the history progresses to double-back on characters or incidents in flashes of memory. The brevity of most sections, lines like post-it notes, resemble a to-do list not for executing but for merely remembering to write down, in order to remember at all. I think of the grocers who, eyeing an item you’ve picked up with no price tag, assess how much you really need it, how much you are willing to spend, and prophesize a price for profit. Usually they are correct.

Do we need someone with more experience to tell us the value of what we can’t see?

“A year ago, I was still paying Chris alimony. He wrote me an email entailing all the reasons I should take him back. He suggested long-distance polyamory.”

Lily’s ex-husband, Chris, is a controlling white male who finds pathetic solace in belittling Lily as his Vietnamese wife, making inferences to her inferiority, abusing her physically, emotionally, and verbally. How many forms of abuse exist? Is one more painful or more affective than the others? Is one preferred? There is no compliance between an abuser and his wife, there are no checks and balances except for the undrawn line of which crossing would represent pushing the limit and going over the edge. Being a victim replaces the role of lover. Obeying to avoid punishment is not submitting to please someone. Lily is a fiercely observant woman, intelligent not just through education but through experience, her observations blunt without mercy. The morals of her fairy tales are not always meant to be uplifting: That silver lining is really made of jade, and jade is meant to break you. As Lily points out, a jade bracelet is meant to be worn on a woman’s wrist as a symbol of delicacy. To remove it is to break it. To be delicate is to be praised for the strength of discipline.

Sometimes it is less about what to do and more about what not to do, to tailor our own behavior based on others. Remember, desirability is essential for our own value. It is from others that we learn what is not working about ourselves.

“I understood then the function of alimony: I was paying him not to be in my life.”

We do know that Lily’s scrolling essay, A Bestiary, is a 2015 collection winner chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum. Its $16 suggested retail price holds true even on the ubiquitous online retailer Amazon, but only if purchasing the book using a Prime Membership, which will ship it to you for a guaranteed arrival two days after check-out. The cost of a new one-year Prime Membership is $99, but the two-day shipping is free as a benefit. The cost of A Bestiary remains the same. The abuse in Lily’s memories will remain there printed on the pages, the description of the bruise, the verbal attacks, even when the second edition is printed. The morals will not change even when the stock market does. Lily will remain the same as well: She will always have seen it in the three-way mirror for what her essay really was, a story worth sharing for the benefit of artifact, a fact that she knew long before a suggested retail price was printed over a barcode.

By printing the artifact of her story, Lily made the art fact—the art of deflecting discrimination, racism, mistreatment. The art of digesting placement in the form of consenting to enter marriage with a condescending man. The art of taking lessons learned from having been disrespected and applying them to new men, who continued to arrogantly spurn her attempts at being loving and caring and loved and cared for in return.

“My abandoned Geography dissertation: how second generation immigrants imagine a homeland they’ve never been to.

Brilliant, I know, and forsaken.”

Lily’s parents upheld her to their Vietnamese traditions and expectations. Her ex-husband pinned her to fulfilling a domestic role caged by oppression and inferiority. Her boyfriend after him became indifferent to her passion to care for him. Her lover, meanwhile, dominated her in hotel bedrooms as she wanted it.

The morals will not change even when the stock market does.

“When does otherness dissolve?”

Like a traveler through foreign lands, Lily is a visitor to each person’s disappointment of her, a guest in the house of submission, where she is told to take off her power and put on a jade bracelet. Where in this essay is the speaker in power? Where in this story does the heroine save herself? To dissuade her parents’ disappointments in her, to dissuade her disappointment in the men she has chosen as partners, to dissuade is a form of selling one particular vision that pretends not to see the others in the same light.

“He asks me how much capital I have, how much student debt, and I think this is a sign that we are becoming more serious, but he just wants to know that he’s better than me.”

At the time of my writing this piece, a “New” copy of A Bestiary can be purchased from a third-party seller on Amazon’s Marketplace starting at $11.89 plus $3.99 for shipping, arrival time not guaranteed. The most expensive copy of the book being sold as New through a third-party on Amazon is listed for $45 plus $3.99 for shipping. The seller, “Any Book,” is based in Florida and has a rating of 4.5/5 stars and a 94% positive rating based on 700,807 customer reviews from the past year.

“Any Book” is quoting a significantly higher market value than suggested retail price—and therefore elevates the value of what it is to own A Bestiary by charging almost three times the price point.

“Mono no aware translates as ‘the pathos of things’ or ‘an empathy toward things’ or ‘a sensitivity to ephemera.’ A thing’s pathos is derived from its transcience.”

To own this particular copy of A Bestiary is to not purchase a $10 lunch for one work week, to cancel Netflix streaming for six months, to defect a membership to the New Museum at the level of Student, Artist, Senior, or Teacher.

“Any Book” describes their $48.99 “New” copy of A Bestiary as “Brand New!” and “Huge seller with millions of transactions!” and “Satisfaction Guaranteed!”

“Desire is striving, the unfulfillment of a mathematical limit.”

Declining to purchase a copy of A Bestiary from a bookstore or online marketplace does not decrease the value of the book itself. Declining to purchase the book does not decrease or increase one’s personal price point, either. Purchasing a book that goes unread is a loss of one’s personal capital, but raises inflation of ambition and promise.

“I imagine Harold bringing this girl he fucked into his apartment, how she makes some banal compliment about the paintings, how her panties are already at her ankles. Where am I? I’m probably waiting for him to call me.”

Curiously, the “Used” copies of A Bestiary listed on Amazon start at a price of $14.82 plus $3.99 for shipping. It costs more to buy what has been experienced already by someone else, before it has been decidedly discarded or traded in for a smaller, less-than-original reward.

“She showed my parents her husband’s paycheck as proof of her happiness. She smiled and I recognized her misery.”

There is something not as painful about someone lesser rejecting you, compared to the pain of someone you admire telling you no.

What comes into play between lovers and ex-lovers is the struggle not of power but of value, and don’t they say that less is more?

To choose to purchase a less-expensive used copy of A Bestiary is not to choose the lesser copy than the one detained in Florida by “Any Book.” Stockholm syndrome of a relationship does not give the captor more power, but ultimately subverts the self-negation of the captive.

“The guilt of our difference.”

A Bestiary remains the same book if it is Used or Like New or Prime. If defaced by highlighters and marginal notes, ripped covers and warped pages, dog-eared creases: Lily has committed her appreciation of being Vietnamese, a woman, a guardian, a daughter gaining weight, a sister who buries her sister, an abused wife, an independent divorcée, another body in the dating pool who enjoys getting to know other bodies even if 800 miles away by car and said body does not remember her birthday.

“Love is a desire of contracting friendship arising from the beauty of the object. (Cicero)”

Your value does not appreciate without action. Investing in order to understand is the only deed due to your account.

“My assumption, now, is that every man has an Asian fetish.
This is born out of low self-esteem - and fact, it’s born out of fact.”

The beauty of A Bestiary is that we know there is a happy ending to the tale we hold in our hands—published, a winner—even if along the way our heroine is lost, alone, put down, corrected, and has not yet found anyone to be a Prince let alone Charming.

“We are so safe we are practically invisible.”

The price of the book does not matter. The story will always be used and deemed as critically acceptable because Lily has lived through it already in the first person. To the rest of us her winning essay is a gift like new, for which we are thankful, because gifts do not charge money.

Shelby Shaw is a writer in New York and Managing Editor of the art and literary journal Storyfile.

A Bestiary by Lily Hoang • Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016 • 156 pages

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Teaching Violence

Sara Hendery on Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future

It starts, for me, with an image of a bull. Burly and dark, hard, like forehead lines, proud and steaming—to some, a symbol of fear, to others, a symbol of home. Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984, is centered, subtly, on the complicated and composite definitions of the places we call home. Sattouf’s text, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, is predominantly rooted in Sattouf’s childhood being fitfully pulled in different directions of residence in Paris, Syria, and Libya. Riad’s father brings a bull figurine to all these homes, a ritual.

When I was young, I was more interested in creating homes within my home instead of finding home in new ones, as my family didn’t move around as much as Riad’s. My sisters and I built forts by the creek, stayed in our treehouse until the sun slept, discovered and re-discovered the best hiding spots in our overgrown back yard. I perpetually embarked upon the old-new, what had been in front of me my whole small life: the blackberry bushes on the hill, the snake family under the bridge, inventing and reinventing my yearning for comfortable space. The Arab of the Future is a book about a different kind of yearning. It is a book of placement and displacement, of where does one belong?, but is also a book about the complexity of culture, family, and a young boy cranking his neck to see his father’s vision for and of the world—clear or not. I have always looked at my own father with the same crooked neck, and I would bet millions of people across the globe have the same throbbing cricks that pinch them when they hear the small but melodic word “dad.”

. . . the teaching of violence is slow but massive, and moves, creepily, like a fog.

As a graphic memoir, The Arab of the Future begs for the reader to embark on a sensual experience: to smell, listen, taste, touch—if possible—place and time. Sensory details of Riad’s family’s homes, down to the smell of oranges or onions alongside a road they are travelling on, are denoted with thin arrows sprouting out of the image frames. The actual images of the book, too, do a lot of the talking without text present. Every character of the text embodies, or is engulfed by, one or many of their personal physical traits. For young Riad, it’s his long, flowing blonde hair that swallows his face like a Tootsie-Pop. He looks different than his dark-haired, Syrian father, Abdul-Razak, a sign that he doesn’t quite belong. In childhood, the misplaced hair, the too-long legs, the ears just a little to the left, anything that sets us “apart,” is unequivocally petrifying. While I have not lived in the spaces where the narrator has lived, I have certainly inhabited the space of childhood, and this book transports me back there. Still, I think about sitting in a creek when I was five and feeling the slick, tongue-like touch of a salamander by my foot. I will never forget that creek, but I will also never forget how my father preferred I wear big black clunky boots, which I rarely wore, if I planned on adventuring in the water. Our senses often tell us what we know, and what we know we’re not doing quite right.

Abdul-Razak, and his wife Clementine, a French woman, are confronted with different perceptions of reality as they move from place to place, the bull propped, still, in their living room—what is a “real” man, a “real” citizen, but also, what is right and what is wrong? How does the answer change from place to place? When they witness a group of Syrian boys killing a dog with a pitchfork, Clementine argues Riad shouldn’t be attending school with boys like that. Abdul-Razak reminds his son, “Don’t forget, you’re not French, you’re Syrian! And in Syria, boys take their father’s side. Period.” A harsh painting unfolds of Riad’s father who, to put it plainly, is at times undermining, prejudiced, dominating, misogynist. But for young Riad, and as in the eyes of many children, “Back then, I didn’t understand very much. But I was sure of one thing: my father was fantastic.” When we’re young, adults are gods, omniscient oracles of space and time. Did I draw a jeweled crown over my father’s head in art class when I was ten? Of course, I did. It is easy to forget adults were young once too, or truly are capable of never having “grown up.”

The Arab of the Future is a portrayal of an innocent child’s-eye-view of what one, at some point in learning to be human, must choose to do—to absorb, dispel, or transfix upon what one is exposed to. “At that age,” Riad says, “I had great difficulty working out the difference between dream and reality.” I think of the image of a bull in an arena and the symbolism of their pairing—a bull lured in by color, a fight between human and animal. It seems an almost fantastical reality. How do we make the choices between right and wrong? Sometimes we do it silently. The inability to speak and the absence of language, or, the impending presence of silence, is resonant and formidable in this book. The reader notices Clementine’s waning disposition through her own quietude; she loses weight, her questions, laments, and worries go unattended by her husband, and soon, her image almost completely surrenders to the background of every graphic as she slowly pushes a stroller, dissolving. When Abdul-Razak gives Riad a gift of a toy gun, the object nearly the size of Riad’s own chest, the image frame shows him pointing the gun at his pregnant mother’s belly. The heavy weight of Abdul-Razak’s gifts, words, and lessons offered to his son, especially in this moment, of being taught to curse one’s enemies with violence, can be overlooked if the reader isn’t paying enough attention. I believe that is the point—the teaching of violence is slow but massive, and moves, creepily, like a fog.

But, did I mention a bull?

In The Arab of the Future it often feels that the narrator is berating Abdul-Razak, and in turn, somewhat chiding Arab thinking. But it is not, in all ways, a harangue of Riad’s father. Abdul-Razak, at the beginning of the book, shows Riad the good luck charm bull that he carries with him from place to place: “For my father, that always meant he was home.” Abdul-Razak is proud, even affectionate, for this object, a version of himself he rarely expresses. The bull is a symbol of sentiment that Abdul-Razak, too, has entered the world from many entryways, and is often trying to grasp at the things he believes are correct, even if at times, unjust. The reference to the bull is planted in the tradition carried along within a family, and ultimately, a young person’s desire to so fervently carry within themselves the marking of some kind of lineage. “Home.” At the heart of this graphic memoir is notions of origin, and moving on, origin, and moving on, origin, and . . . what now? It is beautiful and devastating all in one breath, like most things of unparalleled importance to humans. As a person who has moved from the South to the Midwest, from my mother and father’s warm, delicate home to the loud, often-startling movement of my now-city, I wake in the night unsure of where I physically am, if I have been stolen or if I have moved myself to this new place. What now? I think.

It was very early in my life that I realized it was not my actual fears, but the threat of my fears that were most terrorizing. My father once yelled his deep bellow from the mailbox of our Southern home. Come here! You have to see this! I ran so fast I stumbled over my walnut-knobby feet. My father had found a dead bee nestled in the dirt of his garden. Here, he said, plopping the bee into my hands, First-Communion-cupped. You will never be able to see a bee so close. The threat of its sting, an experience I had not yet had, was enough to keep me dizzy and whirling on playgrounds to avoid them, but now that the possibility wasn’t there, I was fearless. I stroked its bloated striped tummy and leaned in. I love you, little bee. The bee, though, resurrected, or contained a kind of fury inside of it that even after death slumbered in its soul. It stung the center of my palm, near the place where the creases meet, right around the bones, which nipped like a long-needle shot. I didn’t get to see if the bee had woken, or if the sting was a mishap; I had already thrown its body down on the ground and ran away from my father just as quickly as I had run up. It did not occur to me at the time that I had threatened the bee, but it was the bee that had forsaken me, that it was my father who had caused me harm, that it was me who was living in a deep and marooned terror. My father lost his crown—how dare he put me in danger? That wasn’t the reality. My father was sure I would find home in that little bee, that it would have been another one of my old-new discoveries through the lens he believed would keep me young, curious, trying; even if he did, accidentally, put me in danger. It takes a special distance from pain to appreciate stinging.

When we strip away the threat of fear, it is then that we learn most about our homes, no matter how many there are, and who takes us to them—they will hurt you, but they will build you, too.

I never not notice bees—I thank my father for letting me probe them for more than their danger, but their diligence. In an imaginary conversation I have with Riad Sattouf, we talk about stunning duplicity.

The Arab of the Future is, indeed, about a family’s tectonic movement to different homes, but it is also about the nature of being voiceless, about being a child, any child. When I was a young girl, I remember writing in diaries and keeping them open like jaws on my bed so that someone would read them. Isn’t anyone listening? When someone plucks us from the floor, it is difficult not to be molded by them.

The first image of The Arab of the Future is Riad’s small body sitting in the safe palm of his father’s hand, a literal vision of molding, seemingly saving his son from something. But from what? What or who does he need saving from? Sattouf leaves that up to the reader to decide. Flip the book over and on the back cover there is an image of a bull that looks almost in movement, green-eyed and anxious, which offers some semblance of innocent and gracious hope, one thinks, or at least, of the future.

Sara Hendery is from North Carolina but is currently in Chicago earning her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She is an assistant editor for Hotel Amerika and her writing can be found in Creative Nonfiction.

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 by Riad Sattouf • Metropolitan Books, 2015 • 160 pages

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Abjectly Speaking

Morgan Childs on Miranda July’s The First Bad Man

More recently than I’m inclined to admit on the Internet, my father said something to me—female, twentysomething, heterosexual, and very newly single—that felt like salt in a wound. “You call yourself a feminist, but when it comes to romance, you're like a limp rag,” he told me. “When you get your heart broken, you're a damsel in distress.”

We should all be so honest as my father was to me that night I called home for help, curled up in the fetal position, wearing a bathrobe crusted with yesterday’s takeout. Not only was I damsel in distress; I was a damsel who’d sidled herself up to the train tracks and offered the mustachioed villain some help with the rope. I had lost a big love, sure, but then I’d lost my grip, whittling myself into the grotesque, wailing woman I was sure my ex-boyfriend believed me to be, sleuthing for signs confirming I was unworthy of the man who had enumerated my every fault the night he called it off—my enthusiasm, my loquacity, my ambitions, my naked body. Sobbing alone in my apartment, I listened to my own moans with remove, identifying morbidly with the beast that had possessed me. Maybe she was dying, maybe she was giving birth. She was definitely female.

There is a home in our culture for the “intimately disappointed,” to borrow the parlance of Lauren Berlant, a sanatorium of self-help books and commercially sanguine women's magazines. These venues cater to the emotional distress wrought by the “female complaint”: that, as Berlant writes, “women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.” In the throes of heartbreak, I turned to the outposts of what Berlant calls “women’s culture”—with a Kindle, no one needs to know you’re reading The Girl’s Guide to Surviving a Break-Up—but the books in this genre share a premise to which I in my despair objected: That by virtue of being a woman, I was not only worthy, but wondrous; that emotional intelligence and intuition make all of us (every last one!) unspeakably beautiful, infinitely adorable, preternaturally wise. Ask the girl with dried peanut butter in her unwashed hair, and she’ll tell it to you straight: It isn’t always “his loss.”

Like narrator-Kraus and Cheryl, these are women who fall apart when it isn’t enough to do what they—we—do best. When the virtues of femininity—emotional stewardship, verbal acuity, affective housekeeping—fail to merit the women who possess them the companionship in which to exercise them. When empathy becomes insanity. Like narrator-Kraus, Cheryl exercises the strange power of casting herself out. 

The literature of women robbed blind by love has another “intimate public”—one that is sturdier, smarter, sometimes debased and deranged, often vulgar, always messy. Its matriarch is Chris Kraus, who spun the narrative of romantic disappointment out before our eyes in her fictocritical and, it seems, increasingly popular 1996 book I Love Dick. (Let’s forget, for a moment, that Kraus’s protagonist bears her own name; that the book is so often classified as a memoir is enough to induce a claustrophobic fit. In an interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Kraus called on Deleuze’s aphoristic “Life is not personal” to illustrate how utterly two-dimensional the memoir classification can render a text. Novel at least provides more breathing room; exegesis may describe the book best—“‘Exegesis’: the crazy person’s search for proof that they’re not crazy,” narrator–Kraus writes in the book.) Even more than the loss of love, I Love Dick confronts the aftermath of the loss of its idea—the scrambling pursuit on the part of the loveless of a blank space on which to project unrequited affection. Kraus seizes tight control just at the moment of its loss, power just at the moment she is most powerless—the same act of stealth feminism undertaken by the “anorexic philosopher” Simone Weil as Kraus portrays her in Aliens in Anorexia, performing self-starvation—disappearing—as a seizure of agency. Kraus quotes Weil: “If the ‘I’ is the only thing we truly own, we must destroy it.”

Last year, Miranda July offered a new entry in a canon of female writers working with a toolkit Kraus has made popular: July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, actualizes in fewer than 300 pages an entire world knocked off its axis by the lovelessness of its narrator. Through the lens of its protagonist, Cheryl Glickman, the universe of The First Bad Man is so airless as to seem vacuum-sealed; until the novel’s latter half, Cheryl’s matter-of-factness is estranging much in the way that Kathy Acker’s Dick-and-Jane prose alienates a reader of the sexually profane Kathy Goes to Haiti. In her early forties and without a partner, without a family, Cheryl’s bizarre character is saturated in her profound lack: In one passage, alone in a bathroom stall, Cheryl confesses with rare insight: “My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them at the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it.”

Cheryl has two consuming loves. The first is for Phillip Bettelheim, her professional superior and a man so utterly out-of-touch that he calls upon Cheryl to give him her blessing to sleep with a sixteen-year-old, but just enough in-touch to manipulate Cheryl’s desire for him. The novel opens with the protagonist on the road, seeing herself through Phillip’s eyes: “I drove to the doctor’s office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching—windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel.” The girl-on-the-road is an image of female freedom Kraus employs in the latter half of I Love Dick (and one which is smartly upended in David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, in which Amy strips herself of her “cool girl” persona on the drive away from her suffocating marriage). Cheryl’s intense self-awareness often works, unsettlingly, against her. In one such moment, Phil compliments her beaded necklace, then takes hold of it to pull her towards him; an onlooker, says Cheryl, “might have thought this moment was degrading, but I knew the degradation was just a joke; he was mocking the kind of man who would do something like that.” Deluded by a hopeless—and hopelessly unsuitable—prospect, Cheryl’s reason nonetheless works in overdrive. I know what you’re thinking, she seems to say, defending herself before you can even get the words out.  

Cheryl’s second love is for Kubelko Bondy, an infant for whom she developed a fierce affection as a child and whom she occasionally reencounters in other people’s children. “I knew that he loved me more than his mother and father and that in some very real and permanent way he belonged to me,” explains Cheryl of her first meeting with Kubelko. “Because I was only nine it wasn’t clear if he belonged to me as a child or as a spouse, but it didn’t matter, I felt myself rising up to the challenge of heartache.” Lacking both spouse and child, Cheryl—or Cheryl-July—devotes considerable focus to scatological concerns, continually drawing the reader’s awareness to her ability to produce waste. Her domestic life is regimented by a bizarre “system” by which she conserves toilet paper, eats straight out of a skillet, and otherwise restricts her consumption in preparation for moments of despair:

Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and makes this person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash everywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment.

Only when she finds love in the novel’s second act does Cheryl let go of her hypercontrolled chaos and settle back down to earth, where the challenge of heartbreak indeed lies in wait. By a few twists of fate, Cheryl finds real-life love (with a baby or a man, I won’t say) and then loses it again, and then finds it again—in turn puncturing her self-consciousness and strangeness, and then launching it back into the stratosphere.

Kraus and her work bridge the divide between generations of women writing about the brutality of female desire, with her influences—among them Acker, Sophie Calle—on one side and their Gen-X and Y protégés—Ariana Reines, Kate Zambreno—on the other, many of whom frequently work in the first person and have been published by Semiotext(e), the imprint Kraus founded with Sylvère Lotringer. What sets these writers apart from newcomers who cite them as influences—Sheila Heti, Lena Dunham—is the high-octane nature of their prose and the depth of thinking within it, often landing their writing on the discursive interstices between genres. Their narrators are wizened by the present moment, never by the grace of hindsight. Trafficking in the tropes of the female grotesque—the slut, the Madonna, the hag—it is work that, as Kraus herself says, “doesn’t try to make itself loveable.” (In the same interview with Sleek magazine, Kraus indirectly accuses both July and Dunham of attempted lovability, albeit long before the publication of The First Bad Man.)

Despite its comically tidy ending (an epilogue shifts into the third person, bookending the novel with Cheryl’s filmic fantasies) July’s ruthlessness with the book’s narrator and her engagement with the consuming intensity of a woman’s desire to express her own love places The First Bad Man among a feminist literature whose protagonists struggle to be feminists themselves. Like narrator-Kraus and Cheryl, these are women who fall apart when it isn’t enough to do what they—we—do best. When the virtues of femininity—emotional stewardship, verbal acuity, affective housekeeping—fail to merit the women who possess them the companionship in which to exercise them. When empathy becomes insanity. Like narrator-Kraus, Cheryl exercises the strange power of casting herself out.

“When I am beset by abjection,” Julia Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror, “the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. […] The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.” What’s left of women’s fiction, one is bound to wonder, without the subjective “I,” that feminine lens through which experience is filtered? As Kraus herself said, Céline’s “I” of Journey to the End of Night is a different one indeed than that of Weil, who “has been pathologized—she can’t get fucked, she’s manipulative and anorexic, she’s ugly and she dresses badly.” But by wresting herself an “I” with the power to expel, to dispose, to toss aside in disgust, the abject woman seizes a perverse control. This remarkable pas de deux puts the abject in her master’s arms, but allows our protagonist to take the lead. Like the patient who resists the praise of a therapist, the self-abnegation of the loveless—particularly when she is female—allows her to calibrate her narrative with her self-denigration. You don’t love me? asks the abject. You don’t like the way I look, act, talk, fuck? You don’t want to make a home with me? You don’t care what I desire, what I dream of, who I believe myself to be? Well, she says, in her infinite adorability and preternatural wisdom, neither do I.

We knew we were standing on a fault line, that the event that finally divided us would be tectonic in its intensity. But no amount of knowing could have dampened the ache of disappointment, so great that, like a blow to the skull, everything but the stars and colors of trauma and the concussive CRACK fell away. I was blighted by the force and speed with which the end had hit me, and I found myself endlessly replaying the memory of a last phone call, only weeks earlier, his voice on the other end swept up in something heady and sweet and maybe a little deranged: “I love you too much,” he told me. He never knew the half of it.

Morgan Childs is an American food and culture writer based in Prague, Czech Republic. www.morgan-childs.com

The First Bad Man by Miranda July • Scribner, 2015 • 288 pages

Photo courtesy of Helene Childs-Budelis

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By Virtue of Another

Sam Dolph on Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson’s memoir, The Argonauts, is about undoing. Structurally, she undoes everything we are taught about how a piece of literature is supposed to exist and work: she does not give us chapters, indentations at the start of paragraphs, or any kind of chronological order. She undoes the intellectual hierarchy in place that puts theorists and philosophers (Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Sedgwick) at the top and the rest of us at the bottom, by integrating their thoughts and work right alongside her own prose—their names hovering off to the side—thus giving her own name equal weight. She undoes the identities we all cling to because we need them—mother, father, partner, boy, girl, trans, queer, hetero, homo, writer, doctor, artist—and she doesn’t fall apart. At least not forever.

It’s no surprise that she returns again and again to Judith Butler (the undoing master herself) and the assertion that we as humans “are for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.” Nelson doesn’t even need to reiterate the part of the quote that comes before this assertion, Butler’s delicious declaration that we are “undone by each other, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel. . . .” Because The Argonauts is clear proof. Nelson even undoes our understanding of genre by deeming her book a work of autotheory—a term before only used in Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado—rather than the traditional memoir. The truth is that memoirs get a bad reputation.

I once chose to take a class in college called “Reading & Writing Personal Essays,” but was too self-conscious to apply for entrance to a class called “Reading & Writing Memoirs.” Thinking back on this choice, I'm reminded of an NYT piece from 2010 that recognized memoir as "the black sheep of the literary family . . . motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention." Sometimes, I'm embarrassed to even tell people I'm reading a memoir, and I usually feel the need to defend it by saying "I never read memoirs but this one doesn't feel like a memoir, you know?" I'm met with emphatic nods. People get it. We're all uncomfortable with self-reflection, and one of the scary consequences of both reading and writing a memoir is that it forces both parties into self-reflection. Yikes!

In any case, Nelson not only allowed me to avoid humiliation (and even gain some literary cred) in that I could say I was reading an autotheory, but she also offers another platform for self-reflection that is more accessible because it is cradled in theory, and thus feels meditative rather than exposing. What I really think is that we all just need to pull down our collective shame blanket and feel comfortable talking and thinking about ourselves via memoir and in everyday life, but until that happens it's nice to know we have other options.

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The Argonauts begins (after a steamy foray into the forbidden land of queer sex) with an argument between Nelson and her partner, trans artist Harry Dodge, about the inadequacy or adequacy of language. To illustrate this argument, Nelson tells a story of when she—“feral with vulnerability” after declaring her love for Dodge—sent him (as we all wish we had) a Barthes passage that discusses the ever-changing meaning of “I love you.” According to Barthes, anyone who utters “I love you” is like the Argonaut rebuilding his ship: while the parts of the ship are replaced during its voyage, the name of the ship remains the same. To Nelson, this passage solidifies her own truth, that language can always be enough, whereas Dodge can only see it as the opposite: a confirmation that language can never measure up, and even more, will destroy what’s “real.”

This argument silently chugs along as the book moves forward, just barely in the background. Even in the most beautifully biting moments of Nelson’s prose as she details an intense love scene between her and Dodge, or the moment she gave birth to her son, Iggy, or her fear as she’s stalked by a man obsessed with her aunt’s death, the question remains: is language enough? Is this book—is any book—enough? And if it’s enough for Nelson, does it have to be enough for Dodge? For me? For us?

. . . it’s OK to welcome different selves into our supreme (if messy) identities, even if those selves contradict or feel distant from each other at times. Nothing cancels something else out when it comes to who we are.

For me, the answer is complicated because I think one of the harsh truths that I found in Nelson’s work of autotheory is that there really isn’t anything that actually is enough, and this includes language. But this truth isn’t limiting; in fact, it’s liberating. None of the theories or quotes in The Argonauts can stand alone as emblematic of what Nelson is trying to convey, but they all highlight each other and help Nelson tell her story. And more, when Nelson sends Dodge the Barthes passage to declare her love, it doesn’t mean she’s done telling him. I imagine the conversation continues daily.

What The Argonauts helped me see is that no one thing needs to be enough because there is always something else to add to my story. In my most vulnerable moments when I wonder, “am I smartbeautifulcompassionatepatientstrikinghardworkinglovinglovable enough?” the answer can be no, and that can suck. But if in one moment I’m not enough of one thing, I am enough of another. And another and another and another. In the moments where I allow myself to not be enough and come undone, I welcome the possibility of becoming more.

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After watching both of their bodies change side-by-side, Nelson’s belly swelling with her growing son and Dodge’s musculature increasing on testosterone injections, Nelson remarks: “On the surface, it may have seemed as though [Dodge’s] body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But . . . on the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations . . . in other words, we were aging.” Nelson is partly joking, but also partly not.

There is a funny and exciting thing that happens in a queer relationship where everything you see, experience, and think about is also queer; in The Argonauts, Nelson undoes this in a way that doesn’t diminish queerness, but surpasses it. The choices both Nelson and Dodge have made—Nelson’s pregnancy and Dodge’s transition—are inherently queer, but they are also choices and experiences that happen simply because they are “two human animals” learning how, even in their most gendered moments, to be together in their bodies and marveling at what that can mean for each of them independently.

Nelson simultaneously underlines and undoes queerness again when she struggles with understanding what it means to take on an identity that carries with it such problematic connotations: mother. She asks, “is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s ‘normal’ state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body?” Here, we see an intimate moment within a queer feminist as she both questions and justifies her choice. She continues, “How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?” Nelson’s question is an important one—how can we simultaneously hold the identities we’ve worked so hard to create for ourselves (i.e. queer, feminist, progressive, activist) while happily leaping into others that, whether we like or not, contain the very stereotypes and associations we reject? Why do we feel like we must choose and justify? Why can’t we just have it all?

As The Argonauts proves again and again—we can. We just have some undoing to do first. “Poor marriage!” Nelson exclaims as she remembers her and Dodge’s trip to Norwalk City Hall to tie the knot: “off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable).” Sometimes it seems we just can’t win “in the face of the other,” but this defeat makes way for new possibilities, for new definitions, for undoing and rebirth.

As Nelson grapples with her own understanding and redefining of motherhood, she looks to other female artists, writers, and scholars who have manifested the same questions in (or in response to) their own work. Nelson refers to a VICE interview with artist Catherine Opie in which the interviewer comments on the shock one feels when watching Opie go from the SM scene to the motherhood scene. One might feel the same shock while reading through The Argonauts, as we see wild and sexy images of Nelson and Dodge in bed with dildos, and later the tenderness Nelson feels for her son as she climbs into the hospital bed with him during an intense health scare.

Why should this be shocking, though, and why should we expect anything different? Our perverse desires don’t mean that we can’t be moms, or that we’re bad ones. They just mean we’re human. On the other hand, deciding to move from an SM project to one that focuses on motherhood doesn’t make anyone less of a badass feminist. The Argonauts shows us that we can be all of the above, and that no identity cancels another one out. Rather, we need to undo our judgments about the identities that already exist; we need “to be willing to go to pieces” in order to give birth to anything, be it another life, a project, an identity, a self.

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One of the hardest things I’ve heard—a sentiment that once brutally undid me—was something my ex-girlfriend said when we broke up: that she first fell in love with me through my writing, which created an illusory image of me that didn’t hold, and one that ultimately revealed the person behind it, a person she could not love anymore. Suddenly components of myself that I hadn’t thought of as separate were pitted against each other like fight dogs that didn’t know why. Was I unconsciously tricking people with what I wrote and disappointing everyone I loved? Which part of me was truer—the one I wrote with, or the one I loved with? Did I abandon one by choosing the other? How could I trust what I thought of as my own authenticity if someone was telling me it wasn’t?

Needless to say, it took me a long time and many therapy sessions to feel stable enough diving into these questions without succumbing to their power or my overall grief for the relationship I lost, and the self I felt I lost with it (“in the face of the other”). I’m still answering them. But one thing I learned from this breakup and a point that Nelson makes beautifully is that it’s OK to welcome different selves into our supreme (if messy) identities, even if those selves contradict or feel distant from each other at times. Nothing cancels something else out when it comes to who we are. The writer I am doesn’t outshine the partner I am, and vice versa. Both can be lousy, but in other moments, both can be stunning. The trick is to let ourselves honor all of our parts, always.

Nelson writes that she “[doesn’t] want to represent anything,” so I won’t say that she or this book does. What I will say is that Nelson and this book show us what it’s like to allow ourselves to come undone, to “go to pieces,” and proves that we can still come out alive and intact on the other side, just like the Argonaut’s ship. She shows us what it’s like to take that plunge when she—the all-knowing, queer feminist!—confesses that she googled Dodge when she first met him to find out which pronouns he uses, or when she—the good mom!—reveals a confusing mental image she once had of “a half scissor sticking out of [Iggy’s] precious newborn head,” unsure of how it got there.

Nelson undoes and redefines motherhood not only by questioning what motherhood means to her and to society at large, but also by exhibiting her own raw and repulsive experiences as they actually unfolded. “Many women describe the feeling of having a baby come out of their vagina as taking the biggest shit of their lives. This isn’t really a metaphor,” she writes. Nelson owns up to her experiences—ugly or radiant—in the same way we expect mothers to own up to the responsibilities of a curated idea of motherhood. Nelson gives these moments to us without holding back, and by doing this she creates space for different ways of being—and being proud of being—a mom. Why can’t taking a shit be romantic in the same way that “feeling a flower bloom from the inside out” is? Either way, life gets created and a couple months later the baby is sitting on a rug somewhere sucking his cute little finger.

Nelson doesn’t once take the easy way out, and that’s what makes The Argonauts so successful. It’s the type of book that makes me want to break the silence between my ex-girlfriend and me to ask if she’s read it, stop random strangers on the street to wave the sleek little book in their face, or join a book group and demand we read it. It’s not the kind of book to read and put away, it’s one that insists we keep talking about it. Even if the book has a final page, the questions and issues of identity throughout it do not, and they affect us intimately and every day regardless of how we define ourselves. Not only has Nelson started the discussion, but she has also set an example for the way we need to talk about these issues—fiercely and with care, unafraid to unravel.

Sam Dolph lives in Cambridge, MA. Her work has been published in The Silo and Pitch & Rail’s art publication, Pussy.jpg.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson • Graywolf Press, 2015 • 160 pages

Photo courtesy of Micah McCrary

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The Hospitality Hoax

Natalia Holtzman on Richard Makin’s Mourning

It’s now something of a convention for a writer to complain about the inadequacy of language. How difficult it is to apprehend the world by way of sentences. I can't help thinking that it isn't language that is inadequate, but our use of it, our insubstantial grasp. We seem to flicker in and out. Some days I am so articulate; other days I can barely form a sentence. Language can certainly be inadequate, I think, when you cast it away from you, which some writers do, like throwing dice.

Richard Makin is a writer with a tempestuous relationship to language. His writing, whatever else it happens to be about, also has, at all times, itself as its subject. He writes urgently about the negligibility of language, of literature. His novels communicate hopelessness as to the possibility of effectively communicating. He writes sentences about how nonsensical sentences necessarily are. “Consider the arrangement of vowels and consonants that compose any random sequence,” he writes in his most recent novel, Mourning. And so I have been. And as I have, I’ve also strayed further away from any sympathy I might once have had with Richard Makin and his linguistic despair.

Most days, I’d like to have been a musician. I’d like to play the saxophone. I’ve never even touched a saxophone. I’d like to think that music is somehow more immediate than language is. But this is such an easy complaint for a writer to make, and it is so frequently made.

Langston Hughes famously described James Baldwin as being able to use words “as the sea uses waves.” How appealing to think of language as tangible, as tactile, mercurial, and palpable as water. Or to think that it could be.

Baldwin himself told the Paris Review that when writing, "you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had." Baldwin's model is a paradigm of raw, brutal honesty. "You want to write sentences," he said, "as clean as a bone."

I was reminded of this as I read Makin’s Mourning. Richard Makin is a writer of many talents, but he does not write sentences as clean as a bone. Nor has he stripped himself of his own disguises, or delusions; in fact, he sometimes seems swaddled with them.

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Mourning is the third of a trilogy; it follows Work and Dwelling. Mourning deals, in part, with the various limits and failures of language. It is a piece of fiction about the impossibility of making fiction, a narrative about the violence that narrative-making must necessarily wreak. There are characters and there is dialogue in Mourning, but we are not really told who the characters are, and when someone is speaking, it is often hard to tell who that is. The narrative, such as it is, does not proceed chronologically, or along any other linear route we might find familiar.

The first line is: “I can’t remember.” Flip, impertinent, to begin this way. It’s difficult to convey Makin’s disparate, cut-up style without quoting rather extensively from it and so, to give you a taste, the rest of this paragraph continues: “We’re just below the hospitality hoax at the riverend. By then I was sold: low ebb of gravity hence had already the vision. The things that hatched out of the eggs resembled lizards.”

They certainly did! I can’t help being reminded of Naked Lunch. Makin seems to share with Burroughs his distrust of straightforward narrative. “I cannot recall a single detail,” his narrator announces. “There are characters, then the dilemma forms its own solution.”

If our inability to communicate with ourselves and each other leaves us in a kind of desert of insignificance, it also leaves time in that desert.

Occasionally, Makin will mimic the conventions of storytelling before undermining the validity of those conventions. Midway through the first page, he writes, expansively, “It was a warm night in July. Picture me.” Then comes the subversion: “I once was named, now I go about the earth uncalled for; I’m one of the thirty-six.”

Makin’s little subversions can be tart, ironic, and smart. Unfortunately, he can also fall into a kind of juvenile pathos, as in this same passage, which continues: “No one seems to care or notice. I’m the past dug up and lost again, forbidden archaeology.” Or, a bit later: “I began my philosophical career under the influence.” Or, yet again: “Self-loathing gets you everywhere.”

He is occasionally prone to hopeless grandiosity: “I encompass the need for your discontinuance,” he—or his narrator—says, early on. “Origin is a kind of fatality.” “[C]haos is a dying art, it needs reviving.” These statements become tiresome rather quickly. We’ve all, I think, met, or observed, or been, the boy in the basement, widening his eyes, pondering the Big Questions, speculating wildly. For all his subversiveness, I don’t see a great deal in Makin’s work that I haven’t seen before. His observations—about self-loathing, or chaos, or time, or language—don’t seem as original, as groundbreaking, as he might have expected, as we might have hoped.

“Every word lacks consequence,” he writes, on his very first page: “There’s an inexplicable clouding of the clarity, followed by a long period of quietude.” Here and elsewhere, Makin seems to pursue alliteration to his own detriment. Meaning seems occasionally to spiral away from the music of a line, rather than to be bound up in it. The sentence quoted above, for example, clacks along delightfully, even devastatingly, through its hard “c”s: in “lacks,” “consequence,” “clouding,” “clarity,” “quietude,” and twice in “inexplicable” (the “x” and the “c”). But is the clouding of clarity really all that inexplicable? A non-linear narrative, indistinct attribution of pronouns, associative logic, a private frame of reference—these all seem to contribute rather explicably to a clouded clarity.

Makin bewails the distances that separate us, one from another. Language does nothing to bridge those distances: “Impossibility of communication – to bring one’s partner across a dangerous situation, i.e. a creeper bridge. The former had moved back and awaited instructions (risk of greenstick fracture, dissolving hull integrity).” We are, each of us, left stranded. Not only can we not communicate, we can’t even think on our own, individually: “He dare not dream of identifying himself, quite the contrary: that word may well not exist.” We have no way of recognizing ourselves; we haven’t the language to do so.

If our inability to communicate with ourselves and each other leaves us in a kind of desert of insignificance, it also leaves time in that desert. “Other insignificances,” the narrator says wearily, listlessly: “chronicles of wasted time, lost seasons.” Without language, we can’t track time. “Objects and events were entering me from all directions at once,” somebody—who knows who?—says at some point.

The logic here is circular. Makin inhabits a world in which time sweeps past without meaning or significance; in which our lives, therefore, lack all significance; in which we do not even hold significance for each other—in which we can’t—lacking as we do any effective means of communication.  There’s no helping each other across any bridges. Or, as he says a few pages later, “we can’t do anything for one another.”

As he circles through these questions, Makin—or his narrator, or his nameless characters—continually undercuts his own method of questioning. “Is this writing?” he asks. “Once hatched they”—who?—“promptly chewed their way through every volume of the dictionary.” Did the chewing help? “There was literally nothing to write about.” Ah, cruel fate! “Stop me if I say something stupid.” “Some people read it and scream wordplay.” What’s the alternative? “Simply avoid hearing about it or speaking about it or thinking about it or being affected by it in any way.” What is “it”?

Occasionally, Makin is unabashedly solipsistic. “You need not answer back,” he says: “I can readily resume the dialogue.” And yet he is quick to lash out at the overly earnest, the self-involved, anyone else he finds deserving of contempt. “What people really love,” he says, ferociously, “is that they hear their own sound being scored, within these already familiar patterns.” Indeed! Sharp and sarcastic as he frequently is, Makin seems entirely unironic when it comes to himself. For all his undercutting, undermining, etc., he takes himself dead seriously.

What I’d like more than anything is to see him strip away his own disguises. How badly I craved a sentence stripped clean as a bone. But maybe Makin did anticipate this response. I couldn’t always tell when he was in earnest and when he wasn’t. “Believe me,” he writes: “I would rather not be here.”

Natalia Holtzman’s work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Hobart, Redivider, B O D Y, and elsewhere. She recently completed her MFA at the University of Alabama, and currently lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Mourning by Richard Makin • Equus Press, 2015 • 254 pages

Photo courtesy of Micah McCrary

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Reading the Trees

Courtney Bulsiewicz on Angela Pelster’s Limber

I saw a mallard in a small stream the other day; he thrust his head under the creek and threw the water down the back of his feathers, shaking his beak and making his neck a loose green rag. I stopped in the middle of the stairs I was descending to watch him repeat the maneuver another time.

I wondered what that ritual felt like to him. Was it his version of puddle jumping, having fun and being carefree? Was it like flossing, something he didn’t want to do because his feathers were warm and the water cold but he had to be cleaned? Or was it like hot-tubbing, calming and indulgent? I should have stepped off the stairs and allowed myself to watch him. But after the mallard’s second head dunk I became aware of the fact that there were other people around, going about their days, not stopping, looking at me, maybe wondering what I was staring at. I felt self-conscious that I had stopped to look at a duck doing something mundane that I had probably ignored a hundred times before. I left the stream and went down the rest of the stairs. And now I wonder what I might have figured out, learned about the duck, if I had stayed.

Nature has always been a mystery to me, a lacuna of experience I want to fill. I search for understanding and meaning in the natural world, wanting to know what the mind of a sunbathing duck holds, what the hawk sees from way up there, if a tree feels pain when losing leaves. A part of me feels like knowing answers to these questions will help me understand my own existence. 

• 

Angela Pelster’s Limber is an essay collection invested in a similar journey, for her essays center on looking at trees as possible revelators of living experience, seeing implications in limbs, roots, bark that can help us make sense of our own realities. The way Pelster examines trees and other aspects of nature brings her readers a bit closer to an existence we may not be attuned to. Just as dendochronologists study patterns left in tree rings to get a better picture of the world outside of the wood, Pelster examines trees to understand life and the difficulties other living things endure.

By bringing to light stories of trees that reveal peoples and histories of the past, Pelster shows us how much we forget the history contained in what surrounds us. Perhaps we forget because it is too painful to remember.

Within these seventeen essays, the reader can sense a bit of frustration, confusion, sadness, and contemplation about trials. In her piece “Ethan Lockwood,” about a tree limb that enters a boy’s right eye, Pelster writes, “It is difficult to know how to read the signs, which things to be thankful for, how to love this place.” She is trying to make sense of the chaos of Earth, this beautiful planet that holds so much disaster. The stories shared throughout the collection are heavy ones and force the reader to ask the question how much do we have to withstand? But don’t be mistaken—Limber exudes reverence, not melancholia. Pelster’s writing forces her readers to stare pain in the face, revealing a hidden strength contained by nature. In her essay “Rot,” Pelster indicates that trees and humans “are both only one strong wind away from falling.” However, she goes on in a later piece, “Artifacts,” to demonstrate that endurance can continue even after a tree has fallen. Pelster tells the story of “a single stubborn acacia miraculously blooming in the desert—The Loneliest Tree in the World.” The Tuareg people prayed at the tree for years until a drunk driver crashed into and destroyed the monument with his truck. A new metallic tree, made of mufflers and pipes, now stands in place of the living thing killed, a message of hope that we may be changed but can still persevere, reminding people of what stood before and of the importance of remaining. 

By bringing to light stories of trees that reveal peoples and histories of the past, Pelster shows us how much we forget the history contained in what surrounds us. Perhaps we forget because it is too painful to remember. Perhaps because we may have never learned. And then, maybe we forget because we think we are stronger than the natural world in which we live. We forget that the world exists outside our own human existence. That man came last. We don’t have roots to connect us to the earth like trees. We wander on top of the world; we use it as our thing to be conquered. 

• 

Several of the pieces within this collection make me wonder what would happen if we let the earth conquer us. If I lie down in the grass, or climb a tree and just be still; if I had sat with that mallard, even swam with him, would I then understand how the grass, the tree, or the duck speaks, breathes, sees, feels? Would I lose myself completely—if we want to more fully understand the nature by which we are surrounded, must we surrender? Does understanding of the power of nature require a fir tree trapped inside our lung like Artyom Sidorkin in Pelster’s essay “The Boys of Lake Karachay”? To appreciate the life contained within sand, must we be buried in it, as the people of the Green Sahara were, whose bones Pelster writes about in “Artifacts”? These individuals have seen the other side of nature, the side we don’t often think about. The side Pelster is helping us get to. Complicated, dirty, painful, commanding. The side of nature that we can learn so much from:

I suppose none of it really comes to anything, but I pay attention anyway. I collect signs like a doctor tapping on a patient’s body, looking into ears, pressing on a spine, drawing blood from the unseen places. It is difficult to know when one of these will come to something, when some bit of evidence will be made luminous in the beautiful light, when the world will bend and let slide a little secret from its corner.

Pelster calls her readers to be more attentive, to listen to and look at the nature that surrounds us: what is it saying, showing? What must be remembered? Her essays are laden with research, allowing her to engage with the world of trees more, bringing her readers into that world as well, showing us what it means and what it takes to try to understand. I feel like Pelster would have wanted me to stay with the mallard, feel its past and unearth it through experience as well as exploration so we might come a bit closer to meaning. Limber demonstrates just how closely connected we are to the trees, wind, and even rot that share this beautiful world with us: “it becomes difficult to ignore the weight of the earth pressing in from above and the rumbling of the devil below.” We just have to pay attention to what the weight and rumbling can teach us.

Courtney Bulsiewicz is currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction at Brigham Young University. Her writing explores various forms of connection and disconnection individuals make with their families, communities, nature, and even their own selves. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Inscape and The Criterion.

Limber by Angela Pelster •  Sarabande Books, 2014 • 154 pages

Photo courtesy of Micah McCrary

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Letter from a Reader

To the editors of con•text,

While sitting here in rural Ireland, looking out of the window to the yard and the muddy lane beyond, I thought of your publication, and wondered why there hasn’t yet been some review of László Krasznahorkai's Satantango, since it just won the Man Booker International prize, and may attract some readers, unless people are already bored of reading about it, and with our attention spans these days, and with so many things vying for our attention, and with so many things deserving of and needing our attention, it would not surprise me in the least if people have already forgotten about Satantango, I mean I would have forgotten about it if it weren't for the fact that the only things around here screaming for my attention are the sheep in the field just north of the cottage I live in, their incessant bleating which reminds me I should really move them into the adjacent field where the grass is full, but I guess it can wait until it stops raining, or at least I can wait—and that's the thing, it will wait, for as long as I wait, regardless of whether they can wait, because I am their keeper, and they are dependent on what I do, and what I do is dependent on how I feel, and how I feel is dependent on the weather, it's these little things, the stuff we don't even think about, like water falling from the sky, that determine so much, like Williams and his red wheelbarrow, only more sinister, and looking out of the window to the puddles gathering in the yard and the mud running down the sides of the lane I watch the world slip away, but I do my best, I brush my teeth, I make my bed, and at the end of the day I sum things up in a little black notebook, not, however, like the Doctor in Satantango, who recorded so obsessively the goings-on of the day that he came to believe these things existed not just for his recording (a notion that already places him pretty far gone) but because of his recording, which I suppose is always the dangerous and false conclusion one can arrive at, for in the absence of any and all legitimate authority one will be created, first and foremost to discredit the kinds of insights the rain produces, and once we have control over our thoughts the rest proceeds accordingly, that is to say violently, since as a species we do have a tendency towards the tyrannical, it can be admitted, sure I admit it, have either of you ever kicked a sheep, no me neither, but Paddy Doolan down the lane wears steel-toed boots for that express purpose, I’ve seen him walking by, looking as if he’d never been dry a day in his life, like it didn’t bother him, I’m afraid of him, I’m afraid of many things around here, out here in the middle of nowhere, where distance is a close ally, and “psychomotor impairment” a fancy term for waiting out the bad weather, with the things vying for my attention very far away, and the things needing and deserving of the sort of care I just don’t have it in me to give out of sight, but not out of mind, like the sheep just north of me, crying, tell me, do you find it strange, often we know what to do, are capable of doing it, and yet when the time comes to do it, we find ourselves incapacitated, dumbly fascinated by our incapacitation, until finally we find our agency, and anxious to prove its authenticity we test it on another, like Estike, the little girl in Satantango, who tortured and killed a cat to prove that she existed, and who eventually killed herself as the ultimate proof, but don’t worry or get any ideas about me, these days just leaving the cottage, just crossing the threshold into the wet world, will be proof enough for me of agency, and anyway all my sheep are still living the last time I checked, except for the one lamb who died of pneumonia, which is actually a common way for them to go, going even though as it does against my common sense, seeing as how I wear wool sweaters to prevent the sickness in myself, but I also remain indoors, out of the rain, looking out into the rain, which always reminds me of Satantango, in fact what I see resembles what I saw in my mind when I first read it, even though this is Ireland, not Hungary, though I suppose the landscapes of all rural areas share a certain disregard, a disdain even, hell let’s call a spade a spade, a certain hatred of the human presence, as the heap of stones along the lane attest, nature cares nothing for a stone mason, a kind of man I try to emulate, though I know well merely putting stone upon stone does not make a wall, nor me a mason, each stone must fit just so, just as merely putting word after word does not make a sentence, nor me a writer, mere accumulation does not value make, which is not the case with Krasznahorkai in Satantango, whose pages resemble a well-built wall of words, and you read sentence after sentence like a judge imprisoning yourself within them, but to be honest with you I don’t remember much of the book because I read it a few years ago when George Szirtes’ English translation first appeared, I remember more the experience of reading it, the sensation of waterlogged lungs, because one doesn’t read Satantango so much as drown in it, and thinking about it now, I cannot distinguish in my mind the images produced in me by Krasznahorkai’s text from the images I received in Béla Tarr’s film adaptation of the book, which I was already familiar with by the time I got around to reading the book, so that I had come to the book a bit overprepared, but that’s how it always is, the color of one object affects the color of nearby objects, and this law of proximity holds for objects in time, too, as memory collapses all distance between events, even of those separated by the centuries, that’s called history, which, as they say, repeats itself anyway, never mind the steps we take to make damn sure that it does, I mean wouldn’t you agree, would you really disagree with me, that for this madness to mean anything at all mayhem must be made mantric, the wars and coups like incantations uttered and reuttered and rendered no different from any banality of everyday life, banalities which take on meaning by virtue only of their repetition, creating at least some sense of order that obscures the chaos, but in the way little disasters obscure total annihilation, or the way the clouds here obscure the sun and speak of storms, so I am always brushing my teeth and I am always making my bed and I am always recording in my little black notebook, I am always thinking of Satantango because it is always raining, raining, raining, raining, that while sitting here in rural Ireland, looking out of the window to the yard and the muddy lane beyond, I thought of your publication, and wondered why there hasn’t yet been some review of László Krasznahorkai's Satantango, since it just won the Man Booker International prize, and may attract some readers, unless people are already bored of reading about it, and with our attention spans these days, and with so many things vying for our attention, and with so many things deserving of and needing our attention, it would not surprise me in the least if people have already forgotten about Satantango . . .

Yours eternally,

John Ptacek

John Ptacek currently lives in Ireland.

Satantango by László Krasznahorkai • New Directions, 2013 • 288 pages

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Literary Heritage

Kristin M. Distel on Debra Allbery’s Walking Distance

In 1991, the University of Pittsburgh Press published Debra Allbery’s first collection of poetry, Walking Distance, as the winner of the 1990 Agnes Lynch Starrett poetry prize. Allbery’s youth, spent in northwestern Ohio, informs the majority of the collection and serves as a compelling backdrop to her comments on small-town life. Readers will notice similarities to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and James Wright’s examinations of Martins Ferry. Allbery herself spent part of her youth in Clyde, Ohio—also the basis for Anderson’s book. Allbery establishes her own voice, distinct from that of Anderson or Wright; indeed, her writing bears little of Anderson’s disdain for or Wright’s ennobling of Ohioans.

I, too, grew up in Clyde, Ohio and have long been fascinated by the strangeness and idiosyncrasies of this small town. As a young college student, I flaunted my copy of Winesburg, Ohio in my hometown’s library, coffee shop, anywhere that I could display my coveted contraband: the town has denounced Winesburg, Ohio and its thinly veiled caricatures since its publication. Allbery’s book, like Anderson’s, is concerned with the ways in which a childhood spent in a small town shapes one for life, no matter how far a person eventually strays from his or her town. While Anderson’s book employs the journalistic strategy of an exposé, Allbery’s approach is a more generous examination of rural Ohio life. Hers is a gentle, less acerbic aesthetic.

In the tradition of Winesburg, Allbery’s Walking Distance invites readers to lean in while her speakers whisper tales of strange characters who loom large in the town’s collective consciousness. And as a native of Clyde, which Allbery calls “Enterprise” in her book, I am fascinated by her recollections of this small town, though an appreciation of Walking Distance transcends one’s connection to the specific area about which she writes. The collection is characterized by Allbery’s flowing, free verse sentences, heavy enjambment, and adept inclusion of dialogue. As a whole, Allbery is particularly skilled at examining her hometown’s quaint beauty while criticizing its small-mindedness, thereby avoiding clichéd observations of what she has termed “Enterprise, Ohio.”

Walking Distance is the anthem of small-town adolescents as told through the voice of a nostalgic, wise adult.

The overarching theme of the collection is the varying ways in which people try to leave a small town and why it is difficult to do so. The collection begins with a poem titled “Sherwood Anderson Walks Out,” thus immediately establishing a connection to Winesburg that she revisits occasionally. Allbery succeeds, though, in making these references sufficiently understated, avoiding parody or dependence on Anderson for clarity. Subtly, she even seems to reference Anderson’s George Willard, writing, “The local papers change / or stay the same. … Where do the stories happen in this vacant place?” This serves as an effective framework for Allbery’s various speakers who express a desire to flee their small town. She revisits this concept in poems such as “Starkweather,” “Possible Endings,” “Forgiveness,” and “Instinct.”

Even though her poems largely reflect on her own life, Allbery’s poetry is lyrical, not confessional. She generalizes her speakers’ experiences without losing their qualities of insightfulness and detail. Walking Distance is the anthem of small-town adolescents as told through the voice of a nostalgic, wise adult. Perhaps the best example of this is “Carnies.” She writes, “But don’t you know how deep summer crawls inside you in a town like that,” a representative statement of her invitation to join her speaker’s experience. The phrase “a town like that” is significantly stronger than would be a phrase such as “in that town”; her diction makes the poem about Small Town USA, not Clyde (or “Enterprise”) only. Placing this poem near the beginning of the collection establishes the approach that Allbery takes throughout: it is not solely her book, but that of everyone who grew up in a similar location. Allbery’s descriptions of the American Midwest are lyrical explorations of shared experience. Indeed, her work is an excellent example of Joan Aleshire’s definition of strong lyrical writing: “The poems focus on the self only so that the ‘you’ will be better seen, so that the experience will be fully convincing.” Indeed, Allbery captures the collective voice of a region with aplomb.

The poem “The Reservoir” is Allbery at the peak of her abilities. “Reservoir” masterfully examines how the inertia of a small town like Clyde/Enterprise causes one to age prematurely. Through an examination of multiple townspeople (again, a possible nod to Anderson’s technique), she explores the town’s cyclical nature and its power to restrain generation upon generation. The speaker of “Reservoir,” who is jogging atop the reservoir and looking down at the unchanging people and area, notes, “It’s only from this height and pace that she can love her town.” Here, Allbery strikes a clear balance between the frustration and admiration the town evokes; her examination is beautifully complex and authentic.

Allbery’s Walking Distance is a valuable collection, one that will resonate with anyone who has matured to adulthood amid small-town ennui. Almost seventy-five years after the publication of Winesburg, Ohio, Allbery’s descriptions of Main Street, the local elementary school, and the town’s myriad churches blend with and complement Anderson’s classic and still-controversial narrative. When I visit my hometown, I often recall poems from Allbery’s volume, particularly the closing lines of “Walking Below Zero You Tell Yourself”: “At the edge of town the wind dies. / The stillness here is before everything. / You want to go on, into the trees.”  Walking Distance is a book to savor and to contemplate, to carry in one’s pocket while walking the brick sidewalks of small-town Ohio.

Kristin M. Distel earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry at Ashland University, and she is currently a doctoral student of English literature at Ohio University. Her poems have been published in DIN, Coldnoon, The Minetta Review, Flyover Country Review, The Broken Plate, and The Stockholm Review of Literature, and she is the poetry editor of The Critical Pass Review. Kristin’s article on Toni Morrison’s Paradise was published in Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). Five articles on Theodore Roethke, Edgar Allan Poe, Natasha Trethewey/Larry Levis, Phillis Wheatley/Mather Byles, and William Faulkner, respectively, are forthcoming. She has presented papers at The University of Oxford, The Sorbonne/École des Mines, The University of Manchester, the American Literature Association, and many other venues.

Walking Distance by Debra Allbery • University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991 • 96 pages

Photo courtesy of Micah McCrary

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My Page to Submit

Emily Wilson on Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue.

There is a straight stretch of ribbon before you. There is a clump of charcoal. The ribbon is red; the charcoal—well, what is the color between black and gray without waxing too poetic about it? Is the ribbon tongue or tail? Is the charcoal dirt or purifier? Will you need to interact with these objects, or are you just a witness to their existence?

It is okay that you have these questions and are impatient for answers. It is okay that the answer will be “all of the above.” The only thing that will prohibit you from moving forward is a failure to accept multiplicity.

•

Ban is the protagonist of Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil’s latest and fifth collection of poetry. Ban, a young woman of color, is walking home through a London suburb in 1979. A riot breaks out. Ban lies down on the sidewalk with the knowledge that she will soon die.

Ban, as a character and a narrative, is, in part, influenced by Clement Blair Peach, a militant activist killed by police in 1979. Ban is influenced by Nirbhaya, the young woman raped and beaten to death in New Delhi in 2012. Ban is her own story, but she speaks to the stories of everyone who has experienced violence on behalf of identity.

Ban is the poet and the reader; Ban is the product and the process.

•

Charcoal—the very thing Ban is made of—is so messy.

•

I was first introduced to Ban during a panel at AWP when the conference was held in Seattle last year. The panel was entitled What are you projecting? and I went to watch Kapil, who is a favorite poet of mine, speak.

She unraveled a vein of red ribbon through the center of the audience, spread a sheet of paper on the panel’s table. She had a sack of charcoal. She played a recording of herself on her iPod in which she read thirteen pieces about Ban. She didn’t speak as this played. She sat silently, smearing charcoal across the canvas, across her skin.

If you remember the importance of multiplicity, it will not surprise you that this collection is: a novel, a self-identified failed novel, an archive, an action.

Ban is not an immigrant; she is a shape or bodily outline that’s familiar: yet inaccurate: to what the thing is. How to look good on Skype. A vaginal opening. By 2011, she’s a blob of meat on the sidewalk. I progress her to meat—a monstrous form—but here she pauses, is inhibited, and this takes a long time.

•

Before or after the performance, I can’t remember which or when, Kapil held a $20 bill in front of the audience and asked someone to take it if they needed it. I was seated in the third row, to the right of the panel. My heart met my throat—yes, for $20, but also to touch something Kapil had touched.

Did I need it? As a student earning minimum wage, I had wanted it. But I hesitated and remained seated; someone else might need it more. A young woman finally approached the panel after a few quiet moments.

“Do you need this?” Kapil asked. “Do you really?”

Neither Kapil nor the woman seemed convinced. She took the twenty anyway.

•

Is zinc an element? It’s a sheen. Spread it on the ankle of Ban.

Is there a copper wire? Is there a groin? Make a mask for Ban.

•

If you remember the importance of multiplicity, it will not surprise you that this collection is: a novel, a self-identified failed novel, an archive, an action. Its table of contents: 1. [13 Errors for Ban]; 2. Auto-Sacrifice (Notes); 3. Stories; 4. End-Notes; 5. Butcher’s Block Appendix; 6a. Epigraphs; 6b.; 7. Dedication; 8. Installations and Performances. The collection as collage.

•

I wondered, throughout the duration of the conference, what the young woman did with Kapil’s offering. Maybe she bought herself a cup of coffee; we were, after all, in Seattle. She could’ve spent it on a collection at the bookfair, found someone’s work that spoke to her bones directly, shook them the way only sound can. Or, possibly, she wrote her own lines of poetry on the wrinkled and worn green and found some silent moment to slide it beneath the door of a stranger’s hotel room.

•

Kapil reveals that her project was originally perceived to fit inside another form. Although I am interested in errors, perhaps it is more accurate to say I wrote a book that failed—and not in the interesting vulnerable way that books sometimes fail—but in this other way—“the way of the species that isn’t registered or described; that does not emerge.” To replicate but not survive.

•

When Kapil offered the $20, she was implicating her audience. Who among us can take what we want? Who can leave for others? When Kapil performed with her recording, with ribbon and charcoal, she was implicating her audience. Who can sit with what they don’t understand? For how long? •

Radical modernity requires something of me.

An aesthetics of violence.

To write the larger scene.

•

The collection as hybrid.

Hybridity is building something to attract not the insects, but the light. So, in a way, it’s a void, a kind of fertility.

and

You can be hybrid and not share a body with anything else. Thus, the different parts of “Ban” do not touch. They never touch at all.

•

My heart met my throat a second time when I was introduced to Ban on the page, when I held a copy of Ban en Banlieue in my hand. Kapil directly refers to her AWP performance on the page.

[Hold up white sheet with long red tail. Smooth it on table. Extend ribbon into aisle. Empty charcoal from Safeway plastic bag onto white sheet before talk begins. Hold up yellow sheet with black and white zig zag tail as you read the first parts of the talk.]

I had not known I needed this experience, this memory, to be preserved, but here it was: This had happened; I had happened. I had existed as witness to an artist creating. To the art becoming. The process, product, and project.

And what have I done with what I’ve witnessed?

•

What if the money was a distraction, the way all money is, really? The sign of capitalism also serving as its medium. How uncomfortable the intersection between art and consumerism, how dangerous. How do artists work inside the system they are trying to dismantle?

This is a bank for sentences.

All the tellers are out to lunch.

And yet. Creation is an act of survival and there should be no shame in survival. Those who are marginalized are often shamed for both their survival and their creations. What if the offering was as genuine as it was generous? How do we ask for what we are worth? How do we learn to accept it?

It is okay that you have these questions and are impatient for answers, but is it okay that “all of the above” might be the only answer we have so far?

•

Ban turns her head to the wall.

Imagine a cloud of milk as it dissipates, spilled on a London street in an act of protest.

Imagine mica glinting in the oily curd of the pavement.

Imagine that the rough, pink tip of a girl’s tongue slips out, extending to the ivy’s salt—for nourishment.

What did Ban do that outweighed art? What kind of art did she produce?

•

After experiencing Ban en Banlieue, I cannot say that, given the opportunity again, I would rise and take the $20. I accept, instead, the poetry. The language and images, the call to arms and awareness. The story of a young woman who is a desiccating form on the sidewalk. The awareness that white patriarchal violence will not dismantle itself, that capitalism’s complications will not be addressed if left unchecked. The acceptance that my participation in this dismantling has multiplicity, that it can be an imperfect yet powerful product, but mostly process.

•

Could I ask you, or someone else like you, who does not mind getting dirty, to take some charcoal or soot and, casually, smudge the page—and this be my page to submit?

•

There is a red stretch of ribbon before us, but it is anything but straight.

Emily Paige Wilson is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of North Carolina Wilmington as a graduate teaching assistant. Her poetry, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Bustle, Green Mountains Review, PANK, Passages North, and The Raleigh Review, among others. Nominated for inclusion in the Best New Poets series and for an AWP Intro Journals Award, she received the 2013-2014 Kert Green fellowship, was first runner-up in the 2014 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and won the 2012 Emma Howell Memorial Poetry Prize. Follow her @Emmy_Golightly.

Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil • Nightboat, 2015 • 88 pages

Photo courtesy of Helene Childs-Budelis

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A huge THANK YOU to our readers for being a part of our launch week! New writing is coming soon—watch this space. — M.C. & M.M.

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Feminism (n.): Distilled

Micah McCrary on Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist.

Idk I think feminism should be called something different like common sense or something. —From the Twitter of Tina Belcher

I learned many things in graduate school that I should've learned much earlier on. Things that all men should learn early on, as boys. While I learned about the various waves of feminism, about the different schools and scholars championing women's rights throughout history, I also learned about what we've come to call Everyday Feminism: the ways feminism, or a lack thereof, affects how we encounter the world outside the ivory tower.

Many think feminist is “too strong a word” to adopt, or they're confused about what feminism means. I wonder if this might come from the perception that feminism is a layered and complicated thing, only to be discussed as an intellectual subject—from the perception that feminism can only belong to those like Betty Friedan, whose own feminism comes off as something too intimidating to be pared down for the rest of us.

When I come across writers like Roxane Gay, though, I begin to think that the discussions we've had about feminism could've been distilled so much sooner. She writes, in her book Bad Feminist, about everyday feminisms as mentioned above, and it's obvious to me that there are ways we can learn to talk about feminism without fear—fear of getting it wrong, fear of our ignorance being brought to light, fear of all those schools and waves.

It may be easy to think of feminism as its own special discourse, as something attached to a special vocabulary that can only be held by those who've studied it in classrooms—as if feminism has a code, and not enough of us were given the special decoder ring.

But then I think about what it took for me to stop being afraid: writers like bell hooks and Roxane Gay, who assured me I didn't always have to wear an academic hat whenever discussing an -ism.

Each time I hear someone say “I'm not really sure I'd say I'm a feminist,” or something close to this, I wonder what they really believe—whether they really aren't for equal rights or if they're just afraid to speak without qualification. But then I think about what it took for me to stop being afraid: writers like bell hooks and Roxane Gay, who assured me I didn't always have to wear an academic hat whenever discussing an -ism.

A couple years ago, when I asked students of mine to tell me what they knew about feminism, the majority of my students were hesitant to respond. As they sat in silence, one student raised her hand, and I'll never forget what she said next: “When I think of feminism, I think of feminazis and clitlers.” This, I fear, is how many come to learn about feminism: as a movement synonymous with angry women. Before graduate school, I'm sorry to admit, this was all I knew about it myself.

“How do we bring attention to these issues?” Gay writes in “Feminism (n.): Plural.” “How do we do so in ways that will actually be heard? How do we find the necessary language for talking about the inequalities and injustices women face, both great and small?” Gay doesn't seem to realize here that she's answering her own questions through her writing. They're good, poignant questions, but the fact that Gay is asking us—her dear, general readers—is an indication that we're moving toward the answers. We need simply-rendered voices, like Gay's, to enter the conversation, to make us all a little more comfortable learning about the ways in which inequalities are pervasive, and about what we can do to help.

Particularly in Bad Feminist, Gay's writing encourages us to think further, to see the areas in which we participate in actions or modes of thinking that aren't necessarily anti-feminist, but nonfeminist. Although nonfeminist thought may not directly, consciously, or aggressively oppose the goals of feminism, it does trammel the movement toward equality. Think of those who say “girl” or “chick,” when one is an adult and should in fact be called a woman. Think of those who tell both little girls and grown women to smile more. Think of the men who overextend chivalry. Think of those promoting Bruno Mars's “Treasure” or Robin Thicke's “Blurred Lines.” Gay's writing reminds us that feminism needs to be about much more than equal pay in the workplace—it should instead be common sense, because equality might actually be achieved through the ways we can learn to think about both women and men. (For a hip illustration, see Emma Watson's recent U.N. speech.)

Bad Feminist isn't only about feminism, of course. Gay also covers the subject of being American-born to Haitian parents. She covers privilege. She covers the Academy. She covers Oscar Grant. She covers Lena Dunham. What catches my attention most, though, is the way she's able to refine her writing, to translate what often gets so damn complicated when talking about any of these things, into a text that's both accessible and necessary.

As someone who's working on his PhD, I appreciate that Gay, who has a PhD, didn't write Bad Feminist only for those with PhDs. Although she could've. She managed, instead, to highlight what's complicated about race, or class, or privilege, or nonfeminism, in a way that helps propel the conversation in productive ways.

Take privilege, for instance. In “Peculiar Benefits,” Gay defines privilege as “a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor.” She reminds us that privilege exists in many forms, and that it's often all too easy to forget the ways in which we've been privileged, even when at times it feels as if we're not:

There is racial privilege, gender (and identity) privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, educational privilege, religious privilege, and the list goes on. At some point, you have to surrender to the kinds of privilege you hold. Nearly everyone, particularly in the developed world, has something someone else doesn't, something someone else yearns for.

This is striking. It gets me thinking about my own privilege, which is a task more difficult to begin than it should be—difficult because I'm usually encouraged to think about the ways I've been marginalized, rather than privileged. Prompted by Gay's paragraph, I list the ways I am privileged: I'm male, able-bodied, cisgendered. I grew up in the middle class, and I'm educated. I'm absolutely sure there's more.

The fact that Gay can make me interrupt my reading in order to self-examine is a testament, I believe, to the necessity of this text. And I'm certain I wouldn't feel as compelled were Bad Feminist written with the goal of making me think like an academic—instead I think as a black, American man, inextricably tied to the ideas and issues of culture Gay tackles in her book. Because I do have educational privilege, though, I want to do something with these ideas. I want to wrestle with them as Gay has, to look in the mirror after every essay and ask myself where I can do better, where I should be apologetic, and where I must learn to live with the damage that's done.

“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human,” Gay writes:

I am messy. I'm not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I'm right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself: a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dances her ass off to music she knows, she knows, is terrible for women and who sometimes plays dumb with repairmen because it's just easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground.

Perhaps this is exactly what Bad Feminist is about. It asks that we not necessarily embrace a label, but that we embrace the areas where we've failed, either shallowly or deeply, and it asks how we can use these failures to keep doing better, to support what we believe in and to try to do some good in the world. It's likely to get messy along the way, but it seems more than worth a try.

Micah McCrary is a contributor to Bookslut. His essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE, The Nervous Breakdown, Circumference, Identity Theory, Third Coast, Midwestern Gothic, The Essay Review, HTMLGIANT, and South Loop Review, among other publications. He co-edits con•text, is a doctoral student in English at Ohio University, and holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay • Harper Perennial, 2014 • 336 pages

Photo courtesy of Helene Childs-Budelis

[contextreviews]

The Distortion Principle: On Sickness and Perception

Jackie Wang on Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, and others.

This piece originally appeared in Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns.

there is no time to write, and yet i woke up wanting to write

because i wrote last night, i woke up feeling calm

not calm

or as calm as one can feel waking up to bombs going off in your head

always, this ringing

“The body can no longer stand being a body” –Lispector

i breathe

a 4th tone emerges in my right ear

the fear circuitry of my brain lights up

because there will never be silence again

and sometimes it makes me want to die

because i can no longer sink into my books

or my words

everything is fragmented by the noise

i keep losing my place in the thought because of the noise

it’s like that moment at the concert

when the band is sound checking

and for a second there is feedback

and the audience cringes

but the sound is adjusted and the feedback goes away

and everyone sighs in relief

Do you see the world through an oblique cut? Through emotions so intense they threaten to undo your body?

now imagine the moment the feedback blasted you never ended

and you were forced to live in that sound forever

could you think?

could you sleep?

could you be fully present with people

inside the noise

only you inside the noise

now imagine that you are the kind of person who needs silence to read

and that you need to read to live

could you adjust to having to use computerized speech dictation to read books?

could you adjust to not being able to bring the images of the book into relief

to no longer be able to see the pictures inside the words

because of the noise

to only see chunks of pixels from various parts of the picture

slipping in and out of focus

in this way, the noise interferes with vision

it undoes your capacity to even see your thoughts

to see a thought through to the end

in this way, the sentence is truncated

all thoughts return to the noise

and the noise returns you to thoughts of your health

are you even living in the same world as everyone around you?

were you ever?

.

.

.

In Kincaid’s Annie John the protagonist Annie falls ill at the beginning of a three and a half month deluge of rain

from her sickbed she listens to the rain

the world is warped by the delirium induced by her illness

in my writing i have sometimes referred to this as THE DISTORTION PRINCIPLE

the world seen through pain

the world seen through the eyes of the sick or the traumatized

the disorganized thinking of the dying

Kafka’s last words—“lemonade everything was so infinite”—as remembered by Cixous

“I write to you in disorder, I well know. But that is how I live.” Lispector

No other text captures the consciousness of sickness better than Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva

“How can I explain it to you? I’ll try. It’s that I’m perceiving a crooked reality. Seen through an oblique cut. Only now have I sensed the oblique of life. I used to only see through straight and parallel cuts. I didn’t notice the sly crooked line. Now I sense that life is other. That living is not only unwinding rough feelings—it’s something more bewitching and gracile, without losing its fine animal vigor for that. Upon this unusually crooked life I have placed my heavy paw, causing existence to wither in its most oblique and fortuitous and yet at the same time subtly fatal aspects.

"The oblique life is very intimate.”

Do you see the world through an oblique cut?

Through emotions so intense they threaten to undo your body?

The “oblique life” is what I meant when I wrote about the bent tree in my Entropy Magazine interview.

in the morning, i was bleeding. was i bleeding the ocean i dreamt last night?

It is what Jamaica Kincaid captures in the chapter “The Long Rain”

when Annie John falls asleep on her sickbed and dreams of drinking the ocean dry

“As I fell asleep, I had no feeling in any part of my body except the back of my skull, which felt as if it would split open and spew out huge red flames. I dreamed that I was walking through warm air filled with soot, heading toward the sea. When I got there, I started to drink in the sea in huge great gulps, because I was so thirsty. I drank and drank until all that was left was the bare dry seabed. All the water from the sea filled me up, from my toes to my head, and I swelled up very big. But then little cracks began to appear in me and the water started to leak out—first in just little seeps and trickles coming out of my seams, then with a loud roar as I burst open. The water ran back and made up the sea again, and again I was walking through the warm soot—only this time wet and in tatters and not going anywhere in particular.”

in the morning, i was bleeding. was i bleeding the ocean i dreamt last night?

this crack called my cunt, out of which flows the ocean i swallowed in the dream

perhaps i was trying to imagine Antigua

a secret place in the sea between Florida and the islands of the Caribbean

a place i wanted to reach, where the waters were crystal clear and neon coral reefs lined the seafloor like a majestic glittering city

a crooked city, without right angles

i remember entering the waters by way of Miami

and thinking, “the waters aren’t clear here. I will have to swim farther out.”

when i woke, it was snowing outside.

i did not want to get out of bed.

i told myself, i don’t have to.

i told myself, i am convalescing.

i will let the snow set the rhythm by which i rest and wake

i thought about Annie John convalescing during the rain

dreaming in bed

attended to by her parents, the doctor, the obeah woman, and her grandmother

how everything was different after the rain

after she destroyed her family in effigy

but what if this Long Rain, this feeling of everything being crooked, never ends?

on my whiteboard in my little adobe house in New Mexico i wrote the Maria Sabina quote, HEALTH IS COMING

Dylan reminded me of it on the phone and i felt sad because the health i longed for never came

i wrote, what if health never arrives?

what if health never was, and everything has always just been distortion?

the oblique life.

wayward daughters with wonky circadian rhythms, bad teeth, poor affect regulation, and broken senses

could i learn to re-orient myself to THE NOISE?

could i learn to celebrate that which corrupts, degrades, corrodes, destroys, bewilders, destabilizes, inverts, perverts, and derealizes?

when i woke all i wanted to do was stay in bed and write

outside the window next to my bed were ominous icicles

the stalactites of the cave of my forgotten dreams, i wrote

i looked at what i had written late last night

i had spelled “mold” “mould” (the British spelling?)

and knew it was because i secretly wanted to make “mold” more like “mourn”

Jackie Wang is a queer poet, essayist, filmmaker, performer, alien, and prison abolitionist based out of Cambridge, MA. In her critical essays she writes about queer sexuality, race, gender, the politics of writing, mixed-race identity, prisons and police, the politics of safety and innocence, and revolutionary struggles. Follow her @LoneberryWang and loneberry.tumblr.com.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid • Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985 • 148 pages

Photo courtesy of Helene Childs-Budelis

[contextreviews]

Investigating Mother(s)

Kim Kankiewicz on Laura Lippman’s Hush Hush: A Tess Monaghan Novel

Whenever I leave my son, Jack, home alone, we rehearse the rules before I leave: Don’t open the door if the doorbell rings. Don’t answer the phone, unless my name shows up on caller ID. Don’t go outside. Keep the doors locked and the blinds closed. After I’ve reached the grocery store or post office, I call home to check on Jack. My first question, after a general how’s-it-going, is whether anyone has called or come to the door. 

It’s not that I fear for my son’s safety. Jack is twelve, and I trust him to finish his homework and stay out of trouble while I run an occasional errand. What I fear is that someone will discover I’ve left him at home. The rules are not so much to protect him from intruders as to protect me from scrutiny.

As a mother, I am subject to potential criticism in everything I do. This began when I was pregnant and naively ate a tuna sandwich in public, and it intensified during Jack’s infancy, when my approach to feeding and sleep training were apparently matters of national security. When Jack was a high-energy toddler with a baby sister (she’s nine now and still accompanies me on errands, thank you), strangers constantly fretted about his mobility. Iwas criticized for letting him run ahead of me on the sidewalk and forstrapping him into a stroller. Fellow grocery shoppers advised me to let Jack walk when he was seated in the cart and to confine him to the cart when he was trotting down the aisle.

If we’re fortunate enough that our parenting decisions are criticized rather than criminalized, why do we feel so threatened? In part, I think, it’s the sense that people are in our faces but nobody has our backs.

As my children grew, people who were not raising them offered opinions about where the kids attended school and the healthcare they received, about my approach to discipline and my decisions about childcare. The comments are less frequent now, if only because my children spend less time under my direct supervision, but the judgment is still there. Just recently, a woman I hardly know condemned both me and my kids’ piano teachers for allowing the kids to opt out of a recital performance.

This is the brave new world facing private investigator Tess Monaghan in Hush Hush, the long-awaited latest installment in Laura Lippman’s Baltimore-based mystery series. When readers last saw Tess in The Girl in the Green Raincoat, she was sleuthing while pregnant and on bed rest. Now the daughter born at the end of that book, named Carla Scout, is a spirited three-year-old with an independent streak rivaling Tess’s own.

Tess and her partner, retired police detective Sandy Sanchez, have accepted a job assessing security for the infamous Melisandre Dawes. Twelve years earlier, Dawes willfully left her infant daughter in a hot car to die and was acquitted of murder after pleading insanity. She’s returning to Baltimore after a decade in exile to reunite with her teenage daughters and to film the reunion for a documentary. Tess’s assignment becomes more complicated when Melisandre hands over some vaguely threatening notes she’s been receiving. Soon Tess is investigating a poisoning and a separate murder while fielding her own ominous notes.

I’ve been anticipating Tess’s comeback case as if I have a stake in her success as a crime-solving mother. As a mystery fan with children at home, I’ve sought out serious detective fiction that reflects my reality. The pickings are slim. Fictional PIs who are mothers of young children typically populate the pages of “cozy” mysteries. I’m happy to see a gritty investigator like Tess Monaghan take on parenthood with the same imperfect effectiveness that’s characterized her throughout Lippman’s series.

I’m glad to observe that while motherhood has intensified her tendency toward self-doubt—“Tess had always had her share of feeling overmatched and incompetent, but nothing made her feel like more of a failure than being a mother”—Tess and her boyfriend, Crow, have made a good life for their small family. What’s more, though she’s acquired a minivan named Gladys and a predictable evening routine that she performs “like a zombie,” Tess has hardly become boring. If anything, she’s more nuanced. “She had been so self-centered,” Tess acknowledges, reflecting on her previous life with “only herself to tend to.” Now she is attuned not just to Carla Scout’s needs but to the complex inner lives of the people around her. As she navigates the novel’s intricate plot, Tess becomes more intimately acquainted with friends and family members and empathizes even with people who wish her harm.

The irony is that while motherhood has made Tess more cautious about judging others, it subjects her to constant judgment. “Every day, she was judged a dozen times—and almost always found wanting,” Tess reflects as she’s met with “stares and smug glances” when Carla Scout throws a tantrum at the grocery store. After calming Carla Scout and returning home with her groceries, Tess discovers a note written in block letters on the back of the store receipt: “YOU MAY HAVE GOTTEN A LICENSE TO BE A PI, BUT YOU’D NEVER GET ONE TO BE A MOTHER. YOU’RE A CRAPPY MOTHER.” The writer of the note is clearly unhinged, but Tess is less fearful of the messenger than the possible truth of the message itself.

It’s an inspired moment, the discovery of that note, in which a stalker becomes menacing by attacking a mother’s identity. Being labeled a CRAPPY MOTHER is a real fear. Constantly aware of our own inadequacies, we worry that we’re not good mothers and that everyone else recognizes our failure.

Constantly aware of our own inadequacies, we worry that we’re not good mothers and that everyone else recognizes our failure.

Why is this fear so intense? If we’re fortunate enough that our parenting decisions are criticized rather than criminalized, why do we feel so threatened? In part, I think, it’s the sense that people are in our faces but nobody has our backs. Motherhood simultaneously violates our privacy and isolates us. Tess glosses over her private life with strangers, referring to her boyfriend as her husband, because “enough of her life [is] hanging out in public” in the form of Carla Scout. Meanwhile, another character in the novel—a stay-at-home mother—recalls “entire days in which she spoke to no one but grocery clerks and the disembodied voice that took her order at the drive-through Starbucks.”

Isolation pervades domestic life. Writing for the Washington Post, essayist Tracy Cutchlow argues that this sense of isolation contributes to a troubling phenomenon: cases of people who, beyond passing judgment, call the cops on parents who leave their children unattended. “We can’t rely on our neighbors to help look out for our kids,” Cutchlow writes, “and that’s why our neighborhoods don’t feel safe enough.” To restore community, she recommends individual actions like inviting neighbors to dinner or attending neighborhood events.

But how does such advice help someone like Debra Harrell, a low-income single mother arrested for letting her daughter play at a park while she worked at McDonald’s? Individual action is necessary, but it is not adequate—or even feasible—for parents who are disadvantaged by structural inequality.

Ultimately, this is what’s missing from Hush Hush: exploration of the larger world in which we raise our children. Tess resists judging other parents—even Melisandre, who, regardless of her mental state at the time of her infant’s death, behaves abhorrently throughout the novel. The problem is that Tess is so reluctant to scrutinize other people that she is unable to scrutinize a culture that burdens mothers with full responsibility for their children’s welfare and judges the way they carry that weight. Beyond a passing reference to “women without money who didn’t get the help they needed,” Tess does not scrutinize a system that disproportionately polices poor and minority mothers.

A novel can’t be about everything. Hush Hush invests in its characters’ interior lives to great effect. But what does it mean that Tess, who has delved into social issues in previous books, mostly ignores them in Hush Hush? Lippman once told an interviewer: “I don’t think Tess can have a baby and continue in this series…I think she could get married but I think the minute you give your character a child, the reader’s tolerance for some of the things Tess does just disappears.” Lippman was referring to the risky behavior Tess indulged in as an investigator, but she may as well have been addressing Tess’s political outspokenness; both are absent from this new book. For all its strengths in plotting and characterization, Hush Hush unintentionally reveals a societal weakness. By withholding the political from the domestic, the novel mirrors a real world that ensnares mothers in the judgment trap and withholds the means for escape.

Kim Kankiewicz is a Seattle-area writer and reviewer for publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Pacific Standard. Find her online at kimkankiewicz.com and tweeting as @kimprobable.

Hush Hush: A Tess Monaghan Novel by Laura Lippman • William Morrow, 2015 • 320 pages

[contextreviews]

Tattoo You

Kirk Wisland on Barrie Jean Borich’s Body Geographic

Maps are the current rage in nonfiction. In the last few years we’ve seen an explosion of mapped essaying, from Denis Wood’s Everything Sings to Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands to Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City. While some may see this as just another faddish fetishism of the archaic—as if old technology and technique were to grant a creative endeavor instant credibility—I don’t find this cartographical craze surprising. Most nonfiction writing is about finding the self, as the essayist tries to navigatemeaning in the world, to pin herself on the map.

In Body Geographic, Barrie Jean Borich uses maps—literal andconceptual—to explore layers of personal history. We follow her family’smigration from Bohemia to Chicago, andBorich’s own migration across the Midwest, which parallels the evolution of her sexuality. Through first-hand accounts (or her stylized imagination), we meet Borich’s ancestors, her living family members, her lesbian Minneapolis enclave, and her wife, Linnea. Borich offers contrasting images of her various historical locations—for example, her family’s gritty south-side Chicago is juxtaposed with the artificial “Alabaster City” created for the 1893 World’s Fair, which Borich describes as “mere intoxication, a touchable mirage.”

Travel is a means to map her story, not just between her twin homes of Minneapolis and Chicago but on journeys to California, New York, and New Orleans, where she seeks to find her father’s jazz history, or convocations with old Croats who still remember the Bohemian rhythms of imported rituals.

I love the maps Borich integrates into Body Geographic—particularly the archaic maps, such as that of Islandia, in which a sixteenth-century cartographer has filled European waters with fanciful sea monsters, or the seventeenth-century map of California, which presents the coast as an island separated—literally, as it is figuratively—from the inland empire. Here the unreliable cartographer evokes the unreliable narrator. Essayists seek the truth, but our quests are haunted by monsters, our attempts at a personal cartography warped by the unreliability of memory, our truth separated from the land as an imagined island.

Essayists seek the truth, but our quests are haunted by monsters

I was a son of Minneapolis, who frequently dreamed of migrating east to Chicago, seeking adventure in the regional bully and dream-magnet. As a native it is fascinating to encounter the emigrant’s view of your hometown: In Borich’s prose renderings of Minneapolis I see the neighborhoods I occupied and streets I traversed at the same perilous times of night when Borich naively strolled them as a new arrival in the early 1980s.

Borich’s narrative holds extra meaning for me as the son of a gay father who also lived in Minneapolis at that time, a second degree of communion. I follow Borich not just as a guide through those known streets of our shared experience, but as a fellow resident of my father’s world. I see glimmers of alignment, imagined meetings and crossed paths, flickers of my father at the periphery of the bars and dinner parties detailed in Borich’s Minneapolis scenes.

Borich charts her narrative course through a lyrical collage-recitation, wherein she zooms into a particular moment for a few paragraphs before making an associative leap to a divergent thread of her story. She frequently uses “inset of” to zoom in on these particulars. Inset of the Gray City. Inset of Middling America. We are spinning the globe of Borich’s life, her prose a kind of lyrical Google Map wherein Borich pinpoints the details of finite moments.

For me, there was one crucial image missing from these essays: the tattooed twin skylines of Chicago and Minneapolis on the author’s back. The opening pages vividly detail Borich’s suffering under the tattoo needle inking this vision, and in a book filled with personal imagery, from the early maps of Borich’s ancestral homeland up to the MRI scan of Linnea’s brain tumor near the end, this seems like a peculiar omission. But perhaps this blank space is the mark of a confident essayist leaving something to be revealed in a future cartography.

Kirk Wisland’s work has appeared in The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, The Diagram, Paper Darts, Electric Literature, Phoebe, Essay Daily, and the Milkweed Press Minnesota fiction anthology Fiction on a Stick. He is a doctoral student in Creative Writing at Ohio University.

Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich • University of Nebraska Press • 272 pages

Image: Morgan Childs

[contextreviews]

Many Lives, Many Deaths

Marina Blitshteyn on Irene González Frei's Your Name Written on Water

sometimes as a source of comfort after therapy i go to this little used bookstore on the upper west side called westsider books

it's small and dusty and usually takes a bit of a stroll to get to but that's always half the fun

i've found a number of treasures there, just happened upon them, and each time feels more magical than the last

when i first moved to nyc, and in the peak of a deep depression, i found moyra davey's long life cool white there, tucked away upstairs for a reasonable amount of money

i was interested in domestic space, having just moved in with my bf

the world seemed full of possibility in the smallest details

then 2 summers ago i happened upon rosalind krauss's bachelors, a book of art criticism that explores body and form in art by women

at the time i was interested in gender fluidity and poetic form, i was spending a week on my friend's couch in flatbush, and something about the essays spoke to me

i read through them between talking about love and men and the promise of my long-distance relationship that would break my heart months later

then last month another miracle—i wandered over the different sections till i got to a corner i've never really been to before, where the erotica is kept

it's a thin little shelf in the back left, you have to squeeze yourself against it when another customer walks by

there i found an old copy of the story of o and another less familiar work, your name written on water by irene gonzález frei

i start from the beginning but she starts from the end. let me jump to the middle

i can't say what it is that speaks to me when i pick up a notable book but something speaks to me

it might've been the cover, a purple backdrop with some stock photo of a woman's torso, her hand covering her private parts, very ’90s softcore

once i flipped the book over it might've been the mention of anais nin, the mention of the story of o, or most likely the thrill at seeing my own name in the plot description

your name written on water is about a woman named sofia who, though already married, by chance meets another woman named marina

the two look like they could be identical twins, they instantly fall in love and set out on a journey through europe together

never mind that my mother's name is a variant of sofia

never mind that i'd just completed a manuscript of a series of dialogues between me and my mother

never mind that i was entering a phase in my life of sexual exploration and liberation, that i was hungry for a little magic and literature always led me there

i bought my 2 books and took them to have dinner with me

scribbled in my notebook next to a window overlooking broadway

a man ate his burger with relish and i was turned on

i felt the book had a message for me but i didn't know what it was

•

late at night while my friend from l.a. was in town, and in my bed for lack of viable sleeping space, i cracked it open:

“Wherever you are now, Marina, don't ever think I've forgotten you.... We were more than Sofia and Marina; I was you, and I will be you, once again.”

i start from the beginning but she starts from the end. let me jump to the middle—

all month i anticipate my own death. 2 years ago a prophecy from my grandmother, she came to me in a dream and told me i only had “a couple more.”

for 2 years i mourn myself like the end has already happened, like now is just waiting and watching, seeing how i get there

all month i'm driven by a corporal hunger that keeps me charged every night, keeps me masturbating twice a day, leads me into a renewed hunt for pleasure

i figure while i am alive i want to feel bodily love

i want to see what it's like to give myself and let myself be taken

for weeks some men come over and we go through the motions

sometimes it feels like i mime what i'd do if i loved them

i want them to love me, care for me, i want to trust them with my body

sometimes i also want them to be violent with me

my own desires make me uncomfortable

part one of the book begins with the sort of sexualized violence i've spent my adult life flirting with but mostly avoiding

women tied up, raped, and, as we find out later, even murdered

i read these pages in bed and tense up, thrilled and worried

this was weeks ago

•

the more i love a book the slower i read it

once i entered sofia's world i didn't want it to end

i loved the cosmopolitanism of madrid, that she worked at an art gallery, had artist friends, and was super frank about her relationships, especially with men

i trusted the voice because it sounded honest with me, which attests to the writer's skill in weaving spoken language with passages of sheer poetry, and the agility of the translation by kristina cordero

from the beginning it ran wild with the kinds of observations and references that i would traffic in

i also couldn't help but imagine that it was speaking directly to me

the inscription read:

“For Marina who,

of all the people in the story,

is the only one whose name

I did not have the courage to change.”

to think, somewhere in another part of the world there lived a woman named marina, could still be alive in fact, and now i sit here empathizing with her ghost

•

—a quiet moment, a quiet thought

it's after midnight and i can't wait to climb into bed with you, irene

irene, that's not your real name

(i should've been an anna)

you say between sofia and marina there evolved this third body

you called her clara

that's not her real name

“Clarity in the sense of silence.” (oppen)

clarity in the sense of light, svet in russian

•

a good reader writes half the book—

“If happiness means deserving to be happy, then you and Marina are happy.”

i am talking to myself again

•

it seems to me the gatekeepers of the literary canon do not take erotica seriously because it is largely written by women

if it's written by men it's just called literature, isn't it

it must be terrifying for men to read about male sexual ineptitude, or for a woman to take charge of her own orgasm, grab a guy's head and ram it against her cunt

i suspect it's also a linguistic issue—sex in american english is either comically pornographic or comically clinical

think “throbbing member” or “phallus” etc.

moreover on a woman's body, already a political and social battleground, the erotic is reduced to her cunt, her sex, her vagina, her clitoris, her lips

these words are so inadequate in fact that sofia and marina devise their own language for things, a hybrid of sofia's catalan with marina's argentinian spanish

“'And what do you call this, che?' I asked once, pointing to her cunt, stroking it as we lay naked in bed, like a teacher and a student in a libertine novel.

'The concha,' Marina said.”

a lovely alternative, left untranslated

“shell” in english wouldn't do, rings lifeless, just an echo of a living thing, a husk for a ghost, no water runs through it

•

from the middle of this, already at the end of the book, i'm thinking a lot about narrative form, how can we write from within an experience, not knowing how it will end

i am not yet the ghost here, still very much bodied, but i know where this is going, we all do

jenny boully, from the body:

“Everything I do, I do because I know I am dying.”

and here, everything written because our loved ones are

•

“This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet. Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

—keats's tombstone, which sofia and marina visit in rome

•

sometimes when poets say to themselves “i have time to publish, i'm still young,” a stance encouraged in some mfa cultures, other poets like to remind them “keats died at 25”

i use it as shorthand for how much time is up already, how much i may or may not have left to write what i want to write, as futile and underappreciated as it is

right now i'm at the kitchen table typing this into a gmail box, looking out 2 windows over a busy street

the sun is setting slowly but too soon

it's too cold and quiet and i'm alone

“...till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

•

is it my fate, sofia?

can we change it?

we say at the new year “may your name be inscribed in the book of life”

on new year’s day it is written, on the day of atonement it is sealed

you spend the days of awe in between prayer and consternation

is my name more permanent in a book than in water?

is it more like writing in sand, a desert of white

and is the ink white too, or is it more like stone

who gets to write the end that will define me

maggie nelson, from bluets:

“229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.”

and all names too, every year a new book, another desert, the same thirst

•

i was waiting on the corner of east 8th street and broadway, reading about cosmic love, metaphysical love, a love so profound no end could shake it, not even death

i was waiting for a date with a boy i'd never met before and feeling wistful

the wind was blowing my hair around and i had bright red lipstick on

i was thinking i must look beautiful, people were staring, there was still a bit of daylight out

but isn't it wasted on the boy who showed up, maybe looked at my face and my hair wild around it, just intrigued

will i never experience that kind of love books are written about or for

doesn't this just pale in comparison

when he showed up i wanted to make eye contact so intense he'd have to look away

i wanted to hug him or throw myself into his arms like help me help me

this book is so intense and i just came from therapy

help me figure out how i'm supposed to live this life and love myself

i didn't do any of it, instead he asked me stilted questions as we walked to the restaurant, my arms crossed over my chest, not just from the growing wind and cold

i protect myself first, give myself later

this is normal, i had to remind myself, this isn't a story, not fiction

it ruined me to read about the love between sofia and marina

a man will never love me like this, my mother will never love me like this, i might never even love myself like this

frei talks about narcissism in a way that i think is useful for women

after all sofia first masturbates to her own reflection in the mirror, then transposes this lust onto her spitting image, marina

is it shameful to love yourself this much? does it border on incest?

indeed sofia & marina like to pretend they're siblings, like to imagine alternative narratives in which they could've shared a father

this is to be closer to each other, but even closer to themselves

“I once heard someone say that all love is selfish. Maybe that's true, but how beautiful selfishness can be when it emerges from itself to satisfy its vanity through the happiness of its beloved! And how complete it becomes when the gesture is reciprocated! How can you say Narcissus loves himself when he only wishes to satisfy his double?”

•

in the first week of mourning we cover the mirrors

which are also like a book, they tell you a story about yourself

•

my mother never loved herself, a sofia

sophia, derived from the greek, “wisdom”

(disambiguation)

i dreamt once as a child i was lying on top of my mother, sleeping, when the reaper comes in through the door like a man, sticks his scythe through her skull next to me

i jump up and want to beat him to the door

it's like we're locked in a tango

only one of us gets out of here (alive)

and maybe something has to die for something else to live

the reaper, a man, my mother, myself

“I knew that Paradise's perfume lasts until the rains begin to fall, that many lives require many deaths.”

•

i shouldn't have finished reading it when i did but i had time to kill, a gruesome way of saying i didn't want to feel this alone so i drowned myself in a book, still slightly buzzed from a date and about to go on another

it was at ost in the east village, a little cafe i frequent to write in a little notebook and drink cappuccino from a little cup

it was a friday night so most people were social around me, already drunk or about to be

it was too cold so it wasn't as crowded as it could've been, i was mostly alone, tucked away in a corner in the dark, reading by candlelight like a romantic painting

it felt like that summer i finished reading madame bovary and threw the book across my room

i thought if a woman had written it she wouldn't have given emma that kind of death, the most gruesome, most vivid death

that's the fate men often give women who want more of their lives

i thought if a woman wrote emma she would've lived, and lived well

so why disappoint me irene, still not your real name

why describe the most sadistic, most elaborately sexual end, for both of you, both of us, sofia and marina, and clara, and marina, and sonya

again men as gods, as reapers, as death fugues, repeating old tropes, women objectified with sex then objectified as corpses

again an urgency to love myself before it's too late, for the sake of my mother, my mother's mother, the canon of murdered women before us, women who demanded pleasure, women in letters, women whose names were written on water, whose tombstones were built on sand and made of sand

how do we recover from that end, keep reading in anticipation of it?

eventually my friends showed up and joined me in the cafe, and soon it was 3 women instead of just one, a new trinity, 3 parts to one book, a way to diffuse the burden

•

or if, as freud suggested, we are everyone in our dreams, i must be everyone in my nightmares—the child, the mother, the killer, the man, the door

maybe sofia wanted to be forced from paradise

(it’s a trap, like love, like the body)

it was she who prodded marina to have sex with a man for the first time

it was she who dropped the breadcrumbs for the killer to find

it was she who played tricks on her husband

who desired the violence that plagued them both

maybe a classic feminine guilt at being so happy

maybe she wanted her better double gone so she could be the only one herself

like narcissus’s reflection, so alluring it kills its twin

in this sense marina is the living body, sofia her deadly other, a 2-dimensional trick

but we only get the mirror’s perspective

memory forged by survivors, monuments erected by whoever lives

some other is talking to me from beyond an end, a tomb or a book

another being written

•

now the sound of running water through the heating pipes

now knowing the end, the emergence of a new reader

already marked by death, changed by it, a living ghost

now an embodiment, spreading the gospel of the book

saying to myself, you are alive, you are loved, you want pleasure

and beautiful work is possible, even in eulogy, even in loss

a twin impulse, towards love and away, towards reading then

immediately out of it, putting it away somewhere, not yet knowing

how to read it, what it was supposed to teach me, what i've become

a literary figure, a writer, a muse, a reflection, an illusion, a scene

•

“The only true death is the death of memory. The other, the one that awaits me, doesn't frighten me.

These pages branch off, they turn themselves, jumping ahead in leaps, gushing out, receding, stopping to look at what lies hidden in the folds of time, not because of some whim but because they are simply obeying the most basic form of my memory and my hope.

As I threw myself into the happiest days of my life, without losing the tiniest bit of my equilibrium I observed everything carefully, so I would be able to remember it after—to the point that I would remember experiences I was still in the middle of having, and would admire myself for acquiring those new memories even as I did so. To multiply that game of mirrors through a love stolen from mirrors, to close even more trunks within bigger trunks, like those Russian dolls, reminded us to record the steps, the efforts, the hesitations that had led up to our first encounter, because one of the sweetestacts of love occurs when two lovers evoke together the infiniteproposals, the daring plans, and the impatient vicissitudes of love'sevenings.”

a love story then, between irene and the reader, or me and my name

Marina Blitshteyn is the author of Russian for Lovers (Argos Books), Nothing Personal (Bone Bouquet Books), and the forthcoming chapbooks $kill$(dancing girl press) and Kaddish (Argos Books). She splits her time between Buffalo andBrooklyn and poetry and prose.

Your Name Written on Water: An Erotic Novel by Irene González Frei • Grove Press • 192 pages

Image courtesy of Helene Childs-Budelis