L Ives

IMAGE Reviewed in LARB

A Technique for Managing the Obliteration of My Self
James Webster reviews Lucy Ives’s essay collection “An Image of My Name Enters America.”

By James Webster • October 19, 2024

An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives. Graywolf Press, 2024. 336 pages.

ALONGSIDE HER WORK as a poet, novelist, curator, critic, and professor, the writer Lucy Ives has always been sort of a sly historian. Two of her novels are set at pivotal moments in American history. Her 2019 novel Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World is set in the fever-stricken year of 2003, amid the mania of the early “War on Terror,” which lurks constantly in the background. Similarly, her astonishing 2022 novel Life Is Everywhere takes place in November 2014, at the end of an era of American complacency. The settings of these novels are rarely acknowledged by the characters in them, but Ives trusts readers to understand, even subconsciously, how these very deliberate period pieces are influenced by the grander history that is always unspooling above the petty concerns of the writers, academics, and assorted other neurotics that populate her books. With her first essay collection, An Image of My Name Enters America (2024), she moves this same sort of role as cultural meteorologist to the forefront, applying it to a range of subjects, including herself.

It’s a heavy word, but I am going to use it anyway: for the uninitiated, Lucy Ives is a genius. If I fail to convince you, perhaps you can ask any of her other devoted acolytes. I have no doubt that they would excitedly corroborate that she is one of the most thrilling writers that the United States has produced so far this century. Multiple blurbs adorning the outside of Image also rush to laud the power of her intellect and her showstopping stylistic talent.

More than that, Ives is an old-fashioned, big-picture, deep-thinking type of writer. Her work often tilts toward the conceptual, in conversation with the structurally innovative fictions of the 20th century. Ives is part of a vanishing breed of writers who seem to care more about writing than about being read. She is concerned with the limitations of literary institutions in fostering the future of the written word. She is concerned with the novel as a medium, pushing the boundaries of how it is possible to tell a story (Image, as a nonfiction collection, takes the opportunity to indulge in some footnote high jinks à la David Foster Wallace). She is the sort of writer who makes you wonder what, exactly, everyone else has been doing when this has been possible the entire time.

Image is a startling and disarming read in which the author descends from the realms of metafiction. Rather than asking us to join her inside a matryoshka-doll novel, or a funhouse-mirror story collection, she takes us instead on a more familiar journey, though a collection of essays with semifrequent line breaks. The five pieces freewheel across genre lines, ricocheting from critical theory to personal memoir to pop culture analysis to arcane archival research.

This type of book has gained popularity over the last decade, and you have no doubt read at least one of them. They have been featured on “best books of the 21st century” lists. I have seen them referred to as “The Maggie Nelson Industrial Complex.” They’ve been the subject of jokes and tweets, such as this one, posted by the novelist Jake Wolff:

Creative nonfiction writers be like:

I first ate a hotdog when I was six years old. I remember the taste, the scent, the summer.

SECTION BREAK

Hot dogs were invented in 1693 by Steven Hotdog. According to Scientific American, the hotdog is

I will admit, that’s pretty on the nose—but just because the approach, mixing the personal with the cultural/historical, is so familiar does not inherently render the method stale or otherwise suspect. Make no mistake here: Ives remains a formidable, high-performance writer, and Image is a thorny book—even with a vehicle chosen for our comfort. I read it through twice before I found myself capable of describing it without resorting to blurb-baiting metaphors. The longer I sat with these essays, they began to slip through the net of easy superlatives, settling into something rich, complex, and satisfying. The book’s depth seems to grow beneath you, the way the bottom of a swimming pool slopes gently downward. To me, this seems Ives’s intent.

As readers, we have gotten to know Lucy Ives as a exceptional writer, but in this new book, we are invited to meet Lucy Ives the person. An Image of My Name Enters America finds the author setting out to research and reveal herself. The essays confirm certain details readers may have been able to extrapolate—mostly minor revelations, such as the fact that her mother was employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the backdrop for Ives’s debut novel, Impossible Views of the World (2017). She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the setting for her barbed second novel, Loudermilk. She was married, and then divorced, while living in Ridgewood, Queens, and has spent lots of time at NYU’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, facts that form the backbone of Life Is Everywhere. Image is a wide-ranging collection, but it is also clearly a book about Lucy Ives as much as it is about unicorns, Cold War musicals, the Assyrian genocide, or any of the purported subjects of the essays. If this is not a memoir smuggled in through a side door, it is at least an opportunity for recognition of the woman beneath the mask.

This distance between perception and reality is one of the book’s central preoccupations. Like a family tree branching off from a single root, essays that might otherwise seem disparate and disjointed all stem outward from this same point. Even the book’s cover—with its title on the horizon, casting an inverse shadow across the foreground—suggests duality. Like Plato’s cave, the shadow is a mere approximation of the thing, but it is the one we are more familiar with.

In one of the essays, Ives actually expresses her desire to live “alone in a cave,” a thought that she suddenly pursues with the “ardor of a fanatic,” until a conversation with a colleague brings her back to earth. The essays are full of moments like this, where Ives’s mind will arc like a bolt from a mad scientist’s coil, connecting with the nearest object and suffusing it with life, only for the spark to disappear as quickly as it came. Writing, as we will see, is a way for Ives to preserve this spark, or at least to inhabit the moment of its impact just long enough to demonstrate its power through language.

And oh, what language it is! On the page, Ives remains a virtuoso, inventive and agile. Yet without the formal experimentation that marks much of her other work, Image takes on a casual familiarity. Here, she writes the way that she talks—the tone is conversational, digressive, intelligent, and perceptibly anxious. Her references careen from the obvious to the archaic but are always smartly deployed in service of the essay’s broader topics.

The book’s first essay, “Of Unicorns,” is an exemplary cross section. In the essay, Ives wrestles with Pliny the Elder, a childhood field trip, the mythology of the My Little Pony franchise, and medieval tapestry weaving, before finally arriving at unicorns. But even upon reaching its destination, the essay is only about unicorns on the surface level. Really, it’s about growing up. It’s about the glittering promise, and subsequent disappointment, of the Reagan years. It’s about realizing that magic does not exist in quite the ways you thought it did. And it’s a perfect introduction to the book: the subject is accessible, but the approach is dense—the essay is lightweight but airtight.

The book’s title essay is similarly multifaceted. On the surface, it is about “Ives” as a last name and about her family’s emigration to the United States in the early 20th century. She wonders about her family’s forgotten history, lost on the far side of the Assyrian genocide, which bifurcates the family tree like a freeway through a neighborhood. She focuses on the ways that a name, a simple word, can connect her to a real, tangible history, and meditates on what it means to be born into a family, and how she feels about choosing a new one. It is an essay about her relationship with herself and her shitty ex, and the way she thinks about her place in the world.

We are still in the warm-up period at this point. Ives is checking her instruments, the meters and readings. In the next essay, we read about romance, accompanying Ives through her teenage years in the late 1990s. We stop to meditate on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a bonkers film from 1954. We remember the beige plastic of the bygone computer labs. We read about Ives’s “proto-emo” sense of style, versus the decidedly more mainstream dress worn by her best friend, with whom Ives has one of those disquietingly intense relationships. It is one of those friendships that are claustrophobic in their closeness because you do not yet realize that you are in love. Often, you will be the last one to learn something important about yourself.

Once you reach “The End,” the book’s shattering centerpiece, Ives finally, gloriously, lets loose. Subdividing the essay into 26 sections, one for each letter of the alphabet, Ives honeycombs her way through eschatology, 19th-century American Protestantism, her undergrad romance with a graduate student that was as tepid as it was doomed, her conflicting feelings of reverence and jealousy toward a mentor, and, finally, a sort of linguistic-philosophy-inspired breakdown in which she goes for months without speaking and (sort of) steals a car. The essay begins with a recurring dream about tornadoes, as if anticipating the work being described as “tornadic.”

As she acknowledges in “The End,” Ives considers the act of writing, the use of language, as an avenue to escape into something larger than herself. As a writer, you can think inside someone else’s head. “By way of the eyes, words go inside, hover, remain,” she writes at the outset of the “E” subdivision. Living in the thoughts of others is an unbelievably seductive idea for Ives, who is perennially skeptical of institutions, always preferring individuals.

She has been foreshadowing this distrust through all of the earlier essays—and her entire body of work, in fact. On the book’s second page, she mentions her skepticism of Abrahamic religions. Citing the “ecstatic suspension” required by a heaven in the sky, Ives explains her discomfort in a parenthetical: “(I’m afraid of heights).” It’s a small but understandably human fear that separates her from the divine. Magic has failed her, romance has failed her, institutions have failed her. So what is left but direct intervention? She can create these perfect images in her mind, but how can you impart them to the reader one-to-one?

The solution is having each lettered subdivision in “The End” begin with a scattershot of free-association: “P is for Perfume and it is for person. P is for paces and perfection. Pores. P is for Poe. Purloined. Peace! Police! Purple prose. It’s for poetry, a hook or spoon or spade.” Not necessarily tables of contents for the essay’s upcoming sections, these lists are suggestions for further reading, or rabbit holes for the reader to tumble down at their own discretion. It’s as if Ives is handing you bullet points and turning you loose into a whirlpool.

Normally, when we speak about interiority in writing, it is about a place inside ourselves—a world of feelings, of abstraction and intuition. But Ives makes it a much more material, almost physical space—trying to fit so much into the interior that things end up jammed into odd and uncomfortable angles. “Death = being completely inside one’s own head,” wrote Susan Sontag. “Life = the world.” Ives seems to agree, though she never puts it quite so bluntly.

Maybe, in an ideal world, Lucy Ives would be a library, and all of these thoughts and ideas could be shelved neatly inside her brain. Unfortunately for her, she is merely human, and she learns to split the difference by writing. By the conclusion of “The End,” she returns to herself after a dissociative road trip up the California coastline. She goes back to school. She finishes her studies. Writing becomes “a technique for managing the obliteration of [her] self.” She goes on to be a cult-favorite writer of fiction, poetry, and essays who teaches at several universities and gives birth to her son during a global pandemic.

An Image of my Name Enters America is a book driven by curiosity. It’s a celebration of questions rather than the didactic results of scattered research projects. It’s a vulnerable book, occasionally messy, and sometimes distractible. It is also deeply and profoundly humane. Over the course of five essays, the reader comes to understand that Lucy Ives is not attempting to showcase herself as some sort of all-knowing polymath. If anything, she spends the book pressed up against her limitations, straining against the fact that, no matter how hard she tries, she does not, cannot, know everything. That, too, is something to be learned.

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-technique-for-managing-the-obliteration-of-my-self/

IMAGE Reviewed in Believer

October 16th, 2024 | Issue one hundred forty-seven

A Review of An Image of My Name Enters America

by Celine Nguyen | Illustration by Pete Gamlen

When Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie came out last year, I was inundated with essays that analyzed the film’s joys, flaws, and gender politics. They often did so using a popular formula: mix high culture and low—children’s toys with critical theory—to reveal the ideology behind a “cursed work,” one that is flawed, but glamorously so. Many of those essays, I’ll confess, didn’t sustain my attention. But I tore through the poet, art critic, and novelist Lucy Ives’s essay collection with glee—even though she deploys similar tactics and theorists. What makes her approach feel so novel, so fun?

The five essays in An Image of My Name Enters America often take children’s pop culture artifacts, like My Little Pony and The Little Mermaid, and complicate them by applying a historical and critical lens. But the essays don’t feel didactic, because Ives makes her arguments using an appealingly roundabout path. An essay about childbirth and the cruel history of obstetrics takes multiple detours into sci-fi critique, from Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem to Claire Denis’s film High Life. The first sentence of the book is about Ives’s pregnancy, the last sentence about her son’s birth—the trip there, however, involves excursions into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s period rooms, teenage crushes, and the concept of irony. Ives’s strategy, she explains, is to pursue her interests wherever they lead. “It’s like a little ball I toss. It flies from my hand, soft yet determined; knocks against some surface at a distance, plunk.”

Throughout, Ives is disarmingly irreverent: Friedrich Nietzsche is “modernity’s most famous depressive,” and the New York Times article “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” is “head-in-sand, cozy self-improvement” for romantics.

But Ives is serious when discussing historical injustices and infantilizing contemporary delusions—including her own. In “Earliness, or Romance,” Ives shows how fantasies of heterosexual love and family are yoked to America’s violent settlement of the West. Artifacts she examines include the educational game The Oregon Trail and the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which depicts, to use Ives’s cheerfully online phrase, “#cottagecore avant la lettre.” Ives invokes two patron saints of literary analysis, Sigmund Freud and Lauren Berlant, to argue that our dreams of a perfect, self-actualizing romance are inevitably compromised by the past: namely, parental dysfunction and social inequality. Where’s the escape hatch? In lieu of prescriptive advice, Ives offers a “love bib” (as in, bibliography) from A to Z (Arendt to Žižek).

Ives, who teaches at Brown, moves nimbly between a professorial tone and the naive, earnest voice of a student. In “The End,” she deftly narrates her undergraduate years—describing them with vivid, nearly filmic detail, alongside the history of French post-structuralist theory in America. The waning influence of theory in literary academia is a recurring concern of Ives’s, but her effortless descriptions of Lacanian literary analysis make this past feel—well, not quite so past. By including voyeuristic details, like Lacan’s extravagant laundry habits while visiting America, Ives turns imposing scholars into winsome characters.

There are certain through lines in the collection. One is Ives’s interest in imagistic language. At the turn of the millennium, when Ives was in college, she took a leave of absence, flew to Los Angeles, and drove up and down the Californian coastline, “spooked by the ubiquitous image culture of America and simultaneously in awe.” That reverential disquiet hasn’t left her; each essay preoccupies itself with depicting this strange, compromised country. The other through line is Ives’s tenacious critical gaze. By revealing the ideology behind an object (whether it’s a film or antique furniture), she patiently dismantles our fantasies about America and ourselves. It’s painful to let go of these delusions; it’s also the only way to go on. “I wake up after dreaming such a dream,” she writes about her disillusionment with modern romantic love, “and have to go on living. That is the funny thing about dwelling here in the wreckage.” In the aftermath, at least we can cling to her voice—lively, cathartic, and undeniably charming.

Publisher: Graywolf Press Page count: 336 Price: $20.00 Key quote: “I comforted myself, attempting to believe my impulsivity and dilettantism were somehow modernist.” Shelve next to: Moyra Davey, Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson Unscientifically calculated reading time: One cross-country flight, or two with in-flight TV intermissions

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https://www.thebeliever.net/a-review-of-an-image-of-my-name-enters-america/

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE Excerpted in Harper's

https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/lucy-ives-life-is-everywhere-dont-worry-about-the-trace/

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE Reviewed in Bookforum

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2903/lucy-ives-and-the-metoo-novel-now-25067

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Fall 2022 issue.

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE Reviewed in The New Yorker

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LUCY IVES'S TWISTING AND TREACHEROUS UPDATE ON THE ADULTERY PLOT
The many stories in “Life Is Everywhere” read like an encyclopedia whose every entry is at its heart a story of intimate betrayal.

By Hannah Gold
November 16, 2022

In the afterword to her dizzying new novel, “Life Is Everywhere,” Lucy Ives cites a long and heterogeneous list of artistic influences. Two names in particular, Herman Melville and Georges Perec, shed light on her own ambitions. Like Melville with his whaling vessel or Perec with his Parisian apartment complex, Ives, in her novel, attempts the impossible task of building a set in which every emotional and physical detail is noted and accounted for. “Life Is Everywhere” holds out the hope that the novel might be a home to which everything belongs. At the same time, it illuminates the ways in which such novels operate like families unto themselves, absorbing so much apparent dysfunction while maintaining the illusion that all of their parts constitute a happy—or at least a believable—whole.

There’s a convenient marriage in “Life Is Everywhere” between content and form, but that’s where the happiness ends. Its books-within-books conceit is twisty and treacherous, and taken together its many stories read like an encyclopedia whose every entry is at its heart a story of intimate betrayal. Narratives of intractable family conflict abound, especially ones that involve adultery. To gloss just a few entries: a graduate student at a university lies in torpor under the desk of her professor with whom she’s been having an affair; a child named Hamlet plots the demise of her parents; an unfaithful husband jokes with his wife and daughter about Harvey Weinstein. The only section of “Life Is Everywhere” in which I could not detect these dynamics at play was in the book’s first few pages, which are about the history of botulism.

The history lesson dispensed with, we find ourselves in a classroom in New York City where a graduate-level French-translation seminar is in session. Two professors have been subbed in after the course’s original instructor, Roger Herbsweet, took leave pending a sexual-harassment scandal on campus. (It’s his desk the student is found under.) As the lesson progresses, there’s a sense that students and teachers are complicit in their desire for a seamless transition of power that will preserve the well-being of their institution. The regrettable impropriety is already in the process of being kept in the family, a wound closed with a kiss. Multiple people at the university conceive of Herbsweet’s student as a “piece of office furniture” herself. One of the professors, Isobel Childe, lets her thoughts drift to Balzac’s 1834 novel “The Duchess of Langeais,” a failed-seduction plot that involves kidnapping (already you begin to see why it didn’t work out), from which Isobel gleans, “There is always a fine line . . . between submission and enthusiasm.” This bit of sophistry encapsulates just as well the pedagogical methods on display in her classroom: intimidation, hierarchy, scarcity. These encourage the hoarding and preening of a largely topiary language that can do little aside from signal class, be beautiful, and inhibit certain views.

Erin Adamo, our hero, is among the students, although she finds the affair difficult to stomach, characterizing her inability to sympathize with Herbsweet as “a mental tightness, like trying to push a beanbag under a reasonably well-made door (a shut door).” In any case, she has more pressing matters to attend to, namely, the recent discovery of her husband’s serial infidelity, and, more immediately, dinner with her status-driven parents in upper Manhattan. Their anxieties seem to penetrate the story’s omniscient narration: “Although [Erin] was increasingly a source of tragic disappointment where her parents were concerned, at least she was enrolled in a degree-granting program.” Erin, who is long practiced in warding off feelings, prioritizing her intellect instead (at least this is what she tells herself), accepts the startling course her life has taken in the wake of her husband’s betrayal, but is otherwise numb. “It felt like it was hers, this situation,” writes Ives. “It pertained overwhelmingly and exclusively to her, a fate or chemical patterns. She was afraid in a low, ambient way, but she was not struck by terror because she had arrived at that which belonged to her and to which she belonged.”

There’s an encouraging, matter-of-fact drumbeat to Ives’s prose. It’s a style that, much like Erin’s coping mechanism, keeps emotional profundity carefully taxonomized, and therefore at bay, producing for the reader instead a mesmeric hunger for the text itself. The effect is maintained as we step away from Erin’s narrative and peer into her bag, which contains a novel and a novella by Erin, a book by Herbsweet about the life of a French author, a page from a professor’s manuscript (found on the floor), and an unpaid utility bill. “Life Is Everywhere” doesn’t depict a hero’s journey so much as a hero’s rucksack. This form takes inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which she proposes that—rather than a bone that bashes or a spear that pierces—a novel is best imagined as a trusty bag that accommodates and holds on to morsels of daily life. In Ives’s interpretation of Le Guin’s theory, the bag is already inside a story. It’s a shelter within a shelter, a door that closes in a home resounding with argument.

Erin’s novella is a riff on “Hamlet,” a play whose action is set in motion by the presumption of an incestuous infidelity. (“Frailty, thy name is woman!”) The presumption is founded, not altogether well, on the word of a ghost. In Erin’s version, Hamlet is a preteen girl who tells her friend Amethyst, the narrator, fantastic tales of the adventures they’d have if Hamlet’s parents suddenly died. The fantasy is a poorly disguised wish. Her parents bicker constantly; it’s “like watching a fake swordfight.” Herbsweet’s research into the fictional novella writer Démocrite Charlus LeGouffre includes a brief history of courtesans in nineteenth-century Paris, who, he argues, realized an increasingly formalized social status as the “love-marriage,” and the sanctity of the private domestic sphere, rose in importance. Hints of this subject matter—of marriage and a woman’s “place”—resonate in the book’s acknowledgments, where Herbsweet thanks his “enviably capable wife” for typing up this “flawless manuscript copy.”

But the true pièce de résistance is Erin’s novel, which contains “Life Is Everywhere” ’s most fully realized, compelling, and suffocating adultery plot. Immediately, it feels like a story recognizable as Erin’s own, or one that resembles what we’ve so far been told about her. There’s a marriage that ended after the protagonist learned that her husband had cheated on her for years; there are also dispiriting professional obligations, parents who seem lost on the surface of their lives (in this narrative, the father also covertly sleeps around), and New York City. In one of those intertextual winks that you’ll either reciprocate or roll your eyes at, the narrator’s former husband, Cody, a visual artist, keeps a bag of his own on his desk. This is back when they’re still living together. The bag, unlike the one this novel is being ferried around in, is labelled “PRIVATE.” One day, the narrator takes a peek, and finds it’s loaded with “standard issue” pornography. She wonders whether the bag will one day wind up in one of Cody’s exhibitions.

Woven throughout Erin’s novel is an extended meditation on hypergraphia, a writing compulsion that’s immense and irrepressible. Our narrator warns us not to think of it as a genius’s disease, although certain artists come up, like the German minimalist Hanne Darboven, who practiced a contentless, “nonhierarchical”-loop form of writing many hours a day. Another artist associated with the affliction, but whose sensibility couldn’t have been more different, was Balzac, who doused his intestines with caffeine while writing ultra-hierarchical tales of the relations that money, venality, and devotion bring about. The narrator’s grandmother also perhaps labored under this propensity, filling her home and then her hospice room with piles of used yellow legal pads. The narrator herself has a horror of writing, as if it were an inherited defect. She claims not to do it at all.

And yet, whether or not Erin’s protagonist has consented to write it, her narrative has already propagated itself. The record of the speaker’s pain is fastened to the page in many excruciating contortions. While looking through old photos that Cody took of her, she muses, “I wasn’t even alive, then, but look at me, so thin and clean. I was hollow and would float on anything. Now I am filled with a ballooning, thundering life, but then, back then, while I was frail and dead, I had love. I was a loved object, a floating mote, and did not know it. And, here, look at me, after I have found out.” These are haunting, self-lacerating words. Never more so than when the final section of “Life Is Everywhere” reveals that Erin wrote her novel long before she became aware of her own husband’s infidelity.

The recursive adultery plot feels like a joke about the expectations placed on the complex, theory-heavy systems novel, which critics so often perceive as predictive, ahead of its time, or godlike in its memory of things past. Here, every scholarly tool is wielded to tell this story that a woman wrote herself and still could not see coming. Everything, even the form of the novel she’s trapped in, conspires against her. Betrayal is a clash of plots, the faltering of a reality that had to be held up on many people’s shoulders. We cannot protect ourselves from our fictions, not even those devised by our own hand, since we so utterly belong to them, too. ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/lucy-ivess-twisting-and-treacherous-update-on-the-adultery-plot

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE Reviewed in The Rumpus

HOW THE WORLD HAPPENS TO US: LUCY IVES’S LIFE IS EVERYWHERE
REVIEWED BY JAMES WEBSTER

October 4th, 2022

Approximately 365 pages into Lucy Ives’s Life Is Everywhere sits a rejection letter. Erin, the book’s main character, has received a resounding “no” from a literary agent who has, in one fell swoop, rejected both a novella and a novel written by our main character. The agent displays a kind of shrugged-shoulder indifference to the plotless ennui of the fictional characters contained within the manuscripts, saying that they lack something: an arc, a hook, an excitement of some sort. It’s a great moment, because by this point, Ives has attempted no less than four death-defying feats of writing—including making you read both of these rejected manuscripts in full.

The book opens with one of these feats. It tells, in short, the 1,156-year-long story of a species of bacteria. The bacteria produce a protein called botulinum, which attacks the body’s muscles and causes them to seize. The condition, botulism, was exacerbated by the invention of canning, allowing bacteria to thrive and ferment. Botulism was later weaponized during the World Wars, before the banning of bio-weaponry; the thinking was that the bacteria could make enemy soldiers lose control of their bodies. Eventually, researchers realized that hyper-localized injections of the toxins could freeze the body’s muscles in such a way as to prevent them from displaying the effects of aging—a procedure called “Botox,” short for botulinum toxin.

We are then introduced to a New York City academic who has received a not-insignificant number of Botox treatments. We learn about her research. We sit in on one of her classes. We meet several of her colleagues and learn about their personal lives, their scandals both personal and professional. We are introduced to one of the students in the lecture hall. We learn that this particular student is going through a terrible divorce, and that she has changed the locks to the apartment. And finally we are told that this student, our main character, has ended up locked out of her apartment.

And it is after 86 pages that the reader reaches a line break. “These are the events, to the extent that any human events are knowable, that led Erin Adamo to stand alone on the street in upper Manhattan,” Ives informs us. It is the first of Ives’ many spectacular sleights of hand—everything that has preceded this moment, a millennium of niche history and academic pseudo-celebrity, has merely formed the explanation for how a single person in New York City ended up standing where they did.

If it wasn’t obvious from its title, Ives’s third novel aims to signal the entrance of a new player into the realm of the “systems novel,” an increasingly popular term used to describe, most frequently, the Big Ideas books of the 20th century. Historically populated by male writers like Pynchon, Gaddis (whom Ives name-checks in the novel), DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, the “systems novel” depersonalizes in favor of the larger picture. Inspired by the rise of technology like the radio and then the 24-hour television channel, these novels zoom out, shifting the focus from the lives of characters to instead demonstrate how the world at large imparts its influence on our lives. It’s an apt form for the social media era and the misery of staring at one’s phone, having our brains pummeled by outrage cycles and watching collapse happen in real time. We are now intimately familiar with the ways that macro-scale happenings dictate how we feel on a personal level. Life is, in fact, everywhere.

The title of the book also nods to an oft quoted but impossible to source quote from Arthur Rimbaud, who allegedly wrote that “life is elsewhere.” And life did often seem elsewhere back in 2014, when the book takes place. It’s an unseasonably warm Thursday in November, Barack Obama is the president, and we are careening off the sharp edge of the information age into an era of heightened connection and awareness of others, but also of online misinformation, purposeful division, demagoguery, and “doomscrolling.” “Whatever it was that we were living in now, we were not modern. We had no word for ourselves,” Erin writes.

Erin, locked out and wandering, seems aware of this impending cultural contract (or lack of one) as she contemplates the negative space of the atrium in the never-named library where she ends up. The library is clearly the Bobst library at NYU, and worry not, we are given a full biography of both the library’s problematic namesake and its architect. This void at the center of everything, as Erin thinks of it, seems to permeate the very air as she sits in the library, surrounded by both limitless information and crude, ad hominem graffiti.

Like the millennium-spanning introduction and the lengthy examination of library architecture, enormous amounts of Life Is Everywhere feel, at first, like needless digression—and perhaps they would be, in the hands of a lesser writer—but these offshoots add depth, texture, and an experimental flourish to the structure of the book. Ives, in an author’s note at the end of the book, mentions her desire to challenge the form of the novel by imagining a world where “cause and effect sometimes trade places.”

This type of nonlinear approach appears in one of Erin’s rejected manuscripts, a piece of autofiction written by a fictional character. Erin’s novel concerns a woman in her twenties, who has been married for years and who learns, gradually, about the actions of her unfaithful husband. It’s a fascinating intertwining of narrative form that hinges on art’s ability to tell us something about ourselves, or the world in which we live. Erin, the fictional protagonist of Life Is Everywhere, uses her autofiction to reveal to us details about herself that we are otherwise not privy to through traditional third-person narration.

We learn, after having read the manuscript, that Erin wrote the novel about a woman and her unfaithful husband before she had learned of her own husband’s infidelity—effect arriving before cause, or at least a conscious understanding of cause. Erin supposes she must have been aware that something was going on under her nose.

It all might sound a little meta, a little MFA-program, but Ives pulls it off in part thanks to an unshakable confidence in what she is attempting, and the fact that she can write. On a sentence level, the book is full of personality, stunning imagery, and ever-deepening philosophical roots. For example, the way that Erin thinks of her husband, Ben:

Erin knew now the extent of Ben’s laziness. His was a torpor of stupendous, infernal proportions. Although he appeared to be a fully grown man, in fact he was an early pupa, a limbless slug basking in the broth of some spiritual incubation tank, a feeding tube plugged into his neck. Ben was The Matrix (trademark).

The novel’s form is a miraculous, shapeshifting thing, changing at a moment’s notice. Ives radically, deftly reinvents herself throughout, mostly in the unbelievable middle section of Life Is Everywhere, in which we read through the contents of Erin’s backpack: her two manuscripts; a book by the disgraced professor; and several pieces of scrap paper, including an unusually high electric bill. Ives guides readers through dense academic writing about dialectics and gender, a condensed history of the early 20th century surrealism scene, and a translated short story. Each is written in its own distinct voice, even displaying progression in Erin’s own writing ability between the novella and the novel.

Life is Everywhere shatters any kind of straightforward narrative arc in favor of a collage of shards that emphasizes the tone, atmosphere, and the general experience of life in the world at a particular moment. And it wouldn’t work were Ives not a Big Ideas writer on the level of Gaddis, or DeLillo, or Wallace. Fortunately for all of us, she is.

The truly necessary point of comparison would be Helen DeWitt, who, like Ives, is a writer similarly lauded as a genius by those in the know. Life Is Everywhere, like Gaddis’s The Recognitions or DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, is a triumphant celebration of human beings’ capacity for knowledge. These literary pyrotechnics never become self-indulgent, however, as the digressions serve a purpose: the books and articles within the novel all point toward an erasure of women in specific fields, including the “systems novel.”

Ives’s previous novel, Loudermilk, or: The Real Poet, or: The Origin of The World was a vicious and hysterical (here meaning both “funny” and “frenzied”) satire of post-9/11 America, and of prestigious literary programs like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ives herself is a graduate of the IWW, so her barbs land with a realistic weight. Life Is Everywhere takes similar aim at academia, art-world posers, and an aging class of tenured professors and publishing industry careerists who got to where they are simply by being white, male, and having a PhD. Ives, it’s worth noting, is now an adjunct humanities professor at NYU, and her eye, as well as her teeth, remain sharp.

It’s almost self-defeating to talk about Life is Everywhere in any kind of limited fashion, such as a review, because so much of it depends on the form—a truly spectacular gestalt that requires every one of its 472 pages. To reveal too many of its tricks would take away from the joy in experiencing all of the disparate parts that make up the whole. In the end, Life Is Everywhere is the funny, heartbreaking, and incredibly complex story of how a woman ends up sending a petty email—revolving around a pun, no less, on the word “work,” referring to both a person’s career and to cosmetic surgery (“having work done”). It’s a minor event, this email, but it is one that would not have been possible without thousands of years-worth of human history transpiring exactly as they did. We should be thankful, too, that human history has run a course that allows us to read a writer operating on the level that Ives does, able to see the individual threads that we follow through the world writ large.

Across that same course of history, Lucy Ives has proven herself to be one of our greatest under-the-radar geniuses, but an achievement like Life Is Everywhere demands attention. The systems have long been in place, but everyone will see them now. ♦

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https://therumpus.net/2022/10/04/how-the-world-happens-to-us-lucy-ives-life-is-everywhere/

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE Reviewed in Chicago Review of Books

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Ambition and Artistry in “Life Is Everywhere”
BY D. W. WHITE
OCTOBER 10, 2022

From the Latin ambitiō, by way of the Old French, across the Channel and the centuries through the Middle English, and finally to the modern day, comes to our protean patois that pleasant, well-groomed word ambition. To us, it is an unassuming noun, unusually simple, for English, to both pronounce and spell, invoking affirmation of hard work and do-goodness. In the days of the Republic, however, when would-be Senators canvassed Rome for votes before a certain Caesar put an end to all that democratic silliness, there was a downside to future ambition, negative connotations that stuck with it through Milton’s misplaced Paradiso and Dickensian London, when to be “ambitious” was something of an insult. All those high-minded orphans, looking to get ahead. And although that definition has fallen by the wayside in our historically-adverse age, within the literary world ambition, it seems, has rediscovered its devilish ways. To hear it from Goodreads reviews and Twitter rants, “ambitious” novels are far too self-involved, too concerned with their accomplishments and achievements—to say nothing of those who write them. The ambitious is, once again, persona non grata. It is into this monotone whirlwind that the endlessly inventive Lucy Ives launches her latest novel, among the most audacious, effective, and ambitious books of recent vintage, Life Is Everywhere.

The top line descriptor of the book is that it is a systems novel, the death of which has been much exaggerated of late, one that takes on the beastly word of academia. Erin Adamo is a Ph.D. candidate at one of those prestigious Manhattanite universities that lend themselves so well to novels, possessed of a fine literary mind, an imploding marriage, taxing parents, and an apartment for which she has no key. Through this stressed out graduate, Ives refracts a novel of multitudinous brilliance and luminosity, hammering away at convention and the well-trod path with the confidence and skill of an accomplished, fearless writer. It is a credit to both her vision and her publisher’s constitution that Life Is Everywhere, as wide-ranging and risk-taking a novel to be found this side of Infinite Jest, never once feels restrained or neutered.

Ives signals her intention in the opening ten pages, which marks the absolute last instance when Life Is Everywhere may be said to adhere to writing workshop life lessons. Our energetic and polymath narrative entity, who is in for quite the workload over the succeeding 400 pages, begins with a lively history of botulism. Across an approximate millennia and about eleven fields of scholarship, the narration speeds through the Black Death and botox to arrive in a graduate seminar, chairs arranged in a neat socratic semicircle, crash landing into the consciousness of a professor:

Meanwhile, the beings on earth most affected by botulism are not humans but rather waterfowl, which die at a rate of some ten to one hundred thousand per year. Special conditions are needed for the bacteria to produce spores and, thus, the toxin: warmth, protein, an anaerobic environment, wetness. Plant matter and invertebrate animals decomposing along the surface of a lake in sun meet these criteria. They are feasted upon by ignorant birdlife.

But the lives and/or corpses of herons and/or loons were not of particular interest to Faith Ewer. Neither a birder nor a twitcher was she, nor did she particularly enjoy leaving the limits of New York City, except by way of the major airport named for a dead president, and, then, only really—or, really only—to travel the francophone world, but mostly and usually to France itself, where she felt herself alluringly anonymous as well as just foreign enough to keep things stimulating. She was what is termed an expert, and this had the effect of making her, at least in her own imagination, a spy. There was tension in her back, near the neck and shoulders, and stale air in the room.

While the quote does little justice, especially given the effect the weight the preceding ten pages have on the reader, the passage is nonetheless an excellent example of Ives’ movement skills, which are on display throughout. Her third-person narration commands the universe of the book—a key element of any systems novel—without the slightest hesitation or uncertainty, guiding the reader along as if it was her own life, connections drawn along interior lines and misplaced notes.

Erin, whom we rather obliquely meet on her way out the door, leaves her campus after class to dine with her parents and bear witness to the final implosion of her domestic life. In her bag are three documents—a monograph by a professor in her department flanked by two manuscripts of her own—which, in a rather clever laying bare the device, gives Ives her opening. In the spirit of completeness, not to mention adherence to the literary traditions in which she writes, Ives reproduces in full these works, showing her impressive range and the depth of her fictive world. There is indeed no lack of audacity here.

As is true with all systems novels—or, in James Wood’s rather more alluring phrase, hysterical realism—there will be elements of Life Is Everywhere that appeal more to some readers than to others. Ives spares nothing in her examination of Erin’s school bag, chasing oblique theories about obscure French writers to and through their logical endpoints. But the novel is a crafted work of art, a universe of creation that boasts nothing if not confidence and unity of vision. In this sense Life Is Everywhere is a total success, an achievement of its artistic goals made all the more impressive by the loftiness of those aims.

As with all novels, even those on the biggest scales, it is on the sentence level that the war is won, plot-length battles notwithstanding. Ives’s vision is grand and well-executed but it is her technical-mechanical skill that brings everything together. Erin, on the street now, thinks back to an incident the week prior when she was nearly hit by a bus. She recalls how she’d seen a flashing movie of her life passing before her mind’s eye:

The first thing on the screen was Ben’s face. His fucked-up face. Apparently the movie ran in reverse. But, then again, Erin wasn’t actually dying, so it made sense that whatever vision this semi-near-death experience inspired, it was basically an exploration of subjects of current concern, not the great existential themes. Thus: Ben’s face. There it was, and the long bus flowed by, bopping to a standstill.

She was not going to call him. Nope. She was not going to bring him food at the friend’s apartment where he might still be holed up like a genuine fugitive. She was not going to look at messages he had sent her two months ago, when things were still all right, when they were still whatever they had been. She would not look at his endearments, the begging, the threats. She would not read anything he had written.

Ben was her husband.

The movement between Erin’s inner life and speech and the narrative entity’s recognizably slanted stage direction is precise, crafting a bleeding of the two that welds our heroine to her outsized plot. As large and hysterical as Ives’s fictive world may become, it is her mechanics that prevent the reader from ever losing sight of the human element, binding her audience fast to Erin’s fate in this wonderfully bizarre New York evening. Life Is Everywhere is a remarkable, refreshing book, one that offers a reminder of how bold fiction can be, how effectively the novel's form can capture life and its endless absurdities when brought together in unchecked artistic ambition.

https://chireviewofbooks.com/2022/10/10/life-is-everywhere/

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE Reviewed in L.A. Times

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Review: How Lucy Ives turned the ‘What’s in Her Bag’ trope into a brilliantly berserk novel

BY NINA RENATA ARON
OCT. 5, 2022 6:30 AM PT

'Life Is Everywhere'
By Lucy Ives
Graywolf: 400 pages, $18

“What’s in her bag?” It’s a standard question posed in women’s magazines and on YouTube. The answers are meant to give readers an intimate glimpse into a chic individual’s world: what lip gloss she uses, what novel she’s reading. In her brilliantly berserk third novel, “Life Is Everywhere,” Lucy Ives utilizes this conceit to unique effect. If we imagine, that is, that the bag in question belonged to an obsessive, freshly jilted graduate student, “nearly insane with doubt,” awash in stoner wonderment and frustrated literary ambition.

The putative protagonist is Erin Adamo, a grad student locked out of her apartment one night in New York City in the fall of 2014. But the curtain does not open immediately on Erin’s life. Instead, the novel begins with the fascinating history of the discovery of botulinum toxin, starting in the ninth century and following an unlikely path (via its commercial form, Botox) into the faces of millions of women, including a member of the English department where Erin is a student.

This disorienting but thrilling opening gambit is cinematic, like a view from space that pans swiftly down into a single pore on a human face. It prepares the reader for the wild ride ahead, for the grand sweep, the layering of chronologies, the manifold references and acts of repetition that make this novel feel at times like a vital but hard-to-follow art film.

Following the Botox history and a thorough, often hilarious accounting of Erin’s marital breakup and the current drama engulfing her department (involving an older professor and a young student, natch), the reader enters Erin’s bag. What’s in her bag? Two of her own fiction manuscripts; a monograph from 1978, complete with footnotes, authored by the controversial professor about one Démocrite Charlus LeGouffre (a fictional French novelist, but the monograph is so convincing, one takes to Google straightaway to check); a single page of academic writing by the Botoxed professor; and a Con Edison bill addressed to Erin’s erstwhile husband.

They are all here, in full, comprising roughly 250 pages of the book. It’s a move the reader might resent, but it’s pulled off compellingly. It helps that Erin’s manuscripts are at least partially autofiction. They recast events the reader already knows something about, lending the novel a sense of perpetual circling and recapitulating.

These documents represent multiple attempts, workings-through, iterations of the same material, and reading them feels tender if sometimes voyeuristic. We know, for example, that Cody, the philandering husband character in one of Erin’s manuscripts, is very similar to Erin’s husband. We are accessing her grief in another register, one that perhaps should feel more detached but actually is more immediate and sad.

In its spirited play with literary history real and imagined, “Life Is Everywhere” bears a resemblance to Shola von Reinhold’s extraordinary 2020 novel, “LOTE.” Ives’ story-within-a-story also recalls “1001 Arabian Nights,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy.” Is one of Erin’s characters named Hamlet because of the play-within-a-play in the "Hamlet”? Is LeGouffre an echo of Baudelaire’s poem “Le Gouffre” (gouffre is abyss in French) in “Les Fleurs du Mal”? (This LeGouffre attends Baudelaire’s funeral in the fictional monograph!) Or have we simply fallen into our own abyss?

Ives also presents an array of possible readings of her own work. Peppered throughout one of Erin’s manuscripts are reading comprehension exercises, an alcoholism self-assessment and a dream journal titled “Hypergraphia” (a behavioral condition marked by a compulsion to write). We know Erin’s maternal grandmother may have been a sufferer, but the frequent mention of the disorder also functions as a self-own. Just as the reader begins to suspect Ives is constitutionally incapable of cutting pages or paragraphs, she throws out the specter of an actual condition that might be afflicting her main character, possibly even the writer herself.

Erin’s narrator also nurses an obsession with the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, who made large-scale installations of tables of handwritten lines and numbers. These acts of serialization offer a comfort to Erin’s narrator and, maybe, like the multiple manuscripts herein, a key to the book the reader holds in her hands.

“Life Is Everywhere” has a lot in its bag, but at heart it is a novel of academia, situating itself within a long, neurotic tradition of arduous, insular intellectual labor and petty competition among scholars. Its depiction of department dynamics is so pitch perfect as to be truly disconcerting to anyone with personal experience. A professor in a “lurid, floor-length paisley skirt” can be seen “glowering in the corner under a stack of muted raw-silk scarves.” A fellow grad student, “brittle and wan and proud,” makes Erin feel bad about herself, ever announcing her participation in a conference or roundtable on “the figure of the clerk in whatever.”

“Erin did not want to be Alana Harris—and she certainly did not want to be like her,” Ives writes of this student. And yet, she wanted to possess the kind of “potent delusion” that made Alana Harris so productive. (“Grad school!!” this reader wrote in the margin.) In spite of its many forays into philosophy and even mysticism, these grindingly real, almost cringeworthy passages ground the novel.

Sometimes, however, the asides feel excessive. Erin enters the university library, and four pages follow on the life of the antisemitic architect who designed it in the 1970s, students who committed suicide there, the installation of panels to prevent similar future tragedies and the way the panels “symbolized the movement of data as zeros and ones.” It’s a lot. Ives is capable of virtuosic control — there are at least 10 different kinds of writing in this book, and all are carried off so masterfully it’s almost frightening. At the same time, this is a work of art that feels like a barely contained explosion.

But this unhinged campus novel is, to use a campus word, generative. It’s “good to think with” on a vast range of topics: the chauvinism of a strain of literary criticism, the ineffaceable damage done by families of origin, why we can never again recapture the happiness we felt in old relationships or even fully understand why we were actually there, to say nothing of why we are here now. In many instances, Erin seems to lose touch momentarily with the thing we call reality, and those moments feel the most real of all. “Phenomenal reality bobbed,” Ives writes. “It bounced, jiggled.”

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2022-10-05/review-how-lucy-ives-turned-the-whats-in-her-bag-trope-into-a-brilliantly-berserk-novel

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE Reviewed in Booklist

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https://www.booklistonline.com/Life-Is-Everywhere/pid=9766623

Lit Hub on LIFE IS EVERYWHERE

Yuka Igarashi’s first acquisition at Graywolf is a very cool-sounding novel by Lucy Ives.
By Emily Temple
June 2, 2021, 9:30am

Literary Hub is excited to report that Graywolf’s new Executive Editor Yuka Igarashi has made her very first acquisition for the beloved independent press: a new novel by Lucy Ives called Life Is Everywhere, which is currently scheduled to be published in Fall 2022. Here’s the skinny from Graywolf:

The novel is about Erin Adamo, a PhD student living in New York who, in the midst of a breakup with her husband, gets locked out of her apartment. She has with her a debit card, a Metrocard, a phone, and a bag containing papers. Instead of asking anyone for help, she goes to her university library and spends the night there.

That’s the whole plot, but the trick of the book is that it’s also made up of the contents of the bag that Erin is carrying, which includes a novella and novel she’s written, as well as her academic advisor’s book about (the fictional) Démocrite Charlus LeGouffre, a person of ambiguous gender born to a British prostitute living in Paris in the 1800s. Through these documents we start to see how both Erin and LeGouffre live inside dysfunctional systems—romantic relationships, family, academia, society—that erase women. Lucy is a brilliant writer on gender, and Life is Everywhere is smart, funny, and packed with ideas.

“I worked with Lucy Ives on her story collection Cosmogony and the novel Loudermilk and am delighted to be publishing Life Is Everywhere, in which we get to see Lucy’s outrageous wit, emotional precision, and sheer storytelling charisma working on an epic scale,” Igarashi told Literary Hub. “I think this book proposes a new kind of ‘systems novel.’ It’s about how individual selves act, and are acted upon, inside various systems—family, marriage, academia, gender, society—but it also reveals the instability of our notions of selves and of systems, and shows a new way to narrate the relationship between the two. Plus it’s just very fun to read, since it includes things like the history of botulism, a fragment of sculpture with mysterious powers, stolen artifacts, secret identities, and academic scandal.”

Fun to read and full of botulism? We’ll be first in line.

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On site.

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https://lithub.com/yuka-igarashis-first-acquisition-at-graywolf-is-a-very-cool-sounding-novel-by-lucy-ives/

PM deal report.

New York Magazine on COSMOGONY

The Paris Review on COSMOGONY

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Cover.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/04/02/staff-picks-bars-balzac-and-buses/

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The Weird World Of 'Cosmogony' Is Immensely Inviting
By Lily Meyer

Lucy Ives has a mind well-suited to short-story writing, though her recent collection, Cosmogony, is her first. She combines an experimental spirit with roving curiosity, which perhaps explains why her prior body of work is so wide-ranging: In the past 12 years, she's published two novels, several books of poetry, and a significant quantity of art criticism. All, I am pleased to report, are good. So is Cosmogony. Ives — this is a compliment — is a real literary weirdo, and her stories are strange without ever performing their strangeness. Their plots and mechanisms can be baffling, and yet each one is emotionally precise in the extreme. Often, I was moved without knowing what had moved me — a rare feeling in art as in life, and an absolute treat.

Ives's stories may be puzzling, but they aren't opaque. Many writers interested in weirdness overload their stories with tangled sentences or thesaurus words; she's not into that. Line to line, Cosmogony is snappy, voice-driven, and immensely inviting. One story, "Scary Sites," is a dialogue between friends, stripped of any descriptive prose. All the others — with the exception of "Guy," which is the collection's only miss — feel nearly as conversational. "The Poisoners," a crookedly sweet account of an adulterous affair gone right, gave me the vicarious thrill of a good gossip session. Reading "A Throw of the Dice" and "Cosmogony," which are two of the collection's strongest stories, was like listening to a friend lament her mistakes. This fictional relatability is an achievement in "A Throw of the Dice," whose unnamed protagonist is a recent college graduate struggling to set up a life in the Bay Area. In "Cosmogony," it's downright exceptional, given that the story opens with the narrator's best friend getting engaged to a blue-legged, yellow-eyed demon.

As happens often, Cosmogony's title story is its best. I found it nearly perfect. It is at once a philosophical argument — Enlightenment secularism: Good or bad? — and a cosmic reframing of the female-friendship tug-of-wars dramatized in books like My Brilliant Friend or Conversations with Friends. In "Cosmogony," as in the others, the issue at hand is worldview. The narrator's friend is marrying a demon; the narrator herself, perhaps in retaliation, begins dating an "actual angel." Predictably, this creates troubles between the two women. It also disturbs the narrator's belief that she lives in a post-Enlightenment "secular zone. Sure, there might be devils and angels and true believers, but what did that really matter, now that we had the news?" That question — how much does the cosmic matter? — animates the rest of the story, and of the collection. Over and over, Ives asks the reader, in sly and extremely funny ways, to trouble their "Enlightenment-inheriting" belief that humans are at the center of existence, or even know, at any given time, what's going on.

Some of her narrators at first seem befuddled simply by themselves or their social worlds. The friends in "Scary Sites" are parsing art-world dating after #MeToo; Christine, the narrator of "Recognition of This World is Not the Invention of It," is attempting to work out whether she wants to continue in her marriage, or her life. Always, though, a philosophical question lurks beneath Ives's stories' surfaces. Both Christine and the friends in "Scary Sites" are confronting the fundamental, immoral fact that, as Christine puts it, "[t]he way things work is, everything is possible and everything is permitted." If that's true, how is a person in a secular world supposed to know how to act?

Other stories trouble human existence without fretting over secularity. In "Louise Nevelson," the narrator, grumbling over "how thoroughly my life has been defined by my female status," declares defiantly, "I am one of the animals. I live among the other human animals and am one of them. Nothing animal is outlandish to me" — a assertion she seems to hope will, somehow, help her escape the infinite expectations placed on women. (Spoiler: it does not.) In "Bitter Tennis," the narrator leads a regular New York life while claiming to live on the bottom of the ocean, "among the bristlemouths, the viperfish, the anglerfish, the cookiecutter sharks, the eelpouts." To what extent, the story asks, is her life a full human one? Can you lead a complete human existence while thinking of yourself partly as an animal?

Ives gives more answers than short-story writers tend to. She's done with the Enlightenment; she rolls her narratorial eyes at the inching progress of "women's liberation, so called;" she sees in the animal kingdom a set of role models for worrying less over the fact that everything is possible, and working to live more simply, even as human complication hovers infinitely at the edges. Her conclusions are deft and persuasive; she frames them less as revelations, which would be the standard short-fiction choice, than as primal knowledge unearthed by bizarre circumstance. I'd move to her weird cosmos any day.

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https://www.npr.org/2021/03/10/975319243/the-weird-world-of-cosmogony-is-immensely-inviting

On site.

The Brooklyn Rail on COSMOGONY

Lucy Ives’s Cosmogony
By Cigdem Asatekin

There are moments in life that one thinks will add up to something decisive in the end. But more often than not, it’s revealed that they were insignificant in the grand scheme of things—assuming there is one. Lucy Ives’s debut collection of short stories, Cosmogony, is made up of these kinds of moments: a meme you thought would get a few laughs, a tedious coffee date with an artist, a pun you remember from years ago, a sculptor who is a plagiarist but also your mom’s friend, a mysteriously replaced bodega cat.

Cosmogony consists of 12 stories, every single one a profound narrative that takes a different form. When they get surreal, they are reminiscent of dream sequences. Even when they don’t, there is the slight hint of something unearthly, or at least uncanny throughout the book. Yet they all sound so familiar. On a sunny day one can, in a moment’s flash, time travel to visit an old relationship like in “The Volunteer.” One can feel the world “attempting to recompose itself,” growing as soft as a blanket, after the headrush of newfound love similarly to Will and Jamie in “The Poisoners.” Moments are written in such clarity and tact that an angel on earth working in IT, or a woman who lives at the bottom of the ocean taking the A train feels completely reasonable. Lucy Ives writes prose with the poetry inherent in her words, making the natural unnatural and the monotone fascinating, filtering and projecting the reality through the eyes of a poet. While doing so, she unveils parts of human nature through the book’s ostensibly mundane events, like the worldly games of tennis and Murder, or a proverbially unhealthy relationship of a woman and her mother. Some stories include marriage, specifically early marriage, and some bleak aspects of personal, familial, and professional relationships of contemporary living. Darkness finds its way through these cracks. “This is the way things work,” writes Ives in one of those moments, “not through vision but through blindness.”

When Ives writes about art, biographical or historical information finds its place gracefully within the fiction without being mere footnotes. Her reflections provide the basis of a delicate understanding of art criticism in relation to creative writing. Ives’s previous novel, Loudermilk, had a similar approach to longform art writing, and works of art are essential to Cosmogony as well. Their influence permeates all, even if they are only peripheral mentions. A Frida Kahlo portrait, an incredibly “weird” art object of mystery presented to a copywriter in “The Care Bears Find and Kill God,” a violent novel by Joyce Carol Oates, and works of sculptor Louise Nevelson meet halfway with Craigslist ads and a framer’s love affair. Meditations of Gottfried Leibniz (and his theory of monads) and Walter Benjamin (and his essay on human speech) are weaved seamlessly into the narrative, connecting the book’s insightful writing to its author’s wit. In “A Throw of the Dice,” there is a perceptive mention of shipwrecks in art in connection to Stéphane Mallarmé that complements the first-person narration of a writer who translates Symbolist poetry. In the uncanny world of Cosmogony, this makes perfect sense with story-within-a-story writings of erotica. Ives also plays with form as one story, “Scary Sites,” consists only of a back-and-forth conversation, and “Guy” is written in the style of a Wikipedia entry. The Internet’s underlying dominance in daily life has its marks on Ives’s writing as well. From its myths, terms, specific language and memes, there is no escape. “The Care Bears Find and Kill God” walks away from an expected climax by an unexpected mention of a funny image the narrator saw online. “It’s a joke,” she says.

The characters and their surroundings are recognizable to anyone in contact with any metropolitan art scene. Like Ives’s previous novels Loudermilk and Impossible Views of the World, Cosmogony emits the almost privileged feeling of being an insider of the art world. For an individual who is actually in the arts, it’s thrilling: Reading “Trust,” it was certain that once upon a time I was the one who had coffee with the artist who produces x. But having worked at an art gallery isn’t necessary to feel the human connection and sense of belonging conveyed by Ives. In the middle of a world full of the similarly absurd, I have been so many of these characters. I had found a well-hidden FedEx package which was an actual miracle. I sent images of numerous bodega cats to friends. I may have even dated a demon for a little bit. He was just some guy.

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https://brooklynrail.org/2021/03/books/Lucy-Ivess-Cosmogony

On site.

Public Books on Loudermilk

WRITERS: KNOW THYSELF IN EXCESS
BY AARON COLTON

If it is easy to mock the MFA writer, then it is easier still to mock the MFA writer who writes about a writer getting an MFA. How self-indulgent! How clichéd! How many more novels about young writers struggling to write must we suffer? In studies of this genre, critics of contemporary fiction often fixate on its definitive, and most frustrating, characteristic: “self-awareness.” They meditate on how slippery a concept it is, how strange it is to venerate it as a goal, how small a step toward true moral awakening.

All valid, perhaps. But critiques of self-awareness in novel form tend to portray the concept as merely a personality trait, a quality that characters (or even authors themselves) have either too much or not enough of. Yet, as the latest batch of self-aware fiction—in particular, Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk; or, The Real Poet; or, The Origin of the World (2019) and Andrew Martin’s Early Work (2018)—makes clear, self-awareness need not stop at the individual. Even with no shortage of figures vain, self-obsessed, or plainly insufferable, Ives’s and Martin’s novels exemplify how an author might deploy self-awareness to gain crucial insights into the very environments that cultivate self-aware tendencies, in writers fictional or real.

Ives’s and Martin’s project is an investigation into what we might call “institutional self-awareness.” In such efforts, authors put under the microscope an array of writer-characters and the principles of authorship and creative labor they navigate within specific contexts—and in the case of Ives and Martin, specifically academic contexts.

Seen through the lens of institutional self-awareness, the self-directed obsessions of Ives’s characters extend beyond those characters’ individual psyches. Through her varyingly self-aware figures, Ives offers a broader view onto the limited kinds of writing practices that the institution of the MFA rewards.

Meanwhile, Martin’s self-aware characters take us one step further. In Martin’s usage, the self-aware writer demonstrates how MFA programs sculpt not only the writing but also the people within their orbit, regardless of whether they are MFA educated themselves. Early Work shows how such programs in fact program the innermost thoughts, fears, and even desires of self-identifying writers, both within and beyond the walls of institutions.

This is to say, for Ives and Martin, self-awareness shows nothing less than the forces that shape art and the lives of art’s creators.

“LOUDERMILK” AND THE AWARENESS OF MFA DOCTRINE
Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk is a campus novel rife with immature hijinks, departmental politics, and literary subterfuge. Its major characters—students newly matriculated into “the Seminars,” a top-flight MFA program evocative of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—include a libertine, recently postcollegiate bro masquerading as a poet (the titular T. A. Loudermilk), his debilitatingly introverted ghostwriter (Harry Rego), and a fiction writer unable, after the death of her estranged father (himself a famously obscure poet), to write (Clare Elwil).

But where many a campus novel turns a critical eye on academia, Loudermilk appears uninterested in critique. Instead, Ives reveals the literary possibilities—both generative and destructive—that arise in the collisions between varying experiences of creative-writing values.

Ives’s characters are themselves test cases for the effects of self-awareness on the creative willingness and craft of students within the MFA program. What happens, Ives asks, when students of wildly different personalities and histories give themselves to a program that predicates creativity on productivity? And what happens to these students when they take to heart the famously self-conscious dictums of creative writing: “write what you know” and “find your voice”?

In particular, Clare and Harry provide inverted images of what it means to take up or break from institutional directives to be self-aware. For Clare, the prospect of writing from what she knows after the loss of her father proves paralyzing—in no small part because she had embarked on the trip coinciding with his accidental death explicitly in pursuit of experiences from which to write, “lust[ing] delicately after new material.”

So, as Clare falls prey to the twin tortures of writer’s block and imposter syndrome, she also experiences creative anxieties made doubly reflexive by an internalized, and departmentally reinforced, understanding of the MFA student as incessantly productive. “Is it OK not to be working?” Clare obsesses, a thought made all the more distressing by her belief that, as a writer, “one must work to justify one’s being.”

Similarly, as Loudermilk’s ghostwriter, Harry comes to understand his literary task in explicitly quantitative terms: “He needs to find out how people write a lot of poems, because he’s pretty sure that he and Loudermilk—or, rather, he—are/is going to have to write a lot of them.” But unlike Clare, whose initially uncritical adherence to writing what she knows brings only self-doubt, Harry is described as having few life experiences at all to draw from.

Absent institutional guidance, Harry develops an approach to verse in which the impersonal poet functions like a radio tower: catching, scrambling, and rebroadcasting the noise of the George W. Bush era, in which the novel is set. Ironically, this approach receives unequivocal celebration in the Seminars, though this praise is funneled through Loudermilk, who workshops Harry’s poem as his own.

In this way, Ives refashions institutional directives into literary conflicts. She tinkers with what might happen if a character were to hold too closely to a particular rule or to never have been capable of following it. And in so doing, she not only stages the self-awareness that MFA dictums command but also shows how the writers negotiating those dictums might find their writing energized or obstructed.

Ives’s investigation reaches its apex on the subject of “voice”: a quality of writing broadly understood as a matter of personal authenticity, something a writer must well up from inside themselves and nourish (in other words, “find”).

For Clare and Harry alike, the imperative to foster one’s true, singular voice begins as an impediment. Because she may only express the experiences that she herself knows, Clare can neither engage nor fathom the engagement of her voice. Harry’s aversion to his own voice is both bodily and creative. Physically, his voice is awkward and grating—“a little in between and out of bounds of normal registers”—but in Harry’s self-aware conception, his voice “is not even his.” So repulsed is Harry by his own voice that he conceives of an entirely separate being who articulates his words, a presence who, as a poet, is “capable of acts of perception obviously beyond [Harry].”

FOR SOME WRITERS SELF-AWARENESS IS A WELLSPRING, WHILE FOR OTHERS IT IS A MORASS.
Yet these conditions are far from final. For Clare, it is only by failing to write from experience and meditating in torturous self-consciousness on the limitations of the adage that she eventually discovers how to sidestep her obsession with productivity. “Clare can write,” she realizes, “as long as she does not do it”—that is, by betraying programmatic directives and writing, like Harry, in an imagined persona, and from a voice, that “sounds nothing like her.”

Meanwhile, Harry’s self-aware aversion to his voice resolves in an embrace of his own vocal characteristics. As a suspicious classmate eventually coaxes Harry into a poetry-recitation contest with Loudermilk at a departmental soiree, the audience quickly recognizes Harry’s voice as that of the celebrated poet. So, in a reversal of Clare’s epiphany, the voice that Harry had previously separated from himself he accepts as authentically his: a voice, in poetry as in person, “high and low both at once … [with a] superwavy tonal filling that makes you feel it really hard, right at the center of your body.”

From this perspective, Ives portrays self-aware characters not simply for narrative purposes but to instruct about broader questions of literature and institutions. Having spotlighted how the MFA reproduces self-awareness through literary values, Ives neither critiques nor lauds. Instead, she explores what a literary mandate for self-knowledge can mean for the experiences—and, ultimately, crafts—of different writers. And in taking the production of literature as material for storytelling (writing what she herself knows), Ives demonstrates the randomness of those very principles: how for some writers self-awareness is a wellspring, while for others it is a morass.

DESIRE ACROSS INSTITUTIONS IN “EARLY WORK”
Like Loudermilk, Andrew Martin’s Early Work presents a cast of self-aware writers defined by the writing they should be—but, crucially, are not—accomplishing. Yet where Ives highlights self-awareness as a quality deliberately cultivated by institutions, Martin explores the personal repercussions of such self-awareness for the writers who bear it. Martin shows how, even for writers unaffiliated with the MFA program, a fixation on institutions can warp their very self and relationships.

Martin asks: If self-awareness dictates not just a writer’s output but also their capacity for human connection, must one unlearn self-consciousness to become a better person?

Early Work centers around an infidelity between two stalled writers, Peter—a disillusioned English PhD candidate who has followed his poet partner, Julia, to Charlottesville, Virginia, for her studies as a medical student—and Leslie, a scriptwriter who has left Texas both to write and to rethink her impending marriage. The true aspirations of each lie in fiction. And while neither writes for much of the novel, Peter and Leslie’s common penchant for ironizing their own unproductivity and literary interests becomes the basis for their mutual attraction.

“I only read books without stories,” Peter quips in their first encounter. “Why not skip the words, too?” Leslie responds. “Move right along to the cold particularities of life.” In such instances, a clever self-consciousness gives Peter and Leslie a grammar for flirtation; in deprecating the time they waste on “nothing good” or on being “stoned and thinking about, like, the ideal character-defining gesture,” they make clear their intellectual and cultural compatibility.

Alongside these self-aware tendencies, the novel configures its partnerships through an awareness of institutional affiliation, with the initial pairing of Peter and Julia presenting a dichotomous picture. Although floundering in both research and fiction, Peter retains the closest ties to the university. While characteristically ironic in his treatment of professional training, Peter recognizes its necessity; he conceives of doctoral study as “like an MFA, but I’d actually learn something.”

Julia’s associations run opposite. Unaffiliated with academic letters, she separates writing from her medical studies for periodic “poetry fugue[s].” And while Peter’s “half-finished” submissions to literary journals are summarily rejected, Julia’s win acceptance at “good” venues.

Through these differences, Martin depicts Peter and Julia’s relationship in not just contrasting personalities but opposite creative frameworks. The consequence of this opposition is that Peter’s desire for yet another creative in Leslie cannot be understood merely as romantic or erotic. Instead, for Peter, to desire another writer is also to fantasize about writing from a different professional circumstance, or as a different writer altogether.

Seen in this light, Peter’s lust for Leslie maintains his aversion to institutions but relocates it into a relationship with a writer unlikely to threaten him with superior productivity. In Leslie, Peter can continue to live vicariously through the achievements of his partner—“It was … exactly what I would have written if I’d had any idea how,” he thinks on reading a past publication of hers—while also seeing his own frustrations reflected in her stagnation. She is, as Peter puts it, one of the “badass writers” that “this town needs more [of]” (i.e., not the typical MFA student, and therefore desirable), but not a writer who threatens to complete much of any writing. So, in Martin’s design, desire, infidelity, and partnership coalesce to demonstrate how for a writer such as Peter, ever conscious of institutions, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the logic of “creative writing” from the logic of life itself.

Yet, like Ives, Martin does not posit self-awareness as an obstacle writers must overcome. Instead, he reframes it as a perhaps inevitable phase of artistic—and personal—development. None of the novel’s characters transcends self-awareness; rather, they modulate their self-aware habits, learning to live with them in better ways.

After partnering anew with Leslie in Missoula, Montana—another flagship-university town boasting a top MFA program (which Martin himself attended)—Peter comes to accept that “his true calling [is] in PR” and not fiction. And while this realization does not ameliorate his habitual self-deprecation, it does appear to set his stalled life in motion.

Maintaining a literary trajectory, Leslie tempers self-awareness with an earnest, if cautious, self-seriousness. “It did seem possible lately,” the novel concludes,

that there was a chance she was what she’d long imagined herself to be: one of the chosen few to whom the task of chronicling the inner life had been given. There were hours—single hours, sometimes just minutes—when her thoughts moved down into her hands and transformed into something different on the screen in front of her, an eloquent translation of what had been in her head into something smarter, more substantial. She was chasing that now.

No less self-aware, Leslie reclaims her capacity for writing by attuning herself to her own creative promise. If she is to write, Leslie realizes, then she must—terrifying as it may be—regard herself as a person whose talents demand putting expression into words.

The novel does not, however, settle on a reductive portrait of Peter as a failed and Leslie as a successful writer. Rather, through their experiences Martin demonstrates how, in the lives of writers, the self-aware habits, ambitions, and desires predicated by the institution of literature are, however inevitable or irritating, also the stuff of personal growth.

It may well be that a writer’s self-awareness cannot be severed from institutional concerns (such as productivity and affiliation). Even so, the experience of self-awareness remains profoundly human—and even constructive—in art as in life.

SELF-AWARENESS BEYOND THE SELF
Difficult it may be to wrestle with self-awareness. When a character spends an entire novel contemplating their own self-presentation, genius, or intellectual and aesthetic commitments—as do not only the writer characters of Ives and Martin but also those of Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and others in the most recent wave of “autofiction”—readers could be forgiven for losing patience.

But in viewing self-awareness as a concept both personal and structural, Ives and Martin throw new light on our frustrations with the self-aware. In their works, we find that novels of self-awareness—and novels of self-aware writers in particular—provide grounds for teasing out the differences between productive self-awareness and stagnant self-centeredness, not only in literary figures but also in real people.

While the self-aware writer may still rank among the least appealing of contemporary fiction’s recurring characters, those patient (or masochistic) enough to sit with them can learn to discern the systemic origins of what resembles self-obsession, or how what presents as narcissism might in fact be a step toward maturity.

This is not to go so far as to propose self-awareness as either essential or desirable. Neither Ives nor Martin is in the business of moral instruction, and their characters are, fundamentally, instruments of narrative conflict. What both ultimately offer is a better question to ask of self-awareness in its cultural manifestations: Where does this quality come from, and where can it take us?

We should be aware enough to listen.

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https://www.publicbooks.org/writers-know-thyself-in-excess/

On site.

Publisher's Weekly on COSMOGONY

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/85375-hidden-narratives-pw-talks-with-lucy-ives.html

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Workshop at the Poetry Project, Spring 2021

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The Poetry Project offers various low-cost, sliding-scale, and no-fee workshops and reading groups where we attempt to expand participation in cultural production and discussion, and challenge conventional power vectors around who is or can be a student, teacher, scholar to foster a learning model that is counter-hierarchical and more circularly discursive. Teachers, experienced writers, and new writers work collectively with a shared dedication to creating exciting poetry and exploring a wide range of literary genres, styles, and traditions.

Memory Palaces: Visions, Echoes, Forms — 10-Session Workshop
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
VIRTUAL
March 9 - May 11
Led by: Lucy Ives

At a time when digital techniques for saving and indexing allow us to consolidate endless memory in pocket-size devices, what memorial power remains in a sentence or line? This workshop is an intensive introduction to the work of art as mnemonic device, or system to aid and deepen, and/or create, memory. In this series we will explore strategies by means of which memory may be housed in or recovered via writing. Following Frances Yates’s descriptions of occult visual and literary technologies in The Art of Memory and through varied prompts and exercises, we will compose our own “memory palaces,” provisional structures though they may be. And we will consider other texts that both act as mnemonics and describe tactics for seeking, containing, inscribing, preserving, transforming, and reimagining memory, particularly in postcolonial and postmodern contexts. Nor will we overlook the dynamics of forgetting.

https://www.poetryproject.org/events/memory-palaces-visions-echoes-forms-10-session-workshop-lucy-ives

Hingston & Olsen Short Story Advent Calendar

The Hingston & Olsen Short Story Advent Calendar is a collection of 25 individually sealed booklets to open, one by one, on the mornings leading up to Christmas.

From the website:

For the past five years, the Short Story Advent Calendar has lit up libraries and living rooms around the world with shimmering smorgasbords of bite-sized literary fiction. But all good things must come to an end. So grab the emergency schnapps from the back of the liquor cabinet, and join us for one last holiday hurrah.

You know the drill by now. The 2020 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories from some of the best writers around. Contributors to this year's set include:

Sara O’Leary (The Ghost in the House)

Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria)

Jim Shepard (Like You’d Understand, Anyway)

Amber Sparks (I Do Not Forgive You)

Adam Sternbergh (The Blinds)

and [REDACTED x 20*]!

[*spoiler: includes a story by Lucy Ives]

As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know exactly what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1.

This year’s slipcase, with its electric-yellow lining and spot-glossed lettering, comes wrapped in two rubber bands to keep those booklets snug in their beds. (Those who attempt sneaking a peak before the first of December are at risk of being snapped.)

Order here.

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Boxed set.

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https://www.hingstonandolsen.com/2020

Cover.

NYTBR Recommends Loudermilk

EDITORS’ CHOICE
9 New Books We Recommend This Week
June 13, 2019

“I have a lot of apps open in my brain right now,” Lin-Manuel Miranda once said. We know the feeling. That quote turns up late in David Epstein’s new book, “Range,” which reassures committed dilettantes that there’s merit in the generalist’s approach to life: When you’re “facing uncertain environments,” Epstein writes, “breadth of experience is invaluable.”

With that in mind, we offer a generalist’s buffet of books for your consideration this week. Start with Epstein’s own, then move on to an account of the ground beneath your feet (“Underland,” by the gifted nature writer Robert Macfarlane) or a novel based on the real-life saint of Sudan, as St. Josephine Bakhita is known (“Bakhita,” by Véronique Olmi). Read about pandemics, or the settlers of the Northwest Territory, or Neville Chamberlain’s ill-advised strategy of appeasing Hitler; read a biography of the con artist who gave rise to the loaded term “welfare queen,” or settle in with a satire about creative writing programs, or enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert’s new historical novel about the world of New York showgirls. Open some apps in your brain. No environment is more uncertain than today’s, after all, so you might as well put Epstein’s theory to the test and broaden your knowledge.

Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles

LOUDERMILK: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, by Lucy Ives. (Soft Skull, paper, $16.95.) The title character of Ives’s clever attack on writing programs is a hunky bro who decides he can make it big as a poet if somebody else will just write the poems for him. “Ives scores some fine touches in her satire,” Caleb Crain writes in his review, but “in the end I found myself more interested in the novel’s half-hidden earnest side: its exhibition, with persuasive bitterness, of the damage that can be wreaked by the idea that literature is competition, especially when the idea is institutionalized in a classroom.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/review/9-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

The Georgia Review on Loudermilk

https://www.thegeorgiareview.com/posts/on-loudermilk-or-the-real-poet-or-the-origin-of-the-world-by-lucy-ives/

June–August 2019 Frieze Magazine

The New Yorker on MFA Novels

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Issue 204 cover.

What Does It Mean to Be a “Real” Writer?

Two satirical novels, set in M.F.A. programs, challenge our ideas of literary authenticity and achievement.
By Hermione Hoby

Talent is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s something that can’t be defined, only recognized—an irreducible and unteachable entity, like charisma or humor, and its confirmation all the more coveted for being so. In his fundamental study, “The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,” Mark McGurl detailed how, in postwar America, anointing and cultivating literary talent became the purview of creative-writing programs and how, in turn, certain modes of writing came to be privileged above others. With this professionalization—indeed, institutionalization—of a nation’s art form, three injunctions popularized by the M.F.A. became holy writ. Write what you know; show, don’t tell; find your voice. Of this trinity, only the second speaks explicitly to craft and seems readily practicable. It’s the first and last dicta, however, that have proved the most influential, not through their utility but through their confounding simplicity. The question isn’t whether you should cultivate knowledge or voice. The question instead is a screamed “Yes, but how?”

When we identify talent, we say that we’ve found “the real deal,” a flimsy idiom for a solid belief—that, although talent as an entity may be undefinable, it’s still provable. It’s on this putative objectivity, in all its insidious allure, that M.F.A. programs are predicated, offering themselves as arbiters of talent who are able to alchemize literary promise into achievement. Many have found these claims at once irresistible and dubious. One year after graduating from the University of Arizona’s creative-writing program, David Foster Wallace wrote, “The only thing a Master of Fine Arts degree actually qualifies one to do, is teach . . . Fine Arts.” Wallace’s essay, “The Fictional Future” was one of several collected, in 2014, in “MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,” a book that reanimated and enshrined questions both existential (Can writing be taught?) and practical (How does a writer pay rent?). The bathos of the latter tends to casts an absurd light on the former.

So it is that two new satirical novels set in creative-writing programs, Lucy Ives’s “Loudermilk: Or, the Real Poet; or, the Origin of the World” and Mona Awad’s “Bunny,” engage with the chimera of “the real deal.” They are set, respectively, in a version of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a version of Brown University and are authored by graduates of those institutions. These books constitute a kind of institutional critique, to borrow a term from the art world, or an institutional autofiction, to adapt an existing literary term. On the one hand, the satirical tone of these novels tips us off that the institutions being portrayed are fundamentally defective. And yet the pages in our hands are tangible counterfactuals! Because isn’t the published novel—the material proof every candidate longs for—evidence of these institutions’ success? Here is the M.F.A. program becoming self-conscious, displaying both impatience with and anxiety over the criterion of authenticity.

The centerpiece of the program is the workshop, or rather, excuse me, the Workshop; in David O. Dowling’s recently published history of America’s most famous creative-writing program, “A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” the word is reverentially capitalized. For anyone unfamiliar with insular world of the M.F.A., the term might conjure scenes of elvin ingenuity—merry workers laboring at their craft. Instead, this mainstay of the creative-writing program has more often been understood as a process of destruction, of tough love that tears you down to build you up. Dowling writes admiringly about the “volatile cocktail of ego and competition”—the “blood sport” of peers ripping each other’s work to shreds—that pervaded the Iowa workshop in the decades after its founding, in 1936.

His book opens with the boozing, brawling John Berryman—he of the “blow-torch approach” to teaching—receiving a punch from a student. Lucy Ives’s funny, cerebral “Loudermilk,” which takes its epigraph (“Rilke was a jerk”) from Berryman himself, lampoons this kind of masculine swagger. Its prime object of satire, however, is the very bedrock of the workshop’s pedagogy, the identification of artistic achievement. The novel’s titular handsome idiot, Troy Augustus Loudermilk, is a fraud in the most incontrovertible sense; it’s only by passing off the poems of his nebbishy friend Harry Rego as his own that he’s gained entry to the prestigious Seminars for Writing. These plagiarized poems go down well, but what Loudermilk is truly rewarded for is not his artistic achievement on the page but his charismatic performance in the workshop, including cracking jokes and insulting his professor’s sexual prowess. When you’re a fraud and don’t care, you have nothing to lose.

It’s not just the students who don’t care: Loudermilk’s professors include the dyspeptic (and, in his belligerence and drunkenness, rather Berryman-esque) Don Hillary, who welcomes his young poets with a showily profane speech, assuring them that he does not give “one donkey fuck what you do while you’re here.” One student, Clare, overhearing this speech as she walks by his classroom, wonders, “Could one imagine that his pronouncements herald a really excellent form of meritocracy, somehow? That his is, paradoxically, the most sublime of metrics—since incomprehensible, profane, and therefore absolute?” In a field where the “metrics” are so hard to define, much less achieve, you can stop caring at all—like Loudermilk and Hillary—or, like Harry, you can care too much.

As Harry, whom we understand to be a “real” talent, becomes more invested in his poems, he writes himself a long list of questions that include “Am I the one who is writing these words?” and “Who is the one who is writing?” Eventually, he concludes that “the only way to get to the poem is to drop into a perfectly Harry-shaped shadow.” In other words, he must vacate himself to find himself, must fake himself into authenticity. We sense that his private litany of questions, though painful, are far more conducive to his literary growth than the public jousting of the workshop.

Ives’s hyperbolic satire—her outsized, loquacious characters, her stylistic brio—lays bare the central fallacy of “write what you know.” In one sense, we believe Ives is drawing from her own, all-too-real experience. And yet, with its ludic meta-fictionality and the self-conscious construction of characters, the novel cleverly dodges knowable reality, circumventing the question of authenticity altogether.

In “Bunny,” a work of toothsome and fanged intelligence, the agons of ego and machismo are replaced by the sly and saccharine maneuvers of a femme-y clique who call themselves “Bunnies.” Our narrator, the studiedly uneffusive Samantha, joins these women in the first all-female fiction cohort at the prestigious Warren College. “Workshop is an integral part of the Process,” pontificates Ursula, a professor whose self-regard is sustained by the idolatry of her students. (Here, the capitalization of the word “workshop” is scathing.) “Workshop never ‘confuses us,’ rather it opens us up, helps us grow, leads us in new and difficult and exciting directions. My Workshop in particular, I think you’ll find.”

My Workshop: the proprietorial claim is key. The tenor of the workshop proceeds from the leader, which is to say, the particularities and prejudices of one person—one ego. At some point taste, like talent, becomes an irreducible entity. The Bunnies engage in frothy pieties and hyperbolic niceties, telling each other things like, “Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?” Within a rhetoric of universal approbation, every writer turns craven; all talent withers.

Though Awad plays knowingly with the tropes of eighties movies (the book’s hot-pink jacket copy mentions the cult classic “Heathers”; like Winona Ryder in that movie, Samantha has an air of quiet mutiny), we recognize these Bunnies as the apotheosis of that most contemporary archetype, the basic bitch. They love froyo from Pinkberry. They binge-watch “The Bachelorette.” Their Instagram captions are littered with the self-evidently false hashtag #amwriting. “Basic” in this sense is a synonym of sorts for “inauthentic”; we recognize the type, or at least we think we do. These Bunnies, so very bloodless seeming, are in fact quite bloodthirsty. Because, in addition to writing fiction, they’re engaged in an extracurricular workshop of their own devising, where, unlike in the simpering diplomacy of the classroom, their creativity is literally visceral. They conjure dream boys, real flesh-and-blood creations that they call “drafts,” “hybrids,” “darlings,” from rabbits. Unfortunately, these characters can get unruly, and the girls keep an axe close at hand. “Sometimes you have to kill your darlings, you know?” coos one Bunny. Just as Ives has constructed a postmodern playhouse to deflate the notion of authenticity, Awad has winkingly deployed the great ruse of the supernatural.

Are these Bunnies for real? The answer to this question is a twofold no. They are false in their friendships, and, worse, they have no true talent. Even in their own workshop, they never quite manage to pull things off. Their “darlings” always fall just a bit short of the intended reality, lacking fully operational hands or penises. In other words, the Bunnies fail both literally, within their necromancy, and metaphorically, within their writing, to bring their characters to life.

Like rabbits, bad writers are everywhere, bred by M.F.A. programs across the country, turning out banal, interchangeable stories. When Samantha finally conjures her own piece of literature, it’s from a lone and noble creature—a stag. Her creation, Max, is the workshop’s first fully functioning boy. In the wickedly hilarious climax of the novel, the Bunnies show up to their last class bruised, bleeding, and ready, finally, to get real. With sweet feminist irony, it’s this dream boy made flesh who finally liberates them from that feminine yoke, extreme faux niceness. One classmate passes a simple and supremely unsayable verdict of another’s work: “I hated it.”

Max, Samantha’s triumph of extracurricular creativity, is also the agent of institutional destruction. In true Frankensteinien fashion, the proof of the author’s brilliance is her character’s apparent autonomy. No one proves this more starkly than Ava—Samantha’s lodestar and world center, her beloved best friend, whose contempt for the Bunnies (“that little-girl cult”) and Warren is spectacular. She is the one character who seems to radiate pure, unassailable selfhood—tango-dancing, white-haired Ava, to whom Max says, rapturously, “being with you is like being in literature.” It turns out that Ava really is too good to be true; she, like Max and the other bloody boys, is a fictional invention come to life. How is it, then, that she feels more real than anyone else, both to the reader and to Samantha, her unwitting “author”? The question is unanswerable, or, rather, the answer is that unanswerable thing, talent realized. For Samantha, it’s the possibility of companionship with her characters (no less real for being, technically, fictional), not the praise or censure of peers or professors, that galvanizes her to write more, and to write better.

In the final chapters of “Loudermilk,” a “poetry showdown” finally reveals Loudermilk as a fraud and his proxy as the real poet. But, as with an unshameable wind sock of a politician whose lies and blunders do nothing to unseat them, this is by no means Loudermilk’s undoing. Workshop, which we understand to be a sort of microcosm for what Ives later denounces as the “banal hypocrisy” of institutional American life at large, has worked well for Loudermilk. He skips town for New York and gets an agent. Of course he does. “I feel like I couldn’t even have planned this, like how amazing things worked out,” he writes in an e-mail to Harry. “But, hey when you’ve got extreme talent haha ;).” He does not, however, have the last word. At the end of the novel, his author seeks to make explicit her intent in a startling afterword:

If the institution wants to render Loudermilk’s self-expression false, a gesture accomplished merely in order to obtain a fellowship, then so be it! Loudermilk will go one step further: he will be already false, already a pastiche, already a construction.

Loudermilk, c’est moi.

This confounding, fourth-wall breaking address is a spectacularly brazen announcement of inauthenticity. Ives seems to be reminding us that she has fabricated Loudermilk, just as he has fabricated himself. Our “hollow hero” is a fiction who knows himself to be a fiction. Might authenticity itself be an equally fragile myth?

Master’s degrees, agents, and advances can make a difference: talent thrives on recognition, and bills need to be paid. There is, however, no great and infallible arbiter of literary merit. The longing to be anointed, once and for all, as “the real deal” is a fundamentally hopeless desire. Moreover, such longing for external approbation might be the very thing stymieing a young writer from becoming what they need to be, since, as Harry and Samantha realize, both “knowledge” and “voice” can only be discovered for oneself, not bestowed from beyond. What is required is a sort of faith in uncertainty—an acceptance that one’s capacity to conjure authentic new realities will have to be tested again and again, that the writer must be in a constant state of becoming. (In this sense, Harry’s self-interrogation, born of self-doubt, is essential, if exhausting.) And, since thinking must precede (good) writing, it follows that a question might be a more generative tool for a writer than an injunction. Kant famously posed a heuristic in three questions. The first serves as a useful counterpart to the M.F.A.’s first dictum. Not “Write what you know” but, with its honest combination of curiosity and humility, “What can I know?”

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https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-real-writer

It's Nice That on This Site

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/double-click-june-2019-180619

Becca Abbe: www.lucy-ives.com

Lucy Ives is a writer whose particularly unique website was designed by New York-based web designer Becca Abbe. Featuring a lo-fi aesthetic, the site is comprised of six horizontally-scrollable panels which display the different facets of Lucy’s work (news, books, prose, interviews, poems, information). Within these panels, individual articles, when clicked, expand to fill the whole page; the design in its entirety feels like a piece of software itself. “Lucy’s site comes from a series of discussions we had about research-based work and the amorphous nature of writing,” Becca tells us. Becca often references physical objects, or uses them as guiding models when designing websites and in this case, it was archaic reading machines and early graphical user interfaces.

“The index draws from the Renaissance-era concept of the bookwheel and the interior projects pages are based on a Victorian furniture piece called the Holloway Reading Stand,” Becca further explains. “Lucy’s own work relies heavily on Scrivener which is a writing software that also manages all the ephemeral data: research, citations, images, etc. that go into a written piece. Its split-screen design was a big influence on the final site.” When it comes to how viewers digest Lucy’s work, several options are available including the raw text, a link to an online publication, a downloadable PDF, or simply rendered as the file size in bytes.

For those who do a little digging, Becca’s embedded several Easter eggs within the design. Readers can enter “kindle mode” for a distraction-free view. Once fullscreen, a reading tool (AKA pixel line) tracks your cursor and helps keep your place in the text. An option to output the texts with print-only CSS styles is also available via the printer button. Even without these features, what Becca has succeeded in doing, is creating a site which is memorable, and that keeps users exploring. While she designed and built the site herself, she does give a special shoutout to her “genius father Eli Abbe for workshopping the horizontal scroll animation script on the index page with me. Without him, it would not stop at each end.”

On site.

On site.

The Nation on Loudermilk

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Scamming the Scene: Lucy Ives and the Fiction of the Cultural Industry
Ives’ second novel, Loudermilk, lampoons MFA writing programs and the inherited wealth that props them up.
By Charlie Markbreiter

Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk is an aughts period piece: It takes place between 2003 and 2004, during the start of the Iraq War. Troy Loudermilk—rich kid, Abercrombie hot—has enrolled at the Seminars, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop–like MFA program. But he doesn’t write. That gig belongs to Harry Rego, his debilitatingly anxious working-class friend from undergrad. In a present-day version, Harry might write Loudermilk’s application to USC as an independent subcontractor for Varsity Blue. Harry’s nascent poetry skills are derived from a Writing Poetry for Dummies–like guide, which directs him to use language that “[means] more than one thing” and phrases he finds in the local newspaper. The poems, written by Ives, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop poetry MFA program, are inserted throughout the book.

The dudes could have picked other lines of work to scam, but poetry seemed easy to sneak into. “Do you have any idea how many people are into this?” Loudermilk asks Harry. “Somebody could totally run this scene.” In exchange for writing poems in secret, which Troy passes off as his own, Harry gets a split of the program’s stipend while Loudermilk cruises female undergrads. After the Sessions, Loudermilk plans to ping-pong between free bags of poem money: “There was significantly more lucre than you would think in terms of fellowships and grants waived fees…. It would be stupid easy to get in and get out.”

Loudermilk just isn’t rich, though; he’s an heir, which makes Loudermilk what you might call inherited wealth lit—a modern-day version of the 19th century bourgeois novel’s dramas of inheritance. Loudermilk’s father, an “ex-military man” known as the Cleaner, had “made good in the 1960s and early ’70s providing infrastructural triage in locales the United States had not explicitly invaded” and became “alarmingly wealthy during Bill Clinton’s second term.” What does “triage” mean here? The line reads like a child asking an arms-dealing parent, “What do you do?” The parent lies, and the child swims in the results, a boorish aggregate of surplus value and other people’s blood. But Loudermilk isn’t stressed that his trust fund will end; he’s scared that it won’t. Is Loudermilk ashamed of being rich? Does he think that making his own money is the only way to be his own person? We don’t know; in October of his senior year, after Loudermilk proclaims that the Cleaner “had really crossed a line” and falls into an uncharacteristically deep depression, Harry infers that “the Cleaner had probably offered to pay for the rest of Loudermilk’s life.”

With the first round of stipend money, Loudermilk moves them into an apartment smashed next to an undergrad frat house where initiates are shot with BB guns. It’s a raw deal, but it saves Harry from doing the thing he hates most: speaking. Harry’s hatred for his voice borders on dysphoria. “The voice is ugly and sometimes shrill and sometimes bass and otherwise ludicrous, but the major thing about it is that it is not even his.” Loudermilk is obsessed with talking, and if they are together—always—then Loudermilk can speak for Harry. This engenders another dissociative relation: Harry hates Loudermilk’s voice; he just hates it less, despite knowing that the voice is an excuse. The larger problem is that he “dislikes and fears” other people and wants to avoid them. Loudermilk tracks Harry’s quest to find his voice by learning to write, speak, and assert himself. But it’s also a narrative in defense of narrative.

As with Ives’s debut novel, 2017’s Impossible Views of the World, Loudermilk satirizes a particular creative industry: While Views was set at a pseudo–Metropolitan Museum of Art, Loudermilk looks at poetry and academic creative writing. In both books, the markets judge a cultural product’s financial value, but its real (historical, cultural) value is always uncertain, necessitating an informal economy of gossip, jealousy, and clout. Members of the scene trade takes on a cultural product’s worth, and Ives excels at tracking the market-accelerated narcissism of small differences.

Ives’s protagonists—Harry in Loudermilk and Views’ Stella, a lower-level curator at Manhattan’s Central Museum of Art—are shy and observant, repulsed by the social climbing around them and harangued by a clout-chasing inverse. For Stella, it is senior curator Frederick Lu, who wants the museum to collaborate with WANSEE, a multinational seeking to privatize the global water supply and establish WANSEE-sponsored satellite museums. In Loudermilk, the nemesis is Anton Beans, who likes poetry but isn’t sure what it is for; he fills this void of uncertainty by humping up the career ladder, a caricature of the preprofessional MFA candidate.

In the afterword to Loudermilk, Ives writes that the novel is neither satire nor realist fiction; it is a libertine novel. “The libertine,” according to her, “hates society’s laws and loves the roiling dynamics of nature.” This archetype “transgresses in the service of freedom—a freedom the libertine believes is perfectly natural and therefore good.” Loudermilk is less interested in binge-drinking, group sex with corn-fed undergrads, and the Seminar stipend than in unmitigated freedom. He doesn’t know what he wants but wants to keep wanting without restraint.

Ives is invested in the sociological detail characteristic of a social novel, although Loudermilk isn’t a social novel. It isn’t a fully libertine novel either. In a literary critical flourish, she combines elements of libertine novels, realist novels, social novels, inherited wealth lit, postmodern novels, period pieces, poetry, satire, and revenge plots. Why does this book have so many genres? An answer can be found in two of Ives’s recent critical essays, the first on French theory’s American reception, the second on the social novel. Both pieces examine a disconnect between these genres of writing and their intended audiences. Loudermilk—and Loudermilk—result from this disconnect.

In a 2018 Baffler essay, “After the Afterlife of Theory,” Ives gives an intellectual history of French critical theory’s American reception, ending with its co-option by segments of the alt-right, as MAGA stans use postmodernist claims about the constructed nature of truth to peddle fake news. She is not anti-theory; she is against theory that doesn’t serve its pedagogical function, namely, to give readers “the tools…they need to see connections between their studies and the world.” Theory—and genres of writing that employ it, such as Beans’s poetry—that fails to do this is remiss, especially considering how much undergraduates pay to learn it, anyway. Ives ends her essay with this declarative: “The cost of a B.A. is more distracting and enervating to the citizenry than any form of relativism.” Her critiques of theory production are essential to Loudermilk. That Harry, who has no background in poetry, hacks his way into the country’s most prestigious poetry MFA program is both scandalous—if he got in, then can’t anyone?—and appropriate—people without the academic credentials to do poetry should be able to get in. More often, however, they don’t.

A year later, Ives wrote another essay for The Baffler, “Orphans of Dickens.” Similarly concerned about a genre of writing and its pedagogical function, the piece asks why nonfiction literature has dramatically superseded fiction sales since Donald Trump’s election. “Information’s stock rose; artifice suffered.” People want to understand why the world is so bad, so they turn to nonfiction, plump with data. She gets why, but if people want to understand “what’s going on,” she argues, they should read fiction, too. Narrative is, after all, a sense-making device whose ability to string events into meaningful progressions feels especially necessary in an increasingly non-narrative world. (“So much of the media we consume is non-narrative, in spite of the existence of presumably linear ‘timelines.’”) Fiction is already reshuffling to meet this rising need for social context plus narrative, hence the resurgence of the social novel, a genre invented by Charles Dickens out of “an ambition to move between world-historical events and the mundane dramas of intimate life,” as Ava Kofman put it in a recent review of Olivia Laing’s Crudo, a novel that is supposed to feel like reading tweets.

Like Kofman, Ives points out that when fiction simply mimics nonfiction, hoping to absorb its truth value via osmosis, the results are unsuccessful. She critiques Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success—about a hedge fund bro who flees his New York City life on a cross-country Greyhound—for the novel’s failure to examine the power structures behind its sociological detailing, as if the details themselves made the work automatically good. Fiction with a misapplied nonfiction-y style makes the same error as the tweet format in which the same declarative statement is repeated in a grave tone: assuming that adopting a specific genre form automatically endows your words with reality. For Kofman, shafting narrative for non-narrative because the latter is supposedly always more realistic “bodes ill for the readers and critics who still look to the novel as a respite from, and not simply an extension of, the relentless stream of social media.”

Loudermilk, in contrast, is a defense of narrative contra nonfiction’s and theory’s claims as the only good forms of writing—claims that have escalated under Trump. Loudermilk’s plot wraps up neatly because the point of narrative is to make points. Loudermilk and Harry’s agreement is broken, although Loudermilk, with his scammy charisma and trust fund, will be just fine, even when the Great Recession hits five years later. (The tax loopholes that generated his trust fund are not unrelated to the financial crash.) Harry finds his voice, but becoming “the real poet” doesn’t resolve the problems of the market-driven poetry world he is about to willingly enter.

While Loudermilk succeeds in making good on the arguments outlined in her Baffler essays, it does not totally succeed as a novel, although—unlike Crudo or Lake Success—it falters for more conventional reasons. Harry and Loudermilk can feel like tropes. Each is mostly defined by a single desire (for freedom and isolation, respectively), which makes their dynamic and relationships with other characters feel predictable. Her combinations of genre tropes never fully cohere. Each narrative flourish is so anxious to prove its right to exist as a narrative flourish in a narrative work that the book is always pulling the reader out to point at what’s going on.

Still, Loudermilk is worth reading. It’s a funny and cutting novel whose critiques of inherited wealth and its effects on culture in the aughts will keep being true until a full redistribution of wealth, beginning with reparations, occurs. Until then, Harry will fester with avoidance, Loudermilk will be horny, and Beans will continue his lifelong plot for empty career success, while the rich, like the Walton family of Walmart, for example, pour their money into trusts ($9 billion as of 2011) to avoid having to pay an estate tax. They’re thieves but also quite charitable. They support the arts. In 2011, Walmart heiress Alice Walton founded a museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas. Maybe next time, she will found a poetry MFA program—or just send her child to one.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/loudermilk-lucy-ives-novel-review/

The New Yorker on Loudermilk

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What We’re Reading This Summer
June 4, 2019

“Loudermilk,” by Lucy Ives

“Loudermilk,” a new novel by Lucy Ives, is set at a lightly fictionalized Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ives is either puncturing a myth about Iowa or advancing it; either option makes her book an indulgence. I loved the character of Anton Beans, a “conceptual lyricist” with a baby-bald head and a lush, Abrahamic beard. I loved Don Hillary, the requisite alcoholic professor, who once wrote cowboy poetry and now appears to be “slowly embalming himself as a source of perverse patrician fun.” The book’s title refers to Troy Augustus Loudermilk, who scams his way into the program with the help of his friend Harry. Their division of labor is as follows: Troy, a glorious idiot, goes to class, flaunts his loutish good looks, and tries to sleep with as many coeds as possible; Harry, who is painfully shy, sits in their crumbling apartment—the toilet’s in the center of the floor—and completes Troy’s assignments. The pair’s comic adventures interweave with the more melancholy account of Clare, a first-year fiction writer who can no longer write. Clare, who speaks with a clipped, mysterious precision, is an early indication that Ives’s interests point toward the philosophical, even the mystical. “Loudermilk” is not just funny; it becomes a layered exploration of the creative process, from the “tension that once indicated to [Clare] a beginning” to Harry’s feeling, as he plans a poem, that “he wants to walk backward … The challenge is to get himself to fall.” Ives approaches the students themselves with canny tenderness, and their work (which the novel excerpts, delightfully) with grave respect. Her own language is prickly and odd, with a distracted quality, as if she were trying to narrate while another voice is murmuring in her ear.—Katy Waldman

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-were-reading-this-summer-2019

Loudermilk Reviewed in The Believer

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A Review of: Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, by Lucy Ives
by Jameson Fitzpatrick
May 28th, 2019

Format: 304 pp., paperback; Size: 5.5 x 8.25 in.; Price: $16.95; Publisher: Soft Skull Press; Number of dramatis personae: seven; Number of scenes in which A character is in the process of writing: six-ish; Number of metafictional stories and poems appearing within: eleven; Number of fonts used: three; Number of uncomfortable moments of recognition writers are likely to experience while reading: countless.

Central Question: How does a person write (about writing)?

On December 3, 1961, Susan Sontag wrote the following in her journal:

The writer must be four people:

1) The nut, the obsédé

2) The moron

3) The stylist

40 The critic

1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

A great writer has all 4—but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.

I thought of Sontag’s formulation often while reading Lucy Ives’s new novel Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, as the titular character is a writer who is quite literally more than one person. Loudermilk centers on two friends conning their way through the 2003–2004 academic year at “the Seminars,” a prestigious Midwestern MFA program very transparently modelled on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Ives is an alumna). The charismatic Troy Loudermilk attends classes and is the one officially matriculated, while his extraordinarily shy sidekick Harry Rego ghostwrites the poems. As Loudermilk/Harry’s work arouses the admiration—and suspicion—of those around them, the teenaged daughter of two poetry faculty vies for Loudermilk’s affection, and a fiction student removed from the rest of the action struggles to write. Though Ives’s portrait of the Seminars/Workshop is more farcical than flattering, readers expecting yet another referendum on the MFA will be pleasantly surprised to discover a much stranger and more ambitious book. In Loudermilk, Ives has taken a subject notoriously difficult to make interesting—the difficulty of writing itself—and narrativized it into an elaborate plot peopled by avatars of the types Sontag enumerated decades ago.

Loudermilk, who plays chicken with a semi-truck in the novel’s opening scene and sends emails from prufrock69@hotmail.com, is Ives’s moron (2), or fool (a substitution I’ll be making given “moron”’s eugenicist history). Importantly, he is quite wealthy, the sole heir of a former military contractor turned disaster profiteer, and quite hot: “He is six foot three and built like a water polo champion. His face is hard to look away from.” He is also (if this were not already obvious) white, straight, cis, and able-bodied, biographical details frequently correlated with an assumed (if unearned) sense of authority—Loudermilk doesn’t have to write a word to feel right at home at the Seminars. In her afterword, Ives refers to him as a libertine, and indeed, Loudermilk is so free of shame he seems incapable of the emotion, a handy lack for a would-be writer to have. If, per Sontag, one must be a fool in order to muster the confidence necessary for self-expression, Loudermilk’s superlative confidence reflects a profound foolishness.

Only it isn’t his self that Loudermilk is expressing—at least not in the poems that quickly distinguish him as one of the Seminars’ star students. Those are secretly written by Harry, the Cyrano de Bergerac to Loudermilk’s Christian de Neuvillette (whose classic tale of literary impersonation Ives cites as an inspiration in the afterword). The two unlikely pals are collaborators on a hare-brained scheme that began on a whim: during their senior year at SUNY Oswego, Loudermilk discovered the existence of funded graduate programs in poetry and decided it would be a fun and easy way to spend two years. Harry, a former child genius who started college at fifteen, is more than happy to play along, particularly since their arrangement requires him to interact with no one but his trusted symbiont (he has an aversion to his own voice so pronounced that it renders him unable to speak in most situations).

It’s not just Harry’s prodigious intelligence that makes him the critic (4) in Ives’s story, but also his approach to writing poetry. Harry writes because he has to provide Loudermilk’s lines, not because because he has something to say—at least not at first—and so his entrée to poetry comes through analysis rather than inspiration. Like any good counterfeiter, he first has to understand how the thing is made:

Harry knows, based on his limited poetical reading, but whatever, that he’s supposed to be using language that might “mean more than one thing” when he’s creating a poem. But it’s confusing to him how exactly this should work, from the point of view of production. For this reason, he’s developing a work-around. He’s decided to find language that definitely means one thing and then try his best to use it in another way, so that it definitely cannot mean the very thing it usually means—which is to say, exclusively.

As he collages appropriated language into poems that parody the vernacular of American empire in the early aughts, Harry’s first subject becomes doublespeak; or, language itself.

The true nut or obsédé (1) here—the personality who, according to Sontag, provides a writer’s material—is Lizzie Hillary, the precocious fifteen-year-old daughter of two members of the Seminars’ poetry faculty. The undeserving object of her affection is (of course) Loudermilk, who, much to her mounting frustration but certain benefit, she fails to woo. Does anyone have a greater capacity for obsession than a teenager in love? Yet Ives is careful not to reduce Lizzie to a caricature; she is not frivolous (Harry recognizes her at once as “a worthy fucking competitor”). In fact, Lizzie is the first to see—almost immediately—through Loudermilk’s act, and even her infatuation with him belies another, more nebulous desire: to grow up and into an artist. Once again, Loudermilk is just a stand-in.

Finally, there is Clare Elwil, a first-year student in fiction and our resident stylist (3) (Ives declares this outright on page 10). The daughter of a minor but notable expat poet from whom she has long been estranged, and blessed with the kind of C.V. you might expect from an Iowa grad announcing their six-figure first book deal, Clare shares some of Loudermilk’s material advantages, though hers come along with significantly more baggage. Having deferred admission after a serious car accident, she is arriving to the Seminars a year late and with a bad case of trauma-induced writer’s block. Clare’s struggle to write constitutes her entire subplot (her story barely intersects with the other characters’) and the question of style—how to say what she has to say—is both her primary obstacle and ultimate salvation.

We are introduced to Clare via “two terse sentences [she] has been writing for the past ten weeks” Here, and in Clare’s scenes throughout the novel, Ives captures with painfully vivid detail how it feels when words fail you, or, worse, when you fail words:

It is in description now that Clare has a tendency to become most mired. No, now it is in description that Clare has a tendency to become the most mired. The tendency? Is that the word? Mired? The? She slides back and forth, on wheels, mobile yet unable to pass over the hump that stands between her and poised, proper articulation.

Over the course of the novel, Clare reflects on her past success (a prize-winning short story she remembers as “an exercise in style”), struggles with two unfinished drafts, and, at long last, writes a new story, tricking herself into success by “[telling] herself she is not the one writing.” Her classmates highlight “her unique style” in their praise.

Through these characters and their respective fates, Loudermilk posits that all artistic creation requires the use of a proxy. Harry needs to use Loudermilk’s voice to find his own. Lizzie needs to use Loudermilk as a receptacle for her ambition until it can take another form—a work of guerilla art she titles The Origin of the World, after Clare’s story of the same title, which is itself titled after Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde. Clare has to pretend to be someone else in order to write like herself. It is only in their proxies that they are finally able to recognize themselves.

Sontag says a good writer must be a fool and an obsessive, that the critic and the stylist are bonuses (so, inessential). But Ives—not just for her own erudition and syntactical artistry, remarkable as they are—counters that it is the critic and the stylist who are indispensable, for they are the ones who interface thought with language. Obsessions can be substituted, replaced, and tend to descend on us whether our nature is obsessive or not. Likewise, a fool’s confidence can be adopted when necessary; it’s no coincidence “bravado” so often collocates with “false” (or that Loudermilk is the only one of these characters without any apparent artistic promise of his own). Taste and intelligence can be faked, too, of course, but a good writer nevertheless must develop them sometime. Perhaps it is, after all, through the faking that the making happens.

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https://www.thebeliever.net/logger/a-review-of-loudermilk-or-the-real-poet-or-the-origin-of-the-world-by-lucy-ives/

Loudermilk Reviewed in Bookforum

May 16, 2019 • Sylvia Gindick

In Lucy Ives’s second novel, Loudermilk, a charismatic dumbass scams his way into a prestigious MFA poetry program by submitting the work of his antisocial companion. The real writer, who hates the sound of his own voice, follows the oversexed, symmetrically featured dumbass to school and continues to write for him. It’s a fun setup, but the book aims for more than just comedy. Ives, who once described herself as “the author of some kind of thinking about writing,” examines the conditions that produce authors and their work while never losing a sense of wonder at the sheer mystery of the written word.

Through canny third-person narration, Ives cycles through the perspectives of five characters as the book progresses: Harry, the “real poet” (whose voice tends to break into an “unintelligible croak”); Loudermilk, the charming but “hollow hero” (whose speech is littered with creative iterations of “dude,” “dick,” and “fuck”); Clare, the brooding early-success who fears she can no longer write (“What I’ve lost is so easy to name as to make it impossible to speak about.”); Anton, the pompous try-hard who always thinks he’s the best writer in the room (“heir apparent to the poem-based sector of the American humanities multiverse”); and Lizzie, the precocious daughter of poetry professors (“I’m just curious, so sue me!”). Their artmaking involves varying degrees of creativity and mimicry, and it’s often unclear whether we should laugh at their marginal successes—or grudgingly respect them. The fiction and poetry that the characters write, many pieces of which are included in the text, are rendered in a tone that balances sarcasm with tenderness.

Unlike Ives’s previous novel, Impossible Views of the World, which was largely focused on the protagonist's glossy, external world, Loudermilk dives into the characters’ inner lives. This is a chaotic place. They feel shadowed, almost overpowered, by fantasies and visions. Harry’s imagination feels so alive that he envisions it as another person walking alongside him. Clare sees her her dead father everywhere. Both feel constrained by these doubles, which also, paradoxically, give them license to create. As Ives describes the condition in which Harry writes, “He needs to sink back into that greenish-reddish veil through which he can see the gently pulsing backs of words, the frilled edges of sentences. The only way to get to the poem is to drop into a perfectly Harry-shaped shadow.” Clare writes of one of her characters, “She was alone. Sort of. No, she was not alone. She could feel it waiting in the wings, as it were, there, ready to take a word from her, take it to say it again, back, back, back again, as you,” followed by four pages of nothing but “SSSSS$S.”

The novel concludes with a curious afterword in which Ives explains that Loudermilk is a libertine, a symptom of democracy, a lover of freedom who has little capacity for self-restraint. “The libertine transgresses in the service of freedom,” she writes, “a freedom the libertine believes is perfectly natural and therefore good.” Loudermilk continuously does what he does just because he can, embodying Harry’s voice until Harry is ready to claim it as his own. The book’s postscript is another kind of writerly transgression, as Ives emphatically tells rather than shows. In a novel full of doubles, veils, and proxies, it makes sense that Ives concludes with yet another layer.

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https://www.bookforum.com/culture/loudermilk-or-the-real-poet-or-the-origin-of-the-world-by-lucy-ives-21954

2018 Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant

New York, NY (December 3, 2018) — The Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2018 grants. The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.

Joel Wachs, President of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, explains that “the Foundation’s commitment to arts writing is a natural extension of the grants the Foundation makes to artist-centered organizations and museums, which often include funds for the publication of exhibition catalogues, brochures, and other outlets for scholarly perspectives. Critical writing on contemporary art connects artists to audiences, increases dialogue around their work, and is vital to a dynamic and engaged visual art community in this country.”

In its 2018 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded a total of $725,000 to 21 writers. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, blogs, books and short-form writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from scholarly studies to critical reviews, and self-published blogs.

“Since 2006, the program has funded 272 writers,” said Program Director Pradeep Dalal. “A valuable reminder of the rich possibilities of arts writing today, the 21 grantees this year address a remarkable breadth of topics in nuanced and often interdisciplinary ways. Rahel Aima will write on the persistence of techno-optimism and relate it to race and the global south, while Dawn Chan will address Asian-futurism and media art's relationship to the formation of identity. Several projects address the urgent themes of ecology and environment, including Jessica Horton's book on indigenous American art which the jurors felt would reset the parameters of discourse in eco-criticism and anthropocene studies. Wendy Vogel will write on the art world's response to the #metoo movement and will discuss practices like Ana Mendieta's within the framework of sexual violence. Lucy Ives's critical biography of the radical and visionary practice of Madeline Gins calls greater attention to an artist primarily known for her partnership with her husband, Arakawa. Yxta Murray will write on the critique of property redistribution, post-Katrina, by the art collective Blights Out New Orleans. And several writers address public art, ranging from Claire Tancons’s book on processional performance, and Malik Gaines's research, which deploys arguments from art history, performance studies, black studies, and queer theory to sharply articulate the stakes of public art in present day America.”

The 21 grantees are listed by category as follows:

Articles
Ashley Hunt, The Political Economy of the Prison in Contemporary Art Exhibitions
Yxta Murray, Blights Out and Property Rights in New Orleans Post-Katrina
Erin Thompson, Art after Guantánamo

Blogs
Andreana Donahue and Tim Ortiz, Disparate Minds
Essence Harden and Olivia K. Young, Speculative: Black Art Practices of the West
Bradford Nordeen, Memorabilia: Queer Countercultures and Moving Image Art
Susan Snodgrass, In/Site: Reflections on the Art of Place

Books
Malik Gaines, Future Ruins: The Art of Abstractive Democracy
Elena Gorfinkel, Aesthetic Strike: Cinemas of Exhaustion
Jessica Horton, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art and Reciprocity, 1953–1973
Lucy Ives, She is Raining: The Work and Life of Madeline Gins
Eric Golo Stone, Artist Contracts in the Political Economy
Michael Stone-Richards, Care of the City: Ruination, Abandonment, and Hospitality in Contemporary Practice
Claire Tancons, Roadworks: Processional Performance in the New Millennium

Short-Form Writing
Rahel Aima
Siobhan Burke
Dawn Chan
Darren Jones
Christina Catherine Martinez
Wendy Vogel
Chloe Wyma

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https://www.artswriters.org/grant/grantees/2018

Impossible Views Reviewed in Art in America

MAGAZINE JAN. 01, 2018
POSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE ART WORLD

by Jameson Fitzpatrick

That Lucy Ives's Impossible Views of the World (published in August by Penguin Press) and Andrew Durbin's MacArthur Park (published in September by Nightboat Books) are both debut novels written by poets who are also art critics might explain the two books' further similarities. Each centers on a neurotic art worker—Ives's Stella Krakus is a curator and Durbin's Nick Fowler, a writer—in the midst, simultaneously, of an affair with a wealthy, insufferable man; a research project with no clear end; and an ensuing existential crisis. Stella and Nick are both erudite, hypercritical narrators prone to exacting description and essayistic digressions about art, urban life, and the familiar archetypes that populate arts professions. Most significantly, the two protagonists share a fascination with utopias—and a troubling readiness to accept their impossibility as an excuse to stick to the status quo.

This is not to say the books are not distinct. Stella, to a greater degree than Nick, dwells in the particular, as does her story: Impossible Views of the World takes place in the course of one eventful week. An awkward thirtysomething "termed a cartographic specialist in the art history world" but "a dilettante in the world of cartographers," Stella works as a curator in the American Objects department at New York City's Central Museum of Art. (Called CeMArt for short, the museum is a barely veiled send-up of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though the administration's immoderate coziness with a corporate sponsor smacks of the Guggenheim.) Her unfulfilling routine is upended by the disappearance of her colleague Paul, who is "almost a friend" and an obscure but respected poet. Tasked with completing Paul's work on the checklist for an upcoming exhibition, Stella discovers in his desk a photocopy of a fantastical early-nineteenth-century map of a utopian community called Elysia. Determined to figure out the map's significance, she steals the document, along with copies of Paul's files. What follows is an art historical caper that Vogue aptly dubbed "something of a From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for grown-ups."

As Stella gets closer to determining the map's provenance, she may (or may not) be uncovering a conspiracy connecting Paul's disappearance, several generations of a wealthy but disgraced New York family of artists and patrons, possible forgeries, and CeMArt's latest exhibition of American portraiture. That exhibition is organized by the impossibly handsome Fred Lu, a senior curator in American Objects and scion of two wealthy New York families, with whom Stella has been conducting a (mostly) emotional affair while going through a bitter divorce. Stella seems to loathe Fred almost as much as she loves him, particularly for his willingness to collaborate with WANSEE, a multinational corporation seeking to privatize the world's water supply and partner with CeMArt to open satellite museums around the globe.

Where Impossible Views finds its subject matter (and critique) in the institution, Durbin's MacArthur Park looks to what Ives, in her blurb for the novel, calls "the precarious margins of the art world." And where the focus of Views is small, concerned with inconspicuous but meaningful detail, MacArthur Park is big and sprawling, in both its settings and its questions. Nick, a twentysomething poet and budding art critic, begins his travel narrative in New York, where the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy catalyzes a preoccupying anxiety about climate change and the impending end of the world. He then sets out on a nebulous book project "about the weather"-and on trips to Miami, upstate New York, Fire Island, Los Angeles (because he has been commissioned to write about the Tom of Finland Foundation), London, and Vienna.

While in Los Angeles, Nick's book about the weather (which, in a reflexive turn, is what we understand ourselves to be reading) also becomes a book about utopia. This section opens with a history of intentional communities and cults in Southern California, beginning at the start of the twentieth century and concluding with Scientology; at the Tom of Finland Foundation, Nick's guides frame Touko Laaksonen's erotic gay drawings as a "utopian project." But Nick suspects that "a utopia of men is no utopia"—and that all utopias, however appealing, are illusory. In Impossible Views, Stella comes to a similar realization about the Elysia of her map. Though she never believes the town depicted is real, when she finally solves its tantalizing mystery—her own idealized project—she is not quite satisfied. Every utopia fails on its own terms.

TOGETHER, Impossible Views and MacArthur Park suggest that art itself might be such a failed project. Or that the art world is, at least, as Nick implies while considering the 2014 Pierre Huyghe retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

The art world is an unregulated economy that borrows from other economies . . . to continually update its relationship to the world and, in acting as a conduit for other (and all) disciplines, strives to become the clearest image of the world in which we may better see ourselves. . . . Art tries to be everything for everyone at once, all of it contained within salable products that can be exchanged between artists, galleries, individuals and institutions, across media, in a ‘conversation' about what now means, and what that now once meant and will someday come to mean. . . . Everyone wants to be an artist because everyone wants to speak about the now.

An impossible aim, to be sure, "to be everything for everyone at once." But it is not its ambition that dooms the project of art so much as its constraints, "contained" as it is. Consider, in Impossible Views, CeMArt's partnership with an evil corporate sponsor that wants to include affiliates of the museum in each of its planned "smart cities"—"‘technology responsive' communities" around the world in which people will "take refuge not just from everyday inconvenience and security issues posed by fundamentalists but from approaching environmental collapse." (It's worth nothing that WANSEE echoes Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where Nazi officials planned the Final Solution.) The proposed sites include Nevada and Abu Dhabi, evoking international expansions undertaken by the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and others.

Art's complicity in capitalism and its exploitation of natural and human resources is not news, nor is this the most meaningful insight offered by these novels. "Everyone" might want to be an artist not only because they want "to speak about the now" but also because they wish to be a part of the noble project of crafting an "image of the world in which we may better see ourselves." Who doesn't? Who in the art world, anyway? But reflection is not action, nor is this the only way to imagine art's function. As Trotsky wrote, "Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes."

In their accounts of the flawed contexts in which they live and work, both Stella and Nick position themselves as outsiders. Though they blend in well enough, they go to great lengths to make it clear they see through the fictions that others around them happily accept. Disgusted by the scene of the swanky party where Fred announces CeMArt's partnership with WANSEE, Stella wonders: "How could I possibly be a curator if Fred was a curator?" Of the partygoers at a club vying with feigned nonchalance to be photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans, Nick says: "I watched them and did not once allow myself [to] slip into their time." Both fixate on the class differences between them and their more affluent lovers (Nick hates his boyfriend Simon's "moneyed affect"), though both protagonists are white and middle-class, hardly outliers.

Stella and Nick's desire to see themselves as exceptions to the rules of their lives is paired with a sense that they are powerless to change those rules. Stella laments that the circumstances of her life—her career, her relationships—feel beyond her control, even as she recognizes that she must bear some responsibility for them. Nick speaks of history grabbing and shoving us forward as if our role in it were passive. This echoes Stella's description of the "invisible hand" she feels guiding her during her boldest moments. Ultimately, Stella's most profound discovery in Impossible Views is not the origin of the map, but of that hand. Drunk at a friend's party, she cracks it: "When it feels like there is that weird hand. . . . That's you encountering yourself."

How Stella and Nick imagine themselves in their own communities is how many in the art world seem to imagine themselves in the world at large: as outsiders who know better, exceptions to the ugliest aspects of their time and country, but powerless to do anything but study works of art. Through these characters and their delusions, Ives and Durbin reveal the flaw, and danger, of such thinking: it's precisely at the moment we feel most helpless that we are exposed to our own potential power. Helplessness, as Nick says, is a mask. What that mask obscures is not our complicity—it helps us feel that, in fact—but our ability to hammer a better reality into existence. Knowing the mask is there opens the possibility of taking it off, which makes the difference between the meek administration of American objects and the self-determination of American subjects.

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Knowing the mask is there.

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Both erudite, hypercritical narrators prone to exacting description and essayistic digressions.

https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/possible-views-of-the-art-world/

As Trotsky wrote, "Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes."

NYT 10 New Books We Recommend 8-24-17

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/books/review/10-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html?mcubz=1

10 New Books We Recommend This Week

The year of the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution has seen a number of new works published on Russian history, and our list this week includes two of them: Yuri Slezkine’s “The House of Government,” about an apartment complex in Moscow built for the Bolshevik elite; and the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War,” about the Russian women who served in World War II, new in translation from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Laurent Binet remembers a time when literary theory was all the rage, in his fictional take on the death of Roland Barthes; Lucy Ives sets a smart mystery amid the office politics of an art museum; and the pioneering programmer Ellen Ullman offers some much-needed perspective on the tech world.

Radhika Jones
Editorial Director, Books

NEW PEOPLE, by Danzy Senna. (Riverhead Books, $26.) Senna’s sinister and charming new novel, about a married couple who are both biracial, riffs on themes she’s made her own — about what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home, and under the skin. “Senna’s aim is precise and devastating. She conjures up ’90s-era campus politics with pitiless accuracy,” our critic Parul Sehgal wrote. “It’s a novel that reads us. It anticipates, and sidesteps, lazy reading and sentimental expectations.”

THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine. (Princeton University, $39.95.) This panoramic history plotted as an epic family tragedy describes the lives of Bolshevik revolutionaries who were swallowed up by the cause they believed in. The story is as intricate as any Russian novel, and the chapters on the Stalinist Terror are the most vivid.

THE UNWOMANLY FACE OF WAR: An Oral History of Women in World War II, by Svetlana Alexievich. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (Random House, $30.) This oral history, the first of a series that won Alexievich the literature Nobel in 2015, charts World War II as seen by the Russian women who experienced it, and disproves the assumption that war is “unwomanly.” Distilling her interviews into immersive monologues, Alexievich presents less a straightforward history than a literary excavation of memory itself.

A LIFE OF ADVENTURE AND DELIGHT: Stories, by Akhil Sharma. (Norton, $24.95.) In eight haunting, revelatory stories about Indian characters, both in Delhi and in metropolitan New York, Sharma, the author of “Family Life” and “An Obedient Father,” offers a cultural exposé and a lacerating critique of a certain type of male ego.

FREUD: The Making of an Illusion, by Frederick Crews. (Metropolitan/Holt, $40.) Crews opens his study with the question of how Freud, whose scientific reputation has plummeted over the past decades, could retain so much cultural capital in the 21st century. In a single volume, he draws a portrait of Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester and all-around nasty nut job, bringing a new level of detail to these accounts.

THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE, by Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Binet’s playful buddy-cop detective novel reimagines the historical event of the literary theorist Roland Barthes’s death. It’s a burlesque set in a time when literary theory was at its cultural zenith; knowing, antic, amusingly disrespectful and increasingly zany.

TO SIRI WITH LOVE: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines, by Judith Newman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Newman’s tender, boisterous memoir strips the usual zone of privacy to edge into the world her autistic son occupies. In freely speaking her mind, she raises provocative questions about the intersection of autism and the neurotypical.

IMPOSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE WORLD, by Lucy Ives. (Penguin Press, $25.) In this dark and funny first novel about a mystery in a museum, a young woman is stuck in an entry-level job as her private life unravels. Read it as the story of a young woman coming unglued, an art-world mystery or a museum-based episode of “The Office,” complete with a colleague in persistent search of a staple remover.

LIFE IN CODE: A Personal History of Technology, by Ellen Ullman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Twenty years after the publication of her classic of 20th-century digital-culture literature, “Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents,” Ullman discusses her career in programming and the dangers the internet poses to privacy and civility. She knows how to decode her tech-world adventures for word people, and her essays explore gender relations and misogyny in the office, among other enduring issues.

THE DESTROYERS, by Christopher Bollen. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The heir to a construction empire goes missing on the Greek island of Patmos in Bollen’s third novel, a seductive and richly atmospheric literary thriller with a sleek Patricia Highsmith surface. In this world of remote coves and beaches, wealth and luxury are inherent, but also inherently unstable.

Complete with a colleague in persistent search of a staple remover.

Impossible Views Reviewed in NYT Book Review

A version of this list appears in print on August 27, 2017, on Page BR31 of the Sunday Book Review.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/books/review/lucy-ives-impossible-views-of-the-world.html?mcubz=1

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Read this book on whichever level you choose.

Impossible Views in Sept 17 Vogue

Impossible Views in Sept 17 Cosmopolitan

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An ultracharming debut.

Impossible Views Reviewed in Kirkus (starred)

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Da Vinci Code fans die hard.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lucy-ives/impossible-views-of-the-world/

Kirkus Star
IMPOSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE WORLD

An art historical mystery that will interest fans of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, with a narrator equal parts intellectual, ironic, and cool.

In Ives’ scintillating debut novel, an up-and-coming young New York museum curator named Stella Krakus must solve the mystery of a co-worker’s disappearance, fend off her soon-to-be ex-husband, and retrieve her heart from an ill-conceived office dalliance. Stella, who is a 19th-century cartographic specialist, finds a photocopy of a meticulously detailed and illustrated old map titled “Elysia” folded up in her missing colleague’s pencil drawer. Her largely scholarly detective work on the matter also entails a bit of breaking and entering and lunch with her glamorous, secretive art-dealer mother. Ives’ writing derives much of its humor from a combination of high and low—arch formulations and mini-disquisitions studded with cussing, sex, and jokes about Reddit. Its delights include a description of Stella’s Williamsburg neighbors—“proofreaders dressed as majorettes, anorexics in suspenders, rich women in artisanal clogs propping up sobbing toddlers”—and this account of love: “the feeling…of it being spring for the first time, the face of a tiny kitten who is speaking fluent Spanish and is also a genie who can grant your wish, of being truly implied as the person I really was when another person spoke my name. My heart was a piece of paper. It was a paper fan. It was a dove.” Also delectable are an excoriating direct address to the cheaters of the world and a definition of charm in art that seems to have much wider applicability—it's “what happens when nothing works in a given painting. But what you get when nothing works is everything.” Yes!

A diversion and a pleasure, this novel leaves you feeling smarter and hipper than you were before.

Also delectable are an excoriating direct address to the cheaters of the world and a definition of charm in art that seems to have much wider applicability—it's “what happens when nothing works in a given painting. But what you get when nothing works is everything.” Yes!

Impossible Views Reviewed in Publisher's Wkly

Review Posted Online: May 15th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1st, 2017

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7352-2153-6

Ives’s smart and singular debut novel chronicles what turns out to be a big week in the life of Stella Kraus, a petite and observant map expert for a Manhattan museum resembling the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the course of seven days, Stella works through the one-sided residual effects of an affair with an inscrutable colleague being groomed to run the museum. Stella also copes with her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s inappropriate appearances at her work and work functions, eventually taking the matter into her own hands, so to speak. And what about the disappearance of a male colleague? The illustrated map Stella discovers while snooping in his office quickly becomes an obsession as she attempts to determine its provenance by embarking on a sort of scavenger hunt. Ives maximizes her story’s humor with subtlety; a line here and there is enough to call attention to the absurdity of, for instance, the museum’s corporate benefactor’s attempt to secure the world’s water rights. She also isn’t afraid to make her heroine unlikable, which works in the novel’s favor. Ives’s prose and storytelling feel deliberately obtuse at times, requiring readers to slow down to fully immerse themselves in the narrative’s nuances, but the result is an odd and thoroughly satisfying novel. (Aug.)

Odd and thoroughly satisfying.

The Hermit Reviewed in Publisher's Wkly

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9967786-3-3

In her newest book of poetry, Ives (The Worldkillers), an editor and writer of many stripes, condenses what she calls “some kind of thinking about writing” into a cerebral collection replete with meditations on the writing process, dialogues concerning phenomenology, micro-stories, anxieties around a failed novel, lists, quotes, games, and notes to the self. Readers are invited to an inner conversation as the poet grapples with the idea of writing, the history of it, the creative act itself, and also the text as an object, asking permission to be seen (much as Ives permits herself to feel), to exist in the eyes of others, and to participate in the canon. What saves the book from being merely being a treatise or a personal journal is that the reader is taken along on the creative journey; Ives muses about another author or a technique, such as the idea of description, and the page transforms into an experimental playground where she produces gorgeous passages of lush imagery. There is some appeal in the variety of texts and in Ives’s insights into her life as a writer, and she succeeds most when she allows readers passage into this potential space: “One must possess only the ability to tolerate a given position long enough to make it intelligible to others.” (July)

Gorgeous passages of lush imagery.

An Image of My Name Enters America

AN IMAGE OF MY NAME ENTERS AMERICA: Essays

ABOUT

#2 on New York Magazine's 10 Best Books of 2024
A November 2024 Indie Next Great Read
Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024

Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.

What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life—a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son—to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.

PRAISE

“Part criticism, part personal essay, part intellectual jubilation, An Image of My Name Enters America is the most inventive and exciting work of nonfiction this year.” —Maris Kreizman, Vulture’s Best Books of 2024

“From the expansive mind of novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives, stylish, sweeping essays that consider the lure of period rooms, Alanis Morissette, Heidegger, and more.” —Vanity Fair

“Lucy Ives is a genius . . . one of the most thrilling writers that the United States has produced so far this century. . . . On the page, Ives remains a virtuoso, inventive and agile. . . . An Image of my Name Enters America is a book driven by curiosity. It’s a celebration of questions rather than the didactic results of scattered research projects. It’s a vulnerable book. . . . It is also deeply and profoundly humane.”
—James Webster, Los Angeles Review of Books

“I tore through the poet, art critic, and novelist Lucy Ives’s essay collection with glee. . . . By revealing the ideology behind an object (whether it’s a film or antique furniture), she patiently dismantles our fantasies about America and ourselves. It’s painful to let go of these delusions; it’s also the only way to go on. . . . In the aftermath, at least we can cling to her voice—lively, cathartic, and undeniably charming.” —Celine Nguyen, The Believer

“Virtuosic . . . a high-wire act of the mind.” —Liz Brown, 4Columns

"Ives writes with a madcap intellectualism—think David Sedaris with a Ph.D. . . . Readers are advised to sit back and enjoy the many splendors of Lucy Ives' magpie brilliance." —BookPage, starred review

"It is rare for a mind as mercurial and voracious as Lucy Ives's to possess such obvious lexical facility in guiding readers from one thought to the next, but here we are: Ives is one of our brilliant weirdos and must be protected at all costs." —Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024

“Extraordinary...a dazzling display of knowledge, wit, ratiocination, and prose style.” —Kirkus Reviews

"Lucy Ives is probably the most talented, and must be the most interesting, American writer working in the public eye right now." —D. W. White, L'Esprit Literary Review

"Uniformly rigorous, intellectually demanding, and packed with insight delivered in lean, rousing prose. The author's polymathic breadth of knowledge—literary theory, cinema, history, apocalypticism, obstetrics—is breathtaking. . . . I am now convinced that Lucy Ives is the most intelligent human I have ever read." —Melissa Holbrook Pierson, On the Seawall

"[Ives's prose] is insightful, witty, and in on the joke; it is poignant, biting, and vibrant. It is sometimes elliptical but nearly always concrete. It delights in sound and image. . . . If there is a central motivating idea of this work, it is that we simply cannot capture everything in words: something unnamable is always lost in the translation from life to language. Thankfully for the rest of us, that doesn't stop Ives from trying, bringing this remarkable achievement of a collection into existence along her way." —Devyn Andrews, Chicago Review of Books

"Readers of her other books know that Ives is brilliant: getting to know the person, the gorgeous mind, behind those books is a total treat." —Courtney Eathorne, Booklist

"A dazzling and deeply intelligent tour de force of wit and style. . . . It's a deft and enlightening collection fit for re-reads to come; Ives is truly an original." —Sam Franzini, Our Culture Mag

"Ives has written perhaps the keenest retrospective of those years just before and just after the new millennium. …a sweeping tour de force.” —Erik Anderson, Cleveland Review of Books

“This is the kind of book you want to read aloud to people you love, to assign, to give as a present—but don’t loan this one; you might not get it back.” —Alexander Chee

"Ives's writing simply has to be experienced. There are paragraphs and even sentences here that make whole essays in themselves, with a sculptural intensity you can circumnavigate, and the light of her thinking pours from the apertures." —Jonathan Lethem

Date: October 15, 2024

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Format: Print

Genre: Fiction
Purchase here.

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE: A Novel

ABOUT

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Seattle Times Best Book of 2022

A virtuosic, radical reimagining of the systems novel by a “rampaging, mirthful genius" (Elizabeth McKenzie).

Everything that happened was repetition. But it was repetition with a difference. So she dragged along in a spiral, trusting to this form.

Manhattan, 2014. It’s an unseasonably warm Thursday in November and Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment. Her husband has just left her and meanwhile her keys are in her coat, which she abandoned at her parents’ apartment when she exited mid-dinner after her father—once again—lost control.

Erin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. Her bag contains two manuscripts she’s written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who’s recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Erin isn’t sure what she’s doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she’s needed all along.

With unflinching precision, Life Is Everywhere captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. It’s about one person on one evening, reckoning with heartbreak—a story that, to be fully told, unexpectedly requires many others, from the history of botulism to an enigmatic surrealist prank. Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives’s latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, can carry.

PRAISE

“Brilliantly berserk. . . . Ives is capable of virtuosic control — there are at least 10 different kinds of writing in this book, and all are carried off so masterfully it’s almost frightening. . . . This is a work of art that feels like a barely contained explosion.”—Nina Renata Aron, Los Angeles Times

"There’s an encouraging, matter-of-fact drumbeat to Ives’s prose. It’s a style that, much like Erin’s coping mechanism, keeps emotional profundity carefully taxonomized, and therefore at bay, producing for the reader instead a mesmeric hunger for the text itself. . . . [H]aunting.”—Hannah Gold, The New Yorker

“Ives possesses an enthralling emotional and psychological acuity, a seemingly bottomless store of knowledge and a thrilling wit, all of which she applies to the systems under which we live — and how we manage to live within or outside them.”—Lynn Steger Strong, Los Angeles Times

“Life Is Everywhere shatters any kind of straightforward narrative arc in favor of a collage of shards that emphasizes the tone, atmosphere, and the general experience of life in the world at a particular moment. And it wouldn’t work were Ives not a Big Ideas writer on the level of Gaddis, or DeLillo, or Wallace. Fortunately for all of us, she is. . . . Lucy Ives has proven herself to be one of our greatest under-the-radar geniuses, but an achievement like Life Is Everywhere demands attention.”—James Webster, The Rumpus

“This pastiche novel boldly explores what drives the creative mind: genius, vanity, grief, love, and mental chaos. Ives is a brilliant, one-of-a-kind maestro, leading this complex orchestra with great aplomb.”—Booklist

“The novel we thought we’d been reading—#MeToo scandal rocks university!—disassembles itself, becomes something else, and something else again. When we return at the novel’s close to The Incident, it is complicated further, left insistently, uncannily unknowable. . . . Life Is Everywhere reminds us that institutions have the advantages of accumulated power and the time to wait us out. But the rupture has happened. The cracks in the system are exposed, opening opportunities—we just have to take them.”—Jamie Hood, Bookforum

"If Lucy Ives is as smart as her novel Life Is Everywhere, then I am in complete awe. The novel is challenging in all the best ways and an absolute joy to read. How many books in one and yet one book. This is great writing.”―Percival Everett, author of The Trees

“Writing novels is the way Lucy Ives discovers her thoughts about the at once disheartening and marvelous fact of being alive right here, right now. This brilliant and playful novel brims with wisdom.”―Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet

Date: October 4, 2022

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Format: Print

Genre: Fiction
Purchase here.

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Exercise for Writing from Memory

Cover.

EXERCISE FOR WRITING FROM MEMORY AND OTHER EXERCISES

ABOUT

125 x 200mm, 16 pages, black and white printing, saddle stitched, edition of 100, 2022

In Exercise for Writing from Memory and Other Exercises, Lucy Ives sets a series of imaginative and collaborative writing tasks—suggestions for hidden constraints, techniques for assassinating words, wild uses of indices and the infidelities of memory, revisions and lists, a plan for a collectively authored novel. This is a startling and enabling document for any kind of writer.

https://goodpress.co.uk/products/exercise-for-writing-from-memory-by-lucy-ives

Date: March 9, 2022

Publisher: If a Leaf Falls Press

Format: Print

Genre: Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, Self-help
Purchase here.

Booklet.

Booklet.

Booklet.

COSMOGONY: Stories

ABOUT

A March 2021 Indie Next Great Read
A Paperback Paris Most Anticipated Book
A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of Next Year

An energetic, witty collection of stories in which supernatural events meet the anomalies of everyday life: deception, infidelity, lost cats, cute memes, amateur pornography, and more.

A woman walks onto a tennis court. A woman has a conversation with a friend’s husband in a supermarket. A woman sees a painting at the home of an art collector. A woman goes on a run. A woman takes videos of a cat in a bodega. A woman answers a Craigslist ad to write erotic diaries for money.

Cosmogony takes accounts of so-called normal life and mines them for inconsistencies, cruelties, and delights. Incorporating a virtuosic range of styles and genres (Wikipedia entry, phone call, math equation, encounters with the supernatural, philosophies of time travel), these stories reveal how the narratives we tell ourselves and believe are inevitably constructed, offering a glimpse of the structures that underlie and apparently determine human existence–and which we ignore at our own peril.

WATCH

Reading at 192 Books with Shiv Kotecha and Robert Glück

PRAISE

"There is perhaps no author better able to confront the acute absurdities of our reality than Lucy Ives, who veritably tackles the derangements of our era with glee, clarity, and brilliance. In this story collection, Ives touches on the mundane—from memes to porn to errand-running—offering up a version of life that is all the more authentic for its wholly surreal elements (time travel; living underwater). But then, this is what Ives does best: By offering up a kaleidoscope rather than a microscope through which to view our world, she presents us with something more glittery and beautiful and endlessly faceted than we could see if we were looking at it with our own eyes." —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29, One of the Best New Books of the Year

"Ives grapples with information overload while exploring her characters’ deeply personal interiority in this inventive collection. Here, Mallarmé meets Craigslist, as a young translator takes a job writing the diaries of erotic online models in 'A Throw of the Dice' ... . The fascinating, dialogue-heavy 'Scary Sites' surfs between many topics, from Saturday Night Live to violence in literature, to Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s 'Perfect Smoky Eye.' The structurally ingenious 'Guy' takes the form of a casual stroll through Wikipedia’s hodgepodge of entries on Guy Fawkes and the Napoleonic Wars before settling into a startlingly intimate portrait of an affair. Through juxtaposition and collage, these stories illuminate the trickier fringes of life right now." —Publisher's Weekly

"In this collection of short stories, Ives time travels, hallucinates, and performs magic to speak about the mystical qualities of the mundane. The stories all meander into something unexpected before exploding in truth and keen observations of human nature...Ives has the rare ability to boomerang reality totally out of whack before calling it home in an even purer form." —Booklist

"Cosmogony, [Ives's] debut short story collection, takes on daily absurdities and the subtle supernatural, playing with format as she weaves in Wikipedia entries, text messages, and science equations." —Arianna Rebolini,
Buzzfeed, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year

"Ives—this is a compliment—is a real literary weirdo, and her stories are strange without ever performing their strangeness. . . . Each one is emotionally precise in the extreme. Often, I was moved without knowing what had moved me—a rare feeling in art as in life, and an absolute treat. . . . I'd move to her weird cosmos any day."
—Lily Meyer, NPR

“Lucy Ives writes prose with the poetry inherent in her words, making the natural unnatural and the monotone fascinating, filtering and projecting the reality through the eyes of a poet . . . When Ives writes about art, biographical or historical information finds its place gracefully within the fiction without being mere footnotes. Her reflections provide the basis of a delicate understanding of art criticism in relation to creative writing.”
—Cigdem Asatekin, The Brooklyn Rail

"Ives takes a playful approach to her subject and, along the way, reveals how thin the fictions governing our world truly are." —Cornelia Channing, New York Magazine

“A series of impossibly clever riffs on familiar features of modern life . . . from a mind that just won’t stop.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Rare and fearless, Cosmogony's high-wire formal playfulness forges a circuit of human connection blinking at unlikely nodes. Even in moments of alienation and hurt, Ives's characters find themselves inextricably tethered to each other through philosophy, systems that fail them, art and love and searching. The puzzle pieces of this collection notch together, assembling a picture of the mysterious intelligence of coincidence and the sad, funny faces with which we meet it." —Tracy O'Neill, author of Quotients and The Hopeful

"I recommend Lucy Ives’s inventive collection of complex, deadpan, analytical, interrelated, controlledly wandering stories about divorce, lies, fear, parents, memes, the internet, art, artists, information, and literature." —Tao Lin, author of Trip and Taipei

Date: March 9, 2021

Publisher: Soft Skull Press

Format: Print

Genre: Fiction
Purchase here.

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Cosmogony: Stories

A Madeline Gins Reader

THE SADDEST THING IS THAT I HAVE HAD TO USE WORDS: A MADELINE GINS READER

ABOUT

The Brooklyn Rail Best Art Book of 2020
The White Review Book of the Year 2020
The Architect's Newspaper Editor's Pick

Poet, philosopher, architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins (1941–2014) is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, via which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings—in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose, and philosophical inquiries—represent her most visionary and transformative work. Expansive and playful, Gins’s vigorous and often ecstatic exploration of the physicality of language challenges us to sense more acutely the ways in which we can—and could—write and read. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page. She invites the reader into a field of infinite, ever-multiplying possibility.

This revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives, brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins’s 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins’s poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the twentieth century.

READ

Poems by Gins at the Poetry Foundation, with a short introduction

Interview in Bookforum

Interview in The Believer

Chapter 2 of WORD RAIN at Design Observer

Introduction excerpt at Art in America

LISTEN

LA Review of Books Radio Hour

WATCH

Conversation with Paul Chan for the 2021 Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair

Reading and Conversation at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Reading at Poet's House

PRAISE

Sigilo’s Reader provides access to Gins’s major texts, all of which would be currently unavailable otherwise. Lucky for readers, Ives selects a comprehensive array of works: from the 1960s and ’70s, 27 pages of unpublished poems as well as two essays; a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins’s 1969 experimental novel WORD RAIN; and selections from her two other notable book-length works, What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Ives terms WORD RAIN a “carefully calibrated and constructed artist’s book, as well as a comment on the novel form,” and asserts that it is “Gins’s most brilliant endeavor and among the most significant works of experimental prose of the second half of the twentieth century.” This is not a hyperbolic assessment — the Reader ought to provoke a revision not only of Gins’s legacy as Arakawa’s collaborator, but of the wherefores and why’s of experimental writing — of its capacity to say and do what other forms of writing or art-making cannot. —Hyperallergic

In these uncertain times of social isolation, when many of us will spend more time with a book, Gins’s writing captures what we crave from that experience—one that is physically and mentally all-encompassing. While The Reversible Destiny Project may not have succeeded in giving Gins or her partner eternal life, The Madeline Gins Reader does. With each reading we embody her words and write Gins anew, giving her life within the pages of the book and ourselves. —The Brooklyn Rail

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, a startling collection of essays, novels, artist books, and poems, edited by Lucy Ives, makes clear that Gins didn’t go for rote lyrical (or anti-lyrical) celebrations of language or comforting social narratives, but had more pressing goals. Employing a language equal parts phenomenology and microbiology, domestic-architectural intimacy and linguistic voracity, Gins’s literary ambition was nothing short of immunity. —4Columns

This wide-ranging, energetic anthology of poetry and experimental fiction, with an authoritative introduction by Ives shows how Gins (1941–2014) explored the possibilities of literary form and its relationship to content. ... Stimulating and consistently surprising, this is a treat for those interested in interdisciplinary artists. —Publisher's Weekly

The Saddest Thing Is that I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, edited by the novelist and critic Lucy Ives, is a gift. ... One of the real surprises and delights of The Saddest Thing Is that I Have Had to Use Words is the inclusion of early poems from the 1960s and ’70s, which have not been previously published. ... This generous selection of texts is an opportunity to engage with the full scope of [Gins's] thinking. —frieze

For Gins, words are nothing if not physical. It’s their physicality that protects them from perfect comprehension — in the scanned pages making up WORD RAIN, stray digits appear to block out words; in poems, words and lists are emphatically crossed out, smudged, erased. The inherent confusion of language is of course her tactic, for to reach full clarity is to resume gravity. And that’s why experiencing Gins’s writing in print — at long last — is so necessary. The Madeline Gins Reader feels like how I imagine living in a Reversible Destiny house feels — like floating, like hovering, really, in a cloud of mist. While stuck inside your familiar four walls, lockdown is the perfect time to dive in. —PIN-UP

Gins was a master of wordplay; humorous images are built up into piles, with groups of phrases building into networks of meaning flowing in gradients down the page. —The Architect's Newspaper, Editor's Pick for July 2020

[T]hroughout The Saddest Thing, Gins’s written language—especially in its formal arrangements—knows what it’s for. It’s a self-reflexive tool, one aware of its patterns and actions and how these patterns and actions might be described and quantified, kind of like an excited kid typing up directions for how to use the typewriter on the typewriter, nomenclature cards sliding off with every release of the carriage. —Tarpaulin Sky

For anyone who wants to experience directly the uncharted regions of inner and outer space in which language, perception, thought, and image play freely with our cramped expectations of them, the Madeline Gins Reader is an indispensable guide and a startling discovery. Her explorations of the interstices between words as symbols, as images, as sounds, as drawings are sure, steady, and entirely original. There are pleasant surprises on every page, in which narratives open up to encompass your experience as reader; fold over on one another to include and picture her activity as author; break open to scatter into lists, logical formulae, diagrams; reconfigure our grasp of what a page is for and what it can do. It is a dizzying and deeply exhilarating ride. Madeline Gins was a pioneer of language, poetry, and Conceptual art. It seems incredible that her work received so little attention during her lifetime. This volume performs an invaluable service in recalling her to our attention. —Adrian Piper

Madeline Gins was marooned here, on Earth, and made the best of it, using what was available to her, like words. This book is a splendid testament to how far she pushed them, and us, to realize what she already knew. That this, all this, is not it. Not. Even. Close. —Paul Chan

Gins was a foundational figure. Her work was original and yet also deeply indicative of the transformative activities of conceptualism that performed a tectonic shift in art-making beginning in the late 1960s. These brilliant essays, the incredible novel/artist’s book WORD RAIN, the poems, projects, and thoughts have all been scattered, unavailable, or out of print. Ives frames the collection articulately, giving us a vivid sense of the period in which Gins began and developed her remarkable body of work. This is a welcome publication that will renew our appreciation of Gins’s intellect and wit. —Johanna Drucker

BIO

MADELINE GINS was an American poet and novelist, artist, philosopher, and speculative architect. Born in the Bronx, NY in 1941, she grew up on Long Island and graduated from Barnard College in 1962, having studied physics and philosophy. Gins was the author of three full-length collections: the artist’s novel WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), What The President Will Say and Do!!, and Helen Keller or Arakawa. Alongside her own writing practice, Gins also collaborated with her husband Arakawa on a theory of “procedural architecture,” an endeavor to create buildings and environments that would prevent human death. Arakawa + Gins’s Reversible Destiny project realized five built works in the United States and Japan, and before her death in 2014, Gins independently designed a staircase in the Dover Street Market in New York City for Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Long a resident of New York City, Gins participated in experimental artistic and literary movements of the 1960s and ’70s before developing a collaborative practice as a philosopher and architect. She leaves a rich and complex legacy of interdisciplinary thought, action, and writing: although much of her work was unpublished or went out of print in her own lifetime, her prescient efforts in poetics, aesthetics, and environmental studies are central to contemporary debates about how to form communities and create collaboratively and sustainably.

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Date: April 21, 2020

Publisher: Siglio Press

Format: Print

Genre: Interdisciplinary
Purchase here.

Cover.

Ode.

Poem.

THE POETICS

ABOUT

Text by Lucy Ives. Photographs by Matthew Connors.

A superbly made hybrid photobook on the stories that objects invite us to tell.

In July of 2017, photographer Matthew Connors (born 1976) and novelist and critic Lucy Ives (born 1980) embarked on a strange project: to remove and catalog all the contents of Connors's car, a 1992 Volvo 240 station wagon.

Although the New York–based duo began the endeavor without knowing where it would lead, their investigation—of parts, tools, ephemera, litter, personal items, unidentifiable disjecta, among other objects—lasted more than two years and resulted in a series of photographs by Connors and an essay by Ives on narrative forms and temporalities inherent to contemporary media.

This collaborative publication, designed by Elana Schlenker, poses questions about where narrative originates and how we establish our stories in relation to the objects and timescales that carry, ground, and surround us.

PRAISE

"As an integrated artistic statement, this book is a sophisticated exercise in collaboration, trust, and creativity. The audience for The Poetics is definitely those who indulge in active reading, and who are intrigued by unconventional narrative structures – the book brings photographs and writing together in a clever way, making them interdependent. The book is also exciting in its mission of taking a simple, and somewhat amusing idea, and turning it into layered project with many more possibilities and discoveries than we might have guessed. It requires both reading and seeing, and rewards that combined effort with pleasing intricacy." —Collector Daily

Date: November 22, 2019

Publisher: Image Text Ithaca

Format: Print

Genre: Mixed; theory, memoir

Purchase here.

The Poetics.

From the car.

From the car.

LOUDERMILK: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World: A Novel

ABOUT

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A May 2019 Indie Next Great Read
A June 2019 MIBA Midwest Connections Pick
Los Angeles Times, 1 of 7 Novels Coming Out This Month That You Won't Want to Miss
Nylon's One of the Best New Books to Read This Month
Frieze, What We're Reading This Summer

It’s the end of summer, 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry.

Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life.

Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art-making, and the institutions that sustain them.

READ

Excerpt in Granta.

Excerpt at Lit Hub.

PRAISE

This clever satire of writing programs exhibits, with persuasive bitterness, the damage wreaked by the idea that literature is competition. —The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

Ives is either puncturing a myth about Iowa or advancing it; either option makes her book an indulgence . . . Ives’s interests point toward the philosophical, even the mystical. Loudermilk is not just funny; it becomes a layered exploration of the creative process . . . Ives approaches the students themselves with canny tenderness, and their work (which the novel excerpts, delightfully) with grave respect. Her own language is prickly and odd, with a distracted quality, as if she were trying to narrate while another voice is murmuring in her ear. —The New Yorker

The nuanced subversion of tropes and full-throttle self-indulgence of Ives’s writing lend a manic glee to this slyly funny and deeply intelligent novel. —Publisher's Weekly, starred review

Ives’ satirical masterpiece follows poet Troy Augustus Loudermilk, a shallow Adonis recently admitted to the nation’s premiere creative-writing graduate program, located in the heart of America’s starchy middle . . . Laugh-out-loud funny and rife with keen cultural observations, Ives’ tale is a gloriously satisfying critique of education and creativity. —Booklist, starred review

A book where profound poststructuralist meditations on language, chance and creativity are deftly spun through with a myriad of jokes about farting, sex and male anatomy . . . With the Bush presidency and invasion of Iraq playing out ambiently and calamitously in the background, Loudermilk perfectly captures the strange cultural ethos of the early 2000s . . . With razor-sharp prose and a plenitude of linguistic strangeness, Ives has written a novel about American college life that is both philosophically gripping and exceptionally hilarious. —Shelf Awareness, starred review

Lucy Ives has created something special in Loudermilk. The early 2000s setting is unmistakable, and while all the characters are both familiar (in all the right ways) and written with at least some degree of love, none are spared by Ives’ razor-sharp satire. Unlike so many other satirical novels, Loudermilk is nuanced and feels like it has something to say. —May 2019 Indie Next List

Hilarious, pointed, perfectly executed . . . Ives manages to subvert all expectations, and offers up one of the slyest, smartest looks at what it means to be a writer I've read; her every sentence sings, and they're songs I'll return to again and again. —NYLON

Ives, who once described herself as "the author of some kind of thinking about writing," examines the conditions that produce authors and their work while never losing a sense of wonder at the sheer mystery of the written word . . . The book’s postscript is another kind of writerly transgression, as Ives emphatically tells rather than shows. In a novel full of doubles, veils, and proxies, it makes sense that Ives concludes with yet another layer. —Bookforum

In a literary critical flourish, [Ives] combines elements of libertine novels, realist novels, social novels, inherited wealth lit, postmodern novels, period pieces, poetry, satire, and revenge plots . . . A funny and cutting novel whose critiques of inherited wealth and its effects on culture in the aughts will keep being true until a full redistribution of wealth, beginning with reparations, occurs. —The Nation

Readers expecting yet another referendum on the MFA will be pleasantly surprised to discover a much stranger and more ambitious book. In Loudermilk, Ives has taken a subject notoriously difficult to make interesting—the difficulty of writing itself—and narrativized it into an elaborate plot peopled by avatars of the types Sontag enumerated decades ago . . . Sontag says a good writer must be a fool and an obsessive, that the critic and the stylist are bonuses (so, inessential). But Ives—not just for her own erudition and syntactical artistry, remarkable as they are—counters that it is the critic and the stylist who are indispensable, for they are the ones who interface thought with language. —The Believer

Hilarious . . . A riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend. —The Washington Post

Loudermilk, a satire, explores a complex web of plot and episodes, thick descriptions, biting character arcs, poetic and philosophical precision, stylistically different stories/poems within stories, the nature of time, and the mirage of power (or the possibility of unveiling politics, and cracking open agency). By employing a classical theatrical technique of dramatis personae, rather than 'realistic' novel characters, perhaps Ives is able to move between so many registers that enable her unusual 'mash-up' to excel as at once philosophical and planted in the mud . . . Ives’s style of satire shatters the dichotomy between meta-narrative and human empathy. Breaking such a distinction requires rare observational skill, patience, and multi-genre flexibility and curiosity. —The Brooklyn Rail

Ives’s new novel is one of the funniest in recent memory, stuffed with jabs at writers and toxic masculinity, bluntly yonic allusions, and feuilleton-esque prose that prances on page . . . What Ives is playing with here is not just beautiful sentences and humorous situations, it’s the disharmony felt at the core of our experiences . . . Though the empirical distinctions between prose and poetry are often illusory, Ives finds a way to make her prose both a kind of communication—as is expected—as well as a construction of satire. Her words linger longer than normal trade, and find ways to avoid their disintegration, as if the must of a punchline is more lasting, more fragrant; words this eloquently framed and humorous imprint, and, often enough, hold us in their absurdity.
—The Adroit Journal

Loudermilk may best be read as a contribution to a growing body of literature that both historicizes and critiques the MFA program . . . Loudermilk suggests that MFA programs are only incidentally committed to the production of great writing, that their true purpose is the cultivation and maintenance of power. In this, they have been perversely successful—as successful as Loudermilk himself. And yet, paradoxically, their very success in cultivating such power has led the MFA into crisis. —The Georgia Review

This send-up of contemporary graduate writing programs and the characters they attract and create is sure to highly amuse any reader, especially those with a penchant for academia-set hijinks. Reminiscent of Michael Chabon, this highly original satiric novel is sharp-witted and adroit. Brava. —Addison County Independent

Lucy Ives mixes genres with unusual abandon in her second novel, Loudermilk. The narrative could be regarded as a campus novel, a portrait of the artist, a scam story, a retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac, or a farce . . . Loudermilk is a novel about the tension between art and life, and the conflict between labor and power. —On the Seawall

Lucy Ives is as deeply funny and ferocious a writer as they come. She's also humane and philosophical when it matters most. I love Loudermilk. —Sam Lipsyte

With Loudermilk, Lucy Ives tears down the curtain to unveil the wizard—and here all of the characters are implicated in operating the clunky machinery that creates then lionizes the concept of merit or talent in the academic/literary world. The result is this wildly smart novel that hilariously exposes its characters as they try to vault or cement themselves into some literary canon and/or ivory tower, unaware that the canon/tower is an ever-vanishing mausoleum wherein living writers go to get stuck, or lost, or to scrawl their names and draw butts and boobs on the walls. —Jen George

Date: May 7, 2019

Publisher: Soft Skull Press

Format: Print

Genre: Fiction
Purchase here.

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Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World

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Impossible Views Of The World

Reasons to go to school for writing.

Impossible Views of the World: A Novel

ABOUT

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A witty, urbane, and sometimes shocking debut novel, set in a hallowed New York museum, in which a co-worker’s disappearance and a mysterious map change a life forever.

Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan’s renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week in approximately ever. Her soon-to-be ex-husband (the perfectly awful Whit Ghiscolmbe) is stalking her, a workplace romance with “a fascinating, hyper-rational narcissist” is in freefall, and a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing. Strange things are afoot: CeMArt’s current exhibit is sponsored by a Belgian multinational that wants to take over the world’s water supply, she unwittingly stars in a viral video that’s making the rounds, and her mother—the imperious, impossibly glamorous Caro—wants to have lunch. It’s almost more than she can overanalyze.

But the appearance of a mysterious map, depicting a 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella—a dogged expert in American graphics and fluidomanie (don’t ask)—on an all-consuming research mission. As she teases out the links between a haunting poem, several unusual novels, a counterfeiting scheme, and one of the museum’s colorful early benefactors, she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul’s been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life. Pulsing with neurotic humor and dagger-sharp prose, Impossible Views of the World is a dazzling debut novel about how to make it through your early thirties with your brain and heart intact.

READ

Excerpt in Granta.

Book page at Penguin Random House.

Recording of reading from the novel.

PRAISE

“[An] intricate, darkly funny debut…There is so much going on in this novel, so many sharp observations packed into sentences as sensual and jarring as a Mardi Gras parade, that it bears a second look…Ives, an accomplished poet, infuses even mundane actions with startling imagery…Read this book on whichever level you choose: young woman coming unglued, art world mystery or museum-based episode of ‘The Office,’ replete with petty workplace drama, aged PCs and the occasional colleague marching ‘up and down the hall, loudly, in quest of a staple remover.’ It’s a smart novel brimming with ideas about love, art, personal agency, a lack thereof.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An archival treasure hunt yields riches for the heart-worn young curator in Lucy Ives’s ultracharming fiction debut, Impossible Views of the World, though it’s the author’s tart observations of present-day social pretensions that sparkle brightest.” —Vogue

“Cool and bracing…a perfect summer pleasure…An accomplished poet, Ives also knows how to delight sentence by sentence, with turns of phrase that cry to be underlined or Tweeted…Part send-up of the Manhattan art world, part elaborate literary mystery, the novel is bound together by a voice that is at turns deadpan and warm, shot through with a crisp irony that makes it tempting to declare it the literary equivalent of an Alex Katz painting…It’s a singular work, worthy of a place in any world-class collection.” —Vogue.com

“Diehard Da Vinci Code fans will find a new heroine in Stella, the code-cracking art curator at the center of this clever mystery.” —Cosmopolitan

“An art historical mystery that will interest fans of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, with a narrator equal parts intellectual, ironic, and cool…Scintillating…A diversion and a pleasure, this novel leaves you feeling smarter and hipper than you were before.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“An original debut ringing with smart prose, engaging humor and cultivated taste…Ives’ genius is apparent in the intricate way she weaves ironic confession, romantic comedy and artful treatise with explorations into the historic art world…Full of intelligence and imagination, this relatable literary mystery will charm even the most apprentice art devotee.” —BookPage

“Stella is like Hannah Horvath from Girls—smart, with an equal tendency toward snark and introspection—living in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The novel sends up the museum world, with pretentious art folks courting corporate dollars and the usual office politics, but maintains a sense of something larger, even magical, working in the background.” —Booklist

“The charm and energy of Impossible Views of the World rest in Ives’s uncanny eye for the subtle tells of romance, the idiosyncrasies of the NYC young, and the details of 19th-century furniture and art…A clever curatorial mystery, a love-gone-wrong rom-com or a sharp-witted story of a young New York woman, Impossible Views of the World is way more fun than a rainy afternoon in the American Objects wing of a cavernous museum.” —Shelf Awareness

“[A] smart and singular debut novel…Ives maximizes her story’s humor with subtlety; a line here and there is enough to call attention to the absurdity of, for instance, the museum’s corporate benefactor’s attempt to secure the world’s water rights. She also isn’t afraid to make her heroine unlikable, which works in the novel’s favor…odd and thoroughly satisfying.” —Publishers Weekly

“I first knew Lucy Ives’s work as a poet, and to have her prose is a gift, too. The detailed novel she’s built with such authenticity, wit, and feeling is remarkable for its vitality, insights, and lyrical view of a changing world.” —Hilton Als

“This book was written by a rampaging, mirthful genius. It stands before me like a runestone, magical, mysterious—an esoteric juggernaut masquerading as a ‘debut novel.’ During the days I spent reading it, I said goodbye to all else.” —Elizabeth McKenzie

“There are abundant pleasures to be found in Lucy Ives’s debut novel about art curation, corporate control, and utopia (among many other subjects and digressions), but the best is the poetic, elegant intelligence of its narration, vocalized by Stella Krakus, whose every sentence wryly climbs from the ridiculous to the sublime.” —Teddy Wayne

“Lucy Ives, a deeply smart and painstakingly elegant writer, wins the prize with this intricate, droll, stylish book—at once a mystery novel, a romantic comedy, a tricky essay on aesthetics, an exposé of art-world foibles, and a diary of emotional distress. With sharp phrases, uncanny plot-turns, and mise-en-abymes galore, this mesmerizing tale radiates the haute irreality of Last Year at Marienbad and the dreamy claustrophobia of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, this time for adults only.” —Wayne Koestenbaum

Date: August 1, 2017

Publisher: Penguin Press

Format: Print

Genre: Fiction

Purchase here.

In hardcover.

ABOUT

The Hermit is a catalog of thoughts concerning art and experience. Layering fragments of dreams, lists, games, conversations, poems, and notebooks, Lucy Ives offers an intimate look into one writer's practice—"The worst is my imagination: lushly underscoring everything."

READ

Excerpt at BOMB.

Excerpts at The Poetry Foundation.

PRAISE

"Readers are invited to an inner conversation as the poet grapples with the idea of writing, the history of it, the creative act itself, and also the text as an object, asking permission to be seen (much as Ives permits herself to feel), to exist in the eyes of others, and to participate in the canon. What saves the book from being merely being a treatise or a personal journal is that the reader is taken along on the creative journey; Ives muses about another author or a technique, such as the idea of description, and the page transforms into an experimental playground where she produces gorgeous passages of lush imagery." —Publisher's Weekly

"'This is a poem about trying to write a novel,' Ives writes, daring us to read her poem The Hermit like a novel, or at least as a poet’s desire to write a novel. 'When I was 13 I swore to myself that I would become a novelist,' she continues. In fact she already has: Her impressive publications credits include both poetry (including her excellent collection Orange Roses) and even a novel, nineties, a bildungsroman focused on a young woman coming of age during that decade. She is an editor for Triple Canopy, a magazine and arts organization committed to 'resisting the atomization of culture' and who assembled an installation as part of the 2015 Whitney Biennial. Earlier this year it was announced she’d sold her second novel to Penguin, titled Impossible Views of the World. Ives hasn’t just fulfilled the promise to made by her 13-year-old self, she has documented what it took to get her there. In clumsier hands, this would come off as diaristic. In Ives’s, it’s art." —The Culture Trip

"Like the paintings of Agnes Martin or the films of Nathaniel Dorsky, the most important character in Ives’s prose is its reader. In the white space underneath these notes my own mind’s wanderings take on what is not exactly an importance, but a space for reading and thinking. I move around in this writing, and become aware of my moving around within it, and consider not only the shape of the writing, but my own shape as its reader. In other words, Ives’s writing encourages its readers to consider their own power and form among the reality they encounter." —MAKE Magazine

"Throughout The Hermit recur images of dwellings, both simple and extravagant, and they take on the weight of allegory from the outset. The first of these appear in '3,' where Ives’s author notes: 'I write, inconclusively, ‘All culminating in the image of a dwelling: It indicates a secret life…’' This secret life, for the poet-critic, comes into existence only where the mystery of desired knowledge can be apprehended, where she can sit down by the hearth and be with it. She dreams this is where her path will lead her." —Full Stop

"Imagine if all you had was phenomenology, and then that faded, making every legibility left behind look like scare quotes around the word "thought." Lucy Ives is smart in that heart-breaking way that can make a spare, suspicious, elegant work of anti-poetry out of the silent treatment between ideas and those who have them. 'You cannot win,' says The Hermit, in that cognitive territory unoccupied by ease." —Anne Boyer

"Stray thoughts are the protagonists of The Hermit—they might be the after effects of intense focus, yet come across as decidedly eccentric in their resistance to systems (i.e. genre) that might dull their prismatic luminescence. Here they deliver proof of parataxis's poiesis. Ives's exquisite take on ellipsis as realism is a dream, as both vision and something that fully satisfies a wish." —Mónica de la Torre

reading-from-the-hermit.jpg

Date: July 1, 2016

Publisher: The Song Cave

Format: Print

Genre: Mixed; prose poetry, aphorisms, games, memoir

Purchase here.

The Hermit.

Interior.

Reading from The Hermit in fall 2015.

ABOUT

Human Events is an essay pamphlet, published by Flying Object in 2016.

The essay concerns human events and how to write about them. It was composed during an iteration of Flying Object's ResidencyX, from January 2nd to January 18th, 2015. The title of the residency was "Real Allegory." The focus of the residency was described in the following way:

What can research contribute to writing not based in fact? How, more specifically, might we imagine the potential of historical documents and artifacts to teach us about what is not the case, what cannot be, what is excluded or merely (and perhaps eternally and enticingly) possible? And how does a literary construction such as narrative or a trope such as metonymy find its place in the writing of history?

Treating historiography as a poetics—as a discipline concerned with fabrication, contingent meaning, and aesthetic power, as much as objective analysis and proof—this iteration of ResidencyX will include a lecture, workshop, and exhibition. These events will address the question of how the writing of history can serve as a model for other kinds of writing, depiction, and creation, around and beyond the discipline of history. Also explored: the relationship between historical modes of American art making and artistic collaboration, and contemporary practice.

Installation views of the related exhibition.

View of related library.

Related workshop.

Related interview in The Believer.

Date: March 1, 2016

Publisher: Flying Object

Format: Print

Genre: Literary theory

Currently sold out.

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reading-from-human-events.jpg

The cover.

Reading from Human Events at The Poetry Project in winter 2017.

ABOUT

nineties is an unforgettable novella about credit-card fraud, the end of the 20th century, and the lives of young girls. A deceptively simple and clear-eyed look at adolescence at the dawn of American hypercapitalism, nineties is a cautionary tale, rendered in riveting, lucid prose; a narrative of innocence and experience and the intoxicating nature of first friendships.

READ

Excerpt at Triple Canopy.

PRAISE

"Alien, canny, and alert... . So precise as to sometimes feel punishing, nineties is a brief, formal, forceful book. In it, Ives employs an economy of language that undoes the extreme fecundity of the material culture she describes. As a work of literature, it asks: How can writing be a motor for social revaluation?" —BOMB

"I couldn’t help thinking of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers while reading nineties. The adolescent shenanigans of the girls in that movie are definitely higher-stakes. They involve sticking up a restaurant (with fake guns) for money to go on spring break, ending up in jail, then falling in with a local thug, sticking up other spring breakers with him, and climatically using actual guns to take out an entire rival gang. These girls are older than the characters in nineties, but it’s a similar pattern of behavior in that there is no forethought or concern about potential repercussions. They are 'playing with fate' and are turned on by it. I think this is true of every generation, nineties or otherwise. Perhaps it’s just true of youth. The scary thing about this playing with fate is that said fate can be accessed in further and more nuanced ways aside from just credit fraud. The Internet and social media can inspire such cruel, desperate, and depressing behavior (think of all the stories of kids who kill themselves because they are bullied online, because of their sexuality or otherwise), and we are still learning how this behavior will be understood through the eyes of a generation of humans who have never experienced life without it." —The Rumpus

Date: June 1, 2013

Publisher: Tea Party Republicans (Little A, 2015 republication)

Format: Print

Genre: Fiction

Currently out of print.

nineties-cover.jpg

nineties-second-cover.jpg

The original cover design.

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Second edition cover.

Reading from nineties in fall 2013.

ABOUT

The Worldkillers is a book including poems, a novella, and an essay.

PRAISE

"Ives ... is quickly developing into a poet of sentences on par with the poem-essays of Lisa Roberston and Phil Hall for their sharp blend of lyric, thought and wit." —Rob McLennan

Poem. Novel. Essay. Here is a literary triptych whose panels swing from one another unfettered by geometry in wide and wild arcs. But there are hinges. Think of the upkeep of the minotaur at the center of what can only be the labyrinthine mind of Lucy Ives. This particular creature feeds on its own enclosure. Who said time is eternity turned into a moving image? How does this work on the page? As soon as Ives allows things focus, she pulls back, revealing a small component of a larger construct, but never anything objective and irreducibly whole. Thus, effectively her subject and obsession is not the demarcation of time, but the inability of time to be properly or comparatively enacted. What if Stein and Paul Éluard were a single poet? What if Wittgenstein, Elaine Scarry, and Charles and Ray Eames collaborated on a novelization of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits? What if Robbe-Grillet and Hélène Cixous were to re-write The Duino Elegies as an essay? Daedalus never built anything quite like this. Good luck getting out. —Noah Eli Gordon

The Worldkillers is a strange and beautiful novel of numerology written in the course of a day; it is also a brilliant essay on description. But it begins with singing. Lucy Ives ushers us into her newest book via a series of mediations on repetition and transformation. “I saw” unfurls down the page, eventually becoming “I was,” but not before so many things turn in on, and thus into, themselves. This is not some simple reconfiguration of Decartes’ “cogito ergo sum” whereby vision replaces thinking. Neither thinking nor seeing are proof of being. Ives reminds us that language, image, and description are merely operations we perform, beautiful and useful as they may be. Nothing overrides “the physical world[’s]…indomitable reality,” try as we might to kill it. In the face of our love and disregard for this world, Ives gives us a book so unsettling and so stunning that we “either say no words or weep into” the worlds she so generously offers. These are worlds I gratefully receive. —Sasha Steensen

Lucy Ives's The Worldkillers is so much fun. Like a sick-and-gorgeous dollhouse not-meant-for-kids and come-to-life. Or like a series of Daguerre's Dioramas with lights flickering in windows and pale blue smoke lifting out the chimneys. Anything might happen! Yet only one thing can, because this is a book. But will it be horrible? Gruesome? Grand? —Danielle Dutton

Date: September 1, 2015

Publisher: SplitLevel Texts

Format: Print

Genre: Mixed

Purchase here.

wk.jpg

From the book's interior.

ABOUT

A The Believer Reader Survey Book of the Year for 2013

An Entropy Magazine Best Poetry Book of 2014

One of Flavorwire's 50 Best American Poetry Books of the Decade So Far

Written over a 10-year timeframe, Orange Roses enacts a poet’s development: the process of her discovering what a poem might be. In this work, there is hardly a difference between dream and reality—the line between that which exists and that which is merely a construction of perspective is blurred in any attempt to portray a given experience. Ives questions not only what we can get away with, in attempting to add to or alter whatever “poetry” or “literature” might officially be—but, too, what will we be able to take away? Writing is less about choosing between worlds, she suggests in this exploratory book, than it is about existing in one where life and our perceptions thereof are complementary.

READ

"Orange Roses" at Conjunctions

"Beastgardens" at The Poetry Foundation

"Early Poem" at The Poetry Foundation

"On Imitation" at Triple Canopy

PRAISE

“Though lyric in its form, Orange Roses is a coming-of-age narrative that unfolds against the backdrops of college, California, cityscapes, and an American art conference. Explicitly influenced by the work of George Oppen, Ives takes accretion as her lodestar, moving fluidly from analysis to aphorism, concept to sonnet, and paragraph to fragment. . . . Ives is a poet of aporia or lack, seeking to discover what exists by examining what is absent: poetry ‘is not a question of relating language to a person one is but rather of relating it to the exact person one is not.’ Orange Roses is autobiography composed of its omissions.” —Boston Review

"'Mind-blowing' is an overused phrase when describing books, but with Orange Roses, it fits the bill. 'Thought-provoking' would be an understatement." —Coe Review

"Ives’s raw material is the refreshing stuff of life, the mind and the body. The genuine is trickier territory, but I think for all her concerns with imitation and transference, this is a book about the wonder of discovering yourself as writer in language." —Constant Critic

"In which a maturing writer look[s] back on her younger self with a kind of wild surmise, amazing herself by where she has been, and amazing us by where she might go." —Ploughshares

“Lucy Ives’s Orange Roses is a thrilling book. It is also brilliant, hard-earned and honest. In the acute materiality of its poems—part diary/travelogue, part theatrical event, part philosophy—fervently anti-chronological—it is an urgent (albeit always witty and wry) inquiry into the aesthetic set of mind and the act of making. One could say it is an undressing of the readerly act, of the eye itself and its habit of ‘tugging incessantly forward.’ In fact, Ives’ work contests that forwardness and, in its numerous sequences (most vividly in the stunning ‘Early Poem’ and ‘Orange Roses’) she undertakes to imagine alternatives to the no-longer-apparently-natural forces of progress and growth. In this it is also an urgently political book—but without a trace of polemic. Its politics are where they do the most work—in its form and in its poetics. Ives’ work is certain in its undoing of certainty; it has an unforgettable voice as it strips itself of voiced identity; it summons a deeply trusted narrator in a work which cunningly challenges that trust. What illusions are to be left standing? That you cannot improvise the truth. That you can go backwards. That you cannot start over. That you must. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground—that hard drama—have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.” —Jorie Graham

“I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Orange Roses. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. Especially do I marvel at ‘Early Poem,’ the prose poem sonnet sequence that counts its one hundred sentences with great delicacy, freshness, wit, surprise, and wisdom. Original in form and expression, it brings us to attention, thereby to the real, and the leap mid-sentence from one page to another is dazzling. I’m serious. Here we have objectivist vivacity and accuracy near the U-Haul headquarters in Emerson’s America. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the poems ‘Orange Roses’ and ‘On Imitation,’ is a sober certainty—read the latter as a prospectus for the new poetry. To quote an earlier work, ‘If one follows one’s understanding rather / than resisting: pleasure.’” —Paul Hoover

Date: October 15, 2013

Publisher: Ahsahta Press, Boise State University

Format: Print

Genre: Poetry, essay

Purchase here.

orange-roses-cover.jpg

The cover.

On the vine.

ABOUT

Novel is a poetry chapbook.

PRAISE

"I wonder at times what a genuinely philosophical poetry might look like; I know it wouldnt look like philosophy. I suspect it might bear real resemblance to the poems that Lucy Ives is writing in Novel. Such poems accept confusion without reveling in it. Such poems trouble themselves by working toward song in the very realm where thought and perception divide and grow quarrelsome. They forsake Truth with its capital T for truthfulness: an attention to consequence, a willingness to become complicated without false reverence thereof, 'the knot so language would have / mention // of what it later did.' These are poems remarkably without idols; and by that I simply mean that these poems seek to 'follow one's understanding rather / than resisting.' It just happens to be the truthful case that one doesn't always understand ones understanding, and the pleasure of the poem is inextricable from its necessity: an accompaniment into the world that refuses to be domesticated by thought, the very world in which one loves what she loves, the very world in which one makes her home."
—Dan Beachy-Quick

Date: February 1, 2012

Publisher: Projective Industries

Format: Print

Genre: Poetry

Out of print.

The cover.

ABOUT

Anamnesis is a long poem. It was the winner of the 2008 Slope Editions Book Prize.

It was also recorded and released as a 12" by Flying Object/Unicorn Evil, in 2011.

"The word 'anamnesis' relates to how a person arrives at knowledge. In the Platonic sense, it suggests the recollection of ideas which the soul knew in a previous life. In a clinical sense, it is the full medical history as told by a patient; in the Christian sense, it is a Eucharistic prayer; and in immunology, it is a strong immune response. All of these meanings relate to the central concept of this fine collection, how a writer 'finds' and/or 'makes' meaning and deals with the temporary nature of the act, how even our most vital life stories are provisional at best, and how erasure becomes part of the process itself. We are asked to reflect on what previous life brought these sentences to the page, what history of illness or wellness caused the words to form this way, what invisible prayer was erased even before meaning was posited." —Maxine Chernoff, from the Introduction

READ

Excerpt in Typo

An excerpt included in Ugly Duckling Presse's 6x6 lent that particular issue of the periodical its title

Audio at Triple Canopy

PRAISE

"Powered by the refrain-directive 'write,' and 'cross out,' the content of Lucy Ives’ most recent work, Anamnesis, remains under active, sustained deliberation throughout. In this single long poem, her first book, Ives stalls writing at its inception so that a central question—what can be acceptably written here?—hovers over the poem and induces it." —BOMB

"This is an important book: I’ll come back to it." —With Hidden Noise

"The simple concept Ives has chosen for her collection of poems is ingenious. Anamnesis belongs not among stacks of experimental poetry, but with the ambitions of conceptual visual artists who sought to replace the object with the assumptions and intentions behind it: Rauschenberg’s erasures of de Kooning or Ceci n’est pas une pipe are closer to the kind of infinite aesthetics of Anamnesis than those of contemporary poetry. Ives has replaced the book with the act of reading and response. The book does not become the book, does not become itself, until we engage with it. For the elegance of its iteration alone, it merits our attention." —Tarpaulin Sky

"By not holding to one thought, Ives triggers many; we become the writer and the reader of multiple poems. Anamnesis is a new reminder of the fluidity of our roles and our memories. The reader’s experience is not passive, and the stylistic choice to expose poems and the writing of them for what they truly are—decisions and regrets and half-truths—is refreshing." —The Colorado Review

"Ives highlights the poetic occupation of establishing comparative structures only to torment the linguistic foundations on which they are based. The text occludes the making of a manageable recollection, since the thing remembered is at once mutable and disposable. This effect both carries and calcifies content: the afterimages of words and meanings appear and disappear in real time, and are reminiscent of the erasures and alterations found in William Kentridge’s animated films. Like Kentridge, Ives performs a kind of mental trickery as the medium allows for the appearance of progressions. Kentridge’s drawings—when captured in succession—create the illusion of movement, much as Ives’ constructions collect meaning—jerking through affirmations and negations, reflecting the false starts and reboots of living." —Lana Turner

Date: December 30, 2009

Publisher: Slope Editions

Format: Print

Genre: Poetry

Currently out of stock here.

The book cover.

The 12" album cover.

My Thousand Novel is a poetry chapbook.

You can download it as a PDF at right.

Phone Call with Sophie Calle

Date: January 1, 2009

Publisher: Cosa Nostra Editions

Format: Print

Genre: Poetry

Out of print.

mythousandnovel.pdf

🖫

LUCY IVES GIVES SOPHIE CALLE A CALL

In a cross-continent phone conversation, one author traces the narrative artist’s evolution through her books

I was digging up lilies when someone I live with came outside and said: ‘Sophie Calle’. A cordless telephone was indicated. I realized, after a moment, that he meant that Sophie Calle – the ‘narrative artist’, a term she herself approves – was on the line. I ran to answer, as you do, I’ve come to understand, when Calle is calling.

It was a little after midnight in France. Calle wondered if, perhaps, I wanted to reconvene another time, given I was panting. I told her I thought we should seize the moment. I was thinking of the missed connections in her work: a first date that takes place a year late in her autobiographical vignette ‘The Husband’, included in True Stories (2018); the lover whose agonizing failure to appear she relentlessly narrated and re-narrated for Exquisite Pain (2004). I worried that, if I were to delay now, I’d never hear from her again. It didn’t exactly make sense, given all Calle’s communications with me thus far had been prompt and direct. In response to my baroque self-introductory message, for instance, she’d replied with a phone number and just two words: ‘Call me?'

Over the next 90 minutes, Calle spoke to me about the origins of her practice and the enhanced agency her work has given her over the years. Critics sometimes reference Calle’s dislike of elaborate explanations of the motivations and meanings of her combined texts and images. A line from a 2002 interview with Fabian Stech published in Kunstforum International – ‘Let’s say I’m a conceptual shop girl, or shop-girl-ish conceptualist’ – may be cited. In a not-entirely-flattering catalogue essay for Calle’s 1991 exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, writer and photographer Hervé Guibert described her, despite her bourgeois origins, as ‘a shop girl in search of impossible, eternal, perfect love’, and you wonder if she appropriated the sobriquet from him. In my own interactions with her, I found that Calle’s reputation for aplomb – or faux-naïveté, depending on whom you ask – was, in a sense, justified. Calle was not her own interpreter. She would reveal little to me beyond what I could already divine for myself, as a viewer and reader of her work. Yet, in another way, she shared more: her reflections were personal, revealing if not precisely autobiographical.

Many of Calle’s pieces – like early works by Vito Acconci and Adrian Piper, to whom she is occasionally compared – concern the act of following. Calle told me there was a pragmatic motivation for her pursuits in such well-known projects as Suite Vénitienne (Venetian Suite, 1983), for which she followed a stranger to Venice, documenting the stalking process in writing and photographs, and L’Homme au carnet (The Address Book, 1983), Calle’s portrait of a man generated through interviews with individuals included in an address book he had lost on the street. She told me: ‘When you do the work I do, you create situations that are emotional.’ Her aim, she said, in generating interpersonal dynamics that suited her artistic fiat, was to experience relationships in which she was ‘not dependent’. Of the duration of such relationships, she explained: ‘I decide. When it was over, it was just over.’ Somewhat paradoxically, the whole point was not to become involved. Calle accorded an intense attention to the men she pursued, surpassing the regard we tend to think is normal in a romantic encounter. Her gaze was possibly obsessive and definitely logistical: it involved the use of disguises, hidden cameras, international travel and numbing administrative labour in the form of endless phone calls and interviews.

I mention our conversation – which, in another act of mild control, Calle asked not be reproduced here – so that you know what sort of reader of her work I am: I choose to be unsuspicious, even as I admire what Calle’s most suspicious interpreters have discovered in her practice. My favourite among these, the art historian Yve-Alain Bois, wrote a lovely, if periphrastic, essay on Calle titled ‘Paper Tigress’ (2006) in October. ‘She undermines the foundations of her “person”,’ Bois writes. ‘She only gives shape to this mask in order to dispel it as an illusion.’ Linda Nochlin is less patient in ‘Sophie Calle: Word, Image and the End of Ekphrasis’, a previously unpublished essay collected in Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (2015). She considers Calle’s hard-to-categorize displays at once ‘annoying and provocative, seductive and boring, dependent often on personal narrative but refusing emotional closeness’. Of course, after this ambivalent salvo, Nochlin expends several thousand words on a painstaking reading of ekphrastic tendencies in Calle’s texts and images. According to Nochlin, Ghosts (1989–91), for which Calle asked museum workers to describe missing or stolen canonical works of art by male artists, ‘unintentionally’ creates ‘an unconscious feminist response to the Great Art of the museum and its authorized discourses’. Like Bois, Nochlin finds Calle lacking: a mask instead of a person, an unconscious response instead of deliberate critique. Did Calle mean, in Ghosts, to indicate the troubling absence Nochlin herself identifies in her celebrated essay, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ 1971)? Or, does Ghosts, with its tendency to humorously minimize works by Pierre Bonnard and Johannes Vermeer – as one interviewee remarks of Bonnard’s Nude in the Bath (1936): ‘Nothing special. It’s a nude in the bath in the water’ – just coincidentally function as an inquiry into what we venerate by way of immensely valuable art? To extrapolate: is Calle in control?

The answer is yes. But the answer is, also, no. As a thunderstorm traverses the valley below my house and our connection begins to drop in and out, Calle tells me that the responses her prompts elicit – the phrases, feelings, points of view – are variously groomed, edited. For Transport-amoureux (2007), a work seldom discussed in the literature on Calle, the artist invited commuters at Jeanne d’Arc metro station in Toulouse to submit personal notes regarding missed encounters. These messages were then displayed on screens throughout the station. I mention to her that the listings website Craigslist once hosted these sorts of communications, and that I used to read them for entertainment and to try to make sense of the world, that 2007 was probably the peak of my engagement. I say I don’t really know what’s on Craigslist these days, although it seems to have changed a lot since 2018’s Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act in the US and the demise of the ‘Personals’ section. ‘Yes,’ Calle says. And here she tells me that it was necessary to moderate the Transport-amoureux messages, that someone read and approved them before they were broadcast.

This case of official oversight points to the way in which Calle’s work, even if possessed of a distinct lightness that some have received as naivety or dilettantism, co-exists warily with various legal and quasi-legal regulations related to property, privacy, obscenity and public space. Her writing deftly excavates discursive regions in which the personal becomes confused with authority. For her installation and publication Que faites-vous de vos morts? (What Do You Do with Your Dead?, 2019), she invited visitors to her 2017 exhibition Beau doublé, Monsieur le marquis! (A Fine Double, Your Honour!) at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature to reply to the titular question on the pages of a blank notebook. The handwritten responses were reproduced as received, without, as far as I can tell, editing or culling. Yet, this in itself is an editorial choice, since it leaves intact so much repetition and banality: over and over, writers (probably children) gleefully explain that they ‘eat’ their dead: ‘On les mange!’ Elsewhere, the predictable necrophiliac surfaces: ‘On les encule,’ which I won’t translate. More earnest respondents describe mnemonic haunting and magical thinking. Throughout, there is a striking lack of description of protocols for the disposal of dead bodies and of questions around the official regulation of physical decay – an absence that renders the state unsettlingly present. As with the mechanics of birth, Western society seems to prefer to acknowledge the logistics of death only when they are absolutely unavoidable, and then to forget them as quickly as possible afterwards.

More frequently discussed are emendations to Calle’s Suite Vénitienne. At the publisher’s request, the photographs of ‘Henri B.’ – himself a photographer and filmmaker who was scouting locations in Venice during the two weeks Calle stalked him in various disguises – were re-taken by the artist on a subsequent trip, using a male friend as stand-in. The year of Calle’s original visit to the city was also changed. These alterations were undertaken to prevent a possible lawsuit – to relocate, as it were, the project within a credibly fictional realm, even though the work’s force comes from the reader’s belief that they are encountering indexical traces of a real act of obsession, as arbitrary as it is actual. Calle did this for no reason, you might think, even as you marvel at the boldness it took and the odd and highly unstable interpersonal dynamics generated. Fortunately, our fantasy about Calle’s following ‘Henri B.’ is hardly punctured by the changes. Indeed, the editing may even serve to heighten our curiosity. If it’s not real, why does it feel so real? But you should know, as Calle told curator and editor Bice Curiger for ICA London’s ‘Talking Art’ series in 1993, that there is always a ‘lie’ in each of her works: ‘It is what I would have liked to find and didn’t.'

Far from stumbling upon a space of writing in which the factual and the imaginary lose their distinctness, Calle ended up here very much by desire and design. Critics often gesture towards the similarities with surrealist and situationist relationships to urban space and questions of chance when attempting to unpack Calle’s motivations and techniques. But, whereas doctrinaire surrealism compelled the viewer or reader to confront the hypocritical prudery of modern culture, and situationism sought to address the presence of authoritarian narratives in the built environment, Calle’s claim is not really on or about larger systems, except in that they happen to figure in her strategies as raw material. Calle aims at a more subtle human mechanism, one that goes by various names: attachment, repetition, obligation. I’d add another term you see less frequently in the writing on Calle: inheritance. Even as her project takes place in public, it is often about outing the functioning of domestic arrangements. How much, she asks, can we bear to understand about our own actions? Calle compels us to attend to what we have decided, willfully, to forget – whether this is obsessing about strangers, ignoring our own mortality, mindlessly venerating political monuments or works of art, using a payphone, deciding what to eat on a given day or whom to marry, and on and on.

When Calle tells me that her overarching goal is ‘to decide’, and thereby control, her interactions, I understand that it is her aim to detach herself from a commonplace emotional life, one that often goes un-thought. Although her work diverges from the high conceptualism of the 1960s and ’70s – in that it does not focus exclusively on the act of art-making or the artwork’s medium, its institutional context or related economies – it does comment reflexively on the origins of narrative in everyday life. The unconsidered self, in possession of a supposedly natural story, is lost in Calle’s carefully staged endeavours, but an art object is gained. For Calle, this object is usually a book.

While Calle has produced fine, limited editions – including La Fille du docteur (The Doctor’s Daughter, 1991), a box enclosing black and white photographs documenting her 1979 performance The Striptease together with facsimiles of congratulatory cards sent to her parents after her birth – most of her publications are more attainable. Offered in French by Actes Sud and in English by Thames & Hudson and Siglio Press, Calle’s artist books are mass-produced yet beautifully designed, printed and bound in hardcover, almost always with a petite trim size that suggests portability as well as intimacy, an uncanny hominess. There is, additionally, an air of the children’s story, travel guide, devotional text or novelty book about them, a jumble of genres and contexts that somehow coalesce into a uniquely Calleian style, as maniacally energetic as it is refined.

As Calle explained to Gagosian director Louise Neri in Interview in 2009, she has been accused of putting ‘open books on the walls’ with her exhibitions of images and texts, perversely privileging reading in settings normally associated with looking. She tells me that creating sensual experience is her primary goal as an artist. Although, as she also tells me, she often thinks about whether something will work ‘for the wall’, she seems less a devotee of galleries than of Stéphane Mallarmé’s notion that all the world is destined to end up in a book, which for Calle is a multivalent, carnal location. For her most recent English-language publication, The Hotel (2021), this has meant gilt edging, full-bleed photographic images with a painterly lushness and a witty, cloth-bound cover reproducing three vintage wallpaper patterns – amounting to a modern-day reliquary. You do not read The Hotel: you step into it, lie down, feel and smell the personal items of the unwitting guests Calle, posing as a maid in 1981, documented with her camera and daily writing.

With Calle, it is less a question of representation of a real world via false media, than of a symmetry between our experience and her creations that can feel unaccountable and unnerving, for she offers something more nuanced than objective truth. Hers is a painstakingly strategic literature that poses ceaselessly as what has already been written, as that which belongs to the agency and fantasies of others, as what was discarded and only accidentally found, in which ‘I’ is a mystery to be filled in by strangers. Near the end of our conversation, I gathered my courage and attempted a meagre joke. ‘You’re a very lucky person,’ I told Calle, and she laughed. I was ludicrously proud of myself, as if I were the first writer to successfully describe her.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 223 with the headline ‘The World in a Book’

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Date: November 1, 2021

Publisher: frieze

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of frieze, November, 2021.

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November 2022 cover.

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On site.

Sophie Calle, Detail 3 from 'Room 30', The Hotel, 1981/2021, photograph

TRUST SURVEY 2018
What can we learn from Adrian Piper's search for ethical ways of being?

THE VIDEO CONCLUDED “A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016,” Adrian Piper’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.[1] Two friends had recommended it in high terms, and so I went, on a Tuesday in late May of 2018, and was treating it—the video, that is—incorrectly, as the beginning of the show.

In Adrian Moves to Berlin, Piper dances to “selected Berlin house music of the early 2000s.”[2] She’s in Alexanderplatz, Berlin’s storied central pedestrian zone, site of a weird, squat world time clock and the Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft (Fountain of Friendship among Peoples), along with the former GDR’s prize television tower. The square’s Stalinist desolation has been updated since reunification—notably with a shopping mall. However, save for the clock, the shot is too tight for us to make out these monuments to globalized space and time. We hear house music and see Piper in motion in jeans, blazer, pink scarf, sunglasses. It’s possible that Piper, dancing, is not listening to a recording—though from time to time we see her touch her ear, as if adjusting small headphones. She may have memorized the composition, as she did for her 1971–72 performance, Aretha Franklin Catalysis, in which she danced to Franklin’s “Respect” without playing a (publicly) audible track.

Adrian Moves to Berlin, as I later learned by reading a text on Piper’s website, was shot on a Monday in late March 2007 at lunchtime. The video’s title points up a related logistical matter: Piper has relocated to Berlin from the United States, and Piper is “moving to the beat of Berlin,” if we can suffer that expression. She’s at once displaced and attentive to location and time. Piper’s lack of constraint regarding passersby, some of whom seem to shift to acknowledge and even stiffly celebrate her, is a demonstration of autonomy—in particular, freedom of movement—even as we understand that this is an artwork about interpersonal relations in public space.

On MoMA’s sixth floor, meanwhile, in spring of 2018, there were at least two popular ways of engaging with the video, which was projected onto a wall beside the exhibition’s exit. Some people would come up to it and begin dancing along, sometimes so that their friends could photograph them or make a video. Others would assume an attitude similar to those passing through Alexanderplatz on March 26, 2007: they drifted by, commenting on the anomaly of the spectacle. Look at her, they said, sometimes appreciatively, sometimes with an air of confusion. I studied these responses, enjoying them as if they were works of art in themselves—an echo that seemed part of the point. I wanted to dance too, and maybe I did, shyly, standing off to the side. I began to be subject to fantasies about personal agency and started walking through the exhibition in reverse.

“A Synthesis of Intuitions” (now at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as “Concepts and Intuitions”) is a comprehensive show, painstakingly organized in strict chronological order. It was also, as size-conscious individuals noted at the time, the largest exhibition of work by a living artist held at MoMA, filling the entire floor. Traveling backward thus had consequences. I experienced trepidation before The Humming Room (2012), a small room I had to pass through in order to access the rest of the exhibition. Above the entrance was a sign: in order to enter the room, you must hum a tune. any tune will do. OK, I thought. Within the room stood a security guard, who, although currently distracted, was probably empowered to enforce the imperative. I wasn’t sure if I knew how to hum recognizably in public and was concerned, however ridiculously, that if I did not manifest the correct behavior I would be asked to leave. Some of my disorientation probably had to do with the fact that I was coming early, as far as the show’s narrative was concerned, to The Humming Room. Piper explains in an interview, quoted in the exhibition catalogue, that this space is intended as a “kind of pressure valve that allows viewers to let off steam, to release [their] anger and tension and anxiety” after they have passed through the “Corridor of Pain,” her works of the 1990s treating racism and misogyny, trauma, and America’s history of violence and police brutality.[3] But the “Corridor of Pain” was still on the other side of the room for me. I procrastinated, hovering at what was properly the exit of The Humming Room, studying Thwarted Projects, Dashed Hopes, A Moment of Embarrassment, a self-portrait from September 2012 that combines text in white typewriter font with a photographic image of Piper’s smiling face that has been printed in an artificial gray. The text announces her decision to “change my racial and nationality designations” to “6.25% grey, honoring my 1/16th African heritage” and “Anglo-German American, reflecting my preponderantly English and German ancestry.” I lingered on the exclamation point at the end of the declaration: “Please join me in celebrating this exciting new adventure in pointless administrative precision and futile institutional control!” Nearby was a photolithograph, Imagine [Trayvon Martin] (2013), with Martin’s face on a white field printed in an extremely faint, pale gray overlaid with prominent red crosshairs. Beneath Martin’s chin, a sentence rendered in purple typewriter font reads, “Imagine what it was like to be me.” There is no punctuation. With this ellipsis in mind, I ducked into The Humming Room. My humming was literal. It went, “Hum, hum, hum.” The guard had a non-reaction and I stepped to the other side.

I reflected that before entering The Humming Room, speaking of “institutional control,” I had failed, in an important sense. I had been so focused on the directive (you must hum a tune) and, relatedly, on the task of acquitting myself faultlessly as a normal museumgoer, that I had lost track of what was at stake. I had perceived the letter of the law (you must hum) without intuiting its spirit, its ironies, its will to distinguish. I’d striven, ludicrously, to behave correctly, to enter into the law’s good graces, even as Piper’s recent works had already impressed upon me the incontrovertible historical and contemporary fact that the letter of American law is infernal and subtle, its clarity a dissimulation.

Though I had focused on Thwarted Projects, Dashed Hopes, A Moment of Embarrassment and Imagine [Trayvon Martin], there were other works—and other words—to read on the subject of institutional control. howdy says an unapologetic no-entry symbol Piper projects onto a locked door, for example, in her 2015 Howdy #6 [Second Series]. And Never Forget (2016) appropriates the nationalist slogan of September 11, 2001, as the title of a graphic exploration of Piper’s family tree. The genealogical diagram at the lower left of the print montage reveals that her white, formerly slave-holding great-great-grandfather became “colored” in his legal death record, through his marriage to Piper’s great-great-grandmother, who, “[paid him] a thousand dollars in order to obtain her freedom and the freedom of her four children.” Piper couples this detailed elaboration of the administrative workings of America’s racial caste system with another archival revelation and appropriation, an image of the official 2008 letter she received, summarily revoking her appointment as a professor of philosophy and dismissing her from Wellesley College.

Piper’s 2015 Golden Lion–winning Venice Biennale installation, The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3, on the other hand, allows visitors entrée into an apparently more livable bureaucratically managed community, under the auspices of which, at a series of three reception desks staffed by attentive young people, they may pledge always to “be too expensive to buy,” “say what I mean,” and “do what I say I am going to do.” The plain language associated with these and other artworks gave me opportunity to contemplate my own decision-making process, along with the sorts of prompts I was most receptive to. I noted that sometimes I wanted to be independent and sometimes to imitate or join. Sometimes I was thrown back into the problem of not knowing what to do or how to understand the environment, and sometimes problems beyond my own individual actions or experience loomed larger, pointing me out as a subject of history. Overall, I found that the present—present time, present action, present thought—was getting thicker, more specific, more challenging in its detail.

As I continued my walk backward, back into Piper’s work of the 1990s, ’80s, ’70s, and late ’60s, I considered her recent imperatives (“Please join,” “Imagine,” “Never forget,” etc.), along with my own inability to trust either the contract offered by The Humming Room or my own actions within that room, though I had decided to enter. I reflected that—no great epiphany this—contracts, social and otherwise, are tricky. Subject to spontaneous revision, reinterpretation, and disintegration, among other forms of unwanted variance, they tend to function one way in theory and another in practice. I reflected, too, that the author of these works was a professor of meta-ethics and, therefore, in some non-negligible sense, an expert on trust.

BEING AN ANALYTIC philosopher isn’t easy. I know because I made brief attempts at the close of the last century, as an eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old. Most memorable was a course on Kant’s ethics taught by Christine Korsgaard. The Harvard University lecture hall was packed, largely with young men who wore shorts in winter and claimed math courses were a leisure activity. It provoked in me a feeling of extreme discomfort. Though I was at the time unaware that anything related to my identity could determine which disciplines I could and could not pursue, and though Korsgaard herself was female, there was a definite chill. I chose to believe that the chill was mostly due to the way in which the discipline treated language. The notion that a paragraph could be converted—clarified—into a formal grammar, a raft of specific propositions, felt artificial and alien, at least to me, who was unused to words being valued for the stability of their meanings. I was otherwise spending most of my time being a comparative literature major who had just discovered German poetry (Celan, Novalis) and, in a stroke of genius and desperation, had convinced my teaching assistant to let me write a final paper for Korsgaard on a single word in The Metaphysics of Morals. I said nothing all semester, save in the T.A.’s office hours, where I struggled to put in a relevant (to the field, at least) thought.

Thus, it may not be specific enough, particularly in the context of contemporary visual art, to say that Adrian Piper is “a philosopher.” The everyday valence of this term, given the existence, for example, of Slavoj Žižek, who is also, yes, “a philosopher,” can obscure the rigor and technical specificity of what those who work in the analytic tradition do, particularly since it is a method that embraces not just conceptual clarity but empiricism. Given the tendency on the part of art institutions to casually solicit the tidings of adjacent disciplines, particularly those concerned with language, we are accustomed to encountering professional philosophers in galleries and museums. Usually these philosophers, phenomenologists and ideologues (I use the latter term without pejorative intent), offer broad humanistic themes, not unambiguous logical forms. Piper, in her role as an analytic philosopher, works with logic, deploying specific techniques to address discrete problems with identifiable results, though more popular notions such as value(s) and history also come in for consideration.

Piper has taken care to explain that her work in philosophy, her “day job,” as she writes, is not a mirror image, in another guise, of her work in visual art—or, for that matter, an uncomplicated extension of her study and practice of yoga—and vice versa.[4] Though there was a craze among Conceptual artists and others for the analytic tradition’s linguistic turn during the heyday of the so-called dematerialization of the art object, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (“All philosophy is a ‘critique of language.’”) has persisted as a figure of fascination in the American humanities, there has been little cross-pollination between the fields of visual art and analytic philosophy, generally speaking.[5]

I am not proposing to initiate the process of cross-pollination here.[6] I don’t have the skills necessary to the task; moreover, I’m not sure that one career need be deployed to interpret another. But it does seem worth clarifying that Piper is a distinguished philosopher. She is the first woman of African descent to receive academic tenure in a field notoriously lacking in diversity in the United States, and among her many achievements is the inclusion of her 1984 paper, “Two Conceptions of the Self,” in the Philosophers’ Annual, a selection of the top ten papers from a given year, among the highest honors a paper can receive. This paper in turn forms the basis for Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Piper’s two-volume magnum opus, a work some three decades in the making, which Piper describes as the fullest expression of her engagement with Kant, ongoing since the 1960s.

As a philosopher, Piper points up her interest in employing means and ends that are congruent. As she writes in the first chapter of Rationality and the Structure of the Self, philosophers do philosophy in no small part because philosophy requires the exercise of the “buoyant device” of reason, and exercising reason suggests a respect for the rational capacity of others, as well as the existence of something called “transpersonal rationality,” i.e., “principled rational dispositions—to consistency, coherence, impartiality, impersonality, intellectual discrimination, foresight, deliberation, self-reflection, and self-control—that enable us to transcend the overwhelming attractions of comfort, convenience, profit, gratification . . . and self-deception.”[7] Most if not all of Rationality and the Structure of the Self is about showing how this account of the self, a Kantian account, is not only superior to David Hume’s account of the self as primarily egocentric, but in fact the account of the self that already undergirds Humean descriptions. According to Piper, it’s essentially a revision of the entire contemporary analytic field, which she suggests is necessary on practical as well as empirical grounds, as:

When teachers fail to impart a love of philosophy to their undergraduate students, or drive graduate students, traumatized, out of their classes and out of the field, it is often because these elemental guidelines for conducting the enterprise—guidelines that express the simple truth that a love of philosophy is incompatible with feeling humiliated or trounced or arrogant or self-congratulatory for one’s contributions to it—have been ignored.[8]

I can’t judge whether Piper is entirely successful in her enterprise in this book, but I was interested enough to read its thousand-plus pages in PDF form, having downloaded it from her website. A technical work to be sure, it is also beautifully written, full of humor and broadly applicable wisdom. I found, in reading it, that I wished that as a graduate student I had had such a professor. Indeed, my reaction and Piper’s own references to the state of the academy in this text and elsewhere, along with her accounts of her professional and personal experiences there, indicate another wrinkle in the circulation and reception of her work: She repeatedly maintains that the field of analytic philosophy is beset by unethical, prejudicial practices; that it can no longer reproduce itself with integrity. Rationality and the Structure of the Self is launched as a theoretical and practical corrective.

If I go to adrianpiper.com, I can view a video and other materials that explain why Piper elected to publish her masterwork with her own nonprofit, the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation (APRA) in Berlin, even though it was accepted by Cambridge University Press.[9] Piper rejected the prestigious press’s offer, in part because its publicity department asked for cuts to her text. Her refusal to alter her work in any way in order that it might appear with a certifying imprint is an example of a decision to think of images and texts as more than “mere” representations of reality, to reconcile ends and means. Piper has taken care to treat Rationality and the Structure of the Self as an act with practical and ethical consequences, as well as an object or series of messages.

WE MIGHT SAY something similar of the publications that accompany “A Synthesis of Intuitions.” Though we have the predictable oversize catalogue, with its luscious full-color reproductions, there are two additional hefty tomes, Adrian Piper: A Reader, published by MoMA, and Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir, published by the APRA Foundation. These two publications serve, if differently, as useful gestures in relation to the show. Cornelia Butler and David Platzker write, in their introductory “Adrian Piper: Reading the Work,” in the MoMA reader, that they “encourage readers to consider this book as a kind of communal interpretive mural project.”[10] Though the collection has the standard exegetical function of a grouping of catalogue essays, it also functions like a Festschrift and consolidates, deepens, and expands previous accounts of Piper’s career; it likely replaces earlier tomes as the definitive critical compendium, given the various writers’ wide-ranging research interests and areas of expertise. Escape to Berlin, meanwhile, is at once a more and less complex story.

Readers of Piper’s writings in what she has termed “meta-art,” know that she is capable of trenchant analysis and rigorous style.[11] But Escape to Berlin is a different sort of writing, tonally distinct: it is concerned with autobiography, and although Piper repeatedly states that she cannot be concerned with what the reader thinks, the book sounds and feels intimate. It is a first-person narrative about Piper’s childhood, her experiences with family, and her professional life as a philosopher. The book mentions Piper’s career as an artist, but it is not primarily about this aspect of her work. Rather, the memoir focuses on Piper’s loving relationship with her parents and extended family, how she came to have awareness of the world, the ways in which “the American caste system, based on the imagined binary opposition between ‘black’ and ‘white’ ‘races’” affected Piper’s family and Piper herself—particularly through her father’s abandonment by his own white father—and the ways in which Piper’s experience of familial love and societal corruption played out in her work as a professor of analytic philosophy, a field from which she would eventually need, as the title suggests, to escape.[12]

Piper describes a dangerous “dissociation of theory from practice” in contemporary analytic philosophy and throughout the academy, the reign of the “popular rule derived from Socrates’ [sic] execution.”[13] Her adviser, the moral and political philosopher John Rawls, was supportive only when it was convenient for him to be so and, as Piper maintains, effectively wrote her out of the canon by neglecting to cite her work in his own. Others were devious and competitive, when not openly racist and sexist: There is, and this is a beautiful string of descriptors, the “most subterranean, efficient, and easily angered among [Piper’s] colleagues,” who at her first job contrived to create a climate that made it impossible for Piper to receive tenure.[14] I’m giving just one example, but what is clear in this account is the hostility of the academy in general to those who are not male and white and who speak their minds, as well as the particularly closed and conformist nature of the field of philosophy. These are not new complaints, but what is unusual is to see someone lay out the sequence of events in such detail, how it is possible to progress from the happy moment at which one is a desirable prospective graduate student, courted by faculty, to the state of being a threat and serious inconvenience, in spite of, or perhaps because of, one’s achievements. As we have recently seen powerful tenured academics publicly attribute “malicious” intent to a student, it is quite illuminating to see an individual with tenure—who was in theory in a protected position in the academy—describe an environment in which viciousness and paranoia reign, to the detriment of thoughtful pedagogy.[15] And, in this case, it is Piper’s description—which is to say, a description offered by someone whose embrace of the Socratic imperative to align theory and practice, word and deed, means and ends, has given her not just a logical rationale to protest but a professional obligation to do so.

A metaphorical image appears throughout the account, of “a sprout, a tiny sapling slowly and laboriously pushing its way above ground and emerging into the air.” For Piper, this sprout is an analogy for “the self you really are.”[16] Now a doctor of comparative literature and definitely not an analytic philosopher, I find it striking, for literary reasons, that this sounds a lot like a central metaphor of Platonic and Aristotelian poetics, in which personal action (including artistic creation) is thought through using the coming-into-being of nature as a model. Presumably, this sprout also has to do with Kant’s epigenetic conception of pure reason, in which innate mental capacities, Erkenntnisvermögen, or “faculties of cognition,” synthesize external experiential data, along with representational processes that are fundamentally prior to experience. However, and perhaps most importantly, the image of this sprout is a place in Piper’s writing in which her “three hats” come together for a moment, and we can understand the larger project; the kind of self and cultivation of self that is at stake.

Commentators have been perplexed by Piper’s narrative of her clashes with philosophy departments and with Wellesley College, in particular.[17] Can it be true that a smallish women’s liberal arts institution aggressively attacked an artist and scholar of Piper’s standing, who—and this is perhaps the kicker—stands for the sorts of values of inclusion, reasoned critique, and historical reflection that the college is presumably desirous of fostering? Can it be accurate that Piper’s complaints feel only vaguely substantiated (as Piper maintains, she was able to fully identify and address many harmful actions only years after the fact)? Is it reasonable for Piper to have left the United States, to have claimed she did so under mortal threat?[18] And, why didn’t she come to the opening of her own show? Is there not something missing here, some part of the story withheld from us, some simple written fact or other piece of evidence that might drop from the sky to clarify what has gone on? Yet it is also the case that Piper’s protest does not begin with Escape to Berlin or the opening of “A Synthesis of Intuitions.” Piper has been writing about these matters for years.[19] The renewed exploration of the truth status of her claims in Escape to Berlin feels like an extension of considerations that have long been a feature of critics’ and others’ responses: We are not analytic philosophers; can we “trust” Piper’s philosophical texts? We are not appreciators of art (in fact, we are analytic philosophers); can we “trust” Piper’s celebrated art? And there is the matter of art criticism itself: can critics be trusted not to misrepresent Piper’s work? And, conversely, can critics trust Piper not to dismantle their assertions in public, or, rather, trust that she will do exactly that?[20]

TO RETURN TO THAT past version of me, the one who was walking backward through “A Synthesis of Intuitions” on a Tuesday afternoon in May of 2018, I reflected that the present now frequently takes the form of an online survey or option to “like” or re-blog some chad of content, and Piper’s long-standing practice of employing, altering, and criticizing news media in her work feels particularly compelling and relevant. I considered the “Vanilla Nightmares” series of the late 1980s, in which Piper annotated the New York Times with muscular dark-skinned figures, some of whom are equipped with sleek erect penises, along with the ambiguous Mythic Being’s meme-like iteration in the early 1970s as a series of ads in the Village Voice. These works speak to the state of media in our time, and, notably, to the isolating condition of digitally born “bubbles” of sentiment and resentment, under the discursive regime of which we now suffer. Piper’s works from her 1990s “Corridor of Pain” identify a hunger for sameness, depicting how the insecurity of white identity expresses itself through a combination of spectacular pity and fear, alongside tacit acquiescence to the ongoing reproduction of a discriminatory system. The “Vanilla Nightmares” series, just previous to this period, suggests that blank passages in newspaper advertisements and fields of article text are surfaces onto which readers project illusory images generated by racist anxiety and desire. Piper’s illustrations make these fantasies visible—revealing the New York Times as a locus of violent, divisive, and irrational feeling, in spite of its ambition to deal in fairness and trustworthy information. Meanwhile, the Mythic Being is a means of inserting a complex persona—a face and accompanying speech bubble that inspire sustained and careful examination—into the everyday circulatory space of an advertising section. Rescuing text and images of the public sphere of the news from a fate as mere representations, Piper turns them into sites for action, discursively “reflective” surfaces that can’t be fully stabilized, stilled, or assimilated to preexisting categories.

“A Synthesis of Intuitions” asks what role the faculty of reason has to play in an increasingly, if you will forgive the clichés, mediated and automated world: what are we doing with our capacity to represent, and what is it that our representations do? If soon it will be possible to employ artificial intelligence to counterfeit a unique voice, appearance, movement, email style, and so forth, what will it mean for us to consistently or believably “be ourselves,” and what sorts of expressions of identity will come to challenge algorithmic sorting and machine learning, among other increasingly pervasive acts of choice and mimicry accomplished on our behalf by software?

One answer to these questions is to be found in Piper’s emphasis in her philosophy on the crucial importance of transpersonal rationality, the exercise of reason with the presupposition of the rational capacity of others, along with the conviction that the flourishing of others’ reason, their logical perspicacity and ability to argue, is fundamental to one’s own flourishing. Transpersonal rationality renders disingenuous manipulation of others undesirable, from both objective and subjective points of view, as one’s own ability to exercise reason is dependent on the existence of undeceived others who seek to do the same.

Yet what are we to make of the apparently disingenuous Mythic Being, a male version of Piper in Afro wig and mustache, accessorized with mirrored sunglasses and cigarillo, who appeared as both a performance persona and in a series of images? The Mythic Being was, on the one hand, a disguise and, on the other, a tool for exploring interpersonal perception and behavior, along with the functioning of categories related to identity. Though a work of mimicry, the perfection of the Mythic Being’s drag/counterfeit was curiously limited by Piper’s use of passages from her childhood diary to supply much of his language, which appears most often as speech bubbles drawn on photographs. In one filmed performance from 1973, the Mythic Being strolls down a Manhattan street while reciting a fastidious mantra: “No matter how much I ask my mother to stop buying crackers, cookies, and things, she does anyway and says they’re for her, even if I always eat them, so I’ve decided to fast.”[21] Though it’s not clear to me what phrases would be properly congruent with the Mythic Being’s appearance, this sentence about aggressive self-control in relation to a solicitous mother seems stereotypically girlish to me. Thus, I don’t think that the point of the Mythic Being was to fool people into thinking that they were seeing a man, at least, not exclusively—I think that the point was to create an entity that did not physically resemble Piper but had Piper’s history, “an alternative of myself,” as Piper explains in her preparatory notes for the project. “A mythic being is timeless with reference to the actual history of the world. His own narrated personal history is either prior to the history of the world or unspecified in relation to that history,” she writes.[22]

In another image series, of 1974, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), his characteristics progressively take over a photograph of Piper with a female friend from school who had betrayed Piper by secretly dating Piper’s boyfriend. Here the Mythic Being delivers an account of Piper’s pain at her friend’s deception and offers a warning: not to expect emotional closeness or mutual acknowledgment, that Piper will no longer be subject to this young woman’s predations. By 1975, the Mythic Being had become “a static emblem of alien confrontation . . . the personification of our subliminal hatreds and dissatisfactions,” present not just in Manhattan or in print, but also making embodied appearances in Harvard Square, sometimes to cruise white women and sometimes to mug Piper’s white male friend.[23] “I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear” reads his speech bubble in The Mythic Being: I Embody (1975).

THE VERSION OF me who was walking backward through the MoMA show in May 2018, and who therefore saw the 1975 Mythic Being image before the images from 1974 or 1973, had the experience of gazing at the full metamorphosis before the early stages. However, even before this, I saw the Mythic Being’s farewell tour, the vestiges of his visage in the form of a pencil mustache and sunglasses on Piper’s face made up in white makeup, 1975–76, when she performed Some Reflective Surfaces at the Whitney Museum. Some Reflective Surfaces was an exploration of her work as a go-go dancer and seems to have been the Mythic Being’s last public appearance, although by this time he was already a shadow of his former self. The Mythic Being was shifting, contingent; in other words, he was not the static image of a man, not a counterfeit person or false identity, but rather (“being”) a real verb.

Date: December 1, 2018

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of Art in America, December 2018.

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Cover image.

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Video still.

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Thwarted Projects, Dashed Hopes, A Moment of Embarrassment, 2012, digital image, dimensions variable.

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The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear, 1975, oil crayon on gelatin silver print, 8 by 10 inches.

1. The title of this essay refers to Facebook’s multiple-choice “Trust Survey,” released in January 2018, which consists of just two questions: “Do you recognize the following websites?” (Yes, No) and “How much do you trust each of these domains?” (Entirely, A lot, Somewhat, Barely, Not at all). This poll used respondents’ reactions to determine newsfeed rankings for publishers, effectively reducing traffic from Facebook to news publishers, overall, given the tendency of all news publishers to be untrustworthy in the eyes of some readers.
1. Adrian Piper’s website features descriptive texts about most of her artworks, including Adrian Moves to Berlin, adrianpiper.com.
1. Adrian Piper quoted in Christophe Cherix, “Who Calls the Tune?,” in Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2018, p. 16.
1. See Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,” 1996, adrianpiper.com. In this essay/interview she gives an account of the reception of her work in philosophy by her colleagues in the visual arts, many of whom reason that “since they are generally well-read and intelligent individuals, and since philosophy is a discursive discipline (rather than technical and symbolic like mathematics or physics), they should be able to grasp a specialized philosophical argument or text simply by reading it carefully. Given the turgid impenetrability of the deconstructionist texts in art theory they are expected to master, this is not an unrealistic expectation. But when they approach my work in philosophy with this attitude and discover that it is not that easy, they often react antagonistically or disparagingly, or simply withdraw.”
1. The paradigmatic quotation of Wittgenstein is taken from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 4.0031. For one example of this philosopher as fantasy object for later twentieth-century art, see the telling title of David Markson’s 1988, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. An exception to the trend of bifurcation of analytic work and visual art are neo-Kantian efforts in the UK, in part influenced by the work of Art and Language, a Conceptual art collective in turn influenced by the natural language philosophy of Wittgenstein and other British practitioners.
1. For a convincing account of links between Piper’s work as a philosopher and as a visual artist, see Diarmuid Costello’s “Xenophobia, Stereotypes and Empirical Acculturation: Neo-Kantianism in Adrian Piper’s Performative Conceptual Art,” in Adrian Piper: A Reader, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2018, pp. 166–215.
1. Adrian Piper, Rationality and the Structure of the Self. Volume 1: The Humean Conception, Berlin, APRA Foundation, 2013, p. 1.
1. Ibid., p. 9.
1. For an account of the development and self-publication of this book, see Robert Del Principe, Adrian Piper Interview: Rationality and the Structure of Self, 2007–10, video interview, adrianpiper.com. See also Lauren O’Neill-Butler, “Adrian Piper Speaks! (for Herself),” New York Times, July 5, 2018. Here Piper maintains that after she was asked to cut one hundred pages from the text, she withdrew it from consideration by Cambridge University Press.
1. Cornelia Butler and David Platzker, “Adrian Piper: Reading the Work,” in Adrian Piper: A Reader, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2018, p. 7.
1. Piper says that her writings on meta-art “focus on the presuppositions and conditions of particular works I did that I needed to explicate in order to clarify what I was doing and why, at times when the preoccupations of contemporary art criticism offered no fertile insights.” Adrian Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” Out of Order, Out of Sight, Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968–1992, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999, p. xxix.
1. Adrian Piper, Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir, Berlin, APRA Foundation, 2018, p. 233.
1. Ibid., pp. 127, 99.
1. Ibid., p. 115.
1. I cite a now infamous letter written in support of Avital Ronell, a professor of comparative literature, in May 2018. When Ronell was accused of sexual harassment, a number of colleagues came to her defense, claiming privileged knowledge that “malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare,” in spite of the fact that “we have no access to the confidential dossier,” which described the charges. See: leiterreports.typepad.com/files/butler-letter-for-avital-ronell.doc.
1. Piper, Escape to Berlin, p. 9.
1. Thomas Chatterton Williams meditates on Piper’s accounts in “Adrian Piper’s Show at MoMA Is the Largest Ever for a Living Artist. Why Hasn’t She Seen It?,” New York Times Magazine, June 27, 2018.
1. Piper writes in Escape to Berlin, “I knew in my gut (The College) wanted me dead. . . . I still think The College wants me dead; that it will want this even more once this memoir is published; and that, with its powerful international political and corporate connections, it will find a way to make this happen. I believe it will feel once again compelled to make an example of me, as a warning to others to keep their mouths shut,” pp. 223–225.
1. See, for example, “On Wearing Three Hats,” which includes a detailed account of harassment she experienced in academia.
1. See, for example, Adrian Piper, “Art Criticism Essay Suggested Guidelines,” 2016, adrianpiper.com.
1. Piper writes that she was never revealed to be a woman during the course of her performance as the Mythic Being. It was also a scenario in which she was, as she maintains, unable to pass as white. Thus, she experienced constraints related to racism but the liberty of being male. See Piper, “Notes on the Mythic Being I–III,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, pp. 116–139.
1. Adrian Piper, “Preparatory Notes for The Mythic Being,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, p. 109.
1. Piper, “Notes on the Mythic Being I–III,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, p. 138.

MYTHIC BEING
Lucy Ives on the art of Toyen

Rare are they who are up to the task of freeing love from caricature.
—Annie Le Brun

FOR FIVE YEARS, Toyen’s dear friend Jindřich Heisler hid from the Nazis in the artist’s bathroom. There—perhaps also venturing from time to time into Toyen’s neighboring studio—Heisler developed some of the most remarkable experimental photographic techniques of the twentieth century, capturing painstaking miniature dioramas and deploying photomontage to highly original ends. He converted everyday objects and common substances into rich, strange forms, toying with scale and unexpected juxtapositions. One of his favorite materials was Vaseline.

Legendarily, when Prague’s occupiers came knocking, Heisler skipped down the building’s front steps, waving sociably as his would-be abductors passed him on their way up. They would have found his protector alone, smoking and reading. Toyen was known for her love of books. The novel she preferred before all others was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Because she seldom wrote, we know little of how Toyen, born Marie Cěrmínová in Prague in 1902, experienced these events. Heisler died in 1953, leaving no account of the war years. Indeed, we do not even know if Toyen, who famously referred to herself in Czech as a “malíř smutnej” (sad [male] painter), would have employed feminine pronouns. It feels awkward to make use of them in these sentences, but this is the convention among the few chroniclers of Toyen’s life and the mode chosen by one of Toyen’s last living friends, the French author Annie Le Brun. Toyen, were she alive today, might elect differently. Given her tendency to secrecy regarding her personal life and, as time went on, her refusal to speak at all while in public (a reticence she adopted whenever she felt her milieu lacked “poetry”), perhaps it is best to think of she, her, and hers as imperfect signs, mediocre translations, found objects. Asked why she chose to be silent in overly prosaic settings, she remarked, “Je mets mon scaphandre” (I put on my space suit).

That Toyen is simultaneously one of the least known and most productive, multifarious, and inventive of the Surrealists is another mystery to add to the list. She provided illustrations for some 570 books over the course of her career, realized dozens of brilliant paintings, created stunning line drawings and prints responding to the horrors of World War II, and amassed a connoisseur’s trove of pornographic materials. She had two close collaborative relationships. With Heisler, whom she met in 1938, she created the revolutionary photobook Z kasemat spánku (From the Strongholds of Sleep, 1940), among other clandestine wartime publications. Before this, she and the painter, poet, publisher, and set designer Jindřich Štyrský, with whom she was close from 1922 until his death in 1942, founded their own artistic movement, Artificialism, in support of which they held a number of successful exhibitions in Paris, becoming famous in their native Prague and infiltrating André Breton’s inner circle. Breton, Toyen’s staunch supporter, once compared her to a nightingale that had become trapped in his apartment, maintaining that she was somehow beyond judgment or valuation. All that Toyen touched, Breton wrote, was connected to the wild and utterly free song of the nightingale by “a ladder of silk.”

Breton romanticized Toyen as a revenant of the lost nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Prague, city of paradisiacal bridges and Franz Kafka. He wrote of “the mark of nobility that stamps her face, the deep tremor within her co-existing with a rock-hard resistance to the fiercest attacks.” It is true that Toyen had a distinctive look: In 1919, a year after the creation of the nation of Czechoslovakia, a photograph was taken of then-seventeen-year-old Marie, or “Manka,” as she was known. Her fashionable features convened the ideals of Victorian beauty and of the so-called New Woman, combining doll-like symmetry with striking eyes that projected a worldly clairvoyance. The face in the picture is that of a teenager who has just left home, stalwart, ready to forget childhood—the face of a revolutionary. Toyen had joined the anarchists, a group then ascendant in the Czech capital, taking work at a soap factory. She frequently dressed in men’s clothes and distanced herself from her parents. Four years later, she changed her name and became affiliated with Devětsil, a leading local avant-garde devoted to Proletkult and the fantastic.

Toyen: two short syllables. Various origin stories have been proposed for this mononym, some more plausible than others. Le Brun understands it as a shortening of the French masculine noun citoyen, or “citizen,” an etymology that links the artist to the French Revolution and foretells her emigration. American critic Whitney Chadwick, author of a landmark article on Toyen, 1989’s “Toyen: Toward a Revolutionary Art in Prague and Paris,” proposes a pun on to já jen, Czech for “to think oneself.” Toyen’s contemporaries made their own interpretations. Adolf Hoffmeister, a caricaturist, depicted her in 1930 as Ten-Ta-To-yen on the cover of the Prague review Rozpravy Aventina (Aventine Debates). The hyphenate compound is a declension: “that male, that female, that neuter-creature.” Hoffmeister’s thoughtful portrait—a smiling individual in pants casts a shadow as a heteroclite figure with a bird for a head, a pair of fish for a chest, and a drafting triangle and a picture frame for arms—stands in contrast to others’ bafflement at or (as scholars Karla Huebner and Malynne Sternstein put it, respectively) “mythologiz[ing]” and “heteronorma[lizing]” of Toyen’s self-fashioning. Poet and fellow Devětsil member Jaroslav Siefert goes on at length, claiming to have devised the name himself: “I wrote TOYEN on a napkin in big letters.” In a memoir, he lingers over his shock at having often “encountered a strange but interesting girl” wearing “coarse cotton pants, a guy’s corduroy smock, and on her head a turned-down hat, such as ditch-diggers wear.” Later, at a cafe, he is astonished to discover her transformed, “with a clean face” and “dainty pumps on her pretty feet,” sharing a table with Štyrský, a male painter already known to him. “When she extended her hand,” Siefert writes, “I couldn’t exhale for a couple of seconds and I looked in amazement.”

Toyen’s ability to inhabit more than one persona—“male” worker, “female” intellectual—made her an object of fantasy, although the nature of her own fantasies remains a matter of speculation. She was apparently uninterested in romantic attention from straight men. As for her reference to herself as a “malíř smutnej” (“Farewell, I am a sad [male] painter!” she exclaimed from the window of a taxi after a night of carousing with the Devětsilians), Seifert made the wry observation: “We didn’t believe in her sadness.” After Toyen began to collaborate with Štyrský, whom she had met on vacation in 1922, she was seen by some as his “druh,” his companion or common-law wife, although Toyen always maintained that their relationship was platonic. Some who took a prurient interest in the duo thought of them as “twins” or as somehow exchanging gender characteristics. The poet Vitezslav Nezval, fascinated by what he viewed as a symbiosis of binary genders, wrote, “Štyrský was her soul and her female element, because Toyen, who after a certain time dressed like a boy, refused, when she spoke of herself, to use the feminine endings, in order to demonstrate her human and artistic equality.”

Not to be outdone by these many commenters, Toyen created a striking painting titled Polštář (Cushion), 1922. It depicts the salon of a brothel in which naked men and women form a flower chain of flesh, brushstrokes quick but unerring. At the bottom right of the piece of cardboard on which the image was made, two women pleasure each other. “I don’t know if today one can measure the incredible audacity that it took for a young woman twenty years of age to realize this tableau,” writes Le Brun. For her part, Toyen maintained that she had been making erotic images since she was a child. Speaking of her first sexual experience, she used terms suggestive of autonomy and empowerment, declaring that she herself had “ended” her virginity.

Whatever the case may be regarding the physical aspects of Toyen and Štyrský’s intellectually intimate partnership, by the fall of 1925, they were living together in Paris. Theirs was an ambitious plan: Following in the footsteps of Apollinaire—the French-Polish poet whose death from influenza in 1918 cut short an ingenious career—they would synthesize painting and poetry. Although socializing with noted Surrealists, they rejected Surrealism’s fetishization of the unconscious. In two manifestos from 1927 and 1928, “Artificialism” and “The Poet,” they wrote of melding painterly form with poetic sensibility, claiming mysteriously, “We have no memories, but we are trying to manufacture them. There is only one way to rid oneself of memories. To be abandoned by them.”

Toyen’s works from the mid- to late ’20s, in any case, look less like memories (manufactured or otherwise) than visions of liberation. In one startling painting, Polykačmečů (Sword-Swallowers), 1925, a trussed female performer lies smiling on a carpet as nearby two men impale themselves on the titular weapons. Witty notebook drawings from around this time document sex workers, animals, and figures from the Bible, among other practitioners, engaging in every act under the sun. Salome placidly urinates on the head of John the Baptist. Meanwhile, Toyen and Štyrský were compiling a sizable collection of print pornography. For their Artificialist project, they made pleasant, vaguely Cubist landscapes mostly devoid of humanity, the paint thickened with sand—not always their finest work. They cooked up various moneymaking schemes, writing a travel guide to Paris for Czech speakers, designing fabrics, producing endless commercial book covers. They hit the clubs. “Elegant Manka, or Toyen, who buys herself clothes fashionable and ultrafashionable and dines on smoked mackerel at ‘Au rendezvous des chauffeurs’ with Jindřich Štyrský, a painter quiet and artificial,” wrote the observant Hoffmeister in 1926 regarding their Montparnassian exploits.

The ’30s brought change. Whereas Artificialist Toyen had favored flatness, now she began to paint more conventionally three-dimensional forms, rendering them at once vivid and hard to identify: Is the huddled, wire-wrapped entity in Prometheus, 1934, an empty garment? An outcropping of stone? In 1929, she had returned to Prague, although she continued to travel. She was moving out of step with Štyrský, employing some of the tenets associated with Artificialism but discarding others. It was as if she saw the possibility of interiority in a painting that manifested as an impossible-to-complete zone, a rip or fissure in representation itself. When, in 1931, Štyrský began publishing the Erotiká Revue and a serial imprint, Edice 69 (Editions 69), Toyen illustrated a Czech version of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and explored the graphic qualities of oversize genitals. She seems to have been struck by Georges Bataille’s notion of the informe, which Rosalind Krauss has described as an undoing of traditional aesthetic categories, a “deny[ing] that each thing has its ‘proper’ form.” As if in anticipation of the brutality that would soon be unleashed across Europe, Toyen’s work by the mid-’30s had already turned to themes of horror and abandonment. Everything cracks; in works like 1934’s Růžový spektr (Specter in Rose), we no longer differentiate between subject and object, fluid and solid, surface and hole.

In 1939, the borders close and her name appears on a list of artists banned from public activity in occupied Czechoslovakia, now the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Along with Heisler and his immediate family, she has been swindled by a customs agent out of passage to South America. Toyen begins the long wait for the end of hell. Arrests and executions are not uncommon among Prague’s creative milieu. In a rare extant letter to the French poet Benjamin Péret in April 1946, Toyen will say, “Life was indeed terrible here and I often had to hide.”

It was very dangerous to shelter Heisler, who had elected not to show up to a 1941 deportation call. Equally risky was the pair’s continued artistic production. They condensed the unbearable into striking poetic images beginning in 1939 with their collaboration Les spectres du desert (Specters of the Desert), with illustrations by Toyen and poems in French by “Henri” Heisler. They hoped to distribute a second collaboration, this time in German, to invading soldiers as pro-defection propaganda. Nur die Turmfalken brunzen ruhig auf die 10 Gebote (Only Kestrels Piss Calmly on the Ten Commandments) featured Heisler’s poetry, Toyen’s drawings, and a cover by Štyrský, its colophon boldly proclaiming, “This book originated in the suffocating atmosphere of military commands as a document of Surrealist activity that none of the reactionary powers of mobilized Europe can destroy.” During the war, Toyen and Heisler, with occasional input from Štyrský, continued to develop such Surrealist samizdat. Their furtive efforts included the aforementioned Z kasemat spánku, a photobook of “realized poetry” (realizované básne), as well as a number of serial graphic works by Toyen. Her terrifyingly precise drawings for the cycle Strělnice (Shooting Gallery), 1939–40, reveal her at the height of her powers, confecting images of blasted landscapes inhabited by a cat’s head, memorial wreaths, crumbling puppet theaters, and faceless children, among other vivid fragments. She continued in this vein with Den a noc (Day and Night), 1940–43, and Schovej se, válko! (Hide Yourself, War!), 1944. Reminiscent of the work of contemporary artist Milano Chow, these meticulous illustrations-without-books, published only after 1946, evince an existential nausea seldom equaled in modernism.

The wartime projects led to what are perhaps Toyen’s most unforgettable works: a group of loosely related paintings of the 1940s and ’50s united by an attention to hyperfine detail that ebbs cryptically into a zone of nonrepresentation or impossibility. The first among these, Po prědstavení (After the Performance), 1943, depicts a girlish body suspended upside down from what seems to be a dancer’s barre, embroidered bloomers exposed even as feet and head have melted into a carefully worked wall of dripped and scraped paint. Below the hanging figure are an empty pillowcase and what looks like a combination flyswatter–riding crop, accessories for a discomfiting Sadean recital. De Sade, Štyrský and Toyen’s former household god, also informs two paintings titled Na zámku La Coste (At Château La Coste) after the ancestral home of the Marquis, one from 1943 and the other from 1946. In these two studies of ground and wall, a graffito of a fox steps ominously forth, ready to make a kill. Toyen seems to play with an ambiguity also broached in de Sade’s writings: that the causal relationship between imaginative representations of violence and genuine acts of horrific cruelty remains undefinable—and that this uncertainty sits disturbingly at the heart of human politics.

In the early ’50s, Toyen produced paintings based on signs of Prague businesses. By then, she had relocated permanently to Paris, bringing most of her artworks with her—thus much of her oeuvre is in private collections in France. She completed an iconic painting, Mýtus světla (The Myth of Light), in 1946. By 1953, Heisler, its subject, was dead. “The war destroyed his heart,” she later told a friend. One might also say that the war destroyed the last of Toyen’s illusions, convincing her simultaneously of the artificiality and fleetingness of visual experience and its viselike hold on the human imagination.

In exile, Toyen reestablished herself among the Surrealists and began a new series of book-related collaborations. In the 1960s and ’70s, she worked closely with Le Brun and her late husband, the Croatian-French poet and playwright Rodovan Ivšić, providing collages and illustrations for their books. Le Brun once annotated a vulvar collage by Toyen with an intriguing fragment: BIJOU FAVORI: “LA PATTE MEDITATIVE D’UN GRAND FAUVE SUR LA CLITORIS” (FAVORITE JEWEL: “THE MEDITATIVE PAW OF A LARGE BEAST ON THE CLITORIS”). Toyen’s late paintings become increasingly nocturnal and concerned with enigmatic genital forms. Her most reproduced work of this period is the partly collaged Le paravent (The Screen), 1966, in which a spectral three-faced figure garbed in leopard spots and bright-green gloves appears to hover in the central panel of a folding screen. By the ’70s, Toyen was working almost exclusively in collage, mining the exploitative universe of popular print. Le Brun observes that the artist still went to see X-rated films in the theater several times a week at the age of seventy. In November 1980, Toyen passed away.

It is to be hoped that the traveling survey “Toyen: Dreaming Rebel,” which originated at Prague’s National Gallery and is currently at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, will bring Toyen’s work to a larger audience. Curators Le Brun, Annabelle Görgen-Lammers, and Anna Pravdová have accomplished the near impossible in securing loans of Toyen’s paintings from so many private collections and have published a biographically informative and visually rich catalogue in German. A full appreciation of Toyen’s achievements might require a series of smaller exhibitions focusing on short periods—such that her wartime works, for example, can develop their own mythos, a bit like Philip Guston’s Nixon drawings or Adrian Piper’s graphic experiments with the Mythic Being, whose name is borrowed, with apologies, for this essay’s title. Yet the present survey makes an undeniable contribution to the broader ongoing reevaluation of Surrealism. To paraphrase the Artificialist manifesto: Art history retains few memories of Toyen, and thus this is the time to begin manufacturing those memories. We should recalibrate our visions of the past to include this artist, who was a defender of that which hovers fitfully at the edges of visibility and intelligibility, that which does not and cannot conform.

“Toyen: Dreaming Rebel” is currently on view (through February 13) at the Hamburger Kunsthalle; travels to the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, March 25–July 24.

Date: February 1, 2022

Publisher: Artforum

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of Artforum, February, 2022.

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February 2022 cover.

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Toyen, Na zámku La Coste (At La Coste Castle), 1943, oil on canvas, 25 5⁄8 × 34 1⁄4". © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

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Toyen (Marie Cěrmínová), ca. 1919.

CLOSE-UP: WOMAN IS THE HOST
Lucy Ives on Meret Oppenheim’s Object, 1936

NO LESSER EMINENCE than Carl Jung declared her sane. “She seems to have learned a lot from her clash with the elves,” he wrote in a 1935 letter to Meret Oppenheim’s father. This father, himself a medical man, had to be contented. Although he had heard that his twenty-two-year-old daughter had posed nude “for those certain magazines (with whores),” he did not force her to quit Paris for the relative backwater of Basel. Hitler’s rise would be enough to accomplish that. Anti-Jewish laws soon made it impossible for Erich Alfons Oppenheim to practice, and he could no longer send rent money. The sale, in 1936, of one of Meret’s artworks to a New York museum resulted in a payment of $50 (a little over $900 in 2021 currency). It was encouraging, but it was nothing. No one could live on that.

And what of that celebrated artwork, devised in the company of the men Jung strangely termed “elves”? The rumor lingers even today that she didn’t mean to do it. It was a “fluke,” as she herself put it. She had only created it to be amusing, to play along in the clique of middle-aged avant-gardists, Surrealists, et al. whom she’d enthralled with her looks, liberated manner, and precocious linguistic gifts. She “peed in the hats of overly bombastic gentlemen on the terrace of the Dôme,” in the words of Alain Jouffroy. She smoked fat cigarettes, forcing harsh blue smoke through her delicate nostrils, reminding her new friends of a locomotive or cruise ship. The members of the elf committee, not to be outdone, grimaced and dressed up in costumes, shaving their facial hair into weird patterns. She was beguiled and occasionally responded by taking off her clothes.

It was not easy to satisfy the elves. She would leave them, but not before producing an answer to the riddle that seemed to motivate all of their glamorous, hash-fueled activities: What is woman, after all? Max Ernst, for a short time her lover, tried to solve the puzzle, using Meretlein (“Baby Meret”) as his key: WOMAN IS A WHITE MARBLE SANDWICH, he announced in an invitation to Oppenheim’s first solo exhibition in 1936 in Basel. Meretlein, for her part, made an objet of a pair of the older artist’s wife’s white shoes, which she trussed with kitchen string and festooned with a pair of ruffled paper caps, placing them soles up on a chrome platter like the legs of a roasted fowl. She titled the bundle Ma gouvernante—My Nurse—Mein Kindermädchen. Marie-Berthe Aurenche—the French painter who in 1927, aged twenty-one, had made the disastrous decision to marry Ernst—subsequently destroyed this insoluble sign of her husband’s philandering.

Oppenheim, seven years younger than Aurenche, later commented that these were the years in which she slowly became aware of the degraded status of women: “I felt as if millennia of discrimination against women were resting on my shoulders, as if embodied in my feelings of inferiority.” This recognition resulted in a series of depressions. Living in exile at her family’s home in Switzerland during World War II, Oppenheim suffered a crisis and struggled to make any art at all. She briefly became a conservator, a safe profession for an unmarried girl who liked to work with her hands.

But we have overshot the moment in early 1936 when Oppenheim fortuitously wore a fur bracelet of her own design (ocelot atop metal tubing) to a meeting with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at the Café de Flore. Picasso joked—referring to the unusual accessories—that you could cover anything with fur. Invited by André Breton to join a group show sometime later, Oppenheim recalled this conversation, purchasing a cup and saucer at Uniprix and appointing these, plus spoon, with leftover pieces of “Chinese gazelle.” She dubbed it Fur Cup. Breton revised: Luncheon in Fur, he proclaimed, a mash-up of Leopold von Sacher–Masoch’s novella about masochistic obsession and Édouard Manet’s painting of a sexy picnic. The Luncheon quickly caught on, developing an escape velocity that carried it to the Museum of Modern Art, where, as noted, it was cheaply snapped up by Alfred H. Barr Jr. (no dummy), rechristened Object, and featured over and over in the American press. “This Crazy World! Surrealism Is Proving Contagious,” an Illinoisan headline screamed, as if in confirmation of Walter Benjamin’s thesis regarding mechanical reproduction, published for the first time in French the same year Fur Cup was created.

Notoriety meant little to Oppenheim. She might well have been gratified by the current traveling retrospective of her work, thoughtful and completist as it is. (Now on view at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, the show was co-curated by that institution’s director, Nina Zimmer; Natalie Dupêcher, associate curator of modern art at Houston’s Menil Collection; and Anne Umland, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) But she had no desire to shock crowds of confused museumgoers and disliked being famous for a single assemblage she considered, at base, a friendly stunt. Yet in spite of the artist’s reservations, something intimately hers had gone into the furred table setting—which appears sensitive to the touch, as if frilled with thousands of fine antennae. Although often mistaken by drooling critics for a canny representation of someone’s hirsute vulva, Fur Cup is in fact a holobiont, a host and its many, many coexisting guests. It is plural, symbiotic, bristling with susceptibility. It is, in this sense, a guide to survival for those who know how to look (women, among others), hidden in plain sight.

“Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition” is on view at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, through February 13, 2022; travels to the Menil Collection, Houston, March 25–September 18, 2022; Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 30, 2022–March 4, 2023.

Lucy Ives is most recently the author of Cosmogony: Stories (Soft Skull Press, 2021). Her third novel, Life Is Everywhere, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press next fall.

Date: November 1, 2021

Publisher: Artforum

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of Artforum, November, 2021.

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November 2021 cover.

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Person holding Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 Object, New York, 1936. Photo: John Lindsay/AP Photo.

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Man Ray, Erotique-voilée (Erotic Veiled), ca. 1933, gelatin silver print, 4 7⁄8 × 4". Meret Oppenheim. © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris.

OF LIGHT AND FOLDS
On Etel Adnan's Hybrid Practice

Etel Adnan’s contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennale was an artist’s book titled Family Memoirs on the End of the Ottoman Empire. This accordion-fold work contains the artist’s handwritten recollections, in Turkish and English, concerning her family and the catastrophic conflicts of the decade before her birth in 1925. As the text mentions politically sensitive material—social ties between Turkish and Armenian families before the 1915–17 Armenian-Assyrian-Greek Genocide—what had originally been foreseen as an accompanying wall text was shrunk down to a more discreet card one could read while viewing the turning of the pages. At the Biennale, a white-gloved assistant seated at a table silently lifted, displayed, and shifted the pages for visitors.

Family Memoirs on the End of the Ottoman Empire is but one example of Adnan’s sensitivity to the ways in which we look, read, and remember—a sensitivity that inflects her larger hybrid art-and-writing practice. In this particular institutional and national context, the fold took on new meaning, as a site that at once concealed and revealed, that demanded intimate, patient reading and looking from those who chose to approach the table, even as it intensified more broadly resonant connections between everyday life and the centenary of the genocide, still unacknowledged by the Turkish government.

Adnan, who was born in Beirut to a Syrian father and Greek mother, began working as a Californian in the late 1950s. After studying literature and philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut, the Sorbonne, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard, she became a professor at Dominican College of San Rafael in 1958, teaching aesthetics and the philosophy of art. There, a colleague encouraged her to revisit a childhood curiosity—painting—in spite of the fact that Adnan’s mother had warned her that she was “too clumsy.” (“And you believed her?” countered the colleague, artist Ann O’Hanlon.)

Adnan began painting, wrote poetry in English against the war in Vietnam, and undertook an exploration of various media that would lead her to pursue tapestry-making and ceramics, filmmaking, fiction, playwriting, and journalism. Yet, to call Adnan’s path a “career” seems inaccurate: the term conversation is more apt. This conversation encompasses mountains, especially Mount Tamalpais, which she painted daily while residing in Sausalito, where it was visible from a window in her home; cities; wars; space exploration; the worlds of plants and animals; even the nature of color itself, in all its insistence, violence, and richness—and, of course, books.

THE NAME FOR THE ARTIST’S BOOK-FORM favored by Adnan has a somewhat ignominious source: in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Leporello, the lothario’s right-hand man, reads out a list of his master’s amorous conquests. Famously, he sings, “My dear lady, this is a list of the beauties my master has loved; a list which I have compiled; observe and read along with me.” The leporello—an accordion-style binding with hard covers on either end—is so named for its resemblance to that character’s apparently endless list. With pages formed by a single folded sheet, the leporello can be conveniently packed up, its front cover like the top of a box. Yet one might unfold a long leporello to find that it crosses the entire floor of a room. A shorter leporello will stand nicely on a table top, like a small screen or series of walls, its zigzag pages and stiff covers acting as a sort of paper architecture.

Adnan’s interrelated roles as poet and painter meet in these hybrid visual spaces that un-scroll in time. She makes use of blank accordion style books imported from Japan. The covers on either end of the book are wrapped with fabric by the manufacturer; sometimes the fabric is patterned or bears a pasted-on paper label. Adnan occasionally paints over the pattern or inscribes the title of the leporello on the label; otherwise, she does not alter the books before filling their pages. Of her decision to engage with this sort of prefabricated notebook, Adnan writes:

I remember how carefully I used to wash my hands, with what care and apprehension I was choosing a particular scroll, with what interest I was looking at the paper, usually Japanese handmade paper or rice paper made in Kyoto, because everything had to be in tune, the size, the format, the text, the colors, the texture of these colors, the light outside, my own availability; it was each time like entering into a religion for a believer, like going for a climb, for an alpinist, as if painting in this case was also a sacred sport, a battle both spiritual and physical, as well as a game of chance.

It is interesting to read Adnan’s use of the term “scroll” here. Although the pages of the leporello arrive already pleated, Adnan is clearly of a mind to emphasize their continuity rather than their possible status as a series of discrete rectangular planes, divided into units by line-like folds. At times, she continues handwriting or drawing, ignoring the folds altogether and ending only when she has filled the entire book. The tactility of the paper is as important as this quality of expansiveness. In mentioning her practice of adjusting her own “availability” to her materials and environment, Adnan’s remarks are reminiscent of those made by the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki in his 1933 essay, a favorite of students of design, In Praise of Shadows. Tanizaki notes, “Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in to envelop it gently.” He observes that Japanese paper is soundless when agitated and “pliant to the touch.” This tendency to absorb and bend is at once inviting and challenging. Adnan says that to paint and write on “these long horizontal scrolls” is akin to the adoption of a system of belief or an encounter with a landscape; it is a “sacred sport,” a matter neither purely of the spirit nor of the body. Chance, presumably because of the liquid nature of ink as well as the undulating surface of the page, enters into this encounter as well. Materials, Adnan maintains, “become in a way a co-author of one’s work.”

The leporellos entail a sense of rhythm, of variation and call and response. Adnan works with her own improvisational gestures, refusing the notion of the mistake in favor of the happy error. In her essay “The Unfolding of an Artist’s Book,” from which I draw the remarks above, first published in 1998 in the journal Discourse, she writes, “The mind never rests on these scrolls as it moves back and forth on them as a scanner.” She maintains that the books “awake[n] . . . memory images, or memories of the nomadic essence of the spirit.” In these volumes, she is able to mingle handwritten text, drawings, and watercolors without engaging in acts of “illustration.” Rather, she is a translator: “Written words and the visual text mirror each other and form a new entity which combines them both.” In addition, Adnan’s interactions with folding books reveal to her the interpretative nature of perception itself: “Any thought that we may think to be primary, primordial, spontaneous is already an interpretation of something which precedes it.”

Also in her 1998 essay, Adnan tells the story of her friendship with an American artist and war veteran, Rick Barton. Adnan calls her exchange with Barton “a mystic transfer, a gesture in the logic of Being, something that came from a place preceding him and that had to go, to keep going.” When Adnan first met Barton in San Francisco, he was surviving on very little money, a pension from his service, and frequenting cafés in order to have a space to work that was not the small rented room where he lived. He was apparently a habitual user of opium and an avid reader, someone who devoted his life to small ink drawing —fragmentary portraits of café-goers—that he made in leporellos. Barton shared his work with Adnan and in the early 1960s presented her with a leporello he had begun to illustrate with faces and which she was meant to finish. Thus began the leporello chapter in Adnan’s devotion to the dialogue between language and pictures.

ALTHOUGH, AS I HAVE NOTED, ADNAN BEGAN painting in the 1960s, her work was not broadly recognized in visual art circles until 2012, when curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev included her in Documenta 13. Later, Adnan’s participation in the 2014 Whitney Biennial brought even wider acclaim. Here, Stuart Comer curated a floor devoted to intermedia artworks and other practices exploring the relationship between print and visual art, including several of Adnan’s leporellos. For serious readers of Anglophone and Francophone poetry, Adnan was already a figure of renown who had published groundbreaking work in multiple genres in the late 1970s and ’80s. I myself began reading her poetry as a college student in 2002 or so and was astonished, twelve years later, visiting the Whitney, to learn that she was also considered a major painter and creator of artist’s books.

Literary writing and visual works inform one another and interpenetrate in Adnan’s practice. Adnan has, for example, always applied oil pigments straight from the tube using a palette knife, itself not unlike a broad pen nib. And, as the critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie has observed, Adnan’s preferred canvases are “small, intimate, on the scale of a book.” The notion of writing hovers over Adnan’s painting practice, in which she makes her pieces, as Wilson-Goldie writes, using a semi literary method—“in a single sitting, working fast on a flat table, never on the wall or at an easel.” Meanwhile, Adnan’s writing partakes of the painterly; her poems are vivified with references to “red waters,” the “pleated horizon,” “shined surfaces,” and the light and heat of many colored suns, matter and landscapes that tremble on the verge of transformation into vivid two-dimensional images but which refuse to be flattened.

In Adnan’s more painterly leporellos, the zigzag surface is crammed full with seductive lines, sometimes in black ink only and at other times involving rich washes of color. A frequent subject is the artist’s desk, where potted flowering plants, vessels containing fruits, books, jars of ink, and writing implements predominate, as in 1989’s Sausalito, California, and the multiple “Inkpots” books of 2015. If the work in question was created in California, as with Spring (2003), a leporello depicting a series of flowerpots, the humped triangle of Mt. Tamalpais, with its distinct ridges, may be present in the background. The objects, plants, and landscapes of Adnan’s figurative scrolls all have a quiet, uncannily lifelike quality, as if they were gazing back at the artist, affirming her presence. The organization of these familiar items across folds additionally gives the leporello a nearly linguistic sort of revelatory energy, begging to be read from left to right when stretched; the work’s planes seem to cry out, “And then! And then! And then!” Or, perhaps, “Here! Here! Here!”

Elsewhere, Adnan arranges symbols and geometric shapes in patterns that resemble illuminated poetry without ever fully entering the semantic realm; these leporellos have a somewhat more recessed, erudite quality. One wants to linger over them, pausing on each character of the partly invented yet nearly intelligible hybrid alphabet or syllabary Adnan has devised for the occasion of a given artwork, attempting to read it aloud. Such books include Signes (2015) and Signs (2018), in which black “O”s, “X”s, crosses, and dots flirt with shapes approximating Greek letters, as well as Numbers, Signs and Squares (2015), in which numbers in Arabic dance with Greek letters and a variety of bright watercolor squares.

And there are the scrolls containing hand-copied poems written by friends and admired poets in Arabic, English, and French. (Among the American poets so treated are Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.) These pieces are often the most colorful and various, with bright passages in the shapes of hillsides or geometric forms and loose lines, as with Adonis (1984). Adnan’s partner, artist and publisher Simone Fattal, has written in the 2002 essay “On Perception: Etel Adnan’s Visual Art” that Adnan’s leporellos of illuminated poetry are especially poignant and urgent, as their words were “seen by Adnan twice, once as text and once as image.” Adnan, who grew up speaking Arabic but never learned to write the language in an academic context, effects a quiet “revolution in Arabic calligraphy,” Fattal maintains, by means of her highly personal act of recopying by hand.

“I WRITE WHAT I SEE; I paint what I am,” Adnan wrote in her 1986 essayistic daybook, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, which contains an account of her painting practice. “To each place, there is a counter place,” she notes. This pronouncement leads to a comparison of the mountain in the title with Yosemite Valley, height contrasted with depth, aridity with greenness. Elsewhere in the piece, Adnan observes, “I feel trapped in this universe and think of what an anti-universe could mean, which is still a universe; there is no way out.” In a 2009 interview published in Bidoun, she told novelist Lynne Tillman that “I don’t lie when I write.” Adnan explains: “Something happens, and I must discover it. Writing forces one to go to the bitter end of what one thinks.” If there is something propulsive and urgent about the act of writing for Adnan, then perhaps painting provides a more restorative relationship to the line.

Images bear tremendous significance in Adnan’s novels and poetry, whether they serve as subjects and plot devices, or are incorporated into her sentences and lines as annotations in the form of glyphs. Adnan opens Sitt Marie Rose, her 1978 novel inspired by the kidnapping and murder of Marie Rose Boulos, a Lebanese teacher and pro-Palestinian activist, with a meditation on images. An unnamed female narrator is spending time with a wealthy man who shows her his latest amateur Super 8 film of a hunting trip in Syria and southeastern Turkey. The violence romanticized by these soft, grainy images soon spills over, in raw unmediated form, into the streets of Beirut with the commencement of the Lebanese Civil War.

Elsewhere, in what is perhaps her most brilliant work of poetry, The Arab Apocalypse (1989), Adnan’s linguistic writing transmogrifies into ink-drawn symbols—some legible, like suns, some more ambiguous, suggesting color-based notations—which intervene in otherwise relatively orderly lines of roman typeface. In this book of fifty-nine poems, which Adnan wrote at the beginning of the Civil War that raged from 1975 to 1990, there is a need for a form that engages the senses differently from written language and that can express her interrogation of conflict, whether internecine or civilizational. But by the time of this book’s publication Adnan had already been meditating on the book-form for several decades.

“THE ENVIRONMENT WAS MY LIFE,” Adnan said of her Beirut childhood in an interview with poet Lisa Robertson published in BOMB in 2014. In this conversation, Adnan speaks of the “great event” of light, that she saw the light in her sunny and sometimes partisan birth city as “a being on its own,” something to look at as well as to inhabit. The same might be said of the folds of her leporellos. She has written that these folds make possible “combinations of the same reality, the birth of different realities out of a single one.” The fold’s interior, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote in 1988, is a space in which two planes approach each other until they meet in a brief hinge in which they become indistinguishable. There is no content in this hinge, save for the joining of the two planes; a fold is thus a no-man’s-land, in the most hopeful sense of that expression. A fold is utopian. It cannot be claimed for other use. (Try and you will end up with two torn pages and nothing where your fold was!)

But the utopia of the fold in Adnan’s work is not merely to be found in the physical manipulations of the page. It exists in the movement of the palette knife lavishing paint on canvas and in the intensity of the linguistic image in a line of poetry, or in the turn indicated by a comma in a sentence. For those of us who feel “trapped in this universe,” Adnan offers not so much an escape as a key to the unlimited potential inherent in the apparently humble present. “I see infinite distances between any point and another,” she writes in “Sea,” a long prose poem published in 2012. “That’s why time has to be eternal.” Adnan’s artist’s books, her leporellos, dip into the seam of the fold, a shady counter-place rich with thinking. They emerge again to get on with the story, a tale that now seems unending, for what is an ending, anyway, if not another fold?

Date: August 10, 2021

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Print, Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of Art in America, July & August, 2021.

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July & August 2021 cover.

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Etel Adnan: Inkpots, 2015, ink and watercolor on paper, approx. 91/2 feet long. COURTESY GALERIE LELONG & CO.

INSERT AWE SOMEWHERE
How Rachel Harrison’s Sculptures Reframe Art History

One of the earliest sculptures by the artist Rachel Harrison I have seen is 20 × 24″ (for CDL), created in 1999. It is not easy to describe this work, so bear with me for a moment, as this will take some doing. It is a wall-hung structure composed of wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, and a color photograph. The photo, in a cherry-red frame, shows Gustave Courbet’s 1866 The Origin of the World, along with some people who are standing nearby. It appears to be a view of Courbet’s well-known vulva painting as exhibited in the Musée d’Orsay in the late 1990s (the work has since been rehung in a different gallery there). Affixed to the front of Harrison’s assemblage is a board that reads, in a white scrawl atop a violet field, $50.00 bet. It is not particularly easy to see the photograph—or the Courbet itself, therefore. The framed picture is nestled into the polystyrene construction, shielded by the frontal announcement of the low-stakes wager; the photograph sits on a sort of shelf that seems to have been designed for it. In this sense, the photograph is about as framed as something can be, without being entirely hidden. There’s so much going on here—white acrylic mixed with cement slathered everywhere in a way that recalls the uneven texture of insulation, odd rectangular planes, a small painting that is also a weird hand-drawn sign with a narrative about a gamble (between or among whom, and what for?)—that one might even miss the photograph of the masterpiece.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we don’t. Rather, we home in, intrigued and attentive, and walk around to the left side of 20 × 24″ (for CDL) to have a closer look. In the snapshot three individuals huddle before a neighboring Courbet canvas, possibly Nude Woman with a Dog (1868). Nude Woman is not Courbet’s highest achievement, and anyway these people are less important. What we fixate on in Harrison’s photograph is a male figure, his back to us, who stands transfixed before The Origin of the World. He wears a black leather jacket, dark hair closely cropped. We cannot see his face, but we have the impression that his gaze is directed right into the cleft of Courbet’s subject. One could imagine his jaw slack, mouth arranged in a silent “Wow.” He’s like an arrow, pointing, and we don’t quite know whether to stare at the back of his head or to look at (into?) the infamous work of art.

What was that fifty-dollar bet about, again—and who is “CDL”? Is this some sort of “made you look” situation? A different sort of in-joke? Or, are we meant to recognize ourselves in the midst of a multigenerational act of transmission of styles of looking, i.e., tradition? And is there a critical message related to the “male gaze”? It occurs to us, too, that with its frame, the Courbet is almost the right size to be the referent of the title of the sculpture. We’re sure for a moment that we’ve solved the matter of the title, if not the elaborate framing/enwombing of the photograph. But not quite—the measurements are slightly off—that’s not it, either.

The disorientation 20 × 24″ (for CDL) engenders is thus spatial, material, linguistic, and also temporal, given the involvement of the history of Western art. Made three years after Harrison’s first solo exhibition, this sculpture has many of the hallmarks of her later practice, from the materials selected to the strategies deployed: use of polystyrene slabs and a liberal application of paint roughened with cement; a construction whose multiple sides invite multiple viewing positions, along with possibly contradictory readings; plays on language and history that keep the viewer guessing; the inclusion of manufactured objects the sculpture seems to grip, shelter, proffer, embrace; a title that feels autonomous from the object and thus like a work in itself; a joke about human posture and/or sex, which is to say, a universal style of humor.

By including the anonymous snapshot of a young man whose fashion choices are easy to mock and who seems, himself, to have been transformed into a sculpture by the power of Courbet’s realism, before becoming Harrison’s own gawking readymade, the artist also indicates a series of conventions for the viewing and display of art, after the advent of postmodernism. 1. Stand before painting. 2. Obtain photographic reproduction. 3. Insert awe somewhere. But the young man Harrison’s photograph captures is in fact an exception to this theory of the floating signifier: Whereas he would seem to have come to the museum with the expectation of viewing “high art,” here, with The Origin of the World, he has landed on a realist painting that offers him an image that interests him differently, I think it’s fair to say. All he has to do is look, no elaborate rationale or hushed discourse (see trio next door at Nude Woman with a Dog) necessary. Thus, too, the odd compliance of this viewer’s body. The museum has surprised him by permitting him to stare at something he genuinely wants to see.

Harrison has a point. A funny one, at that. And no doubt Harrison wouldn’t mind if the viewer of 20 × 24″ (for CDL) thought a little, too, about the strange history of that particular nineteenth-century canvas, which, conceived as bespoke porn and probably itself painted from a photograph, originally hung in an opulent bathroom and was concealed by a velvet curtain, making its way, as it changed hands, into a series of display boxes with false fronts showing other paintings; to be owned, after the Second World War, by a famous psychoanalyst, before being quietly donated to the Musée d’Orsay by the famous psychoanalyst’s widow, who had at one time been a movie star.[1]

The multiple stagings and framings of The Origin by its commissioner and later owners underscore both the frank obscenity of the painting and the need for props (including its grandiose title) to make it into an acceptable work of art. The painting’s concealment and, one assumes, performative unveiling among cronies, must have accorded it additional value, such that it transcended its possible status as a gynecological artifact. Harrison’s staging, on the other hand, takes the painting right back to this basic function, in part by showing how Courbet’s mercenary realism is of a part (pun intended) with contemporary commercial images. Her readymade guy knows well how to look at this shot, I mean, canvas.

In light of the above, it is not unusual for critics and scholars to emphasize the postmodern aspects of Harrison’s sculpture. Her work is ambiguous, multi-planar, and comprises objects and references that bounce from high to low, that require some technical prowess for their execution or that require none at all (i.e., are readymade), that are conceptually rigorous (require “reading”) or that address popular culture plainly and directly (“entertain”). There are some carnival beads or a photograph of Leonardo DiCaprio. There is a reference to Jeff Koons or Hanne Darboven. There is a trail of Styrofoam peanuts leading from the feet of a mannequin as well as ropes, garbage bags, food, taxidermied chickens, and accomplished drawings of Amy Winehouse that manage to eulogize the singer even as, in one fell colored-pencil swoop, they mock the economies of line favored by Willem de Kooning, along with two of de Kooning’s best-compensated imitators, Richard Prince and George Condo. As John Kelsey, one of Harrison’s most eloquent interpreters, puts it: “There is a point beyond which sculptural properties of material, form, and structure disperse into more hysterical outbreaks of style and vernacular reference, and this is the very point around which the best Harrisons tend to both blossom and congeal.”[2] There’s also Harrison’s tendency to establish her constructions (what Kelsey calls her “complexes”) using polystyrene, best known for its use in buoyant disposable items: coffee cups, take-out containers. It’s the plastic we have liked to expand into foam, and also to condense into a high-impact variety as well as the sparkling cases that once contained everybody’s compact discs. While not as ubiquitous as polyethylene (grocery bags), polystyrene is a shape-shifter. Its refusal to degrade is matched by its receptivity, in its foam state, to carving, cutting, pressure.

I have never attempted to knock over a statue by Rachel Harrison, but given that polystyrene is almost always included in her materials lists—along with wild cards like “plastic pastry,” “latex Dick Cheney mask,” “La Morena salsa can,” and “Slim Jim display rack”—I’ve wondered if there would be a crash or, perhaps, a bounce. Maybe a soft tapping sound, a click or rustle. There would, of course, be a lot of other sounds after this, and I wouldn’t recommend the experiment. Yet, for all their incorporation of disparate materials, some of which originate in the 99-cent store, the Halloween center, the supermarket, Goodwill, Home Depot, and, one assumes, on Craigslist and eBay, Harrison’s works—even as they twist away from the viewer, sheltering a peculiar thing—do not seem dense. Their volume, in other words, does not connote or entail mass.

But Harrison’s refusal of monumentality and even wholeness has another effect. If we follow various semantic trails around and into the surfaces and planes of a Rachel Harrison like 20 × 24″ (for CDL) we discover that our inability to land on a single reading feels, paradoxically, not like the “correct” reading of the piece, not something verifiable, but rather a process that actually and unavoidably occurs. The title is specific, yet it’s baggy, seemingly intentionally so. The frontal sign and various white facades distract us further. This is to say that Harrison’s material and discursive frames get in the way, they compete and jostle; they threaten to become representational. They want to be figures, too. But at the same time, at the center of this flurry of formal and semantic elements threatening to become near-figures, is a clear and direct reflection on spectatorship and the role of realist representational styles, a nicely staged understatement: A guy sees something he likes. It’s this cutting and clever element of Harrison’s work, her focus on vernacular realism and pursuant ways of looking—an interest somewhat poorly acknowledged in previous writing on her sculpture and one I find to be a key element in her strategies of construction—that I would like to focus on for the remainder of my essay.

THE FOREVER POSTWAR
Harrison’s work is often compared with that of Robert Rauschenberg, whose Combines offer a visual if not methodological analogy. Harrison does not shy away from this association and even seems to encourage it,[3] while, at the same time cultivating other conversations and confrontations: with the art of Henry Moore, for example, whose public sculpture Three Forms Vertebrae (Dallas Piece), 1978–79, she boldly augmented in 2013 in a not-entirely-complimentary fashion, with a gigantic hot-pink arrow pointing down at Moore’s work in front of Dallas City Hall (Moore to the Point). There is also the inevitable tie to Duchamp, due to the many manufactured objects she employs. We might see Louise Nevelson in Harrison’s slabs, as well.

I’m limiting myself to earlier twentieth-century references here—avoiding nods to relevant contemporary artists like Isa Genzken and the late Mike Kelley, or to Harrison’s New York–based contemporaries like Nicole Eisenman and Darren Bader—because although it can be difficult to pin down the meaning of single pieces by Harrison, there is a larger gambit at stake, one related, it seems to me, to the shifting fate of figuration in American art after the Second World War. The tension of the pre- and early postwar scene centered on the expression of political commitments in representational art, particularly through figuration and caricature in a social realist mode. Although Clement Greenberg’s canonical “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” dates from 1939, its effects reverberated on the other side of the international conflagration, as a confluence of wealth and need for visual symbols of the US’s newfound soft (as well as hard) power prevailed upon a generation of artists, mostly based in New York. The short version of this story, always a risky version to tell, is that the notion of representing “social issues” by means of a direct, figurative depiction, as in the socially engaged figurative styles of Thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence, and Ben Shahn, was outpaced by an elite leftism, what Greenberg had hinted at in his essay as formally pure “Athene,” the aesthetic heights of complex, imperial, urbane civilization—that which was diametrically opposed to kitsch, or pandering art for the masses.[4] Abstract Expressionism was the alleged savior. Although it was perhaps difficult to see the anthropomorphic face of god in a painting by Jackson Pollock, one could (and was encouraged by the contemporary press to) see the face of some sort of conceptual deity, perhaps one corresponding to the dreadful instrumentalization of quantum mechanics.[5]

I often consider this early Cold War period of transition in relation to Rachel Harrison’s work. Her use of artfully scrubbed-on fields of paint on her polystyrene sculptures recalls the gradations of Mark Rothko, Pollock’s early semi-figurative canvases, or gestures made by a lesser-known contemporary, Byron Browne, in their variety. We see this in the sculptures featured in her exhibitions “If I Did It” (2007) and “The Help” (2012), both at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, and with even more pronounced clarity in the particolored mass that supports a prepubescent mannequin, nude save for a cape and an Abraham Lincoln mask worn on the back of their head with sunglasses, in Alexander the Great (2007). Alexander’s boulder is at once as slight as a kernel of popcorn and as symbolically loaded as Venus’s foam or a sun-burnished cloud rendered by Caspar David Friedrich, propping up as it does a two-faced imperial figure. Harrison’s application of paint here is a citation of a moment when artists on the left seemed to reject authoritarianism in the same breath as Communism, the depiction of presidents along with the depiction of heroic workers and immigrants. Although the rejection of figurative realism was far from universal and was in short order interrupted by the arrival of Pop, the fields of color and drops of paint the abstractionists favored made a bid for visceral excitements beyond language, even as they were blandly internationalist, covertly nationalistic, and, eventually, very selling. In spite of what Greenberg argued, they were a new mass ornament. What, after all, as Harrison’s Alexander seems to argue, looks kitschier today than a canvas by Pollock?

Harrison’s painting practice—for we should probably call it that, as she is a painter as well as a sculptor in many of her works—recalls this demise of social realist figurative styles, one that was apparently necessary for Americans to become world-class artists. Yet Harrison also resuscitates figuration in a social mode, often by way of photographs, drawings, and readymades. The immature figure in Alexander the Great, rising all too gamely out of its massive harlequin packing-peanut—as if in tribute to Amazon Prime (b. 2005)—is not an answer to any sort of question about the failure of figuration. Rather, the work is a series of store-bought (thrifted? stolen?) commercial readymades. It is a testament to the actual overwhelming and, let’s face it, uninterrupted success of figuration as a representational mode in the US: it is a stand-in for a stripped Barbie or Spiderman figurine, combined with a countenance on our money. Nothing, nothing at all has been worked out over the past seventy years by artists, and there isn’t really any “art world” of any significance, just proxy wars and manufacturing. Labor’s power ends at the feet of this plastic adolescent. Still, given the idiotic symmetry of its face and charming, guileless offer of a Jeff Gordon–themed bucket of paint rollers (?), it is hard not to laugh.[6]

Sliding into this storm of references and points of view (themselves frequently readymade) are the directness and vividness of many of Harrison’s titles, which frequently cite contemporary events, neologisms, public figures. I have already mentioned the O.J. Simpson autobiography citation (If I Did It), which does double duty as a counterfactual disavowal of authorship (“What, me, make art?”). The sculptures in “If I Did It” are in turn named for male celebrities: Fats Domino, Al Gore, Johnny Depp. They incorporate slightly unkind pieces of humor—a can of “Slim Fast,” a mercury-filled thermostat, an oversize pirate hoop earring (respectively)—such that each pillar or stack of blocks wears its designated readymade like an epithet. The oddly shaped constructions are handily roped into portraiture through the addition of names and accessories. Indeed, “If I Did It” seems to mock the very notion of pure abstraction. Although I like to think of Harrison coming upon the “identities” of the sculptures accidentally—via some fun pareidolic coincidence, a fortuitous squint of the eye—it seems more likely that she is deliberately recoding Ab Ex as Pop drag.

Harrison’s first solo show, in 1996 at Arena Gallery in Brooklyn, had a memorable, if nearly un-memorizable, name: “Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere?” This question was appropriated from an article in the New York Times on housing codes. Later, in 2004, Harrison culled another exhibition title from the press, “Posh Floored as Ali G Tackles Becks.” The former points up the bizarre results of objectivity as a rhetorical mode, while the latter calls our attention to an odd pun (“floored”) that springs to life in the midst of several assumed identities. And it’s not just these linguistic oddities from the recycling bin or browser history: Harrison likes literature, too. For a 2007 group of photographs, she made use of the title of Charles Darwin’s diary, The Voyage of the Beagle; a 2009 survey at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art was titled “Consider the Lobster,” after the essay by novelist David Foster Wallace. While I personally prefer the 1996 and 2004 titles, I’m not beyond seeing that the name of Darwin’s boat was fairly strange, while the name of Wallace’s essay was pretty normal (for someone reputed to be a genius). This language is decontextualized, pushed to a point of abstraction, then reconfigured, tied to new images and forms; as a result of this process it does, I have to say, become more insistent.

The title of the 1999 work that I mentioned at the outset of this essay acts as an unpredictable frame, one that both encloses the sculpture and gets in the way of its interpretation. I think of Harrison’s titles as shoring up the ambivalent space of figuration in her works and, by turns, getting stuck in it. They remind me of Marcel Duchamp’s explanation of what he learned from the poet, playwright, and novelist Raymond Roussel, i.e., that “everything can be done, especially when you describe it in words, and anything can be invented.”[7] Duchamp credited the poet with the novel conceptual turn in his work, circa 1911 and 1912, a discovery of language’s own hermetic realities and worlds. Harrison’s titles can function in this way, as semiautonomous processes of signification, sometimes pointing back to phenomenal reality, culture, and history, sometimes glossing the object or installation they name, but never fully relinquishing their status as independent figures. If they are frames, they are competitive ones. They seem, however humorously or intelligently, to acknowledge a prohibition on what Duchamp called “Cartesianism,” a method of reasoning from innate ideas and first principles, leading to real truths about the real world.[8] But unlike Duchamp’s spectacular leveraging of language as space and time, Harrison’s titling (along with her appropriation) is more casual, more familiar, more willing to be demoralized by contemporary reality and/or direct about it, and therefore more social, if not overtly political. It may even be that her versioning of the category of kitsch aims at solving Greenberg’s quandary, reactivating the “and” in the title of his 1939 essay to read not “versus” but “as.”

THE ACT OF LOOKING
If Harrison is a painter, a shopper (or collector), and, as I would argue, a skillful writer, then she is a photographer, too. Given the ubiquity of images online and the pursuant erasure of medial distinctions, along with the variety of strategies used by those who now identify as photographers, perhaps it is less important to emphasize the act of “taking” a photo than it is to note the act of situating—framing or, as Harrison’s structures can seem to do, enfolding, grasping—and circulating one. In any case, Harrison is sometimes the active camerawoman, as, possibly, for 20 × 24″ (for CDL) and as for her 2001 installation, Perth Amboy, for which she photographed individuals who had come to view an image of the Virgin Mary that had appeared on the glass of a window in a private home in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Harrison often hangs framed images of celebrities on her polystyrene steles or builds pictures and video into a given piece. Perth Amboy, however, sets photograph and sculpture apart, in part by means of a cardboard maze. The twenty-one photographs in Perth Amboy, many taken from outside the house to capture views of hands on the blessed window, hang on the gallery walls. At the center of the room, tall pieces of cardboard are arranged and folded in such a way that they stand freely, swaying sometimes. They might well be knocked over by visitors. (“Don’t worry,” the artist seems to be saying, “it’s not like it’s going shatter.”) In the maze, Harrison sets up encounters between essentializing toys, tchotchkes, and figurines—Barbie’s “friend” Becky, who uses a wheelchair; a ceramic “Asian” figure; a “Native American” head—and tiny works of art. The anthropomorphic items are arranged in such a way that they seem to gaze appreciatively and obediently at their assigned objects of contemplation, miniature sculptures and paintings. Thus, Harrison, as an artist who is often engaged in staging occasions for looking at photographs, calls our attention to the fact that photographs can be framed by objects and elaborate physical structures, and can frame those objects and structures, in turn. Her use of photography, much like her use of other figurative modes, is ambivalent, a switching station for the currents of meaning that flow through her constructions, reversing direction and colliding from time to time—avoiding realism’s one-way street, while at the same time addressing the fact that viewers are often conditioned to seek realist representation.[9]

Perth Amboy has appeared in a number of institutional settings; like many of Harrison’s installations, it is intended to be meaningfully iterated, changing form depending on its context.[10] It is among the most generous of Harrison’s creations. When Perth Amboy was installed at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016, I took a group of undergraduate writing students to see it, and I have seldom experienced such a strong collective response to a museum visit: the students were enthralled by the photographs of pilgrims’ hands and faces. They also lingered in the cardboard maze, making notes on the various readymades staged there. The students considered these scenes of fake absorption intently. They weighed the feeling of the looking described here against the looking they themselves were doing in relation to the miraculous site of Perth Amboy, where, as they understood, devout people had congregated to touch a holy image. They told me that they enjoyed the way in which the cardboard kept some parts of the room hidden, such that one could not grasp its contents in a single glance. The installation seemed, in some way, to liberate them to be completely focused on their own thoughts and observations. It was also acting, therefore, as a consideration of a possible relationship between privacy and collectivity, two concepts that are usually opposed. The installation seemed to pose a question about the location of the so-called mass ornament: Is it with “them” (the visitors to a miraculous image of the Virgin), or with “us,” we who ponder unpleasant miniatures that in turn ponder bad art? In other words, is the face of Mary kitsch or is the image of museum spectatorship kitsch—or, are these two images and the behaviors they entail actually more allied than we might think?

EXHIBITION MAKERS
Given that, as of the writing of this essay, I have not yet seen “Life Hack,” Harrison’s fall 2019 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and as the uncorrected proof of the accompanying catalogue contains no clear exhibition checklist nor any installation shots—focusing instead on images of past shows and mostly literary essays about Harrison—I cannot offer a sense of what the experience of moving through this exhibition will be like. I do, however, find it interesting that the Whitney is the site of this major consolidation of Harrison’s efforts.

Visitors to the museum’s home in Chelsea may be forgiven for not recognizing in this deluxe incarnation the institution’s scrappy beginnings, in the late nineteen-teens, as the Whitney Studio Club, an experimental downtown exhibition space that encouraged collaboration among American artists. The Club was overseen by Juliana Force, then personal assistant to heiress and sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a somewhat distant patron whose greatest previous achievement was to have backed the 1913 Armory Show. When, in 1931, the Whitney became a full-fledged museum, Force lived above its West Eighth Street entrance in an apartment whose bizarrely eclectic appointments (folk art, Victoriana, contemporary American paintings, a red lacquered elevator, fur carpeting, “a white rubber floor with brass inlay, black furniture inlaid with mother of pearl engravings, a large Bakelite table, opalescent wallpaper, blue satin draperies with pearl fringe, doors decorated with trompe l’oeil designs and rococo patterns offset by lace paper appliqué jambs, gilded eagle lamps that hung from the ceiling on silk cords, and an alabaster cat perched on a sofa”[11]) might have been to Harrison’s own liking. The Whitney Museum, carrying on the work of the Studio Club, did not draw a sharp distinction between decoration and artwork, craft and fine art, kitsch and sublimity, artist and curator. The intended experience was of a multifarious aesthetic space, rather than, as in Greenberg’s conception of the modern art gallery, of recessive surrounds for formal canvases discussing their own display. Force treated art in a familiar fashion and was generally more concerned with inviting living artists and other visitors to the spaces she maintained than with maintaining Neo-Classical or modernist ideals.[12]

The Whitney has since changed quite a lot, deaccessioning, after Force’s death in 1948 and over the intervening seventy-plus years, a number of no doubt excessively kitschy American artworks acquired before the Second World War along with any and all pre-1900 objects, to become an impeccable modern and now postmodern institution. But Harrison has never been the sort of artist to miss an opportunity to point out the strange conditions (historical, social, material) under which we view art, and this makes me wonder. The current catalogue concludes with a “Curators’ Acknowledgements” section by Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit, which names without describing an “ambitious, unique, and incisive plan for this exhibition,” calling it additionally “utterly reflective of Rachel’s vision.”[13] Reading that gnomic sentence, I begin imagining for a moment another pink arrow, à la Moore to the Point, this one some twelve stories tall, perhaps aimed at Hudson Yards, the Vessel, or the museum itself. But I feel unsatisfied by this fantasy intervention, which could only be titled More of the Same, and would have little of the capacity to astonish that I associate with Harrison’s work, save in its monumentality, which, again, would not be very Harrison at all. But what if there is a way in which hosting Harrison brings back some of the emphasis on so-called minor styles that are in fact key to the Whitney’s original reason for being? Or, what if the show simply calls greater attention to our habits of moving around and looking while we are in the current Whitney? Indeed, this second option feels quite possible to me. As most of us know, one of the most disorienting experiences one can have in a museum is to make a ground-figure category error, in other words to mistake infrastructure or trash—say a directional sign or stray packing peanut—for art.

Date: October 28, 2019

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of Art in America, November 2019.

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November 2019 cover.

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Rachel Harrison: 20 × 24" (for CDL), 1999, wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, and chromogenic print, 22 by 19 by 18 inches. Photo Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

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Rachel Harrison: Moore to the Point, 2013, powder-coated steel, 288 by 117 3/8 by 50 inches; at Dallas City Hall Plaza. Courtesy Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. Photo Allison Smith.

View of Harrison’s exhibition “The Help,” 2012, at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. Photo John Berens.

1. For a full account of the painting’s provenance, including its time in the collection of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille, see Thierry Savatier, L’Origine du monde: histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet, Paris, Bartillat, 2007.
1. John Kelsey, “Sculpture in an Abandoned Field,” in Rachel Harrison: If I Did It, Zurich, JRP Ringier Kunstverlag, 2007, p. 121.
1. Several works in the “If I Did It” series include taxidermied chickens on top of polystyrene pillars, a direct reference to Rauschenberg’s Odalisk (1955/58).
1. In the final footnote of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg argues for the irrelevance of “art for the masses as folk art.” Greenberg maintains that folk art, even if it is “on a high level,” is yet “not Athene, and it’s Athene whom we want.” Besides, Greenberg continues, there is no original art of the common people, whom he takes, historically, to be “serfs or slaves” preoccupied by forced labor. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, fall 1939, p. 49.
1. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983. Guilbaut traces relationships between and among the US government’s imperialist ambitions after the Second World War, the nation’s artistic movements, art criticism, and the art market.
1. I have not been able to find a satisfying description of the two objects in the bucket. They are unnamed in other catalogues, while in the current catalogue for the Whitney show they are described as “unidentified objects,” Elizabeth Sussman and David Joselit, eds., Rachel Harrison Life Hack, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2019, p. 122.
1. In an interview published in Audio Arts magazine in 1974 (recorded in 1959), Duchamp explains: “The subconscious never interested me very much as a basis for an art expression of any kind. It’s true that I really was very much of a—if you could use the word—défroqué, or unfrocked, Cartesian, because I was very pleased by the so-called pleasure of using Cartesianism as a form of logic and very close mathematical thinking, but I was also very pleased by the idea of getting away from it. It happened also in several places in the works of Raymond Roussel, a writer who wrote these completely fantastic descriptions of the same order, where everything can be done, especially when you describe it in words, and anything can be invented—in Locus Solus and in Impressions d’Afrique. That’s where, really, I found the source of my new activity in 1911 or 1912.” Duchamp quoted in Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation, ed. William Furlong, London, Phaidon, 2010, p. 21.
1. Ibid.
1. The term “switching station” is John Kelsey’s. See If I Did It, p. 122.
1. For example, at Greene Naftali in New York in 2001, Perth Amboy’s cardboard maze was in a much taller room than MoMA’s galleries and was accordingly scaled.
1. Evelyn C. Hankins, “Engendering the Whitney’s Collection of American Art,” in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 174–75.
1. A main tenet of the Whitney’s first biennials and other group exhibitions was that prizes should not be awarded to the few but that funds should be used to purchase a variety of artists’ works for the collection.
1. David Joselit and Elisabeth Sussman, “Curatorial Acknowledgements,” in Rachel Harrison Life Hack, p. 272.

RAYMOND ROUSSEL
Galerie Buchholz

Difficult author; reclusive aesthete; visionary fabricator of fantastic objects literary, conceptual, and material: The reputation of Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) often precedes him. In photographs he is a pale, impeccably groomed man with a resplendent moustache. A shy smile pairs oddly with the wild energy in his gaze. His writings, allegedly incomprehensible to all but the most committed appreciators of his day still receive less attention than his biography or, what is perhaps more accurate, legend.

Galerie Buchholz’s recent exhibition is the latest view into the Roussel annals. It also functions as a housewarming: Previously exclusively a Berlin concern, Buchholz now has a foothold near the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Behind the robust façade of a townhouse of the sort normally occupied by foreign embassies, Buchholz’s three-room offering of Rousseliana is an extremely welcome addition to the neighborhood and feels, more generally, like a happy return to a fan favorite. Roussel’s work never gets old—partly because of how strange it is, and partly because so few people have actually read it.

Roussel wrote long, formally and conceptually complex poems, as well as novels. He is best known for 1910’s Impressions of Africa, a novel that he published at his own expense and later mounted as an elaborately costumed play. The structure of the novel is famously based on the punning difference between two otherwise identical, seemingly insignificant phrases: les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard (white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) and les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard (letters of a white man about the bands of the old pillager). Beginning with the first of these two arbitrary images, Roussel concludes 26 chapters later with the second; in the pages between, he describes the court of an imaginary African king at which, in a fantasy of colonialism reversed, a troupe of European entertainers are detained, forced to enact various impossible tableaux.

Like the prose of Marcel Proust, Roussel’s oeuvre marks the encounter of Victorian representational styles and ideas about time with those that come to characterize modernism. Unlike the prose of Marcel Proust, Roussel’s writings are not concerned with phenomenal reality. Instead, Roussel wants his readers to consider unreal visions already mediated by writing or other technologies, not experiences but rather images of experience; Roussel is a practitioner of the trope of ekphrasis, or description of another work of art in writing, par excellence. In Impressions of Africa, in what amounts to a displacement of lived time by performances and scientific experiments, unusual devices give rise to new images and texts. There are light-projecting plants; a glass-enclosed mechanical orchestra powered by the thermal sensitivity of bexium, an imaginary metal; a photo-mechanical painting machine. These “machines correspondantes,” as Gilles Deleuze called them, have the additional effect of rendering ornament essential rather than “removable,” as in Walter Pater’s formulation. For Pater—whose stylistic economy was influential for modernists from Proust to Ezra Pound—the “surplusage” of decorative language diminishes meaning. Pater’s rules are passionately flouted by Roussel, whose nearly nonsensical ekphrastic delays, or stoppages, produce exciting excursions into speculative artistic and scientific practice.

Galerie Buchholz helpfully parses Roussel’s relationship to Proust by means of the inclusion of two editions of Proust’s prose-poem collection, Les Plaisirs et les jours, published in 1896, the year before the appearance of Roussel’s first novel-in-verse, La Doublure. This juxtaposition is characteristic of what is most exciting about the show’s display of numerous books, which allows us to draw our own conclusions about the milieu in which one might have encountered these publications for the first time. Even more startling and immediate are enlargements of a series of Roussel family snapshots, some taken by Raymond, including a close-up of Madame Roussel and a pet dog with eyes that appear to be made of glass. Here we glimpse a largely unknown corner of the archive.

Yet far more space in this modest gallery is devoted to the better-known reception history: Roussel’s influence on artists from Marcel Duchamp (who attended a performance of Impressions of Africa) to Joseph Cornell to Marcel Broodthaers; the connection to Surrealism; the American poet John Ashbery’s oft-cited importation of Roussel’s work into American English; Michel Foucault’s early monograph. Such diverse adulation for the show’s subject is reassuring, but upon coming to the fourth vitrine stocked with untouchable publications, one begins to wonder what, in the age of worldcat.org, when bibliographies of obscure texts can be instantly formulated, one is looking at. The sheer quantity of materials included in the show, along with recent works by Cameron Rowland and Henrik Olesen, among others, feels a bit like a missed opportunity. Though for Roussel more was always more, he always advanced via carefully designed procedures. More and more we want narrative and arrangement, space to think about the overwhelming amounts of information we receive; it might have been nice to consider the ways in which Roussel’s miraculous inventions anticipate our desire.

Date: November 1, 2015

Publisher: Artforum

Format: Print

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.
Full text of review available as PDF, below at right.

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November 2015 AF cover.

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R.R.

CRITICAL EYE: PUBLISHING AMID THE MUSEUM’S RUINS

During a 2012 conversation at Art Basel, artist Adam Pendleton told curator Jenny Schlenzka, “I have a copy machine. It’s the queen of my studio.” The remark was offhand, yet revealing and generous. Pendleton, who is in his mid-thirties, has a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, printmaking, book arts, performance, filmmaking, sculpture, and event organizing. At times he describes himself as a conceptualist but, eschewing rigid emphasis on systems and nonrepresentational strategies sometimes associated with the term, he has also spoken of “a kind of philosophy of being” in relation to the images, spaces, and occasions he creates. In all his output, Pendleton works with preexisting language and print materials; as he said in a 2012 interview with Thom Donovan in BOMB, “I am constantly lifting words, sentences, images from a wide variety of sources.” A photocopier was not obviously involved in The Revival (2007), commissioned by the Performa festival in New York, for which Pendleton orchestrated a secular sermon with a full choir by appropriating language from experimental poetry, political speech, and traditional gospel songs. Yet, the duplicating device stands as a possible metaphor and accomplice for a work such as this, in that it enables the rapid recontextualization and repetition of words otherwise located on the pages of books in Pendleton’s extensive library.

Curator Adrienne Edwards argued in her 2015 Art in America essay “Blackness in Abstraction” that Pendleton employs reproductive technologies—Adobe Illustrator, silkscreen, as well as a Xerox—to emphasize “blackness as material, method and mode, insisting on blackness as a multiplicity.” In keeping with this ability to move from the material to the conceptual and back again, Pendleton is known for a photocopied compilation of writings by Hugo Ball, Amiri Baraka, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sun Ra, Adrian Piper, and Gertrude Stein, among others, that he published in 2017 with Koenig Books as The Black Dada Reader. These texts evince Pendleton’s larger Black Dada methodology, which combines influences from both Ball’s 1916 Dada Manifesto and “Black Dada Nihilism,” a 1964 poem by Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). Pendleton’s Black Dada is on the one hand a return to the politically charged nonsense of the Zurich Dadaists and, on the other, an exploration of the term Black as an “open-ended signifier,” as he has said. Black Dada is at once revolutionary and archival, allowing Pendleton to reflect on anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and decolonial political movements, including Black Lives Matter and Occupy, along with philosophical and literary writings. The photocopier has an obvious practical role in this undertaking, particularly given that Pendleton first produced the reader for personal use. Yet the device stands as an allegorical presence, too—indicating Pendleton’s commitment to a nonlinear mode of historiography that allows for repetition, nesting, and transposition, among other transformations and dilations.

The year 2021 is turning out to be significant for Pendleton. His installation As Heavy as Sculpture (2020–21) appeared in the lobby of the New Museum from February to June as part of the exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” curated by the late Okwui Enwezor. A montage of black-and-white imagery and text covering the walls, As Heavy as Sculpture layered reproductions of photographs of political events in Africa, masks, and sculptures, with iterations of language drawn from Black Lives Matter protests, including the acronym ACAB (for All Cops Are Bastards, also represented numerically as 1312). In September, DAP released an artist’s book by Pendleton related to the installation. Titled Adam Pendleton: As Heavy as Sculpture, the volume permits sustained, close consideration of the words, letters, numbers, and images Pendleton selected and sometimes partly painted over for the installation, encouraging a mode of reading in which one considers what cannot be seen as much as what is visible. Also published in September, by DABA and Koenig Books, was Adam Pendleton: Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths, a revisitation of the format of The Black Dada Reader, with a new selection of texts, including writings by Sara Ahmed, Clarice Lispector, and Malcolm X, among others. For his solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened in September, Pendleton published another anthological reader, Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, which functions as the show’s catalogue.

That Pendleton is publishing two new critical anthologies this fall points to a need to reframe the experience of viewing art, one that is particularly urgent in light of current anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements, as well as efforts to reform the labor and collecting practices of museums, along with the composition of their boards of directors. Pendleton’s readers are, in effect, new narratives of the history of art, bibliographies and syllabi, personal records of research and learning, spiritual autobiographies, and guides to contemporary politics. Like As Heavy as Sculpture, they generate original, inter-media, transdisciplinary modes of reading; in Who Is Queen?, for example, one reads the poet Simone White with and against curator Kynaston McShine with and against critic Lauren Berlant with and against composer Julius Eastman, to name but a few of the figures present. All of Pendleton’s selections appear as photocopied texts—“poor images,” in Hito Steyerl’s sense—and he has added various marks and writings. The collections show us Pendleton as an editor and publisher, in a fairly straightforward sense: DABA is, indeed, his own press, through which he recently republished concrete poet Norman H. Pritchard’s remarkable 1971 book EECCHHOOEESS. They also remind us of the radical sort of influence a publisher can have, not just on content but on the very outlines of a given discipline. Pendleton believes that you cannot really understand painting unless you understand improvisation, and you cannot really understand improvisation without a thorough knowledge of poetry and music. Nor will you comprehend lyricism unless you comprehend the intersections of political struggle and love.

This is not mere argumentation; this is an attempt to reengineer the ways in which published writing is associated with the experience of viewing art. Similarly, the physical work Pendleton creates is designed not merely to exist within but to affect the feeling and meaning of the institution housing it. As curator Stuart Comer notes in the preface to Who Is Queen?, the exhibition at MoMA “recalibrates the museum, from a rigid frame designed to regulate official accounts of history into an open, generative, and polyphonic device.” Pendleton has constructed an architectural installation in MoMA’s atrium, with three five-story wooden scaffold towers painted black. The towers mimic balloon frame construction, a method for building homes popular in the US from the 1880s to 1930s; it was simpler and faster than timber frame construction, which required knowledge of complex joinery techniques. These physical frames evoke larger questions regarding housing availability in the US, as well as ad hoc forms of architecture associated with protest: Resurrection City, for example, constructed on the National Mall in 1968 during the Poor People’s Campaign, as well as the encampments of the Occupy movement and plywood boards transformed with spray paint by Black Lives Matter protesters. One might also see a link to the design experiments and architecture of modernism, from El Lissitzky’s 1923 Proun Room to Le Corbusier’s grid-like structures. Pendleton employs the towers as supports for a variety of artworks and devices, including paintings, graphic and textile works, sculptures, screens for moving images, and speakers for a sound piece, as well as a site for events. The exhibition is a powerful Gesamtkunstwerk, or all-embracing art form, with Pendleton signaling to viewers in many different registers and media.

Pendleton has transformed the space at the heart of one of the most influential institutions in the world, calling to mind a related watershed essay. In “On the Museum’s Ruins” (1980), critic Douglas Crimp describes Robert Rauschenberg’s painting practice as “insisting upon the radically different kinds of picture surfaces upon which different kinds of data can be accumulated and organized,” and points to its affiliation with “discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation,” as opposed to historical continuity. In Crimp’s reading, Rauschenberg’s photographic layering, via silkscreen, of canonical artworks—“Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus and Rubens’s Venus at Her Toilet”—is emblematic of a new logic of pictures in an era of near-instant reproducibility and dissemination: singular physical art objects lose their value and qualities as such, and become instead “‘moments’ of art.”

Crimp’s discussion of a movement from emphasis on discrete objects to emphasis on flashes of time seems quite relevant to Pendleton’s practice. But while Rauschenberg explored numerous disciplines and media, beginning his career as a choreographer before turning to assemblage and graphic work, Pendleton is determined to combine an equally multifarious résumé into a single piece, as “Who Is Queen?” makes manifest. There is a larger gambit here to dispense with specialized audiences—readers of poetry, appreciators of sound art, and so on—in order to create a new sort of public, one for whom experiencing multiple artistic disciplines at once is illuminating and desirable. Pendleton seems to believe that we need as many points of access to our history as possible, so he aims to reform not just objects and space, but the very sensory and temporal conditions under which we consume art and other media.

How does Pendleton generate these revised sensory and temporal conditions? A simple answer is: research. As suggested above, these conditions have much to do with that queen of his studio, the copy machine, along with his library of books, and the surfaces and features of the studio itself. It takes a relatively short time to remove a book from a shelf, and a few more moments to then sit and find a page, to stand and go to a copier to reproduce it. Yet, in Pendleton’s practice, these everyday acts of study and reflection, which are also acts of love, traverse much broader expanses of time and space. They recur as moments of viewing and listening in galleries, with pages altered, blown up, and reframed; with pieces of language excerpted and recopied; with new interventions and participants added. Pendleton’s research is amplified by institutions and yet it reframes the location it occupies. His installations resonate with a larger, always-unfinished collection of texts, images, and performances the artist continually mines for republication.

Thus, publication might be a useful way to think about all the work Pendleton makes, and using a term with an industrial history reminds us of the role technology plays in this undertaking. Of the title of his MoMA installation, Pendleton has said,

Queen is a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by a kind of Afro-pessimism, and it’s also a kind of queer theory. Queen is all about being queer, really, the perpetually misunderstood position. It’s about this memory of someone saying to me, years ago, when I thought I had done away with such things, ‘Oh, you’re such a queen.’ It really came out of this feeling or this sense of vulnerability, when someone thinks that they can name you or claim you as something, even if at any given moment it’s not what you might have wanted to be.

With his new books and his work in the museum, Pendleton makes public myriad texts, contexts, histories, and presents, seeking to outpace and overwhelm others’ limiting claims. He helps us look at space (and the contemporary world) through books and then look at books and their pages in a new light. This comparative gesture, the gesture of the publisher, comes with an important difference: traditional authorship has receded, replaced by an alternate and far more vulnerable practice, a practice that remains as open as a dance floor, even as it is contested, haunted, many-voiced, thick with marks. For, as Pendleton has said: “I am both in control and not.”

Date: September 23, 2021

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.
This essay appears in the November/December 2021 print issue of Art in America, with the title, "The Artist as Publisher: Adam Pendleton's recent book projects suggest that his multidisciplinary practice is also a kind of anthology."

Cover.

Article in print.

On Leonora Carrington

SYNTHETIC SURREALISM

In 1949, seven years after fleeing a warring Europe for Mexico City, the artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) read a very curious book. Robert Graves’s White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, published a year earlier, was a mythographic account of the ways in which paganism underlies Christian belief. It posited the existence of a moon-affiliated “White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death,” whom patriarchal structures obscure. According to Graves, one could not successfully write poetry without serving this female deity:

“The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.”

Graves’s scholarly methods were suspect, his tone one of reverence and perhaps obsessive conviction, his sentences elaborate, his sources arcane. T.S. Eliot called the book “prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable,” and Laura Riding, Graves’s former literary collaborator and romantic partner, disliked it very much. Riding felt her own spiritual convictions had been parodied by her ex in what amounted to a “whorish abomination.” Graves seems also to have invented his translations of Celtic poetry, relying on a limited grasp of the language. A series of deductions based on a purported relationship between letters of the Celtic alphabet and certain trees enabled him, he claimed, to uncover divine names hidden in ancient writing. Yet his entirely reasonable overall conclusion—that modern monotheistic religion has effaced other, pluralist systems dedicated to matriarchy and the worship of nature—found resonance with many nonacademic readers, and the book went into multiple editions in 1948, ’52, and ’61. It has since become a classic of Contemporary Paganism.

Carrington, who had previously written a number of short stories in a piquant Surrealist vein—many of them critical of Christianity—took notice. Having absorbed Graves’s fantastical investigation, the British artist went on to write her first and only novel, The Hearing Trumpet, a tale of the apocalyptic upending of an elderly woman’s life. It’s clear The Hearing Trumpet was strongly influenced by Graves’s revisionist mythology: the manuscript, according to Carrington scholar Susan L. Aberth, was completed in 1950. However, it was not published until 1969, in a French translation titled Le Cornet acoustique. In 1974, it appeared simultaneously in the US and the UK, in the original English.

Printed in more than twenty editions and some six languages over the past forty-plus years, Carrington’s story was once again rereleased in January by New York Review Books, with an afterword by Polish novelist and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. After glowing reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker by Blake Butler and Merve Emre, respectively, the first printing sold out in a month. This feat, along with recent republications of Carrington’s two other major pieces of literary work—her memoir of detention in a Spanish mental institution during World War II, Down Below (NYRB, 2017), and her collected short stories (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, also 2017)—suggests that her authorial star is yet again on the rise, perhaps due to a renewed interest in the occult among Gen Z and millennial readers. But how should we think of what Emre calls Carrington’s tendency to be continually “reborn,” if never fully domesticated or canonized? Given her status as both a brilliant painter and an enchanting storyteller, might Carrington be more at home—and, therefore, more recognizable as a major artist—in our own increasingly interdisciplinary age? And why did she herself wait nearly two decades to publish her most fully realized literary work?

Butler and Emre both wax enthusiastic about Carrington’s novel. For Butler, it is a discovery: a “mind-flaying masterpiece,” full of humor and rare events that leave the reader “reconfigured.” Emre, already a convert, sees it as a testament to Carrington’s uncanny ability to mate “the artificial to the natural”—a capacity that reflects the perpetual human ambivalence regarding technology and our animal nature. Both reviewers question Carrington’s reputation as the girl who beat the Surrealists at their own game, to paraphrase a bit glibly. She was heralded in Paris by André Breton et al., who prized her beauty and educated wit, as an example of the intersection of femme enfant and femme sorcière, realized in living flesh. Although she had a famed youthful relationship with the artist Max Ernst in the late 1930s and early ’40s, Carrington eventually rejected the role of muse. Still, it was through Surrealism that she found her way to her remarkably expressive painting practice: the endeavor which, in 1938, produced her well-known Self Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), a striking image of the artist consorting with a hyena and rocking horse while clad in an iconic pair of white jodhpurs.

That painting, with its reliance on unmixed colors and psychological oneirism, is a prelude to Carrington’s more lyrical and fantastical mature work, produced in Mexico City after World War II and characterized by delicate application of egg tempera. In Mexico City, Carrington collaborated closely with Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo and photographer Kati Horna. And she set up her living space to accommodate her various roles, as mother to her two sons (by her second husband, photographer Csizi “Chiki” Weisz), keeper of the house, and painter. Carrington’s studio encompassed all these activities: it was kitchen, laboratory, nursery, salon, and study, all rolled into one. In this sense, it expressed Carrington’s changing orientation to imagery, history, and artistic work. Less concerned with the shocking figurative juxtapositions and revelation of unconscious psychological drives so dear to the Breton-led version of Surrealism, Carrington’s Mexican tableaux meditate upon magic and the divine, primarily as these are manifest in an internationalist array of folk traditions. It is in this context that The Hearing Trumpet should be read.

This first-person novel concerns the fate—which we at first take to be unhappy—of a ninety-two-year-old woman named Marian Leatherby who lives in Mexico with her son and his unpleasant English wife. Marian, as she informs us, has a gray beard and limited hearing. Thanks to a timely gift—the titular trumpet—from her friend Carmella, an elderly artisan of cat-fur sweaters, Marian overhears her family plotting to send her to an old folks’ home. But what a place this turns out to be! The residents are ensconced in fantastical cabins (“bizarre dwellings—shaped like a toadstool, a Swiss chalet, an Egyptian mummy, a boot, a lighthouse—impossible and absurd, straight out of a Bosch painting”); the director, Dr. Gambit, is a Gurdjieff-influenced evangelical fixated on aerobics; and there is a murder plot involving toxic chocolates. However, lest Carrington’s tale appear a mere wacky caper watering down Ernst’s own critique of Victorian mores in his 1934 collage novel, Une Semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), she quickly leaves the institutional narrative behind. An ice age abruptly threatens all earthly life, even as animals and humans are magically drawn together by the imminent return of the White Goddess, a massive beelike being who demands orgiastic worship via dancing and dining, usually both at once.

The Hearing Trumpet’s nonsense is less surreal than synthetic. What had seemed like a novel becomes, in conclusion, a sort of cyclical prose poem of adoration, not unlike the Celtic works Graves bent to his will in The White Goddess. Carrington seems to allude to the Tuatha Dé Danann deities of Irish legend, with their mother goddess Dana, whom she had heard about as a child from her Irish nurse and read about in James Stephens’s comic quest-narrative The Crock of Gold (1912). Carrington’s novel combines elements of Arthurian legend, Mexican culture, Irish myths, and proto New Age spiritualism, with a glimmer of the spirit of the European fairy tale.

In this sense, The Hearing Trumpet seems particularly at home in the context of other folk-related works of feminist Anglophone fiction published in the 1970s, and one wonders if Carrington was at the vanguard of a sort of zeitgeist. The 1970s saw a number of notable works of fiction and criticism related to fairy tales and folklore, in which these vernacular forms are more or less elaborately reimagined. Most famous among these are Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977) and Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979). (Carter happened to own a first, 1974, edition of The Hearing Trumpet.) Also published during the decade were Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), a psychoanalytic reading of fairy tales now thought to be in large part plagiarized from other scholarly works, and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, released the same year. All these works explore the significance of folklore in relation to the formation of personal identity. Unlike Graves, however, their authors have absorbed the lessons of Structuralism and construct their arguments by describing broader social systems, rather than attempting to trace elaborate genealogies back to a singular source of belief.

Although I share some of Butler’s and Emre’s enthusiasm for The Hearing Trumpet, today it feels more dated than Carrington’s earlier short stories; it is less annoyed with the social strictures of Western civilization and more utopian and wondering, and at times this wonder is obtained by way of a celebratory mysticism that can feel a bit forced. What neither recent review mentions is that it is also a tale of the end of the world—which Carrington foretells, ambivalently, as a time when women will at last, and once more, take control of the story.

Christian Marclay's The Clock

Date: April 7, 2021

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

On site.

Carrington in her studio.

THE EXHIBITIONS THAT DEFINED THE 2000S
Christian Marclay’s The Clock

Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour video installation, The Clock, had its 2010 premiere at White Cube in London and went on to win a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Comprising thousands of clips appropriated from films and television shows (Safety Last!, Gaslight, Double Indemnity; “Mission Impossible,” “ER,” “The X-Files”) produced over the previous hundred years, the compilation functions as a chronometer in itself, with depicted clocks and verbal references corresponding to the time at the viewer’s own location. Marclay’s obsessive montage was assembled over some two years in collaboration with six research assistants; Marclay edited this high-low material (Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet alongside forgettable commercial films) using a single aspect ratio. Collaborator Quentin Chiappetta provided expert linking of soundtracks, a key to the work’s immersive and eerily engaging polyvocal quality. Famously, The Clock holds spectators’ attention in a relentless grip through its suspension of resolution, stringing action along between and among various truncated scenes and gestures: a woman walks to a door in one scene and, after a cut, a couple exits a building; a man looks up from his watch and, in a subsequent shot, the camera scans an unrelated landscape.

The Clock has been compared to other works of appropriation-based durational video such as Douglas Gordon’s 1993 installation 24 Hour Psycho, a silent projection that extends the Hitchcock film into an all-day affair. However, The Clock’s treatment of time is quite different from that embraced by Gordon—or, for that matter, such auteurs of slowed-down cinema as Andy Warhol (Sleep, Empire) or Wang Bing (West of the Tracks). Over the course of his daylong video, Marclay does not make his viewer feel the lugubrious infinity of the here-and-now so much as its unbearable brevity and disconcerting ineffability.

“This is a time machine,” intones Rod Taylor in an excerpt from George Pal’s 1960 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel that appears at around 5:45 PM in The Clock. The statement is at once wittily overdetermined and slightly oppressive: sitting rapt in a dark gallery before a 12-by-21-foot projection, The Clock’s viewers know exactly what time it is, even as they observe the present moment slipping unceasingly away without the traditional cinematic payoff of a twist in the plot or, perhaps, a conclusion.

An immensely popular yet ambivalent commentary on the legacy of movies and television in the internet age, The Clock illustrates the technological mediation of contemporary life—in all its thoroughness, speed, and hypotactic accumulation of images. The aesthetics of the database take over, and the video’s thousands of protagonists each have only seconds to distinguish themselves. As director and critic Chris Petit opined, it’s like “YouTube for gallery space.”

—Lucy Ives

Date: December 8, 2020

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

On site.

View of Christian Marclay’s exhibition "The Clock," at White Cube, London, 2010. Courtesy White Cube, London, and Paula Cooper, New York.

ELECTORAL AESTHETICS

I remember some of 1996. That election year nearly a quarter century ago is the subject and title of a new collection of essays—a time capsule, even—edited by artist Matt Keegan with interviews edited by writer and oral historian Svetlana Kitto. In 1996, I was either fifteen or sixteen years old, and I lived in New York City, where I took a bus or the subway to high school most days. I wore a lot of polyester clothes sourced from bins and bulging racks downtown. I carried a plastic wallet with cartoon frogs on it and lugged my textbooks around in a leather Village Tannery backpack that was way too small for the purpose and therefore had a weapon-like density. I read Hermann Hesse, Toni Morrison, Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein. I had never heard of David Foster Wallace, author of 1996’s Infinite Jest. I was obsessed with platform shoes.

I still don’t know where the determination to look and dress the way I looked and dressed in 1996 came from. It was, however, of such importance to me to wear the clothes I wore, and to use a specific eyeliner (white) and hair dye (blue-black), that over time I’ve wanted to decode this affinity. Since I thought less about the provenance of my thrift-shop finds than their colors and shapes, I have to believe I was after an image rather than a series of historical references—but what image was this, precisely? The decadence of the American nineties was a decadence of false minimalism, of up-cycling and appropriation, and of the dissimulation of enormous wealth and geopolitical power in textiles and imagery as “soft” as fake monkey fur or the underfed body of Kate Moss.

I couldn’t vote in 1996, and to the extent I remember that year’s election, it is for the pen that the seventy-three-year-old Republican nominee Bob Dole always clenched in his war-crippled right hand to mask its limited mobility. This, along with the candidate’s susceptibility to memory lapses, was subtly exploited by the Clinton-Gore ticket. Most of what I recall from 1996, if this can be said to be a politics, has to do with messages related to sex. In spite of the country’s having emerged from the puritanical Reagan-Bush years with Democratic triumph in 1992, sex, we were told, was unsafe for a number of reasons (shame, pregnancy, infection). I did not think of this as a sign of the times or evidence that the liberalism of the executive was frequently merely symbolic—saxophone stylings covering for continued dismantling of the social safety net and high rates of incarceration. Instead of thinking such things, I got up each morning and arrayed myself as if I were a visitor to the present from some other, possibly fictional era.

Keegan writes in his introduction that the election of 2016 was an intellectually and politically transformative moment for him, motivating him to investigate “changes that the Democratic Party went through in the run-up to Bill Clinton’s emergence as a presidential candidate in 1992.” The essays, interviews, archival images, magazine and newspaper clippings, and shots of art installations he and Kitto collect in 1996 focus on the experiences and points of view of artists who were either in or nearing their twenties in 1996, some voting for the first time in that year’s election (including Becca Albee, Thomas Eggerer, Malik Gaines, Chitra Ganesh, Pearl C. Hsiung, Jennifer Moon, Seth Price, Alexando Segade, Elisabeth Subrin, Martine Syms, and Lincoln Tobier, among others). The anthology also features contributions from a number of other disciplines, exploring the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act meant to reduce welfare; the AIDS crisis; racism and carceral politics during the 1990s; poet Eileen Myles’s 1992 presidential campaign; American immigration policy; Israel, Palestine, and American foreign policy in the Middle East; and the climate crisis, among other touchstones, many of which significantly affect the present or remain with us in hardly altered forms. The book includes essays by such writers and scholars as José Esteban Muñoz (“Pedro Zamora’s Real World of Counterpublicity: Performing an Ethics of the Self”), Yigal S. Nizri (“5756, Jerusalem”), and Mychal Denzel Smith (“A Lesson to Be Learned: On Clinton’s Approval of the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act”). The book’s guiding animus is the notorious movement toward business interests and globalization effected by the Democratic Party in the platform of William Jefferson Clinton, (in)famously evidenced by the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a Reagan initiative that was finally stewarded into existence by the forty-third chief executive. Keegan explains the relevance of his research to our present situation: “I would argue that this rightward move [of the Democratic party] is also foundational to Joe Biden becoming the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020.”

Keegan has a point. As rhetoric in the lead-up to this month’s contest has tended to emphasize the anti-democratic statements and policies of the incumbent, as well as the GOP’s more general affinity for low turnout, restrictions on voting, creative districting, and indirect representation, 1996 reminds the reader of a longer history of norms, messages, exclusions, and coalitions—Republican, Democratic, and otherwise. One of the most interesting things about the writings and pictures the book assembles is that, although a great deal of this material originates in the year 1996, much of it does not. A number of essays are set several years before or a decade or so after the titular year, suggesting that even as we have a tendency to corral events into discrete dates and spans of time, our experience of them can be far more amorphous and ambiguous. In particular, essays by journalists Ahmad Ibsais and Jordan G. Teicher on global warming and the denial thereof show the ways in which political rhetoric and the news have wreaked havoc on our sense of time and causality. As Teicher notes in his concise history of climate-related misinformation from 1996 to the present, 1996 has the alarming distinction of being the last “cool” year in human history, with its average of 51.88 degrees Fahrenheit just shy of the twentieth century’s overall average of 52.02. “Every year since,” Teicher writes, “it’s been hotter.”

The anthology deploys ephemera very effectively, handily shocking the reader with the stupidity of mainstream ideology of the mid-1990s. A 1996 Kenneth Cole ad, touting the brand’s next-level wingtips, proclaims: “The year is 2020. Computers can cook, all sex is safe and it’s illegal to bear arms and bare feet. The future is what you make it.” Such items—along with an image of Ivanka Trump as teen model or a fear-mongering depiction of the pledge of allegiance in Spanish and German from the xenophobic nonprofit “U.S. English,” still operational today—provide some of the strongest tastes of the moment and foreshadow its lingering social and political effects.

The 1990s were the heyday of so-called scatter art. Although scatter art has perhaps not held up as well as other late-breaking takes on conceptualism (like those of Felix Gonzalez-Torres), some of its interest in the power of metonymy and everyday artifacts has clearly been absorbed—not uncritically—into 1996’s modus operandi. Interspersed among the essays are images of pieces dated 1996 by Rachel Harrison, Roni Horn, Glenn Ligon, Cady Noland, Jack Pierson, Lari Pittman, Julia Scher, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, and Andrea Zittel, along with a still from 1995’s CREMASTER 1 video by Matthew Barney—all of which appear without comment. However, there are no photographs of works by such artists as Mike Kelly, Karen Kilimnik, or Paul McCarthy, who are often understood as dominant artists of the time, and these omissions felt purposeful as well as refreshing. I did, however, sometimes wish that 1996 leaned a bit harder on Keegan and many contributors’ area of expertise, i.e., visual art. It might have been nice to include at least one essay surveying the ubiquitous installation-based work of the 1990s or discussing the numerous artworks illustrated, particularly as the collection is well positioned to explore 1996’s art in an original way, given its wide-ranging interest in policy and popular visual culture. That the book’s ambition to focus on a rightward shift in American liberalism is not more fully explored via “high” art, as opposed to mass media, seems like something of a missed opportunity; or, perhaps the reader is simply meant to connect the dots. Yet, while juxtaposition can be a powerful aesthetic tool, it tends to produce suggestive resonances rather than clear argument, and the reader of 1996 might have benefited from a bit more lucidity with respect to the role of artworks in this historical moment. Given that Rudolph Giuliani serves as Trump’s lawyer today, the book might have considered, for example, his failed attempt to censor Chris Ofili’s 1996 glitter-and-elephant-dung-adorned painting The Holy Virgin Mary while it was displayed at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Although Giuliani was widely hailed as a hero for his actions around the World Trade Center’s collapse shortly thereafter, his authoritarianism and disregard for the First Amendment had already been made clear when he sued and attempted to withdraw municipal funding from the Brooklyn Museum. It is interesting to consider how the art of 1996 might, for the perceptive reader, have decrypted the neoliberal politics of the time—de-normalizing them, as it were—even before these politics became more legible in hindsight.

Two of my favorite pieces in 1996 manage a difficult feat where nonfiction is concerned: that of being at once historically informative and intensely personal, showing how we may experience major historical changes as they are unfolding in the present. Debbie Nathan’s essay recounts her time as the Texas chair of Eileen Myles’s 1992 write-in presidential bid. As Nathan notes, Texas has gone Republican in every presidential race since the 1980s. Nathan, who would otherwise have voted Democrat, decided, after attending a poetry reading by Myles, “that if I was going to throw away the coin of my vote, I might as well toss it into a wishing well of hope.” She joined Myles’s campaign (its slogan: “Veto the mainstream! Stay outside! Vote for Eileen Myles”). She quickly discovered that she was too late to submit signatures necessary to get Myles on the ballot. Undeterred by this or her friends’ dismay at her enthusiasm for an independent candidate, Nathan, a journalist and immigrants’ rights advocate, joined the poet-candidate to paint a giant WRITE IN MYLES on a concrete embankment of the Rio Grande in El Paso. But this is only the beginning of Nathan’s account. She details the Democrats’ ramping up of policing after Clinton’s first success: a 1993 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Democratic California senator Dianne Feinstein calling for tougher measures on immigration, as well as Biden’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by Bernie Sanders, among others. By the time 1996 rolled around, Clinton’s position on immigration was hardly distinct from that of his Republican opponent.

Michael Bullock’s “Cruising Diary: 1991–2001,” meanwhile, is a memoir of navigating the early internet’s male-seeking-male offerings. Bullock recounts his teenaged attempts at cruising and use of a telephone chat line advertised in a newspaper (the source of one very creepy encounter), bringing the reader along as he begins to experiment with web-based communications and, in the process, to reckon with desire, risk, and safer sex. In 1996 there were only limited and somewhat awkward options via real-time chat rooms, but by the early 2000s Craiglist’s personals section had blossomed. Encounters with one Craigslist poster, “ZebraShades,” demonstrate to Bullock the power of the anonymous message board to facilitate new kinds of connection, along with the fulfillment of very particular erotic needs. As he writes, “Digital space allowed a generation of men to grow together, enabling us to each fearlessly seek out our own ZebraShades.”

The verb “to normalize” has become a favorite shorthand in the present, yet 1996 calls our attention to a much longer series of successful and politically devastating normalizations, which we would do well not to ignore or forget. It is a kind of art to establish familiarity and normalcy where, in truth, none can or should inhere. In this sense, as we know, artists are far from the only ones who are creative in their jobs; marketers and political strategists are creative, too. The Jamaican-American artist Dave McKenzie, writing in a new essay on his 2004 performance We Shall Overcome, makes the following observation:

I know the internet and social media supposedly explain Trump, but weirdly enough—and this is why I think of him as the television president—I wonder about there being some sort of delay. At some point, we’ll have a YouTube star who’s president, but maybe not for another fifty years or something. But I’m wondering how each Clinton—from Clinton to Clinton—each moment or figure exposes something in the very recent past of media, of culture. They’re dragging with them some idea from the generation just prior.

If McKenzie is correct, we should be thinking about 1996 today because it is this moment’s media ecosystem and its political events that are likely to affect if not determine the present. I’m not sure what it might mean to be governed by a YouTube president, to extend McKenzie’s metaphor, but it does seem clear that four more years of “the television president” would be an instance of the past not merely influencing the present but overwhelming and, in some sense, displacing it. Overall, 1996 is an informative and, in the end, hopeful collection, demonstrating that we can learn a great deal from recent history, even as the time remaining to apply these urgent lessons grows increasingly short.

Date: November 2, 2020

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

On site.

Matt Keegan's book 1996, with interviews edited by Svetlana Kitto, Inventory Press.

MONUMENTAL INVISIBILITY
Review: The Classical Body in Romantic Britain

Cora Gilroy-Ware’s engaging study of nineteenth-century Neo-Classical sculpture, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain, brings an invigorating new interpretation to a style that many contemporary viewers too often see as either dull or self-congratulatory. A visitor to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London who passes the large marble war monument depicting Captain Richard Rundle Burges may be perplexed to find that this naval captain, who lost his life in 1797 during the Battle of Camperdown, is all but nude. Draped in what appears to be a wrinkled tablecloth, Burges accepts a sizable sword from an attending winged Victory. It is perhaps no wonder that, as Gilroy-Ware points out, the 2012 Rough Guide to London calls this statue “overblown” and questions its dorky sensuality. Figurative marble statuary from this period is indeed hard to look at: derivative of numerous earlier classicisms, it is often engaged in modes of historiography and/or moral allegory that bypass or clash with contemporary concerns and values, promoting sorts of idealism that seem outmoded when not openly celebratory of imperial violence, extractive economic practices, and white supremacy.

Gilroy-Ware’s triumph in The Classical Body is to carefully re-politicize what we perceive as the daffiness, essentialism, homogeneity, and what she terms the “Dream” or “Poem” of such plastic works—to permit us to see them again, reknit into the aesthetic and discursive context of their times. She additionally succeeds in drawing connections between the smooth surfaces of these objects and later expressions of Neo-Classicism, from the fluttering garments of modern ballet to the hard bodies of Nazi symbols to the hyper-depilated form of the Victoria’s Secret “Angel.” Her book is generously illustrated with full-page color images of statues, paintings, and graphic works, and it is fascinating to discover therein that what this writer, for one, took to be the cliché of the ubiquitous pale marble statue in the nineteenth century was in fact a complex means of working through an array of dispositions to public life as well as political and national sentiment. For example, Thomas Banks (1735–1805), creator of the seminude Captain Richard Rundle Burges, was a leftist activist, abolitionist, and pacifist, committed to an “egalitarian classicism.” Gilroy-Ware observes that for Banks, “the classical body became a vessel for utopian ideas.” Although Banks’s disposition was not widely shared, it is noteworthy that appropriation of so-called classical styles during this period did not always connote an enthusiasm, on the part of the artist, for endless imperial wars and colonialism.

The Classical Body’s central argument is that, in Britain, an engaged form of classicism, associated with radical republicanism and revolution, was gradually replaced by a saccharine, tacitly nationalist classicism as the nineteenth century wore on. Whereas France’s Neo-Classical nudes were tasked with allegorizing the power of the popular body released from the shackles of monarchy, British artists navigated a different set of concerns, more rarely expressing democratic values—or, for that matter, any direct political values at all—through their increasingly “Poetic” works. As Gilroy-Ware writes, “The definition of the classical body was especially sensitive to historicizing tendencies, . . . it readily lay open to revisions at any minute.” The British government’s purchase of the looted Parthenon Marbles from Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, in 1816 is one significant example of the way in which Britain embraced an imperial—here, Athenian—classicism. Artists (such as the aforementioned Banks) for whom the nakedness and dynamism particular to Greek, Roman, and later Italian sculpture might serve as an “emblem” of physical liberty and self-determination, as well as the possibility of a more equal society, were succeeded by individuals more concerned with satisfying middle-brow appetites for cavorting nymphs and militaristic muscle-bound hunks.

Gilroy-Ware thus moves the reader from the early 1800s—sometimes thought to have been an era dominated by “Grand Tourism” and the aristocratic manipulation of Classical themes, but which she reads as a more complex and diverse period of assimilation of both past sculptural styles and the writings of eighteenth-century popularizers of ancient art such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann—into the second, third, and fourth decades of the century, when what she terms “Poetic sculpture” overwhelms the utopian “Dream” originally embraced by more radical artists. She discusses Banks’s antiwar figures (some of the most revelatory passages in the book), as well as the “draped Dream” of the toga-heavy royalist creations of sculptor John Bacon Sr. (1740–1799), the origination of a “sweet” style by the draftsman and sculptor John Flaxman (1755–1826), the sylph-filled paintings of Henry Howard (1769–1847), as well as the unrelentingly sugary marbles of celebrity-artist Antonio Canova (1757–1822), which she places into illuminating dialogue with the poetry of John Keats (1795–1821). A significant chapter, “Living Dreams and Poems,” considers the horrific treatment of Saartjie Baartman (1789–1815), forcibly exhibited in the 1810s as the “Hottentot Venus,” in relation to changing British mores and conventions of sculpture and display. A regressive culture no longer pursued an “active connection between Greece and Freedom” and saw no paradox in “putting a captured African woman on stage and calling her Venus.” In this chapter, Gilroy-Ware additionally details painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s use of a Black sailor named Wilson as a model. Having studied and sketched Wilson’s body for a month in 1810, Haydon began a year later writing a series of pseudonymous pieces as “An English Student” for the Examiner, making aggressive pseudoscientific claims regarding white superiority and purported ancestral ties to ancient Greece, employing the Parthenon Marbles as a primary example of his “racial ideal.” Here, Gilroy-Ware demonstrates how the classical body was rapidly becoming a discursive object, enabling the ideology of slavery, “the false consciousness that allowed for the exploitation and exchange of human beings as if they were inanimate things,” to overtake and replace any remnants of egalitarian political sentiment.

I first came to Gilroy-Ware’s work via an essay she published in 2019 in X-TRA magazine, “Knowledge-Montage: Page 3, Poetic Sculpture, and Print.” I was immediately taken by her fluency in multiple registers of thought—melding precise art historical narrative with contemporary commentary (on cheesecake tabloid nudes, in this particular essay)—and her highly original style of affect-theory-influenced interpretation. She deployed these in such a way as to permit me to see the interconnections and resonances inherent to the various layers of her scholarship. I was additionally struck by the synthetic and even intermedial nature of Gilroy-Ware’s overall theory of “Poetic sculpture,” a type of derivative image-making that “ushers the viewer into a remote and disinterested space,” one that is pointedly free of accurate historical narrative and rather trades in sentiment and sensuality. Throughout Gilroy-Ware’s writing there is an exciting and, I think, productive tension: While she excels at capturing the material qualities of works of sculpture (“tender, feeding the desire to caress,” “lathered in a balm,” “finished to a lactic sheen”), her goal in The Classical Body in Romantic Britain is not in fact to detail surface particulars or related techniques but rather, as she writes, “to de-aestheticize objects by bringing to light their lost connection to politicized art.” That she comes to this de-aestheticization by way of the haptic and visual qualities of sculpture forces us to contend with the works in question both as historical objects and as objects located squarely, and often uncomfortably, in the present. In this sense, Gilroy-Ware writes against modernist novelist Robert Musil’s ironic contention, cited in The Classical Body, that “there is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments.” Gilroy-Ware re-substantiates appropriations of the Classical body along with related value systems; in other words, she renders visible that which she ably deconstructs.

Date: October 7, 2020

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This review appears in the print edition of Art in America, November–December 2020.

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November–December 2020 cover.

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John Gibson, Venus, 1862, marble with polychromy, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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Cora Gilroy-Ware, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2020; 320 pages, 109 color and black-and-white illustrations.

FOR THE REVERSAL OF UP AND DOWN

Would you know how to look at the Antarctic, if you were lucky enough to travel there someday? What would you expect to see? Probably you, like me, anticipate a frigid landscape of snow and ice (endless ice), dotted with penguins at its coasts. We may well imagine the North Pole—that non-place taxed by its incorporation into the modern consumer rite called Christmas—doubling it, attaching it to the other side of the globe, a twin, striped post opposite or upside down, as it were. Of course, whether you and I are aware of this, language has already invited us into this fantasy of symmetry: we are thinking of the anti-arctic, that which is opposite “the bear,” i.e., Ursa Major, the prominent constellation of the northern celestial sphere; we are thinking, too, thus, of the arctic, from the Greek arktos, “bear” and, via the magic of metonymy, “north,” from which the more familiar Latin ursus comes. But would we know how to look at the Arctic, either? I vaguely remember (likely this is apocryphal) a moment from grade school, right before a geography test, someone hissing, “Which is the one with bears, again?”

I know few people who have been to the North Pole—not a spot on land, we will recall. Fewer still have been to Antarctica—the one with land, no bears. When I was 23, I traveled by train between Sweden and Finland, stopping overnight in Kiruna, a Swedish town north of the Arctic Circle and home to one of the deepest iron ore mines in the world. It was July and remained light out seemingly at all hours. With some advance arrangement, a tourist could pay to travel down into the mine, but I am afraid of heights and had no wish to do this. A year later, I learned that the local government had decided to relocate the town.[1] Human intervention had irrevocably altered the state of the ground; Kiruna had begun to sink. As of 2020, the movement of buildings and persons two miles to the east of Kiruna’s former inner city is ongoing and will continue for another two decades. In May of this year, the largest seismic event ever caused by mining, a 4.9 magnitude earthquake, was reported at the Kiruna mine of Swedish company LKAB. The scale and risks of this now more-than-a-century-old project, along with the sums of money involved, are dizzying, staggering, disorienting. Which way is up? I think. According to Wikipedia, in 2012 the depth of the mine attained some 4,478 feet, which is to say, around the height of many peaks in the North American White Mountains, some of which I can perceive from a window in the room where I am currently sitting, typing.[2] I also think, losing my bearings for a moment: Am I above or am I below?

The artist Himali Singh Soin has created a lens and a language for seeing in such states—which may also be landscapes—of disorientation, where up and down cease to be opposed and commonplace direction founders. Her ongoing project, we are opposite like that, which is comprised of videos, an artist’s book, as well as a musical composition and performance, partly documents travel she undertook to uninhabited parts of the Arctic’s Svalbard archipelago and the Antarctic Peninsula. It is additionally a reading of the fantastically disoriented and disorienting way of regarding these parts of the world that grew up during the so-called ages of polar exploration, the periods of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when European men set off in boats and heavy woolen clothes, hoping to access frozen reaches where they would prove their autonomy and valor by planting flags in shimmering patches of snow and ice, which were then to belong to the nations from which they came. They went in quest of efficient global circulation, pursuing a Northwest Passage, also engaging in the industrial harvesting of ice—a project that may seem quite strange to us, given contemporary refrigeration technology.

Significantly, as Soin shows in her most recent video, produced in 2019, those who remained at home were not immune to the spectral lure of these otherworldly realms, where hallucinations, disappearances, and cannibalism on the part of Europeans who sought to stake a claim or find a passage were not unknown. A negative fantasy arose in Victorian England alongside scientific research into prehistoric glaciers: when the world ended, it would end in ice. As if persecuted at long range by the very recalcitrant icescape that had consumed Captain Sir John Franklin’s mission of 1845 to discover a Northwest Passage, Victorians pictured themselves as threatened interglacial beings in popular prints and culture. They imagined the ice appearing at their doors, polar bears menacing them on the weekends at their parks, their cities enveloped by a genocidal crystalline substance. In one 1868 print by caricaturist Gustave Doré, featured in Soin’s video, a “southern savage,” who is somehow unaffected by the collapse of civilization so-called, gazes out at an empty London whose inhabitants have not survived a freeze or other apocalyptic catastrophe.

At the center of Soin’s work is a figure portrayed by the artist herself. Dressed—and sometimes seeming to nest—in a cloud of silver emergency heat blankets, this being emerges from frozen masses or walks slowly across tundra, her reflective garments shimmering and loosening in the wind. She is ice, personified. She is still here. Her movements, focused gaze, and undulating attire act as stand-ins for what the art historian Maggie Cao, an expert in landscape painting of the nineteenth century, has termed ice’s “ever-present liquidity,” its liability to “fracturing, restructuring, and, of course, melting,” its “material contradictions.”[3] We watch as ice, solid and slow and never not in motion, departs. Soin’s figure also harbors contradictions of political history: for the Victorian sailor or imperial captain ice was at once a living adversary and cherished lifeless property; ice was a place where nothing was, into which one was compelled to travel; it was a void to be filled, a glamorous screen, a phantasmagoria at once colorless and containing every imaginable color; a killer of and magnet for fantasies; nothing and too many things. It was feminine, other. We need, it seems, some way of looking at ice. We need a language—possibly multiple languages—to address her. We are already too late.

In 1895, the year of the earliest confirmed European landing on Antarctica by the Norwegian steamship Antarctic, a Swedish physicist named Svante Arrhenius was devising the first mathematical model of what we now call global warming, showing by 1896 that increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere could lead to dramatic heating of the planet. In spite of the appetite for coal in his industrializing time, Arrhenius was unalarmed and viewed his discovery as predictive of a relatively slow process of climate change, by way of which it would take thirty centuries for CO2 levels to grow by 50 percent, his marker for a planetary temperature uptick of five to six degrees Celsius. As we know, it has in fact taken a single century for CO2 levels to increase by 30 percent.[4]

In an email, Soin tells me, “When I finally traveled to both antipodes, they weren’t spaces, but places of loss that needed to quickly be written in order to be preserved in some way.” This sentence produces a vicarious immediacy for me: I realize that I cannot go to the North Pole, even if I do someday and somehow travel to the point in the Northern Hemisphere where, to employ the technical definition, the Earth’s axis of rotation meets its surface. Who knows how I might get there but, beyond this, who knows what sort of solidity I would be likely to encounter, what will remain of the ice in this place predicted to be passable by ship within the coming decade?

Thus I turn to the canvas-bound book that accompanies Soin’s video, hoping to orient myself in time and space via writing (a long habit with me). The book is also titled we are opposite like that, and it is taller along its spine than it is long across its pages, giving it the air and heft of a log book of some sort, a portable item that might fit in a large pocket.[5] I think, speaking of writing and pockets, of the titular coat fabricated by Herman Melville’s narrator in his 1850 novel, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War. This allegorical outer garment is a palimpsest, reinforced with whatever fabric comes to hand in an urgent situation aboard a ship headed for Cape Horn, “bedarned and bequilted” by the wearer “with many odds and ends of patches—old socks, old trowser-legs, and the like.”[6] The jacket is a bound object, a sort of book with pages gathered from various sources but lacking writing: like the pale whale set to appear in Melville’s subsequent novel, the jacket is blank. It has, unfortunately for its wearer, not been waterproofed with tar—a foreshadowing of challenges to come—but, and moreover, its whiteness bespeaks the uncertainty and radical ignorance of the young sailor, who may himself be inscribed by events at sea. In book form, Soin’s we are opposite like that is also a palimpsest, but it overflows with writing from many sources and in varied genres and styles, from calligraphic poem to brief play to chart to litany to history. In one extraordinary essay, Soin makes an argument for thinking of the aurora as “a form of art writing,” for example; elsewhere, she provides a guide that may be used to “FOUND YOUR OWN LANGUAGE.” “Bequilted” into the center of the book, which may be read beginning from either cover, is a rectangular fragment cut from an emergency blanket.[7] A reader familiar with Soin’s video might, coming to this silver page, have the sense of brushing the hem of ice’s raiment. The character, if not ice, is abruptly, materially present.

Maggie Cao advises us to read the history of ice as “reveal[ing] the intersection of environmental and political imperialisms that have long fueled our dreams and fears of entropy.”[8] I think about this history as a force for reorientation; for replacing, rescaling the grid, much like the crossing, telescoping, turning lines I read in Soin’s book. I am learning some ways to look and read. I am learning that my own disorientation has language in it—for opposites, like hallucinations and distortions, come with, and from, language. And disorientation, like any language, must have a history.

The title of this essay borrows from that of a 2006 artwork by Tavares Strachan, Chamber with Ice: Elevator for the Reversal of Up and Down, an installation including ice harvested from Alaska, a refrigeration unit, solar panels, fans, flags, and a battery system, exhibited in Nassau, Bahamas. Strachan’s work is discussed in both of the essays by Maggie Cao I cite in the writing above.

Date: October 5, 2020

Publisher: Columbia University GSAPP Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the exhibition site.
This essay appears as a part of A Wildness Distant, an online screening room accessible during fall of 2020.

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On site.

Himali Singh Soin, still from we are opposite like that (2019). Image courtesy the artist.

1. The relocation of the city is the subject the exhibition Kiruna Forever, currently on view at ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design in Stockholm.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna_Mine.
1. Maggie Cao, “Icescapes,” vol. 31, no. 2, American Art (Summer 2017): 48.
1. Clive Thompson, “How 19th Century Scientists Predicted Global Warming,” JSTOR Daily, December 17, 2019.
1. Himali Singh Soin, we are opposite like that (n.p.: subcontinentment press, 2020).
1. Herman Melville, White Jacket; or, the World on a Man-of-War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850), from Chapter 1, “The Jacket,” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10712/10712-h/10712-h.htm#chap01.
1. I use the metaphor of quilting loosely here, as the silver page is not in fact bound into the book but is held in place by static electricity and the weight of the other pages.
1. Maggie Cao, “The Entropic History of Ice,” in Ecologies, Agents, Terrains, edited by Christopher P. Heuer and Rebecca Zorach (New Haven and London: The Clark Art Institute and Yale UP, 2018), 267.

On Mail Art & the USPS

IN 1971, BOTH THE USPS AND THE TERM “MAIL ART” WERE BORN

The first widely circulated use of the term mail art in print occurred in the title of an exhibition catalogue: Mail art—Communication à distance—Concept. This publication was released in November of 1971: the same year that mail processing in America was transformed by the founding of the quasi-corporate United States Postal Service. The exhibition took place on the other side of the Atlantic, as part of the seventh Biennale de Paris, and was the brainchild of a French master’s student in his early twenties. A year prior, curator Marcia Tucker had organized a show with Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondance [sic] School at the Whitney Museum of American Art, featuring postcards, letters, and drawings from 106 participants, though the survey didn’t use the term “mail art.” Indeed, artist John Held Jr. recalls that the exhibition was presented without “standard curatorial comment” altogether. The French show is significant because it foregrounds the role of the postal service itself—which looms in the background, if not the foreground, of many postal works. With the USPS’s crucial role in this year’s election, it is instructive to revisit this exhibition that highlighted the roles postal workers play in artistic production.

In the US, the transformation of mail in July of 1971 was brought about by an act of Congress that converted the former federal Post Office Department into a government-owned company that was expected to generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining. Previously, for some two centuries, American taxpayers had funded the POD. The reorganization into this autonomous entity was agreed to by unions and the government after postal employees, primarily led by Black workers, had successfully engaged in dramatic nationwide wildcat strikes in March of 1970. In New York City, where the strikes began, stocks fell and some feared that the market would close altogether. After unsuccessfully ordering postal workers back to their jobs, President Nixon summoned the National Guard to the Big Apple. However, the Guard and other miscellaneous military personnel—deployed in a mission dubbed Operation Graphic Hand—were unable to restore normal mail service. The 1970 strikes protested pay so low that many mail carriers and other workers required second jobs or received welfare assistance. In return for collective bargaining rights and long-overdue raises, postal worker unions accepted that their place of work would be run as a business—a Nixon-administration idea that they had earlier resisted. According to American mail historian Philip F. Rubio, Frederick Kappel, who had headed AT&T before becoming USPS chairman from 1972 to 1974, saw the resulting Postal Reorganization Act as a first step toward privatizing the mail.

Meanwhile, in France, the youthful scholar Jean-Marc Poinsot had become fascinated by what he perceived as an overlooked mode of artistic production, the envoi, literally “a sending,” and here, specifically, an item sent by an artist in the mail. Poinsot’s curiosity was roused by artist-friends including Christian Boltanski, Jean Le Gac, and André Cadere, with whom he was then socializing as he completed his dissertation at Nanterre. Wanting to bring greater attention to the envoi form, as well as to a growing body of work by contemporaries, Poinsot began soliciting contributions from artists in and around his network of acquaintances, writing to the Swiss Fluxus artist Ben Vautier, among others, for advice. As historian Klara Kemp-Welch notes, Poinsot explained to Vautier, who preferred to be called simply “Ben,” “Envois are only to be found in the possession of their recipients and, as they are not visible in magazines, galleries, or museums, I am obliged to return to their source.” Poinsot’s major finding about mail art seemed to be that “postal communication is a form of long-distance communication, and thereby the aesthetic object is modified both in its form and in its presentation.” Although Poinsot does not elaborate regarding this “modification,” it is clear that many artists considered the bureaucratic processes and official material and graphic formats related to the mail a significant part of the artworks they sent to one another.

The artist Ken Friedman, a Fluxus participant, has written of his experience with postal regulations and his enjoyment of the challenge of trying to send via the USPS “objects that were difficult or perhaps impossible to mail,” such as large chairs. As Friedman notes, this activity required not only precise knowledge of acceptable dimensions and packaging rules but an ability to negotiate with postal workers, who themselves became more intimately involved in the work of art in the case of a bulky or unusually shaped package—perhaps more to their annoyance than creative fulfillment. Also worth considering is the death of Aspen, the “first three-dimensional magazine,” edited by Phyllis Johnson, formerly a writer and editor for Women’s Wear Daily and other periodicals. Aspen met its end in 1971 (the year of Poinsot’s exhibition and the creation of the USPS), after six years of operation and ten issues. The project lost its second-class mail license due to the Postal Service’s ruling that Aspen was not a magazine but rather a “non-descript publication” that was “unclassifiable; belonging, or apparently belonging, to no particular class or kind.” Without a second-class license, it was prohibitively expensive to mail subscribers the experimental magazine—a box containing thematically organized media items. Both of these examples point up the simultaneous freedom and banal constraint represented by the postal service, particularly in regard to visual art. It is clear that artists associated with mail art were interested in the possibilities of the post as a means of circumventing the formality of galleries and museums, of establishing intimacy across distance, and of engendering surprise and joy in one another—not to overlook the general cheapness of this method of sharing work, particularly meaningful in the US, where artists have long been unable to expect much assistance from their government. We might also add that mail art could (and can) be a form of political resistance, establishing vocabularies and codes that would be significant to recipients but meaningless to state censors or other less-than-welcome readers. All the same, artist Yves Klein, who created a series of stamps in his signature blue for exhibition invitations in the 1950s, had to be sure that his self-made postage was regulation size. At the post office, he not only paid the established price for mailing but also tipped the postal clerk to postmark his diminutive paintings. This was not an economic exchange of the same order as one with a gallerist, collector, or museum acquisitions representative, but it was nevertheless a necessary negotiation. And all those who mail artworks (or, anything at all, for that matter) engage in such apparently mundane and yet official, regulated, and theoretically uniform transactions.

In his quest to make an array of (previously semi-private) mailed artworks visible on the occasion of the 1971 Biennale, Jean-Marc Poinsot turned not only to practitioners associated with Fluxus, but also to artists who were participating in slightly older networks: the francophone Nouveaux Réalistes and Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondance School, a network of artists who engaged in a sort of postal “dance.” The responses to Poinsot’s invitation were overwhelmingly numerous and varied, surprising and delighting him (he had a good mail day every day for several years, he claimed). The project, which was originally conceived as taking the form of a book exclusively, grew by chance when Poinsot was invited to contribute to the section of the 1971 Biennale devoted to conceptual art. Poinsot selected forty artists—among whom were such well-known figures as Johnson himself and On Kawara—to be included in the book as well as in the exhibition. He also designed a participatory component: visitors to the installation were able to mail their own letters using a stamp dispenser and a working post box and were invited to make phone calls using a provided stall and to employ photocopiers as well as a photo booth to reproduce traces of their presence in the cavernous gallery in the Parc Floral de Vincennes. The exhibition, which included a selection of works by Eastern European artists, traveled to Belgrade in January of 1972 and to Zagreb the following March.

One of the more unexpected qualities of Poinsot’s exhibition was its inclusion of a number of artists from the Soviet bloc, where state control of media and other institutions gave their envois a different valence from that of pieces produced in the West. Some of these works were designed to encode messages in the guise of “nonsensical” aesthetic experimentation; others were subject to redaction and other forms of institutional mark-making and censorship.⁠ Mailings by the Hungarians Gyula Konkoly and Endre Tót as well as the Czechoslovak Petr Štembera were included—with each artist engaging in his own form of pointed evacuation of meaning from his missives: Konkoly simply reproduced a rejection letter from a grant-making organization in Paris, Tót opted for a series of O’s in lieu of words, and Štembera offered a grouping of blank pages. Tót additionally made use of a poignant artist’s stamp that proclaimed the reason for his communications: “I write to you because I am here and you are there.” When the show arrived at the Galerija Studentski Centar in Zagreb, the gallery director, Želemir Koščević, elected not to open the crate containing all of the envois but rather exhibited the container itself as-was, documenting this artful decision by having himself photographed standing before and atop it. As Kemp-Welch writes, Koščević believed that the exhibition of the works at the Biennale in Paris had “marked the end of the life of this idea,” and that he was therefore exhibiting “the postal package as postal package.” So concluded the circulation of Poinsot’s precocious and unusually engaged master’s thesis.

As Gérard Régnier, a critic and later the director of the Picasso Museum, wrote under his penname “Jean Clair” in a succinct and illuminating preface to the exhibition catalogue, once an object or practice is considered art—“consecrated to, confiscated by a museum” —it then loses its everyday role, becoming, in a sense, “superbly useless.” Thus, there was some acknowledgement that a number anti-institutional artistic practices were receiving their first institutional recognition by being included in a traveling exhibition and a publication with a print run of 1,500 copies. Yet, Poinsot was more concerned with loftier questions in his introduction. Writing in the tortured style of a diligent graduate student, he focused on the question of how meaning relates to artistic form, citing Marcel Duchamp as a paradigmatic example of an artist who generated a “self-enclosed” world of signification, in which the art object is at once a “means of communication and . . . a study of the mechanisms of communication.”⁠ Poinsot offered Duchamp’s exploration of postal dynamics in Rendez-vous of [Sunday] 6 February 1916, a series of postcards narrating a meeting as well as explaining some of Duchamp’s own works, as a canonical example of art commenting upon distribution networks. That Duchamp gave these postcards by hand to his friends, Louise and Walter Arensberg, much-noted collectors of modernist works, might be seen as further proof that the artist intended to comment on the channels that enable art to circulate and survive. Poinsot, for his part, was very concerned with how an artwork intended for a private recipient might become public, “the means by which,” as he wrote, “we become conscious of [these artworks].” He considered that artists might at some point decide to sell some of the works they received by mail, but would do so at “risk of distorting their meaning.”

As we know, this episode, far from representing the conclusion of mail art, was merely one in a long series of actions and events that are ongoing today. Many artists with varied practices, from Yoko Ono to Joseph Beuys to K8 Hardy, have engaged in reciprocal mail-art practices, defying the stereotype of the isolated, incommunicative genius. A visit to the post office can indeed seem so ordinary (or, so distressingly, ploddingly time-consuming, depending on the time of year and one’s location) that it can be easy to forget the incredible benefit that a state-run, non-market-driven post represents. In the United States, where cuts in service and compensation have been the norm since 2011 and where the federal government has repeatedly attempted to privatize the service since the Kappel Commission recommended that the postal service be “self-supporting,” some citizens may forget that an inexpensive and ubiquitous mail system is essential. As commentators and historians have pointed out with increasing frequency, the United States Postal Service continues to be the only delivery service that goes everywhere in the United States, “to patrons in all areas” and “all communities,” as Title 39 specifies. This law also says, rather plainly, “The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.” Meanwhile, FedEx and UPS—whose options that are significantly more price-impaired—deliver, in combination, approximately 130 billion fewer pieces of mail within the United States than the USPS each year. This is a figure that takes a moment to sink in.

Although much is currently being made, and very rightly so, of Trump-campaign donor Louis DeJoy’s June 2020 ascent to the position of postmaster general—along with his leaked plans for austerity, slowing of service, and firing of senior USPS officials—DeJoy’s ambitions are not entirely original. For nearly fifty years the USPS has maintained its awkward status as a semi-public/semi-private “self-supporting” corporate entity.⁠ Its ability to continue on this path has been challenged not just by the advent of email and other forms of electronic communication, but by oversight issues, including a provision in a 2006 law that requires the USPS to fund employees’ future retirement medical benefits in advance, which has been blamed, if controversially, for many of its financial woes. The Great Recession did significant damage, and the company has not turned a profit since 2007. In the context of art, it is difficult to imagine On Kawara notifying a wide array of individuals of the time at which he woke up at a rate of $12.40 (intrastate delivery to a residential address by UPS) or $8.50 (by FedEx “One Rate” envelope) or more per missive. Recall that a first-class “Forever” stamp that will cause your envelope to be conveyed anywhere within the United States, most likely in a matter of days, is currently priced at 55 cents. Perhaps now is a good time to stock up.

Date: September 29, 2020

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

On site.

Cover of the January‒February 1973 issue of Art in America, which featured David Zack’s essay “An Authentik and Historikal Discourse on the Phenomenon of Mail Art.”

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Ben Vautier: The Postman's Choice, 1965, postcard, 3 5/16 by 5 9/16 inches.

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On Shane Carruth & Primer

View of the exhibition “Aspen Magazine: 1965-1971,” 2016, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

LUCY IVES REWATCHES A DYSTOPIAN BUDDY MOVIE
Primer (2004) asks what happens when history is always hanging in the balance

Primer is a film by US director, actor and writer Shane Carruth. Shot independently on a US$7,000 budget in 2004, it was released in cinemas in 2007 and has since garnered a cult following. It concerns the accidental invention of a time machine by two entrepreneurial engineers who labour away at a box-like contraption in a garage start-up (that mythic American site) on the anonymous outskirts of Dallas. Although the plausibility of the science at stake is not crucial to the viewer’s immersion in the situation, Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan)’s device at first seems to be a means of countering gravity; its ability to transport them back in time is a secondary discovery. For Carruth, on the other hand, the film’s science is crucial. So devoted is Primer to impenetrable engineer-speak and avoidance of plot-related exposition that it has spawned a mini-subgenre of explanatory videos and other dissections online. And, although it is ostensibly an exploration of what might happen if you had the ability to go back in time, it also serves as a perfect time capsule of the malaise of US President George W. Bush’s second term.

In Primer, Aaron and Abe tell each other that they want to use the time machine to game the stock market. Their main source of solidarity in this scheme is that neither can pinpoint what exactly makes the device work, although each privately comprehends that, in order to avoid catastrophe, he must control the/a past in which there is a ‘fail-safe’ machine that can be used to destroy all future machines and, therefore, prevent the very discovery of time travel. Abe believes that he is in command of the one and only fail-safe; however, it eventually becomes clear that Aaron is one step ahead of – and behind – him.

The infinitely regressive narrative arms race to control the fail-safe is hard to perceive in the film itself, given that it proceeds according to a standard linear plot. By the time the viewer realizes what is going on, Aaron and Abe have replicated themselves multiple times and exist in a universe in which it is possible not only to change the past but to kill oneself and carry on living. This strenuously unsimplified depiction of the effects of unfettered recursion is about more than just best buddies under late capitalism and weird science. Rather, it allegorizes a negative fantasy about historical consciousness that was endemic to the early 2000s, during the time of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – an era which presages the current age of fake news, as well as the combatting of manufactured narrative through public protests, the making-real through collective presence.

Primer trades in narrative spleen. The characters develop extraordinarily pessimistic relationships – not just with each other, but with the notion of life lived on a unique, unrepeatable timeline. For the two time travellers, all events become mutable and suspect, losing their intrinsic value. Here story, too, is unimportant: the only thing that matters is strategy. Existence becomes as non-narrative as it is agonistic, with time serving the most meagre of purposes – as the passive substrate in which Aaron and Abe are at war. Aaron and Abe’s existential battle concerns origins. Each wants to be in possession of the determining fail-safe. The time traveller who controls this device can render his partner entirely unaware of the disruptive Pandora’s box to which the garage has given rise and, therefore, prevent time travel from being invented. He who emerges from the fail-safe has the power to create a plot and a future in which he can claim, borrowing the all-too-familiar trope: ‘It was only a dream!’ The question is: who will have the privilege of determining what shall have become real? It’s not writing history that I’m talking about here, metaphorically speaking, but the invention of the very media and language that allow someone to write it. What would the present look and feel like, the film asks, if such radical forms of control over history were, in fact, hanging in the balance?

Date: September 1, 2020

Publisher: frieze

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the article.
This article appears in the print edition of frieze, September 2020, issue 213, with the title "Reverse Forecast."

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frieze September 2020.

On site.

Shane Carruth, Primer, 2004. Courtesy: StudioCanal.

RENEGADE ART HISTORIAN ABY WARBURG CHALLENGED THE DISCIPLINE’S ELITISM WITH PHOTOGRAPHY

I suppose I am something of an Aby Warburg agnostic. Or, I vacillate. The German-Jewish art historian (1866–1929) is known for his “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” project, a compendium of photographs of artworks as well as other print items from across time and cultures categorized and mounted on cloth, by means of which Warburg sought to illustrate his theory of collective memory. Warburg is, to me, a figure of a certain mystery: he is now beloved by thinkers in every corner of the humanities for his innovative, comparative approach to the analysis of images, but during his lifetime his work was poorly understood. He, in turn, maintained a certain distance from academia and its tendency to privilege rote diachronic accounts of the development of art. Hailing from an immensely wealthy banking family, Warburg was able to act as an independent scholar, gathering a library of books and tens of thousands of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs and other images documenting artworks that became the basis for the prestigious Warburg Institute, located in Hamburg until 1933 and subsequently in London. In a biography, eminent art historian Ernst Gombrich wrote that he sometimes felt as though Warburg “had no method, but he had a message.”[1] His characterization gets at a major difficulty: by what criteria does one assess the work of a scholar who occasionally acted like an artist—who sought to undo what he termed the grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit (border-police-style close-mindedness) of disciplinary practice?

Warburg began his art historical studies in a fairly standard way, completing his doctoral thesis at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, in 1892. Yet, even as he absorbed more staid philological material, he was a super-fan of two interdisciplinary works, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoön (1766), a reflection on the representational capacities of painting and poetry, and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834), a satirical novel ostensibly about the history of fashion. The latter was the apex of critical prose, as far as Warburg was concerned. Warburg was a scholar of the Italian Renaissance, yet he was also interested the art of Greece, Rome, and Northern Europe, and was most of all invested in wide-ranging questions regarding the meaning and evolution of images. His early exploration of excessive quantities of what he termed bewegtes Beiwerk, wittily translated by Gombrich as “accessories in motion”[2]—an inspired way of thinking about the pleats in garments worn by Botticelli’s female figures—later became a series of semi-scientific convictions about the literal inscription of memory images in the human nervous system.

At the center of Warburg’s theory were visual forms he termed Pathosformeln, or repeating, historically traceable figurative gestures and expressions. An 1895 trip to the United States led to an obsession with Hopi religious practices and dance, which Warburg saw as confirming his beliefs about cultural evolution, in which Western art represented a later stage of development in a universal process of working through violent and fearful impulses to arrive at reasoned responses to the world. He concluded, in one instance via a study of children’s drawings, that the Hopi used a symbolic snake form to represent lightning, a potentially threatening meteorological phenomenon. Warburg’s continually developing theory was profoundly influenced by Charles Darwin’s 1872 The Expression of Emotion in Animals and Men (“At last,” Warburg remarked in his diary, “a book that helps me!”[3]), as well as evolutionary biologist Richard Semon’s Mneme, a 1908 tract from which Warburg borrowed much of his theory of collective memory wholesale.

But even as Warburg flirted with broad, sometimes simplistic assumptions and supernatural syntheses, he was devoted to detailed work on the Western canon. He had the obsessive, acquisitive eye of a collector but, unlike many individuals of his class, preferred to acquire books and photographs rather than paintings and sculpture. Warburg had forsaken his birthright at the helm of the Warburg banking enterprise in exchange for a generous budget to be used for acquiring the texts and media necessary to his research. Beginning in the 1880s, photographs were reproducible as paper prints, and Warburg took advantage of this development in his research, commissioning a small number of photographic reproductions of Renaissance artworks for his dissertation. But it was not until the 1920s that he began arranging numerous documentary photographs of paintings and other works in the set of displays that were to become his Typenatlas (character atlas) or Bilderatlas (image atlas), the compendium of types he named “Mnemosyne,” after the Ancient Greek goddess of memory, who was also the mother of the muses. At this time, Warburg was in later middle age and had already suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown that put him in a sanatorium for three years, from 1921 to ’24. When he died suddenly from a heart attack in October of 1929, a book version of the “Atlas” was still in early stages.

A description of what the “Atlas” was—and now is, given a newly published catalogue, Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original, and the delayed exhibition of the same title, currently scheduled for September 12–November 30 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin—can help to explain Warburg’s recent rehabilitation, which began in the 1980s. To illustrate his theory of how “Western man” individually and collectively used visual representations to overcome “primitive” phobic instincts, he and other members of the Institute staff began grouping photographs of historical artworks around 1926. Starting in 1928, these groups were mounted on vertical panels of stretched black Hessian (i.e., burlap) of approximately 60 by 50 inches and displayed in the Warburg Institute’s library in Hamburg, sometimes accompanying Warburg’s lectures. Warburg collaborated closely with Gertrud Bing (1892–1964), a former doctoral student of philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s and a scholar of German Neo-Classicism who was to become the director of the Warburg Institute from 1954 to ’64. After Warburg’s abrupt death, Bing was the individual most knowledgeable about the panels and their intended destiny, as plates in a book to be titled Mnemosyne. Warburg had planned to explicate the image series in two additional volumes of text but was unable to do so; only his preface survives. Glass negatives had already been made from some of the image-arrangements, but the metal plates to be used in the printing of the book were never created. Although Bing was able to provide her own captions based on her conversations with Warburg for a number of the panels—“Superlatives of gestural language. Haughtiness of self-confidence,” for example—the images were separated from the panels, the original frames and fabric lost. During the 1930s, staff sorted these images back into the immense pictorial archive, and a subsequent re-indexing further muddled matters. The “Atlas” was considered largely lost, if not a bit crackpot.

It was only in the second volume of Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings), published in 2000, that the glass negatives created in 1929 were used to publish fragmentary pictorial evidence of the “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.” Editors Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink produced black-and-white images from the negatives, printing them at a reduced size that tended to obscure their details. They also left off additional commentary, given the lack of extant captioning by Warburg himself. This publication was in no small part encouraged by the resurgence of interest in the works of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), whose theories of media and history had come to seem prescient, particularly in the Anglophone world, with the 1969 publication of Illuminations, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt and subsequently popularized by John Berger in his 1972 TV series and book, Ways of Seeing. (While Warburg was only peripherally aware of Benjamin during his lifetime, Benjamin sent Warburg a copy of his thesis on Baroque Trauerspiel, or tragic drama, which cited Warburg.) Like Benjamin, who often engaged in leaps of thought and argument by way of metaphorical image rather than logical deduction, Warburg was concerned with Zwischenräume, the spaces in between, as well as something he termed Denkraum, or room for thought.

If the “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” shows more than it tells, this is by design. Warburg hoped to create a visual tool that would foster what he saw as art’s innate ability to generate reflective, dialectical distance for the viewer, a key to the civilizing process: by means of this Distanz, states of rational detachment can co-exist with animalistic frenzy, the sober philosopher meets the rampaging maenad, over and over through the ages. This seems like an odd intellectual goal now, but the panels hold an aesthetic fascination that either exceeds this magic theory or, paradoxically, proves it. I find them strange and hard to look away from—whether they combine depictions of “Ascent to the sun,” “The cosmic system as a dice board,” or “Monumentalizing and dissociation,” to name but a few of the trans-historical motifs studied.

The panels are particularly fascinating in the new book, published by Hatje Cantz. At approximately 17 1/2 by 24 inches and 184 pages, the volume is massive enough that I had to strain to get it up my front steps after the UPS guy deposited it there from a safe social distance (speaking of Zwischenraum). The book requires its own desk (luckily I have two in my office) or, preferably, a free-standing support of some sort, which one may discover by googling “nineteenth-century book furniture.” It is the result of a Herculean, or perhaps Cinderellan, feat on the part of historian Roberto Ohrt and artist Axel Heil, who rediscovered the 971 original images by meticulously combing through the some 400,000 now included in the Warburg Institute archive. The book is probably best handled slowly and with gloves, as the large pages crease easily and pick up fingerprints. It’s a dramatic art object in itself, one requiring a kind of physical care to which most of us, myself included, are unused, except in the context of religious practice or visits to institutional archives. Upon receiving the tome, I experienced successive waves of elation and annoyance. What an amazing achievement! I thought. Then, but why do I have to read it standing up?!

The book offers a series of eighty-three full-page color photographs[4] of painstaking reproductions of the original “Atlas Mnemosyne” (as it is called in English), expanding on the work accomplished by the collected writings volume in 2000. It also includes black-and-white prints from the available glass negatives. On the page facing each panel image, captions parse the montages, and sometimes there are close-ups of selected images. A feeling of detective work comes with extended study of these arrangements and glosses. One believes oneself to be re-seeing long-familiar images of Poseidon or Hermes, for example, as fresh figures un-dulled by repetition in Neo-Classical marble or recent appropriation in the US for sugar-free gum branding or flower-delivery logos. In particular, the violence endemic to some Classical imagery and the repetition of this violence in the Renaissance is made, if you will pardon the pun, striking by Warburg’s constellations. There was for me an equal puzzlement at what I experienced as Warburg’s obsession with Western origins and his sometimes paranoid logic of analogy, which in panel seventy-seven, for example, brings together female figures from twentieth-century advertising for anti-aging cream with the mythical person of Medea, murderer of her own children. Here I thought of the repetitious imagery later deployed to more subversive, anti-philological ends by Pop and Conceptual artists, in particular the installations of Hanne Darboven (1941–2009), although many artists have been influenced by Warburg. The panels are hypnotic; with their clear details, they inspire hunts for correspondences that may or may not have been intended by Warburg himself. Yet I kept wondering if there might not have been another way to design the book. Its dedication to the pre-twentieth-century Bilderatlas format means that it must function like a reference volume. Priced at two hundred euros (about $222), it will be unaffordable to many.

RETURNING TO MY earlier question reimagining scholarly disciplines from the inside: the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has described Warburg as a ghost who haunts the discipline of art history. Certainly, Warburg worked to call many of its tenets into question, not least of all its elitism. His “Atlas” was intended to be reproducible as a book, to circulate widely; it also aimed to accomplish a kind of deskilling in relation to so-called visual literacy, suggesting that the most important aspects of art cannot be grasped through philological expertise and complex terminology. Some have solved the puzzle of Warburg’s simultaneous critique of his discipline and extreme insider-ness by thinking of him as an eccentric philosopher of typologies with a serious collecting habit, an erudite hoarder. But this is to overlook Warburg’s interest in technologies related to mechanical reproduction. Photography, among other technical means of reproducing images, became part of his intellectual practice and affected his theories and method. Although he himself did not use a camera to reproduce artworks, Warburg was in no small part a photographer. His elaborate hypothesis regarding the trans-historical transmission of images served to justify his working not primarily with painted surfaces and marbles (as many other historians of the Renaissance might) but with photographs and techniques of montage. And because he had to create his own teaching materials, he also acted as a designer. Although the “Atlas” functions imperfectly as a work of art, its multifarious author is by no means exclusively scholarly in his pursuits.

Yet, it is surprising that a scholar of the Italian Renaissance would forsake the “artist’s hand,” not to mention the original, authentic object, in favor of the reproducible photographic image. Even among more recent commentators on the history of art, it is common to hear of loss and forgetfulness associated with the proliferation of photographs. Critic Benjamin Buchloh, for one, has considered “whether, under the universal reign of photographic reproduction, mnemonic experience could even continue to be constructed.”[5] Warburg seems to have taken a different view—one analogous to that of his contemporary Walter Benjamin. In a 1931 essay, “Little History of Photography,” Benjamin discusses the photograph’s tendency to reveal “material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things.” This is particularly true of early, metal-plate photography techniques such as daguerreotype, which can record minute particulars at a resolution many present-day digital cameras cannot match; as Benjamin writes, “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of [an] optical unconscious.”[6] It is in the spirit of such an optical unconscious—a collectively authored archive of unintended and often-unrecognized visual detail—that Warburg’s “Atlas” is best viewed. This should be done in the spirit of Warburg’s embrace of photography and pursuant embrace of a “technological concept of art,” also a notion I derive (somewhat circuitously) from Benjamin.[7] Far from despairing that the new regime of infinitely reproducible photographic images would, as Buchloh puts it, prevent the construction of “mnemonic experience,” Warburg seems to have wagered that the proliferation of images would permit us to see new, unconsciously created mnemonic worlds, ever multiplying and coalescing dialectically within images. As the existence of a related neologism, “meme,” suggests, on this point at least Warburg was right.

Date: June 8, 2020

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

On site.

A re-creation of panel 39 from Aby Warburg’s “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne,” 1925–1929/2020, gelatin silver prints on burlap. COURTESY THE WARBURG INSTITUTE, LONDON.

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Aby Warburg, 1929 in Naples, Italy. COURTESY THE WARBURG INSTITUTE.

1. E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, with a Memoir on the History of the Library by F. Saxl, London, Warburg Institute and University of London, 1970, p. ix. It is worth noting that throughout this book Gombrich makes frequent reference to Warburg’s “method” and “methodology,” and that therefore this assertion seems metaphorical rather than literal.
1. Ibid., p. 58.
1. Ibid., p. 72.
1. This is to say that the current reproduction is printed in color rather than grayscale, even though many of the original photographs are black and white.
1. Benjamin Buchloh, “Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Archive,” October, Vol. 88, Spring, 1999, p. 124.
1. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone and others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 510–12.
1. Ibid., p. 508. Benjamin’s original phrase is “anti-technological concept of art.”

MOYRA DAVEY CAPTURES THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMPULSE OF WRITING

Moyra Davey repeats herself. Or, as she puts it, she “cannibaliz[es].” She reframes beloved references across her repertoire of media. In various interviews, in one of her essay-films (Les Goddesses, 2011), and in her writing in her new collection—Index Cards, out today from New Directions—I find a sentence attributed to German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder: “The more honestly you put yourself into the story, the more that story will concern others as well.” In Index Cards, it appears twice: in the essay-script for Les Goddesses and as an epigraph for “One Year,” the brief contents of a notebook that she kept in 2012–13. In the second instance, the quote is slightly expanded and, one assumes, more accurate to Fassbinder’s original statement, as if it’s been verified, rather than casually remembered: “I’d say the more you put yourself into the stories, that is, the more ‘honestly’ you put yourself into the story, the more that story will concern others as well.” This is not the only statement attributed to another author that comes in for such treatment in Davey’s work. Throughout her writing and filmmaking, she iterates the words of artists and writers she admires. Their phrases and sentences repeat, much like the serial motifs and formats one sees in her work in photography: images of empty liquor bottles, images of books, images of newspaper kiosks, images of pennies, images of dust, images of people writing on the New York City subway, images folded and mailed, images created by filming photographs made earlier in Davey’s career—to name but a few of her categories and strategies.

For me, Davey, who is sometimes described as a “conceptual artist using photography,” or someone who “works across photography, video, and writing,” fosters a space in which discourse on the arts (photographic and literary histories, in particular), fiction, critical theory, and autobiography flow together, frequently taking the form of pictures rather than sentences or paragraphs. As we learn in Index Cards, which contains fifteen prose pieces dating from 2006 to 2019, as well as a number of small black-and-white reproductions of images by Davey, there is a certain “magic circle” drawn around the authors Davey prefers. “Magic circle” is a phrase that the critic Walter Benjamin applied to the act of creating a collection, and with it he implies at once the synthetic quality of collections and the collector’s selectivity, according these a mildly occult valence via his chosen metaphor.[1] The collector is a creator not just of piles of stuff, but of categories, genres. And with new genres come new aesthetic possibilities. Davey’s “magic circle” encompasses those writers who form the grounds from which her photographs, as she says, “take seed.” Her canon includes (but seems not to be limited to) James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Benjamin himself, Jane Bowles, Jean Genet, Hervé Guibert, Violette Leduc, Janet Malcolm, Susan Sontag, Robert Walser, Simone Weil, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Virginia Woolf. Along the edges of this circle, figures such as Freud, Goethe, Kafka, and Muriel Spark crop up. These sources may seem disparate, but as one reads Davey’s reflections on reading and writing—co-implicated activities—it becomes apparent that all are assembled for a reason. Each has a distinct relationship to detail and clarity in prose, as well as a unique affection for mixing firsthand, reportorial, or autobiographical writing with the fictive or speculative. And while some existed (Wollstonecraft, Goethe) before photography was, strictly speaking, a thing, there is nonetheless something of a photographic impulse in all this writing: a drive to describe and to render as image, a boundless hunger for vividness and particularity that would seem to threaten to exceed the limited capacity of words.

In one of the most beautiful texts in Index Cards, “Les Goddesses,” (The Goddesses), which also serves, as I note above, as a script for Davey’s film of the same name, Davey reflects on the heroic, peripatetic existence of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), feminist, historian, novelist, and philosopher. Davey derives the piece’s title from the superlative nickname given to Wollstonecraft’s two daughters, Fanny Imlay and Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), as well as Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Upon meeting these three accomplished and desirable women, American politician (and Alexander Hamilton antagonist) Aaron Burr bestowed the sobriquet. Davey writes, “The real story concerning the lives of these extraordinary women is filled with many paradoxes, and without a doubt it is more fantastic than any fiction.” “Les Goddesses” is additionally an account of Davey’s fascination with travelogues—with Goethe’s report of his voyage to Italy, Louis Malle’s documentary Phantom India (1969), Wollstonecraft’s descriptions of her time in Scandinavia, Mary Shelley’s collaboration with Percy Bysshe Shelley on History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni—and it is also a study of family dynamics, of how, in particular, sisters imitate and reflect one another. It is, thus, an essay about how images circulate within families, how family members create images of themselves, identify with one another or elect not to. To this series of themes Davey adds one further: the difficult-to-narrate history of her own relationship with alcohol, what she terms “the Wet.” It is a testament to the capaciousness of Davey’s thought that she is able to weave personal memory and literary and political history together in a series of extended and interconnected gazes—or, better, breaths. Near the end of “Les Goddesses,” Davey quotes Benjamin: “There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.” It seems to me that much of Davey’s writing goes in search of such a theory, an innovative genre that discovers its remarkable combinatory capacity through engagement with minor, fugitive qualities, as well as an openness to discovering intimate facts in sometimes impersonal and distant places.

In the film versions of her essays, Davey reads from a stack of pages or repeats words from a recording she listens to on an iPhone, one earbud in, the other hanging from its cord. This documented repetition, the recirculation of language already written and, then, in many cases existing as quotations from other sources within that very writing, heightens our sense that, wherever we are in relation to Davey’s language, we are already well within the province of something that has come before, with text standing as a preexisting item or object that is here merely recycled, reshown, lived through once more. With Davey, we are always in medias res. There are no beginnings in her accounts; narrative origins are refused, because they aren’t really good for anything. Worse than this, they are often chimeras. And I think this brilliant capacity on Davey’s part to transport her reader or viewer or listener into the very midst, the heart, of a given text, is what most distinguishes her practice. Davey says of her engagement with scripts and words, “One of the ways I’d kept photography alive for myself was through writing.” We might expand this statement to see writing as a more general practice for artistic and personal survival, in which repetition, far from dulling experience, richly complicates and supports life.

Date: May 27, 2020

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

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On site.

Index Cards.

1. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, New York, Schocken Books, 1969, p. 60.

(RALPH LAUREN, THE J.CREW PEOPLE, AND OTHER) BLUFFS

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I pertained to a household that received several general-interest glossy magazines, along with the J.Crew catalog. While there were many items to fascinate a young person (who was only partially literate at this time) between the covers of the magazines, a certain set of advertisements held my attention in a way that little else did: images that celebrated the brand Ralph Lauren were not merely narrative but mysterious, somehow subterranean in their intent; they portrayed (usually, although not exclusively) white Americans in opulent settings, richly dressed. The models, whose symmetrical faces shone with terrifying perfect health, were the focus of every ad. They evinced the specific yet distant psychology of characters in a novel one means to read but has not yet read, heroines of unwatched films. I studied these portraits of anonymous pert beauties (occasionally of a certain age) and glowering hunks in cashmeres, silks, furs, cottons, cotton flannels, and wools. I sniffed the pages, nearly drank them. There was a lesson here about the past, and about how people understood one another now, in the present. The men and women had priceless vintage cars, touched one another’s arms, were accompanied by schnauzers, skied with a child, sat on sand or lawns. These images formed a story about family, at once whispered and loudly proclaimed, for those who grasped its codes. It was a story about nation and inheritance, too. I strove to know whatever the person who had created the images knew. I turned to the pages of J.Crew’s seasonal offerings as if I might discover the further elaboration of a plot. Here, however, the models were less obsessed by an ancient familial saga; they merely disported themselves at a rented beach house. I assumed that they were probably the liberal cousins of the Lauren figures, yuppies or something, individuals I might today peg as better-adjusted prototypes for HBO’s Cousin Greg, of the network’s latest sociological study, Succession. They lived less well and their garments were thinner, yet these J.Crew people seemed the more likely to survive.

I did not understand, then, that Ralph Lauren was (additionally) a person, since the two terms merely connoted “boy’s first name plus girl’s first name” as far as I was concerned, and did not quite add up to a human. Lauren was an assimilated version of the founder and designer’s family name, which had at one time been Lifshitz, Belarusian and Ashkenazi; of course, I did not know this. Nor did I know that Lauren hailed from a modest household in the Bronx, the same borough where my own father—who also had an assimilated last name, Iranian and Assyrian—had been born just a year before Ralph Lifshitz.

Although I believed myself to be encountering a drama about important adults, in looking at Ralph Lauren’s ads I was also absorbing a sort of structuralist approach to American social hierarchy, one pioneered by the golden age of Hollywood cinema, if not the mythical Jay Gatsby himself, that was now being leveraged by Ralph Lauren into an empire of something that would soon be termed lifestyle. It was a generalized picture language about taste, affluence, and comfort, even as it was also a series—a “line”—of real things one could buy.[1] It is perhaps no accident it was in 1977, the year when Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sported head-to-toe Ralph Lauren in the comedic film Annie Hall, that the art critic Douglas Crimp composed his now-famous essay for a late-September show at Artists Space, Pictures.

Crimp discusses the regime of pictures, “signifying structure[s] of their own accord,” how the removal of syntagmatic context permitted the exhibiting artists to “isolate, distill, alter, and augment” certain appropriated images, such that “representation [is] freed from the tyranny of the represented.”[2] In these pictures, the viewer is alleged to see the very mechanism of representation, which Crimp associates, above all else, with memory. Or, as Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer winsomely demands of Diane Keaton’s Hall when she insists on telling him the family story behind her mannish tie, “What’d you do, grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting?” Although the audience understands Singer and Hall as engaged in a struggle to understand their respective identities and origins and to love each other across various divides (above all, gender) they are also (and I am unsure about Allen’s intentions here) acting as Ralph Lauren models. Whatever the other messages of the film, the garments the two wear in every scene present a sort of unified front of floating signifiers by means of which the audience may aspire to a finance-driven America to come, one in which anyone can experience the good life—which is now merely superficially coded as white and Protestant—provided he or she has the means and perspicuity to buy it.[3] It isn’t cheap, this drag, but soon it will be everywhere. And when it is everywhere (i.e., now), it will be cheap, too.[4]

The uncanny thing about picture languages is their simultaneous vulnerability (to abrupt recoding) and impenetrability (to historical interpretation). Crimp associated the pared-down aesthetic of the so-called Pictures Generation with the way in which paradigmatic linguistic concepts combine image and word into a sort of mnemonic bundle; it is, to his mind, a crucial, critical gesture for visual art of the late 1970s to point up this underlying mechanism within representation and, therefore, sensemaking. Reporters and fashion critics of the period, meanwhile, were also concerned with memory, although for different reasons. Discussing Ralph Lauren’s meteoric ascent, the press would frequently add a “né Lifshitz” tag of some sort to the first mention of his name. In this way they at once indicated his, to them, unforgettable origins, even as they pointed out the miraculous, world-historical artifice Lauren was so busy confecting.[5] I, on the third hand, since not yet reading with any sort of ease in the late 1980s, only encountered an opaque string of pictures, forms. In a sense, I had to take these ads as they were. I would never, for example, have been able to draw particular distinctions between a patrician domestic scene as captured, for example, by Tina Barney and the latest Lauren spread—except perhaps to say that people in Lauren’s world looked cleaner and more certain. And I could easily have been guilty, had anyone bothered to demand some art criticism from my prepubescent self, of the naive offense Peter Galassi indicates in a short essay on Barney’s photography: “One dispiriting measure of the writing about Barney’s work is that the figure most often mentioned (other than Barney herself) is not another artist but the clothing purveyor Ralph Lauren”.[6] Indeed, here I’m partly repeating, although for good reason, this very error.

Thus, while the images Buck Ellison creates follow in a tradition of large-scale color portraiture developed by the likes of Barney, along with photographers such as Catherine Opie and Thomas Struth, they also partake, in no small measure, of the critical innovations of second- and third-wave conceptualisms, which tend to identify and play explicitly upon discursive structures located in media and behavior, as in Crimp’s description of the work in Pictures, indicating larger systems and economies, some of which are historical in nature. I see Ellison’s work as at once concerned with the traditional purviews of portraiture—likeness, sentiment, and, yes, beauty—even as it is committed to ends we are more likely to associate with criticism: analyzing the ways in which conventions of image making and image reception structure the world, as well as revealing not just particular lifestyles, but inequalities and assumptions about normality and the status quo.

But how exactly does one deploy likeness, sentiment, and, yes, beauty to critical ends? Ellison’s portraits are staged, and extraordinarily so: he does not merely arrange his figures but casts models to play parts in, for example, his Christmas Card series, depictions of a family that substitutes, visually at least, for Ellison’s own. Ellison tells me that he does not instruct the models as to how they should arrange their faces or bodies, but rather takes a large quantity of digital photographs, which he edits together afterwards to achieve an ex post facto collaboration among his stand-ins that constitutes a “yearly” photo. When I look at these images, which are certainly “pictures,” in Crimp’s sense, I find myself struggling to determine who is who within the artificial family. Ellison’s casting at once heightens the significance of roles within the group—such that one says, “OK, he is the father; she’s the mom,” and so on—and removes context to such an extent that there is very little left to see within the picture, save one’s own attempt to parse it. And, as I remark to Ellison in conversation, it’s also true that these people are not actually related to one another. In this sense, the image shows a “family” to which the prohibition against incest does not pertain. While they’ve clearly been dressed (Ellison tells me he works with the stylist Charlotte Collet, a fact I love) to typify a mid- to late-aughts upper- or upper-middle-class Californian aesthetic, there’s also something unavoidably general about the clothes, even slightly unattractive. One person has on a garment I can only describe as semiformal shorts. These are puffy, paired with a childish genre of Adidas sneakers, no socks; if the wearer were not strikingly beautiful, she would look ridiculous. However, instead of looking ridiculous she looks “casual.” In fact, she looks like the paradigmatic expression of that category, a sort of Kantian daughter-in-law or older sister, just the sort of person one needs: to make a simple salad for the holiday repast, clean up wrapping paper without being asked, or linger artfully in the kitchen, nursing a glass of prosecco. Meanwhile, the individual I take to be the patriarch sports a hideous patterned shirt indicating an interest in safaris. One is uncertain as to whether he picked this item up on his latest NGO-related excursion or simply got it at the mall, hoping, misguidedly, to broadcast whimsical masculinity. In either case, the colonialism quietly implied is enough to recast the entire scene in a glance: Indeed, what is a family without the prohibition against incest, we have to ask ourselves; a team, cult, or corporation? What can their intentions toward one another be, and what sort of system of beliefs regarding history does a family of this sort entail? How is it that they “stay” (I qualify the verb because we know they left the set long ago) together?

In a certain way, it is terrifying to me that Ellison can succeed in posing all these questions just by replacing individuals related to him with professional proxies—terrifying, much like the terrifying, unreal health of those Ralph Lauren models. Although perhaps I should not write just. I have been meaning to specify that these photographs were not taken in 1988 or 1994, years we might associate with Barney and Opie’s portraits. Ellison is working within a different image economy, with different technological affordances. However, it is not merely the overwhelming proliferation of photography in our time through digital media that sets Ellison’s work apart from other practitioners I mention here; it is also the changing relationship of public and private spheres in the present that renders Ellison’s techniques pertinent and necessary. As a contemporary philosopher writes, “An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed with them. For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny.”[7]

We live in a time when videos posted to YouTube, among other platforms, allow us to explore others’ domestic spaces and practices ad nauseam, to question the ways in which they orient their beds, scrub their vegetables, steam their salmon filets. Obviously, this—along with the elephant in the room, social media—is not the only style of permeation of the private sphere endemic to the present: each of us is all but constantly being made public via information processed by software and shared back to the creators of this software. One is not, of course, particularly public in the old-fashioned sense, since the predictive tools our behavior informs are created by corporations and sold to other corporations and governments (entities with proprietary, secretive interiors). Yet there is a sense in which this processing of data is much of what constitutes the so-called public sphere. This is what publicness is: a transformation of what was formerly the private into a species of inscription. My movements between and among various websites, my use of an email platform provided by the same corporation that makes my browser, my manipulations of the applications on my phone, are tracked, taken in. They are anonymized and accrue to massive data caches. In 2012 the law scholar Paul Ohm presciently wrote, “We are embarking on the age of the impossible-to-understand reason, when marketers will know which style of shoe to advertise to us online based on the type of fruit we most often eat for breakfast, or when the police know which group in a public park is most likely to do mischief based on the way they do their hair or how far from one another they walk.” Ohm’s paper was titled (more terror here), “The Fourth Amendment in a World Without Privacy.”[8]

But in spite of these seismic shifts in how we understand the relationships between and among individuality, behavior, and taste—shifts Ellison mimics by documenting the form of the individual rather than their instantiation as indexical, documentary, candid, or true visually presenting selves[9]—privacy remains. Privacy is a luxury; it can be expensive to get and maintain, but we know it’s out there. One of the ways we know this is on account of the photographic images that we know we do not have. Among these, as Ellison argues via a series of stunning staged portraits narrating the story of the DeVos-Prince family, are personal images related to the wealthy and powerful. There are “gaps in our society where there is no imagery,” as Ellison told me, noting that when he searched online for childhood and family images of the 45th president’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, the daughter and daughter-in-law of of Republican megadonors and multibillionaires, he found that this material was mostly private, locating only a pair of yearbook photos.[10] After this discovery, and after seeing that an article about the family in the magazine Vanity Fair made use of muddy commissioned paintings rather than photographs for the purpose of illustration, Ellison determined to illuminate this American dynasty. He cast young actors to portray Betsy DeVos (née Prince) as a teen, along with her younger brother, Erik, who would later found the embattled Blackwater USA security corporation; in The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, 1975 (2019) they lounge with siblings in an imagined 1970s-era living room, in what would have been their hometown: Holland, Michigan (local truism: “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.”). Ellison’s staging, while essentially historically accurate with its colonial-revival decor and wool knee socks, is not slavishly so; the relative modesty of the room, particularly given the actual wealth in question, speaks to the family’s strict Calvinism as well as this interior’s distinctness from the sort of fantastical display Ralph Lauren might envision. Here, as in other works in the series, color and poses recall the somber and expensive portraiture of the Northern Renaissance, with its reds and greens, even as the viewer is teased into inventing psychology for those depicted, in spite (or because) of the unavoidable fact that everyone is an actor. Ellison weaves in small, precise clues regarding the family’s past and future. Erik, as befits a warrior-to-be, clutches a toy soldier. Ellison informs me that Erik and his father would cast lead soldiers using a saucepan and molds, painting them by hand. According to Prince’s own autobiographical writing, this craft activity is his first memory. Of course, lead is poisonous, and heavy lead exposure is linked to aggression and mania, among other developmental difficulties. In Dick and Betsy, The Ritz Carlton, Dallas, Texas, 1984 (2019), meanwhile, a pregnant DeVos in an approximation of loudly patterned 1980s workwear, barks into a hotel telephone, as her (uxorious?) loafer-sporting partner attempts to distract himself. DeVos is already a political insider here, even as she is busy having it all, procreating to continue the dynasty. In Erik with Kitty, Blackwater Training Center, Moyock, North Carolina, 1998 (2019), a mature Erik sprawls in a fenced-in field with a kitten and bulletproof vest; he’s clearly stumbled into an amusing allegorical representation of the following sentences from his Wikipedia page:

Prince moved to Virginia Beach and personally financed the formation of Blackwater Worldwide in 1997. He bought 6,000 acres (24 km2) of the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and set up a school for special operations. The name “Blackwater” comes from the peat-colored bogs in which the school is located.[11]

Some things, as Americans have begun saying with increasing intensity and irony since the presidency of George W. Bush, you just can’t make up.

Like the satirical social and historical paintings of such millennial masters as John Currin and Karen Kilimnik, these photographs do not so much represent events as show us how much we do not know, how dependent we are on received ideas, assumptions, and clichés, when it comes to visualizing the lives of the elite.[12] Yet Ellison’s images also, and conversely, serve a function that reminds me of the large-scale schematic drawings of the artist Mark Lombardi, depicting the movement of late twentieth-century capital between and among corporations, families, and heads of state: they show history, not as a collection of lived experiences and details, or even heroic events, but rather as a kind of formal data or code, a quantifiable pattern we would do well to familiarize ourselves with and confront.

As you gaze at the Christmas Card series and DeVos allegories, along with the other pictures gathered in this volume—pictures that explain what it looks like when two models consider a four-hundred- dollar “cheeseboard” at the Heath Ceramics store north of San Francisco, for example, or demonstrate the aggressive flexibility of the axles on the Range Rover, a six-figure car—follow the ironies that become visible. These are strategic images. Ellison’s photographs demonstrate the expensive and increasingly fugitive privacy that attends contemporary democratic society. And they show that the display of luxury, far from being a dead giveaway of the location and machinations of power, is a bluff.

buck_layout-v14.2-jul23-ives.pdf

Date: May 1, 2020

Publisher: Loose Joints

Format: Print (book)

NB: This essay appears in print in Living Trust, by Buck Ellison. It was unfortunately published with a number of typos and formatting errors. Please find a more correct version of the essay here. A PDF of the text is available for download via the floppy disk icon at lower right.

Essay in print.

Buck Ellison, The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, 1975 (2019)

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1. Ralph Lauren was the first American clothing designer to create a completeist line for the home (i.e., Ralph Lauren Home). This product series, along with the Ralph Lauren flagship store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—opened in 1986 in a formerly private domestic setting, the Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo mansion—made it theoretically possible to live in a house (and world) outfitted in the Lauren vision.
1. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” reprinted in X-TRA 8 no. 1 (fall 2005): 17–30. The artists in the show were Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith.
1. Annie Hall, with its Marshall McLuhan cameo and brief animated interlude, presents itself as very knowing where media is concerned. Yet its claustrophobic view of social life—as Joan Didion wrote in 1979 in the New York Review of Books, its obsession with “a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker”—and history give it a promotional air that is difficult to diagnose, at least visually speaking, until one notices the extensive
  Lauren product placement. Didion has a point, yet I think she is rather shortsighted, because she ignores or feels unable to discuss the fi lm’s subtext (i.e., its status as a guide to assimilation). The awkward name-dropping and conspicuous consumption do not occur in a historical vacuum; rather, these are enacted by individuals who are “learning”—to comedic effect, in Allen’s coding of these shifts—how to behave and speak as privileged members of society would/must behave and speak. Singer’s parents live in a cramped apartment under a roller-coaster at Coney Island, but Singer himself is a successful comic who resides in what appears to be a bright three-bedroom in Manhattan and is mostly concerned with pleasure.
1. Here I indicate the massive proliferation of sportswear brands and so-called fast fashion in the past three decades. The polo shirt, at one time presumably a technical garment, is now so widely reproduced as to have no particular use-based identity. I mention this not to mourn something or other, but rather to underline how the visual realm of fashion has become more “democratic” in the US, even as actual conditions have become less so (i.e., beyond other political and governmental problems, income inequality has increased and personal debt has become a necessity for many, with many of these changes and effects dating from President Carter’s massive deregulation of the corporate sphere in 1976 and therefore following a similar timeline as fashion in more than one sense).
1. The tag né(e) has historically served as an anti-Semitic dog whistle. See T. S. Eliot’s lines in “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” for example: “The silent vertebrate in brown / Contracts and concentrates, withdraws; / Rachel née Rabinovitch / Tears at the grapes with murderous paws.” With thanks to writer and artist Abraham Adams for recollecting this passage.
1. Peter Galassi, “Afterword,” in Tina Barney by Tina Barney (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 221.
1. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 52.
1. Quoted in Andrew D. Selbst and Solon Barocas, “The Intuitive Appeal of Explainable Machines,” Fordham Law Review 87, no. 3 (2018): 1087. In a slightly more current and synthetic account of for-profit behaviorism in the digital realm, scholar Shoshana Zuboff writes, “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading. In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed, as decision rights over privacy are claimed for surveillance capital. Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism. Google discovered this necessary element of the new logic of accumulation: it must assert the rights to take the information upon which its success depends,” emphasis mine. See Zuboff’s magisterial The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAff airs, 2019), 90.
1. To be clear, this is not merely the case because of the use of models as subjects, but also because Ellison composes his images digitally, combining and manipulating numerous photographs to arrive at a final scene.
1. My own searches confirm that this is largely the case. I was interested to see that upon DeVos’s nomination, the Detroit Free Press published a slideshow of its print archive related to DeVos, some of which showed candid shots of her including a picture of her walking with one of her children. DeVos, of course, has a long and infamous history in Michigan politics. The quote from Ellison comes from a phone call with the author, December 19, 2019.
1. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Prince.
1. It is worth noting that Ellison’s photograph Pasta Night, of 2016, is a versioning of Currin’s 1999 painting Homemade Pasta, which, I would also like to note, sold at Christie’s in 2004 for nearly $900,000, this exorbitant price being part of what Ellison is depicting in his own semi-painterly work.

On Ecstatic Home Décor

HOW ARTISTS HAVE TRANSFORMED THEIR HOMES INTO OTHER WORLDS
For John Boskovich, Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Florine Stettheimer and Niki de Saint Phalle, obsessive decor served as ‘preparation for a voyage to another plane’

In a letter penned in 1782, the Marquis de Sade claimed that he knew ‘enough about architecture […] to decide if an idea is beautiful or not’. Indeed, De Sade constructed at least two complex literary edifices. The torture-sex rituals of 120 Days of Sodom (1785) are convened by a clique of libertines in the Château de Silling – an inescapable fortress with rooms dedicated to specific activities, such as desecration of the cross or narration of tales of past debauchery (to be violently re-enacted upon victims). The monastery of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois, imagined for De Sade’s 1791 novel Justine – which, unlike 120 Days of Sodom, was published during the author’s lifetime – is less infamous than the Château but somewhat more cruel. The only means of entry or exit is through a winding underground passage, and the complex is further secured by a series of thorn-encrusted hedges, an additional wall and a moat. Overgrown with vegetation, the structure is indistinct, if not invisible, from the exterior. Everyone inside can hear you scream; those outside perceive a thicket or a bosky hill. There’s a nod to the notion of the folly – that thrill of Enlightenment gardens – but Sainte-Marie-des-Bois is not a private building; it is a communal retreat for libertine monks, who maintain stable-like dorms for the objects of their interests, whom they segregate by gender. Precise order reigns throughout this corporate seraglio. Like the Château, Sainte-Marie-des-Bois evinces a fascination on De Sade’s part with, as architectural historian Anthony Vidler has written, the impossible ‘coincidence between imprisonment and liberty’.[1] Certainly, it unites De Sade with the utopian social philosopher Charles Fourier, who similarly proposed, as Roland Barthes notes in Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1976), a communitarian lifestyle in which all functions necessary for life, including coitus, are as communal as they are minutely regulated.

Although De Sade’s interiors precede the technological transformations of the industrial revolution, which transferred the means of manufacture from the home to industrial spaces during the 19th century, they do offer a vision of production that pre-empts the Victorian model. Like the meticulous, fanciful architectural drawings of his contemporary Jean-Jacques Lequeu, which concern themselves with elaborate monuments to classical spirits and genital-shaped grottos sown with smelly flowering plants, De Sade represents spaces so total, so awesome and so expansive that, once we are inside them, there really is no other place to go. In De Sade’s world, there is nothing but fantasy and ceremony, no way to wake up from the dream and absolutely no privacy – not even for the apparently empowered libertine. As for De Sade and Fourier, so for Lequeu: his structures would be impossible to realize in real life but, in the artist’s projections, currently on view in the exhibition ‘Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect’ at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, bodies are effortlessly conveyed through space, combined, created and destroyed, in a sensuous narrative that – seemingly for no reason beyond personal preference – partakes synthetically of logics borrowed from the church, the abattoir, the bedroom, the classroom, the theatre, the kitchen and the prison, both past and future.

A different kind of sensuousness took hold in the Victorian era that followed. According to design historian Peter Thornton, the mid-1800s marked:

the ‘age of the crapaud’ – of the ‘toad’, the disrespectful but apt nickname given by the French to the standard, mid-19th-century, heavily stuffed, deeply buttoned and elaborately trimmed easy chair. This object, together with its sisters the sofas, confidantes, ottomans, pouffes and so forth, were the subject of derision […] but such seat-furniture embodied the true spirit of the period and was to be seen everywhere, modified ad infinitum.[2]

This was a period of ‘seat-furniture’, structures designed for sinking, fainting, zoning out, lingering, posing, pining and attending the inevitable: death. Dense massing of decorative objects and upholstery – fashionable in Europe and the US between the 1860s and the 1890s – added clutter and clashing to rooms duly padded, as if to soften the blow. A craze for drapes and fringing seems to have celebrated the increasingly extreme feminization of the private sphere with symbolic labia: indications of mysterious concealment and delicate sensations to be found only within the vessel of the home.

It was an era of the blossoming of a certain social format: the so-called separate spheres, which had emerged at the beginning of the 19th century, after the revolutions and early stirrings of industrialization. In this organization of society, domestic space pertains to the woman of the house, while the man enters into public in order to work and make known his name. The domestic arena is the site of childrearing, decor, material culture, religion and sentiment, while the public realm is a locus of action, reason, money, politics and history. Alexis de Tocqueville, who travelled to the US from France to observe the relations between men and women there, writes in a chapter on ‘How the Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes’ in Democracy in America (1835), that ‘although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position’. If our contemporary conception of privacy was popularized, if not exactly invented, during the 19th century, then it fell to women to groom and nourish this valuable civic substance. They hung it with drapes, planted it with ferns and, in the process, became enclosed and obscured along with it.

The modern object or room, by contrast, seems to partake, at its most strenuous, of an ideology of limitation: form follows function and function itself is exhaustively knowable. Thus, there can be no need for the chicory of rococo, with its folds and undulations, nor the drips, points and bead-like embellishments of the gothic, nor Victoriana’s endless tufts and patterning. The industrial aesthetic moves indoors. The ‘new woman’ has dispensed with frills, wears trousers, cuts her hair short, practises photography, smokes. The visibility promoted by modernism is remarkable: surfaces are free of encumbrance and, where not strictly administrative, work is intellectual and creative (since, in theory, much physical labour is done by machines), meaning it can take place, once again, within the home.

This said, the ideology of the separate spheres has proved stubborn, if not invincible; even as we have drifted far beyond a historical moment that can reasonably be termed modern, it remains with us. Perhaps this has something to do with the style of privacy that began to emerge in the 20th century along with the advent of mass media. As architectural historian Beatriz Colomina puts it in her book Privacy and Publicity (1994): ‘Privacy is now what exceeds the eyes.’ In Colomina’s reading of modernist design, interior space is often exposed to the exterior in what amounts not to a revelation of the private but, rather, a re-invention of public space on what were apparently private grounds. ‘Modernity’, she notes, ‘coincides with the publicity of the private.’ We need only think of the floor-to-ceiling windows, so prevalent in contemporary architecture, which provide an unobstructed view of a pristinely curated (and pointedly crapaud-free) interior.

Such was the historical trajectory of interior design. Yet, as a spate of current and recent exhibitions attests, there have always been exceptions. A number of 20th-century artists resisted the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres even as they did not fit within the massively influential paradigms proposed by the utopian era of republican revolutions or high modernism’s rejection of the purely decorative. These artists perform a sort of ambiguous installation work, designing interiors that are neither solely for aesthetic contemplation nor for autonomous living but that engage moods of monumentality, esoteric ritual and even entombment, just as they give place to ecstatic forms of daily life that cannot be reduced to work or leisure.

Two artists who lived on opposite coasts of the US during two different halves of the 20th century, Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) and John Boskovich (1956–2006), developed a deeply weird decorative grammar that not only escapes the logics of work and privacy entailed by the ideology of the separate spheres, but also manages to differentiate itself from libertinage as well as modernism. Stettheimer, who wrote poetry and painted elaborate encrusted scenes, usually of flowers and wispy figures and fauns, was also an extraordinary decorator, favouring copious quantities of lace and doilies alongside a new translucent material: cellophane. As a mature artist, Stettheimer painted in her apartment, layering the space with various crystalline textiles in the midst of which she displayed her works, along with her collection of George Washington figurines and images. Similarly, Boskovich altered a rented Los Angeles house, presumably at significant expense, to house artworks that were also furnishings. His custom Prada-themed fridge, his use of koan-like excerpts of poems on objects and walls, along with his inclusion of religious iconography as well as medical and industrial items, gave the space, which he termed his ‘Psycho Salon’, the quality of a large mausoleum or period room for a time in history that had not yet fully come to pass. The relative obscurity of his practice at the time of his death further contributes to a masonic air of hidden ritual about the place, even as its growing fame in art-world circles contributes to its ongoing public-ness.

In his catalogue essay ‘Playing with the Truth’ (1988), Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe sees a ‘narrative of both accessibility and arcane reference’ in Boskovich’s pristine framed juxtapositions of image and text, in which he culls language from such poets as e.e. cummings, John Keats and Octavio Paz and sets it alongside found and altered photographic imagery. Boskovich, according to Gilbert-Rolfe, is at once emphatic about ‘transparency and the idea of its opposite, or presentation and therefore the possibility of what is not present’. In his work, one category does not succeed in transforming or overwhelming the other; rather, they open up to each other in a relation not of exclusion but of addition.

If there is too much in Boskovich and Stettheimer’s rooms, it is not because there are too many things. Rather, all the items have been so obsessively placed, fixed, altered, caressed and framed that their esoteric natures, far from being domesticated, have been exactingly preserved intact and are, therefore, liberated to act upon the eyes and emotions of the resident or guest. Stettheimer was, like Boskovich, a connoisseur of the frame and had a number of lace-like frames constructed for her paintings that also matched her frothy custom furniture designs. Walking into her apartment must have been like entering an amusement park’s rendition of an ice palace, with the difference being that Stettheimer’s glittering false ice (lace, cellophane, painted wood) was not intended for public consumption and reflected her highly rarefied personal taste. Her decor pointed toward a monumental elsewhere that, in spite of her adoration for George Washington, was not exactly or uniquely nationalistic, institutional or religious in nature – even if it was devotional. Rather she, like Boskovich, seemed to be preparing for a voyage to another plane, an alternate universe or an eternal party in her honour.

Both Stettheimer and Boskovich appeared to aspire to a sort of celebratory translation of surface, an extension of reflection that shone or sparkled or glowed dimly without exactly being mirror-like, which served to externalize a complex series of moods and affinities that were not merely or purely personal in nature. Like the winding and uneven mosaic encrustations of the artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden (1998), the surfaces they created were often engaged in plays of light and shade, as much as with material substance itself: Boskovich’s remarkable combinations of citric hues with powdery reds and ingenious recessed lighting being a particularly memorable manifestation of this shared tendency. In contemplating these maximalist practices of decor – the grammars of darkness and light, the hyper-precise framing, the obsessive strategizing of every surface – I am struck by their reliance on qualia, geometric form and what we might term, punning on architectural historian Lisa Heschong’s beautifully titled book Thermal Delight in Architecture (1979), ‘photic delight’. The resonances with the miniaturized landscapes and figures of amusement parks (which often allegorize fantastical worlds), as well as the sparkling gloom we might associate with chapels and shrines, suggest that we would do well to view these homes less as enclosures than as portals. These rooms indicate possibility: here and now and soon; also, elsewhere.

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Date: March 19, 2020

Publisher: frieze

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the article.
This article appears in the print edition of frieze, April 2020, issue 210, with the title "The Ecstatic Home."

Cover image.

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Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Temple of Divination, from Civil Architecture, undated, pen, black ink, grey wash and watercolour on paper. Courtesy: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

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Florine Stettheimer’s studio at Beaux-Arts Building, New York, 1944. Courtesy: © Estate of Florine Stettheimer and Peter A. Juley and Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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Psycho Salon, Boskostudio, Los Angeles, 1997. Courtesy: Estate of John Boskovich and O-Town House, Los Angeles

On Hanne Darboven & Madeline Gins

1. Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment, 1987, Princeton Architectural Press, p. 105.
1. Peter Thornton, Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920, 1984, Crescent Books, New York and Avenel, p. 216.

NO MORE WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
For both Hanne Darboven and Madeline Gins, a kind of personal mathematics became a method of reading and writing their art

The math occurs because of the page—because the page is a grid, a map of coordinates. The message is also a number, a quantity of character spaces. There is no message without a container, no container without limits, no limits without quantification. It’s a realization that occurs over and over in the intertwined histories of visual art and poetry in modernity: writing not as expression but as confrontation with a limited schema or net, that site (cf. Mallarmé) of the writer’s shipwreck.

But I am not really interested in generalizations about media. Of greater interest to me are individuals, specifically their obsessions and solutions. How is it, for example, that two female artists, both born in 1941, one in Northern Germany, one on the east coast of the United States, both living in Manhattan in the late 1960s and participating in adjacent if not identical visual art communities, came to use sums and equations to manipulate the space of the page? Why did each determine that a style of quantification was a necessary component of her poetics? What can we learn from these sometimes inscrutable, personal mathematics, this mathematical prose?

Hanne Darboven, the German artist, was born in Rönneburg, outside of Hamburg, second daughter of three, to Cäsar Darboven, heir to and owner of the J.W. Darboven coffee roaster and general store (not to be confused with the J.J. Darboven coffee company, a better-known firm that has since expanded across Northern Europe). Hanne’s mother, Kirsten, was Danish. Her father was a successful contractor for the German military, supplying coffee to the army of the Third Reich. Later, there was an adolescence involving boarding schools and social dysfunction. Although Darboven had originally trained as a concert pianist, she entered art school, the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, as a young adult. She was thin, yellow blond, conventionally pretty, yet with a kind of sacred circle around her: unteachable. A suggestion from a teacher, Almir Mavignier, was enough to send her packing her bags for New York. In Manhattan, after two years of relative isolation, Darboven met Sol LeWitt in 1968, along with, among others, the artists Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. Darboven’s father’s illness and eventual death brought her back to her childhood home; here she set up a sort of studio, along with a daily writing routine. This was how she made her way to the math, in which 1 + 1 = 1, 2, even as 3 = three three three: a methodology that privileged the act of counting. This was to be a key aspect of Darboven’s all-comprehending practice of time registration and would be expressed through the pages of checksum calculations the artist incorporated into her wall- and room-size installations of writing.

But I need to double back for a moment: in the summer of 1943, when Darboven was two, the Allies bombed Hamburg, at that time a centre of industrial production. The operation, code-named “Gomorrah,” began on July 24, 1943, a time of unusually arid weather, and lasted for eight days, creating at one point a 460-metre-high tornado of flames, with winds of up to 240 kilometres per hour and temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius. Asphalt burst into flame and fuel spilled into the river, causing the surface of the water to ignite. The attack is thought to have killed some 42,600 people, wounding another 37,000 and decimating the city. It was made possible by a radar-jamming technique known as “chaff” (code-named “Window”): clouds of tinfoil strips dropped into the air. The foil interrupted radar imaging, creating false echoes, a fuzzy array; it is an information technology, even in its obvious nature. The results were stupendous. The nearly 800 American and British bombers were effectively invisible.

Although the Allies did not target Rönneburg, where the Darbovens lived, they did haphazardly detonate excess armaments in the suburban landscape. In early July, just before the bombing, the Darbovens’ neighbours’ farm was one such site. Shortly after this event, the Darboven women fled to Lower Saxony, thus avoiding Operation Gomorrah by a matter of days, although their home was still standing when they returned two years later.

I mention these events less in an attempt to inspire pity for this wealthy family headed by a man who did profitable business with the Nazi Party than to point out a series of historical events for which Hanne Darboven was effectively present without the capacity for conscious memory or comprehension. Whatever else she lived before she began to make her “writing”—which was, by the way, the term she used for all her art—echolocations and bombings, the repeated hollowing out of vast architectural spaces, consumed her early youth.

In 1971, Darboven wrote to LeWitt from Germany:

Sol, am completely absorbed in - it - / - it - i wrote about although there / is nothing to write about — / - it - thinking and looking - it - and / - it - and doing - it -, writing - it - / and Oh Sol, i feel like 1968 when / i went to your place with my pages / of “68” again i would like to walk / to your place [a holy place] with / pages of : - it - no title no more, / words words words, oh, if you could / come here, to my place, oh — this / this time, good night my master love… / Hanne

On returning home, Darboven had in some sense taken up her ailing father’s place, becoming a manager of accounts. With her distinctive writing, she investigated the unintelligible side of information flows. She transformed information back into lines, into material. No more words, instead - it -. No more years, instead - it -. - it - was sometimes a loop, resembling a letter but not a letter; sometimes it was a number, treated not as a quantity but as a graphic image, something like a name (3 = three three three) but not a name, either. - it - was when a number was not itself and yet most itself at the same time, turned inward toward its own condition. “Numbers are the most neutral way of talking about things; no names, no objects, just the counting of numbers and the use of dates,” she said in an interview in 1994. Darboven placed herself in the midst of whatever - it - was.

When I look at the drawings Darboven produced during her time in New York, I see her exploring the uses and pleasures of the grid in various ways, using graph-paper boxes as a series of slots to be filled in, organizing and reorganizing. On one page, a series of numbers appears, apparently sourced from a late-summer date, August 30, 1968. When she wrote to LeWitt concerning her “pages of ‘68’” did she mean this very series, Kleine Konstruktion (Small Construction) of 1968, with four sequences of repeating numerals, 30868, 86830, 68308, 83086, day/month/year, month/year/day, year/day/month, month/day/[inverted year]? What might it mean for her to be fondly recalling this earlier page of work in the year 1971, when she began producing more ambitious sums, as in 1933/8K = No. 1, a large-scale numerical permutation on 42 sheets of paper in which Darboven renders three as “3 3 3” and five as “5 5 5 5 5,” for example, elaborating a series that permits her to produce “K” sums through different combinations of added numerals? Although Darboven’s checksums are synthetic, they also defamiliarize numbers, treating them as non-repeating, unique identities to be discovered within one another, rather than as quantities or points in a cyclical calendric sequence. As historian Zdenek Felix points out, it is less that Darboven wants to manipulate the calendar in her calculations, than that the calendar functions as the ideal ready-made matrix, “a system within which unfolding and regression would follow their own laws.”

It is nearly a secondary result of her work with these numbers, the infinite supply in the calendar, that time is pressed together into the characteristic Darbovian event, a seemingly gratuitous value labelled “K.” “there / is nothing to write about,” Darboven joyfully informs LeWitt, who may have been her lover; she is ecstatic, having discovered how to “[do] - it -,” and possibly where to get “- it -,” how to immerse herself in a practice in which there is always more to write, more to manipulate, more loops and checksums, but no longer anything to discuss, “no more, / words, words, words.” As she would later say in an interview, “I wrote things down again by hand so that the mediated experience might impart something to me.”

In the year of the holy walk(s) to Sol LeWitt’s place, another artist and writer, Madeline Gins, an American, lived and worked in Manhattan. Gins, like Darboven, was in her late twenties in the late 1960s, but unlike Darboven she was born in New York and raised on Long Island. She studied philosophy and physics at Barnard College, painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and in the early 1960s she met, collaborated with and, in 1965, married Nagoya-born artist Shūsaku Arakawa, who, along with his mentor Marcel Duchamp, exhibited work in the Dwan Gallery’s 1967 show “Language to Be Looked at and/or Things to Be Read.” Perhaps it is the recent entry of language into visual art that moves Gins to do so much work on her typewriter. Perhaps she sees herself as typing up not just pages but images of a kind. Maybe she, like Darboven, understands the space of the page as not just an opportunity for establishing semantic meaning, but also a site for immersing oneself in an experience of mediation. When, in 1969, Gins publishes her experimental novel and artist’s book, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), it contains a story about mediation, perhaps of the kind Gins herself experienced during the course of the novel’s composition. The dust jacket offers the following summary:

In WORD RAIN, an unnamed narrator sits at a desk in a friend’s apartment reading a manuscript. Surrounding the undefined character is a birthday party taking place in the next room, a glass of pineapple-grapefruit juice that is supposed to be pure grapefruit juice, the loose leaves of the manuscript, and the variable weather conditions. The pages of the manuscript slide to the floor. The weather turns misty and cold. Dishes rattle in the kitchen nearby. A package is delivered. It feels like rain. As each of these distractions occur playing against themselves in almost musical variation, the reader either opposes or flows with them as she reads. Sitting at the desk, she sometimes skims pages day-dreaming or catches the rhythms and reads in word blocks while the text fills itself in…

The reader of WORD RAIN, at once a character in Gins’s novel and an individual independent of the prose, finds numerous textual strategies at play: citations and appropriations of material from other books, as well as a detailed accounting of the by turns elating and distressing phenomenology of reading. The narrator’s (fictional) reading has peculiar results—special effects, one might say. At times she seems to encounter a version of herself in the text, whom she attempts to instruct or salute as from a distance; these moments feel elegiac, suggesting that reading can be an act of reconciliation with, or loss of, the self. At other times, the effects felt by the protagonist-reader are directly physical, synesthetic, as in a passage in which, instead of functioning to deliver semantic sense, words ossify: “The word face was a stone. The word guess was a flint. The words a, the, in, by, up, it, were pebbles. The word laughter was marble.” At the conclusion of this passage, the protagonist-reader seems to become one with these textured, surfaced words: “The word read was mica and I was granite.” It’s a phrase in which the “I” mentioned is at once a term in the manuscript the protagonist reads and also a possible name for the reader, herself. In either case—in either reading—reading is alchemical and transporting.

WORD RAIN also makes use of an eccentric form of mathematical notation (what Gins calls “oiled geometry, liniment algebra and creamed mathematics”) to quantify the text, an imaginary math. Gins’s math is designed to account for the number of words and letters used in a page; it allows for an alternate method of representing a page of writing, that is, by means other than semantic paraphrase, and therefore seems related to Gins’s understanding of writing and reading as having quantifiable, material qualities. Gins summarizes algebraically, such that sentences can be compressed into variables and arranged into formulae (“A = 13W + M1,” where “A = the first sentence,” “W = word” and “M = meaning”) explaining relationships between meaning and energy expended in the reading process across a paragraph or page. In this math, a given passage occurs again, for a second time—and differently. Semantically represented events are lost, but the events of the words themselves and the event of semantic meaning are rendered more prominent by means of mathematical generalization.

“am completely absorbed in - it -,” Darboven wrote in 1971. Gins, meanwhile, describes an experience of “tak[ing] up inside” of letters and words, where the self is a sort of membrane reading renders permeable. The choice not to differentiate between personhood and the activities of writing (Darboven) or reading (Gins) perhaps seems more familiar to us today, given our movement toward an increasingly scriptural society. Yet, moving beyond “words, words, words” into spaces and states of extreme mediation does not come without loss—and what exactly goes missing here is difficult to quantify. If I attempt, instead, to qualify this loss, I might suggest, necessarily engaging in speculation, that it has to do with the historical moment in which both Darboven and Gins were coming to consciousness and early maturity as artists, not to mention the shared year of their respective births. Language, although distinct from information in some contexts, is often treated as, or transformed into, data. By the middle of the 20th century, data had ceased, if ever it had been, to be a raw or mere tool—having become instead a weapon, an instrument of politics, a commodity. The theatres of the Second World War, with their various demands, could only hasten this process, and the civil societies that succeeded the conflict inherited new technologies, beliefs, fashions, drugs and foods from the business of making war. I sometimes think that one major thrust of Conceptualism, as a broad artistic movement, is to aid people in confronting the cybernetic transformation of everyday life in the postwar period, in which a word is no longer word but data; in which movements are data; in which persons, places and things have all become information. Darboven and Gins, paradoxically, deployed their math as a sort of antidote, transforming information back into things.

Date: February 6, 2020

Publisher: Canadian Art

Format: Print

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of Canadian Art, "Antimatter," Winter 2020.

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Cover image.

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Madeline Gins, page from WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), 1969. Originally published by Grossman Publishers, New York © 1969 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins.

Installation view of Hanne Darboven’s “ERDKUNDE UND (SÜD-) KOREANISCHER KALENDER,” 2019. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin. Photo: Timo Ohler.

On Florine Stettheimer

THE REPATRIATION OF F$

NEITHER FRANZ KAFKA nor Louis-Ferdinand Céline had extensive experience in the United States, yet both wrote novels set wholly or in part in the land of opportunity. In 1932’s Journey to the End of the Night, Céline limns New York’s “gold district,” aka Manhattan, which the narrator-hero, Bardamu, fancifully maintains can be entered only on foot, “like a church.” “It’s a district filled with gold, a miracle, and through the doors you can actually hear the miracle, the sound of dollars being crumpled, for the Dollar is always too light, a genuine Holy Ghost, more precious than blood.”[1] This eerie concatenation of capitalism, architecture, and human ambition resembles the earlier surreal landscapes of Kafka’s Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), written 1911–14 and published posthumously in 1927. Yet, there is a haunted and perhaps more vicious mood circulating in Amerika’s bizarro USA: The Statue of Liberty, for example, holds a sword instead of a torch, and “unchained winds” blow around her. “One couldn’t look for pity here,” the protagonist, Karl Rossmann, reflects of this port city of “haste, precision, clarity of representation.”[2]

While hyperbolic and rife with allegory, these portrayals of pre-World War II New York are weirdly accurate. Or, rather, it is their use of hyperbole and allegory that makes them accurate. Modern New York is a place one can see even without seeing it with one’s own two eyes, given the long-range power of media. The city really is the dream of skyscrapers, big bucks, and mobility dangled before the exploitable immigrant, which also makes it something of a nightmare. And these novelizations, dreamed and fantasized and pasted together from others’ accounts, resemble, tonally and rhetorically, nothing in the visual arts of their time so much as the paintings of Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944), who, as a Jazz Age socialite and actual resident of the US, would seem to have little in common with either the clerklike Kafka or war veteran and later anti-Semite Céline. Yet both authors are uncharacteristically comic, even zany, when it comes to American tableaux. It is, for example, possible to compare Amerika’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma, a massive imaginary entertainment operation that ostensibly hires all comers, to Stettheimer’s canvases, which are likewise anomalous sites of performance, often depicting large casts of figures. In their detail, excess, and carefully deployed allegorical systems, Stettheimer’s paintings depict an era of conservative nationalism and roaring decadence, a contradictory cultural and political amalgam that looks ever more familiar.

STETTHEIMER BECAME an American late. Though she was born in Rochester, New York, she lived somewhat less than half her life within her country of origin. In an early instance of the mix of extreme privilege and social uncertainty that would define her life, Florine, along with her four siblings, was whisked off to Germany as a young child after her father abandoned the family. It is not known whether her mother, Rosetta Walter Stettheimer, was aiming to save face or cash, or both.[3] The result was a childhood like an extended vacation. Florine briefly returned to the US in the 1890s, to study at the Art Students League, the first school in New York to permit female students to make drawings from nude models. She was otherwise in Vienna and Paris and other places European, often in the company of her chic sisters, Ettie and Carrie. There were performances of the Ballets Russes, discussions of the vitalism of Henri Bergson, careful examinations of canonical Continental paintings. Then, with the outbreak of the Great War, the Stettheimers decamped to New York, which became a permanent home. Florine Stettheimer would leave the US only once thereafter, to vacation in Canada. In 1914 she was forty-three, with an impressive education but no career.

Most critics of Stettheimer’s multiform body of work—which includes poetry, furniture, and stage sets, along with her complex paintings—have a tendency to cast their essays as close readings of the artist’s social calendar.[4] These treatments have mainly taken the paintings as portrayals of, and decorative backdrops for, Stettheimer’s interactions with Marcel Duchamp (who may have modeled Rrose Sélavy on her), Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Elie Nadelman, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Van Vechten, among other celebrities, some of whom, like best-selling author Joseph Hergesheimer, were more renowned in their own day than they are now. With recourse to her archives at Columbia and Yale, Stettheimer’s careful readers have disclosed her uptown avant-garde coterie. She is understood to have led a life of comfort and leisure, if of questionable romantic and professional fulfillment. The contradictions were many, but increasing quantities of family money seem to have made them more interesting than tragic. (By the time Florine, Ettie, Carrie, and Rosetta Stettheimer resettled in New York, they were apparently quite financially secure.)

Starting around 1918, Stettheimer entered her mature period. She stopped painting post-Impressionist mediocrities and got weird. She festooned her studio with cellophane and Victorian lace. She gilded liberally, filling her canvases with lithe little bodies en pointe. She was at once a consummate Continental decadent and a patriotic American modern—a hyper-feminine late bloomer and visionary, the ultimate outsider-insider. She became a satirist of artistically inclined upper classes, as well as a depicter of nationalist pageantry. She was not a bad poet. She showed infrequently and was nearly forgotten after her death.[5] Andy Warhol got a private viewing of her work in 1961 from a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though professing his “love” in his memoir POPism, Warhol was not above dubbing his forebear a “wealthy primitive painter.”[6]

There is, to be frank, often something of a letdown when it comes to Stettheimer’s reception. Wanda Corn and Michael Leja—two art historians who have, to their credit, shown a greater tolerance than most for the minutiae of the interwar period in the US—have little to say about her. Yet, as New York Times art critic Roberta Smith observes in her review of the current one-woman show at the Jewish Museum, “Every 20 years or so an exhibition devoted to Florine Stettheimer . . . shakes up modernism’s orderly hierarchies.”[7] This latest survey, “Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry,” suffers somewhat from a cramped, windowless setting. Stettheimer’s four late masterpieces, her “Cathedrals” series of 1929–42, in the permanent collection of the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art, are not included, meaning that it is all but impossible to comprehend Stettheimer’s enormous achievement as a painter by way of the show. Without the “Cathedrals” as zenith, the exhibition culminates uncertainly in maquettes, publicity headshots, and barely legible snippets of film related to Four Saints in Three Acts, a 1934 avant-garde opera, featuring an entirely African American cast, with libretto by Gertrude Stein and score by Virgil Thomson. Stettheimer designed iridescent cellophane scenery and feathered and sequined costumes for the show, making something of a splash.[8]

The catalogue for “Painting Poetry” hardly mitigates the disappointment. Even given the dearth of popular writing on Stettheimer that is not a rehashing of Linda Nochlin’s 1980 tour de force in this magazine, the two workmanlike essays by Stephen Brown and Georgiana Uhlyarik are lamentable. (Uhlyarik, for example, resorts to such platitudes as, “Stettheimer painted herself into an art history of her own making, informed by a long classical tradition and activated by a vanguard attitude.”[9]) A subsequent coda-like transcript of a roundtable discussion among contemporary painters rehearses the usual terms in which Stettheimer is praised.[10] Overall, this lackluster if jauntily packaged retrospective, with its anodyne title and incomplete trajectory, deviates little from the boom-bust cycle Smith describes.

IF WE WANT TO grapple more seriously with Florine Stettheimer, it is worth returning to Kafka and Céline’s unreal depictions of the US. We could well think of Stettheimer on similar terms: as an artist who treated America as an exotic, largely unknowable locale and who used the space of fantasy and escapism this orientation opened up as a source of inspiration, improvising at will. This way of looking at Stettheimer may not endear her to contemporary American audiences, who seem to enjoy her work mainly for its flowers, stars, large-eyed maidens, and ubiquitous crystalline frills. However, highlighting Stettheimer’s interest in allegory and appropriation helps to explain such apparently contradictory impulses as her life-long fascination with the figure of the faun as portrayed by Vaslav Nijinsky in his famous choreography for L’Après-midi d’un faune, a ballet based on a Stéphane Mallarmé poem with a score by Claude Debussy, and her equally powerful obsession with the far less sensuous George Washington, to whom she dedicated an entire shrinelike room in her Bryant Park studio and who repeatedly appears in her paintings.[11] From the intently researched exoticism of contemporary designers Léon Bakst, who created sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, and Paul Poiret, the celebrity couturier who in 1911 held a “Thousand and Second Night” fancy-dress soirée, Stettheimer learned the power of orientalist pastiche.

Critics often note the impact Nijinsky’s June 8, 1912, Paris performance of L’Après-midi d’un faune made on Stettheimer. She immediately began sketching costumes and scenery for her own ballet, the story of a well-heeled father-daughter duo who are accosted by art students and compelled to don Bakstian/Poiretian garb and begin dancing. Though the ballet, L’Orphée des Quat-z-arts, whose title cites an annual Parisian ball, was never staged, Stettheimer’s mock-ups evidence rapt work, including collaged fabric and beading. This early undertaking is usually seen as a sign of the talent that would be more concretely manifested in Stettheimer’s designs for Four Saints in Three Acts. L’Orphée might also be read as an indication of Stettheimer’s fashionable equation of personal liberation with the assumption of non-European dress; the clothing of the art students points to a generalized East, in which the constraints of Western society are imagined not to apply. Indeed, in one of the very few extant photographs of Stettheimer, taken ca. 1917–20 in her Bryant Park garden, she wears a matching set of billowing pantaloons and embroidered white tunic. Stettheimer’s garments are even more loosely cut than Poiret’s iconic “lampshade” tunic ensemble, but the association is unmistakable and incorporates another trend in which Poiret also participated: deliverance from the corset.

Stettheimer thus favored an eccentric exoticism—one in which fauns, George Washingtons, and other stock figures were caricatured and fetishized—over related contemporaneous avant-garde movements, even as she maintained a rather straightforward relationship to the sensuality of paint. The academically trained and always elaborately decorative Stettheimer was, for example, never fully taken with Dada’s sardonic anti-art. The Stettheimer sisters’ liking for puckish Duchamp, aka “Duche,” their sometime French teacher, occasionally took a turn for the patronizing, as when Ettie Stettheimer referred to him as a “charming garçon” or the “queer but charming French boy who painted ‘Nude Descending the Stairs’ and other cubistic creations.”[12] Meanwhile, the uncanny imagery and narrative ruptures of Surrealism never caught on with Florine, nor did the movement engage the materiality of paint as much as she might have liked, though comparisons to Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo are hardly out of place. For Stettheimer did not just daub, she built her faux-naive pictures with an artfully wielded palette knife (which is why it is remarkable that her substantial canvases sometimes look like finely delineated New Yorker covers in reproduction). Stettheimer has also been said to have roots in the European Symbolist tradition, and there are clear parallels between her work and the oneiric images of Odilon Redon, for example. However, to the synthesis of the symbol she clearly preferred the ambivalence and deferral associated with allegory, the effect produced when a thing in a picture does not represent that thing, purely or exclusively, but rather points to something else.[13] This current runs so strongly through her work that the very fact that it has not been clearly elaborated by Stettheimer’s critics suggests that the artist’s failure to fully “appear” within either the canon or major American museums may be due as much to this omission as to the artist’s gender. For it is difficult to understand or, for that matter, see Florine Stettheimer, without examining her allegorical depictions of America.

An important political fact of the era during which Stettheimer resettled in New York was the increasing prevalence of attempts to define American identity, as well as domestic policy, with recourse to types and categorization. The use of statistics by the government during the Progressive Era, while ostensibly indicative of a turn to objectivity, was also linked to attempts to limit access to US citizenship and the protections it entails, as well as to jobs, reproductive rights, freedom of movement, and so on. The rise of “race science” in mainstream academia in the teens drove a wave of popular white supremacist publications that claimed empiricist authority, including books like amateur anthropologist and anti-immigration activist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race of 1916. While the US had maintained a policy of relatively open borders until the late nineteenth century, in 1917 the Asiatic Barred Zone Act expanded California’s anti-Chinese restrictions of the 1870s and national anti-Chinese restrictions of 1882, identifying a large portion of Asia as the source of unwanted immigrants, who were to be banned along with idiots, illiterates, anarchists, et al. This was followed by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which restricted immigration from most parts of the world. Though Stettheimer was born in America, she was raised a European. Her status as a native daughter who had to become American in middle age was, in itself, a challenge to the essentialism of nativist views. However, Stettheimer brought with her a European eye for Asian and Middle Eastern art and design. Painted in the midst of the developments enumerated above, her first mature works recognize the racial and ethnic divisions of American society with an outsider’s clarity, even as they participate in the reduction of nonwhites to stock types. At times her use of cliché and stereotypes can appear merely fey or decorative, since these types are obviously not intended to be realistic; yet it is worth examining how her work both resists and conforms to conservative currents of her day.

STETTHEIMER'S New York/Liberty (1918–19) is an early example of the technique for superimposing diverse historical and personal events that Duchamp later termed multiplication virtuelle, a technique that inscribes multiple, discrete meanings into a single image.[14] Depicting battleships in New York harbor, New York/Liberty layers manifold times, tacitly commemorating Stettheimer’s 1914 repatriation into the port of New York, even as it more overtly indicates America’s late May 1917 entry into WWI and President Wilson’s subsequent voyage to the 1919 the International Peace Conference.[15] Though ostensibly about victory and American exceptionalism, Stettheimer’s composition seems designed to be read as an allegory for immigration and assimilation under the American flag (clearly pivotal processes for Stettheimer) as its vantage point is from on board a ship that, as indicated by a thickly gilded Statue of Liberty, is located near Ellis Island.

The Manhattan cityscape that dominates the top half of the canvas functions as a painting within a painting. A bit like a birthday cake, parade float, or theatrical backdrop, this seductively vulnerable skyline justifies the guns mustered to protect it. Like the red, white, and blue banners employed throughout the scene, it signifies both power and peace. Despite its consummate charm, the city appears secondary to the enlarged seal of New York City occupying the bottom margin. Featuring a pair of allegorical figures, this doubly significant seal is a supposedly collective image, an icon for the municipality. But it has been personalized and privately “stamped” by Citizen Stettheimer, who as a woman did not have the right to vote in 1918. The Dutchman, no hardened colonist, possibly an early twentieth-century Dutch naval officer, is jaunty with ribbons. Meanwhile, the Native American employs a union shield as a bizarre breechcloth, while wearing a flag-themed headdress. Stettheimer’s revision of New York City’s social compact suggests, in a strange softening of the US’s new 1917 exclusivity, that Lady Liberty lifts her lamp for all those who resemble Broadway extras. As do Kafka and Céline’s novels, New York/Liberty complicates the utopian fantasy of a newly arrived immigrant. It presents an Oz-like America seen, gleefully and somewhat ignorantly, from the exterior, an advertisement for a theatrical production full of esoteric, and perhaps ultimately inaccessible, cheer.

In the late 1910s and early ’20s, Stettheimer’s paintings become increasingly social, and the miniaturization of compositional elements explored in New York/Liberty and other paintings like Picnic at Bedford Hills (1918) predominates. Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnum (1924) shows a more complex and less ambivalent response to the question of American identity, filtering its visible forms through a beauty contest reimagined as a hybrid event incorporating a circus. Stettheimer presents a pageant of human types watched over by recognizable individuals, including herself at upper left, smiling and well made up, next to writer Edna Kenton and photographer Edward Steichen. At lower right, an impresario who may or may not be a slenderized Barnum oversees bathing beauties tanned and pale, as well as, at center, children in feathered headdresses, a Rudolph Valentino–like figure leading a horse that may or may not be a Lipizzaner, and, at left, an all-black band in elaborate uniforms over which the painter has obviously lingered.

The beauty contest is a pretext for various kinds of showmanship, which Stettheimer organizes according to genre, race, and gender. A seemingly endless supply of palm fronds and dripping red, white, and blue crystals mediate the carefully divided scene, in which everyone stays in his or her corner, as the show goes on. With the exception of Stettheimer and her artist friends, who are legible as themselves, everyone plays (and represents) a role, a mere type, suggesting that their identities within this convocation are at least partly performative. Identity’s fungibility is additionally figured, for example, by the labels (“Miss Atlantic City,” etc.) held by the beauties. Read allegorically, the painting offers a retort to American nativism, since it implies that much national belonging is merely “put on,” contingent and assumed for public occasions. Yet, here Stettheimer also limited herself to satirically depicting contemporary norms rather than upending or abandoning these norms for something else. Though the painting presents a quasi-democratic social sphere in which Americans ostensibly gather to have fun, there remain real divisions and inequalities within the collective setting. Indeed, so many shows go on simultaneously that it is difficult to determine the actual nature of the contest or what is at stake, and for which participants. The scene is, additionally, unrelentingly festive and self-congratulatory, though there is something unsettling about the many knowing smiles exchanged: some smile because they observe an amusing scene, others because they are on display. The painting’s commentary on these dynamics is uneven, whimsical, never quite attaining irony or critique.

Stettheimer’s unusual semi-realist, semi-allegorical mode in her mature paintings, combining both stylized stock figures and portraits of individuals known to her, of which Asbury Park South (1920), depicting a segregated New Jersey beach, is also an example, reaches its zenith with the late “Cathedrals” series, four large-scale compositions devoted to Broadway (1929), Fifth Avenue (1931), Wall Street (1939), and Art (1942). Though Stettheimer’s work was not commercially successful during her lifetime, in the “Cathedrals” series she explicitly appropriates commercial styles only hinted at elsewhere, exploring billboards, industrial lighting, illustration, entertainment industry publicity, and contemporary fashion. The costumes and sets she designed to great acclaim for Four Saints in Three Acts clearly influenced these late paintings, which are setlike in their composition and contain lacy elements recalling the cellophane she used in these designs.

There is a certain seamlessness between this light and purposely vapid work and actual advertising, as one clipping in Stettheimer’s papers at Yale indicates: an East Coast department store advertised its latest cellophane raincoat collection, imitating Stein’s prose style in the copy and including illustrations of Stettheimer’s scenery, an image of one cellophane lion plus palm tree. Like Kafka’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma, where “angels” on ladders play trumpets all day to publicize the performances, Stettheimer’s late works devote themselves strenuously to the American cult of celebrity, perhaps reveling in the emptiness of this endeavor. Even their satirical elements feel resigned to the vapidity of glamor, and recognition of a certain emptiness in New York social life may be as close as Stettheimer came to openly acknowledging the divisions of her new-old homeland.

AT THE END of her life, Stettheimer was working on a ballet about the life of Pocahontas, which, like her 1912 effort, was never to be staged. This patriotic work—celebrating the foundational myth in which Pocahontas rescues John Smith—had a number of strange features: Stettheimer and her collaborator, Virgil Thomson, had decided that Smith and his countrymen would wear Scottish highland garb rather than the expected British costume, and the ballet’s Native American characters were to be dressed in cellophane, gold foil, and feathers. The curators of the Jewish Museum show chose not to include the twenty-two maquettes Stettheimer produced, instead devoting space only to the two earlier stage design projects.[16] Yet the designs for this unfinished epic are worth mentioning because they demonstrate Stettheimer’s enthusiasm for styles of appropriation germane to period popular culture, along with her use of the trope of the noble savage, a stock character embodying the concept of the uncorrupted outsider and therefore allegorizing humanity’s innate goodness, a figure not unlike the faun. This choice of subject additionally implies Stettheimer’s acquiescence to increasingly fervent nationalism leading up to the US’s 1941 entry into WWII, suggesting not only that she viewed indigenous identity as yet another performance, available to a modern update via musical theater, but that she believed, or was willing to pretend that she believed, in an excessively cheerful national origin story.

It is possible that Stettheimer, an unmarried and childless Jewish woman, played down her own anomalousness in mainstream Protestant America, while also answering her family’s polite rejection of her ambitions to be an artist, by exoticizing and feminizing nearly everyone and everything in turn. However, such speculation verges on armchair psychology and almost certainly misses the point, which is that Stettheimer struggled with questions regarding power and assimilation throughout her American career. Oil painting, an economically and culturally dominant art form, became reconciled to minor decorative styles in Stettheimer’s hands, even as she took on major themes, including the nature of American identity. Stettheimer’s ever-changing signatures reflect the fact that she deliberated a great deal about her own authority as an artist. Until about 1920, while she still painted in a derivative European style, she favored her initials, “FS,” superimposed in such a way that the “F” appears to be impaling the “S,” transforming the first letter of Stettheimer’s surname into a certifying dollar sign, as if to say, “Look at me, I am a rich American!”[17] But in later paintings she more confidently offers her full name, often trompe l’oeil-style, trickily “written” on a depicted object. She additionally abbreviated, sometimes becoming the saintly “Florine St.,” a moniker that may have had something to do with Stein’s opera.

Wealth allowed Stettheimer to be at once candid, utopian, hermetic, escapist, appropriative, and in violation of good taste, and she grew into this fact from 1914 on. She assumed an American identity of a kind, as a woman who could, at least in theory, buy whatever she desired. Whereas staunchly middle-class William Carlos Williams in a 1923 poem railed against the lack of “peasant traditions to give them / character,” which made average Americans fools for “gauds,” Stettheimer embraced artificial forms of pleasure and liberty, for she could afford them.[18] The mature Stettheimer made no secret of her affection for luxury. No longer using the hermetically crest-like “F$,” she proudly provided, usually in white, a full, or nearly full, name on her decadent, gilded, and frosted canvases—at least until The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931), where her old “F$” does double duty as the mark on a luxury car. Yet, in spite of her wealth, Stettheimer depicts herself in her final, unfinished painting of 1942, The Cathedrals of Art, standing on the side of folk culture. In the painting, icons of modernism such as MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. and a painting by Picasso appear on one side of a templelike structure, while signifiers of vernacular aesthetics, a stylized bald eagle and Juliana Force of the Whitney Museum, occupy the other. Stettheimer is standing on the side of folk-influenced American Art, as the right-hand column reads, rather than on that of the more lucrative high-modernist Art in America, on the left. Florine Stettheimer, formerly F$, had become extraordinarily, surreally American, as only someone who adopts her nationality as a decorative style can.

Date: September 1, 2017

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of Art in America, September 2017.

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Cover image.

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1. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph Manheim, New York, New Directions, 2006, p. 166.
1. Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. Michael Hoffman, New York, New Directions, 2002, pp. 3, 28, and 13.
1. Rosetta Walter Stettheimer possessed “an inheritance,” according to a wall label at the current Jewish Museum show, that permitted her to support her five children. In her 1994 dissertation, Florine Stettheimer: Alternative Modernist, Barbara J. Bloemink speculates that the move to Europe might have allowed Rosetta to escape the censure of her even wealthier relatives in the US while also living more cheaply.
1. Such works follow in the footsteps of Barbara J. Bloemink’s Friends and Family: Portraiture in the World of Florine Strttheimer, Katonah, N.Y., Katonah Museum of Art, 1993.
1. Stettheimer’s first and only solo show during her lifetime, which opened in October 1916 at M. Knoedler & Co., “Exhibition of Paintings by Miss Florine Stettheimer,” was not a success, in that no paintings sold. As others have indicated, though Stettheimer never again consented to a solo exhibition, in spite of pleading invitations from Alfred Stieglitz among others, she contributed individual works to group shows. Stettheimer asked that her paintings be destroyed upon her death, and though her wish was not carried out by her survivors, her legacy was somewhat loosely managed, leading to further obscurity for an artist who had in fact established herself as a major painter with those who knew her work, including such critics as Henry McBride and Paul Rosenfeld.
1. The Met curator in question was Henry Geldzahler. After a visit to Warhol’s studio, during which, as Warhol writes, Geldzahler “scanned all the things I collected—from the American folk pieces to the Carmen Miranda platform shoe,” the curator extended an invitation to view Stettheimer’s “Cathedrals” series, then in storage. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, New York, Harcourt, 1980, p. 16.
1. Roberta Smith, “A Case for the Greatness of Florine Stettheimer,” New York Times, May 18, 2017, nytimes.com.
1. “Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry” supplies sparse interpretive text regarding Four Saints in Three Acts. For more analysis, see Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 2009, p. 168. Brown writes: “The cast members, in all the ontological presence accorded the African American, appeared in relief against the modern and deeply compelling absence of the set (and against the disembodied absence of the ‘civilized’ and thus white modern subject who did not appear at all on the Four Saints stage). The modern script that accepted the civilized/primitive binary held true, then, even on the avant-garde stage. Modernity, represented by the manufactured plastic sky, is here aligned with death or stasis, in contradistinction to the life force of the African American cast on stage.”
1. Georgiana Uhlyarik, “4 St.s Seen by Florine: A Case Study,” in Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry, ed. Stephen Brown and Georgiana Uhlyarik, New York and New Haven, Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, 2017, p. 56.
1. The roundtable, with Cecily Brown, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Jutta Koether, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Valentina Liernur, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Katharina Wulff in conversation with Jens Hoffmann, praises Stettheimer’s use of color, her style of figuration, and her feminism, noting the queer and/or “trans” aspects of her work. Painter and installation artist Karen Kilimnik, one of Stettheimer’s most obvious living artistic heirs, is not included; see Florine Stettheimer, pp. 143–159.
1. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten, as Bloemink notes in several publications, Stettheimer quipped of Washington, “He is the only man I collect.” Her 1939 painting The Cathedrals of Wall Street contains the dedication, written along two flowing ribbons securing a red, white, and blue bouquet offered to a massive gilded statue of the first president, TO GEORGE WASHINGTON FROM FLORINE ST 1939.
1. Letters of 1916 and 1917 from Ettie Stettheimer to her friend “Gans.” Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.
1. To clarify: A symbol is combinatory and imprecise, bringing together many meanings and suggesting that they coexist, also in the object’s real instantiation. Allegory, by contrast, severs the allegorical object from the context in which it occurs, deploying it as the representative of some hidden or secondary meaning. This is why allegorical depictions are more strongly associated with religious encoding, as well as conspiracy theories and other forms of paranoid reading.
1. The painting’s point of view is that of an individual aboard a ship approaching Ellis Island. It would seem to include Stettheimer’s own return to the city along with larger, distinct events related to WWI. New York/Liberty is thus a history painting imbued with Proust’s modern, synthetic sense of time.
1. Included in the current Jewish Museum show, this painting also had the interesting distinction of being the only artwork borrowed from a private collection for the Whitney’s 2015 reopening exhibition, “America Is Hard to See,” which was otherwise drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection.
1. Another reason for not including the Pocahontas ballet maquettes may be their fragility.
1. The “$” created by Stettheimer’s early initialing of her paintings was pointed out by scholar Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen in a talk at the Jewish Museum on May 11, 2017. Butterfield-Rosen did not speculate on the meaning of this visual pun; the interpretation offered here (for better or for worse) is the author’s own.
1. Williams’s poem “The pure products of America / go crazy,” later titled “For Elsie,” was included in his 1923 collection, Spring and All, reprinted in Imaginations, New York, New Directions, 1971, p. 131

THERE ONCE WAS A PERSON WHO COULD DRAW ANYTHING

Il est surnaturel d’arrêter le temps.
– Simone Weil, Notes for Venise sauvée

At her 1943 death, the philosopher Simone Weil left unfinished a ‘tragedy in three acts’, Venise sauvée, or Venice Saved. This play about an averted coup is gorgeously, strangely formal and slow—a dramatic rendition of an actual early seventeenth-century incursion. Short on dialogue, Weil’s draft is studded throughout with plans for future writing, including description of the exact number of syllables of blank verse to be assigned to various characters. At the play’s close—one relatively complete section—the naïve heroine Violetta declaims a poem. Ignorant of the plot to destroy Venice as well as the role of her own beauty in the collapse of this nefarious design, she murmurs, ‘Qu’il sont beaux sur la mer, / Les rayons du jour!’ (How beautiful they are on the sea, / These bands of daylight!) Offstage, revenge killings ensue, but neither Violetta nor the vast majority of the Venetians know anything of this. The denouement of Venise sauvée envisions a mostly static and unreal scene in which nothing happens save that some light travels. Venice is unaware that it has been saved. And any appreciation of light at the end of this drama does not come with added symbolism. The light is simply present. As critic Anne-Lise François wryly describes this moment, ‘Venice awakens to a beauty it has not lost the power to take for granted’.

In François’s reading of Venise sauvée, Simone Weil has created a play that fails to conform to the rules of Aristotelian tragedy, lacking a convulsive final moment of reversal and recognition. Weil’s play is ‘the (non)record of events that failed to transpire’. In other words, it records non-existent events of a plot that does not unfold. It displays the trace of a transformative will that in fact recedes curiously from the stage, rather than setting narrative in motion. The tragic hero Jaffier, who might have ruined Venice, hesitates to enact Venice’s destruction for no particular reason other than that the city actually exists—and he notices this. After he is betrayed by those to whom he has confessed, Jaffier makes a desperate petition to the sun, sky, ocean, Venetian canals, and blocks of marble. He describes these inanimate things, calls their names and curses them, but to no avail. The historical event collapses inexorably, quietly and mechanically, on his head.

If not strictly speaking a play in which nothing happens, Venise sauvée is a play in which the mystery of the physical existence of the world—one’s surprise, for example, that there is a world at all—has the power to interrupt the history of mankind. Lest this be understood as some form of primal ontological surprise, Weil uses the term ‘surnaturel’ to describe Jaffier’s decision not to act; his choice to instead, as she puts it, ‘stop time’. ‘Il est surnaturel d’arrêter le temps’, Weil writes in a contemporary notebook, regarding Jaffier’s retreat. And she repeats the term, instructing herself, ‘Faire sentir que le recul de Jaffier est surnaturel’. (Give the impression that Jaffier’s retreat is supernatural.) This, according to Weil, is a moment at which eternity enters human time.

Begun in 1940, Venise sauvée is also a complex comment on Paris’s fate under the Vichy state. The play is now infrequently staged, not least because of its incompleteness. And it is indeed difficult to think of a proper theatre and audience for its arabesques of meditative avoidance of action, leading to a non-event including lovely light. Yet, if there is such a theatre and such a setting, it might well be the Serralves Villa, as reimagined in the 2017 exhibition of artist Nick Mauss. With long bands of daylight striping the walls and floors, accompanied by equally expressive passages of shadow, the Villa lushly affirms its own existence. Its citations of classical architecture, along with its modern styling, suggest a complex and highly civilized relationship to the notion of history. Mauss’s sculptural and pictorial arrangements in the space at once reflect the aesthetic lineages in which the Villa’s design participates and challenge its claims to orthodoxy. Mauss’s work—like the sight of Venice imagined in Venice sauvée—and like the tragic hero’s miraculous recognition of the bare and actual existence of the great city—is a supernatural incision in everyday time and space. It permits the visitor access, if not to eternity, then to other planes of vision. Additional pictures, patterns, and outlines now appear within the Serralves Villa. These might underlie or be implicit within the Villa’s rooms. They may be excavations of form dormant in the Villa’s design. They may also simply be possible.

Mauss’s work plays with our expectations regarding surface. The image of what appears to be a pencil sketch has been enlarged in steel. It rests solidly against a wall. One feels a foolish urge to rush over and attempt to fold it in half. Surely it will resist. And yet one now feels an identical urge, with respect to the immaterial shadow cast by this sculptural form. The act in question is equally impossible.

Elsewhere, Mauss’s lines skitter across the speckled surface of a mirror. Intimate figures form. We must place ourselves conscientiously, depending on our willingness or unwillingness to be included, to have our own bodies potentially interrupt (or join) this scene.

The use of printed fabric, too, is a way of disrupting commonplace relationships to the surface on which a picture rests. Patterning, repetition; these gestures trouble the primacy of a single image. Indeed, the print on fabric threatens to become merely decorative, a drape or unrealized garment. It refuses the high seriousness of portraiture. It will not ‘look back’ at the viewer.

Everywhere there is a tension with, if not outright opposition to, lyrical treatment of history. Indeed, this is a tension Weil herself certainly felt. The various rooms and passageways are not explained with recourse to personal histories of the Villa’s creators or owners; no masterful design history stuns us into awed attention with its authoritative detail. Rather, the Villa is engaged as a varied surface, a permeable given. (How beautiful they are…, / These bands of daylight!) Everything we notice here, we are asked to notice as if we have already been looking at it. Everything is new, because we had not yet recognized that we had already been seeing it. The power to take this extraordinary home for granted (a power we never knew we possessed) is returned to us. The question that remains is, what will we do with this weightless liberty?

I do not pose the above question idly. For of course this art making is also occurring in the present of 2017, a historical moment of so outlandish a form that it begs for reconciliation with some era or event of the past. But my citation of Simone Weil’s citation of a 1618 intrigue in Venice as a citation of 1940s occupied France is not intended to serve as a complex analogue for the contemporary. Rather, I cite Weil because she seems to have observed something about the nature of the claims we make about the meaning of history, and I find her observation not merely relevant in a general contemporary sense, but relevant to Nick Mauss’s work, in particular.

The Serralves Villa contains numerous images of itself, numerous reflections, within it. These change with the changing time of day and the passage of visitors. These images are visual and kinetic, created by the elaborations of the sun, moon, and other external and internal sources of light; they are sonic, as when the Villa’s rooms reverberate with voices and footfalls. Clearly there are numerous examples of the way in which the Villa multiplies itself internally, by way of images produced by the coincidence of society and the physical world. (How beautiful they are…!)

Mauss’s response to these images is to admit their existence. But he does not reproduce them, holding them up so that we may step into a romantic dioramic recreation of the scene we already inhabit. He does not elaborate images in such a way that we are shocked or amazed by the accuracy of his gesture. Rather, his drawing—for much of his work, even the work that is not explicitly drawing, is drawing, and he is a person who can draw anything—favours a recessive articulation. To the viewer he offers a line that takes the form of a beautiful event that the viewer does not know he or she has not lost the power to take for granted.

One example of this mode of articulation are the dance figures Mauss has also included in the exhibition. What could be more artificial than these representations, with their unusual, typographically performative arrangements of text? And yet they are participatory images; they show and tell us what will happen, should we dance. They are not representations of dances, they are dances. In this sense, they recede from the eye as drawings and come to seem more like speech or gestures, i.e., the dances that they are. Of course, these dance figures are not original drawings by Mauss; they are reproductions. Their status as reproductions of historical texts intensifies our experience of Mauss’s line as one in retreat. He has not quite written these words, although he has also not quite not written them.

Similarly, the shifting locations and material statuses of the surfaces on which Mauss writes and draws contribute to our sense of his mode of drawing as a deliberate retreat from a kind of drawing that could be claimed or exploited, as such. In spite of this retreat, his drawings hardly cease to appear. They become ever more durable, more multiple, more fascinating, and more ubiquitous. The non-existent white ground of the so-called pencil sketch enlarged in steel I whimsically pretended to wish to bend earlier causes the viewer to attempt to compose a picture using a support that flickers in and out of view. One focuses, erroneously and even a little hilariously, on a white “page” that is in fact a wall. The act of perceiving the steel sketch itself may even become lost in this flickering deliberation.

To return to my earlier contentions regarding Weil’s treatment of history, her personal dedication to participation and empathy, along with her extraordinary capacity for study, suggest that the recessive action of Venise sauvée stands in deliberate contrast to hasty heroic and/or violent solutions to political crisis. Yet, this does not mean that the play ignores the existence of political crises or their seriousness and insolubility. Without idealizing human nature, the play imagines a place and a role in the material world for human nature—and ties this place and role to human politics. The play imagines that one way human consciousness and creativity can function is as a labour of ensuring that the ongoing human appreciation of beauty—a sometimes unconscious appreciation we all hope to have the luck of not needing to be reminded of by way of crushing deprivation, harm, or disaster—can merely continue.

I imagine that a staging of Venise sauvée among the rooms and passageways of the Serralves Villa in which Nick Mauss has staged his various modes of drawing (and withdrawing) would be an echoing, choral affair. I wonder if Mauss would consider contributing a setting for the play’s final poem. Perhaps there is some way of indicating what Weil has conceived of as nearly un-representable events: those sunbeams on water that turn out not to be anything more or less than sunbeams on water. Or perhaps the entire play could be revised to consist in the enactment of that single sentence of appreciative pleasure. I should say that this, at any rate, is what I think of Nick Mauss’s work as already accomplishing.

NB: Discussion of Simone Weil’s unfinished play, Venise sauvée, in this essay is deeply indebted to Anne-Lise François’s brilliant writing in Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience.

Date: June 22, 2017

Publisher: Museu de Arte Contemporâneo de Serralves

Format: Print

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the catalogue.

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Intricate Others.

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On Period Rooms & Erasure

Intricate Others.

HEREDITARY FORCES
The unsettling history behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American period rooms.

There are two ways to access the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American period rooms, situated behind the 1823 Branch Bank facade in the Charles Englehard Court, a space bright with winsome marbles and burbling with fountain sounds. One may enter via either medieval Europe or the patio of another of the museum’s great indoor edifices, the Temple of Dendur. On a recent visit, I took the latter route and, upon entering the American sector, immediately mistook a framed reproduction in the gift shop for “real” art. My prolonged respectful gazing was, mercifully, unnoticed. As I moved awkwardly on, I happened to glance at another item of nonart, a nearby plaque explaining the American Wing’s “Campaign for the 21st Century.” The sign announces:

The American Wing offers the Metropolitan Museum’s principal display of American art made before 1920. Originally opened in 1924, the American Wing has recently undergone a comprehensive renovation to best present its collections for twenty-first century audiences. Conducted in three phases over a decade, the Wing has been modernized and re-conceived to provide a more logical and aesthetically pleasing path along which to travel through American art and history.

Beside this notice is a list of generous donors of “Gifts of $1 million and above as of May 15, 2015.” By my count, there are approximately thirty names on the list, including the City of New York.

The phrases “to best present its collections for twenty-first century audiences” and “modernized and re-conceived” stick with me. The period rooms—a sort of hybrid, heteroclite house within the larger house of the museum—are the center of the American Wing, and the plaque recommends their recent modernization and new orderliness in particular. There is, for example, a newish glass elevator ready to whisk visitors between floors. Numerous touch screens offer animations and informative text. The “house” itself, last redone in 2009, now combines twenty-odd historical rooms, from 1680 to 1915, with parlors harvested from Southern plantations alongside paneled rooms from ancient New England homesteads, not to mention a swank Frank Lloyd Wright parlor. It is an exceedingly complex document, the creation of various unusually prosperous American ancestors working in unknowing collaboration with the museum’s staff and trustees, a ship of Theseus if ever there was one. It also seems to be one of the least popular parts of the museum. Often, one or more of the floors is closed to public view due to, as a guard told me, lack of foot traffic, persistent ceiling leaks, or perhaps a combination of the two. One hopes the wing’s benefactors may help out with ceiling continence soon.

The Met’s American period rooms first opened to the public in 1924. According to Robert W. de Forest, then the museum’s president, the purpose of this chronologically tidy feat of spatial reproduction—a massive diorama into which the public could stroll from century to century, moving backward through time from a decadent nineteenth-century ground floor to a seventeenth-century attic outfitted with low ceilings and heavy wood—was “to test out the question of whether American domestic art was worthy of a place in an art museum, and to test it out not theoretically but visually.” Though an experiment, it was intended to be permanent: the first major installation of decorative arts and furniture of Colonial and early Federal America in an urban museum, in a purpose-built wing containing rooms complete with original paneling, ceilings, beams, staged lighting, and painted skies visible beyond built-in windows. (In Europe, period rooms had been a curatorial modus operandi since at least 1873, when Stockholm’s Nordiska Museet opened a number of them.) The Met’s period rooms were, in one sense, a response to the seductive Continental dawning of Art Deco in the 1910s from the matrix of Cubist and Fauvist art. Deco forms were bright, internationalist, mechanically reproducible, and potentially highly commercial. The 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris proved the movement’s success, though it was not attended by a delegation from the U.S. The rooms of the new 1924 American Wing, meanwhile, expressed the tastes of a tightly knit upper class and increasingly nativist milieu, advertising these interests to a broader public as didactic content. Concerned with a selective history that links moneyed Dutch and Anglophone ancestors of Protestant faith, the rooms detail a conservative, anti-modern vision of the U.S., with a pursuant aristocracy. The rooms elided the influence of late nineteenth-century waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with the increasing importance of German, Jewish, and Catholic culture within the U.S., as well as Victorian innovations in design. They presented American culture as an early nineteenth-century fait accompli, in which rococo revival and neoclassical styles reigned supreme and home decor was all but exclusively authored by males. At the time of the 1924 opening, the Met’s period-room galleries seemed to proclaim that great innovation and beauty in American furnishings commenced just before 1700 and ceased around 1811. The museum would not begin to install later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rooms until 1982.

The wing was the personal project of three men: de Forest; Henry Watson Kent, an influential librarian and administrator; and R.T.H. Halsey, an Anglophile stockbroker, collector, chairman of the museum’s Committee on Decorative Arts, and trustee. The three gentlemen worked autonomously, bypassing bureaucracy. De Forest personally purchased the 1823 facade of the former Assay Office building from Wall Street in 1915, and other acquisitions arrived through familiar channels, such as de Forest’s wife, Emily, who gave the Met its first period-room element, a Long Island fireplace, in 1910. It was by no means a foregone conclusion that American decorative arts were canonically significant, despite the nation’s growing wealth and World War I victory. This afforded the undertaking a certain interventionist quality, even as the results now appear elite in the extreme. These rooms also had the function—perhaps not even secondarily—of increasing the value of the objects they contained. Many of the people affiliated with the Met were themselves Colonial-revival enthusiasts who stood to gain from the boom in antiques and Americana during the 1910s and 1920s.

The value and rarity of these objects cut both ways: the narrowness of the interests of the engineers of the American Wing made their task all the more difficult. Even during the war, it was no simple matter to obtain desirable Colonial and early republican interiors. New England, for example, did not relinquish its wood paneling cheaply. In 1916 and 1917, one young curator, Durr Friedley, was dispatched below the Mason-Dixon to investigate estates facing foreclosure. (Friedley later turned down a more permanent job with the Met and pursued a career as a painter, hanging out with Gertrude Stein and other luminaries.) Historian Jeffrey Trask writes that the Old Dominion “ultimately served as the Metropolitan’s best resource for elite period rooms.” One is the painted Marmion Room, circa 1756, from the formerly slaveholding Marmion Plantation in Fredericksburg, Virginia, obtained in 1916 (presumably by Friedley). Found on the second floor of the Met’s American period-room section, this disconcerting and very yellow space sports dim wall paintings of garlanded vases, Romantic vistas replete with windmills and ruins, impish disembodied heads, and trompe l’oeil marble. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described the room as “incalculably sweet” in a 2000 piece, but I find it drippy and weird. One 1916 description by architectural historian Frank Conger Baldwin claims that the paintings were a gift of gratitude from a Hessian mercenary who had been nursed back to health at the plantation. An elaborate gilded mirror with soggy rococo curlicues and a sunken central folly hangs over the otherwise empty room’s fireplace. The room was also apparently far more luxurious than the exterior of the original manor would have let on—for reasons that remain mysterious—lending it an additional air of unease that is difficult to diagnose. In her 1930 book Virginia Ghosts, Marguerite du Pont Lee records the legend of a “white lady,” a young girl who haunts the Marmion grounds, protecting the place and even attempting to shake hands with some astonished visitors.

But this is approaching a folk tale, and the Met’s rooms were created with far more rational, if not social engineering, ends in mind. Architect, professional home restorer, and Met curator Charles Over Cornelius had touted the “vitalizing influence of period group displays” in his article “The Museum and the Collector” in the inaugural issue of Antiques magazine from 1922. Cornelius’ dry prose unpacks the relationship between selection, arrangement, and connoisseurship of decorative works in a museum. It also provides a sociological anatomy of the collector.

Most collecting is done from one of three points of view—the aesthetic, the historical, or the utilitarian. The aesthetic point of view emphasizes the art content and quality of an object whatever its material or period; the historical attitude allows its historic import or interest to outweigh the measure of its artistic quality, while a utilitarian collector assembles objects of a decorative art for actual use, however carefully he chooses with discriminating care as to their artistic quality. All these viewpoints may be satisfied in the museum by a certain amount of period grouping.

In Cornelius’ account, the visitor to period arrangements is already a consumer of goods, taste, and history. The museum provides visual material that, while not itself available for sale, stimulates the broader market. Elsewhere in the magazine, an unsigned editorial describes “an intensified interest in places and objects of historical and antiquarian value” either connected to “stimulated national self-consciousness resulting from participation in the World War, or somehow a by-product of the Americanization movement”—that is, the initiatives designed to convert immigrants into Americans. This new interest resulted in art exhibits “in which relics, some valuable, some merely curious, some, perhaps, absurd, are coming to be a recognized part of community gatherings of all kinds.” Given the barely concealed venality of Cornelius’ imagined collector, the jump to imagining a chummy, tag-sale-loving “community” of collectors is startling. The anonymous editor’s use of the dog-whistle phrase “Americanization movement” suggests this community would be composed of individuals who, as late as 1922, believed that the rigorous assimilation of immigrants into so-called American culture was not merely important but dangerously incomplete. Enthusiasm for antiques was apparently thought to be a bulwark against degenerate hordes. Among those professing such views were the creators of the Met’s period rooms.

The two catalogues published by the museum to coincide with the opening of the American Wing did more overt ideological work. A Handbook of the American Wing was coauthored by Cornelius and Halsey; the latter was “nativist and anti-immigrant in affiliation and antimodern in his sympathies,” historian Neil Harris writes, adding a further wrinkle to the meaning of the period rooms. The second publication was also coauthored by Halsey, this time with his third wife, Elizabeth Tower: The Homes of Our Ancestors, as Shown in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York from the Beginnings of New England through the Early Days of the Republic, Exhibiting the Development of the Arts of Interior Architecture and House Decoration, the Arts of Cabinetmaking, Silversmithing, etc., Especial Emphasis Being Laid upon the Point That Our Early Craftsmen Evolved from the Fashions of the Old World a Style of Their Own; with an Account of the Social Conditions Surrounding the Life of the Original Owners of the Various Rooms. The interminable title matches the book’s bombastic insistence on the greatness of “the spirit in which those men who made the colonies and those who founded the republic lived their lives at home and superimposed urbanity upon the site of the primeval wilderness.”

Halsey’s image of the past was reactionary, to say the least. As he confided to de Forest in a personal letter, “We should endeavor to show in the rooms things which have class. The furnishings should be restrained and no semblance of crowding permitted”—the assumption being that those who might crowd in would bring with them the worst traits of unwanted, unfit, “un-American” groups. This celebration of ancestral homes took place less than half a year after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, signed into law on May 24 by President Calvin Coolidge (whose White House Halsey would decorate in 1925) in order to “limit the immigration of aliens into the United States, and for other purposes” by means of annual quotas of “two per centum of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the United States Census of 1890.” Much as the American Wing institutionalized an ideological experiment around American domestic culture and history, so this law made permanent those quotas set in place temporarily two years earlier. The restrictions of the 1924 act unpleasantly echo the aesthetic logic of the antiques collector, returning the nation by means of “informed” selection to a bygone time of supposed greater order and homogeneity. As recent books like Adam Cohen’s Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era have shown, the federal government’s decision to turn to 1890 census data to create immigration legislation in the 1920s emerged from discriminatory eugenicist theories that emphasized the hereditary dangers of miscegenation as well as problems caused by “weak minded” members of the working class, who were bound to reproduce in excessive numbers. There was also the perceived danger of the spread of Communism. The ethnic and multinational makeup of the United States depicted in the 1890 census gave license to dramatic restrictions on immigration—helpfully for nativists, as the census all but neglected to admit the existence (and populations) of the continents of Africa and Asia, even as it closed the door to Southern and Eastern Europeans. So while Germany was given a quota of 51,227 and Great Britain was given a quota of 34,007, Italy received a quota of just 3,845. A colonial construct called “South West Africa (proposed mandate of Union of South Africa)” received the minimum quota of 100 persons—African Americans who came to the United States as slaves were considered irrelevant to the act. Other large nations receiving the minimum designation included India, China, and Persia.

The nativist shift that culminated in the 1924 act wasn’t limited to the hushed discourse of collectors of decorative things, of course. “Nordic Victory Is Seen in Drastic Restrictions” read a Los Angeles Times headline on April 13, 1924, citing the coming act as well as Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, first published in 1916, with new editions in 1921 and 1923. Grant’s book outlined a three-tiered system by which whites might identify as “Mediterraneans,” “Alpines,” and “Nordics,” with the final category being the purest and superior designation. Grant warned against the corruption of American society by immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as from the growing economic empowerment of African Americans, whose migration north to industrialized cities disturbed his sense of natural order. He predicted a dissolution of the U.S. into a fragmented, corrupt nation of mongrels if absolute power were not maintained by Nordic whites, whom he somewhat creatively equated with individuals of English, Scottish, and Dutch descent. Grant’s theory of eugenics seemed to condone ethnically and economically motivated violence, such as the West Frankfort, Illinois, mob beating and arson attack carried out on August 5, 1920 against Italian immigrants, who were perceived by local members of the white working class to be colluding with the Mafia. The July 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City, aka the “Klanbake,” saw an almost successful insurgency when Klan sympathizers rejected both an anti-Klan plank in the party’s platform and the nomination of Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, a second-generation Irish American and Catholic. A year later, in August 1925, 25,000 Klansmen marched on Washington, DC, to demonstrate their white-robed numbers and fundamentalist determination.

Beyond serving as an inflammatory ideology, whiteness was a legal concept, as some regarded nation and race as synonyms. In 1925 an Oregon court heard testimony from anthropologist Franz Boas that “it would be utterly impossible to classify” Tatos O. Cartozian and other Armenians “as not belonging to the white race” and ruled in U.S. v. Cartozian that they were European “Alpines.” That same year, the state of Michigan successfully sued to revoke the U.S. citizenship of John Mohammad Ali, a traveling lecturer and wholesale importer born in India, arguing that race and nationality were inextricable. When Ali had become a naturalized citizen in 1921, “high caste” Hindus were considered “white” and therefore eligible for naturalization. But the 1923 case U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind created new precedent that Indians were not white. Ali attempted to defend himself by arguing that he was in fact of Arabian descent, even employing testimony from a University of Michigan eugenicist who argued that Ali was white due to his Middle Eastern ancestry as well as due to the shape and size of his head. The judge ruled against Ali, stating that Ali’s skin was not light enough for naturalized citizenship under current law.

Ultimately, the Met’s American period rooms reflect the eugenicist theory that swept American culture in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Halsey and de Forest’s message was not one of tolerance or collaboration, but rather of required improvement. They wanted to correct newcomers, and in 1924 they set in place a vision of elite homes of America previous to Western expansion, when the United States had not yet fully colonized the Louisiana Territory. Theirs was, additionally, a vision of East Coast gentility at a time of stark disparities, before the emergence of an American middle class in the 1820s and in the midst of an ever-expanding domestic slave economy. This intensely selective vision has been only nominally revised by the museum over time, though the physical space itself has been much reordered and improved. Electricity was added in 1974. In 1980 the bank facade courtyard became an interior space. Starting in 1982 a handful of rooms of the later nineteenth century and beyond were added at the back of the wing. A more spectacular renovation in 2009 brought the elevator and touch-screen displays, improvements for historical accuracy to some period rooms, and a ribbon-cutting speech by First Lady Michelle Obama, who used the occasion to stress the importance of access to the arts for all.

I have no way of knowing what the American Wing’s curators have said to one another over the years regarding the ways in which the period rooms should be labeled, of course. Searching through the numerous touch-screen displays (some of which have a tendency to freeze), I found little mention of the labor, whether paid or not, that created the historical American edifices and furnishings, though there is lengthy discussion of various period styles, master architects, and the curatorial exertions that have resulted in these remarkably atypical “typical” luxe rooms. Nor could I find good intel regarding the original curators’ vision of how contemporary audiences were meant to understand this reconstruction of American life. Yet, in the depths of one of the touch screens, I did finally discover a single digital card on Halsey’s goals in “Educating New Americans.” It is seemingly randomly placed at the end of the series in Gallery 9, the Powel Room, 1765–66. As the card explains, Halsey apparently hoped that the 1924 displays would “teach newly arrived immigrants about American history and values, so that they might assimilate more easily.” I am not sure why current curators have chosen to locate this important information at the bottom of the electronic pot. The year 1924 should be urgently on our minds. And the period rooms are as much, if not far more, a portrait of that time than of any previous era. They should be described as such.

Date: February 6, 2017

Publisher: Lapham's Quarterly

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the article.

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On site.

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Paneling from Marmion, the Fitzhugh family house, Tidewater, Virginia, c. 1756. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1916.

A NOTE ON VANITAS

The driver exited his vehicle to take a selfie with the animals.
—Wikipedia, “List of selfie-related injuries and deaths"

Is all still vanity? Four hundred years ago, Dutch and Flemish painters produced hyperrealist still lifes of flowers, food, and luxury goods, seemingly fixing these gauds beyond time. So-called Vanitas images symbolize the brevity of human life, as well as the ephemerality and essential emptiness of earthly pursuits. Paradoxically, the Vanitas image also boastfully advertises the artist’s “ability to give permanence to the ephemeral and thereby overcome death,” according to historian Sybille Ebert-Schifferer. This tantalizing tension between human mortality and human ambition maintains today: High-net-worth individuals spend ever more in hopes of liberating their physical selves from senescence and death, while the rest of us obsessively save our memories to the cloud, convinced that the digital records that compose us will act as viable substitutes after we are dead. Meanwhile, the online graveyard grows. For example, the number of deceased individuals with Facebook profiles increases by an estimated 8,000 “users” per day, suggesting that our attempts to memorialize everyone and everything may mainly recall the fragility and brevity of life. Just as the Vanitas—also known as the pronkstilleven, or luxury still life, for its shiny and expensive contents—reminded wealthy patrons of their own earthly impermanence, we now negotiate a world of images that confusingly express our time’s extreme finitude (global warming, resource wars, economic stratification) even as they promise escape and immortality (life extension, quantum computing, planetary colonization).

In its earliest appearances in the English language, “vanity” flags the transitory nature of the human body, as well as the essential bootlessness of corporeal whim. Derived from a Latin root meaning “empty, void,” vanity is a paradoxical and sometimes dangerous way of relating to the self: To be vain is to mistake the changeable for the permanent, to love an image in the place of embodied presence, as the drowning victim Narcissus did in myth. Vanity is a conceptual error at once semantic and ontological, in which an item belonging to one category (the body) is presented as if it belongs to another (the numinous). Vanity may be the category mistake to end all category mistakes, a tragic misapprehension that is, all the same, associated with a non-negligible supply of pleasure and fun. Indeed, vanity often assists in crucial ways in our identification and interpretation of value, particularly when it comes to those endlessly seductive, sometimes troubling, sometimes anodyne items: art objects and luxury goods. Though we should perhaps know better, we hope that new purchases and proximity to beautiful, costly things will bring us increased vitality.

In this sense, little has changed since the 1600s, when opulent still-life paintings repurposed the failure to fully recognize our mortality as subject matter. Roland Barthes remarks on the seductive “sheen” of these meticulous and costly renderings of tables piled with wet grapes, split peaches, and shimmering oysters, which symbolize pleasures of fleshly existence; and the occasional leering skull or recently snuffed candle, which symbolize frailty and death. He reads the precise detail of these images as not merely allegorical, but expressive of a drive on the part of the artist to imprint one’s mark “upon the inert by shaping and manipulating it.” The art historian Svetlana Alpers, meanwhile, observes the remarkable “attentiveness” shown to the things of the pronkstilleven, whose astonishing realism suggests that they may also be visual documents of a new and modern style of looking, proofs of an emerging empiricism; soon artists might not merely paint nature but influence it.

As Barthes and Alpers note, the author of the Vanitas painting always seems just about to step into the image, to seize an oyster or disturb a precarious table setting. In Jacques de Gheyn II’s 1603 Vanitas Still Life, a massive hovering bubble threatens either to burst, ruining the composition, or to reflect the curved image of the artist himself, thereby interrupting the illusion of this apparently perfectly impersonal representation. The skill necessary to convey this opposition—between the ephemerality of experience and the overwhelming sensual presence of the physical world—ups the ante: The effort lavished on the delicate, shining surfaces implies that the painter may not believe in his own fleeting nature so much as his vicarious immortality, as guaranteed by the liveliness of the very work he was engaged in painting. The eternal present of the Vanitas image is animated not merely by the voluptuous objects it contains but by the illusion of an eternally living artist, who forever seems to hover just beyond the frame.

What is vanity now, and does it equate with mere selfishness or indicate a more complex balance of rational belief and carnal experience? Cryogenics labs offer to reanimate us into a future of improved technology. Luxury spas promise the approximation of youth. Google’s (a.k.a. Alphabet’s) Calico biotechnology arm will leverage the power of nature to extend life. These endeavors—often described in terms of service, even obligation, to the entire life-loving species—are buttressed by antiaging researchers who seem driven to prove that the more privileged among us are in fact no longer absolutely mortal. At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that, for the foreseeable future, we’ll all age and eventually pass away, particularly since senescence and death are not just emotionally but monetarily involved processes. The populations of many countries are disproportionately aged and aging, which poses challenges to the configuration of cities and economies (as well as questions about representation and inclusion); collective resources are already being strained, even as wealth is distributed with an unevenness that rivals the early nineteenth century—a statistic that becomes more disturbing the longer one ponders it.

The ways in which we recognize and deny death are embodied in the material things with which we surround ourselves. The drive to collect, categorize, and archive is one response to the uncertainty of mortality, and today’s ever-expanding capacities for digital storage encourage the endless memorialization of oneself and loved ones. The permanence or impermanence of such traces, which depend on the viability of servers and compatibility of files, software, and hardware, is debatable; indeed, the update could be the double-edged sword upon which our digital identities fall. Yet perhaps posterity is of lesser consequence to us than it once was. We are able to document our lives with unprecedented speed and medial diversity and produce endless streams of selfies and video testimonies for the “here” and “now.” If most of our content is addressed exclusively to the immediate present, perhaps we have begun to dispense with the notion of posterity at the very moment at which we are, at least in theory, able to save everything. In this case, it is not merely our conception of mortality that has been destabilized, but also our sense of time, in that we have begun to favor ephemerality and inhabit the present—on Snapchat and beyond—in new ways.

This issue of Triple Canopy features artists, writers, and critics who are thinking and working in the midst of these paradoxes. They reflect on a wide range of topics, from the unstable glamour of K-pop to the collective process of aging in naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs), from the deadly force deployed by the American police to the consolations of the recovery of one Los Angeles artist’s cenotaph-like home, from the antideath architecture of Arakawa and Gins to multiple contemporary interpretations of the Vanitas image tradition, from the much-heralded “end of death” to the pursuit of impossible—or nearly impossible—forms of beauty. The futility of human striving meets the plenitude of digital memory, and acts of self-representation contrast with attempts to comprehend the situation of the human species, prompting us to ask: Does death still define life as the “vanity of all vanities,” as Ecclesiastes has it, if death is also a highly remunerative field of scientific research and product development? How will solutions to the perceived problem of mortality be shared out, fairly or otherwise? What framing device will replace the all-comprehending selfie stick?

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Date: September 15, 2016

Publisher: Triple Canopy

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.

Otto Marseus Van Schrieck, detail of Still-Life with Insects and Amphibians, 1662, oil on canvas.

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On site.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selfie-related_injuries_and_deaths

THE IMAGE OF GENRE

IT WOULD BE a very long list indeed if I were to name all of the visual artists dead and living whom I know to have written novels, commissioned novels to be written, or published other literary works. And such acts of publication have not been limited to the bound book. Artists have hung framed pages in galleries, installed (therefore unreadable) books and pamphlets in vitrines, photographed poems and novels and plays, performed poems and novels and plays, printed poems and other unclassifiable though apparently literary texts in vinyl on gallery walls, fabricated and displayed objects described in canonical poems and novels and plays, and even stopped being artists in order to become full-time writers. (Although, I personally know of no one who has done this last thing.) This is to say, it would be a very long and likely incomplete list! The phenomenon to which I refer, that of literary production for not just gallery space but also specific audiences of contemporary art, as opposed to concertedly “literary” audiences, is so broadly, variously, and at times ingeniously undertaken that I am doing no one a major intellectual favor by pointing out its existence.

But, having thought this phenomenon over a bit, and being a writer, it occurred to me that it might be worth discussing the persistence of not just the category of literature — in these intensely mediated days — but also and more significantly the categories of literature, especially by way of the appropriation of literary styles of authorship by visual artists. I should note that I am not angry at visual artists for becoming, or already being, literary authors. I would only like to offer a few observations about how this appropriation of certain semi-professional roles seems to occur, with these observations grouped under a title that indicates, by way of preview for those with limited time, what I am about to argue.

Since the turn of the century before last, literary experimentation has been good for creating readers fluent in the ways of literary experiment. Whether or not exclusively due to such efforts, we are now familiar enough with the diversity of literary genres, their conventions and interpenetrations, that we no longer require written works to adhere to particular laws of form or content in order to be able to read them. The progressive pastiche of various literary heroes, both modernist and post-, has greatly expanded our conception of what and where a poem might be. Even so, radio and moving images quickly overtook (or, had already overtaken) our experimenting heroes, indicating new levels of fungibility of content. These media simultaneously overtook, in publicness and popularity, a genre-agnostic entity of even longer standing than modernism itself: the novel.

It is worth pausing a moment on the novel. I have called it a “genre-agnostic entity,” but it is, of course, also a literary genre. As its name suggests, the novel is a new or novel kind of work, and since its earliest appearances in various parts of the world previous even to the 11th century, with varying degrees of fictiveness and interest in something called a plot, it has been a kind of long-form commemorative and speculative writing that is also quite willing to absorb and depict other kinds of writing and styles of speech and thought, both literary and nonliterary. Fast-forward to the 19th century in France and the novel has become a multifariously designated space for the writing of history, of journalism and critique of journalism, of sociological and economic analysis, gossip, sex tips, table manners, poetry and song, political debate, satire, travelogue, fashion reporting, not to mention dictionary entries. (It is also worth noting that most of this mix can as easily be found in novels of the Renaissance and before.) The novel has survived on the merits of its engaging narrative structure and closeness to everyday life, but these qualities are possibly less significant than its willingness, even eagerness, to be other kinds of writing and forms of expression. As we have seen of late (with Cole, Heti, Knausgaard, Lerner, et al.), the novel, fiction’s grand unit, is also quite often documentary and/or true.

The brilliant omnivorousness — or content-agnostic composting, depending on how you understand literary evolution — of the novel has additionally meant that its diversion into an array of predictable subcategories or strictly defined, sometimes concertedly commercial types known as “genre fiction” is yet another opportunity for appropriation; here of a more fixed version of the novel by some less fixed one, or the other way around. The novel alters, specializes, divides, recombines. It plays on cultural and aesthetic dichotomy, portraying division as well as synthesis. The existence of so-called “genre” novels proves that a major part of the appeal of the novel is its ability to be other than itself: the quick read of the formulaic thriller or bodice-ripper is diametrically opposed to the slow-burning reveal of the literary masterpiece — or, at least, I think so.

I only think so, or know I only think so, because of what I know of the state of genre. I am familiar enough with the diversity of genres, their conventions and interpenetrations, that I no longer require literary works to adhere to particular laws, in order to know how to read them. When I come to a lengthy insurance contract included verbatim in a novel, I know, for example, that I have permission to skim or skip this text and don’t need to read closely in order to discover key plot points and character motivations. It’s present merely for verisimilitude. I mean, I may believe this. On the other hand, I may believe that this insurance document is a painstakingly constructed scrim behind which lurks a secret architecture determining the course of all events occurring within the world of the novel. It’s up to me, the reader, to administrate the reading, to decide. The insurance document is a decorative accessory to the novel, or, in another scenario, the novel is a decorative, possibly interpretive accessory to the insurance document; either I am reading a novel with an insurance document attached or it’s an insurance document with a dependent novel. This is a plausible present of genre, genre as conventions of reading, as a series of decisions about which kinds of reading go where. (In the past, genre had been a succession of rules for composition, later it indicated different species of texts, and even later the kinds of textual patterns one saw in a given text.) Now genre may be in the eye of the beholder. Or, as an acquaintance recently remarked, the public sphere is built from genre. I think that what this acquaintance meant is that the public sphere is built from conventions of looking and reading, from publicly or mutually recognizable conventions for determining what kind of a thing something is and what we might be able to do with this thing.

This becomes clearer with a (mostly) literary example: I think that we are interested in the recent publication by Badlands Unlimited — a publishing concern run by artists Paul Chan, Ian Cheng, Micaela Durand, and Matthew So — of a trio of romance novels because here a high-art brand is publishing a low, popular form, several works of literal “genre” writing. In its adherence to genre convention, this series, “New Lovers,” enacts a kind of image. And in this image is included our amusement at cheerful fulfillment, as well as gentle flouting, of conventions. These books, probably fun to read (I have not read them, though I have discussed them with friends who claim to have done so), are also designed to have a valid conceptual existence, even without being read or requiring our reading. (I don’t, for example, feel pressure to read them, though I like knowing about them.) Though books have been for some time trading on this fact about their existence — that it does not always matter whether or not we read them, that they look nice on a table and so on — here it seems that the physical container, the trim size, cover design (very generic!), etc., is less important than the very genre. It is not that the books are images of books — though they have circulated widely online as JPEGs — but that they are an image of genre, an image of a series of conventions for reading as well as for discussing books, an attitude toward what they may or may not contain.

Reviewers and critics hoping to demonstrate an earnest relationship to “New Lovers”’s first installment of three publications helpfully perform our reading for us, summarizing plots, treating the writers like literary authors in interviews, adding exquisite detail to the image of genre. Indeed, here there may even be a kind of good-natured pun on the very term, as applied to painting (“genre painting”), in that scenes from art-centric everyday life, and perhaps less sex itself than the consumption of porn and images in general, are reproduced for us as the species of these novels. (For example, God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name, by Andrea McGinty, tells the tale of an “art career” as it devolves and/or improves into a series of sexual exploits.) Our ongoing interest in the image is reflected via the genre of these novels; in this sense, they represent a kind of catachrestic portrait of everyday life, documenting nobody’s — which is to say, everybody’s — actual activities and reflecting an improved, possibly “tasteful” version of our (conventional, everyday) looking habits, tastes.

Anyway, artists write novels all the time. I think immediately of AA Bronson’s Lena, or Lana, and Andy Warhol’s a: A Novel, and there is even a recent anthological publication devoted to artist’s novels to tell us more. Of course, I am not sure that the fictions of artists are inherently interesting. I am not sure if the fictions of novelists are inherently interesting! But there seems to be a special license associated with the literary enterprise when undertaken by a visual artist. The artist knows how to organize visual information. The artist manages the informational architecture of the novel, too. The artist makes available aspects of the novel that have to do with this work of management, questions of material format, discursive truth and artifice, means of distribution, intellectual property. The artist’s novel seems to celebrate the tactics of the studio, unsurprisingly, rather than the dynamics of nuclear families or other human genealogies. In this sense, the artist’s novel also seems linked with poetics, where this term refers to a set of strategies for making, especially in or with language. This is, then, not quite the private literature of the living room, bedroom, airplane, or poolside lounge. Reading an artist’s novel is often a kind of aesthetic or intellectual work rather than a leisure activity. And this is yet another perfect deployment of the novel, generically speaking: As we have already seen, the novel does not care which type of everyday life or habit or profession or other nonliterary thought or activity you want it to absorb. The novel is already (and always was) something other than, and in addition to, fiction. It is only too happy to become the discourse of art.

Institutions and businesses displaying visual art, which are related or adjacent though not identical to the public sphere, could also be built from genre. Certainly they have a tendency to cultivate particular conventions of looking. If they do not already enact certain generic conventions, they seem like plausible sites for human encounters with genre. A gallery wall becomes peculiarly useful when we think about it like a page. This wall, like the page of a book, is more or less public, though often only theoretically so. Like print and digital books, the wall of the gallery has a mixed relationship to privacy and propriety. Like print and digital books, the gallery show is usually a mix of singular authorship and shared, collective, and/or industrial production. The analogy is broad and not particularly compelling in itself, and it would probably not be worth drawing this comparison were it not already being drawn for me.

Recently, wandering the cubicles of a large art fair, I came upon some pieces of text by the artist Darren Bader. These were printed on a wall. I turned them over in my mind. In a space of constant potential social encounter, one needs a place to direct one’s eyes, so I read the text with care. I wondered if I should consider the text poetry. It was fragmentary, divided into smaller units. One unit mentioned Emily Apter, a professor of French and American literature with whom I had once studied. I felt a weird kind of gratitude. I also considered the fact — these “poems” were often about reading — that I should be reading more, more frequently, and also in larger quantities. I was spending, I mused, too much time in public.

A few months later, at MoMA’s show of Jacob Lawrence’s “The Migration Series,” multiple rooms displayed books, ca. 1912–1948, behind glass. Cover art and design by Charles Alston, Margaret Bourke-White, E. Simms Campbell, Aaron Douglas, and Winold Reiss stood in metonymically for what I could not read inside. Elsewhere, books were displayed fastened open to a single spread. I photographed titles by Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Scott Nearing, Emmett J. Scott, Jean Toomer, Walter White, Carter Godwin Woodson, and Richard Wright, among others, creating a visual bibliography I later found for some reason to be more complete than the online checklist for the exhibition. I wasn’t sure what my impulse to collect or “read” these titles and authors in this way meant. In so doing, it is likely that I was mostly considering exhibition strategies and not really reading much at all. Yet, reading was being mentioned. The unit of the book — evidence of cultural production — was being mentioned. With my iPhone I dutifully (and privately) repeated this mentioning gesture.

There is a strange promise of privacy in many public displays of books. “You’ll read this later,” such displays seem to say. And when one is alone or, at least, at home, if one is not reading something else, one might indeed read. But the promise might also remain just that: a promise, and a kind of fantasy. Sometimes displays of books or book-like displays are also an image of a kind of reading, a kind of reading worth describing as an image precisely because it is so difficult to obtain in a time of ubiquity of text. The limits of the book are, perhaps, more porous than ever; sometimes, particularly if the book in question is a PDF, I find these limits nonsensically breeched by my email. The book could, in the context of an exhibition, be a metonym for a kind of historical knowledge or cultural production, but it might also be a metonym for a kind of attention, style of reading, or even a mode of consciousness. And in standing in for a kind or convention of reading, the book-as-image is a vague image of genre. (Such images become increasingly precise and focused when they bring us closer to acts, rather than fantasies, of reading — though fantasies of reading are also pretty interesting.) There is really a great deal of exhibition of reading these days. Reading is variously and frequently — via reading rooms, performances, and installed printed objects — purveyed as a notable and attractive habit of everyday life, which it also, to be clear, is; in this sense, displays of reading are a lot like genre paintings.

Not one to be left out of a market in which it is so clearly implied, the Bibliographical Society of America at last arrived at the party with the recent publication of an article addressing the strong showing by books in current visual art. This article, “The 2014 Whitney Biennial: the Book as a Medium in Contemporary Art” by Michael Thompson, provides an exhaustive 50-page description of the 2014 Whitney Biennial’s book-related contents. For all the nerdy delight this extremely precise and engaging account of bookish stuff in the Biennial inspired in me, it let me down a bit by concluding with a sort of non-conclusion, that “books as an aggregated medium comprising many component parts, present few constraints for contemporary artists.” Thompson further observes:

The one component that all conceptual art needs is an idea, and a book, which can take the form of scroll, codex, score, patterned broadside, leporello, audio recording, manuscript sketchbook, and most recently electronic file, and which has long been viewed as the primary means by which to transmit ideas of any kind, whether scientific, philosophical, literary, or artistic, may therefore be the final irreducible essence of conceptual art: an idea without a fixed physical object. [1]

It is inevitably true that books and ideas go well together. However, it is a little odd to find a bibliographer turning to a canonical summary moment in the history of art, something called “the final irreducible essence of conceptual art,” in order to explain the invocation and discussion of the everyday activity of reading that the many displays in the Biennial including books undertook. Displays asked visitors not just to recognize the possibility of reading but to do it, with various necessary time commitments, levels of concentration, and access (many books were behind glass). I much prefer Thompson’s earlier claim that books have a lot of “parts,” and therefore artists like them. I’d go even broader and speculate that in addition to “parts,” books have a lot of kinds, and therefore artists know that people like books (that people even resemble books) — and that people like books so much that people want to experience their liking of them and experiencing of them, over and over again. And people want to talk about books and hear more and more, as Gertrude Stein might say, about how everyone likes them. Do people like books more than paintings? It’s a tough and perhaps silly call, but if you think about it: likely, yes.

What the final, irreducible essence of conceptual art, in all its majesty, may allow artists to do — as it broadcasts its expensive maxims into the present, out of the pit of the past — is to put things in galleries that are not works of art. Though context may do its darndest to turn these non-art things into art, it remains possible to say that what is being displayed, and therefore via visitors’ eyeballs as well as gallerists’ and curators’ efforts valued, isn’t art. I do not mean to suggest that such things aren’t valuable. Rather, their value is imperfectly symmetrical with, and imperfectly assimilable to, structures and conventions of value associated with artworks. What also becomes clear, which is to say, noticeable, is a plurality of modes of authorship; that professional artists aren’t the only individuals who make things and that everyone who makes things isn’t an artist (this last point being meant more as an economic and professional fact than an insult). Thus, if we come to look at a poem, or an essay, or a novella in a gallery — if we see a framed page from a novel by Jill Magid, for example, or a page photographed by Erica Baum —we are reminded of one of visual art’s closest outsides, the outside of reading-not-looking, even as we remain within the context of visual art. And this moment of exteriorization, this appearance of the anomalous if commonplace activity of reading along with the conventions of literary genre in the space of visual art, by way of a certain kind of image, reminds me of another moment in history, one that has little enough to do with conceptualism.

Classicist Gregory Nagy’s “Transmission of Archaic Greek Sympotic Songs: From Lesbos to Alexandria” gives an account of the professionalization and inscription of lyric poetry — in other words, the way lyric poems came to be treated, once they were actually written down. According to Nagy, a “reenacting I” in written lyric poems reenacts an archaic form of public address that would at one time have occurred before a live audience, at a symposium. Here the written text represents a reality that, according to Nagy, is already generic; the live performance was in itself “a fictional occasion,” with pursuant compositional rules and necessity of adoption of a persona corresponding to group expectations. [2] In this sense, once we get to the written lyric poem, what we are reading is a fiction of a fiction, a mise en abyme, as Jacques Derrida (with apologies for the name drop) might put it, a “thinking about its own possibility.” What is real or historical in the archaic, live format, in the expectations of a certain group of listeners, must be somehow reenacted in the written environment. Nagy reads anticipation usefully: Whoever fictionally “speaks” in the written lyric poem, formerly a singer, is the product of the interaction of a group and a conventional role, which interaction, in being written down, is also being reread at some historical distance. The lyric genre, even in its earliest written forms, is according to Nagy already historical, complexly fictive, and dramatically opposed to the private, whether or not we might read such poems privately.

I have to say that I think literature that occurs in art galleries is more interesting when it has done a bit of thinking about its own possibility, and when this thinking has included consideration not just of format and some broad idea of interdisciplinarity, but also consideration of readers — readers both past and present, many of whom may also be writers. (I am thinking about the inclusion, for example, of social histories.) A mention of genre that expresses various kinds of fictionalizing of social forms, and which even socializes fiction, is also a way to think about habit. In this sense, we get to keep our pun: images of genre are paintings of everyday life in which a day lasts a long, long time.

Date: September 13, 2015

Publisher: The Los Angeles Review of Books

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.

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On site.

Hanne Darboven, Detail from Quartett >88<, 1988, 1989, Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2000.

1. Michael Thompson, “The 2014 Whitney Biennial: the Book as a Medium in Contemporary Art,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 109, no. 2 (June 2015): 183. With thanks to Stuart Comer for bringing this important article to my attention.
1. Gregory Nagy, “Transmission of Archaic Greek Sympotic Songs: From Lesbos to Alexandria,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 46.

YEARS AGO BEFORE THE NATION WENT BANKRUPT
An introduction to the journals of David Wojnarowicz

Artist David Wojnarowicz’s thirty or so journals are stored in a pair of boxes in New York University’s Fales Library. Folders of loose photographs, tickets, and postcards are also included, as is an oversize wall calendar, sparsely annotated by Wojnarowicz, of the type one might find in the gift shop of the American Museum of Natural History (triceratops rooting in lush surrounds). “Series 1,” as this lot of the David Wojnarowicz Collection is designated, feels like a grouping of keepsakes: These are items in and by means of which Wojnarowicz marked, from 1970 to 1991, time’s passing. In 1992, he died at the age of thirty-seven.

The journals were also meant for publication and display. Composition books predominate, though there are larger spiral-bound notebooks and one three-ring binder. The covers are occasionally embellished with collage or a holographic sticker. Wojnarowicz interleaves clippings, print ads, band flyers. Pages are pasted over with typescript, newsprint, photocopies of photographs, handwritten notes, redacted poems. The journals were a location in which Wojnarowicz prepared—by means of plans, lists, sketches—work he would later execute in other media, and they were also a site for work. As they themselves self-consciously narrate, these books were a constant in the practice of a peripatetic artist who painted out of doors, who traveled, who regarded homelessness as inherent to humanity (what in one entry he refers to as “the matter of having no home”).

Wojnarowicz made extensive use of the text of his journals, excerpting and reworking sections to create essayistic pieces that appear in Close to the Knives and Memories That Smell like Gasoline. He wrote with his body as witness, vehicle, and recording device: For The Waterfront Journals, for instance, he conducted interviews with people he met on the streets of American cities before “transcribing” monologues from memory, perhaps fictionalizing. In this sense, the kinds of experience with which Wojnarowicz was concerned could not be rendered untrue by the embroidery of art; as the artist once said in an interview with Nan Goldin, “I grew up realizing and believing there’s no difference between fantasy and reality. I always believed that my fantasies were stored pieces of information.”[1]

This belief in fantasy as “stored … information” might inform our reading of the journals, for the writing here seems searingly honest and committed to the actual even as it is devoted to its own language and to the unreal concerns of literature—to symbolism, imagery, dream, erotic transport, and even a kind of lyric thought or philosophy of the self.

Of his diary accounts of sex at the West Side piers and elsewhere, Wojnarowicz told Sylvère Lotringer:

When I wrote them I was so excited to write them, to document them. I thought they were the most amazing things that I had ever seen. They were like films or they reminded me of Burroughs’s Wild Boys. I loved it. I loved the fact that it was outdoors, that it was by the river and in the wind. They were moments of incredible beauty to me.

I remember when I first started becoming more and more aware of AIDS. And here I am sitting with all these journals, looking at them in total disgust. … And now, years later, I realize I shifted again and want these things.[2]

It is with this in mind that one reads Wojnarowicz’s accounts of anonymous sex, his cinematic reflection of the encounter. Many of the selections I have made here, then, are graphic—perhaps more so than other previously published excerpts from the journals. There are also mundane episodes. We see a Manhattan that barely resembles our own. And we see Wojnarowicz at work, taking photos of hell in an alley (homelessness, refuse) or visiting an editor at the Soho Weekly News, the paper that would first publish his “Rimbaud in New York” series. I have wanted to show both the explicitness and the everydayness of Wojnarowicz’s writing practice, as it is in this meeting of the extraordinary and the routine that one finds the crucible of the artist’s personal myth.

I have also included “Dateline for Retrospective Catalog.” This sketch, written in list form, is a draft of a text that appeared in a catalogue of Wojnarowicz’s work from 1979 to 1990, Tongues of Flame. The published work, in paragraphs, is titled “Biographical Dateline,” and it expands the outline’s pithy notes. For example, what in the preparatory document is “Stabbed Steven: lizard tail in hand in police station” becomes, in “Biographical Dateline,”

Stabbed my brother in a fight back in n.y.c.—while waiting for the police to arrive at the apartment to take me away I played with my lizards. One of them dropped the tail off in a self-defense move. The tail continues wiggling for twenty minutes or so to confuse the predator. In the police station a cop asked me what I had in my hand. I replied, a lizard tail. Cops thought I’d gone over the edge.

If the draft “Dateline for Retrospective Catalog” lacks detail and standard syntax, it makes up for this in economy of expression, as a sort of episodic poem.

There is much that has been left out. Without mentioning the mass of writing and illustration that remains unpublished in the journals, it has also not been possible to preserve all of Wojnarowicz’s handwritten punctuation, his use of ellipses, spaces, and dashes of varying length. For this reason, one may look forward to Fales’s completion of a digitization project of the journals, at which time these will be viewable in their entirety online. (Additionally, from November 18 of this year until February 12, 2012, the Brooklyn Museum will host the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” formerly presented at the National Portrait Gallery, here emphatically including Wojnarowicz’s 1985–87 film A Fire in My Belly.)

Date: September 23, 2011

Publisher: Triple Canopy

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction, biography
Link to the introduction.

This piece includes transcriptions and images from the journals of David Wojnarowicz, housed at Fales Library at NYU. The text at left serves as an introduction to the selection, made in summer of 2011 for issue 14 of Triple Canopy, "Counterfactuals."

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Journal image.

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Journal image.

Journal image.

1. “Nan Goldin/David Wojnarowicz,” in David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, ed. Giancarlo Ambrosino (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006), 202.
1. “Sylvère Lotringer/David Wojnarowicz,” in Ambrosino, 194.

THE WRITER had a pragmatic side despite the wildness of his writing. He never claimed to write the truth—or even to write well, for that matter—and did not, as he later said, expect his fiction to be profitable, although it was. Most of all he wanted to be a celebrity, and he therefore composed a big, messy book that upset some people, even as it fascinated others. You could call his efforts performance art: he’d go down to the city and drum up sales by giving unhinged readings. His novel was published serially, and as he composed, he threw in catty references to reviews of previous installments. He had written a book about nothing, yet it was full of characters and events. Nothing much took place—the reader learned only about the first moments of somebody’s life over the course of many hundreds of pages—but there is perhaps no work of English prose more thundering with human activity, desires, and hairbrained schemes than Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Over a century later, it was termed “the most typical novel” of all world literature by Viktor Shklovsky, seminal Russian theorist, while Ian Watt, British-Californian booster of psychological realism, judged it “not so much a novel as a parody of a novel.” Either Tristram Shandy was a masterpiece against which all novels might be measured, or it was a weak attempt by an overly ambitious pretender with a clever idea but no control and even less taste, a torrent of “lexical diarrhea”—to repurpose Dave Eggers’s summation of Infinite Jest’s failings in a 1996 review published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The “weak novel” has been with us for a long time. The weak novel is ubiquitous. Indeed, it is possible that no novel exists without its allegedly weak(er) cousins and that no novel is without its own moments of weakness. In this reading, weakness is not a bad thing. Rather, weakness, specifically literary weakness, is enlivening, challenging, and generally has the effect of compelling the reader to move, as we say, outside their comfort zone. Weak novels cause us to attend to fiction as strategy rather than as entertainment. Tristram Shandy is a weak novel. It is a novel that only weakly consents to participate in the conventions of genre, that is always about to—and sometimes does—fail to be a novel at all. This is, I want to show, an important quality for a literary work to have—the quality of weak identification, or even total disidentification, with its own type or genre. This effort, rather than being destined for failure, is in fact fundamental for the flourishing of the novel form.

I won’t expend further time teasing this idea. I’ll show my hand.

The weak novel indicates, toys with, mocks, anxiously dissects, or otherwise explores language itself and the problems of literary form. It reflects on its own status as a novel. It is not merely “meta”; rather, if the weak novel is self-referential, it is so in order to capture and contemplate the tropes of the contemporary novel and the novel’s function in the present. The weak novel shows its work. It makes no secret of its status as a piece of artifice.
The weak novel is frequently non-narrative and/or seemingly incomplete. It does not avoid digression and possibly exhibits eccentric scrapbooking, grab-bag tendencies that call upon the reader to help the writer out in a struggle to marshal the book’s very material (i.e., to finish writing it). The weak novel may be entirely unbound, a series of pages in a box (see B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates of 1969), or simply incoherent. Of course, its incoherence is never truly simple: where gaps are present, there the real work of reading begins.
At the same time, the physical book gets in the weak novel’s way. The weak novel doesn’t mind this obstacle; it plays with text, image, and layout to emphasize the object that is the codex, sometimes in a manner that interrupts the flow of story as such. The black page of Tristram Shandy is perhaps the most notorious example, but we might also consider the more subtle typographic experiments of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936), with its “newsreels,” or the veering textual architectures of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).
The weak novel is unoriginal. It may contain the unattributed work of other writers, writing copied from non-literary sources, lifted and/or recycled plots and characters, or have the same title as another, often better-known book (as in Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations of 1982). The weak novel does not hide its unoriginality. Rather, it flaunts it. The weak novel would like to be influenced and in fact celebrates influence rather than anxiously rejecting it.
The weak novel is a performance. It is no “mere” book, a conventional mass-produced object that the reader views as sprung, unmediated, from the imagination of a distant genius-author. The weak novel is confusingly present in the so-called real world. The weak novel may be an account of actual events, some of which the writer has staged and participated in, if only for the purpose of describing them in the novel. The text of the weak novel may be a script for a series of live readings or interventions, the publication in novel-form of which lands as an afterthought. It might be the unvarnished record of acts that really took place that the writer of the weak novel dares to present nominally disguised as fiction (see 1997’s I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus) and therefore not fiction at all.
The weak novel inverts and reorders related novelistic hierarchies: figure and ground, diegesis and description (often containing too much description to be “normal,” the weak novel is a trove of “inappropriate” detail; see Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities of 1852), past and present, cause and effect. The weak novel enjoys decadence, along with frustrating forms of minimalism. It puts bodies before minds, prefers hints to strict delineations.

Having listed these qualities, I should acknowledge a possible elephant in the (contemporary) room. Autofiction—in which the author is a character or, what perhaps amounts to the same thing, possesses the same name as the author—is at once a symptom of the novel’s contemporary weakening and an indication of ways in which the novel is, in fact, less weak than it might be. In one reading, autofiction is simultaneously a symptom and mode of critique of contemporary media and bureaucracy, for it proposes protagonists who are fundamentally composed of writing; selves given over to scriptural technologies and algorithmic sorting, who exist in order to “end up in a book,” as Stéphane Mallarmé wrote. In another reading, current autofiction often clings to the conventions of nineteenth-century literary publishing and celebrity culture (i.e., the figure of the author) and could stand to be a tad weaker and weirder.

Autofictions of the 2010s tend to retrofit earlier, more radical meditations on the technical and commercial qualities of fiction to standard plots and are, therefore, generally although not uniformly less weak than their near ancestors. Earlier autofictions, meanwhile, interrogate the very possibility of literary writing, even forbidding themselves from being “smooth” and, therefore, “well written.” Robert Glück’s masterpiece Margery Kempe (1994) interweaves apparently documentary scenes from the sex life of “Bob” with the struggles of the titular medieval seer in her very carnal affair with the only son of God. Its deep weakness is, for example, breathtaking. Its vivid-to-the-point-of-weird descriptions of fucking and deliberately confusing temporal structure compel the reader to toggle between the late twentieth and early fifteenth centuries, as well as to negotiate Margery’s visions of assignations with Jesus on what seems to be an atemporal higher plane, thus drawing the reader into a trance-like state in which contemplation of corporeal sensation itself is paramount. The body exists in time, but we don’t know if it is fundamentally narrative; certainly, bodies are mortal, but it is not clear that the experience of existing in one is germane to the plot conventions of the realist novel. In fact, as Margery Kempe points out, to write a linear realist narrative may be to forego the body altogether—perhaps the self, too—in favor of well-worn tropes. The passionately weak autofictive novel is a special kind of info leak; it is a meter and exploration of what is admissible, limning the limits of what can be shared in prose. See also: Megan Boyle’s Liveblog (2018), whose title, while in a sense inaccurate—given that the author does not blog every single thing that happens to her while she is living (only quite a lot of it)—indicates a radical will to risk and vulnerability.

The weak novel’s active disregard for metrics of so-called good taste and desire to bring into full view the workings of the novel-as-cultural-machine require that it not only do more itself but also ask more of its reader. Here, of course, is what constitutes its counterintuitive weakness: it is a type of writing that does not allow one to simply “sit back and enjoy.” The ergodic nature of the weak novel—which is to say, its requirement of “nontrivial effort” for legibility as described by the critic Espen J. Aarseth in his study Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997)—demands the reader’s participation, sometimes as a coauthor of the work. We could think of this co-creative requirement in terms of the multiple-choice test (see recent work by Alejandro Zambra) or the choose-your-own-adventure tale (see Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch of 1963). Yet, novels are not ergodic merely through the introduction of narrative options; intertexts also contribute narrative uncertainty to novels because they require significant interpretive contributions and acts of intelligent suspicion on the part of the reader. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), a tale of two fictional authors told through their juxtaposed writings, is perhaps the most famous American novel of this sort. More recently, there is Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), with its unstable central fictional fiction, My Pafology, aka Fuck, a novella written pseudonymously by the novel’s erudite protagonist satirizing the appetite for exploitative fiction about the lives of Black Americans. And ergodicity does not end here: within the weakest of novels, time and space are fundamentally flexible, interpretive and interpretable modes. The reader may be tasked with adjudicating what is to be counted as an event at all. Nor is place a given. Writers like Renee Gladman in her Ravicka series (2010–2017) and Eugene Lim in Dear Cyborgs (2017) play with geographies and temporalities in order to compel the reader to notice the linguistic, rhetorical, and genre-related conditions necessary for our belief in recognizable timeframes and locales. A strong novel is set against the unironically dramatic backdrop of some moment of crucial historical transformation, while a weak novel debates the possibility (and worth) of depicting believable locations and events. A weak novel might, finally, engage with passivity, offering itself up as a story about “nothing,” as in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s plotless descriptions of interiors. The weak novel declines, elegantly and bizarrely, to serve as bland entertainment, preferring disorienting or diffractive views of its materials as opposed to reflexive, representational ones.

Talking about the weak novel is also a way to avoid linear descriptions of the novel’s various transformations. For the weak novel waxes and wanes; the novel’s exploration of its potential for weakness is a rickety, ad-hoc tradition, if it is one at all. We often hear of the novel’s “rise” (to bring in Ian Watt’s optimistic metaphor), its progress. But what if we think of the novel as engaging in nonlinear forms of growth, as well as decay? Anyone who has paid even a nominal amount of attention to academia will have noticed the lengths that scholars of the contemporary novel go to prove that innovation continues apace and that, therefore, the most important things to attend to are newness (often via hybridity or thrifty repurposing of the innovations of the past), avant-gardes, and the general forward march of heroic authors (this tendency may be even worse in the academic criticism of contemporary poetry—but that is a topic for another day). Given that the archaic sentences of Thucydides (460–400 BC) can never be rivaled for their mind-crushing syntax, even the most stringent historicist would have to agree that innovation does not move solely in the direction of the future, and what was written in the past is frequently innovative with respect to contemporary writing. Disorienting yet at ease with its own enormity, the weak novel suggests that what was written in the past may serve as an interpretation of what is written in the present.

In my nonlinear, spiraling lineage of the weak novel, much weakness in the contemporary novel emerges, paradoxically, from a medieval text, Sei Shōnagon’s eleventh-century Pillow Book, an ur-weak book that is perhaps more memoir or advice manual, and that has only been translated into English with some uncertainty, given that it exists in four distinct manuscript versions. This digressive text—a text composed wholly of digressions, it should be noted—contains lists and poems as well as narrative sections. Meanwhile, its influence on contemporary novelists is almost certainly greater than anything written by Victor Hugo or John Updike, to select two “strong” novelists somewhat at random. Lady Sei’s meditations have the additional power of addressing questions of media and materiality in minute detail: she lingers over matters of ink and paper, of costume and decor, along with the manner in which various signals might circulate within institutional space (here, a palace). To call her writings postmodern or “influenced” by the invention of hypertext or social media is a ludicrous anachronism and yet such statements do not, by the same token, seem entirely false.

Thus, the historical trajectory of the weak novel might be circular, even as weak novels engage with complex temporal forms. Nesting and hosting are common formal gestures to see in the weak novel because the weak novel does not revile digression or recursion. Think of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), for example, in which the titular character learns, in the second book and to his great chagrin, of the existence of the first book of the novel. Given that the Don’s ridiculous actions and attitudes are themselves motivated by readings in chivalric literature, here we have a situation in which the delusions of a character are presented to the character through his participation in the very sort of artwork that caused these delusions in the first place. This novel additionally proposes that the time of fiction is—like the time described by quantum physics—by nature a time of loops, running in multiple locations and directions at once, such that a character could well read the very book that has brought said character into existence. If we hope to escape the messianic, apocalyptic, and artificial time of Christianity (a linear time that undergirds present-day visions of efficiency), we should be looking to fictions such as this, fictions that help us confront our notions of time and how we mete out description along temporal axes and media formats. We need visionary temporalities, and we need books that raise physical sensation to the level of event. One of the primary affordances of novelistic weakness is to make narrative structure more porous, mystical, inefficient, and vulnerable to confusion with plain “reality,” as such. In an age of news cycles and boom and bust, of the instrumentalization of every sphere of human life, we urgently need to escape from the false opposition of repetition and innovation, the mess of unthinking valorizations of progress. Similarly, the weak novel’s complex rendition of the line between the fictive and the real should be of interest to anyone concerned about disinformation and the ways in which realities are discursively constructed.

To come full circle here myself, my theory of the weak novel is influenced by a mixture of writing, both within and beyond the realm of literary criticism. I borrow the adjective weak from the title of scholar Wai Chee Dimock’s 2020 book, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival. Although Dimock is primarily concerned with scenes of influence and exchange, I was drawn to the notion that a work of writing might only weakly identify with typologies of genre and/or with literature—that a work might have more “resilience,” to employ a term of Dimock’s, be longer-lasting, more nourishing and moving precisely by refusing expectations, withdrawing from obvious manifestations of skill, or otherwise declining to “go hard,” save in opposition to expectations and convention. Such an adamantly weak work might accomplish the alchemical feat philosopher and novelist Maurice Blanchot indicates in his 1962 essay on “Everyday Speech,” in which he describes the everyday as that which, paradoxically, is most difficult to grasp because of its tendency to “escape” us.

The weak novel allows us to reenter the fugitive and supposedly insignificant aspects of everyday life that capitalism has had difficulty assimilating (psychedelia/plain old “weird thoughts,” spacing out, daydream, the experience of the sacred, surprise, appreciation, satisfaction, fascination, ambivalence, tenderness, aimlessness, curiosity, among other mental paths of lesser resistance). This is, in some sense, to reword Timothy Morton’s recommendation of “tuning” in their influential book Hyperobjects (2013)—a broad term they use to describe what we should do with ourselves emotionally and psychologically, in light of approaching climate collapse. While I don’t pretend to entirely understand what Morton means, I have the sense that they would like us to extend ourselves to sense and experience what scholar Anne-Lise François has termed “uncounted experience,” a form of non-instrumental agency she identifies in her book Open Secrets that may be read as a rejection of commonplace validations of productivity where the self and the sensorium are concerned.

I think that the weak novel is the paradigmatic site for such past-hope-but-nonetheless-crucial, possibly-pointless-yet-indispensable contemplative and experiential exercises. And the weak novel can offer us even more than this—as if this were not enough—because it is a mode of literature that can make us less credulous and more playful readers, readers at home with the notion that undecidability is a fundamental feature of linguistic articulation, if not life itself. As the literary theorist Barbara Johnson once observed, “There is politics precisely because there is undecidability.” Thus the weak novel is, at its core, a political art form, a mode of writing that continually reaffirms that the relationship between language and what exists remains eternally open to debate and revision. It is a spot too weak to be conclusively instrumentalized.

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Date: November 30, 2022

Publisher: The Baffler

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

On site.

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Now’s Our Chance. | Bob May

On the Marquis de Sade

SODOM, LLC
The Marquis de Sade and the office novel.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the term bureaucracy entered the world by way of French literature. The neologism was originally forged as a nonsense term to describe what its creator, political economist Vincent de Gournay, considered the ridiculous possibility of “rule by office,” or, more literally, “rule by a desk.” Gournay’s model followed the form of more serious governmental terms indicating “rule by the best” (aristocracy) and “rule by the people” (democracy). Yet bureaucracy quickly developed a nonsatirical life of its own once the French Revolution got under way. The Terror was, of course, infamously bureaucratic, with dossiers the way to denunciation, condemnation, and execution.

On July 2, 1789, as legend has it, a voice rang out from the interior of the Bastille into the street below: “They are killing prisoners in here!” Two weeks later, citizens stormed the Bastille, inaugurating the long and complex series of events that would constitute the French Revolution. The alleged yeller, one Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, had been removed to the insane asylum at Charenton ten days before the siege, thus having miraculously galvanized his potential liberators or murderers and evaded them. It is a singular piece of luck that Sade was not present for the storming, for it is likely that, descending upon the marquis’ luxuriously appointed cell, the sansculottes would have had some difficulty differentiating Sade from his oppressors, much less from their own.

As this series of apocryphal events intimates, the Marquis de Sade occupies an unusual place in French letters. He is at once the paradigmatic aesthete to end all aesthetes, a supreme materialist and spendthrift, an aristocrat determined to organize his life around complexly choreographed orgies (and the eccentrically appointed locations necessary for these performances), and an iconoclast, if not a revolutionary. Though the paper trail that emerges from his early life includes at least three accusations of flaying, stabbing, poisoning, and other unusual forms of physical and emotional abuse—leveled by prostitutes and other women poorly protected by the law—Sade has been held up as a beacon of sexual liberation during an era benighted by Christian repression and hypocrisy. Susan Sontag and Julia Kristeva have praised the freedom of his writing and thought. As the myth of his cry to action from within the Bastille indicates, Sade’s readers are willing, in spite of his title, to receive him as an anarchist hell-bent on upending the feudal order of his day.

But for all Sade’s aristocratic indulgence of peculiar whims and profligate spending on whips and whores, he is also one of the first major authors of what we might term modern bureaucratic literature. His writings are extraordinarily, pruriently concerned with acts that can be accomplished only by people working in groups who follow, in an orderly fashion, arbitrary rules and regulations. These secular constraints not only defy common sense but fly in the face of what we usually think of as basic respect for the sensations and lives of others. Thus another neologism: sadism. The writings of the Marquis de Sade describe dispassionate intimacy in the plural. In this sense, they foreshadow the social world of the contemporary office.

Like the word bureaucracy, sadism is a neologism that has taken on a life of its own. Today, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, sadism is an “enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others.” Yet Sade’s notion of dispassionate intimacy is quite particular. His sadism is less concerned with pleasure in the pain of others than with a lack of feeling regarding the pain of others. Though many of Sade’s writings describe characters who engage in cruel and murderous acts of sexual congress, few if any seem to enjoy the pain of others, no matter how necessary the mutilation of flesh to the act in question. Sade’s embodied economic processes, his sometimes rather less than mutually consenting coworkers, labor to produce orgasm—which is really just a route to apathy. After orgasm, Sade’s libertines are briefly freed from the confusing sensation of need. The libertine looks dispassionately down upon the flayed corpse in which he has just succeeded in ejaculating and experiences clarity. The corpse cannot, reasonably, be the object of affections or emotion; it holds no spell of either generosity or dependency over the Sadean character who has just made use of it. A corpse, even if nominally endowed with life, can inspire nothing other than apathy in the libertine. And apathy is the aesthetic mode that, for Sade, correlates with the best forms of agency, since it demonstrates the libertine’s freedom from Christian sympathy and its attendant hypocrisies. An absolutely liberated, absolutely impersonal pleasure testifies to the libertine’s refusal of insincere social bonds. “Virtue suffers the punishment of crime,” wrote Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet in 1771, “even as crime enjoys with impunity the pleasures that should be the rewards of virtue.” Sadean sex is, to inject a contemporary term, the fuck of the spreadsheet, in which all markers of identity and sentimentality are like the footlong dildo the eponymous libertine heroine of The History of Juliette uses to impale a nine-year-old girl: detachable, iterable, and sortable by size. Anyone can be a libertine, provided she or he is willing to be systematic.

The most famous of Sade’s narratives, 120 Days of Sodom, is also the most explicit about the Sadean protagonist or sadist. Here again liberation through apathy, rather than through cruelty or enjoyment, is key. The four friends who convene at Château de Silling for a four-month debauch are not so much interested in harming others as they are in orchestrating an experience that will be beyond anything they have previously enacted. This experience will, therefore, culminate in their absolute liberation from moral order. Drafted during Sade’s incarceration at the Bastille in microscript on a forty-foot roll of paper pieced together from smuggled scraps, 120 Days was a physical labor of desperation, passion, and personal and political rage, the composition of which was apparently accompanied by elaborate masturbation rituals. Sade never completed the manuscript, so we do not know what will happen to the libertines on day 120—but it seems to be a matter of little difference if they were to walk away from their fortress of horrors with plans to reconvene the following year or if the secluded castle were spontaneously engulfed in flames, taking all occupants to their deaths. (Manuscript notes suggest that sixteen people will survive the events at Silling and return to Paris, but who knows what, in a final draft, might have occurred.) Our own ambivalence regarding the book’s actual ending, which Sade sketches out in his notes as a series of coordinated imprisonments and executions, is not accidental. It results from Sade’s skillful cultivation of simultaneous prurient interest and utter apathy in the reader of 120 Days of Sodom. We are fascinated by the four libertine friends’ stats, by their personal deterioration or fortitude, by their ability to orgasm repeatedly or not at all, by the revolting details of body hair and the shapes of their buttocks. But beyond their appetites, appearances, and aristocratic titles, we know little of the friends save what they do in the fortress. And because what they do in the fortress is determined by a set of laws drawn up at the outset of their macabre vacation, plus narratives supplied by ancient procuresses invited expressly to narrate acts of debauchery, our psychological understanding of the four friends remains limited. We know that they are very rich, highly sexed, extraordinarily well organized, and thoroughly apathetic. Of the victims we know significantly less: they are young, beautiful, soft-skinned.

Within this desert of spiritual detail, one piece of familial backstory is supplied. At the opening of 120 Days, we learn that each of the friends has raped his own daughter and that each has married the unfortunate daughter of another one of the four friends. This arrangement guarantees that Christian marriage has been reimagined as an enterprise of debauchery. Yet this brief peek at a previous arrangement among the four provides a key to the meaning of other relentlessly formal coital permutations set up later on: 120 Days of Sodom is not a novel about the apathy of institutions and how they dehumanize and anonymize their members. It is not about marriage, unless we understand the four friends’ relationship as a kind of marriage. It is, rather, a novel about the apathy of coworking, a description of how individuals collaboratively create codes for behavior and imagine actionable scenarios in an enclosed space—i.e., office, another relative neologism derived from the Latin word for “obligation”—all the while guaranteeing that their actions will be impersonal. This is the sense in which 120 Days of Sodom can be considered an “office novel.” It is also, bizarrely, a comedy; it is the story of a highly successful office and how it works.

If, as in Tolstoy’s formulation, all successful offices are the same, what are the universal qualities of Sodom, LLC? What does this happy office have that other offices also share?

Hierarchy. The four friends form an executive committee, which is overseen by the four procuresses, four duennas, and four storytellers, who operate like a toothless board of directors. Beneath the four friends and their advisers are eight individuals titled “fuckers” whose professional function is not mysterious. Forming the ranks of junior staff are the four friends’ four unlucky daughter-wives and a group of sixteen children who are essentially sacrificial victims, aka interns—or, in a more perverse reading, the very 8½-x-11 multiuse acid-free paper on which the workplace discourse is pitilessly inscribed. There is no mobility within this hierarchy. A kitchen staff of three is exempt from the orgies so that it may concentrate on preparing food. There is also a scullery staff of three, all apparently murdered at the novel’s close according to Sade’s final notes.

Accounting. Sade’s own hand appears throughout the manuscript to count characters, particularly if any have been killed off, and to tally activities. At the close of the manuscript, he instructs himself to keep an account of the particular passions of his four central protagonists, “as, for example, the hell libertine,” though what he means by this is not entirely clear; it appears that he was separated from the manuscript before he was able to make good on this plan. This dispassionate accounting seems to require that the author catalogue the preferences of the four libertines so that each friend is scientifically differentiated. Elsewhere in his notes, Sade complains of his own tendency toward confusion and repetition, an imperfection he planned to correct with a more stringent accounting.

Purpose-built office space. The Château de Silling has numerous chambers with diverse designated functions. For example, everyone is required to defecate in the castle’s chapel. There are bedrooms for sleeping, a dungeon for torturing and murdering, a stage for communicating tales of debauchery. There are no exits; these have been walled off at the novel’s start, accessibility being a liability rather than an asset as far as the libertines’ place of business is concerned.

Production schedule. Each day at the Château de Silling unspools in a regular way. All present arise at ten AM, and debauchery and dining occur at fixed intervals until two AM. There are designated months for certain activities, as well as designated apparel. All present are made aware of their hourly tasks, but only the libertines know of the torture and slaughter with which the four-month fiscal year will end.

Catering. Delicious meals are provided in a timely fashion by dedicated cooks.

Bonuses. There is an unusual amount of eating of shit. In some psychoanalytic readings of the practice of coprophilia, excrement represents money. Certainly scat functions as a rarity in everyday sexual economies. At Château de Silling it is plentiful.

Dispassionate intimacy. All sex acts are preordained and coordinated by statutory schedule. The victims of the libertines cannot choose whether or not to have sex, but even the libertines are not free to choose when, whom, or how they fuck. The only emotional reaction manifested by the libertines is that of impatience, inspired by delays in sexual activity worked into the schedule set at the beginning of the novel. These delays have a speculative function. They increase the libertines’ passion through denial, which increases the yield on passion’s principal, as it were. Such delays are not directed at any particular libertine. They are impersonal, general, and purely pragmatic.

Office work sets into tension, in close quarters, the ambitions of the individual and the destiny of the group. Office workers rub elbows with one another and gather at the water (or kombucha) cooler, rolling chairs collide and become entangled, sweaty softball tournaments are organized. It is possible that the success of the individual can become the success of the group, but it is more likely that in order for an office to succeed, individuality must be undermined, in that it must always directly serve the plural. Here is a rationale for the current vogue for open-plan work spaces, in which one has little privacy unless urinating, defecating, or making coffee. The open-plan-office worker must progress from a state of hyperconsciousness of the effect of her fleshly presence on her coworkers to total numbness in order to get any work done. In such work spaces, the sensitive are likely to spend their days endeavoring to stop unconsciously fidgeting or touching their faces or hair. Open-plan offices also stymie the unusually creative and independent, reducing them into collaborators. Management likes this. Accountability and credit can circulate in offices and even temporarily land, but there should be no authors in offices, only positions. Meanwhile, offices are not just places. Offices are not merely locations, nor are they particularly egalitarian. There are “office politics.” The office has a will of its own, yet, paradoxically, it is not exactly collective.

Setting aside for a moment the annoying behavior to which we must become inured if we are to survive the office (inane chats, baffling email communications, multipage budgets), we must also learn to cherish less our personal specificity. This soft injunction to conform often has a funny way of meaning that we must also become inured to our colleagues’ specific personalities. We do not fully choose or even desire our coworkers, no matter how intentional or progressive the workplace. At the office, we need one another to fulfill certain tasks by means of certain skills. We have less need, inevitably, of our coworkers’ personal histories, the deep reasons why they are the way they are or need whatever is needed. Nor do we have much use for our coworkers’ bodies, in all their ample particularity. We must, with our coworkers, develop forms of dependency and attachment that are risible and fungible, but not too risible and not too fungible. The legend emblazoned above most office doors should be “Try Not to Harm One Another When Convenient but, Above All, Don’t Love One Another.” Far worse than insulting one’s office mate or stepping on a colleague’s toe would be to recognize her or him as one’s soul mate. In such a scenario, all work would cease. We, like Sade’s libertines, require a modicum of impersonality, if not an actual series of statutes or rotating cast of narrating hags, in order to interact effectively with our coworkers. We tersely sign our emails “Best,” but what does this really mean? How can we wish for the best on behalf of someone we—purposefully—barely know? And yet there is no more appropriate or versatile send-off. The polite, efficient apathy implied by “Best” is one of the greatest office supplies known to the contemporary world; it should be bottled and sold in bulk at Staples—which, perhaps, in some sense it already is.

Did Sade know he was writing about office life? Did he intuit that the neoclassic return of republican forms of government to the West would also bring new administrative cultures, new ways of dispersing agency within groups, new levels of mediation and organization of bodies by form and file not even imagined by the church? For Sade, the project of “being with” is a notion not as fraught as it is aggressively simplified. His erotic project, like Kant’s ethical project, is a reasonable means of removing hypocrisy and contingency from social interactions—or, perhaps, of removing hypocrisy by way of removing contingency. (Jacques Lacan, for one, was so taken by the marquis’ infallible logic that he placed Sade’s texts in dialogue with Kant’s writings on reason and ethics to contextualize modernity’s path to Freud.) Sade seems to dream of a sexual relationship in which choice, chance, personal dependency, and the existence of a consenting other have been removed. As things stand, there is too much contingency and complexity in sex for Sade’s taste. Indeed, according to Sade, sex can never be too orderly or too public. It is this valence of his thought that seems overwhelmingly applicable to the contemporary office, if not to contemporary social life overall. We suffer still from an excess of contingency when it comes to others. Too much is possible, particularly in light of the “death” of the Catholic god against whom Sade railed. In major metropolitan areas—hives of office life—everything is permitted, and too many bodies are way too near to hand.

The German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann wrote a lecture on love in the summer of 1969 in which he argues that love is an important form of mediation, a solution to the problem of excessive contingency in republican social life. According to Luhmann, love allows us to simplify our social lives in a way that is, counterintuitively, not reductionist, since love depends on our individuality in order to function. Luhmann argues for the exceptionality of love, maintaining that “other media of communication can take the place of love to only a very limited extent, just as love can not take the place of truth or power or money without limitations.” Compare Luhmann’s solution to Sade’s: the latter removes love altogether while the former describes love as a logical necessity. Perhaps this is why Sade’s descriptions of human interactions seem so much more applicable to office work than to personal life. While the personal continues to dominate contemporary culture, it is difficult for those of us who cherish our individuality, as well as our privacy, to take Sade entirely seriously. We should also be just a bit afraid of him.

It is crucial to mention that 120 Days of Sodom is, in spite of the copious violence and elaborate intercourse, one of the most boring novels of all time, particularly if read from beginning to end. One might, at some point in its pages, prefer to take up with an ATM receipt or an end-user license agreement. The novel expresses apathetic joys that are less reminiscent of the aesthetics of the snuff film—a genre that, pace ISIS, is almost always determined to have been faked—than the horrors of petty administrative perfections, callous email exchanges, and endless insurance forms. The faint pleasure of office culture is merely the anodyne pleasure of any coworker, scrolling through email before she heads out to the next meeting. It might seem like perversity to describe it as such, but take a closer look: herein lies your pleasure. For today, everyone is a libertine.

Date: September 1, 2016

Publisher: Lapham's Quarterly

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.

This article appears in the print edition of Lapham's Quarterly, fall 2016, "Flesh."

Cover image.

Lady.

Women in Concrete Poetry

BUT IS IT CONCRETE?
A new anthology highlights women’s contributions to a hybrid poetry practice dominated by men.

The law of imitative representation, aka mimesis, reigned supreme in Western art for so long that its resistors sometimes found it hard to stop battling it, even when and where it had lost its grip. Consider, for example, some responses to so-called concrete poetry on the part of advocates of so-called conceptual art. The writer and critic Lucy Lippard differentiates between concrete poetry’s naive strategies of linguistic resemblance “where the words are made to look like something, an image” and conceptualism’s more sophisticated liberty “where the words are used only to avoid looking like something, where it doesn’t make any difference how the words look on the page or anything.”

Lippard makes these claims in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. She also cites the artist Joseph Kosuth, who maintains that “Most of the concrete poets are now starting to do theater and getting out of concrete poetry. … They realize the sort of decadence that follows from that sort of materialism.” Kosuth was presumably referring to the situation in New York City. He names just three poets: Vito Acconci, John Perreault, and Hannah Weiner, all of whom are debatable as card-carrying concrete poets. Certainly, Acconci and Perreault would have adamantly identified otherwise. Then there is historian Liz Kotz, who in her study Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (2007) describes a “reliance on rather quaint illustrational or pictorial modes—as in poems that take on the shape of their subjects” that allegedly characterizes all concrete poetry and makes it so “out of touch” with innovative artistic practices of the 1960s.[1]

These characterizations are mistaken, of course, landing at once too far and too short. However, it’s worth pausing on the ways in which they fail. On the one hand, they insist myopically on understanding the term concrete poetry as synonymous with the long-standing tradition of pattern—or shaped—poetry, of which George Herbert’s famous 17th-century “Easter Wings” is one ready example. The bow tie contours of this poem’s two stanzas are credibly winglike. Herbert resuscitates a legacy from ancient Greece, that of technopaegnia, poems lineated to imitate the visual appearance of that which they describe. Sometimes the Modernist Guillaume Apollinaire cutely styled his works this way too (see “Il pleut”; fortunately, this was not the only manner in which he engaged with the page). On the other hand, descriptions that limit concrete poetry to this imitative purview joust at windmills, refusing to acknowledge the movement’s genuinely interesting and prescient innovations. Again, this is probably born of routine: ever since Plato’s bizarre character Cratylus insisted that names are natural and irreplaceable rather than arbitrary, many artists and writers have been guilty of an overweening interest in the representational power of words.[2] Observers have frequently followed them down this rabbit hole.

One such obsessively commentated rabbit is Ezra Pound, who came to believe, by way of an incorrect understanding of the etymology of Chinese characters, among other eccentricities, that written language could successfully partake of material dynamics present in the physical world. It is therefore remarkable that Pound’s ideas were so fruitfully transmogrified by the Noigandres group in Brazil. This cohort of concretists—Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari—took the name of their journal from a line in Pound’s Cantos, grounding their materialist theory of poetry in what, in their 1958 manifesto “Plano-Piloto para Poesia Concreta” (“Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry”), they termed the “tension of word-things in space-time.”[3] As others have pointed out, the Noigandres writers were not alone: Bolivian-born Swiss artist Eugen Gomringer was at the same moment exploring the verbal and visual qualities of printed language. Far from New York City, that cradle of the dematerialization of the art object, in Bern, São Paulo, Darmstadt, Scotland, Tokyo, Vienna, and Toronto, various practitioners investigated the remarkably productive lack of coincidence between the word as pronounced and the word as written.[4] They did not strive to celebrate iconic fallacies or “quaint … pictorial modes” but rather boldly played upon the ambiguities inherent to the various misalignments that exist between and among writing, speech, images, thoughts, and things.

The major innovation of the early or “orthodox” concretists, circa 1952–1958, was to observe—a bit contra Pound—that language did not need to be rendered more material and/or fitting to the material world. They saw that it was already material and, therefore, social and political in its material manifestations, and they progressed from there. The adjective concrete indicates unity or connection through growth in its earliest usages, and certainly the 19th-century invention of reinforced concrete, a substance subsequently employed in modernist architecture, cannot but have been enticing, metaphorically speaking, when it came time to name the movement, given its avant-garde orientation. So-called musique concrète, involving the manipulation of recorded sounds by such composers as Pierre Schaeffer and Halim El-Dabh beginning in the 1940s, may also have been a useful model. The (mostly male) originators of concretism in poetry were somewhat technodeterminist in their outlook and concerned with broad statements about culture and society. In his 1960 essay “The Poem as a Functional Object,” Gomringer asserts that concrete poems should be “as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs.”[5] Haroldo de Campos meanwhile writes of concretism as fundamentally populist and as speaking “the language of today’s man.” He rejects the insubstantial rhetoric of lyric poetry in favor of an “objective” poetry, marked by the “technological progress and non-verbal communication” that also, he maintains, characterizes the Cold War era.[6] Beyond these rather macho assertions, there are three other main tendencies worth underlining in relation to this practice:

(1.) Its interest in what might be termed a “new reader” created by the advent of mass media, someone who is enmeshed in a post-Gutenberg style of literacy in which word, image, sound, and movement are not cleanly separated and active interpretive work from readers is required for understanding;

(2.) Its interest in the material conditions involved in writing and publishing, particularly the lack of alignment between and among media and messages, as well as the possibilities inherent to mediated space once it is explicitly set in tension with the virtual time of signification through the maneuvers of a given poem;

(3.) Its disinterest in traditional literary categories. Where once there was silent reading in one’s armchair, now there might be looking, feeling, hearing, witnessing—perhaps in a gallery or other communal space. The concrete poem was designed to liberate language from print’s fixed paradigms into various semiotic configurations. Or, as the publisher, counter-cultural advocate, Fluxus member, and pattern poet Dick Higgins wrote in 1966, “Much of the work being produced today seems to fall between media.”[7]

As so often seemed to happen with Modernism’s later and perhaps less concertedly modern manifestations, the orthodoxy and manifesto writing of concrete poetry in the 1950s was followed in the two subsequent decades by something more complex, diverse, and challenging to describe. One way to characterize these changes is to say that subjectivity reemerged as a concern. Another might be to observe: women began to adopt and transmogrify ideas associated with concrete poetry. They opened the space of the “concrete”—a space, in truth, of combination, metamorphosis, switching, process, and remediation as much as a space of strictly objective or static media—to their own experiences. This included liminal forms of expression related to interaction with textiles and the space of the home, the life of the body, child-rearing, and language acquisition as well as resistance to mass cultural systems that tended to exclude and anonymize them. As the Italian artist, writer, and curator Mirella Bentivoglio wrote in 1978, “Surely there is a deep relationship between women and the alphabet, and not just because it is they who first transmit its form to children.”[8]

This period of reluctant admission of female practitioners into male-dominated hybrid literary and artistic spaces is explored in a new anthology, Women in Concrete Poetry, 1959–1979, edited by Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre. Published by Primary Information, Women in Concrete Poetry functions as a sort of rejoinder to the 2013 re-publication, also by Primary Information, of An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, edited by Emmett Williams and originally published in 1967. Williams’s anthology, first brought forth by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, overwhelmingly features the work of male poet-artists. Among its female contributors are the ever-undeterred Mary Ellen Solt, who compiled her own anthology of concretism, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana University Press, 1970); Ilse Garnier, who is listed in tandem with her partner, Pierre; and Bohumila Grögerová, listed with her partner, Josef Hiršal. Williams’s anthology collects some 73 authors in total—hailing from Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Western Europe—meaning that women represent approximately 4 percent of those who appear. In the period from 1963 to 1978, there was a veritable boom in anthologies and critical studies of concrete poetics, gathering and discussing the work of hundreds of practitioners.[9] The female artists gracing those seemingly endless pages can be counted on two hands.

This state of affairs was addressed, if not resolved, in 1978 when, after an outcry regarding the paucity of women participants in that year’s Venice Biennale, the organizers belatedly invited Mirella Bentivoglio to curate an exhibition. Bentivoglio produced Materializzazione del linguaggio (Materialization of Language), displayed from September 20 to October 15, 1978, a momentous remapping of the intersections of poetry, visual art, craft, and design through the efforts of female practitioners. Bentivoglio brought together work from more than 70 contributors[10], including herself, for a gallery show and essay-based catalogue that also presented biographies of the artists. Bentivoglio’s brilliant act of anthologizing forms the key point of reference for Balgiu and de la Torre’s 2020 effort.

Women in Concrete Poetry gathers 24 artists from Materializzazione del linguaggio: Annalisa Alloatti, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Paula Claire, Betty Danon, Agnes Denes, Amelia Etlinger, Ilse Garnier, Bohumila Grögerová, Ana Hatherly, Katalin Ladik, Liliana Landi, Giulia Niccolai, Anna Oberto, Jennifer Pike, Betty Radin, Giovanna Sandri, Mira Schendel, Mary Ellen Solt, Chima Sunada, Salette Tavares, Biljana Tomić, and Patrizia Vicinelli. Appended to this roster are 26 additional poets, all active during the two decades named in the book’s title. On a certain level, Women in Concrete Poetry, 1959–1979 functions as a linguistic, geographic, social, and temporal translation of Materializzazione del linguaggio. The welcome presence of work by beloved poets familiar in the North American experimental context but not tapped by Bentivoglio for the 1978 show—Madeline Gins, Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Hannah Weiner—suggests possible links between conversations taking place on the East Coast in the 1960s and 1970s and a broader international context.

Particularly striking among the new contents are asemic writings by Mirtha Dermisache, which provide a counterpoint to the tick marks of Irma Blank and photographs by Bogdanka Poznanović of letter-based actions. Yet I found myself a bit puzzled by the 2020 title. Is it correct or even helpful to raise the flag of capital C capital P here? Though I hope that I am not guilty of the same knee-jerk disdain displayed by Lippard, Kosuth, and Kotz, I did wonder if the women featured in the current collection were in fact “in” concrete poetry. Concrete poetry was a bit allergic to female participants, wasn’t it? And its concerns (proclaimed in the various essays and manifestoes summarized above) seem to overlap in only limited ways with the explorations of the practitioners so adroitly gathered by Balgiu and de la Torre.

I admit that titles are impossible and that grouping varied artistic and literary practices under a single phrase is a thankless task (everyone complains bitterly about the names of so-called movements but goes on using them anyway). I myself hunted for viable alternatives. Everything I came up with required a colon and at least one subtitle. Still, I think it is worth clarifying some of the tensions and ambiguities at play here.

First, I should note that Women in Concrete Poetry’s introduction does not shy away from the difficulty where the anthology’s title is concerned. Balgiu and de la Torre explain that the 50 individuals whose work they gathered “may not have identified themselves as concrete poets.” They also observe a “shift from a focus on the objectification of language in the early concrete program to the materialization of language through bodies that activate the word on and off the page,” writing that they have come to understand “concrete poetry … as a practice rather than a movement.”[11] Bentivoglio, significantly, did not title her exhibition Materiality of Language or Objectification of Language. Rather, she chose a term that implies a possibly chaotic and/or mixed process of becoming, materialization, a verbal noun that does not foreclose an ongoing or even infinite series of transmutations and manifestations in varied locations. (For an earlier show in 1971, Bentivoglio used the expression visual operators to describe the authors of the interdisciplinary work that interested her.[12])

Although Balgiu and de la Torre have taken care to expand their selection beyond the limits of Western Europe and North America, including Argentine, Brazilian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Uruguayan, and Yugoslavian artists, it seems to have been a greater challenge to expand the book’s conceptual paradigm beyond objective or statically material language, i.e., the language of print. Perhaps this seems like a ridiculous quibble. Yet—of the handful of works of criticism quoted in the introduction, two are by residents of North America and stress objectivity as opposed to subjective experience. Mary Ellen Solt maintains, “Emotions and ideas are not the physical materials of poetry,” and Rosmarie Waldrop advocates a “revolt against the transparency of the word.” These positions, to my ear, ring of the somewhat stiff Marxian poetics we now associate with Objectivism and the Language movement in the United States. The programmatic tendencies of these ways of considering writing is surely inadequate to the practices anthologized here—a point on which I think Balgiu and de la Torre would concur. As the biographical notes at the end of Women in Concrete Poetry observe, many of the women included worked in real time and space with numerous materials, curious about the indivisibility of things and feelings. They often understood themselves as conceptualists or interdisciplinary artists. Agnes Denes, for example, is primarily known for her work in land art, notably 1982’s Wheatfield—A Confrontation, a 2-acre wheat field planted in a landfill created in the decade following the construction of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. For the last three decades of her life, Madeline Gins identified primarily as a practicing architect and philosopher. And Hannah Weiner, a designer of undergarments by day, was concerned with flags and clothing as well as the immaterial, psycho-social medium of clairvoyant visions.

What I longed for in the anthology—so elegantly designed and thorough, with its selections ranging from two to a dozen or so pages—was more messiness and, even more urgently, more weirdness, more irrationality, more bodies and sensations and ephemera. Bentivoglio was a fantastic prose stylist, and it might have been nice to republish her 1978 catalogue essay, perhaps along with another essay included in that volume that I find endlessly fascinating, poet Giovanna Sandri’s “Origine lunare dell’alfabeto” (“Lunar Origins of the Alphabet;” Sandri’s typographic constellations are among the selections of Women in Concrete Poetry). In Sandri’s semi-surreal hypothesis, a mystical alphabet guarded by priestesses preceded the Phoenician system, the alphabet from which the Greek and Italic alphabets derive. The letters of this mystical alphabet were composed of cuttings from fragrant trees, meaning that sense and linguistic difference were olfactory in nature as well as visible, etc. A major implication of Sandri’s account is that there may exist unacknowledged, unnamed, forgotten, or excluded forms of language and communication.[13] Art, Sandri suggests, specifically the art of women, can give access to kinds of meaning-making that have been devalued or chased from the public sphere by, for example, the mechanized, standardized, primarily visible word-material that stems from Gutenberg’s invention of printing from moveable type.

Anthologies are like maps: they indicate the existence of a given concept, trend, style, movement (or something else), then offer examples that fit within the limits of their chosen concept, trend, style, movement, other. It’s an awkward definition, to be sure. Admittedly, some anthologies emerge out of their contents rather than beginning with a received idea. Still, it does seem that many, if not all, anthologies suffer from that existential ailment that Jorge Luis Borges diagnosed in his work “On Exactitude in Science:” since summary by nature, the anthology must necessarily fail to accomplish that which it came into being to do, i.e., present a complete, satisfying overview by way of instances, pieces. Indeed, the word comes to English with a slightly melancholy—to my ears—etymology: from Greek anthologia, a gathering of flowers. Although the stems are cut, the resulting arrangement is intended to feed the senses. More often than not, it does, but it will always have left something out, always have been convened to suit a specific taste and occasion. Anthologies are, thus, frequently ephemeral: they serve living readers and may create new (sorts of) readers. Later on, another collection will supplement or replace the collection that came before.

Where all these questions become more interesting is in the context of art and literary practices of the later 20th century, when it is more difficult to say who is “just a writer” and who is “just an artist”—not to mention what genre of writing someone might engage with or which medium or discipline someone specializes in. The citations from Lippard, Kosuth, and Kotz that began this essay vaguely acknowledge this shift but use the occasion of uncertainty to attempt to “win” points for the side of visual art, which seems to them to borrow inessential techniques from literature rather than become fused with or indistinguishable from it. This resistance to mixture points up a pursuant problem related to the anthology form: how to account for practices that not only fall between and among media and disciplines but also require the substrate of real time to come into being. How does one anthologize a practice not primarily located on the page? To put this more plainly: if I photograph you speaking, have I captured your words?

In this context, the anthology is clearly a site of re-materialization and re-mediation, an opportunity to organize perception from historical, technological, and material points of view. Here older formats (or lack of formatting) are revised for the present moment. Women in Concrete Poetry, 1959–1979 partakes of many of the same organizational devices as Williams’s 1967 anthology: it begins with an introduction, collects the work in question in alphabetical order by author, and concludes with a series of short biographical entries. However, unlike Williams’s collection, its front and back covers, with images by Lenora de Barros of a mouth and tongue engaged in sensual play with the keys and type bars of a typewriter, do not reveal the anthology’s title; this task is reserved for the book’s spine.[14] Women in Concrete Poetry also has two editors. Its title begins with the word women. It feels big and stylish and clean, its smooth pages revealing a shadow of the print on the opposite side in a delightful way as one flips through.

The anthology generates a sensibility, a sort of mental and physical image that is also a stylistic shorthand. As I was considering these matters, I also thought of another series of images, a 1976 video by the artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha titled Permutations. Depicting Cha’s sister Bernadette, Permutations has often been mistaken for a self-portrait and, as Cathy Park Hong points out in her recent groundbreaking essay on Cha’s rape and murder, has come to stand in for the artist’s physical presence—even, until early November 2020, on the artist’s Wikipedia page.[15] I was drawn to this series of images not only because it made sense to consider Cha’s films, slides, and performances of the 1970s and her artist’s book, Audience Distant Relative (1978), in the context of Women in Concrete Poetry but also because the misunderstanding associated with the video is relevant to the ongoing project of remediating interdisciplinary work that makes no firm distinction between linguistic approaches to literature and art and those in which the body and sensorium play significant roles. Can editors find a way to satisfy the human liking for iconic images and absolute delineation of categories and preserve the complexity and ambiguity of late-20th-century intermedial work that challenges the old laws of mimesis? Should they try?

Date: January 25, 2021

Publisher: The Poetry Foundation

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

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Women in Concrete Poetry, 1959–1979, edited by Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre.

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women-in-concrete-poetry.png

Art by Matt Chase.

On site.

1. I am indebted to Jamie Hilder’s smart study, Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955–1971 (Montreal, Kingston, London, Chicago: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2016), for these revealing citations. For a longer discussion of possible relations between conceptualism and concrete poetry, see Hilder’s chapter, “Concrete Poetry and Conceptual Art: A Misunderstanding,” pp. 145–186.
1. In this dialogue, the character Cratylus argues that names are not arbitrary but rather derive from divine fiat. Socrates is ultimately moved to give up the study of language in favor of the study of things, perhaps influenced by the extremity of Cratylus’s views.
1. This phrase is cited frequently in criticism on concrete poetry. See for example Brian J. McAllister’s article “Narrative in Concrete / Concrete in Narrative: Visual Poetry and Narrative Theory,” Narrative 22, no. 2 (2014): 235. Accessed November 5, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24615530.
1. See the opening paragraphs of Sam Rowe’s excellent review of the republished Emmett Williams anthology, Chicago Review 58, no. 3/4 (2014): 316. Accessed November 5, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24770681.
1. Eugen Gomringer, “The Poem as a Functional Object,” translated by Irène Montjoye Sinor, in Concrete Poetry: A World View, edited by Mary Ellen Solt (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1970), 69–70.
1. Adriano Spatola, Toward Total Poetry, translated by Brendan W. Hennessey and Guy Bennett (Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2008), 92.
1. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” originally published in the something else NEWSLETTER, Volume 1, Number 1, February 1966; reprinted in Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins (Catskill, NY: Siglio, 2018), 25. I should note that I have also seen this portion of the essay dated 1965.
1. Mirella Bentivoglio, “Introduzione a Materializzazione del linguaggio,” in Materializzazione del linguaggio, Biennale di Venezia, 1978. Bentivoglio writes, “C’è da credere a un rapporto profondo tra la donna e l’alfabeto, e non solo perché per prima ne trasmette la forma ai figli.” Translation mine; I use the term women to avoid the somewhat old-fashioned generalization of the English singular, woman.
1. These include La Monte Young’s An Anthology of chance operations, concept art, anti art, indeterminacy, plans of action, diagrams, music, dance constructions, improvisation, meaningless work, natural disasters, compositions, mathematics, essays, poetry (La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963); Stephen Bann’s Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (London Magazine, 1967); Eugene Wildman’s Anthology of Concretism (Swallow Press, 1968); John B Sharkey’s Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry (Lorrimer, 1971); Jerry G. Bowles and Tony Russell’s This Book Is a Movie: An Exhibition of Language Art & Visual Poetry (Dell, 1971); Jiři Valoch and bpNichol’s The Pipe: Recent Czech Concrete Poetry (Coach House, 1973); Miroljub Todorović’s Konkretna, vizuelna i signalistička poezija, antologija (Delo, 1975); Liselotte Gumpel’s Concrete Poetry from East and West Germany: The Language of Exemplarism and Experimentalism (Yale, 1976); John Jessop’s International Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Missing Link Press, 1978).
1. The list of artists in Materializzazione del linguaggio I located gives 71 names. See https://www.stsenzatitolo.com/st/prodotto/mirella-bentivoglio-materializzazione-del-linguaggio/. However, Balgiu and de la Torre count 81.
1. Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre, “Introduction,” Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979 (New York: Primary Information, 2020), 12–17.
1. The 1971 exhibition in question, at Centro Tool in Milan, was titled Esposizione internazionale di operatrici visuali (International Exhibition of Visual Operators). See Balgiu and de la Torre’s biographical note on Bentivoglio in Women in Concrete Poetry, 464–65.
1. Giovanna Sandri, “Origine lunare dell’alfabeto,” in Materializzazione del linguaggio.
1. The cover of Williams’s anthology is “illustrated” with the following statement: “The book you are looking at is the largest Anthology of Concrete Poetry to appear to date, and the first major one to be published in the United States. Edited by Emmett Williams, one of the founders of the movement, and with the over-300 selections translated whenever possible from their original languages and glossed where translation would not be feasible, all supplemented by detailed biographies of the poets, the publishers of Something Else Press, Inc., take great pride in presenting a cross-section of this most active of modern poetry movements and in introducing so many major writers from so many countries between these covers for the first time to the American reading public.”
1. As the essay points out, Cha’s rape and murder are seldom if ever mentioned in scholarly writing on her work. See Cathy Park Hong, “Portrait of an Artist,” in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020), 151–180. For the revision history of Cha’s Wikipedia page, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theresa_Hak_Kyung_Cha&action=history. Accessed November 15, 2020. The correction of the “biography photo” was made on November 10th, 2020, by a user named Iamevelynk.

On Relativism & Theory

AFTER THE AFTERLIFE OF THEORY

WHEN IT COMES TO THEORY, my own reading habits might encompass something as specific as “literary theory,” or “critical theory,” or, perhaps, to make things awkward through excessive specificity, “French theory,” but usually I just say (and think) I like to read theory. “I’m reading theory.” I also think: I am reading this for pleasure and in order to attempt to understand the world. I’m reading this to have better ideas, to be more alert, to—and this part is key—comprehend the invisible machinations of the system—a paranoid thought, but one which I’m not too proud to admit I’ve, more than once, had.

I learned about theory in college, where I also met someone whose parents had explained Lacanian psychoanalysis to him when he was thirteen, a fact that impressed me no end. For me, however, there was a clear demarcation, a dividing line. There was the time before theory, and there was the time after it. In high school, I had read Hannah Arendt; now I read all the names: the two D’s, the two L’s, gentle B, obtuse K, worrisome A, their predecessors H and N, and, above all, F—F with his masterful sentences. Indeed, these names were like swear words, like drugs, like magnetized tokens in a game played by mildly sadistic immortals. This had nothing to do with literature (which I studied). This was where all of the secrets concerning human culture lay. Once I began to read I couldn’t stop, for the simple reason that I had to find out—by which I mean, what had happened.

Part of me also assumed, because I was nineteen and a college sophomore, that this was a sophomoric phase. I would soon get over theory, and so would everyone else. In this I was, as everyone knows, wrong. Anyway, I’m talking about the early aughts here, by which time (and by all rights) theory should have been, and even was, definitively over. Except that it wasn’t. I could barely wrap my mind around the notion that I hadn’t even been alive during theory’s American heyday, the 1970s, so relevant and necessary did theory seem to me.

Theory was becoming then what it is now. Or, it already was what it now is: something that people write and read, and also a kind of ectoplasm or mood, revelatory and/or offensive and/or self-indulgent. Some have gone so far as to characterize Bill Clinton’s 1998 musings on the significance of the copula (“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”) as directly derived from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. There is the longstanding charge of pernicious cultural and moral relativism, probably more correctly understood as narrative relativism—in other words, the practice of treating any form of discourse, knowledge, or information as a kind of constructed narrative. We’re familiar enough with this line of complaint that I won’t rehearse it here.

What I do think is worth adding to the list of theory’s cultural effects is a general deskilling related to the task of criticism, literary criticism in particular. In the extended afterlife of theory, in and around the American academy, it has become common to favor accessibility in critical thought, along with conceptual keywords, whose valence is either usefully transdisciplinary or a little vague, depending on whom you ask and, sometimes, when. In the United States, theory has become a utopian experiment and experience: it exists alongside increasingly historicist literary studies as a site of mixture and reprieve; it promises, for example, to help literary scholars moonlight as media theorists and art historians, while reminding them to consider the horrors of colonialism and the errors of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, it makes the rounds online, on social media, in popular music, in art world press releases, and in the New York Times, decontextualized and meme-like, sometimes the stuff of conspiracy and outrage and at others the balm of empathy.

Through theory we seem to tarry briefly with the notion of history; at least, this is my opinion. I happen to think that part of the reason for theory’s dramatic success in America is its ability to confirm the existence of history, particularly as a construction that is also, and significantly, real. Theory is not, as some have suggested, post-historical; it expressly addresses the existence of past times and events, though it is not always concerned with historiographic gestures, such as naming and narrating. A more interesting kind of question to ask about theory might be, “How is theory historiographic, i.e., a form for writing history?” Related is another common “how” question: How is theory political?

Given that remarks regarding the post-political nature of the contemporary era—as a time so epistemologically balkanized that debate and compromise are impossible (a style of description itself derived from dear F)—are increasingly widespread, one might well be curious about what aspects of theory tend to accord with a movement away from the possibility of politics, and which tend to resist the shrinking of the public sphere. I can’t, for reasons of time as well as ability, describe all of these tensions, important though they are. Instead, I’ve decided to focus on a certain potted history, which even in its limited scope has something to offer. I think it’s worth thinking about the relationship between institutions and criticism. Or, to refashion my earlier phrase about politics, the possibility of a generative relationship between academic institutions and public conversation.

The Micro Durée

Anyway, everyone knows where theory comes from. It comes from France. It traveled to the United States at some point in the mid 1960s, metamorphosing into something called postmodernism, which might or might not have already begun coming into being directly after the war, even before theory got here.

I joke, but my serious explanation is not much better. The intellectual historian François Cusset has written a fantastic book about this, and most of my knowledge comes from him, along with gleanings derived from the classwork I did as a part of my doctorate. There’s something about the high school-college divide that allegorizes this process of importation, too. So, Camus and Sartre are the starter texts; the world-weary teen absorbs existentialist disillusionment before moving on to purer anti-humanist heights with an excerpt from The Order of Things in a freshman survey of the history of the West.

Or, as it went with the French intellectuals, 1940–45 saw the arrival of surrealists, existentialists, and the work of Annales School historians on American shores. This varied avant-garde, with its taste for rich general interest writing and weird art, may have given some signal of what was to come. Then, in fall of 1966, at a Ford Foundation-funded conference at Johns Hopkins titled “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man met in person for the first time; Roland Barthes delivered a superb talk, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?”; and Derrida described “a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin.” Some American Marxists found the affair decadent and apolitical, while local literary critics, who largely ignored the English translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist apotheosis, La pensée sauvage, which had appeared that very year, fast-forwarded into poststructuralism without so much as a backward glance at Ferdinand de Saussure.

If the enthusiastic Americans, with their grants and soft power, had read Lévi-Strauss’s book, originally published in 1962, they would have seen his then-unusual claim within the context of the humanities that “the final goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man, but to dissolve him.” This might have given a different political valence to the language of criticism disseminated at Johns Hopkins, for the thoroughgoing dependence on the linguistic theory of Saussure—a nineteenth-century Swiss linguist who maintained that regularities exist in language only by reference to internal, structural differences in the language itself—might have been more readily apparent. Saussure sought not laws but relations of differences; his descriptions were influential not only for Lévi-Strauss but for Lacan’s revolutionary description of the unconscious, as well as Derrida’s discussion of the instability of meaning. I don’t mean to imply that there was some naïve adoption of infernal, anti-humanist values here, just a year after Ken Kesey’s first Acid Test, but rather that America was home to many formalist critics, who rapidly became structuralists and poststructuralists, particularly once the 1970s rolled around and the early days of neoliberalism in the university got under way.

Indeed, the difference between formalism and structuralism is worth pausing on for a moment, because the former had become the pride of modernist literary studies in the United States and was only somewhat awkwardly supplanted by the latter (a graft that haunts English departments to this day). New Criticism privileged knowledge of language and its function, but not to dismantle the assumptions held by elites. Rather, after the G.I. Bill of Rights, the New Critics had explicitly designed their poetics to be both accessible and constructive. They offered a literary history and a system of values stripped of classical allusion and baroque allegory in the service of transmission to all. New Criticism had little to say about history, but not because its adherents suspected the constructed-ness of fact and philology. John Crowe Ransom, et al. seemed to have doubted historical memory and political thought as inherently divisive and held high hopes for the redemptive power literature’s special formal affordances might bring to their nation. However, the innovative political speech found on 1960s campuses revealed the New Criticism’s excessively mannered indifference to the politics of reading and writing, which began to seem a toolkit of idealist devices for the repression of history.

In the liberal academy, theory could do something more: it could critique disciplinary boundaries and propose new terms for dialogue. Having borrowed from the spirit of the Annales School, a movement that had coalesced around the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale and which considered long-term social histories as well as nonacademic information, theory reflected on everyday life and questioned hierarchies of knowledge. The articles published by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, though serious works of historical analysis, were at the same time pithy, relatively free of footnotes, and legible to non-specialists. It was in this singular journal, for example, that Lucie Varga published her 1937 ethnography of National Socialism, a prescient document that was also unusual for its combination of rigorous method and elucidation of contemporary politics. Systematic philosophical reflection on the role of history and the humanities in general, as distinct from the sciences, had been underway since the polymathic Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) strove to describe the division of the faculties of the German university, and it was to these questions that a thinker like Michel Foucault, partly influenced by his teacher Georges Canguilhem, turned his attention.

If the Annales had demonstrated the political worth of a literary approach to history that validated all possible sources, Foucault expanded this initiative, treating not just the historical text but also the scientific text as a text like any other, in a supreme act of narrative relativism that sought to show how scientific knowledge might be contingent upon conceptual elaboration. This sort of critical cross-research is of course also relevant to Roland Barthes’s intermedial readings—which propose a transdisciplinary rhetoric permitting images and other apparently non-linguistic items and processes to be systematically interpreted as text—along with the work of many other poststructuralist thinkers, who rejected philological approaches along with other forms of disciplinary silo-ing in favor of methodologies claiming forms of critical authority applicable beyond the halls of academe. These methodological choices are related to an ongoing turn from from rhetoric and philology in contemporary literary studies—what might be termed either a long process of deskilling or a search for new units of analysis and keywords, or, more complexly, both at once.

Thus, for all we have heard of theory’s much-alleged impenetrability, it seems always to have been involved with the category of the everyday, if not with popular culture itself. Thus it could permit American adopters to gesture toward the context of the society of which they were members without speaking about history or politics in so many words, and this quality of its critical voice proved extremely powerful. It was made for the American campus of the 1970s, which, while still galvanized by the insurgent rhetoric of the 1960s, was at the same time rapidly becoming a space of bureaucratic commerce, as graduate studies grew at a faster rate than the rest of the university and the humanities began to falter and lose funding. Literature departments, activated in progressive quarters by an ongoing golden age of experimental writing (Beats et al.) and elsewhere hoping to make good on the New Critical promise of a pure and universalist literary value, seized the moment—and the moment was Deconstruction.

In 1976 Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Of Grammatology appeared; it gradually defined the moment and, according to Cusset, went on to sell some eighty thousand copies. In the text, Derrida proposes studying the ideological underpinnings of Western society through what he identifies as philosophers’ systematic denigration of knowledge’s articulation as embodied writing—rather than simply as idealized speech. This was a challenging science to grasp but, once you got it, broadly useful and a lot of fun. This critical approach permitted a playful relationship to power; it represented an entry into an adventure, a detective story. Though it spawned a million imitators, adherents, and cottage industries, and was perhaps destined to seem ridiculous due to its ornate performativity, theory went everywhere. In a post–Civil Rights Movement era, it seemed to offer the possibility of education without indoctrination, displacing political struggles onto the terrain of discourse and increasing the prestige and relevance of the literary text. It laughed silently in the face of the American “simple man” and patriot; it circulated freely in the social bubbles of prestigious campuses, in seminars, and even got into the sciences and the art world.

As time went on, it was lampooned by detractors like Alan Sokal, who in 1996 successfully published a dummy article in Social Text lampooning what he saw as deconstructive jargon, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” (A professor of mathematics and physics, Sokal boasted serious hard-science cred that made the stunt hard to ignore.) The New York Times reported on “Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly,” somewhat glibly terming Social Text a “journal that helped invent the trendy, sometimes baffling field of cultural studies.” NPR did an interview. There were numerous rancorous transatlantic exchanges.

But theory went on. And on. And on and on.

They Go Low, You Go High Twaddle

And now, approaching the close of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are here. We still have theory. We also have the Internet, as well as various entities on the right who, perhaps taking inspiration from Benito Mussolini as much as Michel Foucault, have explored narrative relativism as well. (“From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fiction, the modern relativism infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable,” maintained Il Duce.) Though I don’t want to bore anyone with elaborate parsings of supposed instrumentalization of the writings of Foucault by members of Steve Bannon’s staff, or libertarian tech mogul Peter Thiel’s affection for René Girard’s theory of mimesis, one has to admit that there is an interesting relationship between postmodern apocalypticism and managerial rationality.

While I don’t necessarily believe that the relativism that pervades contemporary discourse, from Poe’s Law down (or up, depending on where you stand), has a causal relationship with the series of figures and writings that constitute theory, as such, there is cause to examine the correlation here. Certainly, given the things that get into movies, you’ve probably at least once or twice imagined a technocratic dictator reverse-engineering Discipline and Punish, but have you imagined an online retailer reverse-engineering Foucault’s late theory of biopolitics? If not, you may not have to! By way of which cryptic joke I want to mention that the French have long been aware of the possibility of a good reader of theory making reactionary administrative moves. See the case of Foucault’s mentee and literary executor, François Ewald, whose entrepreneurial interpretations of his master’s teachings led him to write a dissertation on social risk and the welfare state, which was followed by a successful career in the insurance industry and then various interventions into politics with the ends of reforming the French system by getting rid of cradle-to-grave entitlements. I doubt that, though Ewald credits Foucault with having introduced him to the notion that we are living in a “postrevolutionary” age, Ewald’s politics are entirely entailed by those of his teacher.

Indeed, this is my point. Theory has begun, more and more, to look like an allegedly value-agnostic way of thinking through the circulation of power and the formation of value—which is to say that it looks vaguely formal and vaguely cybernetic and like a lot of other contemporary communication styles in their relationship to contemporary bureaucracy. Certainly, the art gallery press release, one of the prime sites at which the keywords of theory are offered up to contemporary readers anew, epitomizes this trend: a given artist explores and reveals our preconceptions, suggesting that what we thought was the case, a veritable truth, is in fact a context-dependent construction designed to shelter us from an inconvenient view into history and the horrors and disparities of contemporary social life. I mean, I don’t believe that this sort of description is inaccurate. It’s fair to make such claims. This is indeed what a lot of contemporary art does, and I myself have from time to time described it in exactly these sorts of terms and without irony.

But popular culture’s lack of resistance to the circulation of theory tends to publicly obscure something that is happening to the humanities in general, and to literary studies, in particular. These entities are, I’m afraid, failing again. If there is a forty-year cycle on which American academic literary criticism tends to renew itself, we were due for a new installment in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Sianne Ngai’s glorious work of Marxian affect-theory, Ugly Feelings, a description of neoliberalism’s cruel shaping of contemporary emotion and social experience, might have changed the debate had just a few more members of the old guard gotten onboard. Or, perhaps we would have been successfully carried away by Franco Moretti’s quantification of the novel (alas, everyone has remained quite unconvinced!). Thus, we are left in a situation in which questions like “What is literature for?” and “How do we read literature?” are being most aggressively answered by recent works of autofiction and the lyric essay—not a bad thing in itself, but, then, people are still getting undergraduate educations, and this, I fear, is where the problem lies.

Until recently, I had a contingent position at a private college where a number of my undergraduate students had either been homeless or faced homelessness, and almost all were going into staggering amounts of debt. Many were involved in gig work; some were sex workers. While no one found this particularly sensational, it being New York City, I was confronted by my inability to do anything other than reassure these teenagers (for this is what they were) that they would persevere in spite of the enormous setbacks they were accruing by choosing to get college educations in literary studies at a private institution in the nation’s most expensive city.

I was participating in this doubtful project as recently as November of 2017, at which time the novelist and retired professor of writing, Marilynne Robinson, published two strange articles in The New York Review of Books: “What Are We Doing Here?” and “Year One: Rhetoric and Responsibility.” (The former furnishes the title for her recent essay collection). I’m still not entirely sure what she was getting at in these two wide-ranging essays on writing and American pedagogy, but I was particularly struck by what she had to say about why individuals should get educations in the humanities and why, pursuantly, people should continue to provide said education. Robinson writes, “If I seem to have conceded an important point in saying that the humanities do not prepare ideal helots, economically speaking, I do not at all mean to imply that they are less than ideal for preparing capable citizens, imaginative . . . and largely unmonetizable.” I think, without indulging in a deeper exploration of the metaphorical “helots” (i.e. an enslaved caste in ancient Sparta), the general sentiment here is that an education in the humanities makes one independent and that is good for the nation. So, for Robinson, the humanities are good, but something she refers to as “higher twaddle” or “post-deconstructionism” (another name for the contemporary era, I think) is bad. High-twaddling post-deconstructionism is particularly bad, as Robinson contends, because “we have grave public issues to debate.” I think I almost stood up and cheered with sardonic glee when I first read this.

Robinson is, of course, far from the first to use these late mid-century trends in continental theory to explain why American undergraduates aren’t getting the inexpensive pragmatic educations in the humanities they deserve. Indeed, she’s pretty late to this party. But it is telling to see this notion arise again here, around the question of what is due to an undergraduate who wants to study art rather than, as Sokal wisely framed it, what is due in a peer-reviewed journal. It suggests someone deeply out of touch with the state of contemporary discourse in general and upsettingly in the humanities particularly, in that she has no idea where theory currently makes its living—which is hardly in undergraduate curricula.

To test that theory out, I decided to ask my students at the private college (some seniors) if they knew who Jacques Derrida was.

They, to a person, did not.

The thoughts that have accrued here, about the joys and strangeness of theory, are, therefore, dedicated to them. For they are, as students have always been, the ones who will determine whether academic institutions can contribute anything to the public conversation. This has nothing to do with whether students are “well educated,” meeting standards, or acing tests (or whether they know anything about Derrida, for that matter). Rather, it is about whether they have the tools and material support they need to see connections between their studies and the world, a cliché but not less true for that. Theory clearly continues to play a role in various political and intellectual networks outside the university; perhaps it’s useful for undergrads, too. While I remain a bit agnostic on the “Theory, Ruining Everything or Not?” issue, there are two points on which I am clear: 1., it is a mistake to think that you can replace theory’s strong descriptions of colonialism and late capitalism with vague allusions to said descriptions; and 2., the cost of a B.A. is more distracting and enervating to the citizenry than any form of relativism, narrative or otherwise.

Date: May 1, 2018

Publisher: The Baffler

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.
This essay appears in the print edition of The Baffler, May 2018, issue 39, "The Organization of Hatreds."

Cover image.

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REANIMATION ARTIST
Dodie Bellamy’s bereavement chronicles

IN AN EARLY ESSAY in her recent collection Bee Reaved, Dodie Bellamy takes on a stalker who harasses her by ordering her scads of unrelated items using a fake credit card. “My stalker sends me objects that are not objects. They’re images I keep trying to push into language.” Bellamy provides a list of selected virtual purchases: “BLISS FUZZ’ OFF™ BIKINI PRECISION HAIR REMOVAL CREAM/2 OZ – 2 TUBES,” “SUPER-SENSITIVE SUPREME CELLO STRING SET – 4/4 SIZE,” “FOREST FRIENDS ORNAMENTS FELT KIT,” “TETRA POND AQUASAFE TAP WATER CONDITIONER – 2 101.4-OZ BOTTLES,” “THREE ASSEMBLED MINIATURE WIDOW’S WALK RAILS,” and on and on. American English has been bent and zombified by the need to name an ever-widening object-world that in turn inspires an ever-widening array of bizarre behaviors designed to manage all the stuff. In the absence of such a commodity-world and its attendant grammars, its spammy word-strings and low-resolution thumbnails, would one understand, for example, the necessity of depilating the borders of one’s pubic region with a stinky paste? Or painstakingly hot-gluing a miniature widow’s walk to one’s dollhouse? The answer is that one would not. The title of this essay is “The Violence of the Image.” That seems right.

The nineteen pieces collected in Bee Reaved concern contemporary embodiment. They are about the flickering interstices between what’s physical and what isn’t; the gaps between matter and spirit, language and action, and how these divides are bridged and sometimes obviated. Bellamy treats mob behavior among poets on Facebook; the disorienting experience of having one’s archive collected by the Beinecke Library at Yale; memories of her manic, fantasist first husband; various Netflix programs; the myth of James Dean’s beloved and apparently haunted sports car, Little Bastard. And more. Yet primarily this is a collection about a single event, the passing of Bellamy’s husband, the writer and artist Kevin Killian. A record of grief that is also an astute and tragicomic account of our digitally managed sensoria, Bellamy’s intensely felt prose is persuasive, alchemical. As one reads, that hollow site lately conditioned to push data around on social media and purchase toxic goods produced by slave labor in one click becomes something else. This book is a spell for recovering feeling(s), a sort of salutary linguistic drug.

Bellamy mentions Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking more than once, and I will admit that after completing Bee Reaved I downloaded an audio version of that “bereavement chronicle” (Bellamy’s phrase). I had never read Didion’s account and, listening to it a decade and a half after its first appearance, I found myself challenged. I couldn’t seem to pay attention to the right aspects of the writing. I obsessed over the number of drinks John Gregory Dunne had consumed on the night of his death, as well as Didion’s unflagging insistence on the absolute, crystal-clear normality of the situation. I supposed this insistence, the titular “thinking,” was the whole point, but it nevertheless chilled me in a way I doubted that it was intended to. I felt a bit guilty about my reaction—particularly given that Didion herself has recently passed away—yet the sentences felt like stalling strategies, uncannily practiced and polished and maybe inherited from a previous generation as a sort of wedding gift. Although Bellamy writes that this book was meaningful to her, it’s a very different sort of work than Bee Reaved, and that, to my mind, is not such a bad thing.

Dodie’s Gone

Bellamy and Killian are often associated with the New Narrative writing movement, a loosely affiliated group of writers known for mixing explicit autobiographical and documentary styles with appropriation and pastiche, as well as more traditional tools of fiction. Indeed, they may be the movement’s de facto cofounders, along with other San Francisco-based figures such as Robert Glück (known for his transcendent 1994 novel Margery Kempe), Bruce Boone, and Steve Abbott. As Bellamy and Killian explain in the introduction to Writers Who Love Too Much, a 2017 anthology of New Narrative-allied work including such authors as Kathy Acker and Gary Indiana, “the question,” for them and their colleagues, “was how to reproduce the sensations of ordinary life while subverting the totalizing narrative that had stymied and withered our lives.” The wish to “bring the body back to writing,” brilliantly and collaboratively fulfilled in workshops they participated in beginning in the 1980s, was complicated by the advent of the AIDS crisis. The disease laid siege to queer communities, killing the poet and short story writer Sam D’Allesandro, among so many others. Bodies broke down, betraying the authors who inhabited them, and mortality ceased to be an abstract literary theme, becoming instead a messy, terrifying, and very real foe, ever close at hand. As Dennis Cooper wrote, “AIDS ruined death.”

About that totalizing narrative, deadly in its own way: Bellamy and Killian locate it explicitly in nineteenth-century realist and romantic fiction concerned with bourgeois life (e.g., Honoré de Balzac), but it strikes me that they might also intend the totalizing narratives of other, non-literary institutions: of marriage and the nuclear family; of the great (usually heterosexual) love affair; of manifest destiny; of white supremacy; of capital; of Bildung; of heath and sanity; of enlightenment; of the inviolable meaning of the birth and execution and rebirth of Jesus—to choose but a few. While I’m not convinced that Balzac or, for that matter, George Eliot, among other such giants, were in fact writing in support of the institutions of bourgeois social life of their day, I do see how the descriptive techniques they developed have been exploited over time to create an unimaginative secular mode of storytelling that favors pat tropes, rather than investigating and revealing the conditions of the writer’s life.

When I think of totalizing literary narratives, avoidance seems to be a big part of the gambit. Glossing over ethical ambiguities, yes, but also omitting the fact that, as they say, everyone poops. (People do not, as a rule, poop in nineteenth-century fiction.) From a more contemporary technical point of view, I think of something called the “emotional question,” which I recently learned from a student is a craft-related tchotchke that all short stories must consistently refer to throughout their “arc.” The student had at first called the emotional question “the EQ,” and I had to ask him what he meant by that. He assumed that anyone interested in literature must know all about the EQ. It had to be their watchword. The student had learned about this sacred touchstone in a college writing class. “You know,” he said, “the EQ!” The famous EQ. A relic of Cold War pedagogy as far as I can tell, the EQ is the sort of arbitrary metric that New Narrative came up against. The student and I later laughed about his fervor for a pair of letters, but I will admit that it felt strange and not altogether pleasant to struggle for a moment in their hold.

“The distinction between abstract and material has become a joke,” Bellamy writes in the final essay in Bee Reaved, “Chase Scene.” She is describing how it is to live after Killian’s death. But this is not the same as Didion’s magical thinking, because far from slipping into a fantasy that Killian had not received a serious cancer diagnosis and then died from complications related to chemotherapy treatment six weeks later, Bellamy dwells in the simultaneous reality and impossibility of this emotional, intellectual, and physical loss. It takes skill to inhabit this place, and a character has emerged. She is named Bee Reaved: “Side note about the ‘I’: Dodie’s gone.” Bee Reaved is someone who can talk to Killian, write to him, write about him. She is the one who can confess, of being brought to tears after seeing a couple holding hands on the street, “I so intensely longed for someone who would care enough for me to hold my hand. I have the eroticism of a child.” She can document the weeks, days, and minutes leading up to the moment when Killian is taken off life support. She can admit that at times she was a “horrible wife.”

I never took the garbage out, I didn’t read the final version of your novel Spreadeagle. Not only did I fuck other people, I fell in love with them—all that was fine, you said, as long as when things turned to shit you didn’t have to take care of me, and then you took care of me anyway. The last thing you wanted was a good wife. The unspoken promise of our partnership was that neither of us would ever have to be “normal.”

I’ve forgotten to mention that “Chase Scene” is also an essay about the movie version of Stephen King’s novel about a killer car, Christine, and James Dean’s vehicular death, and Bellamy’s discovery that she has a sister she has never met who was given up for adoption before Bellamy was born, and the poet Jack Spicer’s grave. And there are other details pasted deftly in the margins like little illuminations: scenes from Grey’s Anatomy and Bellamy’s dreams. I feel as if I’ve left everything out: that I am supposed to tell the reader that Killian identified as a gay man, that Bellamy has written in detail about their sex life. But there isn’t a singular issue or emotional question, a.k.a. EQ, here; that is Bellamy’s signature and her talent and genius. Her syntax makes you throb. You pant, trying to pull it in through your eyes: more information, more feeling, more life. More accumulation. Particularly in these Covid-numbed days, this is compelling, enlivening, relieving; reading approaches a state of grace. “You acted like sex was a miracle, like I was a miracle that happened to you,” Bee/Bellamy writes. The essay, like all of Bellamy’s prose, concerns the metamorphic miracle of writing.

The Authorized Version

“Chase Scene” concludes with a scenario that also plays out at the close of Dodie Bellamy’s 1998 novel, The Letters of Mina Harker, which Semiotext(e) has just rereleased as a sort of companion volume to Bee Reaved. In this scene, the narrator’s husband, KK, insists, “I’m your house.” He is naked, kneeling over her. He pauses, jokes: “This is what you always wanted, isn’t it, a house that talks.”

Returning to Letters alongside Bee Reaved, I was struck by this line about the talking house. It’s a sweet yet unsettling image, since archetypal. As in a fairy tale in which objects and animals conspire to aid the heroine, where candlesticks speak and hundreds of mice flood a dungeon chamber to separate grains of wheat from a pile of sand, the talking house is a figure of salvation. A talking house might be the mystical other who accompanies our always-incomplete journey from childhood to whatever comes next. It is, indeed, what we’ve always wanted and needed: someone who knows what this place we are living in is, because they are somehow already of it. They are the place. A house that talks uses its powers of speech to remind us that we are here, sheltered, not quite alone.

Anyone familiar with The Letters of Mina Harker, perhaps Bellamy’s most ornate and challenging book to date, knows that things are a bit more complicated than I am letting on. This epistolary fiction follows the exploits of a hybrid writing subjectivity—part Mina Harker, part Dodie Bellamy (and thus a different spin on the Bee Reaved persona). Mina, who is inspired by the female protagonist of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is, like that Mina, a.k.a. Mrs. Wilhelmina Harker, née Murray, a stenographer, a gatherer of media and linguistic evidence. An aside here to say that I had forgotten that this character is primly interpreted by Winona Ryder in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film adaptation, a fact that adds a whole other pop-cultural valence to the mix. Bellamy’s Mina revises Stoker’s characterization—along with Ryder/Coppola’s and just about everyone else’s. Her Mina is no mere “secretarial adjunct to the great European vampire killer, Dr. Van Helsing.” Rather, this is the true Mina, an undead Brontë-esque figure “dart[ing] across the moor fog condensing on my long plait of hair.” She’s “THE AUTHORIZED VERSION.” It seems that after a fun dalliance with old Nosferatu, she’s moved on. “I will never love him,” she writes. “He’s too weird too intense.”

The language of Mina Harker haunts Dodie Bellamy’s word-processing software, but not only this—it threatens to permanently possess Bellamy’s body. The authorized Mina turns out to have succumbed to Dracula/Nosferatu’s charms precisely in order to be infected with the Count’s infernal powers: “Remember,” she writes, “my kind can slip through keyholes, slide beneath doors.” Whereas in Stoker’s account Mina’s soul vacillates between damnation and salvation, and she is only rescued through the heroism of a crack team of Christian vampire-slayers, here Mina revels in her cursedness, which expresses itself via a voracious appetite for sex and, more important, writing. Page one of the novel’s first letter: “I am so aroused my clit flicks like a tongue.”

Despite being centrally located on many human bodies, clits don’t seem to make it into much literary fiction. Letters is on a mission to revise all that—through the detailing of a sex life that could, factually speaking, be Dodie Bellamy’s own, but which is mediated by the titular character who, as it turns out, begins taking credit for it. Mina mocks Dodie for her relative prudery, and, meanwhile, Dodie “threaten[s] an exorcism” if Mina doesn’t “calm down.” Mina takes two lovers, Quincey and Dion. KK, Dodie’s husband, knows all about this; he offers dry commentary. Of the latter of Mina/Dodie’s paramours, he quips, “You and Dion are two giant screens with different movies playing on each of you.” In the novel’s lush array of sex scenes, KK himself appears, “cock and balls dangl[ing].” As he also seems to be Dodie’s most trusted reader and editor, he’s in the curious position of commenting on his own acts and the description thereof.

Perhaps it doesn’t seem like Letters could possibly be a book about mourning, but I think it is, and this is part of the reason why it makes so much sense for it to appear again at this time. If Bee Reaved is, on the one hand, a text about grief, it is also a book about how one becomes a writer and how that—process? fantasy? act?—gets bound up in one’s most intimate relationships. Similarly, Letters treats loss and how writing permits its assimilation: here a loss of innocence about what one is capable of as an embodied being, about love itself, about the very meaning of our strongest drives and most intense experiences. It’s not that sex is just or merely empty, empty in a simple way. If only! Sex is empty in the extraordinarily haunted way in which mirrors are empty. This is a very hard thing to get over. Some people never do.

Bellamy has an unerring ability to find the verbal mot juste—and not just once, but over and over and over (and over) again. Her sentences are capable of vulpine rapidity, gleaming condensation, shaggy languor, and all sorts of other movements and gestures that astonish, please, unnerve. What separates her from other “experimental”—I employ quotes to help a little with the tiredness of the term—writers who have foregone the faded distinctions of traditional literary genre, is her simultaneous uncompromising antinomianism, a.k.a. weirdness, and stylistic rigor. Her science of the American phrase revises the “show don’t tell” chestnut so that it reads something like, “Exist and never ever cease opening your body and brain to what it might be to write this down.” Not mean. Be. Meaning is not lost in Bellamy’s prose, far from it, but it comes after enunciation. Only with the selection of the word that has the satisfactory texture, suppleness, drip, bite, brittleness, heat, ichor, etc., will meaning begin to pool and teem.

Bellamy’s writing feels simultaneously disconnected from the internet and intimately intertwined with it, too, full of strange contradictions related to being an insider and outsider, both at once. This amphibious quality is what allows her to so convincingly convey psychic and corporeal particularities of our time, to bring us figuratively and literally back to life. Her work simultaneously builds on earlier precedents—like Acker—and foreshadows and even exceeds the most surreal and antic moments in contemporary (auto)fiction by “very online” authors. But, more important, Bellamy’s writing takes on an ambiguous literary substance we seem at once to revile and crave: emotion. She doesn’t rail against our addiction to emotion in its triter manifestations (i.e., sentimentality) or exploit our weakness for it, yet she is engaged with it nevertheless. She tracks it. She tirelessly mimics it, reinscribes it, questions it, drives it out of her body ahead of the cursor, plays with it. She is one of the handful of living writers I know of who have had the force, courage, and maybe also the luck (but what is luck other than hard work) to go beyond cliché.

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Date: March 1, 2022

Publisher: The Baffler

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.
This essay appears in the print edition of The Baffler, March 2022, issue 62, "Political Fictions."

Cover.

THE MAYOR OF LEIPZIG

In Rachel Kushner’s brief novella, a tale of nonevents.

The Mayor of Leipzig, by Rachel Kushner, Karma Books, 71 pages, $20

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Rachel Kushner’s three novels are each densely descriptive slices of US history and life, books that often engage with America’s extraterritorial adventures. Telex from Cuba (2008) is set primarily in American sugar plantations in Cuba before and during the revolution, while The Flamethrowers (2013) flashes back to an Italy overrun by Germans after its 1943 armistice with the Allies during World War Two, and then to Brazil’s so-called second rubber boom near the end of that conflict, largely the result of American investment. This is to say that Kushner tends to examine her country via its exercise of power. Her most recent novel, The Mars Room (2018), an anatomy of prison life in crumbling twenty-first-century California, takes on a more contemporary and pointedly sociological cast, setting its sights on America’s carceral interior rather than its globalist exploits.

All these works have an air of the hard-boiled, wordy aesthetics of the leftist late modernism of John Dos Passos or William Gaddis’s dense prose, liberally mixed with a glossier, popular take on the notion of national identity and events, such as one might find in Victor Hugo. This potent combination of the specific and the mythic is further shaped by Kushner’s interest in women’s lives. Fiction permits Kushner to center experiences and forms of labor—sex work, childcare, the processing of traumas both personal and cultural—that are still poorly acknowledged in big-h History.

Given the above, Kushner’s new and very brief novella, The Mayor of Leipzig, published by the Lower East Side gallery Karma, represents something of a departure. Or, maybe it’s a vacation. Narrated by an unnamed American female visual artist, The Mayor of Leipzig is a tale of nonevents suspended in a sort of non-time that might or might not be the Euro-American art world of the late 2000s and mid-2010s. The artist hears a lame talk by a jerky, upwardly failing male artist, a painter, in Cologne, then travels in the company of her European gallerist Birgit (“whose last name I can’t pronounce”) to Leipzig, where they meet a group of curators who are organizing an exhibition of the artist’s work. That evening, she and Birgit observe a fellow guest, the titular “mayor,” at their nondescript business hotel engaging in some lewd activity in his room, lights blazing and blinds open. The artist wakes up later on with the discomforting sense that a “malevolent presence” has entered her own quarters. Subsequently, the artist—of whom we know (1) that she is married, (2) that she is in the process of dropping her “Lacanian” psychoanalyst, (3) that she is successful enough to have rated an Artforum “Top Ten,” and (4) that she has a sister who may be jealous of her success—goes back to the US. Here, without fanfare, this tale of a working holiday ends.

It’s an odd little jaunt, complicated by the fact that it also seems to be functioning as a theory of fiction. The theory shows up in much the same way as that incorporeal intruder who bothers the female American artist during the night at the Leipzig hotel: it’s nameless and the reader is left unsure as to its purpose. In a short vignette, the narrating artist explains how the art of painting and, by analogy, the art of fiction function. Édouard Manet famously painted a barmaid and probable “part-time whore” at a famous dancehall (his A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882), yet his canvas is not a portrait. It reveals neither a real barmaid nor the (real) model who posed as a barmaid. Instead, what we see is “an image,” into which, as the artist maintains, Manet himself does not have “specialized insight.”

Analogously, “Authors, just like painters, don’t have full information.” Kushner’s artist—herself a kind of image, if a discursive rather than a painterly one—is no more optimistic where she herself is concerned, adding in a metafictional aside: “Rachel Kushner probably understands less about me than you will, after you read this.” We’re later informed, in a mildly gratuitous, likely fictional moment of revelation I’m still scratching my head at a little, that The Mayor of Leipzig is a story, the artist claims to know, that Kushner was originally working on as a Christmas commission for the Financial Times. The FT editor in question made the fatal mistake of reminding Kushner over email that her story should partake of a fun holiday mood and not contain four-letter words, to which, Kushner, livid, allegedly replied that perhaps she would “write a story called ‘A Christmas Carol,’ which would be about a woman named Carol, a plus-sized escort who smokes bath salts” and takes cocaine through her anus.

Not impossible, of course, to read this detour as a sort of self-conscious nod toward Kushner’s usually nuanced depiction of sex workers in her novels. There’s anger here and a reminder that the brain that dreams up considered depictions of the depths and heights of human experience can also propose cruder scenarios that nobody in their right mind would like. I’m not sure what all this means—what that jerky lecturing artist or the other, grosser hotel guest in Leipzig have to do with the female American artist’s ongoing attempts to come to grips with childhood trauma, or how they relate to her efforts to remain interested in an art world that seems boring in the extreme. Certainly there’s a contrast: women who display themselves are images, cyphers, or risible caricatures. Men, on the other hand, seem only to gain power through their ostentation, even in failure or loucheness. I guess I wouldn’t take this as a universal rule, but of course the history of art is littered with supporting examples.

If this was a little disappointing as an animus for the tale, I did still enjoy what feels like a purposive and quite precise failure in this slim volume, a pratfall I’ll be replaying in my own mind for some time to come. “Who gets to not have to try?” an audience member asks the annoying male artist after his ridiculous talk. With her acerbic book, Kushner seems to reply: this time, me.

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Date: February 5, 2021

Publisher: 4Columns

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

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The Persistence of Realism

The Mayor of Leipzig, by Rachel Kushner.

THE STYLE THAT WOULD NOT DIE

There is a well-worn narrative trope that even the novel, despite its multifarious forms and affinity for innovation, seems unable to shake: “boy meets girl.” Let’s examine four recent tellings of this story, all of them quite popular. In the first version a pair meets, but their attempts to be together and love each other are frustrated by class difference, familial histories of abuse, and attachment disorders. The plot of this novel, let us call it story one, runs on questions of psychology and intergenerational inheritance, as well as the workings of larger social systems in the present. Story two, on the other hand, has the interrelation of boy and girl mediated by a myth, that of the macho ultra-male, and boy and girl must unravel this cliché in order to be together successfully. In story three, boy meets girl, but their attempts to be together and love each other are frustrated by the all-but-total mediation of their psychological, social, and physical selves via internet-based communications, content mills, and web cams, along with copious amounts of consciousness-altering substances. In story four, boy and girl’s relationship is even more grievously intruded upon by technology—here a wearable device that records their memories with the precision of digital cinema and archives their timelines for on-demand consultation.

These four “stories” are essentially realist in their outlook. They all focus on individual experience and the minutiae of everyday life, and all are free of supernatural intervention. But this does not mean that they are realist fictions in the nineteenth-century sense, and it is this—the simultaneous survival of the realist mode across two centuries and the dissipation of many of its most integral goals and stylistic advances—that interests me. The four narratives I describe above—Normal People (2018) by Sally Rooney, I Love Dick (1997) by Chris Kraus, Taipei (2013) by Tao Lin, and “The Entire History of You” (2011), episode 3 of season 1 of “Black Mirror,” written by Jesse Armstrong—make use of the basic tropes of realism, emphasizing material detail and time as it is lived. I have selected these four examples because they show a useful array of mediating forces, ranging from the psychological to the technological: Rooney focuses on class and unconscious behavioral repetition introduced by trauma; her protagonists, Connell and Marianne, must interpret each other’s statements and gestures in light of confusion produced by challenging inheritances both economic and familial. Kraus, on the other hand, describes a marriage disrupted by fantasy. “Dick”—the joke never gets old—is at once a fairy-tale notion, cultural construct, and problematic actual guy. “Chris,” the novel’s protagonist, can only unwind the fantasy, deconstruct the norm, and escape the somewhat unwitting cad through the writing of an epistolary novel whose plot is in part the (actual) emergence of Chris Kraus as one of the most original writers of the late twentieth century. Lin’s novel is an anatomy of subjectivity online, which is to say, what hyperconnected subjectivity sounds and feels like, in so-called real life. And, lastly, Armstrong’s “Black Mirror” episode raises the stakes of the mediation implicit in both Kraus and Lin’s narratives—and running in the background of Rooney’s; in a sort of mise en abyme, it offers a realist depiction of what it would be like to have a hyper-realistic metanarrative operating in one’s mind at all times.

HERE, HOWEVER, the commonalities begin to fray. We’ll want to set “Black Mirror,” along with other examples of what I like to call “IT Horror,” such as the films of David Cronenberg or Cary Joji Fukunaga’s recent miniseries “Maniac,” aside for a moment to explore the written documents. These three novels belong to a category of more or less autobiographical fiction that has lately been loosely grouped under the umbrella term, “autofiction”—a genre that, in spite of its blurring of the line(s) between fiction and memoir, has a fundamental affiliation with nineteenth-century literary realism on account of its attention to minute, realistically portrayed details of everyday life and lived time. Other partisans of this style include, but are by no means limited to, writers such as Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Miranda July, Olivia Laing, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Lynne Tillman; their prose resonates with and has perhaps been influenced by the work of New Narrative writers such as Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, and Kevin Killian, who are also loosely associated with Kathy Acker, which were, in turn, preceded by the detailed prose of New Journalism (James Baldwin, Joan Didion, even Renata Adler), modernism’s and surrealism’s various streams of consciousness (indeed, both Marcel Proust’s 1913 In Search of Lost Time and Andre Breton’s 1927 Nadja might be termed autofictions or New Narrative texts, avant la lettre). Although the authors I list are distinct from one another in a number of ways, they may all be considered autofictioneers in that they often work with autobiographical material that is so minor in nature as to transcend its granular particularity to, paradoxically, become general. As in Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in which the existence of a middle-class sex worker is viewed in its rhythmic, changelessly recurring specifics without revulsion or drama, autofiction tends to transform private, personal experience into a series of meditative repetitions, in which routine is emphasized. Its low affect (also expressed in the style of filmmaking of the mid-aughts termed “Mumblecore”) suggests a refusal to depict heightened emotion or elaborate and/or heroic narrative action, perhaps casting such drama as unrealistic hyperbole. The ingredients of autofiction are so blatantly personal and essentially insignificant, that they decline to rise to the level of ideology. While autofiction is often read as an attempt to explore contemporary existence in its material and sensorial “truth,” it may be more accurate to say that it functions as an ongoing exploration of Roland Barthes’s notion of “zero-degree writing,” an impossibly style-free type of writing that repudiates academic conventions (the flourishes of rhetoric, for example) and other formal pretensions that express the author’s allegiance to class-based and other sometimes exclusionary in-groups.

Given its love of the detail “seized” from life, autofiction is, as I have already intimated, the strongest proof or symptom of the ongoing influence of nineteenth-century literary realism on fiction, particularly in the US, in the present. And yet: autofiction hardly takes up all the provocations, ambitions, or interventions of the realist novel. While “realism” (Réalisme) was originally an art-historical term, first applied in 1835 to designate Rembrandt’s distinct brand of humanistic portraiture, in its literary use it indicates not just attention to detail in description but a broader series of innovations with respect to point of view and narrative time. As Ian Watt writes in The Rise of the Novel (1957), clarifying what was at stake in the development of literary realism, in the realist novel “a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences.” One need only think of the comedic plays of William Shakespeare to comprehend this literary mutation; no longer must twins be separated at birth, or humans accidentally transformed into donkeys by fairies, in order for plot to arise. Instead, a character merely walks down a street, seeks to obtain an education, attempts to make a living. Realist characters develop in the course of time. They see and smell and taste and hear and feel in minute, procedural detail. The exploration of external worlds via the individual and through the senses, was a source of great interest, famously, for such French writers as Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola, as well as British authors from Charles Dickens to George Eliot (although Eliot is not always described as a realist, given her interest in satire and meta-fictional asides). Zola, not without a hint of bitterness at the vagaries of literary criticism, remarked in 1880, “The highest praise one could formerly make of a novelist was to say, ‘He has imagination.’ Now that praise would be regarded as criticism.” Whereas Balzac had begun his encyclopedic investigation of everyday life and contemporary social structures in his Human Comedy under the sign of the contemporary dictum that “One must be of one’s time,” and Flaubert became obsessed with the notion of a novel that could be developed based on its own internal principles, becoming a perfectly self-sufficient work of style-less style, later authors took more selective or extreme views. Proust spoke of his commitment to a “realism of the deep I,” while Zola, a fan of positivist approaches and quantification (which he perceived as marks of modernity), maintained that the body is analogous to a machine. Realism responded to numerous ideologies across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, sometimes claiming to encompass all aspects of life via its descriptive powers. Today we are in a moment of continual but uneven haunting by its legacies, and there are several reasons why.

Realism, as a literary style, works in tandem with technological developments progressing alongside it. Literary realism, like the realism of the paintings of Gustave Courbet (who titled his 1855 exhibition of rejected paintings “Du Réalisme”) and the Impressionists, is characterized not just by an interest in popular culture, but also a particular orientation to present time. As Linda Nochlin argued, Realism is anti-traditional, located all-but-entirely in daily time. Building on Nochlin’s contentions in her 1971 book Realism, we might say it is a style of depiction that not only conforms to the philosophies of individual experience advanced by John Locke and David Hume, for example, but that blossoms during the emergence and early popularization of photography (an era which some believe properly begins with proto-photographic techniques developed in the eighteenth century). Realist descriptive styles still present in contemporary North American novels would seem, therefore, to have survived long past the demise of realism as a well-defined and/or energetic interdisciplinary movement; according to Nochlin, this death took place sometime in the 1870s or 1880s. One possible reason for the survival of realist conventions in twenty-first-century fiction is the ongoing proliferation of photography, which itself privileges saving the ephemeral, the momentary, the contemporary, instituting its own temporal regime. Indeed, it is undeniable that there is something shared in the impulse to compose realist fiction and the impulse to create photographic images (suggesting, too, film and television’s ongoing dialogue with realist writing).

Realism is still, where it crops up in contemporary writing, concerned if not obsessed with contemporaneity and current time. It is commonplace to read emails and other digitally communicated messages in the many present-day novels that are more or less haunted by the realist urge. Characters consult phones and screens and worry about what is being said about them online. Yet the time windows of algorithmic processes hardly emerge at the narrative level in autofiction, which, as noted, has so far been treated as the premier innovative imaginative prose style of the contemporary era. Although a novel like Taipei makes frequent reference to images and writing online, the temporality and power of the algorithms that produce search results and order social media feeds remain obscure. In reading Lin’s novel, we have a vague sense of some hidden agency that dwarfs human endeavor, but the radically different time of computation—which is on the one hand impossibly fast (occurring in fractions of milliseconds) and on the other logical (occurring in discrete, managed sequences)—is not depicted. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Digital media are capable of registering units of time that are too brief for the human senses to capture, what some have called the “black box” of the algorithm. Realism depends on time as it is lived (by humans) for its narrative depictions, yet algorithms, which are now ubiquitous in everyday life, partake of a temporality that is fundamentally foreclosed to the human sensorium. Algorithmic time is a source of profound and unresolved tension for literary Realism.

AND SO: how does a popular, realist and/or autofictional novel like Normal People respond to the algorithm, this ubiquitous and possibly tyrannical temporal figure of our era? For, if the novel is truly realist, on nineteenth-century terms, must it not necessarily incorporate this style of time? One might say that that Rooney’s novel progresses according to other concerns, but I am not so sure. Rather, I think the novel offers an alternative interpretation of the present, one in which the asymmetries, botched timing, and resultant misunderstandings in the slightly dysfunctional romantic relationship at the center of the book can be interpreted (i.e., decoded by the lovers) with exclusive recourse to questions around class and family history, rather than issues endemic to data transfer or big tech. Sex, as a source of non-verbal and nearly mystical, irrational communication, is at once the ultimate decoder ring and the reward at the end of a (verbal) misunderstanding well resolved. Rooney seems to comprehend well the interpersonal issues common to computing (weak signals, inadvertently gnomic emails, social-media addiction, and so on), but creates a mildly escapist plot, one in which technology is—and, what is key, realistically—negligible in its effects. The emotional cost of constant access to smartphones is all but entirely left out of Normal People.

On these grounds, I find the scenarios of I Love Dick and Taipei far more intriguing, as these novels do not entirely skirt the issue of the proliferation of algorithms. I Love Dick (which entered the televisual realm as Joey Soloway’s loopy one-season Amazon series in 2017) suggests that writing itself—here, faxes and letters—has overtaken interpersonal contact (e.g., sex) as a more immediate and compelling form. Although the novel is often described as a tale of feminist revenge, patriarchy meeting its match in unfettered female obsession, it is also a testament to the primacy of the act of writing. Kraus’s protagonist, Chris, wins because she writes everything down. She gets it on paper (or, as the case may be, into word-processing software), and this is liberating. Although the novel does not really delve into the time figures of the then-youthful Internet, it is very interested in what we might call postal time—in the failure of the letter to arrive at its destination in a timely way, if ever. In I Love Dick, no letter ever arrives at Dick’s door, metaphorically speaking, and this turns out to be comedic, rather than tragic; Kraus’s message enters into eternal suspended animation, which is also what constitutes its pertinence to the novel genre, rather than to the message genre. In this sense, I Love Dick approaches the status of signal, while remaining essentially narrative in nature; it’s quite a feat.

Taipei, meanwhile, builds on Lin’s influential minimalist prose style, displayed with even more potency in his earlier works, such as his unnerving Richard Yates (2010). Light on plot, Taipei describes interpersonal relationships that exist in a state of homeostatic non-development as characters are unceasingly distracted by things happening online. The act of having a conversation under these conditions—an undertaking which Lin writes with masterful aplomb and obvious enjoyment—is not so much fraught or lopsided, as in a Chekhov play, but strange because vertiginously trivial. “I feel like I hate everyone,” says Taipei’s protagonist, Paul, apropos of nothing. Erin, Paul’s romantic interest, simply concurs, smiling, “Yeah.” Characters are always looking at their laptops, producing discourse, but what they say when they are in one another’s presence, no matter how weird or absolute, does not propel the narrative; they speak, but without hope of changing anything or even successfully describing their environments. Lin depicts a world in which young people are unmoored from time-based obligations, distracting themselves from their own insignificance.

Imprisonment, servitude, and torturous repetition are frequent themes of “Black Mirror,” but among the show’s many obvious warnings about the threats contemporary technologies pose to human rights is a quieter and more severe note about lived, phenomenal time. The key technological innovation provoking the show’s exploration of various (IT-based) horrors is the possibility of “uploading” an exact copy of one’s mind—and, therefore, conscious self—to the cloud. The applications of this affordance are myriad: mini-me personal assistant who lives inside a plastic egg on one’s kitchen counter, enhanced interrogation techniques for police within virtual reality, survival beyond biological death in projective universe(s), creation of various styles of animate copies (holographic, robotic, digital) of individuals, immersive gaming, and on and on.

Perhaps the most intriguing and disturbing consequence of this imagined technology, at least where narrative is concerned, is the mutability of time as it’s experienced in virtual worlds. In a 2014 special episode, "White Christmas," Matt (played by a dastardly John Hamm) describes his job “breaking in” a miniature, synthetic copy of a client destined for an eternity of meaningless service running a smart home. Matt accomplishes his task by leveraging experiential time: while Matt experiences several seconds, the digital copy of the client’s self is left alone in a content-less white void for increasingly long intervals, up to six months, unable to sleep or derive any sort of pleasure. This cruel solitary confinement has the intended effect, producing an obedient digital assistant. In the fourth season’s fourth episode, "Hang the DJ," we observe the ups and downs of two young people whom we believe have enrolled themselves in some sort of dating program, only to learn at the end of the episode that these apparently real individuals are mere digital copies of living persons; the narrative we have seen is in fact a single virtual scenario among over a thousand, all rehearsed by an algorithm in the milliseconds between when the two actual people see each other in a bar and deploy an app on their phones to determine compatibility.

“Black Mirror” suggests that the time of bodily needs and terrestrial life is not something one can merely lose to occasional discursive busy-work, e.g., social media and constant access to email. Rather, the projection of our selves into increasingly artificial and minutely regulated and surveilled virtual environments is, at best, disorienting and, at its most exploitative and permanent, a mode of slavery that will be sold to us as entertainment, convenience, therapy, immortality, and so on. While the first seasons of “Black Mirror,” 2011–2013, evinced a near-total despair (and, terrifying prescience) about approaching anti-democratic trends, later episodes commissioned by Netflix—itself an algorithmic juggernaut—have explored somewhat maudlin solutions, in which characters team up for more or less convincing rescue missions to save ghosts trapped in machines.

But in spite of these late-breaking humanist plotlines, I hardly think “Black Mirror” sets out to make an actionable case regarding the banal (since insidiously ubiquitous) evil of tech. What the show does most effectively is to dramatize and narrate something extremely hard to dramatize and narrate: digital time complexity, which is to say, the amount of time it takes to run an algorithm (which is not very much time at all, something that should alarm us far more than it seems to). Although the show may have set out in 2011 to operate in a speculative or sci-fi mode, many of its themes and proposals—from the gamification of everything to the melding of reality television and national politics—have come to seem plainly realist rather than satirical or fantastically dystopian in their depiction of the intersection of technology and everyday life in 2020. Even beyond this anachronistic relevance, the show’s early seasons are squarely located in a recognizable near-present, one in which fashions and home décor are not futuristic, but rather seem to come from H&M and CB2. The technology may be slightly tweaked, but everything else looks about the same. For these reasons, it might make sense for us, in 2020, to question the genre of “Black Mirror” and compare it not only to “The Twilight Zone” but also, as I have done, to realist fiction.

But can realist novels successfully depict the effects of, if not the actual microprocesses of, algorithmically controlled time? If the novel is to survive (perhaps I’m feeling optimistic today, but I wager that it will), then we should look forward to the emergence of new styles and hybrid genres. Given the haziness of contemporary literary realism and the novel’s love of, well, novelty, I doubt that we will have to wait very long.

Date: October 20, 2020

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.

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On site.

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ILLUSTRATION BY NOLA LOPEZ

Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, 1855, oil on canvas, approx. 12 by 20 feet.

HOW SHOULD AN AUTHOR BE?
Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal, Coach House Books, 2020

I suppose it did not matter to John Updike or Tom Wolfe—to select two figures somewhat at random—that the author died during their lifetimes. Essays proclaiming the fictional, constructed and highly mediated nature of the figure of the author appeared in the late 1960s (Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author” in late 1967 and Michel Foucault’s lecture “What Is an Author?” in early 1969), heralding a new critical way of thinking about authorship that favoured texts, discourse, media, history, and the social and aesthetic workings of power over the notion of a god-like maker who was capable of foreseeing all possible meanings of His unique and irreplaceable literary masterpiece. Although I’m not sure many people would still refer to Updike and Wolfe as geniuses, the invocation of their names does provide a quick and ready example of what it might have meant to be an author at the dawning of postmodernity: the author’s name was a token in the marketplace, the author a concept (if not a lifestyle) that sold. Perhaps this is still the case today. Barthes and Foucault, since French and therefore forged in an education system that fetishized and, in my own limited experience, still fetishizes canonical works with a level of detail and myopia that few Americans past or present would be likely to relate to, were aiming at something other than Updike or Wolfe. They were less concerned with the bestsellers of their day than with a longstanding cultural practice: that of eliding the feeling and social conditions of the present to promote a fantasy about timeless omnipotence and capital-T truth. Barthes had a specific recommendation regarding what should be done. Classical literature, he writes, has never paid much attention to the reader; now, he says, let’s—let’s make way for the birth of the reader.

There’s a sense in which Barthes’s exhortation appears to have been taken up by culture and technology at large (here I refer to the existence of the World Wide Web, where end users, a.k.a. readers, abound). However, it is my intuition that we remain within a paradigm in which authors have by and large retained a certain cachet. Questions are posed in various media outfits about the author’s mysterious process, which is to say, about the author’s desk setup as well as how biography plays into the author’s creations. The contemporary author is generally relatable, but, like the actor or celebrity athlete, with a slightly inhuman twist: The author is a “true” artist, not a hobbyist or aspirant. The author has been confirmed as “the,” not “a,” writer. It’s an apparently minor difference of articles that still seems, these days, to make all the difference. Often entire books are devoted to the task of establishing—with what the writer appears to hope will be adamantine and immortal permanence—this difference.

Lisa Robertson’s new novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, could be taken to be such a book. It follows in the tradition of autofictions I have liked a lot (Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus), as well as some that I have not preferred, providing an account of a Canadian writer’s expatriate youth in Paris in the mid-1980s. It is not easy to summarize The Baudelaire Fractal, so please forgive my slightly awkward try: After a reading in Vancouver, a poet named Hazel Brown wakes up in a hotel room to discover that she has been transformed, perhaps overnight, into the author of the works of the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. At this point, Brown might be in her forties. She remembers this event, this metamorphosis, from the vantage of her late fifties and then also recalls her much younger days, previous to the change (the aforementioned Parisian period). This complex anamnesis is interspersed with reflections on: the life of Charles Baudelaire; the life of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s lover; the painter Gustave Courbet, among other painters and artists of the Third Republic; and tailored jackets. At the novel’s conclusion, Hazel Brown thinks about Édouard Manet’s portrait of Duval, pondering from the vantage of 2019 its depiction of “the immense, silent legend of any girl’s life.” It becomes apparent that the preceding episodes concerning Brown’s life have been intended as a similar, if somewhat less silent, myth. And, if I am understanding matters correctly, it would appear that Brown’s legend is somehow certified or rendered more distinct by its brush with Baudelaire’s weird, disembodied authority.

A note on that floating authority: The transformation is introduced on page 16 of my edition, in the second chapter. The novel does not begin with this incident, and the metamorphosis remains largely unaddressed for the remainder of Robertson’s narrative, until page 135, when it makes a brief second appearance, only to slip from view once more. Brown, who speaks in the first person throughout the book, is specific: It is not that she became Baudelaire himself (“This is obviously very different from being Baudelaire, which was not the case, nor my experience”); rather, that she is now the author of his writing. Brown possesses the spiritual, if not the legal, copyright to all of Baudelaire’s graphic output, “Even the unwritten texts, the notes and sketches contemplated and set aside, and also all of the correspondence, the fizzles and false starts and abandoned verses, the diaristic notes: I wrote them.” Brown did not live Baudelaire’s life, does not look like him, is neither a time traveller nor a historical reenactor, and yet: all that he wrote, she has in fact written.

This is an interesting proposition, one that inspires a series of questions concerning, as Foucault put it, “What is an author?” Is receiving the credit and/or responsibility for Baudelaire’s writing like having a superpower, or is it a curse? Does it mean that Hazel Brown now possesses the magic diction, rapturous rhetorical talent, mastery of prosody and unfailing eye for detail that animate Baudelaire’s verse and prose? Does it mean that Hazel Brown is now due the same celebrity that has, historically speaking, been accorded Baudelaire? Does Brown experience Baudelaire’s hatreds, fears and resentments—the unease that rumbles beneath his sinuous turns of phrase and infernal mastery of form? In other words, we want to know if Baudelaire’s authorship is not merely or exactly a gift, but also an imposition, if it might not in some way interrupt Hazel Brown’s attempt to become the author of the works of Hazel Brown. It is inconvenient, to be sure, that Baudelaire (“not as socially expansive as his own construction of erotic beauty”) was frequently a jerk.

It would be nice if The Baudelaire Fractal addressed these questions. However, unlike other transformation tales—in which the protagonist receives a more visible othering, into, say, a cockroach (Kafka’s well-known story), a giant mammary gland (Philip Roth’s The Breast), a donkey (Apuleius’s The Golden Ass), a pig (Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes), a woman (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando) or many, many other entities (Ovid)—we never find out how the transformation affects Brown. In part, this is due to Robertson’s choice to have most of Brown’s account take place before the authorial switch, when she is still an unknown poet working odd jobs in Paris and, presumably, still the author known as Hazel Brown, unenhanced by vintage spleen. In later life, Brown seems to spend most of her time taking meditative walks with her dog and savouring the agricultural offerings of the French countryside, distinctly un-Baudelairean activities, if Brown’s descriptions of the life and times of Baudelaire are accurate. Thus, Brown’s metamorphosis remains local to the moments where it occurs, on the page. In this sense, it is less a metamorphosis than a claim.

The other difficulty with The Baudelaire Fractal is that Brown’s/Robertson’s research into Baudelaire’s life and circle, research which is deployed as proof of Brown’s (and possibly Robertson’s own) authority, mainly serves to support the notion that Baudelaire was an exceptional individual who, although flawed, was possessed of remarkable taste and aesthetic insight—he, for example, “poured drops of musk oil from a small glass vial onto his red carpets when he entertained his friends in his baroque apartment.” If the novel seems to position itself to explore Baudelaire’s authorship as a historical, social or literary phenomenon, particularly as regards the politics of gender, race and even the legacies of France’s colonialism, it struggles to make good on that ambition, with questionable assertions about Baudelaire’s life with Duval such as, “They were together, loving and fighting and talking, for twenty-one years.” Every few pages a parade of additional luminaries appears, and near the close of the novel we are fielding anecdotes about Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, along with news of an essay on rhythm by the linguist Émile Benveniste, among other miscellaneous items. These are interesting citations, drawn from the canon of comparative literature as imagined in the Anglophone world via the criticism of Erich Auerbach, among others. However, these glimpses into graduate curricula of the 1990s and early 2000s do little, in their current form, to illuminate Hazel Brown’s situation.

For me, the best scenes in The Baudelaire Fractal belong to the Brown of the ’80s, who takes up residence in a series of chambres de bonne after having obtained British citizenship via a technicality (her father’s birth and brief infant stay in the UK). Among these, the most dramatic illustration of Brown’s status as a “girl” is neither an incident when her young lover batters and chokes her, nor when he asks her if she would “care to be prostituted.” Rather, it is a job she acquires by way of an encounter with a random middle-aged bourgeois in a bookshop. Brown is assigned the task of collecting the man’s daughter at school, conveying her home and then ironing and dusting while the child eats her lunch. This intimacy with elaborate, moneyed domesticity gives rise to a series of realizations about gender and labour, as well as the styles of private property traditional marriage entails, with the upper-middle-class wife’s role “so vast, so specialized, thorough, complex, and ornate all at once, that no single woman could perform the entire task.” Brown is briefly “one small component” of this juggernaut of “erotic catastrophes…family histories and political damages.” I found myself rapt as Brown describes a moment when Brown’s employer shows her his key ring, hung with keys to his multiple mistresses’ homes. What Brown doesn’t spell out is that this gesture is at once a proposition and a threat; I imagine there are few among us who haven’t met such a Bluebeard, in one workplace or another. Brown, who notes that she is incapable of smiling and going pleasantly about her work, is inevitably let go. Useless as a servant, in no small part because she would be impossible to add to Bluebeard’s collection, Brown cleverly fails the grooming period. Yet fresher material like this struggles against the novel’s many lugubrious commonplaces: Paris itself, the “artist’s studio” and the notion of The Great Poet, not to mention the much-rehashed histories of Baudelaire’s circle, Courbet, Manet, et al.

A final difficulty, the most significant one, to my mind, is that while Robertson writes sublime prose, with The Baudelaire Fractal she has done little to engage the form or history of the novel—an unusual sort of oversight for her, given her poems and essays are so intimately involved with interrogation of genre and form. Decorative, exhortatory writing that works well in poems crops up here from time to time and seems out of place. There are a number of hyperbolic calls to the reader—“The sexuality of sentences: Reader, I weep in it”—that fall flat, along with asides that seem designed to extract the reader from a sometimes bewildering temporality. The Baudelaire Fractal could have been a fantastic essay or prose series. It does not really work as a novel or narrative, not because it lacks “arc,” whatever that is (and I despise this sort of stale critique of experimental writing), but because its fragments and spirals of thought have been relentlessly assimilated via pastiche—with everything held together, apparently, by the mysterious connection to Baudelaire. I was disappointed by this choice, what seemed to me a deliberate decision to de-emphasize the significant and even beautiful discontinuity present in this writing.

But even given my disappointment with The Baudelaire Fractal, I have struggled to write this review. I deeply admire Robertson and the conversation she and others have cultivated around her writing. Indeed, openly critical remarks about art and literature often feel like a losing battle, and I’m always reminded of Joan Didion’s curt response to one supercilious critic, “Oh, wow.” Over her 30-year career, Robertson has done much to shape contemporary Anglophone poetics. She has written a style of poetry and prose that is not precisely “anti-lyric,” that is, unquestioningly opposed to the conventions of first-person speech and the arabesques that emerge out of attempts to imitate or cite Romantic, neo-classical and classical contexts—which have tended for several centuries now to cannibalize themselves in cute dreams of authenticity (lyres, urns, shepherds with flutes, landscaped estates with fainting mistresses). Robertson’s project is instead a form of “research” into the lyric, its effects, conventions and underpinnings, “work that change[s] the rhetorical conditions of I-saying.” The authority—and authorship—that Robertson has seemed to imagine for herself in past books has been plural as opposed to monolithic; complex, engaged and seductive, rather than given to tropes and filler.

The late art critic Maurice Berger, who passed away in our current health crisis at the age of 63, was a fantastic reader of Roland Barthes, and I think some of Berger’s observations about Barthes’s own relationship to authorship are à propos here. Berger writes, in an essay on Barthes and love published in Artforum in 1994, “[Barthes] was the ultimate flaneur: the ‘I’ that he uttered seemed always to evaporate, to blend into the space around him.” Berger also notes that Barthes was not always the best student of Roland Barthes, that Barthes sometimes lost sight of his own critical goals, “indulging in the very bourgeois delusions he sought to demythologize.” Something similar seems to have transpired here, in that in composing The Baudelaire Fractal, Lisa Robertson has slid into a major blind spot, becoming the very sort of (pre-canonized) author she had seemed, in the past, to write in ingenious distinction, if not direct opposition, to. This leaves me, the reader, with a dilemma. On the one hand, I want to applaud Robertson’s assumption, via Hazel Brown, of a mantle that so many male writers have taken up with casual entitlement; on the other, I feel somewhat betrayed. Even Robertson seems uncertain as to the meaning of the Baudelairean switcheroo, perhaps the reason that her novel barely mentions the transformation the jacket copy claims is at the centre of the work. I find myself coming to a conclusion that seems strangely absent from The Baudelaire Fractal, for reasons that I am still unable to divine. My thought is this: if, as for Hazel Brown and by this narrator’s own account, “all [our] predecessors [are] erased,” then we must actively choose and create what we become—and struggle against mere philology, by which I mean, unconsidered inheritance and repetition.

Date: June 30, 2020

Publisher: Canadian Art

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.

On site.

AS YOU WISH
An Art Historian Reads Silicon Valley

One of the things Pamela M. Lee accomplishes in her new publication, The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption (no place press, 2019), is to write in so many different ways that I will have difficulty here analyzing the book as criticism, as descriptive writing on contemporary art and technology, as an interrogation of the internet’s relationship to the law, as historiography, as a sort of beautifully irascible autofiction. The book is an experiment, and that mixing of genres and disciplines—that un-analyze-ability—is a central strategy. It is also something that I, as a reviewer, need to indicate, in no small part because Lee is a distinguished art historian and critic who maintains a position at Yale. Some might say this is the sort of book you write only after you get tenure. I say: more people should write books like this!

Here is why I like this book: it allows me to explore (i.e., to feel, to be in slowed-down contact with) forms of subjectivity that Lee has selected as exemplary of current discourse in the United States, while also providing a convincing critical reading of said habits of speech and mind. Normally, this sort of thing, the curating of contemporary subjectivities and organizing of them after a pleasing narrative fashion, is the purview of realist novels. However, The Glen Park Library, as its subtitle suggests, is a fairy tale—it’s a historically and critically minded fairy tale, but a fairy tale nonetheless, which means that it deals in fixed concepts and forms, which act a bit like magical talismans, tasks, or quests. Lee takes care to situate today’s foremost spell, “disruption,” in its awful origin text, Clayton Christensen’s 1997 business how-to bestseller, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Disruption, we discover, has lately transcended from localized metaphor to all-governing trope. In the globalized, algorithmically sorted teens, disruption is not just a business model; it’s also a sort of hero-myth, an eerie hyper-ubiquitous period style. It’s what Vladimir Propp might have termed a “function” in his 1928 proto-Structuralist classic, Morphology of the Folktale. In other words, The Glen Park Library is a book that will tell you how you are already reading, whether you like it or not, since you are reading (and living) in a space and time of discursive and technological disruption. Indeed, perhaps these two types of disruption amount to the same thing, for one will have difficulty composing a historical text in a time that has all but rejected public records and public space in favor of mountains of privately hoarded behavioral data. Lee calls this, our time, “an age of disrupted history.”

Yet Lee’s ostensible subject is, significantly, a historical event, the 2013 arrest of Ross Ulbricht at a sleepy San Francisco Public Library. Lee describes Ulbricht, who used the pseudonym the “Dread Pirate Roberts,” as the “protagonist of a dark fairy tale come true.” Ulbricht is currently serving two consecutive life sentences for his alleged role in the creation and maintenance of Silk Road, a now-defunct website that Wikipedia terms, in a flourish I can’t help repeating, “the first modern darknet market.” The controlled substances and murders your bitcoins could obtain on this Tor-enabled message board may or may not have jibed with Ulbricht’s libertarian philosophy; what truly mattered to Ulbricht, as he informed his sentencing judge in a letter, was the disruptive and liberating form of it all, “giving people the freedom to make their own choices.” “As you wish!” was the famous tagline of Westley, a.k.a. the Dread Pirate Roberts, as fans of the classic 1987 film The Princess Bride will recall.

The terms of Ulbricht’s arrest and conviction are murky, in no small part because Ulbricht maintains that he was not the one and only Dread Pirate Roberts. It was just an interchangeable name and role; Ulbricht hadn’t acted alone and wasn’t “DPR” in perpetuity. Lee makes hay with this weird fungibility, which she sees as a vacuous form of privilege (read: authority) that pervades start-up culture and contemporary society at large. The disruptor has the life cycle of a video game avatar: “Fail, die, disrupt, innovate, get born again, and repeat.” A disruptor can probably pass through the eye of a needle—unless, of course, the disruptor’s chosen live-action role-playing begins to surpass (and therefore disrupt) the traditional role of the nation state.

Still, this is a fairy tale, and Lee is not ultimately concerned with global hegemony. What she wants to get at, much like those who dealt in fairy stories in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, is the experiential side of the civilizing process. As Johanna Burton cogently points out in a reading of Lee’s 2013 book New Games: Postmodernism After Contemporary Art, one of Lee’s primary concerns as an art historian (and, I would argue, as a critic) is the consideration of “when certain events are able to occur and, further, when those events can be recorded, registered, or revised.” Thus, at various points in The Glen Park Library Lee clicks into strategies employed by artists Gretchen Bender, Cécile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms, each of whom is seen to provide a kind of public access to forms of social life that are threatened by disruption: forms of personal affect, self-possession, and communion. Lee sees Rodriguez’s installation I’m normal. I have a garden. I’m a person (2015), with materials and photographic still lifes taken around Silicon Valley, as an ethnographic exploration the framing of daily life amid the “platformization” of everything. Can one be normal in the face of massive automated goods and labor exchanges like Airbnb and Uber? Bender, meanwhile, is the author of “librar[ies]” of earlier media hyper-saturation. Her “electronic theaters,” massive multichannel video installations of the 1980s and ’90s, offer a grammar for reading contemporary images in all their speed and variability. In these passages, the book becomes art criticism, but the description of the artworks is always in service of a larger system of resonances Lee is developing in relation to contemporary history and experience. Note that I do not write “argument”!

I should also say that one of the most interesting things about Lee as a writer, something that is present everywhere in her scholarship, is a particular persuasive tone. Even when the art object in question is immaterial or located in disparate places, it is as if the reader is turning it over directly in their hands, so carefully calibrated is Lee’s address to her putative reader. Lee is incredibly convincing and does not let up. But this is not just a matter of making a totalizing argument, one that accounts, in detailed fashion, for the interrelated activities of vast numbers of actors and markets, located across broad swaths of space and historical time. Nor is it solely a matter of understanding an artwork or artist in an exhaustive historical and material sense. Rather, Lee’s persuasiveness seems born of a far rarer tendency: a refusal to take her own position as reader/viewer/critic—and yes, expert—for granted. Many academics, steeped in poststructuralist strategies for the careful framing of institutional noblesse oblige and excessive idealism, could do well to take a page from Lee’s book. She does not merely frame her assertions as ultimately contingent but asks why this contingency matters now, how it could even be the animus behind her decision to take up a given critical concern at all.

One has the sense that Lee needs the fleetness of phrase that her new, small, green-foil-printed volume affords—and that she has also thought a bit about the format and the temporalities and audiences it entails. She’s not working with the lumbering timeframe of a university press, nor is she building a complex argument out of painstakingly researched discrete examples. What she’s doing instead is making various worlds bump up against one another. The resulting book feels internet-y and magpie-quick, yes, but it also delineates a set of correspondences between and among various artists, practices, contexts, and actors. And it makes the case for a fresh style of critical reading—one that includes writing in the (hilarious fictional) voice of someone named the “Dread Pirate Roberts,” as well as exchanging emails with a really awesome retired librarian. What I mean is, here the critic astonishes us with a simple act: She acknowledges that she, too, is a writer.

Date: August 5, 2019

Publisher: Art in America

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the review.

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On site.

Carissa Rodriguez, I'm normal. I have a garden. I'm a person (2015)

ORPHANS OF DICKENS
The social novel at the end of society

AFTER THE ELECTION of the forty-fifth president of the United States, something happened to fiction. Here I don’t mean, thank goodness and for once, the concept of fiction, as opposed to or distinguished from fact. While newspapers benefited (mildly) from a so-called Trump bump of new subscribers urgently wishing to be better informed about just what the hell was going on, the sales of novels—the once profitable form of fiction—continued to decrease in 2017. Information’s stock rose; artifice suffered. Or maybe artifice was taking on a new role in American public life—which is to say, a new old role, one it had for a while been playing in a none-too-fresh milieu, what we might have been inclined to think of as the already-outmoded narrative style of reality television. Artifice, fantasy, fiction, allegory, whatever you want to call it, was edited within an inch of its life, blown up to hysterical proportions, broadcast on an inane loop and unceasingly. This inauguration was the best attended of all time! This statement follows logically in no way from images you have seen and other narratives you have come to accept! You’ll believe me when I tell you because I (can) say it!

It’s now two years since. I have almost no ambition to rehash the disasters and debacles, but I do want to point out a little slip that will have some bearing on what I have to say here—which is, overall, about the state of American fiction, rather than the state of electoral politics. Here, in my opinion, is the slip: we tend to speak of the current executive’s maneuvers as “irrational,” claiming they emerge out of a lack of epistemic if not instrumental “rationality,” which is to say, a lack of respect for the efficacy of reason, but we speak less about their status in relation to narrative forms. Indeed, so much of the media we consume is non-narrative, in spite of the existence of presumably linear “timelines,” that it probably does not occur to us to note that what we mean by “rationality”—a concept that seems only vaguely word-like to me and might well be replaced by “reason”—is almost the same thing as narrative, the following-on of one event by another in an illuminating, usually causal way. His pronouncements are non-narrative, but then again, so is much of mediated social life these days. What journalists and other commentators frequently call “the narrative” (of politics, of values, of daily life, etc.) is a slot at the top of a recently refreshed feed, an instance of disjunction.

I mention these categorical slips—of reason for narrative, of narrative for widely read non-sequitur—because I think it has something to do with the rise of nonfiction as a category of profitable literary writing, a rise that began long before the 2016 election. There is, I would argue, a notable hunger in American society for the comforts of narrative. It’s a hunger for a species of meaning-making that is not specifically logical (though it may be that too) but which rather provides an account of how things, sometimes sentient, sometimes material, get organized across space and time and in relation to one another and sequentially, such that they become the way things are, after having been the way things were. Sure, narrative can be revelatory and informative, but it can also be reassuring, grounding. To attempt to understand and maintain one’s personal narrative is to be healthy, as the popular wisdom goes. Narrative can be incremental; it offers itself up to analysis. It promises to explain something about what human intention and agency are. It is attractively historical. The problem for the contemporary novelist—a problem less pressing for the author of a text on the history of codfish or the business practices of Uber—is that daily life, that classic subject and location of the novel, is, much like everyday consciousness, no longer narrative. I mean, it’s quite possible that human consciousness was never narrative (Thucydides for one seems to think so, particularly in his writings on pirates), but more and more people want narrative, a) because they want to know how we got here and, b) because they want to know what to do next. As the philosopher Galen Strawson has argued, a preference for diachronic, narrative description of human life predominates in contemporary culture, supported by “a vast chorus of assent . . . from the humanities—literary studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political theory, religious studies, echoed back by psychotherapy, medicine, law, marketing, design.” As for Strawson, he’s happily “transient,” as he puts it, with a fundamentally shifting, episodic self. This position does not, I assume, automatically entail enthusiasm for social media, but there’s a sort of formal rhyme I can’t help pointing up.

In a way, I wish I lived in a time in which algorithms weren’t sowing chaos with respect to democracy and the public sphere, but given what I know of human history (another cherished narrative!), it’s likely there’d be some other largely invisible mechanism with a similar function. Meanwhile, as the idea that there is some counterintuitive explanation for the results of the 2016 election burns off and more and more narrativizing reports appear, it’s been interesting to observe fiction’s attempt to self-correct, to return to its former, if ambiguous, place of cultural relevance. It’s scrambling, but in a recognizable direction. This isn’t just a matter of markets, of course; it’s also personal, creative. Writers are citizens, too, and accordingly hold themselves accountable after the fashion of their times—sometimes presciently. Enter, therefore, what looks to be a resurgence of the social novel.

A Sentimental Education

We know a little of what the social novel was. At the very least, we know of Charles Dickens and what the literary historian Louis Cazamian calls that author’s “philosophy of Christmas.” I hope you will laugh a little here, as I think Cazamian is attempting to be at once ironic and precise. Dickens was arguably the first author to bring the urban lower middle class into the European novel as more than scenic decor; reflecting in various ways on his father’s time in debtor’s prison as well as his own stint as a factory laborer during that parent’s absence, Dickens described the precariousness produced by industrialization in generally moving detail—even if Americans are more apt to remember the amusing eccentricities of Tiny Tim and Miss Havisham than the sociological achievement of a work like 1854’s Hard Times, which stands as a sort of anatomy of the imaginary mill town of Coketown. Changes in the British political system and economy during the earlier part of the nineteenth century (expanded suffrage after 1832 and increasing readership of the press) meant that there was an eager audience for fiction that touched upon the organization of society. In the early 1830s, Harriet Martineau, a young, unmarried woman, became the author of a series of bestselling serial parables that explained basic economic concepts such as free trade, via “The Loom and the Lugger,” and unions, via “A Manchester Strike.” Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) emerged out of her conviction that the economic and the personal were not separate spheres, and her more than slightly didactic bent was surely influential for the style of serialized novel Dickens would first produce in 1836 with the Pickwick Papers. Dickens’s work built on Romanticism’s convictions regarding the importance of national history to contemporary identity, with the difference that the influence of modern (i.e., mechanized) systems on the individual were explored. In addition, unlike Sir Walter Scott, he of the sweeping national-historical romance, Dickens dealt unabashedly in coincidence, cuteness, and sentimentality—apparently hoping to motivate readers to philanthropic attitudes and works through minor styles of depiction designed to inspire pity.

It is worth underlining the strategies Dickens used to depict the social world, because even as his novels are among the most familiar to us out of the nineteenth-century Anglophone pantheon (try Googling “Scrooge McDuck merchandise”), their style seems, the contemporary American liberal maintains, anathema to what is valuable and appropriate in politicized art. The cool methods of the French realist novel have somehow won out, and we are inclined to side with Gustave Flaubert when he criticizes the pious deaths of children in that problematic American novel of persuasion, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, itself surely a Dickensian attempt and also notable as the best-selling novel of its century. Americans have learned, perhaps through the rise of documentary technique in the interwar period, that vaguely objective points of view can be not only manufactured but also popularized—via imitation of the action of the camera or the hardboiled tone of the press. Such ambitions to objectivity dovetail nicely with the lessons of modernism, in that both suggest that all representation is inevitably mediated. And, according to the tenets of the New Journalism, which sees its forebears in James Agee and perhaps the George Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier, those desirous of socially relevant narrative can agree that the author is a mediator, a collector, a sociologist, a recording device well aware that “we tell ourselves [constructed] stories.” The culture, a collective invention, is out there to be absorbed. The culture is way more interesting than literature, as Tom Wolfe, for one, many times maintained.

I want to linger for a moment on the bizarre figure that is Tom Wolfe, who wrote so many interesting nonfiction books and then went on to write some of the worst novels of the late twentieth century. In November 1989, in a promotional push for the paperback edition of Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe published a modest summation of the state of affairs in Harper’s: “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A literary manifesto for the new social novel.” Here Wolfe establishes a position at once reactionary and revolutionary (his specialty, it seems). He argues that Philip Roth, standing in for general elitist aversion, steered the ship of the American novel away from realism, such that, “By the mid-1960s the conviction was not merely that the realistic novel was no longer possible but that American life itself no longer deserved the term real. American life was chaotic, fragmented, random, discontinuous; in a word, absurd.” Fair enough, but what was the solution? A: Read Bonfire of the Vanities.

I wanted to fulfill a prediction I had made in the introduction to The New Journalism in 1973; namely, that the future of the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism more thorough than any currently being attempted, a realism that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him.

Wolfe goes on to excuse his rather unsympathetic attitude toward black Americans in Bonfire as prescient reporting and to saw endlessly away at that well-carved chestnut, POSTMODERNISM: RUINING EVERYTHING. But Wolfe would never wax so sentimental as to claim that he is an inheritor of the god-fearing orphans of Dickens. Don’t take him for some sort of Cold War puritan! Instead, he cites an earlier vein of the British novel: Richardson, Fielding, Smollett. These are Enlightenment coffeehouse thinkers, polite anthropologists of the figure of Modern Woman, pre-industrial wits. What Wolfe wants is detail, endless detail. And guess what, would-be novelists? All the complexity and detail of contemporary America is free. You just have to be prepared to go out and take it.

Mr. Contract

Wolfe’s Harper’s apologia of the awful late eighties would be more forgettable if it hadn’t been followed by Jonathan Franzen’s endlessly cited and diametrically opposed essay of the mid-nineties (1996, to be precise), published, of course, in the same magazine. Franzen’s splenetic “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels” blames the information overload on television and the early internet rather than Philip Roth—overall, not a bad move—and concludes that if you want Americans to read your socially engaged books you will need to get maudlin. Although but a brief seven years had elapsed since Wolfe’s sales pitch, the takeaway is that white men are probably as irrelevant to American culture as, say, novels themselves. All the same, Franzen has much to say about both.

Franzen’s exemplars of social-novel success are less antique than Wolfe’s. He goes on a moderate tear about Paula Fox’s 1970 study of the vacuity and instability of white liberals, Desperate Characters. Fox wasn’t culturally successful, of course, according to Franzen. However, hers is the book to read. Culturally successful American social novelists—William Dean Howells, Upton Sinclair, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—are all dead and anyway wrote in a differently mediated age. Their research into the country’s social ills was universalizable. And if Franzen seems to flirt with the notion that novelists might not be omniscient, he eventually concludes that “a black lesbian from New York” and [insert default non-black person, not a lesbian] are cosmically united by their shared “guilty crush on Uma Thurman.” Part of me wants this to be some sort of shy three-way proposition, but I don’t think it is. Reading this now, it feels like an elaborate diversionary tactic—by which I mean, the whole essay. And although, like Wolfe, Franzen keeps his distance from Dickens (C.D. merits but a name-check), it seems safe to say that Dickens’s adaptation by Disney is at the embarrassing Midwestern heart of this matter. If you really want universal plus contemporary plus novel, Disney-fied Dickens is it: this synthesis is inoffensively Christian, magical, and also capitalist; it honors the self-abdicating poor, features race- and genitalia-free animals; kids can watch it. I’m not saying anyone should want this, by the way. I’m just saying, what is the point of an essay about abandoning the notion of an American social novel because of the ills of television plus civil rights that doesn’t address the neutering of Dickens by Disney? The closest Franzen comes to mentioning these cultural matters is a moment in which his imaginary lesbian is seen to be spiritually united with the default American through her shared propensity to buy Pocahontas-themed products at discount stores.

Weirdly, as we all know, Franzen won. He courted his suburbanites, the people he explicitly named as the first generation produced by white flight, and he got their attention. In 2001, 2010, and 2015 they bought his novels—even the creepily titled Purity, which features a nominally Dickensian heroine, a girl named Pip. In an essay on the impenetrable verbal plenitude of novelist William Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult,” published in The New Yorker in 2002, a sort of poetics and apologia for The Corrections, Franzen explains how he cracked the relevance code: “ . . . a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience.” Put otherwise, don’t say anything your reader will not instantly comprehend. Keep it all familiar. (Don’t be like Gaddis!) Fascinating frankness aside, I don’t think Franzen’s brand of social novel—which leans hard on the coincidence line from Dickens while discarding serious sociological content—is holding up against the news and nonfiction, not with our desire for tenacious narratives of development and explanation, as opposed to semi-soft narratives of chance encounters and quirky detail. Indeed, Franzen has always been most interesting, ironically enough, when, far from pandering, he goes light-speed postmodern. His self-reflexive commentary on the author known as Jonathan Franzen is some of his best work.

If I seem to be falling into a Franzen hole, or what amounts to a secondary Dickens hole, let me recalibrate. What I’m trying to say is that when it comes to the Anglophone social novel, the Dickens hole is way, way bigger, and even monumental American social novelists studiously avoided by Franzen, like John Steinbeck and Ralph Ellison, owe something to the Dickensian mode. So with Dickens prominently in the rearview, my question now is, given the contemporary hunger for narrative and fact—an obvious invitation for new social novels to proliferate—what will authors do?

Math and Sensibility

If you were reading the stories published in The New Yorker throughout 2018, the summer in particular, you have one answer. This answer is that topics pulled from headlines—extreme weather produced by climate change, the opioid crisis, #MeToo, the plight of migrants—make for worthy short social fiction. Although some friends rolled their eyes at these literalist tales, I had to admit I sort of liked them. Maybe I liked them for the same reason that I find Harriet Martineau’s parables interesting: they take a subject, work it through a narrative format, arrive at what seems like a necessary ending. In the ending is often contained a lesson—or, a reframing of the original social quandary. In Sana Krasikov’s narratologically flawless “Ways and Means,” set in an NPR-like milieu, the mechanisms and optics of workplace romance are explored. A female employee in her forties, a sound engineer, “dates” an older married show host; when the host ends the relationship abruptly, citing his wife’s cancer diagnosis, the sound engineer thinks little of it. Things become more complex, however, when the host is accused of harassment by an employee in her twenties and the sound engineer is asked to intervene. As the sound engineer learns more about the host’s activities, she realizes that she was not dumped because of the wife’s illness, but because the host preferred a more youthful work-paramour. How the tables turn! What emerges, through the revision of two apparently separate plotlines into a single causally linked series, is the host’s lack of regard for others. At the same time, Krasikov’s comparison of the two women, in their distinct reactions to similar events, reveals intergenerational difference. We can read the forty-year-old as thoughtful if naïve, the woman in her twenties as opportunistic; or, we can see the former as willfully blind to misogyny, the latter as brave and forthright—or perhaps some other permutation altogether.

I liked Krasikov’s story as a description of contemporary mores, but I liked it even more as a formal feat. It felt like a piece of math to me, and these days I’m finding I like math more and more. It’s that feeling that the numbers don’t lie, as the cliché goes. This is likely a species of the contemporary hunger for narrative I mentioned earlier: Krasikov’s story did something—something narrative—to explain how two women who might well be allies could as easily find themselves at personal and professional odds. “Ways and Means,” while not exactly an illustration of political economy, comes, as its title suggests, pretty damn close.

The New Yorker’s turn to topicality and didactic parables caused me to think more about the connection between not just the news and fiction, but social fact and (social) fiction. At the end of the day, even if the plot of Madame Bovary was once ripped from headlines, this, the ripping of material from headlines, is not a reliable means of selecting one’s fictional subjects (see my earlier contentions re: Tom Wolfe). The writer needs a descriptive thickness not necessarily or absolutely associated with sensationalism, if not a personal connection to events. Rachel Kushner and Gary Shteyngart’s recent social works, The Mars Room and Lake Success, respectively, go the thickness route. Carefully researched and lushly written, these two tales of a white woman serving multiple life sentences, inadvertently having abandoned her son, and a (white) finance bro avoiding prison while collecting watches and traveling the United States by bus, having intentionally abandoned his son, are largely concerned with the emotional experience of their subjects. While there is much to admire in each of these books, particularly stylistically speaking, there is a certain lightness with respect to information, in spite of what seems to be a non-negligible amount of research into how to describe the milieus in question. The books are extremely vivid, yet one does not come away from one’s reading better informed regarding either the American prison system or the American finance industry. One may learn more about human psychology, about fate and inheritance; the settings of these novels remain just that. These are not didactic works. They are portraits that discuss unique persons, not broader systems.

I can’t say I was altogether disappointed. After all, I had come to these novels in order to read novels. Shteyngart’s was particularly novel-y (in using this fake adjective, I recall an expressive redundancy once employed by a friend, “It’s a novel-y ass novel”). Lake Success features a despicable novelist as one antagonist of the finance bro, who himself, we learn, once harbored literary ambitions. I don’t want to say that Lake Success has zero sociological ambition; it’s just that most of this ambition seems to have been expended in the enumeration of appurtenances common to luxury condos in Manhattan, along with the particulars of very expensive watches, of which it seems the author is himself a collector. I know pathetically little about how trading works but learned nothing from this book about it. Given my renewed interest in the use of plots to explain other complex social systems, I couldn’t help feeling somewhat sad. “Explain the money part to me!” I wanted to yell as Shteyngart sent his reader into yet another one-percenter’s domestic space, which, I knew, was to be described in obsessive detail, à la Émile Zola, via a close third. But all I gleaned was which expensive things were allegedly worth buying, not where the money came from.

Kushner’s book is the more complex and astute of the two. I think this is because Kushner is particularly good on questions of inheritance and trauma, how it is that we often do not and cannot fully know our own narratives. Her protagonists, much like Galen Strawson, are transients as opposed to endurers. We are apt to come upon them in the midst of piecing together a narrative that stubbornly refuses to cohere. And within this non-coherence of the self, other events, usually tragic, intervene. It’s a moving and convincing sort of paradigm, yet Kushner’s writing on sex work in The Mars Room is far more believable than her writing on prison politics, and I sometimes found myself confused about what I was meant to glean from scenes in which the incarcerated protagonist exhibits admirable behavior, refusing to scapegoat others or to participate in white supremacy. Why depict a white woman whose relationship to identity politics is one of such pure forbearance? I asked myself as I read. Romy, the protagonist and a first-person narrator, seemed not unrealistic, exactly, but an exception, a philosopher with no formal education—which was, I had to assume, part of the point.

In thinking about what Kushner does well in her book, which is to articulate the movements of human psychology in situations of extremity, I began thinking about another book, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted of 2016, which is not a novel but which, to great acclaim, accomplished what an idealized version of the contemporary social novel might do. Based on recordings and notes Desmond, a sociologist, made while living in poor mostly black neighborhoods and a mostly white trailer park in Milwaukee, Evicted, which has already received its due praise and does not need me to lionize it, explains the political economy of real estate in impoverished communities in the contemporary United States—from housing court, to eviction day, to shelter, to new apartment or trailer, and back again. The book also explains why it is profitable to provide substandard housing, unpacking the business of being a slumlord. There are deeply engrossing characters (their names changed) along with a tiny cat named Little who, like at least one infant, does not survive; the reader is moved, even as this remains a didactic text. I found, in reading it, that I could not tell if Desmond’s primary concern was to explain housing issues in Milwaukee or to think about the ways in which people talk and move around their homes, interacting with their neighbors. The book feels literary: people crack jokes, fall in love; coincidences occur. It is not that Desmond uses a convenient narrative form to illustrate his point, but that he finds narrative forms in social and economic relations (indeed, this seems to be a major part of the sort of analysis that interests him). As he writes of one of his subjects, “After being kicked out of her apartment with Vanetta, Crystal was admitted to a homeless shelter. Then through a weary, looping rhythm—make a friend, use a friend, lose a friend—Crystal found, for short bursts, dry and warm places to sleep.” The cycle of eviction is narrative, but unlike the sort of psychologically constituted narrative self Strawson, for one, has in mind, the self eviction shapes is constituted through geography and economic exchange, as well as interaction with others. As Tom Wolfe might contend, perhaps misguidedly, you don’t have to make this stuff up. Yet the way Evicted thinks about what analytic philosophers like to call the maintenance of personal identity is not novelistic. It is not drama; it is fact. In an important sense, we already know what happens.

To return to Shteyngart for a moment, I think about a certain scene early on in Lake Success, in which the protagonist Barry engages in a bit of interpretive thick description of a woman he sees in Port Authority,

“What do you want me to do?” the woman said. One of her mesh bunny ears drooped over her face. Her bottom teeth seemed to be where her top teeth should be and she had no bottom teeth. She was white. Just an hour into his journey, Barry was starting to get something about the Trump phenomenon. Like an idiot, he had thrown 1.7 million, almost two bucks, after Marco Rubio. What choice did he have? He had sat through a five-hour dinner with Ted Cruz in a private room at the Gramercy Tavern after which Joey Goldblatt had turned to him and whispered, “He’s a psychopath.” So they all bet their millions on Rubio. They should have met this woman first. There was nothing Rubio could do for her.

As I read this, I found myself wondering if metonymic details like this woman’s “mesh bunny ears” are effective. While they are clearly a symbol of extractive systems now inescapable in the United States, they remain symbolic. Harkening back to the Playboy bunny and indicating this woman’s simultaneous sexual availability and economic vulnerability, maybe even her status as a sort of permanent servant, the ears are probably made of unstable plastics and imported from China. I know Shteyngart wants to entertain his reader in this moment—and Barry’s flawed observations are meant to be fodder for the reader’s own criticism—yet this character, who prompts one of the more interesting moments of self-reflection in the novel, never reappears. She’s not much more than ears and teeth. The same could be said of a homeless man Barry gets high with and gives a blowjob to later on. These characters appear as bodies with interesting qualities, colorful extras; yet, their narratives are fundamentally separate from the central narrative of Lake Success. And maybe this is the point, that the finance bro really does have nothing to do with poor people and poverty. But if this is the case, why stage these sorts of interactions in a work of literature?

Life Sentences

In his recent novel, Moving Kings, Joshua Cohen describes movers. They’re part of the business of eviction, and though they wouldn’t show up in the Milwaukee-based Evicted, being New Yorkers and all, there’s something of Evicted’s understanding of the narrative nature of the cycle of eviction that occurs in Cohen’s prose, too.

Some houses they’d strike it rich, some would be busts—that was the gamble. That’s why there’d always be a guarantee of base fee from the landlord whose tenant they were tossing or the bank or whoever held the lien.

Around Thanksgiving, they’d tossed two houses with nobody home. In another residence they’d gutted, everyone was giddy and civil because mentally feeble. [ . . . ] Another woman had dandled her infant out a window. . . .

Moving Kings, I should emphasize, is a highly episodic work. We’re never entirely sure whose novel or story it is—and, because of this, it doesn’t leave us with the impression that we’ve witnessed a single event. Rather, the incoherence of the narrative of Moving Kings serves to emphasize the at once repetitive and disruptive nature of the temporal experience of kicking people out of their homes (as well as that of being kicked out), along with the sorts of personal disjunction associated with immigration to the United States. Rather than seek development and interrelationship, Cohen shows how the impulse to construct narrative survives, perhaps pointlessly, in an environment in which it is frustrated at every turn. I don’t know if Moving Kings is, given this tendency, totally successful as a novel, nor is it exactly a sociological work disguised as literature, but it is an impressive literary document about the experience of time and social life in this era. The hunger for narrative is dramatized in the thoughts and actions of the characters of Moving Kings via a contemporary emotional mode the critic Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism”; Cohen’s characters are themselves inventive, creative—we watch them tell themselves stories in order to survive.

The effective disorganization of Moving Kings thus furnishes one clue as to where fiction might go if it wishes to maintain its literary chops while also traveling further into the unfolding particulars of the current situation in the United States. And I think Kushner is embarking on such an exploration, too, though she perhaps remains excessively focused on first-person narrative—and one might well find Jackie Wang’s use of an autobiographical, critical first person in Carceral Capitalism, for example, more effective than this sort of speculative persona. Of course, The Mars Room is likely to have a broader audience than Wang’s theory, even though Carceral Capitalism is likely to be read for a longer time and perhaps more deeply, if at first by fewer people.

This leaves me with the thought that the problems and possibilities of the contemporary social novel are not exclusively tied to genre—i.e., they are not the classical problems of the novel, per se. They aren’t exactly the problems and possibilities offered by the familiar challenge of maintaining a balance between action and description (famously described by György Lukács in his rants on the political efficacy of realist prose). There’s something challenging in this unfamiliar territory but also something hopeful, not just because we seem still to like novels, but because it’s clear that literature can contribute, in a significant way, to contemporary events. And where literature can help is in its combinatory and experimental capacities. Novelists can do things and try things that academics and critics cannot. So I am advocating for that now. Let’s have more social novels that explore the disruption and near-impossibility of our cherished narrative forms. Let’s have more social novels that look for narrative—and even fail to find it. In their spectacular and detailed failure, such novels may more closely resemble us.

Lynne Tillman and the Illusion of Realism

Date: March 1, 2019

Publisher: The Baffler

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.
This essay appears in the print edition of The Baffler, March–April 2019, issue 44, "Truth Decay."

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LYNNE TILLMAN AND THE ILLUSION OF REALISM

Realism disturbs me.

For indeed fiction, if realistic, is a manufactured veil through which we train our gaze in order to obtain a pattern that organizes dots and squiggles into something legible, “an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop,” as Terry Eagleton writes in the London Review of Books. Realism is paradoxical: a lie that reads true. We take two pet rocks, name one “Reality,” the other “My (Mimetic) Attempts to Write About It,” and smash them enthusiastically together. What survives is combed into a neat pile, carefully labeled, set out as a sort of snack.

(see fig. 1)

Mimesis is imitation, and when Aristotle talks about it in his Poetics, he means for it to do one thing: Imitation isn’t a faculty poets deploy to represent the world solely for the sake of skillfully representing the world. Imitation is deployed with the specific aim of inspiring recognition—of evoking, in a somewhat distant audience, a feeling of pity. (Aristotle: “Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ ”) We are brought to tears when someone on stage pokes out his eyes; safe in our chairs, we’ve confused him with ourselves. We’re deceived, yet in awe. Perhaps we resolve not to kill or have sex with our parents (or, failing this, not to get married—regarding which topic, more later).

Ideas about imitating reality have spiraled up through Western civilization with different, though perhaps related, political ends. The realists of nineteenth-century France weren’t exactly Aristotelian in their outlook, but they definitely had ambitions re: mimesis. They wanted to understand the structure of society and, along with the Russians, took great pains to offer precise depictions of things and persons. Balzac may be the paradigmatic example, but I find myself unable to stop thinking about a certain bottle of oil to which a feather has become affixed in a scene in Madame Bovary: “In the corner behind the door, shining hobnailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth.” (This old translation by Ferdinand Brunetière and Robert Arnot is interesting for the way in which it names old-fashioned things, e.g., hobnails. More recent translations tend to replace outmoded words with more familiar, if less specific, ones.) It’s less the elaboration of a world or a social system that fascinates me here than the skill in representing an item that seems purposeless, if classed. I do occasionally cling to this kind of seemingly pointless vivid materiality in prose. It produces not recognition, foremost—though that, too—but surprise. It makes me think for a moment, pace Aristotle, that it might be possible to have a world without psychology, maybe even, pace Hugo, without fate. (In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Greek term ananke, meaning “fate,” is, bizarrely, carved on the side of the cathedral. There seems to be no reason for this, other than that Hugo wanted to imply that fate is an indelible feature of human history. As you see, I find him to be an extremely annoying writer.)

But, of course, we don’t have that world, though Herman Melville’s head is famously turned by the enumerative ecstasy of whale facts. We have a pretty different world, despite materialist trends in certain nineteenth-century novels—and despite their resistance to wanton psychologizing. Although the behemoth twentieth-century psychological realist John Updike may have worshiped at the altar of Flaubert’s scrupulous style, he seems to have taken le réalisme’s lesson only in part, ever subordinating acts of description to the fluid angsts of his American subjects.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist who seems to me to have thought a lot about the above—and in a uniquely deliberate way. In certain of her stories, there is a character named Madame Realism who goes around living a fairly normal New York City life and who is always contemplating art and illusion everywhere she goes because, well, art and illusion are everywhere in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and in Manhattan, in particular. Madame Realism does not shrink from the scene. In the story “Madame Realism’s Imitation of Life,” spotted by fans in a women’s restroom, Madame Realism overhears one say, “I think that is Madame Realism, but do you think a fictional statement can ever be true?” Paradox abounds—for, in reading the story, one has flattered oneself that one is engaged in an intimate experience with a veiled version of Lynne Tillman, with Tillman’s very thoughts. Yet this is because of the presence of a character, a confection in the close third. Thus, there is Tillman IFF (“if and only if ”), the wry disguise of Madame Realism, at least for the purposes of this story, which in fact reads less like a story than a work of art criticism, which would seem to be part of the point. Normally, I suppose, we’d have the entailment the other way around: character IFF author. But Madame Realism doesn’t work that way. She is not here to imitate reality; she’s here to explain to us how the related fictional affordances of narrative and point of view function. That’s how real she is. (The reader is also advised that Madame Realism is playfully distinct from “Sir Realism,” a.k.a. surrealism, that twentieth-century movement in the visual arts and poetry famous for its modernist mystification of femininity.)

(see fig. 2)

No matter how many paradoxes, neat rock arrangements, and feathers stuck to bottles of oil I pile into this essay, none of these phantasmal objects comes close to the unreal, gonzo vividness of Tillman’s 2006 novel, her fifth, American Genius, A Comedy. At its most insanely, maddeningly banal and delightfully paratactic moments—the novel takes place, after all, in a vaguely defined asylum, artist residency, or spa, where the style of one’s breakfast eggs and memories of deceased childhood pets become major concerns—it remains, maddeningly and delightfully, a story about the impossibility of escaping illusion, even when one is doing almost nothing.

American Genius, A Comedy is also about the extremity of Americans. It’s about the violent movement westward, which seems, in the mind of the novel’s narrator, to culminate in the Manson slayings, along with the present-day inability to pardon the Manson Family member Leslie Van Houten, who participated in the killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in her last year as a teenager and who was sentenced to death in 1971. Hannah Arendt once said that she was glad that Eichmann had been hanged, because the Israelis had “pushed the thing to its only logical conclusion.” Arendt felt that so-called justice can’t have it both ways; if someone cannot be forgiven, then, well, they cannot be forgiven, and it is another form of violence to leave the charge unmet. Though this line of reasoning seems a bit neat to me, the narrator’s obsession with Van Houten, who repeatedly returns to her thoughts throughout the novel, is related. Van Houten was at one time the youngest woman condemned to die in California; a special death row had to be constructed for her, as no women’s section existed. However, the invalidation of pre-1972 death sentences in 1972’s People v. Anderson (now overruled) meant that her sentence was commuted to life in prison. Though the verdict in a second retrial stressed her eligibility for parole, and though other members of the Manson Family were successful in parole requests, Van Houten’s applications for parole in California have been, as of June 2018, repeatedly denied. Protected, in theory, by her whiteness and physical beauty, like the charismatic Manson himself, Van Houten lives out her days in prison, unforgivable if ambiguously responsible for her crime, given her age and mental state at the time of its commission, as well as her gender, this last point being a qualification that must remain unspoken, as it at once exonerates her and leaves her open to endless fantasies of blame that are beyond the scope of the law, at least on paper, to name or know.

The narrator of American Genius, A Comedy, in limbo in her institutional retreat, latches on to this other, discursive limbo, a blank in which America refuses to know itself—as it seems relevant, if ambiguously, to her own identity. While it is probably, again, too neat to say that she, like Van Houten, is doing time, it’s part of the interest of the book that it doesn’t shy away from these sorts of bad analogies. It’s American, in this respect. And this narrator is a former historian, which may contribute to her reluctance to participate in storylines unfolding in present-day reality, so-called. While she seems to allow that the present, as a distinct moment, exists, she seems none too sure that it is more than a mushy amalgam of past temporalities—the history of chair design, for example—and timeless inevitabilities—the much-touted sensitivity of her own skin—lacking any true newness or uniqueness worth, as it were, writing home about.

But our retreating narrator, though withdrawn, is not alone, and this makes all the difference to the form and tenor of her refusal of plot in the present. As in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, others (“residents”) are interned, for a brief eternity, alongside Tillman’s genius/protagonist. The hope that utopia is to be found in retreat is held out. As readers, we occasionally let ourselves think of it. Indeed, it’s here that the question of the relationship between the novel and so-called realism comes most strongly into play. “Realism,” Terry Eagleton writes in the aforementioned LRB essay, “is calculated contingency.” In other words, realism can be a style of belief in the existence of others—since you need somebody, or somebodies, to whom things are represented, and asylums, artist residencies, and spas are famous for their captive audiences.

In the first chapter of The Blithedale Romance, a fictionalized account of the Brook Farm commune (1841–47), Hawthorne worries about something he calls “the privileges of privacy.” (The narrator is speaking here: “ ‘Zenobia, by the bye, as I suppose you know, is merely her public name; a sort of mask in which she comes before the world, retaining all the privileges of privacy,—a contrivance, in short, like the white drapery of the Veiled Lady, only a little more transparent.’ ”) Hawthorne is a lover of gothic euphemism, not a realist writer, and his cloaked concepts often assume an intimacy between reader and narrator that feels forced, at least to me. So I’m not entirely sure what he means by this phrase, but his tale of intentional community is full of references to privacy, both literal and metaphorical: veils, secrets, false names, confused identity, performative utterances. There’s dissimulation and distancing—and also a fair amount of discussion of the role of women in American society, women who seem to be the origin of all social illusion, at least as far as Hawthorne is concerned. If American Genius, A Comedy (not a romance) is in some sense a rewriting of Hawthorne’s 1852 narrative, by 2006 the commune has become an institution and the narrator a woman (a “nineteenth-century woman in trousers,” as one character has it)—yet the privilege of privacy remains, along with an affection for unusual monikers (we meet the Count, Contesa, and Spike, et al., not their real names). Our narrator and her acquaintances take advantage of their middle-class privilege, in its collective form, to stage a hilariously god-awful dramatization of Kafka’s letters, as well as, in a seriocomic citation of the nineteenth century and its prized illusions, a séance or “ghost theater.” The narrator observes the workings of her own mind during the latter performance, as her tendency to compose speculative lists and bounce from topic to topic—from familial concerns to American history and back again—is overtaken by something more enigmatic and difficult to reconcile: a chilling realization of the possibility of the absence of thought as thought; the nullification of sentience as sentience.

I can’t halt these alien sensations. I place my hands over my eyes and press hard, scrunching my eyes closed again, so that their veins radiate bloody patterns, garishly colored shapes, pale ashes, the papers I burned this afternoon maybe, everything recognizable is ablaze, like my family’s Eames chairs. I can’t hold on to an image, so I tell myself, in a stately manner, Mark this now, fire burns complacent things, and in a flash it occurs to me why I take things apart, and I want to remember the reason but can’t. Another gust of arctic air makes me shiver, there’s nothing to think about, I open my eyes, it’s all gone, I shut them again.

Though what returns in the séance’s transformative and macabre course “with its bizarre seductions” is simple—the fact of death—the effects of this unbelievable fact on those assembled are richly varied, alarming, and enlightening. The narrator has a vision of her deceased father in his distinctive dark brown swimming trunks; others rant about sex addiction and betrayal, the shape of fate, the qualities of evil (“Let me say this about the devil: He exists,” maintains one transfixed party). All in all, it’s quite an event, as well as quite a convincing portrayal of what routinely goes unsaid, even or especially in privileged private. I think, too, that this has to be one of the great scenes of recent American fiction, on par with the unveiling of the P.G.O.A.T. in Infinite Jest, for example, speaking of metaphorically charged drapery. In it, we catch a glimpse of the structure of the contemporary social world, as well as the limitations of realist description. Because you can’t mimetically describe something that is simultaneously there and not there, which is to say, you can’t describe something unspeakable.

As I was beginning to write this essay, wanting to be thorough and a reasonably good historian, I traveled to the Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University, where Tillman’s papers are kept, and went through all the manuscript drafts of American Genius, A Comedy. Because of this adventure of my own into seclusion, I happen to know that the novel had multiple working titles, including American Skin, and that the narrator originally spoke on the first page about writing a novel. (The first sentence of the draft reads: “The food here is bad, but every day there is something I can eat and even like, and there’s a bathtub, which I don’t have at home, so I can have a bath every day if I can get from my studio, where I’m supposed to be writing a novel, to my room, before dinner, which is at 6:30pm.”) That novel, that fictional novel, has since been removed. It’s been replaced, I suppose, by our narrator’s oddball histories and catechisms, and by visits to an aesthetician who palpitates her face, producing emotion. The clarity of that early title and that fake novel has been smudged out, artfully distorted. However, far from ruining the book for me, knowledge of these initial scaffolds deepens its mystery. It’s not that the novel is just better without these tropes; it’s that the novel is about the fact that such tropes are illusory. A certain truism about the reality of novels (i.e., that in their obvious artificiality or autobiography, they presuppose a world in which fact and fiction are stable, easily distinguished categories) is missing here, can’t be reclaimed. This is not a semiautobiographical novel about a novelist, written by a novelist—what we now call autofiction—nor is it purely a work of invention. It’s something else.

(see fig. 3)

Tillman types, in her draft notes, that “the worst thing is that it’s not over yet—everything’s not safe yet—forest fire—desire to be safe—post 9/11.” She also quotes Freud: “One cannot overcome an enemy who is absent or not within range.” I think I’m starting to understand, more and more, what Tillman is getting at, how she is attempting to capture the complex narratological formats of her time, the interrelated and rather too-real chimeras of news, politics, and history. As you may have heard, Aristotle’s chapter on comedy has been lost; it’s mentioned in the Poetics, but no longer extant. I gesture to this fact from ancient literary history because I’d like to be able to say something definitive about the style of recognition American Genius, A Comedy sets up, being a comedy and all—what sort of mimesis Tillman is after, whether it makes sense to say she is an illusionist, an antirealist writer who has moonlighted as a fictional art writer whose last name is (funnily enough!) Realism; who, being fictional, doesn’t like to be recognized wandering at large in reality by her fans; who may be an anachronism, too, a nineteenth-century character in pants prone to fainting spells; who likes wild cats and also dogs, and also chairs, and so on; who may have put her hero, a modern woman, if of a vaguely Victorian stripe, in the awkward position of having to exist inside a postmodern novel. It may be, too, that Tillman is at once ahead of her time and living concertedly in it. She once wrote something similar of Andy Warhol, and I think that, as also for Warhol, one of her ways of being in and with her own time is to describe an imaginary future that infuses all the presents and the pasts enumerated in her fiction. (In this remark, from The Velvet Years, 1965–67: Warhol’s Factory, I’m inspired by Tillman’s description of Warhol’s relationship to time, both historical and not: “One of the mandates of the avant-garde, which Warhol broke from, was to be ahead of one’s time and to know in what way one was. Shifting into the postmodern, one is pressed to learn how to think, live, work, breathe the present—even if it’s inescapable, like inhaling an unrecuperable past. It’s harder to live in and think the present than be ahead of it; there’s no exit. It’s no aesthetic failing to be in time, with it. The imaginary future is always there and not there, to envision or make up, to wonder and worry about, to live into and even for.”) However, in spite of these chrononautical insights, fun though they may be, the only definition related to genre and imitation I seem to be able to muster—a deficiency entirely my own—is rather generic: At the end of a comedy, people are supposed to get married.

This (marriage) is no laughing matter, nor does Tillman’s comedy deal much in that sort of contract and/or denouement, except to note that American women are unfortunate, in that they often marry for love. Rather, American Genius, A Comedy, a sort of hypertext of recollection and ingenious displacement, a sort of postmodern nineteenth-century novel, ends on a Tuesday, with a facial.

(see fig. 4)

Date: February 2, 2019

Publisher: Soft Skull Press, The Paris Review online

Format: Book, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.
This essay appears in a slightly different form and with the title, "Realism and Illusion," as the introduction to the 2019 edition of American Genius: A Comedy, published by Soft Skull Press.

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Cover image.

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Figure 1.

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Figure 2.

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Figure 3.

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Figure 4.

Madeline Gins's Visionary Cybernetics

Lynne Tillman. Photo: Craig Mod.

MADELINE GINS'S VISIONARY CYBERNETICS
An exhibition of the work of the late Madeline Gins reveals an artist, architect and poet who pushed language into intensely imaginative and speculative realms

In the spring of 1969, the poet and artist Madeline Gins, then in her late 20s, joined a collaborative effort to make artworks and writing on the streets of Manhattan. With John Giorno, Lucy Lippard, Adrian Piper and Hannah Weiner, among others, she contributed to the ﬁnal issue of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s legendary magazine 0 to 9, which took the form of a supplement titled Street Works. Gins’s submission was a ‘group novel’ for which she asked the reader to ‘Please ﬁnish these sentences and return this paper,’ with the ultimate goal of creating ‘a group novel, an historical novel, an exploration of the nature of consciousness’. Also included in Street Works were photographs by Gins and her husband and collaborator, the painter Shusaku Arakawa, of a stylized house ﬂoor plan, laid out on a plastic sheet that could be unfolded on the sidewalk. This floor plan also appears in the endpapers of Gins’s ﬁrst book, WORD RAIN: Or, a Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says (1969), suggesting a connection between the exploration undertaken in Street Works and WORD RAIN’s ecstatic experimental prose.

If you don’t already know who Gins is, the above may sound somewhat academic. It’s another account of fascinating, if minor, permutations in the history of conceptualism in the US, adding some small complexity to the narrative surrounding the anti-lyric poetry of Acconci, along with that of the likes of Dan Graham and Douglas Huebler. Gins was barely better known in US poetry circles than she was in the realms of contemporary art, and her brilliant reimaginings of the American novel and poem have largely been ignored. WORD RAIN – one of the most important works of experimental prose of the later 20th century – is at once refreshingly and depressingly spared academic commentary. Gins’s books are out of print and she has few champions. Though this spring’s ‘Eternal Gradient’ – an exhibition at Columbia University’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery – revisits collaborative sketches by Arakawa and Gins from the 1980s and, though Arakawa is now represented by Gagosian Gallery, Gins herself is not widely noted or remembered.

The reasons for this amnesia are manifold. It’s pointless to linger on the obvious: Gins was female, straight and seems to have taken the exigencies of marriage fairly seriously. Secondly, many histories of poetry’s relationship with conceptualism have tended to focus on the static materiality of language, to the detriment of descriptions of interactivity. Though there are exceptions, conceptualism’s role as critical capstone to trajectories of US art, including modernism and minimalism, has entailed the reduction of language to ‘a kind of object’, as critic Liz Kotz has written. Accounts of language-based conceptualism emphasizing what the artist Roy Ascott, in his 1966 essay ‘Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision’, termed ‘the ﬁeld of behaviour’, are rarer.

Unlike the ‘group novels’ of Huebler and Andy Warhol, Gins’s project was not a site for the confession of secrets and gossip. It was concerned with getting the reader to act. Like Acconci’s poetry, which played with the instructive nature of writing and punctuation marks to explore their possibilities, or Graham’s Poem (1966), a schema and list of ‘materials’ for the creation of a poem, Gins’s early writing was self-reflexive but also did something more. In WORD RAIN, she directly engaged the cybernetic qualities of conceptualism by deploying sentences and prose fragments as means for holistic control of discourse, the human body and social relations, confusing the agency of the writer with that of the reader. This occurred in a manner that reﬂected Gins’s literary and transdisciplinary concerns, resulting in what might be termed a ‘visionary cybernetics’: her interest in systems and communication often went beyond descriptions of what is merely possible into intensely imaginative and speculative realms. Gins treated the slow dawning of the computer age as an incitement to produce art.

Throughout WORD RAIN, there are references to both the act of reading and the act of writing. But the speaker of the sentences is not quite the writer, nor is she quite the reader. ‘She’ is someone who exists in relation to words and who is aware of the possibility of reading as well as the possibility of writing. ‘She’ is aware of the possibility of sensing writing – whether looking at it, touching it, dwelling in it or even, at times, smelling or tasting it:

Read this with me, read that with me, read me with me, read objects (tables, toes, toads, tails, tin, trains, type, tears, throat) read write read right. This is still life. Only I write and read. If you’ve misplaced me on your own, bring me up again from off this page […] I give you this book for a present. It comes with a room, light, a country, sky and weather. I will arrange for you to be made aware of these in detail. You may look at everything. You will see only what I see. Look at this sentence.

Whereas much late-20th-century US experimental writing is myopically concerned with the linguistic turn (a recognition of the arbitrary and systematic nature of the shapes of letters, as well as the sounds and forms of words), Gins’s narration in WORD RAIN places unusual emphasis on the experience of being, simultaneously, a producer and receiver of writing. Experience – tactile, olfactory, temporal, visual, etc. – is folded into Gins’s sentences; the sentences, in turn, produce such experience, which must be (re)described in a sort of feedback loop. WORD RAIN might thus be a memoir of the present, of the very instant of writing, a sort of homeostatic temporality occasionally difficult to differentiate from a biochemical mix that includes the body of the reader/writer as well as the interface of the page.

WORD RAIN has no direct American literary antecedents. Though it superficially recalls various forms of stream-of-consciousness writing or Gertrude Stein’s bristling syntax, its strategies are specific to its phenomenological obsession with the reception of writing that occurs even, and especially, in the very midst of writing. This interest in what Gins describes as the flickering, oozing ‘Chaplinesque persistence of consciousness’, as recorded in and affected by the work of art, is not easily reconciled with modernism’s obsession with literary form and the dramatic upending of academic categories. Nor does Gins’s work dovetail neatly with postwar late-modernist and postmodern literary experimentation. One can’t quite group her with John Cage or Jackson Mac Low, who were so deeply concerned with chance operations and collage; Yoko Ono’s fluxus tasks are, meanwhile, more meticulous in their articulation. Though there are some resemblances between WORD RAIN’s complex sentences and those of poets such as Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer and Leslie Scalapino, perhaps the most convincing analogue is Gins’s friend, the poet Hannah Weiner. A cybernetically inclined writer and performer, Weiner has, of late, had her work translated from the page to the gallery, notably in a 2015 retrospective at Kunsthalle Zürich. In a piece titled ‘Transspace Communication’ (1969, written to accompany performances of her ‘Code Poems’), Weiner cogently observes: ‘The amount of information available has more than doubled since World War II. In the next ten years, it will double again. How do we deal with it?’ She continues: ‘At the moment, I am interested in exploring methods of communication through space; considering space as space fields or space solids; through great distances of space; through small distance, such as the space between the nucleus and the electrons of an atom; through distances not ordinarily related to the form of communication used.’

Weiner treats the poem as a tactical event, an act of communication that occurs ‘through great distances of space’. The ‘Code Poems’ themselves, which were published in 1982, contain lists of flag signals, typically used to transmit messages at sea. Her appropriation of maritime technology reimagines the flag hoist as a noisy, lyric gesture; previously precise code becomes the seed of a form of address that cannot be assigned a single interpretation. One excellent short poem, ‘CHW Pirates’, runs:

CDJ I was plundered by a pirate
CJF Describe the pirate
CJN She is armed
CJP How is she armed?
CJS She has long guns
CJW I have no long guns
BLD I am a complete wreck

Here, the colloquialism ‘to be an emotional wreck’ receives a rough etymological (and romantic) reading. This string of signals is to be imagined as performable – indeed, even potentially performed – as the poem is read. While Gins’s sentences in WORD RAIN are more concerned with the time of writing in domestic space, they make similar claims regarding the significance of spaces and technologies of communication and the ever-increasing amounts of information available. WORD RAIN’s sentences are complexes of signals that transmit and confuse sensation, allowing the reader to become an energetic receiver, an accumulator, a transformer – even and, most visionary of all, the avatar of the writer.

Given her somatic and cybernetic obsessions – trans-disciplinary concerns if ever there were such – it is additionally difficult to categorize Gins in a professional sense, whether as poet, writer or artist. Though she went on to include lineated poetry in her 1984 collection, What the President Will Say and Do!!, she returned to prose for 1994’s Helen Keller or Arakawa: a book that, like WORD RAIN, stretches the category of ‘novel’ in highly original directions. In each of these works, Gins blends keen observations about the activity of consciousness, language and syntax – as well as her own body and environment – with wry humour regarding the oddness of the very existence of meaning. As we see from the title of her second novel, Gins’s collaborative relationship with Arakawa became increasingly central to her work; poetry was a space in which she devoted herself to depicting the interrelationship of consciousness with physical and biochemical processes. Indeed, if readers of this piece know of Gins, it is likely that they know her through her collaboration with Arakawa. Together, they founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation and produced the well-known installation piece and publication series ‘The Mechanism of Meaning’ (1963–73/1978/1988/1997). Though Gins was a prescient thinker – who foresaw ways in which changes in popular media and technologies would collapse traditional disciplinary and social boundaries, transforming everyday life – her role at the centre of an architectural firm devoted to creating environments that were conceived to prevent inhabitants and visitors from dying has sometimes overshadowed her other achievements. Belief in the possibility of immortality seems hubristic, if not delusional, to many – even in the age of research and development companies such as Calico, who are actively seeking solutions to ‘combat ageing and associated diseases’.

Yet, Gins’s achievement as an experimental writer was enormous. Distinct from her artistic and architectural collaborations with Arakawa, her writings provide a vital terminological and metaphysical influence, particularly as they comment relentlessly upon acts of perception. It is not possible to state with certainty whether some or all of the words that appear in Arakawa’s paintings were contributed by Gins, but it makes sense to open the door to such an interpretation. WORD RAIN introduces notions about the interrelation between language and sensation that are taken up again in Helen Keller or Arakawa with new emphasis on the possibility of mapping experience by means other than hearing and sight. This transition – from exploring the interrelated acts of writing and reading in WORD RAIN to asserting how the world can be differently perceived and, therefore, inhabited, in Helen Keller or Arakawa – is key to Gins’s participation in the Reversible Destiny project, as well as to her earlier collaboration with Arakawa on ‘The Mechanism of Meaning’. Gins reimagined the English sentence to enact a way of perceiving the world that would challenge the perceiver, helping them to evade the enervating sensory and spatial habits of contemporary life. She saw the sentence as at once spatial, temporal and shot through with servers (i.e. words).

Madeline Gins (1941–2014) was born in New York, USA. ‘Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient’ is on view at Columbia University’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York, until 16 June. Gins’s ﬁnal work, Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator (2013), is on permanent view at Dover Street Market, New York.

Date: April 4, 2018

Publisher: frieze

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the article.

This article appears in the print edition of frieze, May 2018, issue 195, with the title "Visionary Cybernetics."

Cover image.

Madeline Gins.

Madeline Gins, Title page of WORD RAIN, 1969, Grossman Publishers, New York.

whatthepresident.jpg

Madeline Gins, What the President Will Say and Do!!, 1984, Station Hill Press, New York.

Narrative After Nature

NARRATIVE AFTER NATURE

To the extent that the world is made up of narrative discourse these days, it seems to have two fundamental ingredients or axes: plausibility and syntax. I write, “To the extent..,” because I am unsure how great the influence of narrative on current existence really is—or, for that matter, where narrative is. But to the extent that narrative is still with us, it seems to manifest itself via plausibility, a quality, and syntax, a quantity. In other words, narrative has to have some persuasive valence and it has to put things in an order; these are the minimums. We are also apparently living in a time that flatters and elevates the minimum, a curious aesthetic point in itself.

Take, for example, the news, a narrative form. It has lately taken one of the more dramatic turns in our newest era of turns, implosions, inflations, and drops. And we could talk, in particular, about a turn, in style and tone, of one of the most read organs of narrative discourse in the English language, the New York Times. Uncertain mental paging backward suggests one signpost of the shift to a buoyant new reportorial voice and enthusiasm for visual media, i.e., video, occurred in mid-2016. In May of last year the Times’s Executive Editor Dean Baquet delivered a memo outlining a coming transformation of the time-honored publication of record, long the haven of “All the News…,” etc. No more would the Gray Lady focus myopically on incremental, event-based coverage; up-to-the-minute announcements, Baquet noted, are available all over the Web. Rather, the Times would focus on “authoritative journalism and information readers can use to navigate their lives.” Stories would “relax in tone.” Editors and reporters would develop pleasing new “story forms” attuned to the continually changing ways in which readers consume information and, I guess, live. Baquet’s memo of May 2016 is of a piece with March 2014’s Innovation Report, a document that begins with the Sheenian—and now, I suppose, Trumpian—assertion that, “The New York Times is winning at journalism.” This report admitted the newspaper’s urgent need to seduce new readers, along with an ambition to become more “nimble” and fluent in the ways of the digital age. More recently, in January of this year, the 2020 Report appeared. Things look a bit more sanguine (particularly following the so-called “Trump-bump” of increased subscriptions during the harrowing miasma of post-election days and the interregnum). Baquet’s May 2016 memo on the ubiquity of free up-to-the-minute information is expanded, in the 2020 Report, into a thesis about why certain sorts of journalism are less read, “The most poorly read stories, it turns out, are often the most ‘dutiful’—incremental pieces, typically with minimal added context, without visuals and largely undifferentiated from the competition. They frequently do not clear the bar of journalism worth paying for, because similar versions are available free elsewhere.” The Times must now dedicate itself to “All the News That’s Worth Paying For,” if it is to survive.

To return to my original contention, the Times now deals in plausibility, not fact. And it arranges this plausibility, employing a fun, multimedia syntax. These two gestures suffice, at a minimum, to give it a new narrative style. All this is particularly keenly clear to me because, from time to time, I read microfilm versions of the Times of yore in the basement of NYU’s Bobst Library. I awkwardly manipulate the little film reels and the required viewer for research purposes (this isn’t a case of nostalgia!). Though I do not doubt a single one of the eminently reasonable rationales for change supplied in either one of the Times reports or the memo above, I’ve lately been struck, as I scroll through old articles, zooming in and out, by the loss of the former fibrous, drab, newsy tone. On my way home from the library, I’ll take a look at the current paper, or, rather, update. My daily New York Times “Evening Briefing” appears in my inbox, concluding with a cheery image of some squad of adorable animals or a salute to a counterintuitive and amusing statistic. A sea lion has been rescued in a fuzzy sling! Losing your house keys is, paradoxically, healthful! In spite of myself, I often tremble as I come to the end of the briefing email. I know I’m being courted, entertained, if not pulled back from some imagined psychological brink. In someone’s eyes, I may be a bad reader. I may be distracted. I may not know what’s going on. And at this moment, as I am reading and recognizing a general plausibility overtaking fact, I often miss that former carelessness and professionalism, the hardboiled voice of the mean, old, strict, and somehow trusting paper, the one that talked about “unabashedly savvy real estate” and people who were “stalking a job” (this was the early 2000s, when the table was being set for another implosion), and so on.

If we are readers of realist novels, struggling with the gooey concept of the merely plausible, we might take a long view. We might indulge in some soft epochal categories. We might say that if the West’s 19th century was The Century of the Clerk, and the 20th century The Century of the Teenager, it has already begun to appear, if always prematurely, that the 21st century is The Century of the Troll. Each of the aforementioned figures has its own peculiar relationship to the act of narration. And another obvious tendency allies them: Each labors to reproduce culture. Bartleby, Bob Cratchit, and Bouvard and Pécuchet either did something repetitive or nothing at all; cinema and novels from The Magic Mountain to Lolita, from Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar to Infinite Jest, addressed themselves to individuals on the verge, exploited, ridden with angst, destined to embody whatever culture was, just before they became irrelevant adults; online expressions are relentlessly dissected, distorted, redistributed, but are there any good novels about this yet? Or is it that everything now is about this, including elections? We know well the clerk’s superannuated affect, either nonexistent or mystifyingly attuned to minutia. The teenager longs, weeps, rages, and ironizes, as the curtain of the most American of centuries falls on a pharmacologically managed excess of anxiety and deficit of attention. And now we seem to wonder if we should bother awakening into the next hundred years (who, anyway, is in charge of narrating it?).

The troll, broadly defined, is not a critic or satirist, so much as a weird method actor. The troll has traditionally participated by defining participation itself in an ambiguous if not absolutely negative light. The troll establishes the terms of others’ commitment to truth (which is to say, to any idealized and apparently unmediated entity) and reflects these back as image and/or text, and incessantly. But the troll’s either antisocial or paradoxically altruistic (or, both) interventions have already been extensively analyzed by individuals more qualified than I, and I would merely like to draw from this somewhat hastily defined category a general sense of why the plausible is so important—and how we can possibly give this category a more active, if not positive, valence.

Looking into a series of fragments I’ve jotted down in a notebook, I come across the following vague question, “Given the variety of temporalities that exist, solutions?” I’ve also written a phrase, “Lack of a preexisting commons.” And another strange question, “Does what we cannot forget take the form of an event?” In my own thinking around narrative, I’m familiar with discontinuity. It’s taken me years to learn to write a legible paragraph, and I still approach prose with trepidation, as it’s a highly artificial undertaking for me. (The way I think feels nothing like what I am doing here.) All the same, I am interested in the aspects of narrative that occur at the intersection of technique and reflection, and in prose, though of course not all narration occurs in prose.

Plausibility probably seems, at face value, like an extremely, even depressingly, insignificant quality of narrative. Indeed, it is. But plausibility, as a mere or minor way of addressing what is the case, of reducing the copula from hard-and-fast equivalency to a dotted line, offers us something by way of method that should not be ignored. Much as the troll proceeds from categories in which truth and the sublime are not merely under erasure but the tortured disillusionment leading to said erasure itself constitutes a risible piety, those who manipulate the plausible begin from an analogous point of liberty—a liberty that may also double as disaffection, alienation, boredom, despair. Yet those who play upon plausibility rather than actuality rescue contemplation from foolhardy ideals as well as from paranoid excoriation and embarrassingly principled condemnation. Or, rather, in the weird light of the subjunctive, such writers might, under the right conditions, permit contemplation to occur. (Plausibility need not, for example, be a species of pandering….)

I am not really much on optimism these days, but I did want to say something about why I think it’s particularly worth paying attention to weirder forms of narrative prose right now. I interviewed the writer Dodie Bellamy over the summer, and she said something to me that stuck. She said that there are reasons not to throw out narrative, and I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve thought about this in relation to Renee Gladman’s great new book of short prose, Calamities, in which refrain, repetition, and digression are treated as significant narrative forms—or, they become narrative forms, at least in the sense in which I find myself coming to understand narrative. Narrative does not have to be about moving things forward. It can be about going farther into what one has wanted a word or a sentence to be able to do, describing that wish. One could narrate writing itself, though of course the act of writing has a tendency to become a bit different from what is being talked about. Gladman opens each of her short “essays” (her term) with the incipit, “I began the day….” From here, a variety of things can occur; we might learn about a language game some academics are desultorily running their hands over, or we might hear about the effects of recent reading on the present, about the proximity of old loves. Plausibility is a gentle mist that squires us around. Someone is talking in these essays. Or, rather, someone is writing. I struggle here to express to you the elegance of the thought that is presented in Calamities. I think of the staircase, that fantastic human invention. I guess I would like to ask you to think of a staircase that has some sunlight on it. There is no anxiety in this writing about conviction. A step is offered; you go down. Syntax rises to the occasion, as style.

Perhaps it doesn’t make sense that I see the lightness of such plausibility and gracefully proffered syntax as becoming realer than the labored references of realist prose, but maybe you will understand what I mean. There is something that I want narrative to do now, which is, simply, to believe that I am here and will read, that my presence as a reader is a plausible one. The writer and artist Madeline Gins, for one, often worked with a fantastic sense of obviousness in this vein, so clear and energetic. In her first book of prose, of 1969, WORD RAIN or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), Gins writes, “I give you this book for a present. It comes with a room, light, a country, sky and weather. I will arrange for you to be made aware of these in detail. You may look at everything. You will see only what I see. Look at this sentence.” This will never happen, but I might like it very much if tomorrow’s “Evening Briefing” concluded with this such a series of sentence-based announcements. And if the New York Times began exploring this sort of story form.

Archival Fiction Upends Our View of History

Date: April 6, 2017

Publisher: The Poetry Foundation

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.

On site.

Pages from WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) by Madeline Gins.

HOW ARCHIVAL FICTION UPENDS OUR VIEW OF HISTORY

Realist historical fictions, with the rustling demands of their costumes and their period-appropriate speech, often depend on painstakingly described physical veracity, sensory believability, to steep a reader in the past. While not necessarily factual, such works say: This really occurred, and now you, too, may experience it. As the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt enthused in a review of “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel’s novel about the rise of Thomas Cromwell—perhaps the paradigmatic contemporary example of such fiction—great historical novels “provide a powerful hallucination of presence, the vivid sensation of lived life.”

But a handful of recent works of fiction have taken up history on radically different terms. Rather than presenting a single, definitive story—an ostensibly objective chronicle of events—these books offer a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices. They are not so much historical as archival: instead of giving us the imagined experience of an event, they offer the ambiguous traces that such events leave behind. These fictions do not focus on fact but on fact’s record, the media by which we have any historical knowledge at all. In so doing, such books call the reader’s attention to both the problems and the pleasures of history’s linguistic remains.

The book that made this distinction clear to me is a new novel by Danielle Dutton, called “Margaret the First.” Dutton’s Margaret is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who lived from 1623 to 1673 and was one of the first British women to publish in print under her own name. Cavendish wrote numerous plays, poetry collections, memoirs, philosophical and scientific treatises, and one of the earliest works of utopian science fiction, a novel titled “The Blazing World.” Her marriage to the liberal and well-connected William Cavendish was significant not just for the title it afforded her but because of William’s acquaintance with such contemporary luminaries as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Marin Mersenne. Though Margaret’s interactions with these men were mostly indirect, their influence is felt throughout her oeuvre, including her unusual “Philosophical Letters,” of 1664, an imagined correspondence in which she debates many of their views and the mechanistic scientific tendencies of the time.

Cavendish’s life had enough drama to serve a more conventional historical novel; at least one or two of her illegitimate children, lost to history, could surely have been imagined in these pages. Or Dutton might have chronicled a love affair with, say, the cross-dressing Queen Christina of Sweden, whom Cavendish imitated in one of her own most audacious social stunts, baring her rouged breasts at the theatre. But Dutton’s Duchess mostly stays at home. And she exists, in this book, as a study in textual vestiges, as much palimpsest as person. She is first revealed to the reader via the celebrated diarist Samuel Pepys. Dutton draws on quotations from Pepys’s diary to narrate an amusing interlude from his life: he was in a crowd when Cavendish’s carriage drove by, the mob shouting after it “Mad Madge! Mad Madge!” (The origins of that nickname are disputed, but Cavendish was well known for sartorial, as well as literary, eccentricity.) Dutton’s Pepys feels himself slightly above fandom, but he is struck by her nonetheless: “The whole story of this lady is a romance, and everything she does,” he writes.

That Cavendish’s contemporaries considered her a sort of fiction, even in the flesh, makes her a particularly appropriate subject for Dutton’s approach. The novel is told half in the first person, half in the third, and in some sense very little occurs. Dutton does not supplement the fascinating material details of Cavendish’s milieu with period intrigue; there are no poisonings, no clavichord-backed avowals of love. There are, instead, vivid, episodic bursts of narration, recounting a birthday party, the teasing of her by siblings, and Margaret’s time at court in Oxford, after the revolution interrupted her aristocratic family’s bucolic life. Dutton gives us brief, imaginative glimpses of the youthful Margaret, but as she becomes more famous and, therefore, more recorded, by herself and by others, what we get becomes less speculative, and more tied to those records. In this way, Dutton foregrounds the textual limitations of history, even if it means inventing less of Margaret’s later years.

Dutton’s previous novel, “Sprawl,” is an ekphrastic meditation on the aesthetics of American suburbs, and “Margaret the First,” like that book, is largely descriptive. So, for example, a section about Cavendish’s struggle to conceive a child consists largely of a list of the cures that were prescribed to her and her husband:

This time they tried, for him, crystals taken from wood ash and dissolved in wine each morning; for me, a tincture of herbs put into my womb at night with a long syringe. I submitted silently, William out in the hall. Come autumn I was to be injected in my rectum with a decoction of flowers one morning, followed by a day-long purge, using rhubarb and pepper, then a day of bleeding, then two days where I took nothing but a julep of ivory, hartshorn, and apple, followed by another purge—and on the seventh day I rested. After this came a week of the steel medicine (steel shavings steeped in wine with fern roots, nephritic wood, apples, and more ivory), described by a maid as "a drench that would poison a horse."

Throughout the novel, Dutton treats the reader to a variety of carefully researched objects: “a fine sugar cake with sprigs of candied rosemary like diamond,” “a transparent beehive from which the men extorted honey without disturbing the bees.” Cavendish believed that everything in the universe was fundamentally material, and that matter—including, for instance, books and letters—was capable of thought. It makes a kind of sense, then, that Dutton would reanimate her through textual and material sources—including Virginia Woolf’s essay about her, “The Duchess of Newcastle,” lines from which appear in “Margaret the First.” Dutton acknowledges this in an Author’s Note, and includes a list of more than twenty other books she drew on in her research. Reviewing the book in the Times, the writer Katharine Grant suggested that this reliance on other sources might make readers see the novel as “more a sewing together than an entirely original work,” as though that would be a bad thing. But this is a virtue, and the key to Dutton’s portrayal.

Dutton’s handling of history calls to mind other recent books set in the past, books that have, on the surface, little in common with “Margaret the First.” Marlon James’s Man Booker Prize-winning “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” from 2014, revolves around an attempt on Bob Marley’s life in the late seventies. But the book is full of contentious, unresolvable voices, and never gives us an objective spot to stand on. The role of narrator cycles among members of the police, both Jamaican and American C.I.A., and among agents of various syndicates; there are also relatively innocent bystanders. The story is constantly shifting, and no one seems entirely up to date on what has actually happened. One of James’s characters, Papa-Lo, a Jamaican gang leader of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, gives voice to this continual state of uncertainty. “Sometimes,” he says, “I don’t learn till too late, and to know something too late? Well is better you never know as my mother used to say. Worse, you all present tense and have to deal with sudden past tense all around you. It’s like realizing somebody rob you a year late.” The novel revels in the immediacy of oral history even as it points out, “Rashomon”-like, the difficulty of establishing a single, unified story via first-hand accounts. Perhaps, James seems to suggest, there is no such thing—no pure, stable, and eternally recognizable occurrence, against which all other occurrences can be measured.

John Keene’s short story and novella collection “Counternarratives,” published last year, does something similar, albeit in a very different style. Keene presents many of his stories in the official voice of history; they include maps and newspaper clippings and employ archaic prose styles, and they gradually reveal the ways in which histories lie. “On Brazil, or Dénouement: The Londônias-Figueiras” opens with a news account of the discovery of a dead body in a favela. Then the story shifts to a historian-narrator, who chronicles a dynasty of slave-holding Brazilian oligarchs. Gradually it becomes clear that neither this historian nor the news report can be trusted. Elsewhere, Keene’s protagonists speak in the first person, at once revealing themselves and receding into attractive turns of phrase. Keene’s polyvocal narratives masquerade as “primary-source documents” and present convincing first-person testimony, while at the same time establishing undercurrents that undermine the victors’ tales—and any hope that we will ever fully settle on the truth.

These techniques are not entirely new, of course. Umberto Eco’s best-selling “The Name of the Rose,” published more than three decades ago, is a semi-archival fiction, which imagines that the pages of Aristotle’s writings on comedy were poisoned by a zealous medieval monk, then destroyed in a fire. But Eco’s murder mystery is a flagrantly fictionalized work of literary commentary; his novel wants us to meditate on the canonical prohibition of laughter via an obviously fanciful imbroglio. Though it’s not a work of fiction, a more interesting point of comparison might be Michel Foucault’s strange 1975 text, “I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother...: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century.” Foucault collects the dossier of the legal proceedings, including first-person testimony, along with Rivière’s own beatific autobiography. “Pierre Rivière” is, then, quite literally an archive, but it also functions like a novel, a quality not lost on Foucault.

Though she draws extensively on textual sources, Danielle Dutton does allow herself the freedom of a novelist. (Her author’s note begins, “This is a work of fiction.”) “I am much too,” Dutton’s Cavendish says at one point, unabashedly comparing herself to accomplished men of her day. Cavendish is much, but I have been unable to locate this boastful phrase in any of her published output. Of course, this does not mean that the Duchess could not have scribbled it somewhere or, perhaps, thought it. But clearly, in “Margaret the First,” there is plenty of room for play. Dutton’s work, like James’s and like Keene’s, serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhaps always already been: provoking and serious fantasies, convincing reconstructions, true fictions.

Date: May 6, 2016

Publisher: The New Yorker

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.

On site.

Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, seen here in an undated seventeenth-century illustration.

The Many Ways & Reasons to Mix Poetry + Prose

Author's Note: The final lines of this essay promote a theory of historical ambiguity that could be understood as relativistic (i.e., all accounts are equally suspect). This is of course not the case, and the essay should have been edited to reflect this important fact. To repeat: Some histories are more accurate, more urgent, and, yes, more true than others.

ON THE MANY WAYS AND REASONS TO MIX POETRY AND PROSE
Contributing to a Long-Standing and Very Various Tradition

All I often knew was that I did not only want to write poems. This was a theme through my adolescence (I was an early writer, in some ways) and then later. A bizarre depression settled over the already strange young person that I was, for I had inherited a world that stringently divided prose from verse, that swore to the usefulness of prose and the mere tolerability—bemoaning a noxious lack of good, clear purpose—of poetry, as pop songs played in the background. And on this point I have mostly remained despondent. I have never wanted only to write poems or, for that matter, to write only prose.

But as luck and the lucky fact that it is nearly impossible for a human being to have an entirely unique desire would have it, I was not alone in my wish for literary combination. Though this form, practice, or, as it may be, genre is seldom taught in school (I have been to many), there exists a long-standing and various tradition of bringing together poems and prose into synthetic items of literature. In the classical West sometimes this is called prosimetrum. Elsewhere, I have liked terms like “miscellany,” “saga,” “postmodern novel.” There are, it turns out, not just many ways, but many reasons to write a work bringing together groups of sentences with groups of words that are measured out according to principles and patterns that are not merely grammatical. If your eyes can withstand another 1,500 words, you may gather what are, in my opinion, a few of the better reasons for engaging in this sort of mixture.

REASON ONE: you recognize that much distinction is arbitrary. I do not know if prose is the opposite of verse. This is like asking what the opposite of a cat is. Some may know that verse and prose have long had the strange if plausible function of designating, in writing, the difference between song and “plain” speech. It’s on these grounds, anyway, that much of the much-touted, as well as the much-debated, specialness of poetry, particularly lyric poetry, is, as far as I have been able to ascertain, based.

Let us jump to the 17th century in France. A character in Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme remarks (I paraphrase), “Very cool. I had no idea I’d been speaking prose my whole life.” Such limp delight at learning that one is already playing by timeworn rules suggests a rhyme between canonicity and complacency, of course, but could also hint at the radical irrelevance of the very category of prose—or, for that matter, speech. It is surely easier to maintain interest in these matters when writing has not lain down and died in the pit suggested by the verse-prose distinction. The German Romantics’—to jump again—idea of prose was pleasantly nonstandard. If aphoristic, it was endlessly so, like a staircase in a dream. Their poems were likewise dreamy; sometimes fragmentary, disordered. Their novels included folk songs and other lyric professions, suggesting that there was something particularly worthy about the combination of lineated language with the paragraph, the breaking of prose. The poet Novalis wrote about the sentence as a temporary “containment” of linguistic dynamism, maintaining that “A time will come when it no longer exists.” And Friedrich Schlegel, in his “Letter on the Novel,” composed at the dawning of the new (19th) century, insisted on a lapidary lineage of mixed genre dating back to the late middle ages: “I can hardly imagine a novel otherwise than as a mixture of narrative, song, and other forms. Cervantes never composed otherwise, and even Boccaccio, in other respects so prosaic, decorated his collection with inset songs.”

It seems, too, that within the apparently mongrel and/or pastiche environment of novels including songs, which is to say, songs surrounded by narrative prose, poets might act not only as convenient speakers or singers but also as more or less curious characters, bringing me to my second rationale, aka, REASON TWO: it is conceivable to you that the poet is as likely to be a character or other figment, as a genuine, living person. For Anglophone readers, the inevitable point of comparison is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, of 1962. And, as this novel points up, when the poet, here one John Shade, becomes a character, we find a literalized depiction of those aspects of personality and personal history that in America the professional critic was tasked with discovering and/or vivisecting on behalf of the lay reader. Whether or not Nabokov was aggressively satirizing New Critical leanings in American letters, Pale Fire, like Novalis’s The Novices of Sais, places a poet in a landscape, which is at once the prose of the book and a more-or-less everyday world. In this sense the novelist might be acting as a sort of historian, folklorist, or cultural critic; the song or poem does not appear free of charge but rather demands context, which is often a close cousin of interpretation. It hardly need be said that in the novel the poem can be deployed in an endless number of ways, ranging from artifact to spell.

Yet, the paradigmatic examples of books of poems combined with plot have to be a pair of works written by contemporaries in 11th-century Japan, The Pillowbook by Sei Shōnagon and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. In these two books, the first a diary, the second a novel, numerous characters within court society compose poetry. This is at once a pastime and a kind of networked system of communication and signification, permitting simultaneous epistolary address and reference back to the system, to its histories and commonplaces. Through the poems interspersed in The Pillowbook and The Tale of Genji we learn not merely the emotions and motivations of characters, but also how they deal with the problem of writing and how they deploy it, whether as lure, dissimulation, entreaty, or gift outright. For writing is not only unnatural, it is also and of course a means of obtaining and manipulating power. And the ambiguity of the poem permits kinds of meaning prose’s obviousness precludes. A description of a flower may be just that, yet it may also be sign or secret message; it will be read differently by different characters, just as by the reader herself, who reads over, as it were, characters’ putative shoulders.

The prismatic nature of the poem, its turning inability to remain “just text,” or “just address,” or “mere symbol,” or “absolute literal designation,” and on and on, is also exploited in exceedingly interesting ways in the American modernist context. The lack of (Romantic) mysticism or (medieval) intrigue is made up for in prosimetrical works that take the poem as an item capable of varying and destabilizing contemporary prose to ends at once aesthetic and political. Works by Jean Toomer and William Carlos Williams bring me to my third and final historical reason to combine, REASON THREE: you are bored with a certain (sad) status quo. Toomer’s Cane, of 1923, presents a combination of modernist poems, clear and vivid in their depictions of American landscapes and persons, with short prose vignettes employing vernacular language along with song-like refrains. This unique book’s intent seems to be to bring into dialogue the values of high modernism and the everyday speech and African American folk culture of the South; it seems to have ambitions at once ethnographic and loftily, exactingly stylistic. William Carlos Williams meanwhile locates an American identity through improvisation and excess, re-describing both prose style and the capacities of verse through various modes of excerption, appropriation, and apostrophe, after a fashion that belies his reputation as a rigorous reducer of words into machine-like things. Though Williams wrote many books of mixed genre, Spring and All, published in the same year as Cane and home to the famous minimal poem including a “wheel / barrow,” is the scene of a particularly powerful explosion of speed-fueled prose typewriting; it’s a book of leaps and lashings, a seeming attempt to prove that poetry can invade the syntax of the American sentence, ecstatically. If it does not exactly promote the joy of romantic love, then it demonstrates the power of an encounter of another kind, between precise syllabic poems and a tumbling, rushing onslaught of prose. Like Cane, Spring and All is a comparative text; it invents new terms and tastes by way of contrast and association.

Above I have supplied three reasons, and though I like them fairly well, they do not, in the end, as is probably to be expected, exhaust all my thinking and feeling about varying, combinatory writing styles. I may care most about a mixture of styles because it allows the paranoiac in me to comment on the conservative literary (not to mention educational) systems that I fear linger in our world, in spite of—and sometimes even paradoxically by way of—the iconoclasm of modernist heroes et al. Verse is not just, to my mind, a form with various technical appurtenances, since it has a long history and specific social functions (inputs, outputs); like prose, it seems to me at times a sort of system, with myriad institutional nodes. Though I am not so heroic myself as to believe that my contemporaries are in need of saving, I do often find that some perverse aspect of me would very much like to make things a little bit messier, throw a wrench in the engine, and otherwise, pick your frustratingly well-worn metaphor, cause to function less smoothly said system of literary production. Most of all, stubborn being that I am, I find myself drawn to various styles of silence, said silence being a possible ingredient in, or sign of, the still, at least to me, unaccountable distance between poetry and prose.

Anyway, could we remove a poem from its job as a poem? A sentence, from its job as a sentence? What would we need to contribute to writing to cause such odd dismissals to transpire in a believable manner? What is the very smallest unit that can indicate plot, as such? What occurs (to us) when we are not sure what we are reading? To the extent that these aberrant questions have answers, they indicate the direction toward which some, though certainly not all, of my writing tends, which is to say, not toward the invention of new reasons for writing between and around and among established literary modes, but toward the invention of instances of contrast, that can in turn stand in stark contrast to the abundant supply of similarities I am sure to have found, in my perverse search for fresh difference.

Date: August 3, 2016

Publisher: Literary Hub

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.

On site.

Blue and yellow make green.

SYNTHETICS
The Pink Trance Notebooks
By Wayne Koestenbaum

I THINK OF the aphorism as a sympathetic form. The aphorism is succinct, correct. It slinks shut, sometimes with a little snap or tone. Its brevity is a performance and thus requires skill, also a source of its sympathy. Something (even a great deal of something) has been left out, but the aphorism is not merely or only a fragment or piece, something bit haphazardly off from something else. The aphorism is careful, rather than abrupt, and frequently warm. It is, as they say, lively. “I am dynamite,” says Nietzsche. “I’m like the animals in the forest. They don’t touch what they cannot eat,” says Karl Lagerfeld. “In love, he who heals first, heals best,” says La Rochefoucauld. “My vagina hurts when I watch gymnastics,” says Chrissy Teigen.

Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, novelist, and critic, in his recent The Pink Trance Notebooks, says, “— don’t / keep saying ‘Stabat Mater’ / as if it meant anything —.” Also: “I wrote / down every word the / drunk jocks muttered.” “I am the love / child of Las Vegas / and Belarus.” “I made a film / (Warhol-style) of the child / psychologist and me / orally grappling.” And: “am I / squirrel-like?”

Aphorisms please us. Aphorisms are literary. They end quickly. However, their boundaries are somewhat trickier to establish than one might imagine at first glance, and it’s in this that their peculiar literariness inheres. Literature’s transgression of boundaries (legal, generic, national, stylistic, etc.) allegedly establishes its value and/or goodness. This is the reason we like writing that is literary rather than not, that is not, therefore, purely professional, scientific, didactic, legal, personal, academic, commercial, factual, or whatever else. As artist and critic John Kelsey noted a few years ago, one can hardly be blamed for thinking that literature, in all its liberation and excess, has already been obviated by something called the internet!

As it mobilizes and gains speed, art becomes a lot more like what literature once was (which is a strange thought now, when literature is itself being superseded by digital culture): in its time, literature was a massive info leak that eroded disciplinary hierarchies, overflowing national borders and property lines alike.

“In its time.” I think about the collaborative project of the Athenaeum, a literary magazine put together in 1798 by the Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, two key Romantics. Romanticism’s revolutionary republican, a subject by natural right, required a new mode of literary authority, with the result that the Romantic author styled himself “a massive info leak” — much as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy maintain in their work on “The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism,” The Literary Absolute. With the adoption of the aphoristic series, experimental writing becomes exciting to both writer and reader on account of this writing’s incompleteness, its interest in futurity, its individuality, and its allegiance with process rather than fixity. Or, as the poet Novalis informs the reader of an odd, aphoristic series published as “Blütenstaub” (Pollen) in the first issue of the Athenaeum, “The best of what the French won in their revolution is a piece of Germanity.” A magic genealogy imagined here, in which France’s revolutionary war at home wins it a piece of foreign spirit (if not soil), is made plausible through literary induction. Novalis maintains, “It is a matter of course, for we stand on exactly the road the Romans arose from.” Because Germans are aesthetically linked to Roman mores, republicanism is also German, as is — the reader triumphantly discovers — la République. Romantic literature permits a specialized and nearly nonsensical synthesis, i.e., “France is German,” that is also an overflow of other disciplines, of other criteria for truth — or, as Paul de Man fastidiously puts it, “the continuity of aesthetic with rational judgment […] is the main tenet and the major crux of […] ‘Romantic’ literatures.”

Whether or not it now makes sense to view the discursive syntheses of the World Wide Web in a similar light (i.e., as somehow like art, which is somehow like literature, which is basically Romantic), not least of all because of the existence of algorithmically generated hierarchies, the question of a link between literature’s abilities or ambitions and republicanism remains — as does the question of what literature may, more generally, do or say and for whom. Without taking Kelsey too much to task, it hardly needs to be said that definitions of literary value that depend upon Romanticism are probably incomplete.

Enter Wayne Koestenbaum. Or not, “Enter Wayne Koestenbaum,” because I’m not sure Koestenbaum shares my weird dread that literature may one, not exist, or two, be the inherited fever dreams of a bunch of second-rate philosophers, but enter Wayne Koestenbaum anyway, because Koestenbaum has some very interesting ideas about how to combine aesthetic and rational thought and has placed many of these thoughts in a book called The Pink Trance Notebooks, a series of poems that take the form of lineated aphorisms. These aphorisms are witty, have music if not rhyme, and are occasionally quite visually precise. They combine the sometimes painfully personal with erudition and wit. Re: my aforementioned dread(s), Koestenbaum seems to suggest that I could consider asking myself, “Why do straight men / want to hang out with me? / Why does the Iliad exist?” Good questions.

Like the fascinating rubbish tips that have collected on the ground in a brief metaphor in a certain dodgy English translation of Lacan’s essay on “The Mirror Stage,” in The Pink Trance Notebooks well-turned phrases of diverse origin have been let fall. Choice aphorisms seem to have dropped into a series of notebooks in the course of the writer’s approach to an image of himself. We do not know what the writer’s image looks like except in some screened, flickering, or otherwise transitory view. (Possibly there is no monolith, anyway.) Advice as to whom we’re dealing with, what sorts of men, women, art, and gestures he likes, is always partial; always displayed as non sequiturs, small flags, signals, lines. I would hesitate to call this code, since the rhetorical dynamic is not one of replacement of one thing by another but rather replacement of any feasible or conceivable whole by a sidelong glance, a flash, a sinew. Yet the synecdoche bears a “natural” affiliation with some environment. A whole social life, a whole life, flows on behind these glances. And there is a sense that the eye that beholds what is here also squeezes, flexes a bit, recombines, palpitates something that is, as in that cliché, fugitive. But like most clichés, it’s not just that.

A number of authorities have remarked that time may have two valences rather than three. In other words, that the division may not be between past, present, and future, but rather between the fixity or relative knowability (of course, debatable) of the past and the virtuality of just about everything else. The present is constantly unfolding and therefore impossible to freeze, still, or otherwise capture. The future, meanwhile, is an irrelevant puff of ether, a nightmare or fantasy toward which we are all, if the calendar is to be believed, inexorably drifting. Yet Koestenbaum’s poems seem to have felt, rather than everybody’s everyday speculative dread, a temporal split, and on a daily basis. They dispense with the dumb dream of the future and peruse the present’s extraordinarily limited depths. Smallish (though neatly organized into larger units via notebook), they seem to have been written in — or on, or with — a quite particular portion of the present’s inexhaustible not-quite-yet-ness, the side that kisses the past, and this is why, I believe, we see the word “trance” in this collection’s title, or, rather, why these are trance notebooks rather than notebook notebooks. One does not get to inhabit the queer aspect of the present, its virtual, glowing, ebbing outline, while making a rational spreadsheet at high noon, socialized in a budgetary meeting, sunlight roaring in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, wide awake, and perhaps, because one is so conscious, enjoying some cold-pressed beet juice. (Of course, bright sun can produce its own delirium.) No, because no matter how awake one may be in this scenario, no matter how pink one’s juice, this is not where the present lives. The present is a nothing; it is also all there is (“preemptive / Kaddish for the not dead,” Koestenbaum begins one vignette). The present’s wildness, its unsuitability for codification as knowledge or fact, also suggests the need for trance, as well as the need for synthesis.

I like the notion that trance — being another German import, musically speaking — could displace the sublime. People have spanked the sublime pretty thoroughly of late and, from what I can tell, dispensed with it; but the German Romantics, those so deeply invested in the literary aphorism and that form’s bizarre borders, of course cherished sublimity, with its simultaneous pain and pleasure, its symmetries of annihilation and incontrovertible presence. And I think the Romantics’ desire for an aestheticized language of republicanism, one of magic synthesis, remains a significant object lesson. We have, at any rate, arrived at a moment in American poetry (apologies for the nationalism) at which certain long-cherished questions of address and form are no longer enough to help us out. So-called “conceptual poetry,” whatever this term means, which was apparently designed to give equal traction to all persons with browsers and word-processing software, a highly reasonable aesthetics if ever there was one, has devolved into an attempt on the part of the usual suspects to leverage the commons, if not history itself, during the course of yet another academic conference. Meanwhile, for all the reasons that the lyric has traditionally been disappointing, the reasons Adorno suspects that the lyric’s “own principle of individuation never guarantees the creation of compelling authenticity,” the lyric is still, like your sexy pizza slice costume, failing to impress universally and unequivocally this fall.

The trance state is one in which we are led; we slough off the limits of agency in favor of becoming not one, but n+1 (with apologies to the magazine, whom I don’t mean to invoke). Entranced, we are in the sway of some unknown — or, depending on the kind of trance, some known — other. Rimbaud, famously: “Je est un autre.” But Rimbaud was only drunk. The trance state is not a pronominal exchange; it’s an encounter, an ecstatic combination rather than a coma, renunciation, or switch. Speaking of the lyric, Koestenbaum asks, “Is Whitman pro-onanism / or anti-onanism?” He answers himself, “Obviously / both, Whitman is / pro-bowel.” One could call this a question of profundity, or one could read it as the announcement of a poetic mode that has always, for excellent reasons, been just a few steps ahead, as well as just out of reach, of the ideological quandaries Romanticism so agonizingly and so ecstatically thought to make us care about.

Date: December 2, 2015

Publisher: The Los Angeles Review of Books

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.

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pink-trance-notebooks.jpg

On site.

Wayne's world.

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Definitions of literary value that depend upon Romanticism are probably incomplete.

Three Books by Lisa Robertson

The essay by John Kelsey cited in the text is "Next-Level Spleen," originally published in the November 2012 issue of Artforum.

THREE BOOKS BY LISA ROBERTSON

Is it odd to begin liking a poet on the basis of a pair of lines? This happened to me with the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. And though I eventually found that I did my liking on a semierroneous basis, the affinity was secure. I loved these two lines, from a slim untitled poem out of Robertson’s 2001 collection, The Weather.

It was Jessica Grim the American poet
who first advised me to read Violette Leduc

Are you aware that Jessica Grim and Violette Leduc are both real people? I was not, at least until I came across Leduc’s 1964 memoir, La Bâtarde (The Lady Bastard), on the cover of which a pair of female profiles look ready to kiss. I just liked the sound of those names, “Jessica Grim,” “Violette Leduc”; one character arrives with a strange haircut and opinions, the author she recommends could wear boots that cover the thighs. It’s a Nabokovian limb you potentially like your poet to venture out on: a commonplace the site of an unexpected evocation.

We’ll leave aside for a moment the fact that Jessica Grim is an American poet who, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, has published several books and also works as a librarian, and that Violette Leduc (1907‑1972), besides authoring an autobiography, composed some nine novels and was a friend of Simone de Beauvoir’s: Lisa Robertson’s oeuvre is dense, sonically resonant verse and combinations of verse and lyric prose, and often the result of collaboration or travel—with other artists and across countries, centuries, and literatures, both high and low. The list of her publications gives a clue to her pursuits, which are simultaneously pastoral and modernist: The Apothecary (1991), The Badge (1994), The Descent (1996), Debbie: An Epic (1997), XEclogue (1999), The Weather (2001), Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), Rousseau’s Boat (2004), The Men: A Lyric Book (2006). What follows here treats three of these collections—The Weather, XEclogue, and Rousseau’s Boat—which show to great effect Robertson’s prized dilemma: how to stage obsolescence successfully, such that its strangeness, anachronism, and even its sometime illegibility, can be read intact. For whatever is obsolete is free for the taking. Which is to say, many abandoned styles have something (beauty) yet to offer; we need their insolvent otherness.

As I have explained, I am an innocent. I believed that Jessica Grim and Violette Leduc were aliases, just as I believed in the legitimacy of an “Office for Soft Architecture,” who had sent, folded into my copy of The Weather, a sky-blue flyer printed with a quantity of text presumably referring to that book. The flyer began promisingly: “We think of the design and construction of these weather descriptions as important decorative work.” But the text veered quickly into a territory I knew to be emphatically foreign to any authority worth its salt, with a nod in my direction, “What shall our new ornaments be? How should we adorn mortality now?” And, the author(s) insisted, now plaintive, “This is a serious political question.” The envoi finally convinced me of its impracticality as blurb:

Dear Reader—a lady speaking to humans from the motion of her own mind is always multiple. Enough of the least. We want to be believed.

Who were the authors of the flyer, this “Office for Soft Architecture”? None other than Robertson herself, writing to the reader from the pages of the book (Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture) which would follow The Weather.

But, to begin at the beginning of The Weather, even if Robertson is an author devoted to taking herself out of order, the book is divided into seven ‘days’ of the week, each section containing one long prose section and a shorter, more traditionally lineated poem. “Sunday” ‘s prose presents phrases commencing, “Here…,” with resultant residual anaphora as guide to their overall meaning: “Here is a church. Here is deep loam upon chalk. Here is a hill. Here is a house.” “Sunday” has, as its grander half, the strange untitled poem to which I first made reference:

It was Jessica Grim the American poet
who first advised me to read Violette Leduc.
Lurid conditions are facts. This is no different
from daily protests and cashbars.
I now unknowingly speed towards
which of all acts, words, conditions—
I am troubled that I do not know.
When I feel depressed in broad daylight
depressed by the disappearance of names, the pollen
smearing the windowsill, I picture
the bending pages of La Bâtarde
and I think of wind. The outspread world is
comparable to a large theatre
or to rending paper, and the noise it makes when it flaps
is riotous. Clothes swish through the air, rubbing
my ears. Promptly I am quenched. I’m talking
about a cheap paperback which fans and
slips to the floor with a shush. Skirt stretched
taut between new knees, head turned back, I
hold down a branch,

Here the poem ends, at a comma. It is a factual, even banal, report on the fortunes of one literary person’s room—and the entrance into it of news, of memories, and of the weather—and, then again, this is pure fiction, each thing an instance of contrived metonymy. Robertson’s is a realism of epistemological concerns: even “[l]urid conditions are facts.” “I,” reader, no longer hold metaphor and perception apart; “I” compare, “I” fail to perceive discretely, “I … speed” impetuously into a fantasy in which reading has become, by virtue of this extraordinary capacity for association, a physical event. Most surprisingly, “This is no different….” “Clothes swish through the air”: the phrases borne toward the reader are a carousel of styles, and the shuffling of these costumes, the “shush[ing]” and “fan[ning]” of their physical manifestation as pulpy pages of a novel, “quench[es].” Yes, the “outspread world is / comparable to a large theatre,” but its materiality has become analogous only “to rending paper, and the noise it makes,” just as mortality is a detail, “pollen / smearing the windowsill.” Here everything returns to the book, carried as if by an irresistible wind. Who knows where this weather originates; Chaucer invented a House of Fame to explain it.

“I think of wind,” writes Robertson, portraying herself in a janissary pose at the climax of her long stanza—legs open and “head turned back”—she makes way for whatever’s arriving. Which is to say, a lot of reading went into the composition of The Weather. Robertson writes in her appendix that the book resulted from “an intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description.” Sources include BBC forecasts, and a number of rare, weather-related tracts: “Mr. Well’s Essay on Dew, Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modification of Clouds, Thomas Forster’s Researches About Atmospheric Phenomena,” among many others. By way of these tracts, weather returns to the séance prop closet in The Weather, less phenomenon than diction—which diction is needed (a grant or two probably had to be written to give Robertson time enough to hunt it down) to describe a gorgeous and fleeting consciousness, one unharnessed by memory and receptive only to marks made by the immediate. This is the obvious consciousness of the long prose poems, but it is also the finely balanced syntax of their lineated partners and of a final poem, “Porchverse.” The stanzas of “Porchverse” are spare and beautifully broken and talk about transformation—how things “go”—as in this fine report on the necessity of stillness in a speaker who wishes to bear witness to flight:

Then refused so lucidly as when
I saw a dog
run a doe
to sea.

Robertson’s 1999 collection, XEclogue, was already hot on this theme. And, indeed, hotter, as Virgil’s shepherd Corydon observes in the second Eclogue,

torva leaena lupum sequitur, lupus ipse capellam,
florentem cytisum sequitur lasciva capella,

Lion eats wolf eats goat eats flowering clover: we consume and are in turn consumed. Where The Weather sidesteps this chase and takes a position of third party observer, XEclogue takes enthusiastic part, in ten chapters each titled Eclogue. Robertson introduces her work here with the following excuse, “I needed a genre for the times that I go phantom.” By “go phantom,” Robertson means an inability to find herself reflected in the world around her, social or otherwise. This inability is often called Liberty, according to Robertson, and its symptoms include “illusions of historical innocence” and weird attempts to recognize oneself in “proud trees” and “the proud sky” (Robertson is less interested in flags and eagles). But Robertson has discovered that she has “an ancestress,” a woman of the landed class who is both dead and moving rapidly through the psychic woods, and who can offer advice about how to escape the numbing tropes of Nation and Nature:

Ontology is the luxury of the landed. Let’s pretend you “had” a land. Then you “lost” it. Now fondly describe it. That is pastoral. Consider your homeland, like all utopias, obsolete. Your pining rhetoric points to obsolescence. The garden gate shuts firmly. Yet Liberty must remain throned in her posh gazebo. What can the poor Lady do? Beauty, Pride, Envy, the Bounteous Land, the Romance of Citizenship: these mawkish paradigms flesh out the nation, fard its empty gaze. What if, for your new suit, you chose to parade obsolescence?

Political correctness has turned out not to be an entirely excellent exit-strategy for the twentieth century.
XEclogue is a discussion of this departure, among others. The book forms a basis for the work Robertson executes in her later collections, but it is also millennium-appropriate: full of richer language, speculation about the body politic, and contrived scenarios designed to help the reader entertain a more glamorous notion of self than “the Romance of Citizenship” normally affords.

XEclogue concerns a tripartite dramatis personae: a worried individual named Nancy, the brave and multifarious Lady M, and a gaggle of sex objects known as the Roaring Boys. What results is a series of letters, dialogues, complaints, and stage directions, which lead to the eventual reformation of Nancy, who initially proclaims: “I need to assume my dream of justice really does exist.” Just as Virgil simultaneously mourned alongside farmers who had lost their farmsteads to soldiers and poked fun at them in the Eclogues, Robertson shows she thinks psychology is a predicament and an opportunity. In this description of one of the Roaring Boys, it is difficult to tell when she is talking about the way he thinks and when she is referring to his looks:

Roaring Boy #1 is skinny and pure as the bitter white heel of a petal. Spent lupins could describe his sense of mind as a great dusky silky mass. Yet a feeling of being followed had taken his will away. In an age of repudiation he would exclude sullen indolence and reveal his lace. […] When he closes his eyes he asks: Shall I be sold up? Am I to become a beggar? Shall I take to flight? He is skinny and pure as a calling.

In passages like these, Robertson revitalizes prose and raises the question, if so much is possible in language, must it refer to a world at all? Robertson’s reply is that language must at least refer back to itself and, then, pointedly. She shares the literary conversation which nourished XEclogue at the book’s conclusion: eighteenth century “poet, traveler, and political critic,” Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Frank O’Hara, Virgil, anonymous fourth century ad Latin songs of the Pervigilium Veneris, Rousseau’s Social Contract, the Slits, the Raincoats, Patti Smith, Young Marble Giants, the Au Pairs, L7, Marguerite de Navarre, and many, many (it appears) others.

In spite of this careful acknowledgment of authorship, 2004’s Rousseau’s Boat finds Robertson toying with the remarkable notion that much of what makes the experience of writing powerful is her own lack of authority:

Here/ freedom has no referent. It is like/ an emotion. This is for/ them then. This is a passive narrative. I feel/ it could be useful. I’m forty-one. It/ gets more detailed. I feel an amazement.

The book is a short one. Its back cover bears a quote attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which that thinker describes the way in which the perception of moving water can replace thought: “I felt in myself so pleasurably and effortlessly the sensation of existing….” It’s also a pleasure to hear the poet mention her age, “I’m forty-one.” And then, the astonishing way she bears this statement out: “It / gets more detailed. I feel an amazement.” Robertson displays a talent for the sweeter side of generalization, for unknowingness. The two large poems in the book, “Face” and “Utopia,” are full of hauntingly general language, which is no oxymoron. The poems repeat lines, and much of their power stems from the subtle accrual of sense produced by freely appearing refrains. Thus the reader becomes a subject born along in Rousseau’s boat (these languid poems), batted by lines which softly suggest the fact of mortality.

The effect of the downflowing patter of shade on the wall
was liquid, so the wall became a slow fountain in afternoon.
Our fears opened inwards.
Must it be the future?
Yes, the future, which is a sewing motion.

And Robertson keeps coming up with dates (“It was the spring of my thirty-fifth year,” she writes, or “It was 1993”) which are proof of the simple effect of sadness that precision can give. For the facts are outside the poem, and the poem itself travels away from standard referentiality, teaching thought to refer to itself:

This is one part of the history of a girl’s mind.

The unimaginably moist wind changed the scale of the morning,
Say the mind is not a point of origin, but a skin carrying
sensation into the midst of objects.
Now it branches and forks and coalesces.
In the centre, the fire pit and log seat, a frieze of salal and
foxglove, little cadmium berries.
At the periphery of the overgrown clearing, the skeleton of a
reading chair decaying beneath plastic.

Lisa Robertson knows where she is headed, but this is not the only reason that she is a trustworthy writer. Her work results from a reading practice in which words continue to disturb the poet, who is always just beginning to accept that there is more justice in literature than outside it.

Date: January 3, 2007

Publisher: n+1

Format: Web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the review.

On site.

La batarde.

Author's note: The conclusion drawn (by me) at the end of this essay is not one I would arrive at now. I think it's incorrect.

ERSATZ PANDA

A woman frequents a certain store. In the store there is a small black cat with white markings. The cat is very round, the kind of cat that will expand concentrically when she (delicately) gains weight. Everything about the cat is small and round, from her round feet to her round eyes and small, round snout. Even her tail is perennially looped. The cat’s roundness is perhaps partially the reason for her name, Panda, which the woman learns from the owner of the store. Panda’s coloring is the inverse of panda coloring, white circles on black fur.

Panda discreetly guards the store and expands roundly over the course of a winter. The owner of the store tells the woman, when she asks, that Panda is not pregnant, merely gaining weight. The woman occasionally makes videos of Panda standing on boxes of dishwashing detergent, preening herself against the corners of a rack displaying sacks of circus peanuts. These videos are sent, via MMS, to friends.

A summer passes, another fall, and then, during the course of the second winter of acquaintance with Panda, something happens. The woman enters the store to discover, on the floor of the store near the cash register, a large black cat with a white face and a surprising, bright pink nose, like a nub of chewing gum. This cat’s black fur hangs in grayish clumps, as if he has on a coat of dust over his regular black coat. He lets out a braying meow.

Another customer advises the owner of the store that it would be better to put ‘your lion’ elsewhere.

The new cat resembles Panda in that they are both cats. He also resembles Panda in that he is a black cat with white markings. But he is not Panda.

The woman asks the owner of the store where Panda is.

The owner of the store tells the woman that someone ‘took’ her. He says that this cat was left in Panda’s place. He knows nothing about the reasons for this event.

For many weeks, the woman, now avoiding the store, ponders the disappearance and replacement of Panda. The woman tells the story, up to this point, to a few friends, some of whom are already familiar with Panda, due to the MMSs. One friend begins referring to the replacement cat, the large cat with a pink nose and clumps of ungroomed fur, as Ersatz Panda. Other friends do not comment on the story or refer to the incident. The one friend continues, from time to time, to refer to Ersatz Panda. The woman thinks that this may have something to do with the fact that he, like the woman, was born and raised in the city.

At a second store the woman has begun frequenting, due to the need not to frequent the first store and in so doing be confronted by Panda’s replacement, there is a large orange cat. It drapes itself across a counter and stares dreamily into the ceiling.

The woman asks the person at the second store about the orange cat. The orange cat is a girl. She is called KC, short for ‘Kitty Cat’, which is not her real name.

The woman begins telling the story of Panda, ending on the encounter with Ersatz Panda.

The person at the second store says that this is very strange. She says that KC does not in fact belong to the second store but has for a long time been visiting it. Then last summer, the person at the second store says, a man began coming into the store, pointing at KC and saying, ‘That’s my cat!’

The person at the second store found this very strange. She was sure that KC was not the man’s cat. Subsequently, KC disappeared.

The person at the second store believed that the man who claimed that KC was his cat had taken her, but then, after several months, KC reappeared. And she has continued to appear at the second store. ‘There she is,’ the person at the second store says, pointing.

The woman observes that KC seems to know she is being discussed. ‘She won’t look at us,’ she says.

But now, as winter coasts into a long, slow spring, the woman becomes willing to return to the first store. Ersatz Panda’s fur clumps have disappeared and he appears smaller, if better nourished. He adopts a beatific hen pose.

Here the story ends.

Narration is the act of organizing discrete events into a series. Narration could simply be the act of juxtaposition, repeated, doubled and tripled. Narrative could be merely decorative, I sometimes think.

In the above story, Ersatz Panda is the name given to a cat of mysterious origins. Of course, we understand that the cat has no true name – at least, no proper, given name. In fact, the referent of the name, ‘Ersatz Panda’, is not even really the cat of mysterious origins. Rather, the referent of ‘Ersatz Panda’ is a tangle of social, economic and geographic relations. Some of these relations are mediated by MMS.

This story is interesting mostly because we know so little about what has happened. The story is also interesting because people in the story have so little to say about what occurs.

I think ‘ersatz’ is a beautiful word. And I think, at some level, I relate this story simply – and only – because it includes this word. ‘Ersatz’ first entered the English language, from the German, in the midst of the Victorian era, in the 1870s, a time of a craze for industrial substitutes, from so-called French jet (i.e., black glass) to photography. However, the word was apparently not much used by English speakers until scarcities of the First World War led to the advent of ‘ersatz coffee’, made from acorns, and ‘ersatz flour’, made from potatoes. These examples euphemize grimmer transpositions of mostly inedible materials (soil, paste). The ‘er’, of ‘ersatz’, is in fact an unaccented version of the more familiar prefix, ‘ur–’, meaning, ‘original, earliest, primitive’. The German verb, ersetzen, ‘to replace’, combines this prefix with a Proto-Indo-European root, sed–, which means ‘to sit/set’. There is a cruel element in this etymology, a sign of competition; a secondary thing is placed ‘originally’, in an ‘ur’ sense, belatedly obviating the first thing’s claim to be itself. (Why, we may ask, must the first thing ‘claim’ to be itself? It seems so unfair.) To return briefly to the story, which, in spite of its already having ended here, may be continuing elsewhere, the woman finds herself returning to the first store, warming to the somewhat retiring Ersatz Panda, a black tuxedo cat with a broad face and very pink nose.

I had to stop going to Ersatz Panda’s store for a little while because it all happened so quickly and I didn’t know what it meant. It was even difficult to write about. I mean, consider the situation: A beloved cat is replaced by a terrifying phony. An analogy with the severed horse’s head in your bed (Puzo) didn’t seem that far off. But I should be precise: I wasn’t thinking about retribution or criminal warnings. I was thinking about fate. Ersatz P. scared me, not because he seemed strange to me, but because I already knew him.

Someone once said that fate is ‘the reflection of the world in a raindrop’. This rings true to me but I have to unpack it. What I think this means is that everything that will happen is already determined. But everything is not determined from some future point of origin/view. This is why fate is weird. It is a pattern. It’s everything about your life flattened into an image and foretold in reverse, from this very moment on. Es rever nid loterofd na ega mina ot nide nettal fefil ru oyt u obag nih tyre vesti. That’s why you can’t understand it now.

Ersatz P. would always arrive at the corner store. Panda herself was just a delay, an adverb attached to the arrival of her replacement, since her replacement was her truer self. She was an image I sent to people without knowing the extent to which she already was an image. Ersatz P., on the other hand, is the kind of cat I would never photograph. When he showed up, at first I worried there was something wrong with the store. Later, I worried there was something wrong with me.

I am trying to stop worrying.

The truth is, a year and a half ago, I started making videos of this bodega cat. I made these videos from a swamp of loneliness and fear. I wanted to die but I absolutely wasn’t going to. I had already made up my mind. I refused to die, because dying would mean I had capitulated.

I tried to imagine a human being who was not cowed by failure. Since this was impossible for me at the time, I instead imagined a person who couldn’t really exist and endeavored to think of activities for this ‘person’. I imagined a person whose consciousness was a happy bobbing speck of fluff, a haze of light shimmering above the hood of a recent midsize vehicle. I did want this person to be, if not stupid, then mildly lacking in imagination. It was necessary that the person have no imagination. It’s counterintuitive, given that we’re prone to thinking about feeling as the result of what ‘really’ happens, and what ‘really’ happens is supposedly the opposite of what we imagine, but I’m convinced it’s people with no imagination who have the least idea of what’s going on and therefore live in bliss.

I have these smartphone videos I took of a cat.

The strangest thing was, it worked. Not that I lived in bliss, per se, but that I began to live among some other people.

Voiceover: Panda! Paaaaan Daaaaaa!

A very small black cat with white circles around her eyes walks along the top of a green box of dish detergent. The cat lowers her head and furiously grooms her cheek.

Voiceover: Panda! What are you doing?

The cat looks up. Her eyes are an impetuous dark yellow. They are the color of the petals of black-eyed Susans. The yellow of pre-Bloomberg taxicabs.

After Panda disappeared and the videos stopped, there came the period during which, as I mentioned, I stopped going to the first store at all. During this time, there were several miracles.

The first of these miracles was the painting of my downstairs neighbor’s door. From what I have been able to ascertain, my downstairs neighbor is retired. He does not seem to be entirely single, but he lives alone. He moved into the building last summer while I was away and occupies the smallest unit, whose footprint is partially eaten up by the building’s mailbox area. The first thing I noticed about him was a laminated sign he put on his mailbox. The sign had a bright red border. ‘Just Chillin’’ the sign said. Later, an identical but slightly larger sign appeared on the door of his apartment. This sign included additional information, that it was possible to obtain CD mixes and some sort of spiritual advising (I forget the exact wording) at this location. Sometimes, when I left the building in the morning, the door to the apartment was ajar and my neighbor could be seen working at his computer, his back to the door. The apartment was filled with boxes, stacked floor to ceiling.

Over the next six months, more signs were added to the door. I didn’t look very closely at them, partly, I think, because the door of the apartment was often open when I went by. The new signs included numbers indicating passages in the New Testament. Sometimes a brief portion of the passage in question was also included. There came to be many of these signs.

Then one day I came downstairs to find the building’s super and a younger relative of his painting the front door. They were also painting the door of my neighbor’s apartment, from which all the signs had been removed. They painted the door of my neighbor’s apartment brick red. The front door was painted white. For some reason, my neighbor never put his signs up again after this. It was an unusual (miraculous!) gesture on the part of the management company who collects our rent: In the three years I have been living in this building, I have never seen any attempt to improve it. All the windows are cracked and the floor tiles are coming up in the hallway. The place sways when a truck goes by.

Another sequence of events that seemed to result in something one could call a miracle was an interaction I had with the FedEx guy. When the FedEx guy comes to deliver things, he always calls me. This seems like a fairly recent change in procedure, but perhaps FedEx people have been calling cellphones instead of ringing doorbells for years, I don’t know. The FedEx guy always seems to call when I’m a few blocks away from the house. Sometimes I’m coming, sometimes going. If it’s coming, we chat while I sprint toward him. On the day in question I happened to be going so we agreed he’d leave the package downstairs. The problem was that when I returned home, the package wasn’t there. I did all the things you might expect, running around and checking behind corners and whatnot. I went outside and looked down the stairs leading to the basement. I left a sign in Sharpie for my neighbors on the back of the front door, advising anyone who’d picked up a package ‘by accident’ to please return it. I added that it contained nothing but ‘school supplies’ and other value-free crap. Thirty minutes elapsed. I remembered I had the FedEx guy’s number on my phone. ‘Hey,’ I said, calling him. ‘It’s me.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hi. Did you get your package?’

‘See, that’s the thing.’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Thought I hid it. I put it on those stairs, you know? The downstairs ones? And there were people walking by, so I pretended I was looking for a buzzer, you know? And I found this old part of a broom and I put it on there? Did you see?’

I was running outside to the basement staircase. There was indeed the head of a yellow plastic broom sitting on something.

‘Got it!’ I yelled.

‘Oh good,’ said the FedEx guy.

This was the second miracle.

The third miracle I won’t explain at length, but something I figured out via YouTube is that you can cut your own hair and it does look pretty good. I’m not sure if you know how much a haircut costs in NYC.

The final miracle is more complex. It was a Sunday and I was walking in my neighborhood with my friend, the person who named Ersatz Panda. He and I had just had a big breakfast and were moving slowly. We went past a row of garbage cans and on one can was a black and white cat. It was a mostly white cat, with a black ear. It was sunning itself, panting lightly.

My friend reached out to engage this cat. Anticipating his touch, it inclined its large, flat head.

I reminded my friend about cat parasites.

We walked on.

Behind us the cat flopped off its can. It followed us to the end of the block.

My friend said, ‘Thank you for reminding me not to pet Garbage Cat.’

I’m not sure why he said ‘reminding’, but the thing about this statement was it indicated I am part of the process by means of which he constructs his narrative. I exist for him.

The other thing you need to know about me is that I have been the victim of some pretty extreme forms of deceit. Not scams or frauds but romantic infidelity. This is why I feel reasonably comfortable with the notion that narrative could be merely decorative. It’s how I try to feel OK with what has occurred. A narrative might just be something you casually attach to your real, lived life – a tail made out of a necktie or an unattractive paper hat. It might be an enormous joke to you, but it’s not an enormous joke to me. And now I know this. My greatest desire has always been to take people literally. It’s not the same as wanting to trust them, but it’s related.

The miracles I mention above take their form(s) as miracles, as such, from the fact that some negative expectation of mine was not fulfilled. So: insignificant improvements were made to the apartment building; I found my package; I saved $100 last month; someone knows me. Other people might have less tenuous relationships with the notion that events like these could come to pass. Admittedly, they’re no big deal. But to me they are extraordinary. They indicate that my life will not be an unremitting disaster.

Also my friend: how do I explain. I don’t know if I even sent those videos of Panda to anyone else. He is my closest friend. But I’m a creature of this century and it’s no longer entirely clear what human friendship is.

A woman frequents a certain store. It is a repetitive action and therefore non-narrative. However, inside the repetition, something has changed.

I used to think that what disrupts repetitive living is fate. Now I think that what disrupts living is other people.

Maybe Panda was sitting outside her store, contemplating the seductive greenness of an overturned Heineken bottle. Maybe this contemplation was interrupted by the seductive approach of some eligible cat. Maybe Panda, vacating her post for love, sent out word via local cat networks and a viable replacement (a needy case) was found.

But this doesn’t account for that ‘someone’. It also depends on forms of agency that make no sense, regarding cats. There’s a whole body of literature, not just children’s literature, by the way, about this. Cats make concerted choices; they go adventuring; they know how to read; they return; they give themselves complex names pertaining to their ancestors; they enjoy dancing; they sniff flowers; they cross-country ski; they live forever. The weirdest thing is that while we know many of the above activities aren’t possible, it doesn’t seem entirely true – i.e., faithful to reality – to say that they are, conversely, impossible.

By the same token, every explanation I can give of why ‘someone’ would replace an adorable cat with a weird, obviously abused cat with similar markings is pretty bizarre. In most of these scenarios, this happens because ‘someone’ for some reason wants either to abuse the adorable cat in turn or to threaten the adorable cat’s owners. Maybe it is a combination of the two. But we don’t really have access to these motives. They’re lost to us and to livable time, and now the world we do have access to contains only Ersatz Panda, along with KC and Garbage Cat, all of whom are merely tangential, alas.

Someday I’ll pet Ersatz Panda. Or, given the parasites known to dwell in cat feces, parasites allegedly capable of migrating into the human brain, maybe not. Someday I’ll take a smartphone photo of Ersatz Panda. And I will send it to my friend. And he’ll reply.

granta-banner-ersatz-panda.png

Date: February 19, 2018

Publisher: Granta

Format: Web

Genre: Fiction

Link to the story.

One of Granta's 2018 Top Reads.

On site.

ersatzpanda.jpg

Romy Schneider's chin with kittens in Boccaccio ’70, 1962, dir. Luchino Visconti.

SCARY SITES

— SO YOU’RE ASKING ME if I know, specifically, of another instance of this thing, apart from yours?
— I guess my question is how did you know that? Because I did not.
— I’m trying to think if I know of another instance. In a way it all operates by hearsay, and what you get is an accumulated negative opinion in the next circle out. And of course the opinion does not become uniformly negative. For some people . . .
— They’re like, great!
— Like the victor is . . .
— Like, that fucking woman, why did she be a woman?
— Right. Like, why was that cunt a cunt?
— As it’s usually put.
— As it’s usually put. So, to me, the social effects are—let’s take your example, I do notice every time Cody comes up in conversation and what is said about him. We used to live in a quasi-polite society, so, like, whether those opinions get reflected back into action against this person, however slight, is always unclear.
— He doesn’t live here.
— Right, well, like, before. But I do know, and I do think this is true, and this is, ha, unfortunately for him, doubly true for people who are in the arts, reputational issues rustle around you in a pretty intense way.
— It’s weird because no one seems to know who he is. Like they may have known that I was married for a fair amount of time or something. But they don’t know who that person is I was married to. Like, to the extent that, when I moved out of my place, I basically was like, everybody come and take my furniture.
— I remember.
— I was a bit deep in trauma.
— Do you miss any of that stuff?
— No!
— Great.
— It was the best thing I’ve done in years, and I did it by accident. But someone came over with Phoebe Klein, actually this guy she’s married to, I don’t even know what his name is. But I had this print by a guy who lives in Iowa, and this guy, Phoebe’s husband, was like, are you giving that away? And I was like, oh no. I am not giving the art away! I hope I said that in a nice way. And then this guy was like, oh that’s so great, who is it by. And I said, Oren Droste. And he was like, oh, I know him! That’s crazy, how do you have his work, he’s an esoteric outsider artist. And I was like, yeah, but he teaches at a university.
— He’s not really an outsider!
— I mean, what is an outsider?
— You know Cody is pretending to be an outsider artist.
— I know! Anyway, this guy, Phoebe’s husband, was like, how did you get this, and I was like, I used to hang out with these people, and he was like, oh yeah I knew them, or this circle of people, and then it came out that the person he knew best was Cody. And he just said it like that, “Cody Garrison.” And I think I had given some generic version of the story in which I said I used to be married to someone who was close to Oren Droste. And after the guy said Cody Garrison, I was like, yes, that’s the person I used to be married to. And the guy was like, oh. He sort of didn’t know what to say.
— Poor schmuck.
— Yeah. And then he said, “Is Cody still in New York?” Because I guess that’s the question you ask!
— (laughs) You were like, leave my home.
— I was like, Phoebe I am sorry that you had a child with this person. Hope it works out.
— (laughing)
— I was like, um, no, he doesn’t live in New York. I was like, he—and I mean, I was freaking out internally at this point, I felt like I was in a nightmare—he, Cody, had to leave, I said. I said he did some really bad things. And I just left it at that. And basically Phoebe packed this guy up, her husband or whatever. But it left me in this mode of, this person didn’t know where Cody was or anything about his life, and clearly it had been four years since he had spoken to him. And that’s the only time that Cody has come up, like with anyone anywhere. And I must have seen, maybe you showed me this, that Roberta Smith tweeted about his work years ago.
— I sent that to you.
— Which made me think, maybe I should do something about this, but then I was like, who cares. It’s just another drop in the bucket.
— How would you have responded?
— There’s nothing I could say. I mean, I think my main thing has been, actually, I tried to talk to Thomas Rice, be like, Tom, in case, I want to make sure that you know about what happened with this artist. And I’ve also tried to be like Tom, you should be aware of what happened between me and Darren. I mean, I haven’t said that explicitly to him, but I’ve made it just about as clear as I possibly could without telling him.
— Why does it matter to you that Tom Rice knows that about you and Darren?
— Because Tom has three daughters.
— Wait, they had another kid? When did they have another kid?
— Two weeks ago.
— What?
— It’s crazy. And they are like, we actually do not know how we are going to pull this off, in terms of real estate and stuff. I was like, how can that be? You guys are both working full-time and I assume that your families are wildly wealthy.
— I don’t know about him, but she looks very moneyed.
— Well, I think Tom’s family is in oil. He’s like, super rich. I thought! But what do I know, it’s hard to tell what goes on.
— You never know.
— You never know! But I guess it’s important to me because Tom is somebody who entered a certain space and like his relationship was criticized by his friends as being uxorious. There was some—OK, this is weird gossip—but there was some intervention.
— Before they married?
— Yeah.
— You know that she is supposedly on Tinder? Have you heard this?
— What?
— Oh yeah.
— That sounds like a crazy rumor!
— To be clear, the rumor comes from Danny French, who is a congenital and compulsive liar.
— That’s really mean! And I think that may be a symptom of—I think a lot of these guys who are in that circle are really intimidated by this woman.
— Why do you think that?
— Because she’s very successful, professionally, and she doesn’t really, there’s like no empathy coming from her at all. And in a certain way she’s hard to pity. Like I think people pity Alana, for example. They’re like, oh she’s such a genius, but she’s so emotionally fucked up. I don’t know. I need to get away from all this stuff. I find it so emotionally toxic.
— (laughing)
— (laughing)
— Have you had this conversation with people?
— It’s just, every conversation is that! That’s the message about Alana. And I’m just like, I do not know this person!
— Do you not? Have you never spent time with her?
— I mean, I have. But I don’t know her! Anyway, this is all neither here nor there, and I am saying mean things. But I think it’s interesting, because Tom is in this kind of double position, where he’s made these alliances with different white men, and French, for example, has talked to me about how he specifically seeks out other straight white men to work with because it’s a good way to make money.
— That’s the most French thing ever.
— It was amazing to hear someone say that.
— Talk about pulling the veil back!
— It was interesting to see someone take that route. But with Tom, there are other routes where he’s like I’m all about, like, diversity! But, then, he has this situation where he lives with four women. And he has three daughters. And I think for him, this is just a theory, but he’s like, oh fuck I see how my friends have treated women, what they’ve said about them, what they’ve explicitly told me they would do and then did.
— Wait. Other than French, who are you talking about?
— I don’t know but, like, I told you that stuff Darren said to me about how he and Alejandro would behave at parties.
— As in?
— They would have these plans for women, like for picking women up, that they would then execute.
— But that doesn’t seem hyper-misogynistic to me. That just seems like a thing that straight guys have done since time immemorial.
— Oh, it seems hyper-misogynistic to me, but that is probably because I’m super naive.
— You can do that in a hyper-manipulative way then having succeeded treat the woman badly, or you can ingratiate yourself according to basic laws of human behavior, like the kinds of things they teach you in the FBI, like here’s how to make someone trust you, it’s just steps 1 2 3 4 5. So you can use those for bad ends or good. It could be used against either sex.
— It’s not specific, except insofar as they were not targeting other men.
— Sure. They were doing it for a specific end.
— (laughing)
— (laughing) I’m not necessarily defending this sort of behavior.
— I mean, men can jerk each other off, too.
— I don’t find this shocking.
— All I’m saying is, I’ve had this theory about Tom for a long time.
— So many theories about such a boring person!
— He’s not boring!
— He’s boring.
— He’s really funny! He is. I think he’s a very good public speaker.
— (laughing) Because that’s all that matters. That is damning with faint praise, if I have ever heard it.
— I’m horrible.
— How are you doing?
— I’m OK. I guess I look at other people’s behavior and I’m like, do they think I’m a marked human? One of the last things Cody said to me—this was over the phone before I hung up on him—was, “You’re always going to be a victim.” And the implication was, this is why this happened, because you are a victim.
— What he was implying, I think, was, not because you are a victim but because you conceive yourself to be one.
— Yes. But the point was, you inspire these kinds of actions in other people. To me, when I heard him say that, I felt there was a kind of aggression, whether it was conscious or not. That, while he might have thought he was saying, this is a performance that you do because you can’t stand to occupy any other kind of role, I think he was also saying, like, that’s actually your role, is to be a victim for people who need to do some fucked-up thing.
— It’s possible that’s what he meant.
— I don’t think he heard himself saying that. That’s just the way it sounded to me.
— Was this in the context of a fight?
— This is in the context of him saying, I don’t know why—we were talking on the phone—maybe he wanted to pick some stuff up at the house, I don’t remember. I mean, it was just really hard to go from being with someone for eleven years to not speaking to them. I may have even initiated the conversation. I think what happened was I was like, hey, you lied to me for a really long time. Why did you do that? That was really fucked up.
— And what did he say?
— That was when he said it. Well, the first thing he said was you never loved me, and the second was, you’re a victim and you’ll always be a victim.
— So, to further extrapolate, what he was saying was, it’s your fault, you forced me to behave this way.
— Exactly. And that is what I wanted to ask you about, the invisible social effects. I think that Darren took a similar position, he was like, you’re crazy, you’re out of control, no one who wants to have the kind of professional success I want to have could be your partner because you’re so crazy.
— You’re not a good gala wife.
— Exactly.
— And I was like, but I’m pretty!
— Oh no.
— And he was like, your ass is too sexy. And I was like, this is not going to end well.
— What I was talking about is more a kind of quiet reputational harm that can happen—which is the case with Cody but less with Darren, because you had a preexisting and highly public social contract with Cody.
— I still have that contract, even.
— I bet you do. So, the invisible social effects are liable to be greater with Cody because anyone who is in the little ripple around you two has some version or other of what happened and to the extent there’s a whisper network, or shunning, or changes in opinion that may never ever even become explicit but will in some way affect how that person is treated for a long time, like, I can’t give you empirical evidence about how it operates, but I know that it does, because I do it, and other people do it, too, so we know it’s real.
— I think with both of them I was freaked out because their take on this was, you’re crazy and you’re projecting and that’s why all of this happened, essentially. Because you didn’t have a good grip on reality.
— What does that have to do with the situation with Cody?
— I think he was saying that I thought that I was being a partner in a normal way, but actually what I was doing was really fucked up and no one could live with me. That was the thing that he said to me, no one could live with you. Which is what is so hard for me to understand, because for years I’d been picking him up off the floor and carrying him back to the house. And I was kind of like, no one could live with me?! Like, I thought the whole thing about our relationship was that I took care of you? And that was really—I’m still shocked by that. It’s so hurtful to me. I was giving up a lot of stuff to be with him. It was stupid of me, which is why it’s great that the relationship ended, but it did a lot of damage. But the same thing was true of Darren, because I would listen to him all the time when he would talk about his insecurities and I would just be like, no, you’re great! Like, don’t worry about it, you’ve got this. He used to call me all the time when he would have a bad meeting with somebody, and I would say, don’t listen to that asshole, you’re a good person and things will work out.
— He was like, they didn’t give me enough money!
— No, that’s what would happen! I was so naive! I was such a naive fool. And then, later, he sort of said the same thing, like, you’re too unstable or something, and I was like, but my marriage of eleven years just ended and you’d be unstable, too. But that’s the thing I started to be really afraid of—that everyone I knew also saw me that way. Like, as being someone who just projects things, who is really out of control, and I was worried because I didn’t feel like I was behaving this way, I felt like I was trying to support both of these people. So it’s those effects that I’m trying to understand. And it sounds like it’s mostly within me and has nothing to do with the objective world, so called.
— Right, right. I mean, I can really only speak for myself.
— OK.
— I mean, because I don’t know how others saw you during that period, because they didn’t tell me.
— That’s good. (laughing)
— (laughing) So I don’t have a lot of empirical information on that front. I guess I would say doesn’t everybody expect someone going through a divorce to be highly unstable? Isn’t that even what society wants from you?
— I think so.
— Aren’t you just fulfilling a role in a way?
— OK, so, there are roles, and then there are these social effects that are associated with gossip.
— Yeah.
— But I felt like when we talked about this before you were also talking about something that comes from the person themselves, the aggressor?
— I completely think that’s true.
— So, what is that?
— The truth is that I don’t know that many of those aggressors ever deal with it, but it’s inside. Like, I can guarantee you that if either of those two people ever took a solid dose of psychedelics they would be dwelling on their situation with you for a good portion of time. It’s the kind of thing that gets trapped in there and like maybe you deal with it ten years later or twenty, but whenever you strip off the first layer of mind—I can say from experience that you don’t give up the times that you’ve hurt people. They come up really fast and strong when your mind is able to see it. It’s all in there.
— It’s like the ghosts of genocided aliens? Like in Scientology?
— There’s a “th” word for it?
— I don’t know.
— It is a “Thetan”?
— Yes! They’re Thetans! That’s really good that you know that.
— I was like, “Thanatos”? But it’s not Thanatos. (laughing)
— (laughing)
— No, but those things are—I can only speak analogically because I have not perpetrated anything like this, but when my conscious mind is not in control, I mean, a drug is just one example. It could be dreams, it could be grief, or whenever you find yourself in an unusually vulnerable situation, that stuff is very close to the surface. The body does not forget about those things.
— This is really helpful because when my mind is not in control or doing whatever it does to produce consciousness, for me everything goes back to something that happened to me when I was a child that I don’t understand at all and it’s really horrible. I don’t know what it is, I can’t see it; it’s so scary that I can’t see it, or look at it, and it’s like everything that has happened to me interpersonally since then doesn’t even show up. It makes it really difficult for me to understand how it is for people who are picking up these things as they go. I think in a way there’s some truth in what Cody was saying about me always being a victim.
— Interesting.
— I have a kind of aphasia. I can’t understand how people change as adults. I’m stuck.
— This is probably difficult to answer and why would you know, but, are you sure that there is an event associated with this thing, or is it possible that it is just a miasmic malevolence that has filtered into your way of being and has no specific and singular cause?
— I thought for a while that it was that, that it was a series of things that tipped something and became something that the sensorium couldn’t process anymore (coughing). Sorry (coughing). Sorry, when I start talking about it I get physical symptoms. It’s always associated with my throat. That’s all I know. The other weird thing is I know that both Cody and Darren were people whose parents beat them up. I think Cody had it bad in a lot of ways, particularly because he had a lot of allergies and circulatory and respiratory things that were caused by his mother smoking when she was pregnant, and for years they had a dog that he had terrible allergies to, and he couldn’t breathe. This is a thing that causes me to have a really deep connection to people, but it’s a connection that’s along something that’s so fucked up, I really don’t want to keep doing it.
— So are you saying, common victimhood? Is that what it is?
— Maybe. Or maybe it’s a thing where there’s something that happened, but the person doesn’t have access to it. Like Cody would never talk about this stuff. I just know it through bits and pieces. Darren was aware of what had happened to him, and all of his mania about making money and having success is basically about avoiding being the person someone’s hitting. Which is why I empathized with him so excessively.
— Too bad it made him unbearable.
— Yeah.
— He is not well liked, I hope you know.
— I’ve gotten that impression.
— In part from envy, but just, in general. He’s in that world and people are like, fuck that guy.
— I think he represents a lot of stuff that hurts other people. He took one path in relation to harm. Anyway, what you’re saying about the internal things is helpful. It makes sense. But then the question is, how does that play out for that person? I don’t know whether it’s in terms of their feelings or their actions or how they live. Are they always running away from that?
— I don’t know. I know very little about theories of mind. I’ve never studied them, aside from a stray Freud essay here or there.
— But what’s your intuition?
— My intuition is that disordered behavior results from these things, and the way that disordered behavior manifests happens differently depending on the person, but I think it gives rise to impulses or desires or compensations that remain mostly invisible. We build up fortresses of ideas. And it does affect a person to have a fortress in their brain.
— So, how should society react? Let’s just pretend it’s the 19th century and we can have these kinds of conversations! Because we’re going back there anyway, you know.
— But this is the central disorder of human existence.
— It’s what tragedy is based on, you mean?
— This is the disorder of our world. This is why we have everything.
— We’re completely on the same page.
— This is our sickness. That’s what it is. (laughing)
— (laughing) Right, but so, how should we react to it? I’m not denying its centrality.
— (laughing) This is why everyone in 1967 felt like it would be good to take LSD and meditate and make the Pentagon lift off the ground.
— Is that what we should do now?
— I sometimes think about this in relation to the way people use social media. On the one hand, everyone has to use social media in a somewhat performative way. And they have to come to terms with the voice they use. For some people it’s a very false voice, like a picture, like “This is who I am!”
— Shrill.
— Or, “This is what I’m dealing with.” There is a countercurrent to performativity where people are like, this incredibly intense thing has happened and I’m telling a lot of people. I’m having horrible issues in my marriage or someone close to me died in a really horrible way, or my kid is incredibly sick or I’m really sick or I’m infertile.
— I was fired.
— Right. I was fired, or I’m going to call out my harasser; things it was impossible to be honest about in the past. Or you could potentially use the press.
— As long as you weren’t harassed by Harvey Weinstein.
— Right.
— In which case you could not use the press.
— So, in our society I feel there’s a lot of duplicity, but there is also a countercurrent of candor. Which is interesting. I’m not saying that the candor itself is not in some way performative. It often is.
— Or self-exploitative?
— It’s a very mixed bag. But one thing I will say is that certain stigmas are being shattered and in service of what is always a question. I’m not going to deny that aspect of it. I’m merely identifying a current. People are different about this stuff than they were a half century ago or even a quarter. It’s one of the few things in our society that I think is OK.
— Yesterday I was taking this bus, and it had these movie screens in it? And for some reason they played the Steve Jobs movie with Ashton Kutcher.
— Did you watch it?
— I didn’t listen to the sound but I would gaze up. There’s something very revealing about watching a movie without sound. You find out what it’s about. And it’s amazing because the movie is about, I mean, there are like two female characters in it; it’s just all about these mostly white men and how they get together in these windowless rooms and they’re like, we have this idea that only we can understand, let’s use it to make money. That’s what the movie’s about. And then, at the end, suddenly Steve Jobs is in a garden with his wife, who’s put him in touch with the earth, and he’s reunited with Lisa Brennan-Jobs, who’s sleeping on the couch, and he has a loving non-incestuous relationship with her, although he steals her blanket. And then he goes and dies, but we don’t see that. I mean, Ashton Kutcher is a moron and he’s playing a genius, and it kind of works in this interesting way if you don’t listen to the sound. It’s like an L.L. Bean catalogue.
— Ashton’s very L.L. Bean.
— I love his emotions. He’s like a Muppet. But I did think about how it’s the last time we can tell this story in this way. Like there’ll be a niche show where there’s a Midwestern guy with a beer belly and a beer and it’s like, oh you’re so crazy, and he’s like, I’m so crazy, but there won’t be this Knights-of-the-Round-Table sort of thing. I’m just saying I see this occurring on a representational plane. I don’t know what it means for actual people.
— Yeah.
— I do know that in classes I teach I consistently have a white guy who writes super-violent, exploitative stuff. That guy’s always there.
— Do you call that person out?
— There are some things I can say, but they are dissociating and it can be dangerous. The people I’ve dealt with so far are genuinely ill. I have a really bad one right now. It’s this guy who’s written a story that takes place in “Hispaniola” and it’s about this girl who’s raped in incredible detail. And it’s like eighty pages long and he’s completely done with it and has handed it in and is like, respond to this now! It’s written in a magical realist style. It could not be more awful.
— Oh.
— This is a trend.
— I feel bad for white men, and bear with me, because I think they do this to say, I’m relevant.
— But they can be raped and beat up, too!
— No, I know. But they’re like, I’ll never get anywhere because I’m not trans or a person of color. This is a thing that white men feel. Hard core. So they’re like, oh, I should make art about those things. I’m not kidding. Like this person doesn’t see that they’re being appropriative. They just think they’re engaging with the issues of their time.
— It’s scary.
— I know.
— It’s unreadable, these descriptions of penetration. I’m like, we don’t need—we get how this works, mechanically.
— I would put money on the fact that he believes that he’s woke and engaged.
— I think the part of him that’s conscious is also thinking, I really enjoy these scenes. I’d like to see more violence like this.
— Did you read Preparation for the Next Life?
— No, but I have it. Mike gave it to me.
— If you ever read it, I want to know. It has the most violent and disgusting rape scene I’ve ever read in any piece of literature. I just felt it was exploitative. I don’t know if that’s defensible on my part.
— Mike has a lot of interest in violence.
— The other night I was trying to explain why I thought it was not a good book because of this rape scene. I mean, it is a good book. But it’s melodramatic. The book is sodden with sentimentality and melodrama. And the linchpin of the soddenness is this revolting rape scene.
— That’s very 19th century.
— Indeed. So I was trying to explain to people how I was impressed by the book but I morally object to it.
— It’s like The Road.
— Tell me, doctor, how can I defend my opinion using the proper tools?
— I think you already did.
— If rape is just a fictional tool, why is it objectively objectionable to use that tool?
— I think that trying to argue that something that happens in a book is objective is usually a mistake.
— That’s not what I’m saying.
— But I think that’s part of the difficulty you’re having. You don’t have to decide that other people have to accept your argument. I think you can say that you think that this rape scene is designed to elicit a kind of prurient interest.
— This is what I said.
— In violence.
— It is.
— Do a comparison. For example, the most violent thing I’ve ever read is in this Joyce Carol Oates novel called
Zombie, which is about a psychopath slash serial killer slash rapist who has a fantasy about creating a passive sex slave who will love him forever, and he reads something or sees something somewhere about lobotomies and tries to give lobotomies to—
— His victims.
— His victims. It’s so disturbing. And what’s so disturbing is not the act of trepanation or whatever you want to call it, putting holes in someone’s head or putting a stick in there. It’s the period of time when he tries to keep the zombie alive.
— Right.
— I feel like I’m going to vomit. It isn’t about someone being beaten in the present, it’s about the way in which things that have already happened are leading to events in the present. Leading to hopes that inspire violence, that inspire enslavement, even in the face of death, even in the face of the fact that the victim is already dead and this completely passive object and you can’t do anything more to control them. So, if I were going to try to criticize the Lish book I would set up a comparison between the two and talk about why what Joyce Carol Oates shows you in this super-exploitative book—because who’s more exploitative than she is?
— Number one. Number-one exploiter.
— I would be like, look how much more disturbing this is. And look at what you’re being disturbed by. And look how agency is being deployed in the Lish book and don’t be fooled. And once you say that, the reader is like —
— I surely would not want to be fooled.
— My strategy.
— I suppose I don’t have to read this Oates book.
— Don’t read it! I remember when I was 16 or 17, I guess I was trying to read all her novels and I came to this one and read it all in one night and had this horrible cold clammy sweat and was like, why?!! Why?!?
— God. A mere high schooler.
— That was when I was really at my best.
— Reading-wise?
— Reading-wise and also just—no, I mean, I like myself better now, but that was the time when I look back on how I behaved and I’m always like, that was the way!
— Acting out on the reg.
— Do you need to go back to your desk?
— Not yet. What have we not gotten to?
— The reason I was up all night. It’s that I was trying to write this talk for Friday I’ve been meaning to write all week but just been too scattered. I’ve been thinking a lot about satire, and this talk is about satire and realism and the ways I see them being interrelated. And about how people have a misapprehension of what satire is, how they think it’s like an insult or a hyperbolic portrayal but it’s actually a more complex, older category.
— This week’s flap about the correspondents’ dinner is a perfect example of the misapplication of satire.
— Exactly. It’s interesting to me that the thing that was so upsetting to people was actually the one satirical moment. That thing about the perfect smoky eye.
— That was the one true satire?
— Everything else was basically insults. Cheap shots. And if you look at the recent jokes, like Hasan Minhaj’s jokes or the lady from SNL whose name I can’t remember who I find very generic, they all told exactly the same jokes. That’s what I find really strange! Everyone’s like, this is all so original, but it’s all exactly the same.
— I didn’t watch Hasan or the person before that.
— Hasan is very beautiful.
— Isn’t he?
— You’re just like, oh say anything.
— Just say it out of your beautiful mouth.
— But anyway it’s all exactly the same jokes. You know there was a media blackout around Colbert’s thing?
— I vaguely remember that.
— It was an emergency in 2006 in a way that this thing in 2018, it’s really just a topic that’s being offered up. Like, oh yeah, she’s a brassy lady who doesn’t wax her pussy, et cetera, so let’s say mean things.
— But wait, how does this relate to the question of satire?
— Well, it used to be that novels and other forms of literature partly existed to explain these things to us, to explain invisible things, to be like—
— Here’s human interiority; now you can understand what’s happening.
— Right. Edith Wharton’s like, here’s a guy who doesn’t consummate a relationship; or, Henry James is like, here’s a guy who doesn’t consummate a relationship; or, Virginia Woolf is like, here’s a guy, who doesn’t consummate a relationship. And they’re like, here’s why! It’s a very common theme. And it seems like we are in this moment when—I’m having trouble describing it except by calling it the intersection of satire and realism.
— Hmm.
— Realism is just a mode of novel-making that talks about the event as secular. Realism emerges when you have secular events that are produced by the confluence of material conditions and human history. And there’s no god. But satire is an older category. It’s an older democratic category predating Christianity. It comes from Latin: it’s a medley; literally, it’s a full plate. It has nothing to do with s-sa-say—how do you say that word?
— Satyrs? I always heard about satyrs.
— It sounds too much like the Passover dinner! So I’m trying to think about that in relation to laughter but also in relation to the idea that literature can be a place where information is leaked.
— Right.
— Literature used to exist to share information that couldn’t be shared otherwise. And it seems like social media does not obviate that. And the correspondents’ dinner joke is another site where you can have that information leak. That’s why I thought that Michelle Wolf’s observation about Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s smoky eye is true satire. It’s very intricate. Like, there is this concept, The Perfect Smoky Eye™ that exists, and, like, if you’re not female, chances are you don’t know what that is. Like, I don’t mean you don’t know what it refers to; you don’t know what its deeper meaning is, what meaning is encoded in it. It has to do with female aggression and control of the visual realm, and it also has to do with how women have entered the white-collar workplace. There’s a lot of stuff in that term that she was pointing to by using it. Which is actually, I think, a lot scarier and more unstable than other things she said.
— So, people had misinterpreted the comment but correctly identified the scary site within it?
— I think it doesn’t happen by accident. It stands out because there is something there. There’s a form of privacy being invoked.
— What’s the form of privacy?
— A series of codes.
— That aren’t made public, typically?
— Yeah.
— Interesting.
— I think that’s what’s threatening to people, that they are like, oh I am not up to date. And it happened in a very condensed way. It’s even hard to understand the metaphor as a joke. Like, she burns lies, I mean, she burns facts, and then uses the ash, from the facts, for her makeup. Is that a joke? That seems like a weird metaphor you would read in someone’s short story.
— It’s kind of ornate.
— She was working really hard to sell it. She ended up being like, hey, it’s a tough room, but it wasn’t really a good joke.
— I thought it was a very good joke.
— I mean, I liked the phrase, “The Perfect Smoky Eye,” but the setup didn’t work for me.
— It has metaphorical integrity. She’s saying that she uses lies as a public face. There’s no missing link in the metaphor. It wasn’t sloppy.
— It was too literal. But I did like it as being associated with some form of Christianity. Like she’s burning them in her brazier. And I was like, oh I remember this from the Bush II presidency!
— You’re like, very evocative. Rich allusions here.
— That would have been my comment. If I had seen that on a student paper. I would have been like, very good! Vehicle needs work!

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Date: March 8, 2021

Publisher: n+1

Format: Web

Genre: Fiction

Link to the story.

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Kotler, The Conversation.

A THROW OF THE DICE

When we were first married, he went out and bought a ball gag. It wasn’t something I asked him to do. He wasn’t a tall man but I suppose he was reasonably strong. He had a construction job, at the time. It was the sort of work he claimed to prefer.

We were living in San Francisco and through some act of god managed to find an apartment we could afford in an occasionally fancy neighborhood. It was just two rooms with a kitchen, the bathroom memorable for its coordinating sink, tub, toilet, and floor-to-ceiling tile, all a click shy of Pepto-Bismol. Outside, in the mornings and at dusk, an oddly shaped vehicle I learned to call the Google Bus rolled darkly by.

He was up at five, cycling into the East Bay. Around seven, the garage door screwed into the ceiling that was also the floor beneath our bed (a mattress) went into action. It was a braying sound, accompanied by copious vibration. During this process, I envisioned what I believed to be the exact fashion in which the building would collapse during an earthquake. I saw myself mangled in rubble. I lay, intact within the intact building, in bed, possessed by vertigo.

I did not work in tech, either. I worked fulltime for an employment agency. I had originally gone in to temp but had been hired as the front-desk girl. An Australian man with outrageous good looks, benefiting from the immigration policies of President George W. Bush, had hired me, citing my unusual abilities as a typist. Although I insisted that I preferred something with fewer hours, the agency maintained that it was low on contracts and could I please take them up on this offer, seeing as I was unlikely to receive another.

Yes, I said.

Great, they replied. Wonderful. “I am so pleased!” announced the Australian, glinting hugely. He really was astonishing, ranching in his family, eyes and teeth like polished rocks. He began telling a long, long story about his very young wife.

●

I thought all the time about how much I loved him. It would come to me as I was walking down the street. I loved him, the man I was married to and, as well as being afraid of earthquakes, feared that one of us might die in a plane crash or be pulled down by a rogue wave. I thought of meningitis, serial killers, war. Fog rolled up the hill. It was night again.

I cut up cilantro. We sat at our table by the window and had a beer.

He went on several shopping excursions. He returned with bags stuffed with violet tissue. He quietly reentered the house.

It was a Sunday.

He restrained me.

●

He was, as I was saying, not a large man. He was a relatively small man, and he was full of a searing rage, an odorless, colorless flame, unknowable to the naked eye. We’d take the bart to a party and pass card tables set up by proselytizing Scientologists, and he would explain that they believed all humans were animated by the souls of aliens long ago subject to genocide.

I wanted to take the stress test, but he wouldn’t let me. “L. Ron Hubbard was like, I’m going to invent a truly stupid religion. Look at these people,” he said. He seemed not to want to get too close to them, but I noticed a week later two novels by Philip K. Dick in his open backpack, The Man in the High Castle and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dick having allegedly inspired Hubbard to devise his intergalactic creed. There was something vaguely gothic about Dick, I thought, something sharp and in bad taste. He was paranoid yet flavorful, industrial strength.

We had a friend who’d grown up Mormon but renounced the faith at seventeen and ran away from home. He’d lived in a basement in Oakland for a few years before going to college, then grad school. He had about twenty tattoos and a gold front tooth and loved antique furniture and cocaine. He and the man I was married to went through a period of binges, and somehow I associated it with Scientology. I’d listen to them discuss the unusual activities of the Angel Moroni and the irony of Abendsen’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, before we parted ways for the night, they to a fortress maintained by an eccentric dealer on Potrero Hill, I to my translations and, more importantly, Craigslist.

There were two main things I was doing during the time I was not working at the temp agency, or sleeping, or eating, or experiencing married sex, and these were: 1., translating French Symbolist poetry, and, 2., trawling Craigslist for employment. Specifically, I was interested in Mallarmé, whom I considered glamorous as well as difficult. Anyway, it was something I could talk about in mixed company. It was something that got people to leave me alone. “She’s translating Mallarmé,” the man I was married to said. After this, I was left to my own devices and at liberty to navigate over to some listings.

When the American poet Frank O’Hara was pretty young, he made a translation of Mallarmé’s poem, “Un coup de dés.” It was something I liked to look at. I could contemplate the nature of fame. This was, by the way, before Meditations in an Emergency appeared in a scene in Mad Men and became, if briefly, a bestseller. O’Hara was one of the few poets the man I was married to had read, and he seemed to have romantic feelings for him. There was, leaning in an alcove in the entrance to our apartment, a bent postcard featuring a black-and-white photo of O’Hara: one of the only decorative additions to the place not made by me.

The man I was married to returned catatonic from his excursions with the ex-Mormon. He tapped his fingers in his sleep and ground his teeth.

I got out of bed. It was 2:35 am.

Beside my computer sat O’Hara’s Early Writing. I admit there’s a way I look a little like him; we have the same sad eyes. His translation begins, “a throw of the dice Even when thrown in eternal circumstances in the midst of a wreck be It that the abysm whitened displays furious….”

Abysm, I thought.

But I was only pretending to think about literature. I was on Craigslist and responding to an ad.

I wrote:

To Whom It May Concern,

I am a recent graduate of XXXXXXX University (20XX) and the University of XXXX (20XX) who would love to craft some gripping, sentimental, and definitely erotic diary entries for you.

Please find a resume and several recent movie reviews (www.flashfilm.com) attached.

Thanks!

●

The next day I went to work and in the evening there came a reply:

Hello

Thank you for your interest in our little project. We are developing a small artistic website where we shoot some erotic pictures and erotic videos of a few girls. Each girl has 5 or 6 photo shoots with some video and an interview. We need to create a diary for a few of them. This diary would consist of 2 parts:

ONE: Actual blog (e.g. day 1…. Day 2…. Etc…). Some days should have some connection to the photo shoots, but generally it’s a very creative job. The only other condition is that there should be quite a bit of erotic content.

TWO: Also all the photos (and some of them could be repetitive) need some description. However, you can be creative here as well. Your description doesn’t necessarily need to describe the picture… (e.g. if a girl drinks coffee you might right something about her memories of the past, if she kisses you can talk about texture of her lips etc…. etc…).

The total work is about 10 pages (up or down 1 or 2). Total pay for one diary is around $100.

Website is www.fotoconfessions.com

login: confessor

pwd: first

(it’s operating only partially at this point but you’ll get the general concept, take a look at the timeline on top of the page that allows you to go over to different entries. Also it’s better to use explorer than firefox) Most of the girls need a diary. Please write back if you are interested.

Sincerely,
Lev

I held my breath. I had that feeling I had so often in high school, as of a tracking shot.

Dear Lev, I began typing.

“I want,” I thought that night, “to be free. But freedom is an intellectual demand and, as such, has nothing to do with pleasure.” Far, far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. Truthful, perhaps. Perhaps eternal.

I was not a man.

When I was with the man I was married to, I sometimes wanted him to stop.

“Don’t come,” he would tell me.

Pleasure was a tiny wall in the void, yet the void inhabited it.

In the midst of an unspeakable orgasm, I felt panic, then what I believed was the nearness of god.

I sometimes wondered what Mallarmé knew about this. In 1874, Mallarmé had pseudonymously written all the articles for eight issues of a women’s fashion magazine called La dernière mode (The Latest Fashion). He became a variety of fictional authors of occasional prose, some male, some not. He was, among others, a Marguerite de Ponty, a Miss Satin, someone named “Ix,” and Le Chef de bouche chez Brébant. These endeavors seemed completely ecstatic.

I was still writing to Lev. It was very late. I could only manage a single sentence: Please let me know how I can get started.

●

The man I was married to was sometimes in a sort of trance, and I did not understand, at the time, that such trances are given to people by their families.

I remember sitting with him in traffic, as a spell of rage overcame me. There was furniture tied to the roof. I was driving and could not speak.

The rage was dense and specific and had a syntax. The rage said, “Your life has no ceiling and no walls and no floor.”

What I interpreted this to mean was that my life might not be my life. I might have wandered into someone else’s story and was now failing to cease residing there. Every day, when I woke up, I failed. It was hard to understand how one could live a life that was not one’s own without having any intention to do so, but here I was, letting such things come to pass.

In traffic, in the car, in one of his trances, furniture tied to the roof, the man I was married to observed my rage. He observed my inability to speak.

“What are you thinking?” he wanted to know.

I could not speak.

“You can’t speak,” he said, smiling. “You can’t even talk right now.”

Traffic loosened and I navigated to a parking spot.

You aren’t supposed to talk about these things, the various ways he impaled me, the stars I saw.

There was a soft part to this, and there was something else.

●

I received a reply from Lev:

Please take a girl named Alyssa and do 1/2 page of a diary and 3-4 captions under the pictures. Send it to me and we’ll get started.

Thank you

I did not talk about this with anyone. I felt a brief joy. In the morning, I went to work.

At work, the Australian was massive and upsettingly well formed. He was a terrible person and seemed to like walking past my desk. It was a common route for just about everyone and he needed no excuse.

“How’s the weather?”

This was funny because I had no access to windows.

Later on, retrieving files from the bottom of some complex cabinet, bent over, I was approached by a more seasoned member of the staff, someone high up in billing. “That’s quite a system you’ve got there,” he told me, a reference, one could suppose, to the administrative code of colors and endless number chains with which the folders that were my domain were labeled.

I could not speak. But then I told him, “Yes. Yes, it is.” And rose to face him.

Mallarmé loved foam. He loved something about the sea, the way it hisses in retreat, the way it is a glossy sheet of numbers, constantly multiplying and taking roots and falling into the pit of itself.

People seem to think that the shipwreck is the thing, but that’s just wishful thinking. The shipwreck is something like a statue; it’s not anything, but it can trick us. If Mallarmé had lived during the golden age of installation art (which, by the way, is ongoing), he might have built some sort of room. The shipwreck is a prop, an echo, a decoration from a long-ago-concluded party. We don’t know it’s not an origin. We don’t know it’s not what happened. We keep it as a sign or proof. We set it as a seal upon our foreheads and go on living.

●

The man I was married to and I went for walks along the Pacific.

No one could say our relationship was devoid of fantasy.

He liked to tell me about the activities of the ex-Mormon. He was learning a lot during their narcotic nights. They’d get as high as humanly possible, then go to a park to break things and talk.

The ex-Mormon was apparently footing the bill. The man I was married to explained that the ex-Mormon was extremely canny. He wasn’t an average person and had long ago figured this out about himself. The ex-Mormon was okay with this. He did not force himself to conform.

The man I was married to examined a pair of flat stones. He made them click and skipped one.

“He’s ‘gay for pay,’” the man I was married to said. He described a scene in a recent pornographic video the ex-Mormon had been featured in, in which the ex-Mormon was slung up in a swing. Everyone was dressed as a clown. The ex-Mormon made $5000.

“The great thing is, you can’t see his face. With the makeup. It’s this crazy niche.”

The man I was married to continued to skip stones. “Maybe you should try it,” he said.

It was the close of a warm day in early October. The sun was doing flattering things to the earth and air.

I was thinking about how there are so many shipwrecks in poetry, and I was also thinking about how Frank O’Hara died on a beach, hit by a dune buggy. It’s a death that seems so wanton, so flimsy, like it has to be a suicide. O’Hara didn’t die right away. He was young, forty. He died later, of injuries.

I realized, suddenly, that the ex-Mormon was a handsome man. He wasn’t a bone-snapping killer like the Australian, but he, too, was attractive.

●

I wrote to Lev:

Hi Lev,

Here are captions for the spread that begins, “I am sleeping”:

Line 1. Mmm. Such a beautiful dream, I’m in a grove of banana trees!

Line 2. Oh well, there’s the alarm! Guess I’m just going to have to find a way to make that dream a reality. Wow, feel a little sore from yesterday. Just thinking of how tight Bobby pulled those straps…

Line 3. Just wish I had someone here. Someone like you. Who knows exactly what I like and how to give it to me.

I am not sure what 1/2 page signifies, re: diary, so will give you ~100wrds and hope that’s what you had in mind:

I was trying to get in touch with Bobby all day. I have no idea where he was. It started to get late. I was so lonely that I got dressed up in my silky corset and lace-up boots. But I didn’t want to be blindfolded, and you can guess why: I went into the bathroom and put one foot up on the edge of the sink, imagining Bobby was there watching me. I got so hot that I went over to the bed to finish myself off. That’s when the doorbell rang. You can guess who it was. I was so happy!

Best,

●

Soon my parents came to visit. Their take on my life with the man I was married to seemed to boil down to a single question, “Why are you poor?”

They took us out to lunch at the most expensive restaurant they could find, where my father insulted the waiter. The napkins had a very high thread count. I kneaded mine below the table. With my right hand I stirred some bisque.

The man I was married to chuckled politely.

My father glanced at a woman passing through another room. “Is that dress rubber?” he wondered, in slow and casual tones.

The man I was married to dutifully transferred his eyes to the mark.

I could not speak.

The woman was wearing a cotton shift.

A pit had opened. Everywhere was iridescent. The pit continued to sink, mechanized and sure.

“What’s wrong?” asked my mother, somewhere.

It was magic.

The pit trembled. I could hear but could not move.

My mother brought the point of her napkin to her lips.

“How could he say that?” I managed, on a breath.

“What did I say?” my father bellowed. He was addressing my mother, who was patting him. “I asked a question about a dress!”

“Relax,” stage-whispered the man I was married to. He put my spoon back into my hand.

●

I would go sometimes to the twenty-four-hour donut shop on the hill above our apartment. It wasn’t a fancy place, but the Boston Creams were good and it had seating. It was owned by a family who didn’t seem optimistic about the state of the world, but they knew a lot of the people who came in and maintained a supportive tone. It was a place where I could go to mourn.

I sat along one of the windows, at a narrow counter. I always had black tea with milk along with my Boston Cream, which I cut into small pieces with a plastic knife in a futile attempt to make it less caloric.

It was usually the same man or his precocious daughter who helped me. They didn’t comment on my repeat visits.

I’d sit along the window and stare at words arranged by Mallarmé. I wrote: Like listening to Genesis read in reverse. Always this sense, Mallarmé’s sentences are occurring in reverse. I kept looking at a certain set of lines: “naufrage cela / direct de l’homme / sans nef.” I wrote: That shipwreck of the man directly without a ship. I put a pair of parentheses around “directly.” I erased the parentheses.

Outside, a tram rumbled by, taking people somewhere with mystifying inefficiency.

One evening the man at the donut shop asked, “How old are you?”

I said, because I really wanted to know, “How old do you think I am?”

“You’re 25,” said the man.

“You’re right,” said I.

“Well, have a good night,” he told me.

I walked back down the hill, revising my mental list of shipwrecks in poetry.

●

Lev said:

I like what you wrote. So, let’s start with Alyssa.

To recap: About 7 pages of diary (up or down a bit is ok.) We measure page in a standard way. Then captions.

Please write 3-4 lines per row of photos. e.g. [1 row: It was so nice to see Bobby….] Then second row etc…

We’ll end up with plus or minus three pages.

Consider yourself hired for Alyssa’s diary. If all is well, we’ll hire you for the next one.

If you have questions you can reach me by 415.XXX.XXXX

●

Here are the shipwrecks I know of in poetry:

Odysseus of course had difficulties sailing, as did the apostle Paul, who was shipwrecked four times. John Milton had a good friend named Edward King who died in waters near Wales in the first half of the seventeenth century, and this event inspired “Lycidas,” a poem with the strange formulation, “wat’ry floor.” The poet John Keats died in a sailing mishap and his friend Shelley memorialized him in “Adonais.” Emily Dickinson had a floor, too: “If my Bark sink / ’Tis to another sea — / Mortality’s Ground Floor / Is Immortality.” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a poem about the unthinkable and how it is somehow sanctioned by god. And I am leaving out The Tempest by Shakespeare, although I am thinking, too, of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, in which Prospero is at pains to explain to Miranda that the storm and wreck they are observing is no more than a play. The American poet and labor organizer George Oppen wrote of “The unearthly bonds / Of the singular / Which is the bright light of shipwreck,” and another American, Hannah Weiner, said, “I am a complete wreck.”

And there is Mallarmé.

●

At the temp agency there was a woman in her early thirties. She ironed her hair and wore a pantsuit with a seventies attitude though the pantsuit came from Ann Taylor. She was undeniably chic and had a good position and was married to someone very rich. She was interested that I, too, was married.

“Are you planning to have children?”

I said something about how I wasn’t sure of anything yet, which she took to be an expression of appreciation for the corporate ladder. She began to reel off names of persons I would need to meet.

I waited for an opening. “Are you planning to have children?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “We start this summer.”

“How wonderful,” I told her, feeling adult.

“Look at my ring,” she offered, suddenly trusting me. “Isn’t it amazing? It’s Cartier. They only made like ten of them. It’s brushed titanium with platinum and sapphire and black opal. I like it so much more than a single setting, and it’s so unique. I was so, so touched when my husband suggested it.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Can I see yours?”

“It’s just plain gold.”

“Wow,” she told me.

“I picked it out.”

“Well,” she said, handing it back, “I’m sure your husband loves you more than that.”

●

I wrote to Lev:

sorry this has taken me so long, it will usually only take me 24hrs to turn over an assignment of this length. please let me know about payment and if you have more diaries you need written.

thanks!

One. Dear Diary, I woke up this morning and didn’t know where I was. The first thing I noticed, though, was that I couldn’t open my eyes. There was something heavy and kind of cool covering them. Probably a leather blindfold. Maybe it was weighted somehow, like there was metal inside it. I noticed also that my wrists were a little tender (not to mention certain other parts, which I won’t mention, because I’m sure you’re thinking about them already). I moved my arms around experimentally. They were stretched away from my body, securely fastened by some type of leather cuff or straps to the posts of my bed. I wiggled. I could feel now that my legs were also restrained, in a predictable position, and that I was wearing a leather harness that cut into the skin at my hips, but not in a totally unpleasant way.

It was kind of hard to breathe. I lay there, pulling in short sips of air. I thought, and I don’t quite know how to tell you this, that I could feel drops of water on my face and maybe on my chest and stomach. Then the water began to really fall. I don’t know where it came from. It was warm and I felt myself being bathed but I had to struggle to get air. The water was everywhere, running over me, and then it stopped.

“Bobby?” I whispered.

“No,” said a female voice. “This isn’t Bobby.”

Two. I think I was hallucinating yesterday. Maybe dreaming. I don’t know what it was. I woke up again, late, and there was nothing unusual going on. The only thing was, my hair was damp. I guess it could have been sweat.

I got up, feeling angry at Bobby. I wrote him an email telling him things were getting out of hand and I refused to see him that day or ever again. I know that sounds a little unfair—but I want Bobby to know, just in case he doesn’t understand, that he can’t just sneak up on me, psychologically speaking, without there being repercussions. I mean, my mind is my temple, and my experience with men has taught me that you have to make it a little hard for them! And in Bobby’s case, well, you can guess…how I feel…. The problem is, I might be an addict. But never mind all that, because I had an amazing adventure today.

I decided to treat myself to a movie in the afternoon. I worked out all morning and took a long hot shower. Then I put on moisturizer (almond butter, it’s the only kind I’ll use), slipped on one of my favorite panties (nothin’ but string, baby!), and got into one of my velour lounge-suits. I didn’t wear a bra because, well, it was just one of those days—and I like the feeling of the material. Oh, and I wore lots of lipgloss.

The movie was this cheesy spy-thriller I’ve been wanting to see for a while; I guess I kind of have a thing for the lead actor (it’s the way he’s so good with his hands!). I was just starting to get bored when I noticed this cute boy sit down in my aisle two seats away from me. The theater was very dark, and there weren’t too many other people there. I waited to see if he’d notice me, and when he did, I very slowly started sliding down the zipper on my top until it was down below my bellybutton. Then I slipped one hand in. Now I could tell I had his attention, so I put my hand in my pants. I was imagining what he would think about my underwear. I wished we were somewhere else. But I thought I’d settle for the here and now. I think he knew what I had in mind, because he got up and came over and sat next to me to help out.

Three. I have basically forgiven Bobby. Tonight I let him take me out to dinner. It was a simple affair. I wore a new pantsuit with a corset-top that felt wonderfully tight. We ate at a small French restaurant, it had maybe 10 tables. I ordered oysters and roast chicken and then salad. Bobby just sat there watching me eat. He didn’t even touch his wine. The whole time I felt he was looking at me in a new way, as if he had discovered he desired me differently since I’d told him about what I’d dreamed the other morning and how it had upset me so much I might never want to see him again. I was almost afraid of him. It was like he knew something about me that he’d never known before, and maybe it was something no one else had ever been able to discover. What could it be? I did not invite Bobby home with me. I am waiting until tomorrow to decide what to do.

Four. Late last night I started missing Bobby, and I decided to make a little movie for him. I got the big mirror off of the wall in my bedroom and set it up on the floor with the camera resting on top. I decided this was going to be a movie all about my fears. I sat down on the carpet in my underwear, with a box of matches. I turned on the camera and started taking off my bra and panties very slowly. Once I was naked, I lit a match. I just sat there, watching it burn down to my fingertips in the mirror. When it started to burn me, I looked at the image of myself. I watched myself wince and flinch. I made myself keep looking even though it hurt. There started to be this other part of me there, then, just as I knew there would. I could already feel myself starting to lose control. My hands were shaking, but I lit another match and held it. I was watching myself do this. I brought it down to my knee. But then I jumped up and shut the camera off and went and dropped the matches in the sink and turned the faucet on full blast.

Five. I emailed the movie to Bobby. I think he liked it. He told me it was “deep.” He’s asked me if I will make another one for him or tell him more about my fantasies. I suddenly feel shy again, as if maybe I’m revealing too much about myself. I do have another fantasy to share with Bobby, but I’m not sure if I should. Here it is, Dear Diary. Maybe you can help me decide what I should do. I want to be taking a shower, when Bobby suddenly enters my apartment and then the bathroom. He picks me up and carries me to my bed, where he blindfolds me, ties my hands, ties my ankles. And then he leaves. He just leaves me there. And I can’t move. And when he leaves he locks the door. And then he goes and gets boards and nails them over the door. And then he goes and gets bricks and mortar and bricks over the wood. And then he goes and gets stucco and paint and makes a perfect wall. I can hear him working. And then there is silence and I cannot move and I feel the weight of the bricks on my face even though they’re nowhere near me. They’re so heavy and so cool weighing me down. And it hurts so much and is so peaceful, and during the hundreds of years that pass even Bobby dies and I am completely unknown…

Six. I told Bobby about my new fantasy. I think it definitely excited him. He told me he would come over soon, so I’m just getting ready to see him. I put fresh sheets on the bed, and I’ve been ----------------. I am so excited, I’m almost -------------------. It’s all I can do not to --------------------, but I want to wait for him to --------------------. I think I am going to wear a white dress in the shower so Bobby can tug on it and maybe it will be see-through and --------------------. Or maybe I’ll wear this white -------------------- that doesn’t have -------------------- where -------------------- should be. I should -------------------- my --------------------. I’d like that. Well, I better get the water hot, I think Bobby will be here soon.

●

Lev replied, instantly:

I don’t think you mean “almond butter”

Second, I don’t know what half this is, including the mad lib (?)

Give me a call please

●

I took off early on a Friday, the next day, so I could speak with Lev. I was mortified, but I did not know what else to do.

“Hi, may I please speak to Lev?”

“Yeah, here.”

“Hi.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s, uh,” I started to say.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s you. Writer girl.”

I made a noise.

“Yeah, one second.” Lev seemed to walk into another room. “Sorry, I’m in the studio. You should come down sometime.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what a pornographer was supposed to sound like. Lev sounded brisk, lucid.

“Okay,” he announced, “I have officially entered the green room. Let me call this thing up.” Time passed. “Okay, looking at it. You have too much investment. That’s what I think.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I like it in some ways. I won’t lie.”

I didn’t say anything. I could tell that Lev was lean. He was not exactly short, but he wasn’t tall, either. He was lean and had a simple countenance.

“Care less and be brutal. How does that sound?”

I didn’t know what to say. “Yes,” I said.

“Yes? Yes is not an answer to my question.” Lev was typing something. “Sorry, one second.”

I waited.

“Okay. I’m back. You understand what this is for? I’m not trying to be a fascist.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I would like it if this works. I would like it if it would work.”

“I get it,” I said.

“You were showing a lot of potential there. You have a nice light touch. But brutal, okay?”

“I want to try again.”

Lev said, “There’s a part of it you understand, right, where it’s a game and it’s something you can look at, but there’s another part, too, where it’s only happening. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The important thing is not to be living in the past.”

“Yes,” I repeated, uncomprehending.

“I was hoping we could work together,” Lev said.

Yes, I was thinking, no.

My face starting shaking and I accidentally hung up.

●

The man I was married to got into an accident on his bicycle. He was coming to an intersection at the bottom of a hill. He went over his handlebars and flew onto the hood of someone’s car. The driver gave him $700 to walk away. He came home to lie in bed with a fuchsia bruise hooked from his left nipple to the center of his back.

The bruise looked like a sickle or thin moon.

“Good job walking away,” I said.

The man I was married to was munching some Bayer, flipping through a tabloid.

“Aaron is leaving,” he said.

This was the ex-Mormon.

“He got a job and needs to relocate. He wants to try it for a year.”

“Is this more acting?”

“No. It’s more textbooks.”

“Weird,” I said.

“Not really. Some uncle set it up. I guess he’s going back in the fold.”

“Maybe they’re running out of men.”

“Maybe,” said the man I was married to. I could tell his injury was bothering him. I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling some of his pain. If I shifted, it would hurt him, I could tell.

I shifted.

The man I was married to did not react.

The tabloid was between us, and the man I was married to turned a page.

BIG CUTS FOR WEALTHY, the tabloid said.

I shifted again.

●

That night we went out with the ex-Mormon to celebrate his new future. The ex-Mormon’s hair was so light it was white in the bar. He was a large, freckled cat. His eyes were pale green, nearly yellow. He was the product of inbreeding, heavy and thin at once, pale and dark, canny and naive. I could tell there was something about humanity that he had come to understand and perhaps accept, that I never would, and I think this made me angrier.

I observed the ex-Mormon, wrapped in his superior narrative, undeniable in spite of his ex-ness. Maybe even the apostates got to go to a private planet with a low-melanin female janitorial staff, after death.

The man I was married to was taking an extra long time in the bathroom, probably because of the injury, but who could say for sure.

I entered into a fresh Maker’s Mark, noting that my tab now constituted a full 90 minutes of my employed labor.

“It’s a job,” the ex-Mormon said, “but I’m planning to like it.”

I realized that he had been talking to me for a little while now about his forthcoming rebirth into the middle class. I hadn’t been listening to him because there was something pounding in my ears. It was the voice I could always hear, once I got wasted.

The Mormon would marry someday and have children, and he knew it. The man I was married to would marry again someday and have children, and he knew it, too. But what was I going to do?

It seemed not to be enough for me, I realized, that possibly I was free, forgetting for a moment about the machinations of capital. I was free and could act, and from my actions would be composed an event. And out of a single event and another event, would be composed yet another event, which was a story.

But beneath these facts, which I could say to myself and hear myself say, and even understand as a style of logic, there was something else.

If I could drink another drink, maybe I could listen to this thing. This was the thing where a garland of flowers bursts apart into a ring of porpoises. Beads of foam act as a kind of prism. It can’t be undone but it is being undone right now. The floor of time drops down, releasing a cloud of sand, and from out of the shipwreck, tragic but below us, harmony reconstitutes itself.

Tomorrow I would be walking up that hill again, soon, because a throw of the dice will never abolish chance.

Date: May 14, 2019

Publisher: BOMB

Format: Print, web

Genre: Fiction

Link to the story.

bomb-147.jpg

Issue 147, image by Titus Kaphar.

BITTER TENNIS

I go to visit Jon on the A. It’s a straight shot but I’m late. I sit in one of the two-seat sections, between a door and the front of the train. I am reading Jon’s story on my phone. Occasionally, a text drops down, obscuring the top of the PDF. The messages are all from the same person. I will be meeting this person for dinner later this evening. We’ll be having sex after we have dinner. All this is certain. The person texting me is my closest friend. Jon is just a professional friend and I’m going to see him for work. I am his editor. I should have read his story earlier. I’m at the point where I’m so exhausted this spring I haven’t even bothered to dress in an appealing way. It’s so unseasonably cold and I know Jon wants to sit outside. I’m wearing a long black wool coat and bright blue running sneakers. The sneakers have orange treads. I am carrying the smallest bag I can get away with, which has a metal chain and leather strap, but not the kind you’re thinking of. It takes too much energy to describe the look I’m going for, but it has to do with trying to look like I do not care, which, in this rather unique instance, is even slightly true. I do not care much, although my heart is racing, and somehow I want everyone to know.

I live at the bottom of the ocean. I am capable of quick motion but do not warm. I cause my eyes to grasp each of Jon’s words. I live among the bristlemouths, the viperfish, the anglerfish, the cookiecutter sharks, the eelpouts. I don’t know why Jon and I can’t just have this conversation over the phone.

The A train is moving as efficiently as one could wish, but I know that I am going to be late. Across from me are two teenage girls who are rapidly becoming the heroes of this trip. They are tough and impeccably dressed. One of them causes a Fidget Spinner to spin. They are talking about alcohol. They do some work on their phones then conscientiously put the phones away. They focus on one another; the one girl, the taller, the prettier one, manipulates a black and gold Fidget Spinner. I swoon for them. I imagine they will move to Los Angeles at some point because there is nowhere in New York for them to live now. They cannot go to Prospect Heights with its Ivy-educated transplants, and they can’t stay home with their parents in Inwood. They can’t live in Bushwick – they might sublet there a few months but it won’t last – and they can’t join a Ridgewood commune. Chinatown is too expensive. Williamsburg overrun by Europeans. For these reasons, there is nowhere to go and they must become Angelinas. One of them will make a lot of money. One will have kids. They are placid and gorgeous and discussing how they will obtain what sounds like gin. It’s so innocent and here they are criticizing someone but it’s fair, I tell you. It is very fair. I can tell.

I move my eyes back onto Jon’s story. A text drops down. ‘Do you want to just meet there,’ my friend wants to know. Then my friend sends a link to something on Twitter. I will read these messages in situ later. I absolutely will not click on the Twitter link, I tell myself, as I click through to an image of a tiny black cat whose highly visible pink tongue extends from its all but invisible mouth. I try to think of what I will say in response to this vision. I often write, in response to such links from my friend, ‘It doesn’t like that,’ by which I indicate that the animal doesn’t want to be photographed and thereby rendered semi-humanoid as well as the punch line of somebody’s not particularly excellent joke. I also mean that the animal doesn’t like being conveyed to me as a Twitter link. The animal would ideally like to appear to me as its IRL self, corporeal and gleaming, speaking its own strange language. And what I therefore also mean is, much as the animal desires physical proximity to me, so does my friend. He cannot hide his desire, not with all the Twitter links in the world. I’m teasing, of course, when I send my set phrase, but at the same time I am not teasing, not at all. ‘It doesn’t like that,’ I type. Is there part of me that wants to shout, to yell uncontrollably, YOU CANNOT HIDE? Yes, there must be. Because, in fact, you cannot hide. Not from me. I’ll tell you that right now. I’m a very good reader. Although I seldom mention this to anyone I know.

I live at the bottom of the ocean and Jon wants to play tennis. It’s why I have to travel so far. I mean, Jon doesn’t actually want me to play tennis, but he wants me to meet him at the tennis center at the top of Manhattan where he takes his daughter for her tennis lessons and he wants to tell me, while I am there, that he would like me to play tennis with him.

Clearly, this means something.

There was a time when I myself was a daughter who took tennis lessons, and I’ve apprised Jon of this fact. Therefore Jon is trying, in some sense, to match up our respective familial situations. He’s thinking, you did that and I do this – therefore perhaps it’s a good idea for us to meet in the middle of this piece of coincidence, so we can both try to figure out if there’s any useful information in it. In other words, Jon thinks we have stuff in common. And since we work together and since Jon writes a lot of memoir, he’s multitasking. He’s doing research for a new piece – probably a whole book about tennis – at the same time as he is revising something he wrote three years ago.

He also doesn’t seem to mind that I’m forty minutes late.

‘You’re here!’ he cries.

We’re both surprised. I’m used to meeting him in the usual places where editors meet their writers. I encounter him over email, at parties, in fancy bars. I salute him in passing on social media. We’re privy to some of the same artisanal gossip mills.

But here we are beneath fluorescent lights in a reception area straight out of 1980-something. I have, suddenly, a memory of what it was like to be a child in the 1980s, when I was the small charge of upwardly mobile parents. What’s really strange is that this setting causes me to recall what it was like to be innocent – at least, for a second I think it does.

Jon, meanwhile, wants to know if I’d like to see the courts.

‘Sure,’ I tell him. I express some vague concern about being an unauthorized visitor, treading on hallowed athletic ground, but he brushes it off. ‘I did wear sneakers . . . ,’ I volunteer, as if this was clever of me.

‘Did you read the story?’ Jon asks. He’s leading me into the bubble. The sounds of tennis – pops and little cries – are apparent.

‘Yes,’ I both lie and do not lie. ‘It’s looking good,’ I say, which is a guess more than anything.

Jon doesn’t reply. He nods toward the court where his lanky daughter is demolishing a boy who looks to be a year or two older than she is.

At a pause in play, the daughter seeks Jon out. Her face is radiant. She waves enthusiastically.

‘I have some beer,’ Jon offers. ‘Let’s go outside.’ He is laughing and waving back at his daughter at the same time as he says this. The pairing is incongruous and therefore extremely impressive.

Jon, I think, has a full life.

Jon goes into a duffle he’s stashed in the bleachers and pulls out a pair of bottles. ‘OK,’ he says, laughing again. He’s leading me back out. ‘They’re warm.’

I have to rush to keep up with Jon. He’s more than twenty years my senior, but he does seem to have some kind of incredible physical advantage.

‘(.’

Or I mean, Open parenthesis. Or, Speak now, memory. I mean, I have to pause for a moment here because I want to tell you something about myself before we get to the matter of Jon and his prose and what we say to each other once we’re outside the tennis bubble. I’m somewhat repressed – or, ‘reserved’, as my friend Andrew once put it – and it does take a certain amount of energy to exit the gravitational field of the present. All I seem to be able to come up with at the moment isn’t even a memory but rather a story I once read in an extremely famous book, but if we pretend that it’s a story I myself made up, a story somehow about me, then we’ll get somewhere, I hope. By which I mean, to the bottom of the ocean. Where, as mentioned, I happen to live.

Here is the story: Imagine that you have died (weird), and after your death you awake into what is apparently another world. You aren’t sure if or how this world is connected to the world you inhabited while you were alive, but you are pretty sure that you can’t return to the place you lived while you were living by simply walking around. Meanwhile, it turns out that you are no longer a body. You’re a soul. You find yourself on a shoreline made of clean, gray ash. There is water sitting hazily in a great expanse before you. You can barely hear anything.

You realize that you are not the only soul here. There are countless other souls hovering in this place, gazing out across the water.

Then you realize that there are lives here, too. Not just souls. You’re not going to be stuck here. All along the shoreline sit countless lives in the bank of clean ash. You’re not a life, you’re a soul, but you can see them, the lives, and you know something about what they are. It’s difficult to describe how the lives look, but maybe it’s enough to say they look like sticks of different sizes, cut from saplings, though there are no trees anywhere around.

You begin to examine the different lives. There are so many. The soul must choose. It has to live eventually, but it does not have to live a life it does not select. And so the soul searches, and it lands.

As this ancient story purports to show, everyone has, at some level, chosen the life they live. The story also claims – leaving out the reincarnation bit, which I care less about – that none of us could avoid choosing. And this is what I want you to understand, regarding me: I’m trying to figure out what to do in a scenario in which I have no choice but, at some bare minimum, to keep on existing.

I don’t feel free. Moreover, I feel kind of scared.

I think, by the way, returning to sports, that the way my father dealt with this problem was to play tennis. Because, to be clear, having chosen to be male does not exempt one from the difficulties! I know I’m getting ahead of myself and it’s just a conjecture, but let me keep going: I think that my father decided to teach himself tennis for a bunch of different reasons, in part to obscure his working-class origins and in part to have virtuous reasons to exit the house. But these are probably only the reasons he was conscious of. Much as, if the story about souls recounted here is plausible, if not actually true – and there are aspects of everything we do that we have not chosen for ourselves, not in so many words, even as we have chosen them – then my father’s choice of tennis as one of his main physical and creative outlets in life came at a cost. It was a form of leisure for him but, given his broader cosmological setup, did not mean that he was either free or having fun.

I don’t know much about the cosmos, but I know enough to avoid the game of tennis.

Close parenthesis.

Jon and I are sitting together outside the bubble. There’s a bench here, plus gravel. Below us, near the water, reeds and cattails grow. Jon has already freaked me out by insisting on going inside to the reception desk to ask for a bottle opener, an act I find brazen in the extreme, given that what we’re doing out here with our beers is almost certainly illegal.

Jon keeps laughing at me, but about some things he is deadly earnest. ‘So what did you think of the story?’ he persists. At this moment both of us happen to be staring at a giant blue word, columbia painted on a cliff. I realize that Jon plays his tennis here because he is an alumnus.

‘It’s good,’ I say. ‘I really like it.’

‘Right,’ Jon says, ‘but do you think it needs a little more, a little less? I think you were correct about the androids needing to go. I haven’t really done enough research on that. I got too excited when I saw that Times article.’

I try to reassure Jon that although I suggested cutting the android part, it was still pretty good. I tell him that maybe he should devote a whole story to androids.

‘A whole story on androids? I don’t know about that.’ Jon takes a sip from his beer. He clears his throat, and I can tell he is about to say something he considers important. ‘I really like writing about androids but more as a way to think about people, you know? I don’t care about the immortal soul but, you know, some of my readers do.’

Jon is laughing again.

‘Sure,’ I start to say. I’m about to explain to Jon that this was not what I meant, but he interrupts me:

‘It just wouldn’t work. I never want to have a story that’s about one thing.’

‘But you’re so good at description!’ I exclaim. I’m trying to say that I think Jon can write about whatever he wants. There’s a lot he can get away with.

‘Thank you. But I’m never going to write about androids. They have to be a side issue. You know, there was something else that seems relevant, I’m just trying to remember. Oh, yeah.’

And Jon tells me the following story:

When Jon was in grad school, he spent a lot of time observing people. He wasn’t a bad student, exactly, but he was studying literature and one of the things he knew about literature was that he himself could write it, and this fact troubled his relationship to scholarship, as such. Literature, as everyone knows, is a massive info leak, while scholarship mostly purports to reveal helpful stuff people really ought to know, and all Jon wanted to do while he was obtaining his degree was to give away destabilizing secrets regarding academia. This desire made it difficult to concentrate, among other difficulties. Jon got very interested in sociology, as well as cybernetics. He liked vaguely paranoid theories based on the schematization of the social sphere. He enjoyed thinking about what computing had to do with anything, partly perversely, because in spite of Apple’s bombastic presence on the home electronics scene since that 1984 Super Bowl commercial, few people in the humanities were bothering to think about what effect their word-processing and emailing was having on their knowledge. Jon, by contrast, was brilliant and somewhat young.

But these, as Jon might say, are side issues. They’re just here to give us some sense of what Jon was like. In fact, he was pretty similar then to the person he is now, except that he was unmarried and did not have a daughter.

Also Jon had to take classes for a few years, and because of this he came into contact with other students. Among these people was a certain young woman, who is the person of interest as far as Jon’s story is concerned.

This young woman had a problem. It was a problem that interested Jon, given his social-scientific explorations, because it both was and was not her problem. The young woman’s problem was that she was not recognizable. It wasn’t, for example, that she was invisible or that she shrank from human contact – far from it. In Jon’s account, she was more than reasonably attractive, always simply and elegantly dressed. She had a nice face, nice hair. She spoke with an amount of self-assurance that was neither excessive nor too puny. No, the young woman was perfectly visible and in no particular way repulsive, but nevertheless this did not prevent her from being largely unrecognizable in the eyes of others.

Graduate school, it seems, is an interesting setting in which to observe such a problem play out. The reason for this is that graduate school, particularly in the humanities, is where people go to learn how to introduce themselves. This is perhaps the main skill taught to students of the humanities. The lesson was long and particularly difficult for the young woman who was not recognizable, because she was constantly having to reintroduce herself everywhere she went. For Jon it became a kind of private running joke, although one he did not dare to share with the woman herself. Whenever they were in class together, he would wait for the inevitable moment at which the professor would squint or point and ask, ‘And who are you?’ only to be reminded that the student in question had already been known to him or her for multiple weeks, months, and even years.

Somehow, the reminding did not serve to reinforce memory regarding the unrecognizable student. It was as if she suffered from a detachable aphasia, an amnesia she herself did not possess. It interested Jon for, as he put it, two main reasons: One, this was a psychosocial malady affecting a single organism that seemed to have come into being outside that organism’s body (and truly it was difficult to say if the problem originated with the woman or with others). Two, this was a malady to which Jon seemed, among all his peers and overlords, to be the sole person who was immune.

Jon could recognize the woman.

It was surprising and even semi-miraculous.

At first Jon could barely believe it.

Months went by, maybe a full semester, and at last Jon got up the courage to speak to the woman, with whom, if this is not already obvious, he had managed to fall deeply in love. It was not at all a difficult thing to speak to her. They went out together to a late lunch of desserts and talked a long time.

It was also surprisingly easy to avoid the ‘recognition issue’. There was a nearly otherworldly quality to the woman, in that she herself seemed completely unaware that most other people never had any idea who she was. She lived, oblivious to the problem, and she was even happy.

Jon courted her carefully. In spite of their mutual penury, they went out to many meals with desserts and talked many long talks. Jon believed that he had discovered a previously unknown plane of existence. His studies took on new meaning.

But when summer came again, the woman departed for the West Coast. This was years before the tech bubble burst, a fact that dates Jon a bit, and it seemed like someone had made the woman an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Jon wanted to go with her, but the woman wasn’t interested. She said something incomprehensible – to Jon, at least – about how her decision had to do with wanting to live a different sort of life. She told Jon that he knew her too well.

‘You should write that down,’ I tell Jon, when he is done.

‘Maybe I will.’ He barely pauses, ‘When do you think the current story is going to come out?’

‘Soon,’ I say. I mention that there are two other editors who are reading it, who are perhaps a little less attentive to Jon than I am. I tell Jon I’ll bug them, and that he should bug them, too.

‘OK,’ Jon says. Then, ‘Don’t you have any questions?’

‘Questions?’

‘About the story.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I thought the whole point of this meeting was to come to a consensus about that.’

‘No,’ says Jon. ‘I mean the story I just told you.’ He finishes his beer. ‘Don’t you have any questions about that?’

I have to think for a minute. I’m fighting to be polite. I say, ‘Well, do you know what happened to her?’

‘So you assume the story is true.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know if that matters,’ Jon says. ‘But yeah. I’ve been looking for her on Facebook. My sense is she’s been rather successful.’

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘She was kind of a writer. Maybe half a writer? I don’t know. The one really strange thing about her, aside from the unrecognizability thing, of course, was how much she liked puns. If I’d been thinking about it more clearly I could have seen the end coming.’

‘The lowest form of humor,’ I say, skirting Jon’s reference to pain.

‘Obviously I couldn’t take the joke.’

It’s beginning to get dark and I find myself staring extra hard at the Columbia insignia on the cliff across from us. It stays clear and distinct, even as everything else around us dims to a blue mush. For a while, both Jon and I stop making an effort to speak.

Then Jon says, ‘You know there’s a reason I’m telling you this story.’

‘There always is.’ I mean it in a nice way.

Jon is not listening. He says, ‘It’s a circumstantial reason. It’s because of tennis. I was in the bookstore the other day, browsing for things about your tennis game, you know, as one does, and, I mean, it’s not a thing I would do, read a tennis book, but I was down there in Sports, and I swear, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something called Bitter Tennis, which is a great title, right?’

‘A fantastic title,’ I say.

‘I know. But of course it was a misreading. But this was when, after all these years, I think I understood.’

I don’t say anything.

‘This was why she had to leave. Everyone was just taking things so psychotically literally!’ Jon chuckles. He tugs at the lobe of his right ear.

I say, ‘Is this a real person?’

‘Let’s go indoors,’ Jon tells me. ‘I have to check if the match is done.’

‘You remembered that,’ I say, as I attempt to hide my mostly empty beer bottle in the pocket of my coat. The bottle protrudes but not, I think, too alarmingly.

‘Remembered what?’ Jon is climbing the small hill of the patio.

For a second I’m confused and don’t know what to say. For a second I genuinely feel as if I don’t know or can’t remember what I’m referring to. The reception area before us is brightly lit, and through the large window I can perceive a huddle of youngish professional men who have arrived to play tennis together. A few of them are wearing white terrycloth headbands in an un-ironic way. They stand around the sofas, stretching, fiddling with racquet strings and expensive leather attachés.

But I recover. I sense a sort of infinite laugh rising in me, and instead of laughing I keep talking. I say, ‘The pun. Bitter Tennis. You remembered.’

‘Memory is funny, too,’ says Jon. ‘Here,’ he says, when we are indoors. ‘Give me your beer,’ and he throws the bottle away for me, indicating, unexpectedly, that he understands how uncomfortable I feel.

I have the impression that all the tennis players in the reception area are staring at us. I want to keep things brief. ‘It was nice talking,’ I tell Jon.

‘Indeed.’

‘I’m just going to use the restroom.’

‘Do you feel like a quick game? I noticed that you’re wearing sneakers. I have extra rackets. We can find your size.’

‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I have to meet someone for dinner.’

Jon laughs. He really seems to be in a great mood, in spite of the story. Or maybe it’s the story that’s making him happy, who knows. It clearly means something to him that I’ve come all the way up here.

‘I guess you’re going, then?’

‘I am.’

‘Well, let me know about the story?’

I think he means the one that he’s already written, and I tell Jon that I will. Jon is a fantastic human. I feel less afraid of the wealthy tennis players and their irony deficiency and go to use the women’s restroom.

My phone, meanwhile, makes a noise. It’s my friend.

‘It does like that,’ he writes.

A gray thought bubble with an animated ellipsis indicates that he is, wherever he is, continuing to type.

I silence the phone and take my time urinating. I wash my hands and examine my hair. Everything about me seems reasonable. It’s spring and my freckles are coming out.

On the way to the subway, I look at my phone again. A new message has appeared.

‘It likes that very much,’ my friend confidently opines.

I switch the sound on but then turn the phone off. I feel weak but satisfied. It has been a good meeting.

I can remember there was – and this is a true story – one afternoon when, freshly returned from his habitual tennis game and having consumed half a beer, my father threatened to kill me. I was possibly twenty on the day in question and this time he was serious, though I suppose that hardly matters. I used to lock my door whenever I was alone in the house with him. Mentally, I’d call it dehydration. My mother would begin laughing wildly if I tried to recount these sorts of events. ‘Your father loves you,’ she liked to say, but she didn’t need to be out of earshot for my father to begin talking about which random women in the news it was he presently wanted to assault, whose voices were the most whiny, the most beset by vocal fry.

This is why I moved to the bottom of the ocean. I packed a suitcase long ago. You might think this is a sad thing, but I’ve come to enjoy the incoherent ministrations of the sub-photic beings of the hadal zone, their telescopic eyes and spiny or gelatinous skin. I like the suborder Ceratioidei. I have no idea what they’re saying when their fanged mouths move, but I can always use my phone if I get too hard up for fellowship.

The other nice thing about my current trench community is that it’s pretty dense. We are, speaking of puns, under a great deal of pressure, but here, and maybe only here, there’s no such thing as tennis.

granta-banner-bitter-tennis.png

Date: January 24, 2019

Publisher: Granta

Format: Web

Genre: Fiction

Link to the story.

On site.

JM in 1979.

LOUISE NEVELSON

Among my mother’s 23 friends on Facebook are my ex-husband and my mother’s former best friend, Max. I am not on speaking terms with either of these individuals and neither, I hope, is my mother. My former husband was living a double life for the last three years of our union and Max, my mother’s former best friend, is dead. Of these unfortunate circumstances my mother and I say exactly nothing. There are one or two people who regularly “like” my mother’s posts. I am not among them.

Max seems to have been an OK person. My mother met her recently, within the last decade, and there are a total of four details I can recall regarding the life of Max:

One. Max had an adult son who was a classical musician (I do not recall his instrument)

Two. Max was a woman artist who had a family instead of a career

Three. Max and my mother occasionally communed in nature in Connecticut where both Max and her second husband and my mother and my father, who is my mother’s first husband, have second homes

Four. Max died swiftly of terminal cancer (I do not recall which kind)

I became aware of the last of these details by way of an art object that appeared in the living room of my parents’ second home. The home has an open floor plan on the second floor and the art object had been given pride of place. It stood on an antique chest (scrolling ribbon work and elaborate lock) directly across from the top of the stairs. Attaining the second floor you met the gaze of the object’s numerous intriguingly drilled orifices, its segmented wooden arm, its awkward paraedolic splendor. The object appeared to be tooting. It was stiffly, silently tooting and motionlessly marching and pointing all over the room. It was a masterwork of late modernism, partaking of a style definitively and exhaustively explored by the artist Louise Nevelson. The art object, which was admittedly all but silently shouting that it recognized and pretty well comprehended that it was a rip-off of a Louise Nevelson, was painted a not entirely unappealing terra-cotta rose. It was a little less than two feet tall. It stood before a window facing south.

When I first saw this object I carefully indicated to my mother its resemblance to the work of Louise Nevelson. I attempted to proceed with tact. I gingerly inched out of the shadows, choosing my words with care, wanting to know, did my mother suspect that there might be any way Max had been at all familiar?

“I got that out of her garage,” my mother said. We were going to have dinner in 15 minutes. The open floor plan meant that views of the kitchen with its steaming pasta pot were available. My father had dropped off to sleep on the sectional.

Because I still thought this was a joke, this willing selection of an obviously derivative kitsch item, I suggested, “It spoke to you?”

My mother continued, “After she died her husband, really sweet guy,” this pronounced with no feeling, “said I could take something. She had a studio.”

“Oh,” I said, as a veil brushed sleepily across the room. “She’s dead?”

“Yes,” my mother said. “Just like Louise Nevelson.”

●

There has always been a lot of math going on around me, and lately I am learning more about it. For example, my mother has recently been playing more and more tennis, despite her dislike of the sport. She does so because my father’s tennis game has been growing increasingly weak, due to his age (77), and because tennis was my father’s one great love in life. It is unclear, in this sense, whether my mother is somehow acting as a bridge between my father and his one great love, the game of tennis, or if, in a continuation of other questionable behavior on her part, she is quietly robbing him of his most private joy. That my mother has also used my father’s love of tennis as at once a cloak and rationale for her infidelities, complicates the story, or, rather, the math, of which, as I have mentioned, there has been a lot.

Also complicating our math is the fact that my mother, unlike my father, has no great loves. This is the math that the shameful fail to see: Those who feel no shame can also feel no love. They may feel other things, but love is absolutely denied them. This is why shame, not tragic fate, is the other—the double and/or opposite—of luck. Those who are capable of shame are also capable of much else.

My mother, though shameless, understands this math. This is why she has had to do so very much in order, as she puts it, “to survive.”

●

I, meanwhile, am my mother’s large adult child. I use this language partly in jest. You will find it on the Internet. People say (i.e., type), “large adult son.” They mean something has gone wrong. They mean that an adult son is still around, lingering for ease of comparison. There is another meme I consider nominally related. The text is something like, “Don’t talk to me or my son ever again.” The idea is schoolyard or mall or parking lot as libidinal zone, the awkwardness of attachment, how it looks like Dad is wearing an invisible apron as he stiffly shields his offspring from some important villain. Once I saw someone caption an image of a large Perrier bottle beside a small Perrier bottle with this text. That was outstanding.

I am my mother’s large adult daughter. I am not really that large, and I am not even particularly adult. I can, in theory, for example, bear children for several years to come, which for a woman means, I believe, that she is still quite young.

Regarding the meme invoked above, re: talking and sons, I am not entirely sure what my mother is trying to protect me from. My mother from time to time comments on my youth in an abashed way. “You are so young!” she whispers, touching her own face. “Your skin,” she murmurs, stroking her hair. Yet I do my own taxes, indicating, by way of contrast, my relative lack of naiveté.

Several years ago, long before Max’s death, my mother recounted a nightmare she had had about Connecticut. In the nightmare, my father was dead, and my mother was forced to live “in town.” She said that in the nightmare she did not own a car because she could not afford one and was forced to walk, on the actual sidewalk, to the actual grocery store. My mother said that she was alone in the house “in town” and had to attempt to save money, an undertaking she found extremely frightening. My mother told me this as she drove.

My father, who does not really speak to me, was asleep in the backseat.

These are a very few of the extremely few scenes I am able to relate from the long-term standoff that constitutes my primary human relationship.

●

Louise Nevelson, after whose art my mother’s friend Max shamelessly styled her own, was an American sculptor. Louise Nevelson lived for nearly a century, from 1899 to 1988. She was born in the ancient city of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, formerly Pereyaslav, in central Ukraine. In 1897, there were some ten thousand Jewish persons living in Pereyaslav. In 2017, there are fewer than 100 in Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, which is renowned for its museums.

Louise Nevelson’s paternal grandfather was a dealer in wood. Nevelson’s father Isaac Berliawsky was a merchant who emigrated to America in 1902, sending for his wife and children three years later. Nevelson’s best-known works are monumental wooden sculptures painted a single color, usually black or white. To my eye, they appear charred.

Louise Nevelson is associated with such American artists as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. It is said that Nevelson began working with wood during the late 1930s when, impoverished, she and her son wandered the streets of New York looking for scraps to burn. Her son later became a sculptor.

Like Louise Nevelson, Max gave birth to a son who became an artist. Unlike Louise Nevelson’s son, Max’s son is better known for his art than his mother was for hers. Louise Nevelson identified strongly with her father, at least as far as her professional life was concerned, and her relationship with her son was always strained. Max, on the other hand, understood motherhood as a surpassing achievement, though she had a first name that might, sight unseen, allow her to be mistaken for a man.

●

Ah, gender! How you have continued, in spite of the optimistic tidings of my middle school teachers, to be a pressing concern! Truly, it is a remarkable thing, how thoroughly my life has been defined by my female status. It is worse now even than it was when I was 11, when I was 16, when I was 25, because now I understand the social differentiation of sex. I feel as if I am crouched over in permanence, waiting out my biological clock, praying that the strike of midnight will unsex me, to use Lady Macbeth’s helpfully plain verb, though I know that it will not. No matter how old I become, it will always have been possible for me to have “had” children. The infinitesimal lessening of onus here constitutes a pillar of women’s liberation, so called.

I am one of the animals. I live among the other human animals and am one of them. Nothing animal is outlandish to me.

●

My mother, who never comments on the early termination of my marriage, has always had things to say, regarding the project of becoming an artist. Although she has had a number of friends who were artists, even before the advent of Max, most of her artist-related pronouncements are not very nice. Artists are poor and unrecognized. Society mocks them. Artists are deluded by the success of a small number of artists who arbitrarily meet with forms of reward that have no intrinsic or necessary relationship to the objects they produce. Everything in the project of art making is hazard and/or luck and/or prostitution. Those who labor on in obscurity do so at risk of madness. Their lives are unsanitary.

The not-insignificant irony of this particular aesthetic theory is that my mother is herself a pretty creative type. I would not go so far as to call her an artist, but she is a talented liar.

I wish now to discuss with you my mother’s great artistic feat in life, the work that has for so long consumed her. I wish to discuss also the ways in which her great feat has impacted me. I am part of my mother’s great feat, although my role is but a supporting one, if not that of an infans extra. I am a part of my mother’s masterpiece, if distantly. I stand before it, and I tremble. I fear it more than solitude plus genteel penury in any Connecticut town.

This is to say that, unable to resist the siren song of symmetry, a.k.a., the math, a.k.a., the vibrating abyss and/or much-doctored scorecard that is our family, my mother invited her lover to the release event for the publication of my latest novel. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out that this had occurred, the appearance of the lover, I mean. The lover is, unlike my mother’s friend Max, not dead and, in fact, when I think about it, probably he looks more vital than ever. I saw him but did not quite see him, there. I learned who he was through another friend, who once held a subordinate position in the workplace where for many years my mother was an important individual.

“Oh,” the friend said to me, out of her beer, “so-and-so was at your reading. He was lurking at the back. Remember how years ago he took me to that Bob Dylan concert? I thought that was so inappropriate.” I was nodding to her because I could remember. “I remember,” my friend said, “because he was there that weekend with his much younger girlfriend and later I heard his wife sing at the funeral for—.” My friend was continuing to speak. She was explaining how so-and-so, my mother’s former colleague and, we all believe, her lover was unfaithful to everyone he knew, not just his wife, his younger girlfriend, or, for that matter, my mother. And so-and-so stood at the back of the reading for my new novel, too. So-and-so was ancient and handsome and living and did not attempt to speak to me. He was probably younger than he’d ever been.

My father, meanwhile, sat there. My father did not even glance at the back of the room. He was holding a guide to better tennis.

Date: April 4, 2018

Publisher: New York Tyrant

Format: Web

Genre: Fiction

Link to the story.

On site.

Component from Louise Nevelson's Dawn's Wedding Feast, 1959.

TRUST

I meet the artist, who does x, for a snack one afternoon. We have the kind of conversation it was more necessary to have previous to the existence of the Internet. We exchange general info about the world.

I am attempting to experience a feeling of warmth. It’s general, too. The artist who does x is commenting on the method by which thermostat fixtures have been incorporated into the bakery’s wall décor. She expresses amazement. Possibly she’s struggling.

I cannot remember if the artist who does x says that we should do this again. She offers a few tips for improved existence, evidently intending that I remember and deploy these in a eulogy, should I, at her expiration, have acquired sufficient cultural capital to merit a speaker’s invitation to the funeral.

In this fantasy, she is buried in state.

Why, I ask myself, are so many of the artist who does x’s thoughts about what will happen after one, or both, of us goes away? Why do I understand this so well?

It’s true I’ve been thinking about writing out a list of all my enemies, including brief descriptions of their unique powers and weaknesses. The artist who does x would not appear on this list—and is very unlikely to appear on any subsequent lists of this type—but her behavior suggests that she is concerned about the possibility of a public airing of such a document. For in her mind, she may well have made it. In this fantasy, she lives forever and suffers eternally under the tip of my poison pen. I see she wants to be ready, should it come to pass that my list is aired and she is at the top, number one, where permanent marker forms an escutcheon of loathing. Arrows point! Emphatic asterisks! Random flowers! Stars. “She is the worst!” my list might say.

And yet it doesn’t.

How can the artist who does x not know? How can she not tell that I have no intention of putting her on the list of “Folks I’d Like to KILL” today, next week, or ever, really? We’re just meeting at a mediocre bakery in Chelsea. I’m listening to her talk about her life.

It should, by the way, be obvious that I am not an artist. And it would be nice if everyone I know recognized this, yet no one does. I have the opposite problem of almost everybody in this industry. Everyone has been calling me a closet conceptualist and “mail artist” and performance artist of institutional critique and a post-Internet artworker since day one of my career in gallery admin, but really what I am is a person who, for various complex and private reasons, mainly feels comfortable with menial tasks and who is, meanwhile, of above-average intelligence. If these facts alone make me an artist then, fine, so be it, I am an artist, but I kindly request that somebody for once concede that this is probably not the case. I do not make art. I do not have a personal website. I do keep my desk neat, which some passersby term art. I use adjectives in email. I don’t own many clothes. I am tall and thin and speak softly.

I’m also significantly younger than the artist who does x, though I’ve already aged out of my current position at the gallery. Indeed, my current position is not a career and is not intended for individuals of my advanced age (31). Luckily, as I have no dependents or other prospects, I’m allowed to stay on. I’ve been told I save them the trouble of training a third intern. But since I’m the one who does said training and spends a great deal of her time emailing with, and identifying the clerical errors of, said interns, I’m not sure what this means. I like to think it means that I’ve been fully absorbed, that I’m irreplaceably part of the gallery’s vital human architecture, but I know that come the next financial crisis, the first pink slip, written haltingly out in shaky Japanese felt tip and not without tears, shall be mine.

In this sense, my friendship with the artist who does x, who is represented by the gallery, is either a piece of professional security with which I am padding my impending fall, or it is emotional labor the gallery farms out to me because it can reasonably be assumed that I am someone for whom a friendship with the artist who does x has its advantages.

I don’t love these alternatives.

Meanwhile, the artist who does x and I exit the bakery.

We’re done snacking.

She looks elated that we’ve made it out of confined quarters and are soon to be free of one another. I study this in her, along with her expensive hat. She has begun telling a story I realize, with a sharp slide into nausea, is inappropriately long given the impending leaving-taking, the timing of cross-walk signals, not to mention her already apparent wish to be out of my presence.

“Years ago,” begins the artist who does x, “I was working on a poster installation. It was during my minimal era when I was trying not to do anything, when I was trying not to make art, you know? I wanted to be something else, then. I wanted to be anything but an artist, and I was under the impression that if I did little enough, if I did barely enough, the world would just let me go. And maybe I was even a little angry about that possibility? Of being disposable? And so I had these posters, and they weren’t even of anything, they were these bad images I had taken of other posters, at the movies, or the hairdressers, for shows and things. But of course you know what I am talking about already, you know this was ‘Limelight,’ and actually when you look back this was what made me, not in that sense of some blue-chip fantasy of fame, but this was the time I did the thing that was me, that said me, more than anything before, that wasn’t an imitation of some hero of mine and wasn’t me attempting to do what I thought everyone else wanted and it only happened because I did it, and I was so angry at that time, and so fed up, and so, or so I thought, beyond anything at all, I was feeling, what was the point? However this was what I did and it worked so fucking well I was able to work for the rest of my life, which, as you know, I have. It’s a miracle. It’s so funny that it came out of this moment of truly intense self-loathing. I wonder if you can understand that. But the other night I was lying in bed at home, in my country home, it’s quite quiet there, you know, you can really hear things, and I have this skylight. It’s not directly above the bed, but I can see it, and I can see whatever light comes through, and I like to think about, well, what might be going on in the sky, and I thought about what might be located there because others have seen it, what could possibly be there just because others have seen it, you know? Others who have lain awake looking? Oh, it’s impossible, of course; of course there’s nothing. It’s just an idea I’m having and probably you’re late, Justine, yes? You need to get back? No? You have a minute? Well, I was lying there, looking at this sky I could not see, or thinking about actually looking at a kind of sky that does not exist, one that bears, in itself, all the insignificant marks, the ashes and the contrails, the frothy little wakes, the flecks and pits, from the looking, you know, all that looking that’s got to be so impure! And that’s what I’ve always been thinking about in my work, I realized, the way a thing looks because it’s been looked at, the way a place looks, how it’s changed—and that’s, you know, that’s what’s got me thinking about the sky. Is there anything else in the world that’s been, you know, so looked at?

“I didn’t want to get out of bed. It wasn’t that I wanted to go see the sky. I just wanted to be able to hold it in my mind, this idea, of this sky, this version of the sky—that there was something that was so obviously there, but that you couldn’t see—that I couldn’t see. It was, if you’ll forgive me saying this—I don’t know what this even means these days—it was like trust—not feeling it, you know, because actually I seldom feel it? But it was like the notion of trust, which has always been in my life if somewhat out of reach—and for me it is, and perhaps this is part of the problem if not the simple strangeness of it. Trust is like an image and I am forever trying to see it. I can feel the outlines of it, you know, really can feel imaginatively that there is such a thing as trust, that fixedness of it? But I can’t ever see it, at least, not in real life. Maybe I’ve dreamed about it? I’m not sure. Maybe I haven’t, probably not. I don’t think so. There are lots of worlds in my dreams, but not one of them ever contained trust. And so I think that is why, that must be why I so enjoy conversations with you, Justine. I think a lot of people might find you scary, because there is so much to risk, so much at stake for you, and not even because you really mean it. I imagine you don’t mean to risk so much. I feel a kind of responsibility toward you, and not one that I would really have sought out for myself, given the choice. But somehow we’ve just come to start meeting in this way, haven’t we? I remember when I saw you, that time we met, how terrifying that was. You really told me everything. And I don’t want to say that you shouldn’t trust in that way, because it should be beautiful, it could—”

The artist trails off. The light advising us as to the advisedness of crossing the street has transitioned between foreboding and denial, denial and continuous permission, perhaps ten times during the course of her speech. My face is tight. Probably I want to pee, but I have to make sure that she is done.

I have to let the artist who does x continue speaking because this is what she expects. She expects not only to say these things, but to have them absorbed as tidings of great value, which, in some universe they probably are, since what she means is that I clearly do not know how to act. And never will.

I calmly thank the artist. I begin to bid her farewell.

Anyway, she is right. I recall how an acquaintance, another toady of the gallery system, was recently sitting with me in an overpriced vegan deli, talking about how people don’t care about the artist who does x’s work.

“She’s obsessed with how uninterested people are in her work,” the toady was insisting. Then the toady was describing her own impending marriage to another toady also employed by the gallery system. They were plotting their escape. They would move to the countryside and start a nonprofit and cease to be toadies (except, of course, in memory). They would be moving shortly after the wedding, which would take place on the country estate of one of the toadies’ childless relatives, not a parent.

“She is very, very honest about it,” the toady was saying, of the artist who does x. “She’s just like everyone else, except she’s so totally honest. It’s amazing you can make a career out of that.”

It is true, I think, the artist who does x is honest.

And, as we are kissing the air in front of one another’s faces on the corner of 18th Street, I recall another meeting with the artist who does x, one which took place a year earlier, one which the artist herself clearly has not forgotten. During the course of this meeting, the artist who does x acknowledged that she was aware that I was in the midst of becoming divorced from someone I had married when I was in my early twenties, a thing not really done in these parts—the child marriage, I mean.

We were in a bar and restaurant, farther downtown. The artist who does x was comfortably ensconced on an upholstered item. I knew her less well, then.

“He wasn’t,” I remember telling her, “very nice to me.” I meant my former husband.

It was a euphemism.

I watched changes transpiring on the face of the artist who does x. If I had known the artist who does x better at this time, I would have known that the artist who does x was attempting to gauge the required amount of remorse. I did not know then that she is like a paid griever, a mourner for hire. She will exchange the favor of sadness with you, but you must offer something in return.

Because I am poor and essentially useless to the artist who does x’s career, what I had to give in this moment was information.

“He didn’t,” the artist who does x wanted to know, “hit you?”

I remember that time became slushy and dim. I looked at the artist who does x’s eyes, which were like two lacquered raisins, merciless and slightly too small for her face. I knew that if I said no, the artist who does x would turn away from me, and that this turning away would be for all time. I knew that the artist who does x did not wish to discuss with me the politics of domestic economies, various forms of entitlement. She was not interested in my identity or gender, any more than she was interested in the identity or gender of anyone else. These were mere representations, and representations were not her concern.

The artist who does x wanted to know what had happened. And I saw that in this moment she was giving me an out. She was letting me know that if I could demonstrate to her satisfaction that my current lamentable status in the world was not a predicament of my own devising, she would be willing to withhold at least 15% of the judgment she was otherwise planning to level in my direction.

Oh, how I wanted that 15% mercy. And oh how I wanted her to share a bit of sadness with me.

So I paid.

Date: March 2, 2018

Publisher: BOMB

Format: Web

Genre: Fiction

Link to the story.

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On site.

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Skylight.

Frieze Ideal Syllabus

The Books That Influence Lucy Ives

To celebrate the recent release of her book, An Image of My Name Enters America, the author shares a list of literary works that have inspired her

BY LUCY IVES IN BOOKS, OPINION | 19 NOV 24

I want books to change me. People sometimes speak about emotional transformation in relation to what they read – that their lives have been profoundly altered by their identification with the experiences of a character or the author – but that kind of transformation can feel fleeting to me and perhaps doesn’t address deeper contingencies. (Of course, like anyone, I love a good cry.) I recently read a bunch of histories on the evolution of the alphabet – the earliest form of which, the Proto-Sinaitic script, was invented 4,000 or so years ago to simplify Egyptian hieroglyphs. I was reminded of the simple yet astounding fact that the Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin abjads and alphabets, among others, all derive from this single system for notating sounds, probably created by Semitic-speaking people working in and around turquoise mines sacred to Hathor. On the one hand, I thought: wow, a lot of information and complexity was probably lost when hieroglyphic writing ceased to be used. On the other: how scrappy and clever of humans to come up with this viral thing English-speakers now call the ABCs. This is also to say that we are in possession of a lot of technologies as humans, yet we are not always aware of their presence or effects. We tend to forget them – as we forget the invention of alphabetic writing. I want my reading to bring me into greater awareness of various kinds of physical and conceptual affordances: material and immaterial levers that influence belief and feeling, let’s say. Here, then, follow some books that have helped me to think.

Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966, Routledge and Kegan Paul)

Dame Yates – who died in 1981 at the age of 81 – is, for me, one of the most interesting humanities scholars of the 20th century. She was an art historian, systems thinker, media theorist, literary critic and an expert in the occult. The Art of Memory is an anatomy and history of the ‘memory palace’, an ancient mnemonic system still used by some contemporary memory athletes to memorize long strings of numbers or the order of a deck of cards. (I sometimes use the memory-palace technique to freak people out, but my mind is sort of spongy and lax, so I’ll never be a champion!) Although this is definitely not its purpose, this book introduced me to a theory of beauty I hadn’t been aware of before. I think about it almost daily.

Lady Sei, The Pillow Book (1002/1967, Oxford University Press)

It’s a novel; it’s a memoir; it’s a commonplace book. It’s also a discussion of the politics of literacy and the theory and pragmatics of taste. It exists in at least four variants and has been variously translated. I have always liked the 1967 edition I found in my estranged maternal grandmother’s house after her death, but it might be worth learning more about the versions that exist and the history of its Western appropriation to form your own opinions and choose your own point of entry. Sei’s lists – ‘Rare Things’, ‘Flowering Plants’, ‘Things That Cannot Be Compared’ (this last one touches me in particular) – have given me a model for promoting a certain kind of survival of intuition.

Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2000, The New Press)

Ergodic literature is writing that asks extra work of the reader, like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book. I first learned about Lindqvist’s ergodic history shortly after 11 September 2001, when I was a college student, at a gathering someone organized to help people process what was going on. To me, this is a near-perfect book: it offers a concrete history of ballistics that shows it is not merely a mechanism or a technology but a hideous style of orientation to space and time. The gorgeous and alarming way the book’s format shapes your reading puts you in awe of what is possible with respect to the codex form.

Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, Radical Pedagogies (2022, The MIT Press)

This is a recent addition to my ‘favourite books for thinking’ list. Archival photographs and other illustrations in this large tome accompany descriptions of radical architectural projects, some of which are more like teaching plans or blueprints for social movements. I’m interested that the title frames the collection as being about education – or, literally, ‘leading kids’ – because it is, of course, also about shelter, combatting the notion of scarcity, creative research, joy and self-expression. It really gives the lie to any claim someone might like to make about the inessential nature of art. I’m teaching a class about the architecture of Providence this coming year and have been thinking about including certain sections from this collection along with some of the text of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, which makes it possible for American municipalities to criminalize sleeping out of doors.

Lucy Ives's An Image of My Name Enters America (2024) is published by Graywolf Press and is available to purchase now

Main image: Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, Radical Pedagogies, 2022, book cover (detail). Courtesy: MIT Press

Date: November 19, 2024

Publisher: FRIEZE

Format: Web

Link to the essay.

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Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, 1966, book cover. Courtesy: Routledge

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Lady Sei, The Pillow Book, 1002/1967, book cover. Courtesy: Penguin Classics

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Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, 2000, book cover. Courtesy: The New Press

My Mother, the Metropolitan Museum, and I

Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, Radical Pedagogies, 2022, book cover. Courtesy: MIT Press

MY MOTHER, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, AND I

I recall, as a girl of eight or nine, discovering a photograph of my mother taken a few years before I was born. In the image, my mother stands in a white room. She is laughing as I had never seen her laugh in life, completely taken by elation. Surrounding her are large-format photographs, presumably waiting to be hung on the walls. Some are still wrapped in paper, but two—showing beautiful women—are visible. One of the women is also laughing, almost as much as my mother. I later learned that this long-haired, gently disheveled, smoking and ring-wearing figure was the singer Janis Joplin—although for now she was just an anonymous subject who reminded me a little of myself. When I brought the picture to my mom, she told me that the photographs were by a man named Richard Avedon. In 1978 Avedon, a.k.a.“Dick,” had a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where my mother worked as a curator.

This was a standard mother-daughter conversation. There were many unusual objects in our Upper East Side apartment, and I was a wily sleuth. I was even beginning to believe—knowing nothing of the cost of child care—that my mother’s reason for sometimes bringing me with her to her office after school was that she wanted my assistance. We traveled, hand in hand, from the neighborhood’s upper reaches to Fifth Avenue and the Met’s imposing neoclassical façade. As we ascended the steps together, I believed that the building belonged to us. Only we knew about the unfinished blocks at the tops of the grand columns—meant to become figures personifying the four great periods of art, from Ancient to Modern, but never carved. This was the power of the museum: It could hide a flaw in plain sight and look magnificent while doing so.

My mother and I proudly entered, making our way to my mother’s department. She was a specialist in European drawings and prints, and her office was accessible via a secret door in the wall of one of the galleries, which she opened using a key, often in full sight of gawking tourists. We’d pass through a study room, into the haven of my mother’s private work space.

The smell was of ancient papers, leather, inks, and resins. I did homework or looked through my mother’s collection of antique doorknobs, keys, and keyhole covers. She liked to purchase these odds and ends at European flea markets. I had no idea what they meant to her.

Later, museum closed and workday done, we exited the departmental warren and descended through the empty, darkened building. We passed shadowy busts and portraits, obscure arms and armor, sacred objects visible only in outline. These walks, sometimes up or down staircases inaccessible to the public, would reappear in my dreams. Sometimes it would be impossible to find my way out of the museum; or a work of art might come, disconcertingly and messily, to life. In reality, we always reached an exit without incident. In one subterranean storage hall, passing a giant two-dimensional reproduction of a blue hippopotamus sculpture from ancient Egypt nicknamed “William” by the staff, we’d even salute. My mother’s heels clicked reassuringly. This was her place.

These are my most vivid childhood memories. Of course, there were privileges: an early viewing of the immense Christmas tree along with the intricate, miniature crèche, put out every year without fail in the medieval hall; my mother’s ability to give the occasional tour to my grade-school class, an event that filled me with pride. However, it was the incidental things I cherished: eating lunch in the staff cafeteria, looking through my mother’s suitcase after she’d come home from a business trip. These moments impressed upon me the dignity and solace of work. The institution encompassed my mother; it seemed to support her at every turn.

Dinner conversation with my father revealed a different side of the job: other people. There was the macho curator who always had to get his way, flaunting the economic superiority of his specialty and mocking my mother’s lowly prints and illustrated books. There were also regular updates on Brooke Astor, the late heiress, with whom my mother lunched from time to time—and here the tone of the report shifted. Mrs. Astor was extraordinary; the chauvinist was forgotten amid reflections about Mrs. Astor’s palatial apartment, the pleasantness of her conversation. Sometimes celebrities appeared, requesting tours. There was the week of Brad Pitt. Despite repeated entreaties, all my mother would say was that he seemed “attentive.”

I knew from the Avedon installation picture that my mother’s life at the museum had been different before my time, maybe more surprising. It was, after all, her first big job. She’d fled a difficult family situation in San Diego and taken a master’s in art history at Columbia. Here she’d met my father, who was studying law and had previously worked construction on the side. They’d made a go of it. My mother changed her first name as well as her last in marriage, and my father left behind Yonkers and his working-class roots. My mother had the physical gifts that permit self-transformation: She was slender, with sweet, symmetrical features and beguiling brown eyes. She made powerful friends, including the philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein, and rose quickly through the ranks at the Met, becoming the director of her department. She met Andy Warhol.

“But what was Andy like?” I demanded to know. I was a teenager now, and the 1990s had brought renewed hunger for Warhol’s commodified irony. Even Kurt Cobain seemed to be modeling himself on the Factory magus.

“Weird,” my mother said. “Quiet.”

By this time, my mother and I disagreed on many topics. Not least among these was my appearance. All my clothing was deemed too tight. My eye makeup was eternally inappropriate, what my mother termed “your Cleopatra eyes,” a mild dig I tried to take as a compliment, given the Met’s spectacular Egyptian collection. Meanwhile, I was athletic, verging on Amazonian, or so I felt. By age twelve, I was already passing my mother in height. I played three sports. My face came from my father. His Assyrian-Iranian and Polish features—dark hair, broad face, pronounced nose—had won out over Mom’s German-WASP blend. In spite of my apparently British last name—in fact an Ellis Island corruption of my paternal grandfather’s Ivas—everyone assumed I was of Eastern European descent and Jewish. Among friends’ families I usually smoothed over any confusion by preemptively proclaiming that I had no religious education at all, which was true.

Only later did I understand how fully one can reinvent oneself in New York City, particularly with a good partner in metamorphosis, as it were. In my mother’s case, I was never entirely sure if that partner was my father or the museum itself, which during certain periods seemed to consume her whole each morning, spitting her out again, mysteriously transformed, at nightfall. I continued to grow away from her, at first physically, then creatively. I became obsessed with drawing, a pursuit my mother discouraged vehemently when a high school teacher suggested I apply to art school. I would go often to the museum on Friday afternoons to work on my sketches. I no longer bothered to venture up to my mother’s office; I came alone and sat alone and left without her.

After I was accepted at Harvard, the polar opposite of art school, my mother began taking me with her on research trips, perhaps because I was a good sounding board or perhaps to keep an eye on me. We went to London, Paris, Australia, and French Polynesia. Our last trip, an inquiry into Paul Gauguin’s final days on the remote island of Hiva Oa, was challenging. I was tailed by wild dogs when I foolishly attempted to visit the artist’s grave alone, and my mother came close to drowning. This episode took place on a volcanic beach, where we were walking. I don’t know why my mother decided to swim, but swim she did, and was caught in a rip current. Our host, Monsieur Gaby, and I stood on the shore, watching with mounting horror. “Swim to the side!” Gaby yelled, probably in French. Eventually all was well, but in that petrifying moment I saw clearly and for the first time the distance between my mother and me. It wasn’t just the fast-moving ocean.

Later, after my mother had staggered back to land, we all stood staring at one another. I felt as if I was meeting her for the first time. Gaby, meanwhile, seemed ready to depart. We piled into his SUV. As the vehicle bounded up the lush mountainside, I reflected on what an odd couple we must appear: the brooding daughter wandering off into an overgrown cemetery; the sociable mother nearly swept out to sea. Or perhaps we were not so much “odd” as inverses, I thought, mirror images.

But what a strange and difficult mirror it was.

Date: June 1, 2017

Publisher: Vogue

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction

Link to the essay.
This essay appears in the print edition of Vogue, June 2017, with the title "Her Brilliant Career."
See PDF below.

Cover image.

Model Ingrid Boulting in Grès, photographed by Richard Avedon for Vogue, 1970.

her-brilliant-career.pdf

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Nighttime caterwauler
Porcupine killer

The beast was previously unknown to me. It was small yet large. It was cute yet hideous. It was shy yet it took what it wanted and attacked without provocation (see: Reddit). No one had ever seen one, but it was everywhere, this beast, nesting in forests, stalking rows of corn, circling homes and gardens, feasting on everyone’s pets. It seemed to be composed of parts appropriated from other animals: a toylike head with round ears, a snout stuffed haphazardly full of hook-like teeth, a pointlessly long and supple body, anodyne peg-like limbs nevertheless festooned with claws. It was solitary and, according to legend, at night let out a keening wail—an apoplectic demon-child in search of blood. I knew it lived near me.

I do not remember how I first learned its name: fisher cat. Or, more properly, fisher, as it is not a cat. Or: pékané (Abenaki), Pekania pennanti (classification), Pennant’s marten (English, after Thomas Pennant, a Welsh naturalist), otchoek (Cree), tha cho (Chipewyan), otochilik (Ojibwa), uskool (Wabanaki). Fishers do not fish, and it is thought that early American immigrants mistook them for polecats, a.k.a. fitches or fitcheau, in Old French, terms allegedly related to the Dutch visse, meaning “nasty,” and the Middle English fulmard, a “foul marten.” The French word for the pelt of a polecat is fiche, another possible source for the word, given the North American fur trade.

Perhaps someone said, You’ve got a lot of fishers up there, meaning where I lived: that is, in the woods, two hours south of the Canadian Border. Maybe it was a whole table of people speculating about this, about them, the fishers. I don’t know if the fascination was first someone else’s or if it was always my own; I don’t know which happened first: the googling and the YouTube-ing, or the live appearance, which occurred shortly thereafter, and which, I was later informed, perhaps by the same tableful of people, and thus, perhaps erroneously, is extremely rare.

Here are a few things I do know.

● The adult female fisher is almost always pregnant. She mates in the spring (females are the instigators of this activity). Over the next eleven months, the fertilized embryos remain dormant in the blastocyst phase until the following February, when the increase in daylight hours is believed to trigger implantation, leading to a brief, six-week gestation. Then the female gives birth and breeds again in short order.

● Edwin Eugène LaBeree, author of a 1941 guide, Breeding and Reproduction in Fur Bearing Animals, describes sex between two fishers in the following way: “Such noise! Such yowls! Such howling! No thousand cats caterwauling on a backyard fence at midnight ever could make such a noise…. Once the pair mated there was not a sound. And the moment the mating was over, the female insisted on getting back to her pen immediately.”

● Both male and female fishers have round patches of fur on the central pads of their paws. These patches enlarge during the breeding season and are thought to be involved in mating negotiations.

● Cats and dogs walk only on their toes. Fishers, by contrast, step onto their entire foot. To get a sense of what this looks like, shorten your cat’s legs by half in your mind’s eye. Now imagine your cat (with its new, shorter legs) wearing a set of slippers about the length of the amount by which its legs have been shortened. This is the fisher’s setup. Its feet look like those of a cartoon character, when it is seen strolling across the snow on all fours, from the side. It remains above the snow, its weight well dispersed.

● Fishers famously consume porcupines, although they are not the only predators to do so: wolves, coyotes, sizable felids (bobcats, lynxes, mountain lions), wolverines, and great horned owls partake of porcupines, but with far less enthusiasm. Only the fisher seems to have been designed with this meal in mind. Fishers do well in trees, the porcupine’s preferred locale, and are skilled at delivering wounds to the face, the porcupine’s Achilles heel. Once a porcupine is dead, the fisher delves into the carcass through the chest, creating a hole by means of which it has access to tasty organs like the heart and lungs, as well as the meat of the porcupine’s legs.

● Prices for fisher pelts peaked in 1920, at $100 per pelt (over $1,000 today), and in the late 1970s, at up to $410 per pelt. The fur trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries significantly lowered the fisher population in the US. As the animal became rare or extinct, states closed their open hunting seasons, with California being the last to do so, in 1946. Habitat destruction further threatened the animal, and porcupine populations rose. Perhaps because porcupines were perceived to damage valuable timber, fishers were reintroduced in Canada and some American states beginning in the 1950s. Fishers are currently listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as one of the animals of “least concern.”

It is also the case that before I saw the fishers, I seem to have felt them. This was a little more than a year ago. August was getting late. As I walked back from the mailbox one afternoon, there was a twitching around the side of the house, a glimmer. I was on the porch when a fisher threw itself out of the arbor, just as another emerged from behind a lily. The emerging one froze, head rotating to watch as I retired, hastily, indoors.

Safely enclosed, I went for my iPhone. In the grass, the fishers shrugged. They posed and departed, and I have not seen them again.

One day my neighbor—let us call him M—comes by. He is both the builder of my house and a former resident. He tells a story about a (feline) cat named Effie he thought was falling off the roof one afternoon, but who was, in fact, in the process of being unzipped by a fisher. M emerged to find the remains of the cat and a feasting victor. Attempting to scare the predator off, M himself, as he tells it, became a body of interest. He rapidly bid farewell to Effie’s corpse.

There was another cat too: Marty. Marty was wise; he’d go on missions alone for days. M tells me about Effie’s fate and then about the wonders of Marty.

A month passes. I see M again. He’s giving me vegetables in advance of a long trip, and I say, “By the way, whatever happened to Marty?”

“Oh,” M says, “they got him too.”

Who? I ask, unnecessarily. I don’t know why it is so important to wait to tell me this, to break the news slowly, as M is clearly doing. A wobbling instant later, I realize: This isn’t for my benefit. M knows I keep my cat indoors.

believer-feb-mar-2020.jpg

Date: January 31, 2020

Publisher: The Believer

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.
This article appears in the print edition of The Believer, February–March, 2020, Issue One Hundred Twenty-Nine.

Cover image.

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Illustration by Kristen Radtke.

Martes pennanti.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE VIOLENCE OF 1969?
The novelist Lucy Ives considers guilt and fiction-making, and what it meant to survive a year – and a decade – of such dashed promise

During an elective stay at a psychiatric hospital, Billy Pilgrim, protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, meets a science-fiction fan. Eliot Rosewater – the fan – likes a certain (fictional) writer very much. This writer, one Kilgore Trout, has become obscure. No one reads Trout’s books anymore. Even Rosewater maintains that they aren’t very well written. The only thing is, they’re full of interesting ideas.

Pilgrim’s madness, his tendency to come ‘unstuck’ in time, to claim to have travelled to an extraterrestrial zone inhabited by five-dimensional beings and to have been compelled to mate with a beautiful former porn star, is variously chalked up to his readings in Trout’s oeuvre. The effects of near-deaths suffered during his service in World War II, including Pilgrim’s experience of the fire-bombing of Dresden, are seen as negligible. It’s not the trauma, it’s the science fiction, the fantasy, that’s keeping Pilgrim from grounding himself reliably in postwar reality. Rosewater, Pilgrim’s guide to the Troutian universe, is, in his own way, reluctant to diagnose the latter’s temporal homelessness, but he does offer a clue. Having informed Pilgrim that ‘everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Feodor Dostoevsky’, Rosewater concludes, ‘But that isn’t enough any more.’

That isn’t enough any more. There hardly seems a more apt sentence to describe the state of the US during the year Vonnegut’s book was published. ‘That’ – by which we must assume Rosewater means a story about inheritance that privileges national history in its interaction with parental pressures, money and god – is no longer enough. It can’t tell us everything and/or knowing ‘everything there [is] to know about life’ is no longer all that useful. What you need to know in order to survive now – and specifically in 1969 – is something more.

Whether you think novels can reliably act as guides for living (and perhaps that’s an outmoded, 19th-century notion in itself), Vonnegut is pointing to a certain gap that has inserted itself into narrative, by which he seems to intend humanity’s narrative. He indicates this gap through his fiction, but we might also consider it by way of the actual experience of Michael Collins, the somewhat lesser-known third astronaut who participated in the Apollo 11 mission that put Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin on the lunar surface on 20 July 1969. Collins, who remained behind in the Columbia command module, spent a day orbiting the Moon while Armstrong and Aldrin cowboyed down. For 48 minutes of each rotation, the Moon’s mass blocked all radio contact between the Columbia and Earth. Although Collins has always maintained that he enjoyed these moments of unprecedented isolation from all humans, he wrote a series of notes during this time in which he described his ‘terror’ that Armstrong and Aldrin might not be able to ascend: ‘If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.’

Everyone made it back, mostly in one piece, and thus there was no marked man, no guilty survivor singled out by history, no one with cause to wonder why he had lived while others hadn’t. It was apparently enough. Here we might think, too, of the strange pronouncement Armstrong made – ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ – as he shuffled onto a landscape he and Aldrin compared to the North American ‘high desert’, as if they had been transported to a particularly desolate scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Wild Bunch. (Both films were, incidentally, extended narrative descriptions, also from 1969, of chummy suicide missions.) Later, no one mentioned the redundancy in the explorer’s valiant words. When I consider his language now, I’m only able to make sense of Armstrong’s sentence if I define ‘mankind’ not merely as a category of greater magnitude than ‘man’, but also as a category that exists in the future of ‘man’. Mankind is what man becomes, perhaps, through radical spatial and temporal re- and/or dis-location. In fact, a transmission glitch had removed an indefinite article from Armstrong’s sentence, so no one heard: ‘That’s one small step for a man …’ In other words, abetted by a minor telecommunicative failure, the astronaut produced a mysterious posthumanist aphorism instead of an obvious analogy. There was no solitary, marked man; mankind would go vastly, gigantically forward, together. Everyone stared up into the sky, which is to say, into their televisions and newspapers. They wore the latest sunglasses, which had recently proliferated in myriad space-age silhouettes and candy colours. Everyone, that is, who didn’t think the whole thing was a hoax enacted on a soundstage.

But that wasn’t enough.

Mick Jagger, lead singer of The Rolling Stones, would say, with unwitting irony, during a press conference held to announce the Altamont Speedway Free Festival of December 1969, at which a young man named Meredith Hunter would be stabbed to death: ‘It’s creating a sort of microcosmic society which sets an example to the rest of America as to how one can behave in large gatherings.’ There was a hope inherent to such ill-fated and unavoidably commercial visions of mass presence – as witnessed earlier that year at the muddy, trippy music festival outside the small town of Woodstock in upstate New York – that through ecstatic gathering, through the shedding of temporal and spatial constraints associated with a repressive national history plus norms of nuclear family, via emancipatory chemical and rhythmic means, etc. (we have been told the story many times), something resembling ‘coming together’ might take place. The Brothers Karamazov wasn’t enough and, although the Altamont Speedway was just outside of San Francisco, the Summer of Love had been over for two years, the Haight’s narcotic well increasingly stocked with methamphetamines. This was the autumn when Jagger, a dropout of the London School of Economics, frequently appeared on stage dressed as Uncle Sam. He and his band were solidifying their share of the US market. Altamont was a scheme thrown together by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and Rock Scully, the manager of the Grateful Dead. At Altamont, Jagger, at first flirtatious, complained about the state of his fly: ‘You don’t want my trousers to fall down, now do you?’ And, later, with greater gravity, as the front rows of concertgoers brawled with a Hells Angels biker gang, he demanded: ‘Who’s fighting and what for?’ It was hardly the sort of rhetorical question on which a politics might be built and, in truth, attendees were about to witness the violent breakdown of the microcosmic society Jagger had heralded. The lifecycle of such utopias was becoming distressingly short and attendance, as in wider society, was safer for some than others. For those who disliked camping, mud and crowds, there was always the newly opened Gap store on San Francisco’s Ocean Avenue, purveyor of ‘nitty-gritty blue jeans’ and ‘rugged cords’.

Charles Manson was a great fan of popular music and always a casual dresser in spite of his grandiose pretensions. He and his ‘Family’ came together around an eschatological myth of a race war derived from demented exegeses of the New Testament and The Beatles’ White Album (1968). A rock’n’roll visionary in his own mind, Manson devised a method for surviving the end of the 1960s that required the violent deaths of people tangentially related to individuals in the Los Angeles music scene whom Manson felt had snubbed him. If Manson’s music seemed not to give rise to the historically predetermined slaughter his messianic pastiche of British invasion plus Book of Revelation had disclosed, then surely these killings would be a catalyst. Having brutally done away with seven people on 8 and 9 August 1969 (Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Leno LaBianca, Rosemary LaBianca, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, Sharon Tate), the Family retired to Death Valley. There, they believed that they were to discover a subterranean city where they would live out the apocalypse, during the course of which white people would be decimated. They would subsequently, marked men (and women), return to rule over the confused non-white victors, whom they would mercilessly exploit for profit, forming a new world-historical hegemony: a giant leap.

Thus, it really meant something to be a survivor in 1969; it meant something more than made sense. It felt like a species of space madness, a hope to become unstuck from all previously accepted narratives, which was at once terrifying and, allegedly, the only way out. It meant so much that it was enough for Senator Ted Kennedy to do just that. It didn’t matter that Democratic campaign specialist Mary Jo Kopechne had died on the evening of 18 July 1969, two days after the morning of the day when the three Apollo 11 astronauts had been launched overhead by means of a cone-like combination of skyscraper and bomb. Kennedy could not, in truth, have selected a better night to be the most prominent presidential hopeful in America committing vehicular manslaughter – if, of course, that is indeed what happened – so distracted was everyone on Earth. The Chappaquiddick Incident would dash this last surviving Kennedy brother’s ambitions to be the presumptive nominee in 1972 (George McGovern received the nod), but it did not fully incapacitate him. His continued liberty was, in no small part, due to a convincing performance involving a neck brace and other therapeutic props, along with a compliant local police force in Massachusetts, who ensured that there was no autopsy of Kopechne’s body. Indeed, Kennedy’s explanation of what did occur was so strange and obviously dependent on popular conceptions of the time-bending effects of compounded physical and psychological trauma – resulting from tragedies of both a personal and historical nature – as to resemble Pilgrim’s accounts of alien abduction to planet Tralfamadore: the world of beings who exist in all times at once, and who are thus always already privy to the form of future events. ‘My conduct and conversations during the next several hours, to the extent that I can remember them, make no sense to me at all,’ Kennedy explained, reading from a script into a television camera. His face was weirdly flushed, but his voice was even and flawlessly authoritative. The account of the incident featured a nimble leap between a valiant watery rescue attempt that left the senator panting, concussed, thrown from the confines of standard space and time onto his back on a nighttime lawn. (The viewer could only imagine the stars he saw.) ‘Although my doctors informed me that I suffered a cerebral concussion, as well as shock, I do not seek to escape responsibility for my actions by placing the blame either on the physical and emotional trauma brought on by the accident,’ he said, dropping the ‘T’ word in what was surely one of its highest-profile outings to date. Of course, this, ‘escap[ing] responsibility’, was exactly what he proceeded to do, just a few paragraphs later:

All kinds of scrambled thoughts – all of them confused, some of them irrational, many of them which I cannot recall, and some of which I would not have seriously entertained under normal circumstances – went through my mind during this period. They were reflected in the various inexplicable, inconsistent and inconclusive things I said and did, including such questions as whether the girl might still be alive somewhere out of that immediate area, whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys, whether there was some justifiable reason for me to doubt what had happened and to delay my report, whether somehow the awful weight of this incredible incident might in some way pass from my shoulders.

Kennedy time-travelled. He careened into a future in which he might, at last, become an unmarked man and then swam back again. In the present, he inquired about things that could not possibly be true. His delusion was offered up as proof of his status as a victim. His speechwriter had obviously read Slaughterhouse-Five when it had been released a few months earlier in March – and with a preternatural comprehension of the novel’s symbolic solution to the intertwined problems of guilt and inheritance. The Brothers Karamazov wasn’t enough these days; after all, you couldn’t escape to America, as Dostoevsky’s Dmitri plans to do at the novel’s close, if you were already living in it.

Kennedy’s survivor’s guilt could have come from any number of places and, in this sense, it was easy to believe him. All of his male siblings were dead and his father, Joe, had ordered his eldest sister, Rosemary, to be lobotomized in 1941, when she was just 23 years old. In 1972, National Lampoon printed a fake advert featuring a white Volkswagen Beetle buoyant in dark water to make the awful joke that, if only Ted Kennedy had been driving such a car – famously so non-dense that it would float – at the time of the Chappaquiddick Incident, he would have become president in that year’s election. It is not clear whether The National Lampoon knew that, while alive, Kopechne had driven an identical Volkswagen model. In any case, it was a strange, speculative repetition. Kopechne had been professionally successful, was unmarried at 28 and upwardly mobile. Her careful work strategy, connections and sobriety had not been enough to save her. What you needed to survive in 1969 was, apparently, not the straight and narrow. What you needed was fiction. And guilt.

Date: June 3, 2019

Publisher: frieze

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the article.
This article appears in the print edition of frieze, June–August 2019, issue 204, with the title "Marked Men."

Cover image.

In The National Lampoon.

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1969 advertisement.

On Pseudo-Teen Scammers

OLD TEEN
Keywords: Artists of the teenage con, Bald spots, Grifting, Shoplifting, Soft-focus selfies, Unconditional love

AT THE END OF the twentieth century, American culture figured the knowledge of its teenage population in curious ways. What teenagers knew – ‘You think you know everything!’ their mothers said – was interesting and even profitable, because it was knowledge without agency. The teenager knew, in that she understood the economies, family, schools, institutions, and other systems in which she had appeared, as a result of having been born on planet Earth, in the United States, and, after this, having been subject to the whims of others. The teenager knew, because she had observed the adults. She was attempting to become them. Meanwhile, things were being sold. And the things being sold to her, the teenager, were offered for sale with the knowledge that the teenager did not have a salaried job, nor did she possess other mobilities and freedoms. Again, the teenager knew – perhaps, even, everything – but she could not do much about it. She was a boy or a girl and a minor; possibly she was chattel.

American teenagers of the 1990s were renowned for shoplifting, for working service industry jobs, for purchasing (and sometimes shoplifting) CDs, for dealing and consuming drugs (some of which were prescribed to them by psychiatrists), and for having a poor work ethic, which they allegedly broadcast to the world by wearing clothing they had purchased second-hand or discovered in the trash. These tendencies were all but instantly sold back to them in the form of additional CDs, magazines, movies, and inexpensive clothing that was designed to resemble the even more inexpensive clothing they had been buying second-hand or finding in the trash. Some teenagers had the means to buy these things. Others only observed, wondering if there was such a thing as ‘the authentic.’ But everyone knew.

All the teenagers in America knew everything. I know; I was one of them.

Of course, times have changed. We are in the late – senescent, even – period of the notion of the teen, a moment at which the competing category of ‘tween’ has already long since had its day as a neologism, and the havoc wreaked by the internet on the boundary between public and private life is affecting our ability to comprehend all sorts of narratives. I’m not even sure if you can be a teenager, anymore. Or, for that matter, if there’s anything so special about being a teen. I mean, certainly, you can be fifteen. But it is not clear that it is so very unusual to be an individual who knows everything, but/and can do nothing about/with that knowledge. This particular cultural position seems to be increasingly – and perhaps even disturbingly – well shared out. Now everyone is always on the phone.

In a recent article in The Atlantic proclaiming the end of the teen, as such, Jean M. Twenge describes the lives of teenagers in the following way: ‘… the lure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: twelfth-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.’[1] Twenge, a psychologist who studies intergenerational differences, blames smartphones, along with the unremitting access to social media these devices provide. Contemporary teens are not rebelling or experimenting; they lie around in bed all day screenshotting Snapchat. In the past, American teens had sex and drove; now, according to Twenge, they are more likely to blackmail each other with vaguely illicit, or maybe merely dorky, digital images. Safe in their bedrooms, teens know more and more (they study affect and interpersonal discourse in obsessive detail) and do less and less. One might ask: If they do not become influencers and/or entrepreneurs, are contemporary teens accorded any place in the popular imagination at all?

While I find Twenge’s description of the habits of young Americans plausible, I am myself drawn to different sorts of questions, regarding generation- al shifts. If the ‘old’ teenager, the teen of the twentieth century and perhaps the aughts, was not just a risk-taker or rebel but someone who tried on various adult identities without having to adopt a single one, the end of the teenager could also imply the end of the adult – or, rather, the end of the adult as someone who has chosen a fixed identity for him- or herself. Lives are more reconfigurable – and later on – than perhaps ever they have been. Those who lose spouses go online and find new ones. Those who lose jobs obtain new educations. We comment on articles and videos online as people we are not. As a reticent user of social media, I sometimes fantasize about creating a pseudonymous account or two, via which I might (safely, from the comfort of my bedroom) post and comment as someone other than myself – vociferously, meaninglessly, endlessly. None of it’s malicious, I promise you…

I am a teenager?

But, by the same token, who wants to be a teenager? Who really wants to be that old teen, a minor, in permanence? Someone who has bows in her hair, favours Hello Kitty and Minnie Mouse accessories, dots ‘i’’s with a star, clutching her books to her chest. Someone who wears oversized clothing, speaking softly, with his head bowed, recoiling if anyone tries to touch him. Someone with a certain warmth in her demeanour, a hopefulness, who appears to be in distress. Whose skin is without wrinkles, whose hair shows no traces of gray, who looks like a lost girl needing help. Who is indistinguishable from the teenage mob, waif-like, an androgynous figure hiding behind sunglasses, with a girlish, whispery voice?

The language in the previous five sentences isn’t even my own. It’s taken from reporters’ accounts of adult men and women who have pretended to be teenagers,[2] a confidence maneuver that’s surprisingly common – and perhaps most surprising, in that it occurs at all, for, as noted above, who really wants to be a teen? Among these artists of the teenage con, these ‘old teens,’ are Treva J. Throneberry, Charity Johnson, and Frédéric Bourdin, all of whom were eventually arrested for activities related to their charades and who are richly represented online. Throneberry pretended for over a decade to be fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen. She presented herself as a fresh-faced, pigtailed runaway in need of shelter and schooling in communities all over the U.S. and was largely successful in her act, even as a twenty-eight-year-old. Johnson found many of her marks, women looking for girls in need of a substitute parent, on Facebook. She used Instagram to post adorably captioned soft-focus selfies (‘honey bee love’), and at age thirty-four she successfully enrolled in the tenth grade. The protean Bourdin lived for many years in and out of foster care in Western Europe, speaking multiple languages, hiding his bald spot beneath various forms of teen-appropriate headgear.

Aside from the obvious reasons to be interested in people who engage in these sorts of ‘cons,’ I am interested in them because teenagers are minors; to pretend to be a teenager is to pretend to be a minor. Minors cannot engage in consensual sex with non-minors. Minors must go to school. They may not legally consume alcohol. They cannot vote. To pretend to be a minor when one is not a minor is to in fact possess agency under the law but lie in order to give that agency up, at least superficially. As an old teen, you must establish relationships with proxies, guardians, schools, and other caretakers in order to survive, to have the basic necessities of life. Your relationships with other adults are further circumscribed by the role you are playing. In return, you get to start over, to be too young to know better, to be continually vulnerable and perhaps confused and just beginning – for as long as you can keep the con up. In at least two of the cases mentioned above, even obvious physical signs of maturity like baldness or dry, aging skin were not enough to unmask the old teen. Many marks seem to have been blinded to such obvious contradictory physical evidence by pity, a fact that makes more sense the longer one ponders it.

Old teens are playing both sides of the political gambit. They inhabit the position of deceiver and victim simultaneously, through the form of their chosen con. If earnest and naive, they are ironically, falsely so. If they seem emotionally open, they are engaged in a complex fiction. If they seek affection, it is on duplicitous terms. Yet, old teens, either by reputation or admission, are seldom grifting for money or power. What they want, they say, is authentic, unconditional love. The search for love is a strange knot, for in this quest the old teen is bound to fail. Old teens ask their marks to love someone who does not exist, to raise someone who is already grown. Thus, it’s not just the cunning of the old teen that must puzzle us but also this: Why engage in so elaborate a plot that must, inevitably, fail? Why take such risks for such seemingly minor (please excuse the pun) material rewards?

As I was researching the ‘old teen’ – reading, for example, about Treva Throneberry’s high school romance, or Charity Johnson’s search for surrogate mothers on social media – I had a strange experience: I started to believe I was one. Maybe this was just an instance of the same weird mimetic logic that attends WebMD self-diagnoses, but it might be something more. In particular, Frédéric Bourdin’s bizarre masquerade as a missing American teen he did not even resemble struck me weirdly familiar. (Had I not somehow lived this sort of life, too? I found myself asking.) To escape difficulties created by his confidence ploys as an old teen, Bourdin fled France by pretending to be Nicholas Barclay, a thirteen-year-old Texan who had disappeared three years earlier. Bourdin was ‘repatriated’ to the U.S. and entered the Barclay family drama as a more or less prodigal son. The reason this deception worked for a time, was that some members of the family in fact knew what had happened to Nicholas (he had not disappeared but had rather died).[3] There were at least two cons running at once, and these were even mutually reinforcing. Thinking this through, I began to see the charade of the old teen as more and more recognisable. It wasn’t just that I remembered being a teen and what that felt like, but that I began to see the old teen as a figure for our times, in which the meaning of biological age is so strangely fungible. Now, there is such a thing as a teen only if anyone can be one. There are no more teens, and yet teens are everywhere.

Date: August 1, 2017

Publisher: Vestoj

Format: Print, web

Genre: Nonfiction
Link to the essay.
This essay appears in print in Issue 8 of Vestoj, "On Authenticity."

vestoj-authenticity.png

Cover image.

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Ed Templeton, ‘Teenage Smokers,’ 1999.

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE on Between the Covers

1. J M Twenge, ‘Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?’ The Atlantic, September 2017.
1. K J M. Baker, ‘Forever Young,’ Buzzfeed, September 18, 2014; Y Desta, ‘Whatever Happened to JT Leroy?’ Vanity Fair, August 22, 2016; J Gerstein, ‘8 Cases of Adults Impersonating Teenagers, The Frisky, June 12, 2012; D Grann, ‘The Chameleon,’ The New Yorker, August 11, 2008; E White, ‘Forever Young,’ The New York Times, March 10, 2002.
1. D Grann, ‘The Chameleon,’ The New Yorker, August 11, 2008.

DEC 22, 2022
Lucy Ives : Life Is Everywhere

Novelist, short story writer, poet, and critic Lucy Ives’s new novel Life Is Everywhere has been heralded by some of our most formally inventive and playful writers today, from Jesse Ball to Alejandro Zambra to Percival Everett. No wonder as Life Is Everywhere, a book that contains other books, is hard to categorize. Some have called the structure like that of matryoshka dolls but its inspiration comes directly from an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay that reaches toward a different future for the novel. In Ives’ book we spend just as much time reading the things inside our protagonist’s bag as we do with the protagonist herself. At any moment what we are reading might seem like a #MeToo novel, a book of fictional history, a book of real history, a fantastical adventure of magical statuary, an autofiction, or a “systems novel,” one that looks at how individuals act and are acted upon within structures and institutions, whether a marriage or a university. As Percival Everett says “If Lucy Ives is as smart as her novel Life Is Everywhere, then I am in complete awe. . . . How many books in one and yet one book. This is great writing.” And Jesse Ball aptly adds about this erudite and sly invention, Ives “slays enemy and friend alike.”

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Date: December 22, 2022

Publisher: Tin House

Format: Audio, transcript

https://tinhouse.com/podcast/lucy-ives-life-is-everywhere/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/between-the-covers-conversations-with-writers-in/id583648001?mt=2

Interview with Chris Kraus in Interview

IN CONVERSATION

Lucy Ives and Chris Kraus on Unicorns, Fantasy, and Flaubert

By Chris Kraus
Photographed by Will Matsuda

October 16, 2024

When Chris Kraus got on a Zoom call earlier this month to interview the novelist and now essayist Lucy Ives, she had one urgent question: “How did you develop this mania for research?” Ives, best known for the hit novel Loudermilk and its follow-up, Life Is Everywhere, has now written an essay collection demonstrative of her infinite curiosity and razor-sharp intellect. Titled An Image of My Name Enters America, and out this week with Graywolf Press, it features five braided essays, meandering from subjects like childbirth and My Little Pony to the Assyrian origins of the author’s surname. “I take a lot of risks when I write,” Ives explained. “But I like that challenge of being able to go to the edge of what someone will accept within the piece and then bringing them back in.” Appropriately, her conversation with Kraus below was characterized by a similar spirit of inquiry, as the authors discussed motherhood, fantasy, graphomania, and forging one’s identity in the public libraries of New York City.
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CHRIS KRAUS: Lucy, hi. It’s been a while. When did we talk for your NYU class? Was that a year ago?

LUCY IVES: It seems like that, but I think it was two or maybe even three years ago.

KRAUS: Really?

IVES: Yeah.

KRAUS: Well, I really enjoyed it.

IVES: Well, thank you for coming. A lot of people sent messages afterward saying how special it was for them, and that didn’t happen with the other people who came to speak.

KRAUS: Oh, that’s sweet. Are you in Providence now?

IVES: I don’t actually live in Providence. I live in Vermont. I know, that’s surprising.

KRAUS: That’s one of my dreams.

IVES: Come visit.

KRAUS: We have to talk about that separately, but for now we better circle back and talk about your book, which was amazing. I learned so much by reading it, as everyone who reads it will. These essays, they’re very long and substantial and extremely digressive, and they are driven by your genius for research. And I wanted to ask you about that research. Is that something that goes back to your tweens? How did you develop this mania for research?

IVES: I like that you call it a mania. It definitely is. I guess it started as a kid growing up in New York City and going to libraries at the time. In the 1980s, libraries still had card catalogs, even though people had personal computers. And that was my primary introduction to the archive and these massive analog stores of information. The smell of the cards that people had written on, that there were errors on them, all of that was totally fascinating to me. I guess I just never got over that. When things haven’t been touched for a while or they’re out of public discourse, they become interesting to me. I start to wonder what sort of lives they’ve had in their obsolescence. I love finding out that almost anything that’s been created was also created in the past. Whether it originates from something that happened before or it’s merely a repetition, that doesn’t really matter much to me—it’s just amazing to discover.

KRAUS: What you say about the card catalog is surprising. I imagined that you were a teenager in the early days of the internet and became obsessed. But it’s interesting that you mentioned history because that was my next question. Your research is so exhaustive. There’s a chapter on romantic love where you’re looking at the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. You look at every single aspect of the film, and it’s an enormous gathering of information. Most research is not that comprehensive. How much do you think gets lost in historical memory? Is it ever possible to grasp an accurate image?

IVES: Well, I don’t think you can have an exhaustive image of the past because we can’t even have an exhaustive image of the present.

KRAUS: That’s true. Our perceptions are always very placard.

IVES: Yeah. But we can have a subjective experience of the past that has a certain accuracy because it has to do with surprising ourselves about the present moment. Uncanniness associated with the past goes back to the haunted card catalogs. Surprise and access: that’s what I think I can be accurate about. And I should say that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a film that I’ve probably watched about 300 times. It’s a terrible, terrible movie, but it also has some of the most incredible dance performances in American film. I think it’s really amazing because it’s supposed to be a historical re-enactment of being in the Oregon territories in the 1850s. But of course, it doesn’t turn out to be about that at all. It’s really just about making a movie in America about a hundred years later. I think it shows us this confluence of different professionalized dance cultures and the studio system. But it’s also a movie about human trafficking. I refer to it as a cursed object at the beginning of the essay because I think it backs you into the mistakes of history and how mythical our sense of romantic love is. Romantic love is something that defines someone’s life trajectory, but only by backing into it and going through all of its horrors. It’s really like a horror film in a certain way, and I’m sure a lot of people will be very angry to hear that. Maybe we should cut that.

KRAUS: Flaubert said once that he wrote the whole novel Sentimental Education in an effort to recapture the feeling he had when he saw a certain color of mustard yellow paint on a windowsill. And I wonder, with all of your archival work, what has been the most powerful lever for you to access the atmosphere and the texture of another period?

IVES: Well, I started writing this book because I remembered something very minor. I think even more minor than mustard yellow. It’s this feeling that I had as a child, as a four or five-year-old, looking at a mirror and wanting the mirror to be a portal to another world. I had completely forgotten this wish, and I remembered it a little while ago before I really started putting these essays together seriously. I wanted to write a book that would use adult techniques of doing historical research, but that would partake in that level of fantasy. And I’m not sure why I wanted to make that juxtaposition.

KRAUS: It’s really funny that you say that because reading the book triggered this childhood memory for me in terms of the structure. A game called “The Penny Walk.” Did you ever do that as a child?

IVES: Oh, what’s that?

KRAUS: You’d take a walk and, at every corner, you’d flip a penny and head would be right and tails would be left. So, you’d be creating your own labyrinth in the walk. Reading the book feels like that, like you’re constructing a labyrinth. Inside, inside, inside. Deeper, deeper, deeper. More, more, more. That’s an incredible process, but I guess that’s always your process. Were you aware of trying to up the stakes in this book and amplify that digressive nature?

IVES: Yes. I do want the book to be a space that feels like it encloses you. You can get lost in it, really exit reality in some way and then come back to it again. A kind of comparative experience of feeling like I was somewhere else and now I’m here again. I don’t want people to forget that they’re in the book, but I want the book itself to feel like this space of fantasy. It’s kind of old-fashioned of me, but I am really interested in dreams. I find them very valuable. Something that’s been important to me as a writer has been to teach myself to dream while I’m awake. To be able to access the parts of my mind that make up these fantasy images that I don’t totally understand the origin of and walk around in it. These are the paradises of literature for me. And so, I’m trying to create a version of that. It’s an experiment, but I also mean it quite seriously. The histories that I’m telling, I have tried to verify them.

KRAUS: In the second essay in the book, “An Image of My Name Enters America,” which, among other things, is about the Assyrian origins of your surname “Ives,” you actually describe making a list of topics that the essay is going to cover. You write, “It’s that easy to determine what goes into an essay and what doesn’t. The topics are stopping places.” So, in a sense, the drift you allow in your essays is trying to capture the drift of thought, trying to get to a place that’s more physical. How much do you consciously permit that drift? And do you at times censor it?

IVES: A lot of my writing is done by someone else, and I’m not really sure who that is. She’s me, but when I talk about accessing the dream space, it’s more like a descent into a world where there’s a lot of freedom. Things that don’t make sense here in the world make sense there. For me, the whole reason to write is to be able to descend into that world: to hear the sounds, the music playing, the animals talking. Not to get too weird about it, but it is weird. It’s a lesson of free association rather than trying to bring back messages. And honestly, there isn’t a lot of cutting of material that happens from a topic point of view. It’s really about line edits in the revision process. Each of these essays is pretty much what it was in the first draft. I take a lot of risks when I write. But I like that challenge of being able to go to the edge of what someone will accept within the piece and then bringing them back in. The ability to do that comes from some sort of internal, untranslatable language that I can’t really talk about more than through metaphor.

KRAUS: A visual artist whose work I really like a lot, Marwa Abdul-Rahman, has something similar in her process. She describes it as “audio valence.” She makes these big pieces of assemblages that she feels are being dictated to her—and they are, in a very real sense. And it’s funny that you use the word freedom because that was my next question. What is freedom?

IVES: Freedom. I use that word, but as it’s purveyed to us in the US, I think it’s a pretty freighted concept. It’s sort of a load of kryptonite. A lot of the work that I’m doing as a writer is giving myself permission, developing ways of being in conversation with parts of myself or allowing myself to make these kinds of mental movements. Because the title has the word America in it, I’ve thought, “Should I know what freedom is?” But I guess I view that term as a concept that’s been co-opted and turned into a shtick. To use a phrase that the theorist, Lauren Berlant, came up with, I think that there’s a certain cruel optimism associated with freedom that comes to us wholesale as a received idea. A lot of the privileges that we have are contingent upon our usefulness to institutions. So I think we have to be very cautious about a one-size-fits-all approach. This is not what you were asking me about at all, but one of the things that I really long to do with this book is to have people say to themselves, “You know what? There’s a lot of value in rethinking American history and who gets to tell these stories.” I think there’s a lot to be gained politically and socially from that.

KRAUS: The book opens with you talking about having had a child. Your son must be about the same age now that you were when you were looking through the mirror.

IVES: He’s a little bit younger, but he’s just about to get there.

KRAUS: I imagine that a lot of this has to do with the presence of your child.

IVES: Yes. The things that they say about reliving your own life through your child’s development—not that you’re necessarily living through them, but things return to you that you had forgotten. You are able to access parts of yourself that you didn’t have access to before. Having a child and giving birth, it definitely makes you think about narrative in a different way.

KRAUS: Well, we have to talk about unicorns. That’s one of my favorite parts of the book. You go from a description of My Little Pony to The Unicorn Tapestries at The Cloisters. I haunt that room when I’m in New York. I find them unbearably tragic, the unicorn whose whole body has been assaulted by spirits. How do you react to those? Have you always loved unicorns? And what is it that we love when we love unicorns?

IVES: The unicorn, it’s a double thing. On one hand, the unicorn is a representation of purity: a fantasy about innocence and a power that can renew the world. Everything’s destroyed, but the unicorn appears and it touches the polluted water with its horn, and suddenly all the animals can come and drink. But it’s also a kind of representation of our very uncomfortable relationship with nature, specifically with human nature. That’s why it becomes something in the Middle Ages that, in Europe, is captured and imprisoned and has to have its horn sawed off. It’s something that needs to be harnessed. Bound up in that are all the aspects of humanity that are being oppressed at that time. Interestingly, the unicorn often appears in North America in the 16th and 17th centuries along with the so-called discovery of the New World and the colonization of that space. When Europe begins to colonize Africa, the unicorn appears in Africa. Lo and behold, there’s a unicorn north of Mozambique. Where did that come from? It’s somehow present in these moments of exploitation, these moments in which people are trying to convince themselves that there is something of value to be claimed that is human and also not human at the same time. It’s also why the unicorn is so intimately associated with femininity—because it is a figure for the reproductive power of people who have a uterus, of harnessing the ability to do this thing that’s so natural and also extremely unnatural, which is giving birth to more humans. The unicorn is tamed by a virgin because the unicorn is a substitute. It’s a kind of thing that’s training people to participate in a certain gendered regime of labor. So the unicorn is a very important sign, and when you see it, you should pay attention to it because something is happening there. There’s an ideology that’s being developed. The unicorn never appears in unfraught space.

KRAUS: Wow. I think the heart of the book occurs when you describe this period of your own life when you were an undergrad and you experienced extreme disassociation. You took time off. You went from place to place to place with no particular logic. And it’s the opposite of what happens now in your work. The process of association is extremely sophisticated and streamlined in your work and very effective. So that you experienced this complete dissociation is shocking. You checked out of your normal life and what was expected of you. By writing about it, I think you’re saying that there was a value in experiencing that at the time. Is that right?

IVES: I think by writing that essay, I’m wishfully– after the fact– finding value in it. Becoming unsure if one exists is not a great thing as much as it might be romanticized in some ways. Throughout my life, when I’ve been in difficult circumstances, I’ve said to myself, “You know what? I’m going to try to communicate with a future version of myself. I’m going to pick up this imaginary phone or write an imaginary email.” I mean, one way to talk about it with words that we would use now, which didn’t exist at the time in the early 2000s—I was having a mental health crisis. But I did a lot of writing then as a way of trying to communicate with my future self.

KRAUS: What you’re describing was also kind of graphomania, and that’s terrifying for a writer. Last question, do you think that finding a place of emptiness is essential in order to drift?

IVES: Probably. I think that what’s essential in order to drift is to have a willingness to encounter the strangeness and unevenness of time. Having a willingness to encounter shapes of time that are not directed forward, that are not linear, that are unevenly repetitious, asymmetrical in some way—those are some of the most useful tolerances that a writer can build up. I don’t know if that’s emptiness exactly, but it’s definitely a way of being in dialogue with a kind of presence that doesn’t get a lot of shrift these days. So I’m in favor of that.

Date: October 16, 2024

Publisher: INTERVIEW

Format: Web

Link to the interview online.

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"Lucy Ives by Tan Lin" in BOMB

Lucy Ives, photographed by Will Matsuda.

LUCY IVES BY TAN LIN

I first met Lucy Ives when she edited a short novella of mine, The Patio and the Index, for Triple Canopy. I take a while finishing things up, so we worked on it for over a year and a half, then published in October 2011. Though she's since left Triple Canopy, I feel I've been in touch with her more or less continuously for quite some time. During this period I've read all her poetry—starting with her first book, Anamnesis—as well as her works in prose, including nineties: A Story with No Moral. Anyway, I was recently up in the northernmost part of Manhattan, playing tennis with my twelve-year-old daughter and asked Lucy to join us there, in a spot overlooking Spuyten Duyvil Creek, with the dog roses in bloom. It's one of the prettiest places in the city, and the flowers remind me of the Japanese roses my mother and father used to tend. And there's tennis. Although we met up to talk about Lucy's new novel, Impossible Views of the World, which deals with New York City and the art world, I also had a secret agenda: to get her to pick up a racquet again. She told me she had played as a child.

TAN LIN Are you doing anything autobiographical in Impossible Views of the World?

LUCY IVES Less and less. More and more, I have no life and have to make things up. I've found that to be a good solution to the problem of being a writer. (laughter)

TL I find that life sometimes offers itself up as one long description, rather than one long story, and it's sometimes useful, in fiction, to allow the idea of narrative to subside and description to take over. That's sometimes called the realm of "nonfiction" and it's associated, at least for me, with the use of a documentary apparatus or the bibliographic. How would you describe the relation between fictional and nonfictional elements in your novel?

LI Well, I'm not sure about "nonfiction." For me, nonfiction might not even exist. But that doesn't mean fiction exists in opposition or contrast to so-called real life. Fiction is a way of seeing around corners. It's a system of mirrors that isn't designed to catch my own image, but rather images of what I'm not able or permitted to see in my actual life. I'm not exactly sure how it is you can know something that you don't know, but fiction works like that for me. It's a device for collecting information.

TL What were you trying to collect or see exactly with this latest work?

LI I don't experience life as a narrative structure, so I was curious about that.

TL Life is amorphous and lacks such structure. On the other hand, it's extremely chronological. Can you comment on the distinction as you see it?

LI People talk all the time about the story of their lives, and I thought it might be useful to try to write such a story—except I didn't want to write about my own life, at least not in a straightforward way. I wanted to do something weirder. But, truly, my novel is about relationships. It's often difficult to see the limits of relationships when you're in them, so the book is a way to test those limits and learn more about what it means to exist with others, to be related to them, to be needed by them.

TL Is that essentially a narrative activity?

LI It might be a kind of solitary activity.

TL Stella Krakus, the novel's narrator, is a born observer. In one of the early chapters she's examining her boss's office and sees her "personal collection of bioephemera." And then Stella speaks of her own "wandering eye." I take this to be part of the story's varied inflections, where descriptive nooks and crannies seem to be hiding in the plot. And so, in a way, you have a plot submerged in extensive description and observation.

LI That's right. I really like to linger in description. Originally, there was a very detailed, massive artwork in the book, sort of at the heart of the story, but I cut it out for various reasons.

TL What was it? Can you talk about that artwork a little?

LI It was a large three-dimensional work—a massive cube of wood someone had carved with insane, painstaking detail on five sides, top included, cutting quite deeply, to the center. It showed various intricate landscapes on each side. If anyone were to try to make something like that in real life, it would certainly fall apart. It's not possible to fabricate, which was part of the point.

TL Why did you edit it out of the novel?

LI It didn't do what I needed it to do in the plot. It was at the end, and once I cut it, the thread I was tracing through different places in the book went somewhere else. And that made all the difference. It turned out it was actually a block, a figurative and literal block, even if it was pretty fascinating. There was something important about having a false lure that needed to be taken away in the end.

TL A lure for you?

LI Yes, I think so. It's very strange. In some sense, I must have needed to convince myself to write this novel. But I ended up putting this artwork in a little book of aphorisms and things, The Hermit, which was published last year. I'm very thrifty in that way. Waste not, want not—especially when you've gone to the trouble of creating a massive artwork that can't possibly exist.

TL There must be some residual traces of it.

LI Its residue in Impossible Views of the World relates to certain characters. It led me to create a pair of counterfeiters. I won't say more than that.

TL Is there an appendix that explains this missing artwork?

LI There is an appendix to the book, but it's a historical timeline—so not exactly an explanation. And I'm not sure it has to do with that artwork. It includes both real and fake things, and both real historical events and fictional historical events that only occur in the novel.

TL I noticed more than a few time stamps throughout. Like "8:05," the narrator waking up, the days of the week as chapter headings, the times when emails are sent, and so forth, which are all local and specific and serve to situate or arrange people and the feelings they are having. People are aware of time in the book, and its structure is cued to days of the week, much like a diary. Why is this chronology so important?

LI There is a lot of time.

TL I think about T. S. Eliot's footnotes at the end of The Waste Land, and they are, of course, partly a joke and partly a serious commentary on the failure to achieve coherence across a vast plane. How are we to take your timeline and your time—by which I mean, the time in the novel?

LI Much of the time in Impossible Views is filtered through email, as you note, and the narrator is always on her phone, even though the reader doesn't always know that. It's not always so in your face, but there is a sense of time as mediated and parceled out by email and the functionality of SMS messages, along with some selective web browsing.

TL Yes, Stella's world is highly mediated, certainly by filial and family relationships, and also by technology. I'm thinking of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who described love as a "symbolic media of communication." Certainly a number of semantic codes are at work in this novel, aligned with notions of class and social differentiation, and these are in turn connected to your use of description and observation. Your book is very funny, but also about class and the kinds of feelings mediated within specific social systems, including the museum world. Could you talk a little more about how this relates to the characters? Do they stand in as types that manifest as highly observed descriptions, or as something else?

LI They are types, but I've tried to show, at least with Stella and her parents, some of the complicated nuances of class in New York at the end of the twentieth century. Stella has one parent who is a first-generation American and has experienced a dramatic change in class during his lifetime, and another who is perhaps far more conscious of class but has mostly worked to maintain a certain middle-class position, which she pretends has been hers all along, even if it hasn't. Stella enters this scene with very different ambitions—at least, she thinks so—and proceeds to observe yet another narrative about class as it unfolds in her workplace, where there are members of the one percent, to give a quick thumbnail sketch. These observations play into Stella's descriptive work, as she is often attempting to understand how the institution relates to society at large, whether it's a reflection of society or something else. And it does seem to be truly something else—if not an extremely depressing reflection!

But, then, as you mention, there's also the way in which our networked culture makes its own intervention into these social and economic systems. You'll notice that through emailed articles, and the New York Times online appears as a sort of character in the novel. I think this publication has a lot to do with Stella's class-related interrogations. It provides a counterpoint to her descriptions—as do many of the other acts of communication she engages in on her phone.

TL That's interesting. Sometimes, I like to give my students a book and a set of colored markers. I ask them to mark all face-to-face conversations in blue, all SMS communications in pink, all phone conversations in orange, and all email conversations in green. Then we look at how all those things are tied together. That's part of what I thought about when I was reading your book. Is Stella's primary mode of communication electronic or face-to-face conversation? Or is it some other operational mode working beneath the level of plot? I find it fascinating. There's not a huge amount of dialogue in this book. Can you say something more about this notion of Stella's parceled-out time?

LI Stella is alone most of the time, and she has relatively brief interactions with people. But she's also concerned with a pretty elaborate landscape of the past. There's a personal past, but there's also a historical past, and, contrary to what one might expect, she would like to have a greater commitment to the historical past—and less of a commitment to her personal one. But the presence of her phone, among other factors, makes this difficult.

TL So on the one hand you have a historical—or art-historical—and panoramic scope, then you have details that function in the resolution of the plot, which are also employed to individualize the characters. Can you comment on this crossing between what seem like two different perspectives as they relate to satire and the narrative development of the piece? What does the historical past hold for Stella that the personal one somehow lacks?

LI There is some hope that the historical past, in all its myriad detail and complexity, will provide justice or explain everything. The novel repeatedly offers this up as a possible solution, only to suggest that history is actually at once insufficient and crucial. You're always left to contend with the present.

TL I wonder if there's some sort of criticism of narrative here. You were trained primarily as a poet. Writing a novel is a very different sort of exercise.

LI It took a really long time. This book is the product of six or seven years of work, and I learned a lot about how narrative functions during that time. I don't know if I'm critical of narrative here, but perhaps that's because I'm not entirely convinced that Impossible Views is concertedly narrative. It seems narrative, but it might be something else. Certainly a lot of my other work points to possibilities for structuring writing and working with characters in ways that are nonnarrative.

TL You wrote one novel prior to this one, nineties.

LI Right, but that's really more of a novella. It's almost a short story, though it's too long to be a short story. It's also different because it's primarily an exercise in style. It tries to turn a period style into prose, and characters into a period style. I get the sense that book has often been misunderstood as something it isn't. It's really an object without real people in it, whereas Impossible Views is more of an experiment in trying to think about actual subjectivity, different forms of time, and distinct forms mediating contemporary discourse and narrative.

TL Impossible Views is very character driven. Yet there's a lot of description and very little actual dialogue. Can you say something about how character emerges from description in this book?

LI The narrator is an expert in caricature and satire in drawings. She's also a caricature in some ways. She sees things in a satirical light. I'm very interested in the role of satire in our time because it seems to have taken over our cultural discourse in ways that are actually sluggish and ineffective. Satire doesn't have the kind of liberating force it may have once had, even a decade ago. I get worried when the New York Times rehashes some late-night comic's bit as an item of news in its daily email. It scares me when a newspaper doesn't seem to feel that satire is within its grasp somehow, that it needs to outsource. Maybe it's a deskilling thing in a period when newspapers seem to be in decline. I mean, where are your cartoonists? What is a newspaper, in this case? And what's satire?

TL Has satire become the way we do politics?

LI Of course it hasn't. Satire is a mode of writing and speaking related to irony, with the difference that it's supposed to be constructive. It has much to do with perception and little to do with political agency. But maybe it has become the way we do politics. It isn't that politics is satire, but that we no longer know how to talk about what we would like to be the case and what is the case without recourse to it. Nothing could be more obvious, and yet I think this illustrates the mode—and mood—we find ourselves in. It's good we still have some broad version of satire, because this means there's some possible connection between what we want and what is the case. If there is no longer such a connection, then satire will cease to have meaning—and the impossibility of satire is, to my mind, the impossibility of politics. We are getting close to such a state. Though I should say that there have been some great recent satirical works of fiction, by Paul Beatty and Jen George, among others.

TL If your novella, nineties, was an object and a stylistic experiment, and this new novel is about character, how did you get from one to the other?

LI I don't want to describe myself as being too eccentric, but it's just something that started to happen to me. About six or seven years ago, I was supposed to be doing an academic task when the first scene of this novel just popped into my head. I wrote it down, but I thought: This is not what I'm supposed to be doing right now, I'm not supposed to be narrating this scene. I had no idea what it was, but I just wrote it and this character appeared—the narrator. I somehow found this channel where I could switch into points of view that are coherent. They're like caricatures of subjectivity, but they're also more closely mapped onto language than my own experience of subjectivity as a human being is.

TL I don't understand that. How are they mapped more closely to language?

LI I mean that they exist in language, whereas I'm an embodied, organic thing. They're just there, and I started to encounter them in my academic work, for example. There are other figures who have presented themselves since then, and who I've begun writing about. Some are contemporary people, some are a bit more historical. I know you're not supposed to talk about things that just happen to you. You're supposed to be an expert and do things deliberately, with clear research goals and so on, but my experience of this character is that she just appeared as a kind of dead space within professional discourse, making it possible for me to talk about some things. It goes back to making a device that allows you to see around corners you can't see around in your real life.

TL You're saying that she's a highly mediated stylistic device rather than a character in the traditional sense.

LI Yes, that's exactly right.

TL When does a stylistic device become a character? Was that not desirable for you?

LI I resisted it. That was part of my editorial process, though at some points I did allow her to just be a character and experience certain kinds of contingent events in the story rather than have her just serve as a tool or a device. That part of allowing her to be a traditional character is more complicated for me, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable—deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

TL Why?

LI Because I don't want to suffer, and it bothers me to vicariously experience the suffering of others. I don't want to bring new beings into the world who might suffer, even if they aren't real and will never live and die. It seems irresponsible to me. It's something that I think about and believe about the world. But it's also a form of paranoia, I know. I had a conversation with my editor, Ed Park, about this. He helped me to better describe how people exist in time, instead of showing them as if they existed simultaneously all at once. That's actually how I see things. It's a more normal mode of perception for me.

TL I think that's how everyone thinks probably, with a lot of things occurring simultaneously. Just because thinking is mushy and laying things out in a sequence is—

LI Do you think that means we actually exist in a lot of different moments of time at once?

TL Yes.

LI I think that, too.

TL Narrative is an imposition on an amorphousness that people don't want to accept. Allowing that amorphousness to sit is just as interesting, and I think it results in a different kind of fiction.

LI That is one of the clearest descriptions of something that I've been aware of for a long time.

TL I'm curious about your editor. How did he work with the tension between time as a kind of simultaneity and narrative form as a progression? Was it important for you to have something like a beginning, middle, and end?

LI At some point, my editor encouraged me to stop the action and understand the difference between my descriptions and digressions, and the action itself—what was happening to the characters. He was almost encouraging me to have a more ethical relationship with the characters because in the first draft of the novel there were many more digressions about works of art, literature, and philosophy. There was a whole long passage about Gottfried Liebniz's Monadology as well as other really long descriptive passages. There were also several invented novels that, fortunately or unfortunately, I excerpted at length. (laughter) Those passages were much longer then and there were other elements that went on forever.

TL Was it right to cut those? I'm just playing devil's advocate.

LI I don't know! But you're better than I am at actually thinking and feeling in descriptions. I use them a bit sadomasochistically as a way to explore negative affect and the hell of other people, and to be like, "It's beautiful, you all have to stay here and look at this crap." I think maybe Ed was saying to me, "Do you really want that for yourself? Is that what you want for other people?" He called my attention to what normally I would think of as a sloppy humanist way of dealing with literary elements. He helped me to see that the event is interesting. My novel remains episodic, and it has a pattern, but I'm not sure that's the same thing as a classical plot. If you look at it closely, you'll see there are two patterns running parallel with one another. Together, they approximate something like a plot—or maybe they trick certain readers into thinking that they're reading something that has a resolution.

TL Is that part of the satirical element of the novel?

LI So, again, there are a couple of fake novels that I've included parts of in Impossible Views. The second one I excerpted, Phillip Crystal, is about a young man living in a small city in western New York that is being ravaged by the image industry, by fictional versions of Xerox and Kodak. The novel contains fictionalized accounts of groundwater contamination catastrophes that happened in the '80s. But this novel within the novel is really centered on a nuclear family, and the larger novel doesn't really deal with this matter. It's not an elucidation of family dynamics, really. This is my way of saying that there are unresolved plot elements disguised as artworks throughout the book. It doesn't matter that they're never resolved, because they are just works of art and/or objects. In my opinion, one of the major problems in real life is that many events tend not to be resolved, certainly not in the way that fictional plots are resolved. They're just left however they fall. So I was able to introduce those kinds of elements into my novel by using objects or texts that are incomplete or can't be excerpted in full because they would just completely take over the story.

TL You mentioned that some of the descriptive passages got trimmed or eliminated entirely after editing. What was the line that separated an acceptable description from an unacceptable one?

LI Are you looking for advice? (laughter)

TL Yes! When is too much too much? And how do you know?

LI You don't work on description that way. You're much better at it than I am. You don't have the problems I have.

TL Why don't I have those problems?

LI Because you're better adjusted and were better cared for as a child? I don't know if that's true.

TL I like this idea, but I think I'm quite maladjusted. That's why I prefer long and episodic works that don't go anywhere. But what problems get solved by means of description in Stella's life? She's a very good student of looking and thus of methodologies of description. Can we talk about the psychological dimensions of description for a moment?

LI No, we can't, because, though description might be psychological, I mainly experience it as work. I know you're not supposed to say these things—and though I have a mother who was a curator, I wrote this novel about someone who is trained to describe so that I could prove once and for all that describing things is a real job. I'm sending a message the best way I know how: writing is a real job, too.

Tan Lin is the author of over thirteen books, including Heath Course Pak, Insomnia and the Aunt, 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004, and The Joy of Cooking. A show of his work opens at the Treize Gallery in Paris in October 2017.

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Date: September 13, 2017

Publisher: BOMB

Format: Print and web

This interview is included in the fall 2017 issue of BOMB.
Link to the interview online.

Cover image.

The author Tan Lin.

Leibniz's writing on the monad.

Interview with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

It’s Not the Economy: An Interview with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Lucy Ives: In a piece of criticism you wrote, there’s a quotation from Susan Buck-Morss. She talks about the artwork in modernity as having “the power to interpret reality itself as an illusion.” In my own peculiar reading of the present, we’ve dispensed with reality. But I still see art as a form of critique. You often write about a “logic” associated with photographs; I wonder if you could say something about that, as well as how you understand photographs’ relationship to reality, so-called.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa: I think the photograph has become an almost zero-level instrument of communication with which to reshape the real, with a rate of acceleration and diffusion that’s really hard to wrap one’s mind around. This has happened somewhat independently of society’s collective work of developing widespread visual literacy, so pictures are always acting on us in ways we’re not attuned to or willing to consider. “Logic” has been a term for me to clarify that there’s a calculus at play. By making a series of photographs for a book, I’m also trying to valorize and interrogate a certain logic, or way of approaching reality.

LI: I’m curious about the significance of the book as a vehicle for photographs. I think of Stéphane Mallarmé’s utopian idea that “everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book.”

SW-W: A photographic book is as close to the actual thing the photographer wants you to hold in your hands as they can get. A photobook affords a photographer more narrative control than an exhibition affords an artist. It’s also as close as we can get to giving people democratic access to a photographic experience, with the understanding that most people cannot go to the places where our work is shown. This is why I love writing about photobooks, because they represent what the photographer wanted to put into my hands, from first image to last, from the cover to the end papers. I fell in love with photography in book form long before I went to go see it in museums or galleries.

LI: I want to move beyond the material nature of publishing to the interpersonal. How do you interact with someone, in the course of making a portrait?

SW-W: I make photographs with a 4×5 view camera, which is a modestly transformed version of a 19th-century camera. Its design is almost as old as the earliest cameras we now think of as producing photographs. It sits on a tripod. The one I use is made of beautiful dark wood. A dark cloth snaps on the back, and I put my head underneath. It’s an odd spectacle to see me out on the streets making photographs, as there aren’t a lot of people who are both able and crazy enough to spend the kind of money it costs to make pictures this way, and who do it on a regular basis. I’m always aware that my decision to make an image out in public turns me into an image for others.

When I ask people if I can make their portrait, the question or approach is always the same. I say, “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you,” and then explain that I’m working on a portrait project. I’ll say, “Would you have some time for me to photograph you?” Those are basically the only elements of the request. The whole thing is over in 10 seconds. I’ll walk directly toward the person I want to photograph. I don’t dawdle and flit around. I want to be straightforward. I also want to leave myself as few options to chicken out as possible.

Once someone says yes, I’m interested in everything that prevents them from becoming overly invested in the outcome. I don’t share cellphone pictures of the frame. I don’t carry Polaroid film. I try to dissuade anyone who might want to come gather around. I try to create a bubble in which there’s just myself, the person or people I’m photographing and the camera. One of the main ways I do that is by being quiet, and letting silence grow. I concentrate on how people move, and I think about light. I jealously defend the moment, but I don’t say what I want, because the truth is that I’m not sure. I’ll ask whomever I’m photographing to do things that seem like a variant of what I’ve seen them do before. Like, I would ask, how would you sit if you’re waiting for a friend to pick you up – or, if you’re leaning against this wall, what’s the most comfortable way for you to lean, is it on this side of your body or that. But I don’t say, “Sit here, move your leg, now think about your dead grandmother!” I worry that that would signal something that constructs an anticipation of the image.

Unless you know the weird optics of the view camera, which you can morph in profound ways by adjusting the relationship between the lens and film plane, you don’t really know what I’m seeing. And I don’t want you to obsess about it. When a person turns their gaze on the camera lens, a lot of these little inflections can change, but I’m still drawn to something that seems to belong to people before I even utter the question of whether I might photograph them. There’s a kind of accident that can happen, and it might be a fleeting half-expression utterly unrelated to the moment we’re experiencing together, but nevertheless resonant and compelling. I’m most invested in getting close to that. In a weird way, a person’s anticipatory sense of the image we’re making together gets in the way of me making images, at least in the way I’m trying to.

LI: If, as you say, images get in the way, how did that play into your decision to include archival photographs in One Wall a Web?

SW-W: The appropriated archival photographs turned up by accident. It began when I encountered photographs owned by a man who had lived in Richmond, Virginia, in the special collections at the Virginia Commonwealth University library. He was a member of the FBI who ended up being murdered with an axe in his own house. He had collected these mugshots of people who had been arrested. And there were candid portraits mixed in. It was apparent that these were photographs of people who were bound up in the criminal justice system in some way. I made enlargements of the portraits and mugshots and put them up in my studio. Then a friend urged me to look for found photographs on eBay, and I started looking for 4×5 negatives. I knew I didn’t want prints. That was one of the first things I determined, that I wanted to buy archival negatives that were materially equivalent to my contemporary ones.

But when I’m talking about images getting in the way of me making images, I’m thinking narrowly about not wanting people I’m making portraits of to respond to a pre-existing expectation; that’s the sense in which I try to keep images out. What I would say about the archival images is that as it became clearer to me what kind of work I was making, I understood that my own words or pictures were never going to cover all the terrain I was interested in. Other voices would be needed. The archival negatives immediately gave me a clear sense of a set of histories and genealogies by way of which contemporary conditions in which I was living and working had become normal and, in some sense, invisible. Maybe, in contradistinction to what I said earlier, this means other images also freed me to make images differently.

LI: How?

SW-W: I got more and more interested in describing the world in attenuated ways. The photographs became more oblique. Where I stood and how I made a picture shifted. And the way I made landscape photographs changed a lot. I have to add a caveat to this and say that I am an unreliable critic of my own work. However, I think the landscape photograph became a way for me to get at the pathological investment in violence that I understand to be central to American history and culture.

LI: I think about one archival photograph you include, of a white woman who has a neck wound, being treated in a hospital.

SW-W: The caption for that photograph is Armed Woman Shot by Police, Chicago, 1957. The woman is white, being attended to by an all-black staff. She’s framed centrally, looking out directly at the camera, on her back. Her face is plaintive, and wracked with pain. She’s surrounded by these black hands. They’re not exactly forceful, but what they’re helping to make happen is painful.

I think – to clarify what this image is doing in my book – that the kind of social encounter I’m interested in by way of photography approximates one that precedes or can precipitate violence. I’m interested in the fact that people believe they know things about a person on the basis of the body that person is carrying around and are often impelled to act on the basis of that “knowledge.” I think the bulk of what informs such violent acts is broader and deeper than individual bias. The kind of power we’re reckoning with here can’t be ratcheted down to the manageable abstraction of an individual. Anti-black violence is much bigger than that.

We’ve gone through this period in America where people were trying to say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But it’s not the economy. It’s racism, which not only buttresses the capital economy but has its own economies of desire. These things are important in relation to portraiture because how we look at one another has enormous bearing on how we act.

So, if people travel to the image index in the back of my book and see the titles of the photographs there, they might discover Armed Woman Shot by Police, Chicago, 1957, and they might intuitively think they know what kind of guilty perpetrator will appear in that photograph. But it’s that particular elegant yet pained white woman. She’s being made to suffer by black excellence, being cared for by people who are structurally subordinate to her. What might those black nurses and doctors have been thinking about what would happen if they were doing the same thing as their patient, bearing firearms in front of the police? You have to work to understand what is going on in that room, which is about much more than just one person’s pain.

LI: Your inclusion of the archival photographs activates them as records of the society that produced them. I’m wondering how you see documentary photography’s relationship to the work of deploying images in an evidentiary way, and how you understand the term “documentary,” more generally.

SW-W: Documentary, at least etymologically, has to do with pedagogy. In the American history of photography, the Farm Security Administration photographs from the ’30s play a pivotal role. Documentary photography was used to re-adhere the public to the state, as a scaffold within which national recovery should occur. The images were meant to be transparent, their meanings stable. Of course, they aren’t and never were, as Armed Woman Shot by Police, Chicago, 1957 also shows.

When we get to the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, there’s this crop of new documentary photographers including Robert Frank, and in 1967 there’s this seminal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New Documents, that features Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus: a generation of photographers whose “aim has not been to reform life, but to know it, not to persuade but to understand,” as John Szarkowski said at the time.

Szarkowski’s commentary effects a clear ethical and artistic division between documentary practice in the ’30s and in 1967. At that point, individual creative genius was to be valorized over and against the public sphere or the national body. I have just as much criticism for that notion as I do the statist model. It’s an evasion to claim that rhetorical objects like photographs do not seek to persuade their viewers.

A lot of people in contemporary practice have rejected the term “documentary photographer.” I don’t have any problem with it. I’m willing to speak candidly about the ways in which my photographs are constructed fictions. I can speak to that person who’s invested in a statist model, who would look at a photograph and say, “This person = good, this circumstance = bad,” as though the photograph always only confirms its caption or my best intent. And I’m willing to have an argument with another person who claims that all my book contains is my own creative expression. It plainly does not. Both positions tend toward an anti-social absolutism – one by closing down interpretive responsibility, one by ignoring the politics of the material world.

What I’m trying to “document” isn’t reducible to the individual people who loaned their time to me so I could make their picture, nor is it reducible to the places where I made landscapes. It’s not reducible to singular images. I’m trying to photograph a non-figurable operation of power. I’m trying to photograph the literal fact of something evanescent: the violent operations of white power in a process of normalization and legitimation, which is experienced radically differently, depending on one’s race, class, gender or sexual identity.

Plainly, while the term documentary stays stable, what defines it as a practice varies over time. Sometimes a historically normative form of artistic expression is useful as a way to communicate, in part because of the limitations of its values and rules, as in Armed Woman Shot by Police, Chicago, 1957 for instance. I happen to agree with many critiques of humanist documentary photography, and I am also equally committed to describing what’s happening in the world because it’s fucked and we need to do something about it. I’m trying to work out a way as an artist of holding to both of these positions simultaneously, because they’re not contradictory. How we see and how we act have a history. The images I make or appropriate, and the texts I write or appropriate, are also working in relation to those histories, sometimes in sympathy, often by way of subversion. This is the material I have to work with and this is the best way I know how. I’m simultaneously marveling at the world, and being quite frank about terror.

LI: Do you think the people you photograph are aware of these goals? Can they be?

SW-W: It’s a lot to saddle somebody with. And this comes back to my concern about pre-empting an incident in which something else might occur. I know what I believe, but I don’t know what’s going to happen when I photograph. That not knowing is vitally important, because I can be right about a person and categorically wrong about the portrait that might ensue. If someone asks me what I’m doing, I’ll say I’m interested in how people are living in this particular moment. I’m interested in what it feels like and what it looks like. I’m interested in what it means. I’ll always be interested in that because I make portraits. I’m interested in complex moments of shared relation. I don’t outline my politics, because the risk is that then you’re not only asking that people collaborate, but also endorse your views. And they may not! In sharing my beliefs, I might also imply that the portrait we make will necessarily confirm my views, and that in that sense they will be willing accomplices to my politics. I’ve photographed people with whom I disagree profoundly. Whether that disagreement has anything to do with how they look in a given place and time is rarely, rarely relevant.

LI: How can it be that that’s not relevant?

SW-W: I made portraits of this young guy for a period of about a year when I was in Richmond. He harboured some deeply anti-Semitic beliefs and conspiracy theories about world governance. At certain points I was trying to find a way to photograph those beliefs, but they weren’t visible. Other things were visible – scorn, disdain, a kind of aloofness and insecurity – but, those might add up to something different in an image. So, what’s my responsibility? If this person isn’t covered in swastikas, how do I photograph his anti-Semitism? Is it enough to define him? I could use a caption. I could quote him. But then what am I asking you to bring to this photographic encounter except an excommunicative judgment? And what work does the portrait do to reckon with the complex structures of feeling from which views like this grow? Since the photographic portrait approximates and at the same time creates a certain social encounter, it’s important to deal with the uncertainty inherent in our relations with the unknown and to question how we think and act in that suspended potentiality.

Date: September 1, 2018

Publisher: C Magazine

Format: Print

Link to the interview (abridged).

Full text of interview with images by Wolukau-Wanambwa available as PDF, below at right.

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C Magazine / Issue 139, "Trust"

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Interview in The Creative Independent

On committing to your creative work
Author Lucy Ives discusses the economics of writing, stories about stories, finding infinity, and the sadness and fear that comes from completing a project.
From a conversation with Maddie Crum
July 8, 2021

Some of the plots in your newest collection, Cosmogony, involve fractured working lives. What is your own experience with juggling writing with making a living? Or, what advice would you give to someone who’s trying to juggle writing with making a living?

It’s hard. And I think for one’s own sanity, it’s good to recognize that it’s hard, and not feel annoyed at oneself if it’s a struggle. I think that can be really hard, how annoyed we can feel about how hard it is. I think the advice that I received, and which I followed and found useful, was to just keep doing it, by which I mean writing, and do it all the time, like when you have time, because it accumulates.

I freelance and teach. I don’t make enough to live from writing. And yeah, I guess I would just say, it takes a lot of practice. I think people don’t talk about that, that writing itself—not just like, “Oh, it’s hard.” But that it isn’t natural. It’s like playing the piano or something like that. You have to stay with it to be able to do it well, or be happy with what you’re doing. I don’t have great advice about it, because I think, to me, at least, it remains a struggle, but I think you also get more accepting of the fact that it is a bit of a struggle all the time.

Several of the stories here are metafictional. The narrators talk about narrating, and the satirical characters discuss satire. When did you first become interested in metafiction, or stories about stories?

I always liked that idea that a character can sort of turn around and say, “Actually, I know what’s happening here, and I know that there’s a reader here, and that I’m not alone.” I would have to think for a while to figure out when I first came up across the idea of metafiction. I would guess that it was probably in children’s literature somewhere. But like many people, there was some point when I came upon the sort of big, dead writers who have metafictional things in their work.

And I guess the big people for me are Nabokov and Flaubert, although Flaubert, he’s a more subtle metafictional artist, and he’s more interested in extractic things, but I’ve always liked that. I like doubling. I like it when there’s another work of art inside the piece of writing, and when there’s some kind of writing on that work of art and in that writing. There might be a scene in which there are people talking, and those people might talk about another book, and then inside of that book, there might be a reference to a landscape, and in the landscape, there’s a little goat, and the little goat is singing a song. And then a gnome comes along and shows the goat an urn, and on the urn there’s… I could go on forever, but I just, I like that. I like that distance, because I find that sometimes I feel sort of imprisoned in life, and it’s great to be able to find that distance somewhere, that sort of infinity.

I was going to ask which metafictional stories you like best, but you’ve gone over that a bit. I’m curious just for my own interest, which Flaubert novels or works are metafictional to you, or which interest you in that way?

Well, I would say Madame Bovary is just, it’s perfect. You just learn so much about the world that is in the novel and also about the author’s rage about the culture of his time, and what you’re allowed to talk about and what you’re not allowed to talk about.

And I would also say the book of three stories that includes “A Simple Heart” is an under-read gem. It’s truly, I think, one of the greatest works in fiction. And recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Robert Glück, who’s an American, a living American writer, and his work. I don’t mean in-person spending time with him, but spending time with his work, and his novel Margery Kempe was recently released by New York Review Books, and he has some of that kind of descriptive magic in that book. And that was a book that he wrote by interviewing, I don’t know how many, like 40 of his friends or something, about their bodies, and he partially uses that to create just these incredible acts of description, and you kind of can’t believe you’re reading it, because it’s so beyond vivid. So, there’s a lot of infinity in that book, too, just to give another example of what I mean.

Do you feel that Realism is a limited form for describing the world as it is today? Or maybe just for you personally? It sounds like you feel hemmed in by it.

Well, I think that there’s part of me that feels like she was sold a bill of goods a long time ago, and is still resentful about that. And I guess, I somehow absorbed some kind of, I don’t know, idea about mimesis or imitation, whereby there’s the book, and the book is a mirror of the world, that just contains a picture of the world in it.

But as I spent more time with literature, I come to find out that books are tied to all sorts of other forms of media, and the ways in which language engages in acts of depiction are very complicated, and have to do with all these different forms of technology that we use to provide ourselves “shadow images,” as Plato would say. So, I think that there’s part of me that is—it’s like a grieving part of me that is like, “Wow, I wish Realism were just as simple as that.” As saying, “There’s a cat,” and describing what the cat does. But it doesn’t seem to work like that.

When you’re talking about this remark about Realism, you’re referring to something that one of the characters in the story “Scary Sights” says, that Realism is a secular form, a secular mode for depicting reality. And I think there’s something also about that idea of it being secular that’s important, because humans also haven’t really done without god or deities for most of their history. And so, the confidence of Realism is also something that I find very suspicious, although I don’t totally understand why, but that confidence that I can really show you something that’s there, and that you will recognize.

Some of your stories, and I’m thinking of one in particular, “Recognition of This World is Not the Invention of It,” consider systems and theories versus lived experience. I’m interested in that subject, and the idea of showing both theory and practice in fiction.

I think one of the things that I was trying to do there, or it interested me to do there, was to have a character who is doing everything wrong. And to summarize quickly for someone who hasn’t read the story, essentially, this person is trying to quantify how well she can perceive the world in comparison to the other people around her. And she has this imaginary formula, a mathematical formula. She’s trying to quantify what she can see, and what she can know. And I think that we often use these very peculiar kinds of mechanisms to orient ourselves in the physical and social world, and so this is just an example of one kind of peculiar mechanism that a person could have. But part of what the story’s trying to do with that very theoretical way of kind of getting around living, is to show you where that theory comes from, and then also to show, I think in an optimistic way, that a character can move beyond that.

And there is a moment, a very extreme moment of praxis in that story, too, which is contemplating driving her car into an oncoming car, not to give too much away there, but that character is in a lot of pain, and so is looking for a way out of it. The theory is something that’s being used to make that pain survivable. And it’s part of the job of the story to show how one can move beyond using a construct like that, keeping uncomfortable, upsetting, painful things at a distance, and to have a different kind of relationship to them.

You write not only stories, but also novels and poetry and nonfiction, as you’ve mentioned. Do you typically set out with a medium in mind? In other words, do you know what you’re writing is a story or a poem from the outset?

Right now, I’m very prose-obsessed, and that is the form that I’m interested in right now, primarily. So I write a lot, and there are things that I write that are not for public consumption. That might be poetry, or I take a lot of notes, too. But I often will have a big picture idea for something that I want to do. Like with this story collection, an editor said, “Hey, do you have a story? I want to try to publish a story by you.” And I did not have a story. And I was really afraid of writing stories, because I thought I was very bad at it. I had written one short story in my life.

So I had a couple of misses. And then somehow, I managed to write a story that worked and that the editor liked, which was really amazing to me. It seemed like a miracle. And after that, I had this idea of, “Okay, I’m going to write a book of short stories, because I have to get over this fear of short stories.” And so that was really where the book kind of came from. And I think that fear of the short story was also related to other kinds of fears about living that are in the book, too.

Do you find that short stories are generally more plotted than something like a novel? Is that part of your fear of them?

Yeah, and there’s a different kind of plotting, in my opinion, that’s associated with the short story, and you don’t have very much space, so you have to know how you’re going to get in and how you’re going to get out of the story. It can be this kind of hermetic form, or a form that can’t just spin out; it really has to close.

What does the process of revision look like for you?

I revise the book, and then a few other people read it, and then there is a master document listing all of the things that have to be revised. And then those are broken out, and the book is printed out in various ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever used that function on the printer, where you can do four pages to a sheet or six pages to a sheet. I’ll often read things I write in very small font, to get an overview of them. And then I’ll print them out in really big font, and look at them that way.

I think when you zoom out that way from a novel, it’s much easier to read it, and it’s much less painful to read your own writing, when it’s very small like that. So I find that very effective for either cutting the text down or reorganizing the text. And then if I make the font really big, it’s super painful to read it, because I have to confront my own idiotic ideas.

How do you know when a piece is finished?

Usually I’m overcome with sadness and fear, actually. And when I have that feeling where the bottom drops out of things, I know that it’s done.

Some Things Lucy Ives Recommends:

Three books on love. In the past year or so I’ve been thinking a lot about love in its various manifestations—from the good, to the obsessive, to the agonizing, to the transcendent, and back again—and want to recommend three very different books about it, bell hooks’s meditation All About Love, Robert Glück’s novel Margery Kempe, and Taeko Kono’s short story collection, Toddler Hunting. The last of these is not for the faint of heart.

A staircase. If you are in Murray Hill in Manhattan and have a spare moment, I recommend a visit to Dover Street Market and an unusual staircase inside. Madeline Gins, a poet, philosopher, and architect whose writings I have edited, designed the “swallow’s nest”-like “Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator” in collaboration with Rei Kawakubo. Gins was interested in creating structures that would help people evade mortality; she and her partner, the painter Arakawa, famously declared, “We have decided not to die.” Their work seems particularly refreshing and prescient now.

Some animals. Three years ago, I moved to a rural area and at this time learned about a large mammal I had never heard of before, the fisher, sometimes referred to as the “fisher cat,” although it is not a feline. A quick thumbnail: it possesses a toylike head with round ears, a snout stuffed haphazardly full of hook-like teeth, a pointlessly long and supple body, anodyne peg-like limbs nevertheless festooned with claws. Sounds cute, right?

Since this time, I’ve become more curious about my own ignorance regarding the diversity of sentient, intelligent, mobile entities out there, both present and historical. It’s a bit presumptuous to “recommend” animals, but perhaps I can just mention two. This spring, I have been teaching a workshop on memory and one of my students mentioned the prehistoric titanoboa. It’s very large. A very small animal I see on a daily basis and which I’ve come to feel affection for is the pseudoscorpion, not least of all because it eats booklice.

Date: July 8, 2021

Publisher: The Creative Independent

Format: Web

Link to interview.

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Interview with Lara Mimosa Montes

On site.

TURNING TOWARD THE THRASHING: LARA MIMOSA MONTES INTERVIEWED BY LUCY IVES
The writer on her new poetry collection, rearranging the nervous system, and a fact’s capacity to contain its own strangeness.

My first memory of spending time with Lara Mimosa Montes takes place in an old apartment in Ridgewood, New York. This was eight or nine years ago, when Lara and I both resided in the city and both of us were PhD students, at CUNY and NYU, respectively. It was a small party and most of my recollection from this occasion is of Lara, who was so striking and intelligent and kind. Our friendship has outlasted that party and context, including the doctoral programs (from which I am very glad to say we both graduated). These days Lara spends most of her time in Minneapolis, while I’m in rural Vermont. But we each return to New York—where, incidentally, we were both born—with some frequency and also visit each other where we live now. It’s lucky when you find a friendship like this, one that seems to transcend life changes and the limitations of geography.

This interview was conducted over email in October of 2019. Lara sent me the then-manuscript of her beautiful now-book THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press), a work of serial prose that functions like an essay, a poem, a refrain, or even a film. With its aphoristic lines and longer paragraphs, she is constructing a sort of anti-monument: to events in her own life that resist description; to the past and present of the Bronx; to contemporary artists and writers and friendships; in the spirit of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark; against death but not without deep engagement with loss. Here we spoke (wrote) about the weird porosity and interdependence of fiction and real life, so called, among other things. It’s something special for me to share this conversation with readers of BOMB. I feel I’m extending a small part of my own more private or personal self. Lara brings that out.

—Lucy Ives

Lucy Ives
Early on in THRESHOLES, you introduce the notion of “a fictional character with actual feelings,” an idea that would imply that surrogacy is important to the process of storytelling (or, perhaps, the kind of storytelling that interests you). As the book is a work of nonfiction that foregrounds form, I wondered if you could expand on this idea of mixing the fictional and the actual in writing. Is a fictional character with actual feelings a surrogate for an “actual” person?

Lara Mimosa Montes
Surrogacy—that word in itself contains so much; it’s fraught with maternal associations and gestures, like the kind that involve the willingness to embody, at least temporarily and perhaps on behalf of another person(s), another body or alternative subjectivity. Another trope associated with surrogacy is possession: it is not “I” who speaks in this work, but the stranger whom I carry. If THRESHOLES contains elements that strike a reader as a mix of “the fictional” and “the actual,” perhaps it is because I often felt that I was not “the author” so much as the surrogate for the work. That anxiety about “who is speaking” at any given moment in the text appears throughout the book, and sometimes I experienced this anxiety as a philosophical problem, at other times, a spiritual one. I thought that when I finished the book, I would be done with that question, but I still feel like I am standing in someone else’s shadow.

In this way, the figure of the surrogate also invokes the understudy and the stand-in, as well as the double. So in order to write about the various displacements I had been feeling, these categories of “fiction” and “actual” end up becoming pretty porous. Some months ago, for example, my boyfriend, Ernie, and I were watching a VHS copy of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and in the scene we were watching, where James Woods puts a VHS into the VCR, it was the same time in the movie, 9:44 PM, as it was in the world. I don’t understand how an author becomes a character, or when a carefully coordinated set of truths becomes literature. I just know that it happens all the goddamn time.

LI
That sounds uncanny. Could you say more about how THRESHOLES deals with the act of returning to a place which might once have been familiar?

LMM
The title THRESHOLES comes from a work by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, part of his series Bronx Floors. After I spent some time with this series at the Bronx Museum’s Anarchitect exhibition and then read his Collected Writings, I felt that his understanding of space, line, and form resonated with my general interest in memory, repetition, the allure of substitution. I have always maintained a belief that the uncanny is all around us, so when I read Matta-Clark’s notecards alongside his works, works which I realized also double as the documentation of the work, I wanted to avail myself in my own work of a fact’s capacity to contain its own strangeness. For example, threshole is to threshold as Myrtle Gordon is to Gena Rowlands. Do you remember the multiple-choice analogies section on certain standardized tests from when you were a child? Because I do. I suffered a great deal to understand and then narrate what one unknown quantity had to do with another.

The story of how one object or set of objects may or may not correspond with another is seldom a matter of truth, but instead a matter of perspective; however, were I to rewrite this sentence, I might just as easily consider: The story of how one object or set of objects may or may not relate to another falls somewhere between truth and fiction. In my writing, I don’t distinguish much between my capacity as an author to imagine and invent the relationships between things (ie. facts, objects, people) and my capacity to experience them “in real life.” I have also never forgotten our phone conversation shortly after your novel Impossible Views of the World came out where you said something to me along the lines of “Some truths are so horrible, they can only be rendered as fiction.”

LI
That was maybe a little dramatic of me! I do want to say that now, when I read the coverage of the various Sackler museum wings and stairs, etc., that are having that family name removed from them, I wonder if I couldn’t have done even more in my novel to describe the donor class. Although I think I was talking about something more personal when I said that to you.

But to circle back to the question I just posed, I wonder if you ever find that you notice something about your real life that you didn’t notice previously, having written something fictional. I know that’s a bit broad, but something in your mention of standardized-test analogies makes me think that we probably agree that “real life” and “fiction” are not opposed to each other—and are perhaps both the products of the same sorts of world-making processes. But maybe there’s a difference between them, in that they can be mutually illuminating in some ways. What do you think?

LMM
I know it’s dramatic—that’s why it stayed with me. The truth is horrible, and I don’t always want to write toward it. If not the truth, then what? What am I writing toward? In THRESHOLES, I tried to be okay with this not-knowing. The not-knowing takes place somewhere between the not-yet-written and the not-yet-lived. In this way my writing “practice” feels pretty entropic. Recently, I confessed to someone that I am made nervous by my imagination; the problem with my imagination is not that I love to speculate (I do), but that I also like to test how real and realizable certain fictions are, and then, out of some world-making desire or, more likely, some self-destructive impulse, I end up writing about the outcomes of these thought experiments in real time, as they are taking place, materializing and changing in the moment of writing. I feel a bit too close to my work, and not because I write “about” myself but because I haphazardly subject myself to my own thought experiments and all too willingly participate in my own fictions, all of which have real effects on my actual life. It’s pretty confusing, so I’m not sure if I would describe the process as one of illumination. That might be too optimistic.

LI
Could you describe one or two of these thought experiments? Do they, for example, begin with a premise/hypothesis that you then “test” or watch unfold? I know you may not have meant the term “thought experiment” totally literally, but since film seems to be so much a part of the work you do, I wondered if there might not be something cinematic about this process of creation/self-testing.

LMM
One of the thought experiments I pursued while writing THRESHOLES was “speak from a subject position that is no longer.” In order to address that task, I had to think and read a lot about change, transformation. I reread books by writers like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Melissa Buzzeo, and Clarice Lispector, in order to reflect upon the question, “What happens to a person when they realize they are turning into something else?” I didn’t reread Kafka, though. I was very intentional about reading mainly women during this time, because the kinds of change I had in mind were also inseparable from my interest in the unspeakable. So in approaching the prompt to speak from a subject position that was no longer, I might follow up with: How do you experience your own disappearance? Can this be written about and how?

Since this process is not one that I can always document, in part because these processes are based in somatic experiences which do not always lend themselves to language, in some instances it was just preferable to watch a movie. Plus, I like films not so much because they are stealth fictions, but because I really enjoy watching an actor work through a scene, and I sometimes think of a scene as a given director or screenwriter’s “thought experiment.” I also imagine certain actors, in order to play a part, must invent their own thought experiments. I can’t be the only person who wonders how in the world Elizabeth Berkley got her mind right to play Nomi Malone in Showgirls.

Anyway, you can imagine that certain questions or thought experiments, cinematic or not, are seldom compatible with everyday life. For example, the task of imagining and exploring “the subject position that is no longer” is just not compatible with Thanksgiving. It’s really hard for me to live in the real world most of the time. I just… prefer not to.

LI
There’s an amazing moment in THRESHOLES when the speaker begins to reflect, in response to another person’s bizarre generalization, an off-hand remark about reality, so called: “I took a few moments to imagine the various ways one might respond: Yes, yes, I know how reality works, so no need for the preamble! Or: No, I don’t know. Please, tell me more. Or maybe I would answer a question with a question: Well, how do you know how reality works?”

I smiled deeply, reading this, but I also felt sad. The instant at which we recognize that someone we know believes that they know “how reality [really] works” can be one of disappointment and even loneliness or isolation. At the same time, I can’t help seeing THRESHOLES as an exploration of the constructed nature of reality, which is to say, of “how reality [really] works.” I wonder if the absurd (a.k.a. absurdity) is an important category or affective register for you—and, if so, how you understand it and, specifically, the way it operates in the contemporary United States. Can (shared) recognition of absurdity bring relief? Might it be a style of knowledge, even?

LMM
I’ve never considered that category, the absurd, in relation to my work too much, because I tend to associate it with Dada, and things like Salvador Dalí and his pet ocelot, Babou. But Beckett is absurd. So is the work of Sophie Calle, and I love her writing. I’m so happy that The Address Book and Exquisite Pain exist, so I respect her a lot. But the way that the United States is absurd is so dark and wrapped up in the political. Were a writer to explore the absurd in relation to American tendencies and the like, I imagine she’d have to be pretty versed in satire to some degree, no?

LI
Yes. Probably so well versed in satire that the critique side of things would turn into some sort of weird celebration! Which is just to say that I’m not that sure about the efficacy of satire these days. I think I’m more interested in your thought experiments at this point. Or something you mentioned earlier, “stealth fictions.” One last trio of questions for you: You came close to saying this a moment before, and I meant to press you on it: Is there a definition of a “threshole”? Also, what does the writing of thresholes do to the figure of the author? Does this practice refashion the author in some way?

LMM
Threshole: noun. A point of cross-over, portage, or a violent passing through. It’s a portmanteau. Thresh is a variant of thrash + hole. Threshole is also a double or doppelganger of threshold, “the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested,” according to the dictionary.

Thresholes also refers to the form. Rather than write a crown of sonnets, I wrote a book of thresholes. I imagine there are readers out there who will think this kind of poetry is sloppy or “anti-form,” but how can it be? What is madness without form? There are many antecedents to this kind of writing like Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, and of course your book, The Hermit. The nature of writing thresholes requires an openness to permutation, obsession, cellular reconfiguration, psychic transport, phenomena that happen abruptly and alter the grammar, the time-fabric of the work. So while I pride myself on being an empirical person, something about this process definitely “undid” me. My nervous system, my diurnal patterns, my writing practice—everything had to rearrange itself in order to do this work.

I am obviously still struggling to describe “the work.” I’m not talking exclusively about the book anymore, but the process of becoming flesh. I think there are many writers for whom “the body” is an abstraction, but in my work, the body is never an abstraction or stand-in for something else. I’m also not sure if the level of somatic awareness I had to cultivate in order to write this book is something that can be “taught” so much as given over to. That was often how I felt writing this, given over to something else, often without my permission. To experience this given-over-ness, I had to let go of this fantasy of “consent.” So, for better or worse, I end up turning toward the thrashing instead, an activity which is as familiar to me as it is violent. Am I writing this as a woman, or am I writing this as someone who has experienced a certain kind of violence, and is that violence inseparable from my knowing myself as a woman, and as a writer? I don’t believe this question is a hole we need to dig ourselves out of just yet.

Date: June 16, 2020

Publisher: BOMB

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

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On site.

Photo of Lara Mimosa Montes by Rijard Bergeron.

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THRESHOLES.

On Notice in Bookforum

On Notice
May 13, 2020 • BOOKFORUM TALKS WITH LUCY IVES ABOUT A NEW MADELINE GINS ANTHOLOGY • AMELIA SCHONBEK

THE SADDEST THING IS THAT I HAVE HAD TO USE WORDS: A MADELINE GINS READER BY MADELINE GINS. EDITED BY LUCY IVES. CATSKILL, NEW YORK: SIGLIO. 328 PAGES. $28.

Madeline Gins (1941–2014) never took anything for granted, certainly not something as foundational as language. Gins was a philosopher, writer, agitator, and architect. She is probably best known for her project Reversible Destiny, an elaborate philosophical endeavor she developed with her husband, the artist and architect Shusaku Arakawa, that questioned the inevitability of death. Over the course of several decades, beginning in the 1960s—often in collaboration with other artists, scholars, and architects—Arakawa and Gins conducted research, made art, wrote manifestoes, and designed and constructed buildings that they believed could extend inhabitants’ lives. Calling into question the fixed meanings of words was central to Reversible Destiny. Gins and Arakawa believed that continually interrogating our perception of the world, and the way we represent it through language, could transform our understanding of its basic terms—perhaps even death was not so inevitable after all.

Long before she tried to remake the world through architecture, Gins wrote poems and novels that experimented relentlessly with words. The writer and scholar Lucy Ives has edited a new anthology of Gins’s previously unpublished and out-of-print work, The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words. The volume centers Gins’s early experimentation with language, showing how her poetry was engaged in much the same world-expanding project as her architecture. “Poetry may be writing, of course, but . . . it is also image, performance, gesture, song, social life, gossip, furniture, food, shelter, dance, research, email, garments,” Ives writes in her introduction. “Madeline Gins is the one who taught me that.”

We’re talking in the midst of a pandemic, and the world feels upside down. Which is a fitting time to be thinking about Madeline Gins. I’ve been wishing that I could talk to her about all this, and wondering what she’d be doing, or writing, under quarantine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about her long poem “What the President Will Say and Do!!” It’s supposed to be a parody of executive speech. But it also functions as a series of impossible tasks that are available to anybody who might be interested in them. I think if she were here, Gins would come up with a series of playful tasks. And she would continue to discover new kinds of space within the space of quarantine. My intuition is that she would be very good at it.

Let’s go back for a minute. Gins flies under the radar for most people. How did you find your way to her work?

It happened when I was in poetry school. A very strange place to be, and I was an extremely awkward person. In Iowa City, there’s a bookstore called Prairie Lights where people gave readings. Whenever I went to one, I would pretend to be very busy browsing the books beforehand, so that no one would try to talk to me. Once, I was looking through the art books and I saw a big hardcover catalog that said “Arakawa/Gins” on the spine. I took it out and started looking through it and I was like: “What is this? Is this an architecture manual? Is this a projection of a utopia that people were going to build—and did they build it?”

I went to the library the next day. The University of Iowa library had a very thorough collection of poetry and experimental fiction in the stacks, including Gins’s WORD RAIN. I looked at it and was shocked by how weird it was. I was like, “This is not allowed—how is she doing this?” She’s making the pages into images, she’s included photographs, and the writing is so precise but also funny and strange.

I don’t think I threw it on the ground and ran away, but it was definitely one of those books where you put it back and you’re like, “I need to think about this for a little while.” This was the time of WMDs, when all of this invented language had become part of the larger culture. Seeing the ways that Gins manipulated language was a release, an escape from that culture. What she was doing was transgressive, but she had manipulated language in a way that was so much more extreme and intelligent.

When you tell this story in the book’s introduction, you mention that Madeline Gins was firmly not being taught in your MFA program. In that context, encountering something as off-the-wall as her work probably seemed even more bizarre.

It seemed like, “Oh maybe this person doesn’t understand that you’re supposed to write poems that will be published in literary magazines.” There was a sad version of me that was capable of that thought.

Who were Gins’s fellow-experimenters? And did your sense of her writerly family tree shift as you spent time in her archives?

The most obvious person in that family tree is probably Gertrude Stein, who was interested in space and language in a very particular way, one often read as an extreme high-modernist stance. But scholarship has shown that it was a kind of secret language that she shared with Alice B. Toklas. So, her writing is part of a domestic practice. That’s also something important to think about with Gins. She was trying to figure out a way to have a productive, collective life that is not based on the nuclear family. As she was reimagining the association of people one grows and learns and works with—her writing was part of that as well.

But I think you can put Gins in the context of various experimental traditions. I put her with Hannah Weiner, who was a friend of hers. Weiner was also an underwear designer, and had a practice that wasn’t just writing poetry, but also involved performance and the fabrication of semiotic objects of various kinds. And I think about the poet Bernadette Mayer, and her sister Rosemary, who’s a visual artist and worked a lot with fabric. And there’s the artist, writer, and philosopher Adrian Piper.

She also fits in with writers who had experimental or very capacious conceptions of what the book object could be. I like thinking about Laurence Sterne—you know the black page in Tristram Shandy—in relation to WORD RAIN. The idea that the act of writing and the existence of the book can, in this kind of impossible twist, be folded into the narrative, so that the existence of the book is foreseen within the fiction, as well as the existence of the reader. That kind of reflexivity—what people now call metafiction. Once we start thinking about Gins that way, we can fit her into the American tradition at a different level of experiment, along with what I think of as a group of men who’ve been taken very seriously.

As a poet, there is a singularity about her. There are ways in which literature is always threatening to jump out of its disciplinary boundary. That’s one of the most interesting things about it—it’s always trying to invade other disciplines and take them over. You can see that in spaces like literary theory, for example. You can think about Gins lots of different ways, but she seems most unique if you think about her as a poet.

On that note, let’s talk about words. In all the writing collected in the book, it feels like Gins is in a constant, very physical, relationship to words, whether it’s wrangling or playing—or many other things. The book could be read as one story about Gins and a character called “Words.” How did you come to understand her many stances toward language?

It’s interesting, when you look in the archives, there’s a lot of unpublished material from what I believe is the 1960s and ’70s, a period of just incredible productivity for Gins. In the beginning, she had a typewriter practice. You see a lot of typewriter use in text-based conceptual art, and I don’t think it’s just because that was an available technology. A typewriter is very physical, in a different way than a laptop or even a pencil is, because of the specific sound, and the time between when you strike the key and when the letter is struck onto the paper. It’s like a hiccup. There’s an anticipation, and then an event takes place. Working with the typewriter allows us to kind of stumble around words, and to see the materiality of their spellings, their art of orthography, and the number of character spaces that they take up, in a kind of fuzzy, inexact way that can lead to innovation. Gins produced at least one pretty long, strange, stream-of-consciousness novel, which she never published, about a woman whose body seems to dissolve. That was really something that couldn’t be excerpted.

I think some of Madeleine’s work in this period is related to the Natural Language Philosophy trends of the time. People are exploring the surprise that language exists at all, and that it may structure our very thoughts. There’s what I would call an aesthetic, categorical relationship to language, and there’s also a very rich materialist relationship to language that comes out of her experience with the typewriter. You get a sense of her sensorium merging with this typewriterly sensorium. That’s something that continues. Gins and Arakawa had personal computers in the 1970s. I really don’t know of that many other people who did. They collected computers, basically. There is a movement you can see in in the archives, from this prodigious activity with a typewriter, into, as time goes on, being able to do research not just in print but online. And once you can go online, then it’s like, “Woo!”

I love the idea of the typewriter as an object that allowed her to manipulate and work out questions about words. It makes me think of something she said the very first time we talked: “Language is so magnificent, but it falls into these terrible word traps.” Thinking about the disorienting way politicians use language now, Gins’s comments feel very prescient, don’t they?

Certainly, toward the end of their careers, not just Gins, but also Arakawa, were very adamant that the problem wasn’t just in space and design, it was in language itself. In terms of Gins’s early work, in the many list poems she wrote—some of which I have included—there’s a refusal to engage in the composition of full sentences. Syntax is being removed. Language is losing certain kinds of agency that it previously had in sentences that normalized what it does. We’re being forced to experience it as recalcitrant items that designate. I think she’s looking at a certain kind of violence in language, but also an instability, a sort of bluster, lots of different surfaces and textures.

Neither Gins or Arakawa were, in my opinion, particularly dogmatic in their relationship to language. There was always something about going back to explore experience, and to try to destabilize any hierarchy where language comes first. A lot of the time they’re trying to get in front of language. I think they believed that there was another register of language that was being forgotten.

In thinking about Gins and Arakawa’s work in Reversible Destiny, I always came back to the idea that it’s a project of deep optimism. Remaking language was obviously part of that. How do you see the actual work of trying to remold language happening in Gins’s writing?

She’s working so hard during the ’60s and ’70s to excavate and test words as much as she can. She’s combining sets of fairly common words: “MATH DESK,” or “FLOWER AND BURNT SECRETS.” There are so many sets of things, like “waterfall skin,” “shadow bitten”—phrases where the words are not unfamiliar but the combination is. And sometimes she’ll mix these juxtapositions with juxtapositions that we do know, so that we notice both the strangeness of the strange juxtaposition and the strangeness of the familiar one.

It’s those kinds of things that she’s trying to get at and ask: What is noticing and what is not noticing? And if I can notice noticing, and then I can train myself to notice what I previously was inured to noticing, then what can I notice after that? Language is the medium in which she establishes this style of noticing. Emily Dickinson is the American example bar none of someone who is training herself to see things that aren’t traditionally, customarily visible, using language as a means of seeing. Which gives some sense of the importance of what Gins was doing.

That’s what Gins’s work as a young writer is about. And I have to assume that she used what she learned from these experiments and these poems to develop the Reversible Destiny project with Arakawa.

But I’ve tried to resist seeing the writing as the adolescent phase of Reversible Destiny. I sometimes feel like Gins didn’t do herself as many favors as she could have as a writer. I think she was pretty clear on the fact that she was, you know, pretty smart! I don’t think she was confused about that. But maybe, on a certain level, she didn’t quite realize how great her writing was.

Amelia Schonbek is a journalist who has written for New York magazine, the New York Times, The Awl, Hazlitt, and other publications.

Date: May 13, 2020

Publisher: Bookforum

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

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On site.

Interview with Degree Critical

WRITING-BY-PROXY: A CONVERSATION WITH LUCY IVES
By Cigdem Asatekin

“My interest is less in making a fake protagonist who might stand in for me,” says Lucy Ives over iced coffee one hot Sunday afternoon, “than in having independent characters who produce writing.” That’s what her recently published second novel, Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World (Soft Skull Press, 2019), is mostly about: writing and mediation.

Loudermilk takes place in 2003, and centers around The Seminars, a prestigious graduate program for writers, reminiscent of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (of which Ives is an alumna). Though the book itself is named after someone else, the novel’s protagonist is the real poet, Harry Rego, a socially awkward genius who doesn’t like the sound of his own voice—and so he almost never speaks. He writes, but not for himself, as himself. Instead he writes for his f(r)iend, Troy Augustus Loudermilk, a hunky and handsome but ultimately shallow “dude” who has scammed his way into this rarefied and esteemed MFA program. As Loudermilk makes his way through The Seminars, Harry ghostwrites his poems for him, willfully penetrating “that greenish-reddish veil through which he can see the gently pulsing backs of words, the frilled edges of sentences.” Their nemesis, a classmate of Loudermilk’s, is Anton Beans, a stereotypical “winner” who is attending the program in order to become the “best” poet there is. Another character, Clare Elwil is a second-generation writer and an overachiever from early age. She deals with her writer’s block (“Is it ok to not be working?” she asks herself, over and over again) through not writing: “Because Clare can write, as long as she does not do it.” She takes her ‘self’ out of the equation by mediation, writing and not writing at the same time.

All characters suffer from a by-proxy state throughout the book, as their separate stories intertwine around Gustave Courbet’s famous 1877 painting of a woman’s vulva, L’Origine du monde. The novel includes full poems by Harry and stories by Clare. These artworks-within-artworks feed one another and make each other stronger (and stranger), as completely autonomous, individual texts. Ives’ writers create, and she is the mediator who casts their creations into real life words.

Cigdem Asatekin (Degree Critical): After reading Loudermilk, I’ve been thinking a lot about Clare’s writing and how you can “not be yourself” when writing; or how you can just leave your past, leave everything behind and become someone else. The notion is very layered within the book. Harry is writing as Loudermilk, but then it’s you, Lucy Ives, that’s writing as Harry. Clare can’t write at first but then she can. How did it all work for you, being not yourself? Your characters are not even themselves.

Lucy Ives: I don’t know if you know the work of this German artist, Hanne Darboven, who died in 2009? There is a lot of writing in her work. She says that she writes in hopes of experiencing mediation, “so that the mediated experience might impart something to me.” She wanted to write for the experience of doing just that, instead of responding to or describing something or other. I’ve always liked novels and poetry that contain other works of art for this reason: they don’t just describe, they enact. I’ve found them very helpful. In John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, for example, there is a weird short story about a hotel and a bear. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s a very uptight, middle-of-the-road kind of novel until you get to this short story, and it’s never explained. There is nothing in Garp’s personal history that would seem to allow him to write this short story. I’m fascinated by that inexplicable short story and, in general, by the effects of “fictional” writing. My interest is less in making a fake protagonist who might stand in for me than in having independent characters who produce writing—to think about how characterization functions in relation to media objects and the very possibility of mediation, something possibly transformative or intimidating, but maybe something that the characters want to be involved with, that might impart something to them.

By the way, someone else asked me why there is no romantic plot in this novel. Like, “Why is love not at the center of this?” I think it’s because the two writers, Clare and Harry, are so interested in writing that they really aren’t capable of love. There’s something about desire for very extreme forms of mediation of the self that may not be compatible with romantic love; or, maybe not in the way we currently imagine.

DC: You studied Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. How was your own experience an inspiration for Loudermilk?

LI: That’s a tough question! It was something that changed the course of my life. I went there straight out of college, and I found it to be a tough place to be female. I was born in New York; I’m an East Coast person. I’d never lived in the Midwest before. I’m glad I went and spent time there, but I am also glad it was temporary. I made some good friends, and I took some interesting classes outside of the workshop, which was the place where I first read that essay by Jacques Lacan [“Logical Time”] that I talk about in the novel. I had never thought about cybernetics and game theory in that way before. This was in a class on narratology taught by David Wittenberg; it was great and really influenced my writing. However, I would say that I did not learn very much from the curriculum of the Workshop. But there were many wonderful and intelligent students there.

DC: When reading, I asked myself if Loudermilk is a sort of criticism of art schools and writing education. Does it propose another way?

LI: I hope that this novel makes the project of holding a poetry workshop a little more complicated. That’s my goal. There is nothing in the fiction of this novel that is beyond possibility.

I think writing can be taught with greater emphasis on what is merely or barely possible, rather than the actual. My experiment was to describe characters that are undertaking a scam, a kind of intrigue. It’s sort of a work of art, what they’re doing. This is one attempt on my part to think about how can institutions be places where people expand the possibilities of their imaginations as opposed to just producing things that are either good or bad, and either are published or are not published.

DC: Parts of the book, especially some of the characters, feel very familiar to me. I’ve known many Antons in my life, many professors like Don Hillary. But here’s the thing: I think the future’s still hopeful after reading Loudermilk. I know Anton all right, but I’ve never met a Harry before. There is a chance he can exist, in Iowa, among other people.

LI: I like that you say that you’ve never met a Harry before. That makes me very happy. I haven’t thought about things that way. And also perhaps the Harry type exists within, maybe mixed with, an Anton, who might be a real person, as well. You have to wonder how Clare appears to her peers in the program. They probably think she is sort of a generic woman. She doesn’t talk a lot, and they’re probably just projecting whatever they want onto her. And when other people see Harry, they tend to have very rude thoughts about him.

DC: A lot of Anton’s inner voice monologues are like that.

LI: He’s so jealous!

DC: Is your own writing process similar to Harry’s? He says that “the only way to get to the poem is to drop into a perfectly Harry-shaped shadow.”

LI: Harry’s writing process is not my own, but it’s based on what I know about some other person’s writing process. When I was getting my PhD, I spent a lot of time studying other people’s manuscripts and trying to understand how they function. It was a private project, not really for school. I would go to archives and read other people’s notebooks. Columbia University has Ted Berrigan’s notebooks and you can see in them how he constructed The Sonnets. Harry’s writing process is not the same as Berrigan’s, but it’s partially based on what I learned about how Berrigan wrote. Harry is a person who was neglected as a child and was very isolated. He developed certain practices for creating substitute kinds of presence. That’s what his poetry is about. It’s also the reason he doesn’t win the contest, doesn’t come out on top and impress everyone. He can’t actually establish that kind of relationship. He wouldn’t know how to interact with that, to receive praise and real friendship, such that this could take place. What was really important to me was to show that writing is not always about aggression (as we are sometimes taught in school, whether our teachers are conscious of this or not). Writing is sometimes about constructing kinds of relationships that are bearable. And certainly for Harry, all the things that he does with language and reading are about having relationships that are bearable. Loudermilk’s vanity, his vicissitude, his ultimate emptiness in fact allows Harry to relate to him. If Loudermilk were actually present, that would just be unbearable for Harry. Paradoxically, this awful person is the ideal person for Harry.

DC: And then in the middle of all of this, there is the amazing dream sequence: The Glass Hat Man. I’m wondering what kind of a device it could be in a piece of writing.

LI: I’m entirely willing that the book mean different things to different people. The different parts of it are designed to the extent that I believe I can design something written to mean. I think there’s a limit: You can know things on a technical level, but at the level of representation and signification there’s something happening that exceeds us.

The dream sequence has a technical function in relation to the character, Harry. By the time we make it to the dream sequence we’ve established what it means for him to write a poem, from a nuts-and-bolts point of view. How did he sit down and do that? Where did the words come from? All that. But what is his mind like when it’s at rest and he is not in control of it? What you see in that dream sequence is that there is this other who is present in the dream, the Glass Hat Man, who is this strange kind of id, another character. And that character is saying, “There’s this figure that you need to go meet.” This is a fairly literal reference to Chaucer’s poem, The House of Fame and the figure of Fame that exists there. When Harry is not in control of his mind, his ambition comes in. It was important to me to show that he does actually have ambition and is not completely passive. However it’s only in this state of ceding control to parts of his mind that he doesn’t engage with on a daily basis, that we see this. And also I just liked the Glass Hat Man. He has a glass hat. There is a Cervantes story about a delusional lawyer, who becomes convinced that he is made of glass after drinking a love potion, who has to be transported in straw so he doesn’t “break.” I’m not sure what the exact relationship is between them, but the glass lawyer is somehow part of the Glass Hat Man.

I can tell you these things about Harry’s ambition only now. But when I was writing, I just knew I needed to write that scene. I’m not that kind of writer that would say, “This novel is an allegory,” or “There is something critical about it.” I don’t really write with a sense of including encoded messages that someone might need or want to know.

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Date: September 6, 2019

Publisher: Degree Critical

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

On site.

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NYLON Interview with Kristin Iversen

Ives.

Talking with author Lucy Ives about 'Loudermilk,' the weirdness of 2003, and the problem with Paris Hilton

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: It was 2003 in America, and the revolution was streaming online, comprising sex tapes filmed in phosphorescent-green night vision and starring the kind of people who wore trucker hats and extremely low-slung jeans. It was the year President George W. Bush started a war in Iraq and quickly declared his mission had been accomplished. It was a year of petty victories and history grinding into gear again. It was—it is—the year of Loudermilk.

This cutting, sparkling new novel from Lucy Ives is set in Crete, a fictitious Midwestern town that plays host to The Seminars, only the most esteemed MFA program in the country. Arriving there fresh from graduating SUNY Oswego are two unlikely best friends: the Adonis-like Troy Augustus Loudermilk, and his petite, saturnine friend, Harry Rego. Loudermilk is ostensibly at the program to study poetry, but his brilliant work is all written by Harry. This isn't to say that Loudermilk shouldn't be seen as an artist, more that his art is of a less literary nature: Loudermilk's is the art of the scam.

As Ives tells the story of Loudermilk and Harry, and the assorted people they encounter on campus (look out, especially, for a scammer of a different sort, Anton Beans), it becomes clear that she is telling the story of art, of self-invention, of libertines, of culture, of America. Needless to say, things get dark. And yet, it never gets so dark that you can't see what's right in front of you, in all of its tragic hilarity: the truth of what America is at its very worst and its very best—which, as it turns out, are pretty much the same thing.

Below, I talk with Ives about how she came up with the idea for Loudermilk, why 2003 was such a significant time, and why Paris Hilton is a harbinger of apocalypse.

What was the beginning of this novel?

With this novel and my last novel, it was something that was a little beyond my control, or at least my conscious mind was not saying, Let's write a novel. I became obsessed—in the case of Impossible Views of the World, with the first person narrator; and in the case of Loudermilk, with the relationship Harry and Loudermilk have.

Originally—probably in 2008—I wanted to write a novel about a guy who has a teaching position at a prestigious East Coast university. It doesn't matter which one. He's a terrible person, and he's a lowlife, and he sleeps with his students. He's writing a novel about these two idiots who scam their way into an MFA in the Midwest. I think I wrote about 40,000 words of this framing narrative; as I was writing it, I realized that I only cared about the novel that the character was writing. That's the weird place that this book comes from, from an attempt to make another work of fiction that I wasn't as invested in.

I was interested in the idea of someone who's an artist whose main way of doing their art is not to make art themselves, but to control other people. That's how I understand Loudermilk, as someone who is, in fact, an artist himself, but he's an artist without a medium. Or, his medium is social relationships. He's also, in some ways, a very crude practitioner, and in order to craft the kinds of social dynamics he desires, he needs to deceive other people.

Your last novel was set in a pseudo Metropolitan Museum of Art, and this is set in a pseudo writer's workshop, like the Iowa Writers' Workshop. What do you think it is about not actually dealing with a real place that allows you to get closer to a kind of truth?

It's easy to mistake me for some of the female characters in some of the things that I write, but I'm not really a person who writes autobiographically in fiction. I think that if I were trying to write about real institutions, I would get very bogged down in details. There's something about fiction that allows you to talk about what you know without having to make sure that it can be verified. I think that a claim like that sounds a little politically suspect, but there's a way in which we make up a lot of things when we remember what has happened to us.

I have a tendency to see these artificial places and know who's there when I'm writing fiction. I find that I know very little about real people. I don't know what made my professors or friends in school tick—I speculate, but I really don't know. With fictional characters, I do know. I know everything about their lives, which is really strange. The fiction is interesting to me because it is a space in which you can know what you can't know in so-called real life. With fiction, you can kind of say everything.

This is a very American novel; Loudermilk is essentially American in so many ways. And he enters an MFA program, which is an American invention. And the novel is set in the year 2003, which is a pivotal year in modern American history, the year that Bush said the Iraq War was a "mission accomplished." Loudermilk really had me confronting the idea of what it means to be successful, to get approval, to feel validated, and to produce anything meaningful in America, and how so many of these victories feel so petty and empty. What was it like, when writing, to constantly be interrogating this idea of America?

In a way, this goes back to your first question about where the novel comes from. I'm a nerd. I liked being a student when I was a young person, and I liked to have my stationery and do well on tests, make flash cards, things like that. When I graduated from high school, I had the sense that hard work pays off and the whole American Dream thing, and that if I continued to be a person who was attentive and oriented to details, then things would be great. Also, [I thought] that when I went to college, I would be going into a space where everyone else had the same kinds of values, that we would all be studious and earnest and in awe of the greatness of artists of the past and things like that.

And that's exactly what you found! [laughs]

That's exactly what I found! It was really beautiful and everything has been beautiful since. [laughs] Well, things didn't turn out like that. Without going into too much detail, essentially, the kinds of teaching that you encounter when you get into a university are different. The institution is a source of power. So, the ways that students and teachers behave are sometimes constrained by that, especially if they're trying to get more agency for themselves.

You mentioned the petty victory in Iraq, which is just… everything about that was false. To me, as a person who was just becoming an adult, there was September 11th, which was terrifying and destabilizing and changed my understanding of what history is and where we were in history. I had read Francis Fukuyama's book, I was coming to consciousness during Clinton's presidency, and I had a certain sense of what American imperialism was, and that changed really dramatically. The invasion of Iraq in Spring of 2003, was, I think… there are many disturbing things that have happened in history, but for me, as a young person, this was the most disturbing thing.

I was very disturbed by people's nonchalance about it. I was living in Boston at the time. The bombings in Baghdad would be broadcast on CNN at night, and there was a bank in Harvard Square that had a TV that would just play them over and over. People would stand there and watch them. It was so dystopian; I just couldn't believe that this was happening.

My personal experience of that time was of a time when things had really gone off the rails. There were many bad things that the U.S. government had done, but I just couldn't believe that this was happening. It made me look at what was happening with other institutions differently. I felt like, if the New York Times or the Washington Post or Vanity Fair, if these major publications can become sites for propaganda, what am I seeing in the classroom? What are the values we're working with? How are they advantageous to certain parties and disadvantageous to others?

At the time, I didn't really come to any conclusions, again, this is that problem of real life not lending itself to interpretation. In the context of a novel, I can go back and imagine that there's a way in which a style of poetry that is valued, privileged in a given classroom, tells us something about the way that public address is being imagined in the U.S. during this period of time. This has something to do with people's psychology and their experiences more generally, but also, seeing the institution as a kind of space that doesn't necessarily resist. It's a space that does something else.

This is what I wanted to talk about: How is the institution a kind of microcosm for other things? The seminars aren't a real place; Crete, which is the town in Iowa [where Loudermilk is set], isn't a real place. Even the U.S. that this takes place in isn't the real U.S. It's a version of the U.S. I wanted to try to nest all of these things together, even if it's fake or a guess, to try to show the connection—and how art is a way to see things being connected that so often appear not to be moving in concert with one another in a way that we can interpret.

That's kind of the best description that I can give of my orientation to the real time and real place in the fiction. I keep wanting to make clear that it's a kind of bizarro version, always. I want to keep it from being an attempt to speak about the real place because there's so much information that I'm missing. I only have my own point of view to work from, so I try to go to the strangest parts of that point of view, but it's still limited.

One of the other questions this novel grapples with is how we value art, and the selling of art and the artist, and what is art's role in driving capitalism. One way in which Loudermilk is actually an artist is because of how much he understands how he'll be able to sell himself. This book takes place in 2003, but now, in 2019, the role of the artist in adding value to their art by promoting themselves in a really transactional way, via likes and favorites, makes the whole system feel that much more transparent. What do you think about art in the time of social media? And this might be my way of asking: When are you going to write a novel about social media?

In a way, Loudermilk is a novel about social media. It's just social media before [it existed]. Loudermilk is so elastic, he's prescient, and I do have the sense that he understood what was coming; that he saw the author as an avatar way before the current iteration of that format.

What do I think about now? I feel people are engaged around writing in a way that I can't say is terrible. I am probably a little bit in denial about the quantification of approval. It's a style of metric that keeps changing and keeps evolving, and my own goal, or what I want to do during the time that I draw breath, is sort of different. I don't feel terribly engaged by that. My way of doing things is mainly about developing relationships with people.

I think something that's coincided with the ubiquity of social media is a desire to know what's real or not, and a stronger than ever fascination with the idea of the scam—particularly when people aren't really getting hurt, when it's institutions that are getting hurt. And that's probably because we're starting to understand that institutions are meaningless, but that they're all we have. And yet, people are so terrified of existing outside of the power structure; the people who really feel like they were set up to succeed within it, are the most terrified to exist outside of it. It's why this country is the way it is, and it was like this when Alexis de Tocqueville came here, and it was like this in 2003, and it's a really big mindfuck, and thank you for contributing to that narrative! [laughs]

But also, the scammer plays into the idea of the libertine, a concept you discuss at length in Loudermilk's afterword. In 2003, so much of what Americans were being told at that time was the idea that we were hated for our freedoms and liberalism, but that was so deceptive, and not really an accurate representation of what it was to be an American. In Loudermilk, that can be seen in something as simple as how the women are dressing, including exposing their "whittled hip bones."

When the kitten heel came back in late 2001-2002, I remember thinking, This is bad, this means something bad. At that time, I thought, Okay, here's an image of a woman where the woman is going to have more difficulty moving. And the whittled hip bones, it's like telling women: "You don't have to have a corset, you just can't have any flesh on your body, and also please expose those parts of your body so we know you don't have any." Paris Hilton was a real person, who had a body that somehow conformed to these very strange requirements. I did watch a bunch of The Simple Life, and I thought about that; plus, her and Nicole Richie's relationship is a little bit of a Loudermilk and Harry relationship. We won't read too much into that, even though we know who the brains of that operation is [laughs]! However, I did not watch One Night in Paris. Maybe that'll be for after the novel comes out, I'll treat myself to that, but I don't know if that's really something I want to see.

Well, not unlike the bombing in Baghdad, it was also filmed in night vision. It actually is sort of an interesting, horrific duality, which I'm thinking about right now… because I did watch One Night in Paris.

I think Paris Hilton is an interesting example of the female libertine.

And a Trump supporter, also.

Yeah, it's terrifying. I think there are different ideas about what the rebel is for; what the type of person who engages in this kind of socially unacceptable excess is for; what the function they're serving is. If you think about Paris Hilton in this way—what was she for, what was her role symbolically in culture at the time—she was a spectacle; she was something to look at. She was, in theory, a sexually liberated woman, but she was also awful. She was about the horror of a woman run amok, and there was entertainment value in it, but there was also a justification in it for a kind of reactionary social politics. And, if Loudermilk is a libertine, he is devaluing the idea of freedom a little bit. And I think that's what American libertines do. They don't exist to advance progressive politics, they essentially exist to say, freedom isn't that great, the only thing it's good for is sex or excessive spending or eating. And I don't know if we should be so drawn to those figures, really.

Date: May 21, 2019

Publisher: NYLON Magazine

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

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Conversation with Andrew Durbin

Poet Novelist: An Interview between Andrew Durbin and Lucy Ives

Andrew Durbin is the author of Mature Themes (Nightboat 2014). His work has also appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. He co-edits Wonder and lives in New York.

Lucy Ives's books include Anamnesis (Slope Editions, 2009), nineties (Tea Party Republicans Press, 2013; Little A, 2015), Orange Roses (Ahsahta Press, 2013), and The Hermit (Song Cave, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Lapham's Quarterly, and Vogue, among other publications. A former editor of Triple Canopy, she is currently editing a collection of writings by the artist Madeline Gins.

Both Durbin and Ives have published novels this year MacArthur Park (Nightboat, 2017) and Impossible Views of the World (Penguin, 2017), a New York Times Editors' Choice.

Poetry Society of America: The obvious question, but one that holds a certain fascination for poets: how did you think the process of writing a novel differed from the process of writing poetry?

Andrew Durbin: For me, writing a novel more closely resembled writing an essay and, in many ways, I think of MacArthur Park as a series of essayistic set pieces that I strung together using a loose and semi-autobiographical narrative. This wasn't totally unlike how I've written poetry in the past. My poems usually appear in prose, and they often self-consciously adopt various voices, forms, and styles of "non-poetic" writing, like the essay or the short story, so the distinction between these genres has been fuzzy for me from the start. I'm not sure I've ever thought of the differences between a fiction or a poem or an essay to be particularly meaningful to me, and I see my novel as a fiction stumbling into poetry and vice versa.

Lucy Ives: My novel, Impossible Views of the World, has the appearance of a traditional novel, in that elements such as "plot" and "character" are readily identifiable. I guess I'd say, perhaps too cannily since in retrospect, that many poems I've written have included these elements as well, though few people were likely to be looking for them in poetry. But I'm not really a poet; I'm a nonconformist writer who is interested in form and genre. Or maybe that's to say, I'm a poet, by which I merely mean, I'm a nonconformist writer who is interested in form and genre.

Andrew Durbin: Do you think of Impossible Views as a poet's novel? I don't quite see your new book as part of that odd genre (I cringe at the term since I've never been quite sure what it means, really), but I'm interested in the history of poets writing novels and those novels being called this specific-ish thing, the poet's novel. Did any of that come into play as you wrote?

Lucy Ives: Thank you for asking me this question. I feel a little embarrassed because I definitely have not succeeded in writing a poet's novel with Impossible Views. I've done other weird things that interest me, like making it very difficult to determine the novel's genre, but I haven't written something autobiographical or even really experimental—at least, not in the sense in which I believe that term is usually employed with respect to poet's novels, so called. I am very interested in mimicry and satire, in the ways in which the tropes of the realist novel can be warped and reworked to serve new ends. I'm always thinking about travesty, in a literary sense, and I guess you could say that Impossible Views is me writing my way into the field of the novel. It's an extremely silly book but I'm quite serious about what it does at the level of form. I should note that, in deference to the tradition of the poet's novel, I did include one character in Impossible Views who is a poet and who is writing a poet's novel—so that anyone looking for a poet's novel in my book would not be disappointed.

At risk of annoying you, I wanted to ask, would you ever write a poet's novel? Have you? What kind of novel are you writing with MacArthur Park if it is, as you note above, like "writing an essay"? Are there any important precedents for you, whether novels or other, here?

Andrew Durbin: You're incapable of annoying me! I'm not sure I have. If one tradition of the poet's novel is a text that dispenses with most of the straightforward aspects of fiction (like a plot or recognizably distinct characters), as in the novels of Leslie Scalapino and Renee Gladman, for example, then no, I haven't done that and probably won't. But following the New Narrative poets, many of whom wrote great novels (usually about narrative), then I could see MacArthur Park fitting in that lineage, since my book is, on some level, about writing a book. In the end, the novel is something of a happy accident. I initially wrote many of the parts—the chapter on Tom of Finland, the final section in London and Vienna—as separate from one another (I had originally imagined a more disjunctive book). But then, as I sat with them over the years, I found that these pieces belonged more tightly together than I had first realized, since they were each linked by a speaker (me, not-me) with like-minded concerns about art and community in the age of climate disaster. The book came in through the back door rather than the front.

A few observers have focused on your book's ample and brilliant use of secondary material, much of it invented, but, for me, I found Stella's voice to be one of the novel's oddest, most arresting features, partially because it's one that blends (like the book itself) so many tones and vocabularies. I loved Stella's moments of circumlocution, her office-administrative humor, her flashes of "intractable personality issues." It's an unexpected tone for a literary caper, and it's very different from your other work. She is hyper-intelligent, confused, driven, curious and—at times—a little melancholy. Can you talk about the prose of Impossible Views and how you developed Stella's unique voice?

Lucy Ives: I think your point about the novels of New Narrative being "about narrative" is a good one. I want to linger with that idea for a second before I start talking about Stella, because I think it's a good expression of the way in which a novel can also function as a work of criticism without becoming something other than a novel—or, while becoming something other than a novel, while also being a novel (I'm into these contradictions). Works of art are usually making arguments about various things, and I like to think of them as doing that at a level that is somehow previous to interpretation. In other words, we aren't required to look at them in agonized ways to understand them as having positions, political or otherwise; an argument might be built into the very choice to write in a certain way. This may also have something to do with ways you and I might both be influenced by non-literary forms of practice. I get the sense that you are interested in a broader field of art and performance; meanwhile, I like nerds. If I choose to write something that counts as "literature," part of that choice—for me, at least—is refusing other professional affiliations in favor of this sort of non affiliation. I didn't write this novel, or anything else I've written, because I can't write in any other way. Rather, I wrote in this way and wrote these things because I don't like writing that's too useful. Once an academic told me, "Your writing is so incredibly clear, which is amazing, because you never say anything!" This person was my teacher, and his preferred pedagogical tool was the insult (sadly common among boomers in the humanities). I took comfort in the knowledge that he had no idea how right he was.

But about Stella: There is a sense in which, as well as being human like, she is a stylistic tool, a way for me to synthesize various kinds of speech and writing and put them all in one place so that we can look at them together. It was important to me that she be able to curse and obsess over orthographic conventions. That she be able to talk about sex and clothing and class and the print revival, and so on.

OK, so here's a different sort of question: Can you tell me a little about the title of MacArthur Park? I find the rhyme in it fascinating—in this way that makes me feel weird about it also being the name of a real place. Can the title tell us something about how you think about places and names in the novel (and perhaps elsewhere)?

Andrew Durbin: My work is often concerned with the representation of place rather than the place itself, and the thicket of questions—political, aesthetic, social—that that divide reveals when we begin to venture into it. I like to get entangled in those questions because they inevitably raise a number of backend issues about my status as a viewer or listener or author. In the novel, the narrator drives past Echo Park, mistaking it for MacArthur Park, and tells his fellow travelers that Donna Summer recorded a song about the park that he loves. (Him being wrong matters in a way I won't discuss here.) Later, in that same chapter, the song acts as a Proustian madeleine of sorts. When he listens to it again, he is jolted into an extended memory of a night ride he took with a friend many years before in which they listened to Donna Summer and Frankie Knuckles. He is overcome by the memory of where he comes from (the South) and the awkwardness of his body (his friend attempts to take a photograph of him as Knuckles' "Your Love" plays, but he turns away in embarrassment). This is a long way of saying that I don't come to that kind of emotional material—another kind of thicket—so easily unless I begin somewhere else, whether it's a fiction or not. So, it is weird, that the title refers to a real place. But I think that's part of the strangeness of representation: that it is purports to stake a claim, in some way or another, about something or somewhere that belongs to people besides its author and is therefore subject to disagreement, to a mix of feelings, to a difference of opinion and experience.

It seems appropriate to bring up your title! It's lifted from a book within the book, of which there are many, and it concisely captures the "impossible view" your novel's protagonist attempts to take in her gumshoe research into her colleague's mysterious disappearance. Impossible Views is filled with such moments where viewing becomes a liberating, terrifying, and sometimes seemingly impossible moment of decision for Stella. Can you talk about some of the way your novel approaches seeing and being seen?

Lucy Ives: What a juicy question. My instinct is to say that my novel has a rather depressed or sunken relationship to the notion of seeing and being seen, in that the narrator feels she is constantly misapprehended by those she knows. But, on the other hand, this narrator, Stella, is an ecstatic seer and obsessive describer of the life and objects that surround her; the novel is packed with the work of description. Perhaps Stella is attempting to compensate for what she experiences as her own illegibility via this incessant description, these "impossible view[s]," as you call them. Or perhaps she's attempting to transform description—a field in which she excels and which is traditionally associated with stasis and decoration—into a mode of action. There's something, too, about the insoluble strangeness of being seen; it may not be possible to know how others see you, what they see, and so forth. That eerie and sometimes devastating feeling of being mistaken or misunderstood remains widely available, daily, even. And I think you're right that Stella relives, or attempts to recover and revise, these moments of misapprehension in her own acts of perception. It's part of why she's so driven to find out. She's doing that classic thing of giving to her environment what she wants for herself. Therefore, too, the impossibility. But I should also note that I'm not convinced that Stella is really as misunderstood as she believes she is—her mimetic theories are full of flaws, alas! She is, after all, an art historian.

Date: October 3, 2017

Publisher: Poetry Society of America

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

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Conversation with John Keene

True Fictions: Audio Documentation
With Lucy Ives & John Keene

The following readings and discussion were recorded at True Fictions on September 13, 2017. Writer Lucy Ives read an excerpt from her recently published novel Impossible Views of the World. She was joined by John Keene, who read from his 2015 short-story collection Counternarratives. The readings were followed by a conversation on the use of archival documents and art objects in fiction, writing against conventions in historical narratives, and the influence of reading and writing fiction on the experience of history.

Date: September 13, 2017

Publisher: Triple Canopy

Format: Web

Explore audio documentation here.

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Bookforum talks with Lucy Ives

Bookforum talks with Lucy Ives

Lucy Ives was supposed to be writing her dissertation when Stella Krakus, the main character in Ives’s debut novel, Impossible Views of the World, came into her mind. It would take six years for Stella to fully emerge, but when she did, she brought an unlikely triumvirate of irrepressible qualities: a nerd’s expertise in maps and early Americana, a kooky and misanthropic sense of self, and a gimlet eye for the art world in which she seems surprised to have found herself. Stella is a curator at the fictional Central Museum of Art in Manhattan, and when one of her colleagues disappears, she quickly decides to ignore her professional responsibilities in order to pursue his trace through the more obscure corners of the museum’s collection. Along the way, Stella confronts her soon-to-be-former husband, Whit Ghiscolmbe; her colleague and occasional lover, Fred Lu; and her steely mother, Caro. I recently corresponded with Ives to discuss the book’s brief glimpse into this young woman’s singular, sparkling mind, what Stella’s future might hold, and what it would be like to run into her protagonist on the street.

The entire book takes place over a week in the life of Stella Krakus, a curator at a major arts institution in New York City. She’s a native New Yorker and there’s no doubt that Stella is whip smart—a real intellectual and a keen observer of social life. Her character and its freshness are one of the book’s greatest strengths. How did you come up with her voice?

I was trying very hard to do something else when I started this novel. I was supposed to be working on an academic task—I was a PhD student at the time. I was probably formatting my footnotes or lurking on JSTOR when the novel’s first scene popped into my head. The five-hundred-odd words I wrote at this time subsequently became the first pages of the book. Given these events, I’m not sure if I can take all the credit for the creation of the character or her “freshness”! Though I am the one who wrote this book, I was not intending to write it. It remained insistent over about six years, and while, as I say, I am not always sure if I wrote it or just tried to avoid writing it and failed, I also could not seem not to write it. Stella is quite different from me, yet she seems to be part of who I am in some strange, unconscious, and perhaps uncontrollable way. I don’t know where she comes from.

Stella spends a lot of time devising a hierarchy of the art world: the elegant established curators; the gallerists, who “age magnificently and make a ton of bank” at the same time; the questing youngs who dress too well given their poor salaries and survive on their youth; the corporate types who hang around art events to garner status. There’s an overabundance of enthusiastic women occasionally interspersed by the solitary dashing man who ends up being the one to succeed. Are things really so mercenary and sexist? How or why does Stella feel bound to—or resigned to—her role?

Though many people reading this interview may have already guessed this, I am not a curator, nor am I a gallerist, visual artist, consultant, art handler, professional fundraiser, or any other sort of art worker, though I do occasionally write art criticism. In addition to these limitations, as far as truth is concerned, it’s also very difficult for me to make claims about how things transpire in real life in general; I think this is why I write novels and poems rather than something else. All the same, I am, to some extent, with you on this one, because I, too, often wonder what Stella would do “in real life,” or what would happen if I were to cross paths with her on the street one day or on the subway. It’s likely enough to happen, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t live just the littlest bit in fear of it. I have no idea if she would have read the novel, and, moreover, I would not like to think that the world she lives in actually exists. All the same, it might exist. Or, the world we live in might contain mercenary and sexist features and/or milieus and maybe Stella Krakus is somewhere out there dealing with them.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I’m not sure that Stella really does feel so resigned to her role. When the novel opens, she is aware that things are not going well, and during the course of the novel certain events transpire that make it impossible for her to continue thinking and living as she has previously been thinking and living. To the extent that the novel has a plot, one of its major points or threads is the act of deciding to decide. That sounds a bit meta, but I think it’s one of the hardest things for people to do: to decide to act differently and then continue to decide to act differently, to act as they have never acted before in their lives.

Much of the book indulges in the enjoyments of an obscure, literary mystery. What was your research process like to concoct this crumb trail through historical Americana? I read somewhere that all the works in the book are fictional. How did you come up with all the charming details?

As a scholar, you are supposed to use objects and events of the past as examples to support a story you want to tell or argument you want to make. When the project of the researching professor is described in this simplified way, it’s easier to see some of the difficulties with it. Would you treat something that happened to you yesterday as an event typical of a broader historical trend? Are the objects in your home mere examples of the sorts of things a person like you (for there are many yous, historically speaking) would own? If you are answering “yes” to these questions, then perhaps you have a graduate degree or take a dispirited view of life more generally. But if you are neither of these things, and even if you do have a graduate degree, I think it’s clear how alienating the scholarly construction of reality can be. Having a strong sense of this alienating quality, along with the perhaps even more alienating process of creating texts that organize said research, I wanted to write a novel in which all the facts, as such, were fake. I wanted all these facts to be at once patently fake and very convincing. By proceeding in this way, it was possible for me to comment on the way in which historical and other kinds of facts “look” and “feel,” on how they relate to one another. The details in the novel, in all the imaginary works of art, emerge out of a desire, on my part, to think about how objects and texts from the past are presented to us in ways that convince us of their pastness. I am describing the distance between the past and the present by fictionalizing in this way and also describing the ways in which this distance is formed and mediated by contingent scholarly practices in the present.

Stella seems to approach artworks and historical research with much more vim and vigor than she does in her job’s requisite socializing. Indeed, compared to Stella’s views on her colleagues, her love of research and intellectual play is positively idealistic. Can you say more about that?

I think research is very safe. It is, in a sense, a highly mediated form of social life. It’s a little bit like email, which is a format Stella also loves. If I had to guess, I’d say that Stella is able to have relatively satisfying relationships with other people, not all of whom are alive, through the historical artworks and texts she encounters in her research. This research also gives her agency and a modicum of control over her fate: What she lacks in networking ability, Stella makes up for in information. She may be something of a misanthrope, but she is not a fool, and she realizes that she can get away with being a wallflower if she specializes correctly. Of course, this still leaves Stella at the mercy of the institution she works for, a problem our heroine must tackle before the novel’s close.

One of the pleasures of the book is getting a view into the interior world of an institution that resembles the Met. Some of this is mundane if accurate—Stella coming in late, not doing her actual work—but we also get a bit of the feeling of being in a museum after hours. There are moments when you have some of the world's great art all to yourself, or the privilege to rummage among the enormous collections that never even get displayed. I know your mom worked at the Met for a long time so I’m sure this gave you some insight, but there’s more to it than that. Can you say more about your personal experience of peeking behind the curtains of the art world, including those of its illustrious institutions?

There’s a lot of paperwork in there! More seriously, I think that jobs at art institutions are like many other jobs, although the scenery can be prettier. The present of art institutions interests me less than their pasts, which are inevitably more revealing and also strange. Part of what I hoped to do with Impossible Views of the World was to open up the institutional history of a fictional museum for (mostly gentle, fictional) scrutiny. In my fictional museum, the history of the acquisition of artworks both mirrors and becomes entwined with fictional present-day office haps. Which is to say, there’s a meaningful connection between the past and present in the novel; maybe the novel is even designed to allow that to occur. My own real-life observations of “illustrious institutions” are probably more banal, and don’t include plot twists or dramatic irony—or, for that matter, profound realizations about the meaning of institutional histories! I wish they did. I would probably have to start working at one of them for that to happen.

Stella doesn't seem to see herself as having many choices: she feels stuck at her job at CeMArt, in part because of her ill-conceived romance with one of her ascendant colleagues. That relationship and the end of her marriage occupy most of her social life. Otherwise, the person she appears closest to is her mother, whom she finds competitive and cagey. In fact, Stella feels that the biggest impact she makes is in a violent act that gets passed around YouTube. Why does Stella think her prospects are so grim? Are they really?

Stella spent six or seven years getting a degree and became a specialist in print ephemera. She’s a scholar of caricatures and political cartoons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She’s highly educated and in theory could do whatever she wants, and I think what you’re picking up on is her disappointment that her commitment to expertise doesn’t give her much of an edge in the institution where she works or, really, anywhere else. If she wants to do what she’s been trained to do in the context of the museum, she’s going to have to deal with the indignities of the pecking order and bide her time, for what might be a very long time. Perhaps unrealistically, Stella believed that being an expert in something esoteric would give her an interesting life and some small supply of power. She also thought that her friends and family would magically understand her commitment to weird, old things. But her life, if not uninteresting, isn’t what she thought it would be, nor does she have the sort of power that she had hoped she would have (what this power is, exactly, I am unsure). And no one around her, with the exception of her now-missing colleague Paul, has had much interest in her research. So, this is where things have gone wrong or askew—though I don’t think they’re grim, exactly, or Stella doesn’t see these things as grim so much as annoying. However, I do think we’d have to describe some of the novel’s characters’ actions as grim and reprehensible, and that’s a grimness that Stella can’t escape, no matter how amused YouTube users are by her antics or how well her latest microfiche foray goes. This is not a novel about revenge or redemptive, flamboyant success. The message is slighter than that. It’s about deciding not to look away from events, about confronting the simple grimness of apathy and deception in everyday life and realizing that one can choose to be different.

Anna Altman has written from the New Yorker, n+1, the New York Times, and other publications.

Date: September 13, 2017

Publisher: Bookforum

Format: Web

Link to the interview at Bookforum.

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LARB Radio Hour on "Impossible Views ... "

Author Lucy Ives joins co-hosts Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss Impossible Views of the World, her first novel, which centers on the life of a curator working in New York’s greatest museum. The ensuing conversation revolves around the Ives’ inspiration for writing such a multi-faceted work: part character-driven social satire, part literary pastiche, it’s also an intellectual mystery novel rife with artistic and philosophical resonance. Plus, poet Imani Tolliver, author of Runaway: A Memoir in Verse, returns to recommend Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

Date: September 7, 2017

Publisher: The Los Angeles Review of Books

Format: Audio

Link to the podcast at LARB.
Podcast at Soundcloud.

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Impossible Views of the World Is a Perfect Summer Pleasure
BY LAUREN MECHLING

Lucy Ives’s cool and bracing new novel, Impossible Views of the World, is a perfect summer pleasure. Set at the fictional CeMArt, a museum on the Upper East Side that’s remarkably similar to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—where the author’s mother ran a department for many years, and about which Ives wrote an essay for Vogue—the book offers access to one of the world’s most well-oiled cultural institutions, functioning as something of a From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for grown-ups. An accomplished poet, Ives also knows how to delight sentence by sentence, with turns of phrase that cry to be underlined or Tweeted (hors d’oeuvres at a museum fundraiser are “micro-tizers”; the denizens of Williamsburg are “proofreaders dressed as majorettes, anorexics in suspenders, rich women in artisanal clogs”).

The narrative spans a single week, during which the cleverly named 30-something Stella Krakus (whose life is cracking up—get it?) contends with a harassing soon-to-be ex-husband, an ill-fated affair with one show pony of a colleague, and the mysterious death of another. Part send-up of the Manhattan art world, part elaborate literary mystery, the novel is bound together by a voice that is at turns deadpan and warm, shot through with a crisp irony that makes it tempting to declare it the literary equivalent of an Alex Katz painting. “I am not tall. In fact I am short, with highly regular features,” our narrator relays in the opening pages. “I despise makeup, though I wear lipstick, and, to further frustrate my appearance, I smoke.” It’s a singular work, worthy of a place in any world-class collection. Below, an interview with Ives, 37, a poet and academic who teaches writing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Why isn’t the book set at the Met? Did it start out there and then you changed the name for legal reasons?

It was never the Met. It’s really important that it’s not the Met. All unhappy families are different, and so are all unhappy institutions. This way the museum has its own concerns. Everything in the novel that is an artwork or text is completely made up. Dreaming up artworks and satirizing the discipline of research was fun for me; they’re two of the greatest pleasures I can think of.

What was the spark of the book?

I was supposed to be finishing my dissertation at NYU when this strange scenario popped into my head. It was the idea of a woman going up the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I knew she was having difficulty in her romantic life and there were men who were not treating her with respect. The voice of the narrator was just there, and just available to me. So I started writing things down about her and her life, trying to see the humor in the ridiculousness in the men’s behavior that contrasted with her determination, and it became this world.

What was your mother’s job at the Metropolitan Museum?

My mother was the illustrious director of a department whose purview has changed over time. It focused on works on paper—handmade things like drawings and prints and photographs. She is an expert in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist prints and drawings.

What was it like to be a pet of the Met as a child?

[Laughs.] A lot of the objects of the museum were like members of the family. We would go to visit them regularly. I spent a lot of time in museums and in galleries as a child. Over time it’s become clear to me how much I’ve learned from this. I don’t have the training but I learned a lot about how to think about and relate to art. And for that I am eternally grateful.

You write about your mother in your Vogue Nostalgia. Stella’s mother, Caro, is also a less-than-snuggly art-world professional. How would you compare the experiences of writing about your mother in fiction and nonfiction?

Stella’s mother, Caro, is probably a way I am dealing with some of the challenges in relating to a parent who you respect but is quite capable of tough love. Writing about my mother for Vogue was easier because I know who my mother is and I know what my experience being her daughter is like. The part that was difficult was I felt I needed to come to some kind of conclusion. My relationship with my mother is not going to end. Even after death we keep having relationships with our parents. In a novel you get to create endings that have meaning. In real life you don’t. That’s one of the hardest things about being a human.

Have you ever worked at a museum?

Not apart from one summer as a teenager when I was a tour guide at the Met. I learned that small children really like to touch art.

The book is extremely funny about the cohort of young women who work in the art world and wear high heels and excel at writing thank-you notes. This bit reminded me of that wonderful short-lived reality show Gallery Girls: “The ‘girl’ who works at the museum is very pretty and exceedingly neat. She is a fan of social networking in all its protean forms, and not in an ironic way.” Did you have real-life exposure to what they call “gallery girls”?

For five years I was an editor at Triple Canopy, an interdisciplinary magazine with a lovely website. One of our aims was to bring artwork into a digital realm in a more innovative way than simply presenting a JPEG. During that time I encountered curators and gallerists and gallery managers and interns and desk workers and fact checkers. So I’m going to say yes, I did.

The novel grapples with the seemingly impossible lot of being a woman, and balancing professional ambition and dreams of romantic love. Is this a tension you struggle with? Are you more of a worker or a lover?

I am a worker [laughs]. But I think I’m curious about this quandary because the workplace that I came to in my late 20s and early 30s—academia and publishing—was not the workplace I was promised when I was a child. It was a place that didn’t just see me as an intellect or a creative but saw me first as a woman, and then those things later. This was a huge surprise to me and I’m still reeling about that. I was at an art book fair a few years ago and I met a powerful man in the art world. We shook hands. When my companion, an older influential woman, looked away, he reached out and took my breast in his hand. I don’t know where we find ourselves—are women’s lives better than they once were? Or are they not?

Date: July 24, 2017

Publisher: Vogue

Format: Web

Link to interview.

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Interview with Dodie Bellamy

Headshot.

INTERVIEW WITH DODIE BELLAMY

THE SUMMER OF 2016 WAS FOR ME THE SUMMER OF DODIE BELLAMY. I am a New York resident, but by strange coincidence, when this interview was proposed to me by a WHITE REVIEW editor I happened to be living temporarily just outside San Francisco, Bellamy’s longtime purlieu. I also happened to be headed over to her house for a party later on that week. Thus I was able to secure a verbal ‘yes’ to the interview plan. Bellamy and I subsequently sat down mid-August in her SOMA apartment to discuss her work, particularly her recent essay collection, WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD (2015).

For those less familiar with San Francisco, SOMA stands for ‘South of Market.’ The area contains industrial structures and a few modest wood-clad apartment buildings, but has recently received liberal architectural additions in the form of luxury condominiums and corporate monoliths. Bellamy describes the ongoing gentrification of the neighbourhood where she has lived since 1990 with her partner, the poet Kevin Killian, in her essay ‘In the Shadow of the Twitter Towers’. The essay’s treatment of the present as a confluence of economic and cultural pressures, personal desire, paranoia, ambition, and, oh yes, real estate, is heady and affecting. It exemplifies Bellamy’s skilful attention to the welter of forces and dynamics shaping contemporary life and carries a trace of her schooling in the New Narrative literary movement of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. New Narrative writing, often associated with the writer Robert Glück, usually includes the author’s forthright acknowledgement of her or his own body and sexuality, as well as that of the reader, along with the actual time and place of writing. The author of at least eleven books of prose and poetry, including CUNT-UPS (2001) and THE TV SUTRAS (2014), Bellamy is additionally concerned with affect and precarity, and where desire can lead us once we forgive false notions of what humans need and deserve. Whether or not you find Bellamy’s work ‘experimental’ – in the interview she herself takes issue with this term – it seems clear that her work is engaged with questions about what and where daily life is, not to mention who is experiencing this life, so called. Bellamy doesn’t so much rail against traditional literary forms and genre as ignore them in favour of more exciting and enticing ways of proceeding.

On the afternoon of our August meeting, Bellamy fed me homemade date cookies and green tea. I met Sylvia the cat, one of two felines – the other is Ted, as in Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – with whom Bellamy and Killian share their home. Sylvia displayed a distinct lack of shyness, while Bellamy patiently and generously satisfied my curiosity about her life and writing. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

— Lucy Ives

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — I was reading the essay ‘Phone Home’ from WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD, in which you write about your return to Indiana just before your mother passes away. In the hospital you’re with her; she’s not really conscious and you describe her mouth, her face. Reading it, I had a strange thought: ‘Now Dodie’s mother will get better, so that Dodie can be with her again before she dies.’

A DODIE BELLAMY — That fantasy actually makes an appearance elsewhere in that essay with E. T., because he does come back to life in the movie. That’s what Steven King is all about – in horror, people do come back, but they’re never the same. It’s a deep human fantasy. I sometimes want to squeeze my eyes shut and open them again, and find that my mother isn’t dead, though she’s been dead for eight or nine years now. In poetry classes in the 1980s I was taught Lacan’s theory that the separation from your mother marks your entry into the Symbolic Order. Language acts are about this tragic separation. Writing is always equally about loss and gaining. It gives you the world while you’re writing, but you’re writing about things that aren’t there. So it’s always about loss. I’m writing about my childhood now, and it’s like writing about death in the other direction, because that world is so unavailable.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — It seems like we’re supposed to go back to childhood to figure out why we make errors, no?

A DODIE BELLAMY — That’s why I started writing about it, but now I’m more interested in class issues than personal error. Now I live a basically middle-class life, after having had a working-class childhood, so it’s like I grew up in another world, a foreign world I couldn’t survive in now. If I’d stayed in that world I would be married to a butcher. One of my girlfriends did marry a butcher. By the time I was 15 it was clear I wanted to be a writer – some people don’t totally have to change class to do it, such a hard thing to do – but I always knew I’d have to leave. I’m kind of judgemental about my inability to appreciate working-class life as a child, but there was no place of understanding. It was brutal. Most people I know now feel so uncertain because they don’t know where they stand with the people they know. My experience of the working-class Midwest was that you knew where you stood with everybody. It might not have been pleasant, but you knew. People were very clear about whether they liked you or not. I was kind of a freak, and I was teased a lot. I guess you’d call it bullying now. But a sense of otherness is not necessarily a bad thing. My sense of otherness – which I will try to create in any situation, no matter what the other person is trying to do – has been valuable in writing. You kind of step outside and look.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD deals with things that are quite painful. There’s a description of the hanging of a witch in ‘The Bandaged Lady’. The detail is horrifying, visceral; you write about how it takes fifteen minutes to die if you’re hanged. Unless, of course, you jump first in order to break your own neck.

A DODIE BELLAMY — Who knew, right? I took all this stuff from Silvia Federici’s CALIBAN AND THE WITCH (2004). I put in the idea of a ‘clever witch’ who jumps mostly for sarcasm, though Federici does say that some witches would jump before being hanged to break their own necks and die faster.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — It seems like a fantasy on the part of the historian, that clever witch. As if someone could retrieve dignity from the experience of being executed.

A DODIE BELLAMY — That piece was commissioned as a catalogue essay for Tariq Alvi’s show at the gallery 2nd Floor Projects. Tariq sent these Xeroxed mockups that looked very different from the actual pieces in the show, but still they included the image of the hanged boys. It was challenging and exciting working with someone else’s imagery. On my own, I would never have thought to write about those hanged boys. I spent a lot of time looking at photos of them. I tried to open my heart to them, even though there was no way I could truly enter that experience. I keep coming across the theory that mirror neurons are the source of human empathy. For me, it’s about getting rid of the ego and just looking and seeing what happens. A lot of my writing is about looking. In my book THE LETTERS OF MINA HARKER (1998) there’s a long letter about the death of Sam D’Allesandro in which I conclude that the act of looking is an expression of love. To really look at someone is how you love them.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — Speaking of witches, I wanted to ask you about the ‘Rascal Guru’ essay in WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD. There were some details that I thought were so precise, shocking and eerie. How was that essay written?

A DODIE BELLAMY — It’s an outtake from THE TV SUTRAS. It’s all Google-search collage. I researched a zillion different gurus and some of them were Christian. It was unbelievable, what some of them were doing. And then the language! The gurus did the same dastardly deeds over and over until it started to feel redundant, and the language of the followers, to rationalise it, became much more interesting than the acts themselves. I included a lot of the rationalisations. At some point I decided to make it one guru. So he’s the Ur-guru.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — I like accretion as a compositional principle. You organise facts rather than invent a plot.

A DODIE BELLAMY — Well, it does have a little arc, because he dies at the end. He has all these problems! And then he dies. So it has a narrative.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — How do you know if something is interesting?

A DODIE BELLAMY — That’s hard to tell. This issue’s coming up a lot now that I’m writing about my working-class childhood. I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is going to care about this?’ I’ve just had to presume that maybe nobody will. Usually, if I’m compelled by something, that means it’s interesting. Assignments usually aren’t interesting, so you have to sit with one until some kind of opening occurs and creates excitement. If I can generate excitement, the writing seems to be interesting. I don’t think about it in terms of subject matter. Anything can be interesting, and you can take the most interesting thing in the world and end up with the dullest piece of writing. It’s about engagement.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — I’m interested that you say ‘engagement’ because other people who have spoken to you about your work often want to know why you use collage techniques. They seem a bit surprised.

A DODIE BELLAMY — I don’t understand that. I’m doing something that has a long history, going back to the likes of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. But also I was raised on Kathy Acker’s writing and the whole notion of appropriation. That these things are being questioned now is beyond me.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — It might trouble people that something coded as ‘weird’ could be exciting across generations.

A DODIE BELLAMY — There’s a weird hatred of conceptual writing. And people get suspicious of people who do anything procedural. My precedents have little to do with conceptual writing, but still, it’s like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — I’m curious about your connection to nineteenth-century writing. In THE LETTERS OF MINA HARKER Mina says, and I paraphrase, ‘Dodie’s always reading these books where people don’t do anything. But I don’t want writing to be a consolation for a life of inaction.’

A DODIE BELLAMY — I love nineteenth-century novels. They’re a wonderful antidote to the Internet. I’ve been reading Henry James’s THE AMBASSADORS. At first I couldn’t understand its wild syntax, but I found that when I stop trying with James, the text eventually opens and I’m there with it in all its glory. In the passage from MINA you refer to, I was talking about reading Barbara Pym, whose novels are so much about small, marginal lives. THE LETTERS OF MINA HARKER is a tribute to DRACULA, it’s totally founded in the nineteenth-century. The romance novel ends when the protagonist couple gets together. So this is post-romance, in that the book begins with Dodie’s marriage to KK. But Mina never stops being in a romance novel even though she’s married. I was writing that novel when I was being schooled in New Narrative writing. Daily life was very important in New Narrative, breaking down the fourth wall between the writer and the work – without getting horribly meta about it, which I can’t suffer – questioning the boundary between the personal and the cultural. I’m this walking bag of culture. There’s no ‘me’ outside of culture. The boundaries get really messed up.

In my high school journal, which I’m rereading right now, I’m fascinated with the CHARLIE BROWN character Pig-Pen. Pig-Pen, with the swirl of dirt that surrounds him, has all this culture sort of stuck to him. In one cartoon strip, Charlie Brown asks Lucy, ‘Did it ever occur to you that Pig-Pen might be carrying the dirt and dust of some past civilisations?’ He goes on to muse, ‘He could have on him some of the soil of ancient Babylon.’ While my adult self is excited by the metaphorical possibilities of Pig-Pen, I have no idea what he meant to me in high school. At one point in my journal I’m reading Sartre and exchanging my Charlie Brown sweatshirt for a Pig-Pen sweatshirt – both in the same entry.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — Is being a writer for you always about being with other people? When you narrate your youth it seems like your orientation to writing is often formed in relation to others.

A DODIE BELLAMY — When there’s another person to focus on, it’s easier to write about that than when there’s not another person. When I was writing THE LETTERS OF MINA HARKER, I noticed that the only time Mina is sexual is when she’s with another person. At the time, I was reading Dennis Cooper and I saw that his characters never stopped being sexual. I came to the conclusion that Mina’s passive sexuality was sexist. She needs someone else to turn it on. So I started writing sexual passages where there wasn’t another person actively involved, to create a sense that this woman has a continuous sexuality that doesn’t have to be turned on by someone else. Is that what you’re asking about?

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — Kevin Killian appears in your writing a lot, in different ways and guises. Is it ever hard to live with another writer?

A DODIE BELLAMY — Our writing is so different, so no. Including him when he’s commenting on my life is a part of New Narrative’s focus on community experience. He does critique my work though – I ask him to read everything I write because he’s such a good editor.

The question is, when does Kevin’s editing become a rewriting of the work into the way he would do it himself? Sometimes it’s a hard call. I do end up taking most of his edits. Kevin is in the writing workshop I teach in my living room during the summers and at times I disagree with his critiques of other students, and then I start to think, ‘But you take all his advice yourself!’ I’ve learned a lot from him. He’s got a great sense of comedy. He’s taught me how to rearrange sentences so you get your laugh. He’s also sharp about stripping those red flags of narcissism where people read the writing and groan, ‘Oh, she’s really bragging about herself.’ In terms of the writing, I think it’s wonderful to be with a writer. I’m Kevin’s biggest fan. I think he’s brilliant.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — Often in your writing the narrator says she’s sick. She becomes ill or throws up. My immediate thought is that health is a tyrannical regime. And the term ‘sickness’ has at least two meanings: ‘illness’ and ‘perversion.’ Also, ‘very impressive,’ in slang, like, ‘That’s sick!’

A DODIE BELLAMY — The meaning I had in mind was cultural sickness. Take Trump, for example, but he’s just the start. I hate the word capitalism. I’m so tired of people using the word ‘capitalism’. Modern America, global capitalism, is sick. I watched this video last night called ‘Decolonising the Mind’, by Dr Michael Yellow Bird who teaches at Humboldt State University. He was talking about colonialism, saying that the only way anyone could engage in its horrors is through a lack of empathy. He was seeing colonialism as a state of mental illness. It’s obvious that we live in a sick culture.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — Is there such a thing as resistant sickness, forms of sickness that allow you to escape or enter into altered states that might paradoxically turn out to be forms of health?

A DODIE BELLAMY — I’m reminded of Marion Woodman’s ADDICTION TO PERFECTION (1982), which I read in the late ’80s, when I still was into Jungian stuff. It was about these hyper-functioning women who would just fall apart, because they’re missing their souls or something. I didn’t realise there was a lot sickness in my writing. I have food sensitivities that are troublesome. Before my gluten sensitivity was discovered I worried I had some awful auto-immune disorder. I used to have a couple of days each week when I was stay-in-bed sick.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — I thought about the title of WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD for months before I got round to reading the book.

A DODIE BELLAMY — It’s a good title, right? The sick could also be the underdog, so it’s about revolution. The way things have been going lately, perhaps we should just remove the ‘when’.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — This makes me think about E. T. again, the part in ‘Phone Home’ where you talk about all the actors necessary to the production of the character E. T. I was very overwhelmed by those facts. How did you find that out?

A DODIE BELLAMY — That was all googling. The information is taken from a number of sources. I loved that I was even able to find the grave plots of the people who died. It’s amazing.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — You mean the people who died while portraying E. T.? You suggest that some people succumbed because of psychological or physical stress.

A DODIE BELLAMY — Or they were doomed. It was a kind of sickness, how oppressive the creation of E. T. was to all these different people. Using some woman who has a cancerous voice because it’s so gravelly, for example.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — E. T. was literally made of parts of people whom society marks as being insufficient or abnormal. And then that alien entity being becomes a perfect love-object in suburbia.

A DODIE BELLAMY — Drew Barrymore says E. T. was totally real to her, even though she knew about all the component parts. That’s a metaphor for what’s real to us in general. Things don’t have to be believable for them to be real to us, for them to move us. Something can be very abstracted and still have the power to movem, like an Eva Hesse sculpture. You look at those things and have such a strong response, with no idea why you’re feeling it.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — This is also a compelling aspect of your work, which I see as being a kind of research into affect. You show what’s behind E. T., all the different agents, subjectivities, positions.

A DODIE BELLAMY — I was surprised by how traumatic that movie was. I asked my students, and they were all traumatised as children watching that movie. Now it would have to come with a trigger warning!

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — Do you often think about ways of getting at certain identifications and experiences that escape us, that slip away, maybe because they are traumatic?

A DODIE BELLAMY — There’s a real openness when I’m writing. I try to stay in a libidinal state. It’s like, ‘Wow this is interesting,’ or ‘Wow this connects.’ I try not to get too analytical with it. The way you’re talking about it is really beautiful, but if I were thinking about it that way it wouldn’t get written.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — What’s that libidinal state like?

A DODIE BELLAMY — It’s encountering surprising connections, and the world starts feeling like a matrix. Everything starts feeling like it’s connecting, and I see this and I see that. I pull things in and move them around and see connections. It’s this fluid craziness and I feel like a wizard with a pot that I’m stirring. That’s what allows those surprising connections.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — When you begin to work on something, do you always know what you’re beginning?

A DODIE BELLAMY — Not necessarily. I mean, I do if I take something on as an assignment, which sometimes I do just to get myself to work on something. I just started a new book and I wasn’t planning to write it. And I wasn’t planning to write THE TV SUTRAS. And I wasn’t planning to write ‘In the Shadows of the Twitter Towers’ in WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD. I don’t know how I started writing that, but I could not stop writing it. I liked the idea of having something in the book that was substantial and hadn’t been published elsewhere.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — I was really interested in the character Trey in ‘In the Shadows of the Twitter Towers’, his insane love of gentrification.

A DODIE BELLAMY — It’s hard to tell with Trey. He’s a composite of several real people in my neighbourhood. There’s one guy who’s always calling the cops on some homeless person on his cell phone. And someone else in the building wrote me those crazy letters. I don’t know how I found his Yelp reviews. I eventually cut them down and did a collage because he says the same things over and over again. Discovering those Yelp reviews was one of those gifts from the universe.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — Certain structures related to traditional literary genres seem to be disappearing from contemporary life. Examples might be job security or reliable forms of intimacy, and how people struggle to approach both work and intimacy with trust. Critics like Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai have written about this. Do you see this instability as related to your own work with narrative?

A DODIE BELLAMY — The conventional, midlist novel that’s taught in MFA programmes doesn’t reflect the current reality at all. It’s not even a very satisfying fantasy. I have no problem with conventional narratives. They create this wonderful fantasy of everything resolving at the end. That’s what’s so frustrating in real life – there are so many things where you never know the end of the story. It can fucking drive you crazy. Like the story of this very handsome, vain guy downstairs who was here when we moved in that I mention in ‘In the Shadows of the Twitter Towers’.

Q THE WHITE REVIEW — He was a musician, right?

A DODIE BELLAMY — Yes, and he became a junkie. It was shocking how quickly somebody can disintegrate if they’re into heroin. He was very frail, walking with a cane, and he quit paying his rent. Creepy, creepy people started coming over – he eventually got evicted. And then somebody said he went back to L.A., but I cannot tell you how much over the years I’ve wanted to know what happened to this guy. I’m never going to know! There are stories you get invested in and then they just end. They’re not resolved.

A big topic of everyone’s conversation is how disjunctive their life is, how fragmented they feel. That’s why I read nineteenth-century novels at night, as a sort of antidote. Now I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels, which have the sweep of a nineteenth-century novel. I’m on volume two. You can have a literary form that exists outside your experience, or you can try to create forms that somehow reflect your current experience. Those are your choices. But I find that a lot of fiction students don’t want to be shown that. I like Lidia Yuknavitch. I watch her videos online. She could get anyone to do anything. And she makes a good case about creating new forms. You know that quote by Audre Lorde, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’? Form is political. It’s not a neutral. It carries baggage, all these assumptions about reality. Whose reality does this form correspond to? That’s what New Narrative addresses. The Language poets had basically thrown out narrative, and the point of New Narrative was that there are people who aren’t entitled enough to throw out narrative. Telling their stories is important to them. So how do we tell a story that honours our experience without falling back on all of this crap? I would say that the way fiction is taught in the MFA context would be like writing poetry and only doing sonnets. Or, as a friend of mine says, it would be like going to art school and only doing landscape painting.

There are other ways to write. The novel used to be an experimental form. Kevin says to me, ‘Dodie, you have to realise that the novel is no longer an experimental form.’ Whereas it was. When I was in high school you read Faulkner and it was just presented as good writing. Now you see grad students complaining that Faulkner is too hard for them. Or it’s taught in experimental writing classes – Faulkner, you know? The novel has become this really conservative form. Books like THE ARGONAUTS (2015) by Maggie Nelson should not have been published according to traditional models. It’s so encouraging that people don’t have any trouble reading it. In fact, I think we’re trained for disjunction. Early movies had inter-titles because people didn’t understand the language of film, or disjunction, but now we live and breathe the language of disjunction and fragmentation. To have writing that reflects that seems like it shouldn’t be a biggie.

Date: November 1, 2017

Publisher: The White Review

Format: Web

Link to the review.

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Interview in The Believer

Trying times.

TRANSCRIPT AS METAPHOR

An Interview with Poet Lucy Ives

While Lucy Ives went out for a snack, I lay down on the couch, first checking my phone, then reading the first five pages of Susan Howe’s Sorting Facts: or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, in which she calls poetry “factual telepathy.” Howe sees poetics as a way of conjuring facts, that history isn’t the product of reliable sources, but a process of posing events, batting them around, dressing paper dolls in fact costumes, dragging an information magnet through the streets.

Ives had just finished teaching a companion class to her latest project and installation, Real Allegory, which ran this spring at Flying Object, in which she attempted to call into question commonplace distinctions between historical and literary description and interpretation. Below you’ll find a document of and about a ‘real’ historical event, a conversation between Ives and me on an April evening that became an audio recording, then a transcription, then an edited transcription, in which I chose what I deemed to be the ‘significant’ moments, in which I spruced up all the times I sounded like an idiot. Does this mean the facts are lost? Did I trace over the facts? The historical record inevitably rewrites the world, willingly or unwillingly imitating it, splintering it into fabrications, each one a script for multiple potential reenactments.

— Patrick Gaughan

I. YOU CAN SPEND ALL OF YOUR TIME IMITATING THE WORLD

PATRICK GAUGHAN: I was reading Tropics of Discourse this morning per your recommendation and could see why you were into it: Hayden White’s ideas of historical narrative as being composed of metaphor and other literary tropes, as opposed to successions of facts.

LUCY IVES: I think he’s coming out of a poetics tradition, and that’s a key term in my project: poetics. I wanted to be able to think about poetics outside of literary texts, to see if literary logic could exist in other kinds of environments. “Narrative” and “Description” can be literary, but they don’t have to be. I wanted to understand, “What would a non-literary poetics be?” Because I think when we talk about poetics, that’s actually what we mean. Or when you use that term, you mean something that isn’t exclusively literary. Sure, there’s poetry and there are certain conventions associated with it, but the notion of poetics can exist outside of a literary space.

PG: So you’re saying that literary tropes and styles are linked to not only art but also history?

LI: I think White’s enabled me to find ways to consider this idea. I’ll be in conversation with someone who isn’t a writer, let’s say a photographer, and they’ll be making claims about an image or a brand, they might be interpreting it, and I’ll find myself saying something like, “You’re engaging in literary analysis right now. The way you’re reading this is literary and it’s actually only literary, it’s not like there’s some special mode of interpretation that belongs to photography, it’s that photography is in some sense borrowing certain kinds of rhetorical analysis from literature,” and it’s interesting to see what people make of that, because they often feel excluded from literature!

PG: Who does?

LI: Certain people feel contemporary literature is not “for” them. That literature is a thing happening in another world and that it belongs to other people. And yet they use literary thought. Their suspicion and paranoia about images, for example, or certain modes of design, is a literary kind of suspicion, a literary paranoia.

PG: To whom does description belong? Is it purely a literary thing?

LI: Well, if you believe Levi-Strauss, it belongs to writing, and then there’s the question of to whom writing belongs, but I’m pretty sure on some significant level description has, for a long time, been most obsessed over by literature. I don’t think, for example, that description is the best friend of philosophy, because philosophy hasn’t taken very good care of writing. This is very gossipy sounding, but other disciplines pay lip service to concerns about what writing is or what it does, but inevitably they just want to be able to say the thing.

PG: That writing is just a vessel.

LI: Exactly. One synonym is as good as another.

PG: Or that writing is style-less, just a way of conveying. There’s this Bruce Hainley book I was reading about the artist Sturtevant. It’s two essays, but arranged such that one’s on the left and the other’s on the right. One’s about her reperformance of an Eric Satie piece, the other’s about her version of the store of Claes Oldenburg. Two essays, different subject matter, cross-cut for a hundred pages. It’s nonfiction, but fed through this bouncing back and forth device, which is a literary device.

LI: It also gives you license to think about a lot of things outside of her work, and also maybe to experience her work more fully. Speaking of Sturtevant, imitation is also interesting because literature may be the only space where imitation is basically free to develop as intensely or deeply as it might like to. In other kinds of writing, you’re not supposed to describe something too carefully because the description should always be in service to whatever professional point you’re supposed to be making. But in literature, you can spend all of your time imitating the world. (Of course, I’m not guaranteeing that anyone will read what you write if you do this!)

PG: Imitation not in the sense of imitating someone else’s style, but imitation of the world?

LI: Yeah, the world, so-called or whatever it may be. I’m indicating mimesis here. And in literature we can certainly imagine forms of imitation that might occur without our even defining what the specific objects of imitation are. These objects can be discovered in the process of imitating. This is, for example, what literary experiment sometimes is.

II. THE INCIDENTAL IS WHERE HISTORY REALLY IS

PG: Where’s this image from, US Weekly?

LI: Yes. It’s a bizarre ventriloquizing of Kim.

PG: Right, because it says, “My butt won’t stop growing” exclamation point.

LI: It seems like some kind of horror thing: “My butt won’t stop growing!” There’s some other agency there, apparently. But it’s also totally meaningless. Central to my project is the idea that there is literal speech, but unless we’re convinced of it, we won’t believe it. We can’t believe in the literality of speech unless we already believe it’s literal. And what will convince us that we already believe some speech or writing to be literal? Most often this has to do with genre, like if we read a book that says ‘Nonfiction’ on the back of it.

PG: And to some people, if it’s in a magazine, it’s true. Eh, is it more ‘true’ if it’s in a magazine? Maybe I’m not giving people enough credit.

LI: This image of Kim Kardashian is a totally stupid image, but it’s such a stupid, almost automatic or knee-jerk image that you can’t help but think you’re looking at something real, actual. It seems like an utterance that’s destined to be an index of our time, in some future; it will read as stylized, as symptomatic of our contemporary obsessions and errors. Conversely, I also have the sense that because we know the category of nonfiction exists, we often play with it for other ends. I’m really interested in thinking about how historical texts might, of course, have goals that are similar to literary texts, goals of persuasion, let’s say. And that literary texts might, at base, wish to be informative or critical, but they are troubled by seeming to have no referent.

PG: So, for example, literature is less trustworthy because it doesn’t have sources?

LI: In nonfiction, there’s always a referent. It’s what that genre is founded upon. But if I’m writing endless paragraphs about a cereal bowl that doesn’t exist, it doesn’t serve any particular purpose, and it becomes literature instead of something else.

PG: Since you’re not a Kardashian, no one cares.

LI: Yet I should also say that everybody has become obsessed with this idea that the incidental is where history really is. Because if you try to talk about monumental, huge things, you inevitably fail.

III. WALKING AROUND WASN’T ENOUGH

PG: So let’s get into this idea of what constitutes a historical event. I listened to an interview with this NPR reporter, Robert Smith, who’s been doing five-minute radio segments for twenty years, and he said, “There is no news.” There is no such thing as news. The earth is just going around and happening and when he shows up, he creates a story based on who he talks to, what information he gleans, and then he slaps an arbitrary beginning and ending on it, and then it becomes news. To me, history’s the same thing. History only happens when someone stops the world, picks up a few events and points-of-view, does a little Rubik’s cube action on them or polishes them up, and then it’s history.

LI: That certainly makes sense to me, but I also think that’s only one version of what happens when we make claims about what is the case. And as much as he’s saying that there’s no news until he gets there and presents a point of view, there are things that happen. There are crimes, these things really occur, and there are different ways in which they’re relayed. In any case, going back to gossip, people are going to talk no matter what. It’s not within one person’s, or even a government’s, power to determine how that will occur.

PG: I was thinking about events versus documents of events yesterday when a student of mine presented about 9/11 conspiracy theories, fourteen years after the event. She was probably six or so when it happened, so everything she’s ever heard about it could be classified as news, but seemed more like conspiracy or metaphor.

LI: An artist, Francis Alÿs, who is Belgian by birth, emigrated to Mexico and did a project for which he made little metal dogs; they don’t really look like dogs, but these little metal things with wheels and they’re magnetized, and had little cameras on them and the project was that he would walk around Mexico City pulling the dog on wheels by a string, taking video of the route and also collecting pieces of metal. He’d walk around all night.

PG: How big would it get as he’s accumulating these things?

LI: It got bigger, yeah.

PG: So big you couldn’t even pull it? Like this big?

LI: Maybe not that big. I saw an exhibition displaying the dogs on a shelf, as a little portable TV played the videos. And there were other types of ephemera tucked under plexiglass on an accompanying desk; some of them were tabloid pages about people who magnetized themselves, and there were also drawings of the routes he took around the city. He had immigrated to Mexico City.

PG: So it was as if he used the project as a way to familiarize himself with this new place.

LI: I think that’s true. And also to gather things, to learn more than you could learn just by walking around. Walking around wasn’t enough.

PG: It’s funny that he’s literally picking up pieces of everywhere he goes. Instead of me remembering what I do, the world is sticking to me as I move through it.

LI: You’re not always choosing what you take.

Date: July 14, 2015

Publisher: The Believer

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

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Author photo.

Interview with Srikanth Reddy

The artist Francis Alÿs with one of his magnetized dogs.

THE TECHNOCRAT'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Srikanth Reddy with Lucy Ives

Poet Srikanth Reddy speaks to Triple Canopy editor Lucy Ives about the possible plurality of worlds, poets as “feeling machines,” and how to make an aesthetic object out of bureaucratic relics of the space race.

Lucy Ives: I want to ask about the talk you did as part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is __”) at MoMA PS1 in 2013. You seemed so comfortable in this speculative mode of thinking! I’m curious what role speculative thinking might play in your work.

Srikanth Reddy: My main memory of putting together that talk was actually of its being an intensely uncomfortable mode of thinking! I felt as I was doing it that I was going against the grain of how my mind normally works, if it can be said to work at all these days. It was a useful exercise, however. In the process, I came to feel that there’s a kind of moral obligation to speculate in the way that the Triple Canopy event was inviting people to do. If you don’t think about the distant future of our contemporary historical moment—the longue durée, as it were—then it’s very easy for one’s political or aesthetic practice to be too circumscribed in the “now.” Or even in one’s domestic practice, for that matter. So the project was exciting to me even if it was a little bit uncomfortable. I don’t feel intuitively inclined to think this way. It was definitely work.

LI: In your second collection of poetry, Voyager (2011), there is certainly some interest in speculative thinking, since the book speaks to the possibility of a plurality of worlds. Interestingly, this happens through the erasure, appropriation, and rewriting of a memoir by Kurt Waldheim, former secretary-general of the United Nations and, as was revealed during his (successful) run for the Austrian presidency in 1985, intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

SR: In a way, as I worked on Voyager I was interested in some cosmological questions—“How many worlds are there?” or “How many objects are there in the world?” or “Is the world a single object?”—that real philosophers might find somewhat boring. But in the book I’m trying to deal with these problems not so much speculatively as concretely, through a reading of Waldheim’s hopelessly partial and duplicitous account of the world, trying to retrieve other imaginative cosmologies from inside of that falsely totalizing technocratic text. So the cosmological project of Voyager is more about investigative reading than about speculation to a certain extent. When I say “investigative,” though, I don’t mean to imply that I feel there’s some core “Truth” to be excavated from within Waldheim’s language. Rather, I was trying to investigate a spectrum of plural, lowercase “truths” that I sensed resonating within this historical text. I wanted to see if I could make an aesthetic object out of a Cold War geopolitical document—that was the real literary investigation of the project, in retrospect. So I would differentiate what I do in Voyager from “Investigative Poetics,” which is a phrase I’ve heard here and there and which I think may be problematic in some ways.

LI: What is problematic about that phrase?

SR: I may be misunderstanding the project of investigative poetics, but I think one aspect of this sort of work involves foregrounding and manipulating research documents or archival material—civic documents, old periodicals, scientific literature, etc. But working in this mode, one could run the risk of simply reproducing academic forms of thought and methodology that are quite common in English departments today. This represents a limited notion of the full investigative capacity that might actually be available to a poet, I suspect. On the other hand, one could think of an investigative poetics as mirroring the kind of sociopolitical work that is otherwise performed by investigative journalists in our culture. That, too, runs the risk of somehow narrowing the field of effects and modes of inquiry available to the poet. But I say this with the full knowledge that much amazing work has been done under the sign of investigative poetics; it’s a subject I have to learn more about. The important thing is to keep the notion of investigation as open as possible, I think.

LI: What is that investigative capacity? I’d like to know, for example, how you think about the role of the poet or the “creative writer” within the academy. Is poetry ever a kind of knowledge, in an academic sense?

SR: I hear a lot of colleagues in the humanities self-describe as knowledge workers. I don’t think that’s a helpful way of describing what a poet is doing, even within an institutional context. This is an old-fashioned, probably romantic distinction, but I think of the poet more as a “feeling worker,” or an “affective worker.” Not that I’m hoping for a return to sentimentalism in the art. It’s just that I’m skeptical of any knowledge claim people make for poetry. I’ve never seen the art form as one that is epistemological in that sense. I find that it’s more of a technology of feeling than anything else, or at least, I feel that poetry helps me to orient myself affectively in the world—that this is the work it does for me in my experience, though naturally others will invariably find that it does other forms of work for them. It’s a hopelessly rough-hewn way of overstating the case, the way I’m making these distinctions, of course!

LI: And yet there are what one might call philosophic tendencies within your work—an interest in contemplation, for example.

SR: In the first book of Voyager there is a series of propositions about the world that very loosely echoes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I wasn’t really trying to do philosophy here; I was trying to feel my way toward a kind of philosophical music that was more “flattened out” than the lyric, tonally speaking. The philosophical premise of Book One of Voyager was just that: a kind of a premise for the construction of poetic language. I’m very drawn to conceptual work, since it has a kind of philosophical inflection. (I’m thinking of writers like Tan Lin or Lisa Robertson here, though they may not self-identify as “conceptualists” in a strict sense). But I think it would be a dangerous mistake to make the claim that my own poem—or, in a sense, any poem—is actually doing philosophy! Rather, one could say that the poem—my own poem, that is—is adopting the rhetorical and tonal, and even narratological, strategies of philosophy in order to achieve aesthetic effects. That’s what I like about conceptual work: how it makes me feel. Not that it gives me a new set of political or epistemological tools to make my way in the world. Rather, it allows me to feel my way to a proper stance toward these tools.

On one level, then, I agree with a critic like Keston Sutherland, who has maintained that conceptualism is essentially a form of antisubjectivist dogma—but I don’t think this is necessarily a problem for conceptualists, because many of them would happily embrace the label of antisubjectivism. What I find even more interesting is the way in which his criticism of conceptualism dovetails with ideological positions that are, on some level, anathema to what I would imagine his own politics to be. Keston’s assault on conceptualism is, obviously, a Marxist critique. He argues, if I’m getting things right, that conceptualism is indifferent toward literary craft; Keston’s defense of craft (or technique, or whatever you want to call it) occurs within a Marxist paradigm of labor. But the word “craft” is one of the most cherished pieties of neoliberal workshop culture that we know! This makes me feel like I don’t want to wholly subscribe to either the antisubjectivist aspect of conceptualism or the critiques of those aspects. For me, I’d like to preserve an individual and affective relationship to conceptual writing that might not be something that can be codified under the terms of the current debate.

LI: I’m confused about what exactly you mean by “feeling,” or an “affective relationship.” Normally these are terms we use to talk about relationships we have with other people, though of course not exclusively. Could you say a bit more about this?

SR: Well, I should begin addressing your confusion by confessing that I’m confused about these matters, too. In fact, I think there’s a certain negative capability, or a cultivated uncertainty, that one must maintain with regard to one’s affective labors as a poet—otherwise the work becomes a kind of emotional connect-the-dots. But to speculate further, I would say that I want to move away from an ideological orientation regarding what a poem or a poetic practice can do. The writers I admire most are involved in a kind of sensitive and sensual labor, rather than a self-consciously political practice. I worry sometimes that affect drops out of the conversation when we focus on the political aspects of the art. Or maybe the affect becomes flattened out into mere outrage, or melancholia. To maintain the full spectrum of feeling in one’s work, I think one has to think of the work of poetry as a kind of affective enterprise first and foremost—and doing that involves preserving one’s subjectivity as a resource for that work, against antisubjectivist or other political claims that would overdetermine one’s emotional cogito.

LI: How does appropriation of text fit in with what you are describing about being an affective worker? Is there a kind of feeling unique to rewriting or writing your way into a preexisting text?

SR: This is a great question, and I think it strikes to the heart of a lot of what we’ve been discussing. I think the interesting thing about working with appropriated texts—the great thing about “uncreative writing,” as it were—is that it offers new possibilities for exploring one’s inwardness and subjectivity, rather than ways of escaping one’s own identity under an antisubjectivist agenda. It’s easy to produce work that is empty of feeling when one is working with appropriation, erasure, collage, or any number of other textual operations. The really difficult—and, I think, important—thing to do is to unearth or excavate registers of feeling from within those textual operations.

Date: May 19, 2015

Publisher: Triple Canopy

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

Interview in BOMB 2014

Lucy Ives
BY KENDRA SULLIVAN

Generalizing a decade's affect, the insubstantial magic of capital, and Ives's novel nineties.

In the novel nineties by Lucy Ives, three friends come-of-age by committing credit card fraud. Living in Manhattan at the end of the twentieth century, the girls are surrounded by the dark and contractual abundance of capital; by television, sex, celebrity, and consumerism. The plot—their crime and the subsequent police investigation—launches an inquiry into the nature of guilt, debt, credit, privilege, adolescence, feminism, and what these concepts mean to the daughters of the happy few who live on Park Ave.

Alien, canny, and alert, the unnamed narrator indexes her historical present (the 1990s) as she riddles her way through the compromised process of self-actualization in the age of capitalism. At the outset, her circle steals their friend’s (father’s) credit card, goes on a shopping spree at a local department store, and consoles the girl by threatening to “fuck up” the thieves. The secret crime fuels their sense of autonomy, but makes them vulnerable to a higher authority; namely, their parents and the police. The theft almost reads as an unintentional act of political transgression—not a cure but a rupture. The girls almost read as accidental radicals—their subjectivities shift; their actions author that shift. For an instant, they transcend their classification as “child-consumers” by using credit fraud as a means to outfox the mercenary circulation of money and stuff that makes up their world. They spot a loophole, slip through it, and end up in a psychologist’s office.

Ives says: “Oddly, I think they are all in a hurry to preempt any kind of victimhood that might be foisted upon them, by whom I have no idea. I think it’s this fear of becoming victims that makes them as vile and destructive as they are.”

So precise as to sometimes feel punishing, nineties is a brief, formal, forceful book. In it, Ives employs an economy of language that undoes the extreme fecundity of the material culture she describes. As a work of literature, it asks: How can writing be a motor for social revaluation? Neither ethical tale nor enlightenment narrative, there is no moral; there is no reveal. Wrong-doing fails to present the girls (or the reader) with a chance to recover a workable idea of right-action. Instead, their heist produces a highly constructive form of critical anxiety that asks: Is this life? How should I live it? Will I be punished if I live it incorrectly? Lucy and I speak about these issues and more as nineties, published by Tea Party Republicans Press, enters its second print-run.

Kendra Sullivan You have told me you wrote nineties in response to your own desire to read nineties. What does that mean?

Lucy Ives It means that I wanted to read a book that contained clear, almost (to the extent that this is possible) objective description. I wanted to read something that didn’t contain instructions for how anyone should feel, in reading the book—that wouldn’t instruct one as to how the characters “really” feel, or even as to how the reader should react. I wanted that space to be open and ambiguous, as it is in life. So I wanted to read a fundamentally amoral but incredibly visually and perhaps even spatially precise book.

KS Why do the words on your pages feel so much like objects?

LI This is the style I write in in this book. It seems to fit, also, with the plot, which is about consumerism. This is a novel about an actual affective and aesthetic condition standard to the time in which it takes place, roughly 1992 to 1995. If affect can be generalized across a society and a historical time period, then this is the kind of affect I want to generate, depict, play with.

KS Roland Barthes writes, “Every biography is a novel that dares not speak its name.” Is the unnamed narrator of nineties actually called Lucy?

LI The narrator’s name could be Lucy, but her name is certainly not “Lucy Ives,” or at any rate she isn’t me. In nineties a narrator speaks in the present tense. We don’t know if what she describes has only just happened or if it happened in the past. But the narrator doesn’t have a life in the same way that you or I do, which is of course obvious, but all the same I want to say that I don’t intend for this narrator to have a life; I intend for her to tell this story.

KS The girls lie to their parents and lie to each other. They commit a crime. The police arrive. Multiple dialectics develop: between lies and fiction, fiction and truth, truth and fantasy, fantasy and lies.

LI Maybe something to be said here is that these girls may have little in common. Though they all live in New York City, their families have very different histories; this is the American situation, of course, but perhaps it’s in some way intensified in this particular competitive, privileged milieu. What do they share? Being female, being young, attending the same school, being rich. Are they rich enough? Will they stay that rich? You could say something like, these people have everything so what’s wrong with them, and I think that’s also right, but: they are living in an era of generous credit, in a time in which having is not the same as having the means to have. This is not a judgment, it’s just a fact. And I think you see this disconnection reflected in their way of relating to one another, which is, or was always going to be, extremely venal.

KS The girls remind me of a coven. They share a heretical subject-hood, though their bond feels sinister; their allegiances suspect. Do you think the friends in your book were empowered by their alliance with one another?

LI I hesitate to be too optimistic, but I have to say that I think that these characters are better off having committed their crime, having seen the consequences. Not because now they are reformed and won’t be “bad” anymore, but because they are more informed about how the world works. I think that they know more at the end of the novel than they did at its outset, and I can’t object to that. I’m sad that their friendships have to end, but honestly there are more important things in life.

KS nineties is inflected by atmospheric typographies: street signage, store and brand names, graffiti—and the writing of the girls themselves in the form of notes. When, in a novel, I read that someone is writing a letter, the letter is real even if the writer and the recipient are fictional.

LI I’m interested in the difference between the narrator-as-character and the narrator-as-narrator and how the presence of incidental writing in the book makes you think about this—and also think about the possibility that there is a third facet to this narrator, which is to say, the narrator-as-author.

I’ve imagined the narrator of nineties as someone who is, if not exactly a writer, then unusually interested in writing and the ways in which learning to read and write shape and alter our perceptions. I don’t think the narrator knows exactly how writing changes things, but I think she does feel fairly sure that it does. (Certainly she thinks a lot about brand names.) It seems like writing is a device that allegedly repeats or represents the world, yet it repeats or represents the world imperfectly. All the same, it’s a powerful device for representing, reflecting, and perhaps even understanding what is the case.

Then there is the fact, as you point out, that in the context of a novel a letter between two characters is a “real” letter, a real written thing, even if the characters have no corporeal existence. Maybe this matters to the narrator, too. Maybe written things—the notes, letters, and poems authored by the characters of nineties—get included in the novel because they seem like traces or proofs of real events, events that in themselves remain ambiguous and lacking in objectivity. It’s hard—and the narrator almost knows this—to think without writing. The narrator uses writing but is also still in the process of learning or coming to understand what writing is.

Maybe when we learn to write we also acquire a means of engaging privacy in a selective way. I’m pretty sure that the writing undertaken by characters in nineties is about trying to figure out who their allies are and what—or whose—language it is they speak. They really have no idea who they are, what they sound or seem like. Writing is a means to some kind of provisional resolution of these (inevitably unsolvable) quandaries.

KS While re-reading nineties I recall 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Shopping and browsing figure heavily in both. Clothes that freely cross state borders, where populations cannot, stand in as contact relics of sweatshop labor practices consumers never see. nineties dwells in the surface of excess. Without mention of “exploitation,” it is everywhere inferred.

LI There’s a lot of stuff in this novel. Why is all of it here? What should anyone do with it? I think part of the bad behavior you see in this book is an attempt, on the part of these not very moral young people, to manage this enormous quantity of stuff—stuff, recall, that they know very little about (re: its origins) and which they’re supposed to desire. It’s possible that these characters could have moved on to blowing things up or lighting things on fire and so on. Such actions might be a logical (illogical) step; such violence would seem, then, to stem from being overwhelmed by material things, by the nonsensical unmotivated presence of all this expensive and mostly useless stuff.

KS Kristeva writes of “consumerism that swallows up human life.” Consumerism inspires criminality in the girls; their crime initiates a kind of trial. It’s not totally clear if they survive its proceedings.

LI I think they survive in different ways. Which is to say, they manage. Their parents manage. Everyone seems to be on trial, in some sense, since credit fraud is easily in reach of everyone; so, in this sense, the question is not “Did you steal?” but “Will you?” Anyway, what would it mean to behave morally, or not amorally, in this environment? Is using a credit card legally, in one’s own name, a moral act?

We need suffering in order to have knowledge. It’s not just some stupid free-for-all of postmodern floating signifiers in life! I think this is the tragedy I’m trying to point out here. Debt may not be “real,” but other things you think, feel, see, and so forth are real. Other things (and people) supporting the insubstantial magic of capital are real. I know we all know this! Maybe this has something to do with the fact that suffering is never theoretical.

KS Sometimes, the young girls read like drones collaged from ads in sales catalogs. They slip into the apparatus of capitalism through “wanting” and “suffering.” Their “wanting” and “suffering” is different than the wanting and suffering of those laboring to produce all that stuff, but the girls are no more free to escape their affliction than the laborers are to escape theirs.

LI The characters in nineties are attempting to learn a livable idea of freedom. They’re trying to be free, to behave in the way that they believe people who are actually free would behave. However, their idea of freedom is mostly destructive—and false. It’s based on images they’ve gathered from entertainments of the day and is fundamentally apolitical, by which I mean it has zero to say about what it means to live together and share limited resources and so on. In fact, one of the major problems with the idea of freedom the characters in nineties subscribe to—which is to say, the three main characters, who commit the crime—is that it assumes that one lives in a society of literally limitless wealth and abundance, that there will always be more, and that therefore one is an idiot if one does not simply take whatever one wants. Here, freedom is recognition of this purported infinite abundance. It’s the willingness to look this terrifyingly massive abundance dead-on, to realize the implications and possibilities of a supposed infinite fungibility of money and debt. It probably seems strange to some people that adolescents could have such an idea about larger social and/or economic notions and even act accordingly, but I guess that is what this novel is about.

Date: March 13, 2014

Publisher: BOMB

Format: Web

Link to the review.

nineties-image.jpg

Interview with Susan Stewart

nsfw.

I TURN TO THE WORD “PERSON”
Susan Stewart with Lucy Ives

Poet and scholar Susan Stewart responds to questions from Triple Canopy editor Lucy Ives on the difference between subjectivity and sensing, thinking for its own sake, and the poem as occurrence, instance, or object.

Lucy Ives: Though I am posing these questions in the context of an issue of Triple Canopy related to objects and objectivity, I want to begin with the notion of the subject and, more specifically, what you have termed, in your early book on nonsense, “our appurtenance to one another.” In reading your criticism, I am often struck by your attention to language as a social event—as well as to the role, or roles, of literature and works of art in the social production of meaning.

I’d like to ask you how notions of intersubjectivity may have changed in your criticism over time. Where did you begin, as a critic and scholar, in your thinking around the connections between ethics and aesthetics, and where are you now? What has the role of conversations within the academy been in shaping such notions? Of conversations held outside the academy?

Susan Stewart: The notions of “subjectivity” and “intersubjectivity” have indeed changed in scholarship during my lifetime, and these changes have had particular consequences. When intellectuals sustain a word like “subjectivity,” or use terms from the secret police and the military—“interrogate” a subject; or “deploy” a method—they produce effects in the “real world.” So far as I can tell, the concept of subjectivity originally had a perspectival and psychological valence, then acquired its political meaning within ideology critique, and later moved into literary study as a strange amalgam of psychological and political determination.

It’s a vivid historical fact that many people have been, and indeed remain, reduced to the status of a subject in nearly every sphere of their lives. But at least in Louis Althusser’s analysis of ideology, science and art are domains that can evade the totalizing determinations of what he calls ideological apparatuses. Here I have always thought Althusser follows Immanuel Kant’s distinction between reflective and determinative judgments. Determinative judgments are those efficient, necessarily unthinking decisions we make all the time in order to get through our days; because they are unthought they are most likely to be “subject” to the powers that be. But not every aspect of our lives and not every possibility of our wills is encompassed by such a “subject position.” In the case of science, reflective judgments are capable of creating new categories of understanding, and in the case of aesthetics, our judgments can move entirely beyond our categories of understanding. These are important openings that enable ideology critique and indicate the possibility of living beyond ideology.

As you mention, I have used the terms “subjective” and “intersubjective” in my own writing: “subjective” when I have felt that I wanted to distinguish, in the earlier sense, between individual and “objective” points of view; “intersubjective,” when I have wanted to underline the mutuality and sociality of being. Yet, influenced by the poetics of Allen Grossman and the philosophy of Derek Parfit, among others, I turn to the word “person” when I am accounting for actions that are intended, volitional, and creative.

My most sustained try at thinking through the relation between aesthetics and ethics is my essay “On the Art of the Future” [included in Stewart’s 2005 collection The Open Studio]. There I take up particularly the aesthetics of Kant and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. My interest in this relation stems from my sense that both fields of action are prior to other cultural determinations. Because the practice of art involves hypothetical terms and reversible consequences, art can be a tentative, impermanent ground for exploring intersubjective relations. The ethical acknowledgment of the “in and for himself or herself” of other persons is in turn prior to any terms of aesthetic address, or of any other form of address.

The viewer or listener or audience of an artwork is a living, sensing being. The artist is communicating with, not shaping or forming, that being. For this reason I eschew the idea that art is “experimental,” for I do not believe in experimenting upon persons. Nor do I see any reason to seek to replicate the results of our actions as artists. Art forges, creates, moves ahead of the rest of the culture—some of it disappears and some of it “takes” (place, effect).

LI: I’m curious about how your doctoral studies in folklore may have shaped your work. What did this departmental affiliation permit you—as a critic, scholar, and writer—that other ways of proceeding in the humanities might not have? Do you have a sense of how this particular formation may have shaped your understanding of what constitutes a significant “unit of analysis” within literary studies?

SS: As an undergraduate, I was drawn to literature, anthropology, and visual art, and these were fields much influenced at the time by new methods in semiotics and structuralism. At the same time, the New Critics, and especially the tastes and judgments of T. S. Eliot, were also tremendously important. Every English major came to know the metaphysical poets and the Jacobean dramatists very well, and our sense of modernism was heavily dependent upon French Symbolism.

Meanwhile, Claude Levi-Strauss became particularly important to me, for I was drawn to his ideas about phenomena as “good for thinking” (rather than conceiving of thinking as a means to phenomena/reference). In other words, Levi-Strauss seemed to restore the priority of thinking for its own sake.

In graduate school I continued to study various issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, eventually completing an MA in poetics at Johns Hopkins and a PhD in Folklore Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. At Johns Hopkins my studies coincided with the advent of poststructuralism; my teacher Richard Macksey organized and edited The Structuralist Controversy, the important collection of writings addressing this paradigm change. The Folklore Department at Penn was a deeply interdisciplinary program, and I was taken particularly with the microanalyses of the sociologist Erving Goffman and the kinesics of the anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell, as well as the Slavic Department’s work in Russian Formalism—especially the methods of the literary and cultural critic Mikhail Bakhtin.

Folklore and the avant-garde were two poles of literary production that became quite close in that period (for example, the interest in folk and fairy tales on the part of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and my later friend Kathy Acker). As folklorists, my classmates and I were trained as ethnographers, and we became deeply engaged by the connections between everyday aesthetic practices—stories, jokes, riddles, proverbs, mourning rituals, lullabies, ballads, ornaments—and their often archaic origins. A sense of the continuity of all art forms and a radical appreciation of the reach of their histories was an important legacy of that education.

I had written poetry since childhood. In graduate school I began to see how I could use my prose writing as a kind of ongoing notebook to address problems in art and aesthetics that interested me in my creative work. I wrote my dissertation on “nonsense” out of an intuition about the hyperrational systems on the border of rationality, and my study On Longing grew from consequent concerns with issues of scale, memory, and value.

LI: I wonder if you could say a bit about your early theoretical and critical allegiances.

SS: The questions and debates of the time have remained central to my thinking and writing: Is there a poetic language distinct from “ordinary” language? If so, what are its characteristics? If not, what is the role of metaphor in everyday language and the role of the imagination in culture? Are there universals of human consciousness and universal ethical values? Why are we both drawn to binary thinking and compelled to go beyond it? Is there a way to evade the traps of dialectic? What are the alternatives to materialism, to metaphysics? How are human beings the makers or creators of themselves?

LI: I wonder if you would maintain that many or all of your critical works are, at base, about poetics. It’s a category I find myself constantly unpacking and discussing, both in public and with colleagues and in more private moments. Do you have a working definition of this category and/or a sense of its particular significance for contemporary thought? What should one say to a person who understands the terms “poetics” and “poetry” to be synonymous (or who does not care that there might be a difference between the two)?

SS: Since my early studies in anthropology and literature, I’ve been much influenced by Giambattista Vico’s notion of verum factum—that the truth is made and that we can analyze its causes and effects. This is not a matter of relativism or “social construction”; we are bound by those truths, and their consequences are inescapable. Central to Vico’s philosophy is the notion that poetic making, particularly the work of metaphor, is vital to processes of thought and, at a later stage, to the formation of institutions. Metaphor remains a resource both to sustain and transform the world.

It seems to me problems of definition—What is poetry? What is poetics?—arise in specific contexts of translation or intelligibility. In all of the traditions I have come to know even superficially, poetry is characterized by certain formal features having to do with its relation to time and space. It is composed in patterned, often measured, lines that have distinct beginnings and endings; even when written, poetry thus has rhythm. What is measured can be stress, sound, or visual marks. The resulting work has an articulated form; it is an occurrence, an instance, or an object, and it is possible to refer to it. Because of the quality of attention we bring to it, poetry is endowed with intensity and value. Because it can be made or performed well, poetry accrues to individual makers and performers. Because it can be fictional, poetry carries us beyond lived experience. Because it is both governed by internal rules and beyond the force of external law, poetry is a source of speculation and freedom.

“Poetics” is a term that, like “poetry,” is derived from the Greek word for making, poiesis, yet it indicates the study of the production of forms, including the art form of poetry. Many poets, from Horace to Alexander Pope to contemporary L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, have explored poetics within the medium of poetry itself, but poetics is a matter of analyzing and considering the features of any made form and can be expressed just as easily—in fact much more easily!—in prose. Aristotle’s Poetics, with its concern for the defining features of tragedy and their rhetorical and somatic effects, remains the obvious template for all later work in poetics.
I would agree that my prose writing is largely concerned with poetics. Even so, my most concerted effort in this domain can be found in my paired recent books: Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which addresses the reception of poetry, and The Poet’s Freedom, which addresses its production.

LI: If there exists an ongoing tension between art and philosophy, or art and criticism—if, as you write in The Open Studio, “philosophy’s constantly renewed announcement of the death of art can be read as a response to art’s unstated assertion, by means of its animation of sense particulars, of the limits of philosophy”—how might you, personally and professionally, navigate this détente? Do you consider yourself a philosopher or a literary writer or both—or is the distinction unimportant? Is it possible that you see some significance in a refusal to remain in just one sphere?

SS: This is a question I’ve thought about a great deal, yet I’ve concluded it doesn’t seem especially vital on the level of practice. Philosophy in the United States is largely concerned with problems of the analysis of concepts and sentences—problems already central to every aspect of the poet’s work. My own training was not in this kind of analytical philosophy but rather in what used to be called “literary theory.” (My own children refer to it somewhat ironically as “’70s theory,” and by that they mean Continental philosophy.) Except for my endeavors in poetry as a scholar of the history of the form and as a poet, I often have worked at the margins of disciplines, including aesthetics. But the professional status of my orientation doesn’t preoccupy me so much as the question of whether or not I am “getting somewhere” in my thinking.
That said, it is true that the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, regardless of Plato’s motives in claiming it, has some genuine basis in the very means of production of each form. Metaphysics particularly must remove itself from the constraints of individual voice if its claims are to be universal, yet the central tenets of metaphysics remain authored and achieve much of their authority from institutional recognition. Even so, the central questions of metaphysics—questions of knowing, the problem of an exterior world, the question of materiality, the nature of life, the relation between the soul and the body, the possibility of liberty, the question of other minds, the origin of Being, the existence of God—have as well been central not only to the themes of poetry, but also to its methods. We could reframe this list readily from the perspective of poets, for poets, too, have been preoccupied with the subject/object problem; the representation of nature; the materiality of language; the organic sources of form; the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of a practice of poetry; the bounds of traditions and the possibilities of free creation; the intelligibility of poetry for those who receive it; and a sense of ultimate purpose in creation.

In the end, poets and philosophers alike must take a stance against the mere “drawing of conclusions,” or they will betray what is made possible by their open practices. Creating poems and pursuing truth are human activities that are inseparable from our humanity itself—these actions separate us from other species that can make, but, so far as we know, cannot judge or contemplate their making.

Despite its roots in prophecy, lyric throughout its long history has rarely been written in the future tense or concerned with the future as a theme. Even so, perhaps this persistent absence indicates something deeper about the free practice of lyric; this very openness may indicate that futurity is nowhere in lyric deixis because it is everywhere. What Charles Baudelaire called “the spirit of the lyre” awakens us to our relation to nature, and to our own natures, and calls us to remember and consider and judge. The fact that our imaginations enable us to picture the future, and the future of our species, roots us more particularly in the sources of life and the possibility of its continuity.

Interview with Renee Gladman

Date: December 23, 2013

Publisher: Triple Canopy

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

THE COMPANY THAT NEVER COMES
Renee Gladman with Lucy Ives

In her suite of essays "Calamities," in Triple Canopy’s fourteenth issue, Renee Gladman asked, “Narrative—is anybody still interested?” Gladman speaks with Triple Canopy editor Lucy Ives about essays, ditties, half words, partial masks, and being a sentence writer.

Lucy Ives: Have more “Calamities” transpired?

Renee Gladman: I’m on page 45 of Calamities, which means there are probably about thirty essays now.

LI: They’re about a page each?

RG: Yes, usually a page or a page and a half. I’m starting with a question or premise, like cleaning the espresso maker, allowing that to relate to a heavy topic, but treating it in a haphazard way, allowing that to change into something else or letting it fall off, because there’s really nothing you can say. I start from the idea of being in the day, then generate an idea from it, let it fall apart, and see what the shape is after that. And for some reason they end up having this ditty shape of a couple pages.

LI: Say a bit more about this “ditty shape”?

RG: I call them ditties because they feel less like they’re trying to travel; there is just one point that gets made in a quick circle. It’s funny to call them essays anyway, because they fail as essays. They don’t sustain an argument, they don’t go anywhere, they don’t conclude anything, and the half-paragraph ones seem even more so, kind of absurd. I mean, the whole thing is to allow me to have fun with some of my stresses, like teaching, being an academic, trying to get tenure, living in a sad, lonely city. It’s a way of getting out of a kind of rut, a question I couldn’t get past, what should I be doing with my writing.

LI: What should you be doing with your writing?

RG: If I were a really good drawer I would give up writing and just make beautiful line drawings, or at least for a while that would suffice, but I don’t draw well enough to abandon writing. Sometimes I go around and talk about the sentence and prose, and for a while I was really stuck on how thoughts exist in a preverbal way. I was thinking about how in our minds we have many things going on simultaneously, as images, half words, gestures, partial marks, and from that multiplicity we go into the single line of articulation, of expression. I kept trying to point back to that threshold moment, that translation or becoming. The linguistic selection process, what you decide to privilege, is fascinating to me, but it’s hard to know what to say about it. It makes writing a very interesting space. Writing is not a map, but something that comes after mapping.

LI: Do you think about a reader in that sense?

RG: It’s bewildering enough trying to grasp “the person” in space and time; imagine trying to think about the reader as you write. For me, writing is a kind of pursuit of company that never comes. That comes, but then leaves or gets taken away; a pursuit that, because I write fiction, is embedded in the narrative. It gets acted out in the events of a narrator and another character or group of characters. I guess it is possible to see something about the reader in here.

LI: In the Ravicka novels, the linguistic gesture is itself a character.

RG: It would be much easier to talk about this if we were talking about poetry. In Turkish, when you bring food out to people, the people who are receiving it say, “Health to your hands,” and the person who brought the food says in return, “Health to you.” An encounter could have a bigger sort of performance behind it, so you’re not just saying, “Thank you,” but, “May birds fly through your hair at night.” I wanted to embed in narrative these other symbolic possibilities. Somehow we get the idea that we can’t say what we want, maybe it will make us cry or be too big for our hearts to contain. So we say, “Hi,” but what we really mean is, “Will you pick me up and carry me across the street?”

LI: Ravic speakers say things like, “But could my body handle the three minutes of deep knee bends that I would have to deliver as my apology?” That seems like an unusual relationship to have with one’s language.

RG: My feeling about English is that the subject-verb-predicate order enforces a pattern. Having the body as an extra means of communication is one way of addressing that limitation, but the body still imposes another kind of order. You age and can’t communicate because you can’t spend three minutes in a backbend or whatever. I really wanted to place the sound of the language in an Eastern European space, that felt important, a heavy consonant presence, I’m really drawn to that. I also started speaking this language, before I called it Ravic, aloud with a friend, so I could only say what my voice would allow me to say. Because of English and because I studied Spanish there was a lot of vowel presence I had to get rid of. With a name like Luswage Amini, syllables get pronounced the way a black Southerner speaks. It’s like Lu-SWAGGE, kind of slow, drawn-out. I wanted that to be there. It’s still this black girl who’s writing about this place that’s far away and not necessarily in conversation with her culture. One of my “Calamity” essays is about how I think black people and Eastern Europeans should have a conversation about possible overlaps between their experience, and what if I were to call myself an African American Eastern European, or is it an Eastern European African American, because I think about that.

LI: How does that “Calamity” fall apart?

RG: It starts, “I began the day considering the possibility that the person I am before I set my eyes upon the page I’m about to read—in this case, page 79 of Herta Müller’s The Appointment—is entirely different than the person I am once I commence reading. I know this because I am not Eastern European in my real life.” That’s the entry point. The distraction is, “I can’t get anyone to understand how the black person is another kind of Eastern European, esp. the Eastern Europeans.… How eventful it would be for the Eastern Europeans to begin calling themselves black, or even black-Asian. How undermining of all that is the case for me to begin writing in my bios, 'Renee Gladman is an Eastern European African American.'” Then it says I would do this only to understand myself better as a reader.

LI: There’s the reader again.

RG: I think the reader is there more, in "Calamities." There’s this feeling that there is a community or interested parties who are reading these essays, because they are also junior faculty or are also living in lonely cities or also have a crazy idea, like that black people could be Eastern Europeans.

LI: It feels a little bit like an advice column that doesn’t have the format of an advice column.

RG: I don’t know how you would regard an advice column called “Calamities.”

LI: That makes it really good!

RG: Ultimately, it’s this performance of self. And this is why I don’t have to end them, because it’s an accumulation. If I wrote 120 pages of these essays, I would hope that through the accumulation of attempts to understand myself in particular experiences, maybe I would be something. That would be the self, an accumulation. We have these tiny moments, and it feels necessary in terms of surviving the day to put them together and see where we are.

LI: Why prose?

RG: I came up through poetry, but I am a sentence writer. I don’t know if it’s so much creating narratives as narrative space. I’m interested in time and experience and the sound of telling a story as opposed to the story itself. I have a love and deep interest in fiction, especially fiction in translation, so I teach that. But often in my workshops now I’ll bring in texts that are hybrid, cross-genre works. It’s useful as a way to get students to take more notice of language. I have students read poetry and then enter it from a sentence space.

LI: So the poem also contains the sentence?

RG: You can’t avoid narrative in any kind of language space. And poetry is interested in experience; time is there, and the day. There are places where it pushes toward documentation and begins to remind me of what you might do in prose. Maybe not fiction. But in prose, how you might build sentences around an abstraction or feeling rather than plot points. I think it can only benefit literature for fiction writers to employ various degrees of compression in their approach to narrative.

LI: At the risk of going backward, what’s the difference between fiction and prose?

RG: Fiction is interested in a certain kind of unfolding or sequence of events. Time is more intact in fiction. Prose, I think, introduces the element of the awareness of yourself in language as you are unfolding things in time and allowing yourself to be distracted or interrupted, allowing yourself to question the difficulty of what you’re doing and be stalled, not to move. I want more fiction to do this, because it changes the way we read and understand story. With fiction that repairs all doubt and interruption and experiment by being fluid, coherent; what we expect doesn’t leave much room for me as a reader. But I think the more you talk about these categories, their distinctions, the quicker they break down. Ultimately, what I want is for there to be a blur over everything.

Date: January 31, 2012

Publisher: Triple Canopy

Format: Web

Link to the interview.

Interview in BOMB 2010

Write/Cross-Out: Lucy Ives
BY CLAIRE WILCOX

Powered by the refrain-directive “write,” and “cross out,” the content of Lucy Ives’s most recent work, Anamnesis, remains under active, sustained deliberation throughout. In this single long poem, her first book, Ives stalls writing at its inception so that a central question—what can be acceptably written here?—hovers over the poem and induces it.

While Anamnesis proceeds, therefore, in a mode of deliberate uncertainty, releasing a content of memory and images in spurts over the course of numerous campaigns, her earlier chapbook, My Thousand Novel, seems to take the opposite approach, presenting instead a collection of poems that are immediate and dense in language and imagery. Overall, Ives displays considerable conceptual drive, but the work of this New York-based poet, who is also a dedicated scholar (she is completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU), is neither dry nor academic. Her poetry, especially in Anamnesis, is dynamic, open and affecting, adhering to a line of inquiry and then moving beyond it.

Claire Wilcox Your most recent published work, your book Anamnesis, deals in part with recollection and memory. Where did you grow up? How was it?

Lucy Ives I grew up in New York City. I was born here. I really like living here now, but to be honest when I was younger I spent a lot of time indoors watching television. I was very superstitious as a child, which I think had to do with being alone a lot. My mother worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and sometimes we would walk through it at night. I was an only child and very interested in visual culture, I would say. In looking at things.

CW I just read Hannah Weiner’s Country Girl, from 1971, which you write about in your essay on naming, “SH Where are you bound?” in gutcult. I think Weiner’s poem is very lyrical, but because in her schizophrenia she receives transmissions from an exterior world, there is little sense of introspection, invention and subjectivity. Your poems in My Thousand Novel seem able to observe both what is “real”—“I saw wind press a page to the building”—and elliptically real—“I saw the girl push the looks from her eye”—and then something dream-like or surreal—“I saw the room fold itself in half.” How do you move between these different states of mind and language?

LI I think what you’re picking up on here is just bad writing on my part, what academics sometimes (politely) term catachresis, a kind of a mixed metaphor, like the expression, “the leg of a table.” I will say, in my own defense, that I have often been interested in, or wanted to write, images. The more you work on this, or try to do this, the more you discover how difficult it is to ‘point’ precisely with a word. There is on the one hand the problem of specificity, like if I say, “table,” which or what table will you understand, and, on the other, the problem of trying your reader’s patience, like if I begin, “…the table three feet in length, four feet high, two feet wide, of blondish plywood, with clear varnish, its surface able to reflect a face but not able to reflect printed matter clearly…,” how long am I going to hold your attention?

CW Are there certain contexts that compel you to write more than others?

LI I use writing for some of the same things I might use speaking for but mostly I use it for something else. I value writing for its silence, its weird beyond. I suppose when I think about context I think that I might produce something that would be read, and thinking about a reader might compel me in an exceptional sense, but this destination for what I write, the context of the reader, can always be imagined by me, and probably is often imagined, so it’s tricky.

CW What do you think about being a poet and in academia? Is there a relationship between your graduate work in Comparative Literature and your poetry?

LI There are a lot of practical reasons to want to get an advanced degree. I won’t go into those except to say that I want to teach, or would like to in the future, in order to make a living. This is probably the easiest way for me to make a connection between what I do as a graduate student and what I do with other kinds of writing, though there are certainly other overlaps that would be difficult to point out (at least for me). I have a view of academia that would probably annoy some people in that I don’t see it as incompatible with art. In fact I have difficulty drawing a clear distinction between acts of criticism and what are, I suppose, creative acts. I want to put a question mark at the end of that sentence.

CW What do you think about living in New York City?

LI I think a lot of things about living in New York, some of them include being exhausted by doing it. I spend a lot of time on the subway. I like the cliché about the anonymity of the city, though the actual fact of seeing people everyday, possibly hundreds of people whom you’ll never see again or, even if you do, will not remember having seen…it’s difficult to know what to do with that. I’m probably very loyal to this place, unreasonably so.

CW Do you contemplate moving or traveling?

LI I lived in Paris for four months last year, and two years before that I lived for a year in the northernmost prefecture of Honshu, in Japan. I used to travel a lot when I was in college, but I’ve become more interested in staying in one place these days. When I was 22, I was sure that I would live outside of America for a significant portion of my life. I was kind of a Germanophile for a while and thought that I would move to Berlin after I graduated and probably stay there, but then this never happened. I went to Iowa instead.

CW There are eleven different sections in Anamnesis. How did you come to these divisions? There’s also a lot of physical space between sections; each is divided by a full page marked only by the symbol “+.” Why did you organize the poem this way, and why did you chose this symbol?

LI The poem was written using an Olivetti Praxis 48 (this is a typewriter with really fast action and extra small, raised keys, designed for women I think; they have one in the Centre Pompidou) over the course of two weeks. It was one long typescript, and I had showed it to my husband, Ben, who liked it. As I began typing it up on my computer, it became clear that there were places that contained (if contained is the right word) a pause, and it seemed like it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if I were to put some visual space there. This was when I realized that it might be a complete book on its own.

The section breaks, “+,” are not specifically meant to echo the refrain in the book, “Cross this out,” but that doesn’t mean that they don’t. For me it was just a more attractive mark than an asterisk. And the full page is there to give the reader time, since you have to turn that page. I mean, it’s partially just a convention of books, part of the general book ‘time signature’ you can’t avoid—or that you have at your disposal—the whole page left blank as punctuation.

CW I’m struck by a sense that the anamnesis of Anamnesis, in other words, the recalling or recollection of things past, applies as much to language as to memories. Many of the lines that appear under deliberation in Anamnesis feel close to your writing in My Thousand Novel. But in this case, the poem is not allowed to fully emerge. In the beginning of Anamnesis the reader and writer can’t inhabit the poem, but later there are moments where we are clearly in a poem, and then the imperative is to leave that space. As in:

Wired to adore I lay out across

The snowy field

The green carpet

I picked messages up like

These were leaves

I was good at it

And ok

And in despair

And filled with hate

Cross this out

Write, “walk across the room”

Stop typing

Does your move to frame the process of making a poem mark a shift, or desired shift, in your writing? Are you, in some places, directly recalling language you know yourself to have used, spoken or written, perhaps a kind of writing you find yourself moving away from?

LI It’s probably better not to admit this sort of thing, but one of my main interests in writing, or the act of writing, has to do with the way it mimics, retroactively as it were, more precise recording devices we now have, digital et al. I’m curious about (as I think I suggested in another response) how exact written description can be, or what the powers or limits of written description are. Could I write like a tape recorder? (I know that’s outdated, but I used them so much as a kid, they’re kind of iconic for me.) Could I write a line that’s photographic? I mean, of course I can’t, but it’s difficult, on an intuitive level, to really know that you can’t do this, since it’s logical to feel that you can describe what is in the frame of a photograph, that you could transcribe your own thoughts, etc. So it’s this question of fidelity that is a great concern when it comes to what you call “[being] in a poem.” If I write a line, what exactly will I be repeating or saying? Is the content just the referent of the words, if I attempt to relate or reproduce an event? This is how, in writing Anamnesis, I got to an idea of what a good or appropriate sort of ‘content’ for the poem would be. I wanted to try to ask this kind of question, ‘What is the content of what I write?’ Or, ‘What do I even think I can accurately talk about or show?’

CW You have a lot of animals in your poems, what are they doing there?

LI Ha. Animals are generally thought to have a sort of subjectivity that is different from human subjectivity. I don’t really know if this is true in a biological sense, but it’s certainly true in literature. I think when I include animals in my writing I am thinking of this general tradition of making animals speak in stories, making them walk upright and hold tools, etc., but without doing that. Though it’s a commonplace to speak of the limitedness of animal behavior, I think there is an interesting way in which animals, by virtue of people’s general ignorance about what perception is like for them, point out limits inherent in human perception. I think most of the animals in my poems are sort of on the sidelines, in an illustration that a speaker sees, for example, or sitting at the side of the road.

CW You also make collages. Can you talk about these a bit? Is there a relationship between your collage and your poetry? I know sometimes you’ve published them together.

LI I like looking at images from the recent past, the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s. I like thinking about the mix of earnestness and venality with which some of the commercial images I use were produced. It’s interesting to me that something can look dated that is at such a small remove from us, temporally speaking. But I’m not sure how much the collages have to do with my writing. I should probably stop publishing them together! Actually, recently I did a long collage piece for the journal Triple Canopy. They had asked me to include text, and it was extremely difficult. The writing just sort of asserts itself, like a caption, without your particularly wanting it to, and this makes it challenging to do anything interesting with it (for me this is a challenge, at least).

CW In a recent interview with Charles Bernstein for BOMB, Jay Sanders wrote: “In light of our discussion here, I can see how the emergence of what’s being labeled “conceptual poetry” points to the impatience of some poets for their work to be seen as art. It forces the issue more directly by aping the vernacular associated with appropriation art of the ’70s and ’80s and grafting it upon their poetry practice to see what might still be potent in these tactics.” Do you have anything to say about this comment, and/or the trend Jay Sanders references here?

LI I guess I don’t see conceptualism in contemporary American poetry as deriving exclusively from ’70s and ’80s appropriation art; I’d be interested in reading an essay that made a case for classing Raymond Roussel as a conceptual writer, for example. But there is something more specific Sanders is getting at here, which has to do with the professional contexts in which poetry is sometimes produced and received, and the proximity of the art world (and art market) to these contexts.

CW What about poetry readings? I listened to your recording, “100 Views” on Weird Deer, the Weird Deer Hotline. Your voice is mournful, accented, and coming through the veil of telephone static. I’m interested in this private/public forum, and found this reading much more compelling than many I’ve seen in public. Shouldn’t there be more things like this?

LI I think poetry readings could be more like parties, or more like anything other than poetry readings.

CW Having attended Harvard and Iowa, and currently NYU, do you find that the contemporary work you engage with tends to be from people you have known or know from these places?

LI When I was in college I read a lot of sort of preppy, East Coast poetry: Berryman, Bishop, Merrill, Ashbery, Stevens, among others. I was on the poetry board of a student journal called The Advocate, or sometimes, The Harvard Advocate, to distinguish it from the other magazine of the same name. The Advocate building was this rickety, two-story structure we leased from the university for $1 a year, it reeked of beer, and the people responsible for publishing poetry would meet every Sunday morning to pick through the submissions pile. Although it wasn’t that clear to me that we knew what we were doing, we had a good time, and I learned a lot about how to read—or, how to express what you think about what you’ve read so that other people will like what you like. Iowa was slightly different in that there it’s less about trying to decide what you like or why you like it and more about actually doing some writing and then not freaking out when other people tear it apart. I still see a lot of people I met there, am married to one of them, so I tend to think it was a good experience. Now, in school, I mainly identify as someone “who is interested in poetry.” I’ll just sort of leave it at that.

CW Do you listen to music?

LI Yes, but not while writing. It’s a hold-over from high school, but I’m still scared of this question.

CW When did you find your bearings as a writer. What happened?

LI I’ve just always liked doing this. When I was little, I would make recordings of short ’songs’ (i.e., me, singing) on a cassette player. Then, when I was eight, I wrote this poem for a contest at my school, we had to describe a cover of The New Yorker. It was this Magritte-like image, a man in a bowler hat, dogs and cats falling down through the sky behind him. I’m leaving in my favorite misspelling:

This gentle man must look about himself,

For pets are raining in the sky.

It may just be a change in the weather,

Or a sight for you and I.

But regard his look

For it is carzy.

"Maybelline" at Hyperallergic

Date: July 28, 2010

Publisher: BOMB

Format: Web

Link to the review.

A collage.

A collage.

A collage.

A collage.

Maybelline

I am clearing my mind again
I mean, “I think”
So
I am bad
I am good?
I am very very good laughing a lot in delight
As at the same time there are many cameras?
I am good
I try
My head
Is good
I am the one who is bad
Escaping when it is not time
Racing downstairs
I sleep for years
On a lawn
In Melbourne
In Australia
I am good
I am very good rising in greatness
People say my name not even to know me
I light a candle
I am that good
Animals I created during the 17th century
Could be brought back to life
A drowsy octopus blows its nose on my thigh
Ants lick me
I am wrong
I didn’t know this was happening
And that is so far worse
Even
Than being incorrect
Darkening as it does all previously
Known sentiment
Fear is
Good or not good
Fear is the ultimate purview
Of the philosopher
It is the yoke
To harness bad to good
Fear shivering in excellent sunsets
Either I am bad or I am good
Either
Witnesses have known me or
Truth in their
Responses was
Relative, local
And I dwelt
Or was dwelling
Where
I did not share
Their commitment
To any type of certainty
I am good because
It is right here
What happened
A stacked result
That’s tight
And turns
Whatever face
Away
Probably you
Regret my
Puerile
Statement
You knock
Upon the desk
With one long finger
You take the time
That later
Will be needed
You put it
Away
Great
Good
Foreseen
Very
Very very
Good
Not that I see all
But the point is I am looking
My official release
My redemption
Do not really matter
That I
Know always better than
Maybe I knew
Scholars of America
Here is what I want to do
Maybe born with it
As spring approaches
I discover Carl Jung
In a dream
He dips
Below the horizon
Your jealousy
Was less complex
Carl Jung making speeches
Behind
A simple sky
He does a lot for weather
Wax
A barrel
Pointed at the sky
But I don’t know
As you begin thinking and become one thing
The future is just yellow
How do you feel about gazes
Like an airplane we do not
Know
The nearness of just one actual mile
Is specific
More or less true
An answer would “speak”
You would “turn”
I’d “speak”
I mean, no longer “legion”
I would turn
English is “myriad”
Keats remarked
A recession
In which clouds
Thump the sky
I’ve known this all morning
If someone doesn’t ask you
What you are doing
You shall
Be good
You shall be good for one more day
When I am good I know
What I am doing
I walk on a dais
I swarm ashore
Yes yes
I lie
A lot
This is why
I am not
Good
In the essential
If you were to write something
Topical like
The story of a search
In which, “The Past…”
This would qualify
And I think it’s good
You have your mind
You use it to produce opinion
This is at least partially
The great and famous
Thing
You are more rational and therefore
The more
You speak
The more there is
The good
Lastingly I believe
For you whom humans
Imitate are good
Like
Anyone would say
“I saw it beginning”
If I am bad it is because
I know no
Better
Than to be this way
No
It is because I am wrong in
Not knowing
This is the effect
Finally
Much as
Yes
I am not good
I can
Only read
Law
Its letter
I am good
If I am good
In
This sense
Science smiles
Teeth flickering
The infinite divisibility of distances
Does good
To one
Such as me
I am using words to point to other words and it’s
OK with readers
I live
I don’t do a single thing

Date: March 16, 2016

Publisher: Hyperallergic

Format: Web

Link to the poem here.

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"First Husband" at Poem-a-Day

An image of writing.

First Husband

Here is a description of hundreds of years in which
I never comprehend it is hundreds of years, passing
“We lived together,” I write, but what does that mean
Last night A. convinced me you are a parasite
OK, you’re a parasite, that’s interesting
My blood mixes with the blood of the flea
And we’re having another poetry lesson
It always takes hundreds of years
You’ve interrupted us in the midst of our poetry lesson
I mean “you,” the reader, have interrupted “us”
By which I mean, the bad “you” and, of course, “me”
Out of which construction some American relativism
Comes…
Meanwhile, the flea has returned to Iowa
Ah, flea, let’s look into your affairs!
You seem to have learned a lot from poetry
I truly admired that line about how
A phone charger has become entangled in a tree
And your love of leopards is a neat neoclassical reference
Dionysus animatedly squirting things
Here I’ll insert a description of ……
…………………………………….
[plus provisional knowledge claim]
I wish I could say, “The bad ‘you’ stomps
Upon its hat,” or maybe its “hat”
Or perhaps “it” “gnashes” “its” soft “teeth”
But instead the bad “you” stalks me on email
It sends word to remind me that it is “here”
I mean, nonchalant, therefore
Because this is also poetry
Which is why it is part of the lesson
And reinforced during office hours
The sublime plum
The immortal peach
The slow death of the humanities
Due to pluralism and (?) expense
“If I can’t have them nobody can”
Is what I wished he’d said
Instead he asked me who the fuck
I think I am in the Foxhead
And the brown stick of the Iowa River
We didn’t know much but we knew the river
Things occurred and I can remember
What my body is, in the traditional manner
No politics, except in poems
No deeds, except figuratively
Here is a description of the pink color of heaven and in standing water
Heavens have fallen
I am 24
Here is a thread of ice
Penetrating the human sciences
Once you are here, there is only living
Once you were
And believed I was good until you no longer believed this
Of me

Date: March 26, 2018

Publisher: poets.org

Format: Web

Link to the poem here.

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On site.

"Rue des Écoles" at OPR

Rue des Écoles

Now lighter I took a step somewhere I was going, the streets
parted by a building with a face, and it was 1, noontime, hills
I could remember were definitely in the distance, climbers
you could hear in conversation, the reflected thump of
soccerballs, guides with flags or umbrellas, I remember
that it is moving day, you must meet for lunch, muttering
now, you know, snaps, clapping, it is another
way of saying that what happens next can’t be
seen, whiskers of ironwork form ferns and ivy, cast a complex
shadow over lots of hours: Please say something more, I’m
asking, please tell what comes next, but in a dream it hums and
refuses; dream does nothing, it is either gray
or gleaming nights and someone comes forward in such a
suit, someone is a sparrow or the muse, and I retreat, I mean
in the face of knowledge you can only
feel very sorry. For happiness and unhappiness
are the two proverbial verbs that fly together
and there is such a thing as The Past, so I
may know it, I may be certain of a thing. If someone pretends to hurt
me, I look away into a mirror. “It’s called thinking,” I say and
wash my hands. If ever there were a reason to look up let’s
look down, I’d say. I’d talk into a handheld recording device, yes
that is one way I would do it if … if …
It is late afternoon, I walk where I am meant to go though
it is late, I used to hate being encouraged by others to use what little
talent I had because I thought this would ruin my chances at
being really great at anything, and the person who speaks first at my
appointment is a florist, and she sells
grasses and tulips, she is saying that if she were
a writer, which she is not, she would just speak into a microphone and
later transcribe whatever she felt like saying. She must have
said that, though, “whatever she felt like saying” for I was
glad for her, for I knew she would be a very great writer
but she chose not to be one at all, because of her understanding
that it’s all very well and good, even if all the while you
imagine someone might draw apart the blinds, his expression like a
wave cresting at the mouth, new flesh, and the promise not of
happiness but of attention, adoration, sense, like …
like, not long ago when I felt little or no fear and saw the outline, a
face in profile weirdly twirling on a dangling length of wire, yes, at
this time, not long ago, I became not a singer but someone
who could hear the songs that are misplaced in things, a burden
I guess, but my suburban routes were never good ones, like,
the broken pen in the dirt with its chant about
blue, was I imagining this, was I mad. But the sun was already up, so there
was no denying that time at least was passing, and elsewhere everyone
went on. I did not want to stop them from doing so
Please let me tell you, far be it from me. Thus I stood aside and let
the passerby pass me. I let whoever develop one’s career. This was not
merely right and fitting, it formed an integral part of the larger
story I was telling, an essay titled, NEW EARTH, and there where
you told me I was forgetful, I smiled. What could have led me to react in such
a fashion I don’t know. What I do know is it was summer,
always summer, whenever you felt brave and said a thing to me

Date: December 4, 2017

Publisher: Organism for Poetic Research

Format: Print and web

Link to the poem here.

peltv4coverd.jpg

"Beastgardens" at The Poetry Foundation

Magazine containing poem.

Beastgardens

first garden

Beastgarden.

second garden

Bees go mad on late summer evenings, should
People stray from their jobs towards water

Beastgarden.

third garden

Who makes the rented red boat's
Oars turn

Who is the younger one always
Turning up

Who professes to be better because
He is just looking

Who says he is worse off as
He cannot look

Beastgarden.

fourth garden

The unicycle girl, thin
Like one with a sexual problem,
Goes through
The Schlosspark. This follows:
Father rolling his eyes

Beastgarden.

fifth garden

The man from Manchester
Has my breast in his hand

These are funny
They don't do anything do they

Being burnt by a fire I say

Beastgarden.

sixth garden

Similarly, if only
You grasped some
Titanic misery or a
Love like an old man's

Beastgarden.

seventh garden

Where were we

A ballroom competition goes on
A yellow satin bikini
A fuchsia floor-length are
Dancing; an audience is
Drinking, clapping 1 2 3 1 2 3

Beastgarden.

Date: December 19, 2017

Publisher: The Poetry Foundation

Format: Web

Link to the poem.

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"Early Poem" at the Poetry Foundation

Early Poem

The first sentence is a sentence about writing. The second sentence tells you it's alright to lose interest. You might be one of those people who sits back in his or her chair without interest, and this would have been the third sentence you would have read. The fourth sentence, what does that say, that says something about how I genuinely feel, even if it no longer matters how I genuinely feel, that has not even become the topic of another book. The fifth sentence says that that was left by the wayside because it was such a variable thing. That's what the sixth sentence said, and says, that it sits there still, varying, changing its colors, etc., the army of ancient Rome marches by, they think it is some sort of tomb and display their eagle insignia. The seventh sentence ill conceals its surprise that I should have tried to make it all look so far away. The eight sentence is therefore a meditation on something close at hand. The ninth sentence is a means of approach. In the tenth sentence I discover I am staring at a list of things I have done written in blue pencil on brown paper. In the eleventh sentence I draw a one-eyed duck on the paper beside the list. In the twelfth sentence I circle one of the numbers on the list and I start to feel nervous. In the thirteenth sentence I realize I have chosen something. In the fourteenth sentence I decide I will read my choice aloud. In the fifteenth sentence I stall by saying the words "I don't have a choice." In the sixteenth sentence I stall again by thinking about the obelisk on the Upper East Side in Central Park and how it is called "Cleopatra's Needle," and how around the base of the "needle" there are metal supports in the shape of crustaceans, I think they are crabs in fact but sometimes that word is slightly obscene so I consider not writing it. In the seventeenth sentence I think some more about the kinds of joke that employ that word and whether it is worth thinking about such jokes, as it does alter the genre of what you are writing if such things are allowed to be thought as a part of it. The lawns of the park were very green in summer, and it is early summer right now, right as I think to think this, and this is the first time I have lived in New York City for a full year in ten years, this is what I tell as the nineteenth sentence. In the twentieth sentence I recall the list and resolve again to look at it. In the twentifirst sentence I misspell twenty-first with two "i"s. In the twenty-second sentence I look down at the list, I have circled no. 18759351 on the list. In the twentisecond sentence I misspell twenty-second using an "i" again. In the twenty-third sentence I read what is written next to no. 18759351, it says, "He was sitting on a bench...," but at this moment a breeze enters in through the open window, lifting the page and you begin reading another line, the words, "And you hand in the application and it takes three months and...." In the twenty-fourth sentence you can see me set the page down as another person walks through the door. I turn off the electronic typewriter and scroll out the page and place it facedown on the desk and I cover it with a notebook you weren't aware was also there on the desk. Now you can see it, it is almost the exact same color as the surface of the desk and now you can see it. These were the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth sentences, respectively, it is the lot of the twenty-seventh sentence to have to announce that. In the twenty-eighth sentence a cloud passes over the apartment on its way into space. In the twenty-ninth sentence, I think, next year this will be the number of my age. The thirtieth sentence is all about the speed at which time is passing. In the thirty-first sentence I won't care anymore, I'll see that reality only accrues to itself and does not have to mean something. In the thirty-second sentence I want you to agree with me. Things happen by chance, and what Montaigne pleads with us to believe, in an essay, is that fortune makes herself known in the act of reading, there is much that I could not have intended which is yet here, I forget exactly how this goes, this being the thirty-third sentence. I sit down beside myself in the thirty-fourth sentence and say to myself, smiling, even small numbers are big. This is the working of time, the thirty-fifth sentence joins in saying this, too, once one has crossed the years their number does not matter. But what I was trying to get across was, I think in sentence thirty-six, that maybe you could not have done things earlier, maybe it just was not possible in those days for whichever reasons. You spend the thirty-seventh sentence attempting to spell those reasons out. You fall asleep, and in the thirty-eighth sentence you dream about a room. The room is a classroom in which you are alone, says sentence number thirty-nine, the windows have been left open and a sentence can be read on the blackboard. In the fortieth sentence you have to force yourself to go on. Descartes's dream, you remember, in sentence forty-one, provided a quote supposedly from Ausonius. This is the forty-second sentence, Est et non. Then I think it is safe to say that something begins to happen, sentence forty-three tells us. Sentence forty-four says that you should forgive. Sentence forty-five says that you remember this number as having been particularly beautiful when worn by your mother. Sentence forty-six says the figures move away. Sentence forty-seven is a sentence about what loneliness names itself in the paradoxical presence of others. Sentence forty-eight says it has a name. Sentence forty-nine says that I cannot remember this name. Sentence fifty says that I go back and try and live there in that moment when I was saying the name. I say, "Happiness." This was sentence fifty-one. That was sentence fifty-two. Sentence fifty-four is a sentence about how there is too much of so many things, there is too much of all the words, but the world runs on underneath them and I keep on imagining how you could have heard me, how you could not have heard me. Sentence fifty-five is a sentence about picking up the phone. Sentence fifty-six is a sentence about picking up a small cellular phone but not using it and willing the phone to ring on its own. The gray cotton of the sweatshirt I wear is a warm cotton in sentence fifty-seven. In sentence fifty-eight I decide to keep on saying the numbers. In sentence fifty-nine I hold the page up to the light and see the type on the other side show through. In sentence sixty you start to believe me. In sentence sixty-one I start to go back to the beginning. I wonder if I should worry. The world is full of pauses, the world is full with continuations, says sentence sixty-three. I let sentence sixty-four go. In sentence sixty-five it occurs to me that I concern myself here with something that ought not to be touched. Sentence sixty-six is a guess that this is the mystery of counting, that it goes on and means itself without having a meaning. I count the people in the distance I can see from my window in sentence sixty-seven. In sentence sixty-eight the breeze has a sweet smell. In sentence sixty-nine, it turns the last week of May in the year 2008. Sentence seventy concerns the lack of what I wanted, in my own mind, to be saying. In sentence seventy-one I'm going so far as to ask you if you can see this, how much of what I thought lay before me remained in the distance. In sentence seventy-two there is a hill there. In sentence seventy-three we see flowers open their faces and then black snakes slide down the face of the hill. In sentence seventy-four there is still nothing. In sentence seventy-five the moon changes place with the sun. In sentence seventy-six this takes place again, only now it is day. In sentence seventy-seven it is still day. In sentence seventy-eight it is still day. Why do you think about tragedy, sentence seventy-nine wants to know, since it is the least likely thing to happen. Sentence eighty will eventually come to me and want to know what I am doing with myself. Sentence eighty-one reminds me to expect this question. In sentence eighty-two something changes. I stay up two nights running and in the morning the sidewalk seems to rise up and meet my feet underneath my feet. Sentence eighty-four contains the question, didn't you already know that this would start to happen. Sentence eighty-five agrees. When I start to read sentence eighty-six I discover it contains the words, It is also true that what you said could be. For this reason, sentence eighty-seven is a sentence about why there are certainly points of correspondence between what we expect to be the case and what is. Sentence eighty-eight proclaims it feels the excitement and not the work. Sentence eighty-nine takes action without saying anything first. In sentence ninety I cover my eyes. In sentence ninety-one I uncover my eyes so that I can look again. In sentence ninety-two I cover them again. Now I am speaking to you. Now I am speaking to you. Say the words after me just as I say them. What it means to live is the subject of sentence ninety-six. You are moving out of earshot now. We are not going to miss each other. You have an excellent memory. Please never forget I was the one who told you that