On Foot

by KARA VANDERBIJL

In this part of California, it is too hot to walk. My mother pulls us in a red Flyer wagon to Target over shimmering pavement. If somebody remarks that their house is twenty minutes away, they mean that there are several hills, valleys, and sinuous freeways between us. I cannot read for more than ten minutes in the car without getting sick. Since the heat has kept us from opening a car or house window for five years, I remain convinced that the entire state of California smells like a Budweiser factory, the only odor strong enough to penetrate glass.

Before, our small blue house was the destination, raspberry fields and dairy farms dotting the countryside along the way. Odors of cow manure and freshly cut lawns crept across the northernmost part of Washington State. We sang “Home, Home on the Range” every time our old Honda passed a collapsing barn. I was always in the backseat, pulled along by a series of small, stable explosions.

More than to any one person, my childhood memories cling to nooks and crannies of the world: the high, diesel-smelling inside of a moving truck carrying all of our belongings from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles; the smoggy freeways, the blur of a water reservoir on the right, the diamond window panes of an old house; a library, concealed in the basement of a church; a crosswalk in Burbank, and my mother holding our hands with both of hers; the Redwoods and the Canadian border, deep in the night.

These places are now, as they were then, only accessible by car.

I wish to speak a word for distance, for absolute inconvenience and dependence, as contrasted with what is expected, saved up for in childhood piggy banks or on the backs of greasy hard-earned high school paychecks, – to see People fueled by the strength of spirit and limb, rather than by horsepower. I wish to make an extreme statement, for there are enough champions of driving – if you don’t believe me, you haven’t been spending enough time at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I have met but a few people in my life who remember how to walk, much less appreciate it; for a sad number among these, the greatest pleasure in walking is the pleasure in arriving at their destination, normally a place in which to buy food or beverages, the consumption of which they justify by recalling the “great” distance that they have walked. As for those who not only remember how to walk, but also treasure the activity in itself rather than viewing it as a simple means, I have only heard rumors of their existence. I believe that the entire race died out at the birth of the internal combustion engine.

Although born bipeds, we’re convinced from the cradle that the best way to travel is on the backs of four or more wheels, preferably endowed with slaughtered animal seats, a decent sound system, and air-conditioning. (Never mind that one of our greatest infant accomplishments is a series of uninterrupted steps.) We have forgotten the usefulness of distance, the necessary separation between two points, and the blissful ignorance of both that immediately follows a stroll. We should go forth on a two-block jaunt, only to forget ourselves and walk past the places public transportation will take us. If you are ready to leave behind perfect pedicures, impractical shoes, wireless hotspots and many faint hearted companions, then you are ready for a walk.

In this, I like to think of myself as a proselyte of an old faith, one that has sadly not escaped cynicism. This creed isn’t bound by left or right, nor is it defined by an environmental frenzy or a cosmetic narcissism that takes stock of post-weekend belly fat and runs, half-wheezing, around the block. In this religion, the faithful err; in their deepest devotion, they stray off the beaten path. But they are few – my fellow walkers and I think of ourselves as the last converts, frequently bypassed, gawked at, honked at, catcalled and almost run over by the skeptics surrounding us.

Were there not a half-mile stretch between my home and the El, and then between the El and my place of employ, my existence would take a dishearteningly pedestrian turn. I gladly sacrifice the extra hour of sleep many of my colleagues enjoy in order to make my way up stairs and over curb, through rain and snow and freezing wind. That a person could spend – without committing suicide – but a cumulative five minutes outside every day, spanning only the space between one seat and the next, seems incomprehensible. Why such complacency? Complete immobility, which once only attracted the people whose lives of combat or extreme curiosity had spent their legs, now enthralls some of the youngest members of our society.

I am determined not to be one of them.

Like all pure things, the best walk is born out of necessity, not desire. It begins as a crossing and ends as an offering, a sacrifice of the mind to the body.

I first saw the ocean through the creaking boards of the Santa Monica pier. Paralyzed with fear, I couldn’t pay attention to the fragrance wafting from churro stands or to the chiming of arcade games. I watched the Pacific churn gray and green beneath my feet as my mother tugged on my hand, reassuring me that the boards wouldn’t fall to pieces, that the relentless pull of the tide would not – as my child mind had already imagined – drag the entire structure away from the shore as soon as I stepped onto it.

The act of walking generates a voided space which is no more a village than it is a forest, no more civilized than wild. Fully engaged, your senses will not allow you to get lost the labyrinths in your mind. In rhythm with your steps your thoughts will follow the paths that your body prescribes.

If I simply become a body, or if I indulge in thoughts best left undisturbed during my walk, I have done it an injustice. A walk is neither a form of exercise nor a moving meditation. It is both or nothing at all.

You will walk far before you know where you must go.

Consider first the places that you must visit out of obligation to yourself or to others. Pick a long and roundabout way, including at least one place to rest and one place of magnificent natural beaty. Guarantee that your walk is a quarter to a half-mile longer than you expect you can manage, and extend it when it becomes too easy for you. Walk it as many times as it takes to know it by heart. Then choose a new one.

All roads tend towards parking lots, benches, retailers, public parks, large bodies of water, and sheer cliffs. For every route you choose to walk, there are a dozen places to stand and observe. If you reach the end of a road, stop for a moment and consider that there will never be enough sidewalk for the amount of walking you plan to do. Then turn around and walk to the other end.

Beware of roads that do not frighten you.

Avoid any philosophy that makes the world seem smaller or larger than it appears to be from your place on the road.

Allow yourself to have a favorite route, or perhaps more than one. Go back to them only when you have changed enough to forget why you loved them.

Along the coast in Marseille there is a path that we call la corniche, a generic French term for any road that curls along the edge of the city in tune with the shoreline. Alternately hugging limestone cliffs and jutting out bravely over the Mediterranean, it is a favorite among joggers, Sunday strollers, and fishermen. Beginning at the Old Port, you'll weave between impromptu stalls where freshly caught sardines and other fruits de mer wait to be sold; from the port’s left shoulder ferries leave, transporting sunburnt tourists to the Chateau d’If where, in spite of its foreboding exterior, they will listen to a very dry lecture about how the Count of Monte Cristo was not an actual historical figure.

You will continue down the port’s left arm, past small yachts and smaller fishing boats on the right, and on the left past various theatres and scuba diving schools and hotels and young men riding scooters far too quickly and restaurants where bouillabaisse is the specialty. Before heading up the hill past one of Napoleon’s many fortresses and an abbey from the thirteenth century, you turn around briefly to survey Marseille: whitewashed, salted, preserved in a sort of sun-dappled glory. This is the oldest city in France.

Across from the fortress is a palace, and many apartment buildings, some with laundry floating out kitchen windows. There is a bakery at the top of the hill where you might buy a particularly crusty croissant. Beyond a very small gas station, the road curves sharply; here is a beach, and here, at last, an open expanse of sea to marvel at. Young people, oiled, play volleyball in an enclosed court. Middle-aged women with skin like leather wring out their hair on the sand as they emerge from the waves.

Stand here for a moment, as I have done, convinced that all of France must smell as wonderful as the combination of salt water and the breeze from Morocco and the buttery remnants of pastry on your fingers. Then keep walking. I believe in bridges, and trying my luck under scaffolding, and purposefully wearing flats when I plan on going ten miles. I require small inconveniences in life, if only to remember my great fortune.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about The Hunger Games. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

 "Total Nirvana" - Noir Coeur (mp3)

"Hizzouse" - Noir Coeur (mp3)

"Wet Souls" - Noir Coeur (mp3)

You can view our Saturday fiction archive here from now until the sun dies.

Covert

by JOHANNA DEL RAY

No one but myself knows what I have suffered, nor what I have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity.

- Black Arrow

"The better way," Miss Hamm said with a glib smile, "is to pat it down with your hands."

"Someone taught you that?" Lira asked.

She shook her head. "I read it in a book." Lira had to learn from Miss Hamm's lips, as there were only five books in the manse. Two chronicles by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the rest may as well have not existed. They were in French. Lira spent the afternoon dusting the two attic rooms, preparing them for what her employer called "new arrivals." They had not been in use for some time, since long before the last war.

It was her task to sort the produce, celery from lettuce, avocado from cucumber. For each patient she cut up some in a little cup. The gals were evidently thankful by the way they nodded to Lira. The ward was all women except for a few token males: Miss Hamm's young son Daniel was the gardener, there was a border collie who had impregnated a stray somewhere on the property, Alex Pearl and his brother Ben were the only male employees, and Miss Hamm had a friend named Veld. It was how Lira learned the true meaning of the word platonic.

Veld took her aside suddenly as she was packing up the little crates for the food service. She could not imagine what he was going to say, but after a foreboding prelude, he asked her help in picking out a gift for Miss Hamm. She was both a little disappointed and relieved. Then she felt panicky, for in truth she could not know what someone with fine tastes would even want.

Brushing his long hair from his brow, Veld asked her to not tell Miss Hamm, but she went to do so anyway, at the first opportunity. Her supervisor was sewing the pocket of a long trench coat.

"Lira," Miss Hamm said after hearing the story, bouncing a thimble on her bottom lip, "you must like someone." With the excretion of a border collie no doubt somewhere in her hair, it did not seem like a moment to admit to anything, even if the confession was a lie. She told her mistress what Veld had said earlier.

Miss Hamm stopped sewing and began writing something. "What did you tell him?" she asked. Lira found herself saying, "I couldn't have answered him if I wanted to, and I found that I did not want to anyway."

Later that week a new patient arrived, a young woman by their standards, younger than Miss Hamm, named Miss Darlington. Miss Darlington was a lovely blonde shaped something like a crane. She and Miss Hamm had known each other in some previous life and acted like old friends. In the mornings Lira got in the habit of serving the two women and Veld tea in a leisurely fashion. They would ask her to sit with them if she did not have some other work, which was rare. She found that Veld paid roughly the same amount of attention to his two friends. He spoke to her infrequently, only to ask a question or to suggest he would fetch the next cup himself.

At the onset of spring, Miss Darlington did the opposite, catching a virus that weakened the feeling in her legs. The bug was not contagious. Veld did not mind sitting in the attic; it was not Lira's favorite, but Miss Hamm begged off due to her claustrophobia. Without her boss around, she found Miss Darlington altogether different from Miss Hamm in a way she had never seemed during their placid tea-times.

In the evening when everyone was sleep she sat on her bed and read one of the Robert Louis Stevenson novels. She heard him say, that others may display more constancy is still my hope, and felt the urge to obey.

By the following Friday, Miss Darlington seemed to have recovered, a refreshingly full cast came over her cheeks. She took Lira into town of Tunstall on a wandering pursuit of a new collar for the border collie; she had named the dog Leslie. After ten or so minutes of small talk, Miss Darlington said, "She's quite unused to this, you know. She's doing her best."

Lira knew to tread carefully. "Yes, ma'am."

"When I knew her," she said, "she would read our palms and tell us our fortune. Give me yours. If there's a war, your friend Veld will be called off. Does that bother you?"

Lira thought for a moment. "No."

"It should, Lira, it should. Suppose you were called off. Don't you think he'd be sad?" She look Lira to a fashionable store, one she would have never dared enter on her own. Miss Darlington tried on a few jumpers, nothing particularly seemed to suit her. When they were alone in the dressing room she opened a large black purse and showed her a small silver box.

"What's in there?" Lira found herself asking.

Miss Darlington said, "A gift from Mr. Veld. I'm returning it." Inside was a necklace that glowed with anticipation.

"You don't like him," Lira said.

"No, I don't," Miss Darlington said. "Does that surprise you? Well perhaps it does, you're not used to condescension. It's when someone is saying something they half mean."

"Doesn't that make everything condescending?" Lira said.

"Nearly so," Miss Darlington said.

In the bathroom of a diner, Lira made what small changes she could in her appearance.

Johanna Del Ray is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Atlanta.

"Kill For Love" - Chromatics (mp3)

"Lady" - Chromatics (mp3)

"No Escape" - Chromatics (mp3)

Beauty as the Beast

by RHAGEN RUSSELL

When I first met Hedy Lamarr, about twenty years ago, she was so beautiful that everybody would stop talking when she came into a room. I don't think anyone concerned himself very much about whether or not there was anything behind her beauty; he was too busy gaping at her. Of her conversation I can remember nothing: when she spoke one did not listen, one just watched her mouth moving and marveled at the exquisite shapes made by her lips.

— George Sanders

The 2004 documentary Calling Hedy Lamarr finds its most compelling moment during an episode at the Hollywood Wax Museum. The camera follows Hedy Lamarr’s adult son, Anthony Loder, as he fails to locate his mother’s wax representation and approaches an employee for assistance. Loder’s demeanor wilts at the explanation offered – Lamarr’s figure was dismantled to make room for a Tomb Raider (Tomb Raider!) display.

Loder is a son haunted by his mother’s legacy, and by the need to reconcile that legacy with his recollection of her imperfect personhood. The scene’s implications are wider, though, and speak to our primal dread of impermanence. As awareness of past distinction expires with the memories of those who observed it, and the atrophy of culture-specific meaning threatens even former luminaries with obscurity, we scramble to rescue these icons as compact, portable myths. We are all lucky – luckier than Anthony Loder – to be satisfied with the condensed versions.

The condensed version of Hedy Lamarr appears more relevant and more contested than it has been in many decades. A wealth of post-mortem publicity over the past several years has centered primarily on the scientific innovations she co-conceived, recognition for which during her lifetime was little and much too late. She is now touted, quite suddenly, as the embodiment of beauty plus brains – and the true story of her role as inventor has shown to be no letdown. Interestingly, this occurs as the bulk of her work as an actress gradually proves no opponent to the test of time. Biographies, newspaper write-ups, and memoirs by her contemporaries are littered with lamentations that MGM was never able to put her to proper use.

Criterion Collection buffs skim past the array of vamp roles that seldom did Lamarr justice, and few folks these days could name three of her films; what lingers is the charisma and “real-life” image of the woman. Calling Hedy Lamarr colors that image a tragic one, in effect if not intent. But was Lamarr’s life (which was dotted with major successes, but which culminated with seclusion and litigiousness) a tragedy? Difficult to say. If so, it was as much the tragedy of an entire society as a single woman.

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1913, to wealthy and vaguely Jewish parents in Vienna. She was by all accounts nurtured, well-adjusted, and (up to the point of her departure from school at 16) academically capable. As early as that, she possessed both the reckless confidence necessary to pry her way into film roles and sufficient body image issues to drive her to a stimulant-induced seizure during a weight-loss scheme. By the age of eighteen, she had graduated from bit parts in light Austrian films to stage roles under Max Reinhardt to the lead role in the controversial Czech modernist picture Ecstasy.

The movie was a terrific source of international career hype for Lamarr, as it’s impossible to put a price on public outrage. Blocked by U.S. Customs and condemned not only by the preposterously named Legion of Decency but also by Hitler himself, Ecstasy was the first theatrically-released film to depict sexual intercourse. It also afforded Lamarr the lasting distinction of having performed cinema’s first female orgasm. The sequence in question — replete with insinuated male-on-female oral gratification and the heavy-handed imagery of a snapped pearl necklace — feels transgressive even now. The film in full is a languid expressionist ramble, presented in sun-doused nature shots, juxtaposed symbols, and sensuous, soft-focus close-ups.

Billed under her given surname and exhibiting an adolescent fullness of face, Lamarr was already no stranger to the embrace of the lens. She had posed for the renowned Austrian photographer Trude Fleischmann when she was merely sixteen, and the results — housed at the New York Public Library’s Photography Collection — remain affecting, even startling. Her sloping shoulders and clavicle pull Fleischmann’s lighting into a syrup-wet luster, making a harsh mockery of Photoshop’s every capability. Her face is immaculate, positioned to signal either vulnerability or accident. The rigidity of her torso suggests more effort; her courting of the camera feels unwieldy, for perhaps the last time.

At 19, Hedy married the third-wealthiest man in Austria, politically powerful arms baron Fritz Mandl. The relationship went sour quickly, as Mandl’s controlling nature led him not only to track her phone conversations and forbid her to work in film, but also to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to suppress prints of Ecstasy. At the point that she left Mandl, it had reportedly become necessary that she do so without his knowledge and then immediately flee the country.

When Louis B. Mayer introduced Hedy to America that year, having de-Germanized her and christened her Lamarr in the memory of a recently deceased actress, she was newly divorced and hungry for stardom. She had also become more adept at managing her beauty as an asset. This was intelligent on her part, of course, but very likely launched the preclusion of any happiness in her life. The next two decades saw the high peak and rapid decline of Lamarr’s film career, which comprised some very good roles (in 1938's Algiers, for example), some awful ones (in The Story of Mankind), and a great deal somewhere in the middle. Lamarr’s appeal was clearly not contingent on the quality of her roles, and its nature is still difficult to define.

The idea of Hedy Lamarr, when it happens to enter the mind of the younger public, stands distinctly apart from that of other paragons of cinematic appeal. Her head is not the head of Audrey or Marilyn, screen-printed and spackled across commodities ranging from lampshades to cigarette cases; similarly, her persona has resisted incorporation as a generic stamp of taste status in the vein of Katharine, Marlene, or even Rita Hayworth. Her roles were arbitrary, her acting skills largely belittled and to little consequence.

The characters she embodied most effortlessly were exotic femme fatales or remote beauties, underdeveloped or ethereal to the point of near-two-dimensionality. That she was able to breathe life into these restrictive roles — with an intrinsic warmth that remains kinetic via black-and-white prints — is the measure of her gift. Take, for example, her turn in 1940's Boom Town, as the exquisite and unscrupulous married woman who lures Clark Gable’s wildcatter-come-oil-millionaire from his wife. The role hearkens eerily back to Lamarr’s stint as Mrs. Fritz Mandl, which she described as time spent silently eavesdropping on the conversations of important men at dinner parties. In Boom Town, Lamarr’s character capitalizes by leaking information on her husband’s deals; in her own life, Lamarr made mental notes of control systems advances and arms secrets that would aid her in her later scientific efforts.

Outside of this context, though, the part is thin and typical vixen fare, offered as a wordly contrast to Claudette Colbert’s prim and childish Aryan comeliness. Lamarr’s beauty is grounded to accessibility only by her character’s simple moral repugnance; she is striking on screen but not substantial. The actresses’ real-life character was equally difficult to pin down. Hence Jeanine Basinger’s designation of Lamarr as an example of her “dream image” archetype of Hollywood woman, which Ruth Barton cites in Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film. Her very “unreality,” Basinger posits, was the key to her effect. She “created her own legend…[and] was the last of a movie star type in which we never really knew what her story is.”

While she was alive, Lamarr managed and protected her image as only an egomaniac could. She self-policed with the trademark fastidiousness of a woman with a warped sense of her own value. She offered revisionist accounts of her past, bits and pieces of self-revelation, and rescinded even these more often than not. Her autobiography, published when she was in her fifties and purportedly gleaned from hours of recorded dictation, was a depressing and scandal-centric narrative sprinkled with moments of seeming vulnerability. True to form, it found her projecting an alternating abundance and lack of confidence, and summarily dismissing entire stages of her life (“The trouble is I love him for the same reason everybody loved him. There was no special love.” An entire marriage waved off in two sentences.) Hedy later proclaimed Ecstasy and Me the work of a ghostwriter run amok and set about suing her publisher. It seems the book, like her six marriages themselves, was an offer of intimacy followed by a healthy punch of never-mind.

With Lamarr dead, we’re left very little from which to sculpt a notion of her person. The few larger themes of her life which feel certain also feel uncomfortable, because they feel discordant, and the discord rings true and familiar. She was intelligent enough to utilize her searing beauty as the asset it was, but she couldn't manage to outsmart a world that reduced her to a mere body. To any female striving to self-actualize as a whole individual, that is just plain scary. Hedy Lamarr was the ordeal of The Beauty Myth, manifested in a single life.

Can an intelligent *and beautiful* woman ever truly step away from the mirror? Lamarr’s tale was one of extremes — extreme beauty, extreme gifts – and doesn’t bode well when taken as a case study. Everyone’s favorite merry, potato-headed anecdote bank, Robert Osborne (I mean this sincerely – he is my absolute favorite), objected to the characterization of Lamarr as a “sad figure,” but conceded that the allure which brought her stardom wrought only heartbreak in her personal life. “Lamarr’s beauty was also her burden,” he remarked, “and from it she would never escape.”

It wasn’t for lack of trying. What’s clear about Lamarr’s persona circa 1940 is that she found the typical Hollywood nightlife distastefully rambunctious. She preferred to socialize in small gatherings of friends, avoided alcohol completely, and spent her spare time building an impressive art collection and, well, inventing. While she spoke four languages and had an apparent understanding of technology, she wouldn’t have been mistaken for an intellectual. She considered invention as a hobby, by all accounts, and approached it lightheartedly. But the idea she conceived with inventing partner George Antheil, an avant-garde American composer just returned from Paris, was astoundingly ahead of its time.

Drawing from her conversational exposure to the intricacies of arms technology during her first marriage, Lamarr proposed that they explore radio control of torpedoes. The next step, according to Richard Rhodes’ Hedy’s Folly (an unflowery but immensely readable 2011 examination of the pair’s work), was Lamarr’s consideration of enemy interference. The key innovative aspect of Lamarr’s concept was her solution to the interference issue — that is, the issue of enemy forces deliberately “jamming” signals they detected at set frequencies. The idea was to synchronize both transmitter and receiver to switch together between frequencies in an unpredictable pattern, or to “frequency hop.”

Antheil’s particular expertise was put to use as the pair determined a method for synchronizing the frequency switches of the transmitter and receiver. As it happened, the best-known of his musical works was (and still is) Ballet Mécanique, a piece which happened to call for the synchronized play of sixteen pianos. The “ballet” Antheil had in mind was a performance by machines as opposed to human dancers, and he had labored to regulate the exact tempos of multiple pianolas playing paper rolls. He applied this hard-won skill to the new radio control device, deciding that the transmitter and receiver would be programmed by means of similar rolls of paper, slotted and attached to a vacuum and pushrod system. After the pair worked out the remaining electronic and logistic details of their “Secret Communications System,” they submitted an application and received U.S. Patent 2,292,387 in 1942.

While the idea of a Hollywood glamour queen patenting a military invention is novel in itself, more extraordinary is the fact that it was an invention of consequence. According to Rhodes, the military worked to establish systems of communication based on frequency hopping (or “spread spectrum, as it came to be called) from 1945 to 1978. While the technology was not implemented until the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years post-patent, it eventually formed the basis for a secure radioteletype method, missile guidance systems, the Air Force Phantom radio system, a navigation system, and systems for secure voice communication. Equally important were its implications within the civilian communications industry. The early-1980s FCC authorization of spread spectrum communication within ISM bands led to the development of cordless phones, Bluetooth, GPS, wireless cash registers, RFID systems, and WiFi.

So, why did Lamarr and Antheil’s act of innovation go unrecognized until they were eighty-two years old and deceased, respectively? Many have suggested that her contributions were dismissed out of hand on account of her gender and appearance, and that is probably true to an extent. In the current age of Danica McKellar’s math books and Geena Davis’ Mensa membership, it’s slightly more difficult to buy into the mutual exclusion of beauty and intelligence. In Lamarr’s era, it was much more feasible that a woman’s contributions would be automatically regarded less-than-seriously. Probably more to blame for the oversight, however, were the pair’s unfortunate timing (directly prior to the military upheaval caused by the Pearl Harbor attack) and a short-term patent that resulted in government ownership of the invention. It’s necessary here, however, to discern the exact basis of Lamarr’s unhappy ending. Her most important struggle was obviously one of self-worth and wholeness, not one for public awareness. It was a personal struggle, and it doesn’t require a leap to conclude that she failed.

In a culture that compels women to view themselves as they imagine others view them, and to act always in anticipation of or response to that assessment, the camera is a perfect catalyst for self-objectification. The vast public eye becomes a special Panopticon for women already given to excessive body discipline and commodification of self. Selecting to consciously utilize one’s feminine sexual assets (and thereby present oneself as an object to others) in a bid for empowerment is a far trickier game than most anticipate. To put it simply, we more often than not fall for our own tricks — we become the objects we imitate, and buy into the gender roles we contrive to exploit.

This was Lamarr’s story, on a grander scale than most. She expressed her dissatisfaction with superficial vapidity, famously quipping, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She endeavored, at least for a time, to make her mark outside of the realm of entertainment and looks. But for all her intelligence and ostensible self-possession, she shouldn’t be accused of role-model status, feminist or otherwise. Her string of dissolved attachments to men evinced a repeated failure of execution, not a disavowal of necessity. She was ever-aware of her aesthetic allure, and deftly wielded it to get ahead in her career and manage her love life. The same maneuvering may well have engendered the inescapable emptiness of her film roles and real-life romances, and deeply distorted her personal standards of success.

If Lamarr was indeed youthfully playful and high-spirited into her old age, as Osborne asserts, then her capacity for dissociation may have been tantamount to her beauty and talent. She was, after all, the same woman who denied Forbes Magazine’s 1990 request for an in-person interview before quickly adding this comment: “I still look good, though.” At 75, she was consumed with and debilitated by her failure to remain gorgeous forever. She lived alone and carefully avoided photos and publicity, going so far as to sue national magazines when they speculated at her condition. When she was finally acknowledged with a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997, Lamarr refused to be seen at the ceremony, accepting through an audio message instead.

Rhagen Russell is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Shreveport. This is her first appearance in these pages.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story.

- David Foster Wallace

Wishcasting

by DICK CHENEY

Magic City
Starz
creator Mitch Glazer

The pilot of Magic City ends with a corpse floating through the ocean, perhaps the dumbest cliché in crime fiction. That the offending dead body is the head of a powerful labor union is no panacea on this insult to my intelligence. I lived through the sixties twice, well, three times if you count the four hour brunch I had with George Lucas where he said "In those days" over 450 times.

Nostalgia for the past permeates almost every aspect of society. It is the defining characteristic of a declining civilization, and it is all the more pervasive in the midst of technological or industrial revolution. I hate this attitude, that things were better before x, unless the x you're referring to is the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones. Thankfully, Starz's new series Magic City is so completely overwhelmed with ridiculous cliches that it's difficult to imagine anyone wishing to return to the Miami of 1959.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan's ever-expanding neck (on loan from Tom Hanks, who presumably no longer requires the device) portrays Isaac Evans, the manager of Miami's Miramar Hotel. His backer Ben Diamond (Danny Huston) is a member of organized crime, and the remaining details are copied verbatim from Martin Scorses Casino.

Isaac has two sons and a daughter by his first wife Molly, and he remarried a Gentile woman his daughter disapproves of and his son creepily observes sunbathing in the nude. Since there is no XBox, his eldest son spends the vast majority of his time having unprotected sex, In the pilot alone there are three blowjobs received, all by men. Actually, it is grammatically correct to refer to a blowjob as a "bowjob" if the sexual act in question has occurred thirty years or more in the past. Once in Magic City a woman tries to give another woman a bowjob, but it all goes so predictably wrong.

the ice queen

It gets to the point where you're actively praying for a powerful female character to enter the mix, with the brains and bravado of my wife Lynne and the prominent forehead of an Angelina Jolie. It happens near the end of the second episode, and when you find out she's a tall, icy blonde you just sigh. After striking union members toss Isaac's wife's poodle off a hotel balcony, he doesn't even even respect her enough to tell her the dog died. He just replaces it with a new snarling poodle. This is what amounts to comedy in Magic City.

the abused mob wife

I made a list of the show's clichés so they can fix them:

- Cranky old man with a secret heart of gold

- Bowjob while driving a convertible and the car crashes

- Purportedly religious politician is actually a corrupt buffoon

- Witness has to be intimidated but ends up killing himself anyway

- Young girl has a bat mitzvah and chooses a Judy Garland theme

- Insensitive rich woman can't hold onto a man to save her life, they don't "deserve her"

- Vicious and heartless mob boss uses elaborate metaphors copied from episodes of Bones to suggest depth of field (watching him relate the story of the Frog and the Scorpion with a straight face was more painful than getting a new heart)

- Peggy comes up with a campaign and Don takes credit for it

- Girl tells boy not to call her by pet name, later reveals she prefers the nickname

- LeBron James is afraid of commitment

Don Draper was able to ever so briefly be interesting because of how ridiculous every single word out of his mouth and woman he slept with was. The writers of Magic City have tragically misunderstood the fact that he is meant to be ironic. The officious Isaac is never funny, he does not joke, he simply ribs, like the backup quarterback on a football team. He has no friends, not even his boss or his wife. He gets along with his father, but only because he needs help disappointing the labor unions of the world.

Don's shame at his mysterious origins was obviously a light parable of the Jewish self-hatred of Matthew Weiner, and of course Don really had nothing to fear. Isaac, who is an agnostic Jew, endures slurs and various difficulties related to his ethnicity, but he himself and his family make Ace Rothstein look like David Ben-Gurion. There should an inset displayed during the show of Jeffrey Dean Morgan's circumcised penis as verifiable proof he is what it seems he isn't.

the maid

Isaac's younger son, law student Danny, is infatuated with one of the hotel's maids. As Frank Sinatra prepares for his New Year's Eve concert, Danny sends his intended the gift of a lavish red dress. (Her massive eyebrows are nicely set off by the gown's elaborate fringe.) Women are either servants or whores, and there are about 20-25 prostitutes in the pilot alone. It's a woman in 1959, what else could she be?

Isaac's eldest son Stevie Evans starts an illicit affair with Ben Diamond's tragically abused wife Lily Diamond. At first the sex is completely unprotected and fun, but after the fifth time, she says, "Can you please just hold me Stevie?" To kill time takes a bunch of indecent photos of them having sex. Over seven times she asks, "Did you burn the photos?" If I have to tell you the answer, you don't yet understand the familiar appeal of Magic City. It's like slipping into the second asshole where David Chase forced Terence Winter to put all his bad ideas.

Alex asked me to review the second season of Game of Thrones ("You won't believe what happens to Tyrion!" Fuck you.) I said no. He asked me to review The Hunger Games. I said no. He asked me to review Magic City, and I said, "Only if I can use the word shiksa over twelve times." I must simply be getting old. The past and the future both seem equally boring. All around me in the real world I see things that have never existed before, that are never described in our art or media. I turned this disaffected feeling into a screenplay titled Vaginal Space Program. It has a huge part for Holly Hunter and it was purchased by a savvy executive at Paramount. Look forward to that. What else is there to look forward to?

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording and the former vice president of the United States. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

a prostitute

"Four Hours Away" - Young Prisms (mp3)

"Runner" - Young Prisms (mp3)

"Outside" - Young Prisms (mp3)

25 Verifiable Facts About Marlon Brando

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

1

When I first saw Marlon Brando, he looked like a bowling ball with a lisp emitting from the finger holes.

2

He was a hellion as a teen. His parents sent him to the same military academy his father had attended. He wrote, "I'm kinda homesick and want my mother, but I guess I will get over that. I've received exactly one letter since I've been here. Fine support for the baby of the family." The next month he added, "I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one."

3

He fled the set of Darryl Zanuck's The Egyptian, dressing up in the most expensive clothes he could find because they were looking for the Marlon who always wore a t-shirt and jeans.

4

While filming Mutiny on the Bounty, Marlon spied a Tahitian island and purchased it from the blind elderly American woman who lived there with forty cats and dogs. She had to go to Vallejo, CA for medical treatment. He bought the place for $200,000. Shortly after she moved she died.

5

A Harvard Medical School psychologist who slept with Marlon observed, "There are casual ladykillers and serious ladykillers. The casual ladykiller is a person who doesn't try to involve you in a relationship but seeks to get you only by the magnetism of his sexuality. A serious ladykiller has much more imagination and tries to capture you in more intricate ways - meaning that he involves you with his ideas, his thinking. The seduction is much more complicated - only then he has more trouble because women inevitably fall in love with him."

6

When he was trying to get his break in the theater, he was offered a part in a new play by Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh. Marlon later wrote, "I'd always thought he was dour, negative and too dark." He argued with a producer about "why I thought the play was ineptly written, poorly constructed, and would never be a success."

7

After he filmed the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire Marlon moved into an apartment near Carnegie Hall and seduced the entire group of young actresses at the Actor's Studio. He met Marilyn Monroe when he elbowed her in the face by accident. She replied, "There are no accidents." She invited him over for sex the week before she died. In his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me he wrote, "I didn't sense any depression or clue of impending self-destruction during her call. That's why I'm sure she didn't commit suicide. If someone is terminally depressed, no matter how clever they may be, or how expertly they try to conceal it, they will always give themselves away. I've always had an unquenchable curiosity about people, and I believe I would have sensed something was wrong if thoughts of suicide were anywhere near the surface of Marilyn's mind. I have always believed she was murdered."

8

Jean Cocteau said of him, "Marlon is the only man who can make noise without disturbing anybody."

9

Marlon hated having sex with a condom on. He regarded it as base.

10

After meeting Marlon before they began shooting Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci said, "In Bacon you see people virtually throwing up their guts and doing a monkey's job on themselves with their own vomit. I found this same kind of appeal in Marlon."

11

He would always willingly supply the money for an abortion.

12

When The Godfather came around, Marlon was desperate for a role to revive his career. Francis Ford Coppola could not possibly ask him to audition, so he asked Marlon if he could come by the actor's Mulholland Drive home and "improvise" in front of a camera. After he saw the tape, producer Bob Evans said, "He looks Italian, fine. But who is he?" He did not recognize the man before him.

13

Marlon's mother was a furtive alcoholic. She would take quiet sips from a small bottle whenever she could. "When my mother drank," Marlon said, "her breath had a sweetness to it I lack the vocabulary to describe."

14

In the wake of Dr. King's death, Marlon felt an affinity for the Black Panthers. They did not share this positive feeling. "They told me that they despised me because I was just another knee jerk white liberal to them."

15

The day before A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Ethel Barrymore, Marlon telegrammed his father to say, NEED MONEY BY TONIGHT SHOW SPLENDID LETTER TO FOLLOW MARLON.

16

He believed that by dripping a wet towel soaked with hot water on his head, he would never go bald.

17

On the set of A Countess From Hong Kong, during a close-up, he asked Sophia Loren if she knew small hairs were coming out of her nose. She never spoke to him again.

18

After watching his performance in The Godfather, he said, "When I saw it the first time it made me sick. All I could see were my mistakes and I hated it."

19

If he liked you, he wanted to be close to you, even if just briefly. "Like a large number of men," he eventually admitted, "I too have had homosexual experiences and am not ashamed. I've never paid attention to what people said about me. Deep down I felt ambiguous and I'm not saying that to spite the seven out of ten women who consider me - wrongly perhaps - a sex symbol. According to me, sex is something that lacks precision. Let's say sex is sexless."

20

When Lew Wasserman tried to change the title of The Appaloosa to Southwest to Sonora, Marlon did not take it very well. He hired a group of mariachi players to go around Universal singing a song they had written called "Southwest to Sonora" until the studio aceded to his wishes.

21

In later years, Brando became very uptight about his weight. He would pull up the curtain whenever he changed clothes.

22

Marlon's son Christian spiralled out of control with drugs and alcohol as a teen. He would steal pot from neighbor Jack Nicholson's stash. If Jack caught him, Christian Brando would imitate his part in Chinatown, saying "You do that again and I'll break your fucking fingers, man."

23

On the set of Guys and Dolls, Sinatra and Brando just did not get along. One man never blew a line, the other wrote his dialogue on his hand. Frank's thugs followed him everywhere; Marlon was most happy completely alone. The only way they could get Marlon to go through with it was to buy him a white Thunderbird convertible.

24

On the set of The Fugitive Kind, Tennessee Williams screamed at Marlon, "I need radar equipment to hear what you're saying. If I can't hear my fucking dialogue, I'm going home."

25

As he traveled through France, he once spent the night with a woman in Ascain. "It's a terrible story," he told his friends, murmuring, "awful, awful, awful." They asked what happened, and he said, "I had a very nice time with her, and she made me a wonderful breakfast. I was thinking, 'Thank God she hasn't asked me for anything', but then when I was leaving, she did just that. She said, 'When shall we meet again?' It's too awful. That's what I had been afraid of all along."

Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. She last wrote in these pages about the new classics. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Cool Light" - Bear In Heaven (mp3)

"Sinful Nature" - Bear In Heaven (mp3)

The new album from Bear In Heaven, I Love You It's Cool, was released today.

Vol #2

by BRITTANY JULIOUS

The haunting qualities of any good song transcend genre. The way we listen to music now requires the sort of voracious appetite - a never ending sense of hunger for music - that makes us always search for something new. There are blogs I do not visit and songs I do not listen to, but so much of it is heard on iPods and laptops, in house parties and basement bars that music has become the noise of my day-to-day. The hum of my refrigerator in my small apartment, the screeching of the cars that race quickly down Chicago Avenue, the grunts of the men who play basketball at a nearby park … these are the sounds that infiltrate the constancy of a new album, remix or mixtape.

But certain songs stay put. They resonate long after I first listen to them. Although their appeal eventually wanes, the next band or album or song I discover has touches of them, allowing me to revisit what felt so powerful for minutes, hours, or even days.

"Into the Black" - Chromatics (mp3)

“Into the Black," from the Chromatics’ first new album in forever, Kill for Love, is one of the most startling songs you’ll hear all year. It is not outrageous or flashy, but the first few notes from the ominous guitar riff that settles throughout the song reminds the listener of their tremendous power. Like any great work from the band, it establishes the mood of the rest of the album. In this case, one should expect sorrow, mourning and the perfect soundtrack to late nights.

"Jasmine" - Jai Paul (mp3)

"BTSTU" - Jai Paul (mp3)

My greatest fear for new music from Jai Paul was to step away from my desk only to come back later in the day and realize that he had finally - finally! - released new music. And this happened. I missed the demo release by about half an hour. This amount of time seems minimal taking into account Paul's contemporary classic "BTSTU" was first released in 2010. Audiences haven't heard much since. After waiting this long, we can wait a while longer.

“BTSTU” was and is enigmatic, but also damn catchy. It’s not just a good song, but a good pop song. It deserves a larger audience. Perhaps a great pop song is another example of the way music haunts. A good pop song, both infectious and relentless, demands respect. Only a few people can accomplish something so pleasing and melodic to the ear. And “BTSTU,” years later, hits that mark every time.

Paul's music requires patience; you have to savor it continually, given the frequency at which it is released. Unlike a large majority of the music I listen to, I've been coming back to "Jasmine," Paul’s newest single. Much like “BTSTU,” it includes all of the makings of a perfect pop song: a nice beat, a memorable chorus, an even more memorable voice. But Paul’s music differs from the norm, asking the listener to unravel the layers that hide the value of his work. Once past the immediate appeal, its other stories - the hand claps, the grainy quality, the thumping bass - also deserve to be told.

"Joy" - Julian (mp3)

"Lust Spell" - Julian (mp3)

Ostensibly Julian has a better voice than Jai Paul. Whereas Paul often performs in a quiet falsetto, Julian’s voice sounds stronger and more forceful. But it is less compelling, and coupled with the production of such songs as “Joy,” it takes away from an otherwise solid single. The first few seconds sound like the beginning of a smooth, contemporary house track, but Julian keeps his sound in the vein of contemporaries like Drake and The Weeknd. This is not meant to sound like an insult.

When I listen to another early single, “Lust Spell,” I am reminded of the emerging r&b singers of my 90s youth: young, bright-eyed, and usually singing about experiences that seem more foreign to the singer than what is presented. Something about his range and intonation feels very much like a recent past, and the sound can be jarring when coupled with the contemporary, often bleak and minimalist sounds of the production.

"Leila's Tale" - Szjerdene (mp3)

Szjerdene understands restraint. Many of the emerging or underground male r&b vocalists understand production, but their vocals are second to the music. I first heard Szjerdene’s “Leila’s Tale” late last year. Like a lot of instant classics, it required repeated listening. Oftentimes I got dressed in the mornings or read late into the night with the song on repeat. Szjerdene couples her voice with the instrumentation. She listens to and sings with music, rather than against or above it. A guitar strum is the second vocalist, the other “singer” that complements her song. Like “Leila’s Tale,” new single “Blue Lullaby” has a deeply felt quality that hovers somewhere between disquieting and lovely. But as the listener takes in the steady and driven beat, they are immersed completely in the force of the song. That’s another quality of the haunting: it grips you completely and won’t let go.

"DDD" - Machinedrum (mp3)

"She Died There" - Machinedrum (mp3)

Machinedrum is prolific. I don’t say this lightly. Producer Travis Stewart is skilled at what he does and each new release, regardless of what genre he manipulates or elevates, fits his signature. Throughout many of his best releases (Room(s), SXLND), he incorporates a use of vocal samples that sound, if not lively, then at least lovely. “She Died There,” from Room(s) and “Give a Lil Luv,” from Dream Continuum (a collaboration between Machinedrum and Om Unit) elicit a strange beauty. The songs are neither quiet nor slow, but their use of vocals are startlingly compressing. They root the listener and sound on the cusp of something greater.

Trying to write articulately about what makes so much of Machinedrum’s music so great proves difficult. I was so excited and scared the first time I heard Room(s). It had been a long time since dance music felt so powerful. I asked my friend about it the next day and he said he had deleted many of the songs from his computer. They weren’t instantly compelling to him. Some music takes patience. Certain albums need to settle before revealing their charms. But Room(s) never failed for me upon first listen. It felt and still feels smarter than most anything I heard last year. The way that we listen to music now is often similar to how (I think) some musicians make music. A lack of focus, of a definitive statement stands out. But Room(s) is ambitious. Setting itself apart, it still doesn’t neglect its audience. How could it when it sounds so forceful, so elegant?

“DDD,” from the SXLND EP is unabashedly house, invoking the spirit of the early 90s in its subtle, rapturous groove. Unlike the majority of his most recent work, which blend elements of footwork and jungle, “DDD” has a steady 4/4 beat - a rhythmic pulse that is sexy and fun. It might be my favorite song of Stewart's, and although I know his work is often a testament to the styles and aesthetics he enjoys and experiments with, a part of me craves more music that felt like the first and second and third time I listened to “DDD.”

"Push the Feeling On" - Nightcrawlers (mp3)

Nightcrawlers are an established element of a good night out. “Push the Feeling On” is a song for the moment before the moment the night winds down. It is the final go, that last turn around the bend. You are then most in the element of the room: the strangers around you, bodies pressed close together, the thumping of the bass. I could listen to this song forever and not get bored if only because of the memories of it in public with my friends or alone, but always dancing.

"Crazy-Shaped Lady" - Le Le (mp3)

Although Le Le recently released Party Time, the album sounds retro. By retro, I mean that late-aughts period of French electro house that sounded so exciting as a college student. There was always an element of “the party,” of good times and drinks and dancing. The lyrics are inconsequential to the music, which sounds just right anywhere but on your laptop speakers. Songs like “Damien” and “Crazy-Shaped Lady” (or the new club classic from an earlier release,“Breakfast”) are fantastic because they require little to be enjoyed. It’s a level of fun that permeates through the song, and for Party Time, throughout the album.

"Chicago" - Fred Falke ft. Teff Balmert (mp3)

A week or two ago, my friend and I left a work party and attended a DJ set by French producer Fred Falke at Smart Bar. Falke gets the dance floor. He understands the importance of the moment, and making it last. The feeling doesn’t need to be the same, but it should always be a good feeling, a pleasant moment, an eager moment. To lose that feeling is to no longer know your place and why you're there and how to feel good.

It takes root and won’t let go. Being surrounded by strangers can be both exciting and terrifying. Being surrounded by friends and acquaintances can feel surreal. It is the disruption of place. You’ve been taken away from the music and brought back to your thoughts. Most of the time, you don’t want to go back there.

Falke played “Chicago,” his re-working of the Roy Ayers song and yes, it was a little ripe for the city and the setting, but sometimes a good song is a good song. Falke recognized this in the original and recognized this in the moment of the dance floor. “Chicago,” with its vinyl-sounding quality and smooth disco beat, fit the bill nicely. And weeks later, I still can’t stop thinking about how great it was to hear it again. It was a reminder of something good and now that it’s here, I don’t want it to go away.

Brittany Julious is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find the first volume of The New York Review of Hooks here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

How's Your Hobbit?

by ALEX CARNEVALE

I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. My mother said nothing about the dragon but pointed out that one could not say "a green great dragon" but had to say "a great green dragon." I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

- J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter to W.H. Auden

After publishing The Hobbit in September of 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien worried about the direction his readers wanted him to take next. His book for young adults had been a success by any measure, and readers demanded more about Bilbo and company. His publisher Stanley Unwin informed him that everyone would be "clamoring next year to hear from you about Hobbits." Tolkien wrote back, "I am a little perturbed. I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits." Later he exploded, "I am constantly asked how my hobbit is!"

Had Tolkien felt free to pursue his own interests (he had many varied ones) instead of giving into this pressure, he may not have spent the better part of the next two decades writing The Lord of the Rings, and may have imagined a litany of other worlds. As it is, Tolkien eventually gave in and told his publisher that "a sequel or successor to The Hobbit is called for" - and Middle Earth was born. Starting something new was never a problem for the longtime professor; he claimed to have written "unlimited first chapters", and the beginning of The Lord of the Rings emerged whole with the story of Bilbo Baggin's birthday party.

Stanley Unwin shared the first bits of what would become The Fellowship of the Ring with his precocious son Rayner, who reported that he was "delighted." Other early readers showed similar excitement, including his friend C.S. Lewis, who had completed the classic Out of a Silent Planet mere months earlier. Competitiveness may have played some small part in pushing Tolkien onwards. As he continued his difficult task, he relied heavily on the advice of Lewis, his son Christopher, and at times young Rayner Unwin, whose early endorsement of The Hobbit had been crucial to that book's publication. Tolkien allowed them to read his new work chapter by chapter, like a magazine serial. On the surface, this seems a most disturbing way to approach a writing project, or any creative work, since repetition is the unfortunate consequence, and The Lord of the Rings is nothing if not extremely repetitive. Not to mention Tolkien also readily admitted he was "as susceptible as a dragon to flattery."

Nevertheless, by the end of 1939, Tolkien had progressed well into what would become The Fellowship of the Ring, finding himself at Balin's tomb in Moria.

In the real world, circumstances were not as accommodating. The Tolkien family was struggling financially, his wife Edith was sick, and war loomed on the horizon. As the project progressed, Tolkien sensed the scope of the enterprise he had unwittingly begun, yet could not help but recognize the core value in what he had written, saying, "the story has (I fondly imagine) some significance" - practically braggadocio from a depressed and humble man.

With the onset of World War II, food was scarce on the island of Britain. A German publisher offered to issue a translation of The Hobbit, but demanded that Tolkien write a letter insisting he was not Jewish. The author was upset and said so, but could not afford to pass on the opportunity. These and other distractions slowed his pace, but by 1942 he was ready to say The Lord of the Rings "is now approaching completion." It wasn't. Now his incipient worry was worry that the book would not appeal to the young audience he had cultivated with The Hobbit.

Tolkien was bothered by the state of England during the war, since his personal view endorsed total freedom. When his son Christopher was drafted into the Royal Air Force in 1943, he wrote, "my political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)," and the loss of liberty he felt during the war did not help the pace of his literary work. Depression hounded him, and he told his son, "we were born in a bleak age out of due time." England may as well have been cast in the shadows of Mordor. For over a year he did not look at the scraps of paper and multitude of random manuscripts that, at the time, constituted the novel.

The following year, however, he found himself able to return to The Lord of the Rings. He telegrammed his son Christopher to say, "How stupid everything is! and war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself. I have seriously embarked on a effort to finish my book & have been getting up rather late: a lot of re-reading and research required. And it is continual sticky business getting into the swing again. I have gone back to Sam and Frodo, and am trying to work out their adventures. A few pages requires a lot of sweat: but at the moment they are just meeting Gollum."

Tolkien's concern for his son funnelled into and was absorbed by the work, and he sent his chapters for Christopher to read when he was not in the air. In a telegram he reflected that "Gollum continues to develop into a most intriguing character." Christopher objected strenuously to the name Samwise Gamgee, but Tolkien argued, "the object of the alliteration was precisely to bring the comicness." Tolkien never completely turned away from his own reading during the period, continuing to be engaged in both the academic and literary worlds. He read everything G.K. Chesterton produced - the man's books did double duty by troubling him and earning his admiration. Lewis' prolific, less rehearsed writing also inspired him, pushing him further into his own work.

In fall of 1946 Tolkien told his publisher - by then, very familiar words -  that he intended to have a draft of the novel finished by the next year.

Rayner Unwin, returned from his own service in the war and newly employed by his father's company, read a semi-complete draft of the novel that July. He admired this early version, but readily admitted: "Quite honestly I don't know who is expected to read it." Discouraged, Tolkien managed to compose a rejoinder in his own defense, noting, "The world seems to be divided into impenetrable factions, Morlocks and Eloi, and others. But those that like this kind of thing at all, like it very much, and cannot get anything like enough of it, or at sufficient great length to appease hunger." In short, he knew he had a hit, but who else did?

By the fall of 1948 Tolkien had managed to compile over 1200 pages of his sequel to The Hobbit. Sensing his publisher's lack of enthusiasm for the work (Stanley Unwin was no genius, financial or otherwise), Tolkien began taking inquiries from other imprints. He apologized to Unwin for "presenting such a problem" while boiling inside. In August of 1950, Unwin officially rejected The Lord of the Rings in its entirety, for there was no thought yet of splitting the book into discrete parts. Though no one had yet agreed to put the novel out, Tolkien was already in a panic about the maps that would have to be created for anyone to follow the plot.

When Rayner Unwin finally ascended to a position of prominence in his father's company, he begged Tolkien to resubmit the manuscript, which he had never seen in its entirety - it had just sat at their offices in a state of neglect. Together they agreed to split the book into three parts. Initially, they argued over what to call the second book - Tolkien did not care for The Two Towers, and the third volume was initially called The War of the King.

There was also a long discussion about what to do with the character of Tom Bombadil. Tolkien was in favor of leaving him in, writing, "He is a not an important person - to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a comment. I mean, I do not really write like that, he is just an invention, and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in if he did not have some kind of function.

"I might put it this way - the story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken a vow of poverty, renounced control, and take your delight in things themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately, only the victory of the west will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron."

We imagine all authors of renown as confident successes. Tolkien spent the majority of his life as a somewhat impoverished academic and while he did feel support from his fans, with whom he would readily exchange lengthy correspondence on the thematic issues of his work, at no time was he ever anything but anxious about his future prospects as an author. It was only a vague sense that he would turn out to be right that allowed him to go on at all.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the marriage of Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Lost Kids" - Blood Red Shoes (mp3)

"Cold" - Blood Red Shoes (mp3)

"Two Dead Minutes" - Blood Red Shoes (mp3)

Own Adventure

by JACKIE DELAMATRE

I am visiting Joel. The man I slept with for two years in a total depression.

I still associate him with my death dreams, the ones where I live in the suburbs and stir soup in a sexy thong. They are naked dreams except I am a housewife with nothing else but my body and expensive lingerie and giant pots full of stew. The curtains are not drawn and the neighbors float by on broomsticks and vacuum cleaner nozzles, checking out my ass.

But I am too depressed to lucid dream and cover up or stop cooking. I am with Joel and he only appears as a hired lawnmower who gets his limbs mangled in the blades from time to time and never cleans up. Blood splatters on my picture window, forming paisley patterns in the drawn curtains, but I can’t stop stirring. Back and forth, forth and back.

Joel, the obsessive compulsive who cleans everything thrice. We once took a road trip from Florida to Northern California and on the way through Texas he made us listen to every Tom Petty album in chronological order. Eight hours of one man’s voice because the only other time he’d driven through Texas, he had done the same. Rituals developed left and right for him, accumulating like layers of skin.

He kept a list of everyone who’d been in his car. He coded it by front seat and back seat. No one else could drive. He changed the oil every 76 days and 5 hours. He timed himself when he filled it up with gas. He tried to make new records. He ran from the teller all the way back to the car and eagerly called STOP for me to check the stopwatch.

I left him on our second anniversary when we would have been doing the same thing as the first anniversary despite how much I hadn’t enjoyed bowling (he’d focused exclusively on beating his own score) and a dinner at the same place he went to every Saturday night.

I’m visiting Joel. Does that mean I am in the same state of mind as five years ago? Does that mean I have slipped back? It is Sisyphean, this task of mental health. It is often more than I can handle.

Joel works at Disney World, his childhood obsession spilling over into adulthood. He hasn’t had a girlfriend in the five years since we were together. I ruined him, I suggest. He says that no, I was too kind to him.

“There aren’t many girls who will put up with my shenanigans.”

Why do I go back to him? Because I have rituals of my own. Namely, avoidance of intimacy with the right men.

He meets me on his porch as I slam the cab door shut.

"How long have you been waiting here?” I ask him.

“Not long,” he says, which leads me to believe that he has been here for hours. He likes to stay up all night before the plane flights of others. He will drive the travelers around the city, buy them milkshakes, make them watch a video from his massive library, and then as the dawn is breaking drive them to the airport satisfied that he has completed a task that he is known for, that they will go on their way thinking of his kindness.

It would not be surprising if he’d been standing here since my plane landed, counting the seconds till my arrival. He could be at 7,689. He may admit this to me later after we have made love and he’s feeling at his most post-coital-confessional.

Of course, we have not discussed whether I am going back to him or whether I am just visiting.

And he is skinnier. His cheekbones cave in on his face, threatening to bring the rest of his features with them. I picture his face collapsing in on itself, the bones crumbling under the weight of the skin without the fat and muscles to hold it in place. His clothes hang on his body like he’s molting.

“You’re so skinny,” I say after we hug and I worry about his fragility under my grip.

“I am?” he asks.

“Are you sick?” He says that he’s not. That he’s been trying to eat healthier.

“Healthy as in starving?”

“The less calories you consume,” he says, “the longer you live.”

I’ve read about this: the caloric restriction diet. They’ve done studies with rats and the ones fed limited amounts of foods live five percent longer – a matter of months but a big deal for rodents.

I ask him what he’s been eating. He says come on in and I’ll show you. He opens his cabinets and in identical canisters he pulls out his labeled food. It looks like bird food, little pellets of varying shades of gray. The first is labeled ‘protein,’ the second ‘carbohydrates.’

“Do you just eat this straight?”

“It’s like oatmeal. I add hot water and watch it expand. I portion it out.”

He shows me his measuring devices like NASA-issued tools, so precise that I cannot distinguish one ounce line from another. They are stainless steel and antibacterially clean.

I look at his face, his sharp lines. He has become a tool. I study the line of his silhouette, angling from the top of his head down to his shoulders and waist, and I am reminded of a shovel. I am reminded of a pitchfork. A lawnmower. A conveyor belt built to circle a factory floor.

We settle down on the couch, plastic-covered. There are no objects in view; they have been hidden behind the cabinet doors. His living room is like a furniture showroom, just furniture and nothing else, only a vase full of fake flowers. He is, I realize, one of those people who never takes out the photographs that come with the frames.

The glass of wine is making me sleepy. He asks me if I want another. I have nothing in common with this man but I want to sleep with him. I know he will touch me the same way, the same amount of times. I know he will wake up at the same hour and brush his teeth for the same number of seconds. He counts. I know he will wear the same color palette, probably the same clothes, only slightly aged, and ask me the same questions in the morning – what were you dreaming about last night? You circled your arms like you were directing traffic.

I know I will be safe.

“You ready for bed?” he asks me.

I nod. He touches my cheek. “Where do you want to sleep?”

“Where should I sleep?”

His jutting jawbone looks handsome in the low light of the table lamp. He turns it off with a pair of claps.

I take off my clothes. He’ll want me to fold them, and though by the end of our last go at this, I threw my clothes anywhere, now I treat him like a sleepwalker – not to be startled while still moving. I fold them carefully on a chair next to his bed while he counts out the seconds of his tooth brushing. Then he joins me under the covers, his body a stripped turkey against mine, plumper since the last time we met. Will he notice? With precision like his, how could he not?

He kisses my neck (he has told me before about the kinds of bacteria that live in the mouth; the one, he said, that looks exactly like a skeleton key, is the most deadly), but only briefly.

He cuts straight to the chase, slides off my underwear. Loses himself a bit in the moment and approaches my mouth with his lips. Stops himself at the edges. He is hard already, I notice. Though then I am afraid it is not his erection I am feeling, but rather a bone sticking out from his ribs. I feel his hip bone cutting into my waist. I slide my hand down to his legs and can almost wrap my fingers around his whole thigh. He is breathing heavily and moving slowly, losing energy it seems.

He used to scream things. I wait for this. He used to count down to coming. It was the only counting of his I liked. It was a game to see if he could guess exactly, by the second, when it would happen. He used to scream, “Are you ready? I’m ready! Get ready! 10, 9, 8 …” Now he is silent. Where is the counting? I wait for the counting to let myself go and before I know it, he has come. He has come and I am not even close – where is the predictability, the ritual, I had hoped for?

He lies back on the pillow, rolling slowly off of me, and sighing. He sighs like a pro.

“Hey,” I say after a few seconds of silence in the dark, alone.

“Hey,” he says affectionately.

“What happened to the counting?”

“The counting?”

“You know, how you used to count.”

“What are you talking about?”

And there it is. My favorite part of sex with Joel and I was the only one to have experienced it. What is reality? Sounds made in the dark and no one to hear them but me. Did they happen? Or did I invent the things about Joel that I thought I loved? Did I invent them so there would be something to love which leaves me loving only my own imagination? I am alone again with only my own imagination and I tense up in anticipation of the onslaught of my un-lucid death dreams, the site of my various imagined lives.

When I wake up, Joel is gone. There’s a note on the pillow.

Gone for my jog. The bottom shelf pellets are for breakfast. No coffee, sorry, but there is some herbal tea in the Lazy Susan. I should be back by mid-morning.

I slide off of the bed and over to the bathroom. I snoop around. The cabinets are lined like the kitchen shelves with labeled medicine bottles – pills like beads, multicolored, shaped, sorted and ready to mix and match.

Joel has relabeled the bottles with return address stickers. The first says “Anxiety.” The second says “Erections.” The third says “Weight Loss.” He has simplified his own diagnoses. I pick up the Anxiety bottle to see if he’s been taking any of it, even though I can pretty much guarantee they’re all there. The second shelf is devoted solely to acne, a particular obsession of Joel’s. There are creams, ointments, powders, swallowables, chewables. There is an aerosol spray that looks dubious.

I brush my teeth with no attention to how long I scrub each tooth and look through the rest of the cabinets for his condoms. I see two at the bottom of a basket of travel-size shampoos. I think how sad it is to be here again.

Jackie Delamatre is a writer living in New York.

"American Sneakers" - Pools Are Nice (mp3)

"Dear in the Headlights" - Pools Are Nice (mp3)

"Girls Like Boys" - Pools Are Nice (mp3)

Aliens

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Haruki Murakami decided he could write while watching a baseball game in the late ‘70s. Over a period of several months afterwards, he wrote his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in small increments after working 14-hour day shifts at “Peter Cat”, the jazz bar he owned at the time with his wife, Yoko. He composed the first chapters in English, hoping that his limited vocabulary would allow him to produce a pure work of fiction, unattached to what he considered an overly-nuanced knowledge of his native tongue. Unsure of what to do with the finished manuscript, he simply sent it off to the only literary contest in Japan that would accept such a lengthy work, and won first prize.

Still, Murakami felt that this first attempt – and its quickly-penned sequel, Pinball – were weak, and it was not until A Wild Sheep Chase, published in 1982, that he grew confident in his ability as a storyteller. Critically acclaimed, the surreal tale blends a traditional Holmesian mystery with hints of animism and Shinto; it was also the first that he allowed to be translated into English. His mastery of both Eastern and Western paradigms generates a unique chaos in his work that is as much admired by the younger generation as it is criticized by his Japanese peers.

It would be immature to reduce his work to this simple dichotomy, though; for one thing, he embraces several at a time with an imaginary force that has become difficult to find outside of young adult fiction, yet leaves the cosmic questions unanswered with gentle skepticism. Only Murakami could produce a mind-bending thriller like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a fantasy in fairy-tale terms (none of the characters have names, but are referred to simply by their occupation or physical appearance) made chilling by graphic violence, then almost immediately afterwards Norwegian Wood, a haunting coming-of-age story that gnaws with its realism.

Like all of Murakami’s characters, the hero of Norwegian Wood is startlingly ordinary, possessing (in the author’s own words) “something to tell other people, but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.” Toru Watanabe, a student of drama at a Tokyo university, falls in love with two women: Naoko, gentle and mentally troubled, and Midori, larger-than-life. The youthful unrest of the late 1960s paints an almost comical backdrop to Toru’s troubles: Murakami abandons what he perceives as the mindless obsessions of the group for the struggle of the individual — a theme that, while being as familiar to Western ears as a lullaby, rings foreign to the community-centric Japanese culture. The novel sold over two million copies in Japan alone.

For its author, the instant success was a blow: he felt that the book had ceased to be a work of art in favor of becoming a phenomenon, and Murakami had little desire for fame. He escaped quietly to Europe with Yoko, where he spent the next five years, followed by a fellowship at Princeton, during which he wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his most celebrated work.

Despite his rugged individualism, Murakami carries a deep concern for his country, one that links him to it almost prophetically. In 1995, two disasters — the Kobe earthquake and, shortly afterward, a terrorist attack by cultists in the Tokyo subway system — lured the writer home again, where he turned his efforts towards a non-fictional account in Underground, a collection of interviews with both the attackers and their victims.

It is initially difficult to say what makes Murakami so memorable. I assume that some of his more subtle artistry is lost in translation, but his writing is straightforward, so simply adorned that it is possible to forget you are reading. His more elaborate descriptions do not immerse the reader into the milieu. Rather, they seem external to the rest of the text, pulling the reader out, drawing his or her attention to a detail that may or may not be vital. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for example, Murakami dismisses a river as “swollen with snowmelt”, a metaphor that, after a hundred some pages of seamless text, jarred me as much as one of Fitzgerald’s copious oxymorons.

What he avoids in style, he more than makes up for in the construction of his characters. While ordinary, they are unforgettable, and share a sense of deep alienation; they are set apart. Whether by circumstance or personality they suffer intense loneliness, a by-product of their exceptional freedom. “I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik,” shares ‘K’, the mysterious narrator of Sputnik Sweetheart, “even now circling the Earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.”

Murakami’s aliens build a new universe in order to survive, most often metaphorically, and sometimes literally, in the case of his latest novel 1Q84: the protagonist, Aomame, is stuck in a cab on a busy Tokyo expressway: at precisely four o’clock, she must kill a man in a hotel room. But in order to arrive on time she must exit the vehicle and climb down a ladder from the highway to the street. Before she can climb out, the cab driver cautions her: “You’re about to do something out of the ordinary. Am I right? People do not ordinarily climb down the stairs of the Metropolitan Expressway in the middle of the day — especially women. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I’ve had that experience before myself. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

Suddenly, in Aomame’s Tokyo, things begin to morph: a sickly green moon appears in the sky alongside the old one. Dogs explode. Two vigilantes open a shelter for battered women, and secretly kill the men who abuse them. A reclusive, dyslexic teenager publishes a bestselling story. Tengo, Aomame’s childhood love, has sex with the daughter of a cult leader, but gets Aomame pregnant instead. As Tengo and Aomame’s worlds begin to overlap, they telescope further and further away from normalcy, until the smallest routines ring false.

Like the Orwellian universe that inspired it, the Tokyo of 1Q84 sits under the thumb of an oppressor: reality. In the known universe, Murakami argues, signs and symbols lead up to nothing. What we can imagine holds greater power than what we do. Sometimes, what actually happens belies little of its truer undercurrents, like a badly translated book. And Murakami — himself a translator of many of the cult classics that have established our own culture — reminds us to look past what is in favor of what could be.

At the same time, he grounds his readers with the details: food is endlessly prepared and consumed, the process and experience of which he addresses as mundanely as we experience it ourselves. His female characters tuck their hair behind their ears intimately, an immediate and foreign precursor to sex. Often compared to shells, or admired for their almost newborn freshness, these orifices encompass what Murakami’s women represent: virgin territory, a space to fill and colonize, a new order of things. Never, outside of a David Lynch film, have ears been so fetishized.

Like his words, in which the exceptional blends evenly with the typical, Murakami moves between spiritual and visible with ease, a quality that ties him irreversibly to his roots. In an interview with Ben Naparstek, editor of The Monthly, he shared: “You know the myth of Orpheus. He goes to the underworld to look for his deceased wife, but it’s far away and he has to undergo many trials to get there. There’s a big river and a wasteland. My characters go to the other world, the other side. In the Western world, there is a big wall you have to climb up. In [Japan], once you want to go there, it’s easy. It’s just beneath your feet.”

This transition may be as easy as climbing to the bottom of a well to meditate, as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s Toru Okada discovers, or as difficult as disappearing entirely “like smoke” as Sumire in Sputnik Sweetheart. Murakami leaves breadcrumb trails where he can: his novels often incorporate telephone calls and make liberal use of letters to connect his isolated characters. He is also one of the few writers I have read who incorporates computers and the internet into his stories with unabashed poise. What ultimately brings the aliens together is the violence which links them to the world, alternately inflicted on or performed by them, and the uneasy peace they find in withdrawing from it.

It has been called postmodern, but Murakami’s literature — as staunchly as it refuses to fit into any paradigm — is more of a skeuomorph than anything else. Taking cues from what we know as well as our own reflections, his stories squeeze into the shapes we are comfortable with and, like the wind-up bird, invent entirely unfamiliar songs.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about walking. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Anyone Can Fall In Love" - Kindness (mp3)

"Gee Wiz" - Kindness (mp3)

"Gee Up" - Kindness (mp3)

The new album from Kindness is called World You Need A Change Of Mind, and it will be released on May 8th.

You Can’t Say Th-- on Television

by ALICE BOLIN

Don't Trust the B---- In Apt 23
creator Nahnatchka Khan

Highlights in American history: 1989, the year when Seinfeld freed the situation comedy from the tyranny of the situation. Never forget. No one was about to.

Situation of the new situation comedy Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23: an ambitious MBA grad (Dreama Walker) moves to Manhattan for a job on Wall Street. On her first day of work, the feds shut down her company, and she is forced to find a roommate and a job at a coffee shop. Her roommate (Krysten Ritter) is a con artist who intends to take her money and make her life hell, driving her out of the apartment. Over the course of the pilot, con artist drops her scheme and exposes MBA grad’s boyfriend as a cheating dirtbag. Con artist is also BFF with former Dawson’s Creek actor James Van Der Beek.

Oh, so it’s just about a group of friends who live in New York City?

Yeah, pretty much.

Television is a single gargantuan organism, and with each teen supernatural soap opera, each humiliation-porn game show, each mid-season replacement wacky roommates sitcom, it grows a new appendage. This intertextuality is why there is nothing new on television, and there never will be; why we have to name Murphy Brown as the second coming of Mary Tyler Moore. It is endless entertainment industry samsara, where shows are reincarnated again and again. St. Elsewhere begets ER begets Grey’s Anatomy. I watch Mad Men and I think, I liked this better when it was called Bewitched.

But it’s not only the influences and clichés, it’s the trends. Just think of the weird Hollywood mega-mind that brought forth 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip at the same time, that produced waves of blended family shows, shows about orphans, shows starring Bob Newhart, that gave Whitney Cummings two shows in one season. And the actors are always a problem. A guy who murdered his wife on one episode of Law and Order plays a defense attorney on another episode and they don’t expect that to cause some mental dissonance? Am I supposed to see Mark-Paul Gosselaar on another show and not think of him as Zack Morris?

Confronting these obstacles to originality, some shows decide to go limp in the face of cliché, to submit to television’s connectedness. This is the tack Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 takes to save itself from mediocrity. June, the MBA grad, says at the beginning of the pilot that she thinks her life in New York will be just like Friends. The show clearly knows its lineage, and throws itself into its situation comedy antics full force. Chloe, the con artist played by Krysten Ritter, is hyperbolically amoral and debaucherous, gargling in the morning with peppermint schnapps (“a whore’s toothbrush”) and hiding contraband Chinese energy tablets in her grandma’s antique ottoman — her hijinks are all the more cartoonish because Ritter looks like a beautiful baby giraffe. There is the sitcom-staple weird neighbor, Eli, who we only ever see through an open window. Wikipedia refers to him as “quirky,” though his schtick is actually “always masturbating.”

Van Der Beek is the most overtly self-conscious part of Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 — he complains on the show that people only ever think of him as Dawson Leery, his role on the classic ‘90s teen soap opera Dawson’s Creek, and won’t give him a chance to play other roles. “I was in an all-white version of Raisin in the Sun!” he says, asserting his acting chops. When he teaches an acting class at NYU, in an attempt both to compete with and emulate James Franco, all he writes on the chalk board is “JAMES VAN DER BEEK!!!” and circles it three times. Van Der Beek has a good sense of humor about himself, as the fictional James Van Der Beek is shown as a frivolous playboy, seducing women by playing the theme song to Dawson’s Creek and wearing Dawson’s trademark flannel.

This is absurd, of course — he couldn’t even allure Dawson’s Creek super fans this way. Van Der Beek’s Dawson’s Creek character was a whiny fifteen-year old wannabe filmmaker with a massive, doughy face who struck out with both bad girl Jen, played by Michelle Williams, and tomboy Joey, played by Katie Holmes. The true heartthrob of the show was Joshua Jackson’s Pacey Witter, who began the series with a storyline about fucking his hot English teacher. Williams’ Academy Award nominations and Holmes’s movie career and high-profile weirdo celebrity marriage would also indicate that there is no Creek curse — it’s pretty much only been bad for Van Der Beek’s career. But Dawson was remarkable for his skewed self-perception, always viewing himself as a nice guy who finished last rather than a babyish beta male, so maybe Van Der Beek’s I-was-a-huge-1990s-crush-object schtick on Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 is just following in Dawson Leery’s deluded tradition.

There is a myth that self-consciousness is critique. A lot of low culture is marked by the use of formulas— television, pop music, genre fiction. Parody uses the formula to comment on the form; self-consciousness only points out that the formula exists, and continues to use it. When both the creator and the consumer can say, “I know I’m not supposed to like this, but I do,” everyone feels better about themselves. Similarly, any fondness for somewhat stupid cultural relics of the recent past, Dawson’s Creek, for example, is protected by nostalgia. These forms of passive self-awareness are designed to allow me to like Katy Perry or Gossip Girl or Twilight while still thinking of myself as too smart to like those things. Self-consciousness is a guaranteed way to transcend the trash while still participating in it.

It’s a natural impulse to not want to be one of those fans — the ones who post pictures of Krysten Ritter on Tumblr with lines from Sylvia Plath about dying being easy and tag it #Anna Karenina and #Leo Tolstoy. We apply some remove to save ourselves from the embarrassing adolescent earnestness. Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 is also just applying remove, rather than contributing any innovations to the situation comedy form. But I think of the alternative, the dozens of crappy traditional sitcoms that are still on the air, recycling jokes about in-laws and women wanting to cuddle after sex and airplane food and white guys drive like this, black guys drive like this, and I wish for one second they could acknowledge how stupid they were. Self-consciousness isn’t inherently virtuous, but TV can always use a new gimmick. 

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about nostalgia. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"You Don't Make It Easy Babe (live on Vicar Street)" - Josh Ritter (mp3)

"You Don't Make It Easy Babe (acoustic)" - Josh Ritter (mp3)

The Only Good Thing

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

As always, I’d shuffled all the events of my day around yours. I’d strained towards our time together, leaving work early, rushing to catch the bus, and when you’d made excuses, I’d situated them within what I knew about you so they’d make sense, but really I knew that wouldn’t change the thing you were about to tell me – the thing I couldn’t face, the thing I’d given myself more time, more time, more time to deal with, until there wasn’t any. But when you said:

"The love I have for you is so huge, sweetie, and, but…"

— it was still more like a question, like there were some extra, hidden truths I could surprise you with, some things I didn’t consciously know but rather concealed spectral and miraculous within me – things that might flash over me like a water-worn shell. You spoke quickly and quietly, and directed your voice towards the streetlamp by our bench.

"We’re going to be late," I said after a pause; our tickets were too expensive not to say this. My whole feet ached in the shoes you hated because they made me taller than you, and I kept balancing them heel-toe, toe-heel on the sidewalk, thinking about the long walk here and back.

We arrived just in time – rushing up muted, thickly carpeted stairs – to see the Toronto Symphony Orchestra begin Mahler’s fifth symphony, and it pulled me from my scattered perches of anxiety – what you’d just revealed, what I did this morning, what I did last week, what I did three years ago, what I’d do tomorrow – and, with one hand sweatily gripping the program notes and the other clutching my armrest, I was suddenly nowhere else. Of course, at the same time, I was more aware of time than ever; I felt the late fall evening spreading outside, and the collective ages of the musicians, and long-past moments I’d experienced the Adagietto movement, Mahler’s vast and aching love song to Alma, superimposed against this one, ticking along at the same temporal speed.

At the intermission, as we leaned against a glass table and looked down through the glass wall at the rich, shifting gray of the night’s freezing rain, I rubbed my swollen red face and tried to explain: "Mahler isn’t anymore, but he is when I hear that song, and so is she, and so are they. And then it’s over, and they’re gone." You shifted around against the table and finished your coffee, watching yourself in the mirrored wall across from us. Older people, beautifully dressed and glancing in the mirror as well, passed between us and our reflection. You leaned and kissed me, and hungrily, I kissed you back.

My silent, repetitive love song never really reached you, perhaps because we didn’t understand each other. It radiated into space, exhausting itself, an unstable, brief little sun.

When I dream about you you're not a composite of other people I know, flecked with the day’s particularities and soaked in its anxieties – you’re fully yourself. In these dreams it's truly the past, and I get the flat old feeling, the sick unwashed feeling, the poisonous, insular feeling – the youness of you. We’re eating a meal, and people and their items are flashing around us, and you’re criticizing the smacky way I eat, or expressing concern over my weight or the clownish quality of my makeup, and finally I say something like:

You hate women, you know.

And you say something like: I love women. How dare you.

The day after the Symphony I begged to see you until you gave in, probably because you realized you'd get to fuck me one last time. It was cloudy, an endless-feeling early afternoon, and we walked along the Harbourfront, up and down bleached wooden slats and stairs, near white-gray boats, skirting the gray water. I took off my heels to walk barefoot, and we stepped into the sand.

You brushed against me now and then as we walked along the beach, and I looked out at the water and thought, he is the only good thing in my life. We talked about Fate: you didn’t think the Universe has plans, and I found this very sad. "Didn’t the Universe bring us together?" I asked, grateful you didn’t look at my face as I said this.

"Of course not," you said quickly. "You’re robbing yourself of something if you believe that." I paused, thinking about it. "Maybe you're right. All the men I’ve dated" – (at this point there had only been two, including you) – "believe there’s some grand plan for them, like Fate keeps handing them things – and people – then subtracting them here and there, you know? That way, everything goes back to you."

You shrugged, and we kept walking. Suddenly you jogged ahead, disappearing around a lip of the Lake and a thick stand of trees, and then came running back. "There’s a free barbeque up near the neighbourhood where the really nice houses are," you reported. "They’re saying it’s for the new grocery store that’s opening." You took my hand, and we started walking again.

As we walked along the lake the water changed from black to silver and then the colors of some bright slick trees curved over the water, their shed leaves floating across the surface, coming to rest at the banks. I stared at the lake, at the floating and stillness, and my nose and eyes stung unmistakably, but what could I do? We kept walking.

We ducked through the interlaced trees that you’d dashed through twice already, trudged through the mossy dark for a few moments, through the knotted pine roots and matted needles and the weak geometric gaps of sunlight – and then the trees thinned out, and opened into a house-lined stretch of beach. We saw a couple of tents with METRO stamped on their sides, huddled near where the greying sand ends and the sidewalk, brown with leaves, began. We arrived at the tents and a strong wind picked up, flapping the tent walls and roof together, ruffling the water. Dozens of overfed people were lining up, shifting their weights and minding their children – do you want peppers, Jonah? No peppers? – and watching their places in the lopsided line carefully, itself gone floppy with clinging children and hurled-down knapsacks. One man, with a headset on and shining cropped hair receding from it, gestures at the popping brown rows of burgers and the uniformed flippers and said to me, The price is right. I watched a trio of kids talk about what second grade is like and thought, it’s never easy. I watched you crane your neck, and tried to follow your gaze. The slick compartments of chilli peppers and spiced corn and onions and mustard are barely visible through the bodies and rings of hair and soft loops of arms, and the thick meaty gassy air and the late summer air push the tent in on itself and I felt buoyed by the brave camaraderie of the tough-faced thick-haired mothers, flashing their teeth at each other, gripping and wrapping burgers in paper, playing half-games invisible to everyone else and changing them like traffic lights with each new arrival. They were feeling the weight of their lives slide through their bodies like paint down a window: more behind than ahead, more behind than ahead. Three children, two cars, six deaths, fourteen seasons of perennials – and then there it is and here we were, and it was unimaginable, though it was just the day after yesterday. But they flashed their eyes and teeth at each other and their husbands and children – solidarity. It was happening to all of them, to you and I too, to the birds in the brown moulting trees and to the efficient burger-flippers nearby, and maybe that was comforting. Certainly this gathering had its darkness, but the right-now, real-life loneliness of my apartment was unimaginably worse; by myself I’d heat something from a can while getting rapidly drunk, then go to bed to sleep away some time until the next thing. I could never simulate the goodness of all of this, the walk and the talk and this tiny fair, if I’d had forever to try.

"Listen," you said, taking my hands, "Listen. You know I'm going away, so this, you know, this effort – it doesn't make sense anymore."

I started crying and you tolerated it, waiting. "I didn't lie to you," you insisted.

"Isn't this sad for you too?"

"It is sad, but I'm a boy, honey. We don't cry as much."

For maybe two weeks this winter it grew hot like summer, and everyone on the baking streets strutted around with stripped-off coats, squinting through the sun, and all the flowers and grass came out too early. When the cold came back the crocuses melted into sad gray strings, and the ground re-froze, and the magnolia trees were full and round with blackened flowers. Like those downtown strangers, like you, I understand now that the more you have, the more you want.

You agreed to long distance for a while. I'd wait weeks to see you and each time I picked you up at the airport, the spectre of your absence would choke me five minutes in. I wanted my youth to pass, to pass through into you, and disappear behind us; I wanted you forever. When you left I wanted to leave myself too – I didn’t want a future without you in it. My present sagged without you, and the future, an abstract and lifeless thing, couldn’t be any better. I’ve never loved like that since, and I hope I don't again. I couldn’t cry for months, and nothing felt interesting or appetizing or funny or true. You snipped away at my insides until nothing reached the surface; my emotions slid around like lily-pads, conjured only in the presence of others. I wonder now if you did that on purpose – hollowing me out, so no one else could have me.

The last time we ever talked, you said (what I realize now) was the worst thing you could think of: you pitied me. And of course you did, and so did everyone else I knew: I was broken. You had broken me, and now that I had no more use left you were squirming out, absolving yourself of responsibility, fleeing the scene.

Writing about you feels new, but it’s not – my life is all I have to write about (I mean ‘have’ in the possessive sense, and you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you) so I’ve written about you dozens of times, filled my writing life with dozens of yous. Fittingly for our time, yours and mine, anyone can access this you that I’ve produced, anytime they like. It feels like I’m guiding the whole thing consciously and carefully, choosing each word and editing many times. But pieces of writing are often accidental self-portraits to which you are denied full access until much later, sometimes years, when they show you who you were.

Victoria Hetherington is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. She last wrote in these pages about her writing workshop. You can find her website here.

"Coming Around" - Counting Crows (mp3)

"All My Failures" - Counting Crows (mp3)

"Amie" - Counting Crows (mp3)

Nothing Ever Happens

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

In spring of 1947, the English department of the University of Mississippi had William Faulkner address one class a day for a week. The teacher of each class was barred from attending the sessions. Faulkner spent the entire time answering questions from students.

Q: Which of your books do you consider best?

WILLIAM FAULKNER: As I Lay Dying was easier and more interesting. The Sound and The Fury still continues to move me. Go Down, Moses - I started it as a collection of short stories. After I reworked it, it became seven different facets of one field. It is simply a collection of short stories.

Q: In what form does the initial idea of a story come to you?

WF: It depends. The Sound and The Fury began with the impression of a little girl playing in a branch and getting her panties wet. This idea was attractive to me, and from it grew the novel.

Q: How do you go about choosing your words?

WF: In the heat of putting it down you might put down some extra words. If you rework it, and the words still ring true, leave them in.

Q: What reason did you have for arranging the chapters of The Wild Palms as you did?

WF: It was merely a mechanical device to bring out the story I was telling, which was one of two types of love. I did send both stories to the publisher separately, but they were rejected because they were too short. So I alternated the chapters of them.

Q: How much do you know about how a book will turn out before you start writing it?

WF: Very little. The character develops with the book, and the book with the writing of it.

Q: Why do you present the picture you do of our area?

WF: I have seen no other. I try to tell the truth of man. I use imagination when I have to and cruelty as a last resort. The area is incidental. That's just all I know.

Q: Since you do represent this picture, don't you think it gives a wrong impression?

WF: Yes, and I'm sorry. I feel I'm written out. I don't think I'll write much more. You only have so much steam and if you don't use it up in writing it'll get off by itself.

Q: Did you write Sanctuary at the boilers just to draw attention to yourself?

WF: The basic reason was that I needed money. Two or three books that had already been published were not selling and I was broke. I wrote Sanctuary to sell. After I sent it to the publisher, he informed me, "Good God, we can't print this. We'd both be put in jail." The blood and guts period hadn't arrived yet. My other books began selling, so I got the galleys of Sanctuary back from the publisher for correction. I knew that I would either have to rework the whole thing or throw it away. I was obligated to the publisher financially and morally and upon continued insistence I agreed to have it published. I reworked the whole thing and had to pay for having the new galleys made. For these reasons, I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.

Q: Should one re-write?

WF: No. If you are going to write, write something new.

Q: How do you find time to write?

WF: You can always find time to write. Anybody who says he can't is living under false pretenses. To that extent depend on inspiration. Don't wait. When you have an inspiration put it down. Don't wait until later and when you have more time and then try to recapture the mood and add flourishes. You can never recapture the mood with the vividness of its first impression.

Q: How long does it take you to write a book?

WF: A hack writer can tell. As I Lay Dying took six weeks. The Sound and The Fury took three years.

Q: I understand you can keep two stories going at one time. If that is true, is it advisable?

WF: It's all right to keep two stories going at the samet ime. But don't write for deadlines. Write just as long as you have something to say.

Q: What is the best training for writing? Courses in writing? Or what?

WF: Read, read, read! Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You'll absorb it. Write. If it is good you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Q: Is it good to copy a style?

WF: If you have something to say, use your own style: it will choose its own type of telling, its own style. What you have liked will show through in your style.

Q: Do you realize your standing in England?

WF: I know that I am better thought of abroad than here. I don't read any reviews. The only people with time to read are women and rich people. More Europeans read than do Americans.

Q: Why do so many people prefer Sanctuary to As I Lay Dying?

WF: That's another phase of our American nature. The former just has more commercial color.

with Eudora Welty

Q: Are we degenerating?

WF: No. Reading is something that is in a way necessary like heaven or a clean collar, but not important. We want culture but don't want to go to any trouble to get it. We prefer reading condensations.

Q: That sounds like a slam on our way of living.

WF: Our way of living needs slamming. Everybody's aim is to help people, turn them to heaven. You write to help people. The existence of this class in creative writing is good in that you take time off to learn to write and you are in a period where time is your most valuable possession.

Q: What is the best age for writing?

WF: For fiction the best age is from 35-45. Your fire is not all used up and you know more. Fiction is slower. For poetry the best age is from 17 to 26. Poetry writing is more like a skyrocket with all your fire condensed in one rocket.

Q: How about Shakespeare?

WF: There are exceptions.

Q: Why did you quit writing poetry?

WF: When I found poetry not suited to what I had to say, I changed my medium. At 21 I thought my poetry very good. At 22 I began to change my mind. At 23 I quit. I use a poetic quality in my writing. After all, prose is poetry.

Q: Do you read a good bit?

WF: Up until 15 years ago I read everything I could get a hold of. I don't even know fiction writers' names much now. I have a few favorites I read over and over again.

Q: Has "The Great American Novel" been written yet?

WF: People will read Huck Finn for a long time. However, Twain has never written a novel. His work is too loose. We'll assume that a novel has set rules. His is a mass of stuff - just a series of events.

Q: I understand you use a minimum of restrictions.

WF: I let the novel write itself - no length or style compunctions.

Q: What do you think of movie scriptwriting?

WF: A person is rehired the next year on the basis of how many times his name appeared on the screen the previous year. Much bribery ensues. In the old days they could give a producer three hundred pounds of sugar and be reasonable sure of getting their names on the screen. They really fight about it and for it.

Q: To what extent did you write the script for Slave Ship?

WF: I'm a motion picture doctor. When they find a section of a script they don't like I rewrite it and continue to rewrite it until they are satisfied. I reworked sections in this picture. I don't write scripts. I don't know enough about it.

Q: It is rumored that once you asked your boss in Hollywood if it would be permissible for you to go home to work. He gave his approval. Thinking you meant Beverly Hills, he called you at that address and found that by home you had meant Oxford, Mississippi. Is there anything to this story?

WF: That story's better than mine. I had been doing some patching for Howard Hawks on my first job. When the job was over, Howard suggested that I stay and pick up some of that easy money. I had got $6,000 for my work. That was more money than I had ever seen, and I thought it was more than was in Mississippi. I told him I would telegraph him when I was ready to go to work again. I stayed in Oxford a year, and sure enough the money was gone. I wired him and within a week I got a letter from William B. Hawks, his brother and my agent. Enclosed was a check for a week's work less agent's commission. These continued for a year with them thinking I was in Hollywood. Once a friend of mine came back from England after two years stay and found 104 checks enclosed in letters that had been pushed under his door. They are showing a little more efficiency now, so those things don't happen much anymore.

Q: How do you like Hollywood?

WF: I don't like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65. I prefer Florida.

Q: On your walking trip through Europe how did you find everything?

WF: At that time the French were impoverished, the Germans naturally servile, I didn't find too much.

Q: Did your perspective change after travel to Europe and to other places?

WF: No. When you are young you are sensitive but don't know it. Later you seem to know it. A wider view is not caused by what you have seen but by war itself. Some can survive anything and get something good out of it, but the masses get no good from war. War is a dreadful price to pay for experience. About the only good coming from war is that it does allow men to be freer with womenfolks without being blacklisted for it.

Q: What effect did the R.C.A.F. have on you?

WF: I like to believe I was tough enough that it didn't hurt me too much. It didn't help much. I hope I have lived down the harm it did me.

Q: Which World War do you think was tougher?

WF: Last war we lived in constant fear of the thing catching on fire. We didn't have to watch all those instruments and dials. All we did was pray the place didn't burn up. We didn't have parachutes. Not much choice. World War II must have been tougher.

Q: Is association (such as a boarding house) good or bad as a background for writing?

WF: Neither good nor bad. You might store the facts in mind for future reference in case you ever want to write about a boarding house.

Q: How much should one notice printed criticism?

WF: It is best not to pay too much attention to a printed criticism. It is a trade tool for making money. A few critics are sound and worth reading, but not many.

Q: Whom do you consider the five most important contemporary writers?

WF: 1. Thomas Wolfe. 2. Dos Passos. 3. Ernest Hemingway. 4. Willa Cather. 5. John Steinbeck.

Q: If you don't think it too personal, how do you rank yourself with contemporary writers?

WF: 1. Thomas Wolfe: he had much courage and wrote as if he didn't have long to live; 2. William Faulkner; 3. Dos Passos; 4. Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause a reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used. 5. John Steinbeck: at one time I had great hopes for him - now I don't know.

Q: What one obstacle do you consider greatest in writing?

WF: I'm not sure I understand what you mean. What do you want to do? Write something that will sell?

Q: I mean whether the obstacle is internal conflict or external conflict.

WF: Internal conflict is the first obstacle to pass. Satisfy yourself with what you are writing. First be sure you have something to say. Then say it and say it right.

Q: Mr. Faulkner, do you mind our repeating anything we have heard outside of class?

WF: No. It was true yesterday, is true today, and will be true tomorrow.

1947

"Too Late" - Spiritualized (mp3)

"Headin' For The Top Now" - Spiritualized (mp3)

The new album from Spiritualized is entitled Sweet Heart, Sweet Light, and it comes out on April 17th.

Habitat Jones

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Since eventually the lands of Earth will be subsumed by the rising tides of the planet, it is imperative we learn to live completely underwater. A lot of things are better underwater. Synagogue services are only twenty minutes, for example, and imitating Lord Grantham isn't as bougie. Other aspects are less appealing: no smoke breaks, movies by Ridley Scott just feel claustrophobic, and it's impossible to read Jules Verne without marvelling at his naivete. What is certain is that mankind will be irrevocably altered by this sea change. Jacques-Yves Cousteau termed this new species homo aquaticus, and made a mock dictionary definition of the phrase with a picture of Andrew Sullivan swimming the butterfly.

JYC and Simone with their pet dachshund

"In ten years," Cousteau said in 1962, "there will be permanent homes and workshops at the bottom of the sea where men can stay for three months at a time, mining, drilling for oil, coal, tin, other minerals, and farming seafood and raising sea cattle." The Captain, as he was often called, was a fervent believer in stock farming, and he equipped his flagship Calypso with massive explosives to lay the groundwork for underwater mining until his conscience got the better of him.

That year Cousteau launched a livable capsule that held two members of his team in a project called Conshelf I. The long hours were relieved by radio and television relayed from the surface, and the capsule even featured the ability to provide long, hot showers. Great care was taken to ensure that Albert Falco and Claude Wesly had every comfort in their new underwater home.

the DiogenesFalco suffered terrible nightmares in the Diogenes. When he closed his eyes, he imagined a hand coming to strangle in him in his sleep. The merest indignity because a horrible nuisance; when divers came to maintain the habitat he called them "surface people" and berated them for stirring up a murky haze that obscured the view from his "home." In his diary he moaned, "We are sentenced to remain underwater for a week!"

After Cousteau ordered the divers to avoid disturbing the homo aquaticus, Falco mellowed to the experience. When he returned to land after a mere ten days, Cousteau asked his colleague what exactly it had been like down there as they strolled the streets of Marseilles. "Oh Captain," he responded, "everything is moral down there."

Above the Diogenes, things were decidly immoral. Cousteau provoked the animals of the sea constantly to get the reactions he desired for his underwater films. The Calypso would tear through assemblages of sharks, whales and dolphins to torment the poor beasts into savagery, creating an innate fear of humans that was generally spread by word of mouth. Once an imprisoned octopus (Cousteau had commented that he hoped the creature "would accept its situation") lifted up his aquarium cover and marched back into the ocean. The crew nearly killed many of the dolphins of Monaco when they tried to capture them, not realizing they were markedly different from the more docile dolphins of the Americas. Another time, Cousteau tried to tame a three ton elephant seal. If the animals survived the capture, Cousteau named them.

Cousteau never sat still. His relentless energy is a distinctive quality of all achievers. It bears little to no relation to his own intelligence or the merits of his ideas, only to the likelihood of their accomplishment.

Near the end of 1962, Cousteau addressed the so-called World Congress on Underwater Activities. He argued for the existence of homo aquaticus and informed the group that by the year 2000, people would be born and die at the bottom of the ocean. His next experiment, Conshelf II, placed five men in a star-shaped base at the bottom of the Red Sea, at a cost of $1.2 million. The only way he could afford to fund the research was to sign a movie contract.

They called this second capsule Starfish House. For the ten men inside the air conditioned structure, all was peaceful and idyllic, and the television was nearly always on. The habitat contained quarters for eight men, a kitchen and dining table, a biological laboratory and a dark room. For the massive team on the utility ship Rosaldo and the Calypso, the calm beneath the sea required round-the-clock work in temperatures of more than 100 degrees, as delays had postponed the experiment into the summer though it had been designed to take place in March.

Most of the photography was done at night, when temperatures were cooler and tropical waters flooded with a variety of species. A nasty pack of seventy sharks tormented the crew from the first days of filming, and several close encounters with the beasts nearly killed an inexperienced diver. Given these handicaps, Cousteau's record of preserving the lives of his crew is regarded as sterling considering just how many dives they made.

Of greater concern was the house's deep cabin, which mysteriously kept flooding despite the ideal pressure of oxygen and helium in the unit. The team eventually figured out that helium was seeping out of the habitat through the television cable. The documentary about Starfish House, entitled World Without Sun, won an Academy Award.

emerging from Conshelf III live on EurovisionFor their third experiment in underwater living, Cousteau submerged a globe seven meters in diameter at nine times the depth of Starfish House. On the other side of the planet the U.S. Navy was testing its own venture in underwater living, Sealab II, and the two groups were linked by telephone. The U.S. government experiment entailed aquanaut/astronaut Scott Carpenter confined below for an entire month. Easing his time was a bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy who had been trained to bring supplies to the unit.

The environment aboard Conshelf III was no less lavish. Aquanauts consumed wine and cheese at their leisure, fresh fruit was an absolute mainstay. Cousteau and his wife Simone even celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary in the habitat. Conshelf III launched Cousteau deeply into debt, and the next project, planned as a 300-ton ten man sub that would operate at a depth of 700 meters never materialized. In Cousteau's mind, it would have been the first step to an underwater Disneyland.

The $4.2m deal Cousteau signed with ABC to create a series of television specials marked the end of his serious research. Governments also were turning away from the oceans and focusing on the possibilities of space. Both refuges afforded a measure of distance from reality. It would feel like a relief, on some level, to rid yourself of the landlocked world. The inside of the ocean (for all things contain some penetrable interior, even endless ones) envelops willing participants as a cocoon, and nothing can intrude without permission. It would also be important to have pets.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the writing of The Lord of the Rings. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish. A shark is no more a killer than the housewife who served bacon at the family's breakfast table.

"Watch the Show" - M. Ward (mp3)

"There's A Key" - M. Ward (mp3)

The new album from M. Ward is entitled A Wasteland Companion, and it came out on Tuesday.

You can read all the stories from our Saturday fiction series here.

Diegesis

by JOSHUA D. FRANK

A month out from their arrival on Tonga the three of them spied a small settlement in the distance. They'd been on foot through this deserted part of the island the entire time, and with one member of their party sick (or dying, depending on your point of view) it was a welcome sight. To think of food in such a place was a near impossibility, but every tiny outpost, even an abandoned one, was likely to have a source of fresh water.

They had been forced to let one of their cameras go when they last saw signs of human habitation, trading it for five gallons of water and a bag of highly caloric nuts which tasted something like burnt popcorn. Once you grew accustomed to it, the nuts weren't half bad, but the flavor stayed in Derwin's mouth for hours afterwards, turning sour and making him gag.

He left Tellman and Karen with the sidearm while he investigated the settlement alone. They had argued for a time about who should keep it, but he had won, although as he double-timed it unarmed in the direction of the largest structure, it did not feel like a victory. He did not particularly like the idea of leaving them. Tellman's attitude had gone from a sort of vague optimism to a spiritless drone rather quickly and he worried it might be contagious.

Along the way he saw several peka, the creepy Tongan fruit bats, circling overhead. Strange to see them out in the day. That they could not possibly want to consume human flesh was no comfort when he saw their weirdly coyote-like visages. Everything has a face, he thought. After forty-five minutes he stopped to slake his thirst, and the jungle had diminished enough to where he could see the structure more clearly. He had twisted his ankle on their first day on the island, and it ached now, but he pressed on.

From afar the structure resembled a simple hut, but the closer he ventured to it, the larger it became. At a distance of a hundred meters it loomed large overhead, almost blacking out the heat of the afternoon sun. From the overlaid carvings on the exterior it appeared quite old, but certainly not ancient. After approaching more closely, he decided it was a temple of some kind. Tellman would be unhappy he was not present for the discovery, but considering Karen's condition there had been no choice but that the man with some modicum of medical skill should care for her.

He tried the door, and it quickly gave way to his pull. He entered the temple only after finding twelve to fifteen huts of the kind he had imagined on the horizon surrounding the place. To his disappointment, but not to his surprise, they were all empty, and from the looks of it had been so for a long time. With the possibility of thieves and the occasional film crew accidentally stumbling on the settlement, anything of value was likely underground, and he could see no other viable access point.

As he entered the temple, he felt a cloud of dust enter his lungs and eyes, and some of it made its way into his mouth. He moved more cautiously into the anteroom after that, even as he grew more hopeful. If there were booby traps or deadfalls in this empty place, it only implied that there were items of value to protect.

The inside of the main chamber was filled with more carvings along the lines of what he had seen in the anteroom. All were done in a dark wood he could not identify: perhaps it was not even from the island. At the rear of the room was a rostrum, and behind it one large tableau to which all others seemed to direct and refer. The scene depicted an old and emaciated woman either leaning against a staff taller than herself as support or, as he decided was possible, commanding it. Behind her loomed what Derwin at first identified as a sun, but upon closer examination, the globe seemed to radiate no heat or energy, and he could see a landmass, faint but discernible, on its surface. Earth.

Next to the image of the old woman (he had to remind himself it was only a representation) was a small rodent or possum, most likely the woman's familiar. His eyes lingered on the old woman's face. There lurked both a quiet assurance and a subtle hint of fear. He did not know how long exactly he viewed the elaborate carving, but it was long enough to know he was not entirely well. When he tried to stand, propping himself on two legs felt fine for a moment, but then the light headaches would come in again.

When he woke there was no longer light coming in through the parapets. The woman was gone, and he was lying on his back in a different place. He smelled the dank aroma of popcorn with which he had become so familiar. He heard the sound of footsteps nearby, and tried to raise his head, but found he could not without furthering a dull, then searing pain in the back of his skull. Given a moment to his collect his wits, Derwin was sure he was experiencing the most savage hangover of his life. The only solution he knew of for a hangover was more alcohol, but when he reached into his pocket for the flask, he found it had vanished along with his only knife.

When a large figure entered the room, he immediately hid behind a wooden door. The slow moving shape entered, and seeing him no longer resting on the hard slate, let out an anguished cry. He pinned what he was now sure was a young man's hand behind his back and twisted. He would have threatened the boy quietly but his Tongan was rudimentary at best and pain would carry the message more quickly. What unnerved him was that the boy did not utter a sound after the first scream.

He noticed hanging from the boy's belt of rope, his only remaining knife. He had traded the other two he had brought with him in Vava'u for the seervices of a guide who had disappeared into the jungle as they marched west from the tourist-y part of the island. He pocketed the knife and slammed the boy's head as hard as he could against the door. Staring at the unconscious native, he knew that leaving him alive to follow was not a viable option. Leaning down, he plunged the knife into the boy's heart and felt a shudder: his own.

It did not take long at all to realize he was underground. By following a long pathway, lit by a torch every five meters, he worked his way back into the anteroom. There was the old woman again, in the thrall of the planet, and he realized that he had missed her. He wanted nothing more than to sleep on a pew, to rest the aching head that weighed heavier on his shoulders with every step, but he could not. The one saving grace was that his ankle felt fine, better than fine. His strength grew as he walked and then ran away from the village, and even the pain in his head began to abate.

Tellman and Karen were not where he had left them. The majority of their supplies and the remaining camera were hidden in a nearby bush. He hoped this meant they would not be gone long, but leaving such things unprotected and nearly in the open mystified him. At the bottom of the pack he found the satellite cell phone he could not imagine them leaving behind, no matter how long the trip. He tried to puzzle it out: they thought they would be back quickly and were attacked; something had happened to Tellman and neither of his colleagues could carry the pack. No explanation seemed to take all of the aspects into account, and then he noticed the date and time on the satellite phone.

If the clock was correct, he had been gone over thirty-five hours, which must have raised an alarm. But for them to move, with the condition Karen was in... Crossing a fragile rope-bridge the previous day, she had cut herself on the twisting boards as they splintered. Infection was the biggest fear, but she had also lost a lot of blood in the accident. Her legs might have carried her as far as the temple, but he could not see Tellman risking it if he was with her. He would have left her here to wait if he had done anything at all. Would he have taken the sidearm with him? Derwin could not answer that, but it also seemed probable.

He thought to himself, Tellman leaves to go find me. Karen can't carry the gear and must leave it behind if she wishes to follow. She hides it and comes after him. Within the realm of possibility, but again something was not right. As night began to fall more of the peka circled, chirping at him when he stood up to shoo them off.

After making another meal of the foul popcorn, he hid the majority of the gear in a more concealed spot, strapped the pack to his back, and resigned himself to heading back towards the temple. There was no place else they might have gone. Halfway out, the Tongan rain began, a drenching, unrelenting stream that at first cooled him off, and then began to chill him.

On the steps of the temple he found the boy. Feeling quite silly, he checked for a pulse. Still dead. He viewed the wound and found another incision on the left side of the torso. As he closed the corpse's eyes, a burst of sudden recognition arrived. Add a beard and perhaps one or two kilos around the midsection, and he was certain the young man had been their derelict guide, who had vanished with a camera and a pack after promising to scout the the way ahead more than a week ago. They had hired the boy to help them look for a grave, the final resting of place of a legendary aviator. Tellman had been so sure, that the woman's body had been traded for gold, interred and dug up, passed around so many times, he actually found himself believing it might be found here. It hardly mattered now.

He put an arm through the temple doors, and then extended his right hand, clad in a latex glove, to examine the substance he had ingested on his first go round. The color was a sickly green, probably a native poison of some kind. Incapacitated so, it was no wonder he was unable to recognize the guide as his victim. The influence of the substance may have also been what allowed him to take a life in such a cavalier fashion. He still did not feel entirely like himself.

He found a second entrance to the tunnel system quite by accident, hidden below the rostrum. He fought the urge to stay above ground, not to descend below. There was nowhere else to go, so he followed, dropping seed behind him as he went so he would not find himself moving in circles. Soon the sound of voices grew louder, and this time he did not try to return to the surface, following the dank path until it opened into a larger cavern. He hid near the entrance, and in a moment he saw a glimpse of Karen, seated on a makeshift chair. He thought to try to signal quietly. Before he chanced it, his eye was drawn immediately to her injured arm. She no longer wore a sling, and moved the limb without effort.

He simply watched then. After ten minutes, Tellman made his first appearance, and they both worked in front of laptops. He decided that what unnerved him most was that they did not speak to each other at all. Occasionally Karen would turn to the spectacled Tellman and look as if she might either say something or cry, but after a moment, she returned to eyeing her terminal.

When his eyes had fully adjusted to the lack of light in the room, two things jumped out. The first was that the room was completely flooded with the fruit bats. The peka inhabited the cavern like ants on a hill, and they barely moved except to clean themselves. They second was that his sidearm lay well within reach, if he could move without being seen or heard. His two travelling companions were so involved in what they were doing he doubted he would arouse their attention, but what if the bats took notice?

Instead he stood and calmly walked across the cavern. He made no move towards the gun. He simply went over and stood before them. "What's going on here?" he demanded.

Tellman held up a solitary finger. In a moment, the cavern began to shake, subtly at first, but quickly the vibrations grew stronger. He heard Tellman say, "The boy was strong, and you must have been in the first stages of the virus. I'm surprised you were able to overpower him." Derwin thought to explain that it had been self-defense, but realized the very idea of defending his actions was absurd. 

"She's well," Derwin said.

"She's an automaton," Tellman said. "It's necessary to have one on board."

"You tried to kill me," Derwin managed.

"I'm sorry for that," Tellman said. "I truly am. We needed organs in case ours fail during the trip. You and that autochthon have the same blood type. I'm not being deceitful when I say I hoped you would win, and I left the gear for you to prove it."

"How have you..." he began. "Why the bats?"

"They're quite nutritious and tasty," Tellman said. "We'll need lots of food. Get comfortable. It's a long ride."

Joshua D. Frank is a writer living in Portland.

"Black Eyes" - Talk Less, Say More (mp3)

"Sky Over Everything" - Talk Less, Say More (mp3)

Marbled Wonderland

by SARAH LABRIE

Damsels in Distress
dir. Whit Stillman
97 minutes

People like to give Whit Stillman a hard time for making movies about rich people who only care about themselves, but really he makes movies about rich people who care a lot about bad dancing. Metropolitan, Last Days of Disco and Barcelona all promote terrible dancing in public as a therapeutic pastime. Damsels in Distress — Stillman’s first feature in more than a decade — is also his first to elevate the bad dancing/therapy dichotomy to a cure for all life’s social ills. I, for one, came away convinced.

Damsel’s heroine Violet Wister (Greta Gerwig) dreams of “changing the course of human history” by inventing an international dance craze. In off hours she tries to reform the Roman Letter Clubs (Stillman’s version of frats) of Seven Oaks College by showing up at their parties and waving her arms around. She’s a junior, I think, but she doesn’t ever talk about summer internships or studying abroad. She’s sacrificed a four-year education for loftier ambitions, like the prevention of suicide in the student body’s depressive population through tap.

With her normal-person body, gargantuan smile and eyebrows that don’t match her hair, Gerwig’s Violet is hard not to love. She’s the least movie-star-pretty girl in her posse of ladies, which means, of course, she is the leader. Her sidekicks, Rose and Heather glitter like they got lost on the way to a Gossip Girl shoot but they turn up mostly to protect Violet’s ego, along with the free donut box at the suicide prevention center where she volunteers.

Part of the reason we love Violet is that she fails and fails again. Nobody shows up for the premiere of her international dance craze, and in spite of her best efforts, students keep jumping off buildings. Still, she never so much as doubts herself and for this, she deserves a spot among the Katniss Everdeens and Lisbeth Salanders of the season, if not a throne in movie heaven next to Tracy Flick.

We all know people who claw through life cheerfully deluded, but oftentimes when these people show up in movies, they have penises. Violet has floral silk dresses and a Kate Spade full of good intentions. In the same way Young Adult gave us a female lead who, over the course of a two-hour film, didn’t learn anything or change, Stillman gives us Violet Wister and her all-consuming dedication to beautiful things that don’t matter.

If the whole set-up sounds twee, know that on screen Violet’s perspective comes off as darkly nihilistic. She wants to live in imaginary universe free of aggression, hostility, stupid nicknames, body odor, porn, politics, history or the Internet — a marbled, antiseptic female wonderland where perfume and a pastel dress code are strictly enforced. “In some ways, it is distinctly Whit Stillman,” Gerwig said in an interview, “but in other ways, it’s totally — it’s like an alien made it. But in a good, interesting way.”

Opposite Violet, we get Lily (Analeigh Tipton), a new student at Seven Oaks with baby deer eyes and a teensy-tiny head. We know right away Lily is trouble because she doesn’t wear dresses and she refuses Violet’s offer of a makeover. At first Stillman tries to pit Lily and Violet against each other but Violet doesn’t stand for negativity. Lily calls Violet arrogant and Violet thanks her for her “chastisement”. Lily calls Violet nosy and Violet vows to improve herself. Lily calls Violet crazy and Violet agrees. Lily calls Violet’s boyfriend Frank, “a moron,” and Violet tells her she’s being “a bit harsh.”

Over the course of Damsels, nothing changes, nobody yells at anyone, and nobody makes any decisions. In the end, the whole cast dances and then dances some more. Also, a frat boy who can’t name his colors sees a rainbow. I left the theater thinking, “Nothing as amazing as watching that movie is going to happen to me all year.” (Also: “Why isn’t Adam Brody in more things?”)

Seeing Greta Gerwig in Stillman’s shiny snow-globe of a universe is off-putting. So is watching her recite his blueblood-inflected dialogue. Gerwig got her start in grimy no-budget festival movies like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends. (In Hannah she plays the trumpet naked in a bathtub with Kent Osborne and in Nights she has actual sex with Joe Swanberg on the floor.) Neither feature required her to memorize lines or finish sentences. Her presence in this film, at first, feels like a calculated wink to moviegoers who knew who Gerwig was before Greenberg. Probably, it is. Supporting actors include Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development, Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Recreation, Caitlin Fitzgerald and Hugo Becker of Gossip Girl, Zach Schwartz from The Office and Brody who will never need his credits listed. A consulting producer is Alicia Van Couvering who also produced Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture and Nobody Walks. Dunham was supposed to be in Damsels as was Chris Eigeman, but they both dropped out to do the Girls pilot.

Casting these actors helps Stillman prove he’s still hip in all his premeditated unhipness. It also meant he didn’t have to pay anybody movie star asking prices. Thanks to Damsels’ small budget, Stillman doesn’t need to pander to anybody to make his money back. He can include his weirdo P.G. Wodehouse dialogue and not cater to anybody’s narrative expectations but his own.

Untrammeled freedom isn’t always a good thing though, and parts of Damsels are genuinely bad. One of the damsels can’t act at all, and only one of the frat boys can. Some lines landed on the audience not so much with a thud as with the nervous through-the-nose exhale people reserve for New Yorker cartoons, or unfunny friends whose feelings they don’t want to hurt. “What was that?” asked the woman behind me as the credits rolled. “Whose idea was that movie?”

She probably wasn’t the only person who felt that way. One major critique I imagined coming out in reviews is that it’s tone-deaf to politics. The world the Damsels live in looks more like the Clueless era than this modern age of scrambling economics majors and unemployed law school graduates. But just because an agenda isn’t timely doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. What people who rail against the film’s superficial materialism are missing is that a major theme of Damsels is the decline of decadence. Adam Brody writes a paper on the topic and Violet and her posse attend a drunken frat boy bacchanal.

Perched on top of a rock situated high above the brawling mass of oafs, animals, spilled beer and toilet paper, Violet muses, “This is what happens when decadence infiltrates a society from within… such a society is destined to be overrun. Maybe that’s a good thing.” For all her oblivious insanity, you’d be hard pressed to argue she’s not making a valid point.

Sarah LaBrie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Jennifer Egan. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"At the Table of the Styx" - Will Stratton (mp3)

"If You Wait Long Enough" - Will Stratton (mp3)

The latest album from Will Stratton, Post-Empire, was released on February 12th.

For Love Or Profit

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Nobody has such an opportunity to know the world as a public woman whose opinions are known to favor social freedom. Nearly every male biped of the genus thinks that every woman who believes in freedom is therefore free in his sense of the word, ready to throw herself into the arms of every man who approaches her.

Victoria Woodhull had every reason to hate the world, but did not.

She was born to an eccentric named Roxanna who people called Annie. Her mother had a strong jaw, a prominent nose, a fondness for hoop earrings. Annie had ten children, of which Victoria was the seventh. That her mother called Victoria "my little queen" did not save her from regular beatings from both her parents. In church her mother regularly created a scene by launching into a trance of ecclesiastical ecstasy. The only positive lesson young Victoria was able to take was that even pain had within it the possibility of pleasure. To protect herself from the disturbing reality of life, Victoria summoned two imaginary sisters, Delia and Odessa Maldiva, to reassure her. 

By the age of eight, it was obvious Victoria was the smartest person in the town of Homer, Ohio. She used a photographic memory and massive IQ to outwit both her cruel parents and whatever teachers the Methodist Church would infrequently wrangle to instruct children. Her father lost his savings and drifted from job to job, eventually taking up as a fraud hawking spiritual treatment to medical woes. His daughters Victoria and Tennessee, called "Tennie," were quickly caught up in it.

Victoria was only 14 when she was forced to accept a marriage proposal from the family's doctor, the 28 year old Canning Woodhull. She "accepted the change," and was wed to the man on November 23rd, 1853. Victoria soon found her husband's medical degree was something of a joke; to earn his title only required eight months of training and a short apprenticeship. Her new husband drank to excess on a daily basis, visited prostitutes whenever he could, and gave her a son with severe developmental disabilities.

The young family moved to San Francisco, where friends tried to convince Victoria to become an actress. This inclination soon gave way to making money as a travelling spiritualist healer. After giving birth to a daughter, she divorced Canning and returned to Chicago. Her next husband was a Union officer named James Blood. She reported that a spirit guide told her to move into a house at 17 Great Jones Street in New York City.

The moment she was first exposed to the women's suffrage movement, she saw her future. She wrote, "visions of the offices I might one day hold danced before my imagination." She gave up medical clairvoyance and debuted her new career in September of 1869 when she became a stockbroker during the gold panic. With the assistance of her friend and confidant, the ancient Cornelius Vanderbilt, she turned her savings of $100,000 into seven times that amount through capitalizing on what would become known as the first Black Friday.

Vanderbilt's son prevented Tennie Claflin from marrying his father, but with the financier's backing, the two sisters incepted their new career as Wall Street stockbrokers; their offices were parlor 25 and 26 at the Hoffman House Hotel on Madison Square. Soon the publicity and interest surrounding the all-female agency allowed them to open a larger office at 44 Broad Street, where they were alternately known as the "Queens of Finance" and the "Female Sovereigns of Wall Street." The media fetishized the two beautiful sisters, and as a result they attracted early admirers like Walt Whitman and Susan B. Anthony. "Look at this office," Tennie observed, "isn't this better than sewing drawers at ten cents a pair? Or teaching music at ten dollars a quarter?"

In a sense, Woodhull, Chaflin and Company succeeded based on its own momentum. Massive parties and high living increased the sisters' profiles and kept the firm in the news. Tennie took up with the new managing editor of The New York Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, and they used Victoria's husband as their secretary - he even ghostwrote Tennie's romantic notes to Reid. As her sister devoted herself to the fledgling firm, Victoria planned a greater challenge. She moved to a Murray Hill brownstone and sent a letter to The New York Herald announcing herself as an eventual candidate for a president of the United States:

While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of women with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women should be treated, socially and politically, as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already possessed.

The suffrage movement had been splintered into factions both regional and political in nature, and Victoria picked an ideal time to assert prominence. To support her candidacy she used every media connection at her disposal, and eventually began publishing a weekly newspaper of her own to get the message out. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, as it was called, addressed the issues of the day with the proto-feminist perspective you might imagine, but it also abandoned a moralistic tone, arguing that "ambition, love of power and love of fame are not necessarily evidence of insincerity." It was a bold and true declaration, but it was also as good as a bullseye.

There is a fascination with tearing down both men and women in the public sphere once they assert any kind of moral superiority over their fellow man. In the case of Victoria Woodhull, her ideals and opinions were actually superior: reading them today is like looking into her future, our present. The pages of Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly also contained poetry and fiction, stock listings and sports news. There was no field of human activity which did not apply to Victoria's essential mission. Lasting for six years, the paper hemorrhaged money every time it opened in the morning, but the Weekly did the important work of refining the political and social philosophies of its publishers.

In 1870, Victoria moved to Washington, taking up residence at the Willard Hotel. She began an affair with a powerful member of Congress, a House representative named Benjamin Butler, a former Union general. Her one woman campaign for suffrage oriented around her contention, often posited in the pages of her newspaper, that the Constitution already permitted women the vote. Her crusade made remarkable progress until the president killed the bill before it got off the ground in the House Judiciary Committee. 

Her next step was to form her own political party, which she called the Cosmo-Political Party. She booked the largest auditorium in Washington to jump start her public campaign for the presidency in 1872. Butler's advice for public speaking - "Put that glass of water down. Never touch it while you are speaking" - worked in spades and the resulting oratory was such a success it turned Victoria into a sensation. For her audiences, she was often the first woman they had ever seen addressing a large crowd.

Even those who had previously been skeptical of Victoria's celebrity threw their support behind her resources and popularity. She was still an easy target for faux-moral critics like Harriet Beecher Stowe (who termed her "Darcia Darkeyes") and Anna Dickinson, whose prudishness born of a religious background limited their ability to embrace the considerable value in Victoria's ideas and public appeal. Once she became president, Victoria planned to wear dark blue pants over light blue tights, sporting a short haircut complementing a man's collar and cravate. When a reporter jokingly suggested she would be arrested in that garb, she replied, "When I am ready to make my appearance in this dress, no police would dare touch me."

Just as her political capital reached its apex, wild fluctuations in the price of gold torpedoed her brokerage. The behind-the-scenes operations were run by Victoria's husband James Blood in tandem with her sister, and as the financial side collapsed, the Weekly suddenly inveighed against corporate fraud. Having witnessed the rampant corruption in that world firsthand, they knew exactly where to look for the dirty laundry. The main targets of Blood's editorials were the railroads, but all were fair game. The love affair with Wall Street was decidedly over.

Thomas Nast deserved the death penalty

A legal complaint, filed by Victoria's insane mother Annie against her husband, exacerbated her daughter's troubles by bringing Victoria's domestic life into the open. The supposed scandal that came out of it was the fact that Victoria allowed her diseased alcoholic first husband Canning to reside in her home and help care for their disabled son. In order to justify the arrangement, she invoked the principle of free love, which would end up consuming her public identity. Her ideas about sex turned some of the most powerful forces in the media against her, including Horace Greeley who insisted "my conviction of the proper dissolubility of marriage is the mainspring of my hostility to women's suffrage... My conception of the nature and scope of the marriage relation renders my conversion to women's suffrage a moral impossibility." It is the exact same doggerel offered today. The nastiest and most hurtful bit of anti-Woodhull propaganda appeared in the pages of Harper's, where the subject of the Thomas Nast cartoon would be labeled as "Mrs. Satan."

She took up with the writer Theodore Tilton, who would become her lover as well as her biographer until he turned on her later. Their mutual infidelity came out of his worship of her - among others, he compared her to Joan of Arc. With his help she created a new political party: The Equal Rights Party. To promote the new organization, Tilton penned his biography of her, one of the first in a long tradition of "campaign biographies." Victoria's new platform was designed to appeal to the masses, and it repudiated many of her earlier, more pro-capitalist ideas.

Looking back at that platform today it seems neither completely socialist nor especially radical. Her relationship with Cornelius Vanderbilt convinced her that when someone of extreme wealth dies, it was dangerous to allow them to keep everything they possessed within their own relations. The idea of a death tax scared the very rich and powerful at the time; today we only argue over the size of the fine. Even in her newest and strangest ideas, she anticipated the future of the national conversation more than her detractors could have imagined.

Her own finances improved as long as she was able to stay on the road. An intense lecture schedule restored her empty coffers. However, her bizarre plan to nominate Frederick Douglass in the role of vice president without his consent was not only politically impractical, it diminished the impact of her rhetoric. More importantly, her turn against the devout capitalists who had supported her earlier efforts marked the end to their contributions, and she quickly found herself the enemy of then-conservative New York Times.

Susan B. Anthony's public turn against her came as a result of the gossip from her mother's trial, and it amounted to the beginning of the end. She began sleeping in her new office, and fell deeply in debt. To resurrect the fortunes of her newspaper, she decided to publish a story she had gotten from Elizabeth Cady Stanton about a popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher committing adultery with Theodore Tilton's wife Elizabeth. The story was completely true, and it sold more copies than any other edition of Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly by a large margin. (Some of the editions of the paper were leased for $1 a day.)

Shortly thereafter, United States marshalls locked Victoria Woodhull in jail for the crime of obscenity. After her supporters bailed her out, Harriet Beecher Stowe appealed to her own political connections on behalf of her brother and got Victoria banned from speaking in several auditoriums. Beecher himself refused to sue for libel since he knew the story was true, but Stowe believed her brother innocent. In the summer of 1873, Victoria was finally declared not guilty of all charges, with former lover Benjamin Butler offering the key point in her defense.

Yet all was not well. During the trial, Victoria had suffered a mild heart attack, and she was never the same after her illness. Her ideas were fresh as ever, but in the public eye she had been pigeonholed by the critical media as guilty of something. Her oratory focused on the considerable pleasures of sex, a century before such musings would actually become popular to espouse, noting that "to kill out the sexual instinct by repression is to emasculate character." She herself experimented sexually with her young acolytes as well as with men in power; her husband was pleased to accomodate her wishes if it made her happy.

When the Weekly died, so did Victoria's marriage with Blood. Their divorce came about as a result of a doctor who had fawned over her and then written a series of vicious letters after she rejected his advances. Blood had originally introduced the two, and the resulting scandal ended her political career. He reported that "the grandest woman in the world went back on me."

attempting to voteShe tried to escape that life in 1883 with a move to London and a third marriage, this time to a monied Englishman named John Martin. High society, including her new husband's family, strenously objected to her, and Henry James found the material of two novels in her life. She would never talk about The Bostonians, but she noted in her autobiography that James was "one of your greatest intellectual snobs." In Rome she finally got a real audience with Frederick Douglass, who barely recognized her.

The next year,  she entered menopause and discovered that she suffered from benign uterine tumors. Her desire to restore her undeserved reputation enabled her to find the strength to survive. She wrote, "God helping me, I will not rest until I am known for what I am, not what others have made me out to be." Her daughter Zula managed Humanitarian, a new publication. She threw herself into her writing, into enjoying the company of her wealthy husband. At the age of 57, he taught Victoria how to ride a bike. But then, in March of 1897, John Martin pedalled up a mountain in the rain, caught pneumonia and died. Victoria inherited a vast sum (over $10m by today's standards) and plunged it into the paper for four more years, until she conveyed the estate to her daughter. She occupied her remaining years as a generous philanthropist. When the first World War arrived, she promoted U.S. involvement and organized sewing sessions in her community. She endured until the age of 90, asking her daughter and friends to scatter her ashes over the Atlantic Ocean.

Victoria Woodhull never viewed her sufferings as injustice: it was simply the place and time in which she lived. These were not obstacles, trials or tribulations. There was no need for anger or disappointment that things were not as they ought to have been. It feels inadequate to write about her; it is preferable to simply be as she was. In Rae Armantrout's phrase, Victoria so impotently loved the world.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the underwater habitats of Jacques Cousteau. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Freedom at 21" - Jack White (mp3)

"Blunderbuss" - Jack White (mp3)

Blunderbuss, the new album from Jack White, will be released on April 24th.

Historical Feminism Ages Like A Fine Wine

Alicia Puglionesi on Margery Kempe

Molly Young on Helen Gurley Brown

Kara VanderBijl's Feminist Timeline

Midge Decter's Radical Children

Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Emergent

by KARA VANDERBIJL

This morning in the emergency room, an elderly woman across the hall from me leaned out her doorway as she poked thin arms through the holes in the paper gown. She had left her own dress on, and her own shoes too; turquoise socks were pulled up over her ankles. She looked at me as if she were squinting through her sunglasses. 

“Hi, do you know how to turn on the television?” 

“I don’t, I’m sorry,” I told her. 

“Do you know, I collapsed on Friday because my ankles and feet were so swollen, and I told my friends to call an ambulance for me, but they just laughed!” 

“That’s awful,” I agreed. 

“Finally the security guard at CVS called one for me, and he carried my bags too, even though the nurse wouldn’t.” She looked me up and down, as if to ascertain what might be the matter with me. I straightened my back instinctively. 

“You don’t know how to turn on the TV, do you?” 

“No, I’m sorry.” 

I inspected my own wound - a deep gash, right at the tip of my thumb. It was the mandolin slicer that did it, in every other way a perfectly ingenious invention designed to make sure your potato slices lie in uniform piles at the bottom of a bowl while you sprinkle them liberally with olive oil and salt. I don’t remember what it felt like to put my finger through the porcelain blade, nor do I remember the sound I made, somewhere half between a groan and a chuckle. Half a roll of paper towels sat spotted red on the living room floor as I brought my thumb to new altitudes above my heart. There was very little pain.

It is a risk of the trade, you might say, an inevitable casualty when a particularly stubborn sort of girl has decided to spend more time in the kitchen cooking wholesome meals. Decisions rarely come without consequences. If you decide to do without convenience, choice made for you, some form of pain shows up punctually. 

I’ve often wondered, crazily, whether ridding your life of the extras - processed foods, sugar, caffeine, stress - any of the things that seem to preserve us in a state of placid complacency, of somewhat-awake mostly-asleep knots sitting not quite ergonomically in an office chair in an airless room - puts you at more risk. I feel more vulnerable with a clean body. I feel more exposed to danger, but danger in the way that it is dangerous to wear a skirt on a very windy day. 

I listened to the lady across the hall chat with one of the paramedics about how her bags were so heavy and her father had just been in surgery and could he bring more water and how could she change the channel and I just kept thinking that the hospital, like the sole possession of a friend’s listening ear or the arms of someone beloved, can make you feel safe and protected. It’s a little bit more expensive and it smells funky and they ask you personal questions about your bowel movements and when was the last time you took recreational drugs. But you can buy care, sort of like you can buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

A few weeks ago I was riding a bike with very little brakes through a dark, warm night to the beach. At one point I miscalculated the width of a ramp and slammed into the curb; I knew it was coming, because the shadow of it became apparent approximately two seconds before my front wheel made contact, and I began to push myself backwards off the seat in anticipation of the pain. I managed to straddle the back wheel rather awkwardly, crotch lifted ceremoniously above the seat and bars that would do it harm, but then the left pedal slammed into my lower calf with a force. My eyes fogged over. I thought blood had been drawn, but when my hand touched the warm spot there was only a throbbing bulb. 

By the morning a bruise had blossomed there. 

It was the largest bruise I have ever had, and fascinating. Resembling a large, noxious flower or perhaps the quivering bacteria that we observe under microscopes (outer, dark membrane, lighter liquid inside), it hugged the bottom of my calf muscle. It was black, then green, then yellow, then black again. It was a bump, an extra surface. It’s mostly gone, now, except for some lingering tenderness and a dark border. The skin is shaded slightly blue. 

Once I have given a title to somebody, everything they do fits under the umbrella of their prescribed role. It allows me to be pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised by the flowering of their character, the variance of their colors. When a serf becomes a knight, both pride and envy wrestle inside of me. I have never been sure where I fit in this schematic, what rags cover this heart. I wonder, am I poorly cast for this part?

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Haruki Murakami. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

"Unless You Speak From Your Heart" - Porcelain Raft (mp3)

"Something In Between" - Porcelain Raft (mp3)

The latest album from Porcelain Raft, Strange Weekend, was released on January 24th.

Freeze Tag

by HAFSA ARAIN

I

There was a time when I used to be someone else, someone who used to play outside all day until my skin was as dark as mahogany. I tan so easily. I used to climb trees until sap glued my fingers together.  I used to run in forests so that the trees would lovingly slash my forearms.

I am obsessed with the idea of who I used to be and am not anymore. I used to live in Hinsdale, Illinois from the ages of 4 to 9. These years were the most formative years of my life. As far as I can remember, I spent all of these years out of doors. My memories of sitting in front of the television, of reading books in my bedroom, or even of playing with Barbie dolls with my sister are fuzzy. They wane into the background as brighter moments are happily recalled.

I grew up in a small, 3-bedroom, rented townhouse in front of an abandoned hospital campus. On one side of the campus were thickets of forest in a district park, and on the other was a massive field with a single tree in the middle. The tree, a solitary symbol of stability, had once been struck by lightning in the summer of 1992. It had a gash across its bark that I used to run my fingers over to feel the break in roughness. I remember the thunderstorm well, because it had been the first thunderstorm where I had learned to count the seconds between lightning and thunder. Each second that passed meant that the storm was farther away.

The field used to sprout dandelions in the summer. These were weeds, of course, but I have always thought of dandelions as beautiful weeds. They peppered the green grass with yellow. I used to call them sunflowers.

Adjoining our house were two rental apartments. Our neighbors to the left were a Bosnian family my uncle had sponsored through a Muslim charity to live in America during the war. A mother and her two older children, they shared with us their Bosnian bread. Their son, Nihad, had lost both his legs during his service, and rode around in a wheelchair. Above them lived a middle-aged man named Mr. Carson, who used to entertain us with illegal fireworks shows every Fourth of July.

The only other people who lived in the small townhome complex were my extended family: aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. Over the years in the early 90s, we had all come to be in that complex. One family at a time had packed up its life and left Karachi and unpacked it in Hinsdale, Illinois. We were a band of kids, now that I think of it. All of us were just children learning to live in a new world.

II

We used to spend all of our time out of doors. We did this, because when we were young, we ached to be free.

We were all afraid of that lightning tree, for it was surely haunted with at least one or two jinns, but not quite as afraid of it as we were the abandoned hospital building. It loomed behind our houses – we could see it from our back patios. It was a constant reminder that we did not own this place, that this place was a soon-to-be decrepit piece of property that we would abandon. It would be replaced with something shiny, new, and subsequently unused.

Katharine Legge Memorial Park was a park for people richer than us, but we snuck into it through the gaps in the fence. We watched dog owners walking as we played tag among the bushes and in the playground. I once met Ruby Bridges in the Katharine Legge Community House. I had begged my mother to go see her. She signed a copy of my book and told me to be a brave girl. I wanted to be like Ruby, because she was a little black girl that was brave. I was nothing like Ruby; I was shy and sensitive. But I was equal parts afraid and empowered by my education, like she was.

When we told each other ghost stories, we told them as dusk fell and as the lightning bugs emerged. After a while, we would gather them into our palms and through the slit between our thumbs we would watch them. Once we had had our fill, we would let them free. Sometimes, though, they would die in our hands, and we would bury them two inches into the dirt. A brief moment of silence for the life lost, and then a celebration of life in the form of freeze tag.

At school, we went to our separate classrooms and sat into our separate seats. We divided our lives between home and school at a young age. I would cry in school on more than one occasion. Once after a fellow student had pushed me off the swing set, another time when a boy had told me my mother smelled bad. Another time when I was told no one wanted to play foursquare with me. But at home, I would sit on the warm portable dishwasher plugged into the sink faucet and tell my mother I got top marks in penmanship that day. I would tell her in Urdu, and after I was finished, I did not think about school until the next day.

We were not afraid to talk about school with each other, but school was irrelevant. Only when my cousin was reprimanded for forgetting English did we joke about it, but even then we forgot soon afterwards. We had no time to think of school, we had only time to climb trees or ride our bikes around the circular driveway for hours.

Sometimes, when we felt daring, we would elect someone to walk into the abandoned hospital building. When I was elected, I cried for ten minutes until everyone told me I didn’t have to go in. I cried later, too, but not because of the hospital. I cried because I was a coward.

When one of my cousins would walk into the hospital, they would scream loudly at only fifteen feet in and run back outside to join us. There were dead birds in there, with their eyes staring blankly at the rusting ceiling tiles. We would peer in through a broken window to stare down at the black feathers on the ground, before someone would shrug and say, “Let’s just get out of here before someone catches us.” None of us were allowed to go into the abandoned hospital building. Then we would go play house, where we pretended to serve each other hot dogs, even though we never ate such things for dinner.

Summer in Chicago is warm and muggy. We would pile into the grey van our uncle had bought for our collective use and drive to Highland Queen in LaGrange to fill ourselves up with soft serve ice cream with peanuts and chocolate sauce. It became a tradition for us, and we hastened to get seated in the grey van after dinner during summer vacations. The cashiers would stare agape as twenty brown faces stood in line.

Even in the winter, we spent our Christmas vacations outside if the weather permitted. Bundled up in brightly colored snowsuits with plastic bags over our boots to keep the snow out, we had snowball fights and built snow forts. We were particularly unsuccessful in making a snowman: for some reason our round snowballs would fall apart. An older cousin, in America for college, once had the brilliant idea of using an empty trash bin, the giant ones we used to keep in our garage. Handfuls at a time, we stuffed the trash bin with snow. We pressed on it to pack it in, and once we were finished, we turned it upside down. As we pulled the trash bin up, a rectangular snow pillar remained. We put carrots on it for a nose, stones as eyes, sticks for arms.

When we were at home, we spoke Urdu, but with one another we spoke a combination of Urdu and English. We learned English in school through a speech tutor the district had hired to help students with lisps or reading disabilities. We were treated like we had a disability, too, because when it was time for us to have our English lessons our teachers would tap us quietly on the shoulder. We would walk silently through the hallways as the other students stared through the open doors. We were stuffed into a small office, where we would then learn English words with a thick Chicago accent.

And so, one word at a time, we became Chicagoans.

III

When they tore down the houses, they built a subdivision over the land and the surrounding field. Though sometime around 2008, the property development company went bankrupt and the project was postponed until a later date. We never drive that way anymore, and no one was ever sure if there were other people living over the abandoned hospital building or where the lightning tree used to be.

They had torn everything down: the berry trees where my mother used to pluck blackberries and hand them to us to eat, the climbing trees next to the fence, our stone back patios where we would watch Mr. Carson’s illegal firework show.

We were not there to save the abandoned hospital campus next to the small, old, brick townhomes. We had slowly moved out of Hinsdale, family by family, to nearby Westmont. Westmont was where we owned our own homes that came with dishwashers attached, where the schools were diverse enough to have Asian kids like us, where we each had our own backyards with old trees. We had left behind the Bosnian family who used to give us bread, Mr. Carson grilling on his deck.

The longer we lived in Westmont, the more English our parents learned, and more Urdu we forgot. It was a gradual shift, but now we speak English with one another as freely as if we had never needed the speech instructor. We went through middle school and high school as those parts of our existence slowly took over everything else. You can be who you want to be outside of elementary school, but high school is a place that controls every part of you.

When we see each other now, it is subdued, but familiar. When you know who people were as children, and when they are your blood, you can never un-know them. We are older now, most of us past college age, and enveloped in lives that were unforeseen for us as children. We are young professionals, students, artists, soon-to-be doctors or engineers. And one by one, we become part of the blend, unable to stand out any longer.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living outside of Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Dam Mast Qalander" - Nusret Ali Khan (mp3)

"Wada Na Tod" - Lata Mangeshkar (mp3)

A Certain Age

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Seventeen
dir. Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines
120 minutes

"You need a half-a-cup of white sugar and half-a-cup of brown,” instructs Mrs. Hartling, Southside High School’s Home Economics teacher. In Seventeen, the documentary by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, Mrs. Hartling’s class is in the final lap of their senior year. They are loud and unimpressed, near delirious. Sitting on a counter, one boy casually beats batter with one hand while resting his head on the other. Another student, Lynn Massie, is taking a nap. When questioned about skipping class, one girl quips, “So?” Her parting shot, “Kiss my ass.”

The year is 1982. The town is Muncie, Indiana. And the kitchen classroom, like Mrs. Hartling’s shrill and grinding voice, her tunic apron and Estelle Getty glasses, is a time capsule dressed in blue checkerboard curtains, fluorescent lights, plywood cupboards, and beige stoves. Today, pie: “Never re-roll a pie crust! Ever!” Tomorrow, citizenship, and “how to be a good person, to be honest.”

Conceived and produced by Peter Davis for PBS, Middletown was a six-part television documentary inspired by the sociological studies of Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937). Divided into categories — religion, work, politics, play, marriage, and education — the series is a close and critical meditation on everyday working class American life in the early 1980s.

Reminiscent of Robert Drew and D.A. Pennebaker, Middletown is a slow moving train, slackening its pace in Muncie. Happenings, whatever they may be, are coeval. The mayoral election no more important than the pizza parlor facing foreclosure or a couple’s second go at love.

But Seventeen, the sixth in the series, never made it to television. Scheduled to air nearly thirty years ago on April 28th, 1982, the film was deemed too controversial and ran into what Davis calls, “an institutional buzzsaw.” While it eventually went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, hailed as “without a doubt one of the greatest movies, perhaps the greatest, about teenage life ever made,” PBS’s decision to cut it from the series resembles an adult dismissing his or her adolescent years. A shame, because more so than revolt or hotheaded choices, a “me too” moment in high school is closest to windfall.

Teenagers being teenagers, the plenary account — smoking pot, “getting good and drunk,” merrily swearing, giving birth while the baby’s father is at “the Boy’s Club playing basketball,” being angry and scrappy and rude, partying and getting sad, reading “dirty books” out loud in the library, disrespecting teachers, crudely talking about sex — was simply too hot for TV. Like the girl in Mrs. Hartling’s class, whose duelling “So?” is nasty but also bankrupt and idle, Seventeen is a portrait of what it is to be young, pivoting from stitch to sweet spot, stitch to sweet spot.

Perhaps most decisive was the subject of interracial dating: “White girls don’t mess with black guys but we swallow our pride for you guys because we care for you guys,” Tink and Massie inform their dates at the fair. When a cross is burned on Lynn parents’ lawn, she challenges the taboo and continues to see John. Harassing phone calls result; threats are made — parent to classmate, classmate to classmate. “My mom carries a gun and she ain't afraid to use it. Neither am I,” Lynn barks into the receiver.

In his 1985 review of the film, Vincent Canby likened Lynn to Belle Starr. One, a high school senior with Kristy McNichol hair, nervy swagger, and a slight squawk when she yells. The other, a 19th century Oklahoma outlaw. While the comparison is dreamy, it does appreciate the fugitive quality of adolescence, that roaming fidget and fixed urge to not give a damn.  “Get me the hell outta here,” Lynn mumbles in monotone one day. She’s referring to Muncie. But without much of a plan, the here is more immediate: that day, that week, her house, a dip in her after school plans, her bad mood. Lynn's solution? “Gonna get bombed outta my head."

Although those rarely seen on screen bits are true (and do wonder what would happen if Albert Maysles, Larry Clark and Joey Jeremiah were to toss around a few ideas), Seventeen does enjoy the airier side of high school: the boys, the girls, the feelings, the prom, the epistolary mechanics of it all. In one scene, Lynn, who emerges as one of the Seventeen's main faces, sits in her car with her girlfriend and reads a note from a boy. She’s already read it, chances are more than once, and skips over words feverishly only to jump back and enjoy them for what feels like the first time. As if running her eyes up and down a BINGO card, anticipating a win, she holds the crumpled piece of paper breathlessly. Moments later, dulled by after school boredom, Lynn coolly admits to cheating on him multiple times. She chucks his note on the dashboard and smiles, “I went out on him all the time.” The girls laugh, roll down the windows, turn up the radio, and sing off-tune.

At the championship basketball game, angst fades and the gym’s yellow lights, the pompoms, the players, all burnish the crowd’s faces with what PBS originally had in mind. A row of high school seniors watching their last basketball game is a conceit often used in movies because it’s so easy to pretend the entire world exists in those minutes. Even Lynn lets loose a keenness she would never reveal to her teachers or parents.

Later that week Lynn invites everyone over for a party. Her parents, Jim and Shari, are present but not as chaperones. They drink with her friends, even making breakfast late into the night, drunkenly frying eggs and flipping pancakes. One boy chews on a piece of bacon, catching it before it falls out of his mouth. He can barely stand up. Nearby, an off-duty soldier shares his story about being “15 or 20 miles from the warzone,” as a crowd hangs on his every word. The Four Tops, “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” plays.

The house is chaotic but grows drowsy, and gets at why this, the documentary, is the best way to portray a teenager. Those moments on the weekend when the party starts to die down and boys get hungry and girls are told not to be shy, and unfailingly, someone is trying to revive the affair with music or booze, is specific to that time in life because later on, though the same nights recur over and over, “passing the time” is no longer a valid activity. Even the expression expires.

In the film’s most moving scene, a group gathers in a bedroom listening to the radio. Their friend, Church Mouse, has just died in a car accident and they’ve dedicated a song to him at the local station. “Crank it!” one boy shouts as Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” begins. It plays in its entirety. The lyrics resonate sincerely — a perfect send-off. You realize early on that nobody will cry, and briefly, you half expect the friends to grow up before your very eyes. Never have you seen them so thoughtful at school. As the song fades, so do those sober minutes. Somebody mentions how Church Mouse was buried in his tennis shoes. He pauses and continues, “I wanna be buried face down so the world can kiss my ass.” And just like that, the kids are back. Gloriously so.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about Rachel McAdams. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Out on the Road" - Norah Jones (mp3)

"After the Fall" - Norah Jones (mp3)

joel demott

You can find our Saturday fiction series here from now until the sun dies.

Host

by ERICA CICCARONE

They start at my feet and have taken over my ankles, my shins, and two of them have grown in my right knee. We hope that there will be no new ones. We hope that they will fall off soon, or hatch.

They are blue-ish beneath the skin, some small as eraser buds and others the size of peanut M & Ms. Some are raised, like mushrooms growing on a rock. Others are partially exposed, like coral. There have not been any more since last week, so our hope is that the medicine is working and soon they will disintegrate. Hopefully, the medicine will also kill the creature that is living inside of me. What I want to know is, what will happen to it after it dies? Will it come out of me somehow? Will I spend the rest of my life harboring the corpse of an egg laying creature?

When we first noticed the eggs, we were in the car driving back home from a long weekend at the shore. I was wearing my rubber duckies and my feet started itching. Not wanting to take off the monsters, I stomped my feet on the floor of the car. I clicked my heels together, slapped my toes against the dashboard.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked.

“My feet itch!”

“Christ, it’s those ridiculous boots. It’s not even raining!”

The possibility that it could rain seemed reason enough to don the yellow galoshes.

The itching changed to burning, like the blood in my veins was actually on fire. I tore the laces out of the boots and pulled them off, threw them onto the backseat. Off came the aquamarine socks. You know when you’re dreaming and in the dream you sort of know that you’re dreaming? That was how I felt when I looked down at my feet. A cluster of six on the right foot and three dotted the left foot in the shape of a triangle. Eggs.

I am getting used to my eggs. I sit on the floor in the living room eating popcorn and watching the game shows. Mom doesn’t want me sitting on the couch. She’s afraid that the eggs might spread, that the creature will somehow move to a new host. Can I blame her? She didn’t want me to sleep in my bed, either, but Aunt Patty intervened and Mom agreed to let me sleep there if I put down a piece of plastic. Obviously, I am not going to school. Nor am I going to ballet class or horse back riding lessons, because we don’t want the creature burrowing into Ginger either.

Because Mom works and she decided I shouldn’t be left home to alone to develop a psychological neuroses about my eggs, Aunt Patty comes by a few times a day. She works from home doing something with computers so it’s not too big a deal for her to stop by. We play checkers or pinochle and she brings me a turkey sandwich with lots of mayo and tomato, the way I like it. We think that the creature entered me in the sea, and because they say that the human body is something like 75% water, it doesn’t surprise me that the creature has chosen me as its host. What does surprise me, of course, are the eggs. They are growing, very slightly but noticeably. I cannot see them growing, but I keep a chart of their progress, their growth in centimeters. Nor do I see a new one emerge. It is as if that part happens very quickly when I am not looking. One minute, I had nineteen of them and Bob Barker was hugging some chubby housewife, and the next minute there were twenty. That’s the count right now. Twenty. I am hoping that this nice, round number will signal a stop to their growth. Aunt Patty said, “Just four more and we can start selling them by the dozen.”

The infectious disease specialist is in New York City, 1300 miles from where we live in Metairie, Louisiana. Mom’s always talking about going to the Big Apple to see “a show.” She pronounces it “BROAD-way.” When we made the trip last week, scraping together the Christmas savings, I felt overwhelmed by the bigness of it, so many people, like my identity could shift out of me and jump into another body, and I would return home at night with the personality of a forty-year old accountant named Barry. There was now something so unique and exceptional about me that I felt full and original and great. I wanted to run down Fifth Avenue.

The doctor’s office was on the Upper East Side, right by Central Park. Before we went into the office, my mother said, “His name is Dr. Dudu. He is from Bangladesh and he is very brilliant. Please do not laugh at his name.” I could tell she was trying not laugh herself. I nodded solemnly, but I was very excited to show Dr. Dudu my eggs.

Dr. Dudu was very tall. He had a thick, black moustache and the complexion of a polished saddle. I was wearing some slip-on sneakers and thin socks, and when I took these off, his face screwed up—not in horror like Mom and Aunt Patty — but with an expression of fascination and rapture, like he had just seen the light of God.

After he interviewed me, examined me, and drew blood, he determined that I had been infected with a creature. You’d think he’d speak in fancy medical terms that I wouldn’t understand, but he didn’t. He actually said, “You have been infected with a creature.”

My mother, who had been standing, sunk her hips into the counter and her hand rose to her throat.

“What?” she said.

“It probably chose Julie as a host when she was in the ocean. You are a very unusual girl,” Dr. Dudu said to me. “This happens very rarely.”

This notion thrilled me!

“Eventually, with treatment, the eggs will disintegrate and the bumps will get smaller and smaller over the next three weeks, until they disappear. But you will have some scars.”

I considered this briefly and shrugged.

“Three weeks!” my mother said.

“Maybe two.”

“Can’t you cut them off?” my mother said.

The doctor cradled my foot in his hand and looked at my eggs. “I would not do that. The eggs are beneath the skin. It would be like cutting into the yolk of an egg — extremely painful for Julie. And the scarring would be much worse. And besides, they would still grow back. They must dissolve naturally.”

“What if they hatch?” I said.

“The medication will kill them. You are not a natural host, so the eggs most likely are under-developed anyway. I will give you an ointment for them, to help the itching. You must not itch them.” He shook his finger at me sternly. “Promise me you will not itch!”

“I promise,” I said. I liked him.

By the time I hopped off the examination table, I felt like I was taking the news very well. But that night in the hotel room, I felt differently. I couldn’t stop looking at my eggs. I began to imagine things. An alien race of creatures would be born from my feet, and they would kill me and my mother and leave the house to take over Metairie, New Orleans, and then the world. Or maybe they were actually bird eggs, or starfish eggs. I didn’t mind the idea of starfish being born from my feet, but wouldn’t it be painful? Where would the starfish go? I would probably have to collect them and take them back to the sea. And then what? Would the creature lay more eggs? According to Dr. Dudu, I would know that the creature was dying because I would experience symptoms of the flu. So now, we’re waiting.

Aunt Patty takes my temperature at lunch time.

“Ninety-eight-six,” she says every day, “and cool as a cucumber.”

I have been drawing pictures of the creature. I like to think that it has many eyes with very long eyelashes, and one of those flagellums. Basically, my ideas are a mix of cartoon monsters and microscopic photographs of amoeba in science text books. I am starting to miss school. When my friends call to find out where I am, I don’t mention the eggs. We decided on walking pneumonia: contagious and long-lasting, no one would try to visit me. “I’m feeling a little better today,” cough cough, “Just weak and,” cough, “tired. I’m so tired, I’m falling asleep on the phone.” I keep up with my homework and have discovered that I can easily get through life and school without teachers. Except that I need Aunt Patty to help me figure out a geometry problem from time to time. Sometimes I take the needle of the compass and press it against an egg, almost to the point of breaking the skin. I wonder what would leak out of it. Like the yoke of an egg. It is sometimes lonely here with my eggs. At least I have the dog. Yesterday, I woke up and the dog was licking my eggs. I haven’t told Mom and I hope the dog doesn’t die.

Three months later the eggs have spread up my legs. We have been to New York twice, mortgaged the slanted house, consulted more doctors and they have all said the same thing: wait. I wait, and I feel like a mother, waiting for a baby to complete the gestation cycle and be born into the world. School is over. My friends have stopped calling. I caught Reggie Boudreaux looking through the window at me as I sat on a towel in the living room, practicing yoga. I went to a specialist in New Age medicine who suggested it. I meditate, cross legged, breathing in and out, sending thoughts away as quickly as they appear. The eggs are large and bulbous now, and there are dozens. I cradle my feet in my hands when I am in full lotus and smooth my hands over my eggs.

My mother has ceased communicating with me. Aunt Patty comes less and less. Even the dog has lost interest in me.

One night years later, my boyfriend Michael consults my feet, which are pockmarked as a prehistoric egg. I have never told anyone the story. I keep my feet as a secret all to myself, something sacred, a thing of something like shame and homage together. But I like Michael. He has scars and burn marks from when he was younger and damaged. But he is better now. We are in our thirties, and it has been many years since the eggs started to fall off. But still, I wonder if the creature is still living inside of me.

“These scars, Jules,” he says. “Where did they come from?”

I try to tell him the story. With tenderness, I describe the day at Pensacola, removing my galoshes and tiptoeing into the water. I tell him that I stood there, fifteen years old, in a blue bikini, my mother sunning behind me. I tell him how calm I felt as I stood and waded up to my thighs, as I dipped my head into the water and held my breath and my hair spooled all around me like a mermaid. I tell him I wish mermaids were real. How I imagine they’d have problems like this all the time, how it would be no big deal.

“But what is it?” he says.

I tell him that at some point, as I bathed in the gulf, a creature entered my body. I tell him about my eggs, about the hard, certain texture of them. I tell him about the nine months I sat on the living room floor with them. I tell him how I grieved when they started to fall off, one at a time, into tiny carcasses, deflated and hopeless. It took years, I tell him, for me to stop missing my eggs. It was like a part of me was amputated.

“I felt that way when my mother died,” he said.

“I felt nothing when my mother died,” I said honestly.

And here we are, alone, essentially, on this earth, in each other's arms, and I have told him about my eggs, and we lie there, eyes locked, and I feel his foot graze my foot, his toes run up and down it, something starts to happen to me and I moan. I keep moaning as he strokes my feet. I see the surf of Pensacola and hear the waves; I feel the scruff of the bath towel under my butt and I breathe in, breathe out, sending all thoughts away, until I’m underwater again, my legs turned to a slick scaly tail, my hair floating around me, my neck slit with gills. I am part of the ocean, I am part mother and part ocean. I moan and he strokes my feet.

Erica Ciccarone is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here.

"Colony Collapse" - Filastine w/ Nova (mp3)

"Skirmish" - Filastine (mp3)

The new album from Filastine, LOOT, was released on April 3rd.