Death by Rihanna

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Battleship
dir. Peter Berg
131 minutes

To comprehend all of Rihanna's dialogue in Peter Berg's Battleship is like sorting through the tendrils of 8th century Chinese poetry — so much is said in so little. After spending the first hour of the film uttering such bon mots as "Come on" or "Yes sir," she really opens up when she, along with the otherwise all-male crew of the John Paul Jones, witnesses the unmasking of the first alien species in recorded history. She opens her mouth as if to sigh, and then utters the prophetic words: "My dad said they'd come. He said, we ain't alone." 

Out of sheer boredom Peter Berg turns Battleship into a Levi-Straussian jumble of signs and signifiers. It's sort of what watching Mozart try to play Kelly Clarkson's "Mr. Know It All" on a harmonica would be like. Shortly after the arrival of an alien race sophisticated enough to reach Earth from another galaxy, Rihanna enters into a serious physical confrontation with the organism. Screenings of Battleship in specific metro areas will feature the accompanying Greimas semiotic square explaining the event:

Watching Rihanna take a bloody lip from a disrespectful alien-machine amalgam and trying to enjoy it is very difficult, perhaps on the level of trying to the explain the work of Levi-Strauss at West Point. It is doubly disturbing that the alien lets her go with only that much violence, as if it was meant to stand in for something more. To address the issue of domestic abuse and minority empowerment in a film adapted from a board game stands as one of the definitive artistic achievements of this decade, if not of all time.

Battleship begins when the ne'er-do-well younger brother of a Navy captain named Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) is immersed in a series of monumental fuckups, all bearing a loose but explicit relation to the catastrophic results of American military might over the past decades. First he falls over himself trying to steal a chicken burrito to impress an ungainly blonde woman (Brooklyn Decker); this tragically ends when he is tasered in a moment akin to the savage losses of the Iran-Contra debacle. Appropriately the first ship he serves on is named the Ronald Reagan.

it was down to Taylor Kitsch and Donald Signifier for the role

In the very next scene Alex Hopper launches a climactic penalty kick over the head of a triumphant Japanese goalkeeper who strangely speaks perfect English (the ethnic confusion is merely an allegory for American racism, of course). And so on. Even the name of the actor portraying the film's protagonist is a grotesque joke on the military industrial complex.

Alex Hopper and Brooklyn Decker fall in love despite his mistakes, and he plans to marry her once he receives the permission of her father, Admiral Dickson Shane (Liam Neeson). The casting of Liam Neeson implies so much in Battleship. Something has been Taken, other questions are Unknown, and the approximate state of U.S. military power is in all likelihood Obi Wan Kenobi. "You've got skills," Neeson tells Hopper, "but I have never seen a man waste them like you."

Admiral Shane, you're wanted at the wet bar

He is not the only one disappointed by the exertion of careless American military might. Alex Hopper's brother (Alexander Skarsgård) is routinely upset by the way that his little brother's machinations reflect on his career. "Who do I call to teach you humility?" Eric Northman screams at Hopper, and the camera sails 450 feet in the air in a meaningful nod to the fact that powerful Hollywood executives refused to cast Alexander Skarsgård as Thor. This grave mistake is compounded by the fact that Skarsgård dies about a half hour into the movie in a symbolic nod to Steven Seagal's death in Executive Decision, which would be an ideal subtitle for the Battleship sequel. With all this symbolic nodding it's a wonder Berg didn't accidentally snap his neck.

plane of praxis

The aliens' plan is to drop a bubble shield around the island of Hawai'i, where they can use a powerful satellite uplink to relay a message to their homeworld that Earth is ripe for conquest. Their timing could not be worse, as the Navy is currently performing a series of fully armed wargames with multiple battleships in the region. The aliens themselves resemble humans with long blonde goatees that make them look like Kid Rock and eyelids that blink horizontally.

With biped movement and a similar skeletal structure, the aliens are undoubtedly derived from human stock. Possibly they are human visitors from the future, in which case talk of "an extinction-level event" would be completely impossible. Presumably the aliens originate from an ocean planet, because they seem rather awkward moving around on land, equipped as they are in massive metal suits, and all their spacecrafts are designed to be operated in a large body of water. Maybe they just wanted to drop in for a swim. Since none of this is ever outright stated, the subtlety is shocking in a film with a budget this large.

authentic learning

In the end Alex Hopper earns a silver star and the commendation of an entire nation, even though the idea that ends up saving the planet is entirely the work of a Japanese commander. Berg's point is that the sheer amount of money we spend on armament and war is only remotely justifiable if we are suddenly invaded by aliens who would never even know of our existence if we had not specifically requested they come and attempt to conquer us. If you're travelling among the stars, please, never say where you're from.

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

"If Nothing Lasts Forever" - The Soundtrack of Our Lives (mp3)

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The new album from The Soundtrack of Our Lives, Throw It to the Universe, will be released on June 26th.

Amerikanka

by LUCY MORRIS

When I was still new to Brighton Beach, a local gave me a three-word appraisal of the neighborhood: cranky, filthy, and smelly. He was right, at least, about the wind whipping the trash down the street and the pervasive foul smell — like a garbage day in July but year-round. As for the cranky, I knew I couldn’t judge: I brought my own share of moodiness to this pocket of Brooklyn each day.

The neighborhood that had a century ago been a kind of resort town for Manhattan’s bourgeoisie was, by the time I arrived there, a post-Soviet colony. High rises, socialist-inspired in their sheer scale, loomed over the boardwalk where portly men in gold chains lounged shirtless, gossiping in emphatic Russian. The neighborhood’s bodegas and produce stores, which proffered an endless bounty of snacks, were run by Latino and Korean immigrants. But everything else was Russian. The news kiosks on the street sold outdated copies of Kommersant, Pravda and Russian Cosmo. Neon signs in store windows advertised Apteka instead of Pharmacy or Mobilniy instead of Cell Phones. The ATMs at the American bank where I deposited my paychecks were programmed in Russian. Babushkas hawked appetizing pirozhki on the street in some illicit permit- free arrangement, and the grocery stores sold entire kegs of Baltika beer. Even the sushi restaurants had Russian-speaking staff.

When people stopped to ask for directions on the street, they typically did so in Russian. On the days when I was exhausted from speaking and writing in Russian, in what I thought of as my distant second language, and ready to rush back to the English-speaking part of Brooklyn where I lived, I found myself pushing all ingrained political correctness aside. This is America! I would think, and go on to offer directions in Russian just the same.

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Like so many other regrettable things procured this century, I found my first real job on Craigslist. I was three weeks out of college when I submitted my resume to a retail chain in Brooklyn seeking a translator. A few days later, a man named Nikolai called and invited me in for an interview. We made arrangements, and then in the moment between our goodbyes and the click of the receiver I heard him say, a little nervously, “You do speak Russian, right?” “In principle,” I said, which was one of the very first things I ever learned to say in the language, from a Muscovite teacher familiar with how Russian negotiations worked. My interview with the company was brief, and I could tell almost immediately that I would be hired. I was led to an office behind a toy store and installed in front of a computer with 10 sample translations to complete. When that was done, I was escorted back out to the store where a series of people speaking rapid-fire Russian stopped to examine me. Standing in the Russians’ collective gaze, I suddenly became aware of how I appeared to them: frizzy Sephardic hair untamable, shoes scuffed, and inexperience manifest in nervous gestures. I looked young and unsure of myself, and I cannot say that I was trying hard not to. Later on, when I got the job and started seeing them every day, I would find myself doing things that only fortified that impression.

I did so because I quickly saw that much of my success among the Russians was inextricably linked to a kind of pitying sympathy they had for me, a representative of the culture they were both obligated to assimilate to and deeply uncomfortable with. I could detect the ways in which bits of my personal life, parlayed in casual conversation, distressed them: that I lived far away from my parents, by choice and not by virtue of money or visa restrictions; that I often skipped lunch, because I was both forgetful and broke; and that I dressed in used clothes. Their reaction to my wardrobe, in particular, frustrated and amused me as much as the fact of it did them. In my part of Brooklyn, it was considered “vintage,” but in Brighton it was embarrassing.

Over the course of my daily commute, I watched the train empty of people who spoke English and fill up with those who did not: men in pointy shoes negotiating business deals in Russian, bundled-up babushkas clucking at their bilingual grandkids, women my age texting intently in Cyrillic. I always arrived early enough to go to the Starbucks tucked between a nail salon and a bodega on Brighton Beach Avenue, not because I particularly liked the coffee but because it was my last contact with American New York for eight hours. It was the messiest Starbucks I had ever been to, as though the rush of Russians ordering drinks in their native language — bolsohi, sredniy, malenkiy instead of tall, grande, venti—overwhelmed the non-Russian staff’s capacities (and as my job often overwhelmed mine, I empathized). Sugar granules trailed across the counters, cups spilled out of the trash, and the fetor of the street seemed to push in through the closed windows. A pre-work moroseness was palpable.

Early one morning, a crowd of us stood surveying a lone banana on the floor. It had been abandoned there and smooshed underfoot, oozing out of its peel unpleasantly. “Who would leave a banana there like that?” someone asked sadly in heavily accented English. “Who wouldn’t?” someone replied. “This is Brighton Beach.”

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When you spend time in an environment that is totally foreign, you become accustomed to undergoing a series of disquieting personal transformations, of experiencing life as someone different than you are at home. For most people, this happens when they travel abroad. For a year and then some, it happened to me every day, without even leaving my own borough. It wasn’t especially far from where I lived, but when I arrived in Brighton Beach every morning, even the air seemed different – muskier, heavier, as if the concentration of Slavic intensity formed a cloud over the streets.

And I was different there, too. An outfit that had seemed perfectly acceptable an hour before looked different, even to me, when I got off the B train. But the feeling ran deeper than that. For a while I tried reading ambitious books during my commute, starting with War and Peace, but the metamorphosis that occurred when I shut the book and got off the train – turning from someone highly literate into someone who struggled to spit out a sentence – was so startling that I eventually stopped reading and just stared straight ahead, alone with my English thoughts as the train inched toward a place that called itself, aptly, Little Russia.

My entire self-perception changed as soon as I got there, and the person I thought I was – the person I intended to be – evaded me. Brighton Beach was like a funhouse mirror I was forced to stand in front of daily: the reflection of myself that I encountered there was somewhat obfuscated, but still recognizably me—just familiar enough for the effect to be disconcerting.

Even my name was different during working hours. When I checked for the previous day’s mail at home every morning, the name on the envelope was Lucy Morris, but when I arrived in Brighton Beach an hour later, my name was Lusya Morrris, with a slack-jawed “ya” and an “R” that made waves.

All the identifiers attached to me in the rest of my life — a writer, a runner, an avid reader —disappeared when I arrived there. Instead, what defined me was that I was a born-and-raised American. All day, that fact seemed to hover around me, as though a caption floated above my head everywhere I went in the neighborhood, reading, cartoon-like: Amerikanka.

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Although I wasn’t much for Soviet mythology and was too young to share the suspicions of the Cold War generation, there were often days that first summer when I felt like a spy, discretely observing the rites and rituals of a culture that was not my own, trying to belong as best I could for the sake of professional appearances at the expense of my personal comfort.

Pavel, a security guard at the store where I worked, liked to say that I was planning to work for the CIA one day, as though my job translating instructions to Russian Monopoly (“Be the boss who dictates the rules!” read the tagline) was a natural precursor to becoming a secret agent. Sometimes, out of nowhere, he would look at me fondly and declare, “Special Agent Lusya Morrrrris!” as though using his official English voice would make it true.

In reality, my work was nothing that would prepare me for a political career. I translated copy for each of the products our stores sold, which was posted on aggressively neon websites and supposedly featured in advertisements on public busses servicing Russian areas of New York, but since my time in these places was limited, I never actually saw them.

Every morning, a new series of Russian descriptions appeared in text boxes on the screen in front of me, and I dutifully turned them into English: descriptions of nesting dolls painted to look like American presidents (“Even Obama!!”), Cheburashka dolls that chirped unintelligible rhymes in Russian, summaries of highly Slavic parenting guides (How to Treat Your Child’s Illnesses with Honey), Gzhel porcelain teacups, and felt slippers with supposed medicinal properties. Since it was a struggle for my employers to read English, they almost never checked my work. This meant that they sometimes seemed to forget why I was there or what I was doing. They would stand by my desk and appraise me sometimes, or peer over my shoulder to see what I was typing, but they rarely asked me direct questions, and so, in turn, I rarely asked them anything either. It was as though taking a vocal interest in each other would upset the balance of mutual apathy.

But over time, in incidental bits of conversation, I gleaned some information about the company. It had been founded 15 years earlier, at an opportune moment when the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a massive influx of immigrants to New York. The founder, an enterprising and sartorially daring woman named Sasha who had studied to be an actress back in Moscow, had expanded her single store into a six-location chain with four websites. In the process, she’d managed to drive out most of the charming independent Brighton Beach bookstores and gift shops of the nineties, the kinds of places where Manhattan academics went to buy Russian literature in the original from elderly émigrés.

Sasha’s business strategies were none other than American. She read Jack Welch management books in Russian translation and attended expensive business seminars, hung motivational posters in her office and cribbed nondisclosure contracts from the Internet (I knew they were stolen, because no one at the company besides me had the English skills necessary to write them). She had scrolling LED signage installed in the store windows, ran advertisements with telegenic children on Russian TV, and started selling tchotchkes and translations of the Shopaholic books in favor of Dostoevsky.

But in spite of the American business pomp, in other ways, the company remained rigidly Russian. I was the first non-immigrant that the company had ever hired. Foreign holidays like International Women’s Day were observed—my male boss delivered a red rose to each woman in the office, even, to my surprise, to American me—and most of all, the business maintained a strong sense of family. That familial feel, which was present in all of my interactions with the Russians, was somehow comforting and foreboding at once, the way that most large families you don’t belong to can be.

Once, shortly before I left, I asked Natasha for a raise. With the business savvy of a typical American boss, she stalled. But then she said, “I can lend you some money if you need it.”

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By September, what had originally been a part-time job had expanded in almost imperceptible half-hour increments into full-time work. It seemed to go dark and windy especially early in our corner of Brooklyn, positioned as we were just a block from the water. Accordingly, the seasonal displays changed and a staff of what seemed like dozens went hard at work on the store windows, bringing me signs to proofread from time to time (“Stay cozy with our handmade knit shawls!”). An outrageously sized television was placed in the store windows, broadcasting video advertisements with a series of blonde, unsmiling, high-cheekboned Slavic women in festive boa-trimmed silver costumes. The sound on the ads was muted in deference to some Brighton Beach noise ordinance, and in the absence of sound the women seemed to move their facial muscles in double time, doing their best to entice you into the store without emitting a peep.

photo by Paul Lowry

By then, the novel excitement had worn off, and I had identified the cost of working in another world all day: a sense of deep loneliness, worsened for the fact that I was fairly socially engaged outside of Brighton Beach. I have friends, I sometimes had the urge to tell the people who gathered for intimate conversation around me while I sat attempting to appear occupied rather than excluded. There are people who actually like having conversations with me.

And yet I was hesitant to start conversations myself. I could speak with my coworkers competently, but I was shy on account of my rapidly deteriorating grammar and the space between each word I required in order to locate the next one. I wasn’t sure who dreaded the time it took for me to utter a competent sentence more: my Russian conversation partners or me. My reading and written Russian were the best they had ever been, but my expectations that working among Russian speakers would keep my spoken language sharp proved unrealistic. The official office language was the pidgin Russian of Brighton Beach, a peculiar blend of accents owing to the neighborhood’s mix of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Kazakhs, for whom Russian was often a second language (and since it was mine too, these were the coworkers with whom I got along best).

I developed the immigrant habit of slipping into English for a word or two in the middle of a Russian sentence, but through placement and accent letting it take on a sound of its own, “sendvich,” instead of “sandwich.” And with the sense of embarrassment that often accompanied my workplace exchanges, I once tried to explain away a minor cold by saying I was “under the weather,” only I couldn’t think of a Russian idiomatic equivalent so I translated it literally: preposition, noun, pod pogodoi. I was met with a look of bewilderment and some trepidation, as though I had decided to recite absurdist poetry impromptu.

It was this language barrier, born of the discomfort all parties felt speaking their non-native language, that plagued me most. It not only distanced me from my coworkers, but alienated me from my own sense of self. My identity as a talkative, highly verbal person was miles away from the reserved person I was in Brighton Beach, speaking as little as possible, depending instead upon knowing smiles and submissive nods.

It made me constantly suspicious that I was somehow the butt of a joke I couldn’t understand, and I was also constantly afflicted with a low-grade sensation that I was somehow on display. For a long time, I assumed this was because my office doubled as the break room, and people passed in and out all day with their lunches, tea, and small talk. Later on, once I left, I could see that there was another less visible source for this sense of vulnerability. As the token American, I was something of a curiosity. I was responsible for another role that I had not anticipated or consciously signed on for, something I couldn’t list on my resume or really use anywhere else: the duty of explaining, when conversation did extend my way, what life was like for me, the only American, and as the implication seemed to be, by extension for all Americans.

“What do you eat if you don’t eat meat?” my coworkers crowded around to ask when they found out I was a vegetarian. “How come you don’t live with your parents?” I was asked to account for certain aspects of my culture that I wasn’t exactly clear on myself. “What is the deal with Lady Gaga?” they wanted to know, or, “What does Limp Bizkit mean?” They were puzzled that I snacked on dried fruit and nuts, which I had been taught was healthy. “What are you, Lusya?” they asked, “A squirrel?”

But even more tiring was the struggle to translate my workday experiences and exchanges into ones that my friends, the ones working nonprofit and restaurant jobs back in English-speaking New York, would understand. Eventually, it was this second shift that weighed on me, that I couldn’t, for instance, solicit someone’s take on a remark my boss had made without translating it first. I knew this was good for my language skills, would maybe lead to better paying work someday, but I was also a little bit miserable.

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I began surveying my colleagues, searching for faces I might turn into friends. Everyone was older and didn’t directly address me much, especially the women, so I looked to the men. We were a motley crew, crammed into a low-ceilinged office with yellowing walls. As I slowly learned about my colleagues’ disparate backgrounds— technical degrees, factory work, teaching college — it became clear that often the only thing they had in common was their shared Soviet roots and subsequent immigrant experience, which was still more than I had in common with them.

There was Igor, who occasionally asked my opinion, made good use of his limited English to cobble together Dick Cheney jokes, and seemed more educated and worldly than the others. He had a kind-faced friend named Alyosha, a Gogolian figure with an oversized overcoat and gut, a sparkle of gold teeth, and the air of a civil servant about him. And there was Anastasia, the kind of Russian woman that inspired the folktale, “The Princess Who Never Smiled” — emblematic of the grimness of Russian literature that had initially drawn me to the culture years earlier. The three of them were – for the time – the best of friends. But I was confident that if only I could work up the courage to offer some sentences, I would be able to ingratiate myself. In the kind of weirdly mundane fantasy life that often accompanies periods of loneliness, I imagined going on cigarette breaks with them – even though I was not a smoker – or joining them for lunchtime pierogies at the Café Arbat.

But most often, I worked with Lyonya. He had hooded eyes, sharp Slavic features and skin so pale it all conspired to make him look exotic, a hint of the Mongol about him. By virtue of him being the person I sat nearest to, I supposed he was my closest friend, but it was clear that he did not share this belief.

Lyonya had been the underdog of the office before I arrived, and once I came, instead of conspiring with me, he turned on me. He specialized in a kind of undermining that never reflected all that well on him. He got picked on for not eating meat, something he was fiercely proud of in the face of office jesters who urged, “Just a little bit of hotdog, it’s barely meat!” But when he found out I'd been a vegetarian for fifteen years, he immediately distanced himself from his principles. “Well, at least I eat fish,” he said.

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Winter in Brighton Beach was heralded by the installation of a shelf by the door, where the Russians traded in their boots for heels and polished loafers when they arrived each morning. Meanwhile, my poorly-made leather boots were falling apart, revealing the sole to be little more than a layer of cardboard and peeling rubber. “Nice shoes,” Lyonya snickered. “Are those new?” Since Orthodox Christmas comes on the heels of New Year’s in early January, our holiday rush arrived late. When I asked for vacation, my boss asked when exactly “American Christmas” was. Again I was reminded of the gulf between the worlds I lived and worked in: even the calendar was different.

Nonetheless, I remained. In the tiny, fluorescent-lit office where I spent my days, the thermostat did not ascend past 60 degrees. Lyonya rubbed his hands together for warmth over his keyboard. I sat with my feet pressed against the cozy computer hard drives. We all wore hats and nursed hot beverages. The click of the electric kettle, or chainik, signifying that the water had reached a boil was the sound of the season, our own kind of carol.

The midwinter months dragged on: I seemed to always have my hands on the keys and eyes on the screen while the Russians passed around me. They bustled and lurked, yelled maddeningly and conspired in whispers, they laughed and they ate. An employee somehow cut her foot on glass one day. “Where’s the vodka?” asked the coworker tasked with bandaging her up and calming her down.

Another day, a different girl cut her hand. “Why isn't life easier?'” she wondered through tears, holding her hand under running water. “Come on,” said another Russian impatiently. “Who would want to live an easy life?” When they turned to me for my confirmation, I conceded that this was a fair point but I was not — and still am not — sure that it is.

The office was small and windowless and closed to the natural elements, but it hummed and swelled with philosophical questions and spiritual contemplations, with mixed-language idioms and jokes. On break one afternoon, I sipped my coffee and evaluated the state of my nails. “Lusya,” said a woman I was certain I had never been formally introduced to. “What are you thinking about so seriously?” Moved by the Russian spirit of things, I answered with seriousness, “Life.” The woman, who was somewhat brusque, flashed her gold teeth at me in approval.

Over lunch, conversations of similar import commenced. Was the lychee fruit related to the leech? Was couscous the American kasha? Was being married on a computer game like The Sims or Second Life really so different from being married in real life? (Pavel assured me it was not.) Were we all just controlled by aliens? Where could you find a decent banya in this town, one where you were allowed to sip beer while you steamed? These questions were not of real consequence to me in my American life, but I found I increasingly wanted to know the answers just the same. I was still quiet, but I listened and understood more.

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My Amerikanka status meant I was exempted from the Friday morning staff meetings even the janitors were required to participate in, and no one offered me the USSR t-shirt that served as the informal company uniform. I was glad to be free of these obligations, but it added to my sense of being an outsider, which I felt was obscurely good for my character but which also made me constantly uncomfortable.

There was also a strict militancy to the environment that frightened me, as the product of a highly forgiving value system. My boss, with his stern, unsmiling tones and crisp army green suits terrified me; I sometimes actually shook when he approached. On bad days, Russian sounded Germanic to me in its harshness, all hacked up “kh” sounds and endlessly crescendoing intonation as speakers inched toward their point—a climax I dreaded, as it meant I’d have to respond. A couple coworkers confided that they had learned English by playing World of Warcraft and watching movies like The Godfather. This was evident in both their vocabulary and odd sense of chivalry. One day, the women were locked out of the office so that the men could catch a mouse that had been spotted near my desk. “Lusya,” my boss commanded. “Stand back. There will be blood.”

In such moments of high drama, I forgot that the loud talk of my Russian world concealed the fact that there were actually few solid rules, far fewer, really, than in the progressive part of Brooklyn where I lived. The law of Brighton Beach was that there wasn’t one: you could do whatever you wanted, more or less; a hangover or a desire to go to the beach was, after an unconvincing sigh or mild berating, a perfectly legitimate reason not to come to work. Another advantage of life among Russians, as any reader of their literature knows, is that Russians are very good at understanding chaos, the dramatics of love and family, and personal crises. Those abound in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in particular, and that spring, when what should have been an amicable breakup ballooned into precisely one of these kinds of crises for me, I found that that Russian sensitivity to chaos was just as evident in modern life.

Returning to New York to confront the ruins of my relationship after a weeklong vacation I’d taken to distract myself from it, I decided I had to leave again immediately. I was prepared to work off-site. “Telecommuting,” I told them as if I myself had attended one of Natasha’s American business seminars, “It’s the cutting edge in American management.” But I was also prepared for the likelihood that I could be fired, and in the chaos of the moment, this foolishly did not scare me. But to my surprise, instead of chastising me, the Russians swung into action, wading into my mysterious American world with advice to restore order. When I announced that I was moving in with three male roommates in a yet-to-be gentrified neighborhood, I could actually hear people suck in their breath. Several people suggested I move to Brighton Beach instead. “Don’t be ridiculous,” my boss said after demanding to know how much rent at my new place was. “We’ll find you a nice studio here for $500. You walk to work. You won’t even need a Metrocard.”

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I didn’t move to Brighton Beach, but for a while after that, moved by a newfound interest in me, my boss decided to try convincing me to work longer hours, ideally ten hours a day, six days a week. This was, to be fair, the schedule the Russian immigrants worked. But for various reasons, chief among them my meager pay and a desire to have some semblance of a social life, I resisted. I spent a week refusing to submit a new schedule. “Ten hours—it’s impossible,” I said, raising my voice on the last word, nevozmozhno, for emphasis. “I have classes, I have another job, I have things to do,” trying a new excuse every day in the hope that one would strike my boss as sufficiently convincing, but he wouldn’t relent. “Well, what’s wrong with nine and a half hours?” he asked with a sigh, as though I was depriving him of much more than a few hundred words about Dr. Spock books.

I was annoyed by our negotiations and so I fumed to a few sympathetic friends after work. During the day I found I was easily carried away by Russian moral meditation, but when I went home at night, I could be just as easily swayed by American indignation.

In quieter, introspective moments, I knew that something about hovering between these two worlds was an effective strategy for me, since I was not exactly required to fully participate in either one. Friends chalked up the trouble I had been having articulating myself lately to working in Russian all day, rather than my exhaustion from trying to find footing in a new home and routine. The Russians attributed my ineloquence and oddities, the way I showed up for work unkempt with circles beneath my eyes, to the inexplicable intricacies of being American. “Oh, Lusya,” they sometimes said as they looked at me, shaking their heads as if my very presence confounded them, but it always felt more respectful than mean.

In fact, the only things I then felt confident of – and in some sense responsible for – were the words I translated, a source of comfort I could not locate in any other part of my life. At that time I was translating descriptions of textbooks, and the words I dealt with were ones like razvitiye (development) and voobrazheniye (imagination), words I rarely needed in conversation but to which I nonetheless felt intimately connected—obliged to show up and render them in English, turning the Russian sounds over silently in my mouth like they were the one thing of which I was certain.

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By the time that transitory period was over, the Russians seemed more comfortable with me, as though the discovery of my romantic problems was something with which they could finally identify, something shared and universal. The men, a little more flirtatious since knowing I had become single, started inquiring about my beer of choice and the women, who occasionally asked me to analyze text messages from American love interests, also asked to borrow ten bucks here and there. I knew I was more or less part of this sprawling Slavic family—a distant cousin maybe, but one they were nonetheless happy to see.

They enjoyed sharing with me their vast repertoire of Jew jokes, not maliciously, just as though they believed that as a Jew I might especially understand and relate to them. When I could not always bring myself to laugh uproariously, they thought I might not understand. “You see,” Pavel explained with patience, “It’s funny because there is a belief that the Jewish people are very stupid and greedy.” After a pause during which I tried to let my silence convey my disapproval, he asked breezily if “Hava Nagila” was my favorite song.

Around that time, my officemate Lyonya was replaced by Vanya, who looked about fifteen but was actually, at twenty-two, exactly my age. There were a lot of strange things about Vanya, but perhaps the strangest one of all is that he quickly became my closest confidant. We were odd kinds of foils for each other during those months: almost never in the same mood or mental place, but somehow bonded together during the forty hours we spent each week in chairs side by side. He got into a new relationship the same week I ended one. “Girl,” I heard him tell his beloved Sasha over the phone, “you want me to bring a bottle of champagne tonight? Tell you what: I’ll bring two.” I ground my teeth and rolled my eyes at his naivety. But then, as the days grew long and warm, I found myself starting a new relationship just as Vanya called his off. “All these Brighton girls,” he complained, “They just wanna get married.” Again I rolled my eyes, but this time, it was at what I thought was his excessive cynicism.

The fact that Vanya had no years on me did not stop him from dispensing all kinds of advice. “Listen,” he began one day, apropos of nothing in particular. “All I’m saying is that a person’s education is never over — and I’m not talking about school.” And with all the wisdom garnered in his twenty-plus lengthy years: “Every problem in life can be solved with math except for women.” I could not really fathom what he meant by this, and math was not exactly my strong suit, but I nodded in agreement. He took particular joy in sharing, unsolicited, his courtship experience, with plenty of pointed pauses, almost as if he expected me to be taking notes. “When I turned nineteen,” he once began what I suspected would be a lengthy lecture, “I was just ready to settle down.”

In late April, Vanya embarked on a road trip to Coachella with a van full of other Brighton Beach Russians and returned with a new interest in jam bands and marijuana. He mulled over the idea of growing dreadlocks and made some mockups of the new look in Photoshop. I encouraged him to go for it, at least so the office attention to my hair, which the girls prodded me to straighten, might divert to him, but I was also fascinated by this turn of events. Vanya, who I had thought of as being entirely unlike me in his Russianness, would soon be indistinguishable from my own acoustic guitar playing stoner roommates. I was relieved to have a coworker with a shared set of cultural references, but I was also caught off guard. I was accustomed by now to being the only American, and my fixed status during working hours made it easier for me to experiment with new roles in the rest of my life. I could drink too much at night, go home with the wrong people, and spend too much on cab rides home in early morning hours, but when I showed up for work none of that mattered, I was simply the Amerikanka.

Early in the summer, Vanya and I started propping the office door open and the sunlight that flooded our space noticeably improved our spirits. I could now translate without thinking too hard, and instead my mind filled up with the details of new burgeoning relationships that seemed immensely significant, the kind I would be destined to remember for the rest of my life. In truth, I have already forgotten the details of those, can hardly even conjure up some of the faces. But Vanya — his tight curls, penchant for plum wine, and eclectic taste in music — remains as clear as ever.

+

In early June, one year into my stint in Brighton Beach, I decided I was going to quit my job and leave New York for a while. My latest entanglement was with someone far away and the thought of another city summer lost to office life filled me with dread. But every time I convinced myself that leaving was the best course of action, I was confronted by some feature of Russian life from which I was reluctant to walk away: the tradition of buying food for everyone else on one’s own birthday, occasional champagne afternoons, and heated discussions of everything from UFOs to Greek myths.

Which is why it took me two full months to quit. I began by ambitiously announcing I was moving to Asia, which was a vague plan I had for the following fall. “What are you going to do?” my boss asked me quizzically when I informed him of this. “Learn Chinese?” As if this was actually an insane thing to do, as if he never read the news and could not see that Chinese was now, far more than Russian, the language to be learning.

Soon he dismissed the idea entirely. “So you’re going to Israel,” he informed me with a bemused grin, as if this was the only country a Jew might think to go. “But when will you come back?” I told him with unnecessary defiance, out of some adolescent principle to prove that my ill-considered decision was the right one, that I was leaving for good. He smiled merrily and gave me a look of the kind I was then learning people give during the early stages of relationships, when they’re skirting genuine feeling. “We’ll see,” that look said.

photo by vige

By my final weeks in late July, New York had become unbearable, like it is every summer, and my usually peaceful commute turned rowdy as the B train filled up with teenagers en route to the beach. I counted the days until my departure anxiously, eager to escape. But as my last day approached, I found myself telling my new boyfriend, on a tipsy humid night, that I wished someone could say “Lusya” the way Russians do. He tried valiantly but I shook my head; it was in the softest of spaces between the “s” and “ya.”

I woke up some weekend mornings with Vanya’s favorite Pink Floyd song in my head, the one he used to play on repeat for hours at a time. I thought of the way we both confidently sang along to the line, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,” as though either of us — immersed in our respective American and Russian worlds — had any knowledge of English ways at all.

My boss announced suddenly one day during my last week that I was “the best,” and I considered that boyfriends saying it never sounded as good as when he did, his “the” sounding more like “they” and the intonation of the second word rising out of his mouth like smoke. I wondered if I would ever work somewhere like this again. Some days I hoped I never would. Some days I couldn’t imagine anything else.

+

Unlike the straight tracks that lead to most subway stations in New York, the trains in Brighton Beach swing toward you around a sharp bend. The B trains are the older kind adorned with faded graffiti and out-of-date ads, and their approach always reminded me of the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island, just down the boardwalk from my office. There is the sound of rickety wood tracks and a whoosh of air and the moment when the angle allows you to see both the conductor in the front car and the tail end of the last one simultaneously.

It’s not often that you see the start and end of trains, or of anything else really, all at once. I remember my interview on that muggy late May day, but I do not remember my first day on the job or even, more recently, my last one, in that case because there never really was one. My boss called a few weeks after I left New York to ask if I would work remotely, the telecommuting idea having apparently made an impression. A year later, when I left to go freelance, I just faded away; the Russians stopped offering me work at the same exact time I stopped asking for it, as if by unspoken mutual agreement. Though I had spent two years insisting I was distinctly different from the Russians, in the end, we found ourselves in sync.

What remains most clear to me now are the many hours — days in all — that I spent waiting for that B train to appear around the bend: in lots of rain and some shine, among beach girls in rompers and aging Russian men in unbuttoned shirts, and not infrequently, completely alone. I tried in vain to listen for waves from the elevated platform and saw sunsets over the high rises that looked straight out of the suburbs of Moscow. I sent text messages in Cyrillic by accident. I quaked in my shoes, dreading asking for vacation in a language I didn’t feel I understood, and smiled when it was granted to me freely—when I had to concede that the Russians were so much more generous than I ever suspected, for reasons that were mostly of my own manufacturing.

These visions of what I saw around me obscure exactly what happened to me in between: the person I was when I arrived unkempt on that late May afternoon, and the person I was by the time I left. Just as it is impossible to know how certain scars will heal, the indelible impressions a place and a people can leave become apparent only later. Occasionally, I still find myself wondering in certain situations what the Russians would advise me to do. As I knot my laces, I contemplate if it is time to polish my shoes, or, reaching into a bag of almonds, if nuts really are as healthy as Americans claim. And while I almost never have occasion to ride the B train anymore, there are moments when I think of doing it anyway: of just getting on and taking it straight to the end of the line to find out what I might see and who might be waiting — that now-lost Amerikanka version of myself, perhaps — when I emerge on the other end.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about living alone.

"Sedulous" - Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"Cochon Ville" - Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

The new album from Sebastien Tellier is entitled My God Is Blue.

Nonbeliever

by SPENCER T. CAMPBELL

Wise Blood
dir. John Huston
108 minutes

John Huston’s Wise Blood is a film without a memory. Early on, its protagonist, Hazel Motes — played like a lit matchstick by Brad Dourif — declares, “I’m going to the city, to Taulkinham. I don’t know nobody in Taulkinham.…I’m gonna do some things I ain’t never done before.” This line is one of the few accurate predictions in a story chock full of sham prophets, disappointments, and deceptions: once in the city, Motes will do an awful lot that he’s never done before. He will preach a new, nihilistic faith ("The Church of Truth without Christ Crucified"), be seduced by a preacher’s teenage daughter, kill a man, blind himself with lime, die. But the line might also serve a tag for the film itself, which operates in a shocked present tense, treating everything that happens as an event with neither precedent nor consequence. The individuals of Wise Blood are apparitions that speak to each other with intensity, even conviction, but little sense of history or motivation — as though everything they said were a non-sequitur.

Taulkinham is a purgatorial freak show, a livid surface upon which characters swirl and react, but do not interact. There is a sense of history that flecks around its edges, but the prevailing impression is that Taulkinham is a place where everyone flares into being and diminishes without leaving a mark. Even Motes’s death comes lightly, falling with barely a shiver at the end of the film.

This is in stark contrast to Flannery O’Connor’s novel, a grotesque, comic allegory that has its protagonist play Catholic saint to an audience of Southern Protestants. Satiric and wicked as the book can be, its primary impulse is to show the forces pushing Hazel Motes ineluctably toward devotion, no matter how stridently he renounces his belief. O’Connor famously describes Jesus moving “from tree to tree in the back of [Hazel’s] mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark….” The association of faith and darkness here clearly prefigures Motes’s self-blinding, but more important are the correspondences this image draws between interiority, history, belief and space. Jesus resides inside Hazel, but also behind him; to give himself to faith is to turn around and step backward — into himself, his past, the faith that abides within him, however furiously he disowns it.

Huston’s film makes no attempt to evoke Motes’ interiority. The chief difference between the book and the movie is the obvious one: the novel deals in depth, the film with surfaces. Huston takes this basic difference and applies pressure to it, forcing his adaptation into a subtle but thorough-going subversion of its source material, and bringing it in line with the lost-man movies of 1970s existential American cinema: Five Easy Pieces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver, etc. Wise Blood is a novel that asks us to plunge inside and back in order to find meaning, but it is a film that wants us to glide along its surface and discover that nothing lies inside.

This distinction is easy to miss, since the events depicted in the movie scarcely diverge from those in the book. In the essay accompanying the Criterion release of Wise Blood, Francine Prose sounds what has become the common note about the film: "In spite of himself, he had made a film about a Christian in spite of himself, groping his way toward redemption." As an avowed (one might say cranky) atheist, Huston was not the obvious interpreter of O’Connor’s novel. He signed on to the project only after producer Michael Fitzgerald (a devout Catholic and the son of O’Connor’s literary executor, the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald) had raised all the money to fund it. Huston then proceeded to shoot the movie with a kind of sour-pussed blindness to the source material, apparently under the impression that he was filming a cross between Don Quixote and Green Acres. In Huston’s vision, the troubled young man at the center of the story is the victim throughout of derangement, a madness planted in him by his holy fanatic grandfather (portrayed, almost too suggestively, by Huston himself). And this plays out as a zany satire of the zealous South, in which Motes renounces Jesus to preach the Church of Truth without Christ Crucified, but relents in the final act, committing acts of self-mutilation in the name of asceticism, and passing, one guesses, at last into unclouded oblivion.

Huston had envisioned these sequences as the film’s last belch in the face of religion, an acrid joke exposing the absurdity of belief. In his view, by the end of the film, Motes’s mental disease has finally aligned itself with the notion that humanity’s debt of sin must be settled in self-sacrifice. He dies not so much a saint as a sucker. But the punchline, as Prose notes, is that these scenes refuse to unfold this way. No matter how tawdry, there is a dignity, a resolve, to Motes’s death, and here even Huston ends up a convert: "According to Huston biographer Lawrence Grobel, a hasty script conference about Hazel’s fate persuaded Huston that at 'the end of the film, Jesus wins.'"

What the above story really underlines is how unusually faithful the film is to the novel’s broad story and many particulars. This probably has something to do with its origin as a sort of Fitzgerald family project: after securing the rights to the book from his father, Michael Fitzgerald hired his brother, Benedict, to write the script. Their mother, Sally, handled set and costume design. The Fitzgeralds had known O’Connor personally (Sally Fitzgerald was in the middle of writing O’Connor’s biography when Flannery died), and conceived the film out of respect for her work. Perhaps as a consequence of their fidelity, the chronology of the movie matches that of the novel almost exactly, and virtually all of its dialogue is a word-for-word transplant grafted directly from the page to the screen. Poetic license seems never to have occurred to the Fitzgerald brothers. The differences in plot and talk amount to a few demure compressions.

But the script’s exceptional devotion to its source material is the wrong yardstick by which to measure Wise Blood. Although the story of Huston’s begrudging "conversion" draws a neat ironic squiggle for the film’s footnotes, it underplays the degree to which he carries O’Connor’s plot to a very different existential conclusion. Jesus may “win,” but only in Hazel Motes’s mind, and Huston is committed never to let us in there.

Take, for example, a scene near the very beginning of the film, in which Motes stumbles through a dilapidated farmhouse before heading off to Taulkinham. The house is more than just a shambles: it’s post-apocalyptic, a welt on the landscape. Its walls are singed, soaked, splintered, spooked. Its décor makes a monument to disrepair. What happened here? The film gives no indication; nor does it go out of its way to relate Hazel to this building by way of any expository detail. This is the closest that the film will come to giving Hazel a home, and, even here, it seems perversely bent on denying him a biographical connection with it.

Hazel stumbles around, still wearing his army uniform (another biographical tease, since the war he’s returned from will never be named) and finally scribbles a note on a piece of furniture: “This shiffer robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or your will be hunted down AND KILLED.” Then he visits his grandfather’s tombstone, which sits crumbling out back. These are the only threads to tie this place to Hazel’s previous life — it’s no coincidence that both allude to death. Wise Blood is a film that wants to disavow its characters’ history, severing it like a diseased limb.

Contrast this to the same sequence in the book. O’Connor packs a short story’s worth of background detail into a few sentences: “There was nothing left in the house but the chifforobe in the kitchen. His mother had always slept in the kitchen and had her walnut chifforobe in there. She had given thirty dollars for it and hadn’t bought herself anything else big again.” O’Connor dives from backstory directly into Motes’s psyche, and through that into still deeper background: “He thought about the chifforobe in his half-sleep and decided his mother would rest easier in her grave, knowing it was guarded. If she came looking any time at night, she would see. He wondered if she walked at night and came there ever. She would come with that look in her face, unrested and looking, the same look he had seen through the crack of her coffin.”

When O’Connor handles this scene, only the thinnest membrane separates Hazel’s experience of his environment from contemplation and memory. In this respect, O’Connor’s Hazel has a properly Modernist mind. The Modernist consciousness always inhabits at least two places at once; sensation, thought, and memory are separate-but-inseparable facets of a single subjective experience. Its present is a pliant surface always giving to memory, while its external world holds the keys to its subjective interior, and vice-versa.

For O’Connor, this is more than a stylistic choice. Along with its close cousin, metaphor, she envisions the Modernist consciousness as fiction’s way of grappling with the problem of faith. And O’Connor’s faith is persistently troubled. Like Kierkegaard, Flannery O’Connor saw the believer’s mind as a site bedeviled by struggle, beset by civil war. In faith, the reasoning mind struggles, paradoxically, to ascertain that which is essentially mysterious, irrational. The devout writer’s job is to portray this struggle experientially.

O’Connor’s stylistic manifesto "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" declares, "if the writer believes that our life is and will remain mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself... The meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted." A novelist interested in the mysterious (which, for O’Connor, always means the divine) must therefore write with a peculiar double-vision, seeing depth in every shallow thing.

The surface of this fiction will look strange, even grotesque, full of pocks, growths, and lapses. Once pressed, however, it will plunge the reader full-tilt into the mysterious, the lunatic divine. This type of novelist is "looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees."

In a way, the novel Wise Blood dramatizes the gradual convergence of these two points in the character of Hazel Motes. Motes' attempt to reject religion realizes itself as a zealous commitment to immediacy, to common sense. “I’m a member and a preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way,” he declares to an audience of disbelieving believers. “No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach!” Motes, ironically, is at his maddest when he preaches common sense.

In O’Connor’s spiritual model, any point of view that stops at what’s in front of it will apprehend only a distortion of the truth. To be down-to-earth is to go only halfway; the spiritual (and literary) perspective seeks the infinite through the immediate. This is a solitary, subjective conception of Christianity — to an outside observer, a person haunted by faith will look insane. Hazel Motes achieves authentic insight only after blinding himself, an act that estranges his few companions. "If there’s no bottom to your eyes," he tells his landlady just before death summons him, "you see more." Imagine a Don Quixote whose windmills are also real giants.

 
How does this spiritual ethos translate to the screen? It doesn’t. Not in Huston’s adaptation, at least. In Wise Blood, Huston takes every opportunity to suppress the novel’s manifestations of depth — history, interiority, spirituality. Taulkinham becomes a kind of amnesiac limbo for Hazel Motes and the other characters to float through, instead of the crucible of belief that it is in the book. This creates as an odd flattening effect, perhaps best seen in two of Huston’s more flamboyant stylistic decisions in the film.

Huston self-consciously blurs the period setting, retaining elements of O’Connor’s early 1950s, but confusing them with contemporary signifiers. He dresses the players in period garb, lets them speak in O’Connor’s voice (language so antiquated and stylized it’s bronzed), arranges a few key scenes around a mid-century movie premiere, and even rushes Motes into Taulkinham on a steam locomotive. But he makes no attempt to disguise the location shots of late-1970s Macon, GA, lets incidental characters (many of them local non-actors) wear contemporary clothing, and drives them all around in 60s- and 70s-era cars.

This lapse has a financial explanation: Fitzgerald simply could not raise enough money to set the whole film in the 50s. And the steam engine, according to Brad Dourif, was contracted at deep discount, and used in the film as a matter of convenience. But I think it is reasonable to guess that Huston reveled in the historic schizophrenia these compromises attain. By muddying its temporality, Huston severs the movie from a larger sense of historical context. Motes’s uniform, for example, pretty clearly denotes the Korean War in O’Connor’s novel, but Huston’s film transforms it into a question mark. Has Motes returned from Vietnam, Korea, Europe, or somewhere else?

The fuzzy periodization raises questions about the motivations and convictions of all the story’s characters. Both the novel and the film have a tendency to veer uncomfortably close to delighting in their portrayal of idiots run amok, but O’Connor’s book at least grounds them in a definite historical moment. The grifter tactics relied on by many of the characters, not to mention the stew of prophecy and belief in which Taulkinham seems mired, make one kind of sense if we imagine the film’s main characters were born at the height of the Depression. The characters seem odder, more singular and freakish, if we imagine that the film takes place in the late-70s, and that its characters grew up in the relatively more affluent 50s. (This does not even touch on the subject of race, which the film itself only glancingly notices, but whose Southern context is of course very different in 1950 than in 1979.)

Hazel’s relationship with Sabbath Lily Hawks is a good example of the strangeness the film’s undecided setting imposes on its characters. Sabbath Lily — wonderfully portrayed by Amy Wright as a kind of squirming, engorged naïf — is the teenage daughter of Asa Hawks, the sham preacher that Motes makes his first nemesis in Taulkinham. Sabbath Lily’s innocence never really comes into question. She makes it clear right away that she has designs on Hazel’s pants.

In a telling scene that marks the midpoint of the film, Sabbath Lily persuades Hazel to drive her into the woods, where she presumably intends to have her way with him. In the car, she delivers a long monologue that amounts to a calculated confession of her perversity. Wright plays this scene feisty and syrupy, leaving no doubt that she means the speech to be part of her seduction routine:

Do you read the papers? Well, there’s this woman in it named Mary Riddle that tells you what to do when you don’t know. I wrote her a letter and asked her what I was to do. I said, ‘Dear Mary, I am a bastard, and a bastard shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as we all know. But I have this personality that makes boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not?...' Then she answered my letter in the paper. She said, ‘Dear Sabbath, Light necking is acceptable. But I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to re-examine your religious values to see if they meet your needs in life….’ Then I wrote another letter. I said, 'Dear Mary, What I really want to know is: Should I go the whole hog or not? That’s my real problem. I’m adjusted OK to the modern world.'

OK, but what constitutes the modern world for Sabbath Lily? Depending on which of the film’s period clues we choose to follow, she was either born between the wars or just before the Summer of Love. To be the bastard child of a preacher, to write the local paper with questions about the ethics of going “whole hog,” and to seduce a grown man — the level of scandal these transgressions imply depends on their degree of perceived sinfulness, and this is, in large part, a factor of historical circumstance. Huston’s decision to deprive these characters of historical context undercuts the story’s religious subtext. O’Connor is too lively a writer to let her characters sit on the page as pure allegorical symbols, but each of them certainly represents something: saint, sinner, temptress, innocent, lost soul. Released from their historical footholds, they have a harder time fitting snugly into these categories.

It is not that Huston portrays these characters as more plainly human, exactly. In fact, the contextual decoupling has the opposite effect, flattening the characters, making them seem sketchier, more conditional. There are times in which the movie seems like little more (or less) than a parade of freaks, and one has a difficult time imagining these people living lives outside the credits.

But this is part of the point: to ratchet up the ambiguity until the people onscreen appear phantasmic, unreal, unsettled. It is almost as though Huston, sensing the spiritual conceit of the novel and the script, retaliates, not by swinging the other way and producing a work of didactic realism, but instead by merely refusing to put his foot down. This would help explain the film’s smallest pleasure, its soundtrack, which alternates between a ponderous instrumental version of “The Tennessee Waltz” and zippy, zany original intrusions that seem designed to replace a laugh track. Even at its sweetest, the film’s score sidles in with remarkable self-consciousness (it is too loud, too sappy), never failing to draw attention to itself as a film score. The effect, once again, is to heighten contextual ambiguity. Are these real people? If so, why the swelling strings? Even if we take this to be an artificial story — what kind of story is it? Is it a philosophical film, a melodrama, or a boggy comedy? The soundtrack refuses to settle, always charging in and tossing its characters back into the air.

Even Wise Blood’s sole gesture to a definite past — its use of flashbacks — feels yanked from its grounding context. The flashbacks, which are candy-pink, as though seen through the eyelids, occur three or four times over the course of the film. Each time, they feel as startling and unprovoked as images from a dream. O’Connor uses her flashbacks both to provide basic exposition and to build Hazel’s interior, showing the continuity between his experience, thought, and memory. We learn about the tyranny of Hazel’s grandfather, the trauma of his mother’s death, the persistence of sexual temptation inside him, the shame and punishment he has endured as a result of sexual exploration. Though Huston’s images depict nearly all of this backstory, they do so in a manner somehow both abrupt and unexplanatory. They are shot at extreme angles through the pink glaze, and Huston muffles the audio, making it gauzy, dreamlike, inconclusive.

Like the score, the flashback sequences do more to disrupt the feeling of unity or wholeness than they do to create it. At best, they seem like shards of memory, which point to some past while at the same time illustrating its inaccessibility. There is something cynically comical about the fact that Huston casts himself as Hazel’s grandfather. He stands at the center of these memories, his finger outstretched in a scold, barring entry.

 
One of the odd repercussions of the film’s ambiguity is to draw attention to a theme that the novel’s religious preoccupation tends to overshadow: if identity is uncertain, then it is up for grabs. The novel wants to suggest the opposite. Hazel may try to deny Jesus, but he cannot shake the wild, ragged figure in the back of his mind. “Some preacher left his mark on you,” one character tells him, and this mark goes deep — Hazel’s fervent protestations lead him only to become what he already is.

Huston’s adaptation rejects this fatalism. Unrooted, contingent, these characters exist in a charged present that allows them to refashion themselves moment-by-moment. The novel drives Hazel toward a predestined end. The film, by contrast, stresses Hazel’s chameleon quality, allowing him to slide without much comment from guise to guise. Now he is a soldier, now he is a preacher-hater, now he’s preaching, now he’s a murderer, now an ascetic. Because the film does not concern itself with depth, none of these personas carries more weight than the others. If “Jesus wins” at the end of the film, this salvation does not feel like the culmination of a journey, but instead another of Hazel’s outfits. O’Connor’s Hazel Motes spends the novel orbiting a denied but central devotion; Huston’s Hazel spends the film adrift, and ends it lost.

Viewed in this light, Wise Blood looks less like religious allegory and more like an exploration of fluid, indeterminate identity. Asa Hawks enters the film a blind preacher, leaves it a sighted charlatan. A mummy from a museum finds itself christened the new Jesus, then adopted as Hazel and Sabbath Lily’s impromptu child.

We first see Ned Beatty — at his smarmy best as the singing, dancing, bonafide hustler Hoover Shoates — heaped at the edge of the frame like a rag soaked in gasoline. After watching Hazel preach and seeing dollar signs, Shoates quickly assumes the identity of a devotee, then just as quickly hardens into Motes’s arch-nemesis. After Hazel rebuffs his invitation to team up and shuck the townsfolk, Shoates finds a local drunk and refashions him — by way of a speedy costume change — into a prophet. And so on: these characters are always in flux, shedding their skins and adopting new identities as opportunity suits them. When they do betray a conviction, it seems impulsive and improvised. Sabbath Lily decides she is ready to run off with Hazel literally on sight: “I’m just crazy about him. I never seen a boy I like the looks of any better.” Watch the way she fusses in front of Motes, as though his very presence made her skin giggle. Huston is at no pains to motivate Sabbath Lily’s infatuation, to explain why she finds herself so suddenly besotted, to let this part of the performance be anything more than one-note. Motivations do not apply in Taulkinham. Awry and unmoored, these characters live in states of emotional non-sequitur.

No character inhabits his fluid identity better than Enoch Emery, an eighteen-year-old wanderer and mental child with a fascination for monkeys, mummies, and Hazel Motes. Enoch latches on to Hazel early in the film, and trails him with a canine loyalty, despite persistent slapping-down from his would-be friend. It is Enoch who introduces Hazel to the shrunken mummy on display in Taulkinham’s sleepy museum, then steals it in a misguided attempt to bring Motes the new Jesus he’s been preaching about (“all man, without blood to waste”). Enoch also witnesses Hazel’s introduction to Asa Hawks and Sabbath Lily, and helps him track down where they live. But something strange happens two-thirds into the film. Enoch — up to now a sad, ardent follower — gets waylaid, his plotline branching from Hazel’s in distraction. What diverts his attention? A gorilla named Gonga — in truth, a man in a monkey suit, traveling from theater to theater to promote the latest matinee movie.

This plot thread is entirely independent of Hazel’s, and never reconnects. True, Enoch is still a hanger-on, but the object of his devotion has changed. After noticing a line of kids waiting outside a theater in runny-nosed anticipation, Enoch spies the gorilla, gets in line, tamely shakes his hand — then gets back into line and does it again, ultimately following the promotional van to four separate movie houses. By the final handshake, Gonga gets fed up and tells Enoch to go to Hell. Instead, the boy waits until nightfall, creeps onto the Gonga-mobile, bludgeons the performer, and gets into his suit. Enoch’s final scenes are spent as a gorilla on the loose, terrorizing the inhabitants of Taulkinham.

Silly as it is, Enoch’s story is worth deeper consideration. O’Connor makes Enoch something of a counterpart to Hazel, devoting a number of chapters to his point of view and investing him with the story’s eponymous power, “wise blood” (impulses behind which the boy sees a divine hand). Huston’s Enoch is both shallower and trickier. Because very little of the film takes Enoch’s point of view, he initially appears to be a tag-along minor character, no more central than Hoover Shoates, and certainly not as important as Asa Hawks or Sabbath Lily. Which is what makes the Gonga storyline so perplexing. Why would Huston suddenly give a minor character such a goofy subplot, this frivolous intercession into the main story’s climactic scenes? And — even odder — why, after Enoch has stolen the costume, does the film promptly and utterly forget about him? What might be mistaken for sloppy storytelling is actually Huston’s second major stylistic assault on O’Connor’s spiritual message.

Like Hazel, Enoch has drifted in from out of town, an alien among outcasts. “My daddy made me come,” he complains. “I ain’t but eighteen years old and he made me come and I don’t know nobody and nobody here will have nothin’ to do with me. They ain’t friendly.” This is another effect of the characters’ haphazard rootlessness, and what remains of O’Connor’s story when belief is stripped away — an abiding, unbridgeable loneliness. The word ‘friend’ sits in Enoch’s mouth like a sore. “People ain’t friendly here. You ain’t from here, but you ain’t friendly, neither! And you don’t know nobody, neither! I knew when I first seen you that you didn’t have nobody or nothing but Jesus!” Friendship, as a matter of fact, is an ulterior theme in both the book and the movie. It balances precariously alongside faith, a second and sometimes opposed yearning. The word suffers abuse from Hoover Shoates when he tries to jump on Hazel’s preaching: “Listen to me, friends. Before I met this prophet, here, I didn’t have a friend in this world. Do any of you know what it means not to have a friend in the world?” It makes sense that friendship would be the bait in Shoate’s lie, the word he uses to coax listeners into his fellowship, and so ensure his prophet’s profit.

In O’Connor’s vision, friendship represents a temptation that threatens to lure a person away from proper faith. This faith, after all, is a struggle carried out in solitude by the person who has “nobody or nothing but Jesus.” The authentic believer plunges away from external things toward a solitary, internal contemplation of mystery. Everything around him points back to himself, and, by way of himself, to God. Notice that Hazel’s attempts to reject faith take the form of public acts of communication (i.e., preaching), while his devotion at the end is such a lone experience that, in blinding himself, he shuts the visible world out completely. Friendship is the watchword of sham faith in Taulkinham. Social desires are diversions from belief’s stringent path.

What happens, then, when salvation is also taken off the table? Huston is left with a portrait of loneliness and isolation scaled up to encompass an entire town. This film is haunted by the friendless. No one connects. Hazel’s few moments of warmth occur in the arms Ms. Leora Watts — American cinema’s dullest, fattest prostitute — whose address he gets from a bathroom wall advertising “the FRIENLIEST bed in town.” Apart from this, there is hardly a smile shared between two characters in the entire film. Hazel and Sabbath Lily do commit some act of sex, but no affection seems to follow, at least on Hazel’s part. Sabbath Lily and her father represent the story’s sole kin relationship, but their bond, too, is one of opportunity and accident rather than loyalty or love; Asa curtly rids himself of his daughter as soon as Hazel comes into the picture. And, though Hazel’s landlady proposes marriage to him near the film’s end, she does so in a naked spasm of despair: “I got a place for you in my heart, Mr. Motes. I don’t want anything but to help you, and if we don’t help each other, there’s nobody to help us. Nobody. The world’s a empty place, Mr. Motes!” Hazel responds with what must be the ultimate rejection. He runs away without a word, collapses, dies.

O’Connor’s novel opposes companionship and faith, seeing salvation in the latter and diversion — even fraud — in the former. Huston’s film finds little hope in religion, but no greater hope in friendship. Belief on O’Connor’s terms is never really an option since these characters have no interior — at least none that Huston lets us see. But friendship is equally untenable.

Huston wants us to look at Hazel and Sabbath Lily as two dead ends, each representing an aborted attempt at escape from loneliness. Hazel tries faith, and seems committed enough. However, if Jesus does win, what are the terms of the victory? Hazel forsakes company, speech, sight, and eventually life. In O’Connor’s arid landscape, this gives him a proper religious orientation. But in a world where only surfaces matter, there is little to suggest that Hazel has not given up everything. Take a look at Hazel’s face after his blinding, when he is able at last to look inside himself without distraction. Here is what the interior looks like in Huston’s world of surfaces: a blank screen. It is no accident that the first shot of Hazel after his collapse is a fake-out meant to make us believe he is dead. Turned toward a vacant interior, there’s little difference between death and life.

But Sabbath Lily fares no better. Huston and Wright transform the character from something of a hussy to a lively, lonely, libidinous young woman aching to connect. Undeniably, the character is both wild and vulgar, but Wright plays her with a sadness, too. She does seem genuinely to want to be with Hazel, and virtually all her screen time is spent trying to reach out to him, getting nothing in return. And her devastation when she discovers Hazel’s self-mutilation is visceral, horrifying. This is not merely someone who has stumbled into a scene of grotesque violence. It is also a person who has had her fantasy of companionship graphically exposed as a lie. In Huston’s Taulkinham, both faith and friendship are false prophecies. The characters are trapped in isolation: they cannot turn inward, and they cannot turn to each other.

Enoch Emery overcomes this apparent dilemma by turning into something else. Whereas he spends the majority of the film, like Sabbath Lily, desperately trying to connect with Hazel, his last scenes reel out in radical isolation. As a movie monster come to life, he is in a sense the ridiculous opposite of a preacher. A street preacher seeks to draw people toward him; Enoch’s final montage follows the gorilla as he frightens people away. In his last shot, he sits on a park bench alone, staring expressionlessly ahead as the camera zooms in.

There is a critical distinction to be drawn between Hazel’s blank face after the blinding and Enoch’s gorilla mask, though both lack expression. Hazel diminishes himself as the end of his story closes in: he sacrifices his vision, digs into his flesh with barbed wire, stops eating, and, of course, eventually gives up even the ghost. By gouging into the surface of his character, Hazel exposes the void within. By contrast, Enoch’s transformation is one of addition, or translation: he slides over to a new identity. Enoch has always been one for dress-up; before heading to the museum to steal the mummy, he spends several minutes in front of the mirror, arranging the goofy wig and mustache that make up his “disguise.” By the end of the film, he has fully embraced his predilection for shifting identity. The final shot of Enoch/Gonga’s unreadable face shows a character who has accepted his nature as a creature of surfaces.

It is possible that Enoch is Huston’s central character — a grim cartoon meant to illustrate the thinness and absurdity of Taulkinham. One imagines him staying in the costume for a while, trading it in when another becomes available — all the while alone, all the while adrift. Enoch Emery represents cynical conclusion that Huston’s reading of Wise Blood eventually comes to. Conviction is a dead end: the pursuits of faith and companionship both lead to desolation. The only alternative is to give oneself to the current, drifting alone and anonymous. By embracing flatness, fluidity and the rejection of context, Enoch illustrates, not the way out of Taulkinham, but the correct way to stay inside.

Spencer T. Campbell is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"One Way" - Rose Cousins (mp3)

"Go First" - Rose Cousins (mp3)

The new album from Rose Cousins is called We Have Made A Spark.

photo by xaviera simmons

Ripped Bodice

by BRITTANY JULIOUS

I used to work on the block where a man tried to force me into his car. This was not the first time.

The Rhona Hoffman Gallery, the reason for my trip, is located on a block of Peoria Avenue, off the expansive Randolph Street, and filled with other galleries and artist spaces. On certain Friday evenings, the block is bustling and busy with young people leaning against old meatpacking and industrial buildings smoking cigarettes and tying their shoelaces just so. I never fit in around here, even when I worked on this very block, day after day, during the fall after my college graduation. I never fit in around here, even when I visited two friends, former store owners, now embarking on the next chapter of their lives together outside of the city.

I think about this block because it represents different facets of my changing life and the way I see the world. That fall after college, it was a space of learning and responsibility. I hoped my job would lead someplace else. I hoped I had found a sense of place and purpose.

It was also a space of trouble, of quiet evenings and brisk temperatures. For a while, my greatest memory of that block was not the galleries and stores, but the way my neck hurt again and again while walking against the fierceness of the wind. It is a beautiful block, but like many corners of Chicago, it makes more sense during the day. At night, one realizes how long the blocks are, how wide the sidewalks are, how the only thing one passes by are more buildings and more pieces of trash, but not more people.

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I began reading first romance, then erotic novels during my senior year of college. My interest stemmed from a love of fan fiction and a desire to both write and read beyond the characters I saw on the screen. I've noticed with my friends who appreciate either romance or fan fiction, a love of films and movies. There is the underlying devotion to storytelling and later, the ability to build on what was there. We can always keep going.

I like that the men represent a validation of my fantasies and my fantasies are not merely of the physical, but also of the potential for triumph, for personal redemption, for overcoming the things about ourselves — whether articulated and open or deeply stored within — that often delay the lives we want and the people we want to be. I think of myself as a woman coming back to her optimism. It was lost for a number of reasons in a number of different ways, but a part of me seeks out an interaction with the world that makes risks possible and chances worth taking. What I fear rests in me is a deeply-ingrained thought practice that ultimately makes living and loving seem like things other people do.

The black heroines in many of the novels I read are not traditionally beautiful, but they are interesting. They struggle and weep alone; keep their heads up and minds focused in private. They do a lot and feel a lot and often find peace through extraordinary circumstances that are more difficult than their lives pushing toward financial success and the desire to overcome a challenging society, a prejudiced society, an unforgiving society.

The ways in which I can overcome the world at large are through myself. I can not depend on outcomes of others, but must instead push myself to work harder, to think more, to pursue more. And in my favorite novels, the heroines must overcome the limitations of affection by challenging their willingness to love and trust.

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The older I get, the more aware I am of how I lack a true understanding of normal. To me, normal is pure and right and exact. There is a real idea of normal love, of normal relationships, of normal intimacy. And even though a rational part of me knows that there is no way that a unique, individualistic, surprising world could produce a tried-and-true normal, I still hold on to the idea that there is a “right” way, and I am not doing it.

A friend once asked me what it was like to date as a black woman. She was asking not as a point of othering, but because I told her that “things are different.” We were discussing our parents’ relationships and how rare and strange it was that they are still together. This idea of marriage, of happiness, seems more like an exception to the rule of confusion, pain and regret.

Two years ago, a group of black teenage girls sat across from me on the 66 bus. An older black man, much older, at least in his 50s, began hitting on them, blatantly and disgustingly and physically. They were obviously turned off, because he was crass and because they were young, and this man thought that he could say and do anything he wanted to because these young women tickled his fancy. One girl, agitated, yelled, “I don’t care. Leave me alone! Leave us alone!”

It could have only been the culmination of years of frustration and annoyance because I too felt that anger and grief. This was not a random occurrence for them. This was the everyday, the day-to-day, the moment they stepped outside until the moment they locked their door.

There are slight come-ons, cheesy pick-up lines, catcalls which in hindsight are child’s play, and then there is harassment — physical and verbal — much like these teenage girls on the bus suffered, and what I’ve faced numerous times in the past. Harassment is different, and terrifying, and traumatizing. But once you’ve faced it, in all forms, whether it is a man calling you “A stupid stuck-up bitch” or another grabbing you off the street, a block away from your own home, attempting to rape you before you’ve even gotten your first period, you learn to toughen up, to always be aware, to call out the aggressors from the get go in the hopes that this time won’t turn dire. It’s not about hate but about safety and street smarts. As a black woman, unfortunately, I believe it’s something we become accustomed to at a young age.

It shapes the way you look at life and the way you encounter the people around you. If you are like me, it stifles your freedom, creating an existence of confusion. What does it mean to be loved? What does it mean to be happy?

I still think of the moment when everything changes, when that loss of youth shapes one’s days from here on out. It is that critical age of post-innocence, yet pre-adolescence. In my head, the other girls were able to still feel somewhat young and somewhat free, but I remember knowing more than I should, and feeling angry about it at 12 years old. Even now, I yearn for my age, meaning, the ability to be young and feel young and have that be enough. A co-worker said, “What do you have to stress over?” And I thought, most everything. It’s the same as it ever was.

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Last Thanksgiving, we sat around my aunt's great big television — the place of common gathering for my family — and my grandmother tried to run her weak hands through my thick hair. She couldn't get far. She made a comment about it being unkempt and unright.

A friend shared a conversation she had with a mutual editor and they discussed not my fear of the body, but my fear of the expectations of the body. I am fearful that I lack ownership, fearful that my personality is not good enough or pleasant enough or funny enough to warrant love. If I only have the physical than these interactions must be representative of something inherent in me, something others see but I am unable to recognize or know. There is the me I know and the 'real' me, the me everyone else sees. That distance makes me uneasy.

At the holiday dinner, I tried to talk to my family. We’ve spoken before, held conversations and shared jokes, but the older I get, the more I recognized the full formation of my internal self. The older I get, the more I recognize my dual selves, the one that thinks and sees and feels so much that emotions manifest in stomach pains or stiff joints, and the one the world sees.

“I just don’t like it when people make comments about my appearance. I don’t like being touched without knowing,” I said. But what I actually meant was, I don’t like knowing that there’s something wrong with me, that it is visible, that what I sometimes feel and think deep down can be confirmed through appearances.

Brittany Julious 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 the month in music. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photos by Xaviera Simmons.

photo by xaviera simmons

"Ruby Blue" - Róisín Murphy (mp3)

"Sow Into You" - Róisín Murphy (mp3)

photo by xaviera simmons

Forms of Taking It All

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

They called it the slipper club. All of the photographer Dorothea Lange's friends were Jews; exiled for a second time from the mostly gentile areas of Nob, Russian, and Telegraph Hills in San Francisco to Pacific Heights. Lange was not herself among the chosen people, but all her friends were. They were as far from the immigrant Jews in the Fillmore as they were from the gentiles in the wealthier neighborhoods. The slipper club, so named because Dorothea gave all her closest ones footwear as a gift, met outside the circles of power due to the vagaries of a parlor anti-Semitism. They talked of gardening, the arts, their relationships.... It was through these people that Dorothea met the artist who would become her first husband, Maynard Dixon.

Dorothea Lange, 26, featured a high pitched voice and walked with a limp. She made her living from portrait photography. She set a price and never haggled over it; no one quibbled with the results. For example:

from 1932

Maynard Dixon, 45, worked a pot-smoking illustrator whose sketches were featured in magazines with great frequency. His typical day involved waking up in the afternoon, getting high, and sampling the best of San Francisco's world cuisine. After the earthquake of 1906, he and his friends perserved in their lifestyle, almost amongst the rubble. Their neighborhood was called the Monkey Block, and it was razed in 1959 to build the TransAmerica Pyramid. Nobody was in a position to complain by then.

Maynard showed Dorothea the "real" California. He loved wide open spaces, and his representations of Arizona and New Mexico during the period remain quite captivating. She was immediately attracted to his cowboy good looks, his way around children. Her own concept of style always accentuated her natural beauty and minimized her defects. Despite her infirmity, brought on by a childhood bout of polio, she could hike and picnic, dragging her right leg on the ground when she was tired. The only thing she could not do was run.

the happy couple

They were married in her studio in March of 1920. He wore a cape, a black Stetson and wielded a carved swordcane with a stiletto. Their marriage invigorated his artistic career; he completed 140 paintings during the first five years of matrimony, and his reputation as a talented muralist at first grew and grew. The fact that he was nearing 50 as she approached 30, initially a source of Dorothea's apprehension, did not seem to matter a whit.

While others viewed Dorothea as a strong-willed entrepreneur, she did not mind how Maynard saw her — as a gorgeous young flower, a precious thing that could not be corrupted, but one had to try. This did not stop him from cheating on her with other women, often on long trips to the California wilderness he loved. Yet part of the reason the relationship sustained despite Maynard's imperfections was the fact the two kept their own lives.

Maynard Dixon

Near the end of her life she said of him, "Maynard was a restaurant man, a raconteur, a striking personality, graceful, had style, wit and originality. Much of the wit was defensive. Women loved him." Despite his considerable flaws, she viewed her new husband as an incandescent flame, and was most taken aback when his 12 year old daughter Consie Dixon came to live with them.

As a young child, Consie had been mistreated by her mother. At her stepdaughter's age, Dorothea stood out as helpful, kind and resourceful. In contrast Consie resisted her every directive, and found Dorothea's obsessiveness over her home frightening. (In later years, Dorothea would drop her sons in foster care while she travelled with Maynard and her second husband, Paul Taylor.) Maynard simply expected his new wife to care for the girl, who else would do it? To fill the hours with Consie, Dorothea began taking her picture. It looked like this:

consie dixon circa 1920

In light of the fact a child already lived in their home, Maynard and Dorothea used birth control with alacrity. By the age of 29, she decided it was time to have a child of her own, and she gave Maynard two sons. Tensions with Consie temporarily abated when the girl got a job as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner days after she turned 19. It was the onset of the Depression that would ultimately lose Consie that job and destroy her father's marriage.

Maynard's latent anti-Semitism had driven away most of his patrons, and when the art market in San Francisco collapsed, he could no longer sell his murals to anyone. After losing her job, Consie moved to Taos, New Mexico, and encouraged her parents to follow. Trouble quickly emerged in their new landing spot — neither Maynard or Dorothea had any idea how to drive a car. Maynard broke his jaw flipping over the family's first vehicle.

Taos, New Mexico

Even after that, Maynard tolerated the wide-open spaces of Taos far better than his wife. Dorothea had lost her clientele, her footwear association and the city she loved. The husband noticed none of his wife's unhappiness, and even after agreeing to a move back to San Francisco, the marriage would only last three more years. Dorothea observed in a profile of the family published in the San Francisco News that "an artist's wife accepts the fact that she has to contend with many things that other wives do not." She had her friends again.

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

"Fame" - Santigold (mp3)

"God From The Machine" - Santigold (mp3)

The new album from Santigold is entitled The Master of My Make-Believe and it will be released on May 1st.

You can enjoy the Saturday fiction archive here at your own leisure.

Seventh

by ANDREW DAVIS

He woke with the faintest memory of a good time, the half-addled recollection of something pleasant in the ether. Beside the bed were two comely ovals, and when he scraped his fingernail against them not even the faintest trace lodged underneath. His sigh of relief that they were likely potent elongated his desire for the morning. Light was only beginning to drift through the curtains.

She said, "Do you think it's valid if I just ask her to tell me what happened?"

No glass of water was in evidence, so the first pill slipped dry down his throat, lodging briefly in the deep south of his esophagus before absorbing directly into his cerebrum.

She said, "I don't want it to remain a mystery. If I ask -" she had been wearing sandals (to bed?) and one of them dangled from the end of her foot - "later it will be obvious, so evident that's it's something I had been thinking about for awhile."

He turned to her and nodded and noticed a Sprite hovering on a guitar case. He did not know she played, but he should have known, really, so he did not want to say, but found himself saying, "You play the guitar?" He walked over to the Sprite and washed down the second pill with it. What kind of name was that, Sprite. If an object has the identical name as something else...there should ideally be a law, that no two things could have the same name.

She said, "My ex-boyfriend did. He gave me the case to keep my trombone in." She laughed, but he was not entirely sure if that was a joke or if she actually played the trombone. "She walked in when we were, you know. It was so awkward."

Her hair was bright blonde, sandy at the ends. It might have been intentional. The thought of the style as so calculatedly haphazard should have roused something in him, so he waited to feel it.

She said, "She doesn't care for other people's feelings. She regards pity as a weakness. Not pity, empathy."

She said, "She'll be here any minute. You have to help me figure out what to say." She took the can from him and sipped on it, at first hesitantly, but then greedily. He felt he better understood why things were called what they were.

She said, "If I speak to her. On occasion I find myself talking to her as if she's a child. Not just any child that you might correct for eating something she shouldn't, or taking something that did not belong to her, but the way you might reprimand your own child for doing so."

He said, "I would never just give a kid sugar." She nodded sympathetically. He followed this up by saying, "The only way to raise one of them is in isolation. That way they have nothing at all to compare their lives to."

There was a commotion outside in the street, and while his attention was thus directed, she sat up in bed and wrapped her legs around his arm. He mock-pounced on her and tasted the leftover Sprite, shuddering inwardly. It was like sampling himself. Her limbs were hairer than he could have imagined.

She said, "She's never had a roommate before. I think people learn, given time. They can improve. She would have a chance."

He ran his tongue along her neck. There was the faint residual sweetness from the exertion of sleep, but it possessed no odor, no scent. If all secretions were voluntary, he would have sought no other, and truth be told, preferred it as a method of communication. There was no mistaking it. Then again, perhaps all her secretions were by choice, or simply guided by an external force beyond his capacity to understand.

In his head arose that light burning sensation, and then another, more intellectual pleasure at its recognition, knowing for sure he had not merely swallowed someone's leftover rejected vitamins.

She said, "I just hate when there are all these unsaid ghosts. Its drive me insane to know I have to hold back. I don't know if that's something I'm capable of."

"You've done it before," he said. She laughed lightly at first, and then giggles took over like a seizure. It was all he could do to keep her in his arms.

She said, "She's been seeing a therapist. When she first told me, I thought, great...well I didn't just think that, I told her that was wonderful. And she said I showed too much emotion in my reaction." He nodded. "Because this wasn't an eventuality to be happy about, is what she told me."

"Imagine that," he said, pressing himself against her. "I could listen to you talk like this for hours." With his foot he slid the guitar case under the bed. The mere touch of it brought intense pleasure, like a discrete, painful scrape on the underside of his testicles. As suddenly he drifted out of his reverie. He said, "What you ought to do is, say what you need to say. Don't make it sound like an apology."

"Why?"

"People hate being apologized to. Inside every person," he said, pressing on his rear tooth with his tongue in misguided curiosity about what excitement it might bring, "is this mostly dormant but everpresent sense they are completely in the wrong. It's what separates us from the animals." He coughed. "Make it sound like a compliment." She asked who had told him this. Then she said she thought she heard voices, and a doorbell rang, the sound settling in the air.

When he opened the door standing before him was a salty, short man between the age of 17 and 21, featuring a beggar's haircut. Raindrops issued from his forehead. In the individual's left hand was a vase, probably not a nice one if the accompanying clothes were any evidence. The idea of matching everything to the particular tenor of a vase, of letting things revolve entirely around a craft to hold flowers, struck him as an eminently desirable approach.

"Who are you?" the figure said.

"Terence," he replied. He felt it would unwise to give his real name.

"Okay Terence, is Marla there?"

"Is she about 5'5" with blonde hair and a tattoo of a eucharist?"

"No," the figure said. Terence stepped wide of the door and said, "Marla will be here soon. I invite you to wait indoors. I understand it's raining."

The girl in the apartment - Marla's roommate, he had concluded - took one look at this vase-bearing phenomenon and shrieked, "Where the fuck is Marla, Greg?", picked up a small blanket, and stomped into the bathroom. Greg at first moved as if to follow her but instead he sheepishly set the vase on a coffee table shaped like a machete.

"Greg," Terence said, "you may be having a rough morning. I don't know this for a fact."

Greg grunted.

"Do you have any cigarettes?" Terence asked. Greg just looked at him. Terence fished in the pocket of a woman's robe. "Here. You may require it more urgently than I do."

"I don't take x," Greg said.

"It's 8:30 on a Sunday and I'm appalled by your insinuation. Happiness, you will eventually decide, is the least of your desires. Does that hurt?" Greg's left ear, he had noticed, featured a small silver hoop that looked borderline infected.

"It's not what it looks like," Greg said, accepted the pill and reached into his jacket pocket for what Terence hoped very much was not a weapon. It was a joint. They both swallowed.

The door to the apartment opened and in walked Marla. Had he seen her in the flesh before he would surely have paid more attention to the talk. It made a great deal of sense in retrospect. Her very skin shone, her brunette hair lingered at her hips, a magnificent ballpoint pen extruded from her mouth. People were always talking fervently about what they desired most. As soon as she saw the intimate gathering in her living room, Marla grabbed the vase. Greg opened his mouth, saying, "I was waiting" - but this was all he said. Marla let the vase fly right toward his face. It struck Greg directly on his right temple. Terence was shocked it did not knock the man out completely, but he simply writhed around on the ground like a phantom was inhabiting his body, and sobbed. The girl with the tattoo of the eucharist came out of the bathroom, and seeing what had happened, the two women hugged and touched the tips of their fingers together, as if they had newly discovered a way of conducting electricity. He placed the joint on the table, dragged the guitar case from under the bed, and let himself out.

Andrew Davis is a writer living in New York.

"Let Her Go" - Eyas (mp3)

"Unfold In Dreams" - Eyas (mp3)

The new album from Eyas is entiteld It Will Become, and it was released on March 20th.

Dr. John Carpenter

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

Thanks to Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen's supremely detailed 1999 book, Elvis, Day by Day, the trivial details of Elvis Presley's life are open and accessible to any inquiring fan. Guralnick and Jorgensen used letters, receipts and financial records to tell Elvis' story. The end wasn't maybe the greatest portion of the man's life.

September 28th, 1970

Someone calls up Elvis' road manager and demands $50,000 to reveal the name of the assassin who will kill Elvis during his Saturday evening show.

December 20th, 1970

When his father and his wife Priscilla confront him about his overspending, Elvis freaks out and hops a plane to Washington D.C. He fails in a bid to meet up with J. Edgar Hoover, but he does get facetime with President Nixon. The two like each other immediately.

March 1st, 1971

A surveillance system is installed at Graceland. Elvis places the four monitors next to his television.

September 22nd, 1971

Elvis takes in a movie in his private theater almost every night.

February 23rd, 1972

Over the last year he has grown increasingly distant from his wife. She lets him know she is hooking up with karate champion Mike Stone. In response, Elvis has someone award him a fifth degree black belt.

May 7th, 1972

Elvis heads to Los Angeles, flying on the ticket of one "Dr. John Carpenter." By the end of July Elvis and Priscilla are legally separated.

September 31th, 1973

Elvis picks up the newly crowned Miss Tennessee in Los Angeles, brings her to Las Vegas. While she is out shopping he invites Cybill Shepherd over.

February 2nd, 1973

Elvis presents Muhammed Ali with one of his robes. Ali later reflects, "I felt sorry for Elvis because he didn't enjoy life the way he should. He stayed indoors all the time. I told him he should go out and see people."

February 18th, 1973

Men rush the stage during Elvis' midnight Las Vegas show. Elvis punches one of them in the face. Afterwards, he informs the audience that, "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I'm sorry I didn't break his goddamned neck is what I'm sorry about."

May 27th, 1974

The Jackson Five appear at the Sahara. Elvis has two of his people take his daughter Lisa Marie to the show.

August 29th, 1974

Elvis awards karate certificates to every member of his band.

November 19th, 1974

The National Enquirer runs a headline "Elvis at 40 - Paunchy, Depressed, and Living in Fear." By next year Elvis will be hospitalized for shortness of breath. He and Linda spent most of the time in the hospital watching the nursery over closed-circuit television. He spends three weeks there, and when Linda is not around he passes the hours by watching Monty Python.

July 22nd, 1975

Elvis shoots his doctor in the chest, off a ricochet, while waiving around a handgun in the examination room. Later, he forks over $200,000 without interest for the construction of Dr. Nick's new home.

with Ginger Alden

August 28th, 1976

A review of Elvis' show at The Summit in Houston reads like this: "The show was a depressingly incoherent, amateurish mess served up by a bloated, stumbling and mumbling figure who didn't act like 'The King' of anything, least of all rock 'n' roll."

December 21st, 1976

In San Francisco, Elvis tries to get Linda Thompson to leave for Memphis by telling her she looks "worn out." He keeps his other squeeze, Ginger Alden, in a private room until he persuades Linda to take a flight out of town. After she does, they never see each other again.

August 16th, 1977

Elvis dies in a pool of his own vomit.

Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. You can find the first part of this series here. She last wrote in these pages about Dorothea Lange.

"An American Trilogy" - Elvis Presley (mp3)

"The Girl Of My Best Friend" - Elvis Presley (mp3)

The Best of Ellen Copperfield on This Recording

Dorothea Lange's Failed Marriage

Sex Life Of Marlon Brando

The Onset Of The Western Canon

Entitled To Madonna's Opinion

The Kurt Cobain Experience Unfolds

Barbra Streisand Grows Up In Flatbush

A Sneaking Suspicion of Literature

Anjelica Huston Falls Off The Horse

Prefer To Be Simone de Beauvoir

The Marriage of Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra

Elongated Childhood of Jorge Luis Borges

Jokes At The Expense Of Tom Hanks

Which One Is The Gay?

from Images

by INGMAR BERGMAN

There are two godfathers to Fanny and Alexander. One of them is E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Toward the end of the 1970s, I was supposed to direct Hoffmann at the Opera House in Munich. I began to fantasize about the real Hoffmann, who sat in Luther's wine cellar, sick and nearly dying. I wrote in my notes: "Death is everpresent. The barcarole, the sweetness of death. The Venice scene stinks of decay, raw lust, and heavy perfumes. In the Antonia scene, the mother is intensely frightening. The room is people with shadows, dancing, and mouths gaping. The mirror in the mirror aria is small and gleams like a murder weapon."

In a short story written by Hoffmann there is a gigantic, magical room. It was that magical room I wanted to re-create on stage. The drama would be played out with that room set on stage. The drama would be played out with that room set in the foreground and the orchestra in the background.

There is also an illustration from E.T.A. Hoffmann's stories that had haunted me time and time again, a picture from The Nutcracker. Two children are quivering close together in the twilight of Christmas Eve, waiting impatiently for the candles on the tree to be lighted and the doors to the living room to be opened.

It is that scene that gave me the idea of beginning Fanny and Alexander with a Christmas celebration.

The second godfather is Dickens: the bishop and his home, the Jew in his boutique of fantasies, the children as victims; the contrast between flourishing outside life and a closed world in black-and-white.

One could say that it all began during the fall of 1978. I was living in Munich and felt ill at ease. I was still enmeshed in the tax imbroglio, and I didn't know how or when it would end. On September 27, I wrote in my workbook:

There is no longer any distinction between my anxiety and the reality that causes it. And yet I think I know what kind of film I want to make next. It is far different from anything I have ever done.

Anton is eleven years old and Maria is twelve. They act as observers of the reality I wish to depict. The time is the beginning of the First World War; the place is a small town, exceedingly quiet and well-kept. There is a university, a theater, and a hotel some distance away. Life is peaceful.

Anton and Maria's mother is director of a theater. When their father died, she took over the management of his theater and now runs it with authority and shrewdness. They lie on a quiet street. in the back of the theater lives a Jew, Isak, who owns a toy store. It contains some other interesting and exciting objects as well. A frequent Sunday visitor is an old lady who used to be a missionary in China. She performs Chinese shadow plays. There is also an uncle who is a little crazy but is harmless and who takes certain liberties. The house is well-to-do and extremely bourgeois.

The grandmother is an almost mystical figure who lives in the apartment below. She is fabulously wealthy and was in her past a royal mistress and a great actress. Now she has retired, but sometimes she will appear in an occasional part. In either case, it is a world completely dominated by women, from the cook who has been around for a hundred years to the little nanny who is cheerful, freckled and limps because one leg is shorter than the other, and who smells deliciously of sweat.

The theater is both a playground for the children and a haven. Sometimes they are allowed to participate in a play, which they find enormously exciting. The children sleep in the same room, and they have many things to keep themselves occupied - their own puppet theater, their own movie projector, toy trains, dollhouses. They are inseparable.

Maria is the one who takes the most initiative. Anton is rather anxious. Their upbringing is strict, and severe punishment for even the most trivial offenses is not out of the question. The church bells measure the passage of time; the small bell at a nearby castle announces when it is morning and when it is evening. The Vicar is always a welcome guest, even at the theater. One might suspect that Mother has a special relationship with the vicar. However, this is difficult to know right away.

Then Mother decides to marry the vicar. Mother cannot continue to manage her theater; she must become a wife and mother. It is already apparent that her belly is swelling. Maria does not like the vicar; Anton does not like him either. Mother transfers the ownership of the theater to her actors; crying bitterly, she bids her people farewell and moves into the vicarage with Maria and Anton, who are raging with anger.

Mother is a good wife to the clergyman. She plays her part irreproachably: she gives birth to a child and invites the parishioners in for coffee after the morning service. The church bells ring, and Maria and Anton brood, thinking of revenge. They are no longer allowed to sleep together in the same room, and the cheerful Maj, the nanny, who has become pregnant, is fired and replaced by the vicar's sister, who is a dragon.

With my divining rod, I searched the ground for a source and came upon a vein of water. When I began to drill, it gushed out like a geyser. My notes continue:

Through my playing, I want to master my anxiety, relieve tension, and triumph over my deterioration. I want to depict, finally, the joy that I carry within me in spite of everything, and which I so seldom and so feebly have given attention to in my work. To be able to express the power of action, decisiveness, the vitality, and the kindness. Yes, for once, that would not be a bad idea.

From the very beginning one can see that with Fanny and Alexander. I have landed in the world of my childhood. Here is the university town and Grandmother's house with the old cook; here is the Jew who lived out back; and here is the school. I am already in the place and beginning to roam around in the familiar environment. My childhood has of course always been my main supplier, without my ever having bothered to find out where the deliveries were coming from.

On November 10, I write in my workbook:

I often think of Ingrid Bergman. I would like to write something for her that would not be too demanding, and I see a summer porch in rain. She is alone, waiting for her children and grandchildren. It is afternoon, the whole film is set on a veranda. The film will last only as long as the rain. Nature is showing her fairest face; everything is enveloped in this soft unceasing rain. When the film opens, she is speaking on the telephone. Her family is out on an excursion around the lake. She talks with an old friend of hers, who is much older than she. A deep trust exists between the two. She writes a letter. She finds some object. She remember a theater performance - her big breakthrough. She sees her reflection in the windowpanes - and can catch a glimpse of herself as a young woman.

The reason she has stayed at home is that she has sprained her ankle - it is only a slight sprain; mostly it feels good to be alone. Toward the end of the film, she sees the family returning from their trip; the rain is still falling, but it is now a peaceful, quiet drip.

Everything should happen in a major key.

The porch in summer - everything is enveloped in a soft chiaroscuro. In this piece there are no hard edges; everything must be as soft as the rain. A neighbor's child comes and asks for other children. She has bought wild strawberries, and she is given a treat. She is wet from the rain and smells wet. It is a kind life, a good, simple, incredible life. When she sees the child's hands, the most unusual thoughts come to her, thoughts that she has never had before. The cat purrs, stretched out on the sofa, the clock ticks; the smell of summer pervades over all. She stands in the doorway to the porch and looks out over the meadows with the oak tree, the meadow that leads down in the old bridge and the bay. To her, everything looks both old and familiar and yet new and unexpected. It is strange how longing emanates from sudden solitude.

This looks like a different film, independent of the first, but the material came to good use in Fanny and Alexander, the decision to depict a life, luminous and happy, was there from the moment I found life truly difficult to bear.

Harmony is not a feeling that is totally unusual or foreign to me. If I am just allowed to live quiet and create in a calm environment without being tormented, where I can have a clear perspective of my existence, where it is possible for me to be kind and not need anything or have to keep lots of appointments, then I can function at my best. Such an existence reminds me of the good-natured passive life of my childhood.

On April 18 I wrote, "I don't know much about this film. Yet it tempts me more than any other. It is enigmatic and demands reflection, but the most important thing of course is that the desire is there."

On April 23 I note: "Today I wrote the first six pages of Fanny and Alexander. I actually enjoyed doing it. Now I am going to write about the theater, the apartment, and the grandmother."

Wednesday, May 2:

I must get away from rushing and straining. I have the entire summer in front of me to do this, more than four months. On the other hand, I should not stay away from my desk too long. But no, it's all right to walk around a bit! Let the scenes settle themselves down as they please. Let them become what they will. Then they will be on their best behavior!

Tuesday, June 5:

It is dangerous to invoke the infernal powers. In Isak's house lives an idiot with the face of an angel, a thin, fragile body, and colorless eyes that see all. He is able to do evil. He is like a membrane for wishes that quivers with the slightest touch. It is Alexander's experience of the Secret that makes him what he is. The conversation with his dead father. God showing himself to him. His meeting with the dangerous Ismael, who sends the burning woman to annihilate the bishop.

The manuscript was finished on July 8, not quite three months after I began it. There followed a year of preparation for filming, a long and surprisingly pleasant time.

Then, I suddenly stood there and had to materialize my film.

Watching it today, I see that the long version could have been trimmed down half an hour to forty minutes without anyone noticing it. As it was, the work was heavily edited down to the five different episodes for television. But from that point down to the reduced theatrical version was a long step.

The basic chords in Fanny and Alexander are summed up exhaustively in The Magic Lantern:

To be honest, it is with delight and curiosity that I think back on my childhood. My imagination and sense gained nourishment, and I cannot remember ever being bored. Rather the days and hours exploded with these strange wonders, unexpected sights, and magical moments. I can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and re-create the lighting, smells, people, places, moments, gestures, intonations, and objects. Seldom do these memories have any particular meaning; they like bits of film, short of long, with no point, shot at random.

This is the prerogative of childhood: to move in complete freedom between magic and oatmeal porridge, between boundless terror and joy that threatens to burst within you. There were no limits except forbidden things and rules, which were like shadows, mostly unfathomable. I know, for instance, that I could not grasp the concept of time: You must learn to be punctual; you have been given a watch, you must learn how to tell time. Yet time did not exist. I was late for school, I was late for meals. Unconcerned, I roamed around in the park by the hospital, looking around and dreaming; time ceased to exist, then something reminded me I was hungry, and trouble began.

It was difficult for me to differentiate between what existed in my imagination and what was real. If I made the effort, perhaps I could make the reality remain real, but then, for instance, there were always the ghosts and the visions. What was I supposed to do with them? And the fairy tales, were they real or not?

Translated from the Swedish by Marianne Ruuth. You can purchase Bergman's Images here.

"Barbara" - Rufus Wainwright (mp3)

"Perfect Man" - Rufus Wainwright (mp3)

The new album from Rufus Wainwright is called Out of the Game and it was released on May 1st.

The Cold Side

by KARA VANDERBIJL

In the 12th or 13th century, a wealthy Dutch nobleman was captured and imprisoned by his enemies. When they heard the news, three of his servants vowed to break him out of captivity. Since they were not knights they had to use whatever weapons they could find, the commonest of tools. Perhaps one of them carried a saw, or a shovel. One of them, we know for sure, carried an axe.

Somehow, they managed to free their master from prison and in reward, he endowed each one with a coat of arms and a noble name. To the one who had carried the axe, he gave the name van der Bijl, “of the axe” in Dutch.  

He was the first to bear my family’s name.

To go from being a servant to a man with a title must have changed my ancestor’s life significantly. Or did it? I wonder if he ever got a sword or if he remained stubbornly wed to his axe. I wonder if he crept back to a predictable course of events, marriage and babies and wars and famine, or if he was a visionary and changed his destiny completely.  I find the story difficult to imagine. What is it like to receive a name? Unlike my ancestor, I did nothing extraordinary to claim it — was simply born and swaddled into it one winter.

All sorts of different characters have claimed the name over the centuries, but to be a van der Bijl brings out shockingly similar traits. Struck with wanderlust, our clan covers the globe; I believe that South America is the only continent we have not lived on. Teaching is a primary profession, but many are artists and some do well in business. Every last one is typically Dutch: reserved, curious, tall.

Like his embraces, my grandfather’s stories are ceremonial in their brevity. This, added to the fact that I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen him in my lifetime, means that I can write nothing about him that is not mostly fiction. Facts like exhausted hitchhikers arrive in the occasional electronic letter, on the backs of decorated birthday cards. I construct the narrative carefully with a well-intentioned imagination.

At 82, Adriaan van der Bijl — my “Opa” — stands still tall, still thin, his hair still blond. Framed as I have seen him by his garishly colored Saskatoon living room, I remember him best in the civilized utopia of his vegetable garden. He sits on a white metal bench that curls like ivy against the back wall, one navy-slacked leg folded neatly over the other, one long arm stretched in repose. Early photographs testify that his cheeks pulled up smoothly to the sharp thin peaks of his cheekbones. In age, gentle jowls fall like weathered leather around thin lips. Years in the sun left spots. He speaks when he has something earth-shattering to say; otherwise his silences weigh like heavy volumes in the breast pocket of a crisp button-down shirt, along with a pair of spectacles and a pen on the verge of leaking.

Recently, I wrote Opa an email asking him to send me some of the slides and 8 mm films he keeps in his basement so that I might tug them, kicking and silently screaming, into the 21st century. I expected resistance because I wasn’t sure he was willing to part with them just yet and because when I send correspondence to Canada, electronic or otherwise, I fully expect it to dissipate on the border, or at least be picked over by customs officers, hungry for foreign idioms and donuts.

He responded with a velocity that denied all of it, sending along a box — originally containing snow boots, size 9 — full of slides wrapped in slips of paper denoting their content. In a corner, the 8 mm cassettes gleam, not as mildewed as he promised. At the base lies a thick binder entitled The Story of My Life. In a smattering of languages, stickers, collages from old newspapers and stiff yellowed photos, my grandfather tells his story to everyone and no one.

Adriaan (far left) with his parents and siblings, 1938

It’s a story of loss: of country, first, when Opa’s father (for whom he was named) moved the family from the Netherlands to Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, so that he could teach English.

Then it is the loss of 1944, when Adriaan survived a blistering Indonesian summer at the hands of the Japanese, overcoming malaria and diphtheria and the cruelty of the women’s camp, but his father and eldest brother did not, removed into another camp, half-clothed, perhaps starved. Only two black and white pages in the binder capture those two years: a photo of stark long buildings labeled “barracks at the river”, and one of a thin blond man in his underwear reaching into a common pot of food. When the Japanese were defeated in 1945 the family returned to the Netherlands. They do not speak of that time.

He lost each of his four children at age six to an American boarding school, where they would learn English at the expense of the French and Dutch he and my grandmother Mijo taught them in their infancy. Tucking them into a tiny puddle-jumping plane, he could only gather them back into the house he built for Christmas and summer holidays. Monsoon rains drummed on the tin roof overhead; the jungle eased in, dark and close, around them. At the flicker of a kerosene lamp, moths as big as his palms flocked inside.

In 1986 he buried Mijo on a hillside in Irian Jaya.

Years later, waving goodbye to friends spread out on a crude landing strip he carved, the helicopter blade swiped the last three fingers from his right hand.

All this, the jungle took back.

+

My mother puts a hand on my father’s knee. Perhaps it is Christmas or a birthday. “Daniel,” she says, “call your father.”

He does this after a search for their phone number ends in an unfrequented address book. “Hi Dad,” he says. They talk about the weather and about other people they would not normally talk about except that my step-grandmother Elfrieda is also on the line. My brother and I are brought up. Elfrieda asks for my new address because without fail I have moved since my father last spoke with them. This request, along with her wishes of goodwill, ensures that a birthday card will arrive unscathed, replete with stickers of smiley faces and flowers, folded over a crisp new twenty-dollar bill as you can only find in Canadian banks.

Dad sighs as he hangs up the phone and my mother nods, content. She and Elfrieda occupy what the Dutch refer to as the “cold side” of the family — the side that has been grudgingly admitted through marriage. Yet both women insist on gathering bits of warmth into envelopes, stamping them with foreign postage, and sending them halfway across the world to glue people of similar name together.

On the warm side, we bridge the distance with resigned reports of common genes and would be content to not know one another at all except during the occasional reunion or yearly phone call. Our last reunion, two summers ago in the Rockies, revolved around a lack of common language, and the counting of sets of twins, and the proud bright white name tags we were all required to wear. One great-aunt, losing her memories to the onset of dementia, walks around the circle of plastic chairs and grasps hands gently. “And who are you?” she whispers sweetly. The rest of us follow suit, less excusable, less sweet, less inclined to affection.

mijo

My grandmother Mijo’s mother, Camille, was a bastard, conceived on Christmas Eve 1913 when her mother, a Swiss socialite named Madame Leuiset met a Brazilian diplomat at a party. Camille was born in Paris and, to spare Madame Leuiset's reputation, hurried off almost immediately to live with a foster family in Normandy. Her foster father lost a leg in the war, and the family was poor, but they cared for Camille as their own until she was nine, when her mother sent for her.

In 1935, Camille began working as a seamstress in a dressmaker’s shop. One of her colleagues like my great-grandmother so much that she would not rest until she had married Camille off to her son Albert, an actor and painter. French, but of Russian descent, Albert was good-looking and a shameless philanderer. He and Camille had six children together before he left her for another woman: Yves, Michelle, my grandmother Mijo and her twin sister, who died as a baby, and Marie-Therese, the youngest, whom we all came to know as Aunt Tutun.

Newly alone, Camille trained as a midwife at a convent, launching a career during which she would deliver 20,000 babies — and lose only two. When WWII broke out she was afraid the Germans would invade Normandy, so she took her three surviving children first to Marseilles, then to Geneva, where she worked in triage. She kept Tutun with her when she moved back to France, but Yves and Mijo remained in Switzerland with a foster family for the duration of the war.

In Grenoble, a tiny town in the Alps, Camille worked as an administrator in a center for single mothers. She had nowhere to live and very little money, so she moved from apartment to apartment with Tutun in tow, surviving off of food stamps she got at work while many went hungry because of shortages. Thanks to her position at the shelter, she was a valuable asset in the underground mission helping Jews escape occupied France to the Holy Land.

When the war ended, my grandmother Mijo was ten years old and Tutun was five. Once again their mother put them in foster care, this time at a convent so high in the Alps there were no trees. Here, they guarded the nuns’ sheep and watched wounded soldiers come to the mountains for peace and healing. When the sisters caught lice, Mijo cried as they cut off all her hair. Tutun did not.

Mijo met Adriaan van der Bijl at a university in Paris. After she agreed to go to Indonesia with him in 1960, he built her a house reminscent of a Swiss chalet. Mijo hung garlic from the rafters and baked pies in the wood-burning oven. A turkey that disliked foreigners guarded the front yard, and in the outhouse, snakes curled around the toilet seat.

Four children were born.

Opa's wanderlust took the family to the Netherlands, to France, and finally to the United States when his children were old enough to attend high school. In Erie, Pennsylvania the six of them lived in a double-wide trailer through one bitter winter before he decided that he wanted to return to the jungle; its pull on him was unbelievably strong.

We blame our families for seeing us as mere extensions of their lost desires and dreams, but more often we are the ones who limit their stories by viewing them through the fish-eye lens of our own. Sometimes I think it was "away" that called to my grandfather, not the tropics. My father has certainly responded to the same summons, as have I. There is something to be said for adventures purely geographical, for a steadfast devotion to wandering. 

When we say goodbye, I hug my family gently. I am crossing an ocean, but it is the hair's breadth between us when we embrace that separates us most. We will not see each other for at least a year.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Haruki Murakami. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Oneness" - Many Mansions (mp3)

"Bright Bliss" - Many Mansions (mp3)

the view from my grandparents' house in mapnduma, indonesia

photo by carrie schneider

In Character

by STEPHANIE ECHEVESTE

I wear headphones tightly around my head, letting Jefferson Airplane explode, blocking out everything in a calm coolness, just to keep them from happening. Revelations can be scary and life-changing. Or they can be subtle and intriguing. Sometimes they are both.

I didn't change my seat; it just happened that he was sitting there to my right. Looking at me. Staring at me. Not in an earnest or creepy way, just looking intently at my face, at my features. I must have smiled because he suddenly started talking.

"Do you speak Spanish?" he said. I nodded, confused by the question but not worried enough to get up and move to the other side of the train car. I do speak Spanish, barely, so at first I just answered him in Spanish, but then he kept talking to me and I was too tired to listen and respond correctly. Instead I tried to locate my stop, held my purse and luggage tight as if to prove my security, but then quickly felt guilty in my solitude. He knows I am alone, I thought. He can tell by the way I am clenching my hands around the various straps, by the way I am staring straight ahead and trying to blend in, the way I am sitting on the edge of this subway seat without anyone else by my side.

"Where are you from?" he asked and I, having turned back to face straight ahead after I inadvertently smiled in his direction, turned to my right, then made a slight twist even further and asked "I'm sorry?" pointing my good ear, the left one, towards his mouth to better hear his voice. I don't know why I made the effort.

"Where are you from?" he repeated patiently, still staring intently, gently, at me. I thought about lying, but what difference did it make, I was leaving anyhow.

"San Francisco," I muttered, in a forced Spanish accent, suddenly conscious of his insistent gaze and, more embarrassingly, that my answer, judging by his facial expression, was incorrect, not the one he was looking for. I get this all the time. Most men I meet think I’m more exotic, more foreign, more interesting than I think I really am. And when – if– the men I fall in love with realize that I am actually that interesting, they get scared and run away.

My dental hygienist once told me my name wasn’t exotic enough for me. I asked him what kind of name would be exotic enough and he said Esmeralda. I thought about the Disney film featuring Esmeralda and felt unsettled. She is the one that I look most like, with her olive skin and her dark voluminous hair, her big bright eyes and her small stature. Her gypsy-ness. Is that what I am to people? They look at me and the only thing they can pull from popular media is a Disney character?

I am exotic-looking in that I am not white, nor am I easily identifiable. Every time I am on public transportation people ask me the ‘where are you from’ question. They don’t ask me because they want to know; they ask me because they want to confirm what they already think they know.

I am often claimed to be Indian, Brazilian, Persian, Middle Eastern, Columbian, or Italian. People have gotten angry at me for not submitting to their assumptions, saying things like “You are, you are from there! You have to be!”. They think they know where I came from, they think they’ve got my look all figured out.

He chuckled, and then said, through a big grin, "No, I mean where are you from?" He emphasized the word with a slight nod of his head as he said it.

"San Francisco," I said, with a bit more strength, clear American accent this time, trying to prevent the inevitable. He just looked deep into my eyes until he pulled out what he wanted to hear. Like a dirty little secret he already knew.

"Oh," I submitted, in an effort to end the exchange as quickly and painlessly as possible, "you mean, where are my ancestors from?" I supplied an easy path for a truthful response.

"Yes," he nodded, like a knowing sage, like a man who usually gets what he wants.

I paused for dramatic effect. "Mexico." This feels like a lie. I have only been to Mexico on vacation and service trips. I have no family there and don’t even know the areas of my ancestors.

photo by carrie schneider

The first time I went to Mexico was on vacation with a friend’s family of Mormons. I was one of many kids, but I was the only one whose passport the border patrol checked closely, both ways. The second time I went to Mexico, to a small island off of Cancun to clean the beaches and paint brightly colored murals at local schools, there were little girls constantly swarming around me. Braiding my hair, asking about my bathing suits and my lip gloss. I asked an advisor why they followed me around and he said clearly, “You are like their Barbie. You look like them, but you’re American. You have everything they want, but will never have: opportunity.”

I resumed looking at the tiny red dots, glowing brightly before they disappeared, swift and smooth, like our train car through the very places spelled out above each flare. Subways are like little spaceships, I thought, little tin cars riding through the galaxy. When will this end?

He didn't understand that I had ended the conversation, and instead asked me if I was married. I turned to him and said without expression, "No."

My stop was next and I impatiently sat, tensing up in anticipation of my escape. He asked for my phone number and I refused.

"Why?" he questioned, innocently.

"Because I live in San Francisco," was my lame response.

"So what," he said, "I'll call you, in San Fran, why not?"

I could not think of a good reason why not, so I just sat still and looked straight ahead, trying to force the red light to black out with my intense stare, more theatrically than faithfully. I thought about all the men that have asked me for my number. There have been many. Some have actually called. The ones I’ve dated are the ones I had to call first. Maybe this is a sign.

He asked me for a pen, so he could give me his number, and I said I didn't have one, even though I knew that I did. I always carry a pen in my purse, maybe subconsciously because I sometimes need it to write down the phone numbers of guys I meet who don’t insist on giving me their numbers.

I remember interning in college for an amazing woman who once told me that you should never propose to a man. She had proposed to her first husband; it did not end well. Only now do I fully understand what she meant. Don’t be the man in a relationship. Real men just cannot take it.

"I'm just a nice Jewish guy," he said and I figured he probably was. He asked me for my name and I lied. Generally, when lying about my name, I call myself Samantha. I use this name because it starts with the same letter as my real name and is approximately the same length; it is equally bland and doesn’t give anything away. It is also the same name as my favorite American Girl doll, whose books I read religiously. Though as a girl I was only given Josefina, the Hispanic one.

Of course, when I got off, he got off, I convinced myself that this must also be his stop, but I knew he was probably just following me. Despite my weak rebuff, he proceeded to carry my luggage down the four flights of stairs we had to take to get on the A, the only way I knew how to get to JFK. He was inescapable. He stopped on the platform when I stopped. I tried to believe that he must be going the same direction, to the airport, sans luggage.

And for a minute, or a fleeting moment rather, I thought about what would it be like to be married to this man. To softly kiss his yearning lips and rub his balding head. To have his children and come home to his embrace. It probably would feel the same as marrying any other man, give or take. Belonging to someone, being the wife of someone, being an adjunct member of a sanctioned ritual.

Out of habit, I pulled out my blackberry to check the time. His face lit up and he started to give me his number. I said, “Oh no no no.” Again he asked why not and I finally said what I should have said all along. "Because I don't want to talk to you."

I said it with a newfound confidence, loud enough for him to know I was serious and for people to turn and stare. His face melted of quick yet poignant contortions - first disappointment, then sadness, then anger. I just watched, standing my ground. I felt how I always do when I reject men, powerful and surprised at my power. Powerful because it is up to me to decide who I talk to and who I ignore, who I let into my life and who I tell to leave me alone. Not remorseful in the slightest, even if my declaration was long in coming. Even after I'd been handled, sought after, followed, fucked. Then, as quickly as it had begun, he disappeared into the crowded platform of strangers and I was left alone.

Stephanie Echeveste is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and twitters here.  

Photos by Carrie Schneider. You can find her website here.

photo of the author by jason van horn

You can find our Saturday fiction archive here.

Archie & Friends

by YVONNE GEORGINA PUIG

One morning Archie wakes with a pain and discovers that a nest of snakes has sprung from his heart. He throws the snakes out the window and watches till they slither out of sight. Once he can no longer see them, he believes them gone, and returns to his sleep.

In the morning Archie finds more snakes sliding out from his heart. He calls his friend Abel for help. Abel is a hermaphroditic half-man, half-bear with a fumbling demeanor, glasses, long black hair, and a hollow hole where his mouth should be, through which you can see clear through his head. Abel likes to entertain Archie by balancing shot-glasses inside the hole in his face. They fit perfectly.

Given the hole, Abel acts out his suggestion to Archie about the snakes. He gestures with his wild hairy arms that the snakes must be beheaded. He scribbles on a pad, “Snake, get a hoe!” Archie should yell, “Snake, get a hoe!” every time he finds snakes leaving his heart, and Abel will come running. To prove his skill, Abel runs down into the garden, retrieves a hoe, and hacks off the head of every snake till the floors are streaked with cold blood.

Archie feels grateful he has such a good friend. He spends the day pruning his olive tree, admiring the long narrowing valley at his feet, brown as toast in winter, emerald rich in summer, and now, in spring, something in between. He forgets all about snakes.

The following day the snakes spout from his heart like the guts of a geyser. “Snake, get a hoe!” he cries. Abel arrives with his hoe and begins hacking. Another friend, Paulene, comes along. She wears a long paisley dress, torn up black tights, and carries a portable boom box. She picks up the snakes, and coos to them, “I’m sorry honey baby,” before handing them off to Abel. When the snakes are all dead, Paulene turns on her boom box, Abel hands around his shot glass, and the three friends have a dance party, splashing their feet in the puddles of blood. Abel gets so drunk he falls over like a tree. Paulene just keeps dancing. Archie is angry he has to clean up the mess.

In the morning, to apologize, Abel sends over a gift basket full of pleasant-smelling body deodorants and room sprays nestled in a bed of green paper grass, with a card. Sorry. Archie is touched.

A few weeks pass without snakes. It seems the three friends have gotten rid of the pests for good. They are proud. Archie spends his time outside, doing pull-ups from the branches of his olive tree, practicing his harp, sleeping soundly without dreams, and dancing at Paulene’s dance parties. They go on a vacation to the city, where they drink sitting on benches, and pass by museums. Paulene doesn’t like museums because she gets confused by her reflection in the picture glass. Abel has a gland under his hairy arm which excretes cash; the nights are long and lavish, and in the mornings they are hoarse from talking into people’s ears. Life is fun.

When the snakes return, Archie shoots out of bed grasping his chest. His heart vomits snakes. He tries to scream, “Snake, get a hoe!” but he gags on the words. A snake hangs from his mouth like a long black tongue. He pulls the snake, out and out and out, it is so long, until finally he can speak. He calls Paulene. She will provide comfort. Paulene arrives with muffins and milk, and rubs his back. “Those snakes are so mean, don’t pay attention to them,” she says. “Poor Archie, honey baby. They attacked you!” Paulene tucks him into bed.

Two angels named Arthur and Mabel appear to him in a dream. They are children, twins. They stand in a classroom acting out parts in a play, but Archie can’t hear their voices. Mabel gets close to Arthur and says lots of things and moves her arms around and sometimes points at Arthur. Then Arthur does the same. He says lots of things and tosses around his arms and points. Then they calm down. Mabel puts her head on Arthur’s shoulder. They hug. After a time, they look right at Archie, who is not in the classroom, but watching from the place in his brain which feels, and raise their eyebrows as if to say, see? Archie tries to turn off the dream, but suddenly he can hear them, and they know his name... Archie?  they call, in small, eager voices which he pretends not to hear. Archie?

He wakes frustrated. Those angels disturbed his sleep! All day he sees their faces in his fingertips while he strums his harp, in his olives as he prunes, in his biceps as he flexes. He calls Abel and Paulene. Over beers they all agree, the last thing he needs are little angel children bothering him during his rest. Who do they think they are to ask him questions? Do they expect something from him? How dare they! Paulene scratches Archie’s head. “I’m so proud of you for ignoring them,” she says. Abel stands by with the hoe over his shoulder in case of snakes, and nods. No, Archie definitely doesn’t need that. He needs a dance party. 

Yvonne Georgina Puig is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her website here.

Team Spirit

by SARAH WAMBOLD

The line was already three deep in front of the beer cooler at Casey’s convenience store in Cedar Rapids the Monday afternoon I drove to Iowa City. It was a gray day, which was unremarkable in itself, though it had also begun to rain, explaining the early line for Bud. There were whiskered cheeks and drawn out eyelids on those who waited before me but I knew that the rain played very little part in their or my own decisions for early booze that afternoon.  

When my part in the beer-buying routine came, I shamelessly grasped the cooler handle and pulled down a beer. I had arrived at my childhood home five days earlier, and realized that being back in Iowa enabled my drinking like nothing else. A majority of my visit home was supposed to be spent with family and the few friends whom I still talked to, but mostly everyone drank alone.

Our deepest secret is that we’re all exactly alike. This is also what we draw the most attention to. Before I left Texas for home, a coworker tried her best to act as though she didn’t realize this, as though she had never considered something like team sports before and asked me about being a synchronized swimmer. “How does that happen?” she asked.

Here is how it happens: a group of swimmers — usually women — dance in the water. Sometimes the swimmers are upside down, with their legs straight up where their heads should be and they might bend one knee and then Kick! Kick! Kick! several times with the tempo of the music and then Slap! Slap! Slap! their legs on the surface of the pool so that it makes a cloud of exciting splashes that quickly clears to reveal eight or ten pretty little heads, smiling amid sharp elbows bent to perfection like the corners of a star. The group moves together across the pool. The music can be heard beneath the surface. It is pleasing to the eye.

I left the convenience store and followed a caravan of cars along the county road. The interstate would have been the more direct route, only full of cars less familiar with the territory. I stayed with those accustomed to the place, those who needed to stop every mile to decide whether or not they should go on. During that time of year the earth gave the illusion that it was drenched and the air above it felt like a solid weight on everyone. When I’m home we relieve this tension immediately by falling into line with each other’s worst habits and spilling similar truths about our character along the way. I took quick gulps of my beer in between the raindrops on my windshield. It splashed across my car.  

I arrived in Iowa City buzzed and wet along with everybody else. I stopped at a streetlight in front of the pool where I used to practice.  At my house, I had paused in front of a mirror to admire myself in the swimsuit I had worn during that time as a synchronized swimmer. The suit fit better now than it had then but I remember the way I used to feel in it, fat with a sparkle. That discomfort was absorbed by my team who were supposed to look like me, at least in style if not in body. Most of the team had never actually seen synchronized swimming before. Mercifully, there were a small number of us who had already learned the technique and my small town Fourth of July routines were more than enough background to be considered one of the best swimmers.

We attempted to teach the others how to scull and log roll in a simultaneous effort to appear pretty. The prettiness was impressive even though we hardly ever stayed that way for long. The same muscles that got tired in the water also steered me back to it, but now I was safely afloat in my car. Iowa is full of long drives that are beautiful but you will get bored. Stopping for a drink can put you back on track. When you do it enough, you learn how to put the two together.

Synchro is first practiced out of the water using our arms to represent our legs until we have the choreography memorized. Then we add the music and then we add the pool. At first you look at your teammates to make sure you are together but mostly you use a count to hit it, like a regular dance routine. After a while everyone just knows when to do things.

In Iowa City I looked for a place to park and failed to find one, so I kept circling the blocks with the beer between my knees. I swallowed the last bit of sourness on a street where I wished I could have parked. It was brick and curvy, a place I wanted to get out and walk on, maybe run into an acquaintance. But it was still raining and everything was too neatly packed in. I realized I couldn’t have squeezed in anywhere, no matter how small I’d made myself become.

In hindsight I think just I needed attention. I needed to prove I could be successful in college because in class no one was recognizing my efforts. Sports are something my family does really well. Team sports in particular where you can feel important and modest at the same time. We know how to keep our problems from affecting anyone else. My parents were happy I was involved with sports again, something they knew how to talk about. My mom even took part in sewing decals onto the suits for our performances. Our conversations about synchro made me feel close to her the way talking on the phone feels close despite the machinery.

I settled on waiting out the rest of that afternoon’s rain at a bar on the edge of town near the interstate that will take you across the Mississippi River if you let it. The parking lot was full of Oldsmobiles and Chevys but oddly, the bar was empty except for a trio of regulars at a table in the middle. No glasses were raised when I entered, only eyes. I ordered a beer and sat down with my book at table in the back. When I glanced up at the trio, one of them was smirking at me. I could have smiled back but why bother, I thought and drank as fast as I could.

You can drive anywhere in Iowa City half sober and be mistaken for a student or visiting professor’s assistant from some more understood place. You become a part of something you no longer know anything about. When I finally found a parking spot behind The Sanctuary where I was meeting my friends, a man asked me if they were still checking the meters. I shrugged. I knew they were. You never forget that in a town where no one wants you to stay too long and its useless to tell people that.  Inside the restaurant, I ordered a ginger ale and felt out of place. I moved toward the back and found one of my friends reading Clan of The Cave Bear at a table by herself. Our other friend came in from the rain without a coat.  I felt more comfortable and ordered a glass of wine.

We still remembered our old routines, our history almost too present in our conversations. But that’s why we were together at that moment. When we imagined each other’s lives, we hadn’t been too far off from where we thought they’d go. On the surface we were all together and even below it where we looked different we were still kicking at the same level. There were moments where each of us fell behind: career, relationships, drinks. Like the team I had been a part of, our performance didn’t matter. When I departed later that night, I promised to keep in touch and took the interstate straight home, ready to leave Iowa the next day. I thought about my coworker who seemed surprised that she even had a question for me, let alone that I had an answer for her. But that is how it happens.

Sarah Wambold is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here. This is her first appearance in these pages.

"Call a Doctor" - Karen Mantler (mp3)

"Waiting" - Karen Mantler (mp3)

Bannermen

by DICK CHENEY

The time between when you make your wish and when it is granted comprises everything. As a mere hooligan who only cared about the marginal income tax rate, I did not understand this, so I would keep on wanting the thing. To stop needing to do whatever it is — sleep, eat, summon a dark spirit — is incredibly difficult, but if you do not stop, then afterwards you end up discarding your heart's desire. If you really wish something, you must have it then and now or not at all.

My wish was for Westeros to become alive. Sadly, I wished this in 2007.

What do you do with a show after you kill off its best characters? Without the considerable presence of myself and the last president in the public discourse, The Nation has resorted to slandering black people and mocking Mormons. ("Why Can't We Make Fun Of Mormons?" If you have to ask, you're probably not a liberal magazine.) Sure, my jabs about Katrina vanden Heuvel having two silver spoons embedded in her sizable cheeks are all in good fun, but when you look to who benefits, you can see that Victor Navasky's secret plan is for Romney to be elected. It means his entire bottom line.

The deaths of Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon were also bad business. Not quite Scarlett Johanssen when she's Lorraine Bracco-ing a Norse God bad, but horrible nonetheless. Unlike in The Avengers, where they kill off even incidental characters with gaudy, funereal music, the HBO series felt the need to stay faithful to the novels on which they were based. And everyone dies. Hopefully they haven't read A Dance of Dragons, because there is still a chance to get this right.

She's going through a thing right now

Try watching Game of Thrones with someone who isn't emotionally invested in whether Arya Stark lives or dies on her journey up the King's Road. It's just a series of increasingly disturbing scenes; actually the show is a deep departure from the novels where a twenty page chapter was spent leading up to said scene. Here we just get: rats crawling into men's bodies, the theft of teenage dragons in onesies, the slaughter of babies, the rape of Khaleesis, the austere birth of a shadow. Everyone in the Seven Kingdoms possesses a mid-sized or larger tongue.

The real problem is the focus on the two most boring families of the Seven Kingdoms, the Baratheons and the Greyjoys. The Baratheon's squabble/Clash concerns two feuding brothers, one gay and one impotent, who seek to inherit their oldest brother's birthrights. The words of House Baratheon are "Ned Stark died for this?"

tyrion is peeking during at lease 18 percent of all his screentime

The Greyjoys are somehow worse, if this is even possible. I hate you Theon Grejoy. You look like a jack-in-the-box, you can't act worth a shit, and you didn't even say goodbye to Robb Stark.

The words of the Greyjoys are "incest boating." The ancestral home bases of the Greyjoys are the Iron Islands, and if it did not look so glorious, the scenes set in these environs would be even more execrable than they already are. The set design in Game of Thrones borders on magnificent. The show must cost twelve fortunes. You can easily watch the show without the volume on and get the basic point.

"I came from nothing." "That's the sixth time you've said that."

Game of Thrones uses the word 'only' a lot. At some point, you begin to doubt the singularity of the subject. The dialogue mostly concerns the following:

"Remember our words."

"It was only a dream."

"I am only a maid."

"It is my duty."

Ser Loras, I'm coming!!!

"I cannot, my lord!" (He can.)

"He has to pay the iron price."

"It is only my duty."

"I am your king!"

During a recent episode the takeaway point from seven straight scenes was, "You can't avenge him from the grave." Because most of Game of Thrones' compelling characters have already died off or are about to, much time has been dedicated to establishing new villains. The process is long, and there are a lot of them. Littlefinger actually seems like a super guy compared to most, and young creature playing Sir Loras is a star in the making.

But that's the only thing marking time between when a twee Tyrion is twinkling like Santa's elf about some decision he's going to make that will turn the tide of war. How lovely to imagine how many bannerman will be consumed by the wildfire. In the North, Jon Snow is contemplating throwing a bone to one of the maids from Downton Abbey. It's hard to know who exactly to get behind.

My disgust for the Onion Knight knows no bounds. He can't even read. It's laughable.

you kowtowing little maggot

Someone needs to do a theatrical release of all the Arya scenes. See you later.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to this Recording. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Magic City.

jon snow is the only one permitted a pet for some reason

"The Lost Buoys" - Clock Opera (mp3)

"Move to the Mountains" - Clock Opera (mp3)

Ways to Forget was released on April 23rd.

inside The Nation's editorial offices

Goodbye Station

by LUCY MORRIS

I was up at Grand Central the other day and walked by the line of airport shuttles on 42^nd Street, where I more than once deposited different boyfriends and where they more than once deposited me. I remembered in an instant the individual goodbyes we exchanged and the looks in their eyes — green, green, brown, brown — in those moments, and seeing my own eyes — blue reflected back in them.

That was all very good and edifying in its own way: there are nuances of life you are unable to sense until you’ve intertwined yours with someone else’s for some period. But none of it was as good and edifying as what’s been happening the last few months: there are just as many nuances you are unable to sense until you’ve made your life solely yours, assembled a set of routines and rituals and plans for which you alone are responsible.

I want to say all of this comes as a surprise but I’m afraid it doesn’t. I think deep down I always suspected it could get better than those greetings, those goodbyes, whatever pleasures came in between.

This is not to say I assumed it actually would.

+

For a while late last decade, Micah and I lived out at the southernmost tip of Brooklyn in a house crowded with other people’s furniture. We were legally prohibited from painting the walls or getting rid of the excess of knick-knacks because of some issue with the original owner’s will. It was a material abundance we were too young to deserve, to know what to do with. Sometimes when we didn’t want to do the dishes we’d go to the basement to dig out the silver cutlery of the elderly woman who had lived — and died — there before us.

I was too small for the size of our house, for the seriousness of Micah’s intentions, but maintained a steadfast ignorance of these facts, a quiet campaign of avoidance that I assumed was essential to all relationships. During the years we were together, I hardly went out at all, as if I was afraid that seeing what else and who else was out there might make it impossible to go home again.  In the end, it turned out I was right. Once I did start going out and seeing what else was there, I could not return to that house near the Verrazano, to Micah’s overwhelming affections, to our bed with the misshapen blue sheets we struggled to fit to the mattress each morning.

When I moved out, I found that everything I owned fit into the back of an SUV. This confirmation of my material compactness should have been a relief but instead I found it alarming, as if it indicated some other insignificance or inexperience. It seemed that in the absence of a love that had swelled up into all the corners of my being, into all the hours of my day, I was highly portable, my existence in one place — or with one person — more or less temporary.

Having a major space in your life suddenly vacated is no rarefied tragedy: it happens to most people, and likely more than once. But it takes a long time to fill that expanse inside you again, the minutes and habits and parts of yourself that used to be shared. This did not bother me then and it does not now: it’s a fact of a life in which you choose to love and I would not choose another kind.

+

The appeal of what came next was not that it was better — I knew from the start it wouldn’t be — but rather that it wasn’t as big, that it would in fact be so small, so insufficient, I could start restocking my life with other things again. I took long walks alone around the northern edges of Prospect Park the summer after I left. Everything felt simultaneously new and rusty: a rerouted commute on the same trains, the choreography of cooking old meals in a new kitchen, pacing unfamiliar streets until they became known. I was suddenly aware, too, that there was now a whole variety of experimental forms of pleasure available to me, minor and major, risky and not.

One of these, located somewhere on the axis of minor and risky, was Jonah. If there can be a single explanation for the trajectory of any love, it goes like this: it’s fun until it isn’t. Jonah was no exception.

The last time I recall feeling fondly towards him, early one evening in late summer, we were outside drinking Red Stripe and playing Scrabble. Jonah won the game by a huge margin and then confessed to cheating throughout, but with a grin I had noticed he employed specifically in instances where he wanted his behavior excused, not just with me but with everyone: his friends, family, employers, store clerks. It was an effective expression — humbly crooked but with eyebrows raised as if to say, “How could you not forgive me?” — but once you caught onto it, it was hard not to observe the frequency with which it appeared, and then not to wonder why he was constantly in need of forgiveness, or doing things that required it, however trivial.

I allowed him this for the reason I allowed him many things: it made me wonder. But after a while, to no one’s surprise — including my own — wonderment ceased to be enough, started, in actuality, to seem like an absurd premise for spending time with someone. We continued to become less tender to each other, until we were only capable of being pleasant after we had sex — although during the act we both managed to persist with our minor cruelties.

On another outdoor night, one of the last we spent lodged against each other in the hammock with string imprints forming on our cheeks, a few bats swooped down near our heads and we yelped simultaneously. I remember how embarrassed we both were in the moments afterward at our show of fright. In the whole history of bad things people have done to one other there is no accounting for what we choose to be ashamed of. There is also no accounting for what we choose to forgive.

On that same night, after the bats, I recall whispering, “I love you,” in the way I now can see many people do, when they have run out of other things to say to each other, or stopped looking for more precise ways of relating. But I knew as I said it that it was the only time I had ever lied about loving someone, and although I have done many other things wrong since — left a whole trail of different errors in my wake — I have never again done that.

+

Peter’s bed was so big I could lie across it horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and still not reach the edges. I was very tired when I first arrived in it, but simultaneously having a lot of trouble sleeping. The exhaustion was a broad one, an encompassing uncertainty that made me lethargic and unproductive during the day but also unable to put my mind to rest when I turned off the lights. Peter’s main allure at this particular moment was that his sleep schedule was compatible with mine. We spent three weeks staying up all night talking and then more than a year trying to replicate the intimacy of those weeks, and for the most part, to everyone’s surprise — including our own — we actually succeeded.

In the months I spent camped out in his attic apartment, I rarely brought a change of clothes with me or used his shower, but I was closer to him than I’d ever been to someone else. As happens when you feel unchallenged in other aspects of your life, I rerouted my energies into conducting the relationship as a kind of experiment, testing out behaviors like jealousy and anger, from which I had so far mostly abstained. I had a hypothesis, which I announced to him often, that the ability to exercise these latent emotional muscles was proof of a deeper bond. This was met with minimal reception and was also never proven correct or incorrect, but it was certainly facilitated by the fact that we could sleep in the same bed after arguments without even noticing the other person was present.

Late in winter we both got sick for a month, shared a Neti Pot, let cough drop wrappers and Advil bottles and Kleenex pile up around us. We watched movies to rest our voices but could never make it through one without pausing to talk. Then we got better; it got warm. On weekday afternoons we went to a public water park to float down the lazy river while listening to the oldies station, toes hooked around each other’s tubes to keep from drifting. By then I had begun to worry that the lazy river days were symptomatic of something bigger, that Peter was in some abstract sense slow moving and was reducing my rate of acceleration by proxy — I would have generally preferred to swim laps — but our conversations were actually so rapid I could never figure out where to stop them.

I knew well the sheets on the cot that served as his couch; he slept there, not in his bed, when I wasn’t around. When I talk to him these days, I know he is lying on that cot, and I feel guilty — and then I don’t — for the excess of my own bed, the room I now have to spread out, how I wouldn’t exchange it for anything — or anyone — anymore.

+

The month or two that Ryan spent pursuing me, I spent much of my time hiding out in a large store in the Flatiron District where my cell phone got no reception. There I could thumb through racks of dresses I’d never wear and delay confronting his attempts to win me over. I put it off not because I didn’t enjoy them, but because I did, a great deal, and this was so unfamiliar a sensation to me, so unlike my customary ambivalence that I found it almost physically uncomfortable. To convince myself it was a good use of my time, I usually needed a drink in hand when I called him, leftover party gin in leftover plastic party cups I stacked on my windowsill after we hung up.

On New Year’s, after the countdown and the kiss, we locked ourselves in the bathroom at a party to take a nap. The tiles on the floor were the same as the ones in my mother’s house; my eyes blurred as I studied them. I slept with my head on Ryan’s hip. The rivets of his jeans left an imprint on my forehead.

Some time later we crash danced around my tiny bedroom, unsettling my precarious piles of books, knocking the cheap garment rack that served as my closet at an angle. We had a lot of fun together and not much else, which was the kind of less consuming experience I had believed I wanted but turned out was probably constitutionally incapable of. We fell asleep on top of the covers, this time with his chin on my shoulder, and in the morning we had sex.

“What do you want to do today?” Ryan asked afterwards, pulling on a t-shirt, and in response, without thinking even for a second, I said, “I think we should break up and also we should go to the Met.” Which is exactly what we did. Standing side by side in the American Wing, it was like nothing had ever happened, which seemed like a good sign. But generally this — the suggestion that nothing has changed, when things substantially have—is actually the deadliest sign of all.

Afterward he called me from California to say he wished I was there, which was what we both seemed to think I wanted to hear, but in that moment I realized it was not, that I did not in fact want to be in California at all, I wanted to be where I was: slightly but forgivably late for dinner with a friend across town, sprawled on my bed staring into the apartment across the street. This was a sight I now confronted more than any one person’s face and in truth I found it, in its total impenetrability, more compelling than the eyes and features I used to examine so often. Ryan said he had to go at the exact same moment I did. “I’ll call you later,” he said, and he didn’t, and I was surprised to discover how relieved I was by this, how much more I immediately liked him knowing that we were no longer in any way obligated to each other.

By now I hardly had any real obligations to anyone beyond whomever I promised to meet for a drink, go on a walk with, have over for a meal. I had expected to feel unmoored in the absence of a major commitment, but instead I felt flush with time, the very best kind of currency. I dispensed it freely to the people whose company I most appreciated, and in a very limited way to everyone else. I found this significantly more fulfilling—in reality it made me far less lonely — than I had when all the free hours of my day were accounted for, pre-allocated, in large part, to someone else.

+

On the days when the past sneaks up on me in a song or smell or unanticipated flash of nostalgia, on those occasions when I cannot help looking back, it is difficult not to be upset with myself for how I spent the first couple years of this decade and the last few of the previous one. I was frivolous with my time and money and body and energy during what could feasibly be the only period in my life when my time and money and body and energy are wholly mine and unshared.

By some combination of fortune and miracle, I managed to remain employed the whole time, avoid major financial trouble, and not get pregnant, in spite of expending the absolute minimum effort to prevent any of these undesirable outcomes. Perhaps it is as simple as this: there are periods in life when this is the most you can hope for, the absence of select failures, rather than solid accomplishments.

It is good to have this knowledge but what’s better still is exiting that kind of period and entering, by a similar combination of luck and chance, a new one.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Brighton Beach. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Watching the Fires Waltz Away" - Damon Albarn (mp3)

"The Marvelous Dream" - Damon Albarn (mp3)

Blue Islands

by CATIE DISABATO

Grocery shopping is an aesthetic experience. The cardboard boxes built to hold crackers are decorated with designs that the cracker companies hope will make you feel a feeling, then buy crackers. The crackers lead to cheese. The cheese leads to fig jam. Everything I know about advertising I learned from television – certain colors make you feel certain things and what I call love was invented by guys like Don Draper to sell nylons – but I remember vividly when Coca-Cola debuted those mini-cans in the early 2000s. It was all I could do to keep myself from constantly buying them. They were so cute and little and came in Diet.

If you completely fetishize the act of grocery shopping, the way I do, it becomes totally divorced from cooking and eating. It becomes about places and things. Sometimes I manage to leave the house with an idea of the foods I want to cook. More often, I’ll leave the house with a list of grocery stores I want to visit.

I grew up in the southern suburbs of Chicago, which, in the late 80s and early 90s, did not have a grocery store that carried organic meat and produce. My mother was a sort-of ex-hippie and wanted to raise her children on organic meat and produce. We did not have pop, we had Spritzer. We did not have potato chips in the house, we had blue corn chips. All the other kids made fun of the blue chips, they looked so strange. Sometimes, a boy would agree to eat one on a dare, like sometimes a boy would agree to eat a worm on a dare. I would insist that they tasted just like yellow corn chips, but no one would believe it until they had the chip in their mouth and they were chewing. I relished the attention from my classmates, but it was also hard to be the kid with a weird lunch.

To get our organic items, blue corn chips, and Spritzer, my mother trekked into Chicago several times a month to visit the closest Whole Foods, approximately 30 miles from our house. She buckled us into car seats and filled a cooler with ice, to keep the meat and frozen food fresh during the long drive home.

I remember the Whole Foods from the vantage point of a person so tiny the aisles were like long, wide stretches of road and the shelves were the height of one-story buildings. Shelves filled with colorful bags, bottles and boxes, which themselves were filled with things that tasted good. Things I could have and hold and make my own. In an age before my parents give me privacy, food was something I could own because once you eat it, no one could take it away again. My brother always stole my candy; I learned to eat it quickly so it could be mine.

I hated the fish section, which smelled bad and still smells bad. I loved the bulk goods, the tubs of grains, each with their own consistency. I could sense their enticing textures. I wanted to touch them, the way I wanted to touch paintings in museums, to see what the heavy paint felt like when it dried. While my mother ordered fish and meat at the counter, I tried to touch everything. I did not distinguish the Whole Foods from other playgrounds.

On the few occasions my father took me grocery shopping, he took me to the “regular” grocery store (in Flossmoor, Illinois, this was either Jewel Osco, Dominic’s, or Walt’s). My father lead me through the produce section, grazing. He ate green beans and cherries and anything small left out in piles. He taught me to be grazer. When I’m at Trader Joe’s, I visit the free sample stand two or three times. I eat the green beans from the produce section at Whole Foods. I also eat the nuts, candied fruit, and yogurt pretzels out of the dried goods bins. I use the plastic spoons to pour two or three items into my palm and I eat them while filling plastic bags with lentils or red quinoa.

The only distinctive grocery store my father brought me to as a child was Calabria’s, a small Italian grocery store in Blue Island, the south Chicago suburb where my father grew up. Blue Island is primarily a Hispanic neighborhood now, but when my father lived there, all of the families were Italian immigrants. My grandfather, Michael Arcangelo Disabato, was born in a town in southern Italy called Ripacandida. Calabria’s was named after a region in southern Italy so, combined with my family’s town of origin, I sometimes like to think that Blue Island was a town for southern Italians exclusively. No one ever told me this, but my grandfather died when I was eleven and I don’t remember him very well, so I make things up to fill in the emotional gap. I don’t really remember my grandfather’s voice. I don’t remember if he had an Italian accent.

Calabria’s is hard to remember, too. Narrow aisles, wire racks, boxes of pasta – all vague images. In the back, there was an Italian deli, with fresh baked bread in plastic bins. I remember the bread bins. I remember my uncle, also a Michael, and my father making us capicollo sandwiches in my grandparents’ kitchen. My father made mine with mild capicollo and no provolone cheese. My brother, a third Michael, ate the cheese and the spicy capicollo, the way it was supposed to be.

After college, I moved to Los Angeles. Every neighborhood has a farmer’s market and the produce in the “regular” grocery stores (Albertson’s, Von’s, Ralph’s) is as beautiful as the produce in a Midwestern Whole Foods. I’ve been looking for a good Italian grocery store in Los Angeles. I haven’t found one yet because I’m not really looking for a good Italian grocery store, I’m looking for something that reminds me of Calabria’s, and nothing really reminds you of half-forgotten nostalgia. I’m looking for a feeling I never felt in the first place.

Sometimes I go on a private scavenger hunt for a particular item. I once went to three different stores searching for Morningstar Black Bean Burgers, at least half of which are still in my freezer, crusting over with freezer burn. I searched for Edmond Fallot Dijon Mustard for weeks before finding it in a cheese shop in Century City. Now I see it everywhere, winking at me at the butcher shops and the specialty stores.

I’m the kind of person who will drive half an hour out of my way to go to the nearest Whole Foods, because the grocery store near my house does not have the Sea Salt & Vinegar rice crackers that I like to eat while watching Revenge and drinking red wine. The red wine is from Trader Joe’s, because Trader Joe’s is the only place I buy my wine. I’m the kind of person who will drive fifteen minutes out of my way, from one grocery store to another, just to buy one bottle of wine.

Walking the aisles, I feel a sense of calm and control which I so rarely feel outside of the grocery store. I can pretend to remedy my persistent budget worries by cutting costs in each aisle (no nuts, no meat, no pre-prepared salad). I can combat uncertainty by completing a task, nevermind how small the task. The path before me is clear and unencumbered, the goals are modest and attainable, the competition of those goals is imminent. Checkout, paper bags, refrigerator, pantry, done.

Catie Disabato is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Holiday Home" - Catch Bees (mp3)

"Fighters" - Catch Bees (mp3)

Dream of a World Without Pain

by ALICIA PUGLIONESI

Horace Wells was a dentist in Connecticut in 1844 when the circus came to town. Wells watched as an audience volunteer inhaled laughing gas and then “jumped about” violently without feeling any pain. Soon after this, Wells had a fellow dentist pull one of his teeth while he was high on laughing gas, and he too felt no pain. To feel nothing during a medical procedure was unheard of.

Wells lived in a world infinitely more painful than our own, which is painful enough. People tolerated amputations, wounds, festering abscesses, all manner of gynecological and obstetrical misfortunes. Often they took their pain with equanimity because there was nothing to be done. Advertisements that promised painless procedures were a polite fiction papering the surface of a vast sea of futility and resignation. Surgery, when attempted, was a violent struggle.

Both laughing gas (nitrous oxide) and ether were wildly popular in the 1840s as recreational drugs, but Wells proposed that nitrous be put to nobler use as an anesthetic – medicine's first realistic hope for preventing pain. Wells tried heroically to spread the word about laughing gas, preaching that relief from pain should be “as free as the air.” Perhaps because the gas was identified with recreational drug use, doctors didn't take Wells, a lowly dentist, seriously.

There came a moment of truth: in 1844 Wells was challenged to demonstrate his miracle anesthetic before an audience of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital. It would be a tooth extraction, as before. Wells drugged his patient and grabbed the rotten tooth with the forceps. The patient began thrashing and screaming, and pandemonium broke out in the auditorium. The audience shouted “Humbug!” and "This is a hospital, not a circus!" The patient, a large adult male, hadn't received enough laughing gas to numb him.

Wells fled the auditorium, humiliated. His medical career was ruined by the fiasco, but he couldn't give up on the idea of pain relief. He had glimpsed the possibility of a better world; an evangelical spirit drove him. He began experimenting on himself with chloroform, an inhaled anesthetic at low doses and a poison at higher doses, soon becoming addicted. He spiraled into poverty and mental derangement.

One day, in a burst of religious fervor, Wells threw acid at a couple of prostitutes in the street and was arrested. In jail, as the chloroform wore off, he realized what he had done, and in anguish he took his own life. Wells' widow remarked that the discovery of anesthesia had been to her and her family “an unspeakable evil.”

William Morton, a somewhat unscrupulous dental school dropout, was Horace Wells' partner in dental practice from 1842 to 1843 (he rarely stayed in one place for long). While working for Wells, Morton began courting the daughter of a wealthy high-society family; the family refused to let them marry unless Morton quit dentistry and become a “real doctor.”

In short order, he ditched Wells and entered Harvard Medical School in 1844, the same year that Wells took his nitrous-oxide-anesthesia concept public with disastrous results. Morton was sitting in the audience that day; he knew why Wells' laughing gas had failed, and he knew that whoever succeeded at finding a more powerful anesthetic agent would be showered with fame and fortune. Soon after, Morton attended a chemistry lecture where the professor, Charles T. Jackson, demonstrated the anesthetic properties of a gas called ether. Ether was readily available for laboratory use, and Morton began testing it out on patients, performing a painless tooth extraction in 1846.

The scene returns to Massachusetts General Hospital, where two years earlier Wells had suffered his great humiliation. A skeptical audience had gathered for another trial of a supposed miracle anesthesia. Morton etherized the patient, who lay insensible as his skin was sliced open and a tumor cut out from his throat. This was regarded as the first anesthetic surgery - “it's no humbug,” the crowd murmured – and the surgical theater became known as the Ether Dome. Morton dropped out of school for a second time to promote his discovery.

But he wasn't satisfied with introducing pain-free surgery to the world; William Morton wanted his slice of the pie. He refused to reveal the substance that he had used in the Ether Dome demonstration, and filed a patent for an anesthetic that he called “Letheon” (named, disconcertingly, after the river Lethe which circled the underworld of Greek myth). Everyone knew by then that Morton's anesthetic was just plain ether, and his fellow doctors chastised him for trying to profit from the pain of others.

The patent on Letheon was impossible to enforce, and ether went into widespread use, but Morton never gave up his quest for exclusive credit as the discoverer of anesthesia. He dropped dead in Central Park in 1868 after a twenty-year struggle to win recognition. It was a hot day in July; Morton was debt-ridden and under enormous stress. His death from “congestion of the brain” also may have coincided with his reading an article in the Atlantic that credited the discovery of anesthesia to Morton's enemy, Charles T. Jackson.

Charles T. Jackson, a chemist, geologist, and sometime Harvard professor, had trouble letting things go. When Morton, his former student, announced the discovery of “Letheon,” Jackson immediately realized that the idea of ether anesthetic was lifted straight from his chemistry lecture. Here, of course, certain details are fuzzy: Jackson never applied his idea experimentally – it was more of a passing observation – and he never put it on paper or filed for a patent. But he did meet privately with Morton soon before Morton's first experiment; what information passed between them during this meeting is hard to say, though Jackson claimed that he instructed Morton on the surgical use of ether. However, ether only became an anesthetic when Morton began marketing it that way, which Jackson would perhaps never have done, lacking an entrepreneurial streak.

Jackson's specialty, though was bitter scientific priority disputes. He also claimed to have discovered stomach acid, guncotton, and the telegraph, and his questionable conduct in these disputes led his enemies to characterize him as bizarre, eccentric, even psychopathic. Once Charles T. Jackson decided that you had stolen an idea from him, you were not likely to hear the end of it in your lifetime. He had powerful friends and a seemingly inexhaustible zeal for prosecution. However, the anesthesia battle proved too bitter even for Jackson.

In June of 1873, an exhausted and depressed Jackson was walking through Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston. There is a peculiar legend about what happened that day: Jackson supposedly stumbled upon William Morton's gravestone, where he read he inscription: “Inventor and Revealer of Anaesthetic Inhalation. By whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled. Before whom in all time surgery was agony. Since whom science has control of pain.”

Police found Jackson later that afternoon, ranting and incoherent, and shipped him to the McLean asylum in Somerville, where he died seven years later. Although Jackson did go insane in 1873 while walking in Mount Auburn Cemetery, this account of the cause is probably a fabrication.

Wells, Morton and Jackson didn't discover anything new; they were fighting over credit for a novel application of existing substances. It's no coincidence that they all knew each other and shared ideas about anesthetics – they were part of a small coterie of medical men entertaining the new and radical idea that no one should have to suffer to be cured. Even if there was a clear-cut winner (it would be Crawford Long, an obscure Georgia surgeon who started using ether anesthesia in 1842) we probably wouldn't give much thought to these musty would-be-patriarchs who fought so bitterly for a place in popular memory.

It doesn't seem to matter much who discovered what because the idea immediately became obvious: of course we should sleep through surgery and remember nothing, of course the worst can be avoided. The project of eliminating pain entails also eliminating the memory of pain, a sprawling history of helplessness and resignation, and forgetting the misfortunes that made it possible up to the instant of waking. All that's left to Wells, Morton, and Jackson is the perversity of having suffered so much in the name of ending suffering, a raw deal, really.

In 1942, Preston Sturges directed a biographical film about the discovery of anesthesia, which he wanted to call “Great Without Glory.” Paramount held up the theatrical release of the movie for two years, re-editing it into an incoherent slapstick comedy called “The Great Moment." The film was a commercial and critical failure.

Alicia Puglionesi is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Margery Kempe. She tumbls here.

"Strange All" - Thank You (mp3)

"Can't/Can" - Thank You (mp3)

The Climb

by SAM ZESULKA

He had a cassette player and little else. Standing hurt a bit, but only if he stood for a long time. The hours were liminal; scarred by the pain, but not only the pain, the evidence assembled. His place was not here, but elsewhere.

He heard the high voiced lien of his mother. She stood against all else, against the time you know. He only had to know of her to understand the phenomenon. He...could claim to be a part of her no longer.

Siberia was the place which had first occupied his imagination in geography class. He pictured himself at the cleft of some barren hill, peering over an untold wasteland, his fingers trembling. There was never any sun and he was always very cold.

The next year he grew no bigger, his mother's mark on the wall attested to that. But it was nothing, a physical artifice which might be dismissed with the wave of a hand. Inside, he felt himself growing larger and larger. He noticed it was easier to grip the handle of a brush, the width of a frame. If he saw it when he closed his eyes, he would sketch it.

A fist raised and then lowered. The sound of a clinking bell. Who was to say, in the early years? A petunia. A fallen, open tulip. The catch on a purse.

He was absently doodling in a notebook one day. When the bell rang to end class for the day, he cast the crumpled piece of paper into the class hamster's cage. A girl named Artis hurriedly dipped her hand into the straw and snatched the paper out. She turned to him, grabbed his left arm and explained that several days earlier her grandmother died, and why had he sketched her face?

He made an exception. He told her the truth: he had been trying (and failing) to draw a chrysanthemum.

He found that to measure himself by any specific skill was false, and that taken as a sum of parts he represented a disappointing amalgam. He found no sense of place; it did not matter to him where exactly he slept. A creeping similarity distinguished each environ.

Months before his ninth birthday an angel visited him in a dream. The winged being circled him as if to approach but held back. Then the creature's lithe body separated and congealed into a watery film. The next day in school he broke his left wrist.

A claimant. A swollen bow, pressed into service by its unwilling owner. The stars fell from the earth to land on the sky. He saw the crest of a hill until it disappeared into the belt of a hunter. 

While wandering near a cave, he found within a massive bush, a hardened black stone, shaped like a pyramid, smooth on each side and rough where it faced him. Anger and shame filled him.

School was impossible the next year. He could not absorb the inner logic of algebra; it seemed like a specious riddle to him. Geometry was a breeze in contrast. He was not a natural at languages, but three years of collecting coins in his boyhood gave him a considerable advantage over the other children. At the end of the school year, one of his teachers asked to speak with him privately. She was only in her late forties, an age that might as well have been a thousand to him. Before she said what she was going to say, a finger uncurled a sheet of paper and tossed it in front of him. It was a familiar feeling by this point.

Secondary school was twice the size of his last one. A group of older students would kick out the back of his left knee so he would fall helplessly to the ground, until they were all expelled for cheating on a history test. He was relieved, but also even more alone than before.

A circling hawk. The gasp of a pigeon. Hercules straining against something. More tulips than could fill a vase, or a salon, or an amphitheater.

There was, at last, an art class. The first six weeks were occupied solely with drawing. For the first week he painted simple patterns, like those you might find on a quilt. The second week he attempted to replicate simple objects. From memory, he sketched a scalding rod, hot at the tip.

In old age he was given a gift by a patron of a high powered telescope. Each evening after dinner he examined the constellations. If he could not be there, then what did it matter where he was?

Sam Zesulka is a writer living in Brooklyn.

"Magnetic Dub" - Black Devil Disco Club ft. Afrika Bambaataa (mp3)

"To Ardent" - Black Devil Disco Club ft. Nancy Sinatra (Junior Claristidge remix) (mp3)

Reading at Berkeley

I'm knocked out. I mean, I had a glass of whiskey. I said I hope nobody thinks I'm drunk. Man, I was high this afternoon, and I'm just exactly the same way now.

On July 23rd 1965 the poet Charles Olson took the stage at the University of California-Berkeley Poetry Conference, ostensibly to read a few poems. There was always an apprehension among Charles' friends whenever he attempted public speaking during his last years. The full text of Olson's remarks that evening runs over 60 pages, and it must have been evident to everyone in attendance that Olson, while somewhat cogent for him, would have to be dragged off the stage. Olson's talk that night has alternately been called "a tour de force" (by editor George F. Butterick and "an absolute travesty" (by most others). What follows are some excerpts from the text, along with private remarks during intermission transcribed by Zoe Brown.

ROBERT DUNCAN: As I think all of you, or almost all of you, must know, the man I am introducing tonight is visibly a large man. And he has to find in poetry — a phrase came up in a seminar of his: suddenly he was saying he was trying to find a position inferior to language. Every American impulse from the beginning has been to use it right away, and cash in on it, no matter what it was.

What I want to suggest is, if you find difficulties in Olson, they're because that the only thing in poetry for him is going to be found in a struggle, and because his knowledge of language is such that its usability seems everywhere, I keep thinking he'll never find how to take ahold of that so it isn't usable. We're absolutely baffled. But when he does, we have, the rest of us poets, been absolutely baffled. But when he does, we have the rest of us poets, been confronted with some amazing dimension, in which we find the — will "bedrock of poetry" do? I mean, the really resistant thign, the poem.

He has had to occupy an area in history big enough for some spirit size. You know, it's like he's trying to find clothes big enough for him. The spirit which can roam over anything it can imagine, and then imagine one that is still restless because it can't find a space big enough for it to exist in: we, this evening, will attend a poetry of this order.

One thing I find, for those of you who may really find yourself having to go along with something that will leave you feeling like you could have fitted it in a much smaller space and time, the other things he delights in sometimes are really beautiful songs.

And then you discover that, whatever the huge size in space, in time, he occupies, he also occupies beautiful and discrete, almost ordinary areas.

So, may I now get from the back of the room there, Charles Olson, who will take over.

Applause.

CHARLES OLSON: Thank you. It feels like a convention hall. And I never was running for anything, fortunately.

Oh, would somebody loan me The Maximus Poems? I haven't a copy. Thakn you.

Gee, I did it again. I left something in the room. Yeah, that's right. How the hell do you prove what you always...? Hm, wow, that's crazy. That's a funny one. Where the hell did they go? Somebody took 'em. Would by any chance, Robert Creeley, you have — ? Oh here it is. I got it.

I'd like to first read a — thank you, Robert, for that word "song." In the face of the poets that have read here, I have had an experience.

DUNCAN: Charles, would you please put the microphone on?

OLSON: Oh. Did you say that? How do you do this if there ain't...? Just connect...? You see, this is life. I mean, I either am the Hanged Man, or... Where do you put that, like? Where does that go? There's no hole! Where do you put it? You'd better show me, Mr. Baker. Able Baker. You see, security.

Thank you. That's what we got our nation for. That's why, the rest of us are, fortunately, as Mr. Creeley proved last night, free. And then there's really no worry about the land of free, cause it's been replaced. Like Allen did! Instead of drinking to you and me, I'll drink to that, hm?

But I would like to read first what for me was kind of an experience of writing a song. It's called "The Ring Of" and I hope it's, if my memory is right...Mr. Creeley? That you did...?

ROBERT CREELEY: Yes.

OLSON: Yeah, O.K., that's why. I mean that was so much a matter of support that I felt... Here it is.

It was the west wind caught her up, as
she rose from the genital
wave, and bore her from the delicate
foam, home
to her isle

and those lovers
of the difficult, the hours
of the golden day welcomed her, clad her, were
as though they had made her, were wild
to bring this new thing born
of the ring of the sea pink
& naked, this girl, brought her
to the face of the gods, violets
in her hair

Beauty, and she
said no to zeus & them all, all were not or
was it she chose the ugliest
to bed with, or was it straight
and to expiate the nature of beauty, was it?

knowing hours, anyway,
she did not stay long, or the lame
was only one part, & the handsome
mars had her. And the child
had that name, the arrow of
as the flight of, the move of
his mother who adorneth

with myrtle the dolphin and words
they rise, they do who
are born of like
elements.

Hm, thank you. I just learnt it from you last night. OK, we're off. I mean the horse is at least on the track. See if we can win.

I also wrote a poem which I'm sure neither Creeley nor I would include in anything, but I want to read it. I'm going to read three poems first — that one, this one, and then "Letter 9" of the Maximus Poems, which has to do with this same book, this beautiful book, which I love...because that design on it was done — and then I don't know how many years later, enormous years later, I, after Creeley had criticized me and taught me everything one night, when I was burned up that he let a class go to go down to Peek's to have beer, and I thought the whole of Black Mountain was going to fail if we didn't get those windows in before the freeze that night — and long after, he said, "Don't flip your wig, man."

And that made me, that brought me up to time, eh? I mean, he knocked any wig I ever had off my head that night. And it was beautiful, because he knew exactly what he was saying. And he was right. And I was not up — I mean, I was obviously, like they say, not with it, not right. But curiously enough, it was so many years after even that, that I was left alone at Black Mountain, with my wife and son, and with the beach wagon, which Wesley Huss had acquired before we closed Black Mountain, in fact, within three days I had a beach wagon.

So I feel even comfortable in reading what I consider, and I guess everybody else does, a bad poem, which I wrote as a Christmas pageant or something, a poem for Christmas at Black Mountain. Ha ha ha! Because I suppose Allen Ginsberg still thinks I'm Santa Claus. I'd like him to say,"No!" or I'll run you for whatever you — what do I want to run for, Allen?

ALLEN GINSBERG: Read the poem and I'll decide.

OLSON: That's why I'm reading it. It's called "An Ode to Nativity," and I don't believe it's ever been read. Except for this morning, I thought I'd look at it and I liked it, you know how you do. I don't think anybody has ever...By the way, did you reject, did you even bother to consider it, Bob? How far can I come with this tether?

GINSBERG: Go ahead and read it, read it.

OLSON: Oh, I'm going to do it. Look this thing is so bad, I can't ruin it. The only thing I can, as Allen says, is it might turn out to be how it sounded to me today. I guess that's really how it feels for me tonight, or this morning.

All cries.

No.

All cries rise, & the three of us
observe how fast Orion

Naah, that's too poetic.

All cries rise, & the three of us
observe how fast Orion

Jeez I'm looking it all. Big voice... Shit! You see, you shouldn't talk; you should just read the thing.

All cries rise, & the three of us
observe how fast Orion
marks midnight
at the climax
of the sky
while the boat of the moon settles
as red in the southwest
as the orb of her was, for this boy, once,
the first time he saw her whole halloween face northeast
across the skating pond as he came down to the ice, December
his seventh year.
Winter, in this zone, is an on & off thing, where the air
is sometimes as shining as ice is
when the sky's lights... When the ducks
are the only skaters
And a crèche
is a commerciality
(The same year, a ball of fire
the same place - exactly through
the same trees
was fire
the Sawyer lumber company yard
was a moon of pain, at the end of itself,
and the death of horses I saw burning,
fallen through the floors
into the buried Blackstone River the city
had hidden under itself, had grown over...

+

Recorded during the intermission:

OLSON: Allen, I'm just proving that oral poetry exists, O.K.? Ain't I or not?

GINSBERG: It's very good, it's beautiful.

OLSON: Isn't this oral poetry? Isn't this improvisatory, spontaneous poetry?

GINSBERG: All except one thing, when you had the cigarette in your mouth.

OLSON: And what happened? Was that visual?

GINSBERG: Couldn't hear you at the back.

WELCH: We were worried it was backwards.

OLSON: Gee, I wish it were. I needs to be backwards. That extra piece that I needed: I don't need it, I'm drunk on you guys. And I meant it.

WELCH: Hey, don't you have to pee too?

OLSON: Nah, shit pee? I never pee. The reason why I'm not a queen is I don't have to pee to prove that I'm a man. Go pee, Allen. We got over that tonight.

PAUL X: Can I have a cigarette?

OLSON: Of course, it's yours, baby. Isn't that crazy, I should be smoking your cigarettes? Goddamn it, it irritates me, but it also -

PAUL X: A broad gave them to me, so it doesn't matter.

JOHN WIENERS (introducing a girl): Just here visiting.

GIRL: Hello, how are you? I'm enjoying it so much.

OLSON: Awfully nice to see you. Pleasure. I'm glad. Will you kiss me too? You would kiss me, anyhow, but I want you to kiss me in honor, as well, will ya? In love and honor.

WELCH: That was why we did it.

SUZANNE MOWAT: What are you doing?

OLSON: I'm doing just what I ought to be doing, don't you think so?

MOWAT: I don't.

OLSON: You don't? You think I should be reading poetry? God, I got the poems, but -

WELCH: Charles, do you know John Montgomery? Allow me to introduce John Montgomery.

OLSON: I know Stuart Montgomery, the guy who's publishing Ed and me in London.

WELCH: No, he's the guy who talks so funny in The Dharma Bums, that forgotten painter.

OLSON (drinking): That's the last of it, dammit. I had one last slug.

WELCH: Don't you want to give him a drink?

MOWAT: No, I don't think you should.

OLSON: "...and John Montgomery." Let's do this thing the way it's coming out tonight. "Charles Olson and John Montgomery." O.K.? Now give me that shot. You got a whiskey.

WELCH: I brought this for you, but no one told me that you drink.

OLSON: What the hell is that? Just that lousy wine. Well, I'll just go like Jack Kerouac, right straight on to Rot Red. Drinks. It's sweety time. You, you drunken bum, have a shot. And if you don't stop drinking...

WELCH: Yeah, I know, I'm a terrible lush.

+

OLSON: I think the poets are ahead of the scientists now. I know they are. The decadence of the imagery of science is as shocking as James Joyce. I mean, Ezra Pound long years ago returned the presentation copy of Finnegans Wake to himself, with the word "DECADENCE" written over the cover. I mean, that takes guts, the same guts that led him to say, "I thought I knew something." I'd be proud to have been the man in this century... And like, here I am, dragging my ass after Ezra.

Two years ago in Vancouver, what did I do? I tried to read the poems? Now I could, and instead I'm telling you, "Gee I wish they were more." I'm not just avoiding it. I'll be happy to read them. I love some of them. Just like those poems I wrote longer and earlier, I bet they'll turn out to be all right. That's not the point. They're nothing by comparison to what I propose, or what I would dream I might do. Because poets only are worthwhile if they do what they dream. And there's been a few. In fact, the only ones that count are those who want to be, hm, the same in their dream.

last days of the vancouver poetry conference, 1963

And I'm like — let me continue 5, and I'll come back to 9, which I love because it talks about how a book practically is the only goddamn thing that is a dream in a society like this. And do you know it embarrassed me two years ago in Vancouver. I mean, god, Allen an activist, Orlovsky, Dunky, Creeley, everybody that was there, I feel like an old schlumpf from Gloucester. And, in fact, I'd love to read even that crazy "Tantrist sat saw Lingam in City Hall" or something, I mean, a poem I did read, you know, I'd like to read it right now, like that, like that, like.

And just make it like it felt when it was written, that's all. I am a tantrist. But two years ago I was embarrassed, and not because I hadn't been to Buenos Aires. O.K.?

I mean the universe today is a very hard thing for an individual to possess. The whole human race has it. The efficiency of the universe is in our hands. But for any one of us, as what they used to call a private soul, when I protested was a piece of piss at any public wall, in that paragraph, in that opening paragraph of Projective Verse, but you know, it comes out that the private soul — and if I could cry like the cock at the birth of day - which is all I'm doing tonight — that's the only thing that's more than public and private. And like that great thing we've been talking about and we discussed in seminar. Isn't it nice, really? This is the private soul at the public wall. Charlie Olson. Closed verse. Not even bothering to play the music.

I got the music. I mean, it's like scores, Beethoven and all those things, John Keats' letters in Harvard's library. I read 'em. In fact, I wrote a fourteen line sonnet. You know, it's powerful. I was talking to Ed Dorn recently. Probably I shouldn't have eaten supper...

CREELEY: Please read the poems.

OLSON: All right, Bob, I heard you.

July 23rd, 1965

"Keep Your Secrets In Midnight City" - Kill Paris (mp3)

"Too Many Fish" - Karmin (mp3)

Substance Abuse

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

Malcolm Lowry's biggest bout of binge drinking began when his suitcases were lost en route to New York in 1954. His wife Margerie was used to dealing with his inebriation; his other caretaker in the city was David Markson, a young novelist who had written a critical appreciation of Lowry's 1947 novel Under the Volcano. Markson later wrote,

The man could not shave himself. In lieu of a belt, he knotted a rope or a discarded necktie around his waist. Mornings, he needed two or three ounces of gin in his orange juice if he was to steady his hand to eat the breakfast that would very likely prove his only meal of the day. Thereafter a diminishing yellow tint in the glass might belie the fact that now he was drinking the gin neat, which he did for as many hours as it took him to. Ultimately he would collapse — sometimes sensible enough of his condition to lurch toward a bed, though more often he would crash down into a chair, and once it was across my phonograph.

During a subsequent party held in his honor, Lowry pre-gamed by drinking a bottle of shaving lotion. Markson recalled that during the event "suddenly, cupping his hand to his mouth, he began to make sounds that can only be called 'beeps.'"

Lowry's favorite drink was a constantly evolving subject. He was not a mean drunk, particularly, although he was always careless. His constitution was actually state-of-the-art to be able to absorb the kind of damage he inflicted on it and survived. He saw drinking not as an art, or a path to understanding, but an inescapable part of his daily existence. Once Markson opened his eyes in the morning to find Lowry leering, "Do you have the decency to offer me a drink?"

Lowry and Aiken in Spain 1932Through Malcolm Lowry's life, people were always trying to get him clean. If they liked his writing, they were far more inclined to put up with his behavior, which perhaps seems obvious, but the one thing really has little to do with the other. 

When he first arrived in the United States to stay with Conrad Aiken, he carried only a ukelele and a bunch of notebooks.

with conrad aiken 1931

He absolutely despised New York. He wrote,

In my experience — odi et amo — that particular city — it favors brief and furious outbursts, but not the long haul. Moreover for all its drama and existential fury, or perhaps because of it, it's a city where it can be remarkably hard — or so it seems to me — to get on the right side of one's despair.

Acapulco in march of 1946

In his drunken state, he often wrote letters. He would usually start penning screeds to his friends, agents and publishers just when he had approached rock bottom, so they took on something of a desperate tone. Writing to his agent in 1967, he managed, "Please don't say I'm a shit...for not writing more when you have dealt so kindly with me. It's just that my mind won't work. I am having a lot to contend with right now."

Lowry believed that versions of mescal he imbibed might provoke useful hallucinations, although in reality he was making a common error. The drink had nothing to do with mescaline. 

He was capable of getting in any amount of trouble while under the influence. On occasion he would drink himself under so badly that he resorted to asking witnesses if he had been violated sexually. But for the most part his tolerance was high enough that he did not black out completely.

February 1946

It seems stupid, in writing about Malcolm Lowry, to wonder why he drank so often and so much. Yet in his case, alcoholism constituted such a destructive act it almost demands an answer to a silly question.

Douglas Day wrote in his biography of Lowry that "Orally fixated types are prone to excessive drinking. Sons of austere and autocratic father are apt to express their rebellion against that parent by drinking. Guilt and fear, of sexual origin, are likely to express themselves in drinking. Reaction against a rigidly authoritarian religious upbringing may manifest itself in drinking."

March 1947

Day continues, explaining that "Lowry drank not so much because he chose to, as because he had to: from one source or another, he had acquired, by the age of eighteen, enough guilt — sexual and otherwise — and resentment and insecurity to have made it almost impossible for him to be anything but an alcoholic. He must have been an utterly miserable young man."

what became the Calle Nicaragua in "Under the Volcano"

The protagonist of Lowry's most famous work, Under the Volcano, spends about two-thirds of the novel under the influence. Even the book's most dedicated admirers seem to grow tired of this. The Consul's intoxication, at some point, ceases to be charming. He drinks primarily because he is lonely, but also because he is is afraid of sex, other people and the possibility he may be attracted to men.

Of the book Lowry argued that it was "designed, counterdesigned and interwelded that it could be read an indefinite number of times and still not have yielded all its meanings or its drama or its poetry." If only this did not sound like an excuse for his life rather than a strength of his literature.

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

"When Will I See You Again" - Lord Huron (mp3)

"Son of a Gun" - Lord Huron (mp3)