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by MOLLY LAMBERT

One time Alex Carnevale asked me if I wanted to work on a website he was going to start. "What kind of website?" "A web magazine." "Ha ha ha." I said. "A web magazine." Like most human beings in the early 2000s, I didn't take the internet all that seriously, even though I had been using it since I was thirteen and it was certainly an integral part of my life. I agreed to write a couple of things and then we were off to the races. 

new new new new media b/w old old old old guy b/w cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat

Yearbook memories of my time at This Recording include: Alex's insistence on posting cheesecake photos for the first six months while I begged him to stop and tried to explain that it was like Caligula and nobody who wanted to see the nudity and sex in the orgy scenes would pay attention to the dialogue in the other scenes and vice versa. My insistence on submitting early posts to him in all lowercase (what the hell was that about lol), the Facebook movielike moment when we agreed to consistently use millions of pictures to illustrate text. When I saw the Facebook movie and legitimately felt like it was telling me the story of my life after graduating college.

The first time I realized the internet was more important than I had been giving it credit for was on 9/11, when I signed online and somebody told me I had to turn on the TV right away. After approximately a million other thoughts, including thinking that one of my media studies professors was a weirdly insensitive cynical asshole that her first reaction to 9/11 was to immediately throw a tape in the VCR and attempt to dissect how the media portrays catastrophe (narcissism of small differences?) I decided it was important that I had gone online first. "This is the fastest system possible for information delivery for disasters and everything else," I thought "It is going to render traditional newspapers obsolete because they cannot compete with its speed and ability to keep up." Ten million cat memes later, it sure feels like I was right.

an early editors meeting, screencapped for posterity

I only learned to take myself seriously through not taking myself seriously at all. When I think about blogging I think about this Bill Murray quote about how improv at Second City prepared him for SNL because he was so used to dying onstage that he no longer feared death. He no longer feared failure. He will just keep making jokes until one of them gets a laugh. It is incredibly hard to make every day meaningful. But you try!

I'm going off to work for Bill Simmons and his new website. You'll hear more about it soon. This Recording will continue to dominate the internet in the literary small press category while I go on to conquer new markets like large print internet and 3D. I'll continue to rain down tiger blood on inequality and petty mediocrity everywhere. Soon Charlie Sheen will be one of my goddesses and I'll make him paint his face and dance. 

the Archie Comics and Charlie Sheen remake of Dennis Hopper's The Hot Spot

I am handing over the This Recording twitter to Alex and I will be twittering under my own name (mollylambert) from now on. I keep hearing "Sunrise, Sunset" in the sand dunes of my mind. Why is this post so fucking hard to write? It's hard for me to be sentimental because I am such an Agent Scully but I am also so sentimental (Irish).

I've been pretty sentimental lately because I knew this was coming and keeping secrets is hard. Seriously, thanks to everyone who reads This Recording and helped me become the blogger I was always meant to be. Thank you to Will Hubbard for building us such a nice house, and Alex Carnevale for filling it with beautiful interesting things. 

omg so fucking mean and ageist, we <3 u John Ashbery

Thanks to Alex for making me write that pop culture column for the school newspaper originally. Alex Carnevale has a talent for finding good writers and helping them become great writers. He is somewhat aware of his power, but I'm never sure if he actually knows how hard people work to impress him or what a great writer he is. 

I still live here in my archives. I'll always live at This Recording, trapped in the walls and murmuring softly but insistently about GIFs and serialized television dramas. There will always be Kenny Powers mixes and Mad Men reviews. I will float classically in the digital ether wherever I am. We didn't mean to invent new media (yes we did). 

Molly Lambert is (was? fuck) the managing editor of This Recording. You can find her new twitter here. She tumbls here.

Our Novels, Ourselves

This Thursday, This Recording unveils our list of the 100 Greatest Novels. This will likely be the final word on the subject, and a key to the city will be presented to us in the shape of a novel. In order to broaden our horizons, we asked a group of talented young writers and artists to name their favorite novels. This is the first in a three part series.

Tess Lynch

In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien

This is a book about Vietnam. Please, sit down. Come on, it isn't really about Vietnam, it's about – just sit down for one second – the clashing of public and private life, when the demon-like personifications of every horrible thing you've ever done wage war with whatever good parts of you still exist; the plot consciously implodes on itself, leaving you feeling psychologically fractured and with nightmares about killing your houseplants with boiling water while screaming "Kill Jesus," just like you've always wanted.

Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie

Ignore the movie please. This was Beattie's first novel, and my favorite of hers, not only because there's a character in it who spends all of her time in the bathtub like I do, and not only because Sam is the fictional hot best friend I projected any and all fantasies onto during my formative years, but because it's a quiet study of the electrically-charged feeling of being in love operative-word-hopelessly. The desserts she cooked that you miss, the radio songs, the happy hour beers spent bumming. Too true, Ann, too true.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

You know what? Fuck Lolita. I take that back, don't fuck Lolita, she's too young, plus I loved that book. I loved this one more, though. The poem makes me disintegrate with feelings. I'd get all 999 lines tattooed on my face, but then I'd never be able to work in corporate America. John Shade's poem can be a bit of a downer ("how many more/Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?"), so fictional editor Charles Kinbote comes in to offer up some zippy commentary from the imaginary land of Zembla. I thought Kinbote was supposed to make me feel better, that that was his purpose, but apparently Nabokov, in an interview, mentioned that Kinbote killed himself after publishing the manuscript. God, what a downer. I wish I'd never heard that bit of imaginary news; maybe there's no point to anything and I should go ahead and get that tat, do you think it would be pretty sickkk?

The Stand by Stephen King

This is my favorite Stephen King novel, and that's saying a lot, since I never leave the bookstore without some SK representation. The Stand is so long that if you get the uncut edition, you can step up onto it and get the bird's nests off your roof; even still, you feel depressed when you turn the last page. There's nothing like a story that begins with the end of most of humanity and then continues for about 1100 pages, peppered with the lyrically satisfying name Trashcan Man and lots of details about stomachs exploding. Life is gross. Books can be gross. You didn't want to finish those nachos anyway.

Tess Lynch is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her website here.

Karina Wolf

Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin

These days, Melmoth the Wanderer is more an allusion than a perused text. Nabokov named Humbert Humbert’s automobile after the damned nomad; Oscar Wilde took "Melmoth" as a pseudonym, perhaps because of his shared status as eternal outsider. Maturin’s 1820 gothic novel begins with a bequest – a young Trinity student inherits his uncle’s estate and a manuscript, which relates the tale of his ancestor Melmoth, who extended his life by 150 years, presumably by selling his soul to the Devil. The only out from damnation is to find someone to take over the pact. The novel consists of a rococo series of nested vignettes, wherein characters encounter the cursed wanderer, sometimes peripherally. The pleasure (and challenge) of the text is in its stylish excesses.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I re-visited Wuthering Heights when I taught at hokwan, a Korean cram school that aimed to stuff as many five dollar words possible into the minds of the foreign-born students. The odd task of reading Brontë’s novel aloud to a teenage boy (who loved it) made me appreciate its ingenious storytelling along with its elemental feelings. As a child, Brontë endured the deaths of two sisters and in response created Gondal, a detailed imaginary world that she sustained in letters and stories from adolescence to adulthood. Wuthering Heights retains a similarly corrective power; the novel is less a romance than a psychic outcry and self-assertion.

The Witches by Roald Dahl

The best children’s books are clever rejoinders to the early onset of life, primers for how to deal. Roald Dahl’s The Witches retains the violent menace of early fairy tales while offering readers a wry (and controversial) antidote to vanquishing the enemy, a kind of mass witch transformation and cat-led genocide. Dahl retains his spiky humor and incorrectness – also, his irresistibly charming prose. With lovely line drawings by Quentin Blake.

Karina Wolf is a writer living in New York. Her book The Insomniacs is forthcoming from Penguin. You can find her website here.

Elizabeth Gumport

I am too adrift from myself to know what my favorite novels are. If I could tell you that, I could tell you so many things! But like rats fleeing a sinking ship, my former selves keep escaping me. One of the few things I am sure of these days is that I am twenty-five years old, and so like a child I go around insisting on my age. But we can forgive a child for identifying herself by how old she is, since what else would she have done with those months and years except live them? I, on the other hand, ought to have more and deeper moorings. Instead, the first page of D.H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr looks like a mirror: "Lou Witt had had her own way so long, that by the age of twenty-five she didn't know where she was. Having one's own way landed one completely at sea."

Reading St. Mawr, the feeling I had was not of identifying with the character but of being identified by them. I did not “find”myself. I was found, as if by a carrier pigeon bearing a note. A few months later, it was The Wings of the Dove that saw me: James writes that Kate Croy “had reached a great age for it quite seemed to her that at twenty-five it was late to reconsider, and her most general sense was a shade of regret that she hadn't known earlier. The world was different--whether for worse or for better – from her rudimentary readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it.”

My sense of being “found”by these books was heightened by how I happened to read them: St. Mawr did in fact arrive for me by air, in a package from Amazon. It was a gift from a friend – the same friend who several months later would be the one to recommend The Wings of the Dove. A truly personal recommendation shows you something you don't often see, which is the way you hold yourself out to the world. That is what Lord Mark offers Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, when he shows her “the beautiful” Bronzino portrait “that’s so like” her. What matters is not merely what you are like, but that you are like something – that the world knows what you look like, even when you don’t. When shown the portrait, Milly admits she doesn’t see the resemblance.

Knowing that a book exists is one thing, being made to recognize its existence by someone else another. It is the fact of Lord Mark’s showing her the portrait, and not the portrait itself, that so topples Milly: “It was perhaps as a good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in any connexion whatever.”A personal recommendation is not the same as one cast out to anonymous strangers on the internet.

I will try, therefore, to be as specific as possible: if you are my age, self-absorbed, and aimless but not hopeless, you should read these books immediately. Perhaps the figure sketched in them will impress you as your own, and perhaps it will resolve something for you. Sometimes books enter your life at exactly the right moment. It doesn't happen as often as you'd think: like people, they tend to appear too early, when you are too foolish to appreciate them, or too late, when they have been claimed by someone else.

Elizabeth Gumport is a writer living in New York.

Isaac Scarborough

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

Amongst all of the fantasy novels I devoured as an adolescent, Tigana is the only that holds up through the prism of passed years and moderate maturity – going back and rereading it remains the same mind-bending pleasure that it was when I was fifteen. Not only is it – a rarity in the subgenre – genuinely well written, but it does what fantastical writing is truly meant to: it comments on our world today, in a way that would otherwise be impossible. The power of names and naming stuck with me, and if there’s a reason why I today refuse to spell Ashkhabad “Ashgabat” Kay may very well have something to do with it.

Making Scenes by Adrienne Eisen

The basic willingness to describe modern life’s brutality – from lists of food consumed and bulimiacally purged, to the absurdity of what passes today for courtship – sets Eisen apart; her willingness to describe without going somewhere is also laudable. Reading Making Scenes is an experience closest to voyeuristically watching that cute neighbor across the hallway, except that she has begun to leave audiotapes on your doorstep of her – just as you suspected – far too aware and intelligent inner monologue. This voice sticks around.

Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

By and large, Dostoyevsky doesn’t do plot: throughout his works, there are simply long periods of hysterics and contemplation, generally circling around a heinous crime committed in the very beginning of the work. Demons is no different in this respect, but here the hysterics come first, and then the crimes – a set-up that avoids the disappointment with which both Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment end, and one that provides much more space for the author to develop his characters’ private insanities. And when it comes to madness, Dostoyevsky simply has no equivalent.

Isaac Scarborough is a writer living in Kazakhstan.

Sarah LaBrie

The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

A manifesto for young women destined to spend adulthood in a dimension just to the left of reality, the result of not having solidified quite correctly as children. The three teenaged orphans who guide us through Williams’ strange desert are peculiar but not precious, compelling in their very anti-Amelieness. It’s okay to be a genuine girl wacko, Williams tells us: if you’re smart enough to own it, you still get to win.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Fiction writers who start out as poets have an edge when it comes to building faultless sentences. Carson, a Classicist by trade, applies her skills as a translator of Greek verse to a novel about a monster named Geryon and his arrogant sometimes-boyfriend, Herakles. Building loosely on fragments of a poem by Stesichorus, Carson winds together scholarship and brutal wit to build a discomfitingly relatable love story.

The Counterlife by Philip Roth

In the autobiographical note that begins Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin discusses coming to the conclusion that, before he could produce anything else of substance, he had to write about what it meant to be black. Through the lens of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth offers a metafictional take on the same question as it relates to Judaism while experimenting with perspective, structure, time and form. Probably the most skillfully written examination out there on the bond between fiction writing and the desire for control.

Sarah LaBrie is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her website here.

Daniel D'Addario

England, England by Julian Barnes

In college, one of my mistakes was taking a class on comparative literature, after which I was left thinking that Britain or America could never produce a homegrown “national allegory.” Was I ever wrong! England’s image of itself is grist for this bizarre novel of ideas in which the nation is reassembled as a giant theme park for tourists—with a false king and queen and every famous Briton brought back to life. The novel questions the value of history and of myth—and despite its scorched-earth ending and brilliant dissection of the corporate profit motive, it does so with a bit of affection.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Including Kazuo Ishiguro’s cloistered-England novel The Remains of the Day in my three favorites here felt a little unfair; it’s like being asked to choose among your children, when one is an ultra-sensitive genius. Instead I chose to include the instance in which Ian McEwan, predominantly a creator of tight narrative schemes, most closely approaches Ishiguro’s sensitivity to context (a past era’s very Britishness) and to character. For not the first but the most exhilarating time, McEwan’s games have real consequence: the fate of a young marriage.

Morvern Callar by Alan Warner

Novels with inert protagonists slay me, like Mary Gaitskill’s books, or Updike’s Rabbit series: watching things happen around characters is somehow more exciting and lifelike than watching characters conquer situations themselves (with the author’s help). The protagonist, the amoral Scottish girl Morvern, is glamorously inert; things happen around her as she observes and calculates. The scene in which Morvern, unmoved, lights a Silk Cut cigarette while staring at her boyfriend’s corpse is choked with an ennui Camus would envy.

Daniel D'Addario is a writer for The New York Observer. You can find his website here.

Elisabeth Donnelly

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn was a poet, and a good one, before he was a memoirist (shades of Denis Johnson), which is why his raw recounting of a fragile family stings with moments of sharp beauty and heartbreaking empathy. The plotline is relatively simple; when Flynn was 27 and working at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston, he comes into contact with his long lost father. The book is elliptical and non-linear, echoing Flynn’s memory, diving into blood and family legacy, Flynn’s father’s delusions of grandeur and his mother’s suicide, homelessness, forgotten people, the way cities and vice can chew you up, and the burden of the past on Flynn’s own life. It will knock you on your ass.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The thing that sticks in my mind about Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece is that it’s so… weird. The imagery that he uses to describe the cruelty of this world is unforgettable: the nameless protagonist in his basement with 1,369 lightbulbs, the Black youths forced to fight for gold coins on an electrocuted rug, the riot (and spear) that rips through Harlem thanks to the Invisible Man’s gift of speech. While the book is ostensibly a record of growing up Black in a divided America, Ellison defies expectations at every turn, putting his character through scenes that are consistently strange and always feeling new (which left a legacy extending from John Cheever’s short stories to Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle); and this surprise means that Ellison can cut sharply with the anger, satire, and moody magnificence that’s fueling his work.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

In the category of smart-girl-coming-of-age novels, Elaine Dundy’s American girl in Paris farce is particularly delicious. You’re in good hands with Dundy, after all, her biography was called Life Itself! (yes, with the exclamation point). The semi-autobiographical adventures of Sally Jay Gorce follow her as she dates, fucks, quips, and somehow makes a bad art film in the French countryside. It’s hilarious, and by the story’s end, proto-feminist Sally Jay is like a friend you don’t want to leave.

Elisabeth Donnelly is a writer living in New York. You can find her website here.

Lydia Brotherton

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I was late to the Brideshead party – I only read it a couple years ago — but now I’m one of those people who owns the entire Granada miniseries and sort of goes on about gillyflowers and plover’s eggs too much. I can’t help it, and I’m not sure I can explain it without embarrassing myself: I really love this novel.

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

When I first read Orlando, I was confused by its weirdness and delighted by its casually historical imaginings (there is absolutely no way to read fiction involving Elizabeth I that isn’t tacky except for this). And although I haven’t reread it in a while, I remember and misremember it like a tricky, particularly good dream. Maybe if there were an umami taste of novels, Orlando would be it.

Chéri by Colette

One of the reasons I like reading Colette novels is that in addition to being evocative of summer holidays in France I’ve never had, they have the potential to read as little lyrical self-help books. To be honest, what actually happens in Chéri is less important than the life lessons I manage to project onto all that description of pale, beribboned wrists and afternoon weather: how to wear silk robes during the day and take up with younger men, why it’s nice to upholster your furniture in dove-gray velvet, and — maybe most importantly—how to grow older, and, in your increasing age, more glamorous, demanding.

Lydia Brotherton is a soprano living in Basel, Switzerland. You can find her website here.

Brian DeLeeuw

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

"Favorite novels" is a slippery idea. Favorite when? When I read it? Now, years later, in the memory of reading? I’m not sure I would even finish Danielewski’s novel today (this is saying something bad about me, not the novel), but its blending of pulpy horror and deconstructionist theory felt custom designed for where my head was at ten years ago, in the middle of college. I’ve never in my life been as consumed by the experience of reading a book. Probably I should try to read it again.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

One of the ways a satire can be judged successful is if a lot of people don’t understand that it’s satire. Another is if a lot of these same people get very exercised and moved to protest and write angry and self-righteous ad hominem reviews. American Psycho passes both tests. If there remain any doubters (after talking to some of my friends, I know they’re out there), the fact that Mary Harron directed the movie adaptation should be proof enough. This is the funniest book I’ve ever read, which makes it puzzling why much of Ellis’s other work is so unfunny and sometimes plain bad.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill writes about complicated and uncomfortable emotional states with more precision and cold elegance than anybody else I have read. She’s most known for doing this in her short stories, and in some structural ways Veronica feels like a very long story rather than a novel. But those sort of classifications are irrelevant here. The book spares no one, least of all the reader. The prose itself is a representation of one of the novel’s central ideas: beauty is cruel, but no less beautiful because of it.

Brian DeLeeuw is a writer living in New York. He is the associate editor of Tin House and the author of the novel In This Way I Was Saved. You can find his website here.

If You're Not Reading You Should Be Writing And Vice Versa, Here Is How

Part One (Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin)

Part Two (James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov)

Part Three (W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck)

Part Four (Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, William Butler Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Roberto Bolano)

Girl Geniuses

by ANN FRIEDMAN

I have to admit, it’s almost better than being with a man. It’s almost better than that.

– Patti Smith, 1975

Patti Smith describes Just Kids as “our story” – hers and Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Their first years in New York from the late 60s to the late 70s. From a flophouse in Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel to their own warehouse space. From Max’s Kansas City to CBGB. From lovers to collaborators to friends.

But it’s also “our story” - Patti and us. Patti and every woman who has felt within her a desire to create. Patti and herself. Patti Smith, defiant and sweaty and gripping the microphone, and Patricia Lee Smith, age 21:

I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can’t say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him.

And Patricia Lee Smith, age 22. She can hear her own future onstage howl. She recognizes it when she passes Grace Slick in the lobby of the Chelsea and when she makes small talk with Jimi Hendrix at the Electric Lady. It’s so close that the reverb scares her away.

When I went back upstairs I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people, though I had no way to interpret my feeling of prescience. I could have never predicted that I would one day walk in their path. At that moment I was still a gangly twenty-two-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems.

Except that she could have predicted. She did predict.

This hits so close. The feeling of seeing ourselves and our ambition in reflected in someone great and immediately quashing it with self-denial. Saying, I could never do that. I could never be that. I’m just a 22-year-old girl.

She believes in Mapplethorpe, though. So much more than she believes in herself. She works as a bookstore clerk while he spends his days at home making collages and taking his first Polaroids. Once they scrape together enough money for a tiny room at the Chelsea Hotel, her devotion even extends to the way she navigates their personal space.

I had everything I needed but it was not big enough for two people to work. Since he used the desk, I taped a sheet of Arches sateen to my section of the wall and began a drawing of the two of us in Coney Island.

And again when they move into their own place on 23rd Street:

We talked about it a lot. I would have the smaller space in the front, and he would have the back.

So matter-of-fact: He used the desk. I would have the smaller space.

Even in those moments, when we are that gangly 22-year-old, we have flashes of clarity. We can step outside of our insecurities and see ourselves close the browser tab on an awesome job listing. We can hear ourselves say our art is just something we kinda dabble in. We can feel the lie when we say it’s not a big deal, that we’re just not good enough yet, that we’re not quite ready.

After a while I left and went back to our old room at the Chelsea. I sat there and cried, then washed my face using our little sink. It was the first and only time I felt I had sacrificed something of myself for Robert.

Of course, Mapplethorpe supports and encourages her, too. He is always pushing her to keep drawing, keep writing.

Robert came home late, sullen and a little angry that I had drinks with a strange guy. But the next morning he agreed it was inspiring that someone like Bob Neuwirth was interested in my work. “Maybe he’ll be the one to get you to sing,” he said, “but always remember who wanted you to sing first.”

Ah, but that sense of ownership! That subtle request for credit! See? he seems to be asking, see how supportive I am?

Women’s support for other women doesn’t typically come with baggage of this size and shape. This is why it’s important for us to believe in each other – I mean, really believe in each other. To tell each other to stop punishing ourselves when, after years of pursuing our passion but still calling it a hobby, we remain unconvinced of our own power and ability.

It came, I felt, too easy. Nothing had come to Robert so easily. Or for the poets I had embraced. I decided to back off. I turned down the record contract but left Scribner’s to work for Steve Paul as his girl Friday. I had more freedom and made a little more money, but Steve kept asking me why I chose to make his lunch and clean his birdcages instead of making a record. I didn’t really believe I was destined to clean the cage, but I also knew it wasn’t right to take the contract.

Even after we are onstage, the front-women, performing for the first time with a full band behind us, we think it’s a dream. We look for something else, anything else, anyone else to credit for this magical moment. The dudes who passed along our application. The boyfriend who made us dinner. Dumb luck. But rest assured, it’s us. We worked for this.

That night, as the saying goes, was a jewel in our crown. We played as one, and the pulse and pitch of the band spiraled us into another dimension. Yet with all that swirling around me, I could feel another presence as surely as the rabbit sense the hound. He was there. I suddenly understood the nature of the electric air. Bob Dylan had entered the club. This knowledge had a strange effect on me. Instead of humbled, I felt a power, perhaps his; but I also felt my own worth and the worth of my band. It seemed for me a night of initiation, where I had to become fully myself in the presence of the one I had modeled myself after.

Smith was 29 when she recorded Horses. Joan Didion was 29 when she wrote her first novel. Tina Fey was 29 when she was named head writer of SNL. bell hooks was 29 when she published her first major work. Oprah had just turned 30 when she got her first local TV talk show.

There is a reason “boy genius” rolls off the tongue more naturally than “girl genius.” By the time most of us accept the fact that we have earned this label for ourselves, we are most decidedly no longer girls.

Ann Friedman is the editor of GOOD magazine. She twitters here and blogs here. This is her first appearance in these pages.

"Redondo Beach" - Morrissey (Patti Smith cover) (mp3)

"Because the Night" - Patti Smith (mp3)

"Dancing Barefoot" - U2 (Patti Smith cover) (mp3)

with william burroughs

Brooding & Pop-Eyed

by JAMES CAMP

At the start of the 70s, Al Pacino had exactly one role in a major motion picture under his belt. The movie, Me, Natalie, was small, the role minuscule: in forty-six seconds, the twenty-nine-year-old actor approaches, appraises, and spurns the Natalie of the title on a dance-floor. Taking her in his arms without looking at her, Pacino is all hips and come-ons and cocksureness, too hopped up on the possibilities of the night to ask Natalie’s name, let alone sweet-talk her. "You’ve got a nice body, you know that?" he offers. When she tries to respond, he interrupts her: "Do you put out?" But she doesn't and he is off, eyes flaring, to seek his kicks among broads of broader mind.

By 1980 Pacino was among the most laurelled film actors in the land, a forty-year-old man up to his neck in his own mythology. Though he hadn't yet won an Oscar (that would come later, for his turn as a blind debauchee in The Scent of a Woman), Pacino had been nominated, already, for five.

Lesser honors abounded. The decade brought him two BAFTA awards and a Golden Globe. It also inaugurated the ever-flavorful tradition of Pacino homage. In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta's Tony Manero, clad only in briefs and Scientological self-assurance, sashays down the stairs chanting Attica, drawing a shriek from his shrunken grandmother. (In Dog Day Afternoon, Pacino’s Sonny Wortzik electrifies a crowd by chanting this.) Tony Manero keeps a Serpico poster on his wall.

on the set of the godfather with Francis Ford CoppolaFilm Forum spent a week revisiting Pacino’s golden decade in a retrospective called, straightforwardly, Pacino's 70s. The movies, which vary in quality from the indelibility of the Godfathers to the idle melodrama of ...And Justice for All, are vivid reminders both of Pacino's consistency and of his range.

As a rule, Pacino's roles are divided between the neurotically anxious and the neurotically cool, the nervous and the numb. Stress, however, torments them all. Like suavity for Cary Grant or bathos for Marlon Brando, stress is Pacino’s medium, the idiosyncratic element in which his characters come alive. He is a technician of the twitch, the eye-bulge, the temple-rub. He is also a technician of the blank stare. It reminds you why New York City, something like the kingdom of chronic stress, has always treated Pacino as royalty.

with gene hackman in 'Scarecrow'Michael Corleone, the frozen-hearted heir to his father’s empire, is neurotically cool. Frank Serpico also. "Well, am I invited to the wedding?" Serpico asks when the woman he has been dating, fed up with his delays, threatens to marry another man. Lionel, on the other hand, the vulnerable drifter at the center of Scarecrow, is all nerves and nervous suffering, as are Arthur Kirkland of Justice and Sonny of Dog Day. Bobby, the protagonist of The Panic in Needle Park, is a composite, as scheming as he is pathetic.

Yet these characters who begin as orderly types end by disarraying them. If the heart, for the Pacino of this era, has always gone too hard or too soft, by the end of each movie it is strangely difficult to say which. Late in The Godfather: Part II, Michael Corleone realizes that his older brother, Fredo, has betrayed him. It is New Year’s Eve, 1958 and they are in Cuba. The country is Castro-stalked, coup-poised, decadent. The Corleones are watching a troupe of exotic dancers when Michael catches Fredo, who does not know his brother overhears him, in a lie.

Standing in an amphitheater, the two actors face the same direction, Pacino above and behind John Cazale; the camera faces them. As Fredo natters on to his pals, Michael staggers. He must choose between his brother and the family business. His eyes bulge, brim moistly, then go blank. It is a scene of exquisite contrasts — the nude dancers, off-camera but reflected in the lusting eyes of the audience; Fredo, fluent in his duties as party-host, oblivious of his fatal error; and Michael, never more in love with his brother than against the backdrop of the need to bump him off. For the knowledgeable viewer, the moment is additionally fraught with the imminent failure of the Batista government. "It's my favorite moment," Pacino told an interviewer, "but it's subtle."

on the set of The Godfather Part IIConfronted, Fredo bolts. He is not gone for good. Michael may be unmerciful, but he is not impatient, and eventually he tempts Fredo home with a promise of forgiveness. Forgiveness is fleeting. When Fredo goes fishing one evening, Michael has him murdered. As the fatal gunshot dwindles to silence in the blue-black void of the Nevada twilight, we see Michael brooding, slumped in the semi-dark, enthroned and alone.

When the movie came out Newsweek called it "arguably cinema’s greatest portrait ever of the hardening of a heart." But this is imprecise. Has the trauma of life really hardened Michael’s heart, or has it broken it down, pulped it? A harder heart — a greater gangster — would have dispatched the feckless Fredo without remorse; a softer heart — a greater man — would have spared him. Which shortcoming Michael regrets in himself is the mystery of the film.

ScarecrowSomething similar happens in Scarecrow, when Lionel’s estranged wife tells him she had a miscarriage after he left her (this is not true, a lie prompted by spite brought on by abandonment). Lionel receives this information in a phone booth, his eyes widening as if to accommodate the size of the bad news. Yet Lionel's gaping look of feeling will shortly become the mask of its absence. Soon after the conversation, Lionel goes into catatonic shock, where he stays for the rest of the film. Lionel’s expression — pop-eyed, blown apart with suffering — doesn't change.

Dog Day Afternoon

In Dog Day Afternoon, Sonny involves his friend Sal in a bank robbery to finance a sex-change operation for Sonny’s gay lover, Leon. The robbery immediately goes awry and the two robbers are trapped in the bank, obliged to take its employees hostage as insurance against the police massing outside. Sal is played, again, by John Cazale. (Pacino: "All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life. He was my acting partner.") He is a sympathetic character, a nervous sweet fool hiding out behind a wafer-thin front of thuggishness. The smarter, more calculating Sonny is sympathetic in a different way. Yet Sonny is also irresolute, and as the standoff stretches on he may betray Sal to the FBI.

Sidney Lumet, the director, keeps it unclear; it is not even certain that Sonny himself knows what has happened. At the end, after Sal has been shot and Sonny arrested, Pacino’s face alternates looks of vacancy with looks of anguish. Sonny is a man of great, even spastic emotion, yet it is impossible to tell whether he is in the grip of remorse or resigned indifference.

Is an audience that reacts to tragedies of emotional confusion with confused emotions of its own also tragic? By the time John Cazale got shot, the woman beside me had nodded off. She may have been snoring; it may have been somebody else. I turned in my seat, disturbed but also restless, checking an impulse to check the time. Pacino did his brooding, pop-eyed, twitchy thing. When John Cazale got shot in Dog Day Afternoon, the woman beside me laughed. Others wept. Pacino did his thing again. Again, I turned in my seat. These are long movies.

The Godfather Part IIIt is not surprising that city-dwellers will be too stressed-out to absorb the moral of a movie, or movies, when this moral is that they are too stressed-out to absorb the moral of anything. Indeed, it is an unconscious tribute to the star of these films. At his best, Pacino embodies the inability of the way we feel to keep pace with the way we live, of the heart to bear up under the hassle of modern urban life.

with kitty winn in 'Panic' In The Panic in Needle Park, Pacino’s first major film, he plays Bobby, a raffish heroin addict who falls in love with Helen, a young artist. The two are as headlong in love as getting high, and the movie unfolds as both a scruffy romance and an ordeal of deepening addiction. (The panic of the title refers to a heroin drought.) First catching Helen’s eye in the hospital ward where she is recovering from an abortion (!), Bobby proceeds to seduce her, bed her, introduce her to heroin, and compel her into habit-sustaining prostitution. Unfathomably (and perhaps unfortunately), their love survives it all, even when Helen betrays Bobby to the fuzz and he goes to prison.

In the final scene of the movie, Helen waits for Bobby outside the prison where he has been incarcerated. Bobby is due for release, and when he emerges, cigarette in mouth, he is dumbfounded by Helen’s presence and stalks off angrily. But eventually — inexorably — he slows down, waiting for her. When Helen hesitates, Bobby snorts: "Well!"

Of course he is impatient. We, too, are impatient. The logic of the heart is beside the point when you have a city to get back to and a panic to beat, when you’re rushed and stressed. As Pacino himself has said, remembering Brecht, "People are strange, stinking animals."

James Camp is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. This is his first appearance in these pages.

"Trembling Hands" - Explosions in the Sky (mp3)

"Postcard from 1952" - Explosions in the Sky (mp3)

"Let Me Back In" - Explosions in the Sky (mp3)

January 4, 1954

The following actually appeared in the first 1954 issue of Life magazine.

The morning traffic and parking problem became so critical at the Carlsbad, N. Mex. high school that school authorities in 1953 were finally forced to a solution: they set aside a special parking area for students only. In Carlsbad, as everywhere else, teenagers are not only driving new cars to school but in many cases are buying them out of their own earnings. These are the children who at birth were called "Depression babies." They have grown up to become, materially at least, America's luckiest generation.

Young people 16 to 20 are the beneficiaries of the very economic collapse that brought chaos almost a generation ago. The Depression tumbled the nation's birth rate to an all-time low in 1933, and today's teen age group is proportionately a smaller part of the total population than in more than 70 years.

Since there are fewer of them, each – in the most prosperous time in U.S. history – gets a bigger piece of the nation's economic pie than any previous generation ever got. This means they can almost have their pick of the jobs that abound.

They place in dance orchestras, and work at other jobs or go into business for themselves. To them working has a double attraction: the pay is good and, since their parents are earning more, too, they are often able to keep the money for themselves.

The teenagers here all live in Carlsbad, but the account of youth's opulent opportunities is not restricted to any one community. A young fellow like Sonny Thayer can earn $100 a week in the potash mines near Carlsbad and buy himself a pick up truck, hunting mule and all the equipment he wants to indulge his hobby as an outdoorsman. A Milwaukee high school senior like David Lenske can pick up enough money in odd jobs to buy stocks, all his own clothes and a 1946 Plymouth as well. In city after city merchants freely extend credit to teenagers.

One father, fearing that easy times may not be enough of a character builder, remarked, "They're lucky. But do they know it?" Mostly they seem to know it, even though they live with a worry they can never fully escape – the two years or more of military service for the boys and the constant talk of war that hovers over them all. A judge who handles delinquency matters voices concern over the fortunate teenagers: "I don't know if having all those cars is such a wonderful thing. Some kids make more money than their probation officers with master's degrees." But a filling station operator who hires high school boys declares simply, "They are hard working and well behaved."

Thoughtfully a Milwaukee girl remarks, "We have more independence and education than other generations have had. We are going to be able to take care of ourselves and of our world." This confidence and reasoning reflects in a generation which, having been brought up in and having worked in good and constantly improving times, will in the future expect – and work for – equally good times or better.

It is presumptuous to characterize a whole generation; yet each generation feels obliged to try it as soon as its successor heaves in sight, and the editors of Life are no exception. Our Time-Life correspondents recently made a survey of the mood and opinions of young people all over the country. That survey confirmed Steichen's hunch; this is in many respects the oldest younger generation in living memory. It is sobersided, unromantic, "mature." Since it was raised in a depression to fight one war and is now threatened by another, it could hardly be expected to be a carefree generation. But that is not the whole story.

In our survey one Texas college professor described his undergraduates thus: "They are a generation without responses - apathetic, laconic, no great loves, no profound hates and pitifully few enthusiasms. They are a wordless generation. If they have ideas they don't seem to like to rub them against other people's ideas."

"Unimaginative, yes," reported another teacher, "but they are very realistic. Security is uppermost in their minds." Millions of them seem to share the modest ambitions of a young Seattle engineer: "I'd just like to net $600 a month, and then my family would always be okay. You start earning any more than about that, and it's taxed away from you, so what the hell."

Youth's theme song seems to be, "I don't want to set the world on fire." Rather than take chances on their own, most college boys (there are of course exceptions) would rather work for a large corporation, making their way discreetly and securely up a prefabricated ladder. They seem to be most comfortable in groups and even tend to make dates by fours and sixes.

They show no strong urge either to glorify or to rebel against their surroundings. They are without public heroes or villains. They are reported to be not so wild as their parents, nor so hard working. They gripe less and hope less. They are willing homemakers and fall quickly into monogamy, more from imitation than from any moral or economic imperative. They are refreshingly free of bigotry or race prejudice; and they believe, if in anything, in democracy and the brotherhood of man. Yet they seem skeptical and incurious about the machinery and safeguards of democracy.

One co-ed says defiantly, "Who knows exactly what politics is, anyhow?" Says an Oregon college president, "They live like happy animals. I guess the Great Enlightenment of the last century has finally run its course."

A Generation of Aesthetes? appeared in a 1951 issue of Life.

"Time to Pretend (MGMT cover)" - Jonsi (mp3)

"Good Thing" - Fine Young Cannibals (mp3)

"Not Dark Yet" - Bob Dylan (mp3)

Because He Got High

by LAUREN BANS

Limitless

dir. Neil Burger

105 minutes

For whatever reason someone is trying to make Bradley Cooper a leading man. Okay, not for "whatever reason", specifically for his Crafted by Pilates (TM) abdominal area and that cocky facial expression of his that says "Gurl, I know where you hid those Girl Scout cookies." The problem is a star needs a starring vehicle that can go places, like to mainstream multiplexes. Limitless is not that vehicle. It’s more of a recalled Toyota that explodes into flames on the highway leaving the driver paraplegic.

B Coops plays Eddie, a newly single, science fiction writer who looks like 1998's Eddie Vedder. He has a serious case of writer’s block and an apartment reminiscent of the aftermath of an open Jumanji board. Eddie runs into his ex-girlfriend’s druggie brother on the street and ends up accepting an $800 black market trial drug, called NZT, that renders everything mentally “clear.” The pill enables him to finish his book in an hour. He earns millions on the stock market. He cleans his apartment real good. (And isn’t that is the problem with Adderall? You always swallow it with great intentions and 15 minutes later you’re on your knees, scrubbing the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, Israeli-army style.)

When he’s on the drug, Eddie inexplicably sees his surroundings through a fisheye lens, and struts down the street to a set list seemingly plagiarized from a “Rock of the Ages”-type radio station in Nebraska. It’s probably how Charlie Sheen experiences the world.

The tragedy of the movie is there may not be a worse person upon which to bestow the planet's last few super intelligence tablets. Watching Bradley Cooper gulp them down and proceed to waste his high transforming himself into a Brooks Brothers model feels somewhat unjust, like watching a goldfish eat a Peter Luger steak. Shouldn’t someone be crushing those up and spooning it into Stephen Hawking's mouth instead?

The most disappointing moment is when you realize Eddie’s voiceover narration pre-pill-popping wasn’t deliberately hackneyed - even with a four digit IQ he still says things like, "A fight? I don’t know how to fight. OR DO I?"

with costar abbie cornish

Of course the whole Better Living Through Chemistry imperative isn't without a few roadblocks. Eddie begins to get headaches. He starts forgetting how he spent huge blocks of time (we see one such period in a fast hazy montage — it involves gambling, drinking, effing models, and a fat bearded man. I assume it was a paid promotion for The Hangover 2.) Mysterious people attempt to kill him. The girlfriend whom he quickly wins back by ordering her sushi in fluent Japanese (women are so easy!) dumps him again, and this big focking CEO (played by De Niro, who apparently ordered Fredo to off his agent at some point in the last decade) tries to blackmail him.

But don’t think Limitless is anti-pharmaceutical. Bradley Cooper is just too beautiful to die, like the other plebes who get addicted to NZT do. This pat solution is very satisfyingly explained near the end when he taunts De Niro, "You actually thought that I wouldn’t learn how to overcome the side effects?" Um, yes? At least I did. Maybe the trick is you need to watch Limitless on brain-enhancing drugs for it to make sense, otherwise it's like looking at a hologram without 3D glasses. On that note: if anyone wants to send me some Adderall, I promise I will rewatch this movie and report back. Right after I finish exfoliating the grout on my bathroom floor.

Lauren Bans is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find her website here. She twitters here.

"In Every Sunflower" - Bell X1 (mp3)

"The Great Defector" - Bell X1 (mp3)

"Apple of My Eye" - Bell X1 (mp3)

Rodin's Shitheel

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Adolf Hitler's favorite artist was the sculptor Arno Breker, who died in Dusseldorf in 1991. The most important thing about a Nazi is the date of his death, and Breker was among the more long-lived of his brethren. Breker's sculptures represent a technical competence that is so thorough it is repulsive, and his pseudo-heroic depictions of the human form horrify me. Hitler felt that Greek and Roman art was not tainted by Jewishness, and so Breker followed his Führer's gesture to that place.

Breker's father was an abusive disciplinarian, and he loved his old man dearly, which explains a lot. Arno's biggest influence was Rodin, and he kept a copy of Rilke's book about the legendary sculptor all his life. As a young man he visited the Bauhaus and saw Paul Klee working on multiple paintings at once. Breker felt that it did not "represent real creativity," and took his work in another direction.

It would not be a terrific leap to assume fascists only desire to repress and destroy the arts. The opposite is true: they are captivated, fascinated, and very aware of the power in artistic expression. Not knowing very much about politics when the Nazi party began its rise in Germany, Arno Breker was easily taken in by the sharpness of its propaganda and the movement's popular support. When he finally did join the party in 1937, it was as a uniform, serving as both political leader and artistic guide. By 1940, Breker was already the recipient of the Golden Badge of the Nazi Party. He was forty years old.

breker and assistants put the finishing touches on a work, 1942

Breker's work entailed powerful representations of German heroes, and he controlled the artistic climate in Germany in the 1940s. A mere look from him at the opening of a gallery or a show was enough to ensure no critic would write about the event. He sent for a paper delegation of French artists to Germany in 1941, and when the group returned to France their leaders called artists in Germany "the cherished children of the nation."

Arno Breker with a bronze of his 1939 work, Héraut

Breker's career as a Nazi did not wholly consist of meting out death and pain. When the Gestapo found out that Pablo Picasso was sending money to Spain and Russia, Breker got in touch with Jean Cocteau, who he had charmed in Paris as a younger man, to get him to stop the transfers. Eventually he was called in front of the Führer on the matter. Hitler responded to him by saying, "I am going to tell you once and for all: in politics, artists are like Parsifal; they don't understand anything."

Though Stalin was a fan of the sculptor, after Germany fell to the Soviets Breker fled to the Alps. When he was called before the Americans, he denied ever being an officer, and was generally treated as a victim of the Nazis. His networking skills served him again and he was even approached about sculpting a bust of Eisenhower.

breker comes before a de nazification court in October of 1948The man Hitler tapped to begin to assemble his art collection was Hans Posse. As director of the Führermuseum, Posse put behind previous interests in artists like Klee and Kandinsky and focused on work that was more up his boss' alley. He was possessed by the idea of creating the greatest art collection in the world, and sought no financial advantage for himself from the considerable power he wielded. Naturally, he confiscated Jewish property without a second thought in his zeal.

degenerate art exhibitAlthough faith in ethnic superiority did not usually go with a love of artistic achievement, Hitler's proxies were usually motivated to safeguard treasures and would sacrifice much to preserve them. In contrast, art dealers saw a tremendous opportunity for profit. They wrote to the regime begging to get a chance to acquire artworks the state confiscated from Jews for exportation and financial profit. The regime presented and toured an exhibit of "Degenerate Art" with paintings accompanied by mocking labels explaining why the works were inadequate.

the alte pinakotek after its destruction, 1948

Breker continued to pursue his career after the war, but he was consistently identified with the Third Reich. Critics compared his Nazi sculptures to the work of a cosmetic surgeon, because his men contained no flaws visible to the human eye. This fascist ideal continued to appeal to clients, and even the Nazi-loving Cocteau couldn't resist getting a bust done of himself. Breker's sculpture of Wagner linked him to Hitler's favorite composer, and the connection between the two only intensified the trouble they had in reclaiming their lives in postwar Germany.

Breker's bust of WagnerAlive when others were not, Breker became a secret cause celebre for the German right wing. One pro-Nazi gallery, the Galerie Marco, passed out photographs of Breker with popular artists and public figures to increase his palatability to the public at large. Breker became more symbol than man, and over time his defenders grew.

While students and young people protested his exhibitions, others argued that he should be able to continue his life's work without denigration. There remained a question of whether art created for and by Nazis should be displayed to the German public at all, complicated by the fact that the Reich had displayed the sinful etchings of their victims strewn everywhere, as trophies of death.

Breker's denials throughout were many. He argued that French Jews had not been dispossessed of their property, and he defended the many of his actions during the war. Whereas his friend and Hitler's chief architect Albert Speer apologized and said that he regretted the crimes he committed during the Third Reich, Breker dismissed him, saying, "I don't like his view of the past."

protest against an exhibition of breker's art in Berlin, 1981

Because of his lack of repentance, Breker's art never received a wider airing. Since it is extremely imitative, this is no great loss, but a deluded niche can find power in the strong expression of anything, even evil. Damaged people in a shamed nation create otherworldly reimaginings of their enemies' destruction. To see why Nazi art violates our aesthetics, we can look to the fact that this is neither a relevant or productive message to anyone but Glenn Beck.

But can it be that National Socialism produced no artistic work of any value? In so many ways, Hitler's dedicated agents ensured an anti-Renaissance, but they also aimed to replace what they destroyed with their own version. Daniel Goldhagen has argued that anti-Semitism was so prevalent among the intelligentsia that politics became more important than culture for the appreciators of the period.

Jonathan Petropoulos, in his book The Faustian Bargain, finds an additional cause. He writes of the appeal of violence to the educated class under the guise of the 'noble savage.' Both these motivations would seem to serve an artistic sensibility, and they only reinforce a basic precondition of civilization: that everything has a corresponding artistic culture to accompany it.

with albert speer

Like Breker, Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl defended her work on its own merits until she died. (Hitler's biggest fan, the woman lived to 101.) Some jaded bastard screened Triumph of the Will for me as part of a course when I was 12, and I never forgave him. For the only reassuring aspect of the Third Reich is the moral certainty that nothing of what they were is in us, really. Riefenstahl's talent was too prodigious: the remarkable technique shines through the horror of its subject. Witnessing delighted Germans applauding a stoic parade of murderers is too strange and disturbing a sight to do anything but awe.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about the hundred greatest novels. He tumbls here and twitters here.

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"We Radiate" - Goldfrapp (mp3)

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a breker statue toppled during the war

Sayonara

by LENA DUNHAM

I awake the next morning feeling like I need a blood transfusion. Our guide Shiori arrives at noon, chipper as ever and ready to take us to the airport where we'll board the plane home. She hands me a gift. "From Kazu. To remember last night."

A pleather nurse's cap.

My goodbye with Shiori is bittersweet — we have truly become friends, despite the uncrossable cultural chasm, a chasm evidenced by the fact that she is shocked by frank discussions of sex but was not at all surprised by what we witnessed last night at the S&M bar in the Rappongi district. "I love you," she says, handing me a bag of "bean sweets." I promise to send her the ugg boots she so desperately wants.

"Remember to e-mail Tada," she says. The sleeve of her raincoat is still dotted with red wax from a candle wielded by an obese dominatrix. "The gift he gave you was very expensive. He says you promised to take him to all the clubs of New York."

Did I? I don't remember that. I guess, like so many of my Japanese exchanges, it was lost in translation.

Ground Control To Major Mom

We've come to Japan because my mother is having a small retrospective of her photographs at a gallery in Tokyo.

Traveling with my mother has its challenges. She's adorable, a real gem, but she won't shut up and she generates little bits of trash and she is very nervous about Japanese customs — for instance, her guidebook tells her that the Japanese don't like public nose blowing, which she adores, and that's been a real source of anxiety.

On the 14 hour plane ride she watched Lost In Translation on her in-flight entertainment system. Good movie, but it is now a near-constant point of reference, and likely will be for the entirety of our time in Tokyo. After all, she was quick to note that I am a recent grad with hair vaguely the color of Scar Jo's, traveling with a working photographer. Only my shutterbug partner-in-crime is not Giovanni Ribisi. She gave birth to me.

When we land at Narita Airport twenty tiny men in scrubs and gloves and white rubber rain boots come aboard wearing masks, and announce they're going to take our temperatures as a precaution against the spread of swine flu. They have syringes in their fanny packs and I actually get very scared.

We are greeted in the airport by Shiori, a young representative from the gallery where my mother's work is being shown.

"I will be your guide," she says. Our friend Matthew warned us not to bond with any gallery girls because "you'll never lose them" but I like her. She insists on carrying my suitcase even though she weighs about seventy-three pounds and has hands like paper cranes. The taxicab's seats wear a cloak of white lace. The driver dons matching gloves and takes your Yen (thousands of them!) on a small silver tray.

I once saw a movie in which Toni Collette has hot sex with a Japanese businessman who then dies. She spends the next hour lugging his lifeless body through the Australian outback and crying.

Judging by the medical mod squad and this cab driver's stiff posture, I can't imagine a passionate affair with a native man. A few minutes after we check into the hotel the maid comes into our room to turn down the beds. Panicked, my mom stuffs her dirty underpants into my purse to keep up appearances.

Japanese American Princess

Shiori, helpful gallery girl extraordinaire, has a rival in my new friend, manga artist Miyu. Although thirty-one, Miyu looks approximately fourteen and wears an Anne-of-Green-Gables-inspired hat that only Audrey Hepburn or Audrey Tatou could pull off outside of Japan. She makes beautiful comics about coming of age. She gives me her books, but I cannot read them.

Miyu brings me to 7-11. In the US, 7-11 is just a burial ground for coke slurpeez and microwaveable pizza. Here in Japan, it purveys complex sushi rolls, tempting noodle bowls and delicate pastries with thousands of flaky layers (the label on the yummiest reads "A Taste of The Bread").

Yellowish Fever

I know I said I could never imagine a Japanese affair, but I've changed my mind. Kazu, the art handler hanging my mom's show, is gorgeous like the strong, sexy, dreadlocked Mongol in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (causing my sister to email the instruction: "Yeah, girl. crouch that tiger, hide that dragon. P.S. That's a Chinese movie").

I'm Big In Japan

I get drunk fast on sake. I haven't eaten meat in ten years but this beverage tastes fleshy somehow. I can't stomach much of what is brought to the table at a seven course meal with uber-friend Shiori and Tomio, mom's squat art dealer.

Toshi brings along a well-known Japanese painter who informs me that he comes at his art from a very "passionable" place. I learn that he is also very passionable about Buffalo Springfield, Burt Reynolds ("to most, he is sexiest man") and the Jack Black vehicle Nacho Libre.

He would like a friend in New York, as his only friends are Yo La Tengo and they are always on tour. Poor guy.

After the Party is the After-Party

At 3 a.m. I hear my sleepless mother sighing.

She is sipping chardonnay by the computer. I tell her to take an Ambien and I fall back asleep. Big mistake. Girlfriend takes an Ambien. And she follows it up with a healthy Ambien-inspired nosh session that encompasses two mini-bottles of vino, a tube of Pringles, a box of Ritz Bits, a smattering of mixed nuts. Then there's a mug of sake and a salmon-flecked rice ball. The contents of the mini-bar have been eradicated. When I awake at 9 a.m. she is snoring peacefully, surrounded by wrappers.

To See What There Is To See

We spend the afternoon wandering through the Shibuya neighborhood, which is like if Soho and Times Square had a baby and then moved to the moon to raise it. It is also where many of Lost in Translation's most memorable visuals were captured: filmed, I'm told, from the window of the mega-Starbucks at Shibuya crossing. I'm beginning to resent Sophia Coppola's subtly fascistic dictatorship over our travel experience.

Every linguistic foible, every longing glance out a cab window at dusk — if my mother doesn't say it, then I feel it. We are in someone's else's movie.

There are so many businessmen and business-ladies in Shibuya, all over Tokyo really. A sea of briefcases! Japanese people look so young — fourteen year olds in ill-fitting suits. What kind of business could they all be doing? When they cross the street it looks like a music video, or the cover of Abbey Road. They are so orderly and leave a foot of space between themselves and the next office escapee.

The White Man Cometh

We attend an opening at the Hara museum, all art by hip young collectives, and I develop my second Japanese crush, on a mophead in a t-shirt that says "Hustler: Hardcore since '74."

Being the only Caucasian in a room, you almost feel invisible because you are so visible. When you're in Mexico or someplace, at least they want your paper dollars. But here, we are uncouth, smelly, hairy. We have swine-flu. Our currency is inferior and our history is short. Yet the Japanese also love Sid Vicious, cowboys, birthday cakes, bagels.

It's such a confusing dynamic.

Memoirs of a Geisha

It's a complex process to even get near the hotel pool, one that involves a mandatory shower and a key that you strap to your thigh. But I am immediately thwarted when I see a sign announcing that no tattooed persons may enter the water. My mother is not content to either follow or ignore this rule, so she presents me to the locker room attendant, pointing to my arm and announcing/asking "THIS IS OK!?"

The sweet-faced girl looks vexed, turns a bit red, pulls out a roll of medical tape and proceeds to cover up all my tattoos — even the one my lower back, which she claims to find "kawaii" (cute). I do twenty laps and shed all the tape in the water, mummy-style.

Night On Earth

My mother's opening is considered a smashing success, although attendance is estimated at approximately twenty.

She is interviewed by a Japanese TV crew while I spend a long time talking with a bald Canadian man named Todd who says he is a "thought-leader entrepreneur at the forefront of the meeting between business and education." Todd says it's good to move to Japan because you can get famous more quickly. For instance, he regularly plays ping-pong with the princess Masako, and attends her wine tastings.

At the post-opening dinner, I drink a bit too much sake and have to take a genteel vomit break. When I return from the bathroom, all red and shiny, Shiori is waiting with a knowing grin. She is seated near my crush Kazu, who looks like Heath Ledger and James Iha merged and then put on a ruffled blue blazer. I have been informed that he loves to get high and was waiting for signs of drug use, but it turns out he "doesn't need no drugs, just a trance music." Shiori is looking at him, then back at me, over and over.

"What?" I demand.

"You must go talk to Kazu to learn he is a PUHVERT. I think he's the gay, but he very nice guy. Go sit behind him to learn why he the PUHVERT."

"But I don't speak Japanese, so I don't know what he's saying. Is it about sex?"

"NO, NO!" She blushes. "He very nice guy. Go sit behind him. He the PUHVERT, though. At the clubs he go crazy. You think he's the gay?" I am thoroughly confused and ready to let this whole exchange slide. But outside, after dinner, Kazu motions me over to him.

Quietly, he speaks. "Late this week, we go to the club?"

"Sure" I say. "Are you going out tonight?"

"We cannot," he tells me. "You are wearing wrong shoes. So we will go Thursday together to the club."

"OK. Great." I smile.

Shiori hurries over. "Did he talk to you? Now you see how forward he is!" It is surreal to get into a taxicab with your slightly tipsy mother and look out the window to see fifteen smiling Japanese people in leatherette formalwear waving goodbye joyfully from a street corner. They all bow in unison, over and over, until you are out of view. 

An American Werewolf in Japan

My mother wants to go for a drink with Shiori on the 57th floor of the Park Hyatt hotel, where Lost in Translation was filmed.

I really do like that movie, just as much as the next recently-teenaged girl, and I'm not sure why my mother using it as a constant reference point makes me so crazy. There are several Hyatts near this Hyatt and we spend almost an hour riding up and down the elevator of the wrong one, wandering the darkened halls of its conference center, before we realize our mistake.

When we finally arrive we enjoy an uncharacteristic martini, listening to the smooth sounds of the resident jazz band. "In the movie it's a band called Sausalito and Bill Murray sleeps with the woman. Remember?" mom asks.

That red-haired vixen isn't here tonight. It's a Vanessa Williams look-alike crooning Cole Porter. It's very interesting to hear Shiori discuss concepts such as "honor" "respectability" and "modesty." Her former colleague (a word she pronounces cawl-eee-gew) had an affair with Kazu, art handler crush, and it was a great dishonor, not only for that woman's husband but for everyone who knew either cheater.

Once Shiori was in a club chaperoning a visiting German artist and he kissed a Japanese girl who then fainted. I ask why and Shiori says "because he pulled all the energies from her."

Oodles of Noodles

Manga-artist Miyu giggles constantly, as if any question ("where this street is located?" or "what is that root vegetable called?") is the most embarrassing thing that has ever befallen her. She often knocks on nearby pieces of wood for luck. She has, I hear, published three books, two of which are bestsellers. She lives in a tiny cottage that once belonged to her now-hospitalized grandmother. She dresses like Daisy Buchanan and claims never to have googled herself. She has no idea how many books she has sold. She makes it all look so effortless.

Speaking of effort, I've stopped trying to imitate Japanese manners and now I consume "A Taste Of The Bread" right in the streets, cream on my face, ravenous. Eating in the street is considered very rude here, but I spotted a commuter munching a sandwich in the subway so the jig is up.

Too Much Hospitality

Sometimes, when you've been in Japan for ten days, you start to get a little funny. First, you'll stop noticing the preventive flu masks around you. A businessman will stand out in a crowd because of his Bon Jovi-esque haircut and not because he is wearing a mask over his face.

You will start bowing to people who hold open a door or sell you a honeydew yogurt or inform you that there are fish flakes on some crackers you're not sure you want. You will flash a peace sign and assume a pigeon toed stance whenever someone aims a camera at you.

You have adopted/adapted all these traits, yet you're also low-grade tired all the time. From trying to avoid beef broth. From making sure to remember that L's sound like R's and vice versa. From the outrageously reliable Japanese friends you have made — they are always early and always offering to pick things up for you at the convenience store and always buying you sweet treats that you claim not to want, but that they know you will eat because you're an American with as many stomachs as a cow. It's enough to make you miss the enervated flakes you surround yourself with in New York City.

No One Can Take A Joke

I spend the afternoon with Nanako, a teeny art critic in a deconstructed blazer and Harry Potter glasses. I'm stunned by this culture of hospitality —everyone we meet offers a tour, some tea, a red bean cake — so I jokingly tell Nanako that if my life in the US doesn't deliver I will just move to Tokyo and act on Japanese soap operas. Todd the Canadian thought-leader says everything is easier here. But Nanako is stern. "You'll never get respect that way, or long term satisfaction."

They Might Be Giants

I go to Harajuku Street hoping to spot G. Stefani's muses but am informed that the look is out of fashion. What's cool now is dressing like a secretary — cardigans, pearls, practical pumps. At Uniqlo they don't sell jeans in a size bigger than 27. There's a boutique with a window-full of baby-colored mini-dresses. They'd make nice pillows in the Real World Malibu Barbie house, but they won't suit me. The salesgirl doesn't agree and insists I try on three.

None fit because I am not a Japanese woman and my stomach(s) need some room. I am developing a rash, sweating, can't bear to explain myself so I buy a silver mesh tank top with bells on it. The armholes are far too tight. Returning to the hotel, grumpy and huge, I yell at my mother when she makes the Lost in Translation reference that breaks the camel's back.

Are You There, God? I'm In Tokyo

I'm going to a club with Kazu. What do I wear? How do I dance? If he did kiss me, which he won't (will he!?) then would he want to use tongues? I haven't seen a single dog here, and the streets are so shiny and clean. People have different house slippers designated for every room, so I really can't imagine the use of tongue. Germy. But this is also the country that spawned bukkake, tentacle-rape porn, and Sailor Moon.

I'm starting to understand my resistance to Lost In Translation references. Firstly, it sort of makes me feel like one of those women who visits New York and takes the Sex & The City bus tour. Secondly, as a filmmaker I like to believe that anything I do might be grist for some future movie-mill, but a twenty-something blondish girl wandering Tokyo is someone's private property.

What Happens in Rappongi Stays In Rappongi

We begin my final night at the opening of Tada, a hot commodity in contemporary Japanese ceramics. He's considered sort of an enfant terrible in the ceramics world, and he further cultivates this image by wearing a turban and pounds of silver rings.

"Tada is very sexy, no?" Shiori asks. "A cool kind of big deal artist!" She insists that we stand very near him and just sort of slump and smile.

Afterwards, we are guests at the seated-on-tatami mats dinner to celebrate Tada.

Kazu, is there, wearing a frilly collar that makes him look like a sad clown as re-imagined by Commes Des Garcons. But his body is so long and sinewy, and his ponytail so well done, that I take it in stride. Although neither of us smokes, my mother and I bum cigarettes off a table-mate and someone calls us "naughty women."

Tada and I speak a bit with the aid of a translator (a giggling red-faced Shiori). Outside, it's pouring rain. We are all handed clear plastic umbrellas, and it's beautiful when everyone stands together and chats and there is this sort of anti-rain ceiling covered in droplets and illuminated by Tokyo's myriad neon signs. I tell my mother that if I were to make a film set in Tokyo, I'd want to capture this clear-umbrella phenomenon, but guess who already committed this savvy detail to celluloid? Sofia Coppola, that's who.

Kazu announces it's time to hit the clubs, so I bid mom farewell and wander through the wet streets with Yasu, a disarmingly chatty guy with Buddy Holly glasses and a messy bun. Tada rolls deep with a bad-ass ceramicist dude-crew, and Yasu is the standout. He is wearing a raging bull t-shirt and attended an American University as an exchange student, where he "majored in smoking." He tells me all about his wife, who is at home because she's eight months pregnant.

We arrive at Club UNIT, the pulsing crowd full of Japanese hipsters in suspenders and fedoras. The DJ's are German youth who have clearly moved to Tokyo to be worshipped as gods of fun and style.

Their plan is working. Club-goers bum rush the booth, fighting to get near. The DJs, in turn, take digital photos of their disciples. Kazu and Tada insist on buying me drinks and, more unexpectedly, carrying my purse.

When I protest, they tell Shiori to tell me that "We will show you how a Japanese man is. You are a princess." They think I am a loose girl from the land that birthed reality TV and Cheetos. Shiori says Kazu has a "thing" where he only "has the sex with girls who have never had the sex. He thinks any other way is dirty."

Tada asks my age. I say "23, last week." He's excited. "HOPPY BIRSDAY!"

Suddenly I am faced with a huge bottle of Dom Perignon and a bald man who just keeps pouring it while Tada yells "HOPPY BIRSDAY," again and again. He hands me a pewter mini-vase of his own creation and says "my gift of you." New Order comes on. I let my hair down and dance. Kazu lets his hair down too and tries to waltz. I roll with it. He delivers a long monologue to Shiori, who looks at me and laughs. "What!?" I demand. "He says you are sexy." I'm flattered, considering I'm roughly the size of ninety-one Shioris lined up in a row. S. Coppola really did nail the phenomenon of a Japanese utterance that sounds like an epic and translates into nothing more than a sentence fragment. Recall the scene of Bill Murray being screamed at for minutes by a rockstar director, who has really just asked him to tilt his head slightly.

Now it's time to head to the bar. "A special bar" Shiori says. "A bar for the sadistics." We take a cab to "Fetish Bar." As fetish bars go, this one seems pretty weak. It's about the size of Puffy's Tavern, the bar down the block from me in Manhattan that sees fifteen customers on a good night. Cocktail waitresses wear leather thongs and carry dinky, sub-par whips. One of them is very fat, an oddity in Japan. A sort of big pun den mother, I hear her demand that an ornery client "shut a fuck up." Tada immediately asks that I put on one of the sexy outfits hanging by our banquette. I demur for almost an hour. Shiori sets in. "Why not? This will be the fun. Just a nurse one." I say no. Again and again I say no. I watch Yasu get tied up and "whipped" by our cocktail waitress and I keep saying no.

I allow her to burn my arm with a candle, don't flinch, and I still say no.

"But you are such a sexual person," Yasu informs me. No.

"Can I kiss you?" he asks. "I will not tell my wife because I am my own man of pleasure." No.

"Do you think we're so fucked and inside of ourselves because we are Japanese? We cannot get loose?"

"I don't know," I say. This is making me sad.

So they keep asking about the vinyl nurse's uniform, and I keep drinking. And finally it's just, like, why not? This is the only part of my Tokyo experience Scarlett Johansson can't touch, and anyway, interesting people need to have stories like this.

Shiori and I step into the bathroom, where we stand with a middle-aged salary man wearing only shrunken trousers, his hairless chest covered in red wax. She zips the "dress" on and we emerge. A waitress shouts "KAWAII!" Tada says " LIKE BRITNEY SPEARS!" A random guy in a French maid's apron says, "You so sexy, RENA."

Yasu is awfully wasted and squeezes my butt cheek so hard under the table that I cry out in pain: "NO." For all this talk of honor, there is a surprisingly huge problem with unsolicited ass-grabbing in Tokyo. During rush hour they designate a ladies-only car on the subway.

Yasu goes to another part of the bar and allows the waitress to spread his ass cheeks open and pour hot wax inside.

When his penis comes out, he says "It's not so big — Japanese size! But it can get bigger. Sometime." I am ready to go home. At which point things suddenly get formal.

"It was honor," Tada says, bowing.

"Please you enjoyed Japan," Kazu says.

"Such a nice girl," Yasu slurs.

In the cab back to the hotel, I think that I am starring in a movie about a girl who has just experienced something foreign.

Lena Dunham is a filmmaker from New York City. You can find her website here and she twitters here.

"D.A.N.C.E. (Alan Braxxe remix)" - Justice (mp3)

"D.A.N.C.E. (Extended version)" - Justice (mp3)

"D.A.N.C.E. (Justice remix)" - Justice (mp3)

"D.A.N.C.E. (Mstrkrft remix)" - Justice (mp3)

Basic Arithmetic 

by NELL BOESCHENSTEIN

I first heard Trio as a seven-year-old in the backseat of my mother’s Oldsmobile station wagon. We were probably on our way to my violin lesson because in my memory we were always on our way to violin lessons when I was seven. The album was one of two tapes mom kept in rotation for car rides in the late 80s, the other being Paul Simon’s Graceland. (My first favorite tape was a group tribute to Woody Guthrie that I listened to nonstop between the ages three and six.) That said, I didn't yet quite understand what a "Rosewood Casket" was or grasp the concept of a "Hobo’s Meditation." What I did understand was that this was an album of songs I could listen to repeatedly and that Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt were women I wanted not just in the car with me, but in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on sleepovers at Caetie Ofiesh’s house, and in class as I learned basic arithmetic: one plus one plus one equals three, and that’s no lonely number.

Cream

Supergroups were the spawn of the late 60s. Cream is the archetype. Think also The Traveling Wilburys. The Plastic Ono Band. Supergroups did sometimes, too, exist outside the realm of rock and roll. The Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson), for example, and it’s not too far-fetched to say The Three Tenors were one for the tails and white gloves set.

They were also often a way for the guys to get together, puff feathers, and engage in a ritual of musical one-upmanship. As a result the projects were notorious for being unable to withstand the weight of collective egos. That said, they weren’t always men and they weren’t always frustrated by the complications of said egos. Trio — starring the thinking people’s queens of country music — was one for sure and for the ages. The album was released in 1987 but the women had been planning a record together for at least a decade.

Describing how they first met in an interview, Harris explained how she was on the road with Gram Parsons and Ronstadt was on the road with Neil Young and they “kind of converged and, um, we revealed to each other that our favorite girl singer was Dolly Parton and from there our friendship blossomed because we had something very important in common.” About the first time the three of them sang together shortly thereafter, she continued, "The sound that we made together surprised and astonished the three of us. It was a very, very special sound and we knew that at some point we needed to do some singing and get it down on tape." But their 70s schedules proved too difficult to synch, so the Trio dream was temporarily deferred.

When their schedules did finally let up enough to collaborate it was at a time when country music was increasingly commercialized; what Trio proved was that the traditionalist approach maintained a beating heart of a fanbase. The album hit #1 on the country charts, won a couple Grammys in 1988, had the mainstream buzz to be put up against Prince, Michael Jackson, U2, and Whitney Houston for album of the year that year (it lost to The Joshua Tree, produced by Daniel Lanois who Emmylou Harris later hired to produce her famous 1995 album Wrecking Ball), and sold more than four million copies.

It’s sort of funny to watch the video from the 1988 Grammys as the nominees for best album are named. U2, Prince, and Michael Jackson all get audible cheers and catcalls, but when the nomination for Trio is announced there’s an almost awkward silence, as if people haven’t quite heard of these women or the little album they made sans drum machines and synth. "Funny," because it’s nearly impossible to overstate the combined influence of Harris, Parton, and Ronstadt. Even if they may have been losing then finding their ways again a bit as the 80s progressed, each was already a living legend, having become as much by remaining largely faithful to a basic American vernacular from whence she came.

This sense that each came from somewhere and wears that somewhere like a badge means something to me. I am from Virginia and wouldn’t want it any other way. I think about this fact maybe more than my therapist would like me to and that’s saying something since she, like any therapist, is hardly in favor of an ahistorical individual. Regardless, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes feel defensive in New York about my Virginia aesthetic, despite the fact that it is just that: an aesthetic, frosting on a deeper philosophy.

linda ronstadt

While neither Parton, nor Harris, nor Ronstadt are particularly arty — they aren’t Yoko Onos or Patti Smiths — they nevertheless warrant podiums. Behind their costumes and hair and makeup, Parton, Harris, and Ronstadt are as rock and roll in ethos as anyone, as pure awesome, as badass because, boys, Nashville can be as hard on a girl as New York. It takes a certain kind of stubborn, almost perverse, sense of subversion after all to stick to the dulcimer. Not to mention to be the sort of true blues they are in the red world of country.

To love Trio as a trio is not to admire these women any less as individuals, but that’s not my point. Beyond the strength of their individual personas, what never ceases to amaze me about the album is how the three share the spotlight without ever stepping on toes.  Parton leads on four songs, Ronstadt on three, Harris on two. Parton is pure, aching, bawdy country in "Those Memories of You"; Harris is somber on "My Dear Companion", her voice full of the sound of loss for which it is known (goodbye again, Gram), made only more so by the harmonies in the chorus; Ronstadt has something to prove in “Telling Me Lies,” and prove it she does. The three sing ensemble-style on "To Know Him Is To Love Him" and round-robin style in the final song, the gospel classic "Farther Along."

When harmonizing, their voices meld but maintain what allowed them to be plucked out of the cacophony in the first place. American folk and country music are about singing together: in church, in the fields, on the porch, wherever. That is what this is about. Preach, practice, etc. "The music brought us together," Parton has said. "And the fact that our voices are completely different, all three of us, and our personalities are completely different, our look is completely different, you wouldn’t think that we would fit together in all the ways we do, but we’re very compatible in every way and it’s worked out real good. Since the early 70s we’ve been together and hopefully we’ll be together forever."

There is the sense here that they need each other. Even when not performing as a trio, they are known to pop up and play songs at one another’s shows and to talk in interviews about the years spent together on the road, how unusual that was at a certain time and how important it was to have the companionship and sense of camaraderie they provided each other. Sometimes I find myself at the butt of gentle jokes because I have a fondness for getting out the guitars and mandolins, the Rise Up Singing, and the whiskey, and singing so that all of Myrtle Avenue can hear. I don’t care because afterwards I feel better inside than I did before.

The other thing I didn’t understand when I first heard Trio in the back of the Oldsmobile but do now was that I wanted those women in the car and in my math class for beginners because they were an artistic embodiment of female friendship and collaboration. The imperative importance of those things are learned over time and neither is always easy. In footage of Trio performances you can see that that Parton, Harris, and Ronstadt have all taken notes on those lessons: these women love each other, love working together, love making it work, figuring out the equation so that it adds up correctly, balances out.

Nell Boeschenstein is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here. This is her first appearance in these pages.

"When We're Gone, Long Gone" - Trio (mp3)

"Feels Like Home" - Trio (mp3)

"He Rode All The Way To Texas" - Trio (mp3)

dolly

Plans for Work: October 1937

by JAMES AGEE

The following was submitted by James Agee with his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship.

I am working on, or am interested to try, or expect to return to, such projects as the following. I shall first list them, then briefly specify a little more about most of them.

An Alabama Record.

Letters.

A Story about homosexuality and football.

News Items.

Hung with their own rope.

A dictionary of key words.

Notes for color photography.

A revue.

Shakespeare.

A cabaret.

Newsreel. Theatre.

A new type of stage-screen show.

Anti-communist manifesto.

Three or four love stories.

A new type of sex book.

"Glamor" writing.

A study in the pathology of "laziness."

A new type of horror story.

Stories whose whole intention is the direct communication of the intensity of common experience.

"Musical" uses of "sensation" or "emotion."

Collections and analyses of faces; of news pictures.

Development of new forms of writing via the caption; letters; pieces of overheard conversation.

A new form of "story": the true incident recorded as such and an analysis of it.

A new form of movie short roughly equivalent to the lyric poem.

Conjectures of how to get "art" back on a plane of organic human necessity, parallel to religious art or the art of primitive hunters.

A show about motherhood.

Pieces of writing whose rough parallel is the prophetic writings of the Bible.

Uses of the Dorothy Dix method, the Voice of Experience: for immediacy, intensity, complexity of opinion.

The inanimate and non-human.

A new style and use of the imagination: the exact opposite of the Alabama record.

A true account of a jazz band.

An account and analysis of a cruise: "high"-class people.

Portraiture. Notes. The Triptych.

City Streets. Hotel Rooms. Cities.

A new kind of photographic show.

The slide lecture.

A new kind of music. Noninstrumental sound. Phonograph recording. Radio.

Extension in writing; ramification in suspension; Schubert 2-cello Quintet.

Analyses of Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Auden, other writers.

Analyses of review of Kafka's Trial; various moving pictures.

Two forms of history of the movies.

Reanalyses of the nature and meaning of love.

Analyses of miscommunication; the corruption of idea.

Moving picture notes and scenarios.

An "autobiographical novel."

New forms of "poetry."

A notebook.

In any effort to talk further about these, much is liable to overlap and repeat. Any further coordination would however be rather more false than true indication of the way the work would be undertaken; for these projects are in fluid rather than organized relationship to each other. None of the following can be more than suggestive of work.

Alabama Record.

In the summer of 1936 the photographer Walker Evans and I spent two months in Alabama hunting out and then living with a family of cotton tenants which by general average would most accurately represent all cotton tenancy. This work was in preparation for an article for Fortune. We lived with one and made a detailed study and record of three families, and interviewed and observed landowners, new dealers, county officers, white and negro tenants, etc., etc., in several cities and county seats and villages and throughout 6,000 miles of country.

The record I want to make of this is not journalistic; nor on the other hand is any of it to be invented. It can perhaps most nearly be described as "scientific," but not in a sense acceptable to scientists, only in the sense that it is ultimately skeptical and analytic. It is to be as exhaustive a reproduction and analysis of personal experience, including the phases and problems of memory and recall and revisitation and the problems of writing and communication, as I am capable of, with constant bearing on two points: to tell everything possible as accurately as possible: and to invent nothing. It involves therefore as total a suspicion of "creative" and "artistic" as of "reportorial" attitudes and methods, and it is therefore likely to involve the development of some more or less new forms of writing and of observation.

Of this work I have written about 40,000 words, first draft, and entirely tentative. On this manuscript I was offered an advance and contract, which I finally declined, feeling I could neither wisely nor honestly commit the project to the necessarily set or estimated limits of time and length. With your permission I wish to submit it as a part of my application, in the hope that it will indicate certain things about the general intention of the work, and also some matters suggested under the head of "accomplishments," more clearly than I can. I should add of it a few matters it is not sufficiently developed to indicate.

Any body of experience is sufficiently complex and ramified to require (or at least be able to use) more than one mode of reproduction: it is likely that this one will require many, including some that will extend writing and observing methods. It will likely make use of various traditional forms but it is anti-artistic, anti-scientific, and anti-journalistic. Though every effort will be made to give experience, emotion and thought as directly as possible, and as nearly as may be toward their full detail and complexity (it would have at different times, in other words, many of the qualities of a novel, a report, poetry), the job is perhaps chiefly a skeptical study of the nature of reality and of the false nature of re-creation and of communication. It should be as definitely a book of photographs as a book word, in other words photographs should be used profusely, and never to "illustrate" the prose. One of part of the work, in many senses the crucial part, would be a strict comparison of the photographs and the prose as relative liars and as relative reproducers of the same matters.

Letters.

Letters are in every word and phrase immediate to and revealing of, in precision and complex detail, the sender and receiver and the whole world and context each is of: as distinct in their own way, and as valuable, as would be a faultless record of the dreams of many individuals. The two main facts about any letter are: the immediacy, and the flawlessness, of its revelations. In the true sense that any dream is a faultless work of art, so is any letter; and the defended and conscious letter is as revealing as the undefended. Here then is a racial record, and perhaps the best available document of the power and fright of language and of miscommunication and of the crippled concepts behind these. The variety to be found in letters is almost as unlimited as literate human experience; their monotony is equally valuable.

Therefore, a collection of letters of all kinds.

Almost better than not, the limits of this would be: what you and your friends and their acquaintances can find. For even within this, the complete range of society and of mind can be bracketed; and this limitation more truly indicates the range of the subject than any effort to extend it onto more ordinary planes of "research" possibly could.

Working chiefly thus far with two or three friends, we have got together many hundreds of letters. Many more are on their way.

There are several possible and equally good methods of handling these letters.

1. Beyond deletion of identifiers, no editing and no selection at all. In other words, let chance be the artist, the fulcrum and shaper. This is beyond any immediate possibility of publication, in any such bulk.

2. Very careful selection, the chief guides to be a scientific respect for chance and for representativeness rather than respect for more conventional forms of "reader interest"; and (b) the induction and education of a reading public, for less selected future work.

3. Context notes, short and uncolored, would probably be useful.

4. Take certain or all such letters. Let them first stand by themselves. Then an almost word by word analysis of them, as manysided and extensive as the given letter requires. This could be of great clarifying power.

5. Instead of a purely "scientific" analysis, one which likewise allows the open entrance of emotion and belief, to the violent degrees for instance, of rage, rhapsody and poetry.

6. A series or book of invented letters, treated in any or all of the above ways.

These treatments may seem to cancel each other. Not at all necessarily. I would hope to use them all in the course of time, and very likely would try substantial beginning-examples of all in the same first volume.

The value or bearing of such work would come under my own meanings of science, religion, art, teaching, and entertainment.

It should also help to shift and to destroy various habits and certitudes of the "creative" and of the "reading," and so of the daily "functioning" mind.

It could well be published in book form or as all or as part of a certain type of magazine I am interested in, or as a part of a notebook which I shall say more of later.

As a book it should even in its first shot contain as much as a publisher can be persuaded to allow; and its whole demeanor should be colorless and noncommital, like scientific or government publications. It should contain a great deal of facsimile, not only of handwriting but of stationary.

A story about homosexuality and football.

Not central to this story but an inevitable part of it would be a degree of cleansing the air on the subject of homosexuality. Such a cleansing could not in this form hope to be complete. The same clarifying would be attempted on the sport and on the nature of belief: always less by statement than by demonstration. All this however is merely incidental to the story itself.

An account, then, of love between a twelve year old boy and a man of twenty-two, in the Iliadic air of football in a Tennessee mountain peasant school: reaching its crisis during and after a game which is recounted chiefly in terms of the boy's understanding and love; in other words in terms of an age of pure faith. The prose to be lucid, simple naturalistic and physical to the maximum possible. In other words if it succeeds in embodying what it wants to it must necessarily have the essential qualities of folk epic and of heroic music carried in terms of pure "realism." This is being written now. It is to be about the length and roughly the form of the "long short story."

time staff writers, 1945News Items.

Much the same as Letters.

Hang with their own rope.

I have found no single word for what I mean. The material turns up all over the place. The idea is, that the self-deceived and corrupted betray themselves and their world more definitively than invented satire can. Vide Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day; Mrs. Daisy Chanler's Autumn in the Valley; the journal and letters of Gamaliel Bradford; court records, editorial, religious, women's pages; the "literature" concerning and justifying the castration of Eisenstein; etc.

Such could again be collected in a volume, or as a magazine or part of a magazine; or in the notebook. The above is limited to self-betrayals in print. Those in unpublished living must of course be handled in other ways. One minor but powerful way is, the unconsciously naked sentence, given either with or without context. These are abundant for collection.

A dictionary of key words.

More on the significance of language. Add idioms. A study and categorizing of tones of voice, or rhythms and of inflection; of social dialects; would also be useful. Key words are those organic and collective belief - and conception - words upon the centers and sources of which most of social and of single conduct revolves and deceives or undeceives itself and others. Certain such words are Love, God, Honor, Loyalty, Beauty, Law, Justice, Duty, Good, Evil, Truth, Reality, Sacrifice, Self, Pride, Pain, Life, etc. etc. etc. Such would be examined skeptically in every discernible shade of their meaning and use. There might in a first dictionary be an arbitrary fifty or a hundred, with abundant quotations and examples from letters, from printed matter, and from common speech.

Mr. I. A. Richards, whose qualifications are extremely different from my own and in many essentials far more advanced, is, I understand, working on just such a dictionary. Partly because the differences of attack would be so wide, and still more because the chief point is the ambiguity of language. I do not believe these books would be at all in conflict.

Notes for color photography.

Of two kinds: theoretical and specific. For stills; in motion; in coordination with sound and rhythm. Uses of pure color, no image. Metaphoric, oblique, nervous and musical uses of color. Analyses of the "unreality" of "realistic" color photography. Of differences between color in a photograph and in painting. The esthetic is as basically different as photography itself is from painting, and as large a new field is open to color in photography. Examples of all this, and notes for future use, from observation.

A revue.

Much to do with the whole theatrical form. The dramatic stage is slowed and stuffed with naturalism. Audiences still and without effort accept the living equivalent of "poetry" in revue, burlesque and vaudeville. Stylization, abbreviation and intensity are here possible. Destructive examples of "spurious" use: Of Thee I Sing, As Thousands Cheer, etc. Solid examples, upon which still further developments can be made: the didatic plays of Brecht; The Cradle Will Rock; The Dog Beneath the Skin.

Shakespeare.

Commentary; ideas for productino in moving picture and on stage; criticism of contemporary production of his work and of attitudes toward his work produced or read. In movies: use of screen and sound as elliptic commentary or development of the lines. On stage: concentration totally in words and physical relationships. Qualifiedly good example: The Orson Welles Faustus (I have not yet seen his Caesar). On stage also: Savage use of burlesqued melange of traditional idioms of production, conception and reading, intended as simultaneous ridicule, analysis and destruction of culture.

A cabaret.

Cheap drinks, hot jazz by record and occasional performers; "floor show." Examples of acts: monologues I have written; certain numbers from Erika Mann's Peppermill; much in Groucho Marx, Durante, Fields. Broad and extreme uses of ad lib and of parody. No sets, no lighting and only improvised costume. Intense and violent satire, "vulgarity," pure comedy. Strong development of improvisation; use of the audience in this.

Newsreel. Theater.

The theater: 15-25 cents, 42nd street west of Times Square, open all night. Usual arty-theatre repertory much cut down, strongly augmented by several dozen features overlooked by the arty and political, and by several of Harry Langdon's and all of Buster Keaton's comedies. Strong and frequent shifts in "policy," to admit, for instance, a week embodying the entire career of a given director or star or idiom. Revivals, much more frequent than at present, of certain basics: Chaplin, Cagney, Garbo, Disney, Eisenstein. For silent pictures, uses of the old projector, which gives these at their proper speed. Occasional stage numbers and jazz performers. Cheap bar out of sound of screen. Totally anti-arty and anti-period-laugh. Strongly, but secondarily, political. Most of hte audience must be drawn on straight entertainment value, or not at all.

The Newsreeel: Once a month for a week. Clips from newsreels, arranged for strongest possible satire, significance and comedy, with generally elliptic commentary and sound.

New type of stage-screen show.

Using anti-realistic technique of revue and combining and alternating with screen, plus idioms also of radio; proceeding by free association and by naturalistic symbol and by series of nervous emotional and logical impacts rather than by plot or characters; in an organization parallel to that of music and certain Russian and surrealist movies. More direct uses of the audience than I know of so far. Made not for an intellectual but for a mixture of the two other types of audience: the bourgeois, and the large and simple. Such a show should not last more than 40-60 minutes and should have the continuous intensity as well as the dimensions of a large piece of music. I have begun one such, springboarding from the Only Yesterday idiom, and have another projected, on mothers.

Anti-communist manifesto.

Merely a working title. Assumption and statement in the first place of belief in ideas and basic procedures of communism. On into specific demonstrations of its misconceptions, corruptions, misuses, the damage done and inevitable under these circumstances, using probably the method of comment on quotations from contemporary communist writing and action.

Three or four love stories.

Stories in which the concentration would be entirely on the processes of sexual love. If these are "works of art," that will be only incidental.

A new type of sex book.

Beginning with quotations from contemporary and former types, an analysis of their usefulness, shortcomings, and power to damage, and a statement of the limitations of the present book. Then as complete as possible a record and analysis of personal experience from early childhood on, and of everything seen heard learned or suspected on the subject; analyses and extensions of the significance and power of sex and of sexual self-deception; with all available examples.

"Glamor" writing.

Here, as above on love, the concentration on recording and communicating pure glamor and delight.

Pathology of "laziness."

Essentially fiction, but probably much analysis. Its connections with fear, ignorance, sex, misinterpretation and economics. A story of cumulative horror.

A new type of "horror" story.

Not the above, but the horror that can come of objects and of their relationships and of tones of voice, etc, etc. Non-supernatural, non-exaggerative.

Stories whose whole intention is the communication of the intensity of common experience.

Concentration on what the senses receive and the memory and context does with it, and such incidents, done full length, as a family supper, a marital bedfight, an auto trip.

Musical uses of sensation or emotion.

As for instance: A, a man knows B, a girl, and C, a man, each very well. They meet. A is anxious that they like each other. B and C are variously deflected and concerned. All is delicately yet strongly distorted. Their relationship is more complex yet as rigid as that or mirrors set in a triangle, faces inward and interreflecting. These interreflections, as the mirrors shift, are analogous to the structures of contrapuntal music.

Most uses would be more subtle and less describable. Statements of moral and physical sprained equations. This would be one form of poetry.

dinner with the chaplins

Collections and analyses of faces; of news pictures.

Chiefly the faces would be found in news pictures.

The forms of analysis would be useful, one with, one without, any previous knowledge of whose the face and what the context is. The nearest word for such a study is anthropological, but it involves much the anthropologist does not take into account. The faces alone, with no comment, are another form of value. The pictures of more than face involve much more, which has to do with the esthetics and basic "philosophies" of poetry, music and moving pictures.

One idea here is this: no picture needs or should have a caption. But words may be used detachably, and may be used as sound and image are used with and against each other. And the picture may be used as a springboard, a theme for free variation and development; as with letters and with pieces of overheard conversations.

A new form of movie short.

A form, 2 to 10 minutes long, capable of many forms within itself. By time-condensation, each image (like each words in poetry) must have more than common intensity and related tension. This project is in many ways directly parallel to written "musical" uses of "sensation" and "emotion."

walker evans

Conjectures on how to get "art" back on the plane of organic human necessity.

I can write nothing about this, short of writing a great deal. But this again is intensely anti-"artistic," as of art in any of its contemporary meanings. Every use of the moving picture, the radio, the stage, the imagination, and the techniques of the psychoanalyst, the lecturer, the showman and entertainer, the preacher, the teacher, the agitator and the prophet, used directly upon the audience itself, not just set before them: and used on, and against, matters essential to their existence. Such would be the above-mentioned show about motherhood: a massive yet detailed statement of contemporary motherhood and all ideas which direct and impose it.

"Prophetic" writing.

Here too, the directest, most incisive and specific, and angriest possible form of direct address, semi-scientific, semi-religious; set in terms of the greatest available human intensity.

Dorothy Dix: the Voice of Experience

Typical human situations, whether invented or actual, are set up: then, of each, strong counterpoints of straight and false analysis and advice. So, again, as in a letter, each case inevitably expands and entangles itself with a whole moral and social system; the general can best be attacked through the specific. No time wasted with story, character development, etc.; you are deep in the middle from the start, with more immediacy and intensity than in a piece of fiction: inside living rather than describing it.

The inanimate and non-human.

By word, sound, moving picture. Simply, efforts to state systems and forms of existence as nearly in their own, not in human terms, as may be possible: towards extensions of human self-consciousness , and still more, for the sake of what is there.

A "new" style of use of the imagination.

In the Alabama record the effort is to suspect the mind of invention and to invent nothing. But another form of relative truth is any person's imagination of what he knows little or nothing of and has never seen. In these terms, Buenos Aires itself is neither more nor less actual than my, or your, careful imagination of it told as pure imaginative fact. The same of the States of Washington and West Virginia, and of his histories of The Civil War, the United States, and Hot Jazz. Such are projects I want to undertake in this way.

A true account of a jazz band.

The use of the Alabama technique on personal knowledge of a band.

An account and analysis of a cruise: "high"-class people.

Related to the Alabama technique, a technique was developed part way in Havana Cruise, mentioned among things I have had published, I should like to apply this to behavior of a wealthier class of people on, say, a Mediterranean cruise.

Portraits, Notes, The Triptych.

Only photographic portraiture is meant. Notes and analyses, with examples, of the large number of faces any individual has. The need for a dozen to fifty photographs, supplementing five or three or one central, common denominator, for a portrait of any person. Notes on composition, pose and lighting "esthetics" and "psycho" analysis of contemporary and recent idioms.

The triptych: Research begins to indicate (in case anyhow of criminals and steep neurotics) that the left and right halves of the face contain respectively the unconscious and the conscious. So: the establishment is possible of custom, habit, wherin one would have triptychs of one's friends, relatives, etc: the left half reversed and made a whole face; the natural full face; the right-face.

Collections of these, with or without case histories, in a book.

Also: of each person, two basic portraits, one clinical, the other totally satisfying the sitter; to be collected and published.

Also: "anthropological" use of the family album. Of any individual, his biography in terms of pictures of him and of all persons and places involved in his life. A collection of such biographies of anonymous people, with or without case-history notes and analysis.

City streets. Hotel rooms. Cities.

And many other categories. Again, the wish is to consider such in their own terms, not as decoration or atmosphere for fiction. And, or: in their own terms through terms of personal experience. And, or; in terms of personal, multipersonal, collective, memory or imagination.

A new kind of photographic show.

In which photographs are organized and juxtaposed into an organic meaning and whole: a sort of static movie. Scenario for such a show furnished if desired.

The slide lecture.

A lecture can now be recorded and sent around with the slides. The idea is that this can be given vitality as an "art" form, as a destroyer, disturber and instructor.

A new kind of "music."

There is as wide a field of pure sound as of pure image, and sound can be photographed. The range, between straight document and the farthest reaches of distortion, juxtaposition, metaphor, associatives, the specific male abstract, is quite as unlimited. Unlimited rhythmic and emotional possibilities. Many possibilities of combination with image, instrumental music, the spoken and printed word. For phonograph records, radio, television, movies, reading machines. Thus: a new field of "music" in relation to music about as photography is in relation to painting. Some Japanese music suggests its possibilities.

Extension in writing; ramification in suspension, Schubert 2-cello Quintet.

Experiments, mostly in form of the lifted and maximum suspended periodic sentence. Ramification (and development) through developments, repeats, semi-repeats, of evolving thought, of emotion, of associatives and dissonants. The quintet: here and sometimes elsewhere Schubert appears to be composing out of a state of consciousness different from any I have seen elsewhere in art. Of these extension experiments some are related to this, some to late quartets and piano music of Beethoven. The attempt is to suggest or approximate a continuum.

Two forms of history of the movies.

One, a sort of bibliography to which others would add: an exhaustive inventory of performers, performances, moments, images, sequences, anything which has for any reason ever given me pleasure or appeared otherwise valuable.

The other, an extension of this into complete personal history: recall rather than inventory.

Reanalyses of the nature and meaning of love.

Chiefly these would be tentative, questioning and destructive of crystallized ideas and attitudes, indicative of their power to cause pain. Not only of sexual but of other forms of love including the collective and religious. The love stories, the sex book, and part of the dictionary and letters, all come under this head.

Analyses of miscommunication; the corruption of ideas.

Again, to quite an extent, the dictionary, the letters, personal experience, dictaphone records of literal experience, comparison of source writing with writing of disciples and disciplinarians. In one strong sense ideas rule all conduct and experience. Analyses of the concentricities of misunderstanding, misconditioning, psychological and social lag, etc, through which every first-rate idea and most discoveries of fact, move and become degraded and misused against their own ends.

Moving picture notes and scenarios.

Much can be done, good in itself and possibly useful to others, even without a camera and money, in words. I am at least as interested in moving pictures as in writing.

An "autobiographical novel."

This would combine many of the forms and ideas and experiments mentioned above. Only relatively small portions would be fiction (though the techniques of fiction might be much used); and these would be subjected to nonfictional analysis. This work would contain photographs and records as well as words.

Poetry.

This I am unable to indicate much about; but it involves all the more complex and intense extensions suggested by any of the above, and, chiefly, pesonal recall and imagination. It is in the long run perhaps more important than anything I have mentioned; but includes much of it.

Notebook.

One way of speaking, a catchall for all conceivable forms of experience which can in any way, scientifically, imaginatively, or otherwise, be recorded and analyzed. More than one person could contribute to such a work, and it would be handed ahead to others. It would not at any time be finishable. It would in course of time reach encyclopedic size, or more. It would be published looseleaf, so that readers might make their own inserts and rearrangements as they thought most relevant. Such a record could perhaps best be published by the State or by a scientific foundation.

I would wish, under a grant, to go ahead with work such as this. Most likely the concentration would be on the Alabama record and secondarily on moving pictures, sound-music, and various collections of letters and pictures, and various experiments in poetry. Quite a bit of this work would be done in collaboration with Mr. Walker Evans who is responsible for some and collaboratively responsible for others of the ideas or projects mentioned.

James Agee died in 1955.

"Goldeneye" - Frank Ocean (mp3)

"There Will Be Tears" - Frank Ocean (mp3)

"Swim Good "- Frank Ocean (mp3)

The Strangeness of Coming Back

by ALEXIS OKEOWO

To anyone who has lived abroad for a long time, "repatriate" is a misleading word. It’s similar enough to "expatriate" that it almost seems friendly or, at the very least, benign, like a mole that’s been on your neck for as long as you can remember. As expats, in whichever foreign country we are living, we play a game with each other. In order to figure out how serious a person is about committing to living abroad, we ask them two questions, "So how long have you been here?" and "How much longer are you here for?" If the answer to the first question is not long, the answer to the second better be much longer. If not, we dismiss you as a backpacker, an aimless traveler who has no interest in really learning about or contributing to this country we’ve now started to call home.

But the truth is that most of us will leave our adopted homes at some point. It may take a few years, or a few decades, but that word, “repatriate,” will squirm its way into your consciousness and refuse to leave until you finally pass through America's overbearingly bright customs terminals. Even then, it lurks at the corner of your mind, reminding you how easy it is supposed to be to come back home, as you find out how it is not easy at all.

A trick to permanently leaving a foreign country where you’ve lived for at least two years is to pretend that you’re really only stepping out for a run to the corner store and will be back in a flash. When you see friends at bars and parties in your last few weeks and they express sadness over your departure, tell them, "Oh, it’s just for a little while, I’ll be back in a few months!" This statement, which both you and your friends know is a lie, nevertheless eases a little the pain of leaving, soothes for a few minutes the betrayal of moving back to the States. When you go to your regular hairdresser, greet your neighbors in the hall, and walk up to your favorite street vendors, cheerfully tell them you’ll be going "home" for a while, but that you’ll see them later on in the year. Do they need anything from America? The problem with this trick is that you start believing the lie, this illusion you’ve created of global jet setting and minimal responsibilities. You have fooled yourself into thinking that nothing, even your impending return, is permanent, until it is.

This trick, though most helpful for people who have lived for several years abroad, is also useful for perpetual wanderers, who spend short spurts of time in various lands until they also finally tether themselves down. College students spending their junior semester abroad should be fine.

Except for the last seven months, I have lived all of my adult, post-college life outside of the United States. For two years, I lived in Uganda, then another two in Mexico, with a hazy month-long interlude in Cuba. On holidays, I visited my Alabama hometown and New York, seeing family and friends, bringing exotic gifts, and repeating stories of adventures and disasters abroad. I thought New York was great, constant celebrations and good food and drink. Then I moved here. I feel that I should issue a disclaimer at this point to say that I have grown very fond of New York, but when I first came, I hated living in this city.

I didn't realize until I settled into my new room in Brooklyn that my friends who had moved back to America before me had not been completely honest about the strangeness of coming back. They told me about the initial shock, which I quickly experienced – the surprise at the rushed, orderly transportation system, the over-purified abundance of food and water, the relatively reserved people. They neglected to mention the lingering discomfort that would follow me as I went to work, did my grocery shopping, called my parents, met friends for dinner, went out on dates. I felt like a giant, hulking alien, one who didn’t belong in a sea of people who all seemed to know what the hell it was they were doing. (Get a monthly subway card, get into one of the hundred lines at Whole Foods, dinner tonight at Babbo then The Jane, OK?) The discomfort became physical, a tingling sensation of friction that rubbed against my skin. Not feeling at home in Havana was expected; in my own home country, it was unsettling.

The quiet was the most jarring. When I woke up, it was to the sound of my insistent iPhone alarm clock – not to people laughing, chatting, and selling things out of wagons and trucks in the street outside my window. When I stepped into the subway, except for a few crazy, welcomed instances, the lulling calm in the car was stifling. When I entered my office, the quiet receded to a hush. I relished when a beggar started yelling in a subway car, or hawkers tried to push Broadway tickets onto me in Times Square. Everywhere, it seemed, there were layers of silence upon silence upon silence. One fall afternoon, I got home, Skyped my best friend in southern California, and screamed.

So I refused to let go of my past lives. I carried in my wallet coins from the countries in which I had spent time, large, shiny Mexican pieces and small, grooved Ugandan and Kenyan shillings, knowing that I should purge my purse of them, but secretly enjoying the feeling of nostalgia when I accidentally pulled one out and gave it to a confused cashier. I hung out mainly with other ex-expats, hunting for authentic-tasting Mexican restaurants and reminiscing about trips we took together. I moved into a sublet in a building where most of the residents never spoke English and cooked rich, heavy meals, the smell creeping in under the door to my apartment. I looked up support group meetings for returned Peace Corps volunteers, supposedly for a story I wanted to write. I went out with very nice boys who looked at me blankly when I told them I was dying to move back to east Africa, and soon ended things with them. I was becoming that girl who had lived abroad for a long time and had come back the bad kind of eccentric, and I didn't mind.

The Washington Post recently ran a story about a group of American high school students who were forced to evacuate Egypt – their parents work for the State Department – and move to a Virginia suburb. The article says of the students:

Some of these students wear high school athletic uniforms with the word ‘Cairo’ emblazoned on their chests. Some refuse to change their watches from Egyptian time. They get news through friends' Facebook pages, where Egyptian classmates have posted photos from Tahrir Square and exultant messages in Arabic.

My friend Emily, who lived in Africa before moving back to New York, gleefully sent the article to me and said the kids reminded her of us. These kids also reminded me of other people I knew, people who both had and had not returned and their myriad idiosyncrasies.

I have a friend, a talented photographer, who spent her college years getting one grant after the other to travel across Mexico to do multiple photo projects. After she graduated a year and a half ago and moved home to Arizona, she felt listless and spent some more time in Mexico before signing on to a nine-month volunteer program in Sudan. When she returned home after that stint in Africa, she enlisted in the Peace Corps and now lives in rural Zambia. She says she just can’t settle in America. Another friend's dad has lived in Thailand for many years and will never return to California, my friend tells me, because he is "too dysfunctional to ever live here again." A good friend who moved to Philadelphia after years of traveling and studying in Asia and South America has had it bad, battling periods of depression as we both experienced our first American winter in a while.

There are businesses devoted to providing repatriation services, and they boast that they can help smooth the transition of any professional (with or sans family) from the exciting and unpredictable life he once had in a foreign country, to the more mundane existence that awaits him in his hometown. Learn how to make small talk about current events and gain friends for a modest fee. But the truth is that life abroad isn't really that exciting. It is thrilling and challenging, but no one uproots her life to go to a distant place so that she can be shocked and startled every day. She wants to carve out a life, meet people, find a nice apartment, pay her bills on time, maybe go to the beach a little more often.

I watched the movie The American several weeks ago, after abandoning it the first time I tried to watch it a few months prior. I thought the slow pace had turned me off the film, but on second viewing, I realized that it was because the title character was achingly familiar. George Clooney excels in his portrayal of a man who embodies the tragedy of never feeling – or being capable of feeling – at home. There has long been the trope of the stereotypical expat who lives abroad because he is running away from something. In reality, that figure is less common than you may think. In The American, the protagonist is an assassin, but he may as well have been one of the expatriate artists, teachers, journalists, aid workers, designers, or lawyers that I know. The random, fascinating people we met and places we explored, and the absurdity of always being the foreigners, made our lives wonderfully messy and worth the comfort we left behind. It's not that coming back is so awful; it's missing what we are abandoning.

But, eventually, you recognize, as I did, your tendency to idealize your life in one place and not appreciate the wonders of your life in this place. The itchy feeling of friction wears off, replaced by a familiar restlessness. I reunited with the friends who I had deeply missed when I lived far away, allowed myself to make connections with new people, and remembered why I thought New York was such a striking city. I was grateful for the luxuries of blending into a crowd again and feeling like I had membership in my country of residence. You do adapt, mainly because you know that you will end up going back into the unknown one day. You now despise that damn word "repatriate."

Alexis Okeowo is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She twitters here, and you can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels. Photographs by the author.

"Exodus" - Daara J (mp3)

"Karibu Ya Bintou" - Baloji (mp3)

"Partir de Cero" - Anita Tijoux (mp3)

Snapshot of Northwood Campus. Northwood was an addition built to accommodate the surge in the student population after Allen Ginsberg declared Goddard College “the center of the universe.”

Charles Olson In Vermont

by KYLE SCHLESINGER

The process of transcription is characterized by variation.

— WW Greg

I stumbled on these recordings of Charles Olson when I was a student in a seminar on the history of medieval education that was conducted in the basement of the Eliot D Pratt Library at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. The course was taught by archivist and volunteer firefighter Forest Davis who, after graduating from Harvard College, joined the Air Force in 1943 and served in the Pacific until the end of WWII. After the War, he returned to his studies at Harvard Divinity School on the GI Bill, and shortly thereafter, became a Dean at Goddard College where he worked until 1967. He left to pursue careers at other universities, but when he retired, returned to rural Vermont where he taught part-time and contributed much to our understanding of the college through his extraordinary histories, Things Were Different in Royce's Day (1996) and earth.goddard.edu (2003), both published by his own Adamant Press.

There were four ninety-minute cassette tapes of Olson, each neatly labeled with a typewriter. Recordings of Robert Creeley and Richard Grossinger reading at the College were in the same drawer as the Olson tapes, but the sound quality of both were less than desirable. Davis gave me permission to take the cassettes to one of the listening stations on the first floor of the Library where I spent days transcribing the recordings, donning classic, plastic DJ headphones. Rewind. Pause. Play. Rewind. Pause. Play. Repeat.

In the spring (or “mud season”) of 1962, Olson descended upon the experimental college to read from The Maximus Poems and The Distances, and to lecture on Herman Melville. His captivating performance sparked lively debates with the audience on the nature of myth, history, etymology, narrative, knowledge, and sexuality. Charles Olson at Goddard College is an enthralling and indispensable annotated transcript that celebrates the intersection of Olson’s poetics and a hopeful moment in American education. Olson’s poetry reading was recorded in the Haybarn Theater on April 12, and his lecture on Melville was recorded in the same location two days later (according to the cassette labels).

Olson began the first event by stating his problem with poetry readings, "It gets to be kind of a bore, because it's become a performing art, you feel as though you have an audience, and as if you’re supposed to do a concert or something." He concludes, "I don’t think I believe in verse in this respect at all. As a matter of fact, I know I don't." Hearing this as a student then engaged with medieval education, it struck me that poetry has always been a "performing art," even if it wasn’t thought of as such at the time.

In The Muse Learns to Write, Greek scholar Eric Havelock examines the ways consciousness changes when oral cultures become literate, and suggests how new forms of communication affect the content and meaning of language. Olson shared many of Havelock’s interests and even published a review of his Preface to Plato in the first issue of Niagara Frontier Review in 1964. From Dada to the Bauhaus to the Beat poets reading poems with jazz musicians, by 1962 poetry as a performing art had become a staple in twentieth century American and European poetic practices.

President Royce Pitkin’s offices in the early 60s.

At a time when some historians were lamenting the loss of the common culture of reading, Marshall McLuhan published his tour de force, The Gutenberg Galaxy (also 1962) wherein he announced the end of the printing press' monarchy, examining the interaction between mass media and the transformation of global consciousness within a transhistorical context. A few years later, ethnopoetic pioneers Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock would introduce the expansive history of poetry’s oral traditions to the avant-garde, while poets such as David Antin would blur the lines between poetry and performance art, much in the way that performance artists, many associated with Fluxus and Something Else Press, used language as a visual and oral muse and medium.

In the days before PennSound and Ubu Web, hearing poets read was a rare occasion for most people. There was some poetry on vinyl, but one couldn’t hear a fraction of the diverse number of poets whose readings are represented online today. During the ages of cassettes and compact disks, there was a dearth of professionally produced and distributed studio recordings, but a rise in amateur productions, creating a more eclectic and decentralized record of poetry’s sound. Cassette tapes were easy to dub, and quickly became part of poetry’s cultural currency (Olson mentions that a recording of Creeley reading at the College "ran from this room (was it?) into our kitchen in Gloucester, directly almost. I think it was in a matter of hours — it was like hotcakes."

Forest Davis teaching a philosophy class in the Manor.

At the time I encountered these tapes, I had been reading Olson for a year or two but still felt baffled, if not bombarded, by the bard’s esoteric references, unconventional poetic forms, the mass of Maximus, etc. Sitting in that listening room, hearing Olson read his poems for the first time, was an unforgettable experience. "Projective Verse" became an immediate, irrevocably apparent source of energy and information — everything changed, and was charged by the sound. Listening is an aid to memory.

Goddard’s founder, Tim Pitkin, conceived of the College as a place for "plain living and hard thinking." Goddard was celebrated for its progressive and experimental practices that, like Black Mountain College, were inspired largely by John Dewey’s philosophy of education. In the ’60s, the student population was approaching its peak, with just over one thousand students enrolled after Allen Ginsberg claimed it was the “center of the universe.” According to Goddard alumni Don and Susan Wilcox, the reading was organized by Paul Winer, a student at the time, remembered fondly as a "honky-tonk piano player" who later "became a kind of traveling cabaret act calling himself 'Sweet Pie'." Winer eventually stopped touring to raise a family, and became known as the "naked book guy" and proprietor of the Reader’s Oasis Books in Quartzsite, Arizona. In Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, Tom Clark sets the stage for Olson’s New England tour:

On an April reading swing through upper New England he took Betty along, but her presence did little to curb his need to force the public moment with artificial spirits. At Dartmouth, English professor John Finch, who had set up Olson's reading, could not help noticing his former eccentric roommate was acting 'more rambunctious' than ever before. At Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, Olson's next stop, he was at his outgoing best for the first few days of a week-long reading/lecture visit, helping a young but receptive student audience though his latest mythohistorical Maximus run by airing his views on the poet’s role as mythmaker—reformulated, he said, following discussions a few days earlier with Dartmouth French poetry expert Ramon Guthrie. (Guthrie had pointed out to him that the medieval French verb trobar meant to find, allowing word-root fanatic Olson to link the troubadour poets with Herodotus, Homer, and himself in the tradition of the investigative storyteller, 'the man who finds out the words.') But by the end of the week, both the poet himself and his wife had been summoned before the college Judiciary Committee, reprimanded for taking part in a wild drinking party on campus, and sternly 'told to abide by community laws while there.'

Long-time Goddard College professor of literature and fellow Black Mountaineer Will Hamlin confirmed the report when I interviewed him about the College’s history: "We threw that louse out of here." He also referred to Creeley as a "love" poet. Will was a student when BMC’s founder John Andrew Rice was still rector, long before Robert Duncan, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Motherwell, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, or Olson arrived on the scene. Hamlin wrote, but never to my knowledge finished, an excellent memoir about his time at Black Mountain. Rice once professed: "All colleges should be in tents, when they fold, they fold." He felt that the problem with institutions was that they were designed to survive, to sustain themselves, regardless of their function or relevance. Like any entity, Rice felt that a college should not live beyond its necessary years, and like Black Mountain decades earlier, Goddard shut down the campus early in the twenty-first century, signifying the end of progressive higher education in America.

Early in the recording, someone in the audience asks, "You don’t mind using a tape recorder do you?" to which the poet responds, "No. As a matter of fact I'm going to just watch it like a fire — let's sit here and watch that tape." The poet goes on to present an exegesis on the second century dialectician Maximus of Tyre in order to offer the uninitiated audience a context for The Maximus Poems. Olson’s critique of the poetry reading is the perfect introduction for a tremendous performance where the poet reads from the third and fifth volume of The Maximus Poems with selections from The Distances. From time to time, the audience asks Olson to re-read poems; other times, Olson reads poems twice or starts over in an effort to accurately perform the written word: "You dig? You want that again? I don't know. Call me if you'd like any one of these again. I have this problem with scoring, it's more difficult than music. Like one writes music one doesn’t play it. That’s that problem with this kind of performing situation. I'm not, I'm not, I’m not — I’m Beethoven!"

View of the Campus from Route 2, as Olson would have seen it

The technical and conceptual problems of transcription have been variously addressed by Havelock, as well as textual critic Jerome McGann, poet Jerome Rothenberg, and multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann, who was once told by Olson that "...when the cunt began to speak [when women were finally allowed to perform], it was the beginning of the end of Greek theater." Although the reading and the lecture are built around extant texts, they are performances of "thought thinking"; much of what is said is improvisatory, humorous and insightful.

Kyle Schlesinger is a contributor to This Recording. His most recent book is Poems and Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book 1946-1981 (Center for Book Arts, 2010). Two books of poems are scheduled to appear in 2011: What You Will from NewLightsPress and Picture Day from Electio Editions. Schlesinger teaches the core courses in the online MS in Publishing Program at UHV.

 Charles Olson at Goddard College is due out from Cuneiform Press in July. The above was adapted from the introduction to the volume. You can preorder the book by e-mailing Kyle here.

All photographs are courtesy of the Goddard College archive. You can find recordings of Olson reading at PennSound.

The Manor via. fisheye lens

Doorknobs and Scantrons

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

After I graduated college, I got anxious. Freed from the pressures of tests and books, of making sure my grades were good enough to keep my scholarship, I drifted into a life of waking up at 11 a.m., sleeping for twelve hours with frightening regularity, and an aimless temp job.

I wasn't aware of it while it was happening. My brain started to skid, my thoughts played on a repetitive loop. Suddenly, every little incident in life mattered, and it was way too important: if a stranger shoved me on the subway, I overreacted, swearing out loud. The sight of a train crowded with Red Sox fans, with very little room for my own body, would send me into fits. If a mouse scurried through my room, I ended up crying so hard that I hyperventilated into a bag.

I was functioning enough – while also standing on the precipice of an eating disorder at the time, the type of disordered eating where nobody knew that Powerbars made up a large part of my diet – but I was barely holding on. If the first few years out of college are a test of your fortitude, well, I was failing. I had not even showed up to the class. 
 Salvation came in the form of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. After a barrage of standardized tests without the stress – Did I tap my foot 32 times before I go to bed? Do I sleep a lot? Was I scared of lightning? Answer A, B, C, or D – I found out that I was crazy enough to get in the program, and to get free cognitive therapy for Anxiety and Related Disorders.

Eight sessions later, I was "cured," and making decisions about life. Jobs to apply for, hearty square meals to eat. Things were improving, slowly. But I had to go back. Since the Center was a research institute, once I finished my round of therapy, I was required to go back for follow-up sessions. This meant more imitations of standardized tests, complete with a thick stack of Scantron sheets that I had to fill out.

I like to try new and exciting ethnic foods. I don't like myself very much. I'm scared of flying. Sometimes I lick doorknobs.

After answering four straight pages of do I have X psychological disorder? I got loopy. Picture it: a piece of paper with fifty declarative statements ranging from Small dogs scare me to Sometimes I hear voices. I had to answer a,b,c,d, or e, on a Scantron sheet, filling it in with a pencil, corresponding my letters to never, seldom, neutral - in the middle, sometimes, always. By the time I get to declarative statement #175, my brain was falling out of my head. Slowly. I dealt with this monotony by scribbling the odd statement down on a piece of scrap paper. Taken together, it was turning into some great crazy-girl slam poetry. Like if Sylvia Plath was good friends with Saul Williams.

My follow-up session happened to be on the first real spring day in Boston, where the city shook off the shackles of winter and became a hellhole of blossoming flowers and pollen choking the air. In celebration, my nose was running non-stop. I walked into the CVS in a haze and grabbed the first box of pills that promised sweet allergy relief.

Two hours later, I was lying on a sofa in the basement of my college library, dead asleep with that week's New Yorker on my face. Everyone else in there was younger. In college. Not temping and technically unemployed. An errant cell phone rang, waking me up. Luckily, I was in time to head down to my follow-up appointment at the college clinic.

At the clinic, the research assistant took me into a boardroom with comfy chairs. Her first mistake. She started talking at me, expecting a reply of never, sorta, kinda. Are you still afraid of mice? Do you think that you're going to die? Does that noise the radiator make annoy you?

If I replied sometimes or always, I was expected to elaborate. When did the mice scare you, last month? I grumbled yes and no as much as I could, trying to game the system so it'd end soon. I nodded off between questions, apologizing for "just being REALLY tired." Eventually it came crawling to an end, and I gave her my Scantron sheets and was free to go.

After the appointment, I fought the sludge in my veins and made my way home. I reached in my purse to check up on the allergy medicine I bought earlier. It was knock-you-out Benadryl. Of course. I blushed and kept going, thinking about my future nap.

The next day, I got a phone call from the research assistant. This wasn't typical. "Elisabeth, hi. I have your papers and they're all great. Thanks for coming in yesterday. But there was one thing in your papers that I found very disturbing, and combined with your behavior...”

Oh. "What?"

"You wrote I like to try new and exciting ethnic foods. I don't like myself very much. I'm scared of flying. Sometimes I lick doorknobs –"

I interrupted her. "Those are from the Scantron sheet. I was struck by the way all these sentences sounded. I was writing them all together like poetry."

"Really?"

"Really. And I was on a lot of Benadryl yesterday."

She let me go, telling me that I should give her a call if any problems popped up, and don't hesitate. She cared about me. It was comforting, in a way. Even though I knew I would try my hardest to never see her again.

The anxious years of my life feel like lost years, where I was floating around in the morass of my mind, to the detriment of ever really living. It would have been nice to say goodbye to them by wowing the research assistant with my clear-headed sanity and calm. But the truth, the day-to-day experience of dealing with anxiety ended up being a whole lot knottier. It always is.

Elisabeth Donnelly is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her tumblr here and her twitter here. She last wrote in these pages about John Cheever.

"Down Like Me" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)

"Lies" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)

"May Seem Macabre" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)

Sol LeWitt, Map of Amsterdam without the Amstel River, 1976

She Fell Ill

by BARBARA GALLETLY

Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris
by Asti Hustvedt
W. W. Norton & Company, 384 pp

"The diagnosis of hysteria identified it as a ‘theatrical’ illness, an illness of surface and illusion, as a form of fiction,” Asti Hustvedt writes. French novelists and doctors shared an uncannily close bond through the 19th century. They were, in the author’s words, mutually fascinated. Friends that exchanged ideas, wrote prefaces to one another’s books to lend them legitimacy. Medical writing and fiction, especially on the subjects of gynecology and hysteria, are virtually indistinguishable even to scholars.

Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex wrote that during this period femininity is a forced "prolonged childhood"; a woman is confined to the family. She is not educated. Her political efforts are ridiculed. She can’t even really have money. She has no substantial control over the course of her life. Desires for comfort or physical affection are denied her; Freud would soon describe the libido as male, implying her sex drive is an alien force. She is powerless against visits from her employer in the middle of the night, rape...abuses for which she, the victim, is regularly blamed.

But this doesn’t mean she does not know or cannot think about what is wrong; worry about her reputation, her safety, her dying children or else the creepy wet nurse feeding her infant while she spends 18 hours a days wringing out laundry.

Ideas, it seems, are powerful and can alter us. As Janet [Charcot’s pupil], pointed out, the carriage wheel doesn’t have to drive over your leg; having the idea can be enough to paralyze the limb. (from The Shaking Woman)

So if she becomes hysterical, and by that we generally mean she is unable to bear physically the abuses she is expected to accept, a woman's body acts out against her conscious self. She is aware that "she" does things she does nott actually will: for example, she faints and has a seizure; psychological paralysis takes over her arm or leg or neck; if she is thirteen and gets involved with the neighbor’s son and winds up bleeding, scared, experiences night terrors; she is one of the many assigned to a sanatorium.

Naturally, it seems, the bodies and minds of masses of women revolted against that which didn’t quite "fit" in them. It is in part for these women that Asti Hustvedt, the author of Medical Muses, gives us what she calls "a non-hysterical book about hysteria." If she is lucky a woman will becomes a patient of Jean-Martin Charcot, the revolutionary doctor who will recognize that she is not really epileptic despite her seizures. He knows she is not insane even though she falls into a blank trance easily, reenacts her own rape regardless of who is in the room or what she has been doing.

A Clinical Lesson with Doctor Charcot at the Salpêtrière depicts Blanche Wittman fainting during a demonstration of her hysteria. Painting by André Brouillet, 1887.

Asti describes Charcot as a remarkably single-minded man who was the first to differentiate hysterical and epileptic symptoms and to treat hysteria as a curable affliction. He was able to separate his hysterical charges from conscious responsibility for their weird afflictions, and described them as manifestations of trauma. Charcot observed a patient as she relived her trauma, and years before Freud would articulate his theories, even encouraged her physical expression of her subconscious (though he will not know it as such). He usually, eventually, took credit for curing his patients. He recognized that men could be hysterical, too. Hysteria, it should be noted, is easily induced and highly contagious. One woman's seizure will trigger another.

Charcot's work towards understanding hysteria and its characteristics remains important today — we still don’t know exactly what it is, how exactly to cure it. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) struggles to define hysteria (now called conversion disorder), and it’s rare to find someone with a medical degree to agree that it’s a "real" illness.

Charcot was a revolutionary, a luminary and harbinger of psychology, and yet he was still very much a part of a 19th century Paris in which women were obviously helpless and inferior beings. Charcot was also an artist, loved to draw, and a talented performer who directed his hysteria patients on stage masterfully. Charcot used them as examples of different characteristics of hysteria, by inducing "fits" with magnets, electrical prods, and hypnotism. He demonstrated and then recorded their behavior publicly:

Charcot's 'positively fascinating' teaching style also made a deep impression on Freud, who wrote, 'Each of his lectures was a little work of art in construction and composition; it was perfect in form and made such an impression that for the rest of the day one could not get the sound of what he had said out of one’s ears or the thought of what he had demonstrated out of one’s mind.'

The three women who are the special cases here, the "star" patients of the Salpetriere that served as Charcot's, and indeed Paris' "muses", models of hysteria, were fantastically tenacious, brave and strong. Beautiful Blanche (her real name was Marie) excelled at portraying the symptom/role assigned to her. Augustine was submissive, photogenic, easily sexually exploited, until one day she dressed as a man and walked out of the hospital. Genevieve was probably sassiest, a rebellious zealot who walked hundreds of miles on various missions across France whenever she was released from the hospital.

Blanche would develop from an ordinary hysteric into an exemplary one, She became a ‘queen’ whose talent and beauty were widely recognized. Her symptoms, which had at first been unpredictable, became protypical, medically perfect…the embodiment of Charcot’s symptomology.

It is scary to imagine a doctor demonstrating that, indeed, this woman can't feel a thing! by poking a needle straight through her arm. It is super creepy to see the photos of a woman writhing, terrified of a hallucinated foe or entranced by a divine vision that the same doctor commissioned and had published for general reference. It is shocking to learn that Charcot and Janet and even Freud shaped a history into which these prototypical women simply placed to remain symbols and icons for posterity, art and science alike.

Andre Breton and Louis Aragon called photogenic Augustine “the perfect hysteric” in a seminal 1929 publication The Surrealist Revolution.

Jane Avril, Toulouse-Lautrec's muse, was briefly a patient at the Salpetriere — she developed a nervous condition called "Saint Guy’s Dance" after escaping from her abusive mother, and learned to dance there, calling the hospital her "Eden" and living "amongst the great stars of hysteria, who were at that moment all the rage." They were indeed in better positions at the Salpetriere than they had been at home, and the "theatrical" nature of hysteria meant that even stars like Sarah Bernhardt made visits.

We have simply accepted this history until now, and have mostly relegated hysteria to a misogynistic past. So you can kind of see why this book is important in the way parts of The Second Sex are: finally, we now have a thorough version of the story of the patients of the Salpetriere to replace the one handed down by Pygmalion himself. But Asti's book is also a well-researched attempt at the reinstatement of hysteria and related mass psychogenic illness, which after all, has not really left us (evident, for example, in soldiers returning from war). So her point is also not to dismiss a person just because you don't understand her suffering:

She suffered too many blows involving hearts: her heart and the hearts of beloved others. The heart is the metaphorical location of love, after all. She fell ill with a broken heart.

I have a hard time separating this book from its sister, or one that came out last year, written by Asti’s sister Siri, who is a more established writer and also married to Paul Auster (so a more famous one). A novelist who in What I Loved created the character of a young woman working on a thesis about hysteria in 19th century Paris who inspires her lover's paintings. Of course, or weirdly enough, Asti is married to mixed media artist Jon Kessler. Violet Blum is definitely not Asti Hustvedt, but how strange it must feel to sort of be a character of your sister’s invention.

Siri’s recent book, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, is an investigation of an episode that took place at a memorial service for their father, who died in 2004. Like the hysterics of 19th century Paris, Siri Hustvedt felt an unknown force take over her body and shake it violently while she gave a speech about her father. Every now and then, it comes back to shake her a little more.

Siri on the far left, Asti on the far right: the shaking day

Early on Siri clearly draws from her sister and shares sources, particularly the notes made by Charcot and his followers about the symptoms and definition of hysteria, but this is a wider personal investigation of her own history, the history of psychology, neurology, hysteria, and mental illness; whether an alien force (neurologically speaking) or an unfathomable (hysterical) part of herself shakes her. Her sister also draws on her work.

Siri is extremely empathetic, a careful observer. A very smart reader. With a wealth of experiences and friends to draw from, this means she is also an interesting writer. She expands on the conclusion Asti echoes in her study: hysteria is not just real; it is a diagnosis we must reconsider. Siri is not a doctor, but she makes the case for a greatly expanded definition of hysteria, narrative-based medicine, inclusion of relatable sample cases in the DSM, a holistic approach to treatment of pain. She faces the incredible challenge of how to work against oversimplification of and misconceptions about mental illness and the mind-body relationship.

We often forget that we do not think about every thing we feel or do, but actions can easily become automatic. Memory is selective for almost everyone; the brain makes choices without permission from a conscious owner, and this is usually reasonable. We cannot keep everything in the foreground at once — we are just too much, so when we need to know, we often have to work to understand why. Sometimes a mind-body disconnect can be a sign of hysteria. It can also indicate brain damage, or a combination of trauma and physical incapacitation.

Siri emphasizes the need to know as much of the story as possible: "The closest we can get to entrance into another person's mind is through reading," she points out, and a great success here is her demonstration of that point. Learning about what others feel, empathizing and reflecting, can expand understanding of how and what is felt, and not felt, and why. She convinces me to read carefully, too.

with Auster and daughter SophieAll told, she reminds us, "What does it mean?" is less important than incorporating "what", working towards ownership of a coherent ongoing story. "The conscious self’s boundaries shift. It is a question of ownership, me and mine." All our lives we continue to expand, overlap. Our sisters' stories become part of our own stories.

Clearly, a self is much larger than the internal narrator. Around and beneath the island of that self-conscious storyteller is a vast sea of unconsciousness, of what we don’t know, will never know, have forgotten. There is much in us we don’t control or will, but that doesn’t mean that making a narrative for ourselves is unimportant.

Literature insists on what medicine must remember. Ambiguities and shades of truth shall not be resolved, because they are true too. Which made me think of Elizabeth Bishop's sublimely painful "One Art":

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Because if there’s one thing even the DSM knows, it is that we just can’t avoid disaster.

Barbara Galletly is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels.

"Raggamuffin" - Selah Sue (mp3)

"Explanations" - Selah Sue (mp3)

"Crazy Sufferin Style" - Selah Sue (mp3)

Warren Beatty In Love

by ALEX CARNEVALE

If I have a fault in relation to women, it's that I'm too dependent on love. When I'm deeply involved and all is not going well, my creative impulses become somewhat sublimated. I used to think the answer was not to get involved.

Warren Beatty was wild about Joan Collins. He was enthusiastic about his relationship with her beyond anything he had sampled before. As Warren's friend Verne O'Hara put it, "Sex drives Joan. She was besotted with him. And he was besotted with her." He defended her acting ability constantly, with his fists if necessary. He also used her for his own ends; suggesting she leave the set of a British adaptation of Sons and Lovers as the cast left for England because the publicity she attracted was more useful to him by his side. She was something in Hollywood, and that was what he wanted to be.

For her part, she was devoted to him, and he even bought an engagement ring for her, a gold beacon surrounded by emeralds and diamonds. In January of 1959, they moved into a tiny studio apartment in the Chateau Marmont.

on the set of 'A Loss of Roses'At 22, Beatty was a veritable ball of energy, utilizing his photographic memory for phone numbers to make hundreds of calls a day in between fucks. He resisted proposing to Collins because he simply could not get cast. It was Elia Kazan putting him in the William Inge, Kansas-set morality play Splendor in the Grass that began his career better than lhis sideshow act with Collins ever could. (The magnetic Natalie Wood was his co-star.) Right before his first day on the set of Splendor, Collins became pregnant, and aborted the child quietly so as not to alert the press. The next day production began. When Beatty faltered opposite his celebrated costar, Kazan said, "Pretend it's Joan, Warren."

wardrobe test for 'splendor in the grass' from elia kazan's private albumBeatty was so incredibly into himself that he began weight-training during the production to make sure he looked his best onscreen. When teenage girls around the production noticed megastars Collins and Wood but not him, Warren righted the wrong by arranging for another group to giggle loudly during his scenes. Eventually Joan Collins had to go to Rome to shoot Raoul Walsh's Esther and the King, and while she was there Beatty became convinced she was unfaithful to him.

on the set of 'The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone' with Vivien Leigh and girlfriend Joan CollinsAs his time on The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was ending, he wrote to agent Eleanor Kilgallen from London:

Dear Eleanor,

Don't ask me why all of a sudden I'm able to write letters. I don't know. Anyway – I'm through with the picture now. I have just a little dubbing and stuff to do and that will be it. Next I want to go to Paris and then on to Rome and anywhere else that is interesting and everything is interesting.

with Joan CollinsAs you know – this is the first time I haven't had to worry about where my next dollar is coming from and it is making a lot of things more enjoyable for me. I have been offered several scripts – but I don't know what I am going to do...some people over here have offered me a thing called Bird of Passage (which I am)...

I think I will be a few more weeks over here in the old world before New York – But who knows, they may call me back to accept an academy award for last year...

Love,

Warren

with joan collinsAlthough he and Collins were still engaged, they had already called off a planned wedding and were continents apart. He went after Julie Newmar in Rome without success and sought consolation with the daughter of Actors Studio founder Lee Strasberg, Susan, in Rome. He had sex with her continously, notably in Luchino Visconti's bathroom. (Visconti was older, gay and loved Beatty.)

in an episode of the hitchcock tv series 'Suspicion'When Beatty returned to Los Angeles, his relationship with Collins consisted largely of fighting and fucking. She eventually ended it when she saw he would not. On the promotional tour for Splendor in the Grass, the previously unfriendly Natalie Wood, freshly divorced and starving herself down to 88 pounds, began to know get to know Warren better. It's amazing she didn't run screaming in the other direction.

The press jumped all over Warren as a homewrecker because Natalie would not publicly reveal that her ex-husband Robert Wagner was the cause of the divorce. In any case, the relationship sold the movie well, and continued to bring attention Beatty's way.

on the set of 'The Only Game In Town'

After the release of Splendor in the Grass, Beatty took up residence at the Delmonico Hotel on 59th Street and Park Avenue in New York. His relationship with Wood stood in stark contrast to the life he shared with Collins. Joan was a carefree, happy woman; Wood was depressive, serious and self-involved. As the romance began to fall apart, Beatty's behavior became increasingly extreme. On a blind date with one woman, he invited her to a restaurant he knew was closed, took her back to his house, closed the door and dropped his pants.

One of his one-night stands was an unknown 16 year old Cher, who later reflected that "I did it because my girlfriends were just so crazy about him, and so was my mother. I saw Warren, he picked me up, and I did it. And what a disappointment! Not that he wasn't technically good, or couldn't be good, but I didn't feel anything. So, for me, I felt there's no reason for you to do that again." Shortly thereafter, Warren began to see an analyst for the first time.

with natalie woodBeatty's infidelity towards Wood around Hollywood became an open secret. His signature move was calling women up in the middle of the night, when he would regale them with "What's new, pussycat?" Incredibly, this worked, but it wasn't necessarily the approach. Warren could be very sweet to women; he excelled at paying them the kind of attention they desired and he looked like a god. When Warren asked Wood to come say goodbye to him at an airport, she finally summoned the courage to dump him.

After a terrible experience filming Robert Rossen's Lilith, Beatty decided he wanted more control on future projects. Keen to promote himself off the failure, Beatty planted ludicrous items in the gossip columns about himself. One read: "Three girls who met each other at one of Warren Beatty's swinging bachelor parties in New York last week discovered that, in various years, they had all been Miss Sweden." To lend credence to the hyperbole, he took up with Italian babe Claudia Cardinale.

His savvy eye as a producer led him to a rough script by Billy Wilder's writing partner I.A.L. Diamond. After a co-producer heard Warren whisper his trademark seduction to one young woman, he suggested What's New, Pussycat as a title. The script, however, was dated. After Beatty's first choice to punch it up, Elaine May, declined, he settled on a young Jewish comic he'd seen perform in New York: Woody Allen. The day John Kennedy was assassinated, Beatty spent a cold morning trying to get Stanley Kubrick to direct the picture.

His new love was precociously beautiful French actress Leslie Caron. At 32, she was six years older than him. When they met, Caron was married to the English stage director Peter Hall, and the European coupling had already produced two young children. This of course meant nothing to Warren: Caron's background in ballet reminded Beatty of the career in dance shared by his mother and sister Shirley MacLaine, and Caron's marriage was falling apart. Peter Hall recalled that she flew to him in London and "after a couple of days, Leslie told me she was in love with Warren Beatty and had decided to leave me and go back to Hollywood."

Caron and Beatty were very close – she even administered oxygen out of a tank to him on the set of the film Mickey One. That didn't stop Warren from running around behind her back, including a particularly memorable jaunt at the Playboy Mansion.

with alexandra stewart on the set of Mickey OneThe road to Bonnie and Clyde began when Beatty met Esquire writer Robert Benton shortly after his breakup with Gloria Steinem in spring of 1963. Benton's despondency had led him to the films of François Truffaut (especially Jules and Jim), and the Texas-born writer and his friend David Newman began to write a script about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

After the two showed their treatment to Truffaut himself (they could barely believe it), Truffaut considered Jean-Luc Godard as director, since Godard could speak better English, a choice later abandoned when the Paris-born director demanded they shoot it in New Jersey. Beatty inserted himself into events by picking the treatment for Bonnie and Clyde up off the desk of producer Harrison Starr. When he was cut out of What's New, Pussycat, he pursued his passion for the project, vowing he would have total control.

He had a remarkably similar attitude about his relationship with Caron, which was rocked by a messy custody case brought on by her ex-husband Peter Hall. Beatty found her an analyst. She later reflected: "Once he was interested in a woman, he would never let go. He enveloped her with his every thought. He wanted total control of her, her clothes, her make-up, her work. He took notice of everything. He sent every one of us to a psychoanalyst. He believed the experience was beneficial. He was right."

When his performance in Lilith was roundly slammed by critics, he slept with one of them, and his infidelity became even crazier. He had sex with Bernadette Peters after seeing her once onstage. When he paid $75,000 out of his own pocket for the rights to Bonnie and Clyde in 1965, his real Hollywood career began.

Beatty's first idea was to cast his sister as Bonnie and Bob Dylan as Clyde, which would have been extremely weird. He also thought about directing, but when he fell in love with the part of Clyde Barrow, both his sister and directing were out.

As with his previous relationships with starlets, Leslie Caron had to break up with Beatty. She was deeply hurt that Warren had dumped her from Bonnie and Clyde, and flew to England to be with her children. (Before he took up with Julie Christie, who he had glimpsed during a screening of Born Free, Beatty became infatuated with the married 44-year old Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya.)

curtis hanson's photoset of faye dunawayStill friendly with Natalie Wood, Beatty wanted her for the part of Bonnie, but director Arthur Penn didn't want a star. Jane Fonda said no. Tuesday Weld said no. Ann-Margret said no. Sharon Tate said no. Natalie Wood said no again. According to Beatty, "I was turned down by every living actress." After seeing her onstage, it was Penn who found Faye Dunaway, and photos taken by Curtis Hanson secured her the role.

Somehow, Warren kept his hands off her. Dunaway felt that if they were not platonic, it would ruin the film. A friend of Beatty's submitted in Suzanne Finstad's biography that "Warren didn't do it with Faye because Clyde was supposed to be impotent."

standing ovation at the montreal film festival for 'bonnie and clyde'Julie Christie was still on his mind. He drove out to Sausalito in a long white limo, circling for hours until he found where she was staying. Christie was different from most women he tried to seduce; she was completely without pretense or affectation, and initially resistant to his advances. But they got together anyway. Because of the resounding success of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty was on top of Hollywood for the first time in his life. He turned down Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, feeling it was "not important enough." It was the first in the string of immortal projects he passed on, many because he would be preoccupied by campaigning for George McGovern, including The Godfather, The Sting, and Butch Cassidy.

He fell in with Polanski anyway, joining a group of men who were more interested in testing the sexual limits of the sixties than the psychedelic ones. The parties were generally every Friday night, and operated out of the Chateau Marmont. Warren was particularly interested in threesomes. His lifestyle did not really bother Christie, who never desired marriage and had no desire for children or a family.

february 1966

The couple began to drift during the shooting of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Christie adored the director's improvisational style, but Beatty couldn't deal with it and forced Altman to storm off the set more than once. Things weren't much better between him and Christie. The two lived apart for much of the shoot and there was not much in the way of affection between them.

with his sister on the set of McCabe & Mrs. Miller Julie and Warren argued constantly. (He would become especially incensed with Christie over a sex scene she did in a Nicholas Roeg film, Don't Look Now.) McCabe and Mrs. Miller did not register with critics or at the box office, and Beatty directed his attention towards the project that would become Shampoo while acting in a variety of other films. Now 36, he was concerned with how aging would affect his box-office appeal. He even considered running for governor of California, figuring that if Reagan could do it, so could he.

with christie in the early 1970sAn affair with the actress Liv Ullmann was the final straw in his relationship with Christie. She would stay close to his sister, and despite his behavior, he was heartbroken over losing her. On the wild set of Shampoo, which he co-wrote with Robert Towne, he struggled with his feelings. The week before filming, he had found his dream house at the top of Mulholland Drive, where he began living with Jack Nicholson's ex-girlfriend Michelle Phillips. He renovated his new pad with an architect recommended by Candice Bergen.

here i dreamt i was an architect - warren's mulholland drive padBeatty was very protective of his relationship with Phillips, and she felt like she was being caged in his renovated house. They never went out. As Phillips said, "he doesn't want anyone to know I'm here." In some ways, he got along better with Michelle's seven-year old daughter Chynna. Although he told others that he wanted to marry his housemate, he was still seeing Christie from time to time behind Michelle's back, and then in front of her face. As Phillips later put it, "If you want a shallow relationship, I can recommend Warren Beatty."

nancy reagan, warren beatty, diane keaton After his successful life-after-death comedy Heaven Can Wait grossed $80 million and a number of Oscars, Beatty pursued another passion project, Reds. He became involved with the thirty-two year old Diane Keaton in 1978 after seeing her in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and becoming obsessed. She was blown away at the idea he would be interested in her – her Academy Award for Annie Hall had helped inflate her in his eyes.

Like many of his past girlfriends, Keaton was extremely demanding, and friends saw them as something like the parody of a middle-aged couple. When she saw that being faithful was not in his makeup, she took care not to fall in love. Keaton would also blame herself for the relationship's failure, saying, "To be with me was just too hard. I think Woody said that being with me was like walking on eggshells."

after winning an Oscar for 'Reds'Still, Keaton would not completely fade out of his life. New loves came in as fast as they had in his twenties. It is impossible to estimate how many women Beatty has actually been with, although some have said that it must number around four figures. Beatty maintained a variety of concurrent relationships through the one technique that never abandoned him: his superior phone conversation skills. In the early 1980, he seduced a vast array of actresses and models, including Mary Tyler Moore, Isabelle Adjani, Britt Eklund, Bitten Knudsen and Janice Dickinson.

with isabelle adjani and dustin hoffman on the set of ishtarSeveral things happened to change Warren's life at the end of the 1980s. The first was that the film he made with Elaine May, Ishtar, became one of the most spectacular failures in Hollywood history, and the second was that Beatty's favorite politican, Gary Hart, was destroyed by an extramarital with a 29 year old model. Because Hart's past and present was basically Beatty's own, the scandal hit him particularly hard, as if he himself had been accused of wrongdoing. The third thing to happen was that Warren's father died.

Dick Tracy, mined from the comics his father used to read to him, would become Beatty's life. A story in the Sunday Times found Beatty claiming that he identified with the protagonist of his comic adaptation as "an aging professional who never married." When he began to shoot the movie in 1989, he dumped actress Joyce Hyser for the 30 year old Madonna, who had been cast as Breathless Mahoney. In a change of pace, it was she who did the pursuing of Warren. According to Suzanne Finstad, he called one of his friends excitedly to say, "You won't believe this: I'm sleeping with Madonna!"

the comic that had a penis for a first nameSandra Bernhard recollected Madonna's premediated intercourse to Peter Biskind: "Madonna and I were in the back of a limo driving to some concert in LA, and she said, ‘Sandy, did you fuck Warren Beatty?’ I said, 'No.' And then a month later she started dating him. I always thought, what if I had said yes; would that have meant she wouldn’t have wanted him? The deal would have been off? I guess she was just testing the waters."

By the Oscars of next year, Madonna was too busy for Warren, and he could not find a date for the event. (He took Jack Nicholson.) As he prepared his next film, the mob drama Bugsy, an actress who auditioned for the part in Dick Tracy that had gone to Glenne Headley caught his attention.

The 31 year old Annette Bening had been a sexpot in Stephen Frears' The Grifters, and her full frontal nudity caught Beatty's attention right away. They met for lunch, and while Warren was sizing up her capacity for motherhood, she looked at the meeting as an audition, conscious that the man was a prolific romancer, and also twenty-one years her elder. He dated 22 year old model Stephanie Seymour for a few months to get his last bachelor urges out of his system and then focused on Bening, who he has been married to since 1992.

On the set of the remake of Love Affair, before their relationship had been consummated, Annette's parents came to visit. They all had a nice dinner together, and as her parents were leaving, he asked to speak to Annette in private. He said, "I want to tell you that I'm not making a pass at you, but if I were to be so lucky as to have that occurrence happen, that I want to assure you that I would try to make you pregnant immediately." He was true to his word, and the couple conceived Kathlyn Beatty that evening.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He twitters here and tumbls here. He last wrote in these pages about the art of the Third Reich.

rehearsing with director jose quintero

"The Preakness" - Animal Collective (mp3)

"Call Home (Buy Grapes)" - Animal Collective (mp3)

"Jailhouse" - Animal Collective (mp3)

making his TV debut

Snickers From a Paper Bag

by YVONNE GEORGINA PUIG

It’s just as rude to ask a skinny person if they have an eating disorder as it is to ask an obese person if they have a thyroid problem. Few nice, everyday folks would approach an overweight stranger and tell them to go on a diet. Yet many of these same folks have no problem telling a skinny stranger to drink a milkshake. I'm certain of this because it happens to me all the time.

I never know how to respond. Usually I just laugh and say no, I don’t, and tell them that, actually, I'm trying to gain weight. I think I'm going to get snide next time. Thanks for telling me I look emaciated and sick!! It’s not a confidence booster. If you're thinking that I'm a skinny bitch for complaining about being skinny: I'm not complaining about being skinny, I'm complaining about the fact that you might be thinking I'm a bitch just because I'm skinny.

The assumption is that everyone wants to be skinny, or should be skinny. I don’t believe this is true, and most people I've met who are naturally rail-thin skinny, like myself, want to put on some pounds. There's also very little collective sympathy for people with rabbit metabolisms who rarely exercise and can eat anything they want. When I lament to a friend that I’m eating every tub of Ben and Jerry’s in sight without effect, that friend usually tells me to shut up.

The naturally rail-thin skinny person is lucky, true, but the fear of losing weight is still real. Every pound is important. To this day, I'm still not legally allowed to donate blood because I don't meet the minimum weight to height requirement. If I don’t maintain my weight, if it drops below 110 because of stress, for example, I know that I probably do look borderline sick, unlike an anorexic or bulimic who looks in the mirror and sees too much weight.

In eighth grade, I was called out of class to the counselor’s office and confronted. "Yvonne, are you bulimic?" It was awkward, because I had been eating lunch in the bathroom. (I'd been reported by "two girls" who saw me go into a stall. To this day, I still don’t know who those girls were or what made them think I was vomiting. My feet were facing out and I was finishing my science homework, and, ironically, eating a sandwich.) Defending myself to the counselor meant admitting that I was skipping lunch period to eat in the bathroom because I had no friends. I confessed, but she still didn't believe me. Then I told her that I actually had a pass to go the nurse during fourth period and eat candy bars, because my metabolism couldn't make it all the way to lunchtime. I think this just made her think I was binging. She called my mom, and my mom laughed, but I'm not sure she was ever convinced. Her attitude suggested she thought my mother was in denial.

Here are a few more selected highlights from my life as a string bean spaghetti noodle: On our first date, my ex-boyfriend caressed my shoulder as if he was going to give me a compliment, and then asked me if I was anorexic. A group of construction workers in Boston once yelled at me from atop some scaffolding, "why dontcha go eat a steak lady!" A therapist, in a first (and last) session, looked deeply into my eyes and told me I was very… frail.

Recently, I got food poisoning while on a weekend trip with friends. I had to throw up in the hotel room bathroom while everyone was asleep. Half my friends were lying in bed thinking, "Oh my god, she's been bulimic this whole time and hid it from us!" If another person in our group hadn't also gotten food poisoning an hour later they might still think this. I'm paranoid to get up to use the bathroom in the middle of meals, especially with new people, because I don't want them to assume I'm bulimic. And last week over lunch, a friend I hadn't seen in awhile told me earnestly that I looked like a bobblehead.

Yvonne Georgina Puig is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels. You can find her previous work on This Recording here. She tumbls here.

Photographs are by Helen Levitt.

"The Plains, Bitter Dancer" - Fleet Foxes (mp3)

"Grown Ocean" - Fleet Foxes (mp3)

"The Shrine, An Argument" - Fleet Foxes (mp3)

Plz Advise

by MOLLY MCALEER

Plz Advise is an advice column. You can e-mail me questions about almost anything, but don’t like, take out a loan against your 401k or murder anyone based on anything I say. I'm not a doctor, duh. E-mail your questions to plzadviseme@gmail.com.

Molls,

I used to date a really beautiful and intelligent yet emotionally unavailable man. I parted ways with him when I realized he'd never give me the love I wanted and of course a few months later he tried to come back, professing his mistake. I passed as I'm now with my amazing boyfriend but wished him luck.

I just found out that the ex is in a serious moving-in-together relationship with a really plain, boring, cookie cutter girl. His brother's birthday party is in a month or so and I'm invited. Though I'm happy that we've both moved on there is a touch of "why that bitch?" so to make myself feel better I plan to rock the hell out of my appearance that night.

Here's the question - do I push a corporate "I'm so important" outfit? Or go with a "your girlfriend would never wear this chinchilla vest" in your face casual? Help me, Molls.

Jessica

Back it up, sister. You're in a serious loving relationship with a man and you're going to your ex-boyfriend’s brother's birthday party and planning your outfit around making him and his new girlfriend feel slightly shitty about their lives?

I'm going to assume that you live in a town with a population of twelve and that your ex's brother's birthday is the social event of the year. Like, your town's version of Mardi Gras or some shit. I'm going to assume that you were a surrogate mother for your ex's brother’s wife’s baby and that there's no way you can miss the party without being rude, because homegirl? You have no business going to that shindig otherwise.

There's something about moving on from a situation completely that is just so much more powerful than any of those Romy and Michele-style revenge fantasies you seem to have dancing around in your brain.

Why don't you make a statement about how much better you are by actually being better? Take the money you would have spent on a new outfit and a bottle of wine to bring to the party and take your boyfriend out to dinner. Fuck it, rent a hotel for a night. It seems like you need to be reminded of what matters.

Molls,

Is it normal to be interested in someone you don't know on Twitter because you dig his or her humor? And should I pursue it?

Diane

Yes. Sadly, it is normal. People these days seem to be under the impression that, because someone can deliver a witty line in 140 characters, that they are somehow fuckable and/or crush material.

Someone's funny Twitter feed could imply that they are a thoughtful person with whom you share similar interests and insights. It also could imply that they work best in short forms of communication, have obsessive behavior and are overly cynical/chronically unserious and in many cases, completely self-obsessed. Someone's Tweets, regardless of how authentic they may feel, are a fragment of a greater personality and that personality may not be one you want to tangle with.

Don't do it. Meeting people online is getting more and more acceptable, but asking out a plain stranger on a date because you find their Twitter feed funny? We're not there yet. If you absolutely can’t help yourself, attempt to strike up a dialogue with the person before diving into the dating stuff. Your initial interactions may tell you that this person isn't quite who you expected, or you may find that they're even better than you hoped. Either way, starting with the "I'm interested in you romantically" stuff is mad creepy.

If you want to look at the big picture AKA the faith-having baller picture, I'm a believer that the right people will always end up in the right room together at some point, On the chance that you and your crush wind up face-to-face, do you want to be the person that was sending them (what could be perceived as) weird @ replies on Twitter? That's something you've got to decide for yourself.

Molly McAleer is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Jennifer Nies.

"Lonesome Town" - Ricky Nelson (mp3)

"Fools Rush In" - Ricky Nelson (mp3)

"Hello Mary Lou" - Ricky Nelson (mp3)

Dolores

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

I

Our potato knees match as we sit side by side on the couch, peeling clementines and watching Coronation Street. The radio is on in the kitchen and we've left the balcony door open, and I can hear our tablecloth flapping in the wind on the laundry line outside. Our upper duplex is shaded by the giant Maple tree out front, and yet, we still sweat matching sweat beads on our noses. Like my potato knees and dry skin, my sweaty nose was something that once embarrassed me. When the episode ends and the credits roll — the same slice of life song that for years has trickled out of our television, a plaintive, reticent tune — I stand up and cup my hands, offering to throw away my mother's clementine peels. We share a brief and unexpected smile, both quiet and wonderful, and yet somehow dire. As if anchored by a memory, or the threat of forgetting, I sit back down beside her and rest my head on her lap as she plays with my hair. She reminds me about something I did as a child; the clementine peels warming in my palms.  

II

For restorative purposes, my mother still makes the same fruit cake recipe each Christmas. Briefly, our home smells like a memory and all is forgotten, and the sound of batter licking the side of that yellow plastic bowl is truly captivating. I catch her stealing glances of the old TIME LIFE recipe book and then of me; two fixed and memorized parts of her life that she still anxiously peeks at. As if she'd ever forget to pack the exact measure of brown sugar or add the dried currants, or forget to ask me about my boyfriend, or if I needed to buy shampoo or toothpaste before leaving in a week. My mother will never forget that recipe, and though at first the tiny scar on my forehead appears fresh, "Is that new? What happened?", she quickly remembers how furiously I scratched my chicken pox as a kid. Those scars like the half cup of candied cherries, the shelled almonds, and the loaf pan lined with wax paper waiting on the stovetop, have always been there.  

III

Listening to your mom remember her first pair of bellbottoms or how growing up in Kolkata, she and her sisters would copy patterns from US Vogue, is like being told a psychic secret that finally invites you to a daughters club you naively sought membership to; the product of cable TV, Susan Sarandon mothers, Winona Ryder daughters, and sleepovers at friends' houses. In imagining my mother as impressionable and adolescent, perhaps a bit lithe with her new hips and small waist, and younger than I am now, I learned about nostalgia, borrowing it and misusing it. Listening to her delight in, recall and sometimes misstep while singing along to my Diana Ross CD, often confused those maternal lines that for so long had been much clearer.  

IV

At my cousin's wedding years ago, my mother did the twist in her sari. She put out imaginary cigarettes with the balls of her heels and with her toes — she got real low. I stood against the wall next to my brother and felt for the first time a fiery sense of pride. As if baiting the rock and roll from them, a circle of clapping, cheering guests surrounded my parents. My mother was electric, possessed and polished with pink and yellow disco lights. She was entirely swept by the music, summoning moves that effortlessly returned. Her head rolled back and forth, her lipstick was faded, her cheeks were round and red. Nobody knew my parents were separated.

I drank cherry coke after cherry coke that night and fell asleep in the hotel with my wedding clothes on. I imagine my mother in front of the bathroom mirror, unwrapping her sari as I slept and folding it flawlessly pleat by pleat so as not to get it wrinkled on the flight home.  

V

Along with papier mache stars and bobbles from India, and ornaments we made in school as children, Happy Meal toys from McDonalds — Bugs Bunny, a plastic train engine, a monster from a movie I cannot remember — once hung on our Christmas tree. My mother used to pull out her sewing kit and tie thread around Donald Duck's tail and Marvin the Martian's helmet, and my brother and I would find the right spot to hang our little toys. If a toy was too heavy the branch would dip and mope. From the couch my mother could eye a stronger one and direct us to it; her field of focus shifting from tying tiny knots to scouting sturdy branches. Stevie Nicks, U2, Whitney Houston, and Run DMC were caroling on our record player, and the mischievous and saddling idea that our gifts were hidden around the house was omnipresent.

I can distinctly remember the year when I no longer wanted our toys on the tree. Similarly, I wanted white twinkle lights instead of our rainbow ones. I preferred our more traditional ornaments; the gold ones, wooden ones, angel ones. Left in a box marked DECORATIONS, our Happy Meal toys with cartoon eyes and Cheshire smiles were no longer a part of Christmas. I am embarrassed by the list of things I have asked my mother to change. It's terrifyingly easy to rekindle that feeling of complete shame. 

VI

Deep inside our hallway linen closet and tucked beside our hand towels and faded neon beach towels, my mother used to store her extra boxes of sandalwood soap. Each bar was in an individual box — green with white patterns and red block letters — and each was imported from India in our suitcases, or an aunt's suitcase, or a friend of a friend's suitcase, along with guava jam and sandesh. The smell was so distinct and nearly potent and I remember thinking it was 'acquired' like wine or strong cheese. It was nothing like lavender, vanilla, chamomile, or jasmine. But my mother loved it, she always has. And watching her mind and luxuriate in its specific smell is more intimate than most things; like witnessing a secret through the slim crack of door left ajar.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and twitters here. "Dolores" is among the essays in My Parents Were Awesome, an anthology edited by Eliot Glazer, which you can purchase here.

Photos by Rana Bose, courtesy of Dolores Chew.

"No Future Shock" - TV on the Radio (mp3)

"Will Do" - TV on the Radio (mp3)

"New Cannnoball Run" - TV on the Radio (mp3)

The Fallen

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Mildred Pierce

dir. Todd Haynes

Guy Pearce plays Monty Beragon in Todd Haynes’ HBO remake of Mildred Pierce, the first bit of extant culture that would have never existed if not for Matthew Weiner besides Elisabeth Moss’ first marriage. Pearce almost makes up for ruining The Time Machine; during his love-making with Kate Winslet’s titular character he displays a maddening smile, as if desperate to remind us of how enthused he is by the intercourse. During one intimate moment he flashes a thumbs up.

The 1930s were rife with people — mostly women — pretending to enjoy intercourse. Gloria Steinem once admitted to Katie Couric that she had faked over 10,000 orgasms, which seems low. Remember when Daniel Mendelsohn was insulted because Weiner’s show was too preachy about how racist and sexist America was in the past? (Chuck Lorre has that review taped to the back of his bathroom door.) If you thought the 1960s didn’t have black people in them, wait until you see Todd Haynes’ version of Los Angeles in the 1930s.

Haynes has always been one of the most distinctive American filmmakers — 1998's Velvet Goldmine remains a work of unadultered genius — and now Todd is even willing to appeal to an older generation desperate to relive the genre conventions of early Hollywood. Mildred Pierce is a Horatio Alger novel, rolled into a romance novel, with the rest copied from Theodore Dreiser. Haynes’ version of it is so much better than the original it is hard to believe the two are even related. The director's Mildred is sort of an olden day Elaine Benes; she means well but she ends up sleeping with the weirdest guys. I believe Elaine even did Newman in an episode that doesn't run in syndication anymore.

After Mildred tosses her husband for working over some other lucky lady, she starts waitressing. Winslet holds every scene together by basically doing the acting Olympics: sometimes other members of the cast find themselves watching her. Once, in a hospital, she pretended to wake up so marvelously I thought they should have just faded to black. You can try to understand the reason that Sam Mendes was more interested in Rebecca Hall, but it definitely was not because Kate was not as good at acting.

Haynes' twist on the dated story is to invest it with a quivering tendentiousness that implies other possibilities. Every pseudo-heterosexual move of Monty Beragon shivers the timbers of women and men, and even Mildred's simple making of French toast engenders an otherworldly satisfaction. As in his Douglas Sirk-tribute Far From Heaven, Mildred learns how to experience the world in a more satisfying way, and whatever is not useful to her lies faded and wilting, sure to die. Shame and humiliation can be dispensed with if properly forgotten.

When Pearce's Monty Beragon picks her up on her last day working as a server, he takes her to his beach house, where there is not a single bookshelf. When she asks him if he's just a loafer, he produces his penis. They dazzle one another with the spontaneity of their love-making; he applauds her for her unpredictability. She says, by explicit request of an HBO executive, "I guess I've sort of fallen for you, Monty." 

When MP asks for a ride back to her house, Monty wags his engorged phallus back and forth while humming the music that played while that retarded plastic bag floated around. Do you think Roger Ebert looks back on his absurd **** review of American Beauty and thinks about how he can blame it on Bill Kristol? He probably should have packed up his shit the minute he wrote its last sentence: "He may have lost everything by the end of the film, but he's no longer a loser." Oops.

It must be frustrating to be way more talented than your partner but not able to say it, except when you whisper it between takes to Leonardo DiCaprio. Can you even imagine how many times Mendes made Kate sit through Road to Perdition, a film with a working title of Journey to Boredom? Collaborating with Mr. Haynes, by any measure the man to Mendes' childish grasp of cinema, is a direct hit for the former Mrs. Douchebag, although this particular new man in her life can't offer a romantic entanglement. If anything can turn Todd Haynes straight, it's probably not the outfits Guy Pearce wears in Mildred Pierce. (He looks like he was chopped off a slab of granite.)

men were often never nudes in the 30s

The Daily Mail covered Winslet's divorce like London was being bombed again: She was seen weeping at Mexico City airport on Sunday, but tried to cover up her distress by putting on over-sized black sunglasses. Kate is now receiving regular sex from a model, while Sam Mendes still has to look at Away We Go when he re-checks his own IMDB entry just in case. For both Mildred Pierce and Ms. Winslet, feeling bad for her is about the silliest thing you can do.

The parallels between Mildred Pierce and Kate Winslet’s own personal story percolate the drama. She is forever undressing or being undressed, and she is never alone, never without someone to witness some instance of her ignominy. Forcing herself to consider a job as a housekeeper, she finds she cannot possibly accept a lot in life as a servant, which seems more about her vision of herself than sheer repugnance for what appears to be a difficult job.

something old, something newThere are rumors - only rumors - that after Winslet saw Away We Go, things were never the same. She kept asking her friends in private moments whether their husbands smiled during sex, and if they thought Vendela Vida's novels were any good. The Believer started to seem a little cloying and the ubiquitous presence of rose petals in the Mendes home began to trouble rather than comfort her. She found she had come to loathe the very sight of Rainn Wilson.

For some reason they did not have cell phones in the 1930s, probably because Japan was just a twinkle in the eye of Michael Crichton back then. After Mildred moves on to her new life, her youngest daughter falls ill and no one can reach her. The story of the woman whose personal life evaporates as her business interests soar usually ends in Christina Hendricks being forcibly raped by her husband in Don Draper's office. Mildred's punishment is less clear.

Whenever men imagine the emotional lives of women, it usually says more about the men themselves. The males in Mildred Pierce aren't puppets and they aren't decision-makers. It's like they're all taking lexapro or listening to the Barnhouse Effect. Mildred has just as much agency as Alger's Ragged Dick, but she's also more beneficent than Mother Teresa when it comes right down to it. She even spanks her older daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, starting this Sunday) adorably.

The men are just as harmless, even impotent, like a story incapable of frightening you because you know the ending. We already know what will happen to Mildred Pierce, but we must refresh websites continuously to find out what will become of Kate Winslet.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about the love life of Warren Beatty. He tumbls here and twitters here.

"No Widows (live)" - The Antlers (mp3)

"Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out (live)" - The Antlers (mp3)

"Rolled Together (live)" - The Antlers (mp3)

Holy Text 

by JESSE KLEIN

In March 2010, the University of Texas at Austin and the Harry Ransom Center acquired David Foster Wallace’s archives and later that year made them publicly available. Since then, professors, PhD students and journalists have come from around the world to sit with Wallace’s collected, unpublished writings. Since his suicide in September 2008, he has become something larger than he was in life, not just a seminal 20th century writer, a descendent of Pynchon and DeLillo. He has become a cultural, and, cult, figure of mythic status, a Kurt Cobain or Hunter Thompson. For someone who taught so many how to live, Wallace’s decision not to was and is met with confusion, debate, and sorrow.

Archives provide a fan with the opportunity to spend time with the author, with their private thoughts, with what they chose not to share. It gives the reader the chance to look at the raw data without a filter, the biographer. To sift through his archives, something I undertook over a weeklong span, is to celebrate the intentional fallacy, not to draw lines from work to person and back to work, but to better understand the person who created the work, out of curiosity and love for someone who put together strings of words, and webs from those strings, that mean so much to so many people, including myself.

There are thirty-four densely packed boxes. The Harry Ransom Center along with Wallace’s widow Karen Green and his family have kept everything: travel documents, college homework, early drafts of articles, essays, short stories and novels, drawings and poems from childhood. The idea was less to read everything, to engulf every snippet of information but more so to gain insight into who he was, why he was, until he stopped being. Suicide is a mode of death inherently linked to a person’s life, and in his writing, as well as his archives, it is ever-present.

BOX 26 is devoted to Wallace's posthumous novel, The Pale King, set for release this April. The box is made up of dozens, and dozens, of pages of handwritten prose, a handwriting that is not cursive nor print, that takes up one fifth of a line carefully lining the bottom, that leans slightly to the right, or, forward. The first section in the box is called "Fierce Infant", written in the 1st person, in a green, roller ball pen. At the top of the first page, written in caps is the word "FREEWRITING" and next to it an arrow pointing to "potential title for piece." Though, only two pages later, two brilliant pages later, the words "freewriting – means nothing" are written next to "dead prose" which are entombed in a box in the upper right hand corner. These self-denigrating quips are one of the few consistencies from a person with such varied interests, talents. He let himself go on for three more pages only to write "now what" at the end. It did not seem like he gave himself the space to write freely.

It’s been said that The Pale King will be about boredom and taxes. From 1998 onward, Wallace took undergraduate Accounting courses while teaching undergraduate English courses. In his notebooks for these Accounting classes, notebooks that were at once pristinely kept and littered with scattered thoughts, were questions like, "What is 'bypass trust'?" and "explain 'forensic accountant' – tracks money laundering". In BOX 26, there were three chockfull folders of accounting related documents i.e. his homework. On one loose sheet he wrote, "David Wallace (Patty – can I just see how I did? I won't normally ask you to grade me J)." He got 10/10 on the quiz. But you could see through this work that Wallace was not, and likely will not in his book, merely discuss the minutiae of the IRS, the aching tedium it entails. In one correspondence to an academic, he wondered,

Does the IRS or Treasury Dept. have any studies of just how much noncompliance the US Tax System could withstand? That is, have they done any studies of just how many taxpayers would have to refuse to pay before (a) there would be too many to prosecute, and (b) the government would be hurt by lack of income. (a kind of tipping point in other words.)

Wallace is getting at the human condition at its most primal, money/survival, albeit in an oblique, Kafkaesque way. He later asked, "what did hospitals have before ICU’s?" In asking so many questions he finally had to explain, "I have a vague, hard-to-explain interest in accounting and tax policy (utterly divorced from my own taxes, which I pay promptly and fully like an eagle scout)." Stephen Lacy, a CFO, enjoyed the correspondence, understood Wallace's aims, and so in turn offered this as the "most difficult sentence to understand in tax code":

For purposes of paragraph (3), an organization described in paragraph (2) shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501(c)(4), (5), or (6) which would be described in paragraph (2) if it were an organization described in section 501(c)(3).

It's fun to imagine what Wallace might have done with this dizzying code. Statements like these are impossibly dense but through his translation, they become totally clear. This was one of Wallace’s gifts: he would discuss infinity, or fatalism, or the footnotes of footnotes of tax laws, but would do so with language that was plain, inviting. His use of "like" as written stutter, or of "stuff" in place of the appropriate noun, made Wallace an approachable giant, a Midwesterner, a guy.

(In his review of Siri Hustvedt’s novel The Blindfold, these were his opening remarks: "The point of this review is going to be that The Blindfold is a really good book. The first neat thing about it is that the jacket copy and blurbs are interesting." These statements would have lost marks on a freshman mid-term paper. At times he could be deliberately, though misleadingly, simple.)

Wallace is accessible in part because he’s funny. When he calls Sting "resoundingly unthespian" regarding Dune, that’s funny. When he calls Updike "heartbreakingly naïve" and guilty of a "radical self-absorption" when talking about his novel Toward the End of Time, that’s funny too. And when he wrote his magazine editors, with a conviction and ardor rarely seen from a person so polite, so docile, he’s frightening, and also funny. When Harper's published a section of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, he had this to say:

DAVE W'S CONDITIONS OF SUBMISSION:

(1) inform auth of Decision to Reject w/in 48 hrs of Decision;

(2) any/all rejected pieces are to be shredded, the shreds placed in a burn bag, then that bag emptied into a high wind at least ten (10) miles from any metropolitan area. we will be watching.

Maybe he was kidding, maybe not. He probably was and he wasn’t. For his Roger Federer article, he said that if they changed more than 100-200 words, he would happily take the "kill fee" and not publish it at all. And, again with Harper's, this time with his Kafka piece, he wrote, "I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering if you fuck with the mechanics of the piece." Even here, he could not resist a footnote, it reads, "It may take years for the opportunity to arise. I'm very patient. Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis." The “Ask Charis" is chilling, proof that this has happened before. Just ask Charis.

But all this is gravy. All stuff that's preaching to the converted. People know who David Foster Wallace is because he wrote a big, hard, necessary book called Infinite Jest. Based on Wallace’s other writings, his readers know that this is the book he lived to write. All of his passions and preoccupations are there: addiction, tennis, terrorism, TV, prescription drug use, religion, depression. Wallace researched the material that populates the book for years, in a way, was always researching for it.

Never an alcoholic himself, Wallace was a devoted Alcoholics Anonymous member, and much of Infinite Jest takes place within the sacred circle of AA meetings. Throughout the early 90s, he went to meetings in the Boston area and listened. And took notes. On a page titled "Heard At Meetings", in BOX 15, he transcribed things like, "If you’ve never considered suicide, stay sober for a while", and, "I shit myself every day for years", but also things like, "I see her spending a lot of time laughing", and, "They say it's good for the soul, but I feel nothing inside that you could call a soul." This last quote was recopied into an Infinite Jest notebook in December ’92.

The notebooks from that time, his "siege in the room", were about everything (like Infinite Jest), but from his giving, sad, man-who-knew-too-much vantage point. On high school politics: "the trick for being neither nerd nor quite jock — be no one." On the future of telecommunications: "Audio phone conversations both let you presume the other person was paying complete attention to you and let you not have to pay complete attention to them." Next to this statement is an arrow pointing to "Nixon/Kennedy debates of 1960." His brain was a supercomputer of pop culture. A line is drawn from phony phone conversations to the way television betrayed Nixon’s coolness thirty years before, commenting on Star Trek, predicting Skype.

But the underside, the darkness, everything else he always thought about, was never far, was probably always there. While going through a folder in BOX 15 a loose sheet from a yellow legal pad fell to the floor. It read, "I don’t think it’s an accident that people that shoot themselves shoot themselves in the head." No explanation, just those words in a sea of yellow indifference.

"Good Old Neon", a short story that appears in the 2004 collection Oblivion, is perhaps Wallace’s most deliberate, unadorned conversation with himself. I first read it in a car ride from Montreal to New York on a sunny, summer day. Through the Adirondacks, with my sister on my right and my parents in the front, I was totally destroyed and absolutely electrified. When I finished the story, I couldn’t speak, I just thought to myself remembering the time before I read the story, who I was then, a couple hours ago.

In it, a man sees a "therapist" (a word he later changed to "analyst"), finds it useless, and, without alternative, decides to kill himself. In BOX 24, at the top of the first page of this first handwritten draft is "FRAUD" followed by, "This is the bad part, the foggy part where there's way more than I can ever make you see." Wallace, and the reader, has no choice but to go on.

In different pen colors, blue to black to red to green, the story gets better, shorter, fuller. Where there was once an "analyst" with a "mustache", there is later an "analyst" with a "small ginger mustache", a mustache that is likely taken seriously by its owner and not by anyone else. In his revisions, Wallace would not only correct himself but comment, taunt. Unsatisfied with the first few pages, he wrote at the top of four above the first line, "(I know this part is boring and probably boring you, but it gets a lot more interesting after I kill myself)." This aside made it into the final version of the story. But even the thin sheen of self-defacing humor fades away: "Everything gets so abstract all this free-writing I can't be bothered to even type up. We tried to bombard our problems with will power instead of bringing it into alignment with God’s intention for us." Wallace did not write or talk in extremes, he lived in them.

"Good Old Neon" ends with an oracular exhale, a portion of prose that makes the reader at once alive, aware, terrified, and tired. After going over it for probably the hundredth time, he wrote in a tidy box, "incoherent, but moving." The story is dense, bleak, again necessary, but not incoherent. The last line on that page is also that, "[Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts.]" It is no longer the "I" of the protagonist, or the writer, but a "we" that includes us in the nightmare, a self-imposed nightmare, though it feels inevitable.

At the start of the week, in BOX 31, I sifted through an assortment of Wallace gems. In a 70-page, one-subject notebook called "Midwesternisms", he wrote down verbal tics like "because you know why?" "I had a circumstance happen" and "Just let them get it under their belt and chew on it a while." Later, a list of "Good names", among them '1st name: Tova', 'Pat Rexroat' and 'Elpidia Carter.'" On college tests, professors cooed, "un plaisir, mon vieux" and "I am particularly impressed by your thoroughness." Then, amidst the praise was a page ripped from a spiral notebook with the date "7/31/96" in the top left-hand corner. July 1996 was six months after the release of Infinite Jest, at the height of its praise, a thousand page text that was being lauded as an Important Work, a Big Book. A time most would consider the culmination of a young writer's career. At that time he wrote, "The thing is I get scared it won’t come. I'm back to thinking IJ was a fluke." Then, "'Until there is commitment, there is only ineffectiveness, delay.' - Goethe How to make a commitment – to writing, to a somewhat healthy rltp, to myself."

At the end of this entry, in a journal he felt it was not fit for, was this:

What balance would look like

2-3 hours a day in writing

Up at 8-9

Only a couple late nights a week

Daily exercise

Minimum time spent teaching

2 nights/week spent w/other friends

5 AA/week Church

This was the balance he sought, the life he needed. But a towering intellect does not always come with a rock-hard disposition, a disposition to match a brain like Wallace's. In his writing, and in his archives, he was always battling himself, playing himself in a mental tennis match. His archives show that that match was exhausting, tragic, joyous, and now endless.

I visited my friend at Sarah Lawrence in October 2008 just weeks after Wallace’s death. Many on campus were still in mourning, talked about him as if he was a close friend they'd all lost. I knew who he was, had seen a big blue paperback of his on people’s shelves a few times before, had picked it up once to see how heavy it was. When I asked people why they were so upset they could only respond with their own question: "Have you read him?" I hadn't.

I then tried unsuccessfully to read that big blue book, Infinite Jest. I failed for the same reasons many people do: the footnotes were burdensome, the first 250 pages were dense and largely unconnected. Feeling defeated, I tried semi-successfully to read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I finished it, engaged with it, though felt that there were long stretches where I would drift, where I felt I was being forced to endure linguistic acrobatics. It was his nonfiction — arguably his more accessible work — that was my entry point. I’ve since reread his fiction and cherish it all (including Infinite Jest) for its richness, its complexities, for the fact that his voice is at once ours and uniquely his. So, to explore his archives seemed the closest thing to spending time with a person you love and admire, though you don’t know, and never will.

Sitting there, in the Harry Ransom Center, felt like a religious experience. I had an HB pencil (no ink allowed), yellow computer paper, and those thirty-four boxes (though only one at a time). I could not decide if I wanted to listen to my iPod or not as I didn't want to taint his words, to change their meaning by mingling them with song lyrics. Many times, I had physical reactions to what I was reading. Goosebumps. Sweat. A heaviness in my legs. I would catch myself laughing aloud but only because three people were staring at me. It was embarrassing, having these personal responses among eighty year-old academics, chatty librarians, bored sophomores working the front desk. That week, there were so many of those moments where you see or hear something you know is vital, life giving, and say to yourself, "This is one of those." And all you can really say is thanks. Thanks so much.

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer and filmmaker living in Austin. He last wrote in these pages about Trent Reznor. You can find his previous work on This Recording here. He twitters here and tumbls here.

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