Prompt

by KARA VANDERBIJL

It was summer; we feasted.

I took up drinking coffee so there would be no tea leaves to read. I spent hot afternoons fielding prophecies of the future. As butter melted in the hollow of a skillet, I thought no further ahead than what it would taste like in my morning eggs. Big things happened when I stopped blaming my circumstances for my unhappiness. For one thing, I got mono. I raged against the quiet windows, the kind flowers, the soft bland flood of my convalescence. When all of that broke, I had broken too, into subdued pieces, a child with an appetite only for milk and manna.

J said, “I could cook for you every night.” I wasn’t surprised to hear he’d been visited by an angel. Octopus tendrils trailed off the fork, doused in spicy tomato sauce. The brine of it on my tongue reminded me of my childhood by the sea. Aren’t we all prophets of the impossibilities of our youth?

The French poet Baudelaire uses the word “spleen” to describe a particular melancholy, a gray mood brought on by the dirt of Paris and the rotting carcass of a dog. With the onset of infectious mononucleosis, lymphocytes abound in the bloodstream. The liver and spleen are tender and enlarged. When the doctor pressed her fingers into the skin beneath my ribcage and told me she couldn’t feel my spleen, I laughed. My mouth was dry. Later, I lay in a bath so hot that red flowers bloomed on my legs.

I decided not to be suspicious. I wanted to enjoy things with the innocent fervor that assigns a mythical quality to even the most basic things. I wanted to believe in basic good, in excitement, in childlike wonder. I wanted to change, to become the prompt for a better story.  

Illness was a big frame for the small, stifled narrative I’d built into myself, the lie I had told myself: “You are better off alone.” There were ins and outs to my physical failings that I couldn’t predict. One morning after a shower I sat next to the toilet and dry-heaved before tremblingly climbing back into bed, hair sopping, the damp spreading in waves across two pillows. J whispered to me, concerned.  A good friend sat with me at my sickest and read Mary Oliver poems out loud while I sobbed. I was weak. It takes the bigness of a sickness to belittle you, sometimes, when you’ve made yourself grand and others small, when you’ve let a lie swallow you whole and chew you up.

I slept very deeply when I did sleep, and waking up felt like breaking the surface of a viscous, tepid pond. I did not dream.

J told me about his dreams and about his father. I cried and touched his hand. We shared a cigarette on his back porch at the time of summer night when the air is thick and warm and purple. I had to wash it from my hair afterwards. I fell into dozes on the dark, oblong couch in his living room, while he cooked me noodles with butter and freshly ground pepper.

I never considered the space between two people as a safe place to rest. I had always trusted my surroundings to save me from the people in my life: a forest to envelop the wolves, a house with a picket fence to be home when mother and father’s arms weren’t long enough to reach. But you can move from forest or glen or house; you can’t move from your own blood that teaches you to care even when you think you can’t. Welling up within me was the grace that knew I’d be hurt and the grace that somehow still wouldn’t expect to be hurt. They fought gently.

When it came time, I purchased eucalyptus and hydrangea to mourn my girlhood. I said goodbye with tears. I have always believed in making one’s life a sacred space, in dragging out ornaments and holy oils to mark the demise of something in favor of something else. Even the happiest things hurt.

I didn’t read much. I was too distracted, and there were not many books readily at my fingertips. Like talismans, I’ve always trusted them to take me to who I need to become. But instead of this looking-forward I got caught up in the poetry of the present. It was too beautiful to abandon for even a small amount of time. I sat for long quiet periods, nothing to occupy me, without restlessness. After my recovery, the importance of cultivating an inner serenity seemed paramount.

This summer, Presence was my Holiest idea. Like bread and wine, it’s an old thing that has been made to look simple in the light of new spells. But I won’t take an hour-long half-glance for an instant-long hold of your fingers, for your kiss goodbye after breakfast, all of it bacon and sunshine and whatever other crumbs we’ve been leaving behind to find our way back to one another.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about how to become a foodie. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Here's Where The Story Ends" - The Sundays (mp3)

"You're Not The Only One I Know" - The Sundays (mp3)

Under the Building

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Me and You
dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
103 minutes

Me and You shrinks Bernardo Bertolucci's entire career down to the slimmest possible margins, abandoning any extraneous decoration for its essential elements. The performers are relative amateurs; the sets a basement and an apartment building alongside indistinct streets that could live in almost any time, in almost any place.

Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) is meant to go on a school trip to a ski lodge with his classmates. His mother Arianne (Sonia Bergamasco) takes him to the bus that morning, and as they near the fateful moment, Lorenzo screams at her. He tells her that being dropped off in front of his peers would be shameful and humiliating. She does not let herself get agitated; she is used to being understanding of her son. Instead she tells him, as he rages against his seatbelt, that she does not think he wants her to get angry. This tells us everything we need to know about what kind of mother she is.

In another scene Lorenzo asks his mother a hypothetical question. What if they were the only two people left on earth and had to procreate? (He follows up by wondering what they would name their child.)

Incest has always been up Bertolucci's alley because it is a taboo that he can explore without dipping into the too-familiar milieu of violence and drugs. The dinner between Lorenzo and his mother is funny for how his mother does not react to her son's question. She is disgusted, clearly, but there is nothing of surprise in her response. This tells us everything we need to know about what kind of son Lorenzo is.

Dropped off at the bus, Lorenzo has no intention of being whisked off to a hotel in the mountains, although he pretends to know a great deal about skiing, among other things. Instead, he purchases provisions to last the week and relocates himself to the basement of his parents' apartment building, where he runs into his half-sister Olivia (Tea Falco). She explains that she is merely looking for some of her things stored there, but in a moment she is asking Lorenzo for drug money. He demurs, but it's obvious how delighted he is to be asked by her for anything.

It is still fun to watch how much Bertolucci can get out of young actors. There is nothing much to Lorenzo's story, and the reconstruction of a dank basement into a livable space is the major sign of his intelligence. The gloomy place does not constitute a fascinating setting - it's hardly enough to pin an entire movie on. Still, Bertolucci relishes the details, whether it be a ceramic dog, a mess of army ants, or a slender ankle. The point is not to distract from the human beings themselves and the minute changes that guide them.

Lorenzo and Olivia do resemble each other, with Falco's heroin addict possessing a mannish sexuality that is at once frightening and opaque. Her detox from heroin occupies all of our attention along with all of Lorenzo's, and the indeterminacy in her sexuality normalizes her little brother. Lorenzo at first views his sister's suffering in the same fashion he observes animals in a pet store, except now he is a part of the drama, not a gawker with his face to the transparent partitions. As he sees her suffer in the presence of others and her disease, he must shatter the glass.

A distinctly American soundtrack plays in the background, Bertolucci's nod to the world outside the basement. The songs themselves are all overused cliche, but that's kind of the point. Every part of Me and You is completely familiar to us except for the idiosyncratic basement, rearranged by Lorenzo as an artistic effort to compete with Olivia's still photography:

Lorenzo's talent is obvious:

Olivia shows Lorenzo that the adults in his life have no power over him. He is the only one with agency - she instructs him that whenever someone looms over you, superior, you possess the upper hand, because whatever static perception they have can swiftly be proven wrong. Olivia uses an older man for cash, a younger one for drugs. She is sincere with her brother because unless she can be honest with someone, it's impossible to go on living.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Paul Bowles and the Fullbright Company's Gone Home. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"I Done You So Wrong" - The Paper Kites (mp3)

"Malleable Beings" - The Paper Kites (mp3)

Selective

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Chozen
creator Grant Dekernion

Chozen (Bobby Moynihan) has entered his third decade in the world, and is recently out of prison. He has no job or qualifications to pursue employment. He is possessed of various abilities and talents encouraged on him by a world that seemed to reward such aims. He is finally, irrecoverably a white, gay man, reminiscent of a more rotund, self-aware Andrew Sullivan or an emaciated Kevin Smith.

Chozen's passion for rap music was inculcated at an early age. His first glimpse of African-American culture came in visual form - the confusing, messy Mad-Maxian landscape of "California Love", constantly promising roads that went to new places. After he gets out of jail, framed for a crime he never committed, he moves in with his sister in her dorm, and there finds a familial understanding he missed while incarcerated. He does return to the aspect of his previous life he did find rewarding — the free and easy availability of sexual congress.

His younger sister Tracy (Kathryn Hahn) is the sort of person who has found the clothing and manner she is most comfortable in and sticks to it with a mix of fervent happiness and resigned disgust. She is enrolled at the college, her brother is most certainly not. Chozen navigates the environs of the academic world she inhabits incautiously. The presence of her brother in the place she aspired to at first annoys her, but his innocent dispelling of all academia's silliness and impotence eventually proves useful.

Tracy takes up the direction of Chozen's rap video with aplomb as a class project, reminding us the ivory tower's approach to the concept of learning is far too narrow to be successful with all individuals. Some of us, perhaps even the best of us, are able to learn in a classroom setting, but for others it is a very dreary time indeed.

Troy (Nick Swardson) was raised in a Puritan family that protected him from life's harder elements, but also completely unprepared him to survive without pain in the world as it is. Chozen represents Troy's first homosexual friend. When Chozen is not taking extensive advantage of Troy's financial largesse, he is protecting him from those who might do him harm, chiefly the athletes attending the university, whose fraternities determine most of the social life on campus. This sorry arrangement gives power and prestige to the least intelligent individuals, and places those outside of that scene at the bitter margins.

Chozen shows what a diseased arrangement this is. In many small liberal arts college, athletes are admitted simply to fill spots on teams, regardless of whether or not they meet academic requirements or can succeed in classes. It is strange and disturbing that such crass aims have become completely subservient to a university's nonprofit mission, and the corruption of the campus social life is just as pernicious an effect as the other compromises this reality ensures.

At one point Chozen openly wonders why there are even team or individuals sports in a setting where education and learning is the supposed goal. In his innocent questioning, he shames every university president who has long ago forgotten the reason why they ever entered the cesspool that stands for academia in America.

Fundraising, football and preserving a good environment for the distribution of recreational drugs is all that is left to these fatcats now. Given all we know of what violent hits on unsuspecting receivers do to brain and skull, these ridiculous people have not only failed their primary mission, but are engaged in actively damaging young minds. Chozen exposes how little academia has changed as the world around it grows and evolves.

Chozen's homosexuality is the main distinguishing factor in his act as a rap artist, since it is not everyday a muscled, semi-obese white man speaking African-American slang is so obvious and open with his own attitudes and appetites. At first this seems merely a satire of the rampant misogyny in the hip-hop world, but soon we realize that Chozen is doing the important work of placing homosexual desire on the same level as its heterosexual counterpart.

Chozen normally chooses closeted gays as partners. His honesty with them about what the relationship means from the outset means he never really hurts the feelings of these men, and he is remarkably open-minded when it comes to deciding what potential partners he might enjoy being with. Others seem to draw inspiration from this level of self-awareness, and the two performers who support him onstage, Ricky (Michael Pena) and Crisco (Hannibal Burress) are never at all judgmental about their friend's choices.

What can be done to fix a situation where students are more focused on cradling lacrosse balls than imbibing the knowledge that could actually lead to employment, or at the very least Herodotus references in their rap/rock songs? Chozen suggests that the making of a transgressive art provides all such solutions to these important issues.

In our society, however, it is never the men who are pushing these important boundaries, it is young women who expand our idea of what is possible in the culture. Chozen therefore resonates as a call to arms of sorts, that men need not simply enjoy the rewards of a society white men created to reduce young people to decades of repaying massive debt for no education at all. They can make animated sitcoms for FX instead.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"I Want You To Be Your One Night Stand" - Jeremy Messersmith (mp3)

"Hitman" - Jeremy Messersmith (mp3)

The new album from Jeremy Messersmith is entitled Heart Murmurs, and it was released on February 4th.

Desert State

by JESSICA FURSETH

Every morning at 7 a.m. I climb over my sleeping husband, pulling the curtains open to let in a stream of dusty light. It is pitch black until then inside this hotel bubble without sound or light, but I'm relieved to get up after yet another night of jetlag-ragged sleep. I tiptoe to the bathroom but nothing in this hotel makes any noise: carpet covers every surface, doors close slowly so as not to slam, furniture is heavy so it won't topple over.

The kettle takes so long to boil I have time not only to prepare the cafetiere, but also to brush my teeth for the full two minutes recommended by the dentist. I listen to the buzzing inside my head while outside the sky is preparing for another day of pale sun in a violet sky. It's the same as yesterday, and it will be the same tomorrow. We are in a desert state, in a brand new metropolis built on a sudden fortune, in a place where everything is shiny yet dull. It's a city but it feels like a suburb, created from a drawing board. Every surface is kept clean yet it's always dusty; the air is so dry that it only takes a moment.

I sit by the window drinking my coffee inside a skyscraper hotel, part of a skyline that looks impressive from a distance. The bay is a few blocks away but I can see the shore because the buildings are just a little too far apart. I've never thought about that before: the distance between city buildings. But now, in this brand new environment that's being built in front of our very eyes, it's impossible not to look at it.

In an old city, like the one I call home, the buildings push into each other, like the people on the street, and everywhere are cafes, shops, and even pavements. Here each trip to the supermarket means manoeuvring a ledge next to a six-lane road, before scaling a sloped brick shoulder that takes you to the shopping mall parking lot. You're not supposed to walk is the thing, not when petrol is this cheap. Half the year it's too hot to move around on foot anyway, with the searing sunshine leaving the outdoors just as inaccessible as if we were in a snowstorm.

In the bed, my husband has pulled the covers over his eyes, fighting against the light pouring in. He got here before me, so he's adjusted to the local time. As much as the early mornings are a novelty for me, I envy his ability to stay up past 10 p.m.

The sun is up and I'm awake, but my body is fighting me. I gain a little more ground every day, but I'm alarmed at how my heart pounds against my ribs, like a warning. It's morning in the desert but my body thinks I've been up all night again, hankering back to a place that's much bolder and louder than this. I sip my coffee as I listen to the sounds trickling in, muffled through the double-glazing; the construction work has already started. For every building in this city there's another one going up, and another road blocked to build a new lane. Inside their air-conditioned white cars, people are blasting the horns in frustration over the delays. Outside, the workers wears cloths around their heads to protect from the heat and dust.

Each day the hotel maid brings more bottled water and provides all fresh towels even though the little card says the towels will only be changed if you put them on the floor. We may be in the desert, but there's little concern for saving water. I wonder if they recycle all these empty water bottles. If I leave the cafetiere unwashed the maid will clean it; at first I felt I shouldn't leave it as it's not their job, but then I forgot a few times and now I think it's really nice not to have to do it myself. I watch how people in restaurants ignore waitstaff who bring them things, wondering how long I'd have to live here before I stop saying thanks.

I stretch my body on the impossibly white sheets, thinking about what I'm going to do today. I have work but my head is full of cotton. I'm only here for the week anyway, having come to see my husband while he's working. I'd never have come otherwise, it's not the sort of place you visit. I was at the airport once for a stopover, just long enough to learn the name of the capital city and figure I'd probably never actually see it.

But circumstances happen and now I'm here, in a padded hotel bubble, inside a not-quite-there skyline. Time feels like it's standing still yet it's slipping away, as before I know it it's morning again and I'm opening the curtains, listening to the slow hiss of the kettle as the water heats up. In the desert, and in this city, there are no pavements, but people are creating sandy paths through the construction sites. Every evening the sun sets, creating a bright spectacle in the sky, and for a moment it’s amazing before it's gone and the sky is a dark, blank slate. Something is happening, but life is elsewhere. 

Jessica Furseth is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her twitter here and her website here. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Anya Lsk.

"I Was A Ghost" - Farewell Flight (mp3)

"Everything Changed" - Farewell Flight (mp3)

photo by katie day good

Returning to Something

by REBECCA HUVAL

Just before I moved to Mexico City, I listened to Os Mutantes for the first time. As I drove around the Montana countryside with my parents, ignoring their protests to my imminent departure, Os Mutantes' psychedelic samba inflated my dreams of what the next year would bring. I had swirling visions of boozy costume parties and dancing in glass towers above the city with faceless friends I hadn't met yet. Somehow, it all really did happen. 

I had no idea where I would live in Mexico City and no job, but felt compelled to go. I had just broken up with a boyfriend and was adrift in the states. So my dad drove me to the Helena airport at four in the morning, when suddenly I got a case of food poisoning and stopped at most of the Lucky Lil’s Casino Gas Stations along US-12. Instead of Montezuma’s Revenge, I had his Warning not to go to Mexico. But I left the next day. On the plane, I blared “Ah Minha Menina” in my headphones as if drilling determination straight into my brain, and watched the Mexico City smog give way to the date palms along Paseo de la Reforma, where I would soon make my home.

photo by alfred megally

Now anchored in the U.S., I've been searching for other musical relatives of The Beatles that could transport my fantasies. There’s even an adjective to describe The Beatles’ many kin: Beatlesque. We already know about The Monkees and Oasis, but I’ve uncovered a few international examples that translate a childhood sound into something uncanny — in the Freudian sense of something familiar, yet strange.

Czerwone Gitary was the first example I came across. For many of their songs, this 1960s Polish band’s four-piece sound is so wholesome and sunshiny, you almost glare at the brightness. But the songs I connect with are their balladic Eleanor Rigby’s and Yesterday’s: "Kwiaty We Wlosach" and "Anna Maria." The first song in particular fills you with the kind of nostalgia that weighs down your bones. The singer Krzysztof Klenczon slouches from flat to resolved, a lonely guitar riff whines, and the Eastern European melody echoes as if in an alleyway.

I searched online for a translation of “Kwiaty We Wlosach” lyrics to find out why the song feels so bittersweet, and was perplexed by a barrage of pictures featuring women in elaborate floral updos. The lyrics answered all my questions:

Flowers in her hair ruffled in the wind,

So why go back to those years?

Lost days will not find you anything,

Without memories sometimes it’s easier to live, not returning to anything.

What a punch in the head, or the hair flower, as it may be. This song warned me specifically from trying to recreate memories of Mexico in my quest for the global Beatlesque. Why dwell over memories when “lost days will not find you anything”? Because, as Godard wrote in Pierrot Le Fou, “Life may be sad, but it is always beautiful.” An echoey alleyway is occasionally where we want to be.

Ironically, in singing this song, the narrator is disobeying his own rule of abandoning his past. The music video shows the bandmates (with sideburned mop-tops!) filing 16-mm film canisters in some sort of warehouse. They shuffle through recordings of lost moments in time and stare wistfully into the distance. 

It’s true that we can’t resuscitate our memories, and that in trying, we only disappoint ourselves with a funhouse distortion of what happened. In reminiscing, what I want most of all is to feel the way I once felt. I have never returned to Mexico, partially out of fear that I will discover how irretrievable those emotions are: The naked loneliness I felt in my first week there, sobbing in a hostel bunk bed, when all the buildings seemed bleak and streaked with algae. Then the inexplicable surprise of finding friends as it seemed like the whole city surged into technicolor — the flush of purple Jacaranda trees and a school bus splattered with brilliant paint.

I might never go back to Mexico City, but I will continue to listen to “Ah Minha Menina” and search for other iterations of the Beatlesque. The only true emotional time capsule is music.

Pop Yeh Yeh was the next Fab Four descendant that gripped me. This 1960s movement captures the whimsical feeling of Os Mutantes, despite its violent historical backdrop. Singapore seceded from Malaysia in 1965, but during the same decade, the two countries were united in their love of psychedelic rock. Amidst modernization and race riots between Malay, Indian, and Chinese populations, Pop Yeh Yeh somehow flourished. A Malaysian journalist coined the term “Pop Yeh Yeh” to describe the Beatlesque sound, as in “She loves you,/ Yeh, Yeh, Yeh.”

Last year, the compilation Pop Yeh Yeh: Psychedelic Rock From Singapore And Malaysia 1964-1970: Vol. 1” brought overdue attention to the movement. The uncanny really rings true with these songs: They are cheerful, yet haunting. Surf-rocky guitar reverb accompanies Middle Eastern vocal embellishments, as in Roziah Latiff and The Jayhawkers’ rendition of “Aku Kecewa” and Orkes Nirwana’s “Shorga Idaman.” Roziah’s and Orkes’s mournful female vocals create a sense of unrequited love, much like the great Middle Eastern divas Fayrouz and Umm Kulthum. Orkes trills on devastating high notes.

The California surf rock makes me feel grounded in the current state I call home, while the expressive Bollywood singing beckons elsewhere. These songs are cinematic in the way that Os Mutantes was for me. They conjure up scenes of new possibility, the most cheerful of which is “Budi Bahasa” by The Rhythm Boys and Adnan Othman. It also brings back the way I felt when salsa dancing on top of the tallest skyscraper in Mexico, Torre Mayor, with my motley team of Mexican friends — Fulbright scholars, an architect with an impressive moustache, an ex-Mormon, and several stoners among them. I felt sweaty and loved.

After finding Pop Yeh Yeh, I heard Jacques Durtronc on the speakers of a sun-washed cafe in San Francisco. I stopped what I was working on to dance discretely in my seat. The 1960s French singer dripped with sarcasm, and was accompanied by light doo-wop background vocals that could only have been a joke. When I later watched the music video, my suspicions were confirmed.

Jacques Dutronc's laconic style in 1966 foreshadowed the social satire of "Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (1968). In the music video of “Les Playboys,” Durtronc comments on the French bourgeoisie. Ladies with enormous sunhats smoke cigarette holders as long as batons, and men scarf down caviar. Dutronc laughs at it all with his blasé expression and cheeky dance moves, such as clapping with just his index fingers (you really have to watch it). 

There are playboys by profession

Dressed by Cardin, shod by Carvil

Who drive around the beach and town in Ferrari

Who shop at Cartier as well at Fauchon

You think I'm jealous? No, not at all!

The song is also reminiscent of “Rocky Raccoon” in its regional exaggeration, as the songs amplify the musical signifiers of the rural U.S. or France. At the end of the song, Jacques neighs like a horse in a glissando that apes classic French singers like Edith Piaf. His song mocks our simplistic understanding of French-ness — and me specifically for wanting to exoticize The Beatles. Yet I love it and the other Beatlesque songs I’ve discovered all the same.

Still, nothing Beatlesque will grip me in the same way Os Mutantes’ "Ah Minha Menina" did and does. Even when I hear it on lame car commercials, I’m transported to Montana and Mexico City all at once, to the quixotic girl I was.

On one emblematic night, I traveled from Mexico City to Paracho, five hours west, to visit the family of a guitar maker I had met in the Ciudadela craft market. I wanted to write a story about his deep-rooted guitarrero traditions. At night, I boarded a bus full of Ciudadela crafters, and around three in the morning, we arrived at his family’s home. The guitarrero asked his two grandchildren to sleep in one twin bed while I took the other. For most of that night, the two boys snickered at the crazy güera (white girl) trying to sleep in the kid’s room.

I felt brave and vivacious, listening to “Ah Minha Menina” and traipsing about the world without the tethers of caution. I can still inhabit that boundlessness through music, where dreamscapes are the places where I live out my most daring exploits. But when I turn the music off and remember my life in Mexico, I laugh like those boys at the daring, wonderful things I did: crazy güera.

Rebecca Huval is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in San Francisco. You can find her twitter here, and her tumblr here.

photo by rhona taylor

"Catfish" - Waxahatchee (mp3)

"I Think I Love You" - Waxahatchee (mp3)

photo by Molly Dektar

False Positives

by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

Seeing the men in their dirty little tractors spray-paint the lawn green is how you know the tourists are coming. In college, we called any non-student with a camera a “tourist” though I know, in a vague statistical sense, that there must have been a lot of false-positives. I was born near the Galapagos Islands and went to high school in Times Square; I grew up knowing what it feels like to have to dust off the glitter in order to come to terms with a place. Harvard felt like a perfectly organic extension of Times Square, so it took some effort to not resent people who didn’t know the pristine grasses were painted-on. I sometimes played this game where I would spot them by the lanyards around their necks. (I wasn’t very good at this game.)

There’s a biblical sensibility to this resentment, a rallying against the golden calf. It made me uncomfortable to see buses of Japanese schoolchildren swarm around the John Harvard statue in their starched white shirts and navy blazers, rubbing the bronzed booted foot that my douchier friends drunkenly peed on some nights. They loved Harvard because they did not know it, but they could not love it until they did. Luckily, there’s no shortage of people who want to show them around.

The campus novel has been around since the 1950s and has, since its conception, introduced gentiles to the rituals and totems of the ivory tower. There is a lot of tenure-track malaise in these books, but that’s a niche concern. The genre’s real major draw is the sex — and there’s a lot of it. It makes sense. If you want to get to know place vicariously, what’s more fun than entering it through the bedroom door? Illicit sex is a respite from any monotony that the lifestyle might entail; in Willa Cather’s The Professor, the protagonist has a brush with death after a gas stove leaks in his study. I cannot think of a lonelier way to die.

photo by Molly Dektar

But the genre does more than bring outsiders behind the scenes. It allows insiders to engage in self-fictionalizing. Read solipsistically, “ethical” and “unethical” become null categories replaced by amoral aesthetic designations of beautiful and not-beautiful. If we are all characters in the campus novel, then anything we do can be contextualized, excused, forgiven. Bad behavior, so long as it is written well, is romantically metabolized into a tragic flaw.

Once, in college, a former professor unsuccessfully tried to hit on me by referencing an excerpt from a novel in which the protagonist, a humanities professor (and it is always, or almost always, humanities professors: the genre’s authors rarely place their men in the cold-shower carnal biome of hard science) close-reads what he calls “the podium effect,” a phenomenon whereby the “ugliest and most squalid, horrible, tyrannical, and despicable among [professors] arouse spurious and delusional passions… I’ve seen dazzling women barely out of their teens swooning and melting over some foul-smelling homunculus with a piece of chalk in his hand, and innocent boys degrading themselves (circumstantially) for a scrawny, furrowed bosom stooped over a desk.” 

The writer — Javier Marías — is being satirical here, but that’s the thing about satire, isn’t it? Some people don’t get the joke. Still, there is some nuance to Marías. (And an attempt to pretend there are loads of classic academic novels about boys “degrading themselves” for older women in power. There aren’t.) Other novels don’t even invite misinterpretation. Here are titles of the books in Philip Roth’s David Kepesh trilogy: The Professor of Desire, The Breast. You needn’t have read these books to guess what they’re about.

The third book, The Dying Animal, is my favorite. The novel’s protagonist, a literature professor, patronizingly describes a young Cuban-American student’s thinking (he’s already described her “gorgeous breasts”) in this way: “She thinks, I’m telling him who I am. He’s interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don’t need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velazquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, How much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours?”

Consuela has no interiority. Kepesh fetishizes her because he infantilizes her, and we spend the next couple hundred pages learning to find redemption in his character, because he has found her beautiful, the ultimate pronouncement. He is a professional aesthete and he's chosen her. She, and I, and you, should feel anointed. 

In n+1’s review of Elegy, the movie adaptation of The Dying Animal, Molly Young writes, “I do not speak for all women when I say this, but in reading the book it is possible to feel vicariously worshipped for nothing more than sheer femaleness." This is true. Roth’s descriptions of Consuela’s long, black hair made me feel an almost erotic appreciation of my own. This is the power of Roth’s writing (and maybe my vanity, a little bit). But in reading the book — in reading most of these books, The Dying Animal and Herzog and Disgrace and The Gold Bug Variations, it is impossible to not feel infantilized and essentialized and caricatured. It is impossible, in some way, to not feel completely devastated.

photo by Molly Dektar

F. Scott Fitzgerald once described falling in love as the dipping of all things into an obscuring dye. It consumes. His words have always seemed to me a more accurate description of depression, and I thought about those words often in the days after Javier Marías was used against me. That's how I remember the episode. The devil had cited Scripture for his purpose, and I was sad as hell.

It was made un-sad by one of my mentors at Harvard, a female professor who's read her share of academic novels and doesn't hide behind language to skew reality. She told me about a lot of hard things in the days following Marías' betrayal, about gender and power and bureaucracy and ethics and responsibility and foolishness and sexism and ego. She also told me some things about narration. She told me this: do not let men in power narrate you to you.

There were moving trucks outside the window when I started writing this essay. I’m studying literature at Yale now, reading my way towards a PhD. Student-led tour groups walk across campus, pausing before important-looking buildings so people can take pictures. My ID swipes me into majestic buildings that tourists cannot access, but on sunny days like this, I like to do my work outside, on the wide, grassy lawn. It is open to the public. It is almost winter now, and the green has faded. 

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

photo by Molly Dektar

"Difficult Outburst and Breakthrough" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

"A Bird With No Name" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

Overnight

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

I.

A leg was broken. Its double-sided woodscrew had loosened and its metal thread was irreversibly stripped. Now, my parents’ mid-century olive green chaise lounge looked comically dejected and lifeless, no longer possessing its coy, come hither posture. Few things look more miserable than a purposeless chair, especially one whose purpose is for lazing. So, my father went to the local hardware store to replace the double-sided screw and then after, to a bicycle shop next door where he had the metal flange rethreaded with a tap. But the wood inside the leg was also ruined. The man at the hardware store told my father to fill the hole with matchsticks and carpenter glue and instructed him to, Leave it overnight. The next day, the wood leg—walnut brown and tapered—screwed in effortlessly and the chair was once again, herself.

II. 

The overnight Greyhound from New York to Montreal takes roughly eight hours, give or take twenty minutes. It leaves at 11 p.m. from Port Authority and arrives at the Berri bus station in the morning. Depending on the season, you board when it’s dark and disembark when it’s dark, or board when it’s dark and disembark when it’s light out. No matter the season, you arrive a little wobbly; gum-breath and flat hair. You yawn as you stumble down the stairs because Greyhound stairs, it seems, are built steeply and induce deep, near-stagy yawns.

III.

When I search for the word “overnight” in my inbox, these are just some of the results that span nearly five years of emails.

1. Countless promotions: Overnight holiday delivery ends today! FREE Shipping Overnight! Overnight and Saturday delivery, etc…

2. A note from my father about our puppy, Willis, who was taken to the emergency room because he was throwing up and because his heart was racing: They are doing x-rays now and they may keep him overnight. 

3. Finally, some renovations and fresh coats of paint at my old apartment in Boerum Hill. Thrilled, my roommate wrote: so Frazier is painting the kitchen and we have to let it dry overnight. i will put all the shit away tomorrow in the day. isn't this exciting. There is no reply thread to that e-mail because I likely texted back, Fuck yeah.

4. Dispatches from various family members updating me about my aunt’s cancer treatment:

They may request Jen stays overnight for observation following the first treatment.

Jen will most likely spend overnight at the hospital, however, she is not in a room.  Dolores will be keeping me posted.

she's scheduled for chemo on monday (she'll stay overnight in hospital) and tuesday so they can check her white blood cell count

5. A gchat with my friend about a new boy in her life. On April 2nd, 2013 at 6:07pm, she wrote:

he’s just completely changed the way he talks to me in the last two weeks and i don’t know what the hell is going on

And then three minutes later at 6:10pm, she writes: he went from hot to cold literally overnight!

6. A link (and the full text) of a New York Times profile of Chirlane McCray pasted into the e-mail:

He flirted with her mercilessly, she said, calling nonstop and trying to steal an unwelcome kiss. “I actually told him, ‘Slow this down,’ ” Ms. McCray said. Her resistance became less diplomatic: “Back off.”

But a romance blossomed: Mr. de Blasio, five years her junior, won over her family with an overnight visit that earned him a new moniker: “Brother Bill.”

7. An e-mail from my roommate while I was home in Montreal this past Christmas. A picture was attached depicting the street outside my bedroom window: We got about 6 inches in Brooklyn overnight and it is 10 degrees out. The subject of the e-mail was “Snow day” and I remember thinking how six inches was nothing compared to winter in Montreal. Appraising the difference made me ache for my friends yet promptly miss my parents who were sitting in the next room.  

IV.

Bad timing. I developed a rash on my left cheek — a patch of red that felt like sandpaper. I was meeting an old friend the next day and considered cancelling with a text: Hi! Sorry, feeling sick – lame, I know…blergh. Raincheck?

No response.

The worst part of cancelling a plan is waiting for the acknowledgement of the cancelled plan.

So, I opened my medicine cabinet and reached for a tube of a cream – who knows what, it was thick. I padded it on my cheek with certainty despite itchiness and uncertainty. I went to bed moody, embittered.

The next morning I woke up and checked my phone—no texts—and clomped my morning clomp down my hall and to my bathroom. Focus in the morning is a far off thing and I nearly forgot about my rash. But there it wasn’t. Barely red; barely there. Overnight, just like that, it was gone. Someone should bottle and sell the sense of relief spawned from a rash gone. Suddenly, I felt invincible. Overnight, I was made invincible.

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

An End to Flight

by JOSIANE CURTIS

finifugal, adj. [fan’ee-fyoo-gal]:
(from Latin fini-s end + fug-a flight + -al) 

Of or pertaining to shunning or hating endings; someone who tries to avoid or prolong the final moment of a story, relationship, or some other journey — like a child who doesn't want a bedtime story to conclude, or an adult who's in denial about how it's finally time to wrap up long-unfinished business.

+

We break up in every room in his house, and twice in the backyard.

The first time it happens, we aren't even officially a couple. Maybe it doesn't count as our first breakup, then, but it feels like one. We weren't exclusive, because he was leaving town for the summer and I didn't want to do long distance. It was my choice not to give ourselves a label, but when he tells me he slept with someone else, it still feels like betrayal. We sit on a bench in the backyard and I don’t cry or leave, so we sit, mostly quiet, until we can’t stand to sit quietly anymore. We have dinner plans so we keep them, and I finally make sense of all the times I've waited on couples who sit awkwardly across from each other and barely speak throughout their meal, some mix of caring and caution in the air over the table. I sit up straight and tense; his shoulders slump. We speak only when necessary, expelling words gently, apologetically, as if they have to walk over shards of broken glass to reach each other. He spends the night in my bed and I curl around the edge of the mattress, pulled so far away from him that he might as well be sleeping in another city already.

Sitting on dining room chairs at the corner of his kitchen table, he takes my hands in his and we break up and become an official couple in the same conversation, depending on who you ask. He’s moving back to town and thinks we’re starting a serious relationship, and I think we’re ending things because he isn’t ready for a serious relationship. We have what I think is breakup sex and what he thinks is make-up sex. At a bar later that night, I’m ordering a drink when I feel his towering frame, his arms wrap around me from behind. He rests his chin on the top of my head. “I have the prettiest girlfriend in the world,” he says.

I enter through the back gate and sit in one of two patio chairs he’s arranged, facing each other. I tell him I’m done. I think we’re done until he moves closer to me, his long legs encasing mine, elephant trunk calves pressing my own knobby knees against each other. Skin touches skin, sweat touches sweat, and like that we’re liquid, we’re inside, we’re changing our minds, deciding, again, that we’re not done, not yet. Since the night we met, our bodies have always had a way of finding each other, each part fitting effortlessly, a hand in a hand, a head on a shoulder. In private or public, we flow intuitively together, the way water in a river never has to think about where it’s going.  

That bed in the basement, where after, I feel something grab hold of me in the dark and understand that we have crossed some dangerous threshold. While he snores, I gently trace the outline of his face: strong jaw, Italian nose, lips that, when they smile, pull his eyes into a squint, stretch every part of his face wide along with them. I feel happy but trapped. I wonder how this will end. Understand, now, that it will hurt both of us when it does.

When you realize you are in love with someone in the same moment that you realize you will one day leave them, there is no way it won’t end badly. He tells me that as a child, he could see the way events were going to unfold before they happened. A confession: I write most of this essay while we are still together.

We break up once in our subconscious. He falls asleep on the backyard bench after going outside to smoke and I doze off waiting for him to come inside to bed; both of us, confused and angry at being alone in sleep, pass breakup dreams back and forth like a breeze through the sliding screen door.

On the loveseat by the entryway, angry and hurt, five minutes, I keep my shoes and jacket on. I stand before he finishes talking, afraid I won’t be able to stand my ground if I sit; if we touch. The next week it snows, and I show up at his front door without a jacket and say, “Some nights the best place to find warmth is inside of another body.” I’m not ready to be done. His arms are always open. He is always waiting for me to leave.

My head on his chest on the living room couch, with the TV on in the background, finally. I say I need to take a break, knowing that if I call it the end, it won’t be. He nods, a calloused hand brushing the hair back from my face so he can kiss me on the forehead.

“I know,” he says.

What happens to the child who wants the bedtime story to last forever? A little girl who knows how the story ends, but still begs for it to start over, and over, and over – what happens to her when it finally concludes? She sleeps. She takes deep, steady, peaceful breaths in sleep, and the next morning she wakes up.

Maybe, she’s relieved.  

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. She last wrote in these pages about trash in the yard. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by Stephanie Crocker.

"Two of Us On The Run" - Lucius (mp3)

"Turn It Around" - Lucius (mp3)

Henpecked

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

He married his first serious girlfriend, Greta Konen. At 31, she was five years older and a hairdresser at a travelling theater company. She reached up to about the midpoint of his chest. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, in a fit of pique, he proposed. Greta had refused to sleep with Gregory Peck until he made it legal.

Their wedding reception occurred at the 1942 World Series in St. Louis. They moved to California shortly thereafter, renting a small pink home in Beverly Hills. He had originally seen her standing on a Philadelphia train platform; the same woman was now his wife. It was her second marriage.

Groomed for stardom because of his bellicose palate of expressions and unique charm, Peck begn to take movement classes with Martha Graham. (Tony Randall and Eli Wallach were also students.) "She was in the prime of her prime," Peck once said of Graham. The woman was merciless to her charges, even once pressing down on his back so violently he slipped a disc.

As Peck was cast in more prominent roles, a congregation of women nearly always surrounded him. Greta at first tried to take the change in stride, reminding herself, "I should remember a movie star shouldn't have a wife." It was traditional in those days to minimize how much information about the star's private lives reached the public. Since Greg could charm any woman, why not the gossip columnists as well? They rarely wrote of his indiscretions, unless they were so obvious they could not be ignored.

Once he had asked Martha Graham if he had moved properly. She said, "Tears are running down the insides of my cheeks."

He attempted in vain to behave himself until he met his co-star on the set of Spellbound. This was Ingrid Bergman, herself married to a Swedish dentist. All caution hit the wind. As the film wrapped up, Bergman had enough of Peck and moved on to her next leading man. Peck was a bit hurt, but tried to take it in stride. His wife watched these events with circumspection.

The question of whether or not he had sex with Ava Gardner is an open one. They were close friends and neither admitted to any indiscretion. Dark, large and possessed, he could not have chosen any differently than his tiny wife.

Peck drunkenly cheated on Greta with whoever was available, but his infidelity with the actress Barbara Payton constituted something of a turning point. After the affair, she talked openly to magazines about hard fucking him in their dressing rooms. She told everyone she knew about how big he was. In gratitude, he banned her from the set of her own movie. Years later she became a prostitute on Sunset Boulevard.

In 1948 an organization named Peck Father of the Year.

In 1952 he met a 19 year old Parisian journalist, Veronique Passani, in the company of his wife. He did not really care. On the set of Roman Holiday, newspapers reported his liasion with Audrey Hepburn. It helped the film's box office for sure, but it was barely true. "Everyone on the set was in love with her," he later said. Hepburn was herself engaged.

In Italy Greg's main mistress was actually June Dally-Watkins, 25, an Australian model. He asked her to join him in Paris and pretended he was separated from Greta. June was a virgin, and her mother advised her to return to Australia, which she did after some soul-wringing.

One night Greta and Greg went to the home of her family friends. He suddenly decided to leave, and when she caught up with him, she asked him, did he want her to come with? He told his wife, "It doesn't make any difference."

With his Australian dalliance safely in her home country, Greg was free to focus on Veronique. He conveyed her to Rome and romanced her mercilessly. The game was already won, however; she told her mother the first day she interviewed him and and his wife that she would marry him someday.

In Veronique Peck found a like mind despite their age differences. Or perhaps he really wanted to see things this way: "Veronique and I have the same tastes in arts, sports, everything!" he sometimes cried out, either to the media or breaking out of a dream in the middle of the night. Greta returned to America once it became clear this fascination was no simple affair. Peck married Veronique the day after his divorce from Greta was finalized.

Once wed, the new couple socialized mostly with Cary Grant and his wife, and Greg's benders reduced in their frequency. It was easy to be affected by Greg's insane charisma and appeal, but Veronique took it a step further. She seemed to see him as he truly was: an introverted, semi-haunted sconce. "He is a man of strengths and weaknesses," his second wife noted. "If I had to paint Greg, I would need a whole range of colors to do a portrait because there is great variation."

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

"Digital Witness" - St. Vincent (mp3)

"I Prefer Your Love" - St. Vincent (mp3)

Before the Clue

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Device 6
creators Simon Flesser & Magnus Gardebäck

It opens with Anna waking to find herself in a castle tower with no recollection of how she got there. She begins to wander through the structure’s stone corridors searching for a clue that will explain the where and why of her predicament. But before there can be a clue, there must be a labyrinth; any proper labyrinth must have its island. And so, like the puzzle-based video games before it and like those still to come, Device 6 — an iOS app by the Swedish game developer Simogo — has set Anna in a labyrinth on an island to gather clues and solve the game’s brainteasers.

While the game may be rooted in the Greek mythology of Minos, its posture is more le Carré-ian. As the plot moves forward, the player comes to learn that the labyrinth and its puzzles are an obstacle course for new recruits to join the HAT organization, an intelligence agency dedicated to experiments into free will. HAT is seemingly run by a character with a bowler hat fetish and penchant for turning children’s toys into weaponry — a demented version of James Bond’s Q. Device 6 has fun with espionage tropes. Between levels, players are asked to answer reading-comprehension and pseudo personality-test questions (“Try to picture someone looking at you from a window. Who is it? a) A friend, b) A stranger, c) Yourself”). It’s a cute trick that enriches the player’s experience of being vetted for an elite corps of spies while also spoofing the genre.

The air of exclusivity the game cultivates via self-aware spy jokes is enhanced by the player’s accomplishment of solving a toilsome puzzle and by the exceedingly slick design. It is here that the game sets itself apart. The labyrinth of Device 6 is one built from text. Like a work of concrete poetry. The text narrates Anna’s progress while also serving as a wall, a bridge, a spiral staircase for the player’s movements. The writing itself is far from the gin-soaked prose of Dashiell Hammett, but serves its purpose with no detriment to the player’s enjoyment as it leads them through the game and its six levels. The poetry is in the programming rather than the text.

Eschewing 3D renderings and a Skittles-inspired palette, Device 6 boasts its sophistication with a dusky color scheme of slate gray, deep carmine, and glaucous blue. Instead of animation, the screenscape is peppered with flickering photos. Sound rises and fades as the player scrolls, past classical statues that weep, animatronic monkeys that speak with French accents, and an echo that is stuck in a wishing well. The opening credits unroll like the title sequence to a Steven Soderbergh movie, which is to say with a heavy Saul Bass influence of geometrically choreographed silhouettes. 

Device 6 is not groundbreaking in concept. It seems invented for childhood fans of Myst who’ve grown-up and now work in design. Like Myst, the player must recognize the game’s riddles then deduce its rules before solving. The puzzles perplex, but are hardly incomprehensible, especially as play progresses. The final steps of the game are too easy, too quick. Beating Device 6 brings no epiphanic climax, but wandering through its maze is really fun. The six levels can easily be conquered in a week and the satisfaction that comes from solving each puzzle only comes once — an inevitable limitation. Indeed, the game’s primary drawback is its lack of ad infinitum playability. However, once Device 6 has been conquered, know that Myst and its sequel Riven are now available as apps, for those who finish with an urgent need to return to a mysterious island.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and here. She last wrote in these pages about Harry Smith.

"Out of the Black" - Neneh Cherry ft. Robyn (mp3)

"Weightless" - Neneh Cherry (mp3)

This is the first in a two-part series.

Dance Marathon

by ALEX CARNEVALE

That sort of double vision happens to me all the time on stage. One part of me is dancing, the other observing from the side. This control protects you from an overdone, vulgar presentation. You constantly keep yourself under fire, as it were; you watch, with an ironic eye, as if saying: 'Well, well, so you can do it, but don't show it too much.' Nabokov rarely displays his technique, but his prose is masterful. That's the way it should be -  be a master but don't show your mastery.

Mikhail Baryshnikov's mother looked exactly like him. She abandoned the family when he was just twelve, chafing at the bonds of the Soviet Union. His father never supported his dancing until he became known the world over.

At the Riga dance academy, students embarked on a nine-year program, starting at the age of ten. Baryshnikov was old to enter the academy, but he quickly caught up to his peers, entering the advanced class before the year was up.

Many of Russia's finest performers had already abdicated to the West, but the pipeline closed up at the beginning of the 1940s. Stalin's reign turned the art of dance into little more than illustration of familiar stories and folk tales, meant to emphasize the superiority of the region.

Baryshnikov's early performances were reserved in light of this. His technical acumen has never been disputed, and his best role during this period was as the barber Basil in Don Quixote. He showed his first flashes of stardom in a 1969 production of Romeo and Juliet, where he played the showy role of Mercutio. Because Romeo had previously been banned in the country, the producers only risked one performance.

rehearsal for a TV production of "The Nutcracker"

Many artists take decades to come into their own right, but while Baryshnikov was no young choreographer, he could slip into any role with the facility of the chamoleon. In even the simplest part he showed a power and agility lacking in most of his peers, and even the party saw his potential as a distinctly Russian figure. The way he performed the part, it was never a mask.

It was clear the Kirov theater was now his to command. He was the focus, now, given an apartment by the state along with a healthy salary. A return to the Bard proved difficult, as Kirov's 1970 production of Hamlet was something of a disaster: even the ghost danced, and important monologues were conveyed by jittery, scissor-like leaps. Still, Hamlet was politically safer than Romeo, seeming as it did to the Russian eye a work of pure fantasy. The play opened, in this iteration, with the funeral of Hamlet's father, a pallid start to a most dreary affair.

The press, controlled as it was by the party, issued nothing but raves. Repulsed by these results, Baryshnikov pulled out of the production and began filming a Russian adaptation of The Sun Also Rises. The evolving demands of his stardom meant he was acting more than ever before, and it was no surprise he was a natural at that as well.

But offstage, the atmosphere at the Kirov was toxic. A notable defector among the dancers, Natalie Makarova, escaped her chains because the KGB was too intent on following around Baryshnikov.

Next to go was the Kirov's chief choreographer, who followed Nikita Khrushchev on his way out of power. Konstantin Sergeyev was replaced by a political choice, Vlad Semenov. "Life in the Soviet Union may be likened to treading on a rotten floor that may collapse at any moment. You fall through and never get out of the cellar again," defector/Baryshnikov biographer Gen Smakov writes. Regardless of the politics, the fact remained that Sergeyev's creative energies seemed exhausted and to make use of the theater's talents, a change was needed at the helm.

Giselle, with Natalie Makarova

You can guess what happened instead. The director of the Kirov was no longer a favorable post and few with any talent applied. Igor Belsky was finally brought on, and Baryshnikov hated the man from the moment he set eyes on him. They both suffered equally for this dislike, and Baryshnikov mired in depression. But defection was not really an option — the dancer was watched at all times. Still, he asked friends if they thought he could be successful in New York. All were enthusiastic, which seemed to only deepen his despair.

Don Quixote rehearsal Then his theater toured Montreal. By summer he was performing with Natalie Makarova in Giselle in New York. His friends told him never to return, and he listened to their advice. The next two years were filled with a diversity of roles he could never have imagined in his native country.

1974  July 27th               Giselle

        August 5th             La Bayadere

        August 9th             Don Quixote

        October 27th          Coppelia

        October 30th          Theme and Variations

       December 26th         Les Patineurs

       December 28th         La Fille Mal Gardee

1975   January 4th         La Sylphide

         January 9th          Le Jeune Homme et la Mort

         January 11th        Le Corsair

         May 20th             Vestris

         July 23rd              Shadowplay

         September 22nd   Le Pavillon d'Armide

         September 22nd   Le Spectre de la Rose

         September 26th   Swan Lake

         December 30th    Awakening

1976  January 6th        Hamlet Connotations

         January 9th       Push Comes to Shove

         January 13th     Medea

         May 9th            Other Dances

         May 11th         Pas de "Duke"

         June 15th       The Sleeping Beauty

        June 21st        Petrouchka

        June 21st        Le Sacre du Printemps

        July 12th         Once More, Frank

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Cannibal" - Water Liars (mp3)

"Pulp" - Water Liars (mp3)

Subplot

by KARA VANDERBIJL

I am civilized. My feelings are not.

- Jeanette Winterson

I have planted a nice garden here. Tracing over the past two years, my writing has visibly improved. This is good. I get emotional thinking about it. I nearly gave up writing. You know? It’s easy to be confused. Introspection can be just as dense as the lack thereof.

I have only been happy in short bursts, some of them terribly short. It is my fault. I inherited resignation, the tendency to blame outside of myself. The pendulum swings back to extreme guilt, self-deprecation. I have allowed happiness to become digital, or at least, sublimated. As if thinking correctly could make you happy. As if wrapping emotions into layers of text and subtext could produce joy.

I don’t think that happiness is the goal of a life. At least, it’s not the goal of my life. I don’t believe that unhappiness means necessary doom. But in long stretches it is indicative of a lack of gratitude. I am certainly disconnected, not only from what is most important but also from myself. From others. I’ve divorced parts of myself that need tending. I need to touch and feel and smell and smile. I need to be touched. I need to feel very small and allow myself to slowly be built up.

Because everybody keeps telling me I have so much time I don’t want to waste a second of it. I want to laugh and laugh some more and admit that I’m wrong. Is this allowed? Is it really any more complicated than this?

+

Everybody loses something. Keys. Bus passes. A comb.

I don’t lose things. Circling around a board game, I nominate myself the dice-thrower of one team or another. I throw some good pairs, some mediocre, three great. I can’t be blamed for the outcome. It is a game of weight, of fate.

Lost: receipts, bookmarks, socks.

Soon after moving to France, I had my mother dye my hair auburn. I did not want to blend in. When I didn’t know the right words to formulate my thoughts, I kept quiet. I did not want to stick out.

A mitten. A penny. Phone reception.

Cheap sweaters disintegrate in the dryer. Misguided intentions, spooning rent money into my mouth, living month to month. I can’t even afford what I need, how can I give? This is a lean time, but give out of weakness. Fold the two dollars bills in your wallet, stuff them into a frozen cup on the sidewalk.

Wallet. Passport. Country.

Thirteen years ago today my family moved into another language, took up residence with the irregular verbs. Humans don’t conjugate easily. I wasn’t happy with my handwriting, and so I rewrote my lessons over and over again. I learned the verbs by accident. None of us live there anymore.

A slim, crinkled roll of paper towels fell into the kitchen sink when I tried to put it back in its proper spot and I looked at it and said, “Fuck you,” without thinking, because if I had been thinking in that moment I would have realized what a terribly ridiculous thing it is to a. insult a roll of paper towels, especially when they’re more absorbent than the leading brand and b. to do this so vehemently, as if the rogue paper towels had killed my family before my eyes.

Later, I was baking with a very hot oven (Wikipedia tells me that anything between 450-500 degrees Fahrenheit classifies as a very hot oven.) As it popped and clicked its way to that infernal temperature I worried that the expansion of gas was going to blow the door open or that it was simply going to spontaneously combust, which I imagine is altogether within its range of capabilities. The oven beeps so faintly when it is done preheating, as if to belie the roar of the ignitor and the dull orange flame I can just see when I open the door to peek inside. I cannot let my guard down with this appliance. I have often dreamed of sacrificing small odds and ends in its favor, building a shrine, much like the employees of a hair salon in Los Angeles I once frequented, who offered up bowls of rice and day-old donuts to a particularly moody blow dryer.

Here begins the smaller subplot with the smoke detector. This is one I do not intend to flesh out any more than strictly necessary. Two minutes before the raisin buns were done baking, it came shrilly to life. The next thing I remember, its parts were exposed and I was holding two 9-V batteries in a floured hand. What if there is a fire in the next two minutes and I don’t even know about it? What if when I put the batteries back in, it resumes beeping and doesn’t stop, ever? What will I tell my landlord? Why doesn’t this have a mute button?

I consumed several buns to fortify myself and left the windows open. I replaced the alarm’s batteries and mask; it cried out once, and I shook my finger at it. “Now you behave,” I said.

At the front door of my building, the button next to my apartment number is the only one illuminated. It is a beacon in the night, drawing drunks from the bar kitty-corner to my door like moths to a flame. Punctuate the night with the doorbell ringing. 2 o’clock, the first wave of sloshing bellies spill into cabs, catch the last train south. 3 o’clock, raucous laughter, ring. 4 o’clock, the stragglers shuffle by, think they are somewhere that they are not. At 5 a.m. the first bus passes by on my street, its automated voice more faithful than any alarm: “It’s morning.”

I live alone but I have not been lonely, although perhaps my voice has tended towards disuse. This home and the street speak to me daily; I’m just too young yet to talk back.

With a dream, my feelings change. I feel soft as clay when I wake up, like a child. I am not afraid of all the things that I could be: good, better, worse. The only thing that frightens me is no longer being able to change, no longer being able to study the interminable facets of any given person or situation.

It’s you that I choose to study. I’m a poor student, but even when I’m baffled, I pull these books to my lap. I leave a finger between the pages when my thoughts fly elsewhere.

I can’t imagine a single right answer. In the early morning, I often hear arguments out on the street. Often it’s between two men, a father and son, or two friends who have had too much to drink. The yelling wakes me up and I’m frightened. From the outside, my apartment doesn’t seem secure, but when I’m inside it feels like a fortress. I’m not sure which perception is closer to reality.

Almost nothing is as I expected. It’s better. As I open myself up to possibility, my ideals, these ghostly dreams, disappear for something more painful, more instructive, more creative. I am being chiseled down to the beautiful bits.

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

Photographs by the author.

"The Most Immaculate Haircut" - Metronomy (mp3)

"Love Letters" - Metronomy (mp3)

Felicity's Disguise

by DICK CHENEY

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg

Keri Russell's face resembles a fluttering parchment. The arch of her back is often speckled with azure. The promotion for her FX show The Americans should have been based around the idea, "Did you ever wonder how Felicity would parent her young children if she were also recruited as an agent for the KGB?" We cannot rule out that Felicity was ever not some agent for a foreign government. We can speculate, but never really know, that her job at Dean & DeLuca allowed her to collect various sundry information, and she did seem to spend a lot of time sitting on her bed talking to important men and Scott Speedman.

On The Americans, Felicity/Keri doesn't just talk anymore. Sex is now a part of her job as a KGB agent, and the information that men give out in the throes of love is always ideal, if not exactly certain. In the first ever scene of the Cold War drama (which begins its second season this Wednesday), Felicity/Keri performs oral on a mark, but it is never discussed again. On Felicity itself, the blow job would have been turned over endlessly. The moral of the story is that there is always a lot more of a grey area in life when a Republican president is in office.

I miss those days.

Keri Russell's husband on The Americans, Philip (Matthew Rhys), is the type of dutiful soldier you would expect her to be married to as part of her cover. Unexpectedly, real love (Real Love™) blossomed for this pair of spies late; the respect a man has for the abilities of his wife is easily confused with affection in many marriages.

Across the street from the Jennings family lives the worst FBI agent in the world, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich). Not only is Beeman letting a hard sex relationship with a KGB informant ruin what was left of his unhappy marriage with his wife, he also allows the two KGB agents operating across the street to leave their kids with him while they go off murdering Americans. Stan is a good man and a capable agent, but he has all the emotional maturity of a komodo dragon.

To be fair, some love relationships are worth the destruction of everything around them. Nina (Annet Mahendru) is a senior lieutenant for the resident at the Soviet Embassy; her collection of unusual underwear exceeds that of any comparable Western woman. We have to cheer as Stan casts aside what is left of his family and old life; a spy must make his own fun in the world.

Reinventing Keri Russell as a spy kind of made sense though. Felicity's main skill was lurking, her secondary skill was lurking ominously. She also vanished if you criticized her or mocked her openly, also true of undercover agents. Keri's two children suspect nothing of their parents' activities, although their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) wonders why her mother is up in the middle of the night so often folding laundry. The Jennings' children appear strangely muted, deprived of something ineffable that can never be reclaimed.

Because the vast majority of The Americans consists of two people quietly meeting in a car and then one person leaving and feeling slighly bereft, it can be difficult to keep track of exactly who is winning on either side of things. Stan Beeman appears to be a rising agent in the Bureau, but he could just easily be the fall guy for a more savvy politician in his organization. The important people are those who actually do the work of their betters, The Americans tries to point out, which is ludicrous on its face.

Both Russell and her husband are meant to be native Russians, recruited for the abilities in English and trained for decades of deep cover. Over time Philip has grown to enjoy living in America, claiming that he understands our latent love of freedom better than his wife. In one episode, he explains to her how he believes that Americans are not really capable of a certain kind of wanton murder more familiar to his own side. She comes around to her husband's way of thinking, and it is only us who are left to wonder at the naivete of killers.

Philip must also maintain a love relationship with the secretary to the head of counter-intelligence in the FBI so he can get information directly from the bureau. It is not so much that the woman is unattractive or lacking in traditional charms, but it is the way she loves the man who probes her for sensitive intelligence in her department that causes us to lose faith. To get her to plant a recorder in her bosses' office, Philip proposes to her by silently drawing the words M-A-R-R-Y M-E on her palm during a covert dinner out of town.

At one point she tremulously, disturbingly asks her fiance, "Is this real?" The expression on his face when he asserts that it is transmits a most disgusting feeling into the hearts of all thinking people.

At some point we begin to loathe everyone involved in this sordid drama, even the innocents who have no knowledge of what the people they claim to love do during their free time. Open war on an enemy is fractured and deadly, but it is also honest. The spy himself is morally complete, since his basic allegiance is concrete. The people he enlists in his schemes are corrupted by him - they are the ones who lose everything, only because they never had anything like the basic devotion to country the spy places above his or her own well-being.

Felicity may have been naive, but she never looked as silly as we do, watching these espionage activities decades later. It is so pathetically easy to forget all that was actually on the line. It is even worse, and a much darker journey, when you start to worry nothing was.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about his vision quest.

"Midnight Wheels" - Jessica Pratt (mp3)

"Streets of Mine" - Jessica Pratt (mp3)

Cut While Shaving

by MIA NGUYEN

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. – H.P. Lovecraft

He was a self-proclaimed religious zealot. He proudly insisted on telling the world he was a nonbeliever in romance by devoting himself to the verses of the Bible, above everything. He sacrificed his basic needs as a human being to pursue his quest his faith towards the Lord. His name was Luke and he belonged to a religious cult. We dated for a six-month period. It felt like eternity.

At this point in my life I was seeking validation from another person after being out of the dating game for so long. The lack of codependence left me feeling empty. Looking back on this experience I have confessed time and time again to my close friends that it was a time of desperation. It seems to be the only palpable rationale that comes to mind for diving into a relationship that lacked vast amounts of euphoria and passion. 

Luke had some redeeming qualities, or else I wouldn’t have continued to pursue the challenge. I looked past the extreme religious ideologies he had, became selfless, and compromised time and being for the pursuit of love and overall happiness. He was attractive, charming, fun to talk to, knowledgeable and charismatic. 

I didn’t think it was physically possible to achieve turning a casual visit to the Museum of Fine Arts into a biblical lecture, but he managed. (This has since made me fear suggesting a visit to the art museum or any museum as a date idea.) Every sculpture, statue, and painting was analyzed through his interpretation of the Bible.  

As we stood in view of a porcelain statue, I remember my eyes quickly moving around the room to avoid eye contact, having my consciousness drift away from the conversation. He put a sense of guilt around my neck like a knitted scarf for not listening.

In communicating my thoughts and frustrations about not limiting myself to a religious affiliation, I found enough strength in my willpower to not let it bother me. Luke respected my decision and let the subject go for awhile.

It was quite unusual to be hanging around someone, especially in a romantic setting, while they casually lugged around copious amounts of water in a backpack for their water fast.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I want to make the Lord proud.”

He wasn’t a fan of food, or the act of eating. Every time I made plans with him to have lunch he would find an excuse not to eat, usually informing me he was on a fast or telling me how he was on some weight loss pill he ordered over the Internet. The only time I saw Luke eat in our relationship was a bite of salad before leaving it alone on the plate to wilt.

+

Growing up, my parents didn’t instill my brothers and I with any views or religious deities. I remained spiritual, open, respectful of others for the beliefs they held sacred.  I knew he didn’t respect my disinterest in religion. He made strong attempts to proselytize me into believing in the Lord. He would pass on my phone number to others in the cult, so that they would invite me over their house for dinner. Dinner was a code word they used quite often to lure me in. I wasn’t hungry for the religious bait they were trying to feed me.

After denying his many invitations to join him, he finally succeeded on his quest when he surprised me by leading us to the front of a brownstone.  

“Where are we?”

“Thought I would bring you here.”

+

Every feeling I had in that moment felt like a lost child in a shopping mall. I needed someone to rescue me for the misfortunes I created for myself. I knew I had to steer my way out of the predicament I had put myself over those months.

When we entered the house I excused myself. In a moment of fury and panic I locked myself into the closest bathroom. Looking back on it now I could have stayed there long enough to craft an alibi to warrant leaving so quickly. I splashed cold water on my face with and held onto the sink with all of the willpower I had left. Luke stood behind the door waiting for me to come out. We kept our quarrel down to a whisper.

A woman named Rosemary with strands of dark and light grey hair approached me with open arms. I plopped my body down unwillingly on the seat next to her. The movements in her face suggested that I was in for a rude awakening. She took my hand into hers and asked me to pray. All I thought about when we were praying was a pizza place that was several streets over. Another young woman with stringy light brown hair slid a chair next right next to her. My soul was writhing with fear.

“Do you believe in God?”

“Not particularly. I’m not religious.”

“Well, honey, I think you should. It’s good for you.”

I spent an hour or so listening before I felt the pit of my stomach rising and falling with impatience. I remained polite and told Rosemary that I needed to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Without an ounce of shame, I ended up bolting towards the front door. I made eye contact with Luke before letting myself out.

“We are over,” I whispered.

That day Luke got what he wanted. It was his plan all along to see me get a taste of what I hated the most. I lost him to the hysteria of religion.

After I left the house I got what I wanted. I walked over to the pizzeria a few streets over, the one I had fantasized over during prayer, and ordered myself a slice. I ate it without him. He wouldn’t have wanted to eat with me anyway.

Mia Nguyen is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Rhode Island. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her twitter here and her website here.

Photographs by the author.

"The Horse" - Beach Fossils (mp3)

"Twelve Roses" - Beach Fossils (mp3)

Paris On Fire

I've found an honest and excellent young man who, I believe, sincerely loves me. I've entered into the positive side of life after having lived for a long time by chimeras.

It's all vantage points. From the perspective of the sky, men dominated the Impressionist movement. On the ground things weren't as clear. The singular female impressionist Berthe Morisot was alternately challenged and defused by the indelible artistic talent that surrounded her. Ironically, her personal correspondence to a variety of men and women shows all who knew her in a more stark, realistic light. Modernity came on the shoulders of these individuals, for whom gender was the least of their concerns. After her marriage to Manet's brother Eugene, she gave birth to a daughter Julie, and seemed to be rid of the anxieties of her years as a struggling young painter. The writing in the correspondence that follows is sharp, incisive, and almost entirely devoid of a familiar cynicism.

Edma Morisot's portrait of Berthe

Berthe wrote to her sister about a blind date:

I have missed my chance, dear Edma, and you may congratulate me on having got rid so quickly of all my agitations... Fortunately this gentleman turned out to be completely ludicrous. I had not expected this, and was quite surprised, but by no means disappointed!

Now that I am free of all anxiety, and am taking up against my plans for travel, which in truth I had never given up, I am counting definitely on my stay in Lorient to do something worthwhile. I have done absolutely nothing since you left, and this is beginning to distress me. My painting never seemed to me as bad as it has in recent days. I sit on my sofa and the sight of all these daubs nauseates me.

I am going to do my mother and Yves in the garden; you see I am reduced to doing the same things over and over again. Yesterday I arranged a bouquet of poppies and snowballs, and could not find the courage to begin it.

Berthe

Berthe's mother was an amazing writer, whose plain and straightforward correspondence exceeds the high literature of the time by more than a small margin. She writes to Berthe,

Your father seemed to be deeply touched, my dear Bijou, by the letter you wrote to him. He appears to have discovered in you unsuspected treasures of the heart, and an unusual tenderness toward him in particular... In consequence he often says that he misses you. But I wonder why. You hardly ever talk to each other, you are never together. Does he miss you then, as one misses a piece of furniture or a pet bird?

Madame Morisot was just as jocular with her daughter Edma in describing an encounter with Berthe:

The great joy we have had in seeing each other again is more imaginary than real. It is cruel to admit this, nevertheless it is easy to explain. Berthe does not find me as communicative as I was before her departure; she also claims that I looked at her with surprise, as though I were thinking that she has grown decidedly plainer - which in fact I do - a little.

She always spoke most honestly to her sister Edma.

Manet exhorted me so strongly to do a little retouching on my painting of you, that when you come here I shall ask you to let me draw the head again and add some touches at the bottom of the dress, and that is all. He says that the success of my exhibition is assured and that I do not need to worry; the next instant he adds that I shall be rejected. I wish I were not concerned with all this.

I have wanted to write to you, my dear Edma, but then I feel myself overcome by an insurmountable laziness. I am reproached by everybody and I do not have the strength to react. And I understand perfectly the difficulties you have in painting; I have reached the point of wondering how I have ever in my life been able to do anything...

Didn't you try to work by the river in that place at the water's edge that we thought was so pretty? It seems to me that the season ought to be more favourable, particularly if you have sun. Yves writes that she continues to be bored; as for me, I am sad, and what is worse, everyone is deserting me. I feel alone, disillusioned, and old in the bargain.

Berthe

the morisot house in paris

Berthe's father was extremely ill, and she reported to her sister of her visit there.

I have made up my mind to stay, because neither father or mother told me firmly to leave; they want me to leave in the way anyone here wants anything - weakly, and by fits and starts. For my own part I would much rather not leave them, not because I believe that there is any real danger, but because my place is with them, and if by ill luck anything did happen, I should have eternal remorse. I will not presume to say that they take great pleasure in my presence; I feel very sad, and am completely silent.

I have heard so much about the perils ahead that I have had nightmares for several nights, in which I lived through all the horrors of war. To tell the truth, I do not believe all these things. I feel perfectly calm, and I have the firm conviction that everything will come out better than expected. The house is dreary, empty, stripped bare.

Berthe

I read your letter of last night with much pleasure; everything you tell me is pleasant to hear and reassures me about my exhibition which I thought must be ludicrous You do not tell me what Edouard thinks of the exhibition as a whole; I think I can read between the lines that he was only moderately satisfied with it. Am I mistaken?

The prospect of leaving discourages me a little from beginning anything here; however in a little while I am to decide how to pose the lady with the parrots. If I am satisfied, I'll try to paint it very quickly; if not, I shall not do anything at all under the pretext that I must leave in a hurry.

I have just had lunch and now continue this letter. I have begun my lady with the parrots; I was surrounded by all the boarders while working. I don't think I have posed her very well; however, one could do something very pretty with her. I thought all the time what Eduoard would do of her, and as a result I naturally found my own attempt all the less attractive. I have begun it in the garden with a very prety, quite exotic background - palm trees, aloes, lawn.

Berthe

Last night I went to see Sardou's Odette with Mme Conneau; the performance is much better than I expected. All the references to Nice are received with laughter and applause. The theatre was pretty well-filled, yesterday's peformane was the third. But how false all the modern theatre is, eternally revolving around the same themes! You see that I lose no time in your absence, but I decidedly prefer outdoor pleasures. My walk the other day at Monaco was infinitely more pleasant to me than that stuffy evening.

Berthe

Her mother wrote to her,

Paris on fire! This is beyond any description... Throughout the day the wind kept blowing in charred papers; some of them were still legible. A vast column of smoke covered Paris, and at night a luminous red cloud, horrible to behold, made it all look like a volcanic eruption. There were continual explosions and detonations; we were spared nothing. They say the insurrection is crushed; but the shooting has not yet stopped. Hence this is not true.

Should M. Degas have got a bit scorched, he will have well deserved it.

Madame Morisot

She wrote to her sister:

I saw our friend Manet yesterday; he left with his far Suzanne for Holland, and in such a bad humour that I do not know how they will get there. He wrote to me this morning to inform me about his departure, and to tell me that he had given my address to a very rich gentleman who want to have portraits of his children done in pastel. He advises me to make him pay handsomely if I want him to respect me. This is an extraordinary opportunity that I must not let slip.

If I were actually sure that this gentleman would be coming to see me, I should be somewhat worried. I know my nerves, and the trouble I should have if I undertook such a thing. Suppose that by chance he does come: tell me what I can ask - 500 francs, that is to say, 1000 francs for the two? That seems to me enourmous!

In another letter:

I sent my Cherbourg seascape to Manet. He was to show it to Durand-Ruel. I have not heard anything about it since. I am eager to learn a little money, and I am beginning to lose all hope. Have you worked this week? You are far more fortunate than I am: you work when you feel like it, and that is the only way in which one can do good work. As for me, I work hard without respite or rest, and it's pure waste...

I am invited to go to the country, where I could ride horseback, paint, etc, but all that scarcely tempts me. I am sad, sad as one can be. I am reading Darwin. It is scarcely reading for a woman, even less for a girl. What I see clearly is that my situation is impossible from every point of view.

Renoir's portrait of Berthe's daughter Julie Manet

Berthe's writings show that the men in the Impressionist circle were always her peers. The following was a reply to Mallarme, who had told her, "I want to know what you are doing under your blue skies":

My dear friend, it is kind of you to send me such a charming new entry, and I feel very guilty to have delayed all this time telling you delighted I was. Fundamentally I am like Julie; you disturb me a great deal, and this, as well as the fact that I am working badly serves me an excuse. This country is too beautiful for me.

Now I want to think only of the water-colours, and to try to be worthy of you will be an added difficulty for me. The carnival is on We have been terribly cold these last days, and we have had rain which distressed Bibi; she has a mauve domino - this colour is fashionable in Nice - and she intends to take part in all the festivities. These celebrations would be pretty if only the organizers had a little taste and imagination; the people cooperate with a goodwill that is charming, but there is nothing French about the pranks. This is incidentally the feeling one has all the time - that one is not at home. You can imagine whether I shall be delighted to see Paris again.

Berthe

Manet's portrait of Mallarme Renoir wrote to her from Pornic:

Every day I want to write to you and I do not because I am in a very bad humour. I have ended up by being stranded at Pronic where I am teaching my son to swim; so far so good, but I should be painting landscapres. The country here is quite pretty, and that is why I am so cross. To paint landscapes is becoming for me an ever greater torture, all the more so because it is a duty: obviously this is the only way to learn one's craft a little, but to station oneself out of doors like mountebank, this is something I can no longer do.

In my moments of enthusiasm I wanted to tell you, 'Do come', but then I seized by the boredom of the seashore, and I do not want to play on you a bad trick by telling you to come to a place where I am so bored, a place I should quickly leave were I alone. Nevertheless I went to Noirmoutiers; it is superb and quite like the south, far superior to Jersey and Guernsey, but too far away, much too far. If I were bolder, there would be lovely things to do there, as everywhere else for that matter.

I have gone so long without writing to you that I no longer dare to ask you how you are, whether you have stayed in Paris, or whether you have gone to Touraine, as you intended. Are you still worried about where to live? This is something I want to put out of my mind, I find it so troublesome. To relieve myself of the studio problem I toyed for a while with the idea of going to Algeri with some friends, but I think it is bad to be always traveling, I shall write to you when I painted an interesting landscape.

Now I can only wish you a better humour than mine, and above all good health; the same to my excellent friend Julie. Your friend.

Renoir

"Take It Easy On Yourself" - Scott Gagner (mp3)

"Sentimental Lullaby" - Scott Gagner (mp3)

sanguine

Efficiency

by ELIZABETH BARBEE

I needed an apartment to match my bohemian lifestyle, so I found a small efficiency on the outskirts of Austin. The place was rundown and seedy, facts obvious upon sight, but my mantra was there is beauty in decay. I had just broken up with my boyfriend of four years and it felt hypocritical to discriminate against anything that needed mending. I trusted my ability to romanticize the yellowed walls, the stale cigarette stink, the fact that my neighbors had Wi-Fi names like “Bitches Cum” and “The Dave Matthews Band.” For at least the first week I made the best of it.

Immediately after graduating college I took a job editing erotica. It seemed like the perfect gig for a young English major desperate to demonstrate the depth of her open-mindedness, so I pounced at the opportunity. My first assignment was a gay vampire e-Book called Pack that the publisher described as SEXTREME. Because all of the characters were male there was a lot of pronoun confusion. I could never tell if the protagonist were masturbating or getting lucky. Most of my notes in Track Changes consisted of a single question mark. Regardless, I felt like Anaïs Nin. If only I had been brave enough to shave my eyebrows.

My only friend in town was a free-spirited University of Texas graduate named Saul. He had just sold a story to This American Life, so we were both in the literary biz. He was my first visitor. The moment he stepped through the door he began speaking in the third person. “It isn't bad, but Saul wouldn't live here,” he said. I think now this was his way of distancing himself from the filth of my living space. It was also the first sign of the horror to come.

Later that night, when I was in the early stages of sleep, I heard screams coming from next door. They were not the kind of sexual screams I read about in Pack. They were frightening. The logical thing to do would have been to call 911, but in my dreamlike state I saw only two options: go back to sleep and let my neighbor die, or put on a pair of pants and rescue him. Because of guilt rather than altruism, I chose the latter.

It took him five minutes to open the door, just enough time for me to realize I might get shot. When he finally appeared he was wearing a knee length Madonna concert t-shirt and casually smoking a joint. “Hey, girl, what's up?” he said. “You want to hit this?” I shook my head and explained frantically the reason for my visit. He looked amused. “I get night terrors sometimes. No biggie. I'm surprised you haven't heard me before.” I asked no follow up questions and bought a pair of earplugs.  

Shortly thereafter Saul took an assignment in South America. With my only friend gone, I started a tepid love affair with a first year law student I met at a coffee shop. He had all the markers of a serial killer (frightening intelligence, vacant eyes, distaste for pets), but he kept me company. Plus, he had lots of interesting views on intellectual property in the Internet age, so I decided to overlook his Ted Bundy quality. 

Because I had grown to hate my own place I spent a lot of time at his. It smelled always of fried potatoes, but as far as I could tell he never ate. Instead of going out to dinner we stayed in and rented movies, most of which were directed by Ingmar Bergman. Persona is an uncomfortable thing to watch, especially with someone you vaguely suspect of being an ax murderer.

Two weeks into our lackluster romance he mentioned a roommate whose existence seemed highly unlikely. “It's a one bedroom apartment,” I challenged. “Where's his toothbrush?” “Hugo is a busy man,” he said. “Always jetting off somewhere and taking his toiletries with him.” Perhaps if he had chosen a more believable name I would have stuck it out, but Hugo was too far fetched. I ended things that night. He rarely contacted me after that, but in a fit of paranoia I decided he was stalking me. Too cheap to buy mace, I kept a can of hairspray next to my bed. “If he breaks in I'll douse him with Aqua Net,” I thought.

I am embarrassed now by my egotism. I wonder where I got the idea that I was interesting enough to be stalked. The dude was weird, sure, but only slightly more so than average. Looking back I think it was the unfamiliarity of him that scared me the most. I had spent all of college curled up next to the same man and now I had to get used to this new body. It had hair in places my ex's did not, scars and tattoos I had never seen before. Everything about him, just like everything about that year, was foreign.

All of my discomfort during that time was self-inflicted. I made decisions based on the person I wanted to be (Anaïs Nin) instead of the person I actually was (Elizabeth Barbee, a suburban-bred geek with an affinity for stability). When I came to this realization, I found an administrative job that was boring as hell but allowed me to move to a nicer place. I submitted my final thoughts on Pack to the publisher. “Can we change the main character's name to Hugo?” I asked. “It sounds more vampiric.”  

Elizabeth Barbee is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Dallas. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her vital signs.

"When We're Fire" - Lo-Fang (mp3)

"Blue Film" - Lo-Fang (mp3)

The new album from Matthew Hemerlein is called Blue Film, and it was released on February 24th.

We Have All Learned To Ignore It

by ALICE BOLIN

My first day teaching creative writing to middle schoolers, I walked into the room where my class would meet, normally a health classroom, and found a large piece of butcher paper taped to the blackboard. Written in teacher handwriting across the top of the paper was the question “WHAT IS UNINTENTIONAL INJURIES.” I was on my laptop, trying frantically to record all the examples of unintentional injuries that had resulted from the health class’ brainstorm (“to accidently drop a baby,” “committing suicide on accident,” “accidentl death”), when my group of eighth graders started trickling into the classroom.

There I was, strange adult, rapt by the results of a seventh grade health class activity and clearly taken off guard by their appearance in my classroom. The eighth graders didn’t laugh at me, didn’t even smile, only stared at me skeptically. I scrambled to put my computer back in my bag and stand at the front of the room like some sort of authority, but the damage was done — it is a particular kind of indignity to be regarded as freakish by a group of nerdy pre-teens, one of whom is actually named Anakin.

There was just no way to explain to them what I was doing. “Look at this thing,” I said, pointing to the butcher paper. “Isn’t it funny?” They only eyed me more dubiously. In my first act as their teacher, I had inadvertently revealed my strongest personal compulsion, which is to hoard verbal matter, overheard conversation, stray remarks, stray thoughts, notes, lists, e-mails, gchats, text messages, diaries, notebooks, any and every piece of paper on which something mysterious or funny is written.

For instance: I have in my pocket at this moment a note I don’t remember writing to myself that I found recently on my floor. It reads, “Landscape quote: O pardon me thou bleeding piece of Earth.” (Googling reveals this is from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.) Also in my pocket is a note card where it says in my graduate thesis advisor’s handwriting, “Question / Is there a historical reason for the great number of rear/alley entrances/exits in Missoula bars?” Also: a stranger’s to-do list I found tucked in a book I ordered online; its only noteworthy item is “Return Cal’s pants!”

Why I keep these things, why I needed to document “What Is Unintentional Injuries,” why I write down any interesting group of words that I hear or see, even just phrases that materialize in my brain suddenly but insistently — it is impossible to account for this practice completely, even to myself. As Joan Didion writes in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself."

The easy justification, the one Didion is referring to, is that these random words might some day make it into a piece of writing, and of course they might. But I can tell you this happens for me remarkably rarely: the sentences I treasure most as found artifacts do not transform gracefully to components of writing, either poetry or prose, that could be judged as traditionally “good.” For over a year I kept a file on my computer where I recorded my most emphatic thoughts, in an attempt to identify my mental refrains. I believed this file might become a useful reserve of poetic lines; instead it only serves to illustrate my incredibly vulnerable self-talk.

“Why do I keep forcing myself to think about this?” reads one item in the list. Another reads, “I have to not think about it.” “We have all learned to ignore it” and “It’s no one’s fault,” read others. There are pleas: “Don’t get some other girl.” “Don’t bring your girlfriend.” “Don’t kiss where I can see you.” And confessions: “I’m fairly obsessed with you.” “Sorry I’m so obsessed with you today.” But most of all there are just so, so, so many feelings: “I sometimes really feel that way.” “I am a happy person always.” “I’m always sad, but it’s okay.” “Am I sad or happy?” “I am sad or happy.” “I have no feelings.” “I’m a thing, I’m a feeling.” “I’m a thing.”

Didion also mostly records cryptic phrases, but she relates the strange items that she writes in her notebook as guideposts to memories, the one detail needed to evoke an entire place, time, and mood. The phrase “So what’s new in the whiskey business” written in Didion’s notebook calls to her mind a blonde woman conversing with two fat men by the swimming pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel — an intact context exists in her memory. “'So what’s new in the whiskey business?'” Didion writes. “What could that possibly mean to you?” But for me it is exactly the lost significance, the sentiment that is not meaningless but only unmoored from its origins, that appeals to me about this kind of collecting.

I suppose this can’t be separated from my relationship to poetry: that I love the way that poetry makes words strange and frees everyday speech from its everyday uses. Any carefully written thing can be loved for the beauty and ingenuity of its language, but it is poetry’s main selling point that we may enjoy it at the level of the poem, the stanza, the sentence, the line, the word, the syllable. And much of contemporary poetry is explicitly about divorcing words from their contexts, evoking emotion without a discernible story. So while the sentences I write down rarely become poetry, I have noticed that it is often other people who love poetry who I see also grabbing their notebooks after hearing a startling turn of phrase.

And it is often these same poetry lovers who produce fodder for notebooks: my experience in grad school for poetry was remarkable for the incredible sentences I heard and read delivered offhand. I have recorded in old class notes countless statements like, “Pennies are probably our most happy coins,” “‘I don't want to think about that’ is what my sisters say,” and “Debra says squirrels smell like mice with rotten teeth.” My colleagues annotated my work with comments like “Sexy connotations!” and “I read your movements as ‘begat, begat, begat’ and also ‘subsumes, subsumes.’” Taken in context, none of these remarks are as odd as they seem written here; that’s why it’s so important for me to remove the context, so I can delight in them.

My collecting is not only about enjoying language in its mystery but also becoming a mystery to myself. I often write things on my cell phone’s Notepad feature late at night, when I am half-asleep or drunk, that I puzzle over in the morning.  There are two identical entries that say, “Rom com: woman lives in vegas and is a court reporter.” Another: “Hersheys kisses mutant chocolate chip something.” One of the things I am most grateful for in life is to find traces of my own former thought processes and feelings that I could not possibly replicate or inhabit again. I read “I’m fairly obsessed with you” written in the file of my thoughts and I have no idea whom I was addressing.

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,” Didion writes. “We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” She ignores that to forget can be a supreme grace.  I treasure all of the diaries I kept when I was a child precisely because of the distance I feel from the girl who wrote them. Seventh grade Alice: “It’s totally cool because it’s like we’ve moved on to another level of flirting.” Eighth grade Alice: “You know I’ve been thinking way deep things lately.” First grade Alice: “Dear Alice, I don’t know. Love, Alice.”

I have always been a person who is “sensitive,” and I take too long to get over everything. Reading old journals and notebooks, I am reminded that feelings are, in their essence, immediate, and they pass over us like shadows. All the words I collect are artifacts of sentiments that do not exist and could not even be conceived of again — ideas that once desperately needed to be expressed disappear, leaving husks of language that I save, I care for.

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

Images by Yayoi Kusama.

"Standing Still" - Rachel Reis (mp3)

"Words" - Rachel Reis (mp3)

The new album from Rachel Reis is entitled Ghost of a Gardener, and it was released on February 14th. You can purchase it here.

The Yellow King

by DICK CHENEY

True Detective
creator Nic Pizzolatto

Despite taking place in Louisiana, there were no non-drug dealer, non-minister African-American characters in True Detective until last night, which I regard as quite a feat. Perhaps predictably, this auspicious debut included an old woman's wacky, spiritual wanderings of color as she explained that after death, time goes on. Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) started in disbelief at the old black woman's exhortations, which was more than a small irony. We can't rule out the possibility that McConaughey died in 1997 and James Cameron has been digitally reconstructing every single one of his roles.

in the bloopers they trade wigs

It is downright chivalrous of the Yellow King to target only white women and children. The erstwhile serial killer has been the focus of Rust's obsession, even after he quit the police force as a result of being goaded into a two minute sex scene with the wife of partner Marty Hart, portrayed by a downright luminous Michelle Monaghan. Marty (Woody Harrelson) had other fish to fry. His by far favorite thing to do besides hunt serial killers is to recreate the wonder of the first years of his marriage by pursuing mistresses who resemble his wife at a much younger age. There is actually a name for this practice, it is called nostalgcourse.

if you're going to have sex outside your marriage, make sure a vanity mirror is nowhere nearby

One such conquest, Beth, is suitably impressed by Marty's role in the investigation. She calls him to tell him that all week she has been thinking about letting him fuck her in the ass. "Oh Beth," Marty responds while licking his lips, one of the only times he is guilty of understatement.

To someone who is never really offered anything by the world, one super sweet invitation to an evening of anal sex and recrimination feels like a vacation in the Bahamas. We should thank God for such things, True Detective implies, since they are most definitely temporary. Twenty years later we see Marty eating TV dinners and surfing match.com. There is justice, but only the small kind.

reggie ledoux was a bit of a dick in hindsight

True Detective's most exciting scene came at the end of its fourth episode. A six minute orgy of places and events involved Rust infiltrating a biker gang robbing drug dealers in the projects. The exhilaration of the scene, how everything went bad at once and Rust was at his absolute best, led us to admire the sort of dedication such a person must have for his job, to go to a place so chaotic and horrible it overwhelms every part of the soul. It must be how the people who work in Joe Biden's office feel every single fucking morning.

rust's den reminds me of a room I once had entirely dedicated to gerald ford's pubic hair

Some of the writing on True Detective is maybe a bit heavy-handed, such as when Rust starts to whine about how time is a circle with the same things happening again and again. In one of the show's best scenes he interviews the slimy head of a local ministry. (Did you know a group of ferrets is called a business, and a group of ministries is called a porridge?) Rust is the well-known master of interrogation, as his partner Marty opines to everyone who will listen at any given moment by beginning half of his sentences with the phrase, "Say what you want about Rust..." which is incidentally the same way domestic abuse is often described by the victims, or being with Angelina Jolie is often described by Brad Pitt.

the tuttle ministries may have some dark secrets, but they damn sure know how to feng shui an office

This creepy minister, however, takes Rust's measure in a mere moment, suggesting that it's hard to trust a man who can't trust himself in the same room as a drink. Rust sort of blanches before accepting this faithful appraisal of himself, and we are disappointed, watching our nihilistic detective-hero. Even he must bow down to someone.

Recently God gave me a mission. (It was to find a way to coat David Axelrod's glove compartment with the semen of a stag, and I declined.) I asked if I was to receive help in my task. God explained I was the help.

Just so.

if you're going to craft statues to a pagan god, make ones that look vaguely like Taylor Swift imo

Most disturbing and unusual in the serial killer mythology of True Detective are the small wooden art projects the killer leaves at the scene of his crimes. I think it gave God an idea to try to get me to leave a Lego version of the Constitution in the backseat of David Axelrod's car, but if I listened to every single voice in my head, I guess I'd be Ezra Klein.

spaghetti monster jokes are so 2002

There is something aggressive and domineering about crafting superstition and hate into a tactile form. It is ironic that True Detective replaced the most racially diverse show on television, Treme, although it is no surprise that audiences did not fully take to a drama in which nearly half the cast seemed to be perishing of cancer or Katrina at any given moment. The hurricane's effects are given short shrift in True Detective; Rust explains that it must have been fantastic cover for the killers to take children, and everyone moves on.

Treme was actually quite a hopeful story, in the end, even though that white woman did not get to keep the name of her restaurant and everyone that had cancer died, and the after-school music program got cut for budgetary reasons. OK, actually, the non-saxophone parts of Treme were a bit dispiriting, but at least there was a lively, vivid, fully realized world at its center. True Detective, as Rust says of a parish he visits in the show's pilot, is just someone's memory of a place rather than the thing itself.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer residing for the most part in the spirit world, the rest of the time you may contact his wife Lynne for his exact whereabouts. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"The Well of Youth" - Alasdair Roberts & Robin Robertson (mp3)

"A Fall of Sleet" - Alasdair Roberts & Robin Robertson (mp3)

A Type

by JULIA CLARKE

“He looks like a hamster,” my friend Sarah told me about the intern who broke my heart. He was atypical for my taste: I went for skinny, gawky, baby face, and he was meaty, rough, Brazilian. But great romances are seldom typecasted.

He was getting his MBA at Princeton and working at our company for the summer. We shook hands in the office kitchen and quickly found we couldn’t stop talking. We discussed our families, what we like on our salads, Brazilian culture, movies, past relationships, travel. He taught me the Portuguese word for “arugula,” and I corrected his prepositions when he slipped.

Truth be told, I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend in years. Sure, there were a few fleeting dates, even some that made me hope for a relationship, but inevitably, the guy would lose interest for reasons unexplained.

The intern was four years older than me. He promised me breakfast in Princeton and made me laugh. We had the same taste for British humor, the same disdain for pompousness, the same favorite music and movies.

“You’re like me in skirts,” he used to say, and it was true. Strange as it was, we were kindred spirits, and I felt like I’d known him for years. I fell rapidly: notions of self-preservation go defunct when you’re clouded by charisma.

One Friday, he left work early to catch a flight to his brother’s wedding in Brazil. “See you Monday!” he smiled. That weekend, I pictured him watching the ceremony, standing respectfully in his rented tux, and wondered what he thought about vows of love.

It was just a crush, but I still had a girlish hope that he would commit to me in some way other than a distant plan for pancakes. “How was the wedding?” I asked when he got back. “Oh, really fun. Everyone was so happy,” he said.

He described the dancing, the whiskey and the plane’s turbulence on the way back. He had been momentarily scared of its threatening shakes. “I hate flying,” he said. “Me too,” I agreed, shuddering, “but I love to travel, and it’s a small price to pay.” Then, out of nowhere, he dropped the truth. “I brought my girlfriend back with me,” he said.

Apparently, she was something of a childhood sweetheart, a bond formed years ago and far stronger than the few weeks of playful chatter we’d shared. She came back from Brazil with him after the wedding to start an MBA program at a school in Virginia.

I had a sickening realization that what I thought was flirting — the beginnings of love, even — was just another guy like the rest. In that barren office, far from his girlfriend, he sought shallow entertainment, and I delivered.

“I’m over the Brazilian,” I told my sister. It was humiliating that I had ever thought he was interested, but there I was, caught in a one-sided infatuation. They would probably get married. At best we could be friends; at worst I was his coworker from a summer internship, a bleary memory vaguely recalled.

Somehow, friendship seemed favorable. One Wednesday, he told me he had a lonely night planned, and I cautiously agreed to see a movie with him. When we got to the theater, the cashier looked at us and said, “Together?” The intern looked at me meaningfully, but I took a step backward, shaking my head, paying separately like the platonic friend I swore I was.

The evening was painfully romantic; we sat close to each other in the dark theater, knees knocking and beers spilling, laughing heartily at all the funny parts.

It was misting when we went outside. He chivalrously opened his umbrella, and we walked close together for hours into that damp night, my heels sinking in the soft soil, my hand impulsively brushing against his arm. It would have been the best date of my life except that it was fabricated bliss. His reality was someone else, and mine was only a wish, only as true as the movie we’d just watched.

I abruptly asked him why he didn’t mention his girlfriend earlier. He suddenly looked nervous and small. “She doesn’t know I’m with you right now,” he admitted. “I like your company so much. She’s good, but she just doesn’t fill me. It’s different than this...” he trailed off before quickly adding, “And she wouldn’t understand why I’m with you tonight, so she can’t know.”

I was silent.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like a mixture of pity and disgust.”

The next day at work, he gushed over the night we shared. I was reluctant, but he insisted he had a good time and that we should get together more often. “You’re such good company,” he repeated.

What I knew should be friendship was fast approaching serious attraction. Lies, on his part, were flying. He told his girlfriend he was out with work friends when he was really out with me, watching the sunset from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and admiring my bare legs.

A future with him was immoral unless he broke up with his girlfriend. I resolved to keep my distance, but he was relentless. “I got you a present,” he said one day. “Nothing big — just something to remember me by when you leave for school.”

“Be careful with that hamster,” Sarah cautioned, but we’d already planned a date. He was supposed to visit his girlfriend that Friday, but he put it off so we could be together. “Got Friday off...” he texted me one night, as if playing hooky from school.

He came to my apartment with a bottle of wine and the gift, charmed my sister and told me I was pretty. The present was a favorite movie of his, demanding cruel remembrance of him, my impossible prize. He gave it to me on the roof of my building, where he passionately kissed me all night under the stars. “I can’t believe you don’t have a boyfriend,” he whispered, the Washington Monument coldly blinking in the background. The DVD was The Professional.

He told me he was confused. “She’s a good girlfriend, but she doesn’t fill me,” he kept saying. Still, he remained annoyingly, steadfastly attached. When I moved to Long Island for graduate school, I half-expected our relationship to peter off, but technology maintained it. Even from several states away, he kept talking to me, making me laugh, keeping me virtual company in my lonely one-bedroom.

We sent each other pictures of houses in the Great Homes and Destinations section of the New York Times, something we’d enjoyed independently until we realized it was a commonality.

“I found a house for us,” he’d say, and I’d wonder if our children would have blue eyes like his or brown like mine. It mattered decidedly little. For the first time in my experience, he didn’t demand sex: he demanded me. “We can be friends,” he insisted, and I was determined to believe it.

But I can call my friends, can text them on a whim, and he was perpetually unreachable. Contacting him meant he risked exposure, so I waited for him to contact me, on his terms.

He would gchat me daily, always with some amusing anecdote, some kind word. “You finished your novel yet?” he’d ask. I was used to feeling degraded and disposable, but he made me feel needed, smart and most of all, remembered. He was even with me while I slept. “Some joker just pulled the fire alarm!” he texted once at 1:45 in the morning. I liked that he thought of me at that hour.

He became a staple in my daily routine, and I dangerously started needing him too. I found myself listening for the cheerful ding of a gchat notification as I brewed my morning coffee. My composure was unraveling with each electronic alert.

To remedy it, I experimented with silence, but he saw right through it: “Are you ignoring me? In Brazil we call that rudeness,” and then the next day, “Good morning. Still ignoring me?” He was impossible. “Sorry — been busy — first year PhD stress!” I finally said lightly.

And so we clumsily started up again, making jokes and planning his visits to Long Island. I edited his resume, wrote his thank you notes for the summer internship where we met, encouraged him with his schoolwork and worries about the future. I was his girlfriend with none of that stability or comfort.

Somewhere along the way, I’d lost my self-respect. Maybe he would break up with her one day, but it wasn’t happening now. “We can’t talk anymore,” I reluctantly told him over the phone, and I heard his voice crack when he said goodbye.

About a month later, I was in Princeton using the library’s special collection for a research paper I was writing. I decided it was silly — childish even — to keep my proximity to him a secret, so I texted. He softly kissed my cheek when he saw me, and we caught up on our lives in a crowded coffee shop.

As ever, his girlfriend remained our unspoken impediment. She was his future, and I had to settle for being what could have been. At one point, I caught his gaze, and he quickly shifted his eyes: “Don’t look at me like that! It’s the same as it was that night in D.C. — a mixture of pity and disgust.” So I kindly laughed it off, changed the subject, and we walked for a long time in the cool air as if nothing had changed. And indeed, nothing had.

Julia Clarke is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about a college experience.

"Again" - Janet Jackson (mp3)

"That's The Way Love Goes" - Janet Jackson (mp3)

Helen the Obscure

by ALEX CARNEVALE

On her twelfth birthday, Helen Lawrenson's mother told her that she had never wanted a child. She informed her young daughter she had tried everything she could to end that pregnancy: hot mustard baths, huge castor oil doses, enemas, riding horseback, skipping rope. Even falling down stairs.

Helen's mother cried every time she heard Christmas carols.

Helen copied in her diary that quote from Wilde's De Profundis: "I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The silence, the solitude, the shame - each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience."

at age twelve

When she lost her virginity at 19, she contracted syphilis. After her treatment, she was never once sick again in her life. Instead Helen would have many abortions of her own, including three in a single year. Or at least that is the claim in her marvelous, forgotten memoir Stranger at the Party. I have always prided myself on being able to tell exaggeration from the truth, but Helen Lawrenson made them indistinguishable in her own work.

Stranger at the Party is full of such revelations:

Even my erotic dreams had a literary tinge. I never dreamed of Rudolph Valentino or Clark Gable. Not me. My all-time favorite is the night I dreamed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt went down on me in celebration of his having been elected for a third term. When it was over, we lay on the bed, side by side, smoking - he with a long ebony cigaret holder, I with a short ivory one - and talking, but not of sex or politics. In the dream he said, "What was the first book you ever read?" "The Sunbonnet Babies," I replied.

The idea that women were nothing before the revolution is severely misguided at best, outright sexist at worst. Born in 1907, Helen knew from her first moments that she was the center of all subjectivity, and she determined to prove this at length. (Her grandmother told her not to read Jude the Obscure, it was "a dirty book.")

Helen entered Vassar like it was Oz. "Certainly my standards were higher in those years than they have ever been," she suggests, and it is not the only time she is both funny and sad at once. Helen took a job doing all kinds of writing for Hearst newspapers, where she was willing to take advice from anyone, given that she did not have to accept it then and there. "One of my fellow reporters said to me early on, 'Don't rush around like a fart in a mitten. The idea is to do your job but never act like you take it seriously.'"

with Bernard Baruch

She had first learned about sex from a wayward aunt, who had described it in some detail and revealed that everyone did it, "even Lillian Gish." She dated around some when her job afforded it, but struggled to find meaning in it. She wrote in her diary

I can never mix for long in the fluid exchange of social life. Every once in a while I must withdraw from it and revert to watching. My mind is always standing off and criticizing, seeing myself act, hearing myself talk even watching myself think. Sometimes I have wished that I could feel in an experience, in a relationship, the ecstasy of the moment, aureoled with an ironic consciousness of what went before and what would come after. The trouble is that I want to have that intellectual detachment and also at the same time completely to submerge myself in unself-conscious emotion, drench my ego in feeling, render it momentarily impossible, for it to hover in the air, observing coldly the material me.

She never found this, even when she fucked the most famous rabbi in America.

with Nast

Then Helen met magazine publisher Condé Nast. Their relationship was not aesthetically pleasing on most levels. At 5'9" and losing most of his hair, Nast possessed wonderful posture and never carried cash on him. He said he would not lie to Helen, and she reports that he never got angry with her. "Above all else," Helen writes, "he was a man who loved women. This austere-looking, sedate, fastidious, impeccably-mannered, dignified man, treated with deference by everyone, was perhaps the most deeply sensual person I have ever known. To put it bluntly, he was cunt-crazy. He loved to taste it, smell it, feel it, look at it, above all, fuck it.... It was his primary interest in life, and he pursued it with wholehearted, shockproof, uninhibited enthusiasm."

She claims he never traded anything for sex, although "there were also those who truly liked him for himself, not for his name or worldly position." Helen was hired at Vanity Fair because no person who currently worked there could have been considered any kind of expert on the arts. When Nast interviewed her for the position, he concluded the meeting by commenting, "Even if you don't get the job, perhaps we could have dinner sometime." Her salary was twenty-five dollars a week. 

She disliked the magazine at first, along with the ignorance of those who edited it. "It's a mechanized wit, all triviality," she writes in Stranger at the Party. "These people and their friends don't seem to know what is going on in the world, except in their own rarefied purlieus." She had her first date with Nast later that year. He didn't touch her, and had his chauffer drop her off near her apartment on West 3rd. "Tell me, madam, do people actually live down here?" Nast's driver asked her.

Eventually Nast suggested she marry him, using the following words: "We get along together so well and I love you very much." She declined half-because of his backwards political views and also because she was not in love with the man. When Helen had her first childe, Nast sent roses for the mother and a dress of organdy for the baby, "trimmed with real Valenciennes and a pink satin bow." Some people will always be grateful for how you treated them.

with her husband Jack

She met her husband Jack in the trade union movement, and in her book she claims he was the love of her life. They shared all the same views, Helen tells her readers, in such a maniacal tone I was eventually convinced that this was the least important thing two people could have in common.  

Stranger at the Party makes a show of pointing out of how indiscriminating Helen's travails in love were when it came to race. A convict named Bumpy (you don't want to know the reason he is called this) occupies an entire chapter, and Helen concludes that he was "ahead of his time." She also had a thing with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and any number of Irish men, though she complained of her husband's drinking.

Even being the complete center of all subjectivity has a shelf-life.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Can't Remember To Forget You" - Shakira ft. Rihanna (mp3)

"Nunca Me Acuerdo de Olvidarte" - Shakira ft. Rihanna (mp3)