Arguably the most famous pet owl of the twenty-first century, real or imagined, is Hedwig, Harry Potter’s Snowy Owl. Small wonder J.K. Rowling picked a Snowy for the starring role. The big white bird is the world’s most distinctive owl, with that gleaming white plumage.
In Rowling’s universe, Hedwig and other owls straddle the spheres of the magical and the Muggle as part of an owl post service, ferrying birthday greetings, packages, and even a Nimbus 2000, a wizard’s broomy vehicle, with efficiency and apparent ease. But they also serve as the wizards’ affectionate friends. When Harry needs it most, Hedwig provides warm, comforting companionship.
After the release of all seven of the Harry Potter books and the films based on them, Laura Erickson—a.k.a. “Professor McGonagowl”—made herself something of an expert on the owl appearances in the movies and even started a blog called The Owls of Harry Potter, inviting questions from readers.
Hedwig and other owls straddle the spheres of the magical and the Muggle.In the films, Hedwig is female, Erickson told me. But the owls playing her were all male, and different males filled the role: Gizmo, Kasper, Oops, Swoops, Oh Oh, Elmo, and Bandit. Why male owls? “For one thing, females are bigger and heavier, harder for a young actor to handle, and they have powerful talons,” says Erickson. Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry in the films, wore a thick leather guard on his arm beneath his big black cloak. Talons that can nail a merganser through thick feathers can do a number on human limbs.
Also, she says, “the pure white plumage of older males compared to females looks more striking against a wizard’s black robes.” And why so many substitutes or stand-ins? Because apparently owl actors also need days off. Moreover, she says, owls are individuals “and as tricky to train as cats. One might be excellent at doing directed flybys, another might be much calmer sitting in a tiny cage on a movie set, and another better at interacting gently with a little boy while sitting on his arm.”
When one of her readers asked Erickson whether a Snowy Owl could really carry a Nimbus 2000, Erickson went to her neighborhood hardware store and weighed a corn broom—just over a pound, about half as heavy as a Snowshoe Hare, which Snowy Owls regularly carry to their chicks.
So yes, a real Snowy Owl could carry a Nimbus 2000. But the Snowy Owl in this scene simply flew through, and then the filmmakers digitally added the broom. The owls often dangle their legs when taking off or landing, says Erickson, so in this scene, the owl’s legs are already in position to be carrying something.
But J.K. Rowling made some elementary errors in her depiction of Snowy Owls. Unlike Hedwig, Snowies are mostly diurnal—although they also hunt in crepuscular hours. They don’t hoot as Hedwig hoots to comfort Harry or express her approval—their vocalizations are more like a bark. They don’t nibble on bacon rinds as Hedwig does when she delivers the mail at breakfast time. Perhaps most important, they do not make good pets.
“Don’t even think about taking an owl as a pet,” says Erickson. “They are wild birds requiring a wild life. In cages they simply cannot do all the things their bodies were designed for and their spirits require.” Moreover, they’re hard to care for. “They eat whole rodents or other whole animals, which must be fresh, and their droppings are messy and smelly, requiring frequent cleanup.” It’s a massive commitment, a way of life.
Like most licensed care providers for owls, Erickson will go on at length about the difficulties of keeping a real owl—and also the joys. Erickson is a former editor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and host of the radio program For the Birds. For seventeen years, she stewarded an Eastern Screech Owl named Archimedes (after Merlyn’s bird) and worked with him as an education ambassador, taking him to schools, bird groups, and symposia to teach people about the realities of being an owl.
Perhaps most important, owls do not make good pets.A family had found Archimedes in their backyard on the ground beneath his nest, in very bad shape. “He was completely unfeathered,” Erickson says. “On one side of his tiny body, he had puncture wounds, and on the other side, he was all abraded and scabby.” It turned out the owl was suffering from a blood parasite, so he needed a lot of care. The family took him to a rehabilitation clinic, where he was nursed back to health. But because he ended up imprinting on humans, he couldn’t be released into the wild. He was later transferred to Erickson, who had a license to possess a screech owl for education. “That’s how I was lucky enough to get him,” she says.
Feeding Archimedes was a nighttime ritual. She would take a mouse out of the freezer at the start of The Daily Show, and by the end of The Colbert Report, it would be thawed, she says. “Sometimes he would bite it in half and just eat the head and upper torso, saving the back half to eat the next day. Sometimes he would eat the whole thing at one sitting, swallowing it headfirst and then letting it work its way down. You could watch how he would ratchet it, with the lower bill and the upper bill, and the tail would always be the last part to go down, like spaghetti.”
Each day, around six to eight hours after eating, he would spit out a pellet. To exercise him, she ran him around the neighborhood at night. She would put little jesses or straps around his legs, attach them to a leash, and start running. He would take off and fly right above her head.
Erickson considered her time with Archimedes a sacred privilege. When she was writing in her office late at night with the little owl in the room, she loved calling back and forth with him. Sometimes those exchanges lasted a half hour or more. “There’s a joke that we humans are never a cat’s owner—they see us as staff,” she writes. “I don’t think she writes. “I don’t think Archimedes saw me as staff, more like his mate.”
One August day in 2017, Erickson lost Archimedes. He seemed sort of sluggish that morning, she says. He called a little, but he didn’t seem his normal self. She went over to him and preened his face a couple of times, and he leaned into the preening, like he always did. She left the room for lunch, and when she returned, he had toppled off his perch onto the floor, dead.
“I like to imagine him free,” she wrote in a tribute to him, “flying under the moon or alighting on a massive limb of a big, old elm, or peeking out of a Pileated Woodpecker hole in an aspen, or whinnying under the stars somewhere out there in the universe. I like to imagine that he’s shaken off his obligation to teach people things they should already understand about the ways of owls and the value of nature—shaken it off the way he’d shake out his feathers after preening, a spray of feather dust forming a sparkling halo around him.”
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From What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company.
]]>Jackson Huang’s mother arranged for the school bus to drop him off outside the mall every weekday afternoon because she works at the salon until nine. After he finishes his homework, which he does sitting in one of the stylists’ chairs with a book balanced on his lap, he helps his mother. He sweeps the hair that falls around her chair. He also sweeps the entire salon, from one end to the other, because hairs swirl in the breeze created by the air-conditioning and heat. When someone walks quickly through the salon, they stir up the hairs on the floor, which then land all over the place, and this leaves Jackson more to sweep too.
A year ago the salon was more fun because there were other stylists working there, and Jackson could talk to them when they weren’t busy. There was Irma, with her bright orange hair piled high on her head, her dangly earrings, her loud laugh that filled the entire space. There was Missy, who was young with a small diamond stud in her nose and saw every single movie shown in the mall’s theater. There was Jack, with his snakeskin boots, who would tease Jackson, saying he was named after him, even though Jackson knows he was named after Michael Jackson who was his mother’s favorite singer when she was growing up, and because he was born on the same day in 2009 Michael Jackson died. But they are all gone, off to salons where business is better, and there is a row of empty chairs now. Jackson’s mother is the only stylist left.
Today Belinda, who manages the salon, is here. She pops in a few times a month to see how things are going, but she doesn’t cut hair anymore. She used to, but now the arthritis in her hands is too painful. Jackson’s mother rents her chair from Belinda, who walks with a limp and wears long flowered shirts and sighs a lot. Jackson’s mother dyes Belinda’s hair the color of eggplants. Belinda is always saying she’s not sure how long the salon can stay open. “There’s rumors the whole mall will be shutting down soon,” Belinda says, sitting in the chair next to Jackson’s mother’s station.
Jackson is sweeping and pretending not to listen, but he always listens to everything people say to his mother. He’s very good at what she calls multitasking. He can sweep and eavesdrop. He can do math homework and eavesdrop. He can fold towels and eavesdrop. Eavesdropping is one of his top skills.
“They’ve been saying that for years,” says Jackson’s mom. “I’ll believe it when they turn out the lights and lock the doors.”
Belinda points to a bucket in the hallway next to a yellow sign that says wet floor and features a silhouette of a man slipping. Water from the leaky roof has been dripping into the bucket for the past week. “They’ve stopped fixing things, Tina.” Belinda opens a grease-stained paper bag from Burgerville in the food court and gestures for Jackson to come over. “Fries for you,” she says, holding out a carton. “And fries for me too,” she adds, taking another carton out of the bag. “Who knows if Hank’s dinner will even be edible. He never cooked a meal in the forty-five years we’ve been married, then he retires and suddenly thinks he’s Gordon Ramsay. It’s ridiculous to think you can go from an accountant to a gourmet chef, you know?”
“Thank you,” Jackson says. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to say something about Belinda’s husband, but he knows Belinda will be satisfied with his thanks. Adults always act so impressed when kids say thank you, as if just saying these words is something big and difficult to do. At school, his teachers always tell him he’s so polite, even though he doesn’t do anything special, just follows directions, doesn’t run in the halls, doesn’t cut in line for the water fountain after gym class, says please and thank you when people help him. He just does what he’s supposed to do.
Jackson sets the broom against the wall and takes the fries from Belinda. He thinks Belinda feels sorry for him for having to come here every day, so she brings him treats when she visits. His mother always tells Belinda it’s unnecessary, but she doesn’t stop Jackson from eating the junk food. He tilts the carton of fries toward his mother, and she shakes her head. She’s folding the clean black capes the customers wear when she cuts their hair and stacking them on a metal shelf.
Belinda eats a fry, rummages in the paper bag, pulls out a napkin, and wipes her lips. Her cherry-red lipstick comes off on the napkin. “I’m telling you, it might be time to retire. Hank wants to go down to Florida, and I’m starting to think it’s not such a bad idea. Warm air might do me good.”
“You’re not old enough to retire,” says Jackson’s mom, and Jackson is unsure whether she’s saying it because she really means it or because—as Jackson has learned from listening in on conversations in the salon—women sometimes lie about their age. Jackson wonders how old Belinda is. It’s hard to tell with her eggplant-colored hair and her makeup and her bright clothes. If she had white hair and clothes that weren’t splashed in color, maybe she would look ready for retirement.
“I don’t look old because you keep me looking good,” says Belinda, patting her hair. She finishes her fries and sticks the empty carton in the bag. “I better go,” she says. “I’ve got to make sure Hank doesn’t burn down the kitchen.”
After Belinda leaves, Jackson’s mother flips through a stack of papers on the receptionist’s desk. There’s no longer a receptionist. There aren’t enough clients to need one.
“How old is Belinda?” Jackson asks.
“Seventy-one,” says his mother. She looks up from the messy desk and says, “Old enough to retire.”
“Does she have white hair?” Jackson says.
“A stylist can never reveal these things,” his mother says, and Jackson thinks about the advice he’s read about keeping secrets in his books on magic. Jackson has been practicing saying, “A magician cannot reveal his secrets,” in front of the bathroom mirror while attempting to lift one eyebrow in a way that looks mysterious. He has been studying magic—in books borrowed from the library and in videos on YouTube—for the past three months. His mother doesn’t know about this new hobby. He won’t tell her until he’s good enough to perform ten minutes worth of magic tricks for her.
“Why do so many women like dyeing their hair purple?” Jackson has noticed a lot of women ask for purple streaks or for entire heads the color of eggplants or plums or red grapes. “Isn’t dyeing hair a trick?”
“A trick?” says his mother.
“An illusion,” says Jackson. “Like magic. The illusion that someone doesn’t have white hair, even though they really do.”
“I guess it is,” says his mother. “Here!” she shouts, as she pulls a piece of paper out from beneath a Thai takeout menu. “Found it.”
Jackson peers at the paper and sees the number for the scissor sharpeners. They are a husband and wife—both with gray hair, the husband with a big gray mustache that hangs over his upper lip—and come to the salon twice a year.
“But if it’s an illusion, why don’t people dye their hair real hair colors? Like brown or blond?” Wouldn’t the point be to look like they weren’t dyeing their hair?
“Because they want to feel different from everyone else. Maybe a little dangerous. They want to show the world they’re not growing old.”
Why, Jackson wonders, is it bad to be old? He doesn’t like being nine. He doesn’t like not being able to drive or pay for things or own a dog or make decisions about his life. All he wants is to be older.
“Why is purple hair dangerous?” Jackson says.
“It’s not,” says his mother. “Not really. But I think it lets people believe they’re doing something daring, something outside of what’s expected. And it’s not so out-there, not like a Mohawk or something, so people with boring office jobs can get away with a few purple streaks.” She picks up the phone at the reception desk, and Jackson can hear the dial tone. At home, they don’t have a landline, just his mother’s cell phone. That’s another thing he wants—a cell phone— but his mother says he’s too young. He mostly wants a phone so he can take pictures, but his mother thinks kids who have phones can get themselves in trouble by talking and texting with strangers.
Jackson’s mother punches in the number for the scissor sharpeners, and Jackson can hear music that sounds like it should be played on a carousel coming out of the earpiece. “I’m on hold,” she says. “Hold! It’s not like they’re some big corporation.”
“But you don’t dye your hair,” Jackson says.
His mother lifts a finger, telling him to be patient, but Jackson still hears that carousel music and knows no one is talking to her on the other end of the line.
“And you’re forty.” He has heard other women complain about being forty; last week a woman getting her hair dyed told his mother that once she turned forty, white hairs started sprouting, and her thighs seemed to get lumpier overnight. Jackson is not sure what it means to have lumpy thighs, but it seems like not a terrible trade-off: white hairs and lumpy thighs for the ability to drive and to have a cell phone and to own whatever kind of dog—preferably a corgi—you want. “You don’t have gray hair,” Jackson says.
“I’m lucky,” says his mother. “Good genes.”
“What does that mean?” says Jackson.
“Hello?” says his mother. The other end of the phone is silent.
“Shit,” she says, slamming the receiver back into its cradle. “I got cut off.” She looks up at Jackson and says, “Don’t curse. I shouldn’t curse, but you especially shouldn’t, okay?”
Jackson nods, and his mother picks up the receiver and punches in the number for the scissor sharpeners again. “Do I have good genes?” Jackson says. The carousel music comes on again and floats out of the part of the phone Jackson’s mother holds to her ear. She reaches into her pocket and hands him five dollars. “Food court,” she says.
“But I just ate fries.”
“Then could you get me a Diet Coke?”
“Diet Cokes are cheaper at Dollar General than at the food court,” says Jackson.
“Hello?” says his mother. “Yes, hello, this is Tina Huang at—” and before she can say the name of the salon, she looks up at him and says, “I finally got to a real person and they put me on hold again.” The carousel music starts once more.
“Genes?” says Jackson.
His mother sighs. “It just means what’s passed down to you by your parents. What you’re made of. And I got to forty without gray hair, so you should too.”
But Jackson knows this isn’t the whole equation. His mother is only half of things. He has never met his father, and his mother won’t talk about him. Maybe his father’s hair has turned completely white. Maybe his father dyes his hair purple so he can pretend to be younger and cooler than he is. And even though Jackson knows his mother doesn’t like to talk about his father, he says, “But what about my dad? What’s his hair like?”
“I don’t know,” says his mother. “I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
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From You Are Here by Karin Lin-Greenberg. Used with permission of the publisher, Counterpoint Press Copyright © 2023 by Karin Lin-Greenberg.
]]>We saw the dolphins in the morning. We trailed their shiny fins in the boat for a good half hour; then they went too far, and Papa had to turn back. For me, it was the first time.
It was the end of August 1976. In general, the end of other people’s vacations meant the beginning of ours. The tourists went back to their cities and while we waited patiently for autumn in a hot and long season, we had time and space all for us. Until the middle of October it was lows of 60°F and highs of 80°F, the sea was calm, and the beaches deserted. Only five kinds of noises could be heard: water against rocks, water against hulls, boat motors, screams of birds, and human voices. We had started going again on boat trips with Papa, something we rarely did when the hotel was in full swing. At night he had friends over for dinner and sat them at the restaurant’s open tables. Caterina and I would fill baskets with blackberries in the afternoon while we walked along the road to Cannelle.
That day, rather unusually, the air was heavy and humid with a coming sirocco. From the port, one could barely see the outline of Argentario, like a dinosaur surrounded by its sticky breath. When I got back from the boat trip, I told everyone that I had witnessed the stunning beauty of the dolphins. They looked at me with expressions of enthusiastic surprise, but I knew that they were only doing it to please me. I knew that seeing the dolphins in Giglio was not exactly an exceptional event. In the evening, I decided that I did not want to see fake expressions of surprise anymore. I would keep the magic for myself.
In any case, they were all concentrated on the news. The rumor was now official, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, the two neofascist defendants accused of being the perpetrators of the Piazza Fontana Massacre, would be sent into exile in Giglio a few days later. A fact that no one remembers today, that doesn’t even appear in the most documented dossiers, in the chronological reconstructions of the process, or in the detailed books about the procedural issues regarding the Milan terrorist attack of 1969.
And yet, in those days, Freda and Ventura being sent into exile along with the protests that followed not only disrupted the calm of the island, but also covered the front pages of the newspapers and inaugurated a new phase of the trial, which in the end produced the only convicts from a case that would be closed only thirty-five years later and without culprits.
Seven years had passed since the bombing at the Agricultural Bank, with an array of arrests and subsequent releases, the premature deaths of twelve witnesses, the disappearance of evidence, three separate investigations, two governments, an attempted coup d’état, and two other massacres. The debt of the State in the face of justice became suspiciously heavy.
The coordination of protests was unanimously assigned to our mother Elena. She was the most combative, the most knowledgeable, the one who brought a political consciousness to Giglio, and took it upon herself to share it with whomever she could. Until ’68, she lived in Bologna where she served on the university student committees and belonged to the group that would later found Radio Alice. She studied economics, and, when she was twenty-four, started a doctorate on the Marxist concept of money as an alienated power of humanity. Then she met Vittorio, my father, who was finishing Veterinary School at twenty-seven years old, after spending the last couple of years wandering from one university to another in search of the easiest exams to pass. My mother helped him write his dissertation even though she had no knowledge of the topic (“Behavior Changes in Sports Horses Due to the Use of Bitless Bridles”) and as soon as his dissertation defense was over they toasted with friends and left Bologna to vacation in Giglio. They arrived one evening in May, greeted by the scent of Scotch broom flowers. They had planned to stay two days, but they extended the vacation another five. When the day came to return, they had heard the owner of the hotel where they were staying, The San Lorenzo, say that he wanted to find new management so he could finally return to his family in Livorno, because none of his kids wanted to continue the business and he was tired of being there alone. My father, with the reckless instinct that guided his best actions, nominated himself as a candidate without even speaking to my mother. All he had to do was look outside from the salon window: the cliff of Gabbianara, the sea, a lemon tree full of fruit. Within three days they had signed the contract. A few weeks later, my mother discovered she was expecting a baby. She had returned to Bologna for a few days to organize the move of their humble belongings and to every friend she greeted, she said: “I’m going to live on a small island and I’m pregnant, if it’s a boy I will call him Arturo.” The more disbelief she saw in their eyes, the happier she felt. She would remain in Giglio for twelve years.
She left behind the doctorate, the possibility of a scholarship to a German university, and her communist youth clubs to end up running a hotel and being a cook. She had discovered that she knew how to do it and took charge of a thankless task only because nobody else was doing it and she was incapable of standing back when something needed to be done. In the summer of ’76 she was thirty-three years old. She had red hair and was tall, with a face and body covered in freckles and eyes of the burnt brown color that often accompanies fiery hair. She was a wild and untamed beauty. Someone had nicknamed her the Lioness, but in the end everyone called her Red because of her hair and, above all, her politics. Red was easier to fear than to love.
My father, who at the time was a boy and was not scared of anything, had chosen her more out of superficiality than anything else. The pain embedded in her eyes that had sent other boys running didn’t scare Vittorio. Perhaps he had simply not been able to see it.
*
The Red had called for a plenary meeting open to citizens and tourists on the porch of San Lorenzo at nine in the evening. She had closed the kitchens, suspended the dinner orders, reimbursed those who had full-board, and arranged the chairs for the meeting. One person complained but the majority of the guests wanted to participate. She thought there would be about forty people at most, those from the city council and a few others interested in political matters, but instead, by eight forty-five, there were no more places to sit, not even on the tables stacked in the corner, and so they had to move outside. There were at least two hundred people there. Caterina and I were zipping around the gathering on a bike together, me behind, standing with my hands resting on her shoulders. With us was Irma, the white-orange English setter that was the same age as Caterina and followed us everywhere. She was our pupper, as people said around here. Her real name had to be Immacolatella. It was my mother who chose both the puppy, the chubbiest one there was, and her name: since she had given birth to a little girl and could not name her Arturo, however, she thought to pay homage to Morante’s novel with the name of the dog instead. But the name Immacolatella proved to be difficult and too long. When my sister started to speak, she called the puppy Imma and thus on my dad’s suggestion she became Irma, like Irma the sweet one, he had said.
Caterina and I didn’t know exactly why all those adults were gathered there. We were too busy arguing about how to divide the two thousand lire that we had earned during the week at the stand where we sold handmade goods and old toys.
“Listen, I handmade all the paper diaries, I designed them, and I stapled them, and they’re the things that made us money,” Caterina said. “I should get at least a thousand and five because you didn’t do anything.”
“But that isn’t true, I made the necklaces and the bracelets and the painted stones.”
“We didn’t sell your rocks.”
“Yes we did, the one with the boat and the hedgehog sold.”
“But those don’t count because Papa bought them, so it isn’t money earned. Anyways, you can have five hundred lire. Oh, that’s a lot of money, eh?”
I was silent and she had the upper hand. We had spent a portion of the shared prize on gelato, and I had tapped my finger several times on the metal panel outside the bar saying, “I want this,” and Caterina had told me, “Why are you yelling, you’ll knock down the sign.” We had gone to the café to get cookies and an ice cream, and we stopped to eat them on the edge of the gathering of adults, at the center of which we weren’t surprised to see our mother. Caterina listened to her and understood everything because even though she was only eight years old, she still felt perfectly comfortable with those who were twice her age, with whom she shared not only arguments but also adolescent rebellion.
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From Lesser Islands by Lorenza Pieri (trans. Peter DiGiovanni and Donatella Melucci). Used with Permission of the publisher, Europa Editions. Copyright © 2023 by Lorenza Pieri/Peter DiGiovanni, Donatella Melucci.
]]>I don’t think there are any rules when it comes to how one should use literary references in works of literature, except, perhaps, that they should have a life of their own.
The facts are I’ve written a short story collection and named it Evil Flowers, obviously a reference to Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. I wrote these short stories in a state of objection: I objected to the idea of the short story as an artistic achievement, where the perfection of every detail creates a meticulously built nutshell, to put the meaning of life into. I sought something different.
I was interested in how the mind works when it doesn’t really work, when it doesn’t really think, how thoughts wander, how associations lead you off trail, and back again, and off again. I wanted texts with a looser texture, with a zig zag structure, with digressions and different voices interfering with each other’s narratives. I wanted bursting fits of aggression, sudden and far-fetched associations, and I wanted slow rivers of thought, and if I was walking across a forest of symbols, I’d prefer the symbols to be close to clichés, and the characters trying, half-frustrated, to interpret them as they went along. So, three little questions arise: Why put Baudelaire in there, whose meticulously built sonnets were everything my zig zag stories would not be? And how? And would he object?
“How” is the easiest question to answer—I can simply count the ways he appears: 1) as a quote, 2) as an image (the photograph taken by Etienne Carjat in 1863), 3) in an angry discussion on how to use photographs in texts and what texts are supposed to be and what his expression in the photograph really says 4) as a reference in the title and 5) in a hidden, but pretty determined finger pointing at his essay “On the Essence of Laughter.”
Three little questions arise: Why put Baudelaire in there, whose meticulously built sonnets were everything my zig zag stories would not be? And how? And would he object?So then, why Baudelaire? His angry gaze on the author portrait taken by Etienne Carjat in 1863 entered my life the day I was going to buy a Christmas present for my younger brother. My brother was one of my favorite writers, just that he hadn’t published anything yet—he was nineteen, I was twenty-one. I had studied comparative literature at the university of Bergen for a year and was in a very strange state of mind. The semester was over, the exams were done, I could go home to my parents for Christmas, but I stayed in the room I rented for a couple of weeks more to finish the first draft of my first book, which was not going to be a collection of short stories as I’d always planned it to be.
It was snowing and I think I’d say I had had an epiphany; I was feverishly writing down poems. I had been walking across a street, and I suddenly knew the following to be true, so I wrote it down: Life / is that Lion’s Mane Jellyfish / brushing my thighs / as I swim. / Literature is the trail in the water / behind me as I / run, screaming, / ashore. And I wrote a poem I entitled “I’ll Be a High School Teacher When I’m Done Kissing” which was like this: I imagine / that if I kissed you / hard enough, overlapped your mouth / completely and sucked as hard as I /could, your tongue would loosen /and your heart would follow / at the end of a steaming / red thread / –
I wrote a poem where I compared myself not to a summer’s day but to a snowplough, rusting in a forest, and I wrote a poem about the old Norse hero Gisle Sursson, famous for having kept on fighting with his sword in one hand, although his belly was cut open and his guts spilled out on the ground: Gisle Sursson /held his guts to his chest /as a good hand /of cards/although he knew/he was dying/he held tight[1]. I stood in front of the poetry shelf at the university bookstore and looked at Arthur Rimbaud’s Illluminations.
I’d read one of his poems in a poetry class earlier that autumn that had stayed with me, “The Bridges.” first it stayed with me as something completely incomprehensible, fleeting and elusive, an almost absurd painting of non-existing bridges created by the meeting between light and water over a river (“Crystal-gray skies. A bizarre pattern of bridges, some of them straight, others convex, still others descending or veering off at angles to the first ones, and these shapes multiplying in the other illuminated circuits of the canal”[2]), where the only development was that this image was destructed by a “white ray”—but later I realized that it carried the feeling expressed in all the above cited poems: that life was an illusion, that the illusion needed to be torn down, but still, that there was something burning, living, and breathing, an objection, a protest, quite similar to the feeling I’d had, as long as I’d known myself.
I felt my brother should read him too, as I knew he was not interested in rules but how to break them, but when I read the text on the back of Illuminations, about Rimbaud’s life, which was much wilder (drugs, running away constantly) than the life I wished to influence my brother to have, I decided to keep the book myself, and picked up Baudelaire’s Prose Poems instead.
I don’t think (or maybe I kind of do) that he would object to being a prop in my texts, because even though wisemen tremble when they laugh, real gods do not.I’d read Baudelaire too, with less interest. As touching as I did find the metaphor of the poet as an albatross, clumsy ashore but with a gigantic span of wings in the air, it did not squeeze my soul. But there was one poem I remembered, from the prose poems, “The loss of a halo”, where a poet talks to another poet about how he lost his halo, crossing the street: “Just now, as I raced across the street, stomping in the mud to get through that chaos in motion where death gallops at you from all sides at once, my halo slipped off my head and onto the filthy ground.[3]”
I read it as the poet losing his poetry-halo down into the prose-mud, and this was the kind of halo-losing my brother would be interested in, I thought, so I bought both books. Rimbaud for me, Baudelaire for him. But there was a preface. And in that preface, there was a poem by Richard Brautigan about Baudelaire. It was called “The Flowerburgers, part 4”, and it was like this:
Baudelaire opened
up a hamburger stand
in San Francisco,
but he put flowers
between the buns.
People would come in
and say, “Give me a
hamburger with plenty
of onions on it.”
Baudelaire would give
them a flowerburger
instead and the people
would say, “What kind
of a hamburger stand
is this?”[4]
This, of course, was the kind of hamburger stand I’d been looking for with my poems, and it was very clear to me: I needed the lost halo, and I needed the flowerburgers, and I needed the irritated question from the people demanding hamburgers. I would just have to find something else altogether for my brother, and I walked out of the bookstore with these two books under my arm, a bit oblivious to the fact that exactly these books have been said to represent a big bang of modern poetry, and that my writing would be changed forever by them. And, naturally, this was also the big bang of the creation of “Baudelaire” as a reference in my own short stories, thirty years later.
Would Baudelaire object to being a reference? I think not, and here’s why: When Baudelaire is handing out flowerburgers in Brautigan’s poem, he is both doing what he once did, when he was alive, and writing; disrupting the stability of the common sense of a classical hierarchy of truth and beauty, a disruption Brautigan’s poem is mimicking—and creating—on its own by debasing his wonderful poems into burgers.
In both cases there is a sense of a need of disruption, and I think of the Danish poet Inger Christensen, who has said, “We could perhaps also imagine chance as a diffuse source of energy, which just by being present has an ordering effect, a kind of collaborator into our own production of order. And we could imagine that we got, through this collaboration of chance, a protection against our own overproduction of order.”[5] I sometimes think that that’s one of the things literature has to offer to society; a protection against our own overproduction of order. “What good are Baudelaire’s burning eyes, when it said on the packet you’d get glossy hair!”, says one of the lines in the last text in Evil Flowers.
“Baudelaire is the first visionary, king of poets, a real God! Unfortunately he lived in too artistic a milieu, and his much vaunted style is trivial. Inventions of the unknown demand new forms,”[6] wrote Rimbaud of Baudelaire, in one of his so-called “letters of the seer”. He added his own poem “Squattings”, which during nine stanzas of perfect metric verse follows a monk in a monastery squatting over his chamber pot, sweating, and moaning, and struggling to relieve his body from its excrements—until he, in the last stanza, is finally relieved.
The poem is a caricature of modern poetry, criticizing the dissonant relation between form (the beautiful sonnet) and content (the harshness and ugliness of modern life—“if you see dirt, you must give dirt”, as he also says)—creating the very essence of caricature that Baudelaire so luminously describes himself in his essay “On the Essence of Laughter”. There he describes how he comes across an English pantomime performance, and a Pierrot who is thick and short and who has exaggerated every part of his appearance; his lips are prolonged by two long, red bonds that make it seem like his mouth reaches his ears when he laughs, and when he tries to steal from a cleaning woman, he not only empties her pockets, he tries to put the sponge, the broom, her bucket and finally the water in his own pockets.
To make a caricature you must exaggerate the defining traits, and it is Baudelaire’s point that the laughter created by the caricature is not merely an effect, it is an art—what he calls “absolute comedy”, where the idea and the form are one. The wiseman never laughs without trembling, says Baudelaire, and both that sentence, and indeed the essay itself, has been one of the guiding lights through my writing life.
And so I don’t really think, as one of my narrators suggests, that Baudelaire would object to, for instance, the fact that I use his photograph as a text, interpreting his gaze as sulky and insulted, looking at me, the writer, angry because I’ve used his title the way I’ve used it, making it more concrete and simple (and a bit stupid in its simplicity; Evil Flowers has one meaning; these flowers are evil, while his own title, The Flowers of Evil, rather creates beauty—poetry— growing out of “evil”). I don’t think (or maybe I kind of do) that he would object to being a prop in my texts, because even though wisemen tremble when they laugh, real gods do not.
No matter what, concerning my own writing of these stories and the attempt to find a “zig zag structure”; to fling in his angry gaze was really, in its moment of creation, a momentary impulse, a certain “zig” in the line moving between form and destruction of form. So, there you go, “how and why Baudelaire” has a very simple answer, and that answer is: writing.
*
[1] All poems from Slaven av blåbæret, Det Norske Samlaget, 1998.
[2] Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations (translated by John Ashbery), Carcanet Classics, 2018
[3] “The Loss of a Halo”, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by David Lehman, The American Scholar, 2014
[4] Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America, The Pill vs the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar, Mariner Books, 1989
[5] Inger Christensen, Hemmelighedstilstanden, Gyldendal 2000,—quote translated by Karin Kukkonen https://hasard.hypotheses.org/5038
[6] Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations and Other Prose Poems, (translated by Louise Varèse), New Directions, 1957
_____________________________________
Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Øyehaug (translated by Kari Dickson) is available now via Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
]]>I copyedited for five years in the offices of an esteemed book publisher, and during that time I became an expert in the most trivial things. Minor details occupied my workdays, which I spent in a dusty, windowless room, in an office where tall file cabinets topped by unruly stacks of manuscripts still lined the halls. There, I sometimes chewed a raisin-walnut roll from the Union Square farmer’s market while I worked, or got up to refill the paper cup of water I sipped from all day just to give myself a break.
The adverb hyphenated mid-syllable on page 15 needed tending, as did the orphan—that is, the lonely last line of a paragraph—marooned at the top of page 38. A sentence on 179 began with the sort of dangler that could be made acceptable by changing “Like” to a stodgy “As with,” and the designer kept printing the jacket with prime signs instead of apostrophes, or commas outside quotation marks, or two spaces before a period where we’d already marked one to be cut, and so we sent the proofs back to be printed again.
The former closet where I sat my first year had no computer, just two heavy dictionaries, a thesaurus, and an atlas, and I didn’t yet have text messaging on my phone—once, I discovered an out-of-town friend simply waiting for me outside—but the monasticism suited the work, which felt strangely hallowed. If stultifying, inexhaustible pettiness is the trade of copy editors, then so too is an air of gravitas, or piety, or prestige—something that smells like aging books and tastes like power.
An editor could make whatever suggestions they wished, and the writer, of course, could compose their book-in-progress with as much vision and dream as they pleased. But our deletions and additions—marked in colored pencil on rubber-banded pages, next to which I kept a soft gray eraser—these carried a finality the previous decisions lacked. We could insist a character was not racked with guilt but wracked with it, that an event didn’t happen all of the sudden but all of a sudden, or that the narrator hadn’t kept her eyes pealed but peeled. We determined whether someone was your sister Jane or your sister, Jane, and when a comma needed to precede “who.” We were the arbitrators of these details and the litigators of every request to bend or amend the rules. We were the keepers of the status quo.
I was just a few months out of college when I landed that position, at a rate of $14 and eventually $22 an hour, but the writers and editors I was ostensibly servicing were surprisingly deferential to my pencil marks. There was an editor on the floor who had been at the publisher almost fifty years, and who sometimes tapped on my door to ask how to mark a line break, or whether a pattern in a writer’s language made “grammatical” sense. Her deference unsettled me so much that each time she knocked I told myself she just felt sorry for the lonely drudgery I tallied by the hour.
All of us were gatekeepers in some sense—the editor most obviously gatekeeping what would be published and how, the writer less obviously gatekeeping which details and experiences would qualify as “story,” and how they would be shaped, told, and reproduced. But I gatekept a set of social mores for which I could call in a seemingly unanimous chorus, marking “Web. 8th” to indicate the source of a preferred spelling, or “CMS” for a Chicago Manual rule. I was a litigator, upholding (and occasionally granting exceptions to) a codified set of rules. But whose were the laws?
The linguistics classes I’d taken in college had taught me to appreciate that languages weren’t stable systems but ever-changing, and that these changes build community, exemplify the power of creativity and play, and repair harm. In the best-case scenario, my work might involve legitimating such signs and forms of life: I might put newly coined words and syntactic variations on one book’s style sheet, setting up a precedent for the next.
Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words.In my early twenties, though, I felt like the wrong person to wield a legitimator’s power. And in practice, I was less the advocate of adventurous commas or paradigm-shifting syntax than a weary cleaner of the tiniest, most sparkling closet, working through the nooks and crannies of written English with my lead-pencil broom. I was more respected, and almost certainly better paid, than the actual people who sometimes dipped into our offices, dragging a fragrant dolly of supplies, to take out the pencil shavings and napkins I’d tossed in the trash.
But by the end of my five years at the publisher, I felt intellectually and psychologically worn down by the labor I logged on my biweekly timesheets. Whatever roller-rink of neurons helped me spot aberrations from convention had grown practiced and strong, and it was difficult to read any unconventional sentence without reflexively rearranging it into a more conventional form.
Something had shrunken and withered in me, for having directed so much of my attention away from the substance of the stories I read and into their surface. Few people in our office, let alone outside its walls, would notice the variation in line spacing, the fact that Jesus’ was lacking its last, hard “s,” or whatever other reason we were sending the proofs to be printed again—and if they did, who the fuck cared?
The publisher where I worked was supposedly one of the best places to train for this job: of the major trade publishers, they considered themselves the most old-school, vigilant about fact-checking, last to convert to digital work. They’d trained copy editors who’d left to earn more money elsewhere, and retained a pride in their own non-commercialism that I experienced then as a form of condescension toward the masses (during the period I was there, there was much handwringing over the prospect and then the fact of their 2008 buyout by one of publishing’s “Big Five”).
The copy editors who’d left, I was meant to imagine, might have earned more money, but could not have copyedited with the same care we lavished on our manuscripts, given the breakneck pace of producing those big publishers’ books. Our mode of copyediting might have been waning as a norm, but it remained—and remains—an accepted ideal.
It’s absurd to insist that any choice about language be apolitical.I can’t help wondering, though, whether there wasn’t something insidious in the way we worked—some poison in our many rounds of minute changes, in our strained and often tense conversations about ligatures and line breaks, in our exertions of supposedly benign, even benevolent, power; if those polite conversations constituted a covert, foot-dragging protest against change, an insistence on the quiet conservatism of the liberal old guard, and if they were a distraction from the conversations that might have brought meaningful literary or linguistic change about. In fact, I sense myself enacting the same foot-dragging here.
It’s fun—it’s dangerously pleasing—to linger in the minutiae of my bygone copyediting days, even if, by the time I left that job to teach college writing full-time, I was convinced that “correcting” “errors” of convention most readers would never notice was the least meaningful work a person could possibly do. I’m writing this, however, to ask whether copyediting as it’s been practiced is worse than meaningless: if, in fact, it does harm.
*
Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.
But the argument that texts ought to read “easily” slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture reader—the kind of reader who might mirror the majority of those at the helm of the publishing industry, but not the kind of reader who reflects a potential readership (or writership) at large.
A few years before leaving copyediting, I began teaching a scholarly article I still read with students today, Lee A. Tonouchi’s “Da State of Pidgin Address.” Written in Hawai’ian Creole English, or Pidgin, it asks whether what “dey say” is true: “dat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo’ be mo’ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking.” The article leaves many students questioning the assumptions they began reading it with: its effect is immediate, personal, and profound.
In another article I pair it with, “Should Writers Use They Own English,” Vershawn Ashanti Young answers Tonouchi’s implicit question, writing, “don’t nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES.” Racial difference and linguistic difference, Young reminds us, are intertwined, and “Black English dont make it own-self oppressed.”
It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all.
I wonder if, in renouncing my job when I left it—in calling copyediting the world’s least meaningful work—I might have been reenacting some of the literary scene’s most entrenched big-dick values.Copyediting is also a white supremacist project in its enactment of the values of domination as detailed by Tema Okun in the well-circulated “White Supremacy Culture” document—perfectionism, for one, and worship of the written word, but also the kind of systemic disregard for humanness that pervades Okun’s list: an attachment to logistics and rules instead.
I’d observed when we “translated” books from British or Australian English that books in other countries tended to be less meticulously cleaned up than ours, and as a result I associate the American practice of copyediting with Protestant discipline and a kind of Puritan ethics, an especially American squeamishness about the corpus.
Respect for the trivialities of English convention (and the “capacity” to command them) begins for many of us in kindergarten or first grade, when our self-conceptions as “good” or “bad” writers depend on the skills we are then being taught: how to form letters by hand, how to spell, to capitalize, to denote the difference between a noun and a verb. These skills have very little to do with the qualities that are actually, literally valued—in the form of dollar-dollar bills—by publishers of magazines or books, let alone by those distributing resources in more lucrative fields like film or TV.
But their valuation as a form of prestige capital is deeply ingrained, so much so and so unquestioningly that it remains socially acceptable to call oneself a “grammar snob,” even a “grammar Nazi.” The status afforded these trivia is indicative of what they represent: either belonging to the culture of the powerful or compliance with it, as determined by its appointed disciplinarians.
Reading applications to an undergraduate creative writing track some years ago, I was struck by the number of applicants who cited an elementary school teacher as the origin of their desire to write—who, in other words, credit a first-grade teacher’s praise as the source of their intent to pursue writing as a vocation or career. Should this be where the thousands of hours endemic to a writing life arise?
On the other side of the same coin, I’ve met countless imaginative thinkers and storytellers who, because they aren’t natural spellers or don’t have tidy handwriting or were constitutionally resistant to the doldrums of the five-paragraph essay form—arguably a sign of so-called “talent” in itself—had not only never identified as writers, but had been led to believe that their writing was not “good.”
Copy editors often wield what power they do have unpredictably, teetering between generous attention and brute, insistent force.Some of this speaks to the deep-seatedness of power dynamics internalized at a young age. Some of it speaks to our attachment to clear answers, to an elementary-school paradigm of right-and-wrong. I see, for both students and the writers I work with as a coach, how much safer and easier many people find it to talk about the “rules” of sentences than about less codified, more mysterious aspects of writing, like structure or mood.
I see, too, how often a peer editor seems to get a charge from “gotcha”-ing someone else on these rules. There are power dynamics involved, and for the one doing the “gotcha”-ing, there is often a kind of grasping at straws—a clinging to the “known” and the “knowable,” so as to avoid the terror of the unknown, including the unknown of not knowing whether or how to value oneself.
All of this brings to mind the purposes of modern schooling that Alexander Inglis articulated in 1918, and which John Taylor Gatto invokes in his 2003 essay “Against School”: to establish reflexive obedience before authority, encourage conformity, bar those tagged “unfit” from social advancement, and reproduce this very system—functions we might read in the practice of traditional copyediting as well. Gatto, a libertarian, was writing against the oppression of what he calls the “underclasses,” but it’s easy to see how the racist school-to-prison pipeline arises and thrives within the paradigm he describes.
The school-to-publishing pipeline might work in a similar vein, our most revered copy editors those selfsame red-pen-wielding schoolmarms of yore. The connection between these two “corrective services” is less farfetched than it might seem: the front cover of Lynne Truss’s 2011 bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves baldly announces its “Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” and, even as it labels those identifying with its perspective “pedants” and “sticklers,” delights in its own punitive thrills. Faced with a misplaced apostrophe on a public banner, Truss writes that her “anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage.” Such is the celebrated and richly rewarded spirit of the grammar police. Lighthearted though it may be, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the far right when Truss whimpers, “It’s tough being a stickler for grammar these days.”
I suspect books like this one, or memoirs by former copy editors like The New Yorker’s Mary Norris—who goes by the Comma Queen—are popular for the same reasons books and movies about the wealthy have long been popular: because of a desire to peep the lives of the powerful (your highness the royal arbiter of the comma!), and, perhaps, to absorb or perform some of that power by learning and thus assimilating its values. The publisher where I worked had been founded by a relative of the Guggenheim family and a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society, a story I wager is typical of many well-resourced publishers, so much of the world’s art offered visibility, distribution, and prestige care of the benevolent elite’s disposable wealth.
At the same time, copy editors, like schoolteachers, rarely represent the elite themselves. Usually women, they are also usually poorly paid. An elderly British woman who sometimes advised me had worked at the publisher since immigrating to the US thirty years before, and copyedited Jonathan Franzen’s first books. But her shelves were double-stacked with uncracked hardcovers and yellowing copies of whatever daily newspaper they handed out at subway stations for free; the detritus of her lunches—egg and bacon on a roll, dollar pizza slices—lingered in the corners of her desk.
Copy editors, like schoolteachers, rarely represent the elite themselves. Usually women, they are also usually poorly paid.Sometimes she grew so incensed by an author’s willful or accidental noncompliance that she would shut her office door to huff, moan, and scream in frustrated rage. Interviewed in a 1990 article in The New York Times, she claimed that aspiring copy editors no longer even knew what adjectives were. I approached her the same way I might a labile family member: you never knew when she was going to go off.
Like other emissaries of the powerful (see, e.g., the actual police), copy editors often wield what power they do have unpredictably, teetering between generous attention and brute, insistent force. You saw this in the way our tiny department got worked up over the stubbornness of an editor or author who had dug in their heels: their resistance was a threat, sometimes to our suspiciously moral-feeling attachment to “correctness,” sometimes to our aesthetics, and sometimes to our sense of ourselves.
I do remember trying to convince the publisher not to invoke an Islamophobic stereotype on the cover of a young adult novel as a means of advertising that the book, which featured a Muslim family, disproved it (after a long back and forth, the author and editor agreed). But the substance of every other battle I fought—and there were many, most of which were comma-level minor and a few of which kept me up at night—is lost. To my chagrin, I remember only my own indignation: proof, perhaps, that the attachments we bring to the enterprise of “correcting” written work are, almost always, about something else.
*
There’s a flip side, if it’s not already obvious, to the peculiar “respect” I received in that dusty closet office at twenty-two. A 2020 article in the Columbia Journalism Review refers casually to “fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors”; I’m not the only one who imagines the classic copy editor as uncreative, neurotic, and cold.
I want to say they’re the publishing professionals most likely, in the cultural imagination, to be female, but that doesn’t feel quite right: agents and full-on editors are female in busty, sexy ways, while copy editors are brittle, unsexed. Their labor nevertheless shares with other typically female labors a concern with the small and the surface, those aspects of experience many of us are conditioned to dismiss.
I’m willing to bet, too, that self-professed “grammar snobs” rarely come from power themselves—that there is a note of aspirational literariness in claiming the identity as such. Once, a celebrated male writer who was my instructor at an MFA program found out I’d worked as a copy editor, and responded enthusiastically, “Oh! You can tell me the difference between ‘that’ and ‘which.’”
Indeed I could, and, in an hourlong meeting we’d scheduled to discuss a draft of mine, I spent fifteen minutes doing so. I think I hoped to earn his friendship in exchange, or at minimum his respect. But as a young woman interacting with an older man who represented the kind of writer I hoped to become, I felt minimized inside the dynamic and, when he played the fool and asked me to explain again, I sensed condescension, even mockery, in the request.
It makes me wonder if, in renouncing my job when I left it—in calling copyediting the world’s least meaningful work—I might have been reenacting some of the literary scene’s most entrenched big-dick values: its insistence on story over surface (what John Gardner called the “fictional dream”), on anti-intellectualism but also the elitist cloak of it-can-never-be-taught. The grammar snob’s aspiration and my professor’s condescension bring to mind the same truism: that real power never needs to follow its own rules.
During the uprisings of the summer of 2020, when major news outlets like The New York Times began to capitalize “Black,” it could seem, from one angle, an eyerollingly trifling concession. “Let’s concentrate on correcting the many injustices committed against oppressed groups in our society and stop fiddling with language,” wrote one (male, Italian-American) journalism professor in a letter to the editor; “I am firmly convinced that changes in language arising from political motives are de facto suspect.” John McWhorter, the author of Woke Racism, later wrote in The New York Times that he lowercases the word in his copy, leaving it for editors to uppercase, because “in the grand scheme of things . . . I have a hard time caring that much whether we write ‘black’ or ‘Black.’” That he devoted a full essay to the topic, and insists on outsourcing this bit of labor, may or may not belie his claim.
I sense a kind of hysteria in these protests against “fiddling with language,” the same hysteria that led me to reject the work of copy editors with stridence. Yes, such changes are unbearably minor in the face of ongoing incarceration and murder; yes, they can resemble the peacocking of those corporate BLM statements that did little more than advertise corporations’ whiteness. But it’s absurd to insist that any choice about language be apolitical; writers like Tonouchi and Young make that clear, demonstrating how wrong it would be to entirely ignore a text’s surface: as wrong as it is to ignore race or any other cultural context.
Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words. To treat someone else’s language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?
This form of copyediting would involve less manicuring, less discipline, less standardization, zero punitive impulse, and more attention to managing the tiny story that each sentence is. We might even call it a kind of poetry, attentive to form and pattern in poetry’s spirit. Copy editor as poet-shepherd: the poet-shepherd of prose, maybe.
]]>On the first day of spring, 1911, Esther Honey, great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience, dozed in her rocking chair by the woodstove in her cabin on Apple Island. Snow poured from the sky. Wind scoured the island and smacked the windows like giant hands and kicked the door like a giant heel and banked the snow up the north side of the shack until it reached the roof. The island a granite pebble in the frigid Atlantic shallows, the clouds so low their bellies scraped on the tip of the Penobscot pine at the top of the bluff.
Esther drowsed with her granddaughter, Charlotte, in her lap, curled up against her spare body, wrapped in a pane of Hudson’s Bay wool from a blanket long ago cut into quarters and shared among her freezing ancestors and a century-old quilt stitched from tatters even older. Th-e girl took little warmth from her rawboned grandmother and the old woman practically had no need for the heat her grandchild gave, no place, practically, to fit it, being so slight, and so long accustomed to the minimum warmth necessary for a body to keep living, but each was still comforted by the other.
Esther’s son, Eha—Charlotte’s father—rose from his stool and one at a time tossed four of the last dozen wooden shingles onto the embers in the stove. The relief society inexplicably had sent a pallet of the shingles to the settlement last summer. There was no need for them. Eha and Zachary Hand to God Proverbs were excellent carpenters and could make far finer cedar shingles than these. But as with each of the past four years, summer brought food and goods from the relief society, and some of the supplies were puzzling to the Apple Islanders, like the shingles, or a horse saddle, once, for an island that only had a handful of humans and three dogs on it. With the food and stock also came Matthew Diamond, a single, retired schoolteacher who under the sponsorship of the Enon College of Theology and Mission traveled from somewhere in Massachusetts each June to stay in his summer home—visible on the mainland in clear weather 300 yards across the channel, in the village of Foxden—and row his boat to Apple Island each morning, where he preached, helped with a kitchen garden here, a leaky roof there, and taught lessons in the one-room schoolhouse he and Eha Honey and Zachary Hand to God Proverbs had built.
Useless spalt anyway, Eha said, closing the woodstove on the last of the shingles.
Tabitha Honey, Eha’s other daughter, ten years old, two years older than her sister Charlotte, scooted on her behind across the cold floor to get closer to the stove. She wore two pairs of stockings, three old dresses, a donated wool coat the society had sent, and the one pair of shoes she owned, boy’s boots passed down from her big brother, Ethan, when he’d outgrown them. They were too big for her and she’d stuffed the toes and heels with dry grass that poked out of the split soles like whiskers. Tabitha wore another square of the Hudson’s Bay blanket wrapped over her head and shoulders.
C’mere, Victor, Tabitha said to the cat curled behind the stove. Tch, tch, c’mere, Vic. She wanted the cat for her lap, for some warmth. Victor raised his head and looked at the girl. He lowered his head back down and half-closed his eyes.
I hope you catch fire, you no-good hunks, Tabitha said.
Ethan Honey, fifteen, Eha’s oldest child, sat on a wooden crate across the room, in the coldest corner, drawing his grandmother and little sister with a lump of charcoal on an old copy of the local newspaper that Matthew Diamond had given him last fall the day before he closed up his summer house and returned to Massachusetts. The boy’s nose was red, his lips purple. His fingers and hands were mottled white and blue, as if the blood were wicking into clots of frost under their skin. He concentrated on his grandmother and sister and their entwined figures came into finer and finer view across the front page of the Foxden Journal, seeming to hover above the articles about the tenth annual drill and ball, six Chinamen deported, a missing three-masted schooner, ads for fig syrups, foundries, soft hats, and black dress goods.
Tell us about the flood, Grammy, Tabitha said, still eyeing the cat.
Charlotte lifted her head from her grandmother’s breast and said, Yes, tell us again, Gram!
Ethan looked from his drawing to his grandmother and sister and back. He said nothing but wanted as much as his sisters for his grandmother to tell the story about the hurricane that had nearly sunk the island and had nearly swept away his whole family.
Eha went from the stove to the corner opposite where Ethan drew and tipped a basket sitting on a shelf toward him and looked into it.
I’ll fix these potatoes and there’s a little salt fish left, he said. A can of milk, too.
You want to hear about the flood? That old flood? Again? Esther Honey said.
Yes, Gram, please!
Please, Gram, tell us!
Well, that old flood was almost a hundred years ago, now, she began. Way back in 1815.
A hurricane struck in September of 1815, twenty-two years after Benjamin and Patience Honey had come to the island and begun the settlement, by which time there were nearly thirty people living there, in five or six houses, including the first Proverbs and Lark folks, the ones from Angola and Cape Verde, the others from Edinburgh—Patience herself from Galway, Ireland, originally, before she met Benjamin on his way through Nova Scotia and went with him—and three Penobscot women, sisters who’d lost their parents when they were little girls. A surge of seawater twenty feet high funneled up the bay, sweeping houses and ships along with it. When the wall of ocean hit, it tore half the trees and all the houses off the island, guzzling everything down, along with two Honeys, three Proverbs, one of the Penobscot sisters, three dogs, six cats, and a goat named Enoch. The hurricane roared so loudly Patience Honey thought she’d gone deaf at first, that is, until she heard the tidal mountain avalanching toward them, bristling with houses and ships and trees and people and cows and horses churning inside it, screaming and bursting and lowing and neighing and shattering and heading right for the island. Then she knew all might well be lost, that this might well be the judgment of exaltation, the sealed message unsealing, that after they’d all been swept away by the broom of extermination there’d be so few trees left standing a young child would be able to count them up, and their folks would be scarcer than gold. But not all gone. Not everyone. Patience knew. Some Honeys would persist, some Proverbs survive. A Lark or two might endure. So, for reasons she could never afterward explain, she snatched the homemade flag she’d stitched together from patches of the stars and stripes and the Portuguese crown and golden Irish harp shaped like a woman, who looked so much like a figurehead and always reminded her husband of the one on the front of the ship he’d been a sailor on, that had sunk off the coast and brought him to the island in the first place, and the faded, faint squares embroidered with Bantu triangles and diamonds and circles that he’d carried with him everywhere, that he showed her meant man and woman and marriage and the rising sun and the setting sun, that he always said were his great-grandfather’s, although she in her heart of hearts didn’t think that that could be true, and tied it like a scarf around her throat, and she took Benjamin by the hand and dragged him from their shack out into the whirlwind. She swore it was a premonition, because no sooner had she and her husband passed out the door than the house broke loose from its pilings and tumbled away behind them, bouncing and breaking apart into straw like a bale of hay bouncing off a rick and into the ocean. Now that she stood in the open, facing the bedlam, her legs would not work. She was sure that this was the Judgment and what was to be was to be; it was useless to try to outrun the outstretched arm of the Lord.
Benjamin roared to her over the roaring storm, The tree, the tree! And he pointed to the tallest tree on the island, the Penobscot pine, at the top of the bluff. Benjamin pointed and leaned his face toward his wife’s and pointed.
Up the tree!
Wind plastered his shirt and the rain lashed and streamed down his face and ran from his hair and lightning broke across the sky and thunder blasted against the earth and sea and he roared again over the roaring storm, The tree! And Patience thought of their grown children and their young grandchildren and cried to her husband, The children! And Benjamin looked beyond his wife and there were their children and grandchildren, drenched and shouldering their way against the winds and lashing rains, the ocean rising now up to the windows of the Larks’ old shack and pouring into it through the broken panes, and the largest surging waves thundering nearly up to where his own house had stood not two minutes before and sucking all the earth right off the very rocks and into the black and gray and brooding jade Atlantic, and he cried, Go to the tree! And he ran toward his grown children and young grandchildren and grabbed two soaking little ones from their mothers and carried one each under his arms and ran toward the tree. And the wind roared and spun and they staggered against it, now nearly blown toward the bluff, now nearly blown back away from it. When they reached the tree, one of Benjamin and Patience’s sons, I think she always said it was Thomas, stood on Benjamin’s shoulders and the other sons and daughters climbed up the two men and reached the lowest branches of the old tree and once they got their footing as best as they could in the middle of bedlam, the others tossed the waterlogged children up to them one by one. Once Patience had climbed into the tree, and Thomas followed her up from Benjamin’s shoulders, Benjamin himself scaled the trunk like the mast of a ship and roared once more: As high as ye can climb! And all the Honeys in that old tree climbed with all their strength, the children screaming and crying, the men and women screaming and crying, until the whole soaked clan clung together and to the trunk in a trembling, grasping cluster at the top of that swaying, bending, mighty old tree snapping back and forth in the wind like a whip. And right then they all heard a greater thunder rumble from the clamor and the whole island quaked under them, telegraphing their extinction. And at that moment, Patience Honey, holding one of her grandbabies tight as could be against her side with one arm, and clenching the tree with the other, looked to the south, down the bay, and there she saw that piled ocean, all the trees and buildings and shrieking people and wagons and sloops and schooners churning in its saltwater guts, and an old sea captain named Burnham in his pilot coat rowing a dinghy on the blazing crest of it all, smoking a pipe, bowl-downward to keep the water out, crying for mad joy at this last rapturous pileup, and all of it, that great massif of water and ruin speeding right for the Honeys in their tree, which now seemed like a twig, a toothpick, a drenched blade of grass set against the immensity of that mountain range of ocean and demolition. What was always so eerie about it afterward, Patience always said, what was so terrifying about it that made her bowels feel as if they’d turned to sand, was how quiet it all seemed, like a breath drawn and held, right before it hit, how breathtakingly fast but nearly silent and so just plain beautiful it was, all those people and trees and ships and horses cartwheeling past within the billows. It wasn’t silent, really, but more, so loud it was too big to hear. I could not hear it for that second, because it was just too big a sound for my ears to hear.
The water hit the south shore of the island first and swallowed it whole and smooth. Then it hit the jagged bedrock spine running up the middle of the island and broke over it hissing like a saw blade. When it struck the slope of the bluff it exploded across the horizon in front of the islanders in the tree, hung up and suspended for a moment in an apocalyptic entablature, that Patience afterward always said looked in that instant before it all collapsed back together and swept along how the parted sea must have appeared to the poor Israelites. I was pretty well given up on it all and in that tree holding it so hard the bark cut into my arms and gave me these scars and holding that baby so hard against me I thought I’d crack it, drenched to the marrow and screaming and trying not to let go, but when that tower of ocean and ruination burst apart in front of me, in a blink, but deep as my soul, I saw a broad, dry avenue running through the middle of the sea, and it was thronged with shepherds and sheep and old ladies on donkeys, litters of children curled up asleep on hay in the beds of rickety carts. The parted ocean towered on both sides, sheer, smooth, and monolithic. And inside the water, a pell-mell cavalcade of Egyptian men and horses and chariots scrolled past, tumbling heel over headdress, fetlock over cannon, bumper over shaft. Most of the men wore linen tunics, but some wore leopard skins and feathers and had elaborate headdresses. Some of them were tethered to their chariots by leather reins and held longbows. Arrows and spears twirled among the men and horses and cars. Their black-lined eyes stared wide open, but they were all clearly drowned. And I knew what it was like when God parted the sea. And I knew that Moses was way up there at the front of the line. Not like the idea of Moses, but the man himself. The very man, Moses. When God opened the ocean. Then the waters collected all the relic and rubble back up and swept over the rest of the island. The water churned and rose and rose up the Penobscot pine laden with the Honeys.
Patience looked down through the branches and limbs and watched the seething waters rise over her children’s and grandchildren’s feet, billow up their skirts and rise over their midriffs and up their exposed throats then into their sputtering mouths, and she watched their hair soak up the boiling waters, and she watched the waters swill Benjamin up, too, and she watched her daughter, Charity Honey, wrench free from the tree and tumble away in the wreckage clutching her baby son, David, in her arms, and the waters reached her feet and she felt something deep down in the bottom of the tree crack and give and the tree bowed and she was in the swift and roaring waters up to her waist. Then the tree levered itself back upright. Though it seemed not to swallow at her quite as greedily as it first had, the water still rose, and it reached Patience’s collarbone and Patience always said she could still just see the top of Benjamin’s head below her in the water, serene, almost, almost becalmed, tiny bubbles of air rising from his hair. And it was then, just as the water touched it at her throat, that Patience remembered the old flag she’d sewn for Benjamin from the bits and pieces of other flags and national rags and bedraggled patches, not long after they’d married and first settled their now drowning island, still tied around her neck. She always said later, I just decided right then that if we were all going to Judgment, I was going to fly our little flag until the last possible second. So, I hoisted that baby up even more and pressed it between the tree and my breast harder than I ever otherwise would have dared and freed my hand and somehow unknotted the flag from my neck and held it in my hand and held my hand up just as high as I could get it, and the wind took the flag up and snapped it and practically tore it from of my grasp but I kept hold and there it flew. Then the water rose over the baby, who’d gone past wailing and just stared, wedged between my body and the tree, dumbfounded at the pandemonium, wide-eyed and quiet as it burbled under, and the water reached my mouth and covered my face and went over my head, and still I held that foolish flag as high as I could, and the water rose up my shoulder, and the water rose up to my raised elbow, and the water rose up my forearm, and the water reached my wrist, and so there was just my one hand holding that motley little tattered flag sticking up above the surface of the flood, and the waters rose up my fingers, and just as my hand was about to disappear and that flag and all us Honeys be swallowed up in the catastrophe, the water stopped rising.
The surge struck the innermost of the bay, spilled onto the mainland, dumping the foremost of the ruin it had plowed along the way onto a campsite called Little Shell Cove, where a hundred years later campers still turned up trinkets from the calamity, and the cauldron of wrath doubled back on itself and withdrew, quaffing the people, creatures, pie safes, pews, and catboats it had failed to devour the first time caterwauling off toward the horizon.
The water stopped rising and seemed to pause. It was as if my hand and the sputtering flag were at the center of a great whirlpool guzzling the island down its throat but then the eddying slowed and stopped then began to unwind.
Patience Honey clung to the Penobscot pine under the water, the baby in her arms limp, eyes closed then, asleep against her breast inside the bosom of the sea. Patience looked down the length of the tree, into the garbled dark. Bodies clung to it below. Benjamin. Her cousin and best friend, Shekhinah Goodfellow. Deeper down, the island appeared to move. It began to revolve around the tree, like a dark stone wheel around a wooden axle. It was a whale—circling, nosing at Patience and the other fugitives newly arrived in his kingdom, until he caught sight of an ancient great white shark cruising through the schoolhouse, trolling for drowned children and spinster marms. The whale launched after its prehistoric nemesis and the monsters jetted away from the shallows of the newly drowned world back into the proper abyss.
I could no longer hold my breath. Just as I had to give out and inhale the Atlantic into my lungs and swallow it into my guts like a last meal of seawater soup, the whirlpool began to uncoil from around my hand and the flag and the water began to lower. My arm seemed to rise out of the water, then my head and body, along with the Penobscot pine, too, which rose like the mast of a wrecked ship unsinking. The ship—I mean, the island—and I surfaced and rose above the water and the wind dashed against my face and I gasped at the air and lost hold of the tree.
__________________________________
Excerpted from This Other Eden: A Novel. Copyright © 2023 by Paul Harding. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Assemble a team of Disney and Pixar characters and fight for victory in the arena!
Disney Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances (yes, the full title is a mouthful!) is a tactical strategy game for 2 or 4 players, ages 13 and up, and takes about 35 minutes to play. It was released in the middle of last year, and actually has a couple of expansions out now as well. It retails for $49.99 and is available in stores and online, as well as directly from The Op Games.
Disney Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances was designed by Sean Fletcher and published by The Op Games, with illustrations by Patrick Spaziante.
Here’s what comes in the box:
The character standees and bases are made of clear acrylic (don’t forget to peel off the protective plastic!)—I saw somebody refer to them as “shrinky dinks” and they do kind of have that look to them, though they’re not warped and bent like my shrinky dinks always seemed to turn out. Each base has a 3-letter abbreviation for the character, a health track, and a little illustration for the “ground”—a splash of water for Ariel, a patch of sand for Aladdin, and so on. The base rings snap onto the bottom to distinguish between the red team and the blue team, and each has a little arrow so that you can use the ring to track the character’s health.
The illustrations for the game look like the app the tabletop game is based on: they have that slightly polygonal look of 3D models with a cel animation filter. If you didn’t know this game was based on an app, it may be a bit confusing why these look like video game characters.
Each character’s cards has their face in the top corner so they’re easy to sort out, and the iconography is pretty easy to follow for the most part. They’re marked with an arrow or a lightning bolt to differentiate between movement and action cards, and additional icons in the effect will indicate whether it’s a direct effect (you choose a target) or indirect effect (the card indicates which characters are affected). Each card also has a “gear” in the lower right corner, to be used in the most advanced mode.
The turn order tokens are shaped like hourglasses, with the character’s face in the middle. At the top it shows their starting health and how many points they’re worth if you knock them out. The tokens are double-sided with red or blue at the bottom so you can flip them to the appropriate team. The large number at the bottom is the initiative number, and is used in the more advanced chapters to help set turn order.
The status effect tokens are large cardboard tiles that fit against the turn order tokens—there are both positive and negative effects.
The box itself is made to look like a chest with a big lock on one side, though the printed “lid” doesn’t actually open that way. There’s also a die-cut sleeve that depicts the eight included characters, but that covers up the chest, so I’m not sure if I’ll keep the sleeve on or not. The included plastic insert has slots to keep everything sorted and organized, but unfortunately has no room for expansion at all, so if you get the expansions you’ll either have to keep all of the small boxes in addition, or else ditch the insert and just bag everything up.
You can download a copy of the rulebook here. Sorcerer’s Arena has four “chapters” that gradually introduce the game concepts, so you can learn the basics without getting overwhelmed with a whole lot of rules thrown at you all at once. I won’t go through all the individual chapters separately, but will give some indications about what gets added.
The goal of the game is to be the first to score a certain number of victory points (VP), or have the most VP when the game ends.
Generally, you’ll choose teams from among the various characters: in the first chapter teams are assigned (Mickey and Aladdin vs. Gaston and Ariel) but later on you’ll get to draft characters and have 3 characters per team (or 4 if you’re playing the 2-vs-2 variant).
The turn order markers are placed along the side of the board (there’s a way to bid for initiative in later chapters), alternating between teams, and the turn order token is placed on the first one. The characters start in the blue spaces on their end of the arena with full health. Each player takes the character reference cards for their characters, and then shuffles their two (or three) character decks together to form a single deck.
The rest of the tokens are placed nearby as a supply.
When the turn order marker is on your character, that character gets a turn.
Starting Phase – check status effects and points
The first thing you do is to resolve status effects: if there are any effects next to your turn order token, you remove one status counter. If that was the last status counter, the effect itself is also removed.
Then, if your active character is standing on one of the three golden VP spaces in the center of the arena, you take 1 VP. If your character has been knocked out and is off the board, you place it on the board in the back row of either end of the arena at full health.
Draw 1 card from your deck.
Main Phase – where most of the action happens!
Your character may take one movement and one action, in any order. You may only play cards that match the current character. To move, you may either play a movement card and follow its instructions, or take a standard move of 2 spaces. Action cards vary by character but may include attacks, healing, placing status effects, and more. You may also take a standard attack for your action instead of playing a card by dealing 2 damage to an adjacent character. (There are some characters who have a different standard move or standard attack once you get to the later chapters.)
Health is tracked by rotating the base ring. If your health goes down to 0, your character is KO’d and is removed from the board, and all status effects are removed from your character. The player who knocked you out gets the VP shown on your character’s turn order tile.
In later chapters, you may also use one of your character’s skills once per turn—these are printed on the character card. In addition, each character can be upgraded: if you have the right “gears” on the cards in your discard pile, you may banish cards (putting them back into the game box) to flip your character card over, unlocking an additional ability.
Ending Phase – discard down
If you have more than six cards, you must discard down to six. Then move the turn order marker to the next character in line.
At the end of a round—when every character has had one turn—if either team has scored at least 20 VP or if any player needs to draw a card but has none left, then the game ends and the team with the most points wins. (In the first chapter, the victory threshold is 12 VP.)
Here’s a quick run down of the characters included in the core set!
Aladdin is the only one in the base set with a standard move of 3, making him the fastest character, and his skills allow him to gain Stealthy or potentially heal himself. He also has a lot of movement in his deck, with several cards that can be used as movement or action. In upgraded form, he can banish cards from the opponent’s deck and draw more cards for himself.
Ariel’s skill is “Dig for Thingamabobs” and gives you a good chance of drawing an Ariel card or healing your other characters. Upgrading Ariel boosts the effect of her healing cards—and Ariel is the only character in the core set who can heal other characters. She’s not a fast character, with only one movement card in her deck, but she has several cards that give you a choice of actions, which makes her flexible.
Demona (from Gargoyles) is pretty fast, with a few movement cards that let her speed across the board, and she also has both ranged attacks and area attacks that will do additional damage to adjacent spaces (but be careful not to hit your own characters with that!). Her skill is that if you play 2 Demona cards in a turn, you can clear status effects from her and gain 2 Strong, making her attacks more powerful. Her upgraded side gives you points when you’ve discarded 2 cards on her turn, but then she has to be upgraded again. Demona can be pretty powerful, but is a little trickier to use.
Dr. Facilier (from The Princess and the Frog) is all about status effects. He doesn’t have much movement, but he has a lot of cards that add or increase status effects, plus he may get additional effects based on how many status effects a character has. His skill is revealing the top card of the deck, and if it has the magic icon he gets an additional action phase. When upgraded, he deals extra damage to adjacent rivals that have status effects, and gains bonus points for KO’ing them that way. He has a weak standard attack, though, so he’s not a great fighter.
Gaston (from Beauty and the Beast) is a dumb and strong—he has a smaller hand size, but a lot of health. His “Boast” skill is a gamble: you may reveal the top card of your deck, and you’ll either gain Strong (making his attacks more powerful) or take a damage. When upgraded, Gaston gets to heal, move, and score extra points when he KO’s a rival. Gaston has a bit of movement and some powerful punches, and does extra damage if he can separate a character from its allies.
Maleficent is a magic-heavy character, and her skill lets her draw extra cards if she ends up on a scoring space and has done damage to other characters. Her upgraded ability lets her damage a rival every time she discards a magic card. She loves the crown spaces and has some cards that give her extra effects if she’s on the space, but my favorite card is Dragon Form, which restores her to full health and then does damage equal to the amount of health restored. Watch out!
Mickey is also magic-heavy, and has a special status effect that applies only to him: Magic Broom. He can discard magic cards to give himself a Magic Broom, and also has several action cards that give him more of that status. Not only does the Magic Broom boost some of his cards, it also gives Mickey the opportunity to stack his deck a little bit each time he removes one. Mickey has a mix of movement and actions, and pairs pretty well with other characters who also have magic cards in their decks.
Sulley (from Monsters, Inc.) is the tank, with the highest health in the core set. His skill lets him teleport to a weakened opponent but then gives him an Immobilized so he can’t move on his next turn. When you upgrade him, he gains Tough (stronger defense) and Taunt (rivals have to attack him instead of another character), plus he can heal if he’s next to his allies. Sulley has a mix of actions but generally wants to be next to lots of characters, both allies and rivals, and can be effective at soaking up a bunch of damage.
I remember seeing a lot of ads for an app called Disney Sorcerer’s Arena while playing games on my iPhone or iPad a couple years ago, featuring a mashup of characters: Mickey as the sorcerer’s apprentice waving his wand, Maleficent rising up from a cloud of smoke, Ariel swooshing in to zap with a trident. So last summer, when Disney Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances first showed up on my radar, it looked pretty familiar and I was intrigued to see what it would be like as a physical tabletop game.
But first, let me just say that the title is a bit too much, and it’s not clear how best to shorten it. Do I call it Sorcerer’s Arena or Epic Alliances? The expansion titles are even longer, with official names like
Disney Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances – Turning the Tide Expansion. I think if your core game has a colon in it, you’re already pushing it a bit. Presumably they tacked on Epic Alliances to distinguish it from the app (which doesn’t have a subtitle) but it just seems unnecessary.
Okay, on to the gameplay! Sorcerer’s Arena is a pretty easy-entry tactical strategy game. The box says it’s for 13 and up, but I played a few times with my 9-year-old and she didn’t have any trouble with picking up the rules, and I think the chapter system is a nice way to ease into the game. You start with the basics and are able to get going quickly and see how things work before you get to things like assembling a team and choosing your team’s turn order. And if you’re playing with younger kids, you can always keep playing at a particular chapter level for a little longer before throwing in the more advanced rules. I think for my kid, Chapter 3 felt about right, where she didn’t have to think about which gears were discarded to use for upgrading. If you’re playing with experienced gamers, you can probably skip ahead to a later chapter for your first game, though you’ll still need to read through the entire rulebook up to that point.
Of course, it’s one thing to learn the rules to a game, and it’s another to be able to win. While this isn’t chess (there’s some luck involved because you don’t know what cards you’re going to draw next), it does reward the ability to think ahead and guess your opponent’s next move. I’ve got more experience with that so I had a pretty good advantage over my kid. While there can be some surprises, particularly as you’re learning what each character can do, it’s generally going to be difficult for a new player to beat somebody who has some experience with tactical strategy games already.
That said, it has been fun exploring the different characters to see what they can do, and it will take a bit more practice to figure out how to build the most effective team. Not only is it important to consider the types of abilities each character has in their deck, but you also want to check which gears it takes to upgrade a character, and then build a deck that has those gears. For instance, to upgrade Aladdin, you’ll need 2 shell and 2 fire—but his character card shows that his deck only has 2 shell and 1 fire. If you pair him with a character that also needs fire to upgrade, you may not be able to upgrade them both during the game.
Overall, I think Sorcerer’s Arena is a fun way to mix and match characters from some of my favorite Disney and Pixar movies. They did a good job making abilities that fit the characters so that each one has its own style of play. I’m also excited for the expansions, which add even more characters to choose from—keep an eye out for some reviews of those in the coming months!
Right now, the Op is also hosting a “Road to Gen Con” contest featuring Sorcerer’s Arena! There are several regional events across the US starting tomorrow in Portland, Oregon, and you’ll need to bring your own copies of the characters you want to play in order to participate. The 1st place prize at each regional event is a trip to Gen Con to play in the World Championship Tournament, with various game promo components for 2nd through 6th place.
Here are the dates and locations for the regional events:
You can register for free through Eventbrite.
I don’t know that I’m very good at Sorcerer’s Arena, but I’m game to give it a shot since there’s a local event!
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]]>The grave on which I’m lying is overstretched by the wide-spread canopy of a Japanese dogwood tree. Its fruits, which look like large, spiked cherries, lie half-squashed and rotting all around me. Nearby are a small village of markers belonging to the Schneider family, most of which seem to memorialize children who died in the early nineteenth century. The endless burring of the late morning crickets is making my head feel thick and drowsy, and a nearby chickadee is trying to tell me a joke I can’t understand.
The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery seems nearly empty today—of the living, anyway. I’ve seen a few cars go by the paved curve that wraps around this section, but I’m the only pedestrian. There was no one to take notice of me as I made my way past the acres of plots marked MOTHER MOTHER MOTHER WIFE, carrying the two long-stemmed roses I’d bought in the market at Grand Central Station.
After having jammed into two different rush hour subway cars and elbowed my way through the commuter crowds to get to my train, the last thing I expected of the day was to be so utterly alone. Even the posh, tastefully historic neighborhood I’d walked through from the station at Phillipse Manor was deserted except for occasional landscapers, faces obscured by bandanas.
A few disks of lichen, about the size of sand dollars and the pale green of oxidized copper, decorate the four names on the headstone. The surname at the top is mine.
*
The writer Thomas Beer was born in 1888 and died suddenly—supposedly—of a heart attack at the age of fifty. His mother, Martha, died a few months later. Alice, his older sister, outlived him by many decades, passing in 1981 at the age of ninety-four. Little brother Dick was estranged, buried elsewhere. Their father, William, who died in 1916, is here as well. For much of Tom’s life, most of the family was based in Yonkers, a small city about halfway between the cemetery and Manhattan.
The headline of his New York Times obituary says, “NOTED AUTHOR.” Not quite FAMOUS, not quite CELEBRATED, and certainly not WILDLY SUCCESSFUL AND FINANCIALLY COMFORTABLE, but NOTED. “Grace and economy of words marked all his writing. [. . .] Mr. Beer hated to state flatly that a thing had occurred. He preferred to suggest it by allusion.” Allusive and elusive—these would come to characterize my assessment of him as well.
I’d spent the last week in Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library going through the Beer Family Archives, the existence of which I’d been wholly ignorant when I was a student there in the late ’90s. At the time, I’d had no idea who Tom was, or that he’d graduated from Yale in 1911. My grandfather or one of my aunts might have told me, but it’s likely I took no notice. And as much as I’d like to conjure a vision of myself passing that library for four years as an undergrad, unaware that seventy-five linear feet of family history lay just beyond its walls, the whole of it was likely stored offsite in nearby Hamden. There were no whiffs of barely-heard ancestral echoes reaching out to me as I passed—only the stale dishwater steam venting from the nearby dining halls.
The truth is that strange family facts resurfaced frequently among my relatives, and often unexpectedly, treated as common knowledge by others but unknown to myself. This may be a peculiar condition of those whose parents die young; mine were both in their forties. Of the surviving adults, no one knows quite what to tell you, or when it’s appropriate to do so. At your father’s funeral? A year later, when you’re sixteen? At your mother’s funeral, when you’re eighteen? And what about your younger brother—should you be enlisted to tell him things? As a result, things come out in odd bursts, like sand-buried clams spitting little geysers on the beach.
Over a paper plate of potato salad, a cousin corrects me: “No—your father was married twice before your mother.” “Your mother dated a Black man,” my great-uncle tells me in low, confidential tones at a bar mitzvah. My great-aunt: “Your mother’s father was circumcised as an adult.” My second cousin: “Your mother threatened to leave your father if he didn’t stop drinking.”
The truth is that strange family facts resurfaced frequently among my relatives, and often unexpectedly, treated as common knowledge by others but unknown to myself. This may be a peculiar condition of those whose parents die young.So that only in my early forties I should have become truly aware of my (first) cousin (three times removed) Tom, whose oeuvre included dozens of popular stories in the Saturday Evening Post and a few acclaimed biographies, was hardly surprising. Nor was his queerness, as it became discernible in that slowly developing history. That I should have discovered through a Google search that he and his sister and parents were all buried in the legendary Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, that Jim at info@sleepyhollowcemetery.org should affirm the graves are still there, that they should be a short walk from the grave of Washington Irving and the Headless Horseman Bridge—this all seemed, to me, to be par for the course.
The cemetery sprawls with eighty-plus beautifully maintained acres of markers and monuments, and boasts more than a few historic muckety-mucks besides Washington Irving, including makeup mogul Elizabeth Arden, ur-socialite Brooke Astor, and labor movement icon Samuel Gompers. The cemetery’s website even notes that the Ramones were “buried alive” on the premises for their “Pet Sematary” video. One of the oldest sections is the Old Dutch Burying Ground, where the seventeenth-century headstones have a sullen, circumspect look, as though the sunlight touching them has been dimmed.
There are broad, occasionally steep hills, clusters of towering oak trees, and a river winding along its eastern border. From what I can recall, the cemetery in which my parents are buried is much newer and much more modest—more of a glorified football field in which geometry is the dominant aesthetic rather than the vicissitudes of landscape. The kind of place through which you can drive a riding lawnmower with ease. But I haven’t visited in over twenty years, so I don’t trust my memory to more than this.
*
In the archives, I’d been going through Tom’s correspondence with old college friends, his letters from camp during World War I, yellowing packets of photos, condolence cards to his sister, Alice, and his mother after his death, and Alice’s letters to doctors and friends during the mental breakdowns and hospitalizations in the last few years of his life. I couldn’t say quite what I was looking for, other than to get a better sense of him. But whenever I’d read a letter that seemed, for a moment, to sharpen something in my understanding, I’d feel the queasy worry that this was only superficial; could someone pull a few random emails or photographs from my life and presume to have gotten closer to my obsessions and grudges, my terrors, my joys?
If there was any certainty to be found in the dozens of boxes and hundreds of enclosed folders catalogued by Yale, it was Alice’s faithful love of Tom—not only from his exhausting mental collapses she managed and for which she secretly secured funding from his friends to treat in his last years, but from the meticulous care with which she assembled his archives.
Meticulousness was true to her nature—she’d run an antique business in New York City from the late 1920s to the mid-’40s specializing in Spanish fabrics, and then spent over three decades working as a curator for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, whipping their antique textiles collection into shape and helping it grow. Her entire life, from the personal to the professional, seemed to have been about preserving the past and making it legible for others.
In the archives, she’d written up profiles delineating Tom’s friendships with the correspondents most represented in the files, detailing how they’d met, and when, and a little of the nature of their relationship. In going through folders, I’d find that she’d seeded some of them with brief handwritten notes annotating the circumstances behind a letter, a clipping, snapshot. An addendum to a few plaintive, semi-flirtatious letters from the gay British author Hugh Walpole observes that Tom “spent a good deal of time dodging Walpole,” and that “on the whole he tried to escape Walpole’s attentions.”
Prefacing a stack of studio photographs from the early 1930s, one of which would be featured on the cover of his selected stories, I find a note from 1941 in Alice’s measured, thoughtful script: “Mother hated these photographs . . . I think it is fairly interesting in that all show Tom’s ill health.” With condolence cards from the manager and assistant manager of the Hotel Albert in New York City, a blunt scrawl: “From the Hotel where he died, alone at night. They had not the sense to find us. —A.B.”
*
I wonder if this worry of mine—about whether someone could presume to have a true understanding of me from a few random emails or photographs—is a little disingenuous. Being a writer means that, social media rants notwithstanding, one is fairly powerless over how one’s words will be received, digested, discoursed upon—if at all. You don’t get to hover over your reader’s shoulder while they pore over the intimacies of your life and art, interjecting, No, what I meant there was—. And this is pretty much a preview of the aftermath of one’s death: you no longer get to speak for yourself. Maybe it’s because I’m not a parent, or maybe it’s because writing poetry automatically dooms a lot of what I do to obscurity and oblivion, but I can honestly say that’s never bugged me too much.
No, I think the real anxiety that confronted me in the archive was the great task that must have been faced by Alice: to shape her brother’s legacy into something lasting and legible. And it’s clear that she felt the weight of this responsibility. Every scrap of paper bearing a note in her script, every typewritten narrative augmenting the circumstances of Tom’s life and career feels like the touch of a concerned hand. And it’s certainly possible that her orchestrations of the archive were her own bid for a kind of legacy: the guardian of her brother’s flame.
But here I confront my own self-doubt that I’d be up to such a task on behalf of my own brother’s memory. I can see myself endlessly hemming and hawing over Josh’s school pictures and youth soccer team patches: what should be included? What should be explained? What truths might I gloss over or edit in the name of giving any descendants a more pleasing, empathetic portrait of him?
What should be explained? What truths might I gloss over or edit in the name of giving any descendants a more pleasing, empathetic portrait of him?Tom and Alice seemed to have been very close, both in residence and spirit. They lived with their mother for a great deal of their adult lives, and his best friends, Monty and Carey, maintained a relationship with Alice for years after Tom’s death. I try to map this against Josh and me, and realize that he and I lived together with at least one of our parents for a total of thirteen years—from his birth to our mother’s death. Then our Long Island home was sold, and he went to live with relatives in New Jersey.
I don’t think we could comment on each other’s lives across the ensuing years with the kind of detail Alice does for Tom in his archive—though I’m not saying we should be able to. There’s something about having one’s shared home emptied out that makes one feel scattered, dislodged. With our childhood memorabilia in storage units and family attics, we both spent much of the early parts of our adult lives peregrinating about the country—I following the currents of academia, he those of the hospitality industry. We haven’t lived in the same time zone in decades. The minutiae of his relationships, his sartorial shifts, how he takes his coffee—all these are the expertise of people other than me.
*
I rise from the grave. Remembering the wet-garbage quality of the humid Manhattan air last night, I take extra-deep, clean breaths. I turn back to the headstone and announce, “I’m going to go eat my lunch down by the river, and then come back.” I restrain myself from making a small bow.
The river turns out to be a creek, at best, but the sound of the water is bustling and cheering. As I chew on the remaining half of my bagel with lox schmear, I try to work out what I’m feeling. Not sadness. Respect? Maybe. A sense of having performed a duty? Certainly. The substances that were the bodies of Tom and Alice lie in the earth, but as to their spirits, I know they’re long gone—or, rather, were never here. This, I suppose, is why I feel no compulsion to visit my parents’ graves—they are much more with me than they could ever be there. My father’s guitar, which sang me to sleep so many nights, rests in a case on the second floor of my house. His leather jacket creaks on a hanger in the closet of my study.
Sometimes I wear my mother’s wedding band out when I’m going someplace I think she’d like to be. Fragments of her face greet me in the mirror every day—the dark brows, the vertical line that cuts between them and always made her look angry, regardless of her mood. And as I creep into middle age, the characteristic bags from my father’s side of the family encroach more and more under my eyes.
Something lets out a creamy twitter. Two raptors—possibly vultures—tilt high overhead.
*
Here’s the thing: any worries I might have about my abilities to craft an accurate archive for my brother, on the awful likelihood that he’d predecease me, are completely unnecessary. Tom had no long-term romantic partner—though a few of his queer friends and colleagues did, in the guise of same-sex valets, secretaries, professional managers, etc.—and no children. My brother, on the other hand, is in a loving marriage with a warm, compassionate woman, and has a young daughter whom he adores. He delights in the fact that he’s often able to work from home and be closely embedded in her life. Should the unthinkable happen, Nicole and Billie Rose are more than up to the task of collecting and maintaining the files and mementos that would shape his posthumous portrait into something real. Sure, I’d be on hand to augment and fuss: a story about this knickknack or that old shirt. But there’d be no burden on me to singlehandedly preserve him for the ages.
What is my task, I realize, is my responsibility to be an archive of our parents for Josh. Dad died when he was ten and I was fifteen, and Mom died when I was eighteen and my brother was thirteen. Sometimes, when I offer up a memory to him over the phone—Do you remember when Mom would . . . ?—he’ll respond with a flat No. And the brusque, door-shutting quality of that reply suggests that he resents the extra five years I got with them by accident of being the oldest. To have known them with a memory a little bit more developed than his, with more cubbies and drawers in which to store things.
Twenty-plus years after their deaths, my brother still has no shortage of people to talk to about our parents. As I write this, he’s just returned from a trip where he was visiting first with one of my father’s older sisters, and then with my mother’s best friend. In both cases he gained insight into Dad’s alcoholism and sobriety (how deeply the disease is embedded in past generations of our family, how Dad founded the first nonsmoking AA meeting on Long Island that’s still going strong almost forty years later).
But I can tell him about sitting on Dad’s lap in the orange chair and being allowed to slurp the foam off a beer that had been poured into a German stoneware mug, slate gray and augmented with flourishes of cobalt blue. I can tell him about building little villages with the dozens of sour-smelling wine corks that piled up in our kitchen while we lived in France when he was a toddler. I can tell him about the years of phone messages left on our answering machine by strangers with only first names (the recording was my father, reciting a self-penned rhyme: We can’t come to the phone right now, but we’d like to talk to you anyhow. We may be away or at home or asleep, so leave a message at the beep!). I can share with Josh about our parents as parents—something no one else can do. So am I doing it well enough? Honestly enough? With enough detail that’s evocative and enduring? If I’m not a good enough writer for this, am I good enough for anything else?
*
On my first day in the archives, I signed out Tom’s photo album. It was a volume that spanned from about his late teens to just after college—about 1907 to 1911. The photos all have that characteristically historic sepia tint, their corners tucked into rounded slots in thick, black paper pages. While Tom had already annotated these in ink, Alice supplemented his notes after the fact in pencil, identifying places or people, or Tom himself.
Their two scripts seem to speak not so much to each other as across each other, a pair of different voice recordings being played at the same time. In their photos, Tom has the upslanting eyebrows and narrow eyes I remember from my grandfather, his thick, shiny hair standing up high on his head not unlike my dad’s, and Alice has a calm, serious-looking face crowned with a pompadour I’d learned was red. Like Josh’s, in childhood. Like my father’s moustache. Tom and friends wear belted swimming singlets on the beach. Alice and another young woman wear vaguely nautical dresses with puffed sleeves and long dark stockings as they pose with tennis rackets, grinning (or scowling, it’s hard to tell) under poofy mob caps.
On one photo, Tom has cartooned a halo over the head of their neighbor Margot, and a jester’s belled cap over the head of his friend Jim. In a solo shot, “A.R. Wheeler,” wavy-haired, light-eyed, and leanly muscled, poses in a pair of wrestling briefs and gladiator-style sandals that strap up his thigh, his gaze direct and open, his fists nervously clenched before his hips; “wrestling weight about 122 lbs., February 1910,” Tom notes. In a suit and bow tie, Tom stands between two women with brows shadowed by flower-bedecked hats the size of manhole covers, his quizzical expression half-occluded by one of the brims as he grasps the knob of a parasol. Alice has stapled a note above it: “Tom in the centre is sneering at my enormous hat. –A.B.” Elsewhere, Alice and Tom are sitting on a summery expanse of lawn in front of a Cape Cod–style house with three slightly squinting young women—it’s unclear if they’re looking at him or the person behind the camera. On the picture itself he’s scrawled “The celebrated hair incident,” which is met by Alice’s penciled deadpan rejoinder: “I don’t remember the incident.”
There’s a picnic photo that I’d nearly passed by entirely, the shot angled such that Tom’s face, in profile, is blocked by a woman’s head, thickly braided, in the foreground. He sports a light-colored hat and summer suit, a handkerchief drooping from his front jacket pocket like a tired lily. He’s leaning into the center of the circle made by the other two women in the picture, as if dishing something out from the wicker basket to his left. They’re seated in a woodsy grove. Alice has stapled a note to the top of the page so that it’s draped over the photo like a shutter: “I don’t know where this picnic scene is or who the girls are. The man is Tom. Note cigarette in fingers—characteristic gesture—always. —A.B.”
I’d squinted close to get a better look at Tom’s left hand, extended out from his side. His forefinger and middle finger seemed slightly pressed together, but I could barely make anything out in the blurs and shadows of the old print. Only after I borrowed a magnifying glass from one of the archive librarians could I finally see the whisper of that erstwhile cigarette. Once its shape was clear to me, there was a sudden hot slick of water in my chest, as if someone drove a dowsing rod into my sternum. I felt exposed, certain that all the strangers in that venerable reading room were about to turn from their ancient clippings and slate-colored folders to look at me. I wanted the library to have provided some kind of screen or shelter for me, or at least the permission to cover my face with a long scarf, to have a little privacy in this moment.
I thought of Alice unconsciously learning the ballets and pantomimes of her brother smoking thousands of cigarettes over decades, and here was the fleeting gesture she’d known as unique to him caught on film, like a long-extinct bird. No one else would have known the cigarette was there, but even in its near-invisibility, Alice saw it and knew it and named it right away. She couldn’t bear to have it lost. I put down the magnifying glass and closed my eyes for a long time.
Could I ever go as deeply, as carefully into some remnant of our parents’ past for my brother? How many of their near-invisible cigarettes had I failed to note and catalogue for him?
Shalimar. I need to tell him Mom wore Shalimar.
*
What I remember about my brother’s most vigorous childhood tantrums is his uvula. Sometimes at the end of a particularly impassioned howl, his mouth would stay wide open, his eyes clamped shut. There would be a moment of loaded silence, and as the light hit the inside of his mouth, I would see it at the back of his throat, the nexus of all his rage and sadness contracted to a deep, glistening red drop. I recall being utterly fascinated by its clarity and definitiveness, how it trembled. I described this as part of my toast at his wedding, but I don’t think anyone got it.
*
I walk back from the creek for one last look. Standing at the grave, I hear the low, scratching sound of tires as a car passes slowly, and catch chrome winking in my peripheral vision. I feel anonymous, as if simply an ordinary part of the scenery, folded-in and unremarkable. The pair of roses I’d brought are flame-colored, to match Alice’s hair, and they lie with their stems crossed against each other. I fold my hands in front of me and try to think of something to say.
“Okay, then. Thanks.”
The track for the Manhattan-bound train at the Phillipse Manor train station is right next to the Hudson River. I look out over the boat slips to the water, listening to ropes and rigging clanging erratically against masts, as if marking time by some otherworldly system. Winds are ruffling up the river’s surface so that it resembles teeming, silvery shoals of sardines.
Next to the station parking lot, there’s an incongruously large statue of an eagle with a wingspan over ten feet wide. It’s perched on a stony-looking sphere in mid-screech, with its back to the water. Someone’s left a squat, wide candle and a broom-straw doll at its taloned feet. Remnants of wasps’ nests cluster under its wings and between its legs. The sphere is spattered and pocked with rusty decay. Still, it was clearly made with great expense and care; the primary, secondary, and tertiary feathers are all precisely differentiated, and inside its beak there’s a discernible tongue.
Though it seems to radiate historic significance, there’s no plaque or marker to explain it—it’s simply an outsized, enigmatic raptor shrieking travelers in and out of town. Later I’ll learn that it once perched on top of the old Grand Central Depot (the predecessor to Grand Central Station) over a century ago with a convocation of others, before they were dispersed to private estates and other train stations when the depot was torn down around 1910. It’s entirely possible that Tom and Alice passed under their grim gazes when they took the train to and from their home in Yonkers. But in the moment I reckon with it, there’s no language to fix it in time or context—only a half-opened beak crying out its inaudible past.
__________________________
This essay appears in the new newest issue of The New England Review, NER 43.4 Winter 2022, available now.
]]>What books are appropriate for a 4 year old then? You will find the best books are ones where your child can follow the story line by looking at the illustrations alone AND are interesting enough for reading aloud by Mom or Dad!
These books below definitely do that and are great books for 4 year olds, as well as 5 and 6 year olds.
First, the rules! I am really picky about the books I read with my kids. I want to enjoy the story too!! I also believe that really good books will be fun to read again and again.
So here are a few simple rules I have for choosing books to read aloud with my kids.
I don’t read books about mythical monsters because I might have trouble sleeping. Or fairies!! For the same reason. It might sound strange but a few of us are highly sensitive in our family and strong emotions – sadness, aggression, suspense affect us too much to be enjoyable reading!
The print has to be big enough for me to comfortably read. No squinting here!
I prefer books that have less words to read for my own benefit and theirs. Now days my kids will reassure me with “Look Mum, there’s not a lot of words in the book even though it has 50 pages!”
The book has to have a story line and one that I find interesting to read. So Pokemon, Minecraft, Ninjago and an Encylopedia of dinosaurs, do not count!
If you have younger kids than mine, Peppa Pig might fall into this category too. Do Peppa Pig books have a storyline or not?
So here are some of our favorite books that follow all the rules. (And my 4 and 5 year old love them!)
Board books are great for 4 year olds. One of our all time favorites is this classic board book by Australian author Mem Fox, Where is the Green Sheep?
It has lasted several years in our household and still gets requested again. My 3 year old was even able to impress visiting family members with his early reading skills. Though really, he had just memorized the words from hearing it so often.
This book is about a snail that gets bored with living life on a small rock and joins a whale to travel the oceans. I originally got The Snail and The Whale for one of my kids’ birthdays. It has now ended up being on our regular family reading list.
It’s a great one to read aloud because it has great rhyming and an interesting story line which sometimes my 4 and 5 year old will chime in with.
We don’t have a copy of Giraffes Can’t Dance so we borrowed it from our local library. I enjoyed this book, probably more than my boys did! Though they still liked it a lot. A fun readable story for 4 year olds with a great teaching point to the story line.
Check out all the reasons we love our local library!
A list of best books for 4 year olds has to included Hairy Maclary by New Zealand author Lynley Dodd! I managed to buy a copy of five of the Hairy Maclary stories through the discards pile of my local library.
I love reading these books to my kids- short, funny, great illustrations and memorable characters. Can’t believe my 5 year old could point out to me which dogs were included in which story and which dog is missing!
I know I have been reading Hairy Maclary a lot when I start to identify the neighborhood dogs as there goes a Bottomly Potts, or he looks like Hercules Morse.
Two Frogs by Chris Wormell may be a less known reading book for 4 and 5 year olds but this is one book we have read again and again.
In the words of the back cover, “The combination of frog illustrations and witty text works beautifully, so as soon as you finish it you’ll find yourself flicking back to enjoy this cautionary tale all over again.”
Well anyway I like it because it’s an easy, interesting read with large illustrations. Makes the kids think they have just been read a long book, lots of pages to turn. Highly recommended!
Often not the first book to be chosen for bedtime reading, but it might be picked when one of the “no, it doesn’t have a storyline” books is selected first.
It’s like when your favorite coffee is not available at the local café, well you chose your next favorite coffee. Or in this case… Paddington Bear! Gives the kids a giggle reading about Paddington’s misadventures.
This one is pretty much always requested by my kids and now I’ve just discovered there is a WHOLE series of Walter the Farting Dog Adventure books. One of these will have to be on our Christmas list!!
My 5 year old got this book for his birthday recently from a friend and yes I read it to them. It is a funny story with colorful illustrations, and just really suits my boys’ sense of humor.
I’m sure some of us know of dogs (or people) that fart like Walter and laughing is a great way to end the day!
A great reading book kids who love dinosaurs or dancing or… both! Saturday Night At The Dinosaur Stomp is a fun read aloud book with a simple story about, as the title suggests, getting ready for a party. The enjoyment is in the characterization of the dinosaurs!
The witch and her cat are happily flying through the sky on a broomstick when the wind picks up and blows away the witch’s hat, then her bow, and then her wand! Luckily, three helpful animals find the missing items, and all they want in return is a ride on the broom.
But is there room on the broom for so many friends? And when disaster strikes, will they be able to save the witch from a hungry dragon?
Based on the popular song, The Wonky Donkey is such a fun book for 4 year olds. Who ever heard of a spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey?
The post 10 Must Have Books For 4 Year Olds appeared first on Organised Pretty Home.
]]>“Old Pan”
for lost boys
Windblown seedpod parasols lofted
from a withered western salsify blossom drift past me
in a cloud of silken Tinker Bells, a shitload even. Forgive me,
that’s just the sort of word my brain seizes upon
when I’m on the roof of the shack, sweeping off
half a haystack of pine needles and wondering what on earth
I’m doing here so far above the earth
at the age of seventy. The needles
have woven themselves to a kind of raffifia mat that would,
if I were to step on it, sled off
down the slanted steel beneath me and cushion
my seven-yard fall hardly at all. So, sweep a little,
step a little, sweep a little, step. The this
blizzard of Brobdingnagian dandelion fluffs,
and I think to myself, Sweet heavens, Tinker Bells!
before remembering that ill-timed words
could break me too—swiftly if I’m lucky.
But my oh my, how I fell at twelve for the sleek, bewinged
and leggy little Tinker Bell on the Disneyfied big screen.
Just think how Tink wished woman-sized and flying
could solve today’s pine needle problem in a trice.
True, trice sounds like a wisp of swimwear but is in fact defined
as “to hoist,” and also as “an instant of time”—about as long as
a hoisted fool would take to drop twenty feet.
This is when my wife, not wishing to check
on me through the window, checks on me
through the window and perceives me propped
Astaire-like on a push broom and leaned a little too far out
trying to catch from the storm of salsify seeds asail around me
just one. No, no, I’m not grinning, I’m concentrating.
Nobody in the world ever wanted to grow up
believing this much in words,
even a paltry man upon a push broom, somehow still in love.
_____________________________
From THE TRUE ACCOUNT OF MYSELF AS A BIRD by Robert Wrigley, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Robert Wrigley.
]]>Utica became a refugee magnet by accident.
In the 1970s, Roberta Douglas, a local resident, became concerned about the mistreatment of Amerasian children in Vietnam. She helped one Amerasian resettle in Utica. Then along with Catholic Charities in Syracuse, she started resettling hundreds of Amerasians, and later, working with others, established the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees.
Over the next 40 years, there was a remarkable migration: Thousands of immigrants seeking sanctuary, including Vietnamese, Russians, and Burmese, have transformed this once-fading industrial town.
The newcomers make up about a quarter of Utica’s population of 60,000, according to Shelly Callahan, executive director of the Center for Refugees, recently renamed The Center, a nonprofit group that helps to resettle refugees and assist others in the community. And they have been an economic engine for the city, starting small businesses, renovating down-at-the-heels houses, opening houses of worship—and injecting a sense of vitality to its streets.
“It was so much more than economics,” John Zogby, the national pollster, said about the refugees’ effect on the city. “A whole generation couldn’t wait to get out. Then you had thousands of people who wanted to live here.”
“Other people started feeling good. It was infectious.”
*
The refugees came in waves: In the 1980s, people arrived from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Starting in the early 1990s, over 4,500 Bosnians fleeing the Balkan conflict became the largest group to be resettled.
In the last few years, there has been a sense of accomplishment and possibilities.In the 2000s, there was a surge of refugees from Burma—including the Karen, an ethnic minority persecuted by the Burmese military, who fled to camps in Thailand—and from Iraq, Nepal, Somalia, and Sudan. By 2019, more than 4,000 Karen and Burmese were resettled, becoming Utica’s second-largest group.
“The refugees helped stem the decline,” Ms. Callahan said. “They have a great work ethic and are willing to take jobs that native folks don’t want.” The refugee center helps cushion the landing: It spends about $1,100— federal and state money—on each refugee. Newcomers are given a furnished apartment, with the basics to get started.
Every refugee initially accesses public assistance—but is supposed to take the first viable job offered. “Refugees don’t come here to be on public assistance,” Ms. Callahan said. “That’s not the dream.”
Many currently work as dishwashers, groundskeepers, janitors, cooks, housekeepers, and card dealers at Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona, New York. Others are employed at Chobani, the yogurt factory in New Berlin, owned by Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant. Chobani estimates that approximately 30 percent of its manufacturing workforce in New Berlin are immigrants or refugees.
The Bosnians have been the most successful group.
Many arrived with educations and building skills. “All of us had everything,” said Sefik Badnjevic, 62, a retired machinist, referring to the many middle-class lives uprooted by war. “We try to find here what we lost in Bosnia.”
Mr. Badnjevic was offended when his new neighbors asked questions like: “Did you have stores in your country? Did you have a TV?”
He would show them a video of his home, which he shot before the war: “This is my apartment! This is my car!” he said.
The Bosnians quickly adapted, often working two jobs to get ahead. Then in the late 1990s, there was a stunning confluence of events: The fires, which had been raging for decades, abated. The city tore down almost 200 vacant structures; the National Guard helped clear away the debris.
And the Bosnians bought hundreds of run-down houses in East Utica. The stage was set for what amounted to a massive rebuilding project: Bosnian families—sometimes three generations—did the work themselves. They tore out and rebuilt kitchens; they put in extra bedrooms. They fixed up garages, built decks, and planted gardens.
Many chose two-family homes, living in one as they rebuilt the other.
They often rented the second to parents or siblings.
Every Saturday, for seven years, Mr. Zogby gave a ride home to a Bosnian woman who worked for his family as a housekeeper; in Bosnia, she had been a police officer. One Saturday, she told him she had moved, and directed him to her new home.
“It was only a few blocks from where I had grown up,” Mr. Zogby said. It had been a photo studio, in a two-family house that had declined.
He pulled up to her new residence: She, her husband, and two tall sons had transformed it into a one-family home with white pillars.
“Outside was a massive American flag,” he recalled. “I knew what she was saying: ‘I turned this into my palace.’ ”
The Bosnians have now been in the city for two generations. They are doctors, nurses, physical therapists, contractors, police officers, firefighters, restaurateurs, bar owners, and restaurant managers. They work in Utica’s banks and at City Hall.
Many have stayed in their renovated homes—rather than move to New Hartford, an affluent suburb—even as new, struggling refugees have settled in their neighborhoods.
“If I sell my house, I’m selling my memories of my kids, my family,” said Sakib Duracak, 56, a contractor, who is the president of Bosnian Islamic Association of Utica. “I can’t remember seeing ‘House for Sale’ signs in Bosnia.”
In 2008, the community purchased the old, abandoned Central United Methodist Church from the city for a thousand dollars. It would have been costly for the city to demolish. Over the next four years, they built a soaring mosque downtown, doing the labor themselves.
Two other refugee groups that have been in Utica for more than a generation have also done well: The Vietnamese initially opened restaurants and food stores; most are now fully integrated into the community. Russians, who escaped religious persecution in the former Soviet Union, opened furniture stores and car dealerships.
For more recent arrivals, coming from refugee camps, “the learning curve has been longer, slower,” Ms. Callahan said. Yet the Karen, from the Karen state in southeastern Burma, have established a foothold, opening markets and buying homes.
The Somali Bantus—a community of about 2,000—have had a tougher time adapting.
In Somalia, the Bantus have long been persecuted. They are not seen as true Somalis, but as the descendants of slaves brought from other countries: In the 19th century, Arab slave traders brought Bantus to Somalia from southeast Africa to work on Somali plantations. Yet the largest group of Somali Bantus arrived thousands of years ago from West Africa, before the nomadic Somalis.
In recent years, the Somali Bantus worked small family farms, but they had little access to medical care, education, or jobs beyond manual labor.
They were powerless against armed Somalis: “If you were walking to a larger village, and met Somalis on the road, you could be taken and used to work their land,” said Mohamed Ganiso, 41, a community leader and the former director of the Somali Bantu Association of Central New York in Utica.
Armed Somalis sometimes took over the Bantus’ farms: Ahmed Mukonje, 46, who lives in Utica, was forced to be an unpaid laborer on his own land. “I was farming—but for them,” he said. “Slavery stopped when I got to the refugee camp.”
Clans provided an element of protection: “Everything is the clan,” said Mr. Ganiso, who is Halima’s nephew. “If a person in power was not in my clan, I didn’t trust them.” Disputes were brought before a community chief: “The chief decides what’s fair.”
Utica has always been a city of immigrants.For Somali Bantus, there was a deep sense of dislocation upon arrival in Utica. “The teachers sent home letters about the kids, but the parents couldn’t read them,” Mr. Ganiso said. “If they applied for a job they were told to go online, but they couldn’t.”
Uticans did not open their arms to the Somali Bantus, as they did for the Bosnians. “The Bosnians came with resources—and white skin,” said Dr. Kathryn Stam, the anthropology professor. “The Somali Bantus came with black skin, no education, and centuries of persecution. They were seen as backward.”
But in the last few years, there has been a sense of accomplishment and possibilities: Mr. Ganiso, who worked as a machinist at Chobani and now owns his own trucking company, estimated that unemployment in the Somali Bantu community, which was about 50 percent a decade ago, dropped to about 30 percent in 2019. That year, the unemployment rate in the Utica/Rome area was 4.7 percent.
More than half of Utica’s Somali Bantus own their own homes. Dozens of their children are now enrolled at MVCC and other colleges. “In the camps, we were almost not thinking,” Mr. Ganiso said, de-cribing the years Somali Bantus spent in limbo.
“Now everybody’s thinking about the future.”
*
Utica has always been a city of immigrants.
At the turn of the century, Italians, Germans, Poles, and Irish were drawn to Utica’s factories and mills.
They helped produce boots, screws, tools, hot air furnaces, cast-iron pipe, and beds. They made broom handles from logs that had been floated down the West Canada Creek from the Adirondacks and cut into lumber.
Utica’s large textile mills employed thousands of immigrants. The city was dubbed the Knit Goods Capital of the World. Women mostly worked in the woolen mills; men in the bleacheries. Utica Knitting Company, the city’s largest mill, was said to produce 34,000 pieces of underwear every 24 hours.
When the Italians started arriving in the 1880s, they found steady work and established a close-knit community in East Utica. Many soon began small businesses: “My great-grandfather was the first gentleman to walk up and down the streets of Utica yelling, ‘Lemon ice!’ ” said Anthony Amodio, 56, who works in the restaurant industry in Utica. Later, his grandfather opened a salumeria.
Lebanese and Syrian immigrants arrived around the same time, as part of peddling networks based in New York City and Boston; they sold linens and other dry goods. Many eventually opened grocery stores. By 1940, there were over 70 grocery stores owned by Syrians or Lebanese. Almost a quarter of the city’s population was foreign born, a similar ratio to the city’s refugee population today.
When Utica’s textile mills closed in the 1950s and relocated in the South, it wasn’t the tragedy it might have been. General Electric andother large manufacturing plants moved in. Picking up the slack, they replaced the 5,000 jobs immigrants had lost.
These jobs, too, would eventually vanish.
But in the 1960s, the city was still in bloom. And East Utica—to its immigrant families—was the center of the world.
“Houses were full, bursting!” said Mr. Zogby, who lived there for 36 years. “A family with four sons downstairs. Another with three sons upstairs.”
“It was a tough, none-of-your-shit culture. But as much as there was bullying going on, people had your back.”
Bleecker Street—a long, commercial strip—was the heart of the Italian community.
“There was everything here—you didn’t have to leave the street,” said Carmela Caruso, 62, a small, dark-haired woman who owns Caruso’s Pastry Shoppe on Bleecker Street, which her parents opened in 1958, said, “You could get your hair cut, your shoes shined and fixed.”
There were Italian restaurants and Syrian markets. A fish store served raw clams at sidewalk tables.
And there was a tradition: “Monday nights, that’s when people flocked downtown,” Ms. Caruso said.
All the stores stayed open late that night, and people strolled from Genesee Street down Bleecker. Starting in fourth grade, Ms. Caruso stayed up late, too. “I used to wait tables, make wedding favors, or do my homework, still wearing my Catholic school uniform.”
At 10:30 p.m., her dad and the other shop owners locked up. “Everybody walked home,” she said. “That was normal. That was our life.”
__________________________________
Excerpted from City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town by Susan Hartman.
]]>A pig pickin’ (also known as rolling a pig, pig pull, pig roast or, among the Cajun, “cochon de lait”) is a type of party or gathering held primarily in the American South which involves the barbecuing of a whole hog (the castrated male pig or barrow, bred for consumption at about 12 weeks old). Females, or gilts, are used as well. Boars (full-grown intact males) and sows generally are too large.
Many Southern families have a pig roast for Thanksgiving or Christmas, graduations, weddings, or summer gatherings. Some communities hold cook-offs during festivals, where cooks compete against one another for prize money.
A pig, often around 80–120 pounds dressed weight, is split in half and spread onto a large charcoal or propane grill. Some practitioners use a separate stove filled with hardwood to produce coals which are then transferred under the charcoal grill by shovel; others use charcoal with chunks of either blackjack oak, hickory wood or some other hardwood added for flavor. The style of these grills are as varied as the methods of producing them, some being homemade while others are custom-made.
There is a long-running debate among barbecue enthusiasts over the merits of different fuels. Propane is said to maintain a consistent temperature, whereas charcoal or charwood are often touted as producing better-tasting meat.
The cooking process is communal and usually directed by an authority figure; the host is helped by friends or family. It usually takes four to eight hours to cook the pig completely; the pig is often started “meat-side” down, and then is flipped one time once the hog has stopped dripping rendered fat. Some practitioners clean ashes from the skin with paper towels or a small whisk broom before flipping the hog to help produce high quality cracklings from the skin.
Often the hog is basted while cooking, though the method and sauce used differs according to region. For instance, a typical South Carolina Piedmont-area baste would be a mustard based sauce, an Eastern North Carolina baste is usually a very light vinegar based sauce with red pepper flakes, and Western North Carolina barbecue uses sauce with a ketchup base similar to traditional barbecue sauce.
When the cooking is complete, the meat should ideally be tender to the point of falling off of the bone. The meat is then either chopped or pulled into traditional Carolina-style pork barbecue, or it is picked off the hog itself by the guests. It is from the latter that the gathering gains its name. The barbecue is sometimes eaten with hushpuppies (fried cornmeal, occasionally flavored with onions), coleslaw, baked beans or sometimes Brunswick stew. In South Carolina, it is common to serve pilaf or hash as a side dish. Hash is a blend of leftover pork mixed with barbecue sauce and usually served over rice.
Sweet tea, beer, and soft drinks are often served.
The pig pickin’ is a significant part of the culture of the South; the necessary work and time needed to cook the hog makes it ideal for church gatherings (“dinner on the grounds”) or family reunions, and they can be held virtually year-round thanks to the region’s mild winters. Pig pickin’s are popular amongst the most devoted tailgaters at college football games across the South. The pig pickin’ has been long associated with politics; many local political parties and politicians still use the pig pickin’ to attract people to meetings and campaign rallies.[citation needed] In 1983, Rufus Edmisten, running for Governor of North Carolina at the time, was overheard saying “I’ve eaten enough barbecue. I am not going to eat any more. I’m taking my stand and that is it.”
Culturally and culinarily different from traditional Deep South pig pickin’ events, pig roasts are a common occurrence in Cuba, as well as the non-mainland American state of Hawaii, with roasts being done in the traditions of those places.
]]>
For Breakfast I made some French Toast and 2 Johnsonville Turkey Breakfast Sausage Links. I also had a cup of Bigelow Decaf Green Tea. 70 degrees and sunny outside. I would like to wish all you Moms out there a Happy Mother’s Day! So after Lunch I refilled some the flower and vegetable plant boxes with Potting Soil. Then got the broom and leaf blower and cleaned up the deck and driveway areas. All caught up on everything else. For Dinner tonight I prepared Panko Crispy Turkey Tenderloins w/ Cut Green Beans and Mashed Potatoes.
I had purchased a package of the JENNIE-O® Extra Lean Boneless Turkey Breast Tenderloins at Meijer and had them in the freezer. I laid the package in the fridge overnight to thaw. There’s only 120 calories, 1 gram of fat and 0 carbs per serving! I’m preparing them the same way as I had before. I had looked around at different recipes and I combined a couple of ideas from a few of them to prepare the Tenderloins. I’m making Panko Crispy Turkey Tenderloins. To make these I’ll be needing 1/3 of a cup Low Fat Buttermilk, 3/4 teaspoon (or more) of Frank’s Hot Sauce, 1/4 teaspoon of Garlic Powder, 1/4 teaspoon Onion Powder, Sea Salt, 1 package of JENNIE-O® Extra Lean Boneless Turkey Breast Tenderloins (sliced into smaller strips), Extra Light Olive Oil for frying, 1 cup All-Purpose Flour, 2 teaspoons Hungarian Paprika, Grinder Black Peppercorn, 2 cups Progresso Panko Breadcrumbs, 1 1/2 tablespoons Chile Powder, and 2 Large Eggs or Egg Beater’s which is what I used.
Then to prepare them; You’ll be needing 3 bowls. Whisk the Buttermilk, Hot Sauce, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, and Sea salt in a small bowl. Place the sliced Turkey in a resealable plastic bag and pour in the Buttermilk Marinade. I refrigerated them for 3 hours.
When ready I got a large cast-iron skillet and added 2 tablespoons of the Olive Oil to it and heated it on medium heat. As the skillet was heating I put Flour in a bowl and seasoned it with the Paprika and Sea Salt and Pepper. Then I poured the Egg Beater’s in the last bowl. Finally I put the Panko Bread Crumbs in another bowl and season it with the Chile powder. I removed the Turkey from the Marinade, allowing the excess to drip off. I dredged the Turkey first in the Flour, then in the Egg Beater’s and finally coat them with the Panko. With the cast iron skillet heated I fried the turkey in batches, always being careful not to overcrowd the skillet, until golden brown and an instant read thermometer inserted into the center read 160 degrees. I fried them 3 minutes per side.
These came out so delicious! They came out Golden Brown, Tender and so Flavorful. The Spices worked perfect and the Panko Breadcrumbs gave it a fantastic crunch.
For one side I opened up a Quart Jar of our Canned Green Beans. I love Green Beans and these Canned Green Beans are the best!
Next I heated a package of Bob Evan’s Mashed Potatoes. Just microwave for 6 total minutes and serve, just as good as homemade, if not better. I could make a meal out of just Mashed Potatoes. I also had a Aunt Millie’s Live Carb Smart Dinner Roll. Mom had Ore Ida Crinkle Fries with her Tenders. For Dessert later a Jello Sugar Free Dark Chocolate Pudding.
JENNIE-O® Extra Lean Boneless Turkey Breast Tenderloins
JENNIE-O® Extra Lean Boneless Turkey Breast Tenderloins are 99% fat-free and can be used in quick meals or on the grill. Make turkey breast tenderloin the main ingredient in pasta, kabobs or add some seasoning to create a one-of-a-kind barbeque sandwich. Find this all natural* product in the refrigerated section of your grocery store.
*Minimally processed, no artificial ingredients.
Nutrition Facts
4.5 servings per container
Serving size(112g)
Amount Per Serving
Calories 120
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 2g
Saturated Fat 1g
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 50mg
Sodium 75mg
Total Carbohydrate 0g
Dietary Fiber 0g
Total Sugars 0g
Protein 26g
https://www.jennieo.com/products/extra-lean-boneless-turkey-breast-tenderloins/
The 19th-century Ukrainian Romantic poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), wrote most of his powerful verse from exile. Born a serf, Shevchenko was (anomalously) sent by his master to study art. Fellow artists from Ukraine and Russia helped to raise money to buy his freedom. He later became a member of the Ukrainian “Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius,” a group devoted to promoting Ukrainian self-determination within the Russian Empire, and the liberation of the serfs. He was arrested for his political activity in 1847, and sentenced to a series of exiles. He died in 1861, the year the serfs were liberated, having not seen Ukraine in 15 years. In 1845 he wrote his well-known “Testament,” asking to be buried in his beloved Ukraine. It begins:
Як умру, то поховайте
Мене на могилі
Серед степу широкого
На Вкраїні милій,
Щоб лани широкополі,
І Дніпро, і кручі
Було видно, було чути,
Як реве ревучий…
When I die, let me rest
Buried in a grave
On the wide steppe
In my dear Ukraine,
Where the broad-rimmed fields
And the Dnipro, and cliffs
Are visible, so I can hear
How the roaring roars.
Shevchenko’s “Testament” remains an anthem for Ukrainian national sentiment. It’s a poem of longing, written by a man who is separated from his native rivers, cliffs, and steppe. It shows off the alliterative power of the Ukrainian language. Dozens of musical scores have been written to accompany this poem. Soviet poets who couldn’t publish their own work at the height of Stalinism, from the Russian poet Boris Pasternak to the Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn, translated Shevchenko instead.
Little wonder, then, that after the Russian-language Odessa poet, Boris Khersonsky, began to write poems in Ukrainian in solidarity with the 2013-14 Maidan “Revolution of Dignity,” he wrote a version of “Testament.”
Як умру, то не ховайте
мене на могилi.
Хай несуть мене до неба
полум’янi хвилi.
Хай розвiє сiрий попiл
повiтряна сила,
бо йому, щоб полетiти,
не потрiбнi крила.
Бо нема землi на свiтi,
щоб назвав своею.
When I die, don’t let me rest
Buried in a grave
Let the waves of fire carry
Me up to the sky.
Let the windy powers dispel
The gray ash, let it scatter
For, no wings are necessary
For this ash to fly.
For no land in all the world
Can be called my own.
Khersonsky is a psychiatrist and professor in Odessa. He has written about the shtetls of his Jewish ancestors, his estrangement from his heritage, the stagnant presence of Soviet memorials in Ukraine, and Orthodox Christianity, to which he converted. If Shevchenko’s poem is about spiritual rootedness, Khersonsky’s is about rootlessness. “It’s my destiny to fly overhead,” he writes further, “with the Jewish ashes from the Holocaust.”
The fact that a Romantic Ukrainian poet can be a vehicle for talking about alienation in 21st-century Odessa is important. Khersonsky, who was a dissident in the late Soviet period, is an outspoken critic of the Russian military and cultural presence in Ukraine. His early poems of the Donbass war, read as Russian forces move toward Odessa, appear tragically prescient.
In one, he presents Ukraine as a woman, eternally pregnant with Russia’s thieves “thieves and bandits”—a reference to the Ukrainian heroine in Shevchenko’s “Kateryna,” who is left alone with a Muscovite’s child. But Khersonsky has also criticized ideas about a monolithic Ukrainian identity, and his “Testament” suggests that the Jewish story of loss is part of Ukrainian identity: “Sing to me, Ukraine,” he writes further in the poem, “a simple lullaby.”
“We’ve been at war, but we’ve also started to know freedom.”
A poet who embraces his eclectic mixture of identities, Khersonsky frequently presents biblical texts, from either the Hebrew bible or the New Testament, sometimes setting the two at odds with one another. “Abraham is walking” appeared just before Easter, in 2020. During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the virus hit Odessa especially hard, Khersonsky posted “Korona-virshy” (Corona-verses) to his Facebook page.
When I met him in Odessa in 2019, he spoke of the paradox of the ongoing war: “We’ve been at war, but we’ve also started to know freedom.” Now that the country is actively defending itself against the invasion of its cities, the concept of freedom—and of a freely chosen civic-based patriotism—is more central than ever to Ukrainians.
The poems here were all written in the aftermath of the Maidan protests, during the war against separatists in the Donbass.
–Amelia Glaser, Cambridge, MA
*
Kids, here’s a geography lesson.
Here’s a map. Let’s memorize it.
There’s no Siberia or Kolyma in Ukraine.
And here’s the Vladimirsky highway, off to the side,
Way off to the side, I’m certain, though not completely. This is a geography lesson.
This land won’t go to waste.
There’s not enough space, no place to build huge camps,
it’s not that we’re cramped and angry
but, compared to Russia, we don’t have the expanse.
And we have no taiga, and the snow isn’t so white,
and the shackles have rung out less on our roads, but the sabers more often and the church bells were louder, and we’ve never cared much about the universe but about our own housekeeping.
But this is all psychology, and now it’s time for our geography lesson. A local lesson, from the front door to the gate.
Every hut in our beloved country is on the edge.
And to be honest, I’m on the edge, too.
I feel sorry for the ones at the center, but really I’m especially sorry for the ones in the camp towers, watching the frosty distance.
I’m sorry for the land beneath the searchlights, I’m sorry for the collective-farm cows rumbling from hunger.
There’s no poetry in all this. I accept this rebuke.
This is only a geography lesson. Kids, learn this lesson.
Translated, from the Russian, by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
*
The devils have come and they say “we are angels.”
The henchmen have come and they say “we are brothers.”
They say “we have come from the light,”
but in truth they have come from the dark.
Did you really believe him, my country?
That he’s yours forever and ever,
that you’ll carry thieves and bandits in your womb,
to doze off in the dirt, and awaken to fire?
Why so silent, won’t you answer?
Translated, from the Ukrainian, by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
*
Abraham is walking—old, bearded, severe.
Behind him, Isaac, bent under a bundle of wood,
young, timid, trembling from the strain.
It’s an unbearable weight, a burden like this.
Here comes Abraham. Knife in hand.
Here’s the knife. Here’s the firewood. Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?
Carry this, Isaac, you’re the victim, you’re the two-legged lamb,
But the Lord isn’t all that bloodthirsty, His thoughts are pure,
relax, God’s only testing
the bearded ancient’s patience, your earthly father:
Will Abraham trust the Lord to the end?
How this senile face has changed!
His features have sharpened, his eyes grown dull.
Lie down on these logs, Isaac, pawn in a weird world.
Don’t be afraid—here’s an angel—he’ll intercept that hand and knife
and here’s the ram, horns caught.
The ram will be stabbed and burned before God.
It all ended well. But you’re still tense
youthful Isaac, a sacrifice for all the living.
You bent low under the firewood’s weight, Isaac, bent low, but carried it.
Like you, Christ too will carry his cross,
exhausted, thrice falling in the via dolorosa.
But Christ’s angel-savior didn’t fly from heaven.
He died, then he rose again, in that order.
Arose, and then ascended, according to that famous book.
Translated, from the Russian, by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk
*
What can I say today for my native Ukraine?
What can I say today for myself?
Soul, you are like instant decaf,
that leaves no coffee grounds, dissolved in an abyss.
And the abyss says, I won’t forgive you
not for your jokes, your grief, your indignation.
Because I look at you, but I can’t see you,
and your life is like an electric current.
Translated, from the Ukrainian, by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
*
the virus is totalitarian—breaking through the shell
he penetrates and subjugates each cell
turns a room into solitary confinement
puts us back under the whiskered forefather’s heel
he closes borders he separates couples
he sweeps groceries from the shelves with a filthy broom
he turns beds into hospital cots
he compels us to smuggle contraband goods
he turns neighbors cruel, if it weren’t for fear of getting it
they’d gnaw through one another’s throats
the virus drives everyone, distorting faces
we start to walk in circles like in a prison yard
the virus is the leader he’s a jailor he’s the screw
you’ll die, your face deformed by rage, if you disobey him
he takes all for himself and gives directives in exchange
for everyone to sit alone and fear contamination
Translated, from the Russian, by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk
____________________________
Boris Khersonsky was born in Chernivtsi in 1950. He lives in Odessa, and is the former chair of the psychology department at the Odeaa State University. He has published over a dozen books of poetry in Russian and Ukrainian.
Amelia Glaseris Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at U.C. San Diego. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands(2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020). She is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Yuliya Ilchuk is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity(2021).
]]>Author’s note: Sometimes the past catches up with the present and drags you into a future you don’t want. So it happened to me with the novel Grey Bees. I wrote it four years ago, when the war in the Donbas “settled” and became the norm. When shots and explosions were heard less often, but quite regularly. When the inhabitants of the grey zone and other villages near the front line became fatalists and planted potatoes in fields littered with mines and shells.
When the novel came out, I realized that it would soon become further proof of the tragic history of Ukraine, the history of the war in the Donbass.
But Putin decided to “revive” the war, and has now made it an all-out attack against Ukraine. And this war, with dozens of destroyed villages and cities, with thousands of dead and wounded civilians, has made the novel Grey Bees even more relevant than when it was first published. Now all of Ukraine is Donbas, where Russian soldiers are fighting. Theaters and museums are on fire. The museum of the best native artist of Ukraine, Maria Primachenko, burned down, and with it the entire collection of her work. Hospitals and universities are burning. And now you can’t hear the bees at all. After all, bees can be heard only in peaceful silence.
–Andrey Kurkov
*
Sergey Sergeyich was roused by the cold air at about three in the morning. The potbelly stove he had cobbled together in imitation of a picture in Cosy Cottage magazine, with its little glass door and two burners, had ceased to give off any warmth. The two tin buckets that stood by its side were empty. He lowered his hand into the nearest of them and his fingers found only coal dust.
“Alright,” he groaned sleepily, put on his trousers, slid his feet into the slippers he had fashioned out of an old pair of felt boots, pulled on his sheepskin coat, took both buckets and went into the yard.
He stopped behind the shed in front of a pile of coal and his eyes landed on the shovel—it was much brighter out here than inside. Lumps of coal poured down, thumping against the bottoms of the buckets. Soon the echoing thumps died away, and the rest of the lumps fell in silence.
Somewhere far off a cannon sounded. Half a minute later there was another blast, which seemed to come from the opposite direction. “Fools can’t get to sleep,” Sergeyich said to himself. “Probably just warming their hands.”
Then he returned to the dark interior of the house and lit a candle. Its warm, pleasant, honeyed scent hit his nose, and his ears were soothed by the familiar quiet ticking of the alarm clock on the narrow wooden windowsill.
There was still a hint of heat inside the stove’s belly, but not enough to get the frosty coal going without the help of woodchips and paper. Eventually, when the long bluish tongues of flame began to lick at the smoke-stained glass, the master of the house stepped out into the yard again. The sound of distant bombardment, almost inaudible inside the house, now reached Sergeyich’s ears from the east. But soon another sound drew his attention. He heard a car driving nearby.
Then it stopped. There were only two proper streets in the village—one named after Lenin, the other after Taras Shevchenko—and also Ivan Michurin Lane. Sergeyich himself lived on Lenin, in less than proud isolation. This meant that the car had been driving down Shevchenko.
There, too, only one person was left—Pashka Khmelenko, who, like Sergeyich, had retired early. The two men were almost exactly the same age and had been enemies from their first days at school. Pashka’s garden looked out towards Horlivka, so he was one street closer to Donetsk than Sergeyich. Sergeyich’s garden faced in the other direction, towards Sloviansk; it sloped down to a field, which first dipped then rose up towards Zhdanivka. You couldn’t actually see Zhdanivka from the garden—it lay hidden behind a hump. But you could sometimes hear the Ukrainian army, which had burrowed dugouts and trenches into that hump. And even when he couldn’t hear the army, Sergeyich was always aware of its presence. It sat in its dugouts and trenches, to the left of the forest plantation and the dirt road along which tractors and lorries used to drive.
The army had been there for three years now, while the local lads, together with the Russian military, had been drinking tea and vodka in their dugouts beyond Pashka’s street and its gardens, beyond the remnants of the apricot grove that had been planted back in Soviet times, and beyond another field that the war had stripped of its workers, as it had the field that lay between Sergeyich’s garden and Zhdanivka.
The village had been quiet for two whole weeks. Not a shot fired. Had they tired themselves out? Were they conserving their shells and bullets? Or maybe they were reluctant to disturb the last two residents of Little Starhorodivka, who were clinging to their homesteads more tenaciously than a dog clings to its favourite bone. Everyone else in Little Starhorodivka had wanted to leave when the fighting began. And so they left—because they feared for their lives more than they feared for their property, and that stronger fear had won out. But the war hadn’t made Sergeyich fear for his life. It had only made him confused, and indifferent to everything around him. It was as if he had lost all feeling, all his senses, except for one: his sense of responsibility. And this sense, which could make him worry terribly at any hour of the day, was focused entirely on one object: his bees. But now the bees were wintering. Their hives were lined on the inside with felt and covered with sheets of metal. Although they were in the shed, a dumb stray shell could fly in from either side. Its shrapnel would cut into the metal—but then maybe it wouldn’t have the strength to punch through the wooden walls and be the death of the bees?
*
Pashka showed up at Sergeyich’s at noon. The master of the house had just emptied the second bucket of coal into the stove and put the kettle on. His plan had been to have some tea alone.
Before letting his uninvited guest into the house, Sergeyich placed a broom in front of the “safety” axe by the door. You never know—Pashka might have a pistol or a Kalashnikov for self-defence. He’d see the axe and break out that grin of his, as if to say that Sergeyich was a fool. But the axe was all Sergeyich had to protect himself. Nothing else. He kept it under his bed at night, which is why he sometimes managed to sleep so calmly and deeply. Not always, of course.
Sergeyich opened the door for Pashka and gave a not very friendly grunt. This grunt was spurred by Sergeyich’s resentment of his neighbour from Shevchenko Street. It seemed the statute of limitations on his resentment would never run out. The very sight of him reminded Sergeyich of all the mean tricks Pashka used to play, of how he used to fight dirty and tattle to their teachers, of how he never let Sergeyich crib from him during exams. You might think that after forty years Sergeyich would have learned to forgive and forget. Forgive? Maybe. But how could he forget? There were seven girls in their class and only two boys—himself and Pashka—and that meant Sergeyich had never had a friend in school, only an enemy. “Enemy” was too harsh a word, of course. In Ukrainian one could say “vrazhenyatko”—what you might call a “frenemy”. That was more like it. Pashka was a harmless little enemy, the kind no-one fears.
“How goes it, Greyich?” Pashka greeted Sergeyich, a little tensely. “You know they turned on the electricity last night,” he said, casting a glance at the broom to see whether he might use it to brush the snow off his boots.
He picked up the broom, saw the axe, and his lips twisted into that grin of his.
“Liar,” Sergeyich said peaceably. “If they had, I would’ve woken up. I keep all my lights switched on, so I can’t miss it.”
“You probably slept right through it—hell, you could sleep through a direct hit. And they only turned it on for half an hour. Look,” he held out his mobile. “It’s fully charged! You wanna call someone?”
“Got no-one to call,” Sergeyich said. “Want some tea?” “Where’d you get tea from?”
“From the Protestants.”
“I’ll be damned,” Pashka said. “Mine’s long gone.”
They sat down at Sergeyich’s little table. Pashka’s back was to the stove and its tall metal pipe, which was now radiating warmth. “Why’s the tea so weak?” the guest grumbled. And then, in a more affable voice: “Got anything to eat?” Anger showed in Sergeyich’s eyes.
“They don’t bring me humanitarian aid at night . . .” “Me neither.”
“So what do they bring you, then?” “Nothing!”
Sergeyich grunted and sipped his tea. “So no-one came to see you last night?”
“You saw . . . ?”
“I did. Went out to get coal.”
“Ah. Well, what you saw were our boys,” Pashka nodded. “On reconnaissance.”
“So what were they reconnoitring for?” “For dirty Ukes . . .”
“That so?” Sergeyich stared directly into Pashka’s shifty eyes.
Pashka gave up right away.
“I lied,” he confessed. “Just some guys—said they were from Horlivka. Offered me an Audi for three hundred bucks. No papers.”
Sergeyich grinned. “D’you buy it?”
“Whaddaya take me for? A moron?” Pashka shook his head. “Think I don’t know how this stuff goes down? I turn round to get the money and they stick a knife in my back.”
“So why didn’t they come to my place?”
“I told them I was the only one left. Besides, you can’t drive from Lenin to Shevchenko anymore. There’s that big crater where the shell landed.”
Sergeyich just stared at Pashka’s devious countenance, which would have suited an aged pickpocket—one who had grown fearful and jumpy after countless arrests and beatings. At forty-nine he looked a full ten years older than Sergeyich. Was it his earthy complexion? His ragged cheeks? It was as if he’d been shaving with a dull razor all his life. Sergeyich stared at him and thought that if they hadn’t wound up alone in the village he would never have talked to him again. They would have gone on living their parallel lives on their parallel streets and would not have exchanged a word—if it hadn’t been for the war.
“Been a long time since I heard any shooting,” the guest said with a sigh. “But around Hatne, you know, they used to fire the big guns only at night—well, now they’re firing in the daytime too. Listen,” Pashka tilted his head forwards a bit, “if our boys ask you to do something—will you do it?”
“Who are ‘our boys’?” Sergeyich said irritably. “Stop playing the fool. Our boys—in Donetsk.”
“My boys are in my shed. I don’t have any others. You’re not exactly ‘mine’, either.”
“Oh, cut it out. What’s the matter with you, didn’t get enough sleep?” Pashka twisted his lips. “Or did your bees freeze their stingers off, so now you’re taking it out on me?”
“You shut your mouth about my bees . . .”
“Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing but respect for the little buggers—I’m just worried! I just can’t understand how they survive the winter. Don’t they get cold in the shed? I’d croak after one night.”
“As long as the shed’s in one piece, they’re fine,” Sergeyich said, his tone softening. “I keep an eye on them, check on them every day.”
“Tell me, how do they sleep in those hives?” Pashka said. “Like people?”
“Just like people. Each bee in its own little bed.”
“But you’re not heating the shed, are you?”
“They don’t need it. Inside the hives, it’s thirty-seven degrees. They keep themselves warm.”
Once the conversation shifted in an apian direction, it grew more amicable. Pashka felt he should leave while the going was good. This way, they might even manage to bid each other farewell, unlike last time, when Sergeyich sent him packing with a few choice words. But then Pashka thought of one more question.
“Have you thought at all about your pension?”
“What’s there to think about?” Sergeyich shrugged. “When the war ends, the postwoman will bring me three years’ worth of cheques. That’ll be the life.”
Pashka grinned. He wanted to needle his host, but managed to restrain himself.
Before he took his leave, his eyes met Sergeyich’s one more time. “Listen, while it’s charged . ..” He held out his mobile again. “Maybe you ought to give your Vitalina a call?”
“‘My’ Vitalina? She hasn’t been ‘mine’ for six years. No.” “What about your daughter?”
“Just go. I told you, I’ve got no-one to call.”
__________________________________
From Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, tr. by Boris Dralyuk, published by Deep Vellum.
]]>
Just a cup of Bigelow Decaf Green Tea for Breakfast. 32 degrees and cloudy out today. The wind kept wind chill factor around 21 degrees all day. I took Mom at 11:30 this morning for 6th Radiation Treatment, 14 to go!. Her face is looking better and she’s so happy! I had bought a push broom a while back and I got it out and swept the driveway. Still trying to get rid of all the salt dust. Straightened up the shed after that. Didn’t feel like cooking a meal so I went with a Sandwich! For Dinner it was Roast Beef and Vermont Cheddar Sandwich w/ Chips and Dip.
I wanted something easy to prepare, and what can be easier than making a Sandwich and having some Potato Chips! I had purchased some of the Boar’s Head London Broil Cap-Off Top Round Oven Roast Beef from Kroger. It was a beautiful cooked medium rare and too good to sit in the fridge for long! So for my Sandwich I’ll be using the Boar’s Head Roast Beef, a slice of Boar’s Head Vermont Cheddar Cheese, Kraft Reduced Fat Mayo w/ Olive Oil, French’s Yellow Mustard, and served on Aunt Millie’s Live Carb Smart Wheat Bread. Now this is a Sandwich! I Can’t even describe how delicious the Boar’s Head Rare Roast Beef and Cheese is. It’s just so tender and flavorful. And of course Cheese, which makes anything better, with the Mayo and Mustard makes this the perfect Sandwich! To go with the Sandwich I’m having some Mike Sell’s Reduced Fat Potato Chips with some Lay’s Ranch Dip. For Dessert/Snack later slices of Dole Sliced Peaches.
Boar’s Head London Broil Cap-Off Top Round Oven Roast Beef
Hand-trimmed and carefully seasoned with pepper, garlic, onion and a hint of lemon for tartness, this cut is then slow-roasted to tender perfection. Boar’s Head London Broil Cap-Off Top Round Oven Roasted Beef packs classic meaty flavor in each rich and savory slice.
* Gluten Free
* Milk Free
* No MSG Added
* No Caramel Color
Nutrition Facts
Serving Size 2 oz (56g)
Servings Per Container Varied
Amount Per Serving
Calories 70 Calories from Fat 25
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 3g 5%
Saturated Fat 1g 5%
Trans Fat 0g
Monounsaturated Fat 1.5g
Polyunsaturated Fat 0g
Cholesterol 25mg 8%
Sodium 310mg 13%
Total Carbohydrate 0g 0%
Dietary Fiber 0g 0%
Sugars 0g
Protein 12g 24%
https://boarshead.com/products/detail/12011-london-broil
Boar’s Head Vermont Cheddar Cheese
Crafted in the Green Mountain state with whole milk sourced from regional family dairy farms, this classic cheese has a mild flavor and creamy texture. Vermont Cheddar skewered with seedless grapes and Boar’s Head Ovengold Turkey makes an elegant kabob-style appetizer.
https://boarshead.com/products/cheese/15012-pre-cut-vermont-cheddar-
]]>The last Christmas I spent with my mother, we watched two movies of her choice: Casablanca (1942) and The Terminator (1984). Between rounds of chemo and radiation for the cervical cancer which would soon be declared terminal, Mum had little energy to do more than watch TV. Twenty-three at the time, I skipped the usual holiday revelries at the local pub to join her for a glass of wine and fill in some of the gaps in my cinematic history.
Casablanca made sense: the romance, the impossibility of love in the face of war, Humphry Bogart’s irrepressible charm and Ingrid Bergman’s timeless beauty. But The Terminator? For someone like my mother who swooned over anything featuring Hugh Grant, a sci-fi jaunt about time-traveling robots trying to kill a post-apocalyptic resistance leader seemed oddly out of character. While Mum gripped the armrest and squealed each time Arnold Schwarzenegger came close to taking out a barely grown Sarah Connor, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the gaping plot holes and paradoxes in the spacetime continuum. Mum teased me: “Aisling, can’t you just enjoy it?” After a turbulent adolescence during which I scorned anything my mother enjoyed as pop-culture fluff unworthy of my time, I put aside my cynicism and decided to give her movies, and this rare moment of calm between us, a chance.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Casablanca that stuck with me in the aftermath of her loss. Over the years, watching it on her birthday with a glass or two of red wine became a way of feeling close to her and honoring the few moments of tranquillity we shared as adults. Fourteen years after her death, I might have forgotten Mum’s love for The Terminator if it weren’t for my favorite movie podcast, You Are Good. While recovering from Covid-19, I started listening through the archive and watching the corresponding movies, until I found my way to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and hit play.
Finally, Mum’s Terminator fascination began to make sense.The movie opens with Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) telling us of the nuclear holocaust and subsequent war against the machines that’s fated to occur on August 29, 1997—and how once again, a Terminator (the T-1000) has been sent back in time to kill her son, John (Edward Furlong), now ten years old. Suddenly, Hamilton’s distinct, gravelly voice transported me right back to that last Christmas with my mother. Grief is funny like that, defying time and catching you out when you least expect it.
Immediately, I was enthralled by a rebooted and ever-so-butch Sarah doing bench presses in a high-security psychiatric facility. This is no mild-mannered waitress trying to come to terms with the imposition of pregnancy and the burden of mothering a potential messiah. This Sarah can free herself from restraints with a stolen paperclip and take down all the men who had tortured her during her imprisonment with a broom handle and syringe.
Faced with the T-1000, who tracks her to the institution, Sarah needs more than a broom handle to escape—and luckily, she’s saved by an exact replica of the Terminator that tried to murder her in 1984. Left with no choice but to trust him, she and the machine retrieve John and flee LA for the desert. By this stage, John and the Terminator have begun to bond, much to Sarah’s distaste. And yet, she muses: “Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop, it would never leave him, it would never hurt him… Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.”
Finally, Mum’s Terminator fascination began to make sense. The monologue captures what every child needs from a father, but also a mother’s hope for how her partner might fill this role; it’s laced with the disappointment of what happens when reality (too often) falls short of expectation. When The Terminator premiered in 1984, my mother, only a year older than Sarah Connor, was expecting her first child: me. By the time Judgment Day came out in 1991, she was a single mother with three children under the age of seven. It was rare to see any positive representation of single mothers on screen in the 80s and 90s, least of all a total badass with a secret cache of weapons who’s determined to save the world. Viewed through this lens, Terminator 2 is about far more than robots and post-apocalyptic messiahs; it’s an homage to single mothers and the difficulties with which they’re confronted.
What if motherhood is what gives Sarah Connor the drive to fight for the future of the human race?My mother wasn’t battling time-traveling robots, but she was struggling to secure a minimum of child support through an unsympathetic court system in Ireland, where a constitutional ban on divorce remained enforced until 1996, and in which single motherhood was heavily stigmatized. Maybe she needed a hero, and Sarah had provided it.
It’s a bleak world that Sarah inhabits in Judgment Day, as she plots to save the world from the evil Cyberdyne corporation. Living on the edge, her main associates are a dubious collection of other outlaws, ex-US counter-insurgency operatives, and those living at the margins of capitalism. At her hideout in the desert, two children shoot at each other with toy guns. The Terminator, in a rare moment of insight, says, “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.” The movie seems to ask, why bother saving humanity at all?
In 2022, our world is also looking pretty bleak. We’ve had two years of governments failing to protect people from a debilitating and deadly virus, and many more years of world leaders putting profit and special interests above the increasingly urgent climate crisis. The present is a nightmare in which we remain trapped, and the future is shadowed by the growing probability of our planet’s inability to sustain life.
Watching Judgment Day, I cared far less about the paradoxes in the spacetime continuum than I did about Sarah’s own paradox—her choice to bring a child into a world whose future is terribly uncertain, even threatened. Her conflict is perhaps more relevant than ever to our current reality: how can we bring more children into this world while conscious of an impending climate catastrophe? Millennials and Gen Z are questioning the reproductive imperative more than any previous generation. As a queer, neurodivergent 37-year-old, I’m painfully aware that motherhood in the 21st century implies clashes of desire, fear, and the impossibility of denying that any potential child of mine will inherit a wounded, if not dying, planet.
The biologist and feminist theorist Donna Haraway invites us to ensure the earth’s ability to survive and heal, at least partially, by making “odkin,” not babies. Odkin is an invitation to deconstruct the nuclear family while cultivating kinship bonds between plants, animals, human, and cyborgs. This can mean including companion species within our domestic life, like cats and dogs, or working to protect species and ecosystems in danger of extinction. Odkin, queer kin, and multispecies bonds give me hope of finding other ways to create family beyond the configuration of mother, father, and children.
I also know that bringing children into this world has little to do with logic and everything to do with love.And yet, in renouncing motherhood, a part of me would mourn this unfulfilled desire. Can individuals be asked to forgo our own futurity and bear the burden of planetary survival? In a fragmented, alienating, and quarantined social world, is making odkin enough to fulfill our basic needs for human connection, affection, and community? Or can we balance, as Sarah Connor does, these two contradictory positions: the desire to parent in the face of potential world-ending scenarios.
My mother never doubted I would have children, and she looked forward to having plenty of grandbabies to dote on into her old age. She died at 47, long before any grandchildren would arrive, and her death threw me into a tailspin, leading me to question all the assumptions of my existence, particularly my desire to become a mother. As I inch toward 40, my life is a millennial cliché of housing and employment precarity. A biological precipice, complicated by health issues, hovers in the middle distance, while the climate catastrophe becomes ever more concrete. Motherhood often feels like an imprudent—if not downright ridiculous—consideration. But I also know that bringing children into this world has little to do with logic and everything to do with love.
What if motherhood, and the sliver of hope embodied in her son’s existence, is what gives Sarah Connor the drive to fight for the future of the human race? Rather than the Terminator, who simply follows orders, Sarah’s quest to ensure planetary survival makes her the true hero, subverting the messiah narrative that drives the plot of both films.
Sarah closes Judgment Day with another poignant, brief monologue: “The unknown future rolls towards us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too.”
Our planet’s future, though terribly uncertain, isn’t written in stone. There’s room for hope. Is there still room for motherhood?
]]>“When Is a Horror Movie Not a Horror Movie?” asked The New York Times in a November headline. Recent films like The Humans, Spencer, and The Lost Daughter have been spooking the masses without assists from ghouls, ghosts, and goblins, without fast zombies or slow ones. Writer Eric Piepenburg characterizes the genre as “elastic and regenerative,” and makes the case that you’d be hard-pressed to name a horror movie that doesn’t meddle with other formulas. Given the piece’s overall stance, a more apt title might have reversed the question: “When is a non-horror movie a horror movie?”
I’d argue that the films included in the Times’ roundup earn admittance by the same token as Scream did in 1996, through its banter with the slasher film and its willingness to pull from the same bag of tricks. In other words, through its committed engagement with the genre. Scream’s horror-savvy protagonists enumerate its slasher tropes like they’re part of a Survival 101 study group. It’s a horror movie because its characters tell us so.
Perhaps capturing a maturation of Scream’s technique, films like those name-checked by the Times aren’t as forthcoming in announcing themselves. They converse with horror subgenres without poking fun of them, or the ordinary fears that sustain them. Both The Humans (2021) and The Nest (2020) are set in creaky old dwelling spaces with weeping walls, flickering lights, and doors and windows wont to slam in the middle of the night—but decrepitude isn’t a symbol so much as a sign of cash-strapped neglect in these stories, both of which are slow-burn portrayals of families on the brink of financial ruin. This constitutes a reversal of the ordinary haunted house formula, wherein “real” hauntings symbolize prosaic fears and cannily foreground the anxiety that homeownership (or lack thereof) can stoke, especially in a post-2008 economy.
When is a non-horror movie a horror movie?The horror lineage of The Lost Daughter—an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut—isn’t as obvious. In the film, Leda (Olivia Colman), a Harvard professor and empty nester, is roused from an idyllic vacation in Greece by a rowdy clan from Queens. When a beguiling young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), loses sight of her daughter on the beach, Leda finds and returns the girl, but not without taking a commission: the child’s beloved baby doll. For the rest of the film, Leda alternately dotes upon the doll like it’s a real child and neglects it like a real child would do.
The case for The Lost Daughter as a horror film rests on Nani the doll, and could even be made from a single image of her. Several days into the doll’s captivity, Leda probes Nani’s half-open mouth with a pair of tweezers and startles something inside that begins to wriggle. She drops the doll and watches in horror as an ooze erupts from its mouth and takes an elongated, serpentine shape. Naked, filthy, and lying prone with a meaty worm slithering from her mouth, Nani is a dreadful sight to behold, unequivocally a Creepy Doll.
In Ferrante’s novel, the sequence plays out differently: “I have a horror of crawling things, but for that clot of humors I felt a naked pity,” Leda says of the worm. Gyllenhaal has said that she made The Lost Daughter from horror blueprints, and her flourish in this scene seems to indicate the subgenre from which she borrowed most heavily.
Horror films of the Creepy Doll variety can be difficult to regard as anything other than camp. How else can we process the optics of grown adults doing battle with baby-sized foes? Were this standard horror fare, Nani would undoubtedly (if improbably) pose a physical threat. But like other new meta horror films, The Lost Daughter never strays to a universe outside our own, nor attempts to imbue the child’s toy with anything resembling sentience. Gyllenhaal’s portrayal drives home the somber reality that the story’s bugaboo is as harmless—and defenseless—as an actual baby.
Naked, filthy, and lying prone with a meaty worm slithering from her mouth, Nani is a dreadful sight to behold, unequivocally a Creepy Doll.Beyond heightening stakes with scare tactics, tapping into the Creepy Doll subgenre gives Gyllenhaal access to its toolkit, its symbols and tropes—not to mention the heft of its legacy. To examine those fears at the root, we must turn to an OG demonic doll: The Twilight Zone’s Talky Tina.
A (surprisingly) recent article from Child and Adolescent Health provides context and commentary on “childism” (defined here as “prejudice against children”) in the 1963 episode “Living Doll.” Authors Thomas and Martin begin their analysis with a statement of intention that could just as well apply to The Lost Daughter: “It may be too distressing to confront head-on the reasons behind the mistreatment of children,” they write. “Fiction and storytelling might offer a means of grappling with childism, depicting the underlying psychosocial conflicts in terms both digestible and palatable.”
In “Living Doll,” little Christie’s prized new baby doll, the audio-equipped Talky Tina, butts heads with Christie’s stepdad from the moment she arrives home. “Will you shut that thing off?” he shouts at his stepdaughter, mid-argument with his wife. When the child runs upstairs in tears, Talky Tina turns to the man and says, uncharacteristically, “My name is Talky Tina, and I don’t think I like you very much.” He hurls her across the room.
The adversarial situation escalates to Christie’s stepfather putting Tina’s head in a grip and attempting to saw it off with a power tool. But in the end, Tina wins by tripping Christie’s stepdad on a staircase, causing him to fall to his death. “I’m Talking Tina, and you better be nice to me,” she says in her first address to Christie’s newly widowed mom, staking her claim as the child’s ultimate protectorate.
In their analysis, Thomas and Martin note that Christie and Tina are both nicknames for Christina, and that the episode was timely: just two years prior, a landmark study had introduced the world to the concept of “battered child syndrome.” “Conversations about violence against children were just entering the mainstream,” Thomas and Martin offer as context for the episode. “Using a doll in place of a child softens the blow.”
In The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson conducts her own inquiry into the representational use of dolls in art but arrives at the opposite conclusion. In the chapter “They’re Only Dolls,” she grapples with artist Mike McCarthy’s Family Tyranny, a short video that attempts to portray the intergenerational effects of sexual abuse through the power of suggestion. Nelson marvels at McCarthy’s ability to impress upon the audience a feeling of having witnessed a brutal assault, when in fact all we “see” is a faceless father figure pouring mayonnaise into a Styrofoam ball (crudely made to resemble a head) and jamming a broom handle into a bucket. “‘Don’t worry, they’ll remember it,’ he coos throughout … as if the point of the violation lay less in the momentary discharge of psychosexual energies and more in the abuser’s capacity to leave a debilitating psychic scar,” Nelson writes. The chapter’s title is a quote from Arthur Danto: “They’re only dolls” helps as much as ‘It’s only art,’” he said in response to McCarthy’s work.
Much more pernicious is the lack of forgiveness we extend to young mothers.In flashbacks, Leda is revealed as a short-tempered and petulant mother, too often seeming to dole out punishment in anger. She abandons her family for a period of three years, during which she carries on with life as if they never existed. This mistreatment pales in comparison to the type of abuse that supports Nelson’s claim, yet Nelson’s assessment of McCarthy’s ability to “leave a debilitating psychic scar” through representation offers insight into The Lost Daughter’s power to unsettle. In the film’s most explicit instance of doll violence, an enraged Leda throws her own childhood doll over a balcony when her daughter rejects it as a gift. Her behavior is both unimaginable and—judging by the reception of the film as one that “Understands the Secret Shame of Motherhood” (The Atlantic) and expresses “The Perpetual Rage of Motherhood” (The Cut)—nearly universal.
At the story’s climax, Leda presents Nina with the doll, and Nina demands to know why she stole it. In Ferrante’s novel, Leda replies, “I don’t know.” But in Gyllenhaal’s film, she responds with a much more telling non-answer: “I was only playing,” she says timidly. The excuse betrays Leda’s jumbled state of mind and throws her actions in flashback into relief. In observing Nina and her daughter and reminiscing on her own young motherhood, Leda was also revisiting a time marked by regression. Her behavior toward her children then, and toward Nina and her daughter now, isn’t so much cruel as it is childlike. A scene wherein young Leda seemed dangerously close to returning her daughter’s playful slaps with her own angry ones resembles a hitting match between two toddlers testing each other’s boundaries more so than physical abuse. In the pivotal moment of her walkout, meanwhile, Leda comes across as wandering and distracted, drawn to glimpses of a shiny alternate reality rather than determined to abandon her family.
Ferrante’s novel puts an even finer point on this regression. Toward the end of the book, Leda measures and weighs herself and is alarmed to learn she’s lost pounds and inches. “Among my most dreaded fantasies was the idea that I could get smaller, go back to being an adolescent, child, condemned to relive those phases of my life,” she confesses.
The Lost Daughter’s copious flashbacks demonstrate how Leda responded to her children’s thoughtlessness in-kind. If her behavior is cruel, Ferrante’s book and Gyllenhaal’s film suggest, it’s because children are cruel. Much more pernicious is the lack of forgiveness we extend to young mothers, whom we expect to mature naturally and completely through the experience of being isolated with tiny humans.
In the conclusion of their assessment of Talky Tina, Thomas and Martin (somewhat bleakly) convey the urgency of the 60-year-old series’ message, concluding that the episode “…implicate[s] us as adult viewers in this prejudice against children, whether in the form of direct mistreatment or rigid social roles. The anxieties of adults become the trauma of children, which in turn becomes their anxieties as adults, and the cycle continues,” they write. “But fiction’s power also lies in imagining—even demanding—other ways of being.”
In the New York Times piece, film professor (and, incidentally, author of The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema) Andrew Scahill claims that evolution is indeed the genre’s raison d’etre: “Horror forces itself to keep innovating,” he says.
New meta (nü-meta?) horror films like The Lost Daughter refuse us the comfort of familiar scare tactics. Instead of a knife-wielding baby doll, we have a child’s beloved plaything—forcing us to consider why, as storytellers, we might ever make it murderous in the first place. Unmasking the genre leaves us with the frightening prospect that there’s an element of wish-fulfillment in Creepy Doll movies, in seeing oblique representations of violence against children. At the same time, it exposes the underlying fear that stems from the thought of catching a glimpse of oneself in the mirror, doing battle with a baby-sized foe.
As a form of group exposure therapy, these films assure us that our darkest impulses are anything but extraordinary, and prime us to reckon with the banal, systemic evils that truly grip us, preventing us from imagining other ways of being.
]]>I should start with what happened: I’m on a bus, traveling back to Chicago on the first sweltering day of summer. Actually, the bus isn’t traveling yet. We haven’t left the “station,” which is just a sign stuck into a cement plinth that someone rolls away after the bus leaves. Later, someone will worry about security. Someone will say this was bound to happen.
I’m on the second level of the bus, putting on headphones, wiggling into a position of apathy against the window when I hear shouting downstairs. The sound doesn’t quite peak or harden into language, but it has a rhythm, and the rhythm is urgent, and then it’s afraid, and then it’s angry. What animal instinct awakens that knows something is wrong? It’s a double decker bus. The kind used for interstate travel. There is one row of chairs in front of me and then the stairwell, leading back down to the first floor. The man sitting in front of me is wide-eyed. He can see down to the lower deck. He leans back, looks at me, and bandies his hand around in the shape of a gun.
Fear sharpens me into the moment. Anxiety surges through the crowd. I notice everything: a freckled girl sobs on the phone to her mother, a woman in cutoffs rubs her legs anxiously, a young man in sunglasses and a black T-shirt leans his head against the window and sets his jaw; he looks almost bored. I’m moving without thinking. I cross to the other row, which feels safer, brighter. I’m running on superstition and impulse. People are on the phone to several different dispatchers. They speak in the choked timbre of panic.
In my new seat, I handle the red emergency latch on the window, picture it coming free of its frame, sloughed off like shed skin and shattering against the pavement. I am wondering if it is too far to drop, too dramatic for us to all pile out the window and scatter like insects, when a police cruiser comes squealing into the parking lot in a siege of sound and light. For a moment, time means nothing. It dilates to a ripping point. Fear is miraculous like this: a physical medium. Where does it come from? Dropping over us like a curtain. The officer opens his door as a barricade, kneels in its hinge, and fires. No warning.
You don’t see the bullets, I realize. Of course not! They are just coils of smoke in the air, a burning smell. They live in the future—sounds reaching me after the fact, six percussive beats as fast as the machinery can reload. They come battering around the aluminum tube of the bus. Errant, angry things. One passes through a window—leaves a pile of green-tinted tempered glass on the pavement. Another goes through our cheap seat coverings with a tearing sound, probably. And a third ricochets all the way up to the second floor and passes through the fat and flesh of a passenger’s waist. It chips his hip bone like a teacup, then lodges itself in soft plastic. The gunman runs and falls. I can’t see him, but I can see the heads of other passengers pressed against the window, following him. They stop dead as he collapses against the sidewalk. Whatever separates us from raw emotion—shouting, weeping, beating your fist against something—becomes shell-thin. At a high enough pitch, all emotions are the same.
When it’s over, the cruiser is still rocking with the momentum of its entrance.
*
A story ran in the Columbus Dispatch a few days after I returned to Chicago: “Man charged in Megabus hijack attempt tells courtroom he is mentally ill.” In the picture at the top of the article, I saw his face for the first time. He survived. He was only struck in the hand, despite the seven wild shots—or was it six? Memory immediately distorts the world and is in turn distorted by it. His gravest injuries were sustained from a fall as he attempted to flee the scene. An ambulance took him to the hospital, and he was released into police custody later that day.
In the photo accompanying the story, his mouth hangs open in a wild shout. He’s pressed against his lawyer, a pale public defender several inches shorter who is making a futile effort to quiet his client. The picture was deeply effective if its intention was to inspire fear, to justify violence. This is how fear replicates itself. The contrast makes him look imposing, unpredictable, crazy. It’s a photo of a man caught in the tautology of mental illness: made to look insane by admitting I’m sick, punished by demanding relief.
I learn his name, too: Arsenio Rodriguez, like the Cuban Bolero musician. Is this a coincidence or does some long, specific story unspool from it? Is his family Cuban? Did his mother love guaracha? What music filled his childhood home? What records collected dust on the shelves? The article doesn’t cover that. They don’t have the space. Readers, it’s assumed, do not have the attention span. Instead, it delineates his criminal record: a stone thrown through an ex-girlfriend’s window and a subsequent restraining order; an incident at a Rockville, Maryland, bank, in which he had screamed at a teller but was never prosecuted; a second restraining order granted by Prince George’s County that December; and pending charges for malicious destruction of property, second-degree assault, disorderly conduct, and trespassing.
What tense is there then for an event that recurs, for one that is complete and ongoing, the past but also the present and by extension likely the future?There are, of course, two ways to read this. On one hand, this long string of violence and outbursts could be—and for the most part was—read as the reason Arsenio should, for safety reasons, be separated from the community, which in this case means being sent to prison. And it is for the safety of the community that this decision is justified. But on the other hand, could there be a clearer indication that Arsenio was losing his mind, that he needed help and treatment, than a rock thrown through a window, than screaming at a bank teller? In this other reading violence works as a form of language: a call or a plea, desperate and wordless, a last recourse when all other language fails.
*
I was often asked to tell the story of what happened, and I kept telling it even after people stopped asking. Everyone was interested the first time, but they were not as interested as I was. I could endlessly reshuffle the pieces, adding a new detail I had forgotten, now recontextualized through the statistics and history I had begun burrowing into: facts about schizophrenia, the Nixon administration, police shootings, weapon sales, and spray-painted airsoft guns. I could tell that I was boring everyone, repeating the same story. I knew these facts didn’t hold for others the same sacred logic they held for me, but I kept repeating them anyway.
Every weekday, back in Chicago, I would take the train fifty minutes from my apartment in Edgewater to my job west of the loop, transferring once at Belmont and getting off at Merchandise Mart. On the L, the air was always tight and netted with voices. In the morning people read the paper; on Fridays, men in suits flipped ties over their shoulders and cracked open beers. These were normal things, benign, and yet I found myself getting off the train with relief. My brain was having trouble distinguishing what was dangerous and what was safe.
Most mornings, after I got off the train I would walk the rest of the way over the Wells Street Bridge. It was the water, especially on calm overcast days, that reminded me. Though “reminded” isn’t the right word. A re-experiencing. A resurfacing. Something about the dark, wet surface of the water forces his flank into my sight. I see it catching light, glossy with blood. Not the exposed red blood in the open air, but blood making his T-shirt dark and wet, so much blood it’s consuming his side, spreading quickly through the fibers of his pants and shirt. We didn’t even notice that one of us had been hit. Even he is too shocked to register the pain. He feels only dampness and then an irritation deep in his side, itching he couldn’t quench. Or so I imagined . . . so I imagine when something I see, or hear, or smell dovetails for a moment with the past and pulls me back. And then I hear again the savage noise that crawls up and out of someone’s throat. The woman in cutoffs calling for a towel, an extra shirt, to press into the wound. He is so calm, standing in the aisle like he’s searching the crowd for a friend’s face. His seatmate leads him down the stairs, shreds of cotton turning to rust under her hand.
I receive two text messages saying: “You’ll have to write about this.”
Writers are always waiting for something interesting to happen to us, or at least I was. It’s not the ticket I thought it was. When something finally happened, I spent years trying to figure out what to say, what tense to put this in. A teacher once told our class that literature should always be written in the present tense, in a perpetual and ongoing present—an always already present—because at any moment you could pick up the book again at any place in its pages and find it was still perpetually in motion. I taught English as a second language for several years and learned a lot about tenses, things most native speakers take for granted. Like the fact that tenses have as much to do with completion as they do with time. Has the action ended or does it continue, was it ongoing at the moment you spoke or was it anticipated, stretching out into an imagined future? That the future is always something imagined, something conditional and subjunctive, is another idea coded into language that we hardly register.
On the streets some days, I see the flashing of police sirens; I hear a man’s harsh voice on the street, and I step backwards in time. I have read this is common in PTSD patients. It took me forever to name the experience. In fact, someone else had to do it for me. I still balk at the term a little, unwilling to reduce my feelings to a diagnosis penned in by the parameters of a clinical checklist, a WebMD page. I want my affliction to be singular. At times it feels precious to me. I want to keep it pristine.
What tense is there then for an event that recurs, for one that is complete and ongoing, the past but also the present and by extension likely the future? I want a tense for blurred time and blurred subjects too, that accounts for the failure of memory—its omissions and additions—that does not just speak uncertainty but encodes it in the very structure. A tense without time. We don’t have language for this: the cruiser rocking, the sun beating, the bullets forever in motion even after they have landed. Time honeycombed, collapsing, piles up on itself.
*
I rarely remember my dreams, but I begin thrashing my way out of them. I will be in the middle of a nightmare about fear and helplessness—clawing at the ground for purchase, or trying to mop up the blood of a friend who’s been shot: there aren’t enough paper towels!—when everything comes back online like an engine catching, and suddenly I’m up, shouting into a dark room. My sister wakes me up one night while we’re traveling together. I’ve been tossing and mumbling in bed. In the morning, I’m too embarrassed to ask her what I was saying. Another night, I startle my boyfriend awake, shouting. “What the fuck. What’s wrong?” he asks, flipping over to aim his concern at me. I’m sweat-drenched and upright, staring into his closet, slowly piecing together where I am. My fear sublimates into an immediate, irrational anger.
“Nothing! People have bad dreams,” I say, wrapping the top sheet around me like a toga before stalking out of the room.
“Hey, I need that,” he says as the door shuts.
*
What the article didn’t cover: the closure of the asylum system starting in the 1950s, the over-reliance on tranquilizers and antipsychotic medication in the years after, the gradual but steady defunding of the health clinics that were supposed to cover the gaping holes left behind by the shuttering of large state hospitals. The attack was random, but what does that mean? That it wasn’t targeted? That it wasn’t planned? That the logic of the attack does not play by the rules of the sane? Or that the history is too long, too knotted with failures and false promises to be untangled?
It is unfair to expect this level of cultural and historical insight from a one-page article in a local newspaper, but the way it was framed made the violence appear absent of history, loosed from a chain of cause and effect, and for all those reasons more horrifying. It is easy to pin violence to a single moment, and that might be one of its greatest appeals, its singularity, its temporal limits, its sharp provocative edge, like a tool. But violence begins early, spreads soundlessly. It breaches the surface in a single moment, yes, but its roots are as patient and rhizomatic as a fungus.
Here is one branch: More than age, more than race, more than armed or unarmed, the existence of a mental illness is a greater indicator of whether someone will be shot by police. In 2015, prompted by a lack of national statistics, the Washington Post began compiling information on police shootings throughout the country. There were approximately one thousand such killings, and of those killed one fourth were suffering from some type of mental illness. Despite implicit bias and de-escalation training, the mood of the country notwithstanding, they repeat with unnerving regularity year after year.
The theory is that relatively rare events within huge populations will not fluctuate without massive social change. But I have my own theory: that there is something sacrificial buried in these numbers, a blood offering, a willingness to avoid fear at all costs, even if the cost is another person’s life. Online, you can see these lives plotted as a line graph expressing violence on the y axis and time on the x. Each year is the same steady snail’s trail of ink inching up and out at a 45-degree angle. Like this, abstracted and aggregated, the project has a clinical feel to it. The cold dispassion that often accompanies academics or politicians discussing violence in places or lives far removed from their own. To combat this, the project includes descriptions of each reported killing and links to longer articles written by local reporters. Most of the paragraphs are concise and distant, offering just the age of the victim, the location of the event, a sentence or two describing the events. Some are baffling, others brutal in their brevity, reading like an exercise in space and impact. How can you lead a person from living to dead in as few words as possible? How can you make it hurt while staying objective? I quickly became obsessed with the descriptions.
It is easy to pin violence to a single moment, and that might be one of its greatest appeals, its singularity, its temporal limits, its sharp provocative edge, like a tool.The summer after the incident, I spent many nights in a café named Kafein— jagged, lightning bolt–shaped letters spelled out the name against a black awning— submerged in research, obsessing over this database, drinking cup after cup of coffee as light slowly drained from the sky. I knew that I wanted to write about what had happened, but I didn’t know how. I imagined that with enough dogged tenacity, research could carry me through some imagined finish line. I filled and labeled folders with tantalizing slivers of information, stories that I found particularly interesting—the man armed with wasp spray, a sixty-six-year-old woman holding first a pair of scissors then a baseball bat—or stories that seemed to fit with particular themes—Unusual “Weapons” read one folder, People Calling for Help read another. I had a document labeled “notes” that was just three pages of hyperlinks to associated white papers, PDFs, and local news articles. And after a few weeks I had ten different drafts with ten separate arrangements. It was the writer’s equivalent of pushing my food around the plate: the shape changed, but nothing was added or lost.
On these nights, I would trudge home feeling like I’d just spent hours trying to thread an impossibly small needle, my head buzzing with caffeine and atomized violence. My work was taking on the quality of those collages strung with red yarn that are used in movies about serial killers or intricate conspiracies. An image that only means one thing: the character is becoming unhinged. Sometimes, unable to sleep, I would go grocery shopping in the middle of the night. I liked the strip of bright windows against the night. The freshly restocked produce, the darkened meat counter, the rows of cold, glowing milk cartons—I found it all very comforting. The only people in the store at that hour were other insomniacs—we barely saw each other, shuffling around the aisles—and undergrads working the night shift at the checkout counter. Everyone seemed too tired to pose any real threat.
*
Months after the event I was still thinking about what happened. My mind was stuck on a single question: What would have happened if I hadn’t changed seats? Would I have been the passenger who got hit, the one lead out of the bus leaving behind a ribbon of blood, or worse would the bullet have gone right through my stomach? My chest? These events were all long sealed by time—there was no point in continuing to think about them. Sometimes, I would rub the spot where I had imagined being hit. Sometimes, the fantasy was so strong I would gasp or shudder for no apparent reason.
I saw violence everywhere. Sitting on a train one day, I became fixated on a man who pushed his way onto the train with a laundry basket of rumpled clothes and newspapers. He stood in the corner, consumed in his own private thoughts and conversations, shouting from time to time to the rest of the train car. I would not let myself turn to look directly at him, afraid of inviting a confrontation. But from the corner of my eye, I was convinced that he was looking at me, staring even. I was afraid of him, and ashamed of this fear, aware even of how illogical that fear was, but as the sun dropped over the skyline a sense of impending doom surged through me. I heard the bullet first, or was it a brick, colliding with the train, blowing through the window behind me. Then I saw the shattering glass and the bloodied plastic interior of the wagon. Blood from whom? I didn’t know. And the train compartment was no longer a train, but the hot, bright bus.
The feeling was so intense, I held my breath waiting for it. I considered changing seats, but instead, when the train stopped, I stood up and walked onto the platform. I told myself that I would get on the next one, but when it arrived, I stood in front of the doors unmoving. I was like a stone in a river as passengers streamed around me. Then the conductor called, the doors rattled shut, and I stood there watching the train curve and vanish down the track. I walked the rest of the way home.
*
No one talks about the waiting. How dull it is to get caught up in tragedy, how hungry you get. Hours pass on the bus, police tape is strung, ambulances come and go. The engine and the air conditioning are off, so the bus gathers heat and stinks like a foot. Sunlight beads on our necks. I surprise myself by getting bored. I know we were just in a shooting, but can we leave already? I take calls from friends who have somehow heard about what happened. I hang up on one local news station asking for an interview. When we are finally allowed to get off, we step carefully over the trail of blood, which runs like a ribbon twisting in the wind—widening, narrowing, sun browned, and puckered by specks of dirt. We’re instructed not to disrupt the crime scene. We’re told to leave everything behind. We stumble out, covering our eyes with our forearms, blinking in the keen summer light. We enter, unwillingly, the churning of the criminal justice system. We lose our autonomy. We’re led away like toddlers or criminals. In an alleyway, while the bomb squad pulls our luggage from the undercarriage and a mechanical arm picks through our wadded underwear, we press ourselves into a thread of shade against the building. We’re given bottles of water and crackers, and after someone asks, we’re escorted to a mechanics shop to use the restroom.
Another bus is summoned. We move from the alley to the air-conditioned interior with delight, but we are still not allowed to leave. We have to be processed first. A detective with a black notepad invites us out one by one to give statements. He’s like a caricature of a detective, curt as a French waiter. His face says “get on with it” so his mouth doesn’t have to. He rattles through questions from his black notebook. Mostly I nod or say, “I don’t know. I didn’t see.” Which is true, and, running through his questions, I realize precisely how little I saw. I didn’t even see the gunman. He was nothing but a voice and a shape indicated by a shower of bullets. Instead, I tell him about moving seats, about the girl on the phone with her mother, about the ribbon of blood. I tell him about the police officer skidding into the parking lot and firing. Did he write that down? None of it is useful to the detective. He lets me go back into the air conditioning.
On board another cop is explaining to the crowd that we might be asked to testify. If we’re called, he says, with false cheer, it will be all expenses paid, free flight, free room and board. I’m wondering who would want that, when a girl raises her hand like we’re in class and asks, “What hotel?”
*
The first time it happened was the worst, but not the most spectacular. I had no idea what was going on. The volume on the world seemed to get turned down, and I was suddenly convinced that I was going to pass out, or vomit, or drop dead right there on the stop. I was worried about what was happening, and equally worried about making a scene. It was summertime, twilight, and I was eating dinner on a patio with friends. No one noticed that I’d stopped talking. People kept on with their conversations. I could barely understand what they were saying, their words were so muted by my internal panic. That’s what it was, I would later identify: a panic attack. It’s so obvious when it’s over. That first attack hadn’t even been that bad, but they got worse.
Another evening, in the throes of a wicked hangover, one that left the world shimmering around its edges like a migraine, it happened. I’m at a Mexican restaurant with friends. I play it cool, try to breathe, but by the time we’re back at their place, playing video games from the homey comfort of their living room, it has become unbearable. I step onto the back deck. It’s winter in the Midwest. I take huge, swallowing gulps of the ice-crusted air. I lean over my knees and pant like a marathon runner. I’ve never been so aware of the circumference of my lungs, their cubic volume and tensile strength. I strain my diaphragm for more.
Back inside, I say, I feel like I’m having a heart attack, but I’m pretty sure I’m just panicking. Strange how both things can feel categorically true. Strange how there is no solution in admitting it. Yes, I feel like I’m dying, don’t worry, though, I’m definitely just overreacting, but also what if I’m not? No one is sure what to do, and I stand there feeling ridiculous and alarmed, until someone puts me to bed like a child. A friend puts their hand on my back and mutters to me in a soothing voice until the episode has passed, and I feel at home, and it seems impossible that in fact the world can be so sweet.
It was hard to believe that this was panic-induced, even if I had all the typical symptoms. Some days a portion of my face would feel as if I were contorting, as if it weren’t my face at all, and to assimilate this feeling I’d become convinced I was having a stroke—my anxiety always crystallized around the medical. I would suddenly feel like my throat was closing, like my body was simply going to stop, shut down like a machine switched off. I became convinced I was going crazy, and it didn’t matter that this was one of the top symptoms listed in nearly every account I read of panic attacks. My brain could wiggle out of any logic. If my chest hurt, it couldn’t be panic but a heart attack—it is cruel how similar the two feel.
No one talks about the waiting. How dull it is to get caught up in tragedy, how hungry you get.Psychosomatic: usually just a polite way to call something faked. But when I rush to the hospital after another attack a nurse tells me with sympathy that she’s seen patients pass out from panic attacks. The problem might begin in the mind, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t real effects on the body. Somatic—of the body—is at least half the word, an important and coequal player to psycho—of the mind. Why do we privilege the body with the real, and burden the mind with the imagined? People have reported losing their sight and their hearing from anxiety alone, even though there was nothing wrong with their eyes or ears. Perhaps it has to do with demonstrability: you can see the burn, the cut, the cast around a broken bone. What you can’t see is the panic, the depression, the numbness. Perhaps in this way passing out, losing your sight, watching your arms go numb and twist into a contorted claw, is the mind’s way of proving its pain, demonstrating it in the language of the body.
I am in the hospital specifically because my arms have gone completely numb for no apparent reason. I would marvel at this if it weren’t so terrifying. Now, nurses are pulling the cellophane backs off suction cups for an EKG and drawing my blood. One of them is very young. She’s in training; another, older nurse, stands behind her. The younger one keeps staring at the well of my elbow, its delicate tracing of veins, like she’s trying to remember her grocery list. She taps my bicep with two fingers to stimulate the blood, but she hasn’t yet put the rubber tourniquet on. Normally, I wouldn’t mind her blundering attempts, but when she looks over her shoulder at the other nurse for encouragement, I spiral back into panic. “Can you just do it?” I say to the older nurse.
A doctor eventually comes in and prescribes me hydroxyzine—an antihistamine —to make me drowsy. I don’t understand what good this is supposed to do, but I try it anyway. It does make me drowsy, so now I’m drowsy and anxious, and still can’t sleep. I lie in bed for hours watching television and counting the beats of my heart. After a second trip to the hospital, I’m given Sertraline. This is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, the doctor explains, meaning nothing to me. I start off with half a tablet, which I crack in half by hand. The drug cuts my libido and makes my eyes bullet heavy; it doesn’t seem to help with my anxiety, but a friend suggests I keep a notebook of my feelings. “It’s hard to evaluate something that’s directly affecting your brain,” she says. My records are spotty, the results inconclusive.
*
Finally, we are released into a small parking lot. Our parents are waiting for us along with a small cadre of journalists. I’m able to hug my mother who cries into my shoulder, before my father drags me away for several interviews he’s volunteered me for with local news stations. “I don’t want to do this,” I say clearly, but it’s too late. There’s a stampede of reporters, and then I’m stuck. They have film equipment like miniature artillery. A TV personality with big hair and teeth like Chiclets gum is already sticking a microphone in my face.
Their questions are practiced and cynical: What happened? How did you feel? Who called 911? Was a passenger shot? Were you afraid? I know I am being baited for a sound bite, already slotted into a montage of shattered glass, blood stains, police tape. It’s awkward and embarrassing to have the floodgates of local media unleashed on me at once, all its mechanics laid bare. I feel protective of the story. Like somehow it is getting overworked, contaminated. I want to stop touching it, getting my fingerprints all over its pristine surface. I’ve already repeated the story over the phone to my parents, to the detective, now to the media, too. They want to take and shape it for their purpose; they want to shape it into something cheap and familiar. But I’m changing the story, too. Already, I realize how each time I recall the memory I lose a little piece of it. Remembering isn’t reinhabiting, it’s reconstructing, each memory a memory of what happened compounded with the memory of all the times I’ve had to reconstruct the original memory.
Will you be afraid of the people around you from now on? one especially shameless reporter asks. He hasn’t gotten what he wants yet. “There are dangers around every corner,” I snap, self-righteously, “we cannot be afraid of the people who surround us.” I want to punish him for the question, its inanity and transparent motives. I want him to stop talking, to be left alone. I want to shout: Do you really think I’m that stupid? But I guess I am. He’s getting exactly what he wants: a victim, a story.
For several months, I avoid the clip. I don’t want to see myself, how gaunt I looked, how young, how vulnerable. A lock of hair is pasted over my forehead with sweat. Finally, I give in and watch the clip. I keep the sound off. I don’t want to hear my voice, which I know will sound high and uncanny, which I will hate in equal parts for its alienness as its familiarity. Sound on or off: it doesn’t matter. I know what I’m saying, and I hate, too, that I cannot live up to my own words, that when a new bus arrived, I forfeited my ticket. I had been planning on traveling back to Chicago that night, but when the muffler fell off the back of the replacement bus like some gangrenous limb, something broke. That sharp slap of metal against asphalt, innocuous as it was, rattled around in my head, and I decided instead to spend the night at my parents’ house and drive back in the morning.
*
There’s a hairline fracture running through the center of this story. I don’t know what to make of it, but it won’t leave me alone. The gun wasn’t real. It was an airsoft toy spray-painted to look like the real thing. It shattered when stuck by a real bullet, a plastic hail against the pavement. It means that the only real harm was introduced from the outside, that the only real bullets were the bullets of police officers arriving at the scene. It also means that our fear was in the end our greatest danger, and that for a moment two things were true at once—the gun was both a toy and a mortal danger—like Schrodinger’s thought experiment and we are the cat. I’m bothered by this but have trouble saying exactly why. I am tempted to make a symbol out of the gun—for everything that seems threatening but isn’t, for all the ways we invite our own destruction—but symbolically is the worst way to interpret the world, and even a fake gun can call up real violence. I’m left dissatisfied no matter which way I try to twist the logic of it, like a joke or a riddle that gestures toward an answer but refuses to gel into one.
“Toy weapon” is a common phrase in the Post’s article. It is even one of the categories you can sort by. Nearly 200 of the 5,233 police killings included some mention of toy weapons, and it is just one of the many items used to justify deadly force. Others include pellet guns, BB guns, screwdrivers, metal pipes, rocks, Tasers, baseball bats, shovels, chairs, chains, wasp spray, pieces of wood, gardening tools, bar stools, flashlights, buckets, walking sticks, wrenches, beer bottles, hose nozzles, broom handles, and batons. The exact limit between toy and weapon begins to thin and rupture.
“I’m not terribly afraid of the police being afraid of me,” a friend of mine, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder, writes on his blog. “I’m white, and small. I don’t own any weapons and even my worst psychotic episodes have not involved armed threats of violence against officers or anybody else. But I’m afraid that I’ll need help and call the police, or that I’ll need help and somebody else will call the police and I’ll act strangely, or refuse to calm down, or run away, and wind up dead.” Schizophrenia presents a peculiar problem, in that a psychotic break can sometimes be threatening and very often appears threatening, even when there is no real danger. And one of the most disturbing trends in the stories I collected from the Post’s reporting was how often people were calling for help, either for themselves or someone else, before the victim was shot.
I kept a running list of these cases. There was the thirty-year-old Green Bay man who was shot in his apartment after his mother called the police to request a welfare check on her son. He had called her earlier in the day to apologize to her for being such a disappointment. There was an Arizona man who shouted, “I bet I can outdraw you!” to police after they responded to his 911 call. He was shot six times and later died. There was also the forty-one-year-old white man who was shot after his mother called the Ardmore police because her son was suicidal and had ingested rat poison. And the twenty-five-year-old Black man in Miami Gardens was shot after his mother called 911 because he was standing outside in the cold in nothing but his underwear, holding a broom handle. There was the twenty-four-year-old Bloomington man, and the forty-seven-year-old Denham Springs man, and the thirty-six-year-old Kennewick man, all shot by police after their mothers called 911 concerned that their sons were suicidal: He said he wanted to die. He said he wanted the police to shoot him. The pattern—suicide . . . mother . . . police . . . death—was heartbreaking in both its consistency and irony: the mothers who populated these stories were almost always seeking help, and their sons always wound up dead.
This is one way of saying that fear nests within other fears, is encircled by it. A tautology. A series of concentric circles.
What did Arsenio fear? I don’t know exactly. Even he has trouble articulating this. But there was fear in his voice as he raged at the entrance of the bus. What did he want? He demanded the keys to the bus, and when the driver said the bus doesn’t have keys he demanded his wallet, his rings, and the bracelet on his wrist. He wanted—needed—to get out of state, no matter how illogical this desire might have been.
I did not hear any of this. The bus driver recounted his experience, as we sat together on our air-conditioned bus in the alleyway. But I can still hear Arsenio’s voice screaming at the bottom of the stairwell. It’s a noise that sounds first like anger, then like fear, and then like pain.
I followed his story as well as I could as it wound its way through the court system. For two years he was housed in a state penitentiary waiting to be sentenced. There he claimed he was not receiving adequate medication, and there he once threw a cup of urine on a guard—a fact that was brought up in his eventual sentencing. He was finally sent to a state psychiatric clinic with a two-and-a-half-year sentence and five years of probation. A probation period that could easily turn into another eight years of incarceration.
I don’t know where he went after his two years. For a while I could see his record in a database of Ohio inmates, but the trail went dead when he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. He would be out by now. The day he boarded the bus and demanded the driver hand over the keys, he was trying to get to Indianapolis. Maybe he made it—to Indy or whatever brighter future that city represented for him.
*
When does fear end? Not all at once. The popular myth of tragedy is that it’s transformative, life affirming. The arc calls for some resolution: I take a pill that neutralizes my anxiety, I visit a specialist who unlocks a hidden chamber in my brain, I spend my tax return on a one-way flight to Santiago and spend two months drying out in the maids’ quarters of someone’s house. Or maybe I do manage to dig myself out through research and sheer will. Maybe reading about people brutalized by police transforms fear into empathy—the process as its own product. The most honest answer is also the least satisfying: all of this happens to some extent or another, but none of these are the flipped switch or the tidy conclusion I’m looking for. One day, I get on a bus and am no longer as anxious as I used to be.
Still, I’m compelled to reach for some resolution, some connective tissue between Arsenio’s experience and mine. How is schizophrenia like fear? There are overlaps: the impossibility he must have felt in expressing his illogical needs to a logical world; the difficulty in describing PTSD, with its sudden triggers and magical thinking, to anyone who is not inside my head; the breakdown of language to convey either of our experiences; the fear. But really, they are not like one another. I know little about Arsenio’s suffering, and he knows little about mine. Maybe that’s true for all of us. Maybe we fail to understand anything but the crudest edges of each other’s experiences. And maybe none of that has anything to do with living in the world with one another. Maybe we do not have to understand to work toward what’s best for someone else.
The bus route connecting Columbus and Chicago has since been closed for lack of popularity. I no longer live there anyway. Sometimes I still jump when an air conditioning unit purrs to life on an empty street, when a steel plate collides with the pavement. I am left red-faced and sweating. There are days when I feel nervous boarding a bus, but these days are fewer and fewer. Sometimes I still wake up shouting, or dream that I or a friend has been shot on street corners or in convenience stores. It’s never a bus for some reason, and there are never enough paper towels.
____________________________________________________
“Exit Wounds” by Jonathan Gleason, reprinted with the permission of the New England Review. Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan Gleason.
]]>Meet Neon, the game’s newest agent who can move as fast as lightning, shoot sparks, and create what seems to be walls of energy (or fire) based on the newest trailer dropped by VALORANT on their YouTube channel. The almost-three-minute trailer gives players a sneak peek at the new character’s moves and personality, and we just can’t help but pin-point all the #ProudlyPinoy elements in the video:
As any Filipino should, Agent Neon speaks Filipino! Within the first minute of the trailer, you’ll already hear her sigh “Hay, buhay! (Sigh, such is life!)” – a typical phrase Filipinos like to say when we’re faced with challenges, bored, or tired (or all of the above). After getting hit, she even kept murmuring “Kontrolado ko ‘to (I’m in control)” before going berserk!
Hearing these made us wonder what Filipino phrases could possibly get added into the game. That would be cool, right?
According to the video’s description, Neon is Manila-born but we can’t help but notice how much she loves the beach… just like any Manila girl who wants to escape city life. She has tropical plants on every corner, a photo of a dog on the beach, and a video of a sun setting by the beach. We love her aesthetic!
Too early to say but my bet is that she’s probably a basketball fan who frames her idol’s jersey just like how we go all out when we fangirl over athletes in the Philippines. A blue Pilipinas 5 jersey also hints that she could be a Gilas Pilipinas Norwood or Tenorio fan. Neon even has a basketball and a hoop inside her room.
Plus, spot a second jersey with a “Bonifacio 19” print on her bed! Can’t wait to see how she’s going to dunk her way into battle.
In case you haven’t noticed: Neon is a strong morena girl who needs no gluta. Her awesome look was created by Riot Games game designer Ryan Cousart.
Aside from Filipino-Australian singer Ylona Garcia’s “Entertain Me” on full blast, Neon also has Ylona’s posters on the wall. That’s something a true fan would do and boy, agent Neon sure knows who to stan!
Filipinos are known for being great singers and performers and no chore can stop us from singing our hearts out. In Neon’s case, she can use anything as her microphone – from her toothbrush to her vacuum cleaner. Someone give her a karaoke with microphone, please.
Despite having a vacuum cleaner, Neon still has a walis tambo – a whisk broom made of reeds, that is very visible as you walk through the door. She sure knows her roots!
A Pinoy character deserves a Pinoy voice actor, so Riot Games got talented voice actor Vanille Velasquez onboard. According to one of Velasquez’s recent Twitter posts, Riot Games even gave her “almost free reign in improvising Tagalog for Neon”.
We can’t wait to see Neon sprint onto the scene soon! We’ll hear more from Agent 19 once she officially gets added into the game on January 11, 2022. For now, did we miss any other Filipino element from the trailer? Let us know in the comments section below!
For updates on our latest discoveries within (and outside) the Metro, don’t forget to follow Manila Millennial on Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram. Keep safe, everyone!
]]>LOST IN THE STRANGE, DIMLY LIT CAVE OF TIME
I live in Hamburg. I have a German passport. My place of birth lies past distant, unfamiliar mountains. Twice a week, I go running along the Elbe River I know so well, and an app counts the miles I’ve put behind me. I can barely imagine how someone could get lost here.
I am a fan of Hamburger SV. I own an expensive racing bike that I practically never ride because I’m afraid someone will steal it. I recently took a visit to the botanical garden, sur-rounded by stuff in bloom. I asked a guy wearing all green and a name tag if there was a sorb-apple tree in the garden. No, he said, but there are plenty of interesting cactuses.
People occasionally ask me if I feel at home in Germany. I alternate between saying yes and saying no. They rarely mean it to be exclusionary. They justify the question, saying: “Please don’t take it the wrong way, my cousin married a Czech.”
Dear Alien Registration Office, I was born in Yugoslavia on March 7, 1978, a rainy night. Since August 24, 1992, a rainy day, I have lived in Germany. I’m a polite person. I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable just because I’m not Czech. I say: “Isn’t Bratislava beautiful?” Then I say: “Hey, is that Axl Rose from Guns N’ Roses?” and when the person I’m talking to looks, I turn into a German butterfly and flutter away.
My three-year-old son is playing in a front yard near our apartment. The neighbors say that the owner doesn’t like seeing children in his yard. A cherry tree is growing there. The cherries are ripe. We pick them together. My son was born in Hamburg. He knows that a cherry has a pit, a Kirsche has a Kern, and that a Kern is also a košpica and a Kirsche is also a trešnja.
I was shown cherry trees in Oskoruša. One man showed me his bear fur, another his smokehouse. One woman talked on the phone to her grandson in Austria and then tried to sell me a cellphone. Gavrilo showed me his scar, which looked like giant teeth had made it. There were some things I wanted to see and hear, others not so much.
When I asked Gavrilo how he’d gotten his giant scar, he handed me a few blackberries and tried to give me a piglet as a present, and far up above, in the mountains, a story hissed and spit and it started like this:
Far up above, in the mountains…
The story begins with a farmer named Gavrilo, no, with a rainy night in Višegrad, no, with my grandmother who has dementia, no. The story begins with the world being set alight by the addition of stories.
Another one! Another one!
I’ll take more stabs at it and find a lot more endings. I know how I work. My stories just wouldn’t be mine without digressions. Digression is my mode of writing. My Own Adventure.
You find yourself in the strange, dimly lit cave of time. One passageway curves downward, the other leads up-ward. It occurs to you that the one leading down may go to the past and the one leading up may go to the future. Which one do you decide to take?
I have a hard time concentrating. I am reading about dementia and snakebite poisoning in the Eppendorf University Clinic library. A medical student is sitting across from me holding index cards with illustrations of organs. She spends a lot of time on the liver.
Gavrilo handed me another schnapps.
I offer the medical student a hazelnut wafer but she doesn’t want a hazelnut wafer. A tiny impulse, the idea of an idea, is enough to make me lose what is happening in the main event—now a memory, here a myth, there a single remembered word.
Poskok.
The non-main event gains weight and soon seems indispensable; the snake looks down at me from its tree and into me from my childhood; the remembered word, the semantic panic, I choose the passageway leading down and just like that I am thirty years younger, a boy in Višegrad. It’s summer, a summer in the restlessly dreaming eighties before the war, and Mother and Father are dancing.
A PARTY!
A party for Father and Mother in the garden under the cherry tree. Music is playing on the porch as Mother twirls under Father’s arm. The radio is playing for them. I’m there, but the party is not for me and means nothing to me. I hear the mu-sic and don’t understand what my parents understand. I sweep the porch. I sweep the porch with a child’s broom that doesn’t sweep very well. It’s missing the most important thing, it’s missing what makes a broom a broom: the plastic “bristles” are too far apart from one another. Anything smaller than a cherry slips through them. I scrape along the porch in time to music not meant for me.
The dog barks at my parents, jumping around their legs. It’s not our dog. Our only pets are birds prone to melancholy and hamsters quick to die. The dog was here yesterday too. My parents act like they don’t notice him, or at least don’t take him seriously. He gives up and turns his attention to something hopping along in the grass.
My parents are moving in a way that makes me not want to hang around them. I let the broom drop with a deliberate crash. They keep dancing.
I follow the wandering dog to the field where the Roma have set up their stands and bumper cars and merry-go-round. The dog sniffs at some bushes. It’s boring.
My parents showed affection to each other less often than they did toward me.
A few hours before my parents started dancing, Father had wanted to explain to me how canalization worked. He dropped a little red wooden ball into the drainage canal and we ran to the spot in the river where he thought the ball would have to come out again—an opening in the dike. We ran fast, Father and I. It was great, running somewhere together at top speed so that we wouldn’t miss what was going to happen.
Someone was fishing from the dike. Hook and bobber on his hat. Father slowed down, stopped, and, still out of breath, started chatting with the fisherman. I still remember thinking: No, it can’t be! He can’t just be abandoning what we came here for. If nothing else, his own heavy breathing must remind him!
I said something. I pointed to the world. I said: “Father . . . The ball!” Father raised his arm.
I squatted. The men got louder. The fisherman’s name was Kosta. Kosta and Father argued and laughed. Maybe that’s what Father wanted to teach me: that you can have friendly joking and bitter cursing on a Saturday by the river. But I knew that al-ready. It would have been something new if Father’s belligerence had grown to the point of pushing the other man into the river.
Push him, Father! I thought. I had half a mind to do it myself. The stupid little bell on the line tinkled, the man went to work and caught something.
We wouldn’t find the red ball. I wanted to throw another one in. Father stroked my hair.
Back home he did push-ups (thirty-three) in the yard, fell asleep, woke up, took off his shirt, mowed the lawn, sent me for the newspaper, read. Father read and sweated, his neck hairs sticking to his skin.
He called me over to read me something. He was already furious again. Maybe he wanted to share his anger, same as with the fisherman. Some people from some academy in Ser-bia had written something or other. I didn’t understand every-thing Father said. For example, I didn’t understand the word “memorandum.” I understood “serious crisis,” but not what the crisis was. I knew the word “genocide” from school, but here it wasn’t being applied to Jasenovac, it was about Kosovo. “Protest” and “demonstrations” I sort of understood, and I could also picture what “prohibition of assembly” meant. I just didn’t know why the demonstrating and assembling were prohibited, and whether Father thought that was good or bad. I understood “riots.”
I had questions. Father, a calm man, was crumpling the newspaper and screaming, “Unbelievable!” I didn’t ask any of my questions.
He clambered up the cherry tree and back down it. He dug a hole and shoveled the dirt back into it. He turned on the radio and found music. The screen door rattled and Mother slipped out of the house as if called into existence by the tune. My parents hugged each other. Mother fell into Father’s arms so naturally that it was like they’d agreed to it beforehand. They danced and Father wasn’t mad anymore—it didn’t go together, everything else goes with anger but not hugging and dancing.
At the fairground: I call the dog’s name. I pet the dog. I ask the dog: Whose dog are you? His quick tongue is orange. The dog finds a piece of fabric in the bushes, blue and white and
We wouldn’t find the red ball. I wanted to throw another one in. Father stroked my hair.
Back home he did push-ups (thirty-three) in the yard, fell asleep, woke up, took off his shirt, mowed the lawn, sent me for the newspaper, read. Father read and sweated, his neck hairs sticking to his skin.
He called me over to read me something. He was already furious again. Maybe he wanted to share his anger, same as with the fisherman. Some people from some academy in Serbia had written something or other. I didn’t understand every-thing Father said. For example, I didn’t understand the word “memorandum.” I understood “serious crisis,” but not what the crisis was. I knew the word “genocide” from school, but here it wasn’t being applied to Jasenovac, it was about Kosovo. “Pro-test” and “demonstrations” I sort of understood, and I could also picture what “prohibition of assembly” meant. I just didn’t know why the demonstrating and assembling were prohibited, and whether Father thought that was good or bad. I understood “riots.”
I had questions. Father, a calm man, was crumpling the newspaper and screaming, “Unbelievable!” I didn’t ask any of my questions.
He clambered up the cherry tree and back down it. He dug a hole and shoveled the dirt back into it. He turned on the radio and found music. The screen door rattled and Mother slipped out of the house as if called into existence by the tune. My parents hugged each other. Mother fell into Father’s arms so naturally that it was like they’d agreed to it beforehand. They danced and Father wasn’t mad anymore—it didn’t go together, everything else goes with anger but not hugging and dancing.
At the fairground: I call the dog’s name. I pet the dog. I ask the dog: Whose dog are you? His quick tongue is orange. The dog finds a piece of fabric in the bushes, blue and white and red, like the flag. Unbelievable, I whisper. The dog smells like freshly mown grass. I bore the dog.
A boy whistles through his teeth. The dog breaks free and runs to answer the summons. The boy is my age, and right away I know that he can do lots of things I can’t. He waves me over. He performs for me. He walks on his hands. I turn away, I’ve seen enough. Everything else he has to show me I can just as well imagine, I console myself in my cowardice.
I slink home. Father and Mother are not in the yard any-more. On the radio, two men are speaking seriously to each other, then they both laugh, like Father and the man by the river. It’s like everything can be everything at once, serious and funny, furious and dancing.
What are the chickens doing? The chickens are hanging around in the summer. I peek between the boards into the hen-house. Rays of sunlight slice through the air. I go in, thinking I’ll look for eggs. Sitting on the platform is the snake.
What do you say to a snake?
“Prohibition of assembly,” I whisper. The snake raises its head. It smells in the henhouse the way it always does. The radio is talking about the weather. High of ninety-five. The snake slithers down from the platform.
“Protest!” I shout. Or: “Poskok!”
Father yanks me out of the henhouse. I struggle, as if he were trying to hurt me. Father’s blue faded jeans. Mother puts her hands on my shoulders and turns me to face her, trying to make me look at her. So now she’s dancing with me. What I actually want to look at, though, is: Father versus the snake.
Don’t be scared, Mother says.
I’m not scared of any snake!
Father brings the rock from the garden. Father, on the threshold of the henhouse, raises the rock above his head. He walks in, trying to get closer to the snake, and the snake is trying to do something too, probably get out. It had it good before we showed up. It flows toward the door, toward Father, is it about to jump? Father takes a step back and the radio plays more dance music.
Father shows me the dead snake.
I ask if I can hold it.
I hold the snake, and think: This isn’t a snake anymore. Father is Father, covered with dust. It would have been so great to find the red wooden ball.
The snake is heavier and warmer than I’d imagined. Holding it like this is like not knowing what to say.
“Were you scared?” Father asks.
Why is everyone always talking about being scared?
“Were you?” I ask back.
“It wasn’t too bad,” Father says. He wipes his brow with the back of his hand and then wipes his mouth. Dust and sweat. I can’t help but think: Disgusting.
Father says, “Poskok. It jumps at your throat and sprays poi-son in your eyes.” He pinches my cheek, and then takes Mother’s hand.
That was my parents’ last dance before the war. Or the last I witnessed. I never saw them dance in Germany either.
Father washed himself off with the garden hose. I dug a grave for the snake. It’s still there: poskok. Unbelievable.
_____________________________________________________
Excerpted from Where You Come From: A Novel by Saša Stanišić. Published by Tin House. Copyright © 2019 by Luchterhand Literaturverlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, München, Germany. English Translation Copyright © 2021 by Damion Searls.
In a type of neoclassical painting one might call The Apotheosis of X, the dead hero is bundled up to heaven by a host of angels, usually in a windswept tumult of robes, wings and clouds. A crowd of grieving mortals watches from below. It’s a celestial scramble: in Rubens’ sumptuous Apotheosis of James I, heaven is chaos and James looks terrified at having arrived.
In Barralet’s Apotheosis of George Washington, the dead president has his arms outstretched in a crucified pose, while Father Time and the angel of immortality bear him up to heaven. In a mid-1860s Apotheosis, a freshly assassinated Lincoln joins Washington in the sky, and clings to him in a tight hug. In Fragonard’s Apotheosis of Benjamin Franklin, the new god reaches back to earth with one hand while a stern angel, grasping his other hand, drags him upward.
In 1785, in a Covent Garden theater, a spectacle premiered depicting Captain James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific. During the final scene of Omai, or A Trip Around the World, at the words “Cook, ever honour’d, immortal shall live!” an enormous oil painting descended from the ceiling—Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Apotheosis of Captain Cook, commissioned for the occasion. Cook is carried up to heaven by the angels Britannia and Fame, but his gaze is directed back at the vertiginous earth, where ships and canoes are facing off in Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay. His expression is queasy and his eyes seem to plead: “Don’t drop me!”
*
On his third voyage, on the quest to find the Northwest Passage, Captain Cook had begun to drown in some unseen, interior deluge. He sank into a black mood, lost touch with reality, and inflicted punishments on his crew at the slightest whim. He paced the deck and flew into rages that the sailors called heivas, after a Tahitian stomping dance. He spread terror across the islands, torching entire villages and carving crosses into natives’ flesh in revenge for petty crimes. Even before he became a god Captain Cook had staked out the true space of divinity: violence, of the arbitrary kind. After weeks at sea, as supplies of food and water began to run low, his ship the Resolution sighted a paradisal shore. Rather than landing, Cook insisted, for no reason at all, that they keep sailing, interminably, around the coast. As the unhinged captain circled the island, the year turned from 1778 to 1779. Eyes watched from the beach.
When on January 17th, the Resolution cast anchor at last in a black-sand bay, a crowd of 10,000 gathered to await it. Five hundred canoes, laden with sugar cane, breadfruit and pigs, glided up to the ship. Histories narrate that for the people of Hawaii, the arrival of Captain Cook was no less than an epiphany. “The men hurried to the ship to see the god with their own eyes,” wrote the 19th-century Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau. “There they saw a fair man with bright eyes, a high-bridged nose, light hair, and handsome features. Good-looking gods they were!” An elderly, emaciated priest went on board the Resolution and led the deities ashore. Thousands fell to their knees as Cook passed by. The priest led the captain to a thatched temple, wrapped Cook in a red cloth, and sacrificed a small pig to him, as the people recited lines from the Hawaiian epic Kumulipo, a creation myth.
According to the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, among others, Cook’s arrival marked an extraordinary coincidence. A ritual known as the Makahiki was taking place on Hawaii at the time, in which the god Lono is said to reappear from the distant land of his exile, and to seize power over the earth from the king, for a period of time. As it circled the island in a clockwise direction, the Resolution had inadvertently traced the path of the effigy of Lono as it was borne in a procession around the coast. The idol is made of a pole and crosspiece with white cloth hanging from it, resembling a sail. And Cook, as if following the script of a myth he could not have known, had landed in the bay said to be the god’s home. His sailors reported that the captain was hailed variously as Lono, Orono, Rono, Eroner—“a Character that is looked upon by them as partaking something of divinity,” the ship’s surgeon related, echoing a Biblical phrase describing Christ. Another word used to greet Cook was akua, a Hawaiian term that was translated as “god.”
The Hawaiians fashioned a special idol in Cook’s honor, recorded the sailor Heinrich Zimmermann, but using “white feathers instead of red.” The mariner John Ledyard wrote that the natives “observed that the color of our skins partook of… the white from the moon and stars,” and concluded that the strangers must have some connection with the heavenly bodies. The white men remained on the island for three weeks. They dismantled part of the temple at Hikiau for firewood, and turned the rest into an observatory housing their astronomical equipment, which they would take out, now and then, to stare up at the sky. Each day the priests ceremoniously presented the British with a barbequed hog. The people would gather all the fruits of their land—sweet potatoes, coconuts, bananas and taro—for these gods from a heaven where food had run out.
Another word used to greet Cook was akua, a Hawaiian term that was translated as “god.”
Can one become trapped, unaware, inside another’s myth? During the Makahiki festival, after the Lono effigy has sailed around the island, a ritual is performed known as kali’i, meaning “to strike the king,” in which Lono and the king fight a theatrical sham battle. According to Sahlins, Captain Cook continued, unwittingly, to perform the Makahiki script. On February 3rd, the Resolution departed Hawaii to continue its explorations in the north, yet was struck by a severe storm and forced to turn back. When the British anchored again in Kealakekua Bay, eight days after they had departed, a fog of suspicion and hostility settled over the island as the people attempted to discern the strangers’ reason for returning. The tension soon erupted into violence; two Hawaiian chiefs were killed, and Cook decided to take the king, Kalaniʻōpuʻu, hostage. When the captain waded ashore, hundreds of warriors fell upon him with iron daggers and clubs.
Following Cook’s death, the captain was accorded the traditional rituals for a vanquished chief. His corpse was dismembered, his flesh roasted, and his bones separated and portioned out, with his lower jaw going to Kalaniʻōpuʻu, his skull to somebody else, and so on. Among Cook’s sailors, who had fled back to the Resolution, “a general silence ensued,” wrote the officer George Gilbert; it was “like a Dream that we could not reconcile ourselves to.” A pair of priests rowed to the ship with a bundle containing a large chunk of the captain’s thigh.
Along with their charred offering, they brought with them “a most extraordinary question.” They wished to know when Captain Cook would return to the vessel “and resume his former station.” Would it be in—a very Christlike estimate—“three days’ time?” The two men “shed abundance of tears at the loss of the Erono,” Lieutenant James King recorded, and they asked, “what he would do to them when he return’d.” On shore, other islanders “asserted that he would return in two months & begged our mediation with him in their favor,” according to midshipman James Trevenan. The German sailor Zimmermann recorded a prophecy: “The god Cook is not dead but sleeps in the woods and will come tomorrow,” as translated by an interpreter. Over the following years, the idea seemed to persist that Cook would resurrect.
According to the sailor Edward Bell, who visited the bay in 1793, Captain Cook’s death had become the definitive frame for the Hawaiian sense of time. “The Natives seem to consider that melancholy transaction as one of the most remarkable events in their History,” Bell wrote, and reported that they use it as a date to assist their calendrical calculations. “They still in speaking of him style him the Orono and if they are to be believ’d, most sincerely regret his fate.” The accounts by later British travelers to Hawaii emphasize the surprise and guilt felt by the islanders at Cook’s death, as if they had imagined it to be a play, with no consequence. “The natives had no idea that Cook could possibly be killed, as they considered him a supernatural being, and were astonished when they saw him fall,” reported the English explorer William Mariner in 1806; despite having killed him, “they esteem him as having been sent by the gods to civilize them.”
These stories, told and retold over generations, ignore one obvious fact: Cook was killed because he acted rashly and violently, slaughtering chiefs, kidnapping the king, and giving the impression the British had returned to conquer the island. The fur trader James Colnett, who arrived in Hawaii in 1791, reported that ever since the British first appeared, the islanders had been constantly at war and devastated by strange, unknown illnesses, all of which they attributed to Cook’s revenge. Two volcanoes had awakened and burned night and day, the work, they contended, of the vengeful god. “They made strict enquiry of me, if ever he would come back again, and when I saw him last,” Colnett wrote.
*
When the first missionaries arrived in Hawaii from New England in 1820, they used the cautionary tale of Captain Cook as a potent parable. “How vain, rebellious, and at the same time contemptible, for a worm”—meaning Cook—“to presume to receive religious homage and sacrifices from the stupid and polluted worshippers of demons,” thundered Hiram Bingham, the Calvinist leader of the first evangelical mission. After six months at sea, the Calvinists anchored at the archipelago, and found it beset by the “thickest heathenism,” its sun-drenched landscapes masking terrible despair. Viruses introduced by the British were killing off entire families and villages, and survivors had taken to drinking themselves to death.
The great Kamehameha, founder and first king of the newly unified Kingdom of Hawaii, had died the previous year, and his son had recently abolished the tabu system, the strict codes that had structured daily life for centuries, and which had unraveled in the wake of the British arrival. A crisis of faith seemed to grip the islands, as temples fell into ruin and the totems of the old gods were destroyed. “The nation, without a religion, was waiting for the law of Jehovah,” according to one early missionary. The Calvinists blamed the rampant disease and malaise on the Hawaiians’ immorality, sexual promiscuity, idol worship, and on their reverencing of Cook.
Under the stern Calvinists, the Hawaiian language was alphabetized, the Bible was translated, and novel Christian concepts were mapped onto old Hawaiian words. Schools and seminaries were opened, and draconian morality laws introduced across the islands. The queen of Hawaii was among the first to convert, and much of the population followed her; a broom dipped in water baptized five thousand Hawaiians at once. The myth of Cook-as-Lono lived on in the history books and school primers the evangelists produced, a tale that perpetuated the whiteness of divinity, while simultaneously affirming that Cook and all those who worshipped him were idolators of the worst kind.
Along with their indignations, the Calvinist missionaries brought with them a novel concept of private property, simply appropriating whatever land they desired. They were, after all, apostles of a God who possesses the earth. To the LORD your God belong the heavens… the earth and everything in it, Moses had declared. Their children went on to establish enormous sugar plantations, securing international markets for their lucrative crop. “The world is to be Christianized and civilized,” the evangelist Josiah Strong would assert, capturing the mood of the century, “and what is the process of civilization but the creating of more and higher wants? Commerce follows the missionary.”
In 1840, with the looming threat of an invasion by France, Hawaii sought to clarify its ambiguous territorial status and seek nationhood. The king sent a delegation to the United States and Europe, and three years later Hawaii was officially pronounced an independent nation. However, the plantation owners, eager to sell their crop tax-free in the United States, deeply resented the prospect of Hawaiian sovereignty.
The myth of Cook-as-Lono lived on in the history books and school primers the evangelists produced, a tale that perpetuated the whiteness of divinity.
During the US Civil War, with sugar production halted in the South, the wealth of the white Hawaiian oligarchy soared, enabling it to consolidate its grip on the archipelago’s economy, from banks, utilities and steamships to local commerce and trade. Beset by illness and poverty, the native Hawaiian population had shrunk to a fifth of its former size. The industrialists deemed Hawaiian workers to be lazy and unemployable, casting them aside in favor of laborers from China and Japan whom they could pay even smaller wages. In 1893, the sugar cartel, along with a regiment of US Marines, overthrew the Hawaiian queen Lili’uokalani, in an act that even the US president at the time, Grover Cleveland, condemned as unconstitutional. The American military occupation of the archipelago had begun.
In the American press, racist cartoonists deployed their anti-black arsenal of caricatures to sketch the Hawaiian sovereign grinning as she heats a cannibal cooking pot. They claimed Lili’uokalani was the child of a “mulatto shoemaker,” who illegitimately lorded over her “heathenish” people. With such coloring, it was argued, she was clearly unfit by nature to rule. Along with the queen, the US occupiers arrested newspaper editors who supported her and clamped down on the opposition press. This meant that the only news that came out of Hawaii was delivered by the coup’s spokesmen, who announced that the queen had willingly surrendered both her kingdom and her claim to the land.
To this day, the myth that Hawaiians passively accepted the loss of their nation, without resistance, lives on. Historical accounts make little mention of the fact that some 40,000 Hawaiians petitioned against the occupation and protested in the streets. A century later, in 1993, thousands of Hawaiians marched on the queen’s former palace in Honolulu, again calling for independence. Yet the American public imagination rarely questions whether Hawaii wants to be part of the United States; there is the assumption that Hawaiians, in a distant paradise, must be content. Didn’t they venerate a white man as a god? Didn’t they prostrate themselves before him, dress him and feed him with all the fruits of their land? They killed him in a ritual but, not knowing what they had done, didn’t they, with guilty tears, impatiently await his return?
*
When news of Cook’s death finally reached London in January 1780, 11 months after the captain was killed, it was met not with a public outpouring of grief but a rather morbid fascination at the exotic details. The success of Omai, which starred alongside the Apotheosis painting 80 dancing “savages,” some in blackface, inaugurated a new European ritual of slaying Cook onstage. In 1788, the wildly popular Death of Captain Cook; A Grand Serious-Pantomimic-Ballet premiered in Paris, before going on to tour the Continent, England, and the United States.
…Lord, how you’ll look,
And stare, and clap, Oh! such a Captain Cook!
You’ll bleed when he is stabb’d, die at his fall…
By all accounts, the Ballet was violent, chaotic, “horrid,” overwrought with emotion—and a great triumph. Year after year, it was revived, and the captain’s death re-enacted, like a blood offering the imperial powers continued to make to guarantee their own ascendance. Cook was killed in Yarmouth, Bungay, Leeds and nine times in Norwich; he was bludgeoned to death in Dublin, clubbed in Quebec, speared on Greenwich Street in Manhattan and again in Charleston, South Carolina. Navy men got death-of-Cook tattoos, and aristocratic women wore dresses inspired by “the Indian who killed Capt’n Cook with His Club,” as the society diarist Mrs. Hester Thrale noted.
By the mid-19th century, P.T. Barnum would joke that the celebrated blunt instrument had multiplied itself, securing a treasured place in every museum vitrine. The poet Anna Seward heaved the captain up to heaven in her 1780 Elegy on Captain Cook, To Which is Added, An Ode to the Sun. “To put it bluntly,” wrote the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, “I doubt that the natives created their European god; the Europeans created him for them.”
An apotheosis can arise in an epiphany or in an act of prostration, and it can also happen through poetry and painting, through pantomime and translation. What word do you take for god? The Hawaiian syllables were akua, but this is misleading, for in its original sense the word could refer to any number of sacred beings, objects, or living persons—anything possessing immense power. So too with the word Lono: the crew of the Resolution was never able to figure out its precise meaning. “Sometimes they applied it to an invisible being, who, they said, lived in the heavens. We also found that it was a title belonging to a personage of great rank and power in the island,” Lieutenant King recalled. Not only Cook but the Hawaiian king, too, was greeted with shouts of “Lono!” Misinterpretations create gods.
The historian Samuel Kamakau wrote of the coming of Captain Cook in his 1866 Mo’olelo or “History,” a text widely esteemed as the authoritative “native” account. It was eventually published in English in 1961, after decades of work by a team of translators that included the 19th-century Australian-born settler and former sugar plantation worker Thomas Thrum. In the English edition, the story was heavily doctored, ostensibly to conform to “Western” standards of history-writing, as the Hawaiian scholar Noenoe Silva has shown. Before his description of the arrival of Cook, Kamakau details, over 17 pages, other foreigners who had already arrived by sea, some with pale skin, some with brown. The translators, however, omitted the entire section, transforming the narrative of the appearance of Cook and his ark into a magical, utterly unprecedented event. In the original, Kamakau emphasizes the violence, fighting, and hostage-taking that culminated in the killing of the captain, and concludes with a list.
“The fruits and seeds that Cook’s actions planted sprouted and grew, and became trees that spread to devastate the people of these islands:
1. Gonorrhea together with syphilis.
2. Prostitution.
3. The false idea that he was a god and worshipped.
4. Fleas and mosquitoes.
5. The spread of epidemic diseases.
6. Change in the air we breathe.
7. Weakening of our bodies.
8. Changes in plant life…”
“The best part of Cook’s visit was that we killed him,” the Hawaiian activist Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa writes. If man imagines that a god resembles himself, then the god, eventually, must die. Captain Cook has been killed again and again, on the beach, in the theater, on the page, but the myth of his alleged divinity lingers. With every new death, it lives on.
Deicide is on my mind. How do you kill a god, if not by bludgeoning, stabbing, piercing, splitting, dismembering, boiling, roasting, distributing? Is it through rewriting history, by exposing the machinations beneath myths, by breaking open syllables so that whatever is sacred inside spills out?
Is it by tearing down His image? In the 21st century, across New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii, statues of Captain Cook have been defaced. Strutting across a pedestal in his breeches, telescope in hand, a defaced Cook wears a spray-painted bikini; around the neck of another Cook hangs a large, canvas sign that reads, simply, Sorry. The forecast calls for more. White gods will fall like raindrops. It feels as though the heavens are about to open up.
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Adapted excerpt from Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine. Used with the permission of the publisher, Metropolitan Books. Copyright © 2021 by Anna Della Subin.
]]>With the holidays right around the corner and the looming supply chain issues, we thought it might be time to pull together a bookish gift guide. And who better to advise you on the best books to present to loved ones than some of our favorite writers? (Note: These answers were originally part of our Book Marks Questionnaire feature series.) From poetry collections and illustrated novels to guides for young writers and classic works in translation, there’s surely something for everyone here.
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Marie-Helene Bertino: Giving a book is like giving someone homework so I tend not to do it without saying: Truly, no pressure. I like giving story collections because odds are one story will emotionally appeal […] collections by Manuel Gonzales, Danielle Evans, Laura van den Berg, Lucia Berlin, Anne Carson, Helen Oyeyemi, Helen Phillips, and Thomas Morris are safe bets for enjoyment.
Danielle Evans: Lucille Clifton’s collected poems.
Melissa Broder: The Seas by Samantha Hunt to my fellow romantic obsessive dreamers and Motherhood by Sheila Heti to my fellow childless MILFs.
Tracy O’Neill: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang or Bluets by Maggie Nelson. They don’t know what hit them.
Lauren Oyler: It depends on the person! But The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt.
Emma Cline: The Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. It’s an architectural theory book but it’s so beautifully organized and considered. Or The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram—I like to give this book to writers. It’s weirdly so subtle about character and motivation and can be a really useful tool for conceptualizing motivation.
Karen Russell: Lynda Barry’s Cruddy.
T Kira Madden: I think I’ve given every friend a copy of Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, and if they don’t like it, they’re not my friend. Two birds.
Tana French: Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow. It’s a wonderful book at any time, and over the last year and a half it’s had a whole extra layer of resonance. To a large extent it’s about how people find ways to be happy, make connections, and make a difference in one another’s lives, even during the strangest, saddest and most restrictive circumstances, when their worlds have been savagely transformed almost beyond recognition. I gave it to a lot of people during lockdown.
Nicole Chung: This changes all the time, but the book I’ve gifted most in the past year is Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.
Kyle Lucia Wu: The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi.
Douglas Stuart: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
Kristen Arnett: I am obsessed with Flannery O’Connor’s letters. The Habit of Being is a book I always wind up giving to people, because I think—hear me out—that it’s tremendously funny. She is so goddamn grumpy. There is this line from one of them that she’s writing to a friend and in it she describes herself in an author photo looking like she’d just bitten her own grandmother. I swear to God, what a wild way to describe your own face. Lots of the letters are very tender, too, and there is plenty to unpack about her relationship with her mother and her friendships with women and also her relationship to her own writing. This is an underrated collection, in my opinion.
Raven Leilani: Danzy Senna’s New People.
Crystal Hana Kim: The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair and Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. For fiction, I base my gift on the receiver’s literary tastes.
Laura van den Berg: I gift Alexander Chee’s essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel all the time, especially to students.
Sarah M. Broom: I Live in Music by Ntozake Shange.
Cheslea G. Summers: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz. In the 1940s and 1950s, Frances Glessner Lee painstakingly constructed accurate reproductions of actual crime scenes, which she called the Nutshell Studies. These dollhouses were complete not only with tiny furniture and wee cunning bloodstains but also with itsy-bitsy stockings that Glessner knit with pin-sized knitting needles. The book puts lavish and loving photographs of these gory dollhouse dioramas within the context of proto-feminist work, and I live for it.
Alexandra Kleeman: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer are all books which I’ve given many times over and which contain a piece of my heart.
Leif Enger: I want to give The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa’s great 1994 novel, to everyone I know.
Héctor Tobar: Edith Grossman’s wonderful, 2003 translation of Don Quixote. I’ve handed out this book as a gift at least half a dozen times. Grossman was the translator of many of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels into English, and she brings a deft, lively touch to Cervantes’s masterpiece. When I read it, I realized just how much realism there is in Don Quixote, and how much it’s a commentary on the meanness of everyday Spanish life, and its great social and ethnic diversity.
Kerri Arsenault: Hot Cold Heavy Light by Peter Schjeldahl and anything anything anything by Natalie Ginzburg.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: Claudia Rankine, Citizen.
Rax King: I often give my fellow leftist podcaster types a copy of Zoë Heller’s The Believers, to remind us all not to be so fucking self-important. I hope you guys don’t edit out the swears for these, because to my mind that is a crucial one.
Kristen Radtke: I love giving Lynda Barry’s Syllabus to professors; it’s a beautiful homage to the craft of teaching.
Susan Minot: Last year, many copies of Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Excellent take on race in our country. Recently I’ve given The Sleeve Ought to Be Illegal, an new anthology of short essays written by a long list of people about the art collection in the Frick Museum, with pictures of course. And for a slim novel which I always want to press into peoples’ hands: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offil.
Kevin Kwan: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.
Emma Straub: The Collected George and Martha by James Marshall. I can think of no one whose life would not be improved by those two hippos.
Quan Barry: The Book of Hours by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Barrows and Macy translation. I believe Rilke was a being who understood the true nature of existence, that everything is a manifestation of the one source.
Emily Nemens: For a certain subset of editorially minded friends, Moira Kalman’s illustrated Strunk and White Elements of Style is a perfect gift. This holiday, I found myself gifting Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar.
Steph Cha: Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory. Forty unique, vibrant stories that, for the most part, take less than ten minutes to read. His second book, Tales of Falling and Flying, is equally good.
Terry Tempest Williams: Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Charles Yu: I recently gave Middle Men by Jim Gavin as a gift. Every story is so well-written, and the collection as a whole really hangs together.
Erin Morgenstern: Anything by Shaun Tan, particularly The Arrival or The Singing Bones or Tales from Outer Suburbia.
Emily Temple: I like to give Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation to people as a test. If they don’t need to be tested, they can have Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies or N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, depending on their general temperament.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine: The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, edited by Kevin Young, and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson.
Isabella Hammad: I keep telling people to read The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère. Does an insistent recommendation count as a gift? I’m not sure, but a lot of people have obeyed me…
Sarah Moss: I give different books to different people, but I think all my friends now have Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows.
R.O. Kwon: Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends.
Patricia Engel: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. My father gave it to me, and his father gave it to him.
Eley Williams: I’ve been giving copies of Lavinia Greenlaw’s Some Answers Without Questions to friends in recent months; a book that’s difficult to define, but then sometimes the best gifts are never wholly simple things. In many ways it is a memoir, but also a polemic, but also a keepsake about difficulty and exhaustion, but also a demonstration against them. It helped me recognise and take solace in attempts to find a voice or energy in times of alarm or disjuncture, and I hope handing it to others might do the same.
Bryan Washington: Bread and a Dog by Natsuko Kuwahara.
Helen Macdonald: For a while now, it’s been Elena Passarello’s Animals Strike Curious Poses.
Dave Eggers: The Mueller Report.
]]>One of the most recognizable instruments in both jug band and American folk music has got to be the washtub bass. Also known as gutbuckets, these instruments tend to use an old broom for a neck and usually have a single string.
We would argue that the design of [goaly]’s single-string double gutbucket owes something to the double bass of the violin family as well, with its figure eight shape. On top of those tubs is a plywood soundboard, which is screwed into a series of wood blocks around the lip of the tubs.
For the combination neck and fretboard, [goaly] called up a vintage Louisville Slugger, which is way more interesting than some old broom handle. [goaly] extended the backbone through the body with scrap lengths of 2″x2″, and this spine runs through both tubs and acts as a peg on the bottom. In lieu of a tailpiece, the string is tied to a board that the player secures with their foot.
Although [goaly] experimented with steel cable, clothesline rope, nylon rope, and paracord first, the string is made from weed whacker trimmer line. At the top, the string is attached through the neck — it’s held down with a couple of bent fender washers and pulled taut with a wingnut. We love that [goaly] even fashioned a wooden tool to make it easy to turn the wingnut. And we also love the DIY bridge, which looks like a little person.
There are a couple of ways to make sounds with this thing. Fretting and plucking work, of course, but so does bending the whole thing backward to change the pitch. For a good time, do both. We think it sounds nice and thump-y, and it even makes great percussive sounds on the front and back. Check it out in action after the break.
Don’t have a washtub? A wheelbarrow works too, and it comes with its own stand.
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Have you ever found yourself suddenly in need of finding a small metal object hidden in the woods? No? Well, neither have we. But we can’t say the same thing for [zaphod], who’s family was hoping to settle a dispute by finding the surveyor stakes that marked the corners of their property. It was a perfect job for a metal detector, but since they didn’t own one, a serviceable unit had to be assembled from literal garbage.
To start with, [zaphod] had to research how a metal detector actually works. After reviewing the pros and cons of various approaches, the decision was made to go with a beat frequency oscillator (BFO) circuit. It’s not the greatest design, it might even be the worst, but it could be built with the parts on hand and sometimes that’s all that matters. After packing a 2N3904 transistor, an LM386 amplifier, and every Hackaday reader’s favorite chip the 555 timer into an enclosure along with some of their closest friends, it was time to build the rest of the metal detector.
The sensor coil was made by salvaging the wire from an old fluorescent lamp ballast and winding it around the lid of a bucket lid 27 times. This was mounted to the end of a broom handle with some angle pieces made from PVC sheet material, being careful not to use any metal fasteners that would throw off the detector. With the handle of an old drill in the middle to hold onto, the metal detector was complete and actually looked the part.
So did [zaphod] save the day by finding the surveyor stakes and reconnoitering the family’s plot? Unfortunately, no. It wasn’t a technical failure though; the metal detector did appear to work, although it took a pretty sizable object to set it off. The real problem was that, after looking more closely into it, the surveyors only put down one stake unless they are specifically instructed otherwise. Since they already knew where that one was…
If your homemade metal detector can’t find something that was never there, did it really fail? Just a little something to meditate on. In any event, when even the cheapest smart bulb is packing a microcontroller powerful enough to emulate early home computers, we’re always happy to see somebody keep the old ways alive with a handful of ICs.
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