Search Results for: City Pages

Unpacking Forty Years of Fandom For a Losing Team

David Durochik / AP Photo

Kevin Sampsell | Longreads | February 2018 | 18 minutes (4,605 words)

The last time I cried about a football game was in 2009.

When I was a kid, though — oh man! The waterworks from the coiled frustration and utter heartbreak of losing a game, or ending a season with a sad thud, was often too much for me. I’m not sure what is considered normal blood pressure for junior high and high school dudes, but mine was probably pretty high.

If you’re a sports fan, you don’t need me to tell you that watching a game can elicit conflicting emotions. Some times it’s dull, others, exhilarating. It can run the gamut from mildly stressful to utterly exasperating. We tell ourselves it’s fun to watch games — whether it’s the lightning-fast college basketball Final Four, a tense knuckle-biting World Series, or even the high drama of an Olympics figure skating face-off. But is it really fun? Is watching a game, especially football with its rash of injuries and hyper-macho façade, truly enjoyable in the moment? Or do we just endure it so we can process the positive highlights later?

As a sports kid who eventually blossomed into a book nerd, I surprise a lot of people with my unflagging loyalty to a game that is often seen as barbaric, anti-intellectual, and sponsored by horrible right-wing corporations. For a long time, whenever I’d meet someone new, I wouldn’t reveal the fact that I’m a football fan right away. It was like a weird secret. I’d talk about more “intellectual” subjects: poetry, indie films, twee British music, or collage art. Often I would be looking for clues in these conversations, maybe a word or a name mentioned that would reveal that they knew what a linebacker was, or an onside kick. If I found out someone was a football fan, they would often become my new best friend, at least for a while.

I find it utterly refreshing to meet another man or woman “of arts and letters” who admires the sport like I do, and I glow inside with that feeling of camaraderie. Often though, if I slip up and admit that many of my Sundays are spent worshipping guys in full pads and helmets groping and tackling each other while rich old men tally their bank accounts in their executive suites, I am met with pained expressions and confusion. I counter that surprise by trying to illuminate my humanistic connection to the game — my love for discovering the players’ personal stories of overcoming adversity; the bonding community of fandom; the sheer unpredictable nature of all sports; and yes, indeed, the amazing beauty and skill of what these players are able to do on the field. I can still remember plays that happened decades ago and recall them as precisely as my favorite songs.
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Silicon Valley’s Spin Master

Jan Haas/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

From setting the talking points in interviews to addressing negative publicity before it leaks, an effective communications agent can help build a troubled brand and save a CEO. After doing her job in Silicon Valley for over two decades, Margit Wennmachers has helped companies like Skype, Etsy, Facebook, and Amazon shape their public identity.

For Wired, Jessi Hempel makes Wennmachers the focus of an article, instead of letting Wennmachers be the one behind the article, to describe how communications agencies shape our perception of startups and their founders, and how communications works. As tech’s old reputation changes from a group of nerdy outcasts to a greedy power center run by sexist, gentrifying capitalists, she’s now helping shape the narrative of tech itself. She’s angling for something driven by the old maxim that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Controlling the message of tech has become both easier and harder. In the early days, Wennmachers needed to hustle to put the firm’s founders at the center of tech conversations, which often happened in the pages of a short list of reputable publications. Yes, Andreessen Horowitz had a blog, but its most powerful ideas were conveyed by the traditional press. Consider Andreessen’s iconic August 2011 missive announcing that “software is eating the world,” which became the rallying cry for the generation of tech startups that followed. It was first published as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

That media ecosystem has now been upended and the path to success has changed. Wennmachers’ ability to push out a narrative no longer depends on having an editor’s ear. Andreessen Horowitz can advance its own editorial ideas through blog posts, podcasts, social media, and a newly launched YouTube channel independent of the media, connecting directly with people starting or building companies.

Its founders write frequent blog posts, and they have access to enough social channels that they no longer need a Wall Street Journal to push out their perspective. A former WIRED editor produces a regular podcast that is downloaded and listened to by a wide audience of aspiring founders, business people, policymakers, and tech enthusiasts. “The running joke of the firm is that we’re a media company that monetizes through venture capital,” Andreessen says. It’s a joke, but also an inevitable evolution of Wennmachers’ role—in which a communications lead begins to look much more like a media tycoon.

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Stewards of the Blood

A memorial for one of the four young men killed in Long Island in April 2017. The street gang MS-13 has been blamed for the deaths. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

 

Caille Millner | Michigan Quarterly Review | Winter 2016 | 16 minutes (4,329 words)

I need to tell you about someone whose name I can’t speak. The lack of a name is inconvenient, but it’s not the most important thing about him; he gave it up so long ago. Everything important that I can tell you has been a fight against time and language, and I’m still only halfway there.

Halfway. We were half-grown when we met: eleven years old. Some concerned adult had determined that he was at risk. We all are, but in his case there were metrics. He had immigrated from Mexico. He lived with too many siblings; there was a rotating cast of uncles and cousins in his life. This seemed dangerous ─ we lived in San Jose before it became a booming city, when it was still threaded with apricot orchards and poverty. Some of his uncles and cousins had joined La Nuestra Familia, the Norteños, the gangs that offer protection to Chicanos and Mexicans who lived in Northern California. Joining the gang meant that they had joined a violent feud, with the Sureños from Southern California and also with the Salvadoran gangs — La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

I should have asked him questions about this. The truth is that I failed to find the language to do so. The first reason for this failure is that I was impressed with the ornate speech used by so many of these uncles and cousins. They never spoke about gangs or violence or illegal anything. Instead, they had a seductive patois of slang and simple commands and complex phrases about their respect for tradition, their commitment to duties as men. To my 11-year-old ears these were ancient, powerful words; it sounded like the language of legend. Warriors and glory.

I could only speak about homework and grades. Such words could not compete with theirs even in my own imagination. How could I use them to convince someone else?

When I was near all of them I couldn’t even say what it was that captivated me about the drudgery I was supposed to be championing. When I was alone it became all too clear: That drudgery was my way to be special. What I really liked was the approval I received from those concerned adults for caring. The kind of regard that allowed me to be chosen as a positive influence in another 11-year-old’s life was intoxicating.

Looking back, of course, I made sense as a translator of this other life. I was going places even then. My family was steady and ambitious. They were teaching me the language of the higher classes, but more importantly, they were teaching me their timelines. I understood that for many years my life would be a slowly unfolding landscape of education and that in the distant future I would have nothing to do with boys like him.

Not that this mattered in our moment. I fell hopelessly and immediately in love with him. He was smaller than I was: a thin body, all angles like an arrow tip. His was a face of beveled edges rather than common features — the only curve on him was a radiant smile. As soon as I met him I wanted to see more of it, and I hung around for as long as I could.

To even speak about it now is to risk embarrassment, for this was eleven-year-old love: a love that bloomed over secondhand video game consoles and dimly lit strip malls. We gawked at passing teenagers; we pooled our quarters to split Orange Juliuses and McDonald’s French fries. It was the love of one child — puffy, awkward, patiently hoping to bloom into beauty — for another child who was beautiful and lean and waiting only for others to be overcome by his charm. He never had to wait long. Where I was aloof and serious, he was open and easy.

He knew how to be eleven years old. He took joy in the moment — in the good slice of pizza, the trip to the arcade, the tickle fight. As part of a big family he was happy to be in company with lots of people. To his relatives I must have seemed like the strange one: quiet, introverted, demanding of difficult pleasures that were a long time in coming. I never talked to him, or to them, about love.

The next year he joined the feud.

We lost him, one of those concerned adults told me.

I found the judgment unfair. Even today I can tell you in which prison his body may be found.

He is doing time. Yet I wonder if he sees time in the way that I do, in the way that all of those concerned adults do. We cling to years because our imagination does not extend to the language of duty and obligation. We hoard our years because they belong to us alone, not to the ages.

At 11 years old it is easy to believe in the ages; I was enthralled by them myself. And in many ways, his transformation happened much faster than mine did. At 12 years old he had a new name, new clothes, new friends, a new body. New constraints and intimacies. He had a duty now, and it stood as an immutable fact of life, something beyond individuality. When it was clear to me that I should abandon him so that I could continue on my own slow line of time I did so without regret, and for many years I stopped trying to find words to talk about him. I spent much time on my education and my goals. I busied myself with the intricacies of language and the books of long-dead men.

They never spoke about gangs or violence. Instead, they had a seductive patois of slang and simple commands and complex phrases about their respect for tradition, their commitment to duties as men.

Then as our paths diverged my own line of time sped up. The years that are ticking slowly for him, in his cell, are moving much faster on the outside. Time has become a relentless crush for skill and for money, at least in the land of his feud. San Jose has changed. Like me, it became educated and upper-middle-class. The orchards were paved over for expensive housing; the immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador moved to cheaper cities further south. The crime rates dropped, the feud grew quiet.

Things were different now, I thought. The wounds from the feud would heal. There would be no need for these battles that seemed to have no purpose. Too many were gone but at least it would slow down.

* * *

Years passed. I moved to San Francisco. I chose to live in a neighborhood that seemed to have the familiarity of my birth neighborhood and none of its problems. My neighbors came from Mexico and Panama and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Brazil. It was a neighborhood of modest and miraculous prosperity. Everyone worked as often as they could. Their children played on the sidewalks day and night and they were full of memories of the children they had left behind in the old countries. Their lives ran on the rhythms of phone cards and remittance payments and scratch-off lottery tickets.

When I moved in I asked many of them about the feud. We had similar worries about it, and similar feelings of denial. It was close but we believed that it was far enough away. Two gangs — one linked to MS-13, the other linked to the Norteños — operated on the blocks that bounded us. But because there had been no violence in our small bubble for years we thought that they would always remain there.

Around 8 pm on June 16, 2007, a 15-year-old named Edivaldo Sanchez was standing with a friend outside of his family’s apartment on 24th Street. Eddie, as we called him, often stood outside of that apartment in the evenings. It was a practical choice. He had five siblings and a rotating cast of relatives in his life. He needed space, like any teenager.

Eddie was a student at Horace Mann Middle School. He was a recent immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, a city whose important industries include maquiladoras and drug trafficking.  After her husband died, Eddie’s mother had brought the family to San Francisco. She thought that the move would give her children the peaceful years they needed for an education and a more prosperous future.

What is there to say about him. Eddie made friends in the neighborhood fast. His personality was gentle. He was crazy about soccer and music, eager to help fellow students fix their old electronics or put together a pick-up game. He smiled easily and often. I remember thinking how delightful it was to see that. He was at the age for boys when smiling tends to stop.

We had a nodding acquaintance when we passed each other on the street. He was shy, and being a recent immigrant he was also tentative about the way he sounded. I didn’t want to make him feel nervous by speaking too often. It was another one of my failures of language.

Two men in a stolen Honda pulled up beside the boys that night. We will never know what they said, or if they said anything at all. In the neighborhood, we decided that the men asked who they claimed. We decided that because we knew that the boys claimed no gang associations, and because it was the only question we knew that fit with what happened next.

The passenger in the car pulled out a gun. The boys ran for their lives and he shot at their backs.

Eddie’s friend escaped.

Eddie was hit. He staggered for half a block, collapsed, and bled out in front of a taqueria on 24th Street at the corner of Balmy. He was dead before the emergency response team arrived.

Eddie died near a mural painted with folk spirits, one of whom is giving birth to the world. It’s the first mural at the entrance to Balmy, a short block that’s also a gallery for more than 60 murals. These bright, splashy scenes stretch from the roof to the foundation of almost every building. The murals were begun by a collective of artists known as La Mujeres Muralistas, whose desire to add more peaceful, domestic images to the macho mural art scene in San Francisco during the 1970s grew into a massive visual celebration of Latin American myth and history. Eddie died among a kaleidoscope of life from all around the Americas, the red of his blood joining an explosion of yellows and blues and purples and greens. While he died he was watched over by Archbishop Oscar Romero, by Frida Kahlo, by Diego Rivera, by La Virgencita of Guadalupe, by children escaping war and poverty, and above all by weeping women, women who are weeping for Mexico and for El Salvador and for the innocents massacred in those countries and in this one.

Eddie died near a mural painted with folk spirits, one of whom is giving birth to the world.

When I stepped out of my house the next morning the altar for Eddie had already been assembled. The sun was bright but the red candles were blazing. Most of them filled tall glass cases to the brim and were plastered with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Every corner store on 24th Street sold these candles, but that day they handed them out for free.

Within a few hours it was impossible to walk down that strip of sidewalk. The mourners spread a blanket of flowers and candles and homemade signs that crowded out all of the space in front of the taqueria. Eddie’s family members hung small cardboard signs to rest his soul in peace on the lampposts nearby. The schoolgirls he had helped at Horace taped up pictures of him.

For a few weeks, I passed by him every day. We all looked up when we saw him. I think the memory of seeing him on the same corner, alive and wiry, kept us from cleaning up his memorial in the normal frame of time. We left Eddie’s altar up until it had fully disintegrated. As the days and then weeks passed it underwent a metamorphosis. Bunches of flowers shrank and died. They stained the sidewalk with the violet colors of exploded petals and the yellow powder of broken stamens. The cathedral of candles melted onto the sidewalk, spreading out into red gooey puddles. The goo hardened into something brittle, geological. If I squinted, the sidewalk in front of the taqueria looked like a mural on Balmy.

And above the mess floated Eddie’s face — thin, a little pimpled, forever smiling.

* * *

After Eddie’s time stopped and I was yanked back into an age of ruined myths and false legends I began to look for the language that would help me speak about it. Though I’ve read many pieces about MS-13 and the Norteños, most of them are disappointing. I’m not looking for lurid chronicles or patronizing analysis of the young men who join what is, for them, a ritual battle that exists not just in our time but in all of the ages before us.

Where I’ve found the language to express this has been a matter of accident: like the 1978 novel Broken April. I picked up this book because I was curious about its author, the great Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare. I wondered how a learned, upper-class man (his author photos show him reclining in his Parisian apartment, clad in cashmere sweaters) had found the words to chronicle the martial traditions of his tiny, impoverished country. Kadare’s work is awash in blood and violence — war, feuds, sieges, occupation, brutality — and he writes it all with the calm candor of a professional and the deep passion of a lover.

So I picked up Broken April and I discovered that, for Kadare, it’s partly a matter of translation. The novel is all about making clear the circumstances of the blood feuds that still take place in Albania today, feuds that seem strange to outsiders yet indispensable to those who act them out. As usual, Kadare doesn’t shy away from the horrible toll: Broken April opens with the premeditated murder of an innocent man.

On an early spring day in Albania’s High Plateau region, Gjorg of the Berisha has been perched behind a ridge overlooking the highway since daybreak. As the hours drag on, he’s startled over and over by passerby. He pulls out his rifle at each disturbance.

He’s waiting for a man named Zef Kryeqyqe. Zef Kryeqyqe and Gjorg of the Berisha barely know each other and have no personal animosity, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened the previous year, when one of Zef Kryeqyqe’s relatives killed Gjorg of the Berisha’s elder brother, Mehill. In keeping with the blood feud that their families have been engaged in for generations, it’s now Gjorg’s duty to kill Zef.

The fated man doesn’t appear until dusk. He wasn’t expecting to meet Gjorg near the highway. When Gjorg appears before him, rifle cocked, Kryeqyqe fumbles uselessly for a defense.

Gjorg shoots him. He falls. Gjorg steps out of hiding onto a deserted road and stares at the fallen body.

The crucial act of violence takes place over the first ten pages. By swiftly dispensing with the murder, Kadare can expand at length on the real subject of Broken April: the culture that surrounds and maintains the blood feud. It is a culture that, above all, depends on a strange sense of time. Its rituals are measured in moments and days but its sense of value and consequence stretches over centuries. We learn that the Berishas are villagers in a part of the country that has seen little social change since the Dark Ages. The economy is subsistence agriculture; the residents abide by a medieval code of conduct known as the Kanun. The Kanun regulates manners, marriages, and above all the blood feud in which the Berishas have found themselves.

After Gjorg kills Zef, Kadare flashes back to the weeks after Mehill’s death. Abiding by the age-old custom, the Berisha matriarch hangs her dead son’s bloody shirt up on the family clothesline. She leaves this shirt on the line so that the neighborhood, and Gjorg, can see it. They need the sight of the bloodstain to torment Gjorg until he avenges his brother.

It works. Gjorg has an extended, Hamlet-like season of agonized inaction, but when the winter ends he leaves his family and goes to the highway. In killing Zef Kryeqyqe, Gjorg knows that he is launching his final cycle in the feud. After a month’s truce, he will no longer be the killer but the prey.

Still, when Gjorg walks back into the village he can walk with pride. He has returned honor to his family and banished humiliation, its dark twin. For a long, slow moment in his short life, he is envied and feared and powerful. The villagers spread the word that he has “taken back his brother’s blood.” His mother pulls the stained shirt down from the clothesline and washes it. His father can look at the neighbors with satisfaction. A brief expansiveness opens his family’s existence even as Gjorg feels the looming constriction of certain death.

Zef Kryeqyqe’s death launches another series of actions set forth by the Kanun. The two families fulfill their roles solemnly, without emotion, as though what were at stake was not a murder but a legal transaction. Everything is prescribed and organized, including the fine, or blood tax, that Gjorg of the Berisha’s family must pay. They must pay this tax not to the Kryeqyqe family but to the prince. So, after the men of the village have negotiated the 30-day truce, Gjorg of the Berishas embarks on a long walk across the Plateau to present this payment.

Gjorg’s only possibility for escaping death would be to hide in one of the 74 Towers of Refuge. These towers dot the bleak landscape that we travel through with him. With their comfortless cells and desperate inhabitants, they resemble prisons: “scattered, dark forbidding, with their black loopholes and their heavy doors.” The values of the Plateau villagers assure that their purpose is to function as places of incarceration as well. There’s a special shame for the men inside, one that is visited on their families. Deprived of their prideful place in the community for as long as they have unredeemed blood, these families do not farm: “Whole clans allowed their fields to go uncultivated and themselves to suffer hunger so that the blood might be redeemed….Each man chose between corn and vengeance.” Despite the business-like aspects of the feud, the concepts of comfort and profit are foreign to its priorities of duty and pride. Comfort and profit are concepts for another time, another moment, outside of the feud.

Eventually, we make it to the castle and to one of the most loathsome characters in the book: Mark Ukacierra, the prince’s first cousin. Ukacierra is the “steward of the blood,” the man who is responsible for keeping accounts of all blood feuds on the High Plateau. His archives, which stretch back for centuries, detail every feud that has gone settled or unsettled, and every murder that has maintained it. Ukacierra loves the feud with a possessive madness, fears for its survival, and looks upon the incursions of the contemporary world with hatred. An educated man, he reads contemporary books and journals from the capital city, Tirana, and stokes the flames of his hatred with their interpretations of the blood feud. In the opinion of these learned authors, the feud has been “changing gradually into an inhuman machine, to the point of being reduced at last, according to the author of the article, to a capitalist enterprise carried on for the sake of profit.” The idea that the ancient feud can be reduced to something so shallow, so contemporary, as capitalism — that, to Ukacierra, is outrageous.

Thanks to the impertinence of these outsiders, as well as a general worry that the men of Albania have grown soft and do not take the feud as seriously as they used to, Ukacierra looks on the pale, shaking Gjorg with the closest approximation to love that we see in Broken April. To him, Gjorg is the future of an age, an actor in a long tradition that he adores. Meanwhile, the writers of the contemporary books live in a “weakening” time “without honor.”

The time that Ukacierra lives in is expansive and everlasting. Meanwhile, Gjorg’s time is growing precarious and short. Once he has paid his fee and began the trek back to his village, he has already used up many precious days of his truce. While he walks, Zef Kryqeqye’s family is watching the calendar and making their preparations. Should they miss their son, they may visit his murnanë — a small stone altar that passerby built to mark the place where the dead man fell.

* * *

In the seventh year after Eddie’s death I requested the public documents for a murder case that had started just a few blocks away from where he was murdered. The U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco released these documents in October 2014, after the three young defendants were each sentenced to 27 years in federal prison on charges related to the murder of Alexander Temaj-Castanon.

It was a strange moment to see a case like this one. I still thought about Eddie, though seven years on it was clear to that he would never get any justice. No arrests were ever made in his case. No murderer was ever found. His family had moved back to Mexico, torn by their grief, to face their uncertain future in a more familiar country.

There were few people left in the neighborhood who remembered Eddie, or had any knowledge of what the feud was.

Time had transformed another place. Many of my neighbors were long gone. They left for a less tragic reason than Eddie’s family had: they simply could not afford to live there anymore. The new residents were upper-middle-class and educated. They needed things that would help them thrive on a faster line of time ─ coffee shops, express workouts, places that sold the latest technology. The neighborhood sped up to reflect their needs.

Yet for all that time was speeding up something was still happening in a slower and more ancient era.

On the night of June 21, 2010, Davie Jimmy Mejia-Sensente, aka “Crazy,” or “Loco,” Carlos Mejia-Quintanilla, aka “Sleepy,” or “Dormido,” and Luis Amilar-Zanas, aka “Trucha,” or “Yomo,” were on a 14-Muni bus, traveling on Mission Street from San Francisco to Daly City. The three young men were members of the transnational gang known as La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

A 26-year-old man named Alexander Temaj-Castanon boarded the bus after leaving his job as a cook at a San Francisco barbeque restaurant. Mejia-Sensente, Mejia-Quintanilla, and Amilar-Zanas watched Temaj-Castanon and decided that he was a member of La Nuestra Familia, or the Norteños. They based this decision on their observations of Temaj-Castanon’s tattooed body and his general bearing.

When Temaj-Castanon stepped off the bus on a quiet stretch of Mission Street in Daly City, Meijia-Sensente and Mejia-Quintanilla collected a backpack from Amilar-Zanas and followed him. Amilar-Zanas had placed a gun in the backpack.

The night was dark, the hour was late, and the street was deserted. They crept up behind him. Mejia-Quintanilla pulled the gun from the backpack and shot Temaj-Castanon once. Mejia-Sensente took the gun and shot the dying man again. They watched the body fall. Then they ran.

Temaj-Castanon was not a member of the Norteños or any other gang.

None of these facts were in dispute, not even by the defendants. This was a senseless murder, executed for no other reason than that the defendants believed it was their duty and obligation to eliminate a rival in a blood feud that has persisted for decades. But that duty and obligation, though so compelling as to bring these three young men to assassinate an innocent man, is nowhere to be found in the public documents. The U.S. Attorney’s office dismisses it in the same way that enraged the steward of the blood: “MS-13,” reads the sentencing memorandum for the case, “constitutes an ongoing organization whose members function as a continuing unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise.” In this rendering, murder has been reduced to a business enterprise that must be done on a schedule according to the time demands of a corporate entity.

I can understand this sense of time. I live in it, I fought for it, and I will do all that’s in my power to remain within it.

But in looking through the public docket for this case I located one time factor that the U.S. Attorney’s office may have overlooked.

In 2002, when he was jumped into MS-13, Mejia-Quintanilla was a 12-year-old named Wilfredo Oliva-Castro who lived with his family in El Salvador.

In 1996, when he was jumped into MS-13, Mejia-Sensente was a 12-year-old, name unknown, who lived with his family in El Salvador.

In 1991, when he was jumped into MS-13, Amilar-Zanas was a 12-year-old named Luis Sana who lived with his family in El Salvador.

We will never live in their time but they will always live in ours.

There is one more important notation in the paperwork for this case. Though they’re not publicly available, the docket shows that each defendant requested a translator during the course of the legal proceedings. Presumably the three defendants, all native Spanish speakers, wanted to be certain that they could follow the language of the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, and the judge as these people presided over the direction of the rest of their lives. The case files note that the translators all came to assist the defendants.

I am so glad that they came. But how I wish, oh how I wish, that these translators had spoken sooner.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the Winer 2016 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. It was also named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2017. Our thanks to Caille Millner and the MQR staff for allowing us to reprint this essay.

 

Wallace Shawn’s Late Night

Wallace Shawn in 1988. (AP)

Troy Jollimore | Zyzzyva | Winter 2017 | 30 minutes (8,142 words)

More than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn wrote:

A few months ago, the American public, who in political theory and to some extent even in reality are “sovereign” in the United States, were given a group of pictures showing American soldiers tormenting desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains — degrading them, mocking them, and physically torturing them. And so the question arose, How would the American public react to that? And the answer was that in their capacity as individuals, certain people definitely suffered or were shocked when they saw those pictures. But in their capacity as the sovereign public, they did not react. A cry of lamentation and outrage did not rise up across the land. The president and his highest officials were not compelled to abase themselves publicly, apologize, and resign, nor did they find themselves thrown out of office, nor did the political candidates from the party out of power grow hoarse with denouncing the astounding crimes which were witnessed by practically everyone throughout the entire world. As far as one could tell, over a period of weeks, the atrocities shown in the pictures had been assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept. And so now one has to ask, well, what does that portend?

Thirteen years later, we have a quite good idea of what such a thing portends. Thirteen years later we know much more than Shawn, or anyone, could have known at the time about just how much could be “assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept.” We know so much about this now that it is rather a wonder any of us can sleep at night. And in fact, some people tell me that they aren’t sleeping, that they have not been sleeping well for a while. Not since November. That’s what I keep hearing. Of course, there are those who lost the ability to enjoy an untroubled night’s sleep long before that. Read more…

Ten Books to Read in 2018

Books with hidden spines
Geography Photos / UIG via Getty Images

We asked writers, editors, and booksellers to tell us about a few books they felt deserved more recognition last year. Here are their 10 suggestions.


Maris Kreizman
Writer and critic, former Editorial Director of Book of the Month Club

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (Patty Yumi Cottrell, McSweeney’s)

There’s nothing I love more than an unreliable narrator, and the protagonist of Patty Yumi Cottrell’s debut novel is a doozy. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is the story of Helen, a school teacher from New York City, who casts herself in the role of lead detective on a very tough and personal case — her adopted brother’s suicide. When Helen returns to her childhood home of Milwaukee to investigate, truths about Helen and her family are slowly revealed, and we begin to realize that Helen may be worthy of scrutiny herself. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is both a clever and poignant exploration of the distance between how we imagine ourselves to be and who we truly are.

Read more…

Essay

Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story

 

“It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us.”

—Cormac McCarthy, “The Kekulé Problem,” Nautilus, April 20, 2017

I. The Smartest Person in the Room

I often say that one of the great pleasures of teaching — writing, or any such thing I teach — is that in front of a room of students, a captive audience, I have a few hours almost every day to work out ideas I’m puzzling over with smart people who are ostensibly there for many of the same reasons I am: to puzzle over ideas. Students don’t always know that’s what we’re doing; they often think I have the answers — and with the simplest questions I often do: yes, you should feel free to write with the word “I” — see, I do.

But more often that not, I don’t have the answers, or, my thoughts on a matter are shifting, still in motion. Ten years ago, I might have tried to hide this fact from my students, if I even recognized it then at all; I might have made it seem like I knew definitely more than I did — or do — in the fear of losing my authority in the lecture hall. I might have avoided certain lines of inquiry — steered the conversation down safer paths — because I couldn’t be sure where we might end up, which may have been in a place where a student knew more than I did, or where I might have simply to say, I don’t know, without the wherewithal or the experience to trust this group of people I was with to figure out something new, together. Without the awareness that I don’t know is probably the most exciting place we can be both in the classroom and in a life of writing, too. So here goes.

‘I don’t know’ is probably the most exciting place we can be both in the classroom and in a life of writing, too.

Once, long ago, teaching an essay I had never taught before — but one I now feel like I know like the back of my hand, Michael Pollan’s 2002 “An Animal’s Place” — I reached a point in the conversation with students known as Awkward Silence. I looked up from the head of the seminar table. Blinks. The shuffling of papers. This was before the ubiquity of smartphones, so they weren’t ignoring me with those yet. I looked back down to the essay. My heart sank — then raced. My mouth went dry. Perhaps you know this feeling. Perhaps you can relate, empathize. Back to the essay, maybe I read aloud:

It can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.

I looked back to my students. Still nothing — from me or them.

“Excuse me,” I said, just barely holding onto my vision — it was fading fast — and I fled the room. I was gone for about five minutes and returned with a Tropicana and a Kind Bar, blaming it all on my blood sugar — not shame, humiliation or dread, though I certainly felt all that. We went on. Class dismissed. The semester ended. I survived.

* * *

In fall, 2016, I taught a superb group of undergrads in a journalism class. One of the students, a woman in her first year of college, had written a piece that was being workshopped, and another, perhaps the most generous workshopper in the room — our best reader and our best writer, simply because he’d just read and written more — was looking for something else from the essay, for the author to go deeper into the story of the scam, to stop skating the surface of New York City’s store-front astrologers. These are things we often hear in writing workshops: go deeper, stop skating. After some keen insight, the workshopper said to his classmate, “Look, you’re the smartest person in the room, that’s clear. But — ”

Whatever followed the “but” I didn’t hear — he said something useful once again, and class proceeded. We workshopped another essay. The woman’s final piece was better than the original, based on the suggestions he and others made during class. She went deeper. That’s how it’s supposed to be. But did you catch what he said? “You’re the smartest person in the room, that’s clear.” Quite a compliment. And he didn’t mean only that she was smarter than the other students in the room; he meant she was the smartest person, period. Me included. I sat there. I did not panic. I did not flee. He was not wrong.

In any case, I use this introduction to get at something I’ve been considering — or, really reconsidering — sometimes with students, sometimes on my own, sometimes in my writing, about empathy and its place in our creative work. I’ve long believed empathy is essential to what we do when we write — that we engage our ability to feel with, or, as psychologist Paul Bloom puts it in his recent book Against Empathy: that you can come “to experience the world as you think someone else does.” Bloom’s not talking about writing, really, but his definition, and my own summary — the act of feeling with — as I say, has long shaped my own thinking about how I write, and probably how I have taught others how to write.

But here’s what happened. I often teach — and often make mention of in my writing — the novel Elizabeth Costello, by South African writer J.M. Coetzee. This is a thing I did in the spring, 2017. In two central chapters of the book — “The Lives of Animals,” Parts One and Two — the title character, an Australian novelist, lectures on animal suffering at a fictional Appleton College, in an American town called Waltham. She draws controversial comparisons about the citizens of Waltham, who sit by and do nothing while industrial farms carry out “an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it.” Written here in the limited third person, assuming the consciousness of Elizabeth Costello’s son, John, this section of the novel includes several long quotations from Costello’s lectures, including this, in which she justifies her own authority, as a novelist, to speak in philosophical terms about the lives of animals:

“Despite Thomas Nagel, who is probably a good man, despite Thomas Aquinas and René Descartes, with whom I have more difficulty in sympathizing, there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. If you want proof, consider the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did not, I cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event, the point is, Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”

Reading this with my class, an argument that seems to bring together aesthetics and ethics, I repeated Costello’s claim: “There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.” But we began that day in March to investigate whether what Costello — and perhaps Coetzee — was talking about in terms of sympathy had anything to do with what we often describe now as empathy — what Paul Bloom characterizes in his book as “everything good, … a synonym for morality and kindness and compassion,” or what we find in so much facile writing instruction nowadays, which consolidates under headlines like:

“Why Empathy is the Key to Story”

“Writing as an Act of Empathy”

“On Writing with Empathy”

Or the absolute worst: “Writing with Empathy Will Effortlessly Improve Your Business.”

All this is a simple Google search away.

But does the creative act, the aesthetic act, really depend on such a thing? Is the boundless sympathetic imagination that Coetzee believes in — meaning, the boundlessness of the creative impulse and its potential — really the same as experiencing the world as you think someone else does? Is empathy what we need to write?

Faced with the questions, I answered my students as I’m inclined to do these days when it’s true: I don’t know, I said. But we set to work trying to figure it out.

II. A Little Boy in the Dark

Of course many people know lots more than I do. Many of the people close to me — the psychologists, therapists, mediators, yogis, and pastors, there’s at least one dentist — know lots more than I do about empathy. But the conversation we had in class that day led me to say certain things I was not sure I believed — about ethics and writing and the overlap — until I found myself saying them. Like Flannery O’Connor, who says this about writing — “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say” — it may be that I’ve found teaching leads me to say new things that I think, or, with help, can come to believe in watching their effect on people and in myself.

Here’s what we came to understand, and what I came to say, about the relationship between empathy and the sympathetic imagination: first, they’re not the same thing. And second, what I’m calling sympathy is more useful, more effective — in life and in art — than empathy.

In June 2014, my wife underwent surgery for breast cancer. The night of the surgery, which was successful, she lay asleep, still drugged I think, at NYU Langone Medical Center, about twenty blocks from our home on New York City’s East Side. Her closest friend was staying with us, taking care of our son so that I could be at the hospital throughout the day and into the evening, and the house was dark when I returned. I’d head back to the hospital first thing in the morning. I was exhausted but not exactly tired when I got home — and I’m not sure I’ve ever told my wife this — I went to a Mexican place called ¡Vamos! across First Avenue from where we live, and read in the dimmest of candle light, under booming techno music, the final essay of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” Reading this essay takes about two margaritas.

I think it’s true that the act of reading, in this case, involved a kind of private longing, in my worry, to know what my wife was going through and had gone through already. Though not always the smartest guy in the room — and this reading I did may be more proof of that than anything else — I’ve always been studious, and an essay that offered a grand unified theory of female pain seemed like a good bet for someone seeking understanding, a way to empathize.

But the moment was more complicated than that, because of the performance involved: imagine me there at the bar, hunched over, straining my eyes, alone in a crowded room on a Friday night, reading, and hoping, I suppose, to draw some attention my way. Not to be talked with, but to be seen in pain, perhaps, grieving something. Under the circumstances, sort of ugly. But I was also doing the other thing — right? — seeking understanding, trying to experience the world as someone else does. Not my wife, necessarily, but someone like her — a woman, at least, in pain. And there’s also the truth of the worry, the actual grief involved in a spouse’s illness, her surgery, in visiting hours and the helplessness of having to walk away through the revolving door toward home.

Performances are complicated, which is something we learn in particular about female pain by reading Jamison, who writes, “The wounded woman gets called a stereotype, and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it. Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain. I think the charges of cliché and performance offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.”

There’s no doubt that Leslie Jamison values empathy, and little doubt that she’s empathic — that she spends some fair portion of her life attempting to experience the world as she thinks other people do. I’m sure she tries to feel with other people. You can see it behind her reporting about sufferers of Morgellons Disease or a family who believes their son has experienced a past life. She doesn’t typically believe in these things as the sufferers do — and she’s clear that she’s not agnostic about these things — but you can imagine her trying to feel what they feel. Often in her writing, she’ll describe that act. She’ll perform empathy on the page. Here she’s concluding her essay about the Leningers, whose teenage child, they believe, fought in World War II:

Did I leave Louisiana thinking James Leininger was a reincarnated fighter pilot? No. …

Did I leave feeling that the Leiningers were sincere in their beliefs about reincarnation? Absolutely. … Something more complicated was going on with the Leiningers — and something simpler. It seemed to me that they were just a family seeking meaning in their experience, as we all do. In this case, the human hunger for narrative — a hunger I experience constantly, and from which I make my living — had built an intricate and self-sustaining story, all of it anchored by the desire to care for a little boy in the dark.

Look right in there for the signs of empathy — “as we all do,” she says, “a hunger I experience constantly, and from which I make my living.”

But is it empathy that allows her to write about the Leningers, or to write her grand unified theory? Or her essay “The Empathy Exams,” which I’ve often used as an example of how to borrow forms as a way to arrive at deeper truths than one might be able to by approaching a subject, even oneself, straight on?

Or, is it empathy that allows me to write about my wife — about whom I believe I have felt, and often feel, empathy — when I mentioned her just above, or wrote this about her illness in 2016?

My wife’s health, even after she discovered the cancer, has always been basically good. Surgery required its own recovery time, the emptying of drains, pain medication, and lots of sleep. In the weeks following the surgery, as soon as it was safe to travel, we spent some time on a California beach we love, where she thought she might recover best. She took long, solitary walks and considered her next steps, even while we both knew that, because of me and our son, she’d been stripped of choices that veered too far from what the doctors had prescribed.

Is it empathy that allows Coetzee to write this from the point of view of his character John, Elizabeth’s son, as he drives her to the airport after what’s really been a disastrous few days lecturing on animals and being lectured in return?

“Yet I am not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?

She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her?

They are not yet on the expressway. He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. “There, there,” he whispers in her ear. “There, there. It will all be over soon.”

Is it empathy? I’m venturing to answer no in all these cases — that while Jamison and Coetzee and I are all arguably empathic in our lives, that we may often set ourselves to the task of empathizing with others, when we write, we’re engaged in another sort of activity, tapping into a different, more expansive, more complex, mysterious — and maybe even more ethical — mode of being. Again, Coetzee calls this the “sympathetic imagination.” And soon I’ll explore why I think he means something different with this phrase than empathy.

III. As Weightless as All Others

Vivian Gornick is a writer many writing students know well, especially her book The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. In a key passage from early in the book, in which she addresses not just personal narrative, but also poetry and fiction — which is why I’m quoting at such length — Gornick is mainly interested in what it takes to create a persona out of what’s often only of interest to ourselves.

To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot express directly — inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires — but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from. It’s like lying down on the couch in public — and while a writer may be willing to do just that, it is a strategy that most often simply doesn’t work. Think of how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself, but without all the whining and complaining, the self-hatred and the self-justification that make the analysand a bore to all the world but the analyst. The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

“Detached empathy,” she writes — something, I’d say, like the performance of it we see in Jamison’s essays, and perhaps something like the performance I’m carrying out in this very writing while relating stories about panicking in the classroom and drinking margaritas while my wife lay alone and bandaged in the recovery ward. The persona who does all this performing, Gornick says, is vital: “It is the instrument of illumination.”

Now Gornick will use the word “empathy” elsewhere in The Situation and the Story while writing about work by D.H. Lawrence and V.S. Naipaul and the role of what she also calls “sympathy” in “imaginative writing” — in her case, sympathy for the subject one’s writing about. Lawrence fails in his essay “Do Women Change?” because, says Gornick, “There is not a single moment in the piece — not a paragraph or sentence — when the narrator sympathizes with his subject; that is, when he sees the modern woman as she might see herself, finds in himself that which would allow him to understand why she is as she is.” It’s also in this section that we find another oft-quoted moment from the book: “For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” And Gornick ultimately uses the two words — sympathy and empathy — somewhat interchangeably, or, she uses one to define the other: “What I mean by sympathy,” she says, “is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the ‘other’ as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.”

And I do not disagree with her here — not really — though I like that for Gornick sympathy and imagination are set close by one another in her prose. I also like the notion that for Gornick there’s some aloofness — that detachment — to whatever empathy she’s describing as concomitant with the development of a persona, a character, or a speaking voice. Yet, the matter we were concerned with in my class that day while reading Coetzee — and still the one I’m concerned with now — is an effort to suss out the differences between the sympathetic imagination and empathy as an effort to feel with someone else.

And so back to that day with Coetzee. In her lectures on animal rights and her invocation of the death camps, Elizabeth Costello takes serious interest in what it is that makes us human, and what might disqualify us from a shared place in humanity. It’s happened before, she says, that people have been expelled:

“It is not because they waged an expansionist war, and lost it, that Germans of a particular generation are still regarded as standing a little outside humanity, as having to do something special before they can be readmitted to the human fold. They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part. Under the circumstances of Hitler’s kind of war, ignorance may have been a useful survival mechanism, but that is an excuse which, with admirable moral rigour, we refuse to accept. In Germany, we say, a certain line was crossed which took people beyond the ordinary murderousness and cruelty of warfare into a state that we can only call sin. … Only those in the camps were innocent.”

She’ll go on to say in the lecture that those of us who ignore — who can’t know about, for our own sakes — the horrors of industrial agriculture are like those who ignored, for their own sakes, the death camps, to which she returns at the end of the lecture:

“The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, ‘It is they in those cattle cars rattling past.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if it were I in that cattle car?’ They did not say, ‘It is I who am in that cattle car.’ They said, ‘It must be the dead who are being burned today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if I were burning?’ They did not say, ‘I am burning, I am falling in ash.’

“In other words, they closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object.”

It’s here, and with Leslie Jamison in mind, that I began to explore with my students what the differences between empathy and sympathy might be. We tend to think about empathy as mirroring, both feeling and expressing one’s shared experience of pain in full awareness of all that we cannot know about the individual whose pain we’re feeling. “Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must be really hard,” Jamison writes, “ — it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. … Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object.

Empathy sounds so eminently reasonable; it’s problem solving; and in its way — in the ways it can be tested say, part of an empathy exam — it means to reveal just how good the subject is at performing his emotions. “Empathy is a kind of care,” Jamison writes, “but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.”

For Sheila Heti, who has a chapter in her book How Should a Person Be? titled “What is Empathy?,” in its wake, the performed quality, and the mirroring involved in the emotion, are its greatest threats to the individual:

Forever after, though, it would be really hard to untangle how you imagined other people wanted you to behave from how you wanted to behave. How would you even know what you wanted, when at such a young age, desire had been mixed up with empathy and guilt?

How could I castrate my mind — neuter it! — and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else’s, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy — which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!

Now I’m not sure I’d go that far in dissuading people from developing and deploying empathy, but it does reveal another limit, even as Heti suggests our “endless capacity” for feeling with others. (In this case, the empathy she’s describing is being extended, in her imagination, for an adult who has abused a child — more of that “loneliness of the monster” argument.) But when we consider Heti’s take on the matter — and bear in mind we’re reading her fiction — I actually think there’s really something to her rejection — her murder — of empathy and her embrace of what seems like selfishness.

Bear with me, but here’s a little more of what we realized together in our class while reading Coetzee. After puzzling over the difficult problem of whether those in the class who eat factory-raised meat might still be thought of as within the human fold, we took up Elizabeth Costello’s claim that sympathy — and so, the sympathetic imagination — has everything to do with the subject — one’s consciousness and unconsciousness, presumably — which, when we consider it in light of Heti or Jamison, sets it in stark contrast with empathy, which has the object as its focus. In this way, empathy creates a number of problems for both ethics and our writing life, I think. Consider, just for instance, one of Paul Bloom’s major criticisms of empathy in his book against it: “[Empathy] is a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.”

If Bloom’s right, and here I think he is, what’s to say it wasn’t the spotlight of empathy — a bright focus on those they loved, that dimed for those who were strange, they who were in the cattle cars — that led to what Costello describes here?

“The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka — Poles, for the most part — said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.”

For the sake of those they loved.

Bloom has studied this stuff. He calls empathy both parochial and racist, for the way it focuses on characteristics individuals share — they’re gentiles in Treblinka, say — which seems to rely on our ability to see ourselves in someone else. It’s very easy to see ourselves — to recognize our own pain — in our parents and children. Our wives. And there’s some personal relief to be found in relieving the pain of those we love with our empathy. This is selfish, and it’s also the personal reward of empathy — of which there are many: perhaps most notably, to bask in the glow of our own performed goodness.

But the selfishness Heti is talking about is different, I think, and something akin to the focus on the subject — the self — that moves Costello’s argument for sympathy forward. What Costello is interested in — and here, specifically to encourage people to extend their sympathies to animals — is to make the absolute most of the self and our creative abilities. To recognize them. To realize them. She rejects the limitations of empathy and its ever narrowing focus on the object; she rejects the centrality of reason and even emotion in our consideration of where our sympathies can and must lie; and by focusing on the subject — on what our consciousness and unconsciousness makes possible, which is boundless — identifies the only thing that matters, the only limit to our sympathies, when we consider what existences it is possible to imagine — that limit — “the substrate of life.”

And there’s some personal relief to be found in relieving the pain of those we love with our empathy. This is selfish, and it’s also the personal reward of empathy — of which there are many: perhaps most notably, to bask in the glow of our own performed goodness.

Now, Paul Bloom might say that working within this limitation, which is hardly a limitation at all, is an antidote to problems he sees with empathy. He mainly talks about concern and compassion as more diffuse and workable ethical modes. (“We do best,” though, he says, “when we rely on reason.”) And in her acts of sympathy, I like considering the ways Costello stretches an understanding of “the substrate of life”: Beyond imagining the existence of Molly Bloom, and bats and oysters and chimpanzees, Costello also imagines life beyond life — not the afterlife, but the life of the dead, her life as a corpse. And indeed, it’s her own coming death that animates many of her concerns throughout the novel, and her son John’s concerns, too — up to that last moment when, smelling cold cream and old flesh — what deathly things to notice — he says to her, “There, there. It will all be over soon.” But here is Coetzee, pushing the limit, imagining a woman who has never lived confronted with the knowledge that she will one day die.

“For instants at a time, … I know what it is to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it.

“All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we have is not abstract — ‘All human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal’ — but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back only as a dead self can.”

Here, through a radical sort of imagining by the subject, is the absolute diminishment of the self. Sympathy for one’s own corpse, terrifying as it may be, creates a world beyond personal pain and the ability to feel with another person. In this case, sympathy is the end of empathy because it removes personal pain — the suffering self — from the equation altogether. This sort of imagining eliminates empathy in ways Bloom advocates for — echoing others like Elaine Scarry. Recognizing the difficulty of imagining other people — other real people, including those we’re close to, but more significantly, “those who are strange or different or frightening” — in an essay that, like Bloom’s work, is really about policy, Scarry describes what it might take to achieve equality between the self and the other. She proposes, as others have before her, not “trying to make one’s knowledge of others as weighty as one’s self-knowledge, but … making one ignorant about oneself, and therefore as weightless as all others.” This is the exact opposite sort of ignorance that plagued those in Treblinka who ignored the death camps.

Now, this is strange advice, perhaps, in light of all I’ve said of the necessary focus on ourselves — the subject — that sympathy requires. How can we take advantage of our boundless imagination while also striving to become ignorant of ourselves? Well, again, Scarry and Bloom are not really talking about the life of the writer. And yet, what if we look back to what Gornick advises about creating a persona? In that process, she warns of the “the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.” Isn’t “making one ignorant about oneself” just another way of saying that in our personal writing — or through our characters or speaking voices — we “transform low-level self-interest” into an aloofness about the self that makes possible the very self-implication or dramatic irony, or what have you, that turns life into art, our ideas into stories. Christians call this the way to salvation: dying to self.

IV. Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story

I have a few other writers to bring up in this final section, mainly Vladimir Nabokov and Barry Lopez. One gives me the title of this talk. The other a final example of, and also an elaboration on, the boundlessness of the sympathetic imagination and the power of making oneself ignorant about oneself.

I began in the fall 2016 teaching Nabokov’s 1948 lecture “Good Writers and Good Readers,” which addresses in certain ways some of the themes I’ve been addressing so far. For instance, he talks about the relationship between the beauty of literature, its enchantments, and the moral education books can contain. He speaks too, about how reading should be done — certainly not in an effort to identify with a character in a book, but rather “with impersonal imagination and artistic delight.” (Identification, he says, is “the worst thing a reader can do. … This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.”) In what we’re all here learning and practicing to do — all of us — there’s a balance at play, he says, between the mind of the reader and the mind of the writer, the enchanter. Indeed, if you’re convinced by my claims about the relationship between detachment and the creation of art, and you either write this way already or will give it a try, Nabokov’s ideal reader will meet you halfway. “We ought to remain a little aloof,” he says, “and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy — passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers — the inner weave of a given masterpiece.”

But if that’s the reader’s side of things — that aloofness and detachment, not exactly absorption — where does literature come from? Nabokov offers us a version of its birth:

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

We’ve all faced the wolf in the tall grass — or, maybe it was a bear, as we’ll soon see. Maybe it’s a panic attack; the wolf of being outsmarted by a first-year writing student; maybe it’s a spouse’s cancer; for me it’s very often the death of my father when I was a kid. Sometimes it’s our aging parents and our aging selves. I’ve recently been writing about the wolf that is my mysterious son. But, what Nabokov’s formulation suggests is that when we write literature, we must find our ways — like readers — into detachment and then remain a little bit aloof while we write, maybe a lot aloof if we’re writing a Humbert Humbert. Because neither the immediate fear of the wolf, nor the empathy we feel when we face a dying parent and smell her cold cream, is what makes for literary illumination — or, the way that what we write sheds light on the world, or the substrate of life we share. Those experiences — for the fiction writer and the poet and the factual writer alike — must pass through a prism, says Nabokov — of our minds, perhaps, or what Orhan Pamuk described in his 2006 Nobel Lecture as a sort of second self, one who revels, in a sense, and is surprised by the ignorance of the other:

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding words to empty pages, I feel as if I were bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way one might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. … If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination but from another power, which had found them and generously presented them to me.

If you feel the tension here of mixed metaphors, that’s fair enough: Nabokov is describing writing at the speed of light; Pamuk emphasizes the slowness of what we all do. But the basic point is the same, I think: our words will not shimmer without invention, without the application of what I’ve been calling, with Coetzee, the sympathetic imagination involved in building worlds. Unless our experiences are, in some way, refracted — not just felt, but transformed, by time, by a focus on the telling detail or by the selflessness involved in making ourselves weightless, by deception and invention — of worlds, of the second self — we will not produce art.

I think: our words will not shimmer without invention, without the application of what I’ve been calling, with Coetzee, the sympathetic imagination involved in building worlds.

For Nabokov, Nature provides our model. “Literature is invention,” he says,

Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.

And perhaps, too, does the writer of poetry, and even the factual writer — we follow, if we can, Nature’s lead, in how it deceives us and it how it reveals the truth. Because even if we can agree there may be no true stories — that all art is invention — I’m a believer in truth. Which leads me then to Barry Lopez and the bear in the woods.

In May, 2017, I was in the audience to hear a public conversation between Barry Lopez and the composer John Luther Adams. They spoke about their collaboration over the decades, their appreciation of the other’s work and processes, even the place of birdsong in their lives and art. To open the event, the actor James Naughton read a recent essay by Lopez called “The Invitation.” It was published in Granta in November 2015. Here’s how it opens:

When I was young, and just beginning to travel with them, I imagined that indigenous people saw more and heard more, that they were overall simply more aware than I was. They were more aware, and did see and hear more than I did. The absence of spoken conversation whenever I was traveling with them, however, should have provided me with a clue about why this might be true; but it didn’t, not for a while. It’s this: when an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience.

The details that come alive in this essay are mainly those describing a bear in the woods, a bear feasting on a caribou carcass. Or that’s what it seems at first. Encountering that scene, Lopez writes, “I would tend to focus almost exclusively on the bear.” But as he continues, he reveals the limitations of that approach, what might have led him, long ago, to write something called “Meeting the Bear.” What his companions knew of nature, however — what they could imagine — was that this moment was part of some vastly greater unfolding of events, what Lopez describes as an “immersion in the current of a river.”

They were swimming in it, feeling its pull, noting the temperature of the water, the back eddies and where the side streams entered. My approach, in contrast, was mostly to take note of objects in the scene—the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots, which I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single line. My friends had situated themselves within a dynamic event. Also, unlike me, they felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning. Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.

If you read this essay, you’ll see notes within about the desire to come to know a place deeply — and to be known, in return, by that place and to feel a sense of belonging. Lopez offers rules to live and write by: pay attention, be patient, be attentive to what the body knows. Here’s the conclusion — if we can call it that — he draws.

A grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket is more than a bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket. It is a point of entry into a world most of us have turned our backs on in an effort to go somewhere else, believing we’ll be better off just thinking about a grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket.

Now, I can’t quote lines like this, about an alternative way of experiencing Nature, for an audience of avid readers and then doubt that I’m among people who love language. Nor can I doubt much that we also love that through language we possess an “ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality.” That’s writing, right? That’s also Michael Pollan again; and our ability to generate these alternate realities is also what he suggests makes our pain qualitatively different than animal pain: the pain of the caribou, say. Who knows about that? Like Pollan, I’m a meat eater who tries to be careful about the meat I eat. And the details of what this means we can save for another time, a private conversation — I may not always eat meat; I haven’t always; I’ve become, over the years, both less and more sure of myself, which is sort of the point of all I’ve been saying.

But Pollan’s focus on our pain and the way it differs from animal pain — which, to be fair, is ultimately something he’ll concern himself with very little — reveals the limits, once again, of empathy. It’s a habit of mind that rushes to meaning. Cartesian certainty. (And perhaps — if the parochial spotlight of empathy turns us racist, say — Cartesian cruelty.) It’s no wonder I panicked and had to leave the room.

The writers I’ve been turning to, and teaching lately, lead us to a different habit of mind. This habit resounds in what Pamuk and Nabokov and Gornick and Scarry say, Lopez and Pollan, too, if you read him fully, about building detachment — time, boundless sympathy, another self — into the writing life, resisting whatever need I have to know immediately what a thing means to me. I’ll be a better writer if I resist the pleasure of my own weightiness — and my ability to prove my weightiness and significance to others: I feel your pain; I know the answer; look out, here comes the wolf! If I — and ultimately WE — can get lost, and then eventually found, in the vast weight, in all that’s shimmering, in all of what surrounds us.

The Encyclopedia of the Missing

(James Hosking)

Jeremy Lybarger | Longreads | 4,160 words (17 minutes)

From the outside, it’s just another mobile home in a neighborhood of mobile homes on the northwest side of Fort Wayne, Indiana. There’s the same carport, the same wedge of grass out front, the same dreamy suburban soundtrack of wind chimes and air conditioners. Nothing suggests this particular home belongs to a 32-year-old woman whose encyclopedic knowledge of missing persons has earned her a cult following online. The FBI knows who she is. So do detectives and police departments across the country. Desperate families sometimes seek her out. Chances are that if you mention someone who has disappeared in America, Meaghan Good can tell you the circumstances from memory — the who, what, when, and where. The why is almost always a mystery.

A week after she turned 19, Good started the Charley Project, an ever-expanding online database that features the stories and photographs of people who’ve been missing in the United States for at least a year. She named the site after Charles Brewster Ross, a 4-year-old boy kidnapped in 1874 from the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. His body was never found, and his abduction prompted the first known ransom note in America. Like Charles Brewster Ross, the nearly 10,000 people profiled on Good’s site are cold cases. Many fit the cliché of having vanished without a trace, and if it weren’t for Meaghan Good, most of these cases would have faded into oblivion. Read more…

An Elegy for Bette Howland, a Writer Who Was Nearly Forgotten

Jacob Howland

This past Sunday, The New York Times reported that Bette Howland, a writer most contemporary readers have never heard of, died at the age of 80, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Howland was the recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ prize. She had a prolific decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, first publishing her memoir, W-3, in 1974, which documented her stay in a mental hospital following a nervous breakdown; it was followed in 1978 by Blue in Chicago, a collection of largely autobiographical stories; and then by Things to Come and Go, a collection of three long stories, published in 1983. When Johanna Kaplan reviewed it in the Times, she called Howland, “a writer of unusual talent, power, and intelligence.”

Howland received the MacArthur in 1984 and never published another book, only sporadically contributing to literary magazines and journals, often responding to editors with resistance to the idea of publishing her work.

Despite having a champion, friend, and sometimes lover in the writer Saul Bellow, who encouraged her spiritedly after meeting her at a writing conference on Staten Island in 1961, Howland was often overcome by a lack of confidence, particularly after winning the MacArthur.

In 2015, Brigid Hughes, editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Spaceplucked Howland’s first book, W-3, off the $1 cart at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City and became intrigued upon reading its very first sentences. Hughes had never heard of Howland, but she took the book home and read it in a night. She had earlier in the year begun to think about an issue of the magazine focused on women writers — perhaps, she had thought, there might be something to include of Howland’s.

Hughes, with the help of Laura Preston, an editor at the magazine, began to sleuth for more information about Howland in order to contact her and see if she had more work. The internet offered few breadcrumbs. There was a Wikipedia page with a photo that was not Howland, and there were a few press clippings, but Hughes said at the time, “She had just vanished.”

Hughes and I talked about Howland during the production of her issue focused on underappreciated women writers at a time when I was renting a desk in the magazine’s office. I also became intrigued with Howland and started to read W-3 myself, as well as excerpts from a large stash of letters between Bellow and Howland that Hughes was publishing after their discovery by Howland’s son. Hughes had tracked down Jacob Howland to enquire after his mother’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, Bette Howland had a tragic car accident only the year before. She was suffering from dementia and not healthy enough to correspond with Hughes, but Jacob stepped in and began to work with A Public Space.

As a freelance writer, I thought Howland’s story and Hughes’s rediscovery would make for a good piece for LitHub. So I began to read and assemble everything I could about Hughes’s discovery, which included the letters. I reached out to her son by email to ask more about her, as well as his interaction with Hughes. “Brigid,” he wrote me at the time, “is the reason we found the letters, My wife and I started looking through Bette’s papers for unpublished material, and that’s when we ran across the letters.”

At some point, as I was reading a draft of that issue of A Public Space and working on my own piece about Howland, I went online and ordered first editions of all of her books. They were all under $10 and easy to acquire. I had recently been introduced to the rare book trade, through rare and antiquarian book dealer Heather O’Donnell, owner of Honey and Wax Books, and had caught the collecting bug. Then realizing I would never be able to afford to become a serious collector of any kind, despite being an excellent hoarder of books, I began to dream that I might start a business of my own focused on women writers.

The idea came about after I visited numerous rare book fairs, which I had begun to realize were run primarily by male dealers, male collectors, and predominantly filled with books by men (this is very broadly speaking), and as a result many women writers’ books were priced far lower than those of their male contemporaries

Howland became the inspiration for a new business I’ve just launched, The Second Shelf, and hers were the first books I acquired to sell, if I can bring myself to part with them. Since I bought them, and since Howland began receiving some attention again, thanks to Hughes, her first editions have increased in value and are difficult to come by at all — a copy of Blue in Chicago costs around $80-100 online.

Earlier this year, Hughes announced a new literary imprint, A Public Space Books, and will begin publication with Howland’s experimental novella, A Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which was originally published in TriQuarterly in the 1990s.

The news of Howland’s death this past week came with a strange and surreal, nearly uncanny timing. I had only days earlier published a piece here on Longreads reporting on Hughes’s own erasure from literary history — as the first and only female editor of The Paris Review, and the editor to succeed the renowned George Plimpton. The piece was sparked by a series of frustrated tweets I posted upon learning of Lorin Stein’s resignation from The Paris Review, the result of a sexual harassment scandal in which he admitted to taking advantage of women writers and staff in his workplace.  

It was a poignant and emotional bit of news, and adding insult to injury, all the articles about it kept repeating the misreported legacy of the magazine’s editorship. I found myself urgently needing to correct the historical record of Hughes’s erased role at the Paris Review, the sexist treatment she received by the board in ousting her, and the similarly sexist treatment by the news media in its decade-long misreporting.

Although Howland chose to step out of the limelight, I see her disappearance from literary history as evidence of sexism in publishing and literary criticism. Great male writers, whatever their output or mental state, have legacies that far outlast those of women writers because men read books by men and are less interested in books by women. There is a maxim in publishing I have heard dozens of times from publishers and editors: Women buy and read more books. Women buy and read books by both women and men. Men buy and read fewer books. Men read books by men, not women. This is, again, not wholly the truth, but it’s not inaccurate either. Then, you’ve got patriarchal institutions and the academy still supporting a canon that was built by white men. Literary women suffer from this in their own lifetime, as Howland’s disappearance demonstrates, and they suffer even worse in their afterlives.

Hughes has been restored to her place in literary history with a series of corrections in The New York Times and with a correction on the masthead of The Paris Review. Because of Hughes, Howland is back in print in the pages of A Public Space and will soon have new work on the shelves, along with her out-of-print work.

It’s hard to not be discouraged as a woman writer these days. In addition to facing sexual harassment in the workplace, we have the boys’ club to contend with, we have unequal pay, we are asked far more frequently to write only for “exposure.” We are often given gendered book covers, often whether we want them or not. On top of it all, our literary history is written by men who mostly are interested in what men write.

But all is not lost, women are pulling up women, and some of us, like Howland, might be lucky enough to find champions who do not discriminate based on sex. Here is a quote from just one of Saul Bellow’s many letters to Howland, encouraging her back to the writing desk after her nervous breakdown:

I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.

Who knows if we would have Howland’s books at all without Bellow’s constant encouragement? If one reads the small bit known about her personal biography, it seems incredible that she was able to accomplish what she did. She had very little support in her pursuits. Bellow’s mentorship appears to have made a huge difference in her life. How many other women writers are gone to us, or, like Howland, are on the precipice of being lost?

There is a secret history of literature, one full of forgotten women. Let’s honor the work of Howland and Hughes, and women like them. Let’s find them, pull them out from the cracks, and begin to balance the bookshelves.

This Is How a Woman Is Erased From Her Job

Photograph by Kate Joyce

A.N. Devers | Longreads | December 2017 | 26 minutes (6,577 words)

This is a story about a woman who was erased from her job as the editor of the most famous literary magazine in America.

In 2011, the New York Times ran Julie Bosman’s energetic and gregarious profile of Lorin Stein, the latest head editor of the famous literary magazine The Paris Review — a position for which she declared, “Bacchanalian nights are practically inscribed in the job description.” The profile portrayed Stein as an intellectual bon vivant who loved parties, party-boy banter, and debating literature as if it were the most important thing in the world.

We know now that Stein, by his own admission, abused his power with women writers and staff of the Paris Review. He has resigned from the literary magazine and from his editor-at-large position at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in response to the board of the Paris Review’s investigation into sexual harassment allegations and his conduct. We also know, by his own admission, that he did not treat literature as the most important thing in the world.

Stein himself admitted it in a cringeworthy 2013 online feature from Refinery29 focused not only on the magazine’s debaucherous parties but also on the interior decor of the Paris Review’s offices and fashion choices of the staffers, who were nearly all women. “It’s always been two things at once,” he says about the Review. “On the one hand, it’s a hyper-sophisticated, modernist, avant-garde magazine. On the other hand, it’s sort of a destination party.”

We now know, between this and Bosman’s piece, even without details of the accusations or reports printed in the Times, or the far worse accusations listed in the “Shitty Media Men” list, that these are glaringly honest portrayals of Stein’s priorities at the helm of the Paris Review. Unfortunately.

Also unfortunate was the error in Bosman’s piece naming Stein as the third editor to “hold the title in the magazine’s 58-year history, and the second to follow George Plimpton, himself a legendary New York social figure.” Stein was actually the fourth. Brigid Hughes, the editor who succeeded George Plimpton, had been inexplicably left out of the profile. She was also not mentioned in the piece announcing Stein’s successorship of Philip Gourevitch; although there was no factual error, she was simply ignored.

Read more…

New York Radical Women and the Limits of Second Wave Feminism

New York Radical Women protest the Miss America Pageant on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, 1969. (Santi Visalli Inc./Archive Photos/Getty Images)

At New York magazine, Joy Press has compiled an oral history of New York Radical Women (NYRW), a collective that existed from 1967 to 1969 and played a large role in defining second wave feminism in the United States. Its founders were generally younger and more radical than the women of the National Organization for Women (NOW), who’d come together in 1966 to address specific legislative failures in Washington, DC. NYRW focused more on elements of the culture that held women back.

The theatrics of the group’s organizing has been seared into the public’s imagination. In 1968, they protested the Miss America pageant by interrupting its telecast, crowning a live sheep on Atlantic City’s boardwalk, throwing objects symbolizing female oppression into a “freedom trash can.” The media called them “bra-burners” for this spectacle, and though nothing caught fire that day, the myth endured.

Along with their image-making, NYRW’s intellectual work, in the form of speeches, essays, pamphlets, and books laid the foundation for women’s studies as an academic discipline. Press explains:

Read more…