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This Week in Books: An Everlasting Meal

The False tomb of the child of Akbar in the Tomb of Akbar the Great in Agra on an overcast day. Robert Ruidl/Getty

Dear Reader,

The book that’s been the most help to me during lockdown is a book I’ve never read; I didn’t need to read it for it to save my life. I just needed, just one time, from a review or maybe from simply reading the jacket copy, to absorb its premise and go “huh that makes sense” and then to lock that information away deep in my nether-brain where it would be reserved for the occasion when I would really, really, really need it.

I am, of course, talking about Tamar Adler’s (no doubt) incomparable An Everlasting Meal, a (if I’m not mistaken) wonderful book, the main thrust of which (as I have been led to believe) is that to properly run a kitchen, you have to be constantly planning how the leftover ingredients of one meal will seamlessly blend into the next. This (surely) is a way of thinking and strategizing your grocery shopping which Tamar Adler wrote an entire book about. And I used to be such a bad cook — a non-cook, if you will — that when I first learned oh so many years ago about this concept from the book’s jacket copy or (as I’m now recalling) from my friend Hannah, who described the contents of the book to me (yes, that’s it, she once described the book to me) on the phone (honestly I barely have interacted with this book) or perhaps as we rode together on the train, I was so struck by the powerful logic of it that I locked it away tight in my hind-brain, my deep and permanent lizard-brain. In fact, so stunned do I remember being by this tremendous insight of Tamar Adler’s which (I have reason to suspect) she laid out in detail in the book An Everlasting Meal, that I have got to believe it had an impact on my grocery shopping and meal-planning right away; but the effects weren’t all that pronounced for a very long time, since back then I (truly) did not know how to cook anything. I did not know how to cook anything until last year and therefore until last year I never had an everlasting meal; I never had much more than an everlasting sandwich.

Last year is when I started getting really into recipes. But, reader, I was still a mere “shopping for one recipe at a time” person, a type of person which I have, these past few weeks, come to regard as a very weak and inferior type of person when compared to this accomplished and frankly powerful “shopping for three weeks of meals at a time” person that I have become.

To be totally clear, I placed a Fresh Direct order 3 weeks ago and we have not left the house since. I am a god.

Not a day of lockdown has gone by on which I have not thought of Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, a book I have not read. Not a day has gone by on which An Everlasting Meal has not made me mighty.

I still have plans to make so many — so many different — curries that it would make your head explode. If I told you how many I’m afraid the information would hurt you.

I have never read Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, but, if I never get the virus, friends, I am attributing my survival entirely to the fact that I once merely heard about Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal (a book so powerful that I am beginning to think that no one ever actually could read it without suffering some sort of permanent brain injury, or descending into madness, or raising up a creature from the Dark Pool Below the Tower in My Dreams and unleashing it on an unready world) and that, upon merely hearing of Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, I inscribed in my deepest and darkest most everlasting thoughts a message that will never leave me, that I cannot — that I will not! I refuse to! — forget: “Thus darkly and alone is the Way to everl

 

[Editors’ note: This draft of Dana’s weekly books newsletter, which we received in an email from a strange address that included several photographs in the attachments, each of which is labeled “the False tomb of the child of Akbar at the Tomb of Akbar the Great in Agra on an overcast day,” ends abruptly mid-sentence. We will update this post when we finally hear from Dana what the message of An Everlasting Meal is.]

 

1. “In ‘Afropessimism,’ a Black Intellectual Mixes Memoir and Theory” by John Williams, The New York Times

In an interview, Frank B. Wilderson III talks about his memoir-theory hybrid Afropessimism, which, true to its title, makes the pessimistic case that black suffering is “essential” and even “necessary” to the psychic life of society. It’s hard to read the coronavirus death statistics this week and not see his point.

2. “Beth Alvarado: Grieving in Dreams” by Kimi Eisele, Guernica

Two novelists discuss what it’s like looking back at the books about grief, mass death, and apocalypse they wrote before the coronavirus. “We had no idea then that the virus was there, waiting, and about to be so swiftly spread. Or maybe we did know, could sense, our own precarity. What could possibly sustain a world so stacked toward some and against others?”

3. “No One Disagrees With Rebecca Solnit” by Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic

Jennifer Wilson takes a turn touching the third rail of book criticism by pointing out that a widely lauded feminist author of many books is maybe a bit too easy to agree with.

4. “The Brilliant Plodder” by David Quammen, The New York Review of Books

Many years ago, I intensely read David Quammen’s extraordinarily gripping book about how pandemic viruses emerge. I liked his writing so much that I picked up his book about Darwin and read that, too. Ever since corona showed up, Quammen’s name has been popping up in my feeds a lot as various publications have asked him to weigh in, but I never click on those articles; in fact I feel alarmingly triggered by them, because that book was so terrifying that, honestly guys, the fact that David Quammen is weighing in means we are in terrible trouble. So, uh, here’s an article he wrote about Darwin instead. I read it; it’s delightful. Let’s all read this one and not the others; let’s not become paralyzed by fear when David Quammen says the Big One has come, as he foretold it would.


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5. “For the Union Dead” by Daniel Mason, The Atlantic

A short story from Daniel Mason’s forthcoming collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, in which the narrator discovers a startling aspect of his recently deceased uncle’s favorite hobby.

6. “Broken Pieces” by Cody Delistraty, Poetry

This is a really excellent profile of the poet Cynthia Cruz. “Throughout our afternoon together, Cruz earnestly asks me to help her interpret her poetry, as though she has located the lock to the deepest recesses of her mind but not the key.”

7. “Rereading Sanmao, the Taiwanese Wayfarer Who Sold Fifteen Million Books” by Han Zhang, The New Yorker

One of the world’s more popular writers has recently been translated into English for the first time. Han Zhang reflects on her girlhood fascination with Sanmao.

8. “from Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight,” Bomb

An excerpt from Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel Hex. After a lab accident, a disgraced toxicologist makes a choice. “I guess you could say that I like revenge and they like common decency. I guess you could say I don’t approve of myself enough to protect myself.”

9. “Season of the Witch” by Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Bookforum

A review of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, a novel about a real-life murder which she wrote in lieu of an investigative report because “in Mexico… they kill journalists, but they don’t kill writers, and anyways, fiction protects you.”

 

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We’re Not All in This Together

Getty / Photo Illustration by Longreads

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2020 | 8 minutes (2,043 words)

Call it a dystopia, call it the apocalypse, whatever it is, the fact is, right now, we all have the capacity to kill each other. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s just a fact: We are literally holding each other’s lives in our hands. In a pandemic, every single person’s actions have the most extreme consequences for every single other person. I’m not sure how you can get more serious than that. I’m not sure how people can STILL not take that seriously.

Fuck. It’s hard to express anger without just expressing it. The second you write it down it loses that volatility. How do I convey the rage I’m feeling right now watching families continue to gather together, watching friends clandestinely meeting, laughing like they aren’t responsible for the rising death toll? Should I do it in physiological terms? Ok, I’ll list the symptoms like an illness, since that’s what we’re working with right now: Shallow breath, rapid heart rate, adrenalin. A fucking waterfall of expletives. Shaking. I’m literally shaking with rage. My face is permanently scrunched, my throat twisted, like I’m perpetually getting ready to scream — to shout and kick and yell and punch. Or maybe an analogy works better. Feral animals, threatened and fearful, can explode into bouts of wild insanity. One minute they’re calm, the next they’re thrashing and biting, their eyes bulging and unseeing, their entire body a fist. Blind rage: Uncontrolled, undirected, unstoppable.

I saw all of those unctuous half-naked bodies packed onto a sweltering beach in Australia, knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all the humid holes in the ground packed together in Iran, awaiting the same number of dead bodies. I saw all those stupid drunk kids in bars in the U.K. knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all those abandoned nursing homes in Spain full of the same number of scared seniors left to die on their own.

But I’m not feral. So I just sit here, in the most populous city in Canada, simmering. And when I walk outside, when I run on the road, and I see a park full of people, or strangers face to face, I fucking stare. And I fucking shake. And I don’t say, “What the FUCK are you doing?” Because when I’m told to stay away for everyone’s health, I do. Even if they don’t. Even if they are the 20 percent who believe this is all blown out of proportion, who have the power to sink the 80 percent of us who don’t. Even if they are the reason we went from 90 percent of coronavirus cases spread by travel to 90 percent spread by community. In an apocalypse, a stranger can be a comfort. In a pandemic, they’re nothing but a threat. The community that is left is found in the human beings who distance themselves, not for themselves alone, but for everyone else. Maybe so many people don’t get it because it’s a human paradox: That the further apart we are, the closer we become. Read more…

On Watching Boys Play Music

Arthur Fellig / International Center of Photography / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Read an introduction to the series.

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,059 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

* * *

Three songs into their set, the band has gotten loose and they’re starting to sweat under the stage lights. From where I’m standing a few feet away, I can watch the four guys — a standard formation, with the singer playing guitar, flanked by a second guitarist, a bass player, and a drummer — grimace and grin. The music is feverish, a hook-y mix of ’90s rock and country twang. Playing it, they look expert and at ease, like they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be. 

The lead guitar player is my husband. He’s been in a few bands since we got together more than a dozen years ago, and a few before that. Rousing and charismatic, easy to move to, this is the best of them. 

With a drink in my hand and earplugs responsibly in place, I’m very aware that I’ve spent more than half my life essentially standing in the same spot: off to one side of the stage (close but not too close), eyes forward, shifting weight from foot to foot. I’d like to think that after so much time I’d be less conscious of where I used to be as it compares to the moment I’m in. But the truth is, when I’m at a show — whether the band onstage is comprised solely of men or not; whether the band is famous or unknown or the one my husband plays in — I’m never not thinking about it. 

In an important way this feels like a victory. As a teenager I was adamant that going to shows was essential to my being, something I would never outgrow. Going to a show meant supporting music that had fused with my identity and, crucially, doing it with friends who felt the same way. Going to a show meant being the kind of person who goes to shows — the kind of person I wanted and made sure to be. Even so many years later, it’s hardly a surprise that I married a musician.


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Now that I’m in my late 30s, things have shifted. Bodily and psychically, the relatively simple act of watching this band play is far removed from the ear-ringing dramatics I lost myself in as a teenager. The music itself is different: earworm Americana instead of sweetly sloppy punk. But with the shared vantage point comes echoes of some essential dynamics I’ve been steeped in — some might say implicated in — for more than 20 years, and that have informed the way I’ve listened to music and watched bands play ever since.

* * *

I’ve been watching boys play music since I was 15 years old, when I was growing up in a small town that felt farther from New York City than it actually measured in miles. It’s a classic story, the material thousands of songs are built from: The place I lived was boring and provincial; there was nothing to do but go to the mall, and music saved me. One day I started seeing flyers taped up on walls at school, broadcasting the names of a small crop of local bands alongside hastily scrawled logistical info and rudimentary collages, lazily appropriated photos, and the labored-over lettering that was the trademark of a certain kind of bored and vaguely artistic high school kid. Sometimes a photocopy would be tacked to a bulletin board in a classroom, and I’d let my eyes wander over to it while the teacher’s back was turned like I could will it to beam me up. The world they teased was one I’d been dreaming about, and the flyers were like maps to buried treasure.

My close girlfriends and I started going to shows every weekend. We could hardly believe our luck in finding this so close to home, a genuine local scene in our native territory, where we’d learned to expect little. Bands played in a big warehouse that had been converted to a skate park, or a small club in a strip mall abutting a Pizza Hut, or various firehouses and American Legion halls, and occasionally someone’s backyard. Self-deprecation was a trend when it came to naming — there was Not Good Enough, Last One Picked, and Humble Beginnings — as was alluding to a generalized toughness: Fallout, Eye 2 Eye, Inner Dam. They played catchy, snotty, buoyant punk music that was fun to jump around to, and snarling, screamy hardcore driven by bass riffs and body slams. It was all fast and loud and rude and messy, an ideal soundtrack for our restlessness.

Without exception, these bands were made up of boys, and boys accounted for the vast majority of people who came to see them play. Being a girl in this sea of boys was to be special — tough and wily and possessed of rarified taste. Right away, I knew I was where I wanted to be: in rooms where the air was thick with smoke and the floors were sticky and the sound was abrasive, with people who were attracted to things that didn’t exist for anyone’s approval. 

Kids from other towns and high schools converged at shows, and in these semi-secret spaces, we were drawn together and got close quickly. New faces gave way to new friendships and familiar frictions: long conversations and car rides, jealousy and competitiveness and unrequited love. Loyalty came quickly, and with it, the conviction that outsiders were not to be trusted — especially girls, since there couldn’t possibly be room for all of us. Everything revolved around the shows. The energy of being there rearranged my cells while sating a deep thirst; hours later, I always struggled to fall asleep, dreaming half-conscious dreams where the band was still playing, the music a stubborn throb, my limbs vibrating. 

That music was miraculous for existing within reach. Whether it featured crushing screams or a catchy chorus, it was right in front of me, something I could get my arms around. When everything was clicking — when the band was playing the songs I loved the most, when I tipped my head back and sang along, when the music pulsed intimately through my body in a crowd full of my friends, buoyed further by the promise of the night spooling out ahead of us — the glow of bliss and belonging was so pure and potent it made me dizzy.

I just want to get laid, went the chorus of one crowd-pleasing singalong, the singer repeating the line with a nasal swagger before switching to a scream for the kicker: before I die! Were these bands any good? In the thick of it, it hardly mattered. It was easy to love something that you could stand right next to, something not everyone could touch or even appreciate. It felt good. Leaning up against the stage, my face arranged into an expression of practiced nonchalance, was to insist that I belonged there — and that my attention and support mattered. It made me feel cool, probably for the first time.  

But I couldn’t do it alone. If those flyers for shows had been maps, boys were the passports. And that’s what we called the ones who were our friends: the boys. Along with monopolizing the stage, they were the ones taking money at the door, massed in the crowd, stationed behind soundboards and merch tables, and doing tricks on their skateboards outside. They were the loudest, the most obnoxious, the funniest, the sweetest and most cruel. They had less to prove than we did as girls, though that didn’t necessarily mean they were any less self-conscious or tried any less hard. They played guitar and bass and drums; they sang and scowled and snarled and cracked jokes. They scribbled setlists and hauled gear around and did sound check. They gestured for the levels to be turned up or down. It was all very important stuff, and they made clear that it had nothing to do with us.  

Were these bands any good? In the thick of it, it hardly mattered. It was easy to love something that you could stand right next to, something not everyone could touch or even appreciate. It felt good.

What did those boys really see when they looked at us? Where there was affection, there was also suspicion. One of the tensions churning had to do with authenticity. Have you seriously never heard of this band? What are you, a poser? Another related — but usually unspoken — tension had to do with intent. Did the girls really show up for the music, for the scene, or did we have a predictable ulterior motive? The relationship between us was two-sided, if not exactly reciprocal: If we were special for loving the music, the boys were special because they were the ones playing it. Our attention gave them an aura of confidence and power, while theirs made us both more scrutinized and harder to see.  

Inevitably, some of the boys who played music became our boyfriends, which came with its own set of privileges and responsibilities. I harbored crushes and dated two guitar players. On and off, for too long, I hooked up with another guy who was really the number one groupie of the whole scene, but whose gender meant that he was treated more like a celebrity than a charity case. But being someone’s girlfriend was never the point. My friends and I wanted to be noticed and known, valued as experts and familiars and friends and fans and confidants and critics — and also be desired. We quickly learned that it was impossible to comfortably be all of those things at once. In the lyrics of the boys’ songs — which we memorized and sang along to — girls were mostly agents of heartbreak, objects of longing or blame.   

Among the flyers and band photos and handwritten lyrics covering my bedroom walls, I had taped up a cartoon. Headlined “I’m On the List!” its protagonist and punch line was a serial dater of guys in bands, a girl whose style and self transformed from panel to panel, depending whose hand she was holding: She was alternately punk, goth, hippie, girl next door. “I’m on the list!” she shouted as she shoved her way to the front of lines, trying too hard in a way that made everyone around her sneer. While she cheerfully narrated all the good times she’d had being “with the band,” the illustrations revealed her to be an oblivious opportunist, a hanger-on. I’d torn it out of Details magazine and put it up as a way of showing that I got the joke. 

But I think I sensed even then that the joke was on us.

* * *

Outside of shows, watching the boys play music was a ritual — though band practice tended not to involve a whole lot of actual music playing. The girls (and some boys) would lounge around and talk, graze on snacks and soda while the band noodled around in the living room or garage. When the boys got it together enough to play a recognizable chunk of a song, we’d stop whatever we were doing and pay attention, nodding to the music, clapping appreciatively when they finished. 

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in a band myself. I did, badly. I craved the creative outlet, the spotlight, the place I would carve out, the point it would make. Hilary and I were slowly learning to play guitar; Brianna was already good at bass. We figured we could convince another friend that she wanted to be a drummer. That was what boys did; they didn’t think they needed to be good at something before pursuing it. (They didn’t necessarily have to be or get good at all; talent was not a particular requirement.) One of our male friends could start a band on a lark and have a show in a few weeks. But the mid-’90s in our leg of suburban New York could feel a little stuck in the past when it came to what girls could do. 

Still, we dreamed up band names and doodled them on our notebooks. For a while we got together to write and play songs with simple melodies and tortured lyrics. We were pretty bad, like so many young bands driven by little more than excitement and impatience, but our inability to get our shit together felt more consequential, because it meant the scene we took so much pride in still had no girls in bands. (I’d heard whispers about something called riot grrrl, but it seemed mostly like a colorful rumor in Sassy magazine, a postcard from somewhere else.)

So my friends and I started a zine. We called it Thriftstore Injection, the title partly a rip-off from the name of a girl-led band in Blake Nelson’s 1994 novel Girl. In that book, a Portland teenager named Andrea discovers her own local scene and her life becomes an enviable, angsty blur of vintage dresses, punk shows, and the intermittent attentions of a damaged musician. Here she is describing a raucous show, in her signature breathless style: 

Boys were moshing and girls too and it was this big swirl of people and me and Rebecca looked at each other and then we both ran right into the middle of it. And everyone fell down and we were getting kicked and smashed and falling over everyone and rolling on the floor and then we got up and we were dancing like crazy and whipping our hair around and it was the wildest time! 

I read this book at least 10 times, seeing in it a version of my own life: the joyful frenzy of it as well as the constant self-consciousness, the quiet humiliation of trying to get close to something that could only ever sort of belong to you.

We made a new zine every few months and sold it at shows for a buck or two. Encouraging our readers to pick up the latest recordings put out by local bands, and proclaiming nostalgia for the TV shows of our childhoods, we used our new platform mostly to convey enthusiasm. We wrote as fans not only of bands but of low-level quirky subjects — Pez, ramen, cats — that we played up partly as a way of crafting a voice and identity for ourselves. When it came to the things we really loved, we tended not to describe or interrogate them in too much depth (demos by local bands are described variously as “incredible,” “amazing,” and “kicks so much ass it’s not even funny”). In later issues some light criticism started sneaking in (“sounds like they recorded in a box which makes it kinda hard to listen to … none of the songs stick in your head”), alongside earnest rants about racism, depression, and authority figures.

I read this book at least 10 times, seeing in it a version of my own life: the joyful frenzy of it as well as the constant self-consciousness, the quiet humiliation of trying to get close to something that could only ever sort of belong to you.

We interviewed a handful of local bands — most of them friends of ours — and one bigger score, a California band signed to a prominent punk label making a stop on a longer tour. We crammed into their van on a rainy Sunday before their show and pelted them with questions about their favorite foods, their influences, and the funniest place they’d ever peed. “What do you think of our scene so far?” we asked, craving validation so plainly that it’s clear even on a faded photocopy. “Looks cool,” the lead singer said, and my heart swelled. 

Looking at these zines now, I see an overeager patchwork of underbaked passions and opinions. “I don’t think that anything could ever make me feel the way that music does,” I wrote, skimming the surface of a deep and complicated connection. “I can’t do anything without music playing. It’s even better when you’re a musician, to be able to create music and understand things about it. I feel like I owe it my life.”

I believed it, though. And regardless of the inanities and insults, I was fiercely protective of the scene. I hated when there were fights at shows, because the fights were always started by boys and were only ever about them. To me, their involvement in such stupidity was disqualifying, an offensive distraction from what I believed — or wanted to believe — the scene was supposed to be about. Among those things (despite all the evidence to the contrary) was pushing back against aggressive macho bullshit, which was alienating not only to the girls but to boys seeking a refuge from the tyranny of high school. I cared about zines because they were a place for people to say something, anything; to articulate what they thought and believed, even if it was just “school sucks.” I respected the prevalence of straight edge because it was driven by a conviction, even if it wasn’t my own. 

I wanted the scene to be about more than it was, and after a couple of years I couldn’t ignore that it wasn’t really up to me. Meanwhile the warehouse/skate park that had been the best place to see shows had closed, and some of our favorite bands had stopped playing much. Most of what was left was hardcore music. Increasingly, I wanted to be less besieged by boys, my life less dominated by the things they made. I wanted to be less peripheral to the things I poured my attention into.

* * *

The scene had gotten me through high school, but when I got to college in the fall of 2000 (in New Jersey, not all that far from my hometown but miraculously absent anyone I knew) my attention transferred effortlessly to politics. While I was funneling all that would-be-riot-grrrl energy into national elections and local activism, I started writing for my school’s alternative paper, where a review of the new Cat Power record could sit comfortably next to a critique of globalization. This time coincided with the rise of girl-driven bands like the Gossip and Le Tigre and Bratmobile and Gravy Train!!!! With a new group of friends, I went to see these bands play in larger clubs in New York, dancing and sweating and singing along until our bodies ached and our voices went raspy. In those rooms, with all those women onstage and in the audience, there was a sense that we were part of something that mattered, something that had momentum, and that needed us.

I wanted to be less peripheral to the things I poured my attention into.

I’d felt that particular mix of heady idealism and physical abundance at shows plenty of times before, a fizzy warmth that swept through my whole body and was almost holy. I was always chasing that particular shiver. I missed the version of it I’d experienced close to home: the urgency and weight of it, the insider knowledge that had been so hard-won, the pride that came with staking a claim. But when I watched Le Tigre and Sleater-Kinney dominate the stage, I knew what I’d been missing. For me, there was less immediate intimacy in these spaces, but in some ways that meant there was more freedom.  

There were still boys. Regardless of geography, activism tended to parallel and overlap with music and those who played it, which included plenty of boys who believed they knew everything there was to know about both. It was a world of impassioned attractions, to both causes and people, and within it the boys I was interested in were still mostly ones who played music. But listening to their songs and going to see them play was an occasional thing, not a habit or an identity, or part of anything beyond it.

When I was 20, I fell in love with a talented singer/guitarist who had taken a year off from college to work at Sam Ash while he tried to find success for his band on a two-semester deadline. Their songs were pretty good: shimmering melodies and brightly plaintive vocals, but as they struggled it was clear they didn’t have what it would take. Still, I cared and I wanted him to know it. My best friend and I once raced out to Asbury Park to surprise him when his band played a show at a small club on a random weeknight. We arrived during one of their first songs to find my boyfriend’s mother sitting by herself at a cocktail table, the only person in the whole place besides the sound guy. I gave him a hug after their set and we never spoke of it again. 

I think about that anecdote a lot, and it still makes me cringe. There is something about the dream of playing music that can seem like a particularly delicate thing. To be onstage is to be vulnerable, exposed. It is a display of hope with an undercurrent of need, laying bare a longing to be noticed in a sea of others who understand that hunger — and many of whom share it. There’s a kind of immediate validation in playing, but getting beyond that is a lot more difficult, and wanting it isn’t enough. 

I think, too, about the word “support” — what it means for a girl, a woman, to support a boy, a man, in his pursuits, to show up and stand by and endorse his efforts, or to support a scene at large. In both contexts support is a resource; attention is currency. They can be deployed in ways that make you a participant or that make your position more of a passive one. They can be appropriated. Maybe this is especially true in a dynamic as visible and traditionally gendered as playing music. “Support” is related to both fandom and community, but it can exist without them. The shape of my support varied over the years, but it often involved some amount of glossing over the obvious, pretending things were OK when they weren’t. It didn’t always mean the things I wanted it to, or fully belong to me.

Whatever form it took or how earnestly I bestowed it, I always recognized and resented that my gender made my support a cliché. In some ways, it was as simple as that: I didn’t want to be dismissed as a girl, or as someone who watches. Today, what I resent almost as much as the stereotype itself is its hold on me. Not only the extent to which I still feel the need to object: I am not just a girl who watches boys play music! Not only because it forces me to admit that I care what other people think. What I try and fail to resist is this facile analysis, a flattened sense of burden and blame built on one-dimensional ideas about how men and women relate to each other and what our roles are as musicians and fans. In many ways, the lessons of watching boys play music are ones I reject. But I still learned them, and the songs are stuck in my head.  

Things should be less fraught these days. I’m not ambivalent about supporting my husband’s band; they’re genuinely good and it’s fun to see them play. In going to their shows, I’m supporting a person I love, doing a thing he loves — a thing he’s really skilled at and that I want him to be recognized for. And yet: As much as this dynamic is undeniably, fundamentally different from the one I grew up with, it sometimes resembles it, with the participants in their prescribed positions. And the part of me that loves seeing my husband onstage — that is proud of him, admires his talent, loves these songs, is still turned on — can feel like it’s at odds with the part that doesn’t want to just stand there and watch. 

This feeling is not strictly useful — as a musician’s partner, it is mostly just disruptive. Still, I’ve tried to pay attention to it. And at some point I noticed that my stubborn inner conflict could feel as good, as right, as its absence used to. It reminds me of what I regret, of all the things I’ve learned to look out for, and have come to question — the compromises I’ll accept and concessions I refuse to make. It shows me what I was always right about and what I needed more time to understand. It shows me that it’s possible to outgrow something and still hang on to a part of it. It underscores the distance of two decades and makes those years disappear, all at once. It can be as nourishing as the music, now that there is, at least mostly, room for both. 

* * *

Also in Hive:
Welcome to Hive: Series Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson
Miami: A Beginning, by Jessica Lynne

* * *

Eryn Loeb is the deputy editor at Guernica. Her writing about nostalgia, books, and feminism (or some combination of those things) has appeared in Poets & Writers, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, the Awl, the Village Voice, the Rumpus, and the Millions, among other publications.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

This Week In Books: Too Small For the Occasion

John Keats reading a book of poetry, after portrait by Joseph Severn. English poet, 1795-1821. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

I’m sitting here trying to write up my little “This Week in Books” list, and it’s a real problem, because the literary corona-articles I saved last week already seem… slight. As in, too small for the occasion; preposterously hedged with absurd little silver linings. Re-reading one article I’d saved for my list, I ended up having to ask myself, is it actually ok to conclude that the typhus scene in Jane Eyre demonstrates how pandemics can be beneficial unstructured time for children!? But this isn’t me being critical, ok, this is me saying: that Jane Eyre article is already 10 days old, and what’s happening now is, the exponential growth of the disaster has made all these corona-articles floating in its wake appear smaller and smaller at a similarly accelerated rate. Last week seems so tiny; last month is minuscule. I dare you to try reading anything from February about the coronavirus; it feels sort of like going insane!

The real problem with the literary corona genre, to be honest, is that as the days go by, and more “essential” workers sicken and die, I feel my interest in anything about corona not written by or about essential workers kind of fading. The travails of lockdown are real, of course, but the thing to keep in mind about lockdown is that it is safety. There’s only so much we can complain about this before we start to reveal something… unpleasant… about ourselves; before we begin to align ourselves with what’s being done to the “essential” working class in this country. The mass sacrifice. It’s like the government is sending soldiers into combat with no guns, or something; like the Battle of Stalingrad, but for no particular reason!? I saw a tweet by a garbage collector who said that a passerby yelled at him for wearing a mask because he doesn’t deserve it as much as a healthcare worker. I saw a tweet quoting a month-old Facebook post by a bus driver worrying that his job will endanger him, with an addendum that he has already died of the virus. I see photo after photo of “essential” workers with no masks or PPE of any kind and think to myself that this cannot possibly be okay. Two weeks ago, the FedEx guy was parked outside our apartment — and we were watching, because any time a truck or something pulls up in the street that’s entertainment for us now — when suddenly he screamed, and I mean really goddamn screamed, to no one and to every one of us who was peeking at him out our windows: “What are we even doing out here!!??” The silence that followed was profound.

Doctors and nurses need PPE desperately, but also, so does everyone who’s still at work! So demand not only that your governments provide PPE for your healthcare workers, but for your garbage collectors, too. Please!

That all being said, I’ve still got a few literary corona reads here for you. I’m not trying to, I don’t know, make a grand statement. Just a small statement. I’m voicing a concern — a tiny but exponentially growing concern — that in a couple weeks this will all seem insane. Read more…

Performance Art: On Sharing Culture

Stefano Mazzola / Awakening / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  9 minutes (2,261 words)

The image that struck me most was the empty piazza. That Italian square — I believe it was in Venice — with no one in it. Maybe a bird or two. It looked inviting but also wholly unnatural. A city square is made for people, lots of people, people from everywhere. If people aren’t there, does it cease to be a square? I wondered the same thing about the Louvre and its tens of thousands of objects with no one to look at them — is it still a museum, or is it just a warehouse? I wondered about all those Berlin concert halls with no one to hear their music, all those Indian cinemas with no one to watch their films, all those crumbling ruins everywhere, standing there with no tourists to behold them or to record that beholding for everyone else. At this particular point in history, does art exist if we aren’t sharing it? 

By sharing I mean not only sharing a moment with the art itself, but also sharing the space with other people, and more literally, sharing all of that online — posting updates on Facebook, photos on Twitter, videos on TikTok, stories on Instagram. This kind of “sharing” is constriction rather than expansion, regressing back to the word’s etymological root of “cutting apart.” This contortion of a selfless act into a selfish one is symptomatic of a society that expects everyone to fend for themselves: Sharing online is not so much about enlightening others as it is about spotlighting yourself. It’s impossible to disconnect the images of those now-empty spots from the continuous splash of reports about the coronavirus pandemic gouging the global economy. In America, the economy is the culture is the people. Americans are not citizens; they are, as the president recently put it, “consumers.” And on the web, consuming means sharing that consumption with everyone else. That the images suddenly being shared are empty exposes the big con — that in reality, no one has really been sharing anything. That social distancing is nothing new. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Pneumonia coronavirus

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jessica Lustig, Ed Yong, Leslie Jamison, Rosa Lyster, and Geoff Edgers.

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1. What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus

Jessica Lustig | The New York Times Magazine | March 24, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,227 words)

“You shouldn’t stay here,” he says, but he gets more frightened as night comes, dreading the long hours of fever and soaking sweats and shivering and terrible aches. “This thing grinds you like a mortar,” he says.

2. How the Pandemic Will End

Ed Yong | The Atlantic | March 25, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,549 words)

“The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.”

3. Since I Became Symptomatic

Leslie Jamison | New York Review of Books | March 26, 2020 | 6 minutes (1500 words)

A month after filing for divorce, single mom Leslie Jamison contracted COVID-19. She wrote this meditation on single parenthood, loneliness, longing, and frustration while sheltering in place — and sweating out the virus — with her 2-year-old daughter.

4. Where Water Used to Be

Rosa Lyster | London Review of Books | March 25, 2020 | 11 minutes (2,810 words)

A look at another crisis the world is facing: water scarcity. Rosa Lyster examines the water-stressed cities of Cape Town and Mexico City — cities grappling with issues related to climate change, infrastructure, and inequality.

5. Sinéad O’Connor is Still in One Piece

Geoff Edgers | The Washington Post | March 18, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,857 words)

“She tore up a picture of the pope. Then her life came apart. These days, she just wants to make music.”

‘This Thing Grinds You Like a Mortar’: How Jessica Lustig is Fighting Coronavirus

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In this intimate and moving piece for The New York Times Magazine, Jessica Lustig writes about the dystopian horror story she’s living as she cares for her husband, who has been battling Coronavirus for the past two weeks.

CK and I had settled in to watch “Chernobyl,” the HBO series about the 1986 nuclear accident and its aftermath, when T first felt sick and went to lie down in the bedroom. We stopped after three episodes. That time, when we would sit on the couch watching something together, is behind us. Now there is too much rushing back and forth, making sure T has a little dinner — just a tiny bowl of soup, just an appetizer, really, that he is unable to smell, that he fights nausea to choke down — taking his temperature, monitoring his oxygen-saturation levels with the fingertip pulse oximeter brought by a friend from the drugstore on the doctor’s advice, taking him tea, dispensing his meds, washing my hands over and over, texting the doctor to say T is worse again, standing next to him while he coughs into the covers, rubbing his knees through the blankets.

I am texting the doctor. I am texting T’s five siblings on a group chat, texting my parents and my brother, texting T’s business partner and employees and his dearest friends and mine, in loops and loops, with hearts and thankful prayer-hands emoji. He is too exhausted, too weak, to answer all the missives winging to him at all hours. “Don’t sugarcoat it for my family,” he tells me. He has asked for the gray sweater that was his father’s, that his father wore when he was alive. He will not take it off.

I run through possibilities. I’m not so worried about CK getting sick. I can nurse her too. It’s if I get sick. I show her how to do more things, where things go, what to remember, what to do if — What if T is hospitalized? What if I am? Could a 16-year-old be left to fend for herself at home, alone? How would she get what she needed? Could she do it? For how long?

The one thing I know is that I could not send her to my parents, 78 years old and nearby on Long Island. They would want her to come, but she could kill them, their dear grandchild coming forward to their embrace, radioactive, glowing with invisible incubating virus cells. No. Not them. Someone else would have to take her, someone who has a bedroom and a bathroom where she could isolate and be cared for. Someone would. I lie awake at 4 a.m., on the floor, listening, thinking, wide awake with adrenaline.

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This Week In Books: A ‘Melancholia’ or ‘Take Shelter’ Situation

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Dear Reader,

A thing about me is that I’ve been depressed for awhile. Staying inside a lot. And now, Melancholia-like, real life has begun to mirror my mental state: my outer and inner worlds are on a collision course, and it’s not as clear as I’d like it to be which is drawing in the other.

Last week I told my boyfriend I sometimes have this vertiginous feeling that I caused the pandemic by becoming too socially isolated. I was joking, but not really joking. Yesterday when we were looking out the window at the absolutely nobody going by, I said, “What if we imagined this? What if there is no pandemic, and we’ve just convinced ourselves we have to stay inside?” He responded that he does sometimes worry that we are in a Take Shelter situation. That I, like Michael Shannon in the 2011 thriller directed by Jeff Nichols, convinced myself a storm was coming and prepped our shelter for no reason (I was worrying about corona weeks ahead of the curve), but because I turned out to be right (a total fluke), I will become power-mad and lock my boyfriend inside forever!

Honestly, reader, it’s not out of the question. I told him so, and he said that’s fair because it really does seem like a bad idea to go outside, like, ever again. I hear that brave people are out there doing things like gathering PPE donations for frontline healthcare workers or taking groceries to the isolated elderly or just working their regular jobs at the grocery store, which it turns out are wildly dangerous. I keep trying to psych myself up to do something useful like that, but then another formless day peels off its skin, and I find I have achieved nothing. The best I can say for myself is that I am not one of those people at the park making things worse.

Most of this week’s book roundup is about the virus. The whole world is about the virus. I am so sorry.

1. “America Infected: The Social (Distance) Catastrophe” by J. Hoberman, The Paris Review

Film critic J. Hoberman points to political differences between Camus’ The Plague and Elia Kazan’s unacknowledged film adaptation Panic in the Streets as a demonstration of how pandemic response can inspire solidarity or descend into authoritarianism.

2. “‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’: A Story of the 1918 Flu Pandemic” by Katherine Anne Porter, The New York Review of Books

NYRB has printed an excerpt from Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a short novel (originally published in 1939) set during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and based on Porter’s own experience with the disease. It is an unsettling read for anyone contemplating dying in the Javits Center next month.

3. “The Anger of the Sick” by Davey Davis, The New Inquiry

Davey Davis reviews Blackfishing the IUD, a weaponized memoir which its author Caren Beilin hopes will destroy the IUD the way the documentary Blackfish destroyed Sea World; Beilin seeks vengeance against the IUD because her use of the device left her with an autoimmune disorder. Davis writes that what separates Beilin’s memoir from others in the ‘sick woman’ genre is her explicit call to action; to defeat the IUD, we must first overturn a medical system that doubts women’s pain. This review was published last month, but it seems prescient now, written at the cusp of the moment before the political anger of the unwell becomes everyone’s anger.

4. “What China’s Literary Community is Reading During the Coronavirus Pandemic” by Na Zhong, Lit Hub

One of the strangest consequences of the pandemic is that at any given time, you can have the uncanny realization that you know exactly what most of the people you know (and billions of others you don’t) are doing right now: sitting around at home, trying to figure out how to think about (or not think about) the coronavirus. Na Zhong has put together a list of books that a few members of China’s literary community are anxiety-reading right now. It’s weird to think that their motivations to anxiety-read about a) other plagues or b) World War II dovetail so perfectly with my household’s anxiety-reading compulsions this past week; I’ve been covering the plague angle while my boyfriend has World War II cornered for now.


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5. “The Dystopian Novel for the Social Distancing Era” by Joshua Keating, Slate

Joshua Keating writes that Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is the book that’s been on his mind these days, because so far his experience of the pandemic has not been sickness but rather (reminiscent of Ogawa’s surreal novel) the erasure of items from everyday life. “The losses start small and insignificant. At the local coffee shop, the first thing that disappeared was the table holding the lids and the self-serve milk. Then half the tables vanished. Then all the tables. Then the whole shop closed. Then you hear that the employees were laid off … Perhaps you, like me, thought last Saturday that it would be OK to have a couple of friends over to the house as long as you were reasonably cautious … By Sunday, that was off limits. Today, the idea is unthinkable.”

6. “An Attentive Memoir of Life in Parma” by Patricia Hampl, The Paris Review

Patricia Hampl writes that a book she loved 25 years ago, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s memoir Mother Tongue about expatriate life in Italy, has taken on new meaning during the pandemic. “I’ve been in conversation with this book for many years. And now, yet again, with the undertow of the pandemic clutching Italy in its fierce grip, the book speaks.”

7. “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, The Point

Helena de Bres writes about the books that she turned to for comfort during a period of personal isolation she faced as a child, and how books (generally pessimistic, sad) aren’t really comforting her at all during this period of universal isolation. Instead it’s the unbridled optimism of those crazy people who keep going outside that she’s been motivated by, because she realizes how precious those ridiculous optimists are. We must preserve them.

8. “English PEN Calls for Release of Ahdaf Soueif After Coronavirus Protest Arrest” by Mark Chandler, The Bookseller

A brief note and harbinger: “English PEN has called for the release of Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif, who was arrested during a protest about the treatment of prisoners during the coronavirus outbreak.”

9. “Capitalism’s Favorite Drug” by Michael Pollan, The Atlantic

This one is about coffee — the illustrious Michael Pollan reviewing Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland — and honestly it isn’t supposed to be about coronavirus at all, but I read this line and I can’t stop thinking about the rich people who would rather send us back out to die than pay our bills for a little while: “The essential question facing any would-be capitalist, as Sedgewick reminds us, has always and ever been ‘What makes people work?’” On Salvadoran coffee plantations, the answer to that question was: a hunger crisis engineered by the upper class.

10. “Anna Kavan and the Rise of Autospec” by Gregory Ariail, The Los Angeles Review of Books

This one isn’t about corona either. It’s Gregory Ariail’s review of the Anna Kavan short story collection published by NYRB this month, and how Kavan’s style (she lived in the first half of the twentieth century) defined a genre Ariail calls “auto speculative fiction” (as opposed to “autofiction”), which he describes as “a truly combustive marriage of opposites: the searing confessions of the inner life on the one hand, and speculative narratives that systematically violate natural laws and reject normative discourses on the other.” I won’t tell you which lines of this review remind me of corona; you can pick those out for yourself.

Take care of yourself,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Albatross People

Arthur Morris / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Colin Daileda | Longreads | March 2020 | 7 minutes (2,000 words)

My wife told me she had at last booked a flight back to Bengaluru and so I should relax that evening at our apartment. There I opened a book I was reading about birds, called The Thing With Feathers, by Noah Strycker. I was toward the end, on a chapter about albatrosses.

The wandering albatross looks not much different from a seagull, except it’s enormous. Its wings span 12 feet, twice my height. Wanderers need wings like this because they spend a huge part of their lives floating over the open ocean, plucking fish and squid from the water. They do this away from their mates, because keeping track of each other would cost precious energy needed to stay aloft. Each partner goes about their own life until, once every two years, they flutter back home to the little bits of land in the Southern oceans on which they nest. They greet each other with a dance and quickly go about building that year’s home. Though it takes nine months for an albatross chick to leave its nest, the parents won’t see each other much during that time, either. The baby needs food, and so they fly out in search of it over different parts of the sea. All that time away, and yet albatrosses almost always remain faithful for life.

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Amanda Hess, Robert Draper, Emily Gogolak, Mark O’Connell, and Gabrielle Bellot.

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1. The Wing Is a Women’s Utopia. Unless You Work There.

Amanda Hess | The New York Times Magazine | March 17, 2020 | 20 minutes (5,140 words)

Surprise: women’s empowerment harnessed to American-style capitalism delivers more inequality, and an Instagram wall can’t fix it.

2. The School Shooting That Austin Forgot

Robert Draper | Texas Monthly | March 19, 2020 | 41 minutes (10,305 words)

“The anguish that has plagued the Murchison students presages the kind of long-tail trauma that many of today’s witnesses to shootings will be burdened with for the rest of their lives.”

3. An Intersection at the End of America

Emily Gogolak | Oxford American | March 17, 2020 | 45 minutes (11,400 words)

“A portrait of Dilley, Texas, home of the largest immigration detention center in the United States.”

4. Real Estate for the Apocalypse: My Journey into a Survival Bunker

Mark O’Connell | The Guardian | March 17, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,844 words)

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, entrepreneurs are translating fears of societal collapse into post-apocalyptic gated communities.

5. The Curious Language of Grief

Gabrielle Bellot | Catapult | March 11, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,495 words)

“I wonder why I wonder, and then I remember why: I am still mourning him, in part because I am mourning all the relationships I never got to have with the people who never knew me as a woman.”