Author: litmag_admin

All of the tenants woke up at once. The sun glided across the horizon like dawn or armageddon. Light pouring from each window, flooding through every gate. Lunging across the face, penetrating the eye slit. Something dense and loud shook the building. Colliding with the top floor, a meteor or a missile.

At its incipit, a collective of ambitious architects had organized the building into a maze of studio apartments. Rooms connected by disjointed hallways and corridors, rendering each space partially communal, where the path to the elevator or the lobby or the balcony was taken through neighboring apartments. The vocabulary of the collective drawing references from Deleuze and Borges. They liken their creation to the Library of Babel. Tenants are nourished by the processes of their habitat. Entering the homes of strangers becomes familiar / common. Neighbors become apparitions, distant and obfuscated bodies moving through doors and hallways.

Performance artists recreate their paths, writers and filmmakers document their encounters. The population shifts into a state of becoming. Simultaneously the subject and object of their fascination. Themselves the same strangers that they see at the ends of hallways and looking out windows. Tenants become suspicious of one another. Pursuing and avoiding. Each a part of the larger apparatus of the building. Because of this, when something loud and dense crashes into the building, into the top floor, there is no investigation.

Tenants assemble their theories about the loud crashing of the top floor, “It was without cause or purpose.” … “The installation of a new floor.” … “An extension of the landlord’s will.” … “We are without overseer.” … “There are no more consequences.” … “The visitation of a talented artist.” … “One that we have, as a group, defined as being consistent in their aesthetic and praxis.” … “The performance of their ritual.” … “Equating the building to a body.” … “Each of us a cell.” … “Every cluster of rooms an organ.” … “Each floor a system.” … “It is a break or malfunction in the veins connecting systems.” … “Blood cannot travel.” … “The collective has departed.” … “They have left us without an understanding of our environment.” … “Space is of a poetic nature, it cannot be understood haptically.” … “This is nonsense.” … “And yet it afflicts us.” … “Or we are afflicted with a hypochondriac perception of ourselves.” … “Or there is no difference.” … “Or there was no sound at all.” … “But this is not true.” … “Something has happened.”

Red light illuminates windowless hallways. Fragmented pathways connecting barren or cramped studios. Silhouettes pass one another, clinging to the edges of the wall. Circumnavigating other bodies. The floors creak at the hint of movement. Tampered wallpaper absorbs pockets of light. Someone says that they have been waking up in the middle of the night, seeing images of their mother. The void reconstructs vague memories of her complexion. It feels as if certain pathways have begun to disappear, they say, certain doors aren’t where I remember. Some hallways don’t lead to where they used to.

A tenant who pretends to associate with the collective of ambitious architects, lists the semiotic qualities of the hallway. Speculates why the lights are red, why people won’t talk to one another, why the floor creaks so much. The neighbor who saw their mother in the middle of the night says that symbols must be placed, they do not happen naturally, or as the byproduct of a degradation. If there is a signifier being signified, in this circumstance, it is the aesthetic elements of Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, in which none of us can bear to leave, but there is no reason we should stay.

Someone says that Buñuel might live here, but it is not true. Another tenant says that this could not be true, it would be anachronistic. The layout of the floor changes. Since the sound of the initial impact, the building has felt much more lively. As if awoken. Landlines are severed by tectonic shifts. Wires stretch and unthread. Fires start between walls. Red light crawls into the connecting studios, engulfing the door frame and absorbing the natural fill.

One of the tenants takes on the facade of a performance artist. They perform the movements of the building. When they flex their leg, the floor shakes. When they extend their bicep, the walls bend. When they tense their neck, the ceiling explodes in noise and static.

Further hysterias begin to develop. Each tenant finding their own methods of converting paranoia into a tactile art. The collective of ambitious architects respond cryptically by writing a map of the text, in which each floor’s changing shape is dynamically rendered. But regardless of this, there are no departures and no changes to the migration of the tenants.

apt. no. 4006 – apt. no. 9096 – apt. no. 3619 – apt. no. 2299 – apt. no. 3584 – apt. no. 1345 – apt. no. 3436 – apt. no. 4370 – apt. no. 3813 – apt. no. 2786 – apt. no. 4735 – apt. no. 8562 – apt. no. 7263 – apt. no. 8253 – apt. no. 5782 – apt. no. 1702 – apt. no. 5257 – apt. no. 4474 – apt. no. 826 – apt. no. 4322 – apt. no. 1915 – apt. no. 1765 – apt. no. 8850 – apt. no. 1924 – apt. no. 7211 – apt. no. 1160 – apt. no. 197 – apt. no. 6382 – apt. no. 7860 – apt. no. 5286 – apt. no. 7792 – apt. no. 7394 – apt. no. 6277 – apt. no. 1158 – apt. no. 7493 – apt. no. 9853 – apt. no. 5196 – apt. no. 9277 – apt. no. 2524 – apt. no. 6494 – apt. no. 5820 – apt. no. 6129 – apt. no. 914 – apt. no. 7276 – apt. no. 2714

apt. no. 8858 – apt. no.2659 – apt. no. 4276 – apt. no. 2535 – apt. no. 2851 – apt. no. 2888 – apt. no. 828 – apt. no. 2031 – apt. no. 7303 – apt. no. 3046 – apt. no. 4210 – apt. no. 2325 – apt. no.5803 – apt. no. 9826 – apt. no. 3676 – apt. no. 2103 – apt. no. 2382 – apt. no. 3282 – apt. no. 2720 – apt. no. 1513 – apt. no. 3593 – apt. no. 8575 – apt. no. 8965 – apt. no.6969 – apt. no. 6867 – apt. no. 292 – apt. no. 108 – apt. no. 1408 – apt. no. 1631 – apt. no. 5327 – apt. no. 7254 – apt. no. 2643 – apt. no. 1188 – apt. no. 5182 – apt. no.4163 – apt. no. 9021 – apt. no. 6777 – apt. no. 8203 – apt. no. 2747 – apt. no. 9892 – apt. no. 1915 – apt. no. 1668 – apt. no. 3581 – apt. no. 7846 – apt. no. 4432

apt. no. 4006 – apt. no. 9096 – apt. no. 3619 – apt. no. 2299 – apt. no. 3584 – apt. no. 1345 – apt. no. 3436 – apt. no. 4370 – apt. no. 3813 – apt. no. 2786 – apt. no. 4735 – apt. no. 8562 – apt. no. 7263 – apt. no. 8253 – apt. no. 5782 – apt. no. 1702 – apt. no. 5257 – apt. no. 4474 – apt. no. 826 – apt. no. 4322 – apt. no. 1915 – apt. no. 1765 – apt. no. 8850 – apt. no. 1924 – apt. no. 7211 – apt. no. 1160 – apt. no. 197 – apt. no. 6382 – apt. no. 7860 – apt. no. 5286 – apt. no. 7792 – apt. no. 7394 – apt. no. 6277 – apt. no. 1158 – apt. no. 7493 – apt. no. 9853 – apt. no. 5196 – apt. no. 9277 – apt. no. 2524 – apt. no. 6494 – apt. no. 5820 – apt. no. 6129 – apt. no. 914 – apt. no. 7276 – apt. no. 2714

I’ll look like a cunt if I take off now. So I have to stick it out. Keep my word. Hold this fat bastard’s pungent wheelchair underneath him while he stands on shaky legs. Grasping the escalator handrail so tight his knuckles whiten. Until we get to the top. 

Or his knees give out and we both come to our end. 

From over his shoulder he barks at me. You got that fucking thing ready ‘case I fall? I hear the worry in his gravel voice. But there’s something else. I recognize it. I’ve heard it before. But I can’t figure out where.

Because I lose my thoughts in a good-looking woman coming down as we go up. Her sweet face turns pure hate as she sees the dirty old lowlife I’m aiding. She leans towards him as they cross. Finger pointed in full rage. Vas te faire foutre! Conard!

I like her style. 

A friend of yours? I ask as the escalator carries us away. But he chooses to ignore me. Everyday trifles or bigger worries I don’t care. Because the end of the ride is approaching fast. He snaps at me again asking if I’m ready. Unsure of who he chose to help. 

I shout false confidence.

A cold sweat runs down my brow. 

Fear of death in overdrive. 

His back falls forward in slow motion. There’s still time to drop the chair. Sidestep the slob as he goes careening by. Disappear into the clamor. But I was raised better. So instead of giving up and facing murder charges I brace my arms and legs. Then whisper 1 more pep talk before I probably die. 

You can do this you fucking pussy.

He hits the seat. Him the chair and I we all groan under the strain. But I manage to hold my ground. Every muscle in my body tight. My lower back about to burst. The last of what I think I have. A final shove up over the lip. The chair jumps. He starts yelling. 

Take it easy man! What are you fucking stupid?

Aha! That’s it. Where I’ve heard his voice. Seen his greasy hair. Out front the corner store. The door to the metro. Harassing everyone. Especially the fine looking women. And I’m certain he fits the description of a man who called my wife a whore when she declined his offer to fuck her in the ass. 

So without saying a word I start pushing. Faster and faster and faster. I veer our course towards the gate beside the turnstiles. A hip-level plexiglass door. The old creep is on to me and drops his feet like brakes because he can see his future coming. But we don’t even slow down. He yelps 1 final call for mercy. 

Nothing can stop us now.

His knees hit with a bang. He groans like a dying beast. The gate opens like a gunshot. The latch breaking off and hitting the ground is the greatest joke I’ve ever heard. I’m laughing like a madman. Name a better time than revenge and I’ll call you a liar.

I give him another push with everything I’ve got. Let go. He rolls away at top speed yelling words I’ve been called 1000’s of times so they don’t hurt. People all around stare in shock. Never guessing I made a promise to the woman I love and all they witnessed was me keeping it. 

In November 2018, Karina Longworth released Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’ Hollywood, a biography of both the businessman himself and 10 of the Hollywood women who entered and eventually left his life. The Hughes decades of Hollywood are a vessel for Longworth’s snapshots of movie stars as well-remembered as Katharine Hepburn and as lost-to-history as Billie Dove. The bulk of the book covers Hughes’ bursting onto the movie scene in the ‘20s to his gradual retreat into seclusion in the ‘50s.

The facts of Hughes’ Hollywood career remain stunning, 40-plus years after his death. Seduction investigates the Hughes publicity machine, one that exerted significant control over the press and was successful in positioning Hughes as America’s favorite rich aviator. Unknown to the public was Hughes’ incredible security network, the armada of drivers, associates, and spies he collected in large part to surveil the actresses he was constantly signing to contracts. Seduction tries to get to know a man who was known as both a wildly charismatic figure and an uncomfortable, unknowable personality.  

Just weeks ago, Longworth announced that her podcast, You Must Remember This, will go on hiatus due to the expiration of her current contract to make the show. Since 2014, Longworth has taken on stories big and small, and dedicated seasons to matters as disparate as the Blacklist and echoes of the Manson murders in ‘60s Hollywood . More than 140 episodes in, You Must Remember This has taken on some of the 20th Century’s most enduring and misunderstood cultural legacies.

The podcast’s form follows the abundant research Longworth pours into each season, as evidenced by the bibliographies she puts together for each episode. Synthesizing the conflicting accounts originally told by people who have long-since passed is a large part of a cultural historian’s work; with YMRT’s latest and perhaps final season, “Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon,” Longworth made that work the series’ subject, as she attempted to separate truth from fiction in the famous Kenneth Anger gossip collection.

Each YMRT season has acted as a canvas for the smaller stories Longworth is so skilled at telling. In Charles Manson’s Hollywood, Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher, Kenneth Anger, and Roman Polanski each get their own one-episode biography. The Dead Blondes series uses this style more explicitly, dedicating an episode to the life and times of 11 actresses. With Seduction, she has translated that style from audio to print, producing expansive, decades-long stories without sacrificing or overindulging in the details of the lives that helped sculpt Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”

When I first encountered Longworth’s You Must Remember This, I was thrilled by the Hollywood story she unearthed on the peripheries of the Manson murders: the industry figures who were drawn in and the legacy Manson’s hoodwinking left in ‘70s moviemaking. The efforts to separate the cultural legacy of a Hollywood touchstone from the day-to-day reality of the people involved is why I’m a fan of the show and now Seduction.

I spoke with Longworth over the phone, sitting at the same crowded desk where I had read Seduction, reconsidering the Golden Age as we know it.

Jake Greenberg: Was there a star you found most unknowable in the book?

Karina Longworth: I mean, Howard Hughes (laughs). But aside from him, Jean Peters [Hughes’ last wife] was never very forthcoming, certainly not in talking about her relationship with Hughes. Every interview with her that I came across read like it was written by a publicist, so trying to figure out who she actually was was pretty difficult. The closest thing I feel like I have to something that I didn’t have reason to doubt the veracity of were the depositions she gave during the long battle to figure out who was Howard Hughes’ legitimate heir and, probably more significantly, which state he would be taxed in. She seems to be speaking the most candidly there. But at the same time she’s looking back on this period that was many years before. She has the benefit of hindsight, but is also still holding grudges. So it was fascinating trying to figure out what she was actually thinking and feeling during the time period that most of the book is about.

JG: Was there a star, and maybe it was Jean Peters, whose work you were most surprised by when you revisited it?

KL: Well it wasn’t really a question of revisiting Jean Peters’ work because, besides for Pickup on South Street, I don’t think I’d ever seen a movie she’d been in. Same with Terry Moore — she was someone who was completely new to me. I don’t know that anyone else was that surprising, but I did have occasion to see a lot of films that I’d never seen before — Billie Dove was another person whose work I didn’t know until I wrote the book. And I watched certain Katharine Hepburn films that I don’t think are appreciated as classics, that maybe should be. I think that Christopher Strong is a lot better than its reputation led me to believe. I think Morning Glory is really, really good. It has this reputation of having a good performance but not being a good movie. But I actually do think it’s a very good movie.

JG: One thing I noticed in the book is you kept interrupting these scenes where you’d be talking about Katharine Hepburn, for example, to flash to Jane Russell as a young girl watching Hepburn in a movie theater. You used the same device to show Marilyn Monroe watching Jean Harlow.

KL: I always think about Hollywood as a continuum, and I think it was especially vivid in the 20th Century. I don’t really know how people who are entering the film industry look at film history now, but I know for me, being born in 1980, growing up watching movies you really felt this sense of there being echoes of things happening in the present day in the past, and so I’m always trying to understand events as being part of a continuum.

JG: What was the relationship you were most interested in at the beginning, when you first started thinking about this as a book?

KL: There wasn’t an individual relationship I was most interested in. I was interested in the scope, and of Hughes’ time in Hollywood basically being the exact same years as we consider to be this classical Hollywood era. Just how fascinating that was, and how he was so prolific as a man involved with women, or rumored to be involved with so many women, at the very least. So you could actually make this portrait of what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood, and what it was like to be written about and thought about as a woman in Hollywood, during the most important time in Hollywood’s history.

JG: Are there movies you’re particularly excited that people might discover in reading Seduction?

KL: Yeah, I think for a lot of readers most of these movies will be new. One thing that’s been cool is in promoting the book, I’ve done a number of events where we’ve done a screening of a movie, and two different venues, one in Toronto and one in Austin, requested to show Wait ‘Till The Sun Shines, Nellie, which is a movie I had never heard of before I started writing this book. I think it’s completely off the radar of even a lot of cinephiles, even people who are fans of the director Henry King. It is available on DVD, it’s just kind of a bad color transfer. So those events were really incredible because Fox has this pristine technicolor print of the film that nobody ever rents. It was just so great to be able to share that with audiences, so that would be the number one. But, of the dozens of movies I talked about in the book, I think there are only a couple that are widely revived or seen today.

JG: There’s a passage from Seduction I keep coming back to: “By the end of Hughes’s life, when he was a codeine addict who spent his days and nights nodding in front of the TV, the former star aviator playboy would suddenly perk up when an actress he had once spent time with appeared on the screen. Hughes would allegedly call over one of his many aides, point, and say, ‘Remember her?’” There’s something extremely haunting about it.

KL: I think he was most successful as a spectator. He did try to be a collector, but ultimately in the end, he lost all of these women. He didn’t have what it took to hold onto them in any meaningful way. And over the course of time, he didn’t really even want to be in the room with anybody.

JG: How aware were you of the vastness and extent of his security operation before researching all this?

KL: Oh I don’t think I knew anything about it, other than what you see in [Scorsese’s] The Aviator of Hughes buying up photographs and stuff like that.

JG: It’s stunning to read about him hiring dozens and dozens of people to do this work, and people presumably not knowing that much about it at the time.

KL: Yeah, I think that there were rumors, but from what I could tell, the women who became involved with him either didn’t believe the rumors, or they just thought, “Oh, well, of course, he’s a rich and powerful man. He needs to protect his interests.” And they didn’t think having all these bodyguards and drivers around could be used against them, which is really interesting.

JG: By the end of your research, did you feel like you had a better understanding of what made him so charismatic?

KL: Until his plane crash in 1946, he was super handsome. And I think that there was something in the culture through this whole time, and really until he kind of disappeared from public view, where women were supposed to try to find men like this. In Hollywood and throughout America there was this idea that if you were a young woman, your American Dream was supposed to be to find a rich husband. And he specifically was held up in the media as the most eligible bachelor in America. Terry Moore talks about this: she’s a teenager, alone in a room with this guy and she thinks he’s a creepy old man, but, you know, you weren’t supposed to say no to Howard Hughes. If he wanted to hang out with you, you were supposed to let him.

JG: Transitioning to the You Must Remember This side of things, a uniting style of Seduction and You Must Remember This is the mini-biography. When you first started making the podcast, were you thinking that you wanted to tell larger stories through a series of biographies, or did that form just take hold because of the stories you wanted to tell?

KL: I don’t think that’s ever been a conscious goal. When I started the podcast, I just was interested in this idea that cultural memory is very short, and that Hollywood history is full of things that people either think that they know – like they think that they know who Marlon Brando was, or Marilyn Monroe, or Judy Garland – but they don’t actually know the fullness of the whole life, or they don’t remember specific incidents accurately. And I was interested in whole careers that have just been lost to the cultural memory. Some of my favorite episodes are about people like Kay Francis, and about zero people remember who Kay Francis was. So the podcast was just about trying to bring to life some of these stories that have either been misrepresented or forgotten.

JG: When did Hollywood Babylon the book come into your life?

KL: I think I was about 20. I was in art school in San Francisco, and I don’t remember how I heard about it. But I remember buying a copy on Amazon, which is funny because now if I need to look up something about Hollywood Babylon and go to the Amazon page, it says, you bought this book on, like, April 5, 2000.

JG: You touched on this earlier, but do you think of the accessibility of film history as a goal of the podcast?

KL: Yeah, I definitely hope that people will watch some of these movies. I think that some people found the podcast because of different true crime stories I’ve told, so that kind of exposes people who may not think they’re interested in Old Hollywood to these Old Hollywood stories. But it doesn’t really matter to me if they don’t subscribe to FilmStruck, R.I.P., or start watching TCM, or start buying some of these really good biographies.

JG: The Manson season [“Charles Manson’s Hollywood”] was my way into the show, and I just kept going from there. I knew the basics of the Manson story, but the Hollywood angle I certainly wasn’t familiar with.

KL: Yeah. I kind of only did that season because I had stumbled across the fact that, initially, the police and the newspapers were spreading the notion that the Family had gone to Cielo Drive that night looking for Doris Day’s son. So I was just kind of fascinated with this idea that Doris Day and Charles Manson were part of the same story.

JG: What feels to you like the biggest story you’ve told on You Must Remember This, or the most expansive?

KL: I don’t know. The Hollywood Babylon season was really difficult, because it meant starting from scratch every week, which is the hardest way to do this kind of storytelling. It’s much easier to do something like “Jean and Jane,” [In 2017, Longworth released a You Must Remember This season about the contrasting careers and activisms of Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda.] where the scope is limited to just these two actresses, and just the period of time when they were active. With the Hollywood Babylon season, it was 19 episodes that ranged from the teens to the late sixties.

JG: My next question was actually about “Jean and Jane.” I think it’s become my favorite season. Did it change the way you think of celebrity activism?

KL: I don’t know that it changed anything for me. It was just more interesting to think about these two specific examples. You could say that Jane Fonda has recovered from the bad publicity she received; it doesn’t seem like it’s really holding her back any longer, though it is in the air, and maybe it’s in the air more than it had been 10 years ago because we have the alt-right now, who still hate her. Whereas, everything that happened with Jean Seberg is just not part of the public conversation anymore. And if she is part of any public conversation, I think it’s usually because of Breathless. So it was really interesting to see these two people doing similar kinds of things, and Jane Fonda is able to survive it – not untarnished, but survive it – and Jean Seberg really isn’t. It really destroys her.

JG: What was interesting to me was the scope of both of their activism. I think that that’s very rare for celebrities, for at multiple points for both of them to abandon a lot of what they were doing in Hollywood to support the Black Panthers or go to North Vietnam.

KL: Right. It’s interesting because Jane Fonda has this sort of career resurrection after she does a lot of this stuff. Whereas with Jean Seberg — I think what we don’t think about often with that period of Hollywood is that the things that liberal/leftist activists were supposedly fighting for were so against the grain of what Hollywood was doing as a business. So Jane Fonda was able to stand up for things she believed in, and to some extent to renounce the commercialism and consumerism of Hollywood, but she ultimately went pretty hard back into capitalism, kind of as hard as you could go. And with Jean Seberg, it was really a pure thing, of putting the activism first and not caring about how it would affect her financially or how it would affect her capital as a star. And ultimately, you can’t say that she made decisions that were good for her, even if she was following what she believed in.

JG: On a personal taste level, who are the movie stars you find yourself returning to the most?

KL: I think it varies. With the work that I do, I have to become newly obsessively-interested in whoever I’m researching this week or this month.

R: Apeirogon is a novel where you make the whole world complicit in the events of one story. We are collectively responsible for the moment when a bomb exploded and killed one daughter, when a gun was drawn and emptied into another. Were you aware of that inescapable complicity when you were writing this book?

C: Complicity is at the heart of all story-telling, yes. I suppose I mean this in two very different senses – complicity in the darkness and then the complicity in the availability of light. My novel concerns two men – one Israeli, one Palestinian – who become friends despite the evidence and the odds. By the act of telling, they make us complicit in the stories of the loss of their daughters. In relation to Israel and Palestine, we are, yes, complicit in what is happening there. Or certainly I – as a taxpayer in the United States – am complicit.

There are so many one-dimensional distortions of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. But nothing is one-dimensional. A writer needs to render as many aspects of the situation as he or she can. It is both more rewarding — and exceedingly more difficult —- to think kaleidoscopically about others and then maybe even engage with our so-called enemies. This is what Rami and Bassam do. I could talk forever about what this means politically but I’d like to leapfrog beyond the obvious and talk about what you frame as responsibility. You’re absolutely right when you talk about collective responsibility. And this is where the power of story-telling comes in. Let’s face it, the world is a messy place and I think we must acknowledge that. We cannot reduce it down to absolute simplicities. Simplicity is desired of course, but not easy simplicity.   I think it’s more important than ever to acknowledge that we are so much more than just one thing. We are multitudinous. We are complicated. And we’re certainly not as stupid as our political parties, or our corporations, or our TV stations, or our artists — mea culpa —- seem to want us to be.

So, it becomes the job of the artist to celebrate the messiness and acknowledge how complicated it all happens to be. Maybe then we can help at least confront the problem.   If we keep making it simple, or falsely simple, we risk failure. And one of the things about confronting the problem is acknowledging our own complicity.

R: Is it possible for a book to create a change, to shape a world where those two girls walk on into adulthood? 

C: Humility is the key when talking about the power of literature. The writer can’t do all that much, but the reader can. The most important thing is to let a book work on others. It has to allow people to think differently. It cannot be didactic. It cannot propose a solution. But it can propose a solution that can arise from others. Make the stories heard. Make the messiness understood. Make the contradictions have their own form of sense. Rami and Bassam say it best: We need to know one another. And, yes, they reinvigorate the lives of their daughters through the art of storytelling. So, in a way, yes, they walk into adulthood.

R: You combine things which are hard to even write well when separated: race in America and the peace process in Northern Ireland, tightrope walkers and youth radicals, etc. You are gifted at holding multiple narratives aloft — you never tire of it, and you manage to keep raising the bar. What keeps you playing in that enormously difficult space? 

C: John Berger says it so beautifully: “Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one.” What he’s getting at here is the need to see things from multiple angles and viewpoints. And I suppose I’m fascinated by what is difficult.

Apeirogon was my most challenging book in terms of vaulting into unknown territory. I had to rely on instinct all the way along. And I really wanted to get it correct, but there’s not much “correct” when it comes to opinion or even facts when you’re talking about the Middle East. You have so many different truths that you want to access. I also wanted to fragment the story to reflect the contemporary mind and the leaps the consciousness makes, especially when it comes to the Internet. But we always come back to the important thing – the issue of the human heart in conflict with itself. In this case it is the hearts of Rami and Bassam.  

R: Apeirogon feels like a book that belongs on every bookshelf, by topic, by taste (novel v. short stories), genre (prose v. poetry). Similarly, it fits organically in many different classrooms — math, history, biology etc. Was that intentional on your part? 

C: I’m not very good on intent. I fly by the arse of my pants, mostly. Which is not quite as articulate as Samuel Beckett saying that it is the job of the artist to find a form that accommodates the mess. And that’s what I wanted to do: discover a form that reflects and accommodates the whole.  Also, I wanted to try to write a book that disrupted some of the accepted narratives around Israel and Palestine, and, I suppose, the accepted narrative form. I’d been thinking for a while about writing a novel that echoes some of the ways the Internet has shaped the way we think and feel and even breathe. I originally thought I would do it in fifty chapters and then maybe a hundred and then – about a year into the process – it struck me that Rami and Bassam were telling the stories of their daughters to keep them alive, a Scheherezade moment, if you will, and I thought, “Ah-ha, it has to be 1,001.”  

As for intentionality, when I was writing it felt like music to me. I began to feel like the conductor of an orchestra. I hope that doesn’t sound too grandiose. I wanted to achieve a sound that would disrupt listeners and knock them off balance. To get them thinking differently about this area of the world. Tonal and atonal at the same time. To work contrapuntally. To put all the shards together in a musical mosaic. The great Irish musician Colm Mac Con Iomaire is now putting together some music based on his experience of the book. It’s incredible stuff. He came to the West Bank with my non-profit group Narrative 4 that I co-founded with Lisa Consiglio and several other artists. Colm got inspiration there. I can’t wait until the album comes out.

R: Have you ever gone on a literary pilgrimage? Yearned to live and write in a specific place in the world? 

C: I would love to go to Chile. One of my favourite authors, Ariel Dorfman, whom I consider a friend even though I have never even met him, has written so beautifully about his country. And I’ve never really explored South America, though I think part of my soul is there. I’d like to walk the length of the coastline. And I want to meet the farmers who harvest water from the clouds. They put up nets and capture the moisture in the air.

R: What is your relationship to younger writers? How does it feel like now, as a seasoned writer, someone whose substantial talent is taken as a given, to look at them and know how long the road ahead is for them? Are there certain responsibilities you feel toward them? 

C: I love working with younger writers. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see them emerge with a story or a book. And, yes, it’s difficult because I know how long the road is ahead of them – and increasingly so. Perhaps as a teacher I have been too enthusiastic at times— but, as a friend once said, I’d rather die with my heart on my sleeve than end up being the squinty-eyed cynic in the corner. I tell students that I can’t teach them much except the virtues of desire, stamina and perseverance. In other words, fire. But fire’s a dangerous thing. So many hold their hands out while really they’re just watching themselves burn.

R: When you look at the books you’ve written, is there anything you might do differently? If you could edit something, what would it be? 

C: I’d edit my novel Songdogs, my first novel, written in my late 20’s. I haven’t read it since I wrote it over thirty years ago but I’m certain I would cringe at certain parts. But that’s life. You do what you can do at the time. Apart from that, I tell myself when I write a novel that I should write the only possible thing that won’t embarrass me ten years from now.

R: What does it feel like to bear witness to histories that will impact young people far more than it will impact us, as elders? 

C: Whether we’re aware of it or not, George Floyd is going to be in every story written from here on in. Even the ones the elders write. But I must say I’m not really sure of that word, elders. Not because it makes me into an old fart, but because it suggests wisdom – and that’s something that’s been sorely lacking from so many of us, mea culpa.

R: How do you define success when it comes to being a writer/artist today? 

C: Disruption. A break in the conventional narrative. An embrace of what others have left outside or ignored. An ability to throw the world off balance so that, when it gets to its feet, it sees things a little differently. Your books have done this for me. On Sal Mal Lane disrupted the way I thought. It allowed me to think differently. Such is the beauty of good literature.

R: Have you ever written anything where you began with a certain point of view about an event and wound up looking at it from its direct opposite?

C: When I wrote about Frederick Douglass going to Ireland in my novel “TransAtlantic.” At first, I just thought it was an incredible story — and one we needed to hear, especially in Ireland.  Here was the story of a man, 27 years old, a visionary, an abolitionist, yet still a slave, arriving in Ireland just as the Famine began to unfold.  He had already published his memoir but there was an Irish edition forthcoming.  And he landed among the gentry of Ireland, largely the Anglo-Irish.  He toured around the country.  His few months in Ireland were among the happiest in his life.  “I breathe,” he said, “and lo! the chattel becomes a man.”  

At first. I was surprised that he did not speak out about the Famine and the conditions that the Irish were forced to suffer under British rule.  He remained largely silent about it.  But gradually I began to understand why —he was in Ireland in order to further the cause of the three million of his people still enslaved in the United States.  I am quite sure he felt an enormous empathy for Irish suffering, but he was unable to be very vocal about it simply because he had to protect his own people.  Also, he was on his way to Britain to continue his abolitionist tour.  And let’s not forget: he was still technically a slave and could have been recaptured at any time. So, Douglass was carrying so much weight on his shoulders. 

So, I went from the position of being startled by the story, to being a little ambivalent about it, to a point, I hope, of deep understanding— finally my admiration for Douglass was boundless.  But I also realise that, like all of us, he was a complicated human being.  He was far ahead of his times.  He carried a brokenness.  He dared to think in new ways.  But no history is neat and final.  And that’s what I wanted to write about and attempted to capture. 

R: We live in a time when people are categorized as immigrants or natives and yet, by the very way we consume things for better (reading) or worse (fast fashion), we are not natives, really, of a single place. How do you locate yourself in the world?

C: We’re living in the exponential age. It’s hard to locate ourselves. I’m a person of two countries at the very least— the U.S and Ireland —but I’m also a person of the country of literature, which makes so much available to me.

R: You have wonderful and very straightforward advice to young people in your collection, Letters to a Young Writer. What’s the one piece of advice you would have given yourself, say, as a twenty-year-old? 

C: Get out and do something that does not compute. Join the Peace Corps. Join the army. Join the ambulance crew. Whatever. Do something— at least for a couple of years — that the world does not expect you to do. Disrupt yourself. 

R: What is a question you wish someone would ask you?

C: What is Narrative 4?

R: What is Narrative 4?

C: Ha! It’s a global non-profit story exchange organization, fronted by artists and teachers and activists, that uses story-telling to change the world. I’d love if people could check it out … narrative4.com.

R: What question would you ask of yourself? 

C: Was it all worth it? And before you ask, the answer would be yes. What about you?  

R: My answer would be the same. Has my life had heart? Yes. Therefore, it has been worth the price. There is a reason why Edith Piaf sings “Non, je ne regrette rien,” on repeat in my head.

ISW: I will not be able to ask you the first question that I should ask a Russian poet at this moment, because you live in a country where you might face severe consequences for answering it. We will have to conduct this conversation in the shadow of that fact as if it were something acceptable, which it isn’t. That means that my first question will have to be something else. So, I will start by giving you an opportunity to tell readers a little about your own background and experiences. What is it like being a contemporary Russian poet?

AP: I have always experienced the idea of a person’s “background” as a multifaceted one, and I am inclined to approach it first and foremost as a question about their cultural experience and inner reality, treating the elements of their biography as secondary. I have always been fascinated by the individual evolutionary paths of writers, but I have only found it useful as a lens through which I could view the work of others, so I find it hard to speak about myself in this register. After all, I experience my evolution as being far from complete; I deliberately cultivate the mentality of a neophyte and try to preserve a fresh eye on the world, its problems, language, and what poetry is capable of. I became a poet relatively late in life, and, as far as I can remember, I was always encountering difficulties that others did not seem to be experiencing, in the domains of emotional life, self-expression, and relationships with other people. I have had (and, alas, still have) health conditions that have baffled doctors. This has led to periods when I seemed to have limited points of genuine contact with reality, and my internal resources were also so meager that I sank into some dark shell hole of despair and disorientation. In my attempts to scramble out, I have grabbed hold of various domains of human knowledge and experience, whether it was philosophy, music, or art. In essence, before every poem I’ve written, I have found myself in one of those pits or at the bottom of a well, and my task was to grope for the tiniest handholds protruding from the wall and check whether or not the next handhold-word or rock-meaning could support my weight, the entire mass of my being. The experience of hauling myself out of a pit, expressed in words, is a poem. There were catalysts, of course. For example, when my son was born (I was 22), I felt that time itself spoke to me through the language of an event, and that event was a message addressed to me in a maximally personal way, like nothing else had ever been. My sense of self changed so much that there was no other conclusion; I had to truly come to understand my mode of existence, dismantle it down to the smallest component, pose the question of being in its absolute sense to my life—otherwise, what could I tell my son about life, about happiness and suffering, if I had failed to make sense of them myself? So I turned to poetry, first by translating it, and then as a way of groping for those points of interaction with life, time, and body.

I think that being a contemporary Russian poet is just as complicated matter as being, for example, a contemporary Lithuanian or American poet. The problem lies in the very idea of the contemporary when it is understood in aesthetic terms. An artist does not have the option of adopting something directly from the past—that path is closed—but poetry as an art form, even as we remember it from the proto-poetic period of its development in the European context, requires a balance between “tradition” and “innovation,” which demands that the poet have a certain sensitivity to the artistic practices that may seem to belong to the past as well as those that are appearing in our own time. When it comes to recent political events and the associated widespread surge of Russophobia, being a contemporary Russian poet is more difficult; our entire culture and its achievements have been abruptly devalued in the eyes of contemporary society. For poetry, this means paying for our apoliticality and playing along with the fake reality created by our government. For Russian poetry, it also means the necessity of proving that we are not complicit with the violence, that we are actively opposing authoritarianism, and that we are dedicated to peaceful dialogue between peoples and the creation of a free society.

ISW: What should English-speakers know about the contemporary poetry scene in Russia? Are there are interesting developments you have observed lately?

AP: The poetry scene in Russia is very diverse. Indeed, we are currently witnessing a true flowering of poetry. One phenomenon that I can describe as relatively new for Russia is feminist poetry. There are strong conservative tendencies in Russian poetry, emphasizing the need to preserve the cultural baggage of bygone epochs—and their linguistic expression. In practice, this manifests as the view that rhyme and meter are essential, and one of the main arguments advanced by supporters of this position is the fact that Russian is an inflected language, and its wealth of grammatical endings leads to endless potential for rhyming versification. Free verse and irregular forms have also seen development through the work of many contemporary Russian poets. The landscape of contemporary Russian poetry really ought to be the subject of several articles, if not a huge body of them, but, to speak in general terms, one might point to tendency for groups of authors to be divided (it is never hostile or adversarial, however) along institutional lines, though authors can “migrate” between institutions or simultaneously belong to several of them. It would be pointless to list all of them, so I will simply point out the ones that are most significant from my point of view. For example, that includes the circle of authors around the literary magazine Vozdukh, published by poet, translator, and literary critic Dmitry Kuzmin, the poets around Translit, under the continuous editorship of poet and literary critic Pavel Arsenev—they conceive of poetry as closely related to political activism—the female authors around the F-letter project, who ground their aesthetic praxis in an exploration of the idea of feminism, the circle of authors around the New Literary Review publishing house, the authors participating in the Novaya Kamera Khraneniya project, created by Oleg Yuriev, Valeri Shubinsky, Dmitri Zaks, Olga Martynova, who are brought together by a certain intersection of their poetic techniques, which largely follow in the footsteps of the post-Acmeist tradition, etc. Simultaneously, the so-called “thick journals” have continued to exist. They are a curious phenomenon handed down to us from the Soviet period. Some of them are managing to overcome their ossified conservatism, but others have yet to change their editorial practices despite thirty years without the Soviet regime, and they are, in that sense, doomed. The political situation has split our society into two camps, and that same ideological opposition can be seen among poets and writers as well. I think that it is a line of demarcation, a pivot point in time. The future of Russian literature will develop in relation to this point, and, as the past teaches us, it is precisely humanistic appeals vested in the various literary genres that have a chance of becoming part of history. The supporters of violence have already lost, whether one takes a long-term or short-term view.

ISW: One of the interesting elements of literary life in Russia American translators often discuss is how unapologetically online it is. Why do you think the Internet plays such a significant role and what does that mean for poetry?

AP: I think the small number of journals, and publication opportunities in general, available to a contemporary Russian writer only partially explain that. Social networks truly are important to many people; by posting poems there, an author maintains a form of contact with the literary community, and experiences that community’s quick response to a newly written poem as a kind of support—“you exist,” “you are valuable,” “you are interesting.” The most important reason, however, lies in the general political atmosphere in the country, and in the Russian-speaking world generally; in the last few years, tinged by the collective awareness of the radical suppression of dissent, the opportunities for self-expression in the public sphere have grown more and more constricted, the remaining ones are censored, and speaking out directly at a demonstrated or during a protest action is widely understood as an impossibility, whether directly or indirectly, which means that social networks have become the place where it is possible to express yourself (though one must be wary of current laws—after all, people in our country have faced criminal and civil penalties for what they post or share on social media). Poetry is becoming part of online activism, as sad and pitiful as it may look. Due to the situation in Ukraine, the measures to suppress the protest movement have become harsher, which means all of these factors have been even more palpable.

ISW: One of the most challenging elements of translating your poetry into English for me has been that you are comfortable using abstractions that lack specific physical references. To put it simply, there are a lot more words ending in “ness” in your poems than in most contemporary American poetry. Could you say a few words about that aspect of your style?

AP: To one extent or another, I think that is inevitable for a contemporary poet; after all, our era is closely linked with contemporary philosophy, and all of those abstractions are becoming part of our consciousness, an inevitable element of our language. One can, of course, subordinate poetic language to some abstraction and engage in illustrating ready-made philosophical ideas, but, in my view, the time to reject the role of illustrator has long since come. Juxtaposing abstractions with physical objects gives me—and, I hope, the reader—the potential to defamiliarize them, see them from a new angle. It is an attempt to subordinate those abstractions to the laws of ordinary empirical perception. Poetry can be aligned to philosophy and other forms of knowledge, including non-scientific ones, but it can never occupy a subordinate position and be the handmaiden of any idea, mythology, or ideology, whether it be Marxism, feminism, or any other “ism” we might find useful. Including abstractions in a poetic text also has an open message; these abstractions are objects, just as palpable as a tree branch or a park bench, and my task in that domain is to show how human perception is refracted as it passes through a constellation of abstract concepts that are capable of organizing its existing experience and even constructing a new one.

ISW: One of the critical moments in your career was when you began to write political poetry. What brought about that decision?

AP: The impetus was the situation in Ukraine, the immense contradictions that began to intensify around 2014 and led to an armed conflict, the escalation of which we are witnessing today, along with the general political situation in Russia and the world. This is not only due to my personal circumstances (my family, on my father’s side, traces its origins to Ukraine), but also because, in general human terms, this was an ordeal for many people, and I experienced the need to respond to it almost instantly. This subject is new to me, and it has affected the form of my poems, made it freer. I felt with great clarity that it was impossible to write about war and violence using strict meter and rhyme; given the evocative quality characteristic of such forms of poetry, there would always be some scarcely perceptible element of the verse that would be rhapsodic about the source of violence, gazing it in with adoration, while the mission of poetry is universal peace and the remediation of violence. Universal peace and a life without violence is, of course, an ideal that many will view as unattainable, but that is what ideals are for, inspiring us to endlessly strive for them. We are currently paying for our years of apoliticality. The politicization of art is a necessary step on the path to genuine freedom for society and the individual.

ISW: I would like to follow up on the idea of the politicization of art. As a translator of literature from Ukraine and Russia, I have often noted that Americans tend to read work from the area for its political relevance, not its literary and aesthetic merits. Do you think that pattern is a concern, and how is it relevant to your experience?

AP: I am certainly concerned about that situation, when people begin to experience poetry without deploying the aesthetic frameworks of the other artforms—which is what enables us to understand poetry as “painting with words” or “the music of verse” or “the science of metaphor—” and instead simply check for the presence of political shibboleths. That tendency also exists in Russian literary criticism. Without impugning poets’ political agendas or how they manifest them in their work, I would prefer if people continued to view poetry as an artform, with an enormous range of associated aesthetic elements. The vocation of poetry is to transform consciousness, and poets must use the full arsenal of poetic techniques, developed over the course of centuries, constantly striving to expand it—after all, any political agenda and the associated language has already been formulated by someone else, and uncritically accepting these ready-made semantic assemblages would mean violence against one’s own consciousness and the consciousness of others, since a poet, in my view, can only accomplish his mission by grounding himself in extreme nonviolence.

ISW: How important is it to you that your poetry reach audiences in the English-speaking world?

AP: It is very important to me, and very valuable. I love the English language and its literature and culture. It is a joy for a poet to be heard and understood in different corners of the world, and I have been blessed with that experience, for which I am boundlessly grateful—especially these days, when everything Russian seems discredited. It is important to express the simple truth that the people and the government are not one and the same, and, indeed, the Russian people have found themselves in the position of hostages.

ISW: How do you expect Russian culture and, for lack of a better word, Russian consciousness, to change as a result of the terrible times we are living in?

AP: I expect the social schism we have already mentioned to intensify, and that will inevitably affect the creative sphere. A great deal will go into expiation of our guilt for what has happened to the innocent victims, into ridding ourselves of this shame, and into transforming that historically conditioned shame into political action that will help us to create civil society and the rule of law. A great deal will go into seeking out and manifesting the reality we have been forbidden to see for many years, forbidden to call things by their right names. A certain pathos of repentance is emerging in many literary genres, tinting the intonation of many current and recent authors. We may also see the emergence of militaristic literature, rhapsodizing about violence in the name of a just cause and glorifying the imperial spirit, and it is that aforementioned struggle between value systems that produces the electric potential difference required for fruitful cultural development. This may be my optimism talking, but I want to believe that even the most difficult times can lead to such flourishing. On the whole, there will be two competing images of Russia—that of a great empire, a nuclear power imposing its will on the world, and the image of a Russia where the primary values are the life, health, happiness, and wellbeing of every individual person. These two images, these two vectors of development, as we have observed in practice, are incompatible. We have a great deal of work ahead of us to bring our country back into the domain of civilized dialogue. We have a long road ahead before our homeland is restored to us.

Kroll’s hands lay slack on the table as if he meant to abandon them there. I wondered what an investigating judge was obligated to do about a man like Kroll, and whether, in calling me to this cafe, the judge now shirked her duty or bent to it. 

The cafe was still shuttered against scorching daylight, now dimming. Soon the night markets would open: divining beetles, sea-petroleum, delicate bottles of attar of orange. A skink without a tail darted up the wall. 

“You’re very quiet,” the judge said. “Have I mistaken myself in you?”

The judge needn’t have worried; my autobiography of Kroll would not lack color or incident. Kroll had traveled, and that could go into the book, as could the melancholy of the packet-boat, and waking cold and disconsolate in grimy pensions. A stranger here, Kroll had been overcome by “a disease of the will,” as Kroll had called it. I wondered whether there still issued from Kroll some few of those small, threadlike goings-out which could be called hopes but are actually something subtler and more various, largely hidden, hardly coming up to the bearer’s awareness; we are all of us burred with them; they lend to our souls a kind of slubby nap against which others stick or glide with pleasure or aggravation, other people, also projects, objects, events of a certain order. This napped or ridged surface of ourselves is delicate as the flanged underside of a toadstool. It is subject to collapse, in certain lives. It is crushed.

 “You appear to have depths,” the judge said. “But don’t wear them out. No one likes talking to someone who doesn’t like talking.” 

“I am new to this city,” I said. 

“That can’t be helped, can it?” said the judge. “Immerse yourself; recollect; report.”

From outside came the shouts of water-sellers and lottery-foreseers working the knots and queues of stalled autobus traffic. 

“We know where you’re staying,” said the judge. “You’ll be contacted about payment.”

Kroll rose from the table. 

“Am I expected to begin now?” I asked. “How?” 

We kept pace, Kroll at first wavering as if to consult my pleasure in choice of paths. Then he struck a tangent off the ring road, uphill from the harbor and the nighttime souk, along a narrow street lined with corrugated-metal shacks and dead-fronded jacarandas. The book could begin here, with Kroll marching uphill as toward a destiny, perhaps to perish in some strange and somber way. Or let it begin later, on the downslope, as I followed Kroll along a dirt path that ended on a litter-strewn canal-bank. 

The open secret of the so-called sparrows’ meeting place was in all the guidebooks. Some of these particular sparrows looked runty or otherwise plain, as if in flagrant spite of their legend. I hoped this meant the bar was low enough for Kroll to join in—I so wanted to see him hailed or even merely slapped—but he lingered on the edges of the group. The sparrows had come here to play a complicated game. There were no monomaniacs among them; instead, the sparrows had inherited a picture-language, a dramatics, which they wielded with scorn. What mattered was not to declare oneself, nor to lose oneself, but to be seen to operate the picture-language with disdainful ease, the better to gesture to still other schemas, other contents: rich, inexpressible, well known. By twos and threes sparrows would depart for the dark. Gravel skittered down the scree. 

Kroll lingered, forcing me to linger, too, in appearance even more furtive than Kroll. I looked down at a puddle; I thought about fetid water’s integrity as a body, its durable skin. I could not stand to look up from the puddle and see Kroll: his dumbshow of awkwardness, his further dumbshow indicating that this awkwardness was only a costume, that underneath lay passions like anyone’s, like everyone’s. Most painful to me was Kroll’s apparent pride in having concealed from the sparrows what was in truth not at all concealed: that his awkwardness was hateful to him, that he himself was hateful to himself, and that he hoped—in this he was still young—to be proven wrong. It was not sophistication that separated Kroll from the sparrows, or not only. 

Kroll edged closer to a group standing around a trash-barrel fire. Like Kroll, I braced myself for his rejection. How could the sparrows not notice his incompetence, his shocking lack of address? I watched instead their indifferent tender welcome, Kroll’s dazed and beaming gratitude. I told myself that what the sparrows seemed now to give would soon be withdrawn, proffered just this once and then no more, that Kroll did not see this but I did: one day soon he would find it difficult to recall this happiness, though he would never forget it so thoroughly as would the sparrows. To recall happiness is to realize that you are without it, bereft. 

Kroll opened his wallet. He held out a folded bill or maybe a visiting card. I came closer.

“I am not a mystic,” Kroll said.

No one replied. 

“I am not an adventurer,” Kroll added. He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands wide in demonstration of his innocence. One sparrow snatched at his hand and another took Kroll by the arm. In the dark, Kroll and the sparrows took up the customary poses. Was the picture-language really as limited as this? I stretched myself out on the ground next to Kroll; at once the posture yielded me its idiot thrill but it seemed to say nothing to anyone else. No one engaged me; no one stepped on my head. And yet a convention of the autobiographical genre requires me to furnish this account with sensations. Gravel pricked my palms; I shivered; the earth smelled vegetal, marine. Nearby, a soft sound, as of a nightjar’s rustling wingbeats. Listening to Kroll shriek and mewl, it seemed to me I could stay like this always, in Kroll’s noisy proximity, envious and grateful, when one of the sparrows leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Enough for you.” I stood up and tried to brush the filth from my clothes. Kroll was gone. I thought of asking the others if they’d seen which way he’d been headed. Ship’s horns sounded in the distant harbor. Someone lit a pipe of dense and crumbly kif and we passed it hand to hand, cupping the ember. 

The next morning, as I came out of my hotel, I noticed several men loitering across the square. All were men of one type, Type Kroll: indrawn, bowed, dressed in serge despite the heat. I was sure I recognized Kroll among them. With a single glance back at me, the man who must have been Kroll set off down the twisting street, toward the casbah or the funicular or some other vista as yet unknown to me. 

I watched him go. 

I bought myself a tiffin of boiled cashews and returned to my room. Let Kroll look to himself today. Much of the autobiography would consist of scenes à faire: Kroll pays the asking price for pirated video cassettes in the bazaar; Kroll, at the butcher’s stall, stands mesmerized before a flayed sheep’s head black with crawling flies; Kroll goes to the pier to watch the divers plunge down and bring up lumps of sea-petroleum (the water sluicing off their seal-slick bodies, the shock of their ulcerated hands); Kroll lingers in an ancient and desacralized temple, gazing up at the bone-white vault of the ceiling. These pleasures of travel initially disappoint, but, considered autobiographically, each reveals an edifying mortificant: the bitter lure of novelty, the picturesque immiseration of the global south, the hollowness of the self. This much was as good as written already. 

I worked until the shadows had long since lengthened and the lottery-foreseers were again calling out in the street below. Of the projected scenes and their accompanying skein of aperçus, something less than I’d hoped had written itself: Butchered head. Vault. Slick body, black with flies. I was not disappointed. I read the words as Kroll would have; I felt Kroll’s delight on recognizing his own story.

My room had no proper desk; to write, I had slouched in the only chair, a wicker throne woven in the local style. Now my back ached as if I’d been beaten. Everything in the room, even the latticed wicker, radiated heat. I stood at the window, hoping for the cool of evening to come lapping in. Above flat rooftops of staggered heights, the last remnant of the gloaming had taken on a humid, chemical radiance, a darkness tinged with green and violet, as if malevolent spirits had botched the granting of a childhood wish: to breathe the air of distant planets. I touched my forehead to the windowpane. It was warm as blood. Out there, a figure hung from the glass: conjoint, pendant, peering in at me. I raised my hand and I felt a shudder, a lag, in our doubled motion. 

There was a knock at the door. Before I could answer, a woman swept into my room, dispelling phantoms. She had with her a pair of snorting, gasping dogs; their eyes bulged and their tongues lapped the humid air. 

“I am Ndidi Morchiladze, daughter-adjutant to the judge,” the woman said. 

“Daughter-adjutant?” I asked. 

“Don’t let’s stand on ceremony,” she said. “Show me what you have so far.”

“I haven’t written anything yet,” I said. 

“Have you not?” said Morchiladze. The dogs flopped down at her feet and lay panting. 

“The judge mentioned payment,” I said. When a lie is not ready to hand, I temporize. The Kroll-book would have to arm itself. The weak exotica I had concocted—sorrows, vistas, subtle perceptions—all this could lend Kroll only so much cover. Then too, it was not lost on me that the judge knew only one verdict. How else would a judge judge? It might be best to set Kroll loose in the book as nothing more than a plurality of positions, a series of discontinuous Kroll-functions. 

“Don’t overestimate your faculties; you are not tasked with prophesy,” said Morchiladze. “Your memoir has only to fill in some forensic gaps; let us see events from the perspective of this ‘Kroll.’” 

But why always Kroll, I wondered. I might just as well write about somebody named Schropf, or Dozhd. Or Majeroni. 

“Your book will be a dagger in the head of anyone who thinks they can wait the judge out.”

Morchiladze yanked her dogs to their feet. To the accompaniment of a strangled wheezing, she stalked from the room. 

I believe that Schropf must have foretold his own death, often, and not only boastfully and foolhardily. Dozhd and Majeroni would have recounted the expropriations and the liberations, the sheltering for weeks on end in borrowed apartments in the ugly new-rise blocks. The flight under assumed names, the beginning of the long wait here in this tropic land. And then Schropf would say that he’d seen another of their countrymen today, another today, as if following them. Schropf had foretold, too, the un-worlding pain of it, and the quailing irrectitude of his murderers, the police. He’d known that he would have to prop them up at the last, hew them to their duty as executioners while they larked and giggled and pitied themselves. 

Schropf had been mistaken in much: there had been no extradition, and consequently no long walk through fog-shrouded streets of home; no eerie quiet in which to gather the necessary equanimity; no faint scent of the city market (salt-cod and cut flowers); no face glimpsed at a slate-roofed gable window, eyes downcast in scorn or love. 

The death of Dozhd had gone without saying: as Schropf, so Dozhd, all their life.

Just before he bolted I made Majeroni promise never to tell anyone how I let him escape: loping, zip-tied and bloodied, over the garbage-strewn plain, unaware how his white shirt shone in the van’s headlights; dragged back, stumbling and sobbing, laid down among them, face-down, like them. How the vault of the sky must have wheeled above them all the long night through; like sleepers, they could not know it; like dreamers, they only thought they woke. 

Kroll and I walked along the canal. Snake-birds perched on fence-palings, drying their outspread wings. Kroll had broken cover just after dawn, sauntering out the doorway of a shebeen. I could have caught up to Kroll right then, or at any point since. I hung back. The gravel towpath became a broad cobblestone causeway; we were nearing the city proper. 

The morning was already hot. I had gone without sleep, keeping watch for Kroll’s emergence from the shebeen. Outside, I had had to imagine the scene within: the conviviality of submerged hostility, the slow and fumy self-poisoning from wood alcohol, the dancers and the sharpers and the barman all wrecked on kif and shine. 

By dawn I felt leached of life, parched and hollow. 

“Kroll,” I called out. He might be prevailed on to slow down. 

The morning air was close. Sweat dripped down the small of my back. I felt, rather than saw, a slackening of my perceptual field, followed by a suffusion of dreamily parti-colored spots. I lurched; a wall of ground rushed up at me. 

“Kroll,” I said again, but it came out softly, murmured into the ground. The mud beneath the paving-stones smelled vegetal, marine. By the time I had struggled to my feet once more, Kroll had put quite a distance between us. To gain on him, it seemed to me I had to command my legs with an undue deliberateness, inwardly telling each in its turn, “Go, go.” This effort of mine was registered by that steadfast inhabitant of the pilot-house we all carry high in the crown of our head; he took up residence there the moment we learned to speak; he is no pilot at all, he has merely been on watch all this while, aware of all that comes and goes within the dome spread out beneath him. Thoughts and feelings have been the least of it; he is keen; he registers all subtle, all barely detectable motion: faint tremors, ghosts of abandoned longings, pale shadows that flit by. Now, after long years, he knows us so well he can predict what we will do next, and what in turn will happen then, but he never intervenes; he will not so much as issue a timely warning; he is like a doorman who neglects to tell you that you have had a caller. If only we could prise him from his stronghold.

I shouted Kroll’s name. He seemed to hear me, even at such a distance; he halted without turning around. 

I called out again: “Kroll! I know you, what you are. Confess your aberrant tendencies: mysticism and adventuring.”

I did not know Kroll, what he was. But what other gambit did I have, what appeals did I know how to make, other than imprecations? Perhaps I was the judge’s creature after all. 

Kroll walked on. The canal passed under a bridge and Kroll vanished in darkness. Traffic streamed over the bridge under a brightening mackerel sky. I could see nothing in the darkness beneath the iron vault of the bridge, and nothing beyond that. Kroll might have already walked on. Soon Kroll would make himself part of that rushing world, lost to me for good. Soon, or already, lost to me for good. I hurried. 

“Kroll,” I said as I came into the shadows. I stood still. It was cold in the sudden dark; the air smelled of canal-borne pollutants and whatever ichorous algae survived them. I was afraid I might not be able to resist the temptation to hurl myself into the black water that sluiced and rushed in the dark. I made ready to enjoin Kroll once more to confess to mysticism and adventuring. 

“Kroll,” I said again.  

“Kroll,” said Kroll’s voice in the dark. 

I took faltering steps toward the voice. Space pressed in on me. 

Now I saw how to write Kroll’s book. It would not in the least resemble the one the judge had commissioned of me. To attain the greatest dispersion of Kroll-functions, to array them in unforeseeable constellations, I would have to seize the inhabitant of pilot-house in his stronghold. What he knows, what we will know as soon as we take hold of him, is the discontinuous: the ghosts of urges and recoilings (pale shadows); and how people pressed themselves on your mind and even your heart, before they revealed themselves for what they had been all along, phantoms, nothing but phantoms; and the way we used to sense, while in the grip of fever, that there was another schema behind the schema to which we thought our thoughts appealed. And more than that, the Kroll-book would be written in the language of the pilot-house, which shares not one word with our own.

Kroll did not see the ground rush up at him this time. Gravel pricked his palms; he shivered.

Sam Goody was a haven set across from a broken decorative fountain in the dimly lit mall I grew up near, a shop where misfits and bankers, smokers and jocks, single mothers and next-door neighbors found themselves assembled by a shared desire for music. It was a place for discovery, a place where unearthing a musical gem, by force or by accident, could help a youth from a small Southern town carve out an identity. An open mind and some disposable income could lead to a treasure that might alter your life.

If, like me, you didn’t have any disposable income, then a Christmas gift certificate from your cooler, older cousin would suffice. On this occasion, the winter of 1994, the deck, was stacked against me. When you’re on the cusp of the awful in-between years of adolescence the world is a confusing place. None of your choices matter but, to you, every choice carries the weight of the future. It never once occurred to me that choices were reversible or even inconsequential in the grand plan. Choosing between albums to purchase? You may as well ask me to select an organ to remove.     

I knew what I was supposed to listen to, what I was supposed to choose. Radio and social pressures pushed me toward acceptable, popular music of the day: alternative rock bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam; pop stars such as Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, and Boyz II Men; contemporary country by the likes of Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus. I loved it all and I wanted to opt for the biggest status-achieving album I could afford. I knew that my choices on that day in that Sam Goody would forever elevate my social status and transform me into a wise, sophisticated trendsetter within my church youth group and my inner circle of friends—both of them. God willing, it might even grant me a silent nod of approval from the store employee with the spiked hair and nose ring.

None of that happened. Instead, I chose poorly.

As desperate as I was to have my musical choices accepted, there was a small pang in my head imploring me to do something drastic: to expand my musical horizons. With a world of music at my fingertips, my burgeoning adult consciousness vetoed every decision my adolescent heart came up with. That’s how I ended up with two, bargain-priced CDs: Lead Belly’s Greatest Hits and Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming. I may as well have opted to open a 401k with my change jar. 

At home, both records sounded awful to my nascent, underdeveloped ears. ‘Awful,’ however, at age 13 really meant, “These songs don’t sound like the other songs I like on the radio.” Even in “CD quality sound!” they sounded hollow and muddled, like a warped picture broadcast to an ancient television. Worse, they sounded like the past, and it was a past I wanted nothing to do with. Yet, here I was, the new owner of two relics from music history.

The Lead Belly CD made for rough listening as it sounded like a copy of a copy of a copy from some ancient field recordings. Out of tune and barely audible even at high volume, I didn’t even make it through once. Like any other proud member of the Alternative Nation, I listened to “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” twice and then watched my (bootlegged) VHS copy of Nirvana: MTV Unplugged in New York, knowing that Nirvana’s unchained closer, a cover of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, was superior in every way to the original recording. Nirvana’s version was loud, unhinged, and very, very cool. Lead Belly was exactly none of those things.

Dylan’s Slow Train Coming was equally unlistenable, albeit in a different way. Around 1978, Dylan converted to evangelical Christianity, recorded several Christian-themed albums, refused to play his prior secular material in concert, and routinely prophesied to audiences onstage. He was a man transformed and Slow Train Coming was the first recorded output from this “born again” period. It’s an album rife with Christian allegory, sermonizing, and pointed religious imagery. The album’s cover art is an extension of this theme, a literal image of a train moving (slowly, I presume) across tracks being built, one by one. In the foreground, a man holds a pickaxe that resembles a none-too-subtle cross, ready to wield it with power. Dylan fans are not always keen on this period of his career, to put it mildly. I will, however, go one step further: Slow Train Coming was fucking awful to listen to. It was painful, burdensome, boring, and very much the opposite of a religious experience. I just wanted it to end.

I made it through all of Slow Train Coming in one sitting, but it was 46 minutes of my young life I’ll never get back. When I was done listening, I turned right back to my (bootlegged) Nirvana video, and, as the opening chords of “About A Girl” rolled out from the television speakers, I remember thinking, Thank God—thank GOD—I have some real music to listen to. I needed to wash the sour sounds of Dylan’s holy visions out of my ears.

Dylan’s transformation from revolutionary poet and songwriter to Christian evangelist happened unbeknownst to my young self. All I heard in the music (all two times I listened to it) was gospel backup singers, big brass horns, noodling, non-grunge guitar, and a man whose voice can best be described as unique. The lyrics read like they were ripped straight from Wednesday night choir practice (e.g., “For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears/

It is only He who can reduce me to tears”). Worse, I was being preached to on (what I thought) was a rock and roll record. At a time in my life when I was actively attempting to rebel against those same ideas Dylan embraced, I had just blown what little musical capital I had on albums that were brutally out-of-step with who I wanted to be. The adult choices I made that day in Sam Goody delivered unto me some adult consequences. This was music that my parents might enjoy, and I had to eliminate that evidence with a quickness.

I trashed both CDs. I dropped them in the garbage bin and hauled it to the curb. It didn’t occur to me to try to return them, and the nearest place I could have tried to sell them off was at least 100 miles away. I don’t even think I knew selling used CDs was a thing until I was 16 or 17. Besides, drastic times call for drastic measures. Or so I reckoned. 

I know what I’m supposed to say: “I was young then, I’m older now and learned a valuable lesson about life. I realized that there’s more to music than the first listen and I wish I still had those CDs.” But, no. I’m not sorry I got rid of them. They were useless to me at the time, a form of musical currency I couldn’t cash in and they would be equally useless to me now, I suspect. In the time I’ve devoted to discussing, writing about, and dissecting music, I never once thought, “Man, I still wish I had those CDs.” Not once. I’ve gone back to listen to Slow Train Coming and most of Lead Belly’s recordings. They are perfectly fine documents that I understand are culturally important. I acknowledge their value, but they did not have the intended consequences of a Dylan-esque conversion. Not the way I hoped they might, anyway.

I’ve encountered music since then that has transformed my mental faculties, my listening habits, and my understanding of music’s role in our culture. I’ve had moments when my young life was altered by music’s more holy qualities, times when it felt like music could unlock knowledge of my identity. I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t been transformed by at least one song or one musical moment in their lives. Being transformed by music, however, is a lengthy process. It is full of false starts and terrible choices along the road to enlightenment. No listening experience remains the same from month to month, let alone year to year.

What strikes me about that moment, what keeps that memory encased in my hippocampus, is how much I tried to force a transformation to happen that day. I believed that if I sacrificed momentary indulgence for lengthier gratification, if I played the long game and opted for a slow train rather than the fastest method of arrival, I would be better off; I could even win at life. Not only would I achieve lasting happiness by shunning those immediate urges to pick up a copy of Throwing Copper on CD, eschewing trends and current cultural commodity and elevating the status of my capital-S Self, but I would also be recognized and rewarded for my intelligence. Instead, it all ended up the trash and I was out $30 in Sam Goody gift certificate cash.

Forcing a musical transformation left me broke and broken, unhappy and unfulfilled. I didn’t learn any lessons after being burned by my choices. At the time, I was just mad and disappointed with the unfairness of it all. Still, remnants of that 14-year-old holding a Soul Asylum album in one hand and a Velvet Underground album in the other, knowing which one I want and opting for the other, still exist every time I make a musical selection. I’ll never outrun these choices—the ‘should’ and ‘should nots’—so I’ve learned to work around them and to choose whatever works for me in the moment.

By the time I was old enough to revisit Dylan’s catalog, the entire mall and the Sam Goody from my youth was wholly abandoned. As shoppers migrated to Best Buy and Target, the interiors stayed empty and unrented until one day, without celebration, the entire mall, and the world of music it once contained, was leveled into a flat piece of earth.

Almost ten years after that regrettable Sam Goody experience, on a visit home, a passing train forced me to stop my car outside of town, a few miles from the spot where the mall once stood. I watched as train cars creaked along slowly, covered with graffiti and littered with odd, disjointed images, artist tags and colorful tableaus. I looked up from my CD wallet in time for one oddly familiar image to roll by. On a train car in black spray paint, a man with a floppy hat and cross-shaped pickaxe, similar to the man centered on the album cover of Dylan’s Slow Train Coming, was poised mid-swing. “This slow train is bound for glory!” was spray-painted above his head. Maybe so, maybe it was headed to that destination. But I wasn’t on that train. Instead, I rolled over the tracks after the last train car disappeared from sight. I had some other destination in mind. Somewhere very similar but also very different.

The striking, Borgesian death of Wren Cartwright is the forgotten story of East Village lore. Precisely because the neighborhood has experienced seismic tumult, from the crack epidemic to the AIDS crisis to rapid gentrification, it has left few witnesses to such an eccentric lifestyle and its improbable end. Thus separating reality from anecdote is that much more difficult.  

While alive, Wren Cartwright was but one among a veritable platoon of tatterdemalion book scouts who threaded the New York City subway systems, slouching subterranean travelers who emerged into the light of day only to plunge into musty, outer-borough second-hand stores, or to canvas estate sales upstate for first editions or bundles of Civil War letters that had, until then, been rotting in attics. Chelsea flea-markets were frequent battle grounds as this horde of hustlers possessed sharp elbows and shrewd, encyclopedic knowledge of literary arcana. They were known to screech at one another if they happened to reach for a fine, embossed copy of Treasure Island at the same time. Auction houses, book collectors, and the less-esteemed bookstores of the Upper East Side all purchased their wares (some shopkeepers met these grubby shades at the back door where they were paid for their pickings off the books and in cash). They were always men, mostly middle-aged or wizened, be-speckled bachelors on the march, daily circling New York City, moving just enough books to survive at a subsistent level. Most wore a laminated copy of their independent retailer’s license on a thread around their neck to silently signal to timid clerks that they didn’t have to pay sales tax. All were on the hunt for that elusive white whale in book form to lift them from poverty. That paper Moby Dick would surface on the horizon during blazing sunsets of rent-fueled desperation at the end of every month—a first edition Fitzgerald that, at a glance looked to be signed by the infamous alcoholic, only it was the scribbled name of the book’s previous owner.  With an exhausted sigh the volume was slung onto the counter for purchase as the fog of false hope swirled anew. 

Except for Wren Cartwright. He miraculously scored. 

As the story goes, told and retold among scouts, collectors, and retailers, one humid July afternoon he found himself at a Brooklyn Heights church rummage sale. There, within a box of old newspapers and coverless paperbacks secreted within a battered, stained and nearly unsalable copy of Leaves of Grass was a cache of yellowed letters from a young Bram Stoker to the master himself. They nearly slid out and onto the dirty gray sidewalk. Words unread for a century.  Even better, drafts of Whitman’s appreciative replies were tucked in as well. Scribbles of his poetry reached for the margins. Wren clutched the parcel to his heaving chest with one hand while thrusting exact change at the salesperson, lest they, in breaking a dollar bill, had time to inspect the item, declare it a treasure and set it aside as no longer for sale. He stuffed the receipt into his greasy billfold and fled down into the subway. These feral booksellers were a shrewd bunch, and Wren knew that the letters were going to lift him out of poverty like bat wings. For at that moment, the revival of Dracula ruled Broadway. The black etchings of Edward Gorey’s poster for the play were plastered all over town. As his discovery was just a few years after the Stonewall riot, gay culture was on the rise and as such letters of this nature were quite collectable. Wren’s whale had surfaced in a perfect confluence of trend, popular culture, and exclusivity. The faded book plate declared the owner of this volume to have been the sexton of the very church where Cartwright had made the purchase. Whitman had famously lived in the area, so provenance was not a problem. He knew not to take the letters to the bookstores; they would preemptively dismiss his find, outright devalue it, begrudgingly offer a pittance and sell the letters in the window at a criminally high mark-up. No, treasure such as this was destined for an international seller, likely for auction to the highest bidder. Bypassing Manhattan’s big-name auction houses and their byzantine approval processes, he shakily made the rare long-distance call to a London firm that dealt only in books and manuscripts and they immediately set an appointment for their New York representative to inspect the letters. In short order, the sale was made to an anonymous collector with a standing order to pay top dollar for items relating to a short list of favored authors. The buyer went public after the sale with the intent of gifting some of the letters to Trinity College Dublin. Biographers for both writers cawed to the press that this was the literary discovery of the decade. Within a fortnight of his find, a large amount of money was wallowing in Wren Cartwright’s bank account. And with this, some of his habits began to change: not his dress, he still took the subway, he still ate miserly in out-of-the-way diners; though he continued to move books around town, for the first time in his mostly unrecorded life, Wren began to acquire for taste, not profit.  

While little is known of Cartwright before his windfall, more is known about the years leading up to his dramatic demise. Public records offer up a birth in Delaware, an unfinished degree in English from Stetson University in Florida (it’s speculated that he left as a result of a campus-wide purge of homosexual students and staff. There’s no evidence for this except the explicit timing of his hasty move north). Tax returns show a variety of low-paying clerking jobs until his obsessive love of literature eventually translated into a peripatetic existence of selling books while living in a variety of SROs up and down the outskirts of Manhattan. It’s worth noting that the majority of his early residences were always within walking distance of major gay cruising spots on the city’s Westside, though any connection is purely conjecture. As far as we know, Cartwright left no journals, and lived a friendless life outside of his connections to the book trade. He disowned or was disowned by his family (they refused to collect his corpse, which was cremated and buried on Hart Island, a potter’s field off the Bronx so overfed with the bodies of New York’s forgotten that skulls roll ashore on Orchard Beach after strong storms). His drift into a hermitic existence is hard to trace, though money from the Stoker-Whitman sale fueled an unstated resolve. He immediately moved to a large, ground floor studio in the East Village at a time when it was a cheap and dangerous neighborhood. The Bowery was blighted, muggings common. Since he could have afforded safer, more luxurious housing, in hindsight it is tempting to surmise that he chose this apartment neither for thrift nor location, but the singular rarity that his front door both opened to the street and was equipped with a mail slot.   

There are many different types of bibliomania. Beyond the typical affinity for genre, there are literary manias that, oddly, have gone unrecorded. At the time, Wren Cartwright’s death received little notice outside a curt, riddle-like headline in the August 5th, 1998 edition of The New York Post: Porn Addict Chokes To Death on Smut. His peculiar story has gained more attention in recent years as hoarding, the compulsive collecting of things, has moved from an obscure concern among social workers and into the public sphere via reality shows and social media. While the tapestry of New York City is stained with countless lonely deaths, none have ever been as articulate or as unusual as Wren Cartwright’s suicide. 

With the Stoker-Whitman sale, his focus shifted entirely onto gay erotica and pornography. The mass of gay pulp produced during prior decades was, at that time, unwanted and unappreciated. These steamy sex romps from the fifties and sixties were discarded as more emboldened, celebratory gay pornography followed the sexual revolution. Cartwright not only purchased every available copy of gay pulp that he could get his hands on—he also acquired large quantities of Bob Mizer’s pictorial magazines and any and all lewd apocrypha. Bookseller and original member of New York City’s Gay Men’s Chorus Ben McFall reports that his reputation among the other booksellers was someone who paid well and in cash for any and all gay material. “I also saw him at the bars, drinking alone, always reading, never socializing. I never saw him at the baths. Most of the book scouts were straight, so I expected he’d have been pleased to see a familiar face but he never made small talk.” Similarly, Glenway Wescott biographer Jerry Rosco, a longtime resident of the East Village, knew Cartwright by sight. “He was just one of those characters you saw around town, always lugging a bag of books with him. I heard he got banned from The Oscar Wilde Bookshop for haranguing a customer who bought the last copy of some porno mag he lusted after.” Cartwright also subscribed to every gay publication of a sexual nature. Among his known magazine and chapbook subscriptions, from the popular to the obscure (this is far from an exhaustive list), were Black Inches, Blueboy, Bound and Gagged, Drum, Drummer, Freshmen, Guzzler Magazine, Honcho, International Barracks, Latin Inches, Mandate, Mister, Playguy, Samson, Stepson Quarterly, Straight To Hell, Urge and Vulcan. 

He is known to have quarreled with Straight to Hell editor and fellow curmudgeon, Boyd McDonald. Cartwright accused McDonald of withholding several early issues of STH simply to spite him. While McDonald was known to play or trick or two, he was also famously cash-strapped and would have benefited from Cartwright’s largess, so it’s likely a minor dust-up in some Times Square porn store has transmogrified into legend. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: Cartwright, as the consummate consumer, frequented the same haunts as editor Boyd McDonald and science fiction and fantasy author Samuel R. Delaney, writers who explicitly recorded the erotic adventures Wren coveted, and was in turn consumed by; a sexual Ouroboros of gluttony. One can’t help but think that, though Delaney and McDonald were the risk-takers, desire triumphs obsession as at least desire can be spent. With obsession, accumulation occurs until somewhere a dam breaks, either psychically or otherwise.  

From the limited information we can gain from the police report, there was no furniture in Wren’s apartment with the exception of a spent mattress on the floor. Every inch was given over to his burgeoning library. Even the refrigerator had been removed some years prior; his corpse was described as emaciated, so at some point his collecting trapped him/entombed him. His rent was paid far enough in advance to guarantee mummification before his body was discovered. So much is unknown, including whether the mailman who made the fateful delivery was aware that he or she had inadvertently caused the death of another human being. Nor was it possible to know which magazine delivered the fateful blow, enforcing a seppuku of centerfolds and tan lines down Cartwright’s open mouth, choking him to death. No photographs of the scene, quickly ruled a suicide, survive. (No photographs taken of the reclusive Cartwright while he was alive have to come to light, either). What was apparent, however, is that the abundance of books and magazines, and likely rare manuscripts and letters, were arranged in such a way as to act as gears: each conveyance of pornographic material in anonymous brown paper wrappers during those final days set a domino-process in motion. At some point, Cartwright could no longer rise from his bed. Enthroned on piles of pulp as mail was pushed through the slot, prior deliveries were propelled forward. Think of the dark architectural designs from the great eighteenth century illustrator Piranesi come to life. The meticulousness of this paper clockwork meant that, near starvation, Wren Cartwright was able to purse his lips and receive one final delivery, extreme unction, possibly in the form of a California surfer, nude, looking over his sun-kissed shoulder, a wave about to break that never will. 

The complexity of this machination cannot be overstated. The singularity of the design is overwhelming: the entire apartment and all of its contents were arranged to act as a slow-moving guillotine, his obscene library serving double duty as a deadly apparatus, a contraption the creation of which required an outré imagination and nearly fiendish planning. It’s likely models were built and tested, attempts failed, plans revisited; the investment of time, the sheer determination, is unfathomable and augments Cartwright’s suicide to a new form of self-expression, surpassing the mere politics of immolated monks and all their ilk. 

It is now considered culturally criminal that such a vast collection of pornography, one that likely represented the entire erotic output of gay America up until his death, was unceremoniously hauled to the dump. This loss was described by poet and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Merrick Community College Philip F. Clark as “The burning of our Library of Alexander. Or more likely our Library of Bagoas, Alexander’s boy-eunuch lover, for those magazines were in their own way love letters. The men pictured had the bodies we all coveted; the stories were ones we could only tell each other.” Likely somewhere within the now defunct Fresh Kills landfill, this buried museum quietly rots. Glossy buttocks, mimeographed cocks, page after page of torrid encounters and anatomical descriptions are blindly churned to soil by innumerable insects. Was Wren Cartwright’s collection a suicide note or a paean to beauty, an example of mental illness unchecked or a singular act of deviance: one of carnal images and lurid letters, a cut-up like no other, designed to make the ghost of William S. Burroughs stew in jealously within his bunker, just a few blocks away?  On the tenth anniversary of his death, painter and performance artist Lorenzo De Los Angeles launched a one-night art installation at the East Village experimental theater, La MaMa, symbolically recreating Wren Cartwright’s moment of death. Inspired by the erotic artistry of Surrealist Hans Bellmer, works of gay pornography were connected by an intricate web of strings to a plastic skeleton being force-fed images via an elaborate series of funnels in a room created by cardboard boxes. Every time a viewer plucked at one of the strings, another image would slide into the skeleton’s unhinged jaws, filling the fishbowl ensconced within its ribcage, making the viewer complicit in Cartwright’s demise. Outside of De Los Angeles’s moving sculpture and a passing mention in Gary Indiana’s autobiography that he suspected Cartwright of swiping the original manuscript of his first novel, Horse Crazy, New York City’s culture commentary on Cartwright’s bizarre demise has been surprisingly minimal. Only singer Dean Johnson of the Velvet Mafia is known to have consistently memorialized the compulsive collector.  After Wren’s passing, he frequently dedicated shows to him. (Johnson’s own 2007 death is shrouded in mystery.)  

The methodical premeditation of such a suicide surpasses the typical diagnosis of hoarding, which is based on the fear of letting go. With Cartwright’s death, we have the creation of an Egyptian tomb, replete with homoerotic hieroglyphs. The mailman was merely a servant laying the last brick, sealing the sepulcher, as it were. Or is his death a mystery we will never solve? Should we avoid reflexively painting it as a tragedy? For if his actions were a thanatological embrace of the erotic life society had tried so hard to evict him from, then Wren Cartwright can be said to have built not a tomb, but a cathedral of desire, one whose collapse he himself orchestrated, as all religions eventually implode as sacrament begets sacrifice.

If dreaming in a foreign language can be a considered a sign of fluency, Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, Whereabouts—like the dream—is where she has delved full immersion into the Italian language and embraced it as her own. Lahiri’s novel, originally written as Dove mi trovo in Italian and translated on her own into English, is perhaps a literary rebellion for her American audience—and also for herself. The term for writers who write “outside their voice”, coined as exophonic, alludes to the distinction between the author’s traditional voice and the reinvented one.

And for Lahiri, it is truly a reinvention. If Lahiri is considered an exophonic writer, then she has challenged herself to push through the boundaries of “exo/outsiderness” to a distinct brand of linguistic “insiderness” that adds a fresh notch to her literary milestones, although Whereabouts is not her first venture into writing in Italian. In 2015, Lahiri wrote In alter parole in Italian, with a translation written by Ann Goldstein as In Other Words in 2016. Also in 2016, Lahiri wrote the book, Il vestito deo libri (The Clothing of Books), followed by Dove mi trovo (Whereabouts), published in Milan in 2018. While the first two were autobiographical, Dove mi trovo is the first Italian fictional novel that Lahiri has written and subsequently translated on her own.

The careful brush strokes she has painted into this work are extraordinary; each word, in a language no longer foreign, is chosen with determination. It is ironic that she prefaces the novel with the quote from Italian writer, Italo Svevo: “Every time my surroundings change I feel enormous sadness. It’s not greater when I leave a place tied to memories, grief or happiness. It’s the change itself that unsettles me, just as liquid in a jar turns cloudy when you shake it.” While Lahiri’s protagonist has never left the city in which she lives and struggles to sway from her routine, Lahiri herself has embraced change by moving her family to Italy in her zeal for the Italian language and culture.

Lahiri’s most fervent readers who are searching for her former style and themes of cultural identity, assimilation and dislocation with immigration, will not find it in this novel. What they will encounter is a profoundly transparent reflection of a young woman’s daily solitude. The theme of displacement lingers with the narrator’s continuous discomfort with her surroundings, but Whereabouts’ unnamed protagonist, unlike the central character in Lahiri’s earlier works, has remained in the same environment throughout her life. In an unnamed country—Europe is implied—with an unnamed narrator, Lahiri takes readers through a series of vignettes that explores the day-to-day life of a woman of around 46 years of age ruminating on her own solitude and “the banal, stubborn residue of life.” The contents of the book are organized by location i.e. “On the Sidewalk,” “At the Museum” or temporally “In August” or “At Dawn”. As Lahiri herself wavers between America, India, and Italy, in Whereabouts, readers are immersed in the various spurts of possible plot that never quite proliferate in the protagonist’s life. While characters are introduced, they don’t seem to make any impact on the narrator’s future. “Pleasant encounters like this break up our daily meanderings. We have a chaste, fleeting bond. As a result, it can’t advance, it can’t take the upper hand. He’s a good man, he loves my friend and their children.” We anticipate a follow-up that never veritably materializes. These vignettes are simply the narrator’s daily musings, tinged with melancholy, that do not actually translate to any change in plot development. But the truth and beauty in that portrait of humanity and daily experience is seethingly real and still vividly realized.

Readers rather encounter a slide reel of the protagonist’s memories disparaging her critical mother and reminiscing about her loving but bystander father, who died when she was 15. Like her trips to the pool, “eight different lives share the water at a time, never intersecting,” the characters in the novel never really intersect in a meaningful way. They are only in her life at the margins. Lahiri presents a somewhat dystopic portrait of daily life in the depiction of this protagonist but also in the lives of the people she encounters.

It is not quite clear yet if this is a characteristic of a new voice, point of view, or her Italian writing style. For those readers who are accustomed to Lahiri’s figurative style of writing with its focus on the South Asian immigrant experience, the stark contrast might be alarming. This reading will not render those homologous connections to the immigrant experience, but it is not Lahiri’s responsibility to bind her readers to these connections with her work. Whereabouts rebels against the expectations for Lahiri to adhere to former themes of culture and identity that she has felt constrained by in the past. Lahiri demonstrates her frustration with readers’ questions:

‘But this book in Italian is an exception, isn’t it? It’s not part of a longer path, right? But won’t you be writing about me, my family, my experiences anymore?’ This sense of expectation is a heavy burden and takes away my appetite for writing. I would rather find another job. Because to me, writing means freedom.

Like Moushimi in Lahiri’s 1^st novel, The Namesake— for whom “immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge—it was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever,” Lahiri so chooses to immerse herself in all things Italian, and the language with which she feels more authority than in Bengali, but less mastery than in English. Is she finitely an Italian author now? As Edward W. Said, writes in Culture and Imperialism, “No one today is purely one thing.”

The challenge of writing in the language of the unfamiliar is clearly not for the faint-hearted, but increasingly we can see in Whereabouts, Lahiri has mastered it. While the notion of voice can be interpreted in both the linguistic and the verbal, it does not read exactly like Lahiri’s former literary voice. The succinct sentences of her translated prose is a contrast to the intricate writing and the imagery in her earlier English novels. On the other hand, it is a linguistic rebirth; and Lahiri thrives on this awakening. If voice is socially constructed, is this how she was taught to read and write in Italian? Is she succinct because she is writing with a limited vocabulary or because this is her way of seeing the world? Either way, Lahiri should be commended for her valiant experimentation with language. Often, individuals experimenting with new languages perpetuate a shyness—a metaphorical insecure giggle—but this is not reflected in Lahiri’s work. Lahiri writes with the confidence of her character, Mr. Kapasi in Pulitzer Prize winning, Interpreter of Maladies, when he began to aquire expertise in new languages. On the other hand, as Lahiri recounts in interviews, when you are considered an expert, you don’t write in the same way. That confidence and expectation can give way to a literary surrender. And Lahiri discernibly has no desire to wave that white flag. In fact, like her former characters who braved a new world with immigration, Lahiri, too, risks her present sanctuary for the literary unknown.

While Lahiri’s past works of literature that were written in English have been centered in the South Asian diaspora, she has always flirted with Rome in her books, weaving in threads of characters’ connections to Italy. Her works written in Italian have now become a sort of praxis, reflection into action. In Other Words is the reflection, and Whereabouts is the action. And she has truly committed herself to this introspection. Like her characters from The Interpreter of Maladies, she has delved into other worlds beyond her predilection for writing about identity and heritage, which has, in effect, created a departure from Lahiri’s former voice and style and reflects a paradigm shift for her as a writer. Whether she will come back to her former literary techniques is yet to be seen. Still, it is invigorating to experience this new side of her writing and writing reflections. As her characters from her previous books travel back and forth to India, Lahiri travels back and forth to Italy, discovering a home and solace in the Italian language. Like Hema from Unaccustomed Earth, whose love affair with Kaushik—though a rebellion—reminds her of home, Lahiri is likewise freed from “the weight of an imposed identity.” “You need to dig where you don’t feel comfortable” she explains in a 2017 interview with Francesca Pellas. Perhaps this is the most important lesson we are encouraged to follow: dig where it is uncomfortable—don’t mire yourself in comfort, for what might result is an awakening. Lahiri has cultivated a new voice and language, inviting readers with differing narratives of displacement and isolation to connect. In Whereabouts, Lahiri trades security for freedom and it is fascinating to read the journey in her writing.

In Other Words was the first book that Lahiri wrote in Italian but the translation was written by Ann Goldstein. Lahiri’s discourse about the process of translating her own work with a faithful translation has demonstrated that it has been an arduous journey. In concurrence with Jorge Luis Borges’ perception that the “The original is unfaithful to the translation,” Lahiri, too, has reflected on whether a translator, similar to a book cover designer, can get it wrong. As she writes in her 2^nd book in Italian, The Clothing of Books, “Like a translation, a cover can be faithful to the book, or it can be misleading.” In an act of regaining authority and discipline, Lahiri decided to translate Whereabouts on her own.

Lahiri has deliberately chosen a relationship with the Italian language. In a piece that she wrote for The New Yorker in 2015, Lahiri illustrated “My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.” This relationship allows her to reflect, to separate herself from her literary accolades, and start anew, developing a less traditional narrative structure. When an author challenges her literary tradition, the writing does not stay static. Lahiri describes her writing in Italian as a faucet that turns on when she travels to Italy and off when she is back in the U.S. For her readers, it is a different read altogether, and demonstrates, in its simplest form, that it is never too late to try something new. It is not clear if this rebirth of writing in Italian means the death of writing in English. What is clear is that this writing is her portagioie or “joy box”. And it is the reader’s as well.