Category: Uncategorized

Avenue E

Avenue E

is not an avenue on the island of Manhattan,

and the insistent lick of the East River or the East River Drive

can’t ever make it one.

On the far side of that river a real Avenue E exists–

but that meant Brooklyn,

and we never went there, Steven,

because for us Manhattan was the point of all those years;

not the Empire State Building or Chrysler Building

but out on the edges,

where those crumbling restaurants served borscht bialies and a window seat

and were always the first stop of the night:

the beets dunked in red liquid,

the waiter smiling,

the background hiss of cigarettes and voices

and everyone dressed with a particular purpose;

walking down the street with a warm stomach

past bookstores and clothing shops,

cars trucks and taxis honking and bouncing

and the smiles and the looks and the stopping to chat;

walking through those moldy doors

into the kiss of a drag queen and

Lou Reed singing about fishnets, lipstick:

long earrings on the boys,

black pumps on the girls,

wandering from one tiny room back into the other

nodding at familiar faces, drinking scotch and eyeing the bartender

when Daniel, who I had cruised for six months,

slipped up behind me and cooed over the music

that he was putting you in my safe-keeping

then slipped away.

Four months later we were at your apartment,

drunk, killing roaches with our cigarettes;

you went out for a carton

and Daniel sat on my lap and began kissing me:

I don’t know if it was the alcohol

or the fact that we were finally, actually, doing it

but we kept bursting out laughing and then we just couldn’t stop:

Daniel leaned his head on my shoulder,

I leaned mine on his,

and we shook and laughed and kissed each other’s necks

until we heard footsteps that could only be yours on the landing below;

when you opened the door he was in the kitchen washing dishes

and I was in the living room changing the record:

it was Marianne Faithfull, she was singing “Broken English,”

and we screamed the words out at each other

while Daniel swayed back and forth between us;

then he kissed you full on the lips, you put your arms around him and me,

I put mine around the two of you

and I don’t remember how long we stayed like that

or who it was that moved first

but I do remember that when I closed the street door

and stood on the sidewalk

the sky was grey and turning over me

and the streets were flicking slowly open:

empty and a little more promising.

One night you and I were at my apartment talking about the band we had just seen:

you told me you had had an affair with the drummer

then leaned over the coffee table and said you wondered

if people now thought we were having one

because we always left in each other’s company.

This was long after you had shown me the first issue of Avenue E,

told me how you and three friends had stayed up for a week

to get it just right.

E was energy; E was ecstasy; E was excitement; E was for everyone.

E was poems and stories and cut-out figures and

individually colored drawings all enclosed in a large plastic bag.

Each E had different sayings from tea bags and fortune cookies;

each E had its own special tarot card, its own unique E surprise.

Now you said you wanted to do another issue and you wanted me to do it with you.

Of course I said yes;

E would put me in print; E would make me famous;

E would get me, like you, into all the clubs for free.

This was 1982. I was going to be a writer or a rock star.

You and Daniel had just moved in together.

Lots of people were jealous. The Pyramid was still ours.

I would leave work at midnight and we would meet at the bar:

you would turn away from whoever you were talking to,

put your hand on my leg and we would plot

how E was going to change the world.

E would defeat Reagan.

E would expose the military industrial complex.

E would bring visual art and writing together;

it was the vision of E: true egalitarianism.

Eventually the man you had been talking to

would tap you on the shoulder

and the three of us would raise our vodkas and toast the new E era.

Sometimes I’d go home with him and sometimes I wouldn’t.

Everyone knew about Avenue E and everyone said they wanted to help.

We got pictures of abortions and babies

and poems about families that went nowhere.

You found a fake proclamation from Mayor Koch saying

that no man could be out on the street after dark

unless accompanied by a woman.

We collected ads from galleries; we went to poetry readings;

your neighbor said he would draw the cover:

that night we were so happy we drank more than usual and

hugged in your hallway for a long long time.

Sometimes I would watch you in your leather jacket,

gesturing and smoking a cigarette. Daniel would be off in a corner

talking to someone. People would stop and say hi and sneak you a feel.

You would introduce me and they would ask if we were cousins

because we both had curly hair and talked with our hands.

We talked to each other every day; we solicited more artwork;

one night we laid everything out and realized we had 42 pages

and money for 30.

We called every temp agency we knew and took every job offered.

Every Sunday I’d figure out how much we had

and how much we still needed.

You’d order take-out Chinese and say

you didn’t know how you’d manage without me.

I’d say you’d do just fine, it would just take a bit longer.

Daniel would call or come by and you would coo at each other.

I’d turn on my calculator and pretend not to notice.

People began coming up to me in bars

instead of pretending we hadn’t met 4 times already.

Sometimes they’d pull me into the bathroom

when they went to do drugs.

When it was finally finished we had a big party and

everyone danced and drank and wrote on a wall

every word they could think of that began with E:

it was the eighties; E’s were everywhere.

We made up E poems, gave away E prizes,

Daniel created E cocktails and we drank them extremely efficiently.

I remember walking around handing out crayons for people to write with,

putting my arms around you

then making out with someone who is now dead.

Even now I can see him walking up to me

saying something extravagant

about how I looked holding a cocktail and crayons,

taking the red one I extended

and when I smiled,

touching my wrist with his thumb and laughing

pulling me into a chair:

his green earrings shining; his hands stroking my cheeks;

his lips around mine,

soft and wet.

This is the only way I know, Steven,

that will bring him, you, Daniel, everyone back.

May 20, 2023
Double Buns

I hover around the buffet’s sushi section.

The sushi chefs replace each piece as they are taken from the table.

I place two pieces on my plate and one in my mouth every five minutes for forty-five minutes.

I slink away for a minute to talk to my uncle.

He has flown in for the dinner, thrown by the yeshiva, honoring his father, my late grandfather.

I like talking to my uncle about women, but when other people approach us, he starts preaching about the joys of travelling.

I slink back to the sushi.

My gaze lingers on the soup table.

The server is a short Dominican girl with her hair in double buns and braces on her teeth.

She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

My grandfather used to love bragging about my uncle’s youngest son.

Particularly when this boy, my cousin, was very young.

When my cousin was four or five years old, he had memorized:

            every single president of the United States

            every single vice president of the United States

            every single prime minister of the state of Israel

            all three backwards

My grandfather always placed a great deal of importance on memorization.

My father did not.

My father emphasized comprehension over memorization.

But my grandfather offered rewards.

Over the years, I was rewarded with a wide array of electronics for the memorization of a wide array of Jewish prayers.

The longer the prayer, the more expensive the reward.

My grandfather never actually tested me himself.

My grandfather had his son-in-law, my father, test me.

My father would report the results to my grandfather.

William Wyler’s These Three stars Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins, and Joel McCrea.

The real stars of the film are child stars Bonita Granville and Marcia Jones.

Merle and Miriam are two recent college grads who start a school for young girls.

Joel McCrea is the local doctor who helps them with handiwork.

Miriam secretly loves Joel, and Joel and Merle openly love each other.

Bonita Granville, a ruthless troublemaker with a perplexing persecution complex, blackmails Marcia Jones, getting her to corroborate false accusations against Miriam and Joel.

The children accuse Miriam and Joel of engaging in a sordid affair behind Merle’s back.

Bonita whispers that the two of them are exposing students to unspeakably lewd acts, sounds.

In college, I was close with the poetry editor of the literary magazine.

She was a kind, thin Dominican girl with a musical lilt in her voice.

After graduation, I took her to the Jones Beach boardwalk on July 4th to watch fireworks.

I thought I had been there before with my mother and sisters

I remember it being a fancy place.

I wear my turquoise button down, grayish skinnies, turquoise glasses, black-and-gray yarmulka.

She wears a knit amaranth sweater, black shorts, contacts, and has her hair in double buns.

Her mother walks her to the car when I arrive to pick her up.

You know, Dominican mothers, she says, and I nod.

As if I know.

When she and I get to the boardwalk, I am shocked to discover it is not a fancy place.

There is a beach block party going on.

The music is loud.

The sound system cheap.

The ambience, neglected grunge.

We walk and talk along the boardwalk.

We pass a group of children running around.

They chant as we pass through their midst.

They chant Sugar daddy, Sugar daddy.

I do not understand what they mean at the time.

I understand that their words are directed at us.

She and I both blush and avert our eyes until we pass the kids.

We stutter in our conversation.

Lose our trains of thought.

Struggle looking for them.

The night has gotten cold when we get back to the car.

We see some fireworks from the parking lot.

We had been on the wrong side of the beach.

I drop her off at home.

On the drive home, I shout at myself.

I do not understand.

At the yeshiva dinner, we sit through speeches.

I am on one side of my uncle.

My father is on his other side.

The two of them are talking.

The speeches are interrupted by a montage of old photos of my grandfather.

The montage is followed by a brief speech about my grandfather.

We listen quietly.

Rabbis get up to speak about other people.

I slink out of the dining room.

Outside, I inspect the dessert buffet as it is being arranged.

The Dominican server with the braces and double buns approaches me.

She tells me that she really likes my tie-dye tie.

I tell her I really like her semi-translucent glasses frames.

We speak for a minute.

When I see my uncle, I tell him that I think this server likes me.

He raises his eyebrows.

Years ago, he told me to watch the film Rodger Dodger.

The film stars Jesse Eisenberg as a teen who runs away from home to spend time with his womanizing uncle.

The uncle takes the boy under his wing, and spends a night with him, trying to get the teen laid.

My uncle has often told me to get laid.

He has never taken me under his wing.

My uncle’s son, the one with the memory, grew up to be a sporty kid.

He also grew up to be annoying.

He would ask me sports questions.

He knew I hated sports.

I spent a few weeks by my uncle’s, when his son proposed a bet.

My cousin said that if I shoot a basketball, and make one shot, for a week he will not be allowed to speak around me without raising his hand and getting called on.

I made the shot.

He raised his hand often, eagerly.

I never called on him.

A number of years later, we were all together for Passover.

My cousin grated on my nerves continuously.

At the Seder table, I told him a Jewish story.

The story of the death of Rabbi Akiva.

The story of how the Romans raked metal combs across Rabbi Akiva’s flesh.

Of how Rabbi Akiva was flayed by metal combs.

I told my cousin that hearing him speak felt like being flayed by metal combs.

Shortly before the graduation ceremony, after classes ended, I went to a big party.

I had barely slept for three days.

The party was being thrown by an old roommate of mine.

I got high with him right when I got there.

I was only on my first drink.

The party was filled with drunk, single Jews.

I was very high.

The crowd of people made me very anxious.

I hole myself up in my old roommates bedroom.

A few couples come in, seeking alone time.

They make polite exits when they see me splayed out on a bed, mumbling to myself.

I am busy processing the potentiality of a relationship with a non-Jew.

I construct multiple, lengthy chains of possibility.

Some less positive, some more.

No chain positive for my family.

At the end of the yeshiva dinner, I look for my uncle.

He is flying out the next morning.

I do not know when I will see him next.

I spot the back of his bald head entering the bathroom.

Through the crowd, I see the double buns of the Dominican server enter the same bathroom.

I nervously check my phone and eat three cookies.

I hover close to the bathroom door.

I hear faint, high-pitched shouts.

Yes daddy, yes, oh yeah Daddy, I hear.

I drive my grandmother home.

At my grandfather’s shiva, the grandchildren spend alot of time in the kitchen.

Our parents are visited by wave after wave of well-wishers in the living room.

I am sitting with my cousin in the kitchen.

The annoying one with the memory.

My sister stands nearby, charging her phone.

My cousin turns to me and asks me who I think our grandfather’s favorite grandchild was.

As I begin opening my mouth with a cruel, arrogant answer, my sister interjects.

Me, obviously, she brilliantly declares.

Obviously, I agree after a pause.

She leaves the kitchen and I tell my cousin how much our grandfather loved him.

I tell him how our grandfather used to brag about him all the time.

He tells me nice things too.

Me and my cousin really did make peace.

But I did fudge some of these details.

I omitted some things.

Like how the girl I went to the boardwalk with had been seeing another guy.

I met him once or twice.

He seemed like a goofy, but unfunny, asshole.

He was with us at graduation.

She and I were next to each other, in line, in our seats.

The guy was on her other side.

They made out all day.

They held hands for most of the ceremony.

That night on the boardwalk, on July 4th, she mentioned him once.

Mentioned how he does not answer his phone.

I disparaged him briefly.

Really, I failed to offer any of myself to her.

It was not all omission.

I wrote some real fiction.

Like my uncle and the Dominican server.

That did not happen.

It was fiction.

Why did I invent such a rendezvous?

Does it mean I’m like the child terror that is Bonita Granville in These Three?

Projecting sex out of a delusional sense of persecution?

Why do I feel persecuted, and how?

Am I trying to castrate myself?

Is there anything left for me to castrate?

Doesn’t my manhood belong to the Jewish people?

That feels like a weak excuse.

At the end of the dinner, my uncle and grandmother implored a now-very-religious old roommate of my mother’s to set me up with her niece.

My mother later told me a weird story about this old roommate.

About this old roommate’s husband.

My mother told me that this woman’s husband was in medical school with my father.

My mother told me that the four of them, the two couples, my father, my mother, my mother’s old roommate, and my mother’s old roommate’s husband, were hanging out in an operating theater.

The old roommate’s husband reached into the open torso of a study corpse, pulled out the heart, and proceeded to juggle the organ.

In Rodger Dodger, the uncle never gets his nephew laid.

The boy’s independent self-discovery is the movie’s “moral.”

Forget the uncle’s cavalier approach to sex.

The movie ends with the teenager back in high school, suavely flirting with a female classmate in the high school cafeteria.

It is about framework.

A proper teenage boy should not try to bed women in dive bars, sleazy clubs, all-night diners.

He should be making moves on nice girls in his high school cafeteria.

My mother’s now-very-religious old roommate’s niece chose not to date me.

Do we get to choose our own cafeterias, or are our cafeterias chosen for us?

May 20, 2023
Bad Writing: Travis Jeppesen

Travis Jeppesen is bad. The United States–born, Shanghai and Berlin-based writer, artist, and critic has been rebelling against the staid, familiar form of “critical” writing and churnalism overtaking many art publications, so often press releases by another name, by carving out a form of art writing that rises to the occasion of art itself. In his most recent book, Bad Writing (Sternberg Press, 2019), Jeppesen investigates work that is capital-B Bad, an epithet he uses as a descriptor for art that disrupts our aesthetic and moral sensibilities and thus is able to claim its title, rightfully, as art. Over the course of a month this spring, we exchanged emails discussing this goodness and badness; debating the limits and murky boundaries of art and literature; of language and image; of the individual and collective.

Above all, Jeppesen, and Bad Writing, misbehave. His criticism enlivens images and indulges the sensual and the sick. It pushes art and language to their breaking points and asks them to flex some more, all to make us reconsider how and why we should write about art at all.

Drew Zeiba: The essays in Bad Writing, if that’s even the appropriate word, were written over a relatively long period. How did this line of thinking, about b/Badness and the limits and possibilities of art writing, begin for you? And when did you realize you were writing a book?

Travis Jeppesen: Most of the pieces were written over a five-year period, from roughly 2011 to 2016. Some of them were the direct result of specific commissions, but a big bulk of it went into my PhD dissertation (called a “thesis” in the UK), which I undertook at the Royal College of Art in London and finished in 2016. Towards the end of that period, I realized that I would eventually turn it into a book—essentially much of the criticism and ficto-criticism I was writing during these years were all interrelated, thematically. The same concerns just kept coming to the forefront, no matter what topic I was addressing. Someone said that artists who write criticism inevitably end up writing about themselves, about their own work through an examination of other subjects. Certainly, Bad Writing can in many ways be read as an elucidation of the aesthetic underlying my novel The Suiciders (Semiotext(e)), even though I don’t talk about The Suiciders specifically in this book. But The Suiciders came out in 2013, and was written over a ten-year period, so I guess you could say that Bad Writing represents an attempt to articulate what have been enduring concerns for me for quite some time.

DZ: You open the book by talking about the current state of art criticism, which I think we can both agree is pretty depressing for a variety of reasons. Can criticism be useful, or beyond useful, —a contribution to writing in a broader sense, to literature?

TJ: I think that criticism can be useful and has a place. As I write in the book, this is more or less my own modest effort at practicing criticism as a literary art form, trying to put criticism on the same level as the poem or the novel. Or painting or sculpture, for that matter. Criticism need not be a strictly utilitarian or, even worse, consumerist venture. I think it’s very much the writer’s responsibility to put forward a model of language usage that goes beyond being merely a vehicle for transmitting information. Criticism can come loaded with both strong ideas and an imaginative or poetic deployment of language. Criticism should be constantly re-inventing itself.

DZ: What historical precedents are there for critical writing that is itself literature or art, that advances art rather than just decorates it—or sells it? In Bad Writing, you spend time with Gertrude Stein, treating her as one of the central exponents of Bad writing—and of writing on art as art. Still, the current uncritical state of criticism has not always been its state, and despite all of today’s bad, or let’s say uninspired, criticism, there must still be some that’s Bad, as you understand it.

TJ: This was the project of art criticism from its origins. Certainly the work of James Elkins, one of the few art historians I know of who’s researched the history of Western art criticism, reveals this. In the late 18th century, when art criticism as a modern form that we know it as today was first coming into existence in England and France, literary responses to art might take the form of monologues, often written in the voices of imaginary or historical personages (pre-figuring ficto-criticism and object-oriented writing), satirical songs, elaborate dramas, or Voltairean critique. This developed into the Salon criticism of the 19th century in France, a lot of which was written by poets and novelists. Even though the role of the art critic eventually grew to become more professionalized and hence specialized, the poet-art critic role endured well into the 20th century, from the activities of Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein in France all the way up through the New York School poets like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara and the current great proponent of that tradition, Eileen Myles.

DZ: That said, to what degree can the current uncritical and unliterary nature of so much art writing be chocked up to the economic conditions of the art world, and of media more generally, where more work, to feed the high-speed glut demanded by the internet, is demanded for less pay from writer-workers in increasingly precarious positions?

TJ: Well, this is certainly a major issue. The art world isn’t really the meritocracy it likes to imagine itself to be—usually it is those who are best at networking and making friends with the powerful who advance to the forefront, and those people aren’t always the brightest, the most talented, or the most original. And precisely because there is so much money in the art world, those who don’t have it are afraid to offend those who do. And, perversely, those who do have it are incentivized to downplay or conceal it; they’re more often than not drawn to the art world because of whatever aura of exclusivity they’ve projected on to it and feel desperate to belong to it, to say all the right things and show up at all the right events so that they won’t get kicked out of the club. Just bring up the topic of money at any art world dinner you get invited to, watch the displays of discomfort all around you. As I say in the book, the art world is more or less run on fear. Though that is also an obvious result of a wider malaise of the Zeitgeist, call it late capitalism or neoliberalism or whatever.

DZ: You, among other recent writers on the historiography of art history as a discipline, a textual discipline, have taken Clement Greenberg, one of Modernism’s most definitive, or at least well-known, critical voices, to task. In the case of Bad Writing, one of your sharpest critiques is of his inability “to throw Descartes in the trash were he belongs.” What is the use of a Bad writer over a writer who is very good in a traditional sense, as we might argue Greenberg was? And, in the face of that, what makes Bad Writing Bad writing?

TJ: I don’t find the Greenbergian project of formalism all that objectionable, in and of itself. Certainly the underlying ambition, trying to understand artworks in purely aesthetic terms, was useful and influential for me at a certain point. I wish more critics and curators today frankly had more of an aesthetic point of view. Instead, so much of the work that is deemed important does so because it checks all the politically correct boxes or fits some consensual agenda that has nothing to do with any perceived or alleged artistic or aesthetic value. Where Greenberg went wrong is when he went off on this ego trip, considering himself to be the chief arbiter of taste. He was also operating during a period where that kind of macho posturing in the art and literary worlds was taken a lot more seriously than it would be today.

Some of the badness that I put forward here, as a literary or critical trope, is more implicit than explicit; that is, I also play with it in my writing, rather than just dealing with the subject of intentionality—intentional badness—in others’ work. For example, in some of the essays, I use summarization. In school, we’re taught that merely summarizing a literary work or a film is bad criticism. Instead, you’re meant to extrapolate themes and ideas in putting forth a unique assessment, throwing in a quotation here and there from the work to support your argument. (A parallel project to the texts I developed in Bad Writing was the evolution of object-oriented writing, which is essentially a re-creative art form, where you’re re-creating, in your own language, the essence of another work of art. This is quite similar to what you do when you summarize, but not exactly the same.) Through the “bad” process of summarization, I felt I was able to arrive at certain critical assessments from within, rather than coming at it from without, as more formalist approaches attempt to do.

DZ: In Bad Writing you advance a notion of what you call object-oriented writing. You also have your own subject-object neither/nor un-formation, the sobject. It’s hard to think of the phrase “object oriented” today without thinking of Object Oriented Ontology, a loose branch of philosophy in recent vogue. How do these lines of philosophical inquiry fit into your writing? What can being object oriented offer the writer?

TJ: I deeply admire the work of Graham Harman, but I must admit I came to it rather late, after I had already developed the idea of object-oriented writing. Encountering Harman’s writing, and realizing that he was pursuing a parallel trajectory in the field of philosophy, opened up so many new pathways for my own thinking about what I was doing. I’m crudely paraphrasing here, but Harman even says, somewhere in his writings, that maybe the next step for metaphysics is to evolve towards the field of aesthetics or art-making.

Object-oriented writing was very much conceived as a sort of metaphysical approach to art writing, and grew out of my frustration with what art criticism has conventionally become. So the idea is to infest inanimate (art) objects with agency, through the vehicle of writing. While at the same time acknowledging the inherent futility, the impossibilities, of such a task. Of, in a sense, reveling and rejoicing in those impossibilities, in that failure.

DZ: While Bad Writing has more plainly experimental works, like the later pieces of ficto-criticism, some of the essays that at least superficially “traditional” often launch into rather unusual, unpredictable elements alongside more expected descriptive, historical, and analytical methodologies. I think of in particular the essay “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” which at first seems, if rather poetic, a straightforward analysis of the paintings of Christian Schoeler, but where suddenly we realize that you, or your words, have come to inhabit the image. The frame you are working around is “imploded” not by its irruption but in a way, by your entering it or revising its frame-ness. Your subject (that is, the object of your interest) and your own subjectivity are melded into the para-subjectivity of that thing you’re gazing at, writing on. What boundaries and boundarylessness are you invested in? And how does the particular art you’re looking at change how you write, change the way language can work with and through it?

TJ: I’m glad you asked that, because I think what art I’m looking at definitely has an influence on the way I write about it. I guess it comes down to temperament—there’s work that I’m able to “enter into” more readily than others. “The Anatomy of Melancholy” is a piece about Christian Schoeler’s work, and there’s certainly a clear sensuality to those paintings on the surface, but that sensuality is composed of a fluidity, not just in the brushstrokes, but by Schoeler’s overall approach to painting: both as a physical act and in the philosophy behind it. Certainly one sees that unity that I try elsewhere to describe as the body-mind machine, the vehicle, at play here, which makes it easy for me to “illustrate” that through the writing, not by doing the conventional thing and describing it from a detached scientific “outside” view, but by entering into the thing, by trying to become fluid like the paint; and also showing the similarities between writing and painting.

So to answer your question, I would say I’m ultimately invested in a sort of weaponized writing, that is: the deployment of writing as a means for dissolving boundaries, rather than respecting them.

DZ: Many of the artists you feature are not only prolific, but feel invested in repetition, almost as compulsion, as fixation. Repetition, and listing, and accumulation, also become, at times, another set of Bad writerly habits you deploy.

TJ: I’ve always been a lover of repetition, down to the micro- and meta-levels; I love consonance and assonance, etc. Maybe because I was trained as a musician from the age of six, part of my perceiving or understanding has been molded by repetition, which is of course a key element of music.

DZ: But, for all this strangeness, the book possesses a certain clarity. Or at least in the beginning portion, where the pieces take the form of more traditional art writing, before entering the frame, moving along with the art, and then departing non-fiction “truth” for ficto-criticism, which itself starts narratively and arguably becomes increasingly obscure, somehow both more fluid and fragmentary in its prose. Why this descent?

TJ: It can certainly be viewed as a descent, if you’d like. But I tend to view it as more of an ascent—where the language “rises” beyond the mere need to make sense, in a conventional way, reaching this higher plateau, where it is gradually released from the stringency of this requirement, finally graduating into “the space of no-writing.” It’s a bit like dying, if you’re wont to view dying as a beautiful thing rather than a horrible, disgusting, tragic experience.

DZ: While the text may be difficult, in the more conceptual sense, it is a quite readable book in a physical sense: standard size sans-serif font, everything organized how one expects a book to be organized. However, throughout there are the scribbly, stylized titles and the semi-asemic strokes that are hard to read, or resist reading, at least in a traditional sense. You also make similar marks that you post on Instagram. I’d love to hear more about this drawing-writing, about reading and/as seeing.

TJ: I started doing this kind of “bad writing,” using calligraphic pens and markers, but also traditional Chinese ink and paper, many years ago. It sort of evolved organically out of my daily writing practice. I’ve always been a notebook keeper, I’ve always had to write out my first drafts by hand. Some of the pages of my notebooks would be filled with these illegible scribbles, asemic writing is what some artist/writers have taken to calling it. Once I showed a close friend some of these pages from a notebook, and she suggested that I try doing this on a bigger, more painterly scale. I followed her suggestion, and so that’s one pathway my work has taken. I’ve had a few solo exhibitions of this work, and while some may argue that it is technically drawing or painting, to me all of it belongs to the category of “writing”; it’s really an extension, of sorts, of my writing practice.

We don’t really have this calligraphic tradition in the West. For this reason, I feel like a lot of people just don’t get what I’m doing at all. I’ve always loved the preciousness of writing by hand, and when I first began traveling to China and Taiwan in 2011, I fell in love with Chinese calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting—this great tradition that was never burdened with this Western division between “word” and “image.” In a sense, I’ve been looking for ways to re-create that scriptoral divisionlessness in my own language or tradition. So this is why I called my first big exhibition of this work (and the limited-edition monograph that accompanied it) “New Writing”: the title can have multiple meanings.

DZ: With literary writing, Bad writing, illegible writing, image-writing, all these multifarious ways of making and crafting from and beyond language, what does the work of the writer become? Or, to put it more simply, remedially, even: what is writing?

TJ: I would define writing as play of the most serious sort. I’ve come to view language as just another material—the same way painters deploy oil paint or sculptors use clay. I’m interested in these moments, where you get to a point where one can detach a word from its meaning—and then what are you left with? Pure sound. Building blocks of those sounds, which look like sentences, but are markedly a-signifying… Though are they? For isn’t this just another way of creating meaning, of making new meanings arise from these detached signifiers?

May 20, 2023
Duty to Cooperate

“How can I help you today?” she asked, her hands on her hips, as she looked at the guy in front of the counter. He was still looking at the menu, trying to decide what to get.

A minute later, she scratched her chin a couple of times. “It’s probably best if you let the person behind you come up, while you figure out what you want.”

He looked at her, his brows furrowed. “I’d like the grilled tilapia with mashed potatoes and buttered corn.”

“For here or to-go?”

“For here,” he said, putting the menu down.

“Fourteen dollars and seventy-three cents.”

It was a routine: Towards the end of her shift, almost every day, she hated her job, passionately. There was always some reason; yesterday, it was her manager Roy, who had refused her request for a pay raise. “I’ve been serving waffles and French toasts and mozzarella sticks to drunk customers for two years now. Don’t you think I deserve a bit of a raise?”

“Not yet,” he had replied.

Today, it was Rita, who had bumped her elbow into her stomach, as they were frying poblano peppers and didn’t apologize loud enough for everyone to hear it. “I want you to say it out loud, ok? I want everyone to know how clumsy you are,” she had shouted at Rita.

“Alright, I’m sorry,” Rita said, as she walked away from the kitchen.

“I don’t know how idiots like that get hired. This place needs a new manager, you know?” she said to the rest of the cooks, who weren’t paying much attention anyway. Speaking of managers, she thought, who the hell are they to tell me not to put my hands on my hips when I’m at the counter? What’s next? They’ll want me to cut my hair shorter?

~

It was around five pm when she walked out of Ihop Express. Her car was parked a couple of blocks away. She was carrying her box of free dinner in one hand while texting her boyfriend Tony, with the other. He was supposed to buy her a 14k gold bracelet for her birthday, which was coming up in three days. “I’m so freaking excited about it! Is it beaded? Will you be coming to my place? Do you…”. Her texting was interrupted by a guy peeking out of a tent on the sidewalk.

“Got a couple of bucks?” he asked, his graying old beard covering almost the entirety of his face.

She put her phone in her pocket and just stood there, shocked that she had never seen this tent before.

“I don’t have any cash on me, but I got some roasted turkey with rice and potatoes. Would you like that?”

“I’ll take anything. Thanks.”

She handed him the box and moved on, phone in her hand again. “Do you know what time you’ll be there?”

She got in her car and started driving home. The seat belt alarm was beeping, but she didn’t care. She had Beyonce and Jay Z singing ‘Crazy in Love’ on her Pandora station and was tapping her right hand on the dashboard to the music. Her phone beeped. It was a text from Tony. “I don’t think I can buy you a gift. Just got laid off today.”

She picked up the phone with her right hand, the other hand trying to keep the wheel straight as she drove on cruise control on the highway. “WTF? You got laid off from your sixteen-dollar-an-hour FedEx job? That’s got nothing to do with my gift! You promised you’d buy me that bracelet a month ago.” A car next to her honked. Apparently, she had been swerving into their lane. She honked back at them, while continuing to type. “You had better show up at my home with my gift. Or else…”

She put the phone down. The speed limit was sixty-five; she was going around eighty. She pressed hard on the gas pedal and sped up. “That son of a bitch. How dare he think he could just take back his promise? I’d never do that to him!” She turned the music up. “Crazy in hate!”

The car in front seemed to be going too slow for her. She honked at them before cutting through two lanes and winding her way ahead. It was her phone beeping again. “So, you don’t care at all that I got laid off? All you care about is your fricking bracelet, Lena?”

She threw the phone away and floored the gas pedal. She almost hit the car in front, so she veered to the right. Later, when she’d think about it, she couldn’t remember the exact sequence of events. But she knew she was going ninety when she hit the car to her right, trying to pass the car in front of her. Her chest jolted forward and hit the wheel. She looked at her right-side mirror: it was gone. She looked in the rearview mirror: the car she had hit was pulled over, its driver’s side door and the front bumper bearing deep dents. Her breathing was rushed and sweat was pouring down her face. She slowed down, trying to find her phone so she could call Tony.

The phone was on the floor, on the passenger side. She pulled over and took a sip of water, laying her head back, her chest heaving wildly. She looked in the rearview mirror and the car she had hit was catching up to her.

The water bottle hit the floor as she sped up, cutting through lanes. She could see the other car following her. She was hoping to get far enough away from it so they couldn’t get her license plate number.

~

By the time she got home, it was dark and the whole thing seemed like a blur.

She was taking her shoes off near the door, when her mom rushed up to her and started talking about Sue, Lena’s aunt. “You won’t believe what Sue told me today about her boyfriend. He’s been cheating on her for years. And the crazy thing is…”

“Mom, leave me alone, would you? Where’s Danny?”

“He’s in his room, doing what he always does – playing that stupid video game. But listen, Aunt Sue’s really in a tough spot right now.”

She went into Danny’s room and locked the door shut, as her mom stood outside, still talking about Sue.

“Hey sweetie, how was your day?” she said, as she sat next to him on the bed.

He looked up briefly, before continuing with the Minecraft game on his phone.

“Talk to me, honey.” She picked him up and sat him down in her lap, running her fingers through his hair, her chin resting on his head. “Do you love mommy? She almost died today. And she almost killed…never mind.”

“Mom, I’m so close to winning this game. Just let me play.”

“Alright, just move over, so I can lie down next to you.”

He grunted and moved his eight-year-old-self to the other side of the bed, still riveted by his phone.

She tried replaying the accident in her mind, but it seemed unreal. Surely, it didn’t happen; it was just a nightmare. Of course, her car was fine. Well, maybe it did happen? But what was certain was that there was no way the other driver got her license plate.

She turned around, snuggled up to Danny and pulled a blanket over them. After he had been begging for months, she had finally relented and bought him a new phone almost a year ago, so he could enjoy his games more. She was still making monthly payments on it. Screw that fricking Roy, she silently cursed. Can’t even give me a two-dollar-an-hour-raise? Who the hell does he think he is…Ihop CEO?

She didn’t know what time it was when she got up in the middle of the night and texted Tony: “Sorry that you got laid off.”

~

She was at work a couple of days later, at the counter taking an order, when her phone vibrated in her pocket. Unlike other employees, she had always refused to silence it. “I’m putting it on vibrate; that’s good enough,” she’d told Roy.

Later, while taking a break in her car, she checked her voicemail. It was what she was dreading: a call from an insurance company asking to speak to her about the accident. Damn…how the hell did that dude get my license plate, was the first thought that came to her mind.

She ran into the kitchen. Rita was making buttermilk pancakes.

“Hey Rita, ever been in a car accident?”

“Nope,” she answered, without looking up from her skillet.

“You know anything about insurance claims?”

“Nope.”

“Well, that’s mighty nice of you,” Lena said, as she walked out to her car.

She lit up a cigarette and started googling ‘at-fault-driver in car accident.’ Every article she read made her more anxious: ‘at-fault-driver liable for injuries and payments;’ ‘accident will go on driver’s record;’ ‘other driver may file a lawsuit if you don’t cooperate with their insurance company.’

She threw the phone down and turned up the music. It was Beyonce again. She rolled down the windows and spat in the direction of the Ihop.

The calls came in every couple of days, the same woman, saying the same thing: “We need you to contact us. Based on the claim filed by our insured client, you’re legally required to share information about the accident and have a duty to cooperate.”

She was having lunch with her mom and Danny one Saturday, when her phone rang. She could tell from the number that it was the insurance folks.

“Why’s your phone been ringing so much these days?” her mom asked.

“Damned spam callers.”

“I hate those people. I wish the same for them that I do for Sue’s husband’s killer: they ought to rot in hell.”

“Mom, I’ve heard that story a billion times. Please, just stop.”

“Hey Danny, you want to hear a crazy story?”

Danny was busy with his phone, as usual. He looked up at grandma. “No nannie, I’m busy.”

“Ok, one night, a long, long time ago, your grandma’s sister’s husband was driving home from work, when a drunk driver hit his car and killed him. Not only that, he drove away from the scene and the cops never found out who it was. If you ask my sister what bothers her more today – losing her husband or not finding and jailing the guy who killed her husband – she’ll say it’s the latter. I tell you, there are some real crazy psychopaths in this world. Don’t you think so, Lena?”

Lena got up and went to the kitchen sink with her plate. “I don’t need to listen to this crap anymore.”

~

She was driving to work on the highway when she looked out the window. She was around the same spot where she had hit the other car. Her hands started trembling and for some reason, the memory of her aunt Sue screaming in her bedroom, yelling “I’m going to find you, you bastard! I’m going to find you and you’re going straight to hell!” and pounding her fists on the walls of her room, came back again in her mind. Even as a fourteen-year-old, it was something she knew she wouldn’t forget – watching her aunt cry and yell at the same time – but it had been a while since she’d thought about it.

As she was walking up to the restaurant, her phone rang. It was the insurance company. She put it back in her pocket, before taking it out and answering it. “Hello.”

“Can I speak with Lena Carter?”

She hung up, squeezing the phone with her fist and put it on silent mode for the rest of her workday.

~

It was one of those mid-autumn days that were gradually becoming rare: it was warm, sunny and dry. They were sitting in her car, next to a park, watching the maple leaves drift down onto the ground.

“What happened to your door and mirror?” Tony asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she replied, smoking her cigarette. She passed it to him.

“No thanks,” he said, looking out the window, his hand resting on the dented door. The passenger-side mirror was gone. Over the past decade, sitting in the passenger seat, he was used to seeing his face in the mirror and it felt strange now to not see himself.

“You ever worry about how you’re going to pay your rent?” she asked. “Got enough savings from your former job to get you through a few months?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fair enough, you funny guy.”

She took a last puff before tossing the cigarette out the window. “Tell you what: I’ll share what happened to my car and then you’ve got to answer my question, ok?”

He nodded, smiling.

“I was drunk and drove into a tree by the side of the road. Simple as that.”

“Really?! When did this happen and why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“Well…there was that tiny little thing about you not keeping up your promises and pissing me off…remember that?”

“And there was that tiny little unexpected thing about me losing my job and not having any income…remember that?”

“It doesn’t fricking matter, Tony! You made a promise. A promise is something you stand by, regardless of what life throws at you.”

He clenched his fist and punched it into the car door. “Oh really? Well, what about the promise you made to let me move in with you…when was that…when Danny was like three?”

“Screw it. This isn’t going anywhere.”

She got out and shut the door hard enough to make Tony jump up in his seat.

“You can’t just walk away from this, you know!” he shouted.

“Oh yes, I can. I can do whatever the hell I want. I can choose to pick up the phone or not,” she yelled as she pointed her phone at him. “I can choose to not have an alcoholic boyfriend move in with his son and raise him to be a jobless drunk like his dad. Those are all choices I can make. You get that?”

He started walking away from her, punching his fists in the warm autumn breeze. He was gone too far to hear her screaming “Stop, come back! I need you!”

~

She kissed Danny goodnight and turned off the lights. She closed the door and walked out, before returning and blowing a kiss in his direction.

Her mom was at the dining table reading the newspaper. Lena filled up a glass of water and sat down next to her.

“What’s up in the news, Mom?”

“Same old stuff I’ve been reading for decades. Nasty people doing mean things to nice folks like us. Over and over again. It never changes.”

“Mom, how does aunt Sue really feel about Uncle Bill’s accident?”

Her mom put the paper down and took off her glasses. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about that?”

“Just answer my question mom, for once…would you?”

“It’s what I told your kiddo. She’s never going to let go of that sense of injustice. I’ve told her that it’s harmful to keep all that anger and resentment inside her, but she just can’t get it out of her mind. Poor thing.”

“Do you think she’d feel better if the other person owned up to their fault?”

“Hell yeah. She’s been wanting that for decades. Both she and I know that the other person’s going to pay a price for their actions, at some point in their life. You don’t just get away with that kind of stuff.”

Lena ran her fingers around the glass, moving them up and down and in circles. It was late – eleven pm – and she had an early morning shift the next day. Her mom had put on her glasses and resumed reading the paper.

Lena got up and headed to her bedroom.

“Goodnight, dear,” her mom said, as she closed the door shut.

Danny was sound asleep. She put an extra blanket over him and closed the blinds, before lying down next to him. It had been a tiring day and it didn’t take long for her to fall asleep.

It started sometime in the night: the pounding on the walls and the yelling: ‘You bastard, I’m going to find you!’ She sat up and ran to the wall, putting her ears next to it. ‘You’re going to hell!’. She fled from the wall and reached for her phone. She dialed the insurance company and got to their automated message. ‘Press 1 to leave a voicemail for your claims representative.’ She hung up, clutching the phone tightly in her quivering hands.

No, she couldn’t do it. There was no way she could handle her premiums going up and have an at-fault accident on her driving record.

Plus, it wasn’t really my fault, she reminded herself. If only Tony had kept up his promise, none of this would’ve happened.

‘You have a duty to cooperate and are legally required to share information about the accident.’ ‘The other person’s going to pay a price for their actions’. ‘Nice folks like us.’

Her arms and legs were shaking as sweat dribbled down her face. She had a sip of water before turning around to face Danny. “I love you, Danny. You’re the best,” she whispered silently, as she rubbed her hands over his blanket.

The pounding and yelling continued through the night.

~

Her eyes were droopy from not sleeping well the night before, and the loud rock music they were playing was only making her fuzzier. She hated her eight-am Tuesday shifts.

“What do you want?” she asked the guy in front of her.

“Umm…I’d like a turkey sandwich, but on gluten-free bread. Also, can you make it with mozzarella cheese instead of cheddar? And oh, no fries, extra salad. That’s it,” he said, as he put the menu down.

She started typing the order into the computer. Somewhere in the middle, she stopped. Aunt Sue was screaming and pounding her fists on the wall. Tony was not keeping up his promise. Her car’s mirror was shattered as she rammed into the car next to her. Her body was full of anxiety about her insurance premiums going up and a lawsuit being filed by the other driver. There weren’t enough nasty folks like her in this world…oops…she meant, there weren’t enough nice folks like her in this world…her heart was pounding as her mind reeled through it all.

“What the hell are you asking for? Can’t you just keep it simple? No fries, extra salad? Who the hell do you think you are?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I know exactly what I mean,” she said, pounding her fists on the table. “You’re being a royal prick!”

The guy moved closer to her, his hands pushing on hers. “Say that again?”

Roy, the manager, came running in. “Hold on, this has got to stop. Lena, I think you need a break.” He took her by her hands and walked her to the kitchen.

~

The rain wouldn’t let up. It was hard to see beyond the wet windshield. They were parked at the same spot, next to the same park they were at a month ago.

Faith Hill was playing ‘This Kiss’ on Pandora, as they passed along a can of Michelob’s back and forth.

“I fricking love this song…don’t you? It reminds me of that night we went dancing at that Olympian pub…remember how drunk you were? You mistook this other woman for me – just because she was also a brunette – and started dancing with her, holding her hands. I had to come pull you away! Oh my god…”

“Oh yeah, baby…I remember that. Those were the days. I even had a job then!”

“Hey, did I tell you that we both have a lot more in common now?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, as he took another sip of the beer.

“I also got laid off. Well, I got fired. But I like to think of it as a layoff. You know what I mean?”

“You did?! When?”

“Doesn’t matter. Screw jobs…who needs them? Losers who don’t know what to do with their lives. Screw insurance, screw lawsuits, screw…everything!”

“I don’t know about the last three, but amen! Here’s to screwing,” he laughed, as he opened another can of beer.

She was tapping her feet and swinging her body back and forth. ‘This Kiss, this kiss…it’s the way you love me! It’s a…’

Her phone rang. It was the insurance company.

She stopped abruptly and sank into the seat, closing her eyes and bringing her legs up to her chest. It kept ringing. She picked it up and stared at the screen, her finger hovering near the green ‘accept’ button.

May 20, 2023
Baldy

It was that very hot summer in Amsterdam, in 1978 (?)

I had seen notices in the Dutch papers that James Baldwin would be signing books at the Athenaeum book store on the Spui.

Not wanting to miss a chance to see an idol, I noted the day and time.

I biked over on a Saturday mid afternoon, very hot and very humid, crowds and a long line, all of which Amsterdammers do not handle well.

A table had been set up under the red and white awning by the wide open entrance, near the racks of magazines and newspapers.

There was a pile of books; I wasn’t even sure which book he was there to sign and I was not going to purchase one anyway, since it would have been a Dutch translation and prohibitively expensive.

The line snaked and slowly pushed forward; soon I could see him in his chair, head bent over, signing and chatting a bit. His forehead was wet and he appeared somewhat uncomfortable, tired, and slightly distracted.

Finally I got to the table, nervous and in flustered awe, trying to collect my words and knowing I would have to rattle them off very quickly.

He gave me a slight smile that broadened a bit when he heard my NYC accent.

Rapidly, I blurted that I was living in Amsterdam and was a Dewitt Clinton High School graduate. I had been art editor of the literary magazine, The Magpie. I knew, of course, that he had been literary editor (with Richard Avedon) as art editor) before he graduated in 1942.

As if inflated with some magic oxygen, he perked up and straightened and suddenly that wonderful broad smile spread across his face. He looked directly at me with those iconic eyes, extending his hand and saying “how nice to hear that.” Then he asked about Marcella Whalen, the faculty advisor, who was instrumental in encouraging his literary aspirations.

Hearing that distinct and totally recognizable voice and being so close to him physically, felt almost magical, a sort of suspended animation.

However, the spell was quickly broken when the four people directly behind me, seeing I wasn’t buying a book, started grumbling. They raised their voices louder, peppered with some choice, caustic Amsterdam expressions, and unceremoniously shoved me out of the line and into the crowded square.

May 20, 2023
Editor’s Note

The KGB Bar and Reading Room was my home away from home in college—you could even say I grew up there. Which is why, years later, this opportunity to guest edit the journal is all the more special to me.

In some ways, the theme of the issue felt a bit like cheating. The dilemma lay in trying to produce something that involved writers I’ve read and long admired along with what I believe is the role of any good journal: to give platform to new voices. So, to ask the writers I admire, who are established in the craft, to share with us the works of new voices that they have been mesmerized by, whom they feel the world should know, felt like the most logical thing in the world. It also left little work to do on my part.

I was somewhat surprised to see the diversity of writers in Voice, because it wasn’t something I was conscious about when making the selections. Living in New York, I’ve always been fortunate enough to be able to forget where I come from, what my gender is. I still believe, in my utopia, that should be the case. My aim here was to showcase hidden jewels, irrespective of everything else. As luck would have it, when you look for something different and special, you, by default, look everywhere—under every pillow.

I am humbled and taken aback by the work we have published here. Putting this issue together reminded me of how much talent and incredible work there is out there, outside our radar. Beauty never ceases.

So here is an issue that brings you voices you have possibly never heard of but should know about—beautiful, melancholic, brutal and strong.

May 20, 2023
Asides & Strangers

An intelligent and exciting debut short story collection, White Dancing Elephants (Dzanc Books, Oct 2018) focuses on the varied experiences of women of color. Bhuvaneswar deftly explores the complexities of intersectional feminism through tales about queer Indian women, queer biracial women, diverse immigrants, narrators with physical and mental illnesses, women of color coping with the trauma of miscarriage and rape, etc. Chaya’s prose is simultaneously crisp, clear, and layered with storytelling references. It’s essential to foreground the importance of saying and remembering stories of women usually forgotten—and this book does just that.

I spoke with Chaya over email, shortly before her reading at KGB Bar’s Sunday Night Fiction Series.

Michelle Hogmire: I was blown away by the first story in White Dancing Elephants, which is also the title story. It’s a frank discussion of the horrors of a miscarriage and colonialism, from a female perspective. I’m interested in the choice to begin with that story—and to title the collection after it. How did you decide to start with that piece, and what tone/mood is it meant to set for the collection? Also, in terms of form, you do some fascinating things with parenthetical asides in the title story: the grieving mother uses them to address her child directly, as if he’s still alive. Could you talk about that choice?

Chaya Bhuvaneswar: I felt that there was some special magic in starting the book with a story that some people had said was “too personal” to share, even though it’s not actually that personal. It talks about a biological experience—miscarriage, pregnancy loss—that doesn’t have to be seen as strictly personal, but in some ways as inevitable in women’s lives. By breaking the “taboo” and refusing shame, I felt it was talismanic to start the story with this. I also meant it as a tribute to my deepest love. Family.

The asides are in a little bit of tribute to Grace Paley, who I feel uses “asides” so often in her stories, though often without parentheses. I like things like parentheses and flashbacks and shifts in tense and shifts in point of view, all of which are typically “beaten” out of MFA-trained writers. So there’s a little delighted contrariness in including a story with all of those that has nonetheless resonated with a large number of readers.

MH: Storytelling and intertextuality seem to play an important role in your writing. In “The Story of The Woman Who Fell in Love with Death,” a brother processes his sister’s disappearance through the lens of a story. “The Bang Bang” and “Chronicle of A Marriage, Foretold” both tell the tales of writers. “Newberry” references real comic books and works by sociological theorists, and “Adristakama” is framed by tales from a Hindu comic book. Could you talk about the influence other texts have on your writing? What’s their importance in this collection?

CB: I love the Hindu epic concept of “stories within stories,” a concept so beautifully brought to life in a book I read years ago and only vaguely remembered but loved—Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie, which actually draws its inspiration from a Sanskrit work literally translated into The Ocean of the Rivers of Story. I also enjoy contemporary stories within stories, like in My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk and in Possession by A.S. Byatt, both of whom are models for me in some sense. In the sense that they never seem to pander. They write at an emotional pitch that is true to them. They are as serious and oblivious to “fashion” as they want to be and I love them for it.

MH: I was also struck by the story “The Life You Save Isn’t Your Own,” which is about a woman named Seema whose life hasn’t gone how she anticipated. The story ends with Seema saving a boy; he won’t remember her name, but she doesn’t mind. This story does an excellent job of upending traditional narrative conclusions: Seema’s messed up life hasn’t changed, but she has helped a stranger. The theme returns again in “In Allegheny,” when the main character Michelle, a surgeon, helps a random boy experiencing an asthma attack. Could you discuss the role of strangers in your work? What function do they serve in your writing?

CB: I think the “stranger” character is inevitable in stories about people who feel isolated and unable to more than superficially connect to others; I also think strangers meeting and befriending each other in some way is an exciting event to depict in fiction, however ordinary it may be, and somehow this brings me back to the sensibility of Kieślowski films, where I always feel like the minutiae of how strangers become important to and intimate with each other is so exquisitely dissected. I am really interested in that process. Also the way in which someone initially a stranger, then accepted into a tribe, can always be demoted back to the status of “stranger.” I feel that experience is one I face daily as a woman of color, as the child of immigrants, in a country where on first glance, I’m a “stranger with a strange name”—then get accepted—but can always be cast out again, made to feel that any history of acceptance or full equality might not have actually happened. Might not be real.

MH: What are you working on now?

CB: I’m finishing a novel that’s going out on submission as well as a second collection of stories, and I’m being coaxed into putting together a collection of essays from several I’ve published recently, like this one at Medium, this more recent one that just went up at Off Assignment, the travel magazine, and this one on ethnic pornography I am so grateful to have published at The Millions.

MH: Care to share a moment, a person, or a story from your past that made you want to become a writer?

CB: I can! In high school I met and interviewed the acclaimed poet and writer Terese Svoboda. OMG was her life glamorous compared to the worry, fretting, stress, and restrictions of my growing up in Flushing, Queens. In stark contrast she tried on different boas before going out one afternoon and reminisced over herbal tea about her time with the Nuer tribe in Sudan a few years before. And also had whispered, secretive conversations with either her spouse or someone else, it almost didn’t matter which compared with the shouting matches and nagging of suburban immigrant marriages I’d seen. WOW. I made up my mind on some level, then and there, that I would be a writer, somehow. Even if, like the poet in my story “The Bang Bang,” it all literally took place in a closet while on the outside I kept up a completely conformist and off-the-radar life.

MH: If you could change one thing about publishing, what would it be?

CB: That’s easy. The percentages. Instead of 88% straight, upper middle class, Judeo-Christian white women—65% straight white women and the rest a complete and shifting mix of gay men, men of color, gay men of color, queer and trans men and women of all colors, straight women of color, people with disabilities. Muslim women and men, Buddhists, others, just for starters. Give us 35%. Do even that and we’ll start getting somewhere.

MH: Who are your literary heroes?

Margaret Atwood, Sandra Cisneros, John Edgar Wideman, Grace Paley, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, Lauren Groff, Walter Mosley, Toni Morrison. It’s an enormously long list. Because I think literature itself is heroic.

MH: What kind of writing excites you?

CB: Very precisely crafted and honed writing that at the same time has a lot of rage, passion, vitality.

MH: What advice do you have for writers just starting out?

CB: Just don’t give up. Literature needs you whether you know it yet, or not.

May 20, 2023
A Good Week for a Birthday

1.

As a Gemini in good standing

I divide everything in two

cannot conceive of Adam without Eve

dividing Eden between them

for one full day

in Ithaca in the sun and then to bed

the bed we made of wood from an olive tree

2.

There is nothing like a dame

a Martini

the last at-bat of the first game of the 1988 World Series

a Martini with a dozen raw oysters

a jug of water for the geraniums on a day of full sun

a joint

a bedroom farce

a weekend in a swank hotel in Montreal

a day without news

dying in your sleep

3.

What do you want to do on your birthday

Well, I have to file my column, run two errands,

empty two boxes of books, shelve them

write a poem or revise an old one worry that

I write too much decide not to worry enjoy

Linda Ronstadt singing “Frenesi” in Spanish

It’s my birthday and I can fly if I want to

high if I want to

join me the sun is cooperating

and there’s time for a swim

before cocktails and steak on the terrace

4.

My drink of the summer owes its origins

to the evening at Café Loup with Terrance Hayes

who drinks only tequila because tequila alone

gives him no hangover and Vinny suggested palomas

grapefruit and tequila and I took that formula

added a splash of Cointreau two splashes

of Giffard grapefruit liqueur three squirts of lime

a lot of ice and shook it in a pickle jar (best

shaker there is) topping it off with club soda

or grapefruit soda in the movie of my life

I play the bartender hero who listens

to everyone’s troubles and woes

People ask me how I’m doing and I say

“I’m livin’ the dream,” a reliable laugh line

5.

Is Berlioz the Baudelaire of French music

the two geniuses linked by opium

take the “Symphonie Fantastique”

five movements one hour long

so it’s on the car radio when we arrive

and it’s still on when we return

after forty-five minutes of testimony

from the wise man in the wheelchair who

wondered who had it worse

the heroin addicts or the meth heads

the meth kills you faster

you can live longer on heroin

and suffer more

6.

What would I choose as my theme music

if I were the classical music disc jockey

maybe Bernstein’s overture to Candide

or Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Cakewalk”

or Schubert’s overture to “Rosamunde”

in honor of John Scheuer

I have my Tolstoy to look forward to

and if music can stand for peace (the food of love)

today’s poem is a little tribute to the novel

summarized TV-Guide style:

Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.

7.

A beautiful day

Why don’t we get married, I say

We are married, Stacey says

I know but we can pretend

To be you and me

Twenty years ago

Just for the hell of it

Maybe we can even go to Bermuda

And tell people we’re on our honeymoon

And be believed

— June 9-15, 2018

Originally published in Hopkins Review 2019

May 20, 2023
Hard Tyme

Greyhound tomorrow

Axe, leathers, Aqua Net: check

“Adios, Fort Wayne!”

♫You know where you are?

You’re in the jungle, baby!♬

DISHWASHER WANTED

Looks that kill, pipes too

LA’s most dangerous band

Own transport a plus

Rat and Dee can shred

Drummer Spike’s a dick, but hey

He’s got good contacts

Slayed the Troubadour

A&R guys want us bad

The chicks want us more

“You’re gonna be huge!”

“That’s why we hired you, Sal”

“Next time knock, capiche?”

“Squeeze” video shoot

The boa looks underfed

Chrissy’s cool with it

“Dude, I saw her first!”

Spike’s pissed, Dee nods off on set

Reputation sealed

MTV loves us

Sal says Trixter digs our shit

Time to hit the road

Pyrotechnics fail

Rat’s eyebrows were nearly toast

“Can you insure bangs?”

“Turn the Page” was right

Your thoughts will be wandering

“Goodnight, Milwaukee!”

Spike frowns at breakfast

“Chrissy like the ring you bought?”

“Code of the road, bro.”

Back in studio

Maybe it’s the crack talking

We sing like angels

Sales figures are low

Something called “alternative”

Sal says it’s a fad

A meeting is called

The gigs with Warrant are off

“Too late for haircuts?”

Hi Mom, Hi Major

Fishing in Alaska pays

Forwarding my mail

“A postcard arrived.”

Spike and Chrissy got married

Love really does bite

May 20, 2023
A Mélange of Poems

Conference of the Century

The birds     in their conference

             speaking                           in tongues

     speaking praise         to someone

from the shelter

                                     of their aviary

     while the boy

lies dying                           in the mud

                                                             below

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

such an antiquated scene

         written                               on stone

   with chisels     and pigment

olive trees                         are scattered

     across the slope

                                       of the mountain

there is the memory of fire

   seen         in the blackened     traces

that always   face south

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

and somewhere else

                                               far lower

is a ring   of stones                           where

     a performance   takes place

each day

                       at precisely the same hour

a ring of memory                   locked in place

         until the century

                                           breaks apart.

Generations

Pynchon in his prime     wading

through the syrup of his memories     the cracked

and groaning history     carefully placed

and pigeonholed     between the wooden

blocks and barriers     that separate the naked

theory from his warm and sticky appetite

ungrateful Pynchon     luxuriating like

a father’s child     that knows with such a deep

instinctiveness     that blood overwhelms

psychology     and that the craving he

suppressed for far too many years     can

only be extinguished by a quiet failure

oh Pynchon     your sweat stained body

your filthy mind     how both of these cooperate

to flood the world with the quiet light

of excess     by the narrative fog

of objectified revenge     by the spreading of roots

and the untapped fruit of your unfolding.

Last Night on Earth

Bright light became a limit

a retreat from color     a fading out

as we stumbled past the pit

that constantly burned     smoking

and stinking     filled with

the detritus of winter

the moon glaring as it slid

along its well-oiled wires

shaping distant strategies

our fists of bone in white and blue

each hand unlocking a possible

future     tense and flooded

salted metals enclosing us

trapped within the sweetness

that we quietly despised

that terrible night when

the moon turned grass to silver

and all was liquid     and dissolute

bright lights     seen from underwater

triggering the pivot of an eye

triggering a longing for music

that floods from depths of mind

to the ice-coated surface   of

a silent lake          an empty lake.



Peacocks Hold Their Place in the Landscape

There were peacocks among the sculptures     deep within the muddy groves that we stumbled into     peacocks that flaunted in ways that the best art could never do     quietly fitting into its apportioned place within the landscape

the day was cold     the ice still clung to the surface of the mud that spread to fill the widening gyre of tramping     crushing up against the bamboo corridors

every work that we thrilled for   a compromise between abstraction and placement     seemingly impossible for it to be moved to any other location     its absolute sanctity identified by interactions     by lines that stretched on invisible wires to create a web of knowing   and beauty   across a field     a level that rose above the shape of individuation

and there we strolled in filthy shoes     unwitting as we traversed those pre-planned routes that gave us perspectives that we failed to recognize as manipulation     a perfect alibi for the joyous rush of our sensations

the whole a dialectic     a deferral of conclusion to the philosophy of movement     a world of stone   and wood   and the brilliant feathers of the peacocks     and the two of us     enmeshed within the structures that held us captive.

Moon Comes to Accept Winter

More moon     appearing so     continuous

it’s a mouth     it’s a corpse     it illuminates

the sex     we fight so hard to hold at bay

so restless     my angel   so desperate

for movement     as I communicate

by touch alone     my tongue still

trapped     as heavy as a granite slab

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

what happens when this life is ended?

only one of us can be the survivor     one body

dust    the other     decaying organically

within an endless stubbornness     beneath

the moon that shines on our obsessions

the moon – a whispering of starlight     swept

clear by such a heavy-wristed sponge

an erasure of all residual egotism     gleaming

sickly     and painted by a blood moon

the pain-wracked glimmer of midwinter

we have traveled in time     unrecognized.

Maybe All of This

Maybe air     so hot and penetrating

maybe the body that fits

     exactly     spine against spine

maybe oil that floats on water

     like a second skin

               never to molt     or shed

maybe the neon that floods our darkness

     that ripples across a liquid surface

               fragrant     with gasoline

the underlying perfume     of any city

maybe the flashes of fire that threaten

     to overwhelm a star filled sky

               on a night of clarity

maybe the interior of a silver maple

     where insects have turned the heartwood

               into dust

maybe a plume of smoke     visible

     from all six hills

               that surround this town

maybe a dirty window     reflective

     from the buildup

               of the soot of decades

maybe the weakness

     of arthritic fingers     failing once again

               to loosen a bolt

maybe pens and books and staples

     scattered across a desk

maybe the upper lip that you trace

     with your finger     remembering

maybe driving the lesser traveled road

maybe all of this     or maybe

                             nothing at all.

May 20, 2023