Category: Uncategorized

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

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 

Odee Bones was an autograph name, a stage tag, a nom de la rue as she often said. Her real name was Odile Bonnard, like the famous painter, but not that family. She was a raven-haired woman, or as Frank imagined her, a Poe-haired woman. She had an Edgar Poe-like personality—morbid, dark, seemingly bred in some remote country you never heard of. And, except for a few absurd tics, she fit quite well in the parade of that depressed poet’s heroines—a Lenore or a Legeia—all the femme fatales of the stewed Romantic imagination.

And Frank often pictured her just that way: Odee Bones, weeping by the cold tomb of her mother; Odee Bones languishing in the musty bed chamber of some gothic mansion clutching a crucifix; Odee Bones standing alone in a wolverine fur cape at the end of a stone jetty in the English Channel during a storm; Odee Bones, wounded and bleeding at the bottom of a ravine in an upstate New York forest, while Catskill coyotes howled at the moon.

She had that seductive quality of women who are aligned with the death drive, be it by choice or accident. Sex with such women was dangerous. It might start out fun, but somewhere in the middle you begin to realize you’re dissolving into the all too real and indifferent universe, an inorganic molecular void in which your lust was the product of chemical imbalances and your precious personal thoughts were nothing but crashing atoms spinning endlessly down through bottomless space. Which is to say, she could make you afraid, but somehow that only increased Frank’s attraction, an attraction that was currently drawing him away from Lincoln Center and toward his home downtown.

He passed the A-C-D subway station north of Columbus Circle. He should have got the train and rode home, but this night, he decided to walk instead. He would walk all the way downtown. Hell, he might even stop for a beer somewhere to make the walk more lively. You couldn’t drink openly on NYC streets anymore thanks to Herr Rudolf—no more brown paper bags in his Broken Windows world, or as Frank liked to think of it—Broker Windows, i.e. making the city safe for Wall Street, their clients and children.

In any case, there used to be a bar around 61st and Broadway—a McCann’s or a Miller’s. Frank couldn’t remember the name, but he used to hang there decades ago when he was naïve and young and had no confidence or talent. It was an old school New York steam table bar where you could get a pastrami sandwich or mashed potatoes and gravy and sit in a booth scribbling in a notebook like a hoarder taking a break from his collections. No one bothered you. Such bars were an important form of escape in Frank’s early NYC life. Of course, one of the illusions of youth is that you can actually escape from yourself, your family, your spouse, your history. Thirty years might pass before you realize you can’t, not even at the friendly bar rail of McCann’s. In part, because McCann’s wasn’t there anymore. It was now one of those ubiquitous Korean-run salad bar joints with their over-priced convenience and their perpetually grumpy cashiers.

Frank passed the salad bar and continued to Columbus Circle. To his left was the skeleton of a new Trump Hotel. They were stripping the façade off the former Gulf and Western Building, to rebrand it. The whole area was just beginning to attract the new money class. The high towers and stone facades to the east were there to house both the power brokers of the city and their imitators who paced back and forth in their luxury apartments overlooking the park, sipping martinis through crystal straws similar to those used to suck up the life blood and brain waves of all the anonymous Janes and Joes wandering in the streets below.

Fuck them, Frank thought as he made his way around the circle’s west side to 9^th Ave and turned south. Back in the 70s, he used to live in a building on 57^th and 9^th. The building was boarded up now, but Frank would always walk by when he was in the neighborhood. 400 W. 57^th was the address, but the door was on 9^th. The building sometimes reminded him of a ghost ship rising out of the turbulent sea of his own past bearing the Ark of some Frank Payne Covenant, and if and when the wrecking ball ever hit it, the ghosts and stories of thousands of departed residents would come raging out like a psychic storm howling over the now trendy west side.

Despite the scaffolding, there was no construction, and hadn’t been for years. In the middle of one of the most rapidly developing parts of Manhattan, this particular building remained abandoned, a sore thumb of resistance in the fetishistic creep of Midtown glass and steel. Rumor had it that some tenant refused to leave. The landlord could not legally evict the person so they had to wait until he or she died. But then, who knew if that rumor was true.

Some buildings take on a sinister quality over time, and 400 West 57^th was one of them. It had a definite “don’t-go-there-aura” like the house your grandma used to warn you about on at the end of Death and Disease Street. Such buildings might be associated with murder, suicide, Satanic ritual or extreme and unnatural sex. They were often accompanied by ominous music too, and because of their geological intensity they had the ability to bend light, to glow eerily and warp the space/time matrix for blocks around. On humid nights the streetlights would hiss and crackle, radiating diffuse halos of impending mental pain. And so Frank walked by his old haunt with trepidation, and the 70s walked alongside him when he did. Odee always claimed he was a man out of time, living in limbo, with no fixed identity or purpose.

The 70s were like an alternative universe, a traveling black window-pane next to Frank’s ear. All he had to do was pop his head inside that little window and he would be back in that old black and white New York he loved—a city of deli sandwiches and shot and beer specials, a city where men wore fedoras and overcoats, and made important calls from phone booths, feeding the quarters into the slot and listening to the slow syncopated beat of the falling coins as they hit the bottom of the box.

That old room, as he remembered it, had a certain disturbed perspective, claustrophobic and fast, but at the same time, static. Frank would sit in the fourth floor window watching the shadows moving in the street below while smoke and steam rose from the vents of Hells Kitchen and Midtown. He used to imagine the water tanks were music notes on a patchwork staff of asphalt rooftops. He listened to radio dramas in his room back then—rebroadcasts of The Shadow and the Isaac Asimov Hour. Everything that came out of the radio seemed old—old singers, old songs, old stories. Even the timbre of men’s voices was different—a post-war tremor still lived in them, a gee-whiz paranoia that mixed innocence with the toxic ambitions of the capitalist age.

He remembered the other men who lived in the apartment with him: drifters and odd balls with old-timey nick names like Laughing Ralph, Jimmy the Kid, Broadway Danny, and Mickey Leftovers—fringe dwellers and misfits with adjectives attached to their names as if to scaffold their fragile identities. None of them would ever be famous for anything, so they needed those adjectives if only to avoid disappearing into the void of city life.

But disappear they did. Jimmy the Kid disappeared one day. He left all his stuff in his room and they had to throw it out. It was mostly stolen stuff anyway, because, as Ralph always said, the Kid was nothing but a petty thief and his day of reckoning had probably come. Mickey Leftovers went to the hospital and never came back. They carried him out on a stretcher, fighting the whole way, his bedclothes stained with blood and urine.

Ambulances came and went with a certain frequency on that corner. One day Frank and Laughing Ralph were standing around down on the corner watching the aftermath of a car crash. Car crashes, like fires, were good entertainment in the days before computers. People would meet their neighbors and catch up on community gossip. “Hey Jimbo, how’s the wife and kids?”  “I hear Finkelstein’s pharmacy is closing.” Ralph swept his flabby arm across the 9^th Ave. landscape and laughed: “Just think, all this madness when all people really want to do is watch TV, have a decent meal and fuck.” Frank though it was a profound comment at the time. A month later Laughing Ralph was also gone—some kind of heart problem.

Back in the 70s, Frank used the phone booth across 9^th as a personal phone. Passersby would shout up to his window, “Yo Frank, your girlfriend’s on the phone.” Frank’s girlfriend was Darley Cohen, a Brooklyn gal, from way out in Sunset-Flatbush-Midwood world, a land of cut-rate upholstery shops and bagel bakeries. You could smell the sea from the stoop of her house but you couldn’t see it. The sea was still ten subway stops away. Sometimes, they would go and look at the sea, but the cold grey aura of human insignificance often got to be too much for them.

Now Darley Cohen was no Odee Bones; she wasn’t “artistic” or “creative” but they did share certain traits. They were both dark-eyed and tragic. They both had an engaging sarcastic laugh, and they both had a certain languid acceptance that suicide was probably the most likely outcome to a life without logic or vector. Happiness was a matter of getting by day to day and keeping a short focus. Both women were runaways if only in spirit. In some sense, Frank provided this service for each of them—he was the perpetual stranger in town, any town, and as such he was an easy substitute for running away from home. It was an odd role for a boyfriend but he wore it with pride because it worked for him.

One night after drinking at some Wall Street Irish watering hole with his dishwashing buddies, Reid and Warren, he came home quite late and there was Darley, sitting in front of his door with a half-assed bandage tied around her left wrist claiming she had just tried to kill herself but she decided to come see Frank instead, as if he might offer her some reason to live. Frank knew he was the last person anyone should call if they needed a reason to live, but apparently he was just that person for Darley that night. And Odee must have felt the same way that day she showed up downstairs of his Lower East Side apartment twenty years later with a suitcase and a perverse bond to an old abusive boyfriend named Otto, the Oedipal Austrian.

Now, as often happens, there’s a movie in Frank’s head closely associated with the building at 400 W 57^th St. It’s called Angelheart, an Oedipal mystery in which Mickey Rourke plays Harry Angel, hot on the trail of a crime of which he discovers that he himself is the perpetrator. Certain scenes were pertinent, especially the shot of a lighted window high above a midtown street, where Harry Angel sold his soul to Satan. Frank had made a similar transaction, which was somehow related, after the fact, to Darley’s suicide attempt. It was a week or so earlier. There was pint of bourbon, a candle, a jack-knife, and, if he tried, he could still feel the heat of that candle flame and the knife blade edge against his palm, but he couldn’t remember what got sold and to whom? Who was the seller and who was the buyer? Was it Existential Despair that drove it? A taste for Dada? Or plain old morbid Romanticism.

Probably the most Angelhearted thing about the building was the elevator. It was a narrow beige box resonant with the smell of wigs, second hand suits, hair product, and little dogs. When you were going down it felt like it would keep going down, past the ground floor, through the sub-basement and into the very crust of the earth. In fact, there were buttons on the elevator panel that didn’t have numbers on them, as if the panel was originally made for a taller building, or one that had private floors. Frank had even pushed these buttons a few times but they didn’t do anything. At least that’s what he thought at the time.

 Frank remembered nights riding that elevator past the third floor, the one below his, and he would often hear a Billie Holiday record playing all soft and crackly somewhere in the interior. Sometimes the elevator would stop on that floor all by itself and the door would open, but nobody ever got on. And there was always the music—he could still hear it, echoing around the empty halls.

It was a scene straight out of Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch, but this movie was directed by Frank himself, and he could walk into that scene; he could get off over and over on the 3^rd floor and walk down the hall like a lost actor on the wrong set until he reached the room where the music played. The door was open and Frank entered. The room was empty except for a man sitting at a table with his back to the door. The man seemed to be writing something, scribbling in a notebook while the record was spinning on an old phonograph.

Frank walked up behind the guy, took him by the shoulders and turned him around in his swivel chair. That’s when realized the body had no weight! In fact, it was nothing but a dusty old suit stuffed with straw. But there was a face to it, not unlike Frank’s own face. It was rubbery and gooey and the features were smeared into a blur somewhere between laughter and disgust. Suddenly Frank understood why they couldn’t tear the building down.

He pleaded with the guy: “You’ve gotta let it go man. You’ve got to let me out of here.” He shook the over-sized sad doll, but there was no answer, because you can’t answer when your mouth is just a smear on a pitiful illusion. And Lady was the perfect soundtrack for the ambiguity. “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” she sang. Take what away? And who from? And why did Odee love that song? 

Did I mention that Billie Holiday was Odee’s favorite singer. She said the voice had a sense of decay about it, a sense of falling or of having already fallen. She said listening to Lady was like walking through a graveyard with a forced smile. And did I mention that Frank first met Odee Bones in a Brooklyn waterfront bar on New Year’s Eve, the same symbolic night that Harry Angel sold his soul to Satan. The noose of associations was tightening like a string of prayer beads around Frank’s mind, beads he counted to a beat marked off in images of tombstones in a moonlit cemetery and jagged water tanks on Manhattan rooftops and the rattle of subway cars making down rails to dark outer boroughs and the whistling of lonely homeless men in scaffold shadows. Music was everywhere, but it was the tone that concerned Frank most—it was disturbing and not a little prophetic. As Billie herself might sing: “Swing Brother, Swing.” Shoobeedoobeedo. Here comes another dewey-eyed fool. And so, on that note, Frank crossed 56^th and continued walking south, thinking his sweetheart Odee Bones might actually be home when he got there.

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.

First, I’d like to define what I mean by style. Or rather: what style means to me: The expression of an author’s subjective truth within the framework-truth of his time.

Usually an author writes

a) about what interests him. (i.e. about something he likes    hates    fears, etc.)

b)    hopefully    about what he knows.

(No one can write successfully about something he doesn’t know. & by this I don’t mean phantasy. But you’ve got to know something about nursing, about hospital administration, if one of your characters is to be a nurse. About sickness and its horizontal helplessness, if the character is the patient.)

The author’s subjective truth is already to some extent expressed by the selection of his material & by the angle from which he presents it.

His objective    or collective    truth is the validity of the selected material within the context of his time.

(Of another time, if he chooses to write about historical events or characters. But they must be relevant to the truth of his own time as well. As for instance Brecht’s Mother Courage or Arthur Miller’s Crucible.)

(Personally, I like to write about anonymous often nameless people. He/She/The Woman/His mother’s sister’s husband/ etc. By remaining nameless they become more prototypical of their specific situation or relationship. They grow from the inside out, their world ripping around their thought of themselves.    —I’m forever fascinated with the ego-image & its outward reflection, or projection.—    I have tried to render the ‘essence’ of a Mother/Daughter stalemate    in a play Breakfast Past Noon    by putting the dialogue into the past tense…)

Every thought    or situation    has its own heartbeat. Its own breath cadence. Its own organic page-duration. The very choice whether a thought    or situation    should become a short story     a novel    a play    & of what length    is already part of the style. Or form.

To me, even a potentially exciting thought or situation is dulled & becomes irrelevant if the form    or style    is not the perfect mirror of the content.    (Perhaps this is why a finished stylist like Flaubert never quite succeeded in realizing his great ambition: to describe boredom without boring; in Sentimental Education…)     Kafka    Gertrude Stein    Beckett    Borges    Nathalie Sarraute    Robbe-Grillet    Claude Ollier    & many other recent Americans like Stephen Koch & Joseph McElroy    are all masters of mirror-description, in a my opinion.     Usually through repetition with a slight variation; an almost hallucinatory groping.

(By repetition I do not mean: writing on after one has nothing left to say. Letting a story    or play    run on & on, like a beheaded chicken running around a courtyard. As I’ve said before: the length of a story is an organic part of what the story wants to say.)

The inseparable bond between style & content becomes particularly evident when one tries to translate a work. (& I’m not only thinking of translating puns.) Each language has its own recurrence of vowels; its own sound associations. When influence    slant    direct    an author’s thinking whether he realizes it admits it or not. A language is, after all, the expression of character & thought pattern of the people who live in it. & vice versa. & the grammar that regulates the sequence & importance of the different words within a sentence is the psychological key to the character & thought-pattern.

—The same applies to the slang, that constantly changing language within a language. That changes: as to like; switches from cool to heavy; that blows your mind & freaks you out.—

Nothing reveals a discrepancy between content and its expression as blatantly as the attempt to express that content in another language. (Which is another reason why plot stories that place little emphasis on style are more popular export articles.    —Why an author like Günter Grass, with his Tin Drum, is a lot more popular in America than his compatriot Uwe Johnson, a stylistic innovator, with his also bulky Speculations about Jakob, or his Third Book about Achim.—    A faithful rendering of STYLE requires the self-effaced patience of a translator of poetry.

Truth & reality    at least the interpretation & expression of truth & reality are as subject to fashion as our concepts of what is beautiful & what ugly. Which no one will deny are subject to constant change. Yet, many people do deny that their points of view aesthetic as well as MORAL follow trends of fashion.

When pointed shoes & spike heels came back, replacing previous rounded flatness, many people said: God! How can anybody walk in that! Until many of those many people began walking in them… Because they no could longer face themselves as ‘clodhoppers’.

& when flat-heeled roundness made its first reappearance, just as many people regretted the days of gracefully tip-toeing helplessness… Until many of the many began feeling that: ‘Only prostitutes willfully reduced their mobility…’ & descended from their pointed heights to the respectability level of comfort.

When hemlines went up, so did eyebrows.    For a while.

Now, the same heads shake their regret of long-legged liberty at the sight of a maxi-coat, climbing into a bus. (Paradoxically enough: older women who might have more reasons for hiding their legs & seek additional winter warmth besides, do not go in for maxi-coats;    At least not yet.)    Etc.  Etc.  Etc.

Or, on another level: when the Renaissance introduced perspective into 
painting belying painting’s basic truth: 2-dimensional flatness    it introduced a new way of seeing. A new & different pictorial ‘reality.’ That eventually went to extreme in trompe-l’oeil reality or Campbell soup cans. & every time, people’s vision adjusted itself. & the memory of previous visions was effaced. Until the landscapes around Arles began looking like Van Gogh’s paintings…etc…

Every taste    every moral indignation    every life & death sentence    has its lifespan of truth & reality. Until it is superseded by the next. & every time, we speak of: progress. & look back upon the immediate past    over fashionably padded or drooping shoulderlines    with a condescending smile for our childhood follies.

While annotators annotate.

& analysts analyse

(a recurrence of fashion in clothes not so unlike what people wore during the bloody days of the French Revolution. A cut of coats not so unlike those worn during the civil war…).

& prophets prophecy doom & subsequent enlightenment.

& historians mutter about: history repeating itself.

& tired cynics take refuge in the triteness of proverbs. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

& prophets prophecy doom & subsequent enlightenment. & subsequent doom.

& critics criticize, & shake their heads…

& all are safe. On the safe side of basic absolute truth & reality. On the premise that human life on earth continues to pose more or less the same basic problems    of survival    individually as well as collectively. From one millennium to the next.

Granted: primitive man running from a dinosaur was not so differently motivated from a jaywalker in city traffic. By a similar mixture of imprudence & fear for his life. But the FORM of his imprudence has changed.

An author attempting to describe the jaywalker’s feelings cannot borrow imaginary retrospective fear-drama from the dinosaur contemporary. & yet, certain authors try to do just that. It is not so uncommon on television or in the movies. & certain critics applaud. & recommend them as examples.

Or, on a psychological level:

The jealousy    outrage    possessive indignation    that prompted Othello to smother his loyal wife may still be felt by a husband/wife/lover party to a wife-swapping club of bridge-bored suburbanites in search of release. He might even be prompted to act in Othello’s old-fashioned fashion.

But an author describing    or inventing    or reinventing such a drama cannot justify the righteous indignation    the concern with shame & honor    that was the fictional reality in Shakespeare’s days.    —Which was perhaps equally unreal, untrue to life even then. Today’s author would at least have to touch upon the mixed-marriage problem somewhere along his storyline. Go into housing discrimination, etc. Nor could he blithely reuse the handkerchief evidence, in this Kleenex-age. Unless he made a special point of his heroine’s using a handkerchief, rather than Kleenex. Which would give the lady a different character, setting her off as something of an original among her fellow suburbanites.

Still: there are many readers    & networks; & especially certain critics    that cling to this bygone fictional reality. & have nothing but scorn & yawns    if not outright hatred    for an anti-novel like Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie which is    to me    a perfect modern— (& timeless) reality portrait of jealousy. Of suspicious spying & speculating from behind half-closed shutters. & no more ‘an unnecessarily repetitive complicating of a banal incident’ than somebody’s varying stages of degrees of jealousy.

But to certain critics who are looking for past centuries’ fictional reality in contemporary writing    (& it seems to me that the tendency to look back oriented certain of these critics in the choice of their profession)    La jalousie is a failure of a novel. A bad boring book. Because it does not offer a clear-cut plot, elaborated according to the standard: beginning-middle-end prerequisite by an omniscient author. Who makes his characters behave as though there was no such thing as multiple motivation. Or a subconscious. As though each knew on page 1 where he’d have to be at the end. After a detour-conflict in the middle.

As though truth & reality were stately unshakeable absolutes.

There is perhaps a deeply rooted psychological reason behind this attitude. Behind this distrust of style. Especially of stylistic innovations; unconventional punctuation or spacing; lists; ampersands instead of spelled-out ands; figures not spelled out; varying indentations of paragraphs, etc.etc. A distrustful moralizing attitude that feels    at best    that form should not be noticeable, in a work. (I think that it is the effort involved in creating the form that should not be noticeable.) That style    or form    should be totally subordinate to the content & not an integral indispensable part & aspect of the work, as important as the content.  —A soul without a body is a ghost.—    That a work cannot be successful, if the style is noticeable. That a noticeable style obstructs/obscures the content. Or    the most common accusation    that it is used as a screen behind which to hide a lack of content…

It seems to me that the psychology behind this ‘formophobe’ attitude is the same that attaches a value judgement    a moral evaluation    to the basic differentiation of:

positive & negative

active    & passive

light      & dark

white    & black

right     & left

& finally, to sum it all up & get to the crux of the problem of

male     & female

masculine & feminine.

At the risk of being accused of blatant feminism and prejudice    (men have opinions, women are opinonated) , I’d like to point out that form is a feminine, a female concept.

Which explains perhaps its dubious reputation. & the constant attempt, on the part of certain    usually male critics    to keep    or to put    form in its subordinate place.

Whereas the concept of content is definitely male.

All of life around us    all of nature    electricity    the kabbala    all teachings of wisdom    show that one cannot exist without the other. That content & from shape one another. Feed one another. That they are originally bound to each other in never-ending interdependence.

Why speak ill of the surface. Only the void has none…

(& already each of you who may be drawing a picture of the void in his mind is giving it a form. A different form in each mind…)

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.

“I felt it myself, and made others feel it.”  –Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“For the first time in motion picture history, members of the audience – including you – will actually play a part in the picture. You will feel some of the physical reactions, the shocking sensations experienced by the actors on the screen.” So warned 1950s horror maverick William Castle, as he introduced his 1959 camp classic and deliciously sadistic Vincent Price vehicle, The Tingler. Both enticement into never-before-seen-or-felt terrors and warning of the physiological danger of sitting and watching, the film announced the arrival of the latest innovation in cinema technology: PERCEPTO (a close cousin of the oft-lampooned Smell-O-Vision, the immersive Emergo, and early 3D), a sleight of hand through which audience members would become “living participants” in the “actual shock-sensations” and “physical reactions” of their screaming on-screen counterparts. Imagine the gall and genius of PERCEPTO and its conspiring theaters: Here, in this theater, no one is safe from experiencing real sensation. Here we are all participants.

The so-called King of Gimmicks, Castle outfitted theaters to make moviegoers directly feel on-screen action: he provided PERCEPTO instruction manuals and kits to install vibrating motors under seats to shock and surprise – and remind audiences of what their bodies already knew. Built on a fusion of early 20th-century amusement park immersive spectacles (Coney Island simulations of the San Francisco earthquake, Pompeii eruption, and other historic natural disasters) and 1950s marketing of new technologies to fill seats in an era when livingroom television threatened to eclipse movie theaters, PERCEPTO called out its audiences and their comfortable viewing distance. Promotional posters and advertisements invited audiences into real bodily experience, the movie-going version of a game of Chicken, baiting: “DO YOU HAVE THE GUTS TO SIT IN THIS CHAIR?” 

PERCEPTO also strived to make “real and powerful” for audiences what phenomenological approaches to cinema take for granted. Equal parts gimmick and revolution in cinematic empathy, this new technology understood that the experience of watching a film activates physiological and cognitive response beyond our eyes and ears. It also ventured beyond a two-dimensional understanding of movie screens to underscore how, as art historian and curator Catherine David has described, “projected images have been overflowing the flat, frontal limits of the traditional screen and moving into the bodies of spectators ever since the origins of cinema itself.” It grasped film as a medium that engages multiple senses simultaneously, impacts blood pressure and nerve response, the movements of muscle and bone, the complex result of “mysterious electronic impulses” relayed in the central nervous system. Castle insisted that audience members would “actually take part in” and “feel” what hitherto seemed simply a two-dimensional image plane: a Chicago-area advertisement promised “YOU actually FEEL real physical sensations as you shiver in fright to its FLESH-CRAWLING ACTION!” Sign me up.

While his films are often dismissed as B-movie body horror, Castle was exploring embodied and participatory spectatorship in a way that resonates with Vivian Sobchack’s understanding of “embodied perception” and “lived-body experience” in film viewing. A central voice in the phenomenology of film and sensory responses to cinema violence, Sobchack provokes us into taking cinema seriously as an enterprise connecting bodies and not just minds: “more than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience,” an encounter structured by the relationship between consciousness and carnality. Perhaps unlikely bedfellows, Castle and Sobchack share a belief in the sensory experience of images, particularly those that bring us closer to others’ bodies in pain or poses of death, extending our mechanisms of witness beyond the realm of the visual and intellectual into the physiological and carnal. Whether in a darkened theater or interacting with various screens, this is a voyage beyond voyeuristic pleasures into empathetic encounters we can feel in our muscles, nerves, bones. Blood pressure rises, palms sweat, we grab onto our seats and prepare for a physiological ride.

Castle’s Vincent Price vehicle The Tingler is self-aware (dare I say meta-cinematic) in its exploration of the bodily consequences of viewing; on-screen characters and the theater audience alike are, like Sobchack, “achingly aware” of their bodies as “sensuous, sensitized” physiological entities. Price portrays Dr. Warren Chapin, a pathologist and coroner for the State prison who performs autopsies on executed prisoners and studies the physiological effects of fear in his own theater of death (not unlike the surgical theater captured in Eakins’ 1875 painting, The Gross Clinic). Through the magic of PERCEPTO, The Tingler translates its on-screen camp-horror into actual sensations the audience feels in their seats, making manifest the bodily experience of cinematic perception: the film’s central monster-baddies – parasites who feed on human fear and enter characters’ spinal cords (those command centers of sensation) – enter the theater as back-lit projections and shock-vibrations on filmgoers’ spines, synchronized as audiences come face-to-face (and spine-to-spine) with scenes of attack and death. A primal scene: As we sit and watch, we feel the danger of viewing scenes of violence inflicted on other bodies. Our sensorium activated, we experience physiological responses to on-screen sensations that extend into the theater aisles, under our seats, vibrating within our skin. 

The Tingler refused passive viewing and wanted audiences to understand how watching can be a dangerous enterprise, one in which our bodies (not just our mind’s eye) are impacted. This recalls the notorious surrealist montage that opens Un Chien Andalou (1929 silent film co-conceived by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel), a cinematic primal scene that climaxes in an act of sadistic film editing as a single razor blade slices through the moon and then an eyeball, a proxy for our own eyes – an enticement and warning that seeing is never purely about vision; it has real physical effects. Whether viewing an extreme close-up of a finger penetrating a seething bullet wound in one of many interrogation scenes in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), watching Alex sit in “the chair of torture” with eyes clamped open and forced to “viddy” films of rape and murder in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), encountering the ritual crosscut slaughters at the climax of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), or witnessing the dry heaving of a former leader of Indonesian death squads as he returns to the site where he killed hundreds in The Act of Killing (Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, 2012), as members of the audience we flinch, take part in, and feel pain at the sight of others’ experience. We check our limbs to feel for wounds, our eyelids hurt, we feel nauseated. This is more than alienation in the face of spectacle violence; this is participatory, embodied empathy in action.

In July 2013, hip hop innovator, artist, actor, and poet Mos Def (rechristened Yasiin Bey) “starred” in a video reenactment of the standard operating procedure for force-feeding hunger striking detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Released by the British human rights organization Reprieve and initially posted on The Guardian online, the video went viral within hours and circulated to an audience of millions via international media websites. On one hand, this was a film with a lead actor in the role of orange-clad detainee, a cast of Guantánamo “guards” wielding handcuffs, “medics” outfitted in green scrubs and plastic gloves, and a director (British filmmaker Asif Kapadia, later lauded for his 2015 gut-wrenching documentary Amy, is never on screen though audible as he shouts “Cut!”). Yet Bey did not merely inhabit a fictional role or function as an artist engaged in activist performance art, but his was a real body actually experiencing the force-feeding procedure. As a stamp of documentary authenticity, the film announces “This is what happened” as prelude to Bey’s entrance on screen. The Guardian described how “There was no rehearsal: after all, no acting would be required. In an instant, he was no longer Mos Def – rapper and Hollywood star – but a powerless prisoner, experiencing what hunger strikers in Guantánamo Bay endure daily.” 

In the central reenactment sequence lasting two and a half minutes, Bey wears the requisite orange jumpsuit metonymic of detainees in the War on Terror, the most widely recognizable postmodern prison uniform, and steps into the bodily experience of a hunger-striking detainee. The camera cuts quickly between close-ups on Bey’s exposed wrists and ankles, as guards handcuff and chain together his hands and feet, all strategically framed so we can see neither the faces of “guards” nor “detainee.” Everyone is an incomplete body, the manacled limbs and administering hands standing in for a whole set of prison relations – the spectacle of race, discipline, and state violence visible in the contrast between Bey’s blackness and the white tattooed arms of guards. (Such details quietly recall the 2001 death-row drama Monster’s Ball, which Bey costarred in alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs and Halle Berry, and similarly features a chair of discipline and torture.)

In the guise of detainee strapped to restraining chair, Bey gives form to both a physical site (Guantánamo Bay Prison) and physical experience (force-feeding procedure, nasogastric plastic tubes forced up the detainee’s nose, down throat, into stomach) that are so often representational black holes outside comprehension, seemingly impossible to access via empathetic engagement. Yet at the same time that the film allows us to “see” Guantánamo, it is highly stylized and readily acknowledges its status as a staged reenactment. Bey the individual (not yet detainee) first walks on screen and enters a stark white minimalist soundstage reminiscent of a modern art gallery or site for a performance action (think: Marina Abramović or Joseph Beuys). Upon closer inspection, we notice this is a heterogeneous space containing the equipment of both a film set and medical-prison discipline: key lights on tripods stand next to towering bags of IV fluid, all positioned around a single restraining chair, doubly suggestive of an electric chair and canvas director’s chair (an actual director’s chair appears following the reenactment sequence). Dressed in head-to-toe designer black, from modified fez to wing tips, Bey speaks out from the screen and directly addresses the audience as a prelude to the performed reenactment. The entire video is shot on this soundstage, a decontextualized blank slate that feels far from the store of images we associate with “prison.” Yet this is a different kind of prison than exists in the American popular imagination. We’re not inside recognizable cell blocks popularized in films Escape From Alcatraz (Dir. Don Siegel, 1979) or In the Name of the Father (Dir. Jim Sheridan, 1993); the blankness of the space is fitting for the decontextualized site of Guantánamo and undisclosed detention centers throughout the world that remain black sites invisible to public eyes.

As threefold spectator-voyeur, proxy detainee, and performer-activist, Bey exists in complicated relationship to actual detainees, as do we as spectators viewing this video reenactment. Although he temporarily steps into the role of detainee and experiences a procedure similar to those on 2013 hunger strike, he still retains agency as a performer and American citizen whom has “volunteered to undergo the procedure,” a privilege not permitted the 44 detainees “force fed against their will.” Dismissed by some as propaganda spectacle and “publicity stunt,” hailed by others as an act of protest and “legitimate performance art” that draws immediate attention to the ethical trespasses of Guantánamo allowing audiences to engage viscerally with detainees’ experience, it functioned both as media event and reenactment art with ethical intent. Bey’s performance also evoked connections between force-feeding of detainees and violent policing of African-American masculinity, the reenactment video distributed online via YouTube and Vimeo alongside Facebook livestreams of police-involved shootings. 

More than an ethical wake-up call and indictment of the Department of Defense under Bush and Obama, the reenactment also raised questions and provoked provisional answers on the role of art in generating communities of empathy and catalyzing political change: How might we attach not just an image to the representational void of Guantánamo but also a physiological experience that we can feel in our bodies? While disclaimers that accompanied online postings of the video believed this was dangerous physiological business – “Warning: the video is hard to watch and extremely upsetting” and “Some viewers may find these images distressing” – are there limits to what we can feel as viewers in the face of “distressing” or “upsetting” images? Beyond purely affective or emotional response, it’s impossible to deny the “hard to watch” physical consequences of watching Bey undergo this procedure as a reenactment of what the 44 force-fed detainees actually experienced. Yet are there limits to what Bey can claim to experience through his voluntary participation in a dramatically truncated force-feeding procedure (his two and a half minutes vs. the typical two hours it takes to administer to detainees) and because he can tell his “captors” to stop or the director may step in and call “Cut”? And finally: though wildly different in tone and intent than The Tingler, the audience to Bey’s reenactment similarly becomes a community of “living participants” who “actually feel real physical sensations” – a community of feeling both on and off screen, collapsing the point-of-view of experiencing subject and viewing audience into simultaneous first-order bodily experience.

One last set of questions – a challenge to film viewers, artists, and critics to scan their senses and confront how bodies-that-watch feel, experience, and desire what happens on screen: How do sadistic spectatorship, masochistic participation, and human curiosity fuel the relation (and collapse the distance) between viewer and performer, or between Bey and the Guantánamo detainees? How does viewing Bey’s painful experience of force-feeding – his gagging, flinching, and difficulty breathing, the low-angle shots capturing his flared nostrils and neck muscles tensed, a series of bodily events “happening” yet also strategically staged – expose the impossibility of separating the aesthetics, ethical-ideological, and complex sensory-erotics (senserotics) of empathetic encounter? This is not a matter of diagnosing film experience as sadistic or ethical or transformative or perverse or life-affirming or life-destroying (it is surely all these things and more), but of being human and living inside a sensing body.

Whatever your specific response to viewing his reenactment-performance, likely some combination of recoil and perverse fascination with scenes of prison discipline usually hidden from public view, there’s no escaping that watching Bey’s body “actually” undergo the procedure makes the viewing body feel something. We all enter the prison simulacrum and inhabit a shared body of sensation and suffering. We are then faced with a choice about whether to keep viewing, sensing, participating in what’s experienced on screen (what Sontag dubs the ethical challenge of “co-spectatorship”). Ultimately the audience is confronted by the same question that Tingler posters posed as a taunt and a dare to be more human, to stop merely looking at screens but to participate in what we see: “Do you have the guts to sit in this chair?” 

Do you?

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.