2. WHO THE FUCK SHOOTS HIMSELF NEXT TO A HORSE?
3. SOUTHERNERS DON’T TALK LIKE THAT. WHAT ARE THESE MOUTH SOUNDS, FRANCES?
4. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE DOESN’T GET ANY FUNNIER IF YOUR SECOND WIFE IS A DITZ
5. THAT SUICIDE NOTE SURE WAS LONG. ALSO? A LITTLE PERVY
6. DEUS EX MACHINA RIPPING SHARTS OVER HERE MIGHT WANNA CLEAN THAT UP
7. SOMEHOW THAT N-BOMB DOESN’T FEEL “EDGY” TO ME
8. NOT SURE BRUTALLY RACIST COPS DESERVE REDEMPTIVE STORYLINES
9. AAAAND HE JUST BROKE THAT KID’S FACE
10. THE CRYING LADY IS AUSTRALIAN. GUESS THAT SHIT’S GONNA GO UNEXPLAINED
11. IN BRUGES ALSO SUCKED, THERE I SAID IT
12. WOW, THIS WHOLE SUBPLOT IS JUST AN EXCUSE TO MAKE JOKES ABOUT LITTLE PEOPLE
13. THE DEER IS CGI? YOU FILMED ON LOCATION. LOOK AROUND, CITY BOY, FUCKTON OF ACTUAL DEER
14. THAT’S NOT HOW DNA EVIDENCE COLLECTION WORKS
15. I MEAN, IT’S OSCAR-NOMINATED SO DESPITE ITS BIGOTRY/MISOGYNY/GAPING PLOT HOLES MAYBE IT DOES MAKE YOU THINK ABOUT THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF TRAUMA… WAIT WHAT, THAT’S NOT EVEN THE RAPIST… THEN WHY DID HE GO IN THE CANDLE SHOP? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
16. JESUS CHRIST
17. FUCK IT. LET’S GO SEE BLACK PANTHER
]]>2. WHO THE FUCK SHOOTS HIMSELF NEXT TO A HORSE?
3. SOUTHERNERS DON’T TALK LIKE THAT. WHAT ARE THESE MOUTH SOUNDS, FRANCES?
4. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE DOESN’T GET ANY FUNNIER IF YOUR SECOND WIFE IS A DITZ
5. THAT SUICIDE NOTE SURE WAS LONG. ALSO? A LITTLE PERVY
6. DEUS EX MACHINA RIPPING SHARTS OVER HERE MIGHT WANNA CLEAN THAT UP
7. SOMEHOW THAT N-BOMB DOESN’T FEEL “EDGY” TO ME
8. NOT SURE BRUTALLY RACIST COPS DESERVE REDEMPTIVE STORYLINES
9. AAAAND HE JUST BROKE THAT KID’S FACE
10. THE CRYING LADY IS AUSTRALIAN. GUESS THAT SHIT’S GONNA GO UNEXPLAINED
11. IN BRUGES ALSO SUCKED, THERE I SAID IT
12. WOW, THIS WHOLE SUBPLOT IS JUST AN EXCUSE TO MAKE JOKES ABOUT LITTLE PEOPLE
13. THE DEER IS CGI? YOU FILMED ON LOCATION. LOOK AROUND, CITY BOY, FUCKTON OF ACTUAL DEER
14. THAT’S NOT HOW DNA EVIDENCE COLLECTION WORKS
15. I MEAN, IT’S OSCAR-NOMINATED SO DESPITE ITS BIGOTRY/MISOGYNY/GAPING PLOT HOLES MAYBE IT DOES MAKE YOU THINK ABOUT THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF TRAUMA… WAIT WHAT, THAT’S NOT EVEN THE RAPIST… THEN WHY DID HE GO IN THE CANDLE SHOP? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
16. JESUS CHRIST
17. FUCK IT. LET’S GO SEE BLACK PANTHER
]]>Playwright Antoinette Nwandu on writing new kinds of black characters and her upcoming film with Spike Lee.
The post ► Why We Need Black Antiheroes, with Antoinette Nwandu appeared first on Clyde Fitch Report.
]]>In this episode of The Scene, we welcome playwright Antoinette Nwandu. Nwandu’s plays include Pass Over, Breach: a manifesto on race in america through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate, Flat Sam and others. Her work has been supported or produced by the Sundance Theater Lab, The Cherry Lane Mentor Project (under Katori Hall), The Kennedy Center, The Flea, Naked Angels, Steppenwolf and Victory Gardens, among others, and her awards include the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, The Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, The Negro Ensemble Company’s Douglas Turner Ward Prize and a Literary Fellowship at the O’Neill Conference. Her play Pass Over, produced at Steppenwolf last summer, started a national conversation on racial bias in the theater community, and it was also recently recorded and turned into a film by Spike Lee, to be released on Amazon this April.
Her newest production is now Breach, at Victory Gardens in Chicago until March 11. Breach tells the story of Margaret, who per Victory Gardens’ description “uproots her life, including her dead-end job and fizzling relationship, after finding out that she is unexpectedly expecting…Breach is a smart comedy about friendship, motherhood, and family, and tackles the mother of all challenges: learning to love yourself.” In our conversation today, Nwandu describes her interest in writing a new kind black protagonist–one who can be “a mess” in the way many of our culture’s popular white antiheroes have been. We talk about self-perception in the African American community and how people can learn to accept and embrace their authentic selves. I also get an update on how the film of Pass Over has been progressing and hear how Steppenwolf and Spike Lee staged a rare, one-night-only return of her play for black audiences from across Chicago.
Thanks to all our listeners for your continued support. If you enjoyed this show, we hope you’ll leave us a review and also consider sharing it with others on social media. It only takes a moment, but when our viewers post, retweet or otherwise recommend an episode they like, it’s very beneficial for the show. We also invite you to catch up on all our past episodes, either here on the CFR or by subscribing on iTunes. On Twitter, you can follow me and this show @_SeanDouglass_ or @TheSceneCFR.
The post ► Why We Need Black Antiheroes, with Antoinette Nwandu appeared first on Clyde Fitch Report.
]]>I hope you’re doing well, gazing at aesthetically-pleasing sunsets or reading Proust while wearing rose-scented perfume, or whatever it is you do in your free time. I’m going to try and make this as brief as possible, but please bear with me, as what I’m about to discuss is a hill I am more than willing to die on.
Like most people who were alive and had access to modern technology at the time, I got all swept up in the Lady Bird buzz that swarmed towards the end of last year, when your ode to the city of Sacramento and coming-of-age broke a Rotten Tomatoes’ record for highest number of positive reviews without any negative ones, and just in general seemed to be all anyone wanted to talk about. Naturally, curiosity got the best of me, so I bought a ticket and settled in for an experience that, according to general consensus, would rank right up there as one of the most moving and emotional of my life.
And yeah, I laughed a couple times, shed a few tears here and there, blah blah blah. But by the time the screen went black and the end credits started rolling, I was more confused than anything else. The number one question clanging and banging around in my mind:
Where were all the conversations about men, Greta?
In a movie chock-full of interesting, multidimensional female characters having interesting, multidimensional conversations, a disturbingly small number of them revolved around the tried-and-true topic of chit-chat between chicks in movies: dudes.
It just felt like Lady Bird missed so many opportunities to needlessly invite the Y-chromosome to an X-dominated party!
Like, for example, in the scene where Lady Bird asks her mother, Marion, what an appropriate age to be having sex might be, and her mother gives her a genuine, non-judgemental answer — the exchange seems to deliberately omit the over-the-top awkwardness that is an absolute staple of every movie scene ever in which a child is having a conversation with a parent about sex… I don’t think you actually meant to do that, though, did you? There were so many possibilities there, Greta!
For instance, Marion could’ve gotten super upset that Lady Bird was thinking of being anything other than a pristinely white-clothed, cross-legged angel of chastity and demanded to know the name of the boy she was probably already pregnant by, this would inevitably lead to a nice screaming match that would end in Lady Bird being grounded “for eternity” or something.
Or, for a slightly less Carrie-and-her-Bible-thumping-mother-like exchange, Marion could have started openly talking about sex and Lady Bird could’ve started covering her ears and cringing because hearing her mom saying the word “hymen” would’ve just been too much! (It wouldn’t even have had to be the word “hymen”—“condom,” “penis,” “clitoris,” all would’ve worked — it basically writes itself).
(Side Note: Going the “bodily-functions-are-gross” route would still pass the Bechdel Test (unfortunately) but it would check off enough other boxes for a typical movie involving parents having a conversation with their teenagers that I’d be willing to call it even).
Or how about the scene earlier on in the movie, where Lady Bird and her best friend, Julie are snacking on communion wafers and giggling about masturbation, and Lady Bird says, “Maybe it’s different when there’s really a penis in there” as opposed to a showerhead. Ideally, this conversation would’ve devolved into ludicrous, Amy Schumer-style detail about all the different ways to masturbate, complete with some giggle-laden mention of vaginal discharge, menstrual blood, female ejaculation, or some combination of the three. The girls would then progress into a heated discussion of all the different boys at school they’d let “hit it from the back” and “stick it in all their holes.” These boys would all be mentioned by full name and rated in great detail on their “fuckability.”
But instead, we got some un-male-mentioning crap that illustrated the quirks of childhood bonding and the importance of close and uninhibited camaraderie between girls during the hectic hormonal-ness of the teenage years.
Pretty disappointing, if you ask me.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment in the entire movie, though, Greta, was the fact that Lady Bird and Julie have a falling out and break up as friends over something other than that they both have a crush on the same guy? It would have been so easy to make Lady Bird also have a thing for the math teacher or for Julie to develop feelings for the kid who doesn’t want to participate in the economy and lies about his virginity, but nooo, instead we get a real and intimate look at female friendship and the trials and tribulations it faces during adolescence.
(I really don’t mean to harp on this, Greta, but Julie could’ve shouted, “Kyle doesn’t even think you’re pretty!” Or something similarly brutal and cutting at Lady Bird during that fight on the quad. Otherwise, I don’t know… the whole thing felt very female-focused and not very male-focused… it was weird).
I just can’t help but feel a twinge of annoyance every time Lady Bird comes up in conversation about the Oscar race. In a year touted for its emphasis on female relationships in film, it feels like Lady Bird is the only awards-front runner that didn’t find a way to dump a healthy amount of dude-flavored tea into the harbor, if you know what I mean.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is lately being billed as a mother-daughter movie, but the great majority of its runtime is spent watching Frances McDormand’s character talk obsessively about the police chief to anyone who will listen, and while the things she says aren’t romantic in nature, the police chief is a man, so it counts.
Hell, even The Shape of Water, which has been described as one of the most unique and “uncharted territory-venturing” movies in a long time, goes to all the trouble of making its female lead only able to communicate through facial expressions and sign language and STILL everything she says revolves around the dude she wants to bang. If that’s not commitment to keeping an otherwise groundbreaking train on the male track, I don’t know what is.
Unfortunately, Greta, it’s a level of commitment you just weren’t willing or able to attain. Whether that’s because Lady Bird is your solo directorial debut and you’re relatively new to the game, or maybe you, for whatever reason, actually intended the primary focus to be on the girls in the movie, or simply because you’re a woman, I guess I’ll never know.
But let’s face it, it’s probably because you’re a woman.
Sincerely,
Lady Bird Poacher
I hope you’re doing well, gazing at aesthetically-pleasing sunsets or reading Proust while wearing rose-scented perfume, or whatever it is you do in your free time. I’m going to try and make this as brief as possible, but please bear with me, as what I’m about to discuss is a hill I am more than willing to die on.
Like most people who were alive and had access to modern technology at the time, I got all swept up in the Lady Bird buzz that swarmed towards the end of last year, when your ode to the city of Sacramento and coming-of-age broke a Rotten Tomatoes’ record for highest number of positive reviews without any negative ones, and just in general seemed to be all anyone wanted to talk about. Naturally, curiosity got the best of me, so I bought a ticket and settled in for an experience that, according to general consensus, would rank right up there as one of the most moving and emotional of my life.
And yeah, I laughed a couple times, shed a few tears here and there, blah blah blah. But by the time the screen went black and the end credits started rolling, I was more confused than anything else. The number one question clanging and banging around in my mind:
Where were all the conversations about men, Greta?
In a movie chock-full of interesting, multidimensional female characters having interesting, multidimensional conversations, a disturbingly small number of them revolved around the tried-and-true topic of chit-chat between chicks in movies: dudes.
It just felt like Lady Bird missed so many opportunities to needlessly invite the Y-chromosome to an X-dominated party!
Like, for example, in the scene where Lady Bird asks her mother, Marion, what an appropriate age to be having sex might be, and her mother gives her a genuine, non-judgemental answer — the exchange seems to deliberately omit the over-the-top awkwardness that is an absolute staple of every movie scene ever in which a child is having a conversation with a parent about sex… I don’t think you actually meant to do that, though, did you? There were so many possibilities there, Greta!
For instance, Marion could’ve gotten super upset that Lady Bird was thinking of being anything other than a pristinely white-clothed, cross-legged angel of chastity and demanded to know the name of the boy she was probably already pregnant by, this would inevitably lead to a nice screaming match that would end in Lady Bird being grounded “for eternity” or something.
Or, for a slightly less Carrie-and-her-Bible-thumping-mother-like exchange, Marion could have started openly talking about sex and Lady Bird could’ve started covering her ears and cringing because hearing her mom saying the word “hymen” would’ve just been too much! (It wouldn’t even have had to be the word “hymen”—“condom,” “penis,” “clitoris,” all would’ve worked — it basically writes itself).
(Side Note: Going the “bodily-functions-are-gross” route would still pass the Bechdel Test (unfortunately) but it would check off enough other boxes for a typical movie involving parents having a conversation with their teenagers that I’d be willing to call it even).
Or how about the scene earlier on in the movie, where Lady Bird and her best friend, Julie are snacking on communion wafers and giggling about masturbation, and Lady Bird says, “Maybe it’s different when there’s really a penis in there” as opposed to a showerhead. Ideally, this conversation would’ve devolved into ludicrous, Amy Schumer-style detail about all the different ways to masturbate, complete with some giggle-laden mention of vaginal discharge, menstrual blood, female ejaculation, or some combination of the three. The girls would then progress into a heated discussion of all the different boys at school they’d let “hit it from the back” and “stick it in all their holes.” These boys would all be mentioned by full name and rated in great detail on their “fuckability.”
But instead, we got some un-male-mentioning crap that illustrated the quirks of childhood bonding and the importance of close and uninhibited camaraderie between girls during the hectic hormonal-ness of the teenage years.
Pretty disappointing, if you ask me.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment in the entire movie, though, Greta, was the fact that Lady Bird and Julie have a falling out and break up as friends over something other than that they both have a crush on the same guy? It would have been so easy to make Lady Bird also have a thing for the math teacher or for Julie to develop feelings for the kid who doesn’t want to participate in the economy and lies about his virginity, but nooo, instead we get a real and intimate look at female friendship and the trials and tribulations it faces during adolescence.
(I really don’t mean to harp on this, Greta, but Julie could’ve shouted, “Kyle doesn’t even think you’re pretty!” Or something similarly brutal and cutting at Lady Bird during that fight on the quad. Otherwise, I don’t know… the whole thing felt very female-focused and not very male-focused… it was weird).
I just can’t help but feel a twinge of annoyance every time Lady Bird comes up in conversation about the Oscar race. In a year touted for its emphasis on female relationships in film, it feels like Lady Bird is the only awards-front runner that didn’t find a way to dump a healthy amount of dude-flavored tea into the harbor, if you know what I mean.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is lately being billed as a mother-daughter movie, but the great majority of its runtime is spent watching Frances McDormand’s character talk obsessively about the police chief to anyone who will listen, and while the things she says aren’t romantic in nature, the police chief is a man, so it counts.
Hell, even The Shape of Water, which has been described as one of the most unique and “uncharted territory-venturing” movies in a long time, goes to all the trouble of making its female lead only able to communicate through facial expressions and sign language and STILL everything she says revolves around the dude she wants to bang. If that’s not commitment to keeping an otherwise groundbreaking train on the male track, I don’t know what is.
Unfortunately, Greta, it’s a level of commitment you just weren’t willing or able to attain. Whether that’s because Lady Bird is your solo directorial debut and you’re relatively new to the game, or maybe you, for whatever reason, actually intended the primary focus to be on the girls in the movie, or simply because you’re a woman, I guess I’ll never know.
But let’s face it, it’s probably because you’re a woman.
Sincerely,
Lady Bird Poacher
Wide-open category in the vast swath of cinema I actually saw in 2017, but the winner was the emotional core of her movie, where she learned a heart-wrenching lesson about the magic — and responsibility — of friendship.
Winner: Tara Strong, Princess Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: The Movie
Oddly, not a lot of great roles for men in the movies I went to see last year but one performer was sensual and conniving, and, in the end, a kind of hero. Plus he sings! Sorry, guy from Ray Donovan whose name I can’t spell, it’s not your year.
Winner: Taye Diggs, Capper, My Little Pony: The Movie
Other movies looked good, probably, if I had seen them, but once I witnessed the majesty of Rainbow Dash’s signature sonic rainboom on the big screen, everything else would have been like staring at a wet cheesecloth.
Winner: Anthony Di Ninno, My Little Pony: The Movie
It all starts with the words, doesn’t it? From FADE IN to FADE OUT, all across Equestria, one film delivered the goods.
Winner: Meghan McCarthy, Joe Ballarini, Rita Hsiao, and Michael Vogel, My Little Pony: The Movie
Cartoons have directors! Who knew? Who do they yell “action” at, the cartoonists?
Winner: Jayson Thiessen, My Little Pony: The Movie
Which do I choose? The forbidden love story, the desperate battle to save civilization from a fascistic invader, or the one with the gorgeously-rendered aquatic creature? Trick question, I choose the movie with all three.
Winner: My Little Pony: The Movie
See you this time next year, and don’t get cocky, Sherlock Gnomes!
]]>Wide-open category in the vast swath of cinema I actually saw in 2017, but the winner was the emotional core of her movie, where she learned a heart-wrenching lesson about the magic — and responsibility — of friendship.
Winner: Tara Strong, Princess Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: The Movie
Oddly, not a lot of great roles for men in the movies I went to see last year but one performer was sensual and conniving, and, in the end, a kind of hero. Plus he sings! Sorry, guy from Ray Donovan whose name I can’t spell, it’s not your year.
Winner: Taye Diggs, Capper, My Little Pony: The Movie
Other movies looked good, probably, if I had seen them, but once I witnessed the majesty of Rainbow Dash’s signature sonic rainboom on the big screen, everything else would have been like staring at a wet cheesecloth.
Winner: Anthony Di Ninno, My Little Pony: The Movie
It all starts with the words, doesn’t it? From FADE IN to FADE OUT, all across Equestria, one film delivered the goods.
Winner: Meghan McCarthy, Joe Ballarini, Rita Hsiao, and Michael Vogel, My Little Pony: The Movie
Cartoons have directors! Who knew? Who do they yell “action” at, the cartoonists?
Winner: Jayson Thiessen, My Little Pony: The Movie
Which do I choose? The forbidden love story, the desperate battle to save civilization from a fascistic invader, or the one with the gorgeously-rendered aquatic creature? Trick question, I choose the movie with all three.
Winner: My Little Pony: The Movie
See you this time next year, and don’t get cocky, Sherlock Gnomes!
]]>And why you can liken the production to farm-to-table cuisine.
The post How Indie Theater Like ‘Athena’ Suddenly Becomes a Hit appeared first on Clyde Fitch Report.
]]>Independent theater is like a hermit crab. Vulnerable to exposure and attack, it must seek refuge in the protective shell of an empty Off-Off-Broadway theater no longer inhabited by its previous tenant.
There is an inherent humility to this crab-by existence, one that suits perfectly the modest ambitions of an independently produced show. The chance to gauge the reaction of a live audience after months or years of workshops and staged readings is nourishment for the creative team, morsels feed the next draft of the script or leads to an Off-Off-Broadway festival to further develop more nuances and polish. See: the nomadic life of the hermit crab.
Yet, once in a great while, this fragile organism unexpectedly garners big attention. Modest expectations, codified since the first rehearsal, must be abandoned.
You’ll know you’ve stumbled across one of these rare creatures by a change in physical cues. The outside of the theater may look different. Wait-listers may line up outside the entrance a half-hour before the doors even open. The audience demographic begins to skew older. The house is packed in a way that Broadway can’t match, marked by all those plastic chairs hastily set up beside the risers and all those audience members only too happy to sit on them. Even the virtual plumage undergoes a transformation when the pull-down tab for online ticket purchases is now accented by two words, bold and red: sold out.
Whether early in its run or halfway through it, the production is no longer a fledgling, naked little crab. And the drama of its transformation can leave everyone slightly stunned.
Athena is a quintessential case study for this kind of success. Running at a venue called JACK, in Brooklyn, the play depicts two teenage girls training for the Junior Olympics in fencing. The story unfurls through conversations between Athena, which is probably not her name, and a character named Mary Wallace as they begin and end physical practice sessions. Occasionally, we catch a glimpse of what happens when the complex relationship between them spills past the walls of the gym. In one case, we discover that the more experienced Athena has taken the innocent Mary to a club, resulting in a trip to the ER.
At the start of its three-week run, the anatomy of Athena looked no different to the outside observer than any other independently produced show passing like a whisper through the Off-Off-Broadway life-cycle. It began with a script by Gracie Gardner that percolated for 10 years without a production. This script was given to The Hearth, a small theater company composed of two artistic directors, Julia Greer and Emily Miller. They rented JACK, a 50-seat staple of Clinton Hill. The cast of three was secured, with Greer playing Athena and Abby Awe as Mary. Normal procedure, through and through.
Then the tipping point: On Feb. 19, New York Times critic Alexis Soloski wrote a glowing review of the play and branded it a Critic’s Pick. “As a theater actor, what you want in your career is to know fewer and fewer people in the audience,” Awe told me. “We sold out, and we have people rushing the show like it’s on Broadway.”
Are there predictors to this success? Let’s start with Gardner and her script. Recently, she won the highly publicized Relentless Award, a $45,000 grant by the American Playwriting Foundation, for a different play, Pussy Sludge. Gardner’s name entering the forefront of the national theatrical consciousness certainly brought Athena a shot at a level of publicity that is generally reserved for much larger shows.
There is much to be said for the seemingly monolithic power of the Times. Many believe as they have always believed: the entirety of a show’s success can hinge on a single review. Such power can be wielded benevolently, to advocate for shows of lesser means. A critic can hold in their hand the trust of a large swath of audience; their review can grant legitimacy to a show that perhaps hasn’t yet achieved it elsewhere. (I am pursuing my graduate degree in dramaturgy and work as a personal research assistant for Soloski.)
Still, to boil down Athena’s rise to context and timing seems reductive. There must be something in the show itself fueling its success. It seems to exploit a tip-of-the tongue phenomenon, both asking and answering questions still forming in the collective mouths of the theatergoing public: Whose stories are going to be told? Athena’s existence insists, for example, that a friendship between two teenage girls is a sufficient story to be told.
The entire production is holistically attuned to this point. It is written by a woman. The Hearth is run by two female artistic directors, one of whom is acting in the show — and the other one directs. All the actors are women. On the production side, women provide set, lighting, sound, costumes, props, stage management and PR. “There is a different feel to the rehearsal room when you enter,” Awe says. “I think it’s very impressive to see female and non-binary artists hanging lights and setting up the sound. I feel like it’s an anomaly in the industry at the moment.”
Audiences want theater that is hyper-conscious of its messaging across the whole of the production. You could liken it to farm-to-table cuisine. The team cares for the authenticity of its message through every stage of the process. You feel it in the final product on stage.
What’s next for Athena? The Hearth recently announced an additional five performances, March 20 to 24. Beyond that? “The exposure Athena is getting and the people that are seeing it are people that could have an effect on where the show goes after this run at JACK,” Awe says. “That’s something that was truly not on my mind two weeks ago. I feel this play reaches many different types on a human level. Clearly the story is relatable to many.”
Nothing is certain, of course. But the surprise success of Athena might suggest that soon this hermit crab will move into a much larger shell.
The post How Indie Theater Like ‘Athena’ Suddenly Becomes a Hit appeared first on Clyde Fitch Report.
]]>No, we're not all brooding eccentrics.
The post Thriving in Science, Working as Artist? Here’s an Elegant Proof appeared first on Clyde Fitch Report.
]]>Not all artists are brooding eccentrics. Dr. Jacob M. Appel and Dr. Paul Ranelli are living proof that artists can do well in mathematics and science, too.
Appel holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Brown University, an M.A. and an M.Phil. from Columbia University, an M.S. in bioethics from the Alden March Bioethics Institute of Albany Medical College, an M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University, an M.F.A. in playwriting from Queens College, an M.P.H. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Appel has taught at Brown University and has been admitted to the bar in New York and Rhode Island.
He also is a prolific writer. His first novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, published in 2012, won the Dundee International Book Prize, which honors debut authors. Since then, he has managed to stay busy in between his day-job as a psychiatrist and completing more than 10 other books.
“When people at cocktail parties find out I’m a physician, they often show me their rashes. When I tell them that I’m merely a psychiatrist, they sheepishly hide their rashes and show me their souls,” Appel said. “When they find out I’m an author, they preemptively tell me that they can’t loan me any money.”
He has also written essays, which have been featured in The New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post and Chicago Tribune, among others, and he has penned a few plays and even a collection of poetry set to come out next summer.
“All I wanted to do when I was young was to become a bioethicist,” he said. “Alas, there is no clear career path for becoming a bioethicist, so first I became a lawyer, and then a physician, and tacked on another seven graduate degrees for good measure.”
Appel practices emergency psychiatry in NYC. He’s also sarcastic. “I’m optimistic that if I keep practicing, I may get good at it,” he quipped. When asked which came first, passion for the arts or love of science, he replied: “I fear you overestimate. First came my love for pizza. The art and science merely pay for the gourmet toppings.”
More seriously, he adds, the problem with his work as a psychiatrist is that the stories he hears, however inspiring, are off-limits as a creative prompt, owing to HIPAA safeguards against using patient information. “I hear the most amazing stories — but I cannot share them with anyone… I generally write about loss, the fleeting nature of friendships and love, and the nostalgia and regret that shapes the lives of most reflective people. Uplifting stuff.”
Paradoxically, while his first novel had its roots in the political realm, Appel doesn’t find politics to be inspiring. Indeed, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up satirizes both patriotism and its critics. “I am currently working on a novel about a cancer support group that tries to plot a political assassination,” he concluded, offering a perfect melding of art and science.
Nearly 2,000 miles east, meanwhile, Dr. Paul Ranelli, another scientist, is gearing up for several art exhibitions.
Ranelli, who is a professor and associate head of the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Minnesota, holds a Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin, a Master’s of Pharmaceutical Administration degree from Wayne State University, and a B.S. of Pharmacy from the University of Rhode Island. Ranelli was the fall 2014 Honorary Fellow in Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. On the science side, his focus is called “social pharmacy.”
“Social pharmacy focuses on the human side and the sociological side,” Ranelli said. “How people make them, what laws are related to medicine — the economics of those — and the public health system and how it relates to pharmacy.”
On the arts side, he’s also a photographer, and has managed to meld his love for his art form with his science practice.
“I thought about other ways to communicate the medication-taking experience that people have,” he explained, such as how a photographer might depict someone who is consuming medicine — or how he would go about asking consumers about their experience taking pills. “So I had that idea and I was thinking about how to go about doing that because I don’t have any art exhibit experience, or curator experience,” he said. Then, last year, at a meeting in St. Paul, MN, Ranelli met Jes Reyes of Minneapolis-based Avivo ArtWorks, a social-service agency that helps people with medication and substance abuse issues and mental illness.
Reyes liked Ranelli’s idea, and said it was something that Avivo would be interested in. He was curious to see if Ranelli could expand his idea to encompass more mediums than just photography. The resulting exhibit — “To Really See” — focuses on the experience of taking medicine. Some 50 pieces of art were submitted by people within the Avivo organization. “To Really See” also includes photo-voice, with the artists describing what the photographs mean. “To Really See” has already been displayed at the Minneapolis Central Library and is now at the Bio-Medical Library of the University of Minnesota until April 2018.
Ranelli has also dabbled with playwriting. He collaborated with Minneapolis’ Mixed Blood Theater to write Go Ask Alice, in which patients openly tell stories of their relationship to medicine.
Like Appel, Ranelli has spent his life in academia, but it wasn’t a shock to his friends when he became involved in the arts. “The people that knew me, they weren’t surprised. The deep meaning that an artist puts into their artwork is a story that you cannot get in an office.”
The post Thriving in Science, Working as Artist? Here’s an Elegant Proof appeared first on Clyde Fitch Report.
]]>In 2014, the state of Michigan switched Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, exposing its residents to lead contamination. The lethal switch was first christened as a cost-cutting initiative in a city that is black and poor. Call it what it is: the chemistry between racial capitalism and American governance. After all, it was Governor Rick Snyder who appointed the now former emergency manager Ed Kurtz, who said his job in Flint was “strictly finance” and “did not include ensuring safe drinking water.” If, in 2016, when President Barack Obama drank filtered water from Flint’s taps to prove its safety, the optics of moralist propaganda made you sick to your stomach, call that good chemistry.
For our Chemistry issue, our contributors explore the complex interactions between matter and life, how things change and how things stay the same.
Since everyday life is hard enough, in her essay “Crushed…,” Tiana Reid urges you to fall harder. She writes, “To say ‘I have a crush’ is to feel forced upon, a reminder of dispossession, yes, but also a small glimpse of possibility, that alchemical feeling of vitality so foolishly powerful that I live for it.”
When’s the last time you felt that way on a dating app? Romance is gamified, monetized, instant, but also potentially endless (as long as you keep paying for it), argues Ana Cecilia Alvarez in “Matchmaking.” The author, who trained as a professional matchmaker, learned that “you never wanted the client to fall in love, just to fall in love with the service.”
In an effort to destabilize white women’s contemporary narratives around sexual power, Hiji Nam interviewed Grace M. Cho, associate professor of sociology, anthropology, and women’s studies at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Cho deconstructs the term “fetish” as a narrative to describe the sexual labor of Korean women during the Korean War: “If we think about a racial fetish as something that’s rooted in historical trauma, or that carries forth traces of historical trauma, then we’re talking about the merging of desire and trauma.”
Responses to all kinds of trauma are not at all uniform. Niko Maragos writes, “Laziness, indolence, sloth are figured as the refusal to endure the pain required to escape poverty, according to this anti-working-class narrative.” Riffing on Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, the essay “The Body in Painlessness” puts the opioid crisis in a historical context and argues that collective attention to pain and embodiment can make us rebel.
If pain should have a renewed place in social movements, what room is there for pleasure? Adapting an excerpt from Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times (AK Press, 2017), carla bergman and Nick Montgomery consider how rigidity kills creative transformation and radical change. So much pleasure and power is lost when everyone is trying to be the perfect political subject: “When politics circulates in a world dominated by hypervisibility and rigidity, there is a huge swath of things that do not count, and can never count: the incredible things that people do when nobody is looking, the ways that people support and care for each other quietly and without recognition, the hesitations and stammerings that come through the encounter with other ways of living and fighting, all the acts of resistance and sabotage that remain secret, the slow transformations that take years or decades, and all of the ineffable movements and struggles and projects that can never be fully captured in words or displayed publicly.”
In another critique of political appearances, Bobby London’s essay “Hurt People” explores the often too flimsy relation between political labels and political action. In the end, London states that “revolution is about tearing down not just the hierarchical systems that control us but those within ourselves.”
It’s a mode of self-critique that Stuart Hall knew well. Anthropology professor David Scott emphasizes how the late scholar modeled what it means to be a “listening self,” a mode that sits with critique but does not reduce itself to it, a mode that is generous, receptive, and attuned to the other.
It is worth imagining a world where we listen to the relation between nonhuman and human animals, in their differences, similarities, and plurality. In “Like a Dog,” Jacob Bacharach argues that even if Shakespeare hated dogs, they are Shakespearean, effortful, and unknowable. “A dog is her own character, self-created in each moment without any obvious intention, at once reflective of her audience and entirely self-contained, clearly the product in some fashion of a human hand, and yet so seemingly without an authorial inventor.”
You’ve heard it before—the watered down Audre Lorde—that skin care is self-care and self-care is an “act of political warfare.” This is not a metaphor. Exploring the popularity of Korean cosmetics, also known as K-beauty, in America, Sophia Cross links the U.S. imperial military presence in Korea and worldwide to skin-care regimes. Cross writes that “the endless war, in all its iterations around the globe, is a naked resource-management tool with increasingly flimsy justifications for the ultimate goal of ensuring U.S. market access to anything, anywhere, at any time; victory, then, means continuing to fight in perpetuity.”
In an intimate meditation on the long-term bonds between the military and industry, Kelsey Atherton tells the story of how nukes live among us. While museums and the entertainment industry suggest nuclear weapons are a far-off power controlled by terrorists, nuclear stewardship is in fact about reckoning with the “human cost of creating maintaining, and using” massive amounts of nuclear weapons.
An attention to chemistry requires an attention to complicity. Victor Frankenstein, the scientist who usurps women’s reproductive capacity, does not give his monster a name, but chemistry demands that we confront new combinations and structures. We must name the monsters within, and claim the monstrosities we have had a hand in creating.
]]>I get it, women are a little thrown by me because I’m the first man they’ve met who uses his vague interest in craft beer in lieu of a personality. Even though it’s 2018 and microbreweries have been mainstream for decades, this is a fresh, unique interest that only I have. I know, it takes some getting used to how edgy I am. Seriously though, if you know more about beer than I do I will lock myself in the host’s bathroom and refuse to come out for the rest of the night. Other than that, I’m just a regular joe, so treat me exactly how you’d treat any other literary genius.
“What do I write,” you didn’t ask? The poetry of places and songs of cities. It’s adorable that you call it “travel writing”; I think of it more as a professional excuse to be an asshole on tour buses. Not that I’d ever take a tour bus! That’s right, I hate organized tourism. And if you don’t tell me I’m a rebellious firebrand for taking that stance, I will spiral into a bottomless depression and it will be completely your fault.
No, whenever I travel to a new place, I usually just walk the foreign streets with no GPS and let the siren call of the city guide me. Sure, you could say that’s how I got mugged four times, and why I once woke up in an ice bath with a sharp pain and 95 stitches in my abdomen. But I bet the tour bus didn’t go to a bunch of seedy, “underground” jazz bars that literally no one cares about, so it was totally worth it. Now, when someone asks me about my time in Romania, I just pat my surgical scar and say, “Romania? Why I knew her intimately."
Yes, that’s another radical thing I do, where I use gendered pronouns for every place I visit. See, to you cities are just “places,” but to me all the cities are people and all the people are cities. How else would I know that Chicago is a middle-aged man who works in manufacturing, or that Portland is a gender-fluid street performer, or that you’re a small fishing town that is famous for its saltwater taffy? I get that this might be confusing, but for me, the voice of a generation, every city I visit, is a new lover I take. Seriously, I will fuck a bridge if they’ll let me. When you’d say something boring and predictable like “Good to be back in New York,” I’d say something exceptional and fresh like, “Ah, Lady New York. How I’ve missed her concrete and steel embrace.”
No one has ever said anything like that before. I’m the first one.
I can see you’re trying to leave, but being able to tell the difference between girl cities and boy cities is all I’ve got. So if you don’t think that’s ground-breaking, know that you’ve single-handedly strangled and buried my dreams tonight.
]]>I get it, women are a little thrown by me because I’m the first man they’ve met who uses his vague interest in craft beer in lieu of a personality. Even though it’s 2018 and microbreweries have been mainstream for decades, this is a fresh, unique interest that only I have. I know, it takes some getting used to how edgy I am. Seriously though, if you know more about beer than I do I will lock myself in the host’s bathroom and refuse to come out for the rest of the night. Other than that, I’m just a regular joe, so treat me exactly how you’d treat any other literary genius.
“What do I write,” you didn’t ask? The poetry of places and songs of cities. It’s adorable that you call it “travel writing”; I think of it more as a professional excuse to be an asshole on tour buses. Not that I’d ever take a tour bus! That’s right, I hate organized tourism. And if you don’t tell me I’m a rebellious firebrand for taking that stance, I will spiral into a bottomless depression and it will be completely your fault.
No, whenever I travel to a new place, I usually just walk the foreign streets with no GPS and let the siren call of the city guide me. Sure, you could say that’s how I got mugged four times, and why I once woke up in an ice bath with a sharp pain and 95 stitches in my abdomen. But I bet the tour bus didn’t go to a bunch of seedy, “underground” jazz bars that literally no one cares about, so it was totally worth it. Now, when someone asks me about my time in Romania, I just pat my surgical scar and say, “Romania? Why I knew her intimately."
Yes, that’s another radical thing I do, where I use gendered pronouns for every place I visit. See, to you cities are just “places,” but to me all the cities are people and all the people are cities. How else would I know that Chicago is a middle-aged man who works in manufacturing, or that Portland is a gender-fluid street performer, or that you’re a small fishing town that is famous for its saltwater taffy? I get that this might be confusing, but for me, the voice of a generation, every city I visit, is a new lover I take. Seriously, I will fuck a bridge if they’ll let me. When you’d say something boring and predictable like “Good to be back in New York,” I’d say something exceptional and fresh like, “Ah, Lady New York. How I’ve missed her concrete and steel embrace.”
No one has ever said anything like that before. I’m the first one.
I can see you’re trying to leave, but being able to tell the difference between girl cities and boy cities is all I’ve got. So if you don’t think that’s ground-breaking, know that you’ve single-handedly strangled and buried my dreams tonight.
]]>That’s why I’m giving up my F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet.
This wasn’t an easy decision to make. The F-22 has been an integral part of my life since I first realized that the top-notch avionics and superior performance of this stealthy fighter offered me exactly the maneuverability and flexibility I need to defend my property and protect my family. I’ve slept well knowing that I had the air superiority to defend my household against just about any intruder. And, contrary to stereotypes, I almost never have to fire one of the F-22’s missiles in anger. Often, the conflict resolves itself the second I start her up.
But this isn’t just about me and the sport I love sharing with my kids (you may not care if your daughter can’t hit the broadside of a barn with her weapon, but I do, and mine has done so countless times). It’s not just about the calm that’s been brought to my community (for example, my neighbor hasn’t complained about my dog barking a single time since he first saw me pulling the F-22 into my driveway). And it’s not just about the way my wife looks at me like I’m someone she can depend on (she used to complain that I made mountains out of molehills, but since I bought the Raptor, she’s seen me do the opposite on numerous occasions).
Yes, giving up my F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet will be a sacrifice. And the emotional loss will be pronounced, especially that first time I go out to my backyard hangar and see my F-117 Nighthawk, my F-16 Falcon, my MIG-29, the two M18 Hellcat tanks, my swarm of armed drones, and the dozen camouflaged AI-fortified robot mercenaries I managed to order before the Silk Road shut down … but I won’t see the fifth-generation, single-seat, twin-engine, all-weather stealth tactical fighter aircraft that’s become my favorite. I know when I see the spot where the F-22 was parked, the memories will come flooding in… me sitting in the glass cockpit in front of the all-digital flight instruments acting out scenes from Dunkirk for my kids (they’re not allowed to see rated-R movies). That time when the twins missed the bus but I was still able to get them to school in plenty of time (they pretended to be embarrassed when the sonic boom went off, “Oh dad…”). The way we preceded each of Bobby’s Little League games with a flyover (in retrospect, we should have warned the other teams, but Go Padres!).
Yes, it’s hard to accept that, when it comes to the F-22, all I’ll have left are these memories. But every American has to do his part, and I’m doing mine by laying down this weapon. I know the NRA might not like it. And some of the guys in my mountain militia group will see my decision as the beginning of a slippery slope: Today, I’m handing over my F-22. Tomorrow, maybe it’s my ship to shore Tomahawk missiles or my refurbished Mother of all Bombs Bunker Buster. But that’s not what this is about. It’s about me giving up this one weapon, and it’s worth it if it can save a single life (or in the case of my F-22, a hundred or so lives per missile).
And don’t worry about Bobby’s Little League team. They’re gonna get such a kick out of the nuclear sub ride, they won’t even remember the old F-22.
]]>That’s why I’m giving up my F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet.
This wasn’t an easy decision to make. The F-22 has been an integral part of my life since I first realized that the top-notch avionics and superior performance of this stealthy fighter offered me exactly the maneuverability and flexibility I need to defend my property and protect my family. I’ve slept well knowing that I had the air superiority to defend my household against just about any intruder. And, contrary to stereotypes, I almost never have to fire one of the F-22’s missiles in anger. Often, the conflict resolves itself the second I start her up.
But this isn’t just about me and the sport I love sharing with my kids (you may not care if your daughter can’t hit the broadside of a barn with her weapon, but I do, and mine has done so countless times). It’s not just about the calm that’s been brought to my community (for example, my neighbor hasn’t complained about my dog barking a single time since he first saw me pulling the F-22 into my driveway). And it’s not just about the way my wife looks at me like I’m someone she can depend on (she used to complain that I made mountains out of molehills, but since I bought the Raptor, she’s seen me do the opposite on numerous occasions).
Yes, giving up my F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet will be a sacrifice. And the emotional loss will be pronounced, especially that first time I go out to my backyard hangar and see my F-117 Nighthawk, my F-16 Falcon, my MIG-29, the two M18 Hellcat tanks, my swarm of armed drones, and the dozen camouflaged AI-fortified robot mercenaries I managed to order before the Silk Road shut down … but I won’t see the fifth-generation, single-seat, twin-engine, all-weather stealth tactical fighter aircraft that’s become my favorite. I know when I see the spot where the F-22 was parked, the memories will come flooding in… me sitting in the glass cockpit in front of the all-digital flight instruments acting out scenes from Dunkirk for my kids (they’re not allowed to see rated-R movies). That time when the twins missed the bus but I was still able to get them to school in plenty of time (they pretended to be embarrassed when the sonic boom went off, “Oh dad…”). The way we preceded each of Bobby’s Little League games with a flyover (in retrospect, we should have warned the other teams, but Go Padres!).
Yes, it’s hard to accept that, when it comes to the F-22, all I’ll have left are these memories. But every American has to do his part, and I’m doing mine by laying down this weapon. I know the NRA might not like it. And some of the guys in my mountain militia group will see my decision as the beginning of a slippery slope: Today, I’m handing over my F-22. Tomorrow, maybe it’s my ship to shore Tomahawk missiles or my refurbished Mother of all Bombs Bunker Buster. But that’s not what this is about. It’s about me giving up this one weapon, and it’s worth it if it can save a single life (or in the case of my F-22, a hundred or so lives per missile).
And don’t worry about Bobby’s Little League team. They’re gonna get such a kick out of the nuclear sub ride, they won’t even remember the old F-22.
]]>“I know you’ll have children. I just know it. I am certain of this fact due to my private portal into future-land that lies at the bottom of this alligator skin Birkin.”
“I have this app on my phone that tracks all my fluids. It sends out a dolphin honing sonar alarm when I’m ovulating and my husband takes the next submarine home to urgently spawn.”
“I knew this woman who had seven miscarriages, then she finally got pregnant, went into labor and lost the baby in the hospital. But don’t worry, she kept trying and now she has a healthy boy. It will happen eventually for you.”
“Hand on the universal remote. Weather Channel turned way up. No eye contact at all. Let me pour you a drink, darlin’. What’ll it be? "
“I know I have sleeves of tattoos, slurp pure corn syrup through a straw for breakfast, and maintain a raging social cocaine habit, but I would be happy to carry your child in my untainted uterus, even though you haven’t even asked me.”
“I’m sure if you just meditate, relax, and do some energetic tapping, you’ll get pregnant again when you aren’t even trying. Meanwhile, just enjoy this time to yourself. You’re so lucky to get to sleep in.”
“Maybe you’re not doing it right. Have you tried the position where you are both standing up like horses? It’s great especially if you want a boy next time.”
“Have you tried these 10,000 lab tests that cost your entire annual income plus secret shoe fund? Have you ever considered IVF?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll have another one soon.”
“If it’s meant to be, it will be. Everything happens for a reason (that only I know).”
]]>“I know you’ll have children. I just know it. I am certain of this fact due to my private portal into future-land that lies at the bottom of this alligator skin Birkin.”
“I have this app on my phone that tracks all my fluids. It sends out a dolphin honing sonar alarm when I’m ovulating and my husband takes the next submarine home to urgently spawn.”
“I knew this woman who had seven miscarriages, then she finally got pregnant, went into labor and lost the baby in the hospital. But don’t worry, she kept trying and now she has a healthy boy. It will happen eventually for you.”
“Hand on the universal remote. Weather Channel turned way up. No eye contact at all. Let me pour you a drink, darlin’. What’ll it be? "
“I know I have sleeves of tattoos, slurp pure corn syrup through a straw for breakfast, and maintain a raging social cocaine habit, but I would be happy to carry your child in my untainted uterus, even though you haven’t even asked me.”
“I’m sure if you just meditate, relax, and do some energetic tapping, you’ll get pregnant again when you aren’t even trying. Meanwhile, just enjoy this time to yourself. You’re so lucky to get to sleep in.”
“Maybe you’re not doing it right. Have you tried the position where you are both standing up like horses? It’s great especially if you want a boy next time.”
“Have you tried these 10,000 lab tests that cost your entire annual income plus secret shoe fund? Have you ever considered IVF?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll have another one soon.”
“If it’s meant to be, it will be. Everything happens for a reason (that only I know).”
]]>It will combine my passions for interior design, opiates, and surrounding myself with male writers constantly under the influence who expect me to wait on them hand and foot.
Think about it — millennials have resigned themselves to coworking spaces that try to mitigate the crushing weight of the gig economy with Scandinavian design elements and IPAs on tap. Punctuated with false cheer demanding you “respect the hustle” as if working four jobs is a point of pride rather than a necessity.
At my establishment, there will be no capitalist false gods, no margarita machines. No threats about our “working better together.” No “death before decaf” because that’s a reminder of our own fleeting mortality.
Instead, there will be luxe surroundings; a respite from your three-bedroom apartment in Bushwick with too many Tinder randoms coming through for one bathroom.
Picture plush, hedonistic seating. Velvet banquettes, floor pillows that don’t resemble bean bag chairs and a complete lack of Edison bulbs. Oriental rugs and silk tapestries. Hell, even fainting couches. It will be the literal soft landing while performing your Sisyphean feat of updating your employer’s social media platforms with “disruptive” content.
Plus, what better lubricant for networking than opiates? Fintech, media, and freelancers from all walks of life will come together and maintain lasting bonds that they’ll probably forget about within two hours, which is the optimal amount of time that finance and media should interact.
Most importantly, there will be no neon signs telling you to do what you love, because you don’t need a condescending fixture giving you an existential crisis. Instead, you’ll be lounging and smoking while working on your laptop, surrounded by other degenerates who also made the Forbes’ 30 under 30 list. Because you can’t throw a Bud Light at a sports bar in Manhattan without hitting one.
While my establishment won’t be able to help with your lack of health insurance or student loan woes, this safe space is meant to enable the digitally lost generation with the best they can get — an Instagrammable aesthetic.
Membership dues via cryptocurrency will not be accepted.
]]>It will combine my passions for interior design, opiates, and surrounding myself with male writers constantly under the influence who expect me to wait on them hand and foot.
Think about it — millennials have resigned themselves to coworking spaces that try to mitigate the crushing weight of the gig economy with Scandinavian design elements and IPAs on tap. Punctuated with false cheer demanding you “respect the hustle” as if working four jobs is a point of pride rather than a necessity.
At my establishment, there will be no capitalist false gods, no margarita machines. No threats about our “working better together.” No “death before decaf” because that’s a reminder of our own fleeting mortality.
Instead, there will be luxe surroundings; a respite from your three-bedroom apartment in Bushwick with too many Tinder randoms coming through for one bathroom.
Picture plush, hedonistic seating. Velvet banquettes, floor pillows that don’t resemble bean bag chairs and a complete lack of Edison bulbs. Oriental rugs and silk tapestries. Hell, even fainting couches. It will be the literal soft landing while performing your Sisyphean feat of updating your employer’s social media platforms with “disruptive” content.
Plus, what better lubricant for networking than opiates? Fintech, media, and freelancers from all walks of life will come together and maintain lasting bonds that they’ll probably forget about within two hours, which is the optimal amount of time that finance and media should interact.
Most importantly, there will be no neon signs telling you to do what you love, because you don’t need a condescending fixture giving you an existential crisis. Instead, you’ll be lounging and smoking while working on your laptop, surrounded by other degenerates who also made the Forbes’ 30 under 30 list. Because you can’t throw a Bud Light at a sports bar in Manhattan without hitting one.
While my establishment won’t be able to help with your lack of health insurance or student loan woes, this safe space is meant to enable the digitally lost generation with the best they can get — an Instagrammable aesthetic.
Membership dues via cryptocurrency will not be accepted.
]]>In light of the recent crossbow spree in the wheat fields, our benevolent ruler, Lord Sir Bevin ”The Pasty,” would like to set a few things straight. He has heard your indomitable groaning, but alas, there’s nothing he can do at the present moment to assuage your suffering. For you see, the problem lies not within his opulent throne room — nor in the country’s infallible Magna Carta — nay, the true culprit slumbers ‘neath these very thatched roofs.
The Devil’s plaything of which we reference ‘tis chess.
Verily our benevolent ruler has observed a direct correlation between the increase in crossbow-related deaths and children playing chess. It is undeniable that a youngster obsessed with “capturing queens” and “checking kings” is more prone to fits of violent rage than a child who exclusively plays with dirt or is afflicted with the plague.
How could they not be? Few experiences inflame the impressionable mind of a child more than viciously flinging a defeated piece from the board. If they play long enough, children begin to view everyone as nothing more than giant chess pieces, waiting to be knocked over. Truthfully, our greatest apothecaries have confirmed it so!
And, yes, though crossbows are a relatively new invention, we have had myriad forms of bows throughout the land for centuries. Without a strong bow, how would we protect ourselves from barbarians or, even worse, barbarians with crossbows of their own? Besides, Sir Bevin doesn’t remember any vicious slayings from when he was growing up. There may have been some, but surely not like now. The state of our fiefdom is much, much worse since the peasants began preoccupying their time with savage chess instead of sitting under the tutelage of the town priest who reads to them the Holy Bible in sacred Latin.
But indeed, ’tis simplistic to blame solely chess, for that would be the height of absurdity. The fault also lies with these bawdy tales our bards recite in the local taverns. Stories of intercourse and brutal, violent exploits are transforming your precious children into murderous fiends. And don’t even get the Sir Bevin started on that lute music you all can’t seem to get enough of. If sex made sound, though the king assures me it does not, it’d be that of a minstrel strumming away on his venereal lute.
To answer your question, no, Sir Bevin won’t outright ban chess per se. After all, a wise ruler considers economic factors, and chess boards are selling quite well. Chess is still the problem, but it should be up to the parents to regulate their offspring.
The point here is that the problem most certainly definitely ’tisn’t crossbows. ’Tis chess. And bawdy tales. Not crossbows!
]]>In light of the recent crossbow spree in the wheat fields, our benevolent ruler, Lord Sir Bevin ”The Pasty,” would like to set a few things straight. He has heard your indomitable groaning, but alas, there’s nothing he can do at the present moment to assuage your suffering. For you see, the problem lies not within his opulent throne room — nor in the country’s infallible Magna Carta — nay, the true culprit slumbers ‘neath these very thatched roofs.
The Devil’s plaything of which we reference ‘tis chess.
Verily our benevolent ruler has observed a direct correlation between the increase in crossbow-related deaths and children playing chess. It is undeniable that a youngster obsessed with “capturing queens” and “checking kings” is more prone to fits of violent rage than a child who exclusively plays with dirt or is afflicted with the plague.
How could they not be? Few experiences inflame the impressionable mind of a child more than viciously flinging a defeated piece from the board. If they play long enough, children begin to view everyone as nothing more than giant chess pieces, waiting to be knocked over. Truthfully, our greatest apothecaries have confirmed it so!
And, yes, though crossbows are a relatively new invention, we have had myriad forms of bows throughout the land for centuries. Without a strong bow, how would we protect ourselves from barbarians or, even worse, barbarians with crossbows of their own? Besides, Sir Bevin doesn’t remember any vicious slayings from when he was growing up. There may have been some, but surely not like now. The state of our fiefdom is much, much worse since the peasants began preoccupying their time with savage chess instead of sitting under the tutelage of the town priest who reads to them the Holy Bible in sacred Latin.
But indeed, ’tis simplistic to blame solely chess, for that would be the height of absurdity. The fault also lies with these bawdy tales our bards recite in the local taverns. Stories of intercourse and brutal, violent exploits are transforming your precious children into murderous fiends. And don’t even get the Sir Bevin started on that lute music you all can’t seem to get enough of. If sex made sound, though the king assures me it does not, it’d be that of a minstrel strumming away on his venereal lute.
To answer your question, no, Sir Bevin won’t outright ban chess per se. After all, a wise ruler considers economic factors, and chess boards are selling quite well. Chess is still the problem, but it should be up to the parents to regulate their offspring.
The point here is that the problem most certainly definitely ’tisn’t crossbows. ’Tis chess. And bawdy tales. Not crossbows!
]]>BILLY JOEL: Thank you, that’s called “Piano Man.” Now this next song—
JOHN, AT THE BAR: Whoa, hold on a second. What the hell was that?
BILLY JOEL: What do you mean?
JOHN, AT THE BAR: Well, Bill, you’re a friend of mine so I don’t want to sound rude, but that sounded kind of familiar. Don’t you think?
BILLY JOEL: I’m not sure what you’re getting at…
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: That’s about us!
BILLY JOEL: What? No, no, not at all.
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: You say our names in it, Bill!
WAITRESS: Consider yourself lucky, just “waitress” Billy? Really? We’ve worked here together for years. Do you really not know my name?
BILLY JOEL: What? Of course I know your name…you.
OLD MAN: Hold on, are you trying to say that I requested a song without giving you the name or melody? That I just expected you to guess, like a mind reader or something? That never happened, that’s slander! And who the hell calls it a tonic and gin?
BILLY JOEL: Listen, it is very, very loosely based on my experience performing at various different piano bars. Don’t read too much into it. Anyway, this next one is called—
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: So you meet a lot of real estate novelists named Paul, do you? They’re just scattered up and down Long Island, are they? Unbelievable.
BILLY JOEL: Aspects may be inspired by my time here, but that’s it. Very loosely inspired.
DAVY, U.S. NAVY: “Probably will be for life”? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
BILLY JOEL: Don’t take that personally Davy, I just had to make a rhyme; I swear I didn’t mean anything by it.
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: Oh you mean you needed something to rhyme with your jab about me not having a wife?
DAVY, U.S. NAVY: You could’ve said “and has a really great life,” I feel like you were being needlessly harsh there. And did anybody else feel like the entire song was about how the only thing that makes our pathetic lives worth living is listening to him play the piano?
BUSINESSMAN: My friends and I are here for a work function, we’re not here because we’re lonely, that’s really jumping to wild assumptions.
BILLY JOEL: Listen, everybody, I’m sorry if I crossed any lines; it really wasn’t my intention to—
DAVY, U.S. NAVY: When we asked you to sing us a song tonight, we were thinking more along the lines of “She’s Got a Way” or something.
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: I mean, you go on and on in the song about how you help us forget about our problems. What made you think we’d want to hear a song primarily about our problems? That’s just cruel.
JOHN, AT THE BAR: Now everybody gets to hear about my dream of being a movie star, which I told you in confidence! And why’d you go blabbing about me getting you free drinks, the manager is gonna have my head.
WAITRESS: My name is Pam, jackass!
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: Do we at least get some royalties out of this? I don’t remember signing away my life rights for your little song. What if I was going to use this as material for my novel?
BILLY JOEL: It’s just one song guys, there’s a whole album full of others. It’s not like I’ll be playing it constantly. Nobody will even hear it, I’m sure of it. It probably won’t be that popular, so don’t worry about it.
JOHN, AT THE BAR: Well, you may be right, Bill, and I may be crazy, but I think you better stay away for a little while, just so everybody can cool off a bit.
BILLY JOEL: Where am I supposed to go?
JOHN, AT THE BAR: I can get you a gig at this Italian Restaurant I know. My friends Brenda and Eddie told me about it.
]]>BILLY JOEL: Thank you, that’s called “Piano Man.” Now this next song—
JOHN, AT THE BAR: Whoa, hold on a second. What the hell was that?
BILLY JOEL: What do you mean?
JOHN, AT THE BAR: Well, Bill, you’re a friend of mine so I don’t want to sound rude, but that sounded kind of familiar. Don’t you think?
BILLY JOEL: I’m not sure what you’re getting at…
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: That’s about us!
BILLY JOEL: What? No, no, not at all.
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: You say our names in it, Bill!
WAITRESS: Consider yourself lucky, just “waitress” Billy? Really? We’ve worked here together for years. Do you really not know my name?
BILLY JOEL: What? Of course I know your name…you.
OLD MAN: Hold on, are you trying to say that I requested a song without giving you the name or melody? That I just expected you to guess, like a mind reader or something? That never happened, that’s slander! And who the hell calls it a tonic and gin?
BILLY JOEL: Listen, it is very, very loosely based on my experience performing at various different piano bars. Don’t read too much into it. Anyway, this next one is called—
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: So you meet a lot of real estate novelists named Paul, do you? They’re just scattered up and down Long Island, are they? Unbelievable.
BILLY JOEL: Aspects may be inspired by my time here, but that’s it. Very loosely inspired.
DAVY, U.S. NAVY: “Probably will be for life”? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
BILLY JOEL: Don’t take that personally Davy, I just had to make a rhyme; I swear I didn’t mean anything by it.
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: Oh you mean you needed something to rhyme with your jab about me not having a wife?
DAVY, U.S. NAVY: You could’ve said “and has a really great life,” I feel like you were being needlessly harsh there. And did anybody else feel like the entire song was about how the only thing that makes our pathetic lives worth living is listening to him play the piano?
BUSINESSMAN: My friends and I are here for a work function, we’re not here because we’re lonely, that’s really jumping to wild assumptions.
BILLY JOEL: Listen, everybody, I’m sorry if I crossed any lines; it really wasn’t my intention to—
DAVY, U.S. NAVY: When we asked you to sing us a song tonight, we were thinking more along the lines of “She’s Got a Way” or something.
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: I mean, you go on and on in the song about how you help us forget about our problems. What made you think we’d want to hear a song primarily about our problems? That’s just cruel.
JOHN, AT THE BAR: Now everybody gets to hear about my dream of being a movie star, which I told you in confidence! And why’d you go blabbing about me getting you free drinks, the manager is gonna have my head.
WAITRESS: My name is Pam, jackass!
PAUL, A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST: Do we at least get some royalties out of this? I don’t remember signing away my life rights for your little song. What if I was going to use this as material for my novel?
BILLY JOEL: It’s just one song guys, there’s a whole album full of others. It’s not like I’ll be playing it constantly. Nobody will even hear it, I’m sure of it. It probably won’t be that popular, so don’t worry about it.
JOHN, AT THE BAR: Well, you may be right, Bill, and I may be crazy, but I think you better stay away for a little while, just so everybody can cool off a bit.
BILLY JOEL: Where am I supposed to go?
JOHN, AT THE BAR: I can get you a gig at this Italian Restaurant I know. My friends Brenda and Eddie told me about it.
]]>When there’s a long wait for a table.
When there’s a long wait for a table and you made a reservation and had called to confirm it.
When you are not happy with your table and they can’t move you.
When your seat is right next to the bathroom or the kitchen. Or both.
When your table is wobbly.
When there’s no silverware on your table.
When they didn’t give you a menu right away.
When they don’t have what’s on the menu.
When they’re out of the entrée you usually order.
Not ever.
When other tables get their order before you, even though you ordered before they did.
When you want the food to arrive quickly because you have to catch a show or a flight.
When you want to pretend to be like Jack Nicholson Five Easy Pieces.
When your phone’s dying and they don’t have an iPhone charger.
When you don’t know anyone who works in the hospitality industry.
When you know someone who works in the hospitality industry.
Absolutely never.
When the food is cold.
When the food doesn’t look pretty.
When they give you water with ice and you asked for no ice.
When they gave you curly fries with parmesan instead of straight fries with parmesan.
When you drop your fork and ask for another one and they don’t get it right away.
Again: never.
When the check is late.
When the check is early.
When they forget to split the check and you asked them like four times.
When the check includes the tip because how dare they get to decide how much you should tip them?
When they don’t accept American Express or Discover.
When they don’t accept bitcoin.
When your dinner companion gets fed up with your entitled behavior and storms out of the restaurant.
Never ever ever ever ever.
]]>When there’s a long wait for a table.
When there’s a long wait for a table and you made a reservation and had called to confirm it.
When you are not happy with your table and they can’t move you.
When your seat is right next to the bathroom or the kitchen. Or both.
When your table is wobbly.
When there’s no silverware on your table.
When they didn’t give you a menu right away.
When they don’t have what’s on the menu.
When they’re out of the entrée you usually order.
Not ever.
When other tables get their order before you, even though you ordered before they did.
When you want the food to arrive quickly because you have to catch a show or a flight.
When you want to pretend to be like Jack Nicholson Five Easy Pieces.
When your phone’s dying and they don’t have an iPhone charger.
When you don’t know anyone who works in the hospitality industry.
When you know someone who works in the hospitality industry.
Absolutely never.
When the food is cold.
When the food doesn’t look pretty.
When they give you water with ice and you asked for no ice.
When they gave you curly fries with parmesan instead of straight fries with parmesan.
When you drop your fork and ask for another one and they don’t get it right away.
Again: never.
When the check is late.
When the check is early.
When they forget to split the check and you asked them like four times.
When the check includes the tip because how dare they get to decide how much you should tip them?
When they don’t accept American Express or Discover.
When they don’t accept bitcoin.
When your dinner companion gets fed up with your entitled behavior and storms out of the restaurant.
Never ever ever ever ever.
]]>But look out, Silicon Valley, because my son Carver is only 9-years-old and already disrupting a 27 person classroom.
Yep, you heard that right — nine.
He’s throwing mulch. He’s throwing fits. He’s smashing chairs and he’s sitting on pumpkins. He wore his swim trunks on the fall field trip. He wore his blue jeans into the pool.
He just doesn’t raise his hand — he raises both hands and tries to initiate the wave, even though no one thinks it’s funny anymore.
What was Mark Zuckerberg doing at age 9? What about Ellen Musk, huh? Jeff Beffos? Not even Travis Kaepernick sold his first Craigslist hamster until he was 11.
I wish I could say that, like most parents of gifted children, Carver’s knack for disruption struck me immediately. I mean he was quite the kicker in the womb, and at four-weeks old it did take six grown men to wrestle him down into the baptismal font.
But speaking frankly, my husband and I had always considered him a bit of a dud. It wasn’t until his teacher used the d-word that the pieces fell together. Now, whether he’s carving the word “PISS” into his desk or simply blasting the self-narrated George W. Bush audiobook during super-silent reading period, I know my pint-sized prodigy is disrupting Ms. Hamilton’s third-grade classroom with 100% of his heart, 100% of the time.
Some people try to tell me my son has a problem. They think a boy his age shouldn’t be bringing an axe to show-and-tell or Grubhubbing Bonefish Grill catering off his teacher’s PayPal account. They say a lot of things, and after a while it hurts. It gets under your skin. You find yourself questioning every single decision you’ve ever made as a parent: Did I read to him enough? Did I listen? Should I not have chugged exclusively sour apple snow cone juice during the pregnancy?
But at the end of the day, the naysayers are just jealous or bitter. My son is a shooting star in a summer sky. He’s pushing Dick Van Dyke off the rafters in an elementary production of Mary Poppins!
And my husband and me? We’re darned proud. So hold on to your wind-powered hats or what not, San Francisco. Cause in a few years my little Carver will be running the place. He’s already interrupting his female peers at a sixth-grade level.
]]>But look out, Silicon Valley, because my son Carver is only 9-years-old and already disrupting a 27 person classroom.
Yep, you heard that right — nine.
He’s throwing mulch. He’s throwing fits. He’s smashing chairs and he’s sitting on pumpkins. He wore his swim trunks on the fall field trip. He wore his blue jeans into the pool.
He just doesn’t raise his hand — he raises both hands and tries to initiate the wave, even though no one thinks it’s funny anymore.
What was Mark Zuckerberg doing at age 9? What about Ellen Musk, huh? Jeff Beffos? Not even Travis Kaepernick sold his first Craigslist hamster until he was 11.
I wish I could say that, like most parents of gifted children, Carver’s knack for disruption struck me immediately. I mean he was quite the kicker in the womb, and at four-weeks old it did take six grown men to wrestle him down into the baptismal font.
But speaking frankly, my husband and I had always considered him a bit of a dud. It wasn’t until his teacher used the d-word that the pieces fell together. Now, whether he’s carving the word “PISS” into his desk or simply blasting the self-narrated George W. Bush audiobook during super-silent reading period, I know my pint-sized prodigy is disrupting Ms. Hamilton’s third-grade classroom with 100% of his heart, 100% of the time.
Some people try to tell me my son has a problem. They think a boy his age shouldn’t be bringing an axe to show-and-tell or Grubhubbing Bonefish Grill catering off his teacher’s PayPal account. They say a lot of things, and after a while it hurts. It gets under your skin. You find yourself questioning every single decision you’ve ever made as a parent: Did I read to him enough? Did I listen? Should I not have chugged exclusively sour apple snow cone juice during the pregnancy?
But at the end of the day, the naysayers are just jealous or bitter. My son is a shooting star in a summer sky. He’s pushing Dick Van Dyke off the rafters in an elementary production of Mary Poppins!
And my husband and me? We’re darned proud. So hold on to your wind-powered hats or what not, San Francisco. Cause in a few years my little Carver will be running the place. He’s already interrupting his female peers at a sixth-grade level.
]]>You would be correct in saying we’ve done nothing to curb the number of sharks in the water of our extremely popular beach. In fact, we’ve tried to attract more sharks to our waters. We’ve thrown barrels of chum into the sea. We’ve stolen blood from local blood banks and dumped it into the water. We’ve even set up a beachside PA system to play a very specific sound frequency that sharks find sexually arousing. A shark-free beach is like target practice for hungry sharks. It’s what these bad sharks want and we refuse to give that to them. The solution to fewer shark attacks is definitely not fewer sharks in the water.
The common denominator among all of our beach’s shark attacks is certainly not that they were perpetrated by confused sharks enticed by chum and blood. No. The common denominator is that these shark attacks were committed by bad sharks. When you realize that, you can shed your prejudices and realize the only solution to a bad shark is a good shark. We’re going to arm about 20% of our lifeguards with the best and most powerful sharks. We don’t want all our lifeguards to have sharks, just certain highly trained lifeguards who can control their own shark like they’re goddamn Aquaman. These bad sharks won’t know what hit them.
In the event of a horrific shark attack, our lifeguards will now be armed and ready to offset the attack with a shark of their own. Sure, we already ask too much of our lifeguards. We ask them to work for little pay on an underfunded, overcrowded beach. They do so because they are committed to preserving the safety of beachgoers even though we make them pay for their own sunscreen and life preservers.
It’s time for these same underpaid lifeguards to take on the additional responsibility of wielding their own good shark as a weapon in the event of a deadly shark attack. This is the safest possible option. Our lifeguards will now be able to stop these attacks and save countless lives. They’ll also endanger a few lives as their personal sharks inevitably get scared and accidentally attack beachgoers because sharks are not meant to be used for personal safety. But, hey, that’s just the price of freedom.
Even though this approach will lead to even more sharks in our beach’s waters, it has nothing to do with the fact that our beach receives massive monthly donations from the shark lobby. The positions we hold on issues of shark-riddled waters are positions we’ve held since the day we opened this beach. We always accept the help of anyone who agrees with our agenda. These hungry sharks buy into our ideas, we don’t buy into theirs. Arming our lifeguards with sharks is a common-sense proposal, so don’t let the anti-shark left convince you otherwise.
]]>You would be correct in saying we’ve done nothing to curb the number of sharks in the water of our extremely popular beach. In fact, we’ve tried to attract more sharks to our waters. We’ve thrown barrels of chum into the sea. We’ve stolen blood from local blood banks and dumped it into the water. We’ve even set up a beachside PA system to play a very specific sound frequency that sharks find sexually arousing. A shark-free beach is like target practice for hungry sharks. It’s what these bad sharks want and we refuse to give that to them. The solution to fewer shark attacks is definitely not fewer sharks in the water.
The common denominator among all of our beach’s shark attacks is certainly not that they were perpetrated by confused sharks enticed by chum and blood. No. The common denominator is that these shark attacks were committed by bad sharks. When you realize that, you can shed your prejudices and realize the only solution to a bad shark is a good shark. We’re going to arm about 20% of our lifeguards with the best and most powerful sharks. We don’t want all our lifeguards to have sharks, just certain highly trained lifeguards who can control their own shark like they’re goddamn Aquaman. These bad sharks won’t know what hit them.
In the event of a horrific shark attack, our lifeguards will now be armed and ready to offset the attack with a shark of their own. Sure, we already ask too much of our lifeguards. We ask them to work for little pay on an underfunded, overcrowded beach. They do so because they are committed to preserving the safety of beachgoers even though we make them pay for their own sunscreen and life preservers.
It’s time for these same underpaid lifeguards to take on the additional responsibility of wielding their own good shark as a weapon in the event of a deadly shark attack. This is the safest possible option. Our lifeguards will now be able to stop these attacks and save countless lives. They’ll also endanger a few lives as their personal sharks inevitably get scared and accidentally attack beachgoers because sharks are not meant to be used for personal safety. But, hey, that’s just the price of freedom.
Even though this approach will lead to even more sharks in our beach’s waters, it has nothing to do with the fact that our beach receives massive monthly donations from the shark lobby. The positions we hold on issues of shark-riddled waters are positions we’ve held since the day we opened this beach. We always accept the help of anyone who agrees with our agenda. These hungry sharks buy into our ideas, we don’t buy into theirs. Arming our lifeguards with sharks is a common-sense proposal, so don’t let the anti-shark left convince you otherwise.
]]>2. Break the bongos, find a particularly pointy piece of wood, and stab the upstairs neighbors. While this method is on the obvious side, one cannot expect the sort of creativity it would take to hypnotize them into stabbing themselves at 3 AM. One must consider the circumstances at hand.
3. There is a poetic beauty in fatally muffling these meddlesome noisemakers who don’t have the decency to play someone else’s practiced and processed, commercially digestible music. Remove the skins from the heads of the bongos, and suffocate your neighbors.
4. For these posturing pseudo-beatniks, a variation on the cement shoe and Chicago overcoat method gives a period-appropriate nod to your pretentious poseurs. Knock your upstairs neighbor unconscious with the bongos, slouch the limp body in the standard-issue residence furniture that seems incredibly suited to short people, despite the fact most people have hit their growth spurt by 18, place the two feet in each upside-down bongo, cement into place, and, once firm, toss the neighbour into the Bow River, or Elbow River, as you prefer.
5. Advertise via a Facebook event that their room is hosting a drumming gathering with Free Craft Beer! Leave your phone number as the contact, since the buzzer only sometimes works in your building, and buzz up anyone interested. When the crowd finds out there is no free beer to lull the ache of the bongo playing, they will turn on the players.
6. Ah, garroting. An incredibly popular form of street murder through the 18th and 19th centuries and a method that deserves a comeback. As this was originally executed by choking the offender with a piano wire, this is only achievable with a more traditional bongo, where twine or cord is used to add tension to the skin of the drum.
7. Thumb screws? Thumb screws! Remove the lugs, or hooks as you may prefer to call them, which are the metal, mechanical replacements for a twine tension system. Affix the bongo bashers to an uncomfortable dining chair, which comes with any standard issue rez room with furniture designed to not be sex-compatible, and use half-bongos to cuff the arms to the desk, securing them with duct tape, or drilling them onto the particle board dining table if you wish to see a secure closure. Proceed with the thumb screws.
8. Make them eat the bongos. Alright, so this one might or might not kill them, but imagine the immense pleasure of knowing that they will have stomach splinters, which could lead to tears in the stomach lining, infection, and death.
9. Skin and stretch their hides out over the drums so you can have the pleasure of beating them whenever you please.
10. Disassemble the bongos, and use the wood as kindling to begin building a fire around a signpost, find some twine, and use the lug hooks to anchor the twine to the ground. They have been perpetually half-baked on stanky, low-quality weed that they have diffused without having the good manners to share, so use this opportunity to finish the job.
11. With a sledgehammer, detach the two bongos from their center block, and turn the hemba, the larger of the two drums, on the floor. Place the neck of one upstairs neighbor on the hemba, place the macho over the neck, and sledgehammer the smaller drum into the larger one, severing the head.
12. Wait for them to die from the built-up pressure from not getting laid. This should only take a few months at most: as indicated by their heart-murmur-spasmodic palming, flat-palmed smacking, and fingering pianotage, that they do not have the crescendoing, rhythmic capacity to keep a lover, any lover, ever.
]]>2. Break the bongos, find a particularly pointy piece of wood, and stab the upstairs neighbors. While this method is on the obvious side, one cannot expect the sort of creativity it would take to hypnotize them into stabbing themselves at 3 AM. One must consider the circumstances at hand.
3. There is a poetic beauty in fatally muffling these meddlesome noisemakers who don’t have the decency to play someone else’s practiced and processed, commercially digestible music. Remove the skins from the heads of the bongos, and suffocate your neighbors.
4. For these posturing pseudo-beatniks, a variation on the cement shoe and Chicago overcoat method gives a period-appropriate nod to your pretentious poseurs. Knock your upstairs neighbor unconscious with the bongos, slouch the limp body in the standard-issue residence furniture that seems incredibly suited to short people, despite the fact most people have hit their growth spurt by 18, place the two feet in each upside-down bongo, cement into place, and, once firm, toss the neighbour into the Bow River, or Elbow River, as you prefer.
5. Advertise via a Facebook event that their room is hosting a drumming gathering with Free Craft Beer! Leave your phone number as the contact, since the buzzer only sometimes works in your building, and buzz up anyone interested. When the crowd finds out there is no free beer to lull the ache of the bongo playing, they will turn on the players.
6. Ah, garroting. An incredibly popular form of street murder through the 18th and 19th centuries and a method that deserves a comeback. As this was originally executed by choking the offender with a piano wire, this is only achievable with a more traditional bongo, where twine or cord is used to add tension to the skin of the drum.
7. Thumb screws? Thumb screws! Remove the lugs, or hooks as you may prefer to call them, which are the metal, mechanical replacements for a twine tension system. Affix the bongo bashers to an uncomfortable dining chair, which comes with any standard issue rez room with furniture designed to not be sex-compatible, and use half-bongos to cuff the arms to the desk, securing them with duct tape, or drilling them onto the particle board dining table if you wish to see a secure closure. Proceed with the thumb screws.
8. Make them eat the bongos. Alright, so this one might or might not kill them, but imagine the immense pleasure of knowing that they will have stomach splinters, which could lead to tears in the stomach lining, infection, and death.
9. Skin and stretch their hides out over the drums so you can have the pleasure of beating them whenever you please.
10. Disassemble the bongos, and use the wood as kindling to begin building a fire around a signpost, find some twine, and use the lug hooks to anchor the twine to the ground. They have been perpetually half-baked on stanky, low-quality weed that they have diffused without having the good manners to share, so use this opportunity to finish the job.
11. With a sledgehammer, detach the two bongos from their center block, and turn the hemba, the larger of the two drums, on the floor. Place the neck of one upstairs neighbor on the hemba, place the macho over the neck, and sledgehammer the smaller drum into the larger one, severing the head.
12. Wait for them to die from the built-up pressure from not getting laid. This should only take a few months at most: as indicated by their heart-murmur-spasmodic palming, flat-palmed smacking, and fingering pianotage, that they do not have the crescendoing, rhythmic capacity to keep a lover, any lover, ever.
]]>Sounds kind of nuts, right? I brought this on myself. A portal to hell opened up in my living room the second I hit save on the final version of my most recent book: How to Self-Publish a Book for People Who want to Self-Publish a Book About Self-Publishing Books for People That Want to Self-Publish Books.
Look, I knew this would catch up to me eventually. Things have been pretty weird ever since I released my first work: How to Write Books for Money About Writing Books for Money to Sell to People Who Want to Write Books for Money About Writing Books to Sell to People in Ten Minutes a Day for Two Weeks.
Everyone wants to write a book. I knew I was a bit like Satan, capitalizing off folks’ dreams while making a hearty profit. In fact, the whole idea for my book series came to me in the form of a demon while I recovered from dehydration after a week-long bout with the flu. Best hallucination I’ve ever had.
I had to make a change at the time. My company, Cash Stuffed Envelope Bonanza, was on the verge of bankruptcy. I’d started my career on a noble path, running advertisements in local newspapers for how to make $20 an hour or more stuffing envelopes. The secret there, send customers a template to run adds having people send you $20 to learn how to make $20 an hour stuffing envelopes. All you need is a few thousand suckers (people) to respond over the course of a year. Genius.
The internet ruined that gig but opened up this new opportunity. I’ve done well as a self-publishing maven. I have it on good authority that thirty of the top five million Amazon Kindle-only authors have read one or more of my works. I’m proud of the future best-selling authors I’ve created. I’m thankful for you and your aspiring writers’ meetup crew for purchasing my books. I’ve sold dozens if not hundreds of each edition — all through my own advertising and publicity efforts.
My blog gets twenty million unique visitors a month. My content is varied, ranging from topics like the “Five Steps It Takes to Write a Blog Post On the Five Steps to Writing a Blog Post,” to my most popular post: “How to Become an Author by Writing.” I’ve translated that piece into Twenty different languages, including English Braille.
I really fucked up. A snake with a dragon head is spiraling its way out of the portal. This won’t end well.
I hope I can repent. This is my last book on the topic of self-publishing. I’m switching genres to the more lucrative self-help market. I’ve already completed the first draft of my next book, Waking up in the Morning: A Great Way to Start a Productive Day. Do you think that will get me out of this bind?
This is some tearing at the seams of the universe type shit. A kraken has escaped from my apartment. It was carrying seven print-on-demand copies of my books in each of its tentacles. Have I mentioned you can buy hard copies of my books through my website? Of course, I offer a discount on bulk orders.
I’m going to need to sign off. I’m being chased by a man whose body is actually composed of Africanized honeybees. While I run, I’d like to remind you to enter your email below to sign up for my daily newsletter of tips for getting people to sign up for your daily newsletter of tips for getting people to sign up for daily newsletters.
Off to hell I go!
]]>Sounds kind of nuts, right? I brought this on myself. A portal to hell opened up in my living room the second I hit save on the final version of my most recent book: How to Self-Publish a Book for People Who want to Self-Publish a Book About Self-Publishing Books for People That Want to Self-Publish Books.
Look, I knew this would catch up to me eventually. Things have been pretty weird ever since I released my first work: How to Write Books for Money About Writing Books for Money to Sell to People Who Want to Write Books for Money About Writing Books to Sell to People in Ten Minutes a Day for Two Weeks.
Everyone wants to write a book. I knew I was a bit like Satan, capitalizing off folks’ dreams while making a hearty profit. In fact, the whole idea for my book series came to me in the form of a demon while I recovered from dehydration after a week-long bout with the flu. Best hallucination I’ve ever had.
I had to make a change at the time. My company, Cash Stuffed Envelope Bonanza, was on the verge of bankruptcy. I’d started my career on a noble path, running advertisements in local newspapers for how to make $20 an hour or more stuffing envelopes. The secret there, send customers a template to run adds having people send you $20 to learn how to make $20 an hour stuffing envelopes. All you need is a few thousand suckers (people) to respond over the course of a year. Genius.
The internet ruined that gig but opened up this new opportunity. I’ve done well as a self-publishing maven. I have it on good authority that thirty of the top five million Amazon Kindle-only authors have read one or more of my works. I’m proud of the future best-selling authors I’ve created. I’m thankful for you and your aspiring writers’ meetup crew for purchasing my books. I’ve sold dozens if not hundreds of each edition — all through my own advertising and publicity efforts.
My blog gets twenty million unique visitors a month. My content is varied, ranging from topics like the “Five Steps It Takes to Write a Blog Post On the Five Steps to Writing a Blog Post,” to my most popular post: “How to Become an Author by Writing.” I’ve translated that piece into Twenty different languages, including English Braille.
I really fucked up. A snake with a dragon head is spiraling its way out of the portal. This won’t end well.
I hope I can repent. This is my last book on the topic of self-publishing. I’m switching genres to the more lucrative self-help market. I’ve already completed the first draft of my next book, Waking up in the Morning: A Great Way to Start a Productive Day. Do you think that will get me out of this bind?
This is some tearing at the seams of the universe type shit. A kraken has escaped from my apartment. It was carrying seven print-on-demand copies of my books in each of its tentacles. Have I mentioned you can buy hard copies of my books through my website? Of course, I offer a discount on bulk orders.
I’m going to need to sign off. I’m being chased by a man whose body is actually composed of Africanized honeybees. While I run, I’d like to remind you to enter your email below to sign up for my daily newsletter of tips for getting people to sign up for your daily newsletter of tips for getting people to sign up for daily newsletters.
Off to hell I go!
]]>Mrs. Van Morgan. Third Grade. White-haired, spectacles, deliberate in movements. When angered, which was frequently, would call students “ruffians” and “hooligans” and pull on their earlobes. Give her the AK-47.
Sister Mary Immaculata. Fourth grade. Gentle soul who encouraged love of reading. Wan smile. Slip her one of the handguns marketed to women, a .38 Special or Smith & Wesson 9MM.
Mr. Donatelli. Gym teacher. Balding, big calves, easily provoked. Excelled at hurling volleyballs at heads of inattentive students. Accurate at range of 10-15 yards. Really didn’t need a gun.
Sister Teresa Regina. Fifth grade. Always dressed in cowl and full black habit. Talk about concealed carry! Could easily pack a Glock under that habit. Maybe another strapped to her ankle.
Mrs. Masterson-Davis. Eighth grade. Brisk, organized, no-nonsense. Favored large handbags ideal for carrying a semi-automatic handgun, the Sig Sauer P938 or Ruger Lightweight Compact Pistol. Handbag pockets ideal for storing extra ammunition.
Sister Saint Gerard. Roamed the hallways. Big, assertive, terrifying. Once threw a student into a glass door. Give her the bazooka and stand clear.
Brother William. Ninth grade math teacher. Lithe, sharp-eyed, quick-moving. Make a good sniper. Position him near the cafeteria with an M-16. Night goggles and percussion grenades optional.
Mr. Cameron. Tenth-grade Spanish teacher. Excitable, adenoidal, unpredictable. Give him the — oh, forget it. Really. It would not end well.
Mr. Delany. Eleventh grade English teacher. Ruddy-faced, watery blue eyes, thatch of brown hair, intermittently combed. Smelled of cigarettes. Fond of reciting Yeats and Neruda in class. Casual attitude toward grades. Subject of many rumors, most involving excessive alcohol consumption. Once stepped in when another teacher was berating a student in the hallway. Separated them. Spoke kindly to the student. Give him the AR-15. He’ll know what to do with it.
]]>Mrs. Van Morgan. Third Grade. White-haired, spectacles, deliberate in movements. When angered, which was frequently, would call students “ruffians” and “hooligans” and pull on their earlobes. Give her the AK-47.
Sister Mary Immaculata. Fourth grade. Gentle soul who encouraged love of reading. Wan smile. Slip her one of the handguns marketed to women, a .38 Special or Smith & Wesson 9MM.
Mr. Donatelli. Gym teacher. Balding, big calves, easily provoked. Excelled at hurling volleyballs at heads of inattentive students. Accurate at range of 10-15 yards. Really didn’t need a gun.
Sister Teresa Regina. Fifth grade. Always dressed in cowl and full black habit. Talk about concealed carry! Could easily pack a Glock under that habit. Maybe another strapped to her ankle.
Mrs. Masterson-Davis. Eighth grade. Brisk, organized, no-nonsense. Favored large handbags ideal for carrying a semi-automatic handgun, the Sig Sauer P938 or Ruger Lightweight Compact Pistol. Handbag pockets ideal for storing extra ammunition.
Sister Saint Gerard. Roamed the hallways. Big, assertive, terrifying. Once threw a student into a glass door. Give her the bazooka and stand clear.
Brother William. Ninth grade math teacher. Lithe, sharp-eyed, quick-moving. Make a good sniper. Position him near the cafeteria with an M-16. Night goggles and percussion grenades optional.
Mr. Cameron. Tenth-grade Spanish teacher. Excitable, adenoidal, unpredictable. Give him the — oh, forget it. Really. It would not end well.
Mr. Delany. Eleventh grade English teacher. Ruddy-faced, watery blue eyes, thatch of brown hair, intermittently combed. Smelled of cigarettes. Fond of reciting Yeats and Neruda in class. Casual attitude toward grades. Subject of many rumors, most involving excessive alcohol consumption. Once stepped in when another teacher was berating a student in the hallway. Separated them. Spoke kindly to the student. Give him the AR-15. He’ll know what to do with it.
]]>Mary Anne and the Stigma of Anxiety
Will Mary Anne lose clients when they find out she’s on Xanax?
Claudia and the Case of Cultural Appropriation
Cokie Mason dressed as what for Halloween??
Dawn and the Factory Farm Dilemma
Dawn wants to save the animals — but what about all the migrant workers?
Stacey’s All-Girl’s STEM Club
Stacey’s not so boy-crazy anymore…
Jessi Explains Intersectional Feminism
Jessi may be a junior member but no way she’s putting a Taylor Swift CD in her Kid Kit.
Mallory and the All-White Writer’s Panel
Mallory makes it to AWP — but where are all the POC?
Abby Punches a Nazi
Will the video go viral?
Logan Listens
“Not All Men” — not in the BSC!
Mary Anne and the Stigma of Anxiety
Will Mary Anne lose clients when they find out she’s on Xanax?
Claudia and the Case of Cultural Appropriation
Cokie Mason dressed as what for Halloween??
Dawn and the Factory Farm Dilemma
Dawn wants to save the animals — but what about all the migrant workers?
Stacey’s All-Girl’s STEM Club
Stacey’s not so boy-crazy anymore…
Jessi Explains Intersectional Feminism
Jessi may be a junior member but no way she’s putting a Taylor Swift CD in her Kid Kit.
Mallory and the All-White Writer’s Panel
Mallory makes it to AWP — but where are all the POC?
Abby Punches a Nazi
Will the video go viral?
Logan Listens
“Not All Men” — not in the BSC!
I wake to the sound of old-school hip-hop playing faintly down in the street. Also jazz, from the apartment next door. The woman who lives above me is picking at her banjo. Someone down the block is a playing a classic Beatles tune. Plus there’s like four hundred cars honking their horns outside, and my roommates are having a screaming argument over which one of them stole the other’s idea for a podcast. I drink a LaCroix and head to yoga.
During yoga, I offer this very famous literary author named Jonathan an adjustment on his Warrior Pose and during the mid-class LaCroix break he asks me if I’ve ever read anything by Philip Roth. I say that I have. Then he asks me if I’d be interested in reading a draft of an essay he’s writing. I tell him I’m in a rush, but we exchange numbers. I make a mental note to check out how his latest release is selling in paperback before deciding whether I’ll call him back.
For breakfast, I swing by a new eatery called Nudge and pick up a LaCroix and a banana that’s been held over a skillet where bacon is frying for two minutes. Delicious.
I accidentally make eye contact with a guy on the train and he reads me a scene from his pilot script about a successful actor forced to return to the small town where he grew up when his father gets sick. When he’s done he asks me if I found the dialogue believable and I say I did. Then a man standing nearby yells to the whole train, “Hey, there’s a guy giving feedback down here!” and suddenly every man on the train is shouting scenes from their pilot scripts at me. They’re all about either successful actors or comedians returning to the small towns where they grew up when their father’s get sick. It’s all very cliché and makes me feel pretty good about the pilot script I’ve been working on, where a successful author returns to a mid-sized suburb to confront his mother.
I arrive at Notch HQ in time to begin the workday. Notch is what marketing would be if marketing took classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade and ate more pineapple. There are vases of orchids all over the place, also vintage pinball machines and Betty Page pin-up posters with Che Guevara heads pasted over her breasts. During the morning staff meeting, a Croatian woman wearing a camouflage jacket over a tiger print bikini reads a found poem made up of death row inmate’s last words. When she’s done the CEO, Bryce, asks everyone to pitch him nine ideas on how the imagery in the poem can be translated into GIFs that Lorde can project onstage during her summer tour.
Today is my performance review. Bryce comes into my office and maintains direct eye contact while telling me an extremely graphic story about having sex with his secretary’s aunt at a funeral. When he’s done he says I cringed seven times while he was talking, and asks if I think I can get down to three cringes by my next review in six months. Notch was a news magazine when I started working here. I have a degree in journalism from Emerson. I also have eighty thousand dollars in student loan debt. I tell Bryce I’ll do my best, and crack another LaCroix as soon as he walks out of my office.
I spend the rest of my day teaching a Korean rapper American slang terms for marijuana and researching who owns the rights to Casper the Friendly Ghost. For dinner, I decide to go by Truancy for a beef spindle. Everyone in Brooklyn is going crazy for beef spindles, and the ones at Truancy are the best, even if their claim to have invented them is total bull, since everyone knows that beef spindles occurred to Maggie Gyllenhaal in a dream on the set of The Deuce.
Walking into Truancy I bump into that author, Jonathan. He asks if I’m still interested in reading a draft of his essay. I tell him I’ll call him when I have time. Before he walks away he asks me if I think gentrification is bad. I say I do. Then he asks me if I know who François Truffaut is. I say I do. He says he had a feeling I would, and winks.
The clerk at Truancy says they’re all out of LaCroix and I suddenly become aware that within the walls and beneath the streets of this city there are seething legions of vermin all tearing at one another in an endless, seething orgy of unimaginable horror, and that really the city is theirs and theirs alone, and that nothing I accomplish can save me from one day dying and having my corpse lowered down into their domain, but then the clerk tells me that they have LaCroix at the bodega next door, so I head over there.
Walking out of the bodega, I stumble into a clash between feuding improv teams. A guy in a flannel shirt says to another guy in a flannel shirt, “Here’s a suggestion: Go fuck yourself.” That guy starts writhing around, pretending to fuck himself, and then a third guy in a flannel shirt criticizes his decision to contort his body around and says that if he were working from the top of his intelligence he would have simply mimed masturbating. Then they all start arguing about what ‘working from the top of your intelligence’ means. As I watch, something strikes my head from behind, and everything goes black…
Briefly regain consciousness, tied and gagged in the trunk of a moving car. My head swims, and for a moment I almost grasp what “working from the top of your intelligence” means before passing out again.
Wake up tied to a chair in a cheap hotel room. Jonathan is watching me from the bed. He asks if I was ever planning to read his essay and I admit that I probably wasn’t. He starts crying. “People think I’ve got it made,” he says. “Endowment money. These cool frames for my glasses. Blurbs from Kakutani. But sometimes I feel like, within the walls and beneath the streets of this city there are seething legions of vermin all tearing at one another in an endless, seething orgy of unimaginable horror, and that really the city is…”
I stop him. “Jonathan,” I say, “I’d love to read the essay.” Jonathan smiles.
]]>I wake to the sound of old-school hip-hop playing faintly down in the street. Also jazz, from the apartment next door. The woman who lives above me is picking at her banjo. Someone down the block is a playing a classic Beatles tune. Plus there’s like four hundred cars honking their horns outside, and my roommates are having a screaming argument over which one of them stole the other’s idea for a podcast. I drink a LaCroix and head to yoga.
During yoga, I offer this very famous literary author named Jonathan an adjustment on his Warrior Pose and during the mid-class LaCroix break he asks me if I’ve ever read anything by Philip Roth. I say that I have. Then he asks me if I’d be interested in reading a draft of an essay he’s writing. I tell him I’m in a rush, but we exchange numbers. I make a mental note to check out how his latest release is selling in paperback before deciding whether I’ll call him back.
For breakfast, I swing by a new eatery called Nudge and pick up a LaCroix and a banana that’s been held over a skillet where bacon is frying for two minutes. Delicious.
I accidentally make eye contact with a guy on the train and he reads me a scene from his pilot script about a successful actor forced to return to the small town where he grew up when his father gets sick. When he’s done he asks me if I found the dialogue believable and I say I did. Then a man standing nearby yells to the whole train, “Hey, there’s a guy giving feedback down here!” and suddenly every man on the train is shouting scenes from their pilot scripts at me. They’re all about either successful actors or comedians returning to the small towns where they grew up when their father’s get sick. It’s all very cliché and makes me feel pretty good about the pilot script I’ve been working on, where a successful author returns to a mid-sized suburb to confront his mother.
I arrive at Notch HQ in time to begin the workday. Notch is what marketing would be if marketing took classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade and ate more pineapple. There are vases of orchids all over the place, also vintage pinball machines and Betty Page pin-up posters with Che Guevara heads pasted over her breasts. During the morning staff meeting, a Croatian woman wearing a camouflage jacket over a tiger print bikini reads a found poem made up of death row inmate’s last words. When she’s done the CEO, Bryce, asks everyone to pitch him nine ideas on how the imagery in the poem can be translated into GIFs that Lorde can project onstage during her summer tour.
Today is my performance review. Bryce comes into my office and maintains direct eye contact while telling me an extremely graphic story about having sex with his secretary’s aunt at a funeral. When he’s done he says I cringed seven times while he was talking, and asks if I think I can get down to three cringes by my next review in six months. Notch was a news magazine when I started working here. I have a degree in journalism from Emerson. I also have eighty thousand dollars in student loan debt. I tell Bryce I’ll do my best, and crack another LaCroix as soon as he walks out of my office.
I spend the rest of my day teaching a Korean rapper American slang terms for marijuana and researching who owns the rights to Casper the Friendly Ghost. For dinner, I decide to go by Truancy for a beef spindle. Everyone in Brooklyn is going crazy for beef spindles, and the ones at Truancy are the best, even if their claim to have invented them is total bull, since everyone knows that beef spindles occurred to Maggie Gyllenhaal in a dream on the set of The Deuce.
Walking into Truancy I bump into that author, Jonathan. He asks if I’m still interested in reading a draft of his essay. I tell him I’ll call him when I have time. Before he walks away he asks me if I think gentrification is bad. I say I do. Then he asks me if I know who François Truffaut is. I say I do. He says he had a feeling I would, and winks.
The clerk at Truancy says they’re all out of LaCroix and I suddenly become aware that within the walls and beneath the streets of this city there are seething legions of vermin all tearing at one another in an endless, seething orgy of unimaginable horror, and that really the city is theirs and theirs alone, and that nothing I accomplish can save me from one day dying and having my corpse lowered down into their domain, but then the clerk tells me that they have LaCroix at the bodega next door, so I head over there.
Walking out of the bodega, I stumble into a clash between feuding improv teams. A guy in a flannel shirt says to another guy in a flannel shirt, “Here’s a suggestion: Go fuck yourself.” That guy starts writhing around, pretending to fuck himself, and then a third guy in a flannel shirt criticizes his decision to contort his body around and says that if he were working from the top of his intelligence he would have simply mimed masturbating. Then they all start arguing about what ‘working from the top of your intelligence’ means. As I watch, something strikes my head from behind, and everything goes black…
Briefly regain consciousness, tied and gagged in the trunk of a moving car. My head swims, and for a moment I almost grasp what “working from the top of your intelligence” means before passing out again.
Wake up tied to a chair in a cheap hotel room. Jonathan is watching me from the bed. He asks if I was ever planning to read his essay and I admit that I probably wasn’t. He starts crying. “People think I’ve got it made,” he says. “Endowment money. These cool frames for my glasses. Blurbs from Kakutani. But sometimes I feel like, within the walls and beneath the streets of this city there are seething legions of vermin all tearing at one another in an endless, seething orgy of unimaginable horror, and that really the city is…”
I stop him. “Jonathan,” I say, “I’d love to read the essay.” Jonathan smiles.
]]>It was about five years ago, and I was making props for a space-themed cocktail night at a local bar. Space girls, various incarnations of dolls’ heads with fishbowl helmets. I stood back as I completed the last one and realized that there were lots of body parts left over. The torsos weren’t especially compelling, but the discarded limbs definitely had possibilities.
I picked up a particularly chubby arm and amputated it from its headless torso with a steak knife. Too big for jewelry but it felt good in my hand. Depending on the angle, it might have been waving hello or going down for the third time. This I loved. But what to do with it? Then I looked down and saw my keys.
I’ve always had a lot of keys. I never throw them away. Some are cautionary tales of past relationships or bad employment, others are reminders of happy households or road trips in unpredictable cars long gone to the junkyard. Every now and again, when they get unwieldy, I edit them down to the ones currently in use and start over, leaving the decommissioned keys in a drawer to be rediscovered while looking for something else.
I had recently done one of those edits, so my key ring was pretty bare and my keys were not easy to find. The fat little arm was a perfect solution. I could have my ambiguous limb with me every day in a purposeful way. A utilitarian solution to a fanciful, sentimental, and aesthetic quandary.
It is a little large for a vintage evening bag, which is mildly annoying, and people do tend to look twice or ask questions. Disembodied limbs are disturbing for some folks. Not me, though. As long as her nail polish isn’t chipped, I’m good to go.
Key Ring Chronicles is a crowd-sourced project that explores the stories behind objects that people keep on their key rings. It was created and is overseen by Paul Lukas, who has kept a quarter with a hole drilled through it on his own key ring since 1987. Readers are encouraged to participate by sending photos and descriptions here.
]]>It was about five years ago, and I was making props for a space-themed cocktail night at a local bar. Space girls, various incarnations of dolls’ heads with fishbowl helmets. I stood back as I completed the last one and realized that there were lots of body parts left over. The torsos weren’t especially compelling, but the discarded limbs definitely had possibilities.
I picked up a particularly chubby arm and amputated it from its headless torso with a steak knife. Too big for jewelry but it felt good in my hand. Depending on the angle, it might have been waving hello or going down for the third time. This I loved. But what to do with it? Then I looked down and saw my keys.
I’ve always had a lot of keys. I never throw them away. Some are cautionary tales of past relationships or bad employment, others are reminders of happy households or road trips in unpredictable cars long gone to the junkyard. Every now and again, when they get unwieldy, I edit them down to the ones currently in use and start over, leaving the decommissioned keys in a drawer to be rediscovered while looking for something else.
I had recently done one of those edits, so my key ring was pretty bare and my keys were not easy to find. The fat little arm was a perfect solution. I could have my ambiguous limb with me every day in a purposeful way. A utilitarian solution to a fanciful, sentimental, and aesthetic quandary.
It is a little large for a vintage evening bag, which is mildly annoying, and people do tend to look twice or ask questions. Disembodied limbs are disturbing for some folks. Not me, though. As long as her nail polish isn’t chipped, I’m good to go.
Key Ring Chronicles is a crowd-sourced project that explores the stories behind objects that people keep on their key rings. It was created and is overseen by Paul Lukas, who has kept a quarter with a hole drilled through it on his own key ring since 1987. Readers are encouraged to participate by sending photos and descriptions here.
]]>Samantha “Sam” Baker wakes up on her 50th birthday. She reaches for the iPhone on the nightstand and immediately feels a tear in her rotator cuff. She heads into the bathroom to pluck the white chin hair that grew overnight.
Sam enters the kitchen, anticipating a special breakfast with her family. Instead, she finds her husband watching the latest Trump news on CNN, and her teenage daughter posing for a selfie while licking a can of Rockstar Energy Drink. “Oh, hi,” her husband finally says. “If you’re looking for the Pepcid AC, I took the last one. This fucking guy, am I right?”
Next, Sam goes to her Barre Method class and pays $25 to squeeze her glutes next to her best friend Randy. During class, Sam texts Randy that she would definitely do it with Jake Ryan if she had the chance. “Jake Ryan the divorced dad who was convicted of embezzling from the youth soccer league?” Randy texts back. She includes three eggplant emojis.
“No, I’d do it with Jake Ryan the divorced dad who was busted for holding illegal poker games in his apartment complex,” Sam replies. “But he doesn’t even know I exist. Hey, do you have any IcyHot in your Kate Spade crossbody? My left hamstring is seizing.”
What Sam doesn’t know is that she accidentally sent the text to Jake Ryan whose number she has in her phone from that time they worked the dunk tank together at the school carnival.
While waiting in line at Starbucks, Jake gets the text and realizes Sam has the hots for him. Then he goes back to looking at 25-year-old massage therapists named Kayleigh on Tinder.
Later, Sam takes an Uber home after day drinking at a wine bar. The driver is a guy known as Farmer Ted because he grows medical marijuana and heirloom tomatoes under his deck. He asks her to go with him to a protest march later that night and she replies, "Gah! Is Trump all anyone can think about?”
At home, Sam sees she’s been kicked out of her bedroom because her husband rented it on Airbnb to a couple from Seattle who make bespoke wedding tuxes for pugs. Not only did her entire family miss her birthday, but now she has to sleep on the Crate and Barrel sectional she spent weeks deciding on with her decorator?
“I can’t believe it. They fucking forgot my birthday,” Sam sighs. Then she looks through the mail and realizes that the AARP sure didn’t.
The Seattle hipsters brought with them a foreign student named Long Duk Dong. Sam takes him to the anti-Trump march later that night and tells him, “I hope nobody yankies your wanky!” Later, Long Duk tweets from his @TheDonger account, “TFW your honky host is straight-up racist.”
At the march, Sam ogles Jake who’s waving a sign that says TINY HANDS HUGE ASSHOLE with his hot millennial hookup Karolina. Karolina is totally rocking her pink pussy hat, which makes Sam sad because it’s impossible for perimenopausal women to wear headgear without sweating to death.
Upset, Sam leaves the protest to cry in her Volvo. Farmer Ted finds her and captures it on Facebook Live. Then he asks for her Spanx to sell on eBay and she obliges. “I can’t believe I gave my Spanx to a geek,” she groans. “Now my FUPA will be totally visible through my Lululemon.”
Jake leaves the march with Karolina who’s throwing a pop-up hang at Jake’s ex-wife’s house while she’s out of town on a yoga retreat. After Jake becomes furious that Karolina’s friends don’t appreciate the ’80s on 8 channel on Sirius XM radio, he sends Sam a DM. Unfortunately, she doesn’t get it because her phone ran out of battery while she was tracking her teenage daughter’s trip to the frozen yogurt shop.
Hours later, Jake tries to make a deal with Farmer Ted: Sam’s Spanx in exchange for Jake’s hookup Karolina who is blackout drunk. Farmer Ted says, “Seriously, bro? Have you ever heard of a little thing called CONSENT? JFC it’s not 1986, you caveman,” and he drives Karolina to her mother’s house and doesn’t even charge her the Uber surge rate.
The next day is Sam’s daughter’s TEDx Talk about the struggle of white girl feminism, but she has her period and she’s also drugged up on whatever was in the vape sesh she just did with her friends, so the TEDx Talk is a disaster. After a moment of reflection, Sam’s family finally realizes they forgot her 50th birthday because they’ve been so distracted by the problems of Trump and social media. Sam doesn’t accept their apology, however, and says, “Whatever, losers. I bought my own present and it’s a trip to Paris by myself. Good luck trying to figure out how the dishwasher works.”
She bravely walks out of the TEDx talk only to see Jake Ryan waiting for her in the Porsche he leased after the divorce and now totally regrets because of the gas mileage and also he looks like a d-bag in it. He drives her to his apartment and presents her with a gluten and dairy-free birthday cake that is aflame with 50 candles. The moment before they throw it in the sink so the 50 candles don’t catch the curtains on fire, Jake smiles and tells Sam to make a wish.
Sam replies, "I’m 50 years old, motherfucker. I don’t have time for wishes.” Jake leans in for a kiss but she’s already on her way out the door to the airport.
]]>Samantha “Sam” Baker wakes up on her 50th birthday. She reaches for the iPhone on the nightstand and immediately feels a tear in her rotator cuff. She heads into the bathroom to pluck the white chin hair that grew overnight.
Sam enters the kitchen, anticipating a special breakfast with her family. Instead, she finds her husband watching the latest Trump news on CNN, and her teenage daughter posing for a selfie while licking a can of Rockstar Energy Drink. “Oh, hi,” her husband finally says. “If you’re looking for the Pepcid AC, I took the last one. This fucking guy, am I right?”
Next, Sam goes to her Barre Method class and pays $25 to squeeze her glutes next to her best friend Randy. During class, Sam texts Randy that she would definitely do it with Jake Ryan if she had the chance. “Jake Ryan the divorced dad who was convicted of embezzling from the youth soccer league?” Randy texts back. She includes three eggplant emojis.
“No, I’d do it with Jake Ryan the divorced dad who was busted for holding illegal poker games in his apartment complex,” Sam replies. “But he doesn’t even know I exist. Hey, do you have any IcyHot in your Kate Spade crossbody? My left hamstring is seizing.”
What Sam doesn’t know is that she accidentally sent the text to Jake Ryan whose number she has in her phone from that time they worked the dunk tank together at the school carnival.
While waiting in line at Starbucks, Jake gets the text and realizes Sam has the hots for him. Then he goes back to looking at 25-year-old massage therapists named Kayleigh on Tinder.
Later, Sam takes an Uber home after day drinking at a wine bar. The driver is a guy known as Farmer Ted because he grows medical marijuana and heirloom tomatoes under his deck. He asks her to go with him to a protest march later that night and she replies, "Gah! Is Trump all anyone can think about?”
At home, Sam sees she’s been kicked out of her bedroom because her husband rented it on Airbnb to a couple from Seattle who make bespoke wedding tuxes for pugs. Not only did her entire family miss her birthday, but now she has to sleep on the Crate and Barrel sectional she spent weeks deciding on with her decorator?
“I can’t believe it. They fucking forgot my birthday,” Sam sighs. Then she looks through the mail and realizes that the AARP sure didn’t.
The Seattle hipsters brought with them a foreign student named Long Duk Dong. Sam takes him to the anti-Trump march later that night and tells him, “I hope nobody yankies your wanky!” Later, Long Duk tweets from his @TheDonger account, “TFW your honky host is straight-up racist.”
At the march, Sam ogles Jake who’s waving a sign that says TINY HANDS HUGE ASSHOLE with his hot millennial hookup Karolina. Karolina is totally rocking her pink pussy hat, which makes Sam sad because it’s impossible for perimenopausal women to wear headgear without sweating to death.
Upset, Sam leaves the protest to cry in her Volvo. Farmer Ted finds her and captures it on Facebook Live. Then he asks for her Spanx to sell on eBay and she obliges. “I can’t believe I gave my Spanx to a geek,” she groans. “Now my FUPA will be totally visible through my Lululemon.”
Jake leaves the march with Karolina who’s throwing a pop-up hang at Jake’s ex-wife’s house while she’s out of town on a yoga retreat. After Jake becomes furious that Karolina’s friends don’t appreciate the ’80s on 8 channel on Sirius XM radio, he sends Sam a DM. Unfortunately, she doesn’t get it because her phone ran out of battery while she was tracking her teenage daughter’s trip to the frozen yogurt shop.
Hours later, Jake tries to make a deal with Farmer Ted: Sam’s Spanx in exchange for Jake’s hookup Karolina who is blackout drunk. Farmer Ted says, “Seriously, bro? Have you ever heard of a little thing called CONSENT? JFC it’s not 1986, you caveman,” and he drives Karolina to her mother’s house and doesn’t even charge her the Uber surge rate.
The next day is Sam’s daughter’s TEDx Talk about the struggle of white girl feminism, but she has her period and she’s also drugged up on whatever was in the vape sesh she just did with her friends, so the TEDx Talk is a disaster. After a moment of reflection, Sam’s family finally realizes they forgot her 50th birthday because they’ve been so distracted by the problems of Trump and social media. Sam doesn’t accept their apology, however, and says, “Whatever, losers. I bought my own present and it’s a trip to Paris by myself. Good luck trying to figure out how the dishwasher works.”
She bravely walks out of the TEDx talk only to see Jake Ryan waiting for her in the Porsche he leased after the divorce and now totally regrets because of the gas mileage and also he looks like a d-bag in it. He drives her to his apartment and presents her with a gluten and dairy-free birthday cake that is aflame with 50 candles. The moment before they throw it in the sink so the 50 candles don’t catch the curtains on fire, Jake smiles and tells Sam to make a wish.
Sam replies, "I’m 50 years old, motherfucker. I don’t have time for wishes.” Jake leans in for a kiss but she’s already on her way out the door to the airport.
]]>When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, my brother asked what I made of it, and I texted back “…not surprised.” A week later, when Artforum’s Knight Landesman joined the procession of firings, I signed a petition against sexual harassment in the art world titled “Not Surprised.” The slogan was derived from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms T-shirt series. A truism is a statement that offers nothing new because it restates the obvious. At a #MeToo rally outside a Trump hotel, writer Moira Donegan, reporting for the London Review of Books, noted a protestor’s sign, raised in defiance to our President: “DON’T NORMALISE ASSAULT.” “But,” Donegan writes, “#MeToo has shown that sexual assault is an entirely normal experience, an experience so common that the men who do it find it mundane.”
Because, or perhaps in spite, of this Donegan created a spreadsheet where women were invited to report, without qualification or duress, their experiences of assault in the media industry. That this opportunity is otherwise nonexistent partially explains the document’s virality. Within 12 hours, Donegan took the “Shitty Media Men” list offline. I never saw it, though I wish I had. The list’s existence triggered perennial rebuttals to women speaking for themselves and to each other about rape: that women might or should prefer to report assault through more “legitimate” channels despite the fact that what these channels often investigate are the possible faults of women’s accounts rather than their actual substance. Or that women do not or cannot differentiate accusations of physical assault from instances of insinuation and coercion. Or that false accusations are anywhere near as common as rape is. After Donegan was alerted that writer Katie Roiphe was planning to out her in an essay to be published in the March issue of Harper’s, she penned her own. Despite her suspicions of the efficacy of women’s testimony to change our current conditions, Donegan wrote that “the experience of making the spreadsheet [showed] that it is still explosive, radical, and productively dangerous for women to say what we mean.”
From here we are left with the questions: Who is asked to speak about rape? Who is listened to? And how do we speak of rape? What words do we have to accurately account for what continues unaccounted for? Many of these questions, and others, were generously wrangled in a written panel I moderated for Adult back in 2015 (and during, as Dayna Tortorici discerningly calls it, The Long 2016). The past few months of conversations have taken for granted that reporting assault is necessary, even morally obligatory. In this panel, Katie J. M. Baker, Victoria Campbell, Ragna Rök Jóns, Doreen St. Félix, Brenton Stokes, and Sarah Nicole Prickett carefully and kindly untangle this and other assumptions about, as I clumsily put it, “what we talk about when we talk about rape.”
“Certain forms of accusation are more media-friendly, more easily mythologized, more salacious, more influential,” Campbell writes in the panel. #MeToo’s association with celebrity and the ever blinding presence of white womanhood entrenches the notion that some rape is too known to be reported. As St. Félix writes, “reporters totally know about ‘lower-class rape,’ the rape that happens in prison or in the hood or in war zones, but normalize it as a casualty of an already criminal existence. An experience that fits the space they’ve been allotted.” St. Félix later writes that rape is as common as “currency,” which is a fitting metaphor when you consider how the enslavement and rape of black woman is the bedrock of this country’s wealth. Rape is about power and it is about sex, but it is also about wealth—the product of power’s abuse.
Sometimes silence is preferable. Sometimes choosing to remain silent is not a choice, or, as some would have us put it, it is a choice one consents to without enthusiasm. St. Félix, once more, reminds us “not all bodies are pedestaled on a myth the way white women’s fragility is, a myth of fragility sustained politically, legally, and socially at the expense of black and brown women and people.” And—it is worth noting even though it risks derailment—a myth upheld, in the past and even now, by the false accusations of white women against black and brown men.
Even as we note, with some relief, that yes we spoke and some men have been fired and others have not been reelected, we also need to remind ourselves that speaking—more specifically, that posting on social media—is not enough and is not our only option. A few men retreating into their wealth after a week of public shaming does not begin to address the conditions that made and kept these men wealthy. “Despite all the spotlighting of victims, there are other ways to act when—or before—it comes to rape,” Prickett writes. “Education is activism in another genre, and reporting is only one form of education. It’s the form of education I want to see least.”
Yet what we rarely see, even now, is sexual education that teaches pleasure and its communication. Some women would rather canonize Aziz Ansari than admit that bad sex, even when consented to, can still be unwarranted, unwanted, and up for scrutiny. “What we don’t access when we talk about sexual assault,” St. Félix writes, “is the transition to violence that occurs in what are most often—at the outset—consensual, or at least not emotionally or physically violent, relationships. We don’t access the fact that structural inequality runs so deep some populations cannot even consent to the quality of the air they breathe.”
There is much more in this panel that remains relevant, necessary. I would write that I look forward to the day when that is no longer the case, but I don’t believe that day will come. We will have to remain attentive to these words. And wait for our turn to tell other stories. I’ll close with one last sentiment, from Prickett: “So many women’s stories are only rape stories when rape is one of the very few discourses available (if we’re good-enough victims) in which to channel the many ways we’re fucked.”
The original title for this panel was “What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape,” which was kiboshed for a couple of reasons. One of these was also a reason for doing the panel in the first place: We do not feel comfortable with using rape as an SEO term, even while knowing that overcoming this discomfort in naming rape is one of the more necessary steps in changing a culture that permits, among other pillagings of autonomy, the thing we call rape. Months ago, a number of controversial, reported pieces on rape in our communities (or communities to which we’re adjacent), from the “alt lit” ordeal to the Emma Sulkowicz saga at Columbia to the Rolling Stone cover story on “Jackie” at UVA, prompted me to think less about the act itself and more about how we speak it into existence. When is rape heard? Who speaks, and who gives permission?
In talking together and with friends, the Adult staff has long felt that there are things that we mean about rape, consent, and responsibility that we can’t say without seeming to take the wrong side. How do we criticize the notion of “rape culture” without denying that certain elements in masculine culture do permit, as Amy Schumer recently illustrated, “raping” as a competitive sport? If we talk about “dick culture” instead, why is it that while dicks are as readily metaphorized as guns are, the definition of a victim strictly adheres to the physical? Then again, rape is bad enough without being a metaphor, let alone what reads like a fantasy in the pages of Rolling Stone. We wish we weren’t using the word “fantasy.” We worry the reality has become almost profitable, even as the conditions don’t change. How do we express the fact that although we do not assume that anyone who says they were raped is lying, they may not be giving us gospel? How do we explain without derailing that there are worse things than rape, or that there are things that feel to us more like rape than rape as it’s defined by law? And, speaking of law, how do we speak of consequences for the crime without turning carceral or becoming the cops we claim to hate? What if we knew more about consent? Would we speak less of consequences then? Even here I’m unsure—who are “we”? Certainly, “we women” would not be a sufficient response, even if all of us were women.
One night, Victoria and I got into a long discussion about affirmative consent. We—and everyone on this panel—want passionately to get past the ways in which consent is discussed in public: as a legal qualifier, as a clinical assignation for one’s desire in a given moment, as a command and not a wish, as a demand handed to the person with less power in almost any given situation. Consent is too limited. Consent, too, is often not really about choice. If we animate it throughout our bodies, we renounce it every time we sign a contract not written in our language. We’re always consenting and not consenting to situations outside our control.
After 11 weeks of keeping this panel open for answers, new questions, doubts and deletions, revisions and revisitations, I read Katie’s story for BuzzFeed News about how law schools teach—or don’t teach—rape, in particular to female law students. According to one anonymous letter written by a second-year law student at a top school, “sexual assault [is] often harder to discuss in class than murder, or racial profiling.” It’s this paradox I can’t quite wrap my head around: how “awareness” around an issue, raised to protect and privilege victims, can lead to such silence and isolation. All openings are defined by their closures. The more we talk about rape as a culture, the less we are able to say.
•••
Reporting rape seems today to be the individual’s main form of activism against sexual violence. But, what are some reasons to not report rape to police, to schools, to the media, even to friends?
VC: I don’t want any more laws on my body.
That said, the other night I was casually reporting my week to a lover and realized I’d been harassed at a friend’s apartment a few days before. The incident was annoying, and vaguely threatening: like someone had suddenly let their pit bull dog at me, like, “don’t worry he’s just a puppy,” but I look down and it’s a fucking pit bull. (Note: I actually characterize in my mind the man who confronted me as a dog and not a man because a man has been trained to understand the word “No,” whereas untrained dogs—and the owners that infantilize them—tend not to. Also, there’s something about this incident that was “cute,” or that I characterized or let become “cute.”)
I feel uncomfortable now in a way that I wasn’t then; I wasn’t going to “report” it, though I’m reporting it now. But what am I reporting? Not the incident, the violation, or even the event, but the “report” itself, the noun-form of the verb “report.” The report as both the act of carrying something and the thing that is carried, both the act of speaking and the thing that is being spoken, both an experience and its telling. My report, which is also my witness. Here, in my report of my report, I’m not particularly interested in the content of the event—i.e., what made it harassment, what made it sexual, what made it wrong—but in how the report changes the experience itself. (Another note: The person I’m talking about said that he had been “falsely accused of rape.” The rapist is always falsely accused if he declares himself to be innocent. A thief can say, “I didn’t steal it,” a murderer can say, “I didn’t kill them,” while still acknowledging the fact that something has been stolen and the bodies are there. But the rapist must either admit to the crime or totally negate the existence of the crime entirely.)
That a report is always mediated, by verbal and nonverbal communication and also potentially by the state, if one chooses, isn’t a reason not to do it. If reporting rape is the individual’s main form of activism against rape, then a space and practice of giving forth withholds should be the collective form of activism. Not just for the sake of reporting sexual violence, but to develop a practice based on putting attention on what hasn’t been said so that what has been experienced can find a form. Experience finds form within practices of mediation. Once something finds a form it can be collectively acknowledged, affirmed, and acted upon. Communities can take action by learning to govern and mediate and teach, while the State (school, media, et al.) mainly takes action by policing. So deciding whether or not and how to report something also involves deciding how you’d like to be listened to.
BS: I had a phantom onus to be loyal to the person who raped me because before he raped me he was one of my best friends. I don’t have any personal relationship with the police. I feared the police’s lack of response due to the fact that not only am I a black male, I’m also (considered, in this case) gay. The police don’t have an excellent track record with either black males or homosexuals, let alone both. I also felt more able to talk to the rapist face to face than to bring him before a judicial system. It wasn’t until my friend and fellow survivor told me of his incident with the same person and encouraged me to speak with my university’s administration that I even considered coming forward. I did it the next day, alongside him.
RRJ: It boils down to relations of power and privilege. Many survivors of sexual violence find themselves retraumatized when they try to reach out to the gatekeepers of justice, so why bother? To quote Laverne Cox, “There is no justice. Amen.” But, “there will be justice”—there must be changes made to a system and social order that continuously devalues the legitimacy of rape as violence, the voices of women and minorities, and the traumas endured by survivors. Moments of public spectacle will force survivors further into the closet of trauma, but we must nevertheless organize collectively and communally, in multiple though overlapping social formations, resisting rape cultures and their post-trauma oblivion.
SNP: “Why bother” is a pretty flippant thing to say about an endeavor that speaks to an individual’s catharsis, perhaps, but also to an individual’s care for others. I guess I “retraumatized” myself when I wrote “Your Friends and Rapists” last year, and maybe I “retraumatized” some who read it, but I also tried to write away from trauma, not just in the piece but in my correspondences afterward with readers. Roxane Gay “retraumatized” herself when she wrote “What We Hunger For” in 2012. Mary Gaitskill “retraumatized” but also untraumatized herself when she wrote “On Not Being a Victim” in 1994. Kathleen Hale “retraumatized” herself when she took the stand in a rape case, not because she wanted justice for herself but because she wanted it for a number of women that included her; she re-“retraumatized” herself again when she wrote “Prey” in 2014, and I don’t think anyone, after reading that essay, would want to know why it is she “bothered.”
There are all kinds of reasons not to speak. One is to avoid being (seen as) a victim, to not be the girl who cried about rape. Another reason is to avoid any dealings with authority figures who remind you of rapists, like policemen or doctors. Another reason is not wanting to act as an activist.
Of course, despite all the spotlighting of victims, there are other ways to act when—or before—it comes to rape. Education is activism in another genre, and reporting is only one form of education. It’s the form of education I want to see least. If adults took young women—young people, teens in general—seriously as sexual agents, and if adults taught sex education seriously from sixth grade on, we’d have less to report by the time we get to campuses in America.
The fear of facing blame is often cited as a reason one chooses to remain silent about rape, although blame often manifests as doubt. Should the promise of being believed be the only reason to speak? Is there, conversely, such a thing as being too believed?
VC: There is such an obsession with “fact”! It’s very limiting, this characterization of speaking as a means to an end, or as a means to literally produce “truth.”
What I’m sensing in this prompt is a conflation of “to speak” and “to accuse.” The promise of being believed is what’s at stake in an accusation. Certain forms of accusation are more media-friendly, more easily mythologized, more salacious, more influential.
Sure, there is “awareness” and “prevention.” The latter can be objectified in statistics and so I guess that means some kind of progress and the former is rarely a hand on the levers of power. I’m certain the labor involved in getting one’s speech recognized by state, media, and social apparatuses is easier for some than for others—just as some have more to gain in blame than they do in speech and vice versa. Better to focus on what’s at stake in speaking than in accusation—on who you’re speaking to, on what speech does, different kinds of speech, different characterizations of speech, and different ways to empower speakers and listeners. Some people get a book deal, some people get told it’s their fault, some people aren’t listened to, and there’s something at stake in how each individual’s accusation is handled.
KB: I think reporters fail when they hide from facts because the facts are complicated. In my reporting, I strive to legitimize, or at least accurately describe, “gray area” situations instead of dismissing them. As Kat Stoeffel wrote in her wonderful piece “It Doesn’t Have to Be Rape to Suck,” many of us want to talk about “situations that fall outside the conventional definition of rape but nonetheless reflect a gender power dynamic that leaves women [and others] sexually vulnerable.” All rape is presumably unwanted, but not all unwanted sex can be presumed to be rape, and we should be able to make these distinctions for ourselves without getting into what Kat calls the “Was It Rape” debate. How can we talk about this without delving into the messy, complicated details? The problem is that there’s little to no incentive for people to share these details publicly, or even among friends. I mean, we’re not even doing that here.
SNP: Accurate description is the gift of legitimizing experience, a gift that Rolling Stone did not afford Jackie. They made exceptions for her. They let her be special. I get why she wanted to be special, her case to be special: The facts can be complicated, but they can also be commonplace, and maybe she didn’t want to know that whatever happened to her could also have happened to someone else. Maybe she wanted to feel chosen. (Making their prey feel chosen is how many serial predators do their work.)
It’s hard to look at such dull, grey experiences as my two main experiences of un-asked-for intercourse have been and see why it actually hurts—the first time, anyway. The first time still feels bad. The second time was more like an attempted rape, and it felt like, are you serious? I was 26 or 27, and it felt like getting carded at the liquor store. Like, I was simultaneously insulted and flattered, as if being taken lying down were somehow tantamount to being mistaken for a younger, prettier, dumber / more innocent girl, and in the end I was more upset with two of our mutual friends for being like, “Yeah, that’s just Jack” than I was at Jack. We could call that the “Was It Jack” debate. On the other side, there is always the friend who, rather than listening to what you tell her, feels the need to tell you “You Were Raped.”
BS: One reason I chose to speak out about my experience in such detail (that, might I add, was not adequately communicated in the Huffington Post article) is that I wanted to fight against being profiled as another innocent, defenseless, gay boy who got singularly attacked by a default heterosexual and cisgendered male aggressor. As part of the black community, I feel the implicit pressure to not be characterized as “weak” or “passive” simply (but not exclusively) because of how pornography, among other things, has stereotyped our penises as relentless anacondas. But I also feel pressure from nonblack communities to not “come off too strong” because of the potential for others to be “uncomfortable” with my “threatening” presence. I am rejecting these pressures when I choose to speak.
DSF: To speak to whom? I take the implied audience to be those legal institutions that hold incarcerating power, or social spaces that hold exiling power. I must believe many people who have spoken out to power about their sexual assaults, especially those people whose speech isn’t often believed in any political context, know that they very well may not be believed, to the extent that belief would lead to consequences for the rapist. If they are looking for consequence.
If she were my friend and we were in an enclosed room 20 years ago, I would have urged Anita Hill to keep silent. I am not so convinced on speaking out. There’s this overbearing empowerment narrative, telling us that because patriarchy has silenced us for so long, speaking out is unilaterally subversive. You have to come out as a sexual-assault survivor, come out of this moralized darkness, as if the outside light can’t become the glare of surveillance. As if you won’t lose your job and be set out on the street if your boss is the one that harasses you, as if you won’t materially endanger yourself and your children if you go to the police against your husband. We ought to challenge this white feminist fetish for speaking out publicly, and the accompanying condemnation of people who choose silence.
Not all bodies are pedestaled on a myth the way white women’s fragility is, a myth of fragility sustained politically, legally, and socially at the expense of black and brown women and people. Silence has preserved my body and ensured my safety more times than I can count, and during the times that I had to speak out, either for the safety of other people within the predator’s range or for my sanity, I chose to speak to women, in quiet, closed places.
I know stories of women from Port-au-Prince to Brooklyn who don’t speak but instead give knowing glances when they pass each other on the corner. And I know men who were found in the morning but their balls were not.
Bethany Saltman, a former sexual-violence activist and Womyn of Antioch member, wrote recently about the disparities between the public reception of Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)—a recent performance backed by a personal narrative, largely met with encouragement—and the Antioch College Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, an affirmative-consent campaign that, in its time, became a laughingstock. Saltman writes:
I think it has something to do with the way we, as a culture, have embraced the power of storytelling. We are so saturated with personal tales, so oriented toward individuals and their agonies and ecstasies. The Womyn of Antioch didn’t have a story to tell, per se. We had a message to deliver, a hegemonic discourse to smash . . . I actually wrote in my 1991 article that I was “shocked” by the survivor’s “powerful and candid story, partly because of the very frightening and close emotional nature of a personal discussion about rape.” What a difference 20 years makes.
To whom have these 20 years made the biggest difference? Whose rape becomes a “story?” Whose does not?
VC: The narratives that get told are those that can cut the cleanest line between those who are good and those who are bad, between those who are victims and those who are survivors, between the abject desire of the male and the virtuous strength of the female. These narratives sacrifice one member of society in order not to implicate the entire system that backs up an empire’s claim to power. They really do spin best on CNN.
Also, Carry That Weight was an ascetic act. It tells a Christ story, it tells an underdog story, it tells a survivor story. It tells all of our favorite stories. There’s a hero against the villains. Every aspect of that story bore currency—weight, if you will.
RRJ: It depends what we mean by a “story.” Do we mean a clickbait headline, or a memoir, or those moments in discourse that exist and persistently crystallize a collective conscience over the realities of violence? In any case, it’s usually not black women, brown women, queer women, trans women, even men who are the center of these headlines. It’s usually women whose experiences are palatable to the pen, or whose lives are relatable to the wider networks of people in power. Yet, conversely, marginalized survivors of sexual violence often find that they must rehearse and repeat a story, traversing the trials of never being believable enough, desperately trying to prove one is not bearing false witness. It can be disheartening, but we need to have our stories heard, regardless.
BS: I agree with Ragna and want to add that even personal, purple-hearted stories have been converted to palatable, clickbait headlines for the sake of digestible media. Emma Sulkowicz’s trauma is in no way less legitimate than that of Eric [the pseudonym of a black man at Amherst who got sexually assaulted by his roommate] or of myself, but I’m aware that a case like hers, along with her demographic and race, makes her story more “eligible” to be a breakthrough case. The way that she handled it was a breakthrough. The case is not.
DSF: Saltman’s evaluation of the differences between Carry That Weight and the Womyn of Antioch holds in a cosmetic sense. I’m more troubled by the tendency to stake those two moments on opposite poles of rape and consent activism, because such a myopic setting up of the history gasses the double crisis the country will not name. The so-called national conversation on sexual assault centers its gravity so squarely in the experiences of white or “white-looking” women attending colleges cordoned off from the city, often living in dormitories or near the school. I get it, of course—culture-makers are equal parts thrilled and horrified by the seeming paradox within the term “campus rape,” that such a debased violence can happen in rich, lily-white spaces. Rapists terrorize those dorms, those frats, but white women are not the only people who are raped there; rapists terrorize, but the campus is not the only place. In fact, lived experience and statistics show that American campuses are not even close to the most dangerous places for women.
I say we’re in a double crisis, because black women in any given institutional space—colleges, police custody, prisons, the street, their homes—are the people most likely to be raped in America. Black trans women, once more, are under siege. That’s pure Americana: a forcible extraction of body power from black women bankrolled the birth of this nation. To me, the crisis is at first this institutionalized violence and then secondly the erasure of black women’s experiences—and here I’m calling out Title IX–prostrating white feminism—from the conversation. Erasure isn’t exactly what I mean; I think I mean apathy. Reporters totally know about “lower-class rape,” the rape that happens in prison or in the hood or in war zones, but normalize it as a casualty of an already criminal existence. An experience that fits the space they’ve been allotted. Black women and Latina women aren’t afforded the virtue white women have. I mean, you can read Dorothy Roberts, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robin Kelley, so many black scholars on how capitalist antiblackness prevents marginalized women from participating in the theater of victimhood that is white and upper-class, one of a few lenses through which I receive Sulkowicz’s thesis.
All this to say: when I was 14 years old, being sexually harassed once a week by the same police officer completing his stop-and-frisk round, I did not have the option to drag the prison-industrial complex with me on the 2 train. If it sounds like I’m dissing Carry That Weight, I’m actually pointing out the outsize treatment huge media like the New York Times are investing the project with. The boundary between public and private was transgressed on my body and bodies like mine centuries before we were born. That transgression is intimately tied to tremendously lucrative institutions like these war complexes, so irrevocably tied.
KB: I’m so in awe of the young activists who have turned campus assault into a national issue, some of whom are barely out of their teens, yet more effective than any other organizers I know (and more critical of the movement’s whitewashing than you might think). At the same time, too much of today’s reporting on campus sexual assault is well-meaning but breathless trash catering to Americans who’ve never been able to resist young white coeds in trouble. I get chills down my spine watching the page views go up, and up, and up on Ivy League rape stories. The more brutal the story is, and the prettier the victim, the more successful.
SNP: “Young white coeds in trouble” evokes so well the pulpy, fictive aspects of popular rape stories. When I say “fictive” I don’t mean that the stories aren’t true but that, because they make heroines out of victims, and because the heroines do have this . . . serial look, they often feel as flimsy as paperbacks. I’ll read an “Ivy League rape story” and think, “Oh my god, this is plagiarized.” (NB: After I wrote this—not because I wrote this, obviously—the Globe and Mail published Tabatha Southey’s very recommended column on the Rolling Stone fiasco, and she takes the pulp-fiction line; I take after her in some ways.)
That reaction is wrong, and sad. Even if the central events of these stories are common and even memetic, the experiences of the events do differ. We don’t get to see a lot of difference. We’re not even sure we should show it. Many self-reporters are afraid that showing anything other than what’s “common” in the experience will subtract from the meaning of events, from the master narrative of specifically sexual assault as a crime against the powerless, and sure, even if we’re not powerless, we’re also not wrong to be afraid. Specificities in feminine experience tend to be pointed out as holes in our story. To many (male) authorities, that’s what femininity is: our story, and we better stick to it. Victimhood gives us the same deal. So, to return to “plagiarism,” I think it occurs when even the best-meaning authorities, including editors, don’t know how to ask for clarification of an experience without casting doubt on its lived-ness.
When it came to my own story, I’m with Katie. I’m not from the Ivy League, but I pass and I’m pretty, and I felt a very, very cold comfort in the number of people who read that essay because of the way it began. Many women who are demographically like me would call it “my rape” story, but the possessive has always struck me as a little too received, too precious—my abuse, my abuser, my rape, my rapist. I can’t. I always want to be like, “Honey, he’s not your rapist.” If he raped you, the odds are good he’s raped someone else. Beyond that, I don’t feel that “rapists are rapists,” in the vein of “rape is rape” or “cheaters are cheaters.” Rapists are also “our boys.” Rapists are also, as Stella Gibson says in The Fall, our husbands, brothers, boyfriends, friends, and sons. As disturbing and counterintuitive as it feels to say, we have to give rapists their full humanity, or we’ll never cede their actions the full ethical weight of a permission—a responsibility—misused.
KB: I think more reporters need to work harder to find stories about rape survivors who aren’t educated white women, but I also know from my own experience that it’s both logistically tricky and ethically complicated to seek out rape survivors who aren’t ready to come forward. Most survivors who court press are those educated white women, because they have the social capital and support that makes it, if not easy, not as impossible to deal with the backlash that comes with speaking up. Also, they write press releases and send them out, unprompted, to reporters, with their cell phone numbers and Gmail addresses highlighted. They take photos of their art projects. They want to get in touch.
I would love to report on, for example, undocumented students who are assaulted, but I (obviously) can’t run around a college campus asking students if they are undocumented and whether they’ve been raped.
Doreen, I wonder, as someone who is only in a position to report, not to hire other reporters, what role should media play? Is it even ideal for, like, CNN to start tracking down the 14-year-old being sexually harassed once a week by the same police officer completing his stop-and-frisk round? Is it even ideal for me to do that?
DSF: CNN should definitely not follow black girls around on camera because I’ve seen their coverage and they do a poor job of lighting our skin. Ha, ha. But seriously, I can only see that scenario creating more danger for people. I wonder if one aspect of the problem has to do with segregating news into beats? These two beats—1) race and 2) campus rape—run parallel to each other on the Internet and rarely converge, therefore ignoring the overlapping experiences of, in particular, women of color. Of course the campus rape beat is also a race beat. It’s about everyday violence recast as aberration in white spaces. I know I’m not answering your question at all, but I’m trying to say that stories of black and brown women and their sexual assaults could and should more readily appear in journalism that is classified under what we now understand as race writing.
SNP: Yes. More stories should also be unclassifiable. I wanted the thing I wrote to be unclassifiable, yet I couldn’t have it both ways; I couldn’t escape the fact that my story was classed by my ability to write it—because, like I said, I’m the kind of victim who gets believed.
This is partly why I have been assigned and/or have promised and have felt unwilling/unable to not write other stories like it, stories we call “women’s stories.” As Lidia Yuknavitch says to Vanessa Veselka in Violence: “Why is women’s writing only rape stories?” Or big unified theories about female pain in books that end with “I want our hearts to be open,” as if that’s not . . . how you get an infection. And now someone’s going to say that I’m blaming the patient.
RRJ: I’m in agreement with Doreen on the need to burst the elitist bubble of a current college rape crisis. It’s not a crisis, it’s a wake-up call. I wonder, though, how we expand the dialogue to include survivors of sexual violence who are not in the forefront of its theorizing, or who are disenfranchised from discourse due to digital divides. While I think in particular of trans women or queer assigned-male-at-birth people, like myself, I have seen a nebulous problem in trying to formulate any sort of essence behind the rape victim: She is not always a woman, or has a vagina. We often give cursory mentions to the peripheral, less central, issues of sexual violence and those who endure such traumas, like young men or queer folks, but we need to be attentive to semantic nuances so we don’t steamroll people who already may be hesitant to enter the conversation.
SNP: Ragna, I agree that the rape victim shouldn’t be essentialized, and at the same time, that the victim who is raped because she is perceived as essentially female should not be shooed aside by progressive discourses. I also often find myself wishing that certain rapists were the ones who had to report their rapes, who had to endure the questions, the kits and the exams, who had to squirm in the spotlight or the hot seat. This is not a very useful wish. I’m just a little bit worried that this panel is—that I am—that all of us are leveraging a little too much pressure on those who survive and not enough on those who assault.
Last year, I was working on the New Inquiry Dicks issue with Hannah Black and Jesse Darling, who are both so brilliant and such advanced thinkers, and we were writing the ed. note together. I had spent a lot of time on the notion of “dick culture,” and so when Hannah and Jesse wrote in a draft of the editor’s note that “those radical feminist accounts that see rape culture as emanating directly from the biological power rests not in the flesh, but in the social order,” I emailed them something that almost applies to your question:
I disagree that feminists, radical or otherwise, see rape culture as directly emanating from the biological penis. Very few find it so simple. Most commentators talk about the social order. At the same time, most people who are raped report experiencing the physical component of the rape as, yes, emanating from a biological penis*, in particular one wielded as a dick (hence “dick culture” as a less-inadequate term), and until the majority of penis-havers do not grow up to become men, I’m going to have sympathy for the poor unenlightened women who haven’t heard that the penis is so passé, and with it, their fears or anxieties. Tell a person bleeding from rape that the power doesn’t rest in the flesh. Tell a person who years later experiences wracking pain during SORRY IT’S SO UNCONTEMPORARY BUT VAGINAL INTERCOURSE that when her vaginal muscles clamp tight in an expression of trauma that the power doesn’t rest in the flesh. I’d prefer a) that we not condescend to so many; b) drag rape into this. It’s everywhere else, god knows.
This year, and in a less embarrassing reply to a totally reasonable question, I’d like to restate Hannah and Jesse’s line to suggest that the powerlessness doesn’t rest in the flesh. If the only criterion is an orifice, we are actually all vulnerable to being entered by force or coercion, and yet it is overwhelmingly those of us who are perceived as vaginal and feminine, whether or we’re not we’re biologically female, who are made and/or seen to be victims. This isn’t at all scientific, but I sense a correlation between the subject whose nudity is guarded or hidden like a secret and the subject most likely to be a victim—which is why I also feel that every time we disproportionately freak out about the leak of private information that also concerns “private parts,” from Jennifer Lawrence’s selfies to Laverne Cox’s nudes to Amy Pascal’s vaginal shopping list, another rapist in America gets his wings. Though you’re absolutely right that “victim” shouldn’t be synonymous with “her,” when I say “rapist” and “his” I don’t think I’m generalizing much.
RRJ: I hate writing about rape, and I only did this openly because Ana reached out, but I was diagnosed with severe PTSD after being raped in my sleep (and other places). I completely agree with your stance, but perhaps I should have foregrounded that trans women and otherwise mentally atypical folks are sort of fucked, because we’re often not protected by the same systems that protect cis women, but also we’re told that our claims to trauma are less important, or that the violence we face is less real. I’ve heavily supported particular feminist strains of thinking about rape in terms of sexism and heterosexism, but I’m more involved with focusing on trans and marginalized dialogues over the conversation about rape. I think Brenton intended to say the same with his critique of the way that sexual assault is colored and not queered.
In her 1994 essay for Harper’s, “On Not Being a Victim,” Mary Gaitskill writes that she often spoke of her own rape in exaggerated metaphors out of a “desperate desire” to give her experience some “consequence” to outsiders. At times, she says, she “even flat-out lied about what had happened . . . because the pumped-up version was more congruent with my feelings of violation than the confusing facts.”
When we talk about consequence, we should also talk about consequences. Go.
BS: The best way to give the experience of being raped its proper consequence is by drawing connections between rape and other forms of trauma. There’s no one form of trauma that’s “more important” than the other, but there are traumas that are comparable because they’re created by similar forces, i.e. patriarchy. We can see genocide as the rape of a culture or deforestation as a rape of the land, and so we can also feel like rape is something massive, or at least a lot bigger than our bodies. I think these exaggerations are still the truth.
VC: Growing up, the Internet gave me the kind of sexual agency that no 14-year-old girl has IRL. I could write my body and my sexuality. I could lie about my age and gender. I could meet strangers and fuck them, and I could make love. Sex became a craft, and the body was a bit out of reach—it couldn’t be “achieved.”
When I started having sex with men physically, and not just virtually, the rules changed. I didn’t have power anymore. I had two options: to consent, or to delay consent (but I could never delay the act itself). I was condemned to execute sex in the time and space the institutions of teen dating demanded. And in the way that boys wanted it—what way was that? He didn’t have the language and I didn’t have the voice. On the Internet, sex was everywhere but the actual act of doing it. Here, sex was everywhere but language was absent of it. Those previous forms of my freedom—the freedom to voice desire from a different voice, to speak the body in a way that was not my body—were not accessible and I could not live them. They did not count and were not real. When boys asked me if I was a virgin I didn’t know how to answer and I usually told them I was raped.
SNP: Victoria, why “condemned?” Or rather, condemned by what? You’re cutting a clean line yourself between virtual and physical, between the pretense and the absence of power. I relate very personally to sneaking out of the house and into chat rooms, to trying on different ages, agencies, sexualities. Although, I was never good at sex until I’d done it in the flesh, and also, I was already 18 years old. Maybe I felt stronger—louder—in my body than I would have if I’d been 14, 15. Still, I’m startled by your answer to the boys, which seems like a kind of defensive tackle, a way of saying: The worst has already been done, and: I’m assuming the worst of you, that you won’t understand or believe, that you won’t have anything to say, so we won’t have to talk about it. It’s a morally stark, almost Clarissa-type move: Why should I seek to conceal my disgrace? Except, everything earlier suggests you had grace instead.
VC: I think I used the word “condemned” because it implies a sentencing. It felt like a very literal “sentence”—my body was a fixed signifier at the mercy of a certain grammar of sexuality, a sexuality that was available to me at that time and that I related to. “Rape” fit into that grammar as a means to access a sexual narrative that was neither “virginal” nor “too experienced,” as something unwritten but under which I could still take cover. Maybe I was terrified that my hymen actually existed and that someone wouldn’t find it?
I’m curious now if other very young women have done this, if only to get someone to stop pestering them about their sexual history. It’s a quick fix, the motive is shallow. A similar strategy is telling someone you have to go to the bathroom in order to avoid a date-rape situation.
For the reporters in the room: How do you account for potential distortion when reporting on an instance, or a phenomenon, of sexual assault? How do you determine what is “credible?” Whose experiences “count?”
KB: I try to focus more on stories about institutional injustice and less on the sexual assault itself. For example: I don’t need to know the play-by-play of what went down that night (unless my source wants to tell me), but I do want to know every detail of why her attacker was on the hearing panel that determined her case, or why the police told her “women lie about being raped.” (Both recent examples.) When I do have to fact-check sensitive details, I just tell my source that I want to help her make her story as strong as possible. They usually get it, and if they don’t, they’re probably not ready for media coverage, anyway. I’ve found that if I don’t push someone into telling her story—which I never do, I actually let people drop out of stories all the time if they’re not ready—they won’t have any problem with fact-checking, because they feel comfortable with me and understand why I need to corroborate certain things.
VC: I’m going to loosely rehash a problem voiced by Lia Cigarini, in her essay “Symbolic Rape” (Il manifesto, 1979). She asks us, “Who’s more wrong? The woman who cries rape, or the woman who thought she had rights in the first place?”
The woman who distorts the rape story—or invents one altogether—isn’t necessarily telling a different story than what the rest of us have experienced. She’s either “crying wolf” for a reason, or her unreason is itself a reason. But her story, when outed as a fiction or distortion, mocks both the law and those women who believe that the law was set up to protect them in the first place. Whose experience “counts”? Whose counts more? Who’s more wrong? Perhaps the answer lies in reorienting the question —who was the law actually written for in the first place? Or—how do we even speak about the symbolic rape of the law itself?
Survivors as activists (or confessors) tend to say things like “my body” and “my choice” but also “my rape” and “my rapist.” Let’s talk about the possessive—and the repossessive. Why “my?”
VC: We’re taught that it’s a possession, but it’s not. This isn’t just a survivor vocabulary, it’s an essentially female vocabulary. Or, it is the vocabulary by which I have been feminized. “It’s your body. Don’t let anyone touch it.” “You need to take responsibility for your own body.” “Your body is yours.” “Accept your body.” “You have your own body.” Women are property without rights, because if my body were truly my property, I’d have the right to sell it.
SNP: Ha! Though, I’ve always hated “sell my body” too. I prefer to think of selling or bartering a body’s knowledge, assets, abilities, skills. Besides, I personally—I do mean personally; I mean that this is where the personal comes loose from the political—don’t like to think of my body as being mine, at least not entirely, just as I often think of my choices as not entirely mine.
RRJ: Maybe it’s because we’re trained by neoliberal systems to identify our bodies as ourselves. Or maybe it’s because when we frame a form of bodily exposure as sexual violence, that frame of reference presupposes the inviolability of the body. For me, speaking on the behalf of this body, and its choices, there is a need to demarcate the body politic from my own private body. I refuse to resign myself, once again, to those who inscribe my body with unwanted dicks or cisnormative appraisals of my trans womanhood. Maybe it’s because we seek to reclaim our bodies, ourselves, when trauma possesses us.
DSF: Generally, I’m wary of the emphasis survivor-activists put on speech. Empire coerces thought on the level of grammar and syntax, but I don’t know that policing people away from their organic way of speaking is liberatory, if it’s not just another militarized tic dressed as “radical speech” or whatever. How many times have I rattled off the phrase “my body” in quote unquote safe spaces, and not even my tongue believed the ceremony? This body, my body, is mine fiercely, but I’m not tormented with the fact that in the past it was made others’ property. I’m not even principally thinking about sexual assault, here. Actually, it’s relieving to think of my body under torture as a piece of property, because then I have the option to cast away the dispossession I endured as a feature of the person or state who was violent to me. That’s their shit. Not mine.
Still, I am here for the confrontational nature of the possessive in certain political contexts because I think saying “my rape” performs documentary work, makes the speaker the literal, solid, bodily evidence that the legal system claims is so hard to discern. I know the importance of archives: Think of the millions of women and men at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, underneath buildings in Battery Park City who had no meaningful access to records or to their tongues. Survivor-activists who choose to say “my rape” instead of “the person who raped me” incarnate trauma’s formlessness on the one body that can’t be a fugitive to the crime. That’s good record keeping, simply. Me, if I’m choosing to speak publicly about violence, I locate power in indicting the agents, in hardening the ephemeral ways they’ve been violent in sentences constructed like “They violated me.” I’m not pressed for the state’s judgment on violence. So often, the state’s actually the perpetrator. I’ve always had a taste for social vengeance, shaming, and exiling—what can I say? I’m from the Caribbean!
BS: I personally don’t like to say “my” when concerning the person who raped me. I’ve said it in the past and have felt uncomfortable claiming him as “mine” in that regard, so I’ve actively rejected that terminology. However, I do use “my” when addressing my body and how I’ve been affected by the event, because I’m laying claim to my equilibrium that was disturbed when the rape happened. I also acknowledge that I’ll never be the same person I was before the rape, and that’s fine, but a greater post-traumatic equilibrium had to be established and, quite honestly, I’m not sure I’ve reached it yet.
James Asbrand, a psychologist with the Salt Lake City Veterans Affairs PTSD clinical team, has said of male-to-male sexual violence in the military: “One of the myths is that the perpetrators identify as gay, which is by and large not the case. It’s not about the sex. It’s about power and control.” Rape is often codified as a heterosexual abuse of power, even when it occurs in queer, or at least homosexual, encounters. Should we change the “straight reading” of rape? How?
VC: What does a queer rape look like?
RRJ: What does a queer rape feel like?
DSF: That platitude is so tired to me. So tired. Rape isn’t about sex it’s about power. Bless Asbrand, though. It’s not a meaningful distinction, at least for those of us who have felt that even the most deeply consensual acts we’ve committed were forced into place by some invisible social hand. But to the point about changing the reading of rape: yes. In fact, I think that we should begin to understand rape and sexual assault as a systemic violence native to all empires, including this North American one. Shifting to that framework has helped me to understand instances of sexual violence that don’t occur in a white, middle-class, and heterosexual space. I’d like to point out that in America, the particular reading of rape—rape in which there’s a victim recognized as such—isn’t just heterosexual, it’s racialized. I’ve said this before, but legal history and common-law history here points to a huge swath of time during which black people could not be raped but could be rapists because they were not human. Also, narratives are heavily individualized. If there’s any power imbalance pointed to as context, it’s often a proximate one, like men being generally physically stronger than women.
All of this seems to dislocate rape from its essential place in the settling, forming, and continued function of this country, and therefore ability to be experienced by any body living. So I understand Asbrand to mean, and many of us who say rape isn’t about power, it’s about sex, I think we’re really trying to resist the allegory around it, we’re realizing that violence doesn’t generally come from some dark and mystic and unique place inside “bad people,” but that it’s plain and endemic, like a currency.
BS: I think rape should be de-codified from the heterosexual context of power and abuse, because not every aggressor is a self-proclaimed straight man. The person that raped me was self-identified as homosexual and cisgendered. He is also Latino and comes from a culture that does not consider men to be gay unless they are sodomized in any way and/or are effeminate. I think this institutes a twisted hierarchy among gay men that is a pathological analogue to “bros versus sissies,” or “jocks versus nerds.” We must change the straight reading of rape by, for example, emphasizing the commonality of domestic violence in so-called alternative relationships.
RRJ: I’m tired of a rape-as-power argument that disregards the orgasm, or the ejaculation of desire, which is what drives acts of sexual violence. It may be power, or control, and probably is, but rape is rape because it is bodily, sexual, carnal, affective in touch. I’m also not buying a “they were not gay” presumption. The reality of prison rape is real, especially for trans women incorrectly incarcerated, but prisons are also sites of queer relations. Sexuality between men does not take one form; identities sometimes do and don’t coincide with practices. Sexual violence is a particular manifestation of power, of power’s desire to loosen boundaries, to control or touch peoples or bodies.
Let’s ask the question posed in the title of an essay from Total Sorority Move: “Is it Possible That There Is Something In Between Consensual Sex And Rape . . . And That It Happens To Almost Every Girl Out There?”
VC: “Yes.”
Have you had an experience that could be called rape, but that you have chosen to call something else? What and why?
VC: Wage labor.
SNP: A slap in the face. A miscommunication. A misdemeanor, sometimes, not a crime.
I’m disinclined to use “rape” as a metaphor or simile, but totally inclined to use metaphors or similes in place of “raped” instead of committing to a) an exaggeration or b) the maximum severity, because right now “rape” allows for no minimum. It’s important for me to know that it could have been worse—in my case. In some cases, it couldn’t have been worse. We have degrees of murder and of assault; we should also have degrees of rape.
What does consent look like to you? What would it mean to seek responsibility from each other instead of plain affirmative consent?
KB: I think consent has become more of a legal term than anything else. It’s a clinical disclaimer. Even the most progressive “affirmative consent” policies imply that if you accurately obtain consent, you’re in the clear. But to me, seeking responsibility means attempting to take care of one another. That might mean admitting culpability in order for the other person (or both people) to heal, even if you didn’t do anything that could be adjudicated on a campus or prosecuted in a courtroom. Of course, most toxic/forced/coercive situations can’t be resolved that way. Also, this is a litigious country and I don’t think we’re going to see men admitting guilt anytime soon, which is why I don’t think restorative justice approaches I’ve read about will work on college campuses . . . the goal right now is to evade liability, not to learn, grow, etc. Anyway: “Consent” should be expected but not clung to as an ideal solution.
VC: Responsibility would mean to pay attention to response—to physical response. To slow down and listen. And to learn, physiologically, how to read a body’s response.
BS: I think that physical, somatic transmutations of sexual energy are important. For instance, I’m aware of how my gait becomes more fluid and expressive when I’m walking around someone to whom I’m physically attracted, how I deliberately take time to shift lilts from Spanish to English when I’m speaking both languages in succession and that I’m sure to open my face up (muscularly) before I look at someone with “interest” so that I have full range of expression. I let my sexuality brim over to affect even the way I pick up a fork when I’m eating.
I also love nonvocal communication and expressing myself without speaking, but I have recently become more comfortable with speaking about what I like, need and want (sexually, specifically). I’m at peace with how my voice resonates in my body, and so I use that as a tool. I also know that I don’t have to be overly curt with someone in whom I’m not interested, principally because my affirmative and negative actions are pronounced enough to make the messages clear from a baseline perspective. When I express myself clearly enough so that my audience receives what I’m transmitting, there’s no need for me to be irritable unless someone chooses not to receive these messages.
DSF: The legal meaning of consent is sterile, the social meaning volatile, but within my relationships, when the consent was there, it hung in the middle of us like atmosphere. Consent feels wordless to me—a space more than an extractive transaction between two or more faiths—and without a beginning I can mark. We begin consenting to each other way, way before we are skin to skin, and our need to build this consenting atmosphere extends to situations that aren’t obviously sexual. Many nonsexual friendships aren’t consensual; how many children are coerced into their family’s particular ideals for behavior? That’s why the politics of consent are so damning, because what we don’t access when we talk about sexual assault is the transition to violence that occurs in what are most often—at the outset—consensual, or at least not emotionally or physically violent, relationships. We don’t access the fact that structural inequality runs so deep some populations cannot even consent to the quality of the air they breathe.
VC: Consent takes different forms, but I know how it feels: Consent, from the Latin word consentire, means to feel together.
SNP: Yes, Victoria. Exactly. The problem with making consent a matter of law is that we then expect consent to look like something, to be something on paper. I like the idea of consent as an agreement. I loathe the idea of that same agreement as something drawn up by one party, herein referred to as “the man,” and signed on the bottom line by the other, referred to as “the woman.” In this extremely unfun game, affirmative consent becomes yet another question of the individual versus the corporation, “the woman” vs. “The Man.” The question also becomes one of whether “affirmative” means “passive,” or at least implies a kind of standardized female passivity.
KB: I don’t know about that. I don’t think that the policy requiring “affirmative consent” on California campuses, for example, assumes female passivity is the norm; it assumes that women have a harder time getting accommodations under Title IX. It assumes that it’s easier for a male college student to claim his accuser was asking for it because she texted him the next day than it is for that woman to convince administrators he raped her regardless. Is the law ideal? No, but it’s not expanding the carceral state, as some feminists who don’t quite understand how it works have claimed (for one thing, it’s not a criminal statute: I send this piece by law student, Know Your IX cofounder, and all-around genius Alexandra Brodsky to anyone who doesn’t get it). The current college adjudication system is faulty, and I think this law is a solid stopgap that makes it a little less awful for accusers.
VC: That’s true. “Affirmative consent” doesn’t necessarily take female passivity as the norm as much as it values proof and evidence over the lived experience of those involved.
SNP: Good points, Katie. I just think that the culture that created “affirmative consent” laws on campuses is also responsible for female—I mean feminine—passivity as an ideal, if no longer a norm. If you’re a girl who isn’t passive, you’re slutty or crazy or “too much.” That ideal isn’t dead, but rather is buried, still, in “affirmative consent.”
At the same time, maybe it’s masculine passivity we should be talking about; it’s definitely masculine passivity that is going unchecked all around us. Look at the reports of our friends and acquaintances from the alt lit or the poetry worlds. A lot of rapey guys are very passive. They’re sidlers. They sidle up and wait for you to push them away. They don’t read as sexual or aggressive, so you’re not sure what’s happening until it’s happening, and they’re really good at acting like they don’t know what’s happening until—or while!—they are doing it. These passive, rapey, often intellectual guys think their lack of commitment to masculine roles somehow abdicates them of the responsibility that comes with inhabiting male desire in a world that places, as Victoria suggests, the solid proof of that desire above the less-legible evidence of mine. If you’re a man, if you’re living as a man, I don’t care how unmanly you think you are. Being passive doesn’t amount to much resistance.
Another thing: Although I like money a little too much and men not enough to bear the equation of wage labor to rape, I find it unsurprising when serial passive rapists turn out to be total motherfuckers at work. When all those stories of sexual assault finally came out about Jian Ghomeshi, I remembered that when one of his accusers told me (in person) about working with him, the sexual assault and innuendo constituted maybe 10 percent of her story; the other 90 percent was about how he shirked his duties and worked a third as much as she did and took all the credit. Or, to use a pettier, first-hand example, when Tao Lin was accused of statutory rape a number of months ago, I remembered that when he and I had a long mutual interview for publication once, he seemed to think it not at all unusual that—although we ostensibly met as equals; I wasn’t his interviewer—I would transcribe the entire conversation myself for no compensation or thanks. I did it because I didn’t think (as he did) that interns should do it (it was so fucking boring, there was basically nothing to learn), but I was bemused and unimpressed that he accepted, and I’m equally unimpressed that I volunteered.
I make a point of remembering these contexts because consent is work. It doesn’t have to be laborious, but it’s work, and work should be shared.
And because, to answer Lidia Yuknavitch, so many women’s stories are only rape stories when rape is one of the very few discourses available (if we’re good-enough victims) in which to channel the many ways we’re fucked. Because when we’re taken advantage of physically, intellectually, financially, we also instinctively know that those stories—those 90-percent-of-our-life stories—are not going to make the same news cycle that perpetuates the “crisis” in (almost purely) sexual politics. “If it bleeds, it leads,” and we all know what bleeds every month.
VC: If consent is work—the work of communication, the work of seduction, the work of attention—then what kind of work is being affirmed? Work is a relationship whether or not it is shared, just as sex is work regardless of whether or not it’s waged. Is “affirmative consent” contract labor?
“Affirmative consent” contractualizes sex, bringing a physical encounter into existence as either sex or rape. Consent isn’t just an agreement, it’s an operation. “Affirmative consent” actually doesn’t take for granted consent as shared and withheld in different ways. It can’t if it’s going to effectively govern an exchange. Title IX is as much a product of a culture of rape as it is a product of a culture of affirmation, which is essentially a culture of protocols.
I’m more inclined to take a stab at marriage as the hidden layer of patriarchy underneath Title IX, rather than the gender roles of those it’s forced upon. Marriage is, historically, a contractualization of sex. Sex is coded by breach and contract, just as marriage is by vow. It’s “yes” tonight followed by “I do.”
When does a physical encounter come into existence as sex? When does activity come into existence as work? And what about those times when my desire comes into existence as something other than my own, even as someone else’s? There’s what I want and what I’m told to want, what I think I should want, what I’ve told another person I want, what he wants, what I think he wants, what I want to want, what I don’t want, what I’ve wanted before, what I want now and won’t want tomorrow, what I could just as easily want, what I might as well want.
It’s a “yes” or “no” answer but it begs the question. What is the question to which there are only two answers? Is it, “Do you want to sleep with me?” Is it, “Will you sleep with me?” Is it the ambiguous insistence that I’m “Okay? Are you sure? Are you sure you’re okay?” Is the question perhaps, “Have I earned it?”
This panel was moderated by Ana Cecilia Alvarez.
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This reality is transparent in the case of policing. The Fourth Amendment—which protects against unwarranted search and seizure—is spatially defined. Individuals have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” from the eyes and ears (and noses) of the state in places where they can reasonably expect not to be overheard or observed by others. You have the most privacy in your home, somewhat less in your car, and hardly any on a public street. Thus, those who can afford more private space will inevitably have more privacy. People who live in densely packed neighborhoods and thin-walled apartment complexes, who have little “curtilage” surrounding their homes, who live their private lives in public spaces, have considerably less. The homeless—who, by necessity, live in public space and have tenuous property claims to their makeshift dwellings—have barely any Fourth Amendment rights at all. Like many of liberalism’s guarantees, privacy is not a universal right but a class right: guaranteed to those who can buy it.
When a middle-class white person imagines a privacy violation, they tend to think of an embarrassing disclosure of personal information: their sexts posted online, their email address leaked in the Ashley Madison hack. Some may imagine the “creepy-crawly” feeling of being watched. Indiana University School of Law professor James P. Nehf has written, reflecting the perception of many scholars, “Privacy is seldom a matter of life and death.” But for the poor and marginal, invasions of privacy are often lethal matters. A stop-and-frisk can easily end in a police shooting. Data shared from a registry can lead to arrests or deportation. Scrutiny from a caseworker can tear a family apart.
In the past few years, a wave of new scholarship has emerged that underscores the inadequacy of universalist privacy discourse. In order to protect against the tangible harms of surveillance, these scholars say, civil libertarians must attend to the particular.
While many liberal privacy advocates warn that a dystopian society is around the corner—unless, say, proper limits are placed on law-enforcement access to cell-phone data or communications collected by the National Security Agency—these new scholars argue that a huge portion of the American public already lives in a privacy-free rights environment. Through their close attention to social history, a new picture of privacy emerges: less like a universal right than like a privilege of whiteness and wealth. The laws that protect some from the scrutiny of the state have never protected those whom the state seeks to confine and control. For the poor and marginal, the nightmare scenario is already here.
From the plantation to the penitentiary, surveillance and punishment originated in America as projects of social control. The slave system was enabled by a trio of information technologies—the slave pass, the fugitive slave poster, and the slave patrol—which together enabled the planter class to exert dictatorial rule, projecting their power throughout the antebellum South.
Plantation ledger books served as proto-biometric databases, recording not only financial records but the physical characteristics of enslaved persons’ bodies, their labor and reproductive capacities. Plantation architecture facilitated intervisibility between the overseer and the slave, from the verandas of the big house to the slave quarters and fields. These interlocking systems—enabled by sight, terror, and violence—were designed to disrupt solidarity among enslaved peoples, prevent runaways, and, most of all, deter and quell rebellion.
In northern cities, regulation of vice fell not to the courts but to constables, night watchmen, and jailors, who were given wide latitude in their choice of punishment. They paid special attention to unruly working-class women—those, as Jen Manion documents in her excellent 2015 history Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America, who were “too poor, too loud, too sexual, too drunk, or too independent.” Anyone who posed a perceived threat to the white heterosexual family, or its gendered division of labor, attracted the attention of the authorities. By 1807, Manion writes, the poor were just as likely to be held for what they did not have, a job or a home, as for how they behaved. Poverty itself was the crime.
Virginia Eubanks’s new book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, which came out in January, extends this historical trajectory into the 21st century. Despite the successes of abolitionist, labor, civil rights, and feminist movements, America’s prisons are still warehouses for the poor, the police state is still mainly a means of regulating the lower orders, and the watchful eye of the modern-day constable is still trained primarily on the poor, the brown, the defiant, and the marginal. Eubanks, an associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY, has spent her career illuminating how our systems of provision and punishment collude to control and survey the poor, who are presumed to be dangerous social deviants.
Automating Inequality explores how the brick-and-mortar poorhouse of the 19th century has been replaced by the “digital poorhouse” of today. In the contemporary welfare system, poor people’s worthiness for benefits and their propensity for criminality are assessed by data-mining computer algorithms, which, contrary to the hopes of their proponents, tend to recreate and exacerbate inequality. Eubanks explores three experiments in which algorithms are replacing or augmenting human decision-making —Indiana’s automated Medicaid eligibility process, Los Angeles’s coordinated entry system for the homeless, and Allegheny County of Pennsylvania’s predictive algorithm for assessing childhood risk of abuse and neglect.
With the exception of the Indiana program—part of a statewide privatization effort led by Republican Governor Mitch Daniels, who would probably means-test trick-or-treaters if he could—the systems Eubanks encounters were at least devised with the welfare of the vulnerable in mind. LA’s registry, “touted as the Match.com of homeless services,” was supposed to distribute housing resources to the neediest with an efficiency and precision that a lurching municipal bureaucracy could never achieve. The Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), launched in August 2016, was designed to eliminate the human bias that leads caseworkers to overreport nonwhite families as maltreatment risks—and overlook the signs of abuse elsewhere.
In practice, however, automated systems rely on the collection of ever more intimate details about the lives of welfare beneficiaries, cataloguing, classifying, and ranking “their traumas, coping mechanisms, feelings, and fears.” From the moment they apply, welfare applicants find themselves ensnared in a web of surveillance, subject to persistent scrutiny, a presumption of guilt, invasive interrogations, coercion of their reproductive choices, and violations of their bodily and decisional autonomy. In the supposed interest of preventing fraud, saving taxpayer dollars, and protecting children, the state forces poor families to bare themselves, interrogating every purchase, every parenting decision, every relationship.
Automation undermines due process and fails to address the underlying causes of poverty. These systems collect and produce data that justify the status quo and criminalize desperation. The Allegheny algorithm treats the use of public services itself as a risk to children. “A quarter of the predictive variables in the AFST,” Eubanks reports, “are direct measures of poverty: they track use of means-tested programs such as TANF, SSI, SNAP, and county medical assistance.” That means that poor families are at a higher risk of being investigated for neglect and abuse if they take advantage of the services available to care for their children.
The homeless in LA face a comparable devil’s choice. In order to access housing resources, homeless men and women in LA must fill out a “vulnerability index” entry survey. The survey solicits an array of personal information: social security number, full name, birth date, demographic information, veteran status, immigration and residency status, and where the respondent can be found at various times of day. It also asks intimate questions about the applicants’ experiences with domestic violence, sexual assault, self harm, drug abuse, sex work, and mental health. Admitting “risky, or even illegal, behavior” on the entry survey, Eubanks found, can “snag you a higher ranking on the priority list for permanent supportive housing.” But it also makes you more vulnerable to the police. The self-reported data in the LA registry is made available to the LAPD without a warrant, departmental oversight, or judicial review of any kind.
Most of all, Eubanks demonstrates, increased digital scrutiny and automation further isolate the poor from the affluent, undermining the intimate interactions that facilitate empathy—or, better yet, solidarity. “Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management,” Eubanks writes, “digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices.” It’s easier, after all, for a caseworker to change a zero to a one than to face, in person, the parents of 6-year-old Sophie Stipes, a severely disabled child whose Medicaid benefits were cancelled by Indiana’s automated system. The digital poorhouse reframes questions of justice as questions of efficiency. Algorithms score individuals, deciding how to distribute scarce resources, but in so doing they reify scarcity. “Homelessness is not a systems engineering problem,” UCLA law professor Gary Blasi told Eubanks. “It’s a carpentry problem.” As with the county poorhouses of yore, Eubanks writes, automation is a means of managing the poor, “so that we do not have to eradicate poverty.”
Eubanks’s book is a rejoinder to the bloodless numericalization of social problems that typifies the neoliberal approach to welfare. Automating Inequality is filled with tender, humane stories about people on both sides of public provision. Gary Boatwright, a 64-year-old homeless man affectionately known as “Commander Kush” by his neighbors, offers Eubanks his bottle of water—a precious commodity on Skid Row—when she comes to visit his tent. Patrick Grzyb and Angel Shepherd, disabled and unemployed, live with Angel’s 9-year-old daughter Harriette and Patrick’s six-year-old granddaughter Deseraye. When the girls bicker, Patrick has each of them don a sleeve of the “Get-Along-Shirt,” one of Patrick’s “roomy button-downs,” until they stop fighting. The mixed, intergenerational family has faced a series of neglect investigations by the Allegheny Office of Children, Youth, and Families (CYF). Pat Gordon, a CYF caseworker, Eubanks writes, “is the kind of woman who keeps pictures of other people’s children in her cubicle. . . . Her mischievous laugh quickly transitions to quiet seriousness” when she discusses the kids she serves.
Typically, Eubanks observes, stories about the poor only have two lessons, either “‘You should feel sorry for the poor’ or ‘You shouldn’t.’” With these complex, intimate portraits, Eubanks seeks to break the ideological injunction that our narratives of poverty orbit around worthiness. Paraphrasing the journalist Monica Potts, Eubanks observes, when it comes to depictions of the hard up, Americans tend only to tolerate “illustrations of suffering, litanies of misery, or morality plays of bad choices and their consequences.” But human beings aren’t object lessons for the middle class.
For Eubanks, defeating the moral mythology of poverty, which has persisted in America since the founding, is pivotal to rectifying the wrongs of the digital poorhouse. The notion that poverty is primarily a consequences of moral lack sooths the consciences of the middle class, underlies the assumption that poor people are bad parents, and justifies a system of permanent totalitarian surveillance in their lives.
Eubanks is but one of a number of scholars who reject these mainstream premises about privacy and surveillance. Indeed, as she and others show, the legal regime of privacy was never intended to protect them in the first place.
In her 2016 book The Poverty of Privacy Rights, Boston University legal scholar Khiara Bridges documents how women on welfare are denied spatial, decisional, and informational privacy in nearly every aspect of their lives. They are subject to invasive, sometimes retraumatizing, questioning as a prerequisite for attaining benefits. Through restrictions on funding elective abortion and family-cap policies for mothers on welfare, the state intrudes upon the most intimate decisions of their lives: variously forcing women to give birth and to terminate pregnancies against their wills. Courts have consistently upheld warrantless searches of welfare recipients’ homes—supposedly the most sacred place in Fourth Amendment doctrine—to search for evidence of fraud. The courts reason that welfare applicants have an “uncoerced” choice to refuse a home visit, because there is no penalty for refusing to consent—other than the denial of benefits. But of course, it betrays a profound indifference to the lived experience of poor people to suggest that the threat of losing benefits is not coercion. As legal scholar Chris Slobogin has noted, those suspected of tax fraud—a crime whose cost to the American taxpayer is incomparably more severe—enjoy the full protection of the Fourth Amendment, while those suspected of welfare fraud receive none.
The government’s justification for its punitive and intrusive approach to welfare is its interest in protecting poor children and reducing fraud. But our government also declines to do the very thing we know would contribute most to poor children’s safety and health: make their families less poor. One in five American children lives in poverty; American children are ranked 26th among rich countries in terms of “overall well-being”; and we spend among the least on benefits and services to families. America’s stingy approach to public benefits contradicts our supposedly dogged commitment to safeguarding poor children. Instead, our punitive welfare state seeks to “correct” the bad behavior of poor mothers—whose moral flaws are presumed to account for their poverty—while declining to provide for their needy children.
The best way to eliminate the more punitive, suspicious, and stigmatizing aspects of the welfare system would be to abandon means-tested benefits altogether. In its place, we could have a universal basic income or system of universal child allowances. A universal benefit alleviates the need for persistent state scrutiny and intrusive data collection—because everyone gets it regardless of need. Universal benefits (like social security and Medicare) also help to diminish the stigmatizing and isolating aspects of means-testing. It’s harder to scapegoat and demonize poor black mothers—a persistent theme in anti-welfare rhetoric—when every American family is receiving cash benefits.
We would do well to abandon the popular understanding of the privacy-rights bearer as an affluent white man—unburdened by history, by power, by coercion. He bears almost no resemblance to those who endure the worst consequences of surveillance. The embrace of such a figure by civil-liberties groups routinely limits our ability to imagine the privacy harms experienced by nonwhite, nonmale, and nonrich people. The right “to be let alone,” as Brandeis and Warren explained in their 1890 articulation of legal privacy, is of little use to those whose economic circumstances necessitate a life of interdependence. The common law principle that a “home is man’s castle,” is worthless if you don’t have a home.
Those of us who believe in privacy as a fundamental right—a guarantee of human dignity, autonomy, and self-determination—should also advocate for policies to correct the massive inequalities in wealth and power that make the equitable enjoyment of privacy impossible.
]]>a war of our own device,
a festival of consent.
They practice dispossession in collaboration, as withdrawal, and we’ve been fascinated for many years with the sociality of the music. Can you get that in a poem? Well, if it’s in a poem that’s just poetry in a tight chemise. A band makes music; the making of the band is poetry: anarchitectural, anatopological syntax in correspondence. How can you make the making of the music sound good? The social cultivation of “mere accompaniments” of the utterance. Their practice is their theme. Sometimes this takes the form of commentary, sometimes of inventory. Making ain’t reducible to its conditions but it ain’t detached from ‘em, either. We make cars, the league of black revolutionary workers might say; but really what we’re making is the league of black revolutionary workers—off and under and over the line. What Thom might say is: they thought I was making poems but really we were making poetry. We want to keep seeing what we come to in the making. It’s not that matters of skill or craft have been suspended. They just been socialized, deindividuated, shared. Thom is them. Thom’n’em, Them downstairs, in a tremendous submachine of milk’n’cookies. To say that them is a poet, or a good poet, is to narrow the scope of the shit in which they involved, a threshold poetry hands when its care and study gets so deep. Neither the poet nor the poem can contain such virtue: what it is to be able not so much to ask but to construct a question, to be allowed being also to be required to construct, construct implying some intention—fanned out all over the yard like some weighted canopies or a community sing of open corners or a conversion of the guards—to hit a poem or a poet in the throat or in the stomach. Man, it’s a shame how them fucked up all them damn poets and them damn poems’n’em.
And Malik’n’em’s problematic of making, in dislocation, withdrawn, a discourse curved in the outskirts of black performance, left as an empty sequence. “The name of this tune is ‘Mississippi Goddamn.’ And I mean every word of it.” The way she says “and” is neither a bending of a note nor a slurring of two. It’s an infinite n, endless, endlessly and unbendingly ribboned and turned’n’em, empathically folded in not in between, unintegered, disintegrated with gratitude. To think Nina Simone as actor, Gunther Kaufman—in Fassbinder’a concern with Brecht’s concern with gesture—as dancer: genre bent, or slurred, and neither. Is blackness a deeply energetic position from which to communicate or a deeply energetic apposition from which to announce communicability? Deep in these ongoing epilogomena to any future meta/physics, she had a wig on cocked to the side. And she hummed every word of it.
The experiment consists of this entangled state being shared between experimenters, each of whom has the ability to measure either with respect to the basis or . We see that if they each measure with respect to , then they never see the outcome . If one measures with respect to and the other , they never see the outcomes . However, sometimes they see the outcome when measuring with respect to , since
this leads us to the paradox: having the outcome we conclude that if one of the experimenters has measured with respect to the basis instead, the outcome must have been or , since and are impossible. But then, if they had all measured with respect to the basis, by locality the result must have been , which is also impossible,
and never even gone.
To emancipate oneself from oneself is the secret overpopulation of the mono-instrumental imperative. The composers guild throws seed, hill by hill, in minimal dispersion. This is liturgical ru(m)ination, jalalian glossolalia. Jalal al-Din is discourse, well, here you go again. You say you want your freedom, but all you wanna do is share, deforming life in the terraform—“always a collective differentiation” under firm tara. Somewhere I read you long to dispossess yourself of yourself. What’s the relation and/or the difference between emancipation and dispossession? “I’d like there to be space between us and then also a crushing, a pounding.” Eastman, alone, says, “let sonorities ring,” which is what King did when he said “let freedom ring” way past the meaning of what he said, being eastern man alone. Must we mean what we say? Mo. Meant to write no but mo mo’ better in the mo + less than fullness of its articulation. Mo mean no + yes, which is more + less than no, motherfucker. Eastman, unalone, can’t, won’t, yeah. Is hearing a feeling standing over you like Marx asking questions? Cavell gives sharing as an individual affair. Your sharing seems different—either dispossessive of that individuality or held in that all but already given dispossession, the given having given itself away to never was. We got to forgive you, never even gone? Are you ever gon’ go? Give it up, turn it loose.
Still a player?
We crush a lot. Pound plenty.
What is a group?
group (n.) 1690s, originally an art criticism term, “assemblage of figures or objects forming a harmonious whole in a painting or design,” from French groupe “cluster, group” (17c.), from Italian gruppo “group, knot,” which probably is, with Spanish grupo, from a Germanic source, from Proto-Germanic *kruppaz “round mass, lump,” part of the general group of Germanic kr- words with the sense “rounded mass” (such as crop (n.). Extended to “any assemblage, a number of individuals related in some way” by 1736. Meaning “pop music combo” is from 1958. Round ass lump or lumpen is from 1976. Lumpen from lumen, or inside lip, a unit of luminous flux in superfluid kisses, from an influenza of switches (such as crew (adv.). A way people be sharply butterflying.
I wanna do bad things to who, Gruppen, writing in a state of abandon. Is a dissertation defense a form of self-defense? Groups. A group of groups. Is there anything other than the group? Or, to be more precise, is there nothing other than a group? Is there a size limit on groups? When is a group too big to be a group? This is the problem of scale. Murray Jackson says Philip Levine’s work is work; is work always, and of necessity, group work? What if it’s not about putting shit together but about how shit falls apart? Communicability against the state. Another history of the group. Another history in this metaphysics. The art of the fugue, evil nigger. Difference got out of jail, and died in the street, saying this is grime. The art of the upper room. The art of the river rouge.
Doubleness of the beguine,
is there any beginning,
the beguine then wandering? Orewoet,
the desire that drives one mad, die minne to bear ghebruken?
Contrafactum, substitution of text
without changing the music, maintenance
of a melody when the text changes,
expands or contracts, requiring sustenance,
or melisma, or double time,
is it too far to think the counterfacticity of King Pleasure and Eddie Jefferson?
Or some kind of scattish
counterfactotem, the sacred utility man,
a one-man band emblematic of nothingness, scatman carousing, shining in the light that Brent resounds, Hadewijch set to music
hedwig made plain, Edwidge Dantichant,
a maronnage of beguining, running, begging, praying, singing, dancing?
But how’d the beguine begin, and who the hell got there from here, what redirection, what rhum, what rhumba, what ronald, what rose-antoinette, what Martinique, what jubilee? Come on, man, certain weird, black-ass white women, evidently, and some Burghardts bogarting for the people.
23.1 Improvisation is how we make no way out of a way. Improvisation is how we make nothing out of something. 23.1.1,
some ways, that thing, is it the same thing to think and to be? To think and to do? To think and to feel? Let’s say that already embedded in this Parmenidean series is the resistance to the very idea, as well as the very regime, of the epistemic even as it’s already scarred by it in being held in it, in its placement of thinking at the center of a relation that soon becomes a relational matrix. (And isn’t this brutalizing interplay of centrality and relationality, in its very surreptitiousness, part of what decoloniality wanted to be about the business of exposing and disavowing?) This idea that thinking, which is to say the thinker, comes first and everything (else in this expulsive grasp that links and constitutes thing and else in severalty) revolves around it, is a problem of settlement, of the settler who brings the center with them, as them, everywhere they go; and today the question is whether the idea→state→activity of “bewilderment” does anything to ameliorate it. The fact that we still here seems to indicate that we hope so. Cole Porter’s jubilee begins again,
one mo’gin. 1. What if the problem isn’t coloniality as an episteme? What if the problem is that coloniality is always already given in the very idea of the episteme? What if coloniality is the age, or the locale, or more precisely, the spacetime, of the episteme? 2. Is bewilderment an expression or a refusal of the epistemic? Is bewilderment in line with other notions—such as techne or doxa—that are said to deviate from the epistemic? Or is it something like the unconscious, or the aesthetic, that might be best characterized as deviant within the epistemic? Is coloniality, or modernity, the episteme of the episteme, where the constrained motion of from and within indicate a common terroir, the general field of scientificity, which is space time itself, produced and then discovered? This Foucauldian question is not meant to advance, against Foucault’s grain, an overarching anti-historicism: it is, rather, a question concerning the perhaps inconceivable, but certainly still unconceived, breadth of the very idea of the geographico-historical as such, unravelled in the beguine,
ne mo’ one mo’gin. 2. At stake is a general problematic of separation. In which case, are we talking, finally, about decoloniality and bewilderment as modalities of partition within a spatio-temporal order, a geographico-historical regime, that is given in and as partition? I don’t know. I’m bewitched. Bothered. I’m Rodgers and Hart and Ella. In this regard, ain’t nothing new. Either need to let all that shit go or just keep going all up in it without worrying about it, or trying to name our way either out of it or innovatively within it. These prolly amount to the same thing. Meanwhile, just since I woke up this morning, how many vicious thoughts have I thought about people with whom I agree on 99% of what they say and with whom I share 99% of their desires? I lost count. That’s bad, and I really want to work on that, but I can’t work it by myself, or in my head, or in the interpersonal diorama,
Diotima, Jadwiga, Hedwig, Edwidge,
Hadewijch, set edge, set to music.
Maybe the difference ain’t between
performance and practice. Maybe it’s
not between practice and playing.
Maybe the difference is all inseparably
inside out and unexternalizable, all and
more and none and gone, come on,
It is early, and inside of an airplane sitting outside of the San Francisco Airport, a mother is asking a person two seats ahead of me to switch seats, so that she can have a window seat for her son, and he looks at the world outside of this metal container that is dragging us back to somewhere in the waiting Midwest. I have this fear of heights, but I do find the appeal in looking out of windows during flights. In Oakland, where I spent the past five days reading poems in hotel rooms with friends that I only get to see a couple times a year. Two nights ago, one of them ran up to the roof of the hotel at night and looked over, everything below was an impossible darkness. It’s that kind of height I find myself uncomfortable with. Some would tell me not to think of it as a fear of heights so much as a fear of falling. Planes work if you can manage to not think of the machinery. The way I walk into a store and buy what my body is demanding without thinking of the labor that carried the product to that moment. But, this mother wants her son to understand the world from this height and the person in the window seat she wants isn’t moving. So she is loud now, shouting in the name of her child, who also isn’t moving, and who seems preoccupied with the small screen in front of him, where two cartoon characters are wrestling each other over some treasure. I am thinking of what it must be like to not have a desire to get close to heaven at a time like this. A time when there is just a hint of morning coloring the sky as the waning darkness fights against it, making it so that everything above is the color of blood pushing its way across a dark surface This is the part of the flight I live for: being pulled into the impossible beauty above and feeling like I could touch it if I wanted to. I’m not particularly excited about going back home today, though I do miss it. The dying summer and covering the Midwest in a kind of heat that doesn’t afford anyone the mercy of Oakland’s proximity to water. It is one thing to love where you’re from and miss it, and another to fall in love somewhere else and then have to pull away. When the mother gives up on the person two seats ahead of me, she makes eye contact with me and my precious window seat. I pretend to not notice, nodding my head along to imagined music coming out of my detached headphones. But I’m a poor actor, and have no luck convincing her of my being oblivious to her suffering. Standing over me, she pleads, explaining that her son has never even been on a plane before, though has loved watching them from below. And she wants him to have a window seat so that he’ll be maybe be less afraid. And I know that I have been afraid and found comfort in seeing. In the turning of my head to that which I fear. And so I surrender my seat and I watch the eager mother carry her son in her arms, to that which she thinks will make him whole. I push myself into an aisle seat and prepare for the long flight home, considering that perhaps life is too short for fear. There is always going to be something outside, waiting to kill us all.
]]>In my interviews with a group of friends and colleagues about assumptions in technology design about their disability, the most common experience was of exhaustion. New technologies often require the hard work of people who use them and who have to adjust to continuous updates. Heather Vuchinich, who is a writer and astrologer, says that closed captions on television and movies “are often of poor quality, too small, or unavailable.” More important, she notes, is “the psychological effects of depending on technology for something ‘normal’ people take for granted.” Vuchinich sometimes jokes that she’s part “cyber” because of her dependence on hearing aids, but this sense of being cyber can also mean feeling subhuman.
Even tech supposedly designed to “help” disabled users can sometimes discriminate against disabled people. A web browser can easily detect when someone is using a screen reader and direct them to limited functionalities specifically designed for blind users, even if they haven’t consented to being channeled to a separate user experience or asked for or wanted such functions. Leona Godin, a writer who holds a PhD in 18th-century English literature, reports that when she accesses library websites they continually suggest she use a library for children and nonacademic readers who are blind. “To assume that a blind person is not also a scholar needing to access the full catalogue feels a little insulting.” There’s a pacifying work that the word ‘inclusion’ does, rendering users as a generalized body of people without regard for the proliferation of varying identities and needs under the banner of “disabled.”
This is because even inclusive technology is still often guided by the belief that disability must be cured. Cure is goal oriented, causal and finite. Cure assumes that when a user is in one state, typically illness or impairment, they can get to the other state, a complete negation of their previous one, through technological or medical means. This assumes the given state only exists as a problem to be solved, and that its negation is an obvious moral good. While the narrative of cure applies to people who are ill or temporarily impaired, disabled people need a different conceptual framework. Even with the most advanced technology, disability can not and—sometimes should not—disappear from people. There are disabled people whose relationship with their own bodily functions and psychological capabilities cannot be considered in a linear movement from causation to result, where narratives of technology as cure override the real varieties in people’s needs and conditions and falsely construct binary states—one or the other, abled or disabled—shadowing everything between or outside of those options.
Many members of the Deaf community take pride in their identity, and in advocating for their rights. The idea of cure can lead to the erasure of identity, giving a false promise that technology can solve a cultural problem of barriers that exclude disabled people. In the 2008 documentary Examined Life, artist and activist Sunaura Taylor explains the difference between impairment, which she describes as “our own unique embodiments,” and disability, which is “the social repression of disabled people.” Disability, in this light, is a condition of a society that disables people. As an ableist social construct of what a normal body is and does, technology framed as cure harms disabled people who are more vulnerable to breaches to and compromises of their privacy. Narratives of technology as a solution for people to overcome their disability thus reinforce oppressive ideas like what constitutes a socially acceptable body. Such narratives in turn take space away from the public imagination about what needs to be done to abolish ableist thinking.
Care, in contrast to cure, is a form of stewardship between people who support each other in communication, action, and social engagement. It is actualized by extending one’s mindfulness of another person’s dignity and feelings, while respecting their independence. Care is made possible when parties are mutually accountable for each other’s well-being. Caring differs from an explicit division of power and is not a transfer of the decision-making process, because it is based on a sense of interdependence, which is a free exchange that cannot be contracted or automated. If the narratives of technology-as-cure focus on the explicit, obvious, visible conditions of enhancement, technology-as-care focuses on more implicit, less visible conditions that are difficult to identify. Technology can be used for care when it buttresses our autonomy and does not assume our decisions in advance. While machines can learn, automate, and execute certain tasks faster than humans, human deliberation—a subtle murmuring or hesitation—is often a sign of deep thinking. This deliberation should not be seen as a matter of inefficiency but rather as a sign of care that cannot be automated. The slowness may be the integral element of human agency.
Artificial Intelligence, on the other hand, is often framed as the latest solution to complex problems, hyped and tossed around conveniently in all situations due to its ontological expansiveness. But systems of AI are already deeply embedded in our most mundane electrical communication, from what’s surfacing on your Facebook timeline, to search suggestions on Google and so on. AI can be broken down into several parts: broad data collection that is fed into learning algorithms, which power “intelligent” automated decisions. The final point of “intelligence” requires attention. As researchers M. C. Elish and Tim Hwang write in a 2016 book, An AI Pattern Language, AI is essentially “a computer that resembles intelligent behavior. Defining what constitutes intelligence is a central, though unresolved, dimension of this definition.” AI’s intelligence most often manifests in the seemingly autonomous organization of information and its applications, for example, Internet advertisements that suggest products based on a complex user profile. Most Internet corporations collect a wide range of data in order to extract behavior patterns and predict future interaction. The algorithms that continually evolve models for organizing information are the basis of machine learning, which, according to M. C. Elish and Tim Hwang, “enable a computer to ‘learn’ from a provided dataset and make appropriate predictions based on that data.” The scale in which the model learns and transforms, along with the growing amount of data from people’s interactions with computational systems, poses new points for consideration.
There are innovations for disabled people being made in the field of accessible design and medical technologies, such as AI detecting autism (again). However, in these narratives, technologies come first—as “helping people with disabilities”—and the people are framed in subordinate relation to them. Alarmingly, narratives around AI often present it as a covert release from social responsibility. The field of precision medicine attracts a techno-optimist vision of tailored, on-demand medical services based on genetic data that presents itself as the alternative to the current “baseline average” medical service. An imaginary scenario includes preemptive medical intervention prior to the appearance of symptoms, based on algorithmic analysis of data that is aggregated and managed free of the conventional medical regulations. These narratives flatten the spectrum between cure and care, illness and disability, medical intervention and inclusive adaptation.
The new normals of impersonal, “intelligent” services may come with unseen repercussions. Machines learn, oftentimes with mistakes. When no person can be held responsible for the medical decisions made by AI, who is accountable for a clinical mistake or instance of discrimination? AI will have a material impact on who gets considered worth saving, reifying existing social hierarchies by further alienating those who are already excluded. AI can render disabled people invisible from the database, if they have communication disabilities, or unique body features or psychological capacities. Alternately, it can make disabled people hypervisible by profiling their identity and render them more vulnerable to threat, surveillance, and exploitation. Either way, AI performs tasks according to existing formations in the social order, amplifying implicit biases, and ignoring disabled people or leaving them exposed.
What kind of technological advances do disabled people really want, then? To start, they seek necessary representation in the innovation and design process. Too often, sign-language recognition systems try to be all-inclusive and in the process lose usefulness. Instead, architect Jeffrey Mansfield says, “AI that limits recognition to daily commands one might use while driving, watching TV, or changing thermostats . . . can be much more robust in our daily lives. Self-learning sign-language recognition from both first-person and third-person POVs would be useful, as well as self-learning, real-time automatic transcription for multiple speakers.” These ideas are grounded in the intricate life experiences of a Deaf person. Furthermore, Mansfield points toward the need for updated cultural narratives around technology as inherently more advanced: “People have assumed that YouTube auto-captioning or dictation offers adequate accessibility that can replace other, more analog forms of accessibility such as sign language interpreting or accurate captioning.” Mainstream narratives of new technology often set aside the social and civil advances that are still necessary to truly address the needs of disabled communities for practical access and the ability to decide what they want. Leona Godin suggests “a functional eyeball—I could wear it on my head or as a necklace or sunglasses, but if it told me what was happening in front of my eyeballs, my brain could take care of the rest.” It’s important to note her insistence on retaining control of what she does with the added information. The kinds of prosthetics she wants would enhance her autonomy, not supplant it.
To empower disabled people through technology, Chancey Fleet, whose education practice focuses on accessibility, points to a need to help people become critical users, saying, “Emerging technology users may learn enough to succeed at immediately pressing tasks, but if they don’t progress to becoming critical users they are very unlikely to encounter the idea that their data and interaction with the system might be used in ways they don’t expect.” Fleet suggests that “if an application is looking at my browsing and purchase history and curating what it shows me in response, there should be a place where I explicitly allow or don’t allow that (like I grant microphone access, or don’t).” This is part of demystifying algorithms, one of the objectives in computer-programming workshops I’ve facilitated for people who are Deaf, Blind, or on the autism spectrum or who have a combination of disabilities. The end goal is, as dancer and choreographer Alice Sheppard proposes, “disability leading the design process as positive, generative artistic forces.” Artistic provocation, calls for political action, and technological research and development can come together as a conceptual framework. In respect of disabled people’s approach to technology, the scholar Meryl Alper, in her book Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality, writes, “They are not passively given voices by able-bodied individuals; disabled individuals are actively taking and making them despite structural inequality.” Technology only becomes useful for people with disability through a combination of community support, societal acceptance of the varieties of disability, and appreciation of unique individual circumstances.
Given the power of technological narratives to influence our ideas of future societies, changing these narratives should lead to renewed social appreciation for disabled people. Change should occur first through the acknowledgement of disabled people as users, communities, and vital parts of the public. An appreciation of their full humanity would mean disabled people do not have to fight for what is available for nondisabled people by default. And there must be readily available opportunities for disabled people to design technology for themselves. Their everyday needs and imagination need to be at the forefront of design, not an afterthought in the name of benevolent inclusion that can render people unable to participate in the society. Shifting the narratives about technology-as-cure to technology-as-care can facilitate a dialogue about disability as a human condition for everyone to consider, not just the people with impairment. Technology-as-care is not considering disabled people as someone to be “cared by” others; rather, it is appreciation of disabled people’s tenacity and creativity to design technology that people can use to “care for” each other.
]]>The buzzwords that dominated the TERF wars—free speech, call-out culture, no-platforming, identity politics—continue to circulate in round after round of think pieces and hashtags. Unfortunately the lion’s share of the conversation/meme war continues to be—to borrow Christian Parenti and James Davis’s frame—moralistic rather than strategic. Instead of assessing any given arrangement of forces and options for adequate responses, too often these interventions retreat to abstract and dogmatic proclamations. As Carwil Bjork-James noted about the slinging match over violence vs. nonviolence, we often forget to ask a central question: “What works?” The answer is always situationally contingent. But learning from specific situations remains crucial, if we are to avoid further farce and/or tragedy. It’s worth reexamining recent attempts to counter anti-trans toxicity with this in mind.
Nagle uses a common argument from leftist opponents of no-platforming: that engaging our opponents in civil debate is not only right but also effective. She claims that the left has become anemic by cowering in the shadows, trying to ban its enemies instead of debate them. Her focus on how we win is essential—we agree on the need to assess leftist interventions on the grounds of efficacy. But the conclusions she and her comrades draw are wrong. Far from being silenced, anti-trans feminists continue to roam free in spaces of sanctioned public discourse, often by invoking liberal norms of free speech. Their false claim to a position that is both anti-trans and leftist, and the concomitant “debates” they insist upon, have together drained our time, energy, and resources. The debates haven’t made us stronger but have instead weakened our ability to dismantle anti-trans bigotry where it’s most important—in our workplaces, families, and community spaces. Free-speech rhetoric has been used to legitimate dehumanizing calls for life-threatening violence—institutional and interpersonal—against trans women, men, and nonbinary people. None of this has brought any part of the left closer to winning—instead it has opened significant political space for a slew of toxic right-wing attacks at micro- and macropolitical levels.
Such language can be jarring—to some, “sisterhood” feels like an exaggerated rhetorical device, suited to megaphone harangues and comment sections, or a hangover from an outdated political lexicon. For many it is a sharp reminder of who and what has been centered in the deeply flawed history of feminist organizing: an in-group forged from exclusions, as critics as far back as Sojourner Truth have underscored. For our family, the concept of the sisterhood remained a touchstone, despite its serious defects and failings. When my birth mother fought through four years of ultimately terminal cancer, alongside the boundless support of our biological family, it was the care work from friends she’d made over 20 years of anti-patriarchal struggle that kept her afloat and alive. Her network painted murals in our backyard, traveled from other continents to take her to the beach, stocked our fridge, changed her sheets when they were drenched in painkiller sweat, talked her through dying with techniques derived from feminist co-counseling, and held me when I stumbled through the planning of her funeral. These wonderful women, these extra aunts and mothers who surround me still, took the enjoinder to make the personal political seriously, and left me with an understanding of the sisterhood that is very concrete indeed. And it was to the sisterhood I turned in the mid-2000s, when my surviving mother underwent the three years of bureaucratic and medical processes that took her from Robert to Raewyn.
She did not choose this path as a piece of political performance art, in order to dramatize the fluidity of gender or provoke debate online, though her transition has sometimes been treated that way. Indeed, the logics of choice and causation were inadequate: The descriptions and metaphors that cropped up instead were of waterfalls and avalanches, speaking to inevitability, heartache, and the great relief of coming home. My mother had academic tenure and owned our house—certainly a more generous cushion than the room of one’s own and 500 a year stipulated by Virginia Woolf. As a result, she was not subject to all of the risks that people face in gender transition. Important support came from the feminist sisterhood, but there were also crushing silences, and hostility in places where I had hoped for something different — not only because I expected feminists to grapple adroitly with gender complexity but because I had learned to expect solidarity. I had thought of our nuclear family as only one node in a larger communion of people struggling to extinguish the patriarchal order. But that kind of affinity, I discovered, became more tenuous the further away we got from a carefully vetted core.
So I learned to vet more carefully, even as I continued to hope that more cis feminists would get their shit together. I had some reason to be hopeful. By the middle of this decade, Laverne Cox and Janet Mock had become media icons, popularizing a complex feminism foregrounding racial and economic inequality, and inextricable from their trans-rights work. Transparent—before Jeffrey Tambor’s fall from grace—overflowed with trans-affirmative feminisms. Gloria Steinem saw the light, and the blight of the trans-exclusionary Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival disappeared for good. And most importantly, thanks to the unceasing work of trans organizers, public-policy shifts also began to happen: Gender-neutral bathrooms appeared in more institutions, the U.S. Department of Education released guidelines for protecting trans students, and the Department of Justice issued a memo extending anti-discrimination measures to trans employees. These incremental gains were far from an endgame, but they provided breathing room, and tools to be wielded by a movement we hoped was getting more powerful by the day. If there was a culture war, I thought, surely we were winning—both within feminism and without.
But a backlash was building, and not only from the far right. Anti-trans bile spewed by self-appointed feminist spokeswomen appeared regularly in progressive media outlets: the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Observer. These were frequently represented as explorations of legitimate controversy: When Michelle Goldberg wrote the characteristic “What Is a Woman?” she used the cover of journalistic musing (“I’m just asking!”) to clear space for anti-trans bigotry in the pages of a flagship liberal magazine. This wave has yet to recede. Only a month ago, my mother was caught in a Crossfire-style encounter on Australian national radio, where she had to sit across from an anti-trans feminist hurling terms like “genital mutilation” while the hosts (cis men, naturally) made jovial interjections like “this is fascinating.” They sounded as though they had invited a discussion on the merits of different brands of mustard, rather than social arrangements with life-and-death consequences.
Trans womanhood continues to be treated as a topic of playful debate for the chattering classes in places like Sydney, New York, and London. The stakes are high—Mike Pence is now a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, “bathroom bills” are cropping up across the U.S., and Trump appointees are busy rolling back any gains won under the Obama administration. We cannot lay primary responsibility for this state of affairs at the feet of anti-trans feminists—their influence is not so great. But the damage they do is real: Not only do they open space for liberals and leftists to opt out of trans solidarity, but they also provide rhetorical cover and ammunition for right-wing attacks.
The liberal impulse to grant anti-trans positions airtime as part of a “debate”—exacerbated by profit-seeking publishers operating in an economy of rage clicks and engineered controversy—is corrosive. Every time a prominent anti-trans feminist is taken seriously as an interlocutor in liberal or left spaces, arguing with them saps us of precious time and energy. That in turn weakens our ability to fight right-wing encroachments, putting people in serious danger: at work, at home, in jail, on the street, at swimming pools, at the doctor, and in public restrooms. This is to say nothing of the anti-trans feminists who explicitly work with groups like Focus on the Family to push for a poisonous policy agenda, continuing a long and ugly tradition of symbiosis with the religious Right.
Debate is not a useful mode of engagement with the people whose sense of self and/or clickbait-derived paycheck is dependent on their bigoted position. To reiterate: This is not a moral argument but a tactical one. We don’t need a detailed grasp of Gramsci, Foucault, or Overton to understand that profound political struggles play out on the terrain of what can or cannot be considered a reasonable topic of debate. Professional anti-trans feminists know this: For them, getting past the gatekeepers into sanctioned public discourse remains a goal. The new(ish) online vectors may have changed the game, but not to the point where Julie Bindel will turn down a Guardian column in favor of a Reddit AMA.
Blocking professional bigots when they try to use institutionally endorsed platforms is not equivalent to censorship, and need not involve calling on the state or administrative enforcers to do such work for us. Rejecting their presence in the few organizing spaces, publications, and other institutions where we have influence remains useful, in order to deprive them of the oxygen they might use to grow, the resources we might divert to their bank accounts, and the energy that we would spend on engaging with them. No fucking quarter.
But on its own, this is obviously far from enough. For feminists, ridding ourselves and the Cisterhood of trans-antagonistic baggage requires the kind of triage that liberation movements and their accomplices have always done: making calculations about who is simply an enemy and who we need to shift. On one hand, deep and legitimate rage about trans marginalization has sparked ferocious militancy, which finds more common ground with the Compton’s Cafeteria riot than with the Human Rights Campaign. On the other, a realpolitik has governed other modes of engagement—with the relatives at the holiday meal who support the gays but think all this trans stuff is going a bit far, with the girlfriend who’s never had occasion to think through the full implications of the U.S. healthcare rollback, with the union committee representatives who keep using the wrong pronouns. These interventions are not always designed to recruit cis people to the front lines, but attempt at least to neutralize cis bigotry.
The process of moving human obstacles often entails slow, frustrating, and exhausting work that happens largely offline, in recurring and cumulative conversations. It means grinding engagement with institutional reform, even when that work is deeply unsexy (long-term campaigning support for legislative reform, for instance). Sometimes it involves contradicting anti-trans bigots in public debates, when someone has been naive or incendiary enough to give them airtime (with the goal not of shifting the professional trolls but of inoculating their audience). I hope allocation of the more wearying parts of liberationist labor will change; as it stands, behind almost every cis person with a halfway decent position on trans politics is at least one very generous, very patient, and very tired trans or nonbinary educator. Taking on more of this work is not particularly fun—I don’t enjoy speaking with hostile or prurient people face to face, trying to painstakingly shift them away from implicit or explicit bigotry, searching for language that doesn’t rely on shorthand or shared assumptions. But my guess is that when I’ve done it, it was probably a more effective use of my time and energy than when I participated in outrage pile-ons on Twitter.
In the wake of 2016, calls for “left unity” have returned with a vengeance. Certainly it’s worth retiring the exhausting and exhausted opposition between caricatures: “identity politics” on one hand and a “class first, class only” left on the other. But are we doomed to repeat mistakes of lefts past, where specific liberation struggles were positioned as disposable in the search for mechanistic proletarian unity? Surely by now—after years of tireless work by Marxist feminists, among others—we are capable of class politics that is strengthened, not weakened, by confronting the various distinct modes of material marginalization in contemporary capitalism. Work for trans liberation, as Nat Raha recently pointed out, can and should go well beyond liberal ideas about social inclusion. Trans and nonbinary struggles for health justice are assets, not liabilities, to the broader fight for universal and equitable health care. The fight for safety for trans women, trans men, and nonbinary folks at work can build a militant labor movement, rather than weaken it. The campaign to free CeCe McDonald—a trans woman imprisoned after defending herself from a violent attack—showed us how work framed in terms of trans liberation can work with, rather than detract from, the broader movement for prison abolition.
As any organizer will remind us, building concrete coalitional politics across differentiated experience is messy. Budgets are limited, time is finite, and sometimes real, zero-sum trade-offs arise that cannot be resolved through elegantly worded manifestos. The basic principle, however, is straightforward: Our trans comrades deserve not only to survive but to live. The world is still full of professional anti-trans agitators who loudly proclaim otherwise. Without question, shrinking their audience requires work far beyond limiting their platforms. But we do not owe them our column inches, our speaking halls, or our patience. To cede these spaces, in the name of good-faith liberal debate, is to compound a massive strategic error, which no contemporary left can afford.
]]>In the 2015 film The Witch, this iconic round-the-fire ritual is a climactic reveal of witches living in the woods. But through subtle, fleeting cues throughout the film, we have been made to understand their association with Natives lurking just off frame. Witch magic, the frightened mother of a stricken child intones, is Indian magic.
In the mid-17th-century atmosphere in which this “New England folktale” takes place, the threat of witches follows from a fear of the Natives and their grounded intimacy with a coveted land yet to be tamed by settlement. This intimacy with land is then projected onto Indigenous forms of sociality and sexuality deemed unruly and un-Christian. Tellingly and expectedly, in The Witch it is the teenage girl of a Puritan family who, in coming into maturity and sexuality, brings witchery into the home. The film’s unexpected performance at the box office—grossing $40.4 million on a budget of $4 million—might in part be attributed to a recent revival in America’s interest in witches. This interest, broadcast by crystal-wearing enthusiasts all over various social media and fashion editorials, rarely attends with such historical accuracy as The Witch to the specter of savagery that witches once promised. How many viewers who delighted in the uninhibited fire dance at the end of the film gave even a second thought to the brief glimpse of Native men at the beginning?
Though it is the subtext of savagery (ascribed to both Indigenous and African-descendent peoples in the Americas) that animates narratives around witches, white women who take up the mantle of witch magic rarely understand themselves to be engaging in Indian or savage play. The turn to witchcraft as a trend (rather than a practice) is conditioned by white women’s desire to obfuscate the power begotten by their whiteness. The occult is after all definitionally about power that obscures its origin. In the current fashion and fashioning of witches, the historical connections between witches and racialized savages, however sublimated, continues to magnetize the appeal. I am sympathetic to this appeal even as I am suspicious of it; it marks a desire to be contrary to the colonial project, even if it does not always enact it.
The current trend in witch infatuation marks an alliance foreclosed. In the early days of America, when accusations of witchcraft were leveled at Indians, Black people, and settlers who strayed from the strict disciplining needed to create a cohesive sovereignty of one dominant nation, it was because witches were a threat. The representations of witches that dominate contemporary American cultural consciousness—the “Surprise, Bitch” meme from American Horror Story, Stevie Nicks, people who talk about healing stones a lot—betray the role witches could have played in undoing the nation.
That is not to say the threat of witches to poison the patriarch has completely disappeared. In recent weeks some men have been quick to label the campaigns bringing forth sexual assault and harassment accusations as witch hunts, willfully ignorant that the term refers to a concerted campaign against women. The foolish use of the term has been noted and mocked by women, some of whom have also reappropriated the term to declare themselves the witches doing the hunting (which may very well be what the men were unconsciously getting at in the first place—the feeling of being hunted by witches).
Actual witch hunts of the past such as the Salem witch trials followed from a fear of Indian women and their role in forms of governance alternative to those of the foundling country. Along with genocidal tactics of sexual violence, early settlers also worked through their fear by projecting it elsewhere. The hypervisibility, and necessarily spectacular aspects, of witch trials against white women were an arena to handle physically and politically the threat of Indigenous societies where women were in power. Beyond the events at Salem—a historical spectacle as formative to America as the Thanksgiving myth—unruly women, be they Native, Black, or white, have continuously been posed as savage and placed outside the enclosed boundaries of civilization and nation. In a move toward symbolic enclosure, both witches and Indians have been reduced to accessorized signifiers hawked by Urban Outfitters and Forever 21, available for the carefree to adorn themselves with at Coachella and express their pagan predilections for living ever so briefly outside time.
The work of enclosure is key here: Cultural representations of witches reign in their savagery even as horror movies such as The Witch might give participants a chance to be fearful of it. Enclosure is also the means by which the nation turns Indigenous land into private property, which then must be defended against subjects construed to be savage. Along with witch, savage, and slut, the accusatory title of heathen is also hurled throughout colonial times at those who stand in the way of a cohesive nation. Derived from the word heath, which can mean uncultivated plain or wild forest, heathen in its first uses in Christian contexts meant someone who not only lacked proper religiosity but also inhabited land in a noncivilized manner. To cast aside the heathen through death, incarceration, or rehabilitation has gone hand in hand with clearing the land to be made into property. Heathen is no longer a category of persecution, but the ideology that there are savages—i.e. Indigenous and Black peoples—with no valid claim to land and life certainly persists.
These colonial logics that permit ongoing dispossession and death point to one of the failures of white witches: While they might hex Trump, they do not in any meaningful way extend their lifestyle to stand with those still marked by the history of the heathen. The etymology of heathen helps illuminate an argument put forth by Silvia Federici in her classic feminist text Caliban and the Witch, that the American witch hunts were not just terrorist strategies to silence dissent and demand obedience, but were also importantly a strategy of enclosure. Federici’s theorization of primitive accumulation locates the development of capitalism in three linked processes: The coerced reproductive work of European women, the persecution of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Africans. While white witches once represented a threat to that reproductive order, they have since been sanitized and permitted, even if at the fringes, into civil society.
There
are multiple simultaneous nostalgias at work with the current witch obsession. There’s the nostalgia not only for a romanticized premodern time when earth-based practices, like a life structured around seasonal ceremony, were more possible, but also for the ’90s and its earnest invocation of girl power. First uttered by the punk group Bikini Kill, “girl power”—as a phrase, attitude, and position—was brought to wild heights of popularity by the Spice Girls. It is not surprising that in this atmosphere of celebration a fascination with witches would arise. While modern-day witches may seem, at times, aligned with a feminist political critique of capitalist reproduction, the fundamental threat of savagery they could pose to the nation is downplayed in their mainstream and even cult-classic iterations, which tacitly support female empowerment while avoiding the crisis in femininity witches have summoned in their naked fire dances. Of the many witchy movies and TV shows of the ’90s, several have since become millennial classics. The Craft—released in 1996 and centered on a group of four occult-dabbling Catholic schoolgirls—remains the iconic standout of the genre for its ability to brand the female empowerment narrative in the definitive looks of a contemporary coven: black latex, black eyeliner, black chokers. Unfortunately, what begins as a goth feel-good tale of getting revenge on slut-shaming football jerks turns to a jealous girl-on-girl fallout. Released three years earlier than the goth-chic cult classic was the more family-oriented Hocus Pocus, set in Salem, which features Bette Midler playing a genuinely scary and villainous witch but one who is defeated in the end by a teenage boy. Indians are absent from these movies and the lore they invoke. And though there is some passing reference to the violence faced by heathen women of the past, these films are mostly centered on redemptive stories of love: love between friends and sisters, but always more importantly romantic love between men and women.
The paragon of pagan chick flicks Practical Magic, for instance, begins in Puritan times with the scene of a witch about to be hung. This witch is feared for her magic and resented for her homewrecking ways. Ancestor to sisters played by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, the witch puts “a curse on any man who dares love” any of her female descendents. What ensues is a lifelong quest for the sisters to find un-hexed heterosexual romance. At one point they pull off a spell to reanimate Nicole Kidman’s abusive boyfriend with a pentagram made from a can of reddi whip. And in the end, Sandra Bullock’s character overcomes both the persecution of witches as outsiders and the family curse by falling in true love with a cop, once the violent enforcer of order transformed into a benevolent, handsome man.
Herein lies one of the more sinister revisions at work in the ’90s movie about witches—the strange women who abandon civilized life to live naked with other women in the woods become straight. According to colonial logics, women accused of witchcraft and Indigenous and African-descendent peoples are fundamental threats to the nation state. Their unruly sexualities (and the non-Western societal structures they index) are capable of undoing the binding power of the nuclear family, otherwise known as the power of the father. But the depictions of witches in the ’90s worked hard to repair witches’ reproductive role in the home. Willow, the beloved lesbian witch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is the exception whose status as sapphic icon proves the rule.
Though it debuted only a few years after The Craft, the TV series Charmed brought witchiness and ’90s nostalgia into the millennium. Drawing on the girl-group model of The Craft, Charmed is about the tribulations of three sisters, which often involve the difficulties of dating-while-Wiccan. In the third-season episode “The Good, the Bad and the Cursed,” one of the witch sisters, Phoebe, upon visiting a ghost town in the West, suddenly feels the literal pain of a Native American man stuck in a “time loop.” The symbolic sympathy between witches and Indians is for a moment rendered material but only so that Phoebe, played by Alyssa Milano, and her older sister Prue, played by Shannen Doherty, can perform a benevolent act of rescue—preventing the man from being killed and bringing him out of the time loop. The witches then succeed in keeping the Native man in his proper place in the past, while they return to the modern world where their domesticated life of pagan ways is allowed.
Even more recent is American Horror Story, whose third season, Coven, capitalized on the dual trends of witches and wokeness by tapping into national discussions on continuing racial violence against Black people. The season begins in the torture chamber of a white witch mistress, Madame Delphine LaLaurie, played by Kathy Bates, where the enslaved Black people under her ownership are depicted in gratuitously stylized pain and deprivation. Tiffany King has written that the show perfectly illustrates the fungibility of Black flesh: “She runs a torture chamber in order to satisfy lusts that include and exceed the sexual. In one episode, she murders and then uses the blood of an enslaved newborn child as an elixir that wards off the aging process. One gets a sense that the possibilities for Black flesh are unending under her ownership.” One also gets a similar sense from the how the show’s writers use their Black characters. Marie Laveau, played by Angela Bassett, is both a villain and protagonist throughout the season and references an often erased Black Indigeneity, here indicated by practices of vodou. In a disturbing but all-too-typical narrative device, the unnecessary, gory depiction of Black death operates as plot pivot, dramatic climax, and background horror at different points in the show.
The associations between Blackness, Indigeneity, and unruly sexuality that inform witchy narratives and the American construction of savagery illuminate the complicated, sometimes paradoxical forms of racialization in the New World. Returning to Federici, the Caliban in her book’s title is a character who has been interpreted and reinterpreted since he first appeared in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Because Caliban lives on a fictional island that evokes the Caribbean, literary critics such as Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd among others have noted a signifying slippage between Caliban as a Black and/or Native American savage. His mother Sycorax is a witch in exile from Algiers, while Caliban is a native to the New World whose name is derived from the word cannibal. This mingling of Africa and the Americas as sources of witchery continues into both the historical and pop cultural accounts of Salem, where an enslaved dark-skinned woman from Barbados, Tituba, was cast as the colony’s original witch, whose evil influence then infected other women and girls. While historians have debated whether Tituba actually had any African ancestors, she has been represented from the time of the Salem witch trials to contemporary times as a Black woman. This is a rare instance in the American cultural canon, and a telling anxiety, of ascribing an Indigeneity, that is a set of place-based non-Western traditions and practices, to Black women. Instead of the vacuum of history that the white settler enforces on the African Native during enslavement—through, among other things, stripping them of their names—their presence becomes a site for a slew of forbidden, dangerous, ancient magic in the context of colonial witch hunts.
While
the ever expanding Western frontier may not be a feature in every witch movie I’ve discussed, in almost all of them the move away from a comfortable home is a precursor for falling into witchcraft. The trope of a perilous journey away from a familiar home illuminates another underlying American tradition that influences the conditions for the production of white witches: the wildly popular and widely circulated captivity narratives that were published from the 17th to 19th century. The stories mostly follow the same plot: A woman traveling to the frontier is captured by hostile and barbaric Natives whose way of life she is eventually seduced by, causing her to hesitate or even refuse to return to white society. The anxious fascination that drove the popular consumption of these narratives was based in the fear of an alliance between white women forgoing the settler project for Indigenous ways of life.
The alliance that creates a sense of horror in these narratives is between those who can undo the reproductive necessities of colonial settlement. Reproductive crises, embodied by the savage and be-witching to the white woman, are the specter of captivity narratives of the past and contemporary tales of Wiccan women. The girls in witch-media are not only far from home but also often without a mother. The dead or missing mom trope is a distinctly millennial anxiety that Shaun Scott, author of Millennials and the Moments that Made Us, argues follows from the greater number of women entering the workforce full time. The ascendant figure of the career woman spurs the constantly repeated question: Can women have it all?—a question vaguely evocative of witchy accusations, What are these women capable of? The dead mother Scott points to as marking a millennial anxiety about modern women’s role or lack thereof in the domestic sphere has a corollary in the dead baby that has been the mythical distillation of witchy evil. Witches steal babies, they eat babies, and they cover themselves in babies’ blood. Relatedly, Indigenous peoples were figured as cannibals throughout the contact and colonial period throughout the Americas. Their taste for human flesh was but one of the more savage acts that legitimized conquering by refined Europeans, whose cannibalistic episodes could be chalked up to aberrations spurred by the devilish landscape of the frontier. Indian practices and the practices of ambitious women threaten to undo the binding powers of the normal nuclear family, triggering both anxieties and obsessions with the figure of the witch. The taking up of witchiness then makes sense at a time when more and more women may be delaying or opting out of motherhood. The depiction of witches in movies and TV more then seeks to assuage these anxieties by allowing witches to live normal, straight-women lives.
For Indigenous and Black women, however, the shifting savage signifier has not quite slipped away. It still sticks to racialized bodies that signify other ways of organizing society. Accusations that resonate with the title of heathen are now also hurled at Muslims both in America and abroad. Current projections by white Americans of a Muslim takeover harken back to the reconquista of Spain, a 700-year period when all Jewish and Muslim residents were expelled. The final years of the reconquista, the longest war in world history, overlapped with the colonial conquest of the Americas in the 1500s, and much of the language of savagery and rhetoric of conversion that conquistadors used against Natives had for generations been used by Catholics and other Christians seeking to expand their kingdoms in the name of Christ by violently repressing Islamic society. Islamophobia is not a recent political phenomenon in these lands—it has structured white American consciousness alongside the fear and fascination toward the Indian and African savage. While white women find pagan play empowering, those marked by the history of the heathen know what it is to be hunted. America is not a magical place, but its government can make people disappear.
]]>Ingalls captures the surreal monotony of this circumscribed terrain—at once noisy and stultifying, sprawling and claustrophobic—in a brilliant dovetailing of minimalist prose and maximalist premise. One day, while Dorothy does the dishes, a strange bulletin drifts in over the radio: a six-foot-seven-inch humanoid amphibian dubbed “Aquarius the Monsterman” has escaped from an oceanographic institute, killing his keepers in the process. In a letter to the writer Daniel Handler, Ingalls describes her fiction as “a combination of fable, fairytale and Romance” and identifies her main literary interest as “narrative: stories, patterns and the movement of thought.” Her own thought moves across distinctions of high and low, major and minor, in a manner as well suited to her subjects as the oversaturated repression of Todd Haynes’s best films. Though born in Massachusetts in 1940, Ingalls has lived most of her adult life in England. She was drawn abroad by “the whole Shakespeare jamboree that was going on here back in the ’60s,” but she’s also professed a love of American sci-fi movies, pulp fiction, and melodrama.
In Mrs. Caliban, the B-movie monster wanders onto the wrong set. Conventionally a vehicle of mass unease—think the respective nuclear and colonial allegories of Godzilla and King Kong—Ingalls instead casts her creature in a domestic drama, using him to bridge collective anxiety and private need. Larry, the name by which the creature introduces himself to an admirably unfazed Dorothy after wandering into her kitchen, recalls the familiar trope of pursued beast pursuing white woman. His violent flight from an abusive research facility incites mass-mediated panic, which drives him to seek shelter in Dorothy’s suburban home. But in the long interim between their introduction and climactic fate, Larry and Dorothy strike up an easy and frictionless affair. The couple pass their days in unexpected peace, joking over lunch, watching TV, driving to the beach, and having mutually restorative sex. (In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe famously says of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, “I think he just craved a little affection, you know? A sense of being loved and needed and wanted.”)
The genre confusion in Mrs. Caliban has been part of the novel’s allure through its fitful journey out of and back into print: The endorsements on this new edition invoke film thrillers, kitchen-sink realism, social satire, poetry, and romance. The proliferation of small details on which realist fiction traditionally relies for historical texture is only inconsistently evident here. Mrs. Caliban, like the suburbs on which Ingalls trains her gaze, is self-conscious about its porous edges, nodding frequently to the data of its contemporary moment but declining to incorporate it. Health-food freaks, religious extremism, and the “circus” of international politics drift in and out of characters’ conversations, remaining peripheral. Dorothy mostly avoids pursuing subjects that gesture beyond her domestic orbit, as though to linger on them were to risk being overtaken by them, just as the novel’s realism risks being usurped by other modes.
In a more just literary ecosystem, Ingalls’s debt to popular genres might have earned her a broad readership. Though her first book appeared in 1970, Ingalls came closest to wide acclaim when in 1986 the British Book Marketing Council named Mrs. Caliban one of the twenty greatest novels by an American to be published since World War II. Now her many writings are mostly out of print, though three of her novellas were selected by Daniel Handler and reissued under the title Three Masquerades earlier this year. Hopefully more will follow.
Dorothy’s
need for her Caliban is oblique but deeply felt, and the satisfactions he offers are immediate. Larry arrives in the wake of a series of private disappointments. Dorothy’s husband Fred is unfaithful and uncommunicative, an emotional distance exacerbated by the death of their only child and a subsequent miscarriage—“I think we’re too unhappy to get a divorce,” Dorothy tells her best friend, Estelle. The novel’s setup prior to Larry’s entrance is brief but vivid in the texture it provides of Dorothy’s daily life, as she ushers Fred out the door to work, does her exercises, runs to the grocery, and visits for coffee with Estelle.
After Larry’s arrival, much of each day becomes occupied by Dorothy’s efforts to make her world intelligible to her new companion and to measure it against his own. Often she fails, as when she struggles to define the phrase “radical chic” or identify an activity that Larry’s seen on television and reenacted for her. (It turns out to be Merce Cunningham choreography.) Larry tries to reciprocate with descriptions of the underwater society from which he was taken and his different sensory perceptions of this new one, but usually, in the absence of shared experience, he can’t. His insufficient attempts occasion some of the novel’s most affecting language, as when he says of the constant backdrop of the ocean’s music, “The sea speaks to us. And it’s our home that speaks. Can you understand?” But such lyrical approximations are the exception rather than the norm. Larry and Dorothy’s failures of mutual intelligibility are most astonishing because Ingalls pulls off the kind of explicit dialogue about difference that in less deft hands might make a reader cringe. Unlike King Kong or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Larry’s nearly human anatomy and capacity for language allow him to make his own connections between his situation and nonwhite or immigrant others. Ingalls cleverly troubles classic monster movies’ distinction between allegorical (nonhuman) and literal (human) difference by letting her characters voice their own analogies; she respects both Dorothy and Larry enough to imagine their conscious apprehension of the gulf across which they’ve met.
Throughout the novel, Larry’s otherness toggles between familiar and fantastical registers. He speaks with “a bit of a foreign accent,” and returning him to his home in the Gulf of Mexico would require Dorothy to follow the archetypal course of anti-immigrant anxiety by smuggling him south across the border. Thanks to his quick appreciation of the ubiquity of racial animus, Larry is able to walk anonymously down a crowded street as long as he applies the right shade of make-up to his green-brown skin, passing as human not by obscuring but transposing his difference: “The secret is to wear a color that’s different from most of the people who live in the area.”
But Larry’s foreignness captivates by virtue of the ways in which it least resembles the kinds we know—he’s an emissary from a world fully external to Dorothy’s. When she confesses, “I thought everywhere everyone had to fit in, or other people began to feel worried and threatened,” Larry denies that such things happen in the ocean and insists on the idiosyncrasy of human antagonisms. He represents and longs to return to a society without individual distinctions or inconvenient desires, to which both racism and marital strife would be foreign in turn. There is no heartache in his society because mating partners are interchangeable, each as good as another. “When we want something, it’s true,” he tells Dorothy; “The thing you want is the thing you have, isn’t it?”
Though Dorothy accepts Larry’s desire to return home and concocts a plan to get him there, her newfound happiness is punctuated by the recurrent thought that she couldn’t bear to lose him. The preceding years were devoid of interests and attachments, but with Larry, “Now, at last, she had something.” He may have no place in the human world, but in the privacy of Dorothy’s emotional life, he fits.
It’s easy to forget, given the specificity and warmth of their relationship, that Ingalls gives us reason to wonder if Dorothy is so enlivened by Larry because she’s conjured him herself. We learn early on that Dorothy has lost confidence in her ability to distinguish between reality and imagination. In the weeks before Larry’s arrival, her radio issues a number of other improbable utterances, including a program about a violin-playing chicken and an assurance that she’ll have another child. These brief hallucinations isolate Dorothy, but the instrumental uses of fantasy are likewise open questions for her neighbors. The difference is one of degree, not kind: Her friends’ doubts about the status of reality occupy a more mundane register of processed foods, pesticides, bad horoscopes, and other such invisible perils of modern living.
Ingalls is subtle but shrewd in her portrayal of suburbia as a species of paranoia. Dorothy’s social environment is structured by the border between the apparent safety of the visible world and the anticipated dangers that constantly threaten it. The reality of a threat is secondary to the fervor with which one prepares for its incursions. This pervasive feature of late–Cold War suburban life emerges most prominently in the public panic about Larry, sustained by a sensationalist media, and in Dorothy’s effort to make sense of the collective appetite for it. “Once a thing is in the air, everyone sees it,” she tells Larry, by way of an explanation, “even if it isn’t there. It’s an influence.” But the paranoia well precedes his arrival. Dorothy’s long and restless walks after the death of her son used to worry her husband Fred, because “even in the suburbs,” he feared, something might happen, someone from another neighborhood might attack and rape her. This fear of porous boundaries is both a motive and an effect of the life they’ve built; Larry therefore satisfies a fantasy of Fred’s, too, by violating the protective enclosure that the suburbs promise and inevitably fail to deliver.
Larry
and Dorothy’s visions of a livable future may be incommensurable: Dorothy’s newfound sense of purpose depends on Larry, who is not welcome in her world and longs to leave it. By the early 1980s postcolonial feminists had cautioned that the happiness of someone like Dorothy might only be secured at the expense of someone like Larry. In “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak influentially reappraised the literature of white women’s self-realization around which feminist criticism had so far been organized, taking up Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as emblematic objects of white feminist investment. The subordination and exclusion of racial others, Spivak argues, is not incidental but essential to the triumphant individualism of a novel like Jane Eyre. Jane needs Bertha, the Jamaican Creole first wife locked in the attic of her love interest’s estate, as a foil against whom to measure and assert her own autonomy. Bertha had just a few years prior served as a legitimating figure for the unruly (white) feminist critic in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s watershed study The Madwoman in the Attic; in Spivak’s reading she instead represents the “not-yet-human Other” on whose back such feminists’ independence is achieved.
In the case of Mrs. Caliban, Spivak’s intervention is illuminating but not, I think, damning. Ingalls is canny about the instrumental role Larry plays in Dorothy’s dawning self-assurance. Tellingly, Caliban enters Spivak’s essay as a figure for the colonized subject who escapes stable subjugation: The creature of Frankenstein, for example, is like Caliban to the extent that he resists containment by the white mind that created and seeks to destroy him. Ingalls’s reference to Shakespeare is not developed beyond her novel’s title, perhaps because the parallels can’t be parsed neatly: Unlike Larry, in The Tempest Caliban is denied a partner, condemned to isolation and servitude for attempting to undermine the white nobleman who enslaves him. Ingalls’s novel could not be called Miranda, after his master’s daughter, who loathes Caliban and whom Caliban attempted to rape in the play’s past. By the logic of the title’s formalized coupling, Dorothy is a willing traitor to her species and her race.
The failures of the women’s movement in the 1970s are commonly narrated as a result of its exclusions, with middle-class white women’s myopia alienating people to both the right and left of high profile figures like Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. On the one hand, apolitical housewives and mothers resisted being informed of their own oppression, and many became eager foot soldiers in Phyllis Schlafly’s crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment. On the other, working-class women, queer people, and women of color refused to have their struggles subsumed under a single-issue agenda, either forcing difficult internal conversations or abandoning organized feminism altogether.
It’s tempting, then, to read Mrs. Caliban as a compensatory invitation, welcoming the previously excluded Caliban into the scene of white womanhood—its literal home—in the wake of feminism’s qualified successes. Whereas in Spivak’s reading of Jane Eyre Bertha must be exiled to the attic, Larry may not be entirely inassimilable to the world in which he’s trapped. He comes to enjoy sharing music, television, and housework with Dorothy, and she speculates that were they to have a child it could, as a U.S. citizen, technically become President. We might therefore credit Ingalls with rectifying rather than reproducing the racism of narratives in which white women’s growth is achieved through instrumental relationships with the disempowered. (The genre is, unfortunately, alive and well three decades after Spivak’s essay, having recently appeared on the big screen in the egregiously nostalgic Victoria & Abdul.) But Larry cannot stay in Dorothy’s world and does not want to, and the self-possession Dorothy achieves through their relationship is severely limited. Dorothy is not Shakespeare’s Miranda, but neither can she promise fidelity to Caliban till death do them part. It is to Ingalls’s great credit that her novel understands this and provides a conclusion to match.
Perhaps the most responsible reading would refuse to credit Mrs. Caliban with avoiding the failures that Spivak critiques; perhaps Dorothy’s encounter with radical difference is only a useful projection, something she’s imagined to satisfy her own emotional needs and that couldn’t have existed outside her head. But by encouraging the reader to question Larry’s reality, Ingalls also cues us to doubt the fantasy he embodies. Larry may claim to represent a world without individual difference—a world in which the fantasy of desire and the reality of mutual obligation are in clear alignment—but Dorothy doesn’t buy this self-description. When he tells her that among his people, “The thing you want is the thing you have,” she insists that this is false not simply in her world but also in his own experience and therefore in his world, too: “What about prison? You were in one,” she says, reminding him of the research facility from which he fled. “And there are all kinds of prisons in the world. Everywhere.”
Their solution to their shared prison is partial and fleeting, like every solution we’ve yet known, involving not a decisive flight into one reality or another but something more like détente between the two. “Is it like the sea?” Dorothy asks him of a human crowd. “All the changing sounds?”
“No,” Larry answers; “Not at all. But I like the thought.”
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