Author: Brad Johnson

We never had any time. I paced the island cabin in the Pacific Northwest where we’d been overwintering, denning up like wolves. We’d left everything – LA bungalow, wilting jobs. Here our water came from a well and our power from the sun, though the January sky was a concrete pancake and we had to ration our generator gas daily to make up for the lack of light. Me, L., our kid, what would happen to us? We were weeks away from living with my parents.

‘I got an interview,’ I said to L., through the semi-darkness. We brushed by each other at the propane stove. The cube steak was gristly, how did you cook this stuff?

‘Bingo,’ she said.

Suddenly I was Arthur, freely pulling swords from the stone. I bent back into the cast iron pan. Our lives were ballooning forward, this shining, yawning, kismet-like chance — Excalibur!

Over the bad satellite phone connection, our astrologer friend had handed me this exact Pendragonic visualization. ‘Help,’ I’d said, calling her even before I told L. the news. I was terrified.

‘The task will feel easy, fated, like Arthur’s, almost effortless!’ my astrologer friend said – ‘or else it won’t.’

Voraciously I’d glommed onto the role play, repeating the image on loop as I wadded a waterproof bag with chosen clothes.

In my most utopic imagining, my back was a slab of muscle (even though Arthur sprang Excalibur with his pinky) and the next morning, as the chartered boat ripped away from the beach and my small waving unit (who stood there miming a cheering motion for my benefit and thus – bolstering me and my chance of success – the benefit of everyone involved) I again and again swept my arms overhead to grip the sword handle. I was him, King Arthur, you could also call me Wart. At forty-one I was already dented, a mostly lost cause, but finally the heaviness between my shoulder blades was on its way to being earned and as gelid water slushed crossways in front of us – a hero’s journey – this gave me hope.

 

*

 

Twice a month I poked a small syringe of testosterone cypionate at a 45-degree angle into my belly fat, each time on the flip side of my torso. T was thick and needed a draw needle. I was always in a rush, jamming in the point after rapidly priming it. I clunked away the bubbles in the syringe nose and released. It was 40 mgs, mini-stings, basically nothing. A male mosquito might have more. It didn’t make me angry or different in any way I could tell except I was mildly, milkily horny for most of each month and what sleep I did have was drenched in something small and barely familiar, but sex-like, such that I hated waking up.

I was preoccupied with a single fear: that I’d smell different or I already smelled different, and I tried to keep my body from rubbing things, leaving any kind of residue or moldy funk. Often I crept to bed late and kept myself firmly rolled in a foot-wide lane of sheeting throughout the night. In the mornings I’d jump out first thing to help our waking kid and relight the cashed fire. Then while they cuddled, I checked my pits and boxers for something telltale or off. I desperately wanted some kind of animal intimacy and to be invited back towards innernesses L. kept sealed from me – places I used to feel at home in, but now could barely—

The gap kept expanding. I sweated to reach my hand across the outspreading bed. Night gnawing = endless. Wasn’t there some math about approaching zero, but never getting there, never touching?

Other fears: wading partway into twilight puberty, taking myself seriously, being seen. I kept the single-use vials hidden in a beat-up cardboard box on a shelf behind my T-shirts. Ostensibly this was because the accompanying syringes were dangerous to three-year-olds, but more likely I craved some kind of cover, preferably a long low endless cave. Ever since childhood I’d hoped to crawl back into this or that corner and fix myself, then emerge somehow impenetrable, whole.

 

*

 

‘Bye!’ I yelled over the blasting duel-marine engines. Then stared across the gray strait. Bald eagles, humongous, shitty, regal, doodled each other dramatically over the green frothy fir tops. This is how it finally starts, I said. I hadn’t been alone in months and months. Feet, knees, chest – I had them. I saw a band of light spasm across the water and looked for an effulgent, rising sword. Soon the boat was packed with businessmen, engineers and project managers in overly-tidy Realtree caps with arms full of plans for the outer islands and how they might develop them. I was also busy! and from the farthest bench seat I remembered where I was headed and shouted into my phone memos and scraps of ideas that might collect into something meaningful, like a job talk, making sure I was heard.

An hour later I was in a barber’s chair in a rural strip mall. From under my smock I stared across the U-shaped parking lot: the Laundr-o-Park was packed, the ubiquitous teriyaki takeout bright against rows of mud-splatted rape trucks. I was copiously bleeding everywhere but into the silicone sheath of my trademarked Diva cup. Years in, I was still bad at Diva cup. Or did I have more blood now, somehow? My pores were getting thicker (also my eyelashes, my genitals), facts I was mostly ambivalent to or confused by, despite all the aiding and abetting I was doing. My strongest, most prevailing sense was that my brain should ignore whatever my hands (metaphorical or literal) were manufacturing, especially with regard to my body and its parts.

In the urinal I shoveled as much blood as I could over to the sink. My legs felt wave-sawn, as if I was trying to hold the floor together with my feet. I was coming from outside to inside. The wind was still whapping, my face was forever red, the tightly-synthetic atmosphere drummed. These slick, beige walls, cocooned from the barbers’ chairs and the parking lot and surrounding potato and grain fields = possibly, at least since birth, the most inside I’d ever been. I breathed in. Tried to condense. Condensing was hard. Everything was foggy, my new glasses prescription was badly off, I often tripped or tried to climb over cat-sized shapes on the January-sodden bracken-deranged paths, cats that dematerialized when I looked back for them. Plus I was constantly drunk from androgen-producing herbs suspended in something akin to Everclear, which I gulped three times a day as instructed by an herbologist I’d entrusted with my monthly finances but never met. He lived in a dusty oaky CA mountain town and his name was Joshua. Believe you bro!

I checked the fade in the mirror as I tried to scrub the bathroom of my leftover bio goop. Fade line passable, at least last-minute interview worthy. My barber was def. gay, which haircut-wise could have been ideal but hadn’t panned out. Evidently not a born-to-fade gay. ‘Gay’ was hilarious though. We (‘gays’) all knew it. In LA we used to go to a lesbian feminist haunted house called Killjoy’s Kastle. Lesbians were the funniest. Didn’t they have someone reaching out of a stall door, also with a Diva cup!, full of thick dripping cornstarch-y blood? Someone with a plaintive voice demanding: ‘WHOOOOO can help me with this?’ F-ing fall out of your chair funny, or your pants, or your life. I splashed some water. Mirrors were also a problem. My face, not the glass, was blurry. I had no idea what I really looked like besides lumpy, fuzzy, profuse. My lip hair draped out over my lips. Trimming it meant committing to ‘mustache’. Not the virile teenage Outsiders kind that everyone wanted either. But tomorrow I had to present myself, offer, among other things, a paper finally proving what everything in my life had been prepping for, building towards, forever. ‘Hey, thanks for . . .’ I said, trying to force a few trial words out, but someone was pounding their body into the urinal’s hollow-core door.

Once, as we sat eating soup together, a writer I loved had said that just the feeling of his breath touching the microphone-weave made him cry. He was the most tender writer I knew and he wrote about drinking and drugging almost exclusively and nothing else. What was more tender than disappearing?

More muffled door scraping.

I exited by way of ushering the guy in with my body, offering him the nugatory bathroom.

‘What’s nugatory mean?’ he said.

‘SMALL, (insignificant, worthless).’ I often used my body this way, to get closer to things. ‘There’s been a murder in here,’ I said, slushing some of the bloody paper towels over towards the trash with my foot. ‘Possibly.’

 

*

 

Pre-security, at the nugatory commuter airport, I forwent liquor for cold tea. What could I possibly say to them, the even now amassing committee, that was worth saying? I searched my life for anything extreme. I might talk about the Arctic, though what about it? I was no longer sure. The only thing I remembered about the place was the non-hyperbolic feeling that my head was going to whirl off.

I texted L., who had already won and escaped jobs just like this. I had to check in, I was still a parent despite all this freedom.

There’s a problem, I tapped. I’m writing the same fucking story, all the time, same story, it never changes.

Try the thing about overwintering? she tapped back. We were a team.

Or was it: Alone in a leather chair eating a club sandwich. Sounds tough

?

I was having a hard time interpreting texts. I could feel the text under the text – pale, lethal, struggling to breathe and be recognized. I could hold it – that was the problem.

Overwintering’s not a thing, I texted back.

But of course it was. Overwintering was the only thing. Sticking yourself somewhere for months, in the dark. In the Arctic, trappers’ cabins the size of refrigerator boxes dotted the ice and rock. I opened my toilet bag and from it poured a slug of herbs into my iced tea. They tasted weedy, like they’d been dredged from some over-ethanoled backwoods pump. Plus huge nasty raccoon piss. Gassy, greasy, sploogy. The herbs made me really go for it. Made me feel like I was Mad Max driving a motorcycle for the first time with the accelerator cemented to my tongue and also with half my brain already shorn off, drooling.

Our kid called me ‘papi’, which I loved. It was a substitution but not. A marker of difference, right out in the open. Something anyone could feel okay using, even if to us it meant all kinds of semi-subcultural things. Rubbings we invented or turned up. But now, even we (degreed, invested in undoing paradigms) had become confused by it. By subbing ‘papi’ in for ‘daddy’ and ‘father bear, cat, etc. etc.’ every single time it came up in a book or conversation, didn’t it take on the same patriarchal dadcore valence?

I was too sensitive. This was a known quantity in all my relationships. All of my girlfriends, partners, wives told me to ‘stay on my own side’, as if that was a possible maneuver, something I had chosen not to do but had access to, like email correspondence, like getting this job with health insurance. I wanted to stay on my own side. Wanted to erase the presensing, uncomfortable ability I had to mold myself to others’ perceived needs, or when I saw someone reacting, to favorably overcorrect. Maybe the T would help, I often thought, at least before starting it. Not because I’d be less female, but just because I’d be less ‘me’.

I boarded the plane last and slumped into the aisle seat, nodding and slobbery from the sediment at the bottom of my herbs. Had that been me in the security line, chugging the sludgy many-dose bottle so no gloved hand could snatch it? The Arthurian power was still in me somewhere. I had less than twelve hours to produce. I ripped open my laptop, my hands felt clumsy, this was another effect of T, I’d read. Your finger pads might change.

OVERWINTERING:

I pounded out.

I’d recently noticed the keys on my dad’s laptop were completely worn off from the acids in his fingers and the velocity at which he struck them. He’d replaced them with huge neon-yellow letters so that the whole keyboard was shouting at him. Ear hair, elongating nose. Would that happen to me?

But after OVERWINTERING I couldn’t get anything going. I knew writing should be completely unrestrained, more than was otherwise possible. Like anything, a story was a body.

In the talk, I wanted to explain two basic things about being in Svalbard, on the island of Spitzbergen, very near the North Pole, two things besides what mattered most: that L. was pregnant and I was very far away.

The first was something the trip leader had told me. She was enigmatic, always in a huge parka or else swimming naked, i.e. enclosed. ‘I needed to be lost,’ she’d said. ‘So I told him to blindfold me and take me somewhere on a snowmobile, then dump me off.’ Following these instructions, she said, he left her in an unmarked trapper’s cabin for two weeks, or maybe a month, before his need to retrieve her overpowered him. He’d done exactly what she’d wanted, but they never recovered from it, sexually or otherwise. ‘We had to break up,’ she said.

The second was an even more vapory story about a baby born into a barren, snow-pasted fjord hundreds of miles from the nearest clinic, whose mother couldn’t make milk. The parents found a seal, the trip leader said. And when the ice disappeared with the spring melt, the baby weighed more than a three-year-old.

Now I wanted to go back there. This was, among other things, what the ‘talk’ was about.

I also knew that I needed my family to come. Three months in the darkest place on earth seemed urgent. Our main problem was sleep. Now that we were finally getting some, it wasn’t rejuvenating us.

Even just last night L. had punched me in the throat while dreaming. You punched me in the throat! I said, bragging, wanting her to apologize. It had almost felt good, and in this morning’s cold-padded air I tried to show her the bruise.

‘There’s nothing,’ she said.

But there was something! Fresh neck wrinkles, I’d just discovered them. Time was screaming, soon the tangy wild roses would be out we’d never have a second to look at them, our kid would be gone, I’d be an old maybe-man, we had to take it seriously.

‘Plus how about compassion?’ she yell-whispered, trying not to wake him, our kid. ‘It was MY nightmare, you never even asked me how I was.’

My laptop screen blinked, still morbidly empty of meaning. My body was pulsing and woozy. Gross, how could I possibly be turned on now? But whenever the feeling showed up, I was relieved. The plane wobbled as it descended through the stratocumulus layer. No job talk meant no magic bullet to save us, no tidily-creased benefits package, no ego fuel, no proof I was okay and somehow legible, i.e. could continue being.

What, anyway, was reasonable? One summer I made all my money pulling the single digestive vein out of shrimp after millionth shrimp, de-heading them alive with a pop of my thumb.

‘I dreamed,’ L. said, another mostly sleepless night, ‘that nothing should enter you.’ Which was in itself an opening back towards her.

‘Yeah,’ I said, lunging for it. She was right, I didn’t want anything to enter me. Except, wasn’t I begging for entrances all the time? Maybe it didn’t matter anymore and I was ready to accept the universe’s pupae, the soft, spasmodic love I was always saying I was desperate for, i.e. if nothing came in – breath, serum, sophomoric libido, sex, everything that was fluent and charged up with meaning – how could I ever change?

We’d fought about all of this but it didn’t mean anything, it was just a fight about fear.

‘WHOOOOO can help me with this?’ I said loudly to the flight attendant, trying to hand him my laptop screen.

I was always sure someone could do a better job of my life than I could. I turned towards my seatmate in 26D, who must have worked for VSCO or Tinder. We were landing in the ‘Bro’ Area after all.

‘Remember King Arthur?’ I said. I did a quick, gestural sword pull.

‘Uh,’ he said.

Something in him = annoyingly squirmy. I did it again, lingering for effect as I drew the blade, no small feat in economy. Lancelot had been in love with Arthur, had it for him hard, the squishy weight of something dick-like, the pulling it out metaphor, hadn’t I cried into, become gay into that book? I could also pull it out!

‘Uh, so I think that’s He-Man?’ he said, wriggling more. ‘You know, “I have the power”?’

Landings always made me tear up, it was the air pressure. I turned away, toeing a cracker out of the aisle with gusto.

 

*

 

That first late October in the Arctic, when I’d disembarked the runway airstairs, most of the world was below me, almost gone. It was morning, but the sun’s face was missing and the sky was obsidian-lite. As we crossed the tarmac I saw a lone goose in the nearby tundra. See, something was living, thriving.

I texted L.: made it! Instantly the text landed in LA. Satellite-globs make connectivity lighting-quick at the poles.

Then came a series of endless nights or endless days. My phone and computer barely worked due to the cold. The darker it got, the less I slept, the more unaccountably amped I became.

‘But how did S. know when to come get you?’ I asked the trip leader, an artist, after she told me her story. We were with the group in the settlement’s sole and unclosing bar. For the first time in my life drinking beer was unnecessary, the buzz was already so high. ‘Like, how did he know you were alive, let alone done being lost?’ I was jealous of the dynamic, recognized it.

S. was at the next table over, body huge and capable. His name meant something like ‘mug’. Of course he was aware of her entirely.

‘But I wasn’t done,’ she said.

Across the road, above the Svalbardbutikken Co-op and rows of now-dogless husky chains, sheets of tinfoil sealed an apartment’s windows against any past or coming light. Soon a group of us would leave the bar, find the apartment’s owner, force him to surrender his last bottles of wine, claw down the foil . . .

I’m at the top of the world! I said to myself, laughing or howling inside. I was, without knowing it yet, also there to evacuate something. To take out the ‘I’. I had to stamp myself down. How else could we survive?

I was walking over very loose gravel.

‘WTF, we have a kid coming?’ L. could have said. When I tried to tell her about all the weird hour-by-hour yo-yos in polar darkness, how dawn never came, though continuously drinking we stayed up past nine a.m. – were still awake – watching for it.

 

*

 

I wanted I gone but couldn’t stop talking about myself. But it’s so gooey! Recessed, hidden, stuck. If I opened up my throat, could anyone (dedicated, head-lamped) ever get to it? The Arctic was falling apart, leaving its own exposed, sloppy trail. It made me think of Lygia Clark’s Baba Antropofágica with all that spit and all that saliva-soaked thread, Lygia who said: ‘I dreamt that I opened my mouth and took out a substance incessantly. . .’

The next day in the big conference room on the California coast they would ask me about her quote, how one minute I translated the work as: ‘Cannibalistic Slobber’, and another time: ‘Cannibalistic Drool’.

‘Don’t you care?’ they said.

What was the difference between those two self-slicking words? The quality, the momentum of the wanting? How bad you needed it, far you’d bend?

‘I’m trying to stretch language to fit my body,’ I tried to say, or meant to.

And if there’s no cave dark enough?

But that was tomorrow and now I was still on the generous ocean-view balcony with my laptop, my thighs half-frozen, half-thawed. Below me, hoarse, possibly restorative pinniped sounds bonked chorally. What was seal milk (besides thick, creamy, exponential), what did seals do. I needed to slow myself down or I’d be non-interviewable by morning. Behind me the big, loose, quiet bed. If only I could show the bed to L., if only we could lie there next to each other. Everything was possible about our life except we weren’t healed yet, which meant when we were done overwintering, we might, like late ice, break up.

‘To combat fear,’ our therapist said, ‘the brain stem needs small sentences, no personal pronouns.’

I stared at the bruise-blue Pacific – impassive, rapidly swelling without remorse.

‘It is night, it is safe,’ the therapist intoned over Skype, audibly demonstrating. She meant we should use it for our kid, but he slept fine. It was us, our problem.

Behind me, the salt-grimed sliding door: ‘It is night, it is safe. Sleep is here, sleep can come.’

 

Jess Arndt’s short story collection Large Animals is available now from Cipher Press.

Image © Ingrid Siegel

The post Slobber and Drool appeared first on Granta.

In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re talking to Rax King, who’s teaching a six-week nonfiction workshop on the personal essay. (Rax’s excellent Electric Literature essays on teen romance novels and Meatloaf should convince you she knows what she’s talking about!) We asked her the same ten questions we always ask, and she favored us with some gems about when to take a break from your writing, when to send in the Catholics, and when to eat an entire loaf of bread.

---

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

I took the excellent Tony Tulathimutte’s CRIT workshop, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Tony is a hardass Virgo and will not let you get away with any of your shit, writing-wise, and also he gave me a sick coffee table once. But the most eye-opening thing he did for me was point out that when I don’t know what to make a character do, I always have them smile. Like, I was devoting hundreds of words of fluff to people’s smiles, and I had no idea! Stuff like this is the best use of a writing class or workshop for adults who know basically what they’re doing, I think. Of course, there are lots of useful lessons about craft and writing practices that teachers can impart, but students will get the most use out of a good teacher’s experienced close reading of their work.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

We leave all these narrative stones unturned, because we’re still stuck on the story we thought we were telling about ourselves.

I took a real weird writing workshop when I was in high school. I was the youngest student in the room by a country mile. The teacher was this pipe-smoking Robert Frost devotee who wore a lot of tweed—it was like he’d Googled “retired poet outfit.” And I’ll never forget that his big piece of advice for us, this advice that he teased us with week after week but never actually revealed until the last session, was “send in the Catholics.” As in, if a piece of writing isn’t working as is, make it a Gothic-type story about Catholicism instead. It was the worst thing I ever heard in my life, and to this day, anytime I’ve hit a wall with a piece of writing, I hear that smug mutherfucker in my head saying “send in the Catholics.” I hope that guy’s having a bad day, if I’m honest.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

If you’re stuck, don’t keep hammering away at whatever section is stumping you. Go do something else for half an hour and then look at the piece holistically. Grant yourself entry from another angle. I’ve never had any luck pushing through writer’s block with sheer brute force, but by focusing my effort elsewhere in the piece, I can usually open it up for myself that way. I think this is especially useful advice to my fellow personal essayists, because we fixate on the memoiristic precision of what we write—we struggle with structural or narrative overhauls. We pick and pick at the sentence level and leave all these narrative stones unturned, because we’re still stuck on the story we initially thought we were telling about ourselves.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

I’ll put it this way: I’ve written a novel myself, and I in no way “had a novel in me.”

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

To give it up outright, probably not. To come back to it some other time, yes, absolutely. If your manuscript has stopped being a labor of love and is just unceasing thankless drudgery, put the damn thing down before you hurt yourself. And if all writing has started to feel that way, again, put the damn thing down before you hurt yourself.

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

It does nothing for me to tell me my story sucks shit if you’re not going to help me fix it.

They’re equally valuable! It is, to me, of exactly equal value to know when some aspect of my manuscript is working and to know when it isn’t. What isn’t valuable is nonspecific praise or criticism—it does nothing for me to tell me my story sucks shit if you’re not going to help me fix it, and it does nothing for me to tell me it’s perfect when we both know I hate myself far too much to let you blow smoke up my ass.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

Absolutely not. For many reasons, but practically speaking: you’re going to hate everything you publish five years after it’s published anyway. So you might as well write stuff you’re proud of, not stuff that you think is going to make some slush reader cream their jeans.

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

• Kill your darlings: As advice, this has some value, but I always get stuck on the fact that it sounds so goddamn good to say out loud! “Kill your darlings” is the “cellar door” of tired writing advice.
• Show don’t tell: If I never hear this shit again, it’ll be too soon. What does it even mean?! You want I should draw you a little picture so you don’t have to read my book? Is that it? A little diagram?
• Write what you know: I’d amend this to: write ideas and perspectives that you’re confident you understand. Don’t talk out of your ass. Know when to cede the microphone.
• Character is plot: I never heard this one before! It sounds silly as hell, though.

What’s the best hobby for writers?

I don’t know how to even begin to answer this, so I’m going to make something up. Embroidery. All writers should do embroidery.

What’s the best workshop snack?

An entire loaf of bread, consumed over the course of the workshop with butter. And I won’t share.

The post Rax King Is Not Going to Let You Blow Smoke Up Her Ass appeared first on Electric Literature.

YA author Hanna C. Howard shares why she feels fiction is a bit like Brussels sprouts, especially when sautéed with olive oil, salt, and pepper: good for your health and soul.

Every now and again I meet someone who, upon learning that I love to read and write fantasy, says something like, “I don’t really read fiction. It seems like an indulgence when there are so many other books to read.” By ‘other,’ they mean nonfiction: business books, or self-help, or history, or some other overtly productive genre.

(Hanna C. Howard: Keep Submitting, Writing, Working, Trying.)

The words are always offered ruefully, as if the person is vaguely sorry for them and wants me to know they mean no offense. But they invariably stir the embers of my storytelling passion into a flame, because I think people (adults, especially) very often miss the boat when it comes to fiction. 

I can’t suppress the suspicion that these folks might be imagining made-up stories to be something like daytime television soap operas: high on nonsense and low on value. But the truth is that most fictional novels are just as edifying and educational as your average nonfiction tome; they just wear it differently. 

*****

You’ll learn everything you need to know for writing young adult fiction, including what readers look for, the importance of plot, theme, and setting, how to craft entertaining dialogue, and much more. Plus, gain insight into the submission process and what it takes to succeed in publishing. You’ll come away from this eight-week workshop with the skills and know-how to craft a successful young fiction novel!

Click to continue.

*****

Fiction Like a Brussels Sprout

They are like Brussels sprouts sautéed with olive oil, salt, and pepper: perhaps not as healthy as raw or boiled sprouts, but the point of eating them that way is to enjoy the experience, not to get healthy. And yet, you may get healthy along the way regardless. (By the way, if you’ve never eaten Brussels sprouts prepared this way, do yourself a favor and whip some up tonight.)

Here’s an illustration of what I mean: If you’re feeling down and are looking for hope, you might head to your local bookstore and check out the Psychology section. You might come away, like I did years ago, with an anxiety workbook that asks you to assess various symptoms and feelings, and then gives you exercises to work through them. This can be very beneficial, of course, and sometimes necessary, but in the short term it may not leave you feeling much better. 

(Blessed Are the Legend-Makers: 11 J.R.R. Tolkien Quotes for Writers.)

But let’s say you go to the fantasy section of the bookstore and take home a copy of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Say you binge read your way through Frodo and Sam’s journey to destroy the One Ring, and you arrive at the end of book three, when Sam himself is beset by heavy despair. And you read this:

Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West, the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. (Tolkien, The Return of the King.)

What happens when you encounter something like this, experience something like this through the lens of another character in another place and another time, is multi-layered, complex, and beautiful. You might be comforted by the conviction that you are not the first person to have felt the weight of your own sadness and hopelessness to the extent that you now feel it. 

You might suddenly understand something new about the heaviness you feel. You might discover a reason to hope that you didn’t have before. You might find that the beauty of the narrative actually brings you joy. You might find your burden becoming slightly less difficult to carry.

Escaping Into the Magic of Fiction

All this in the space of a few sentences, simply because you are engrossed in something that is not your own life, your own sadness, your own pain, your own fear. You are giving yourself a safe escape out of yourself, into someone else. 

And to me, this is the incalculable and alchemical magic of fiction: that it can teach us and inspire us and change us in ways that overt instruction sometimes cannot, because it gifts us with experiences we could never have on our own and lets us be the ones to make sense out of them. It isn’t like arithmetic, where one plus one always equals two; it’s like a painting or a symphony, which seems to arrive at a different solution for every individual, depending on their need.

(Empathy vs. Sympathy vs. Apathy.)

I think this, too, is the reason that entertaining fiction can tackle harder issues in ways that promote healing and empathy. The point of a story like that is not to leave you with a greater understanding of this or that issue; the point is to satisfy you with a rollicking good tale, well told. 

But truly good stories have within them myriad perspectives, ideas, and experiences that speak to the challenge of being human, and they invite you to encounter them safely, through the eyes of someone else. Fiction does not aim to teach, it aims to entertain. Which is perhaps what makes it such a superb teacher.

Plain vegetables have their place, but sometimes what you need is a good cooked meal that feeds your soul as well as your body. Sometimes what you need are human experiences, roasted with fragrant seasoning and served over a bed of romance and high adventure—from which you may come away fuller, healthier, and more satisfied than you would on a diet of raw facts.

*****

Feed your soul with Hanna C. Howard’s novel, Ignite the Soul

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When Hari Kunzru finished writing Red Pill in early 2020, he had no idea that the summer leading up to its release would see the uprisings that followed Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd and other instances of police brutality against Black people, widespread calls to defund the police, or broader conversations about the history and present-day role of policing in American society.

Circumstances have made the fictional police drama Blue Lives that he includes in the novel, and his narrator’s concerns about the cultural power wielded by its alt-right showrunner, all the more prescient.

In the second of my two-part interview with Kunzru (you can read the first part here), we discuss cultural myth-making around state violence, whether TV audiences want police to break the rules, how to effective push back if they do, and the ways in which American policing is and is not unique in the world. 

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Preety Sidhu: In the wake of the uprisings against police brutality and systemic racism, there’s been renewed criticism of the role of TV procedurals in shaping public perceptions of policing. Your fictional show Blue Lives takes it even farther, showing more extreme brutality than is the norm on American TV. Your narrator becomes convinced that the man behind it has tremendous power to shape the future. How potent do you think this type of cultural myth-making around state violence is?

Hari Kunzru: I think it is quite potent. One thing I wasn’t expecting to feel so very topical was the stuff about Blue Lives. We’ve been living through the most sustained, and actually broadly supported, civil rights movement since the 1960s. I think the vast majority of Americans want to see some sort of change. And it has been interesting to me that there has finally been a focus on the portrayal of law enforcement in television. 

In the olden days it was very simple, the copaganda. The noble policeman, the terrible criminal. But we’ve got something very interestingly cynical that has happened. It’s been happening since the 70s. You might point to the Dirty Harry movies and remember Clint Eastwood as a sort of maverick cop in 70s San Francisco. He basically opened the lid on the idea that actually what people want is for the police to break the rules. They want the police to go beyond what they’re allowed to do in order to take revenge or keep us safe. The “us” being a very interestingly defined character. Who is the “us” who is being kept safe and who is the “them” that we are being kept safe from, is the big question in all of these obviously. Culturally, there’s the enduring interest in the lawman who breaks the rules, who goes beyond what’s acceptable and makes himself a kind of terrifying executioner figure. This is where I use this slightly obscure 18th-century character, the Comte de Maistre, who was an ardent opponent of the French Revolution and believed very much in state power. I think he’s very weirdly relevant to this moment.

Who is the ‘us’ who is being kept safe and who is the ‘them’ that we are being kept safe from?

I mean look at 24. I think for Brown people in America, the success of 24 has been a very weird and troubling thing, amidst its glorification of torture, its contempt for procedure, and its presentation of any kind of oversight as being something that just hampers the movement of justice. So all those kinds of things are in the mix. 

There’s also just the straightforward thing about cable TV, you can do more and show more stuff on cable TV. I mean Game of Thrones would look very different had it had to abide by broadcast rules. So there is this edging towards an increasingly graphic portrayal of violence, and particularly torture. And there’s this interest in good characters who represent the law doing bad things, and their suffering from doing bad things. This is the interesting twist on it all, the shows are often very interested in the moral cost to the person who’s committing this violence, because they’re doing it for the “us.” 

Yeah, I took this further. And I imagine, what does it actually say? What is the cynicism at the heart of this, about the possibility of having justice without torture and without the use of vigilante violence? And it’s coming really right to the fore. We’re speaking to the events in Kenosha. We see a 17-year-old boy who was apparently very infatuated with the police, and had been trained in some way by his local police force, some sort of course. Then he takes it upon himself to illegally acquire a weapon of war and insert himself into a very tense situation in another town and then—it seems very predictable that that kind of thing would happen. I don’t have particular sympathy for him, but I can understand how those events transpired. I think this culture of Blue Lives Matter, he’s part of that.

PS: I was absolutely thinking of 24 as I read this, because I had watched that when I was around undergrad age, about 15 years ago, and I was a big fan at the time and I did not think very critically about it. If I pull up an episode now, I’m sure that my response would be pretty different. At the time it was quite seductive to see what he’d do for the greater good.

Cop shows provide a kind of a supplement or substitute for a sense of closure or justice that real life doesn’t give us.

HK: People wanted to have the rebalancing that they felt was not being given them by real life. One of the ideological things these shows do is that they provide a kind of a supplement or substitute for a sense of closure or justice that real life doesn’t give us. Plot always is about the reduction of life’s complexity to a kind of simple structure and, if you plug in this deep desire for justice that people have—you know, off you go.

PS: Given that these narratives are so compelling, do you think that there are effective ways to push back, in a narrative sense or culturally?

HK: The way to push back is to seize control of the means of production. It’s for other people to be allowed to tell stories, for other people to be elbowing their way into the writers’ room, into the director’s chair. It’s great that we’re very, very belatedly seeing a recognition on the cable shows that Black stories are commercial. We have Watchmen and Lovecraft Country. These kinds of shows are turning up, and they’re wildly popular, and they are entertaining, and they center very, very different stories and perspectives than before. I think things are very different from what they were five years ago, in terms of the media landscape. When I look back to the kind of crumbs that we used to be satisfied with—when I was coming up and then in the 90s, we were just super excited if we saw a Brown face or a Black face on the screen.

PS: How do you think the contemporary American attitudes and media messaging about policing that inspired Blue Lives compares to other cultures and time periods you’re familiar with? Is there anything unique in the way that some parts of American society valorize the police these days?

HK: I mean, in every society there is a sort of standard right-wing law-and-order position. The idea of policing by consent, which is supposed to be the foundation of modern civilian policing, is less fictional in some places than it is in others. I think that the two unique American factors which make the situation much more volatile and much more urgent are—one is guns. I mean, just purely and simply police procedures. When the police go to do traffic stop here, they are trained to deal with the possibility that there will be a gun in this situation. Where it just wouldn’t occur to a British cop in a traffic stop that that might be a possibility. It would be a once in a lifetime—I mean many, many British cops will never encounter a person with a gun. Many British cops will never carry a gun. And because there’s so many guns in American life, all situations are potentially situations of armed violence. We’ve all watched endless depressing and sometimes very scary videos of these police stops where people are brutalized and the police are clearly in a sort of trance of tension. It’s very often because they’re extremely afraid and they’ve also been trained to think of themselves as a sort of militarized force. 

One phrase that keeps coming to mind is “bringing the war back home,” which was associated with the left in the Vietnam era. It was the idea that they would try and make the Vietnam War visible to ordinary Americans as a way of stopping the war. What’s happened since Iraq and Afghanistan, 20 years of these conflicts, is that we’ve got a huge pipeline of veterans and military equipment. The militarization of the police is an important part of this, using people who have a military mindset, who are equipped as soldiers and who treat the streets of the city they’re supposed to be policing as a battle zone. So in a very direct sense, the war has come back home and what we’re seeing right now is partly to do with that. 

But if you look further back, I think the second factor that is uniquely American has to do with the history of American police forces as slave patrols. Also, weirdly sort of revenue generating operations, if you look at Ferguson. Part of the roots of the Ferguson uprising, it was that the police gave a lot of quality of life tickets to a mostly Black town. The police, as they do in so many places, didn’t live in Ferguson. They live in white cities neighboring Ferguson. They use jaywalking, broken tail lights, incorrectly stored vehicles on your property. All these things are used to extract revenue from the residents and the police are acting as predators because they’re the only revenue generating operation that Ferguson really had. The city government wasn’t going to run unless they managed to extract a lot of money from people that way. 

Of course, we’ve got thousands of different police departments in the U.S. and they have different histories, but to broadly generalize, there’s never been a sense that these police departments grew organically out of the communities they’re policing. There’ve been many attempts in recent years to make them fit better in that way, but the notion of who’s getting protected and who they’re getting protected from is highly racialized, has this particular history, and is only really being interrogated now. I mean the call to defund and abolish police departments seems, I would imagine, almost incomprehensible to a lot of people in other countries. And of course to many white people in America, who imagine that this would mean anarchy. But it makes sense in this history of abolitionist tradition, which is a counter tradition to the tradition which comes out of slavery. So there’s such a particular history of police in the U.S. and it is not a happy one.

PS: Possibly because police appear so embattled here, they may get valorized, as a response from the people who feel they are being protected or they fall in the “us.”

HK: There’s a Blue Lives Matter protest for every Black Lives Matter protest. You can see the history in the fact that those two groups coalesce around the issue of policing.

The post Hari Kunzru Explains How Cop Shows Contribute to State Brutality appeared first on Electric Literature.

Night Blossoms

 

Once there was this kid in the front row
Raising his hand as though he would turn
Into a ball of light and vanish if he didn’t
Answer the question the teacher was asking.
I was convinced I’d grow up to be a samurai
Back then, so I didn’t understand a word,
But before the kid could answer, another
Kid boxed the ears of another kid and it
Was chaos in the way nature is a chaos.
The rain has been lying to the sun again.
And heaven loves knives. Bathe in the dust.
Flocks of surprise descend from on high.
Grass flourishes between the words where
Sorrow is isosceles and red goes black very
Quickly in the light that increases the light.
When I quit smoking, I became scared to fly.
Needles tack in their gauges to extremes.
The sun keeps us. Infinities are a poker face
Hidden in this moment. We read a line of life
And we twitch in an iron dream that remains
Blinded by the shadows of their referent stars.
Words are drawings that will be missed
And this guy won’t answer the waitress when
She puts his order in the computer and asks
Him how many eggs he wants – he keeps
Saying: Look, just tell them it’s for Tim.
Absence affects sleep and hands bloom
In a desert in me. I kiss the voice I hear
And pick flowers from my veins.
Fog is writing a world inside a word.
Bones cannot hide their light. The original
Road runs ahead collapsing into nightfall.

 

 

 

 

 

Quietus

 

Before my memory leaves,
I would like to say, one late
Summer afternoon, daylight
Was at its peak intensity,
The lights were off inside,
Everywhere, then through
The windows, the light made
Its own light in the absence
Of light, and an effect, quite
Real, grand and ineffable –
As precisely inscrutable
As the present moment
And as quickeningly sublime –
Raked through the room.
I stood there a long time,
Alone, and had to live
With a distinct feeling,
Radiating from the condition,
Something complete had been
Filed with the terrible library
Of dreams and experience
That were about to begin.

 

 

Image © Takuma Nakagawa

 

These poems are taken from A Better Place Is Hard to Find by Aaron Fagan, forthcoming from The Song Cave.

The post Two Poems appeared first on Granta.

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