John Coltrane. Photo: Hugo van Gelderen for Anefo. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The first thing you hear is McCoy Tyner’s fingers sounding a tremulous minor chord, hovering at the lower end of the piano’s register. It’s an ominous chord, horror movie shit; hearing it you can’t help but see still water suddenly disturbed by something moving beneath it, threatening to surface. Then the sound of John Coltrane’s saxophone writhes on top: mournful, melismatic, menacing. Serpentine. It winds its way toward a theme but always stops just short, repeatedly approaching something like coherence only to turn away at the last moment. It’s a maddening pattern. Coltrane’s playing assumes the qualities of the human voice, sounding almost like a wail or moan, mourning violence that is looming, that is past, that is atmospheric, that will happen again and again and again.

What are we hearing?

It has been hard for me to know what to say regarding George Floyd’s murder, or the uprisings that it has sparked. Sometimes I feel as if there is nothing new to say or write, or nothing that I can say or write that I have not already said and written. We watched George Floyd call out for his mother as a police officer suffocated him to death in broad daylight, in full view of citizens, as other officers facilitated the murder by helping to restrain him. On July 16, 2019, Attorney General William Barr declined to bring charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who suffocated Eric Garner in broad daylight, in full view of citizens, as other officers facilitated the murder by helping to restrain him. That murder took place five years, almost to the exact day, before Barr’s decision. I have run out of words for describing the horror of such regularity. I do not even want to describe the horror for you—what will it gain me to describe it again and again and again? What will it teach you to hear me describe it again and again and again?

What would you even be hearing? Read More

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis had already published four novels when he wrote The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, which was serialized in 1880 and appeared in book form in 1881. It received mixed reviews, some readers feeling that it lacked plot, that the characters were uninteresting, that it was more a philosophical treatise than a novel. This is a criticism already foreseen by Brás Cubas, who apologizes to those readers who “love direct, sustained narrative, a regular, fluid style.”

… whereas this book and my style are like a pair of drunkards: they stagger left and right, start and stop, mumble, yell, roar with laughter, shake their fists at the heavens, then stumble and fall …

The first English translation, by William L. Grossman, did not appear until 1953, which was not surprising in view of the fact that Machado was virtually unknown in Europe and North America until after World War II. And it was only some years later, primarily in the sixties and seventies, that critics inside and outside Brazil began to recognize the novel as a work of extraordinary originality. Read More

The painted lady larvae came in a small, clear plastic cup with a half inch of growth medium on the bottom. Tiny holes in the lid for air. The day they arrived, each was no longer nor thicker than an individual, mascara-plumped eyelash. There were six living larvae in the cup. You could find them if you looked, squirming across the medium or edging up the sides, but you had to look.

I never thought much about eyelashes until I started shopping for them. Now they’re the first thing I notice on a woman. My daughter is a dancer. She’s only nine, but her dance school requires she wear false lashes for all performances. I’ve always been afraid of glue-on lashes. The ripping off part scares me the most. I’m afraid the adhesive will take with it something that matters. Instead, I found a company that makes magnetic lashes. A thick coat of eyeliner, and they stay right on. They are endless, the things I discover so my girl can do what she loves.

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We’d tried to grow painted lady butterflies at home before, but we traveled too much that summer. They are easy to care for during their larval stage, but once they build their chrysalides, you have to keep a careful watch. After they have hardened—but not so long after that you disturb the unseen process happening inside—you must transfer the chrysalides to the netted cage that will be the emerged butterfly’s home. You must set inside the cage a bowl of sugar water filled with little wads of sweet-water-soaked paper towels, also at just the right time, remembering to change the water and towel wads every other day. Stay near. You must be present at the moment when the butterflies emerge. We missed the good parts last time. We had to take the net cage to my parents’ house. The painted ladies emerged there, without fanfare, living most of their brief, final days while we were away.

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The magnetic lashes were advertised in several lengths and degrees of thickness, each named after a city: Nashville, Dallas, Portland, Chicago. Portland was the least conspicuous, then Seattle. The Chicago lashes were more densely packed. The Los Angeles style was longer and crosshatched in a way that made you want to look at them closely. They resembled Madonna’s $10,000 mink lashes, but without diamonds at the base. We bought Seattle. When they arrived and we’d gotten them applied I asked, “What would Dallas have looked like on you!?” I couldn’t even begin to imagine Vegas on my child’s eyes.

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I thought it would be a positive learning experience to watch something tiny and plain as those larvae grow into creatures as beautiful, as magical, as butterflies.

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Wanda Coleman. Photo: Rod Bradley.

Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a sterling, one-of-a-kind record of what it meant to be the late, great poet Wanda Coleman. I will offer a few comments, but let it be said, in life and in poetry, Wanda Coleman always preferred to speak for herself.

In Wanda’s introduction to her chapbook Greatest Hits 1966–2003, published by Pudding House Press in 2004, she wrote:

Eager to make my mark on the literary landscape, I got busy finding the mentors who would teach me in lieu of the college education I could not afford. As a result, I have developed a style composed of styles sometimes waxing traditional, harking to the neoformalists, but most of my poems are written in a sometimes frenetic, sometimes lyrical free verse, dotted with literary, musical, and cinematic allusions, accented with smatterings of German, Latin, Spanish, and Yiddish, and neologisms, and rife with various cants and jargons, as they capture my interest, from the corporate roundtables to the streets.

First of all: the syntax of that second sentence is breathtaking. Second of all: what could I say to follow that!? Maybe something about my own true introduction to her?

In the summer of 2001, I shared the stage with Wanda at the Schomburg Center for Black Research’s 75th Anniversary Heritage Festival. The reading, “A Nation of Poets: Wordsmiths for a New Millennium,” included Wanda and me, along with Amiri Baraka, Staceyann Chin, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith. It’s not a very detailed memory. I was too awed to truly pay attention to anybody’s poems (my own included). I mostly only remember the “frenetic, sometimes lyrical” (Neologismic? Languafied?) sound of Wanda’s voice, her towering hair and bangles, her patterned fabrics and big glasses and big wicked laugh. I don’t remember what she read, though I know she was writing some of her best work at the time and finally receiving some long overdue attention. Mercurochrome, the book she published that year, would be a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry, and 1998’s Bathwater Wine had received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. But Wanda was still announcing her presence and suspicions. Read More

On joy, cultural empathy, and the K-drama Crash Landing on You.

Still from Crash Landing on You

In April, I was suicidal for the first time in over a decade. Even before lockdown, my mental health had been poor. The dreams I was having in April—back when I was actually sleeping—were anxiety-based and vivid. One recurring dream I had, both before and during the pandemic: I was walking in a grocery store where everyone but me was white. They would put their hands on my wrist or back or hair as I walked by. If I said anything in my dream, if I reacted, someone would say, “You’re taking this too seriously.” Wide awake at three in the morning, I didn’t wake my husband. I needed to make a decision for me, not for him—I called a hotline.

After the call, I made two lists. One was the things I had to do to stay alive. The other was a list of things to accomplish in my hopefully long life. Even writing this now, I still feel the eviscerating embarrassment I felt while scrawling out ambitions and ideas and small beloved things: walk down the street again eating a lemon ice cream; write another book; visit my friend in Sweden.

When solace is dramatized, it tends to be portrayed as therapy visits, ones where you cry yourself empty, meals spent with friends or family, or the character in the short story who, in the last few paragraphs, looks at something beautiful in nature and, somehow, that peony dripped with rain opens a locked door inside him. My solace is a K-drama on Netflix: Crash Landing on You.

The premise is this: an obscenely wealthy young businesswoman has a paragliding accent and ends up in the demilitarized zone. This woman, Yoon Se-ri, runs into members of a North Korean military unit, including her future love interest, Captain Ri Jeong-hyeok. Making a poor choice, Se-ri disregards the directions Ri Jeong-hyeok gives her and goes the wrong way. She runs through a field laden with land mines, finds a conveniently fallen tree that has smashed into the electric fence, and parkours over it into North Korea.

We live in a world where anything feels possible. Why should I ask television to behave rationally?

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In the future imperfect, which is to say, in that commingling of temporalities wherein the past is brought forth to the future to give rise to the present, Black (Trans) Lives Matter provides a conceptual framework to understand the ongoing struggle in the present by way of a future (aspiration) in which black lives will have mattered to everyone.

—C. Riley Snorton

I’ve had two songs stuck in my head since May 26, when mourners and demonstrators began gathering around the site of George Floyd’s last breath. When this is all over, I’m not certain I’ll be able to think of one without the other, those songs and the feeling of a gathering force. Or, more nearly, I don’t think this—the struggle for black life—will ever be over, but something will take its place in the immediacy. The virus will wax, the governors will make tepid conciliations, attention will turn back to the presidential election, a new song will become the only song I know. But for now, these two songs, written on either side of social and historical divisions, have become for me a single, oscillating anthem.

The first is somewhat unlikely, more a memory than a song. I hadn’t heard Evan Greer’s “I Want Something” in nearly a decade, but watching the old brutality unfold anew in video after video online, there it was, still playing in a younger corner of my mind. In the story I tell myself, I first encountered Greer’s music as a teenager in the Philadelphia suburbs. I have a vivid memory of biking around that town, feeling the wind in my face, playing “I Want Something” over and over. It’s possible that this is an invented scene, given that I can’t find the version of the song I remember anywhere. Nonetheless, I loved that song in the way that disaffected suburban kids love things. Bush had been elected for a second term. The Patriot Act, which expanded the state’s ability to surveil its citizens under the auspices of war, had been renewed. War was endless. I wanted out.

At the time, in the early 2000s, Greer was a founding member of the Riot-Folk Collective, whose album Rise Like Lions I associate with a specifically Bush-era sound, a kind of mostly white anarchist heartfeltness. In truth, I periodize this style of folk-punk as “Bush-era” not because the bands stopped playing afterward but because I stopped listening. In the long interval since then, Greer became the deputy director of an internet freedom nonprofit, released a new album, and came out as trans, a fact that, though a decade belated, came to me as a surprise. Or, well, surprise is not exactly the right word because, although I didn’t yet know it, my attachment to “I Want Something” as a teenager had to do with what feels to me now like its markedly trans sensibility.

“I Want Something” is profoundly, almost painfully earnest. Each verse of the song sketches a portrait of young people who are isolated, burned out, worn down. Each verse, that is, paints an incredibly bleak, dysphoric picture of the here and now. But despite (or because of) all of that bleakness, Greer sings through it with exuberance. Each chorus interrupts these scenes of depression, dissociation, with what can only be called a utopian demand—“I want something / better than this.” And while Greer insists, over and over, that she “doesn’t know exactly what” this something better might be, as Kathi Weeks observes in The Problem with Work, “the utopian demand can be seen as something more than a demand for a specific goal or set of goals. Rather … it is a process of constituting a new subject with the desires for and the power to make further demands.”

When I say that this is a trans sentiment, this exuberant oscillation between insisting on the bleakness of the present and making inchoate demands for “something better,” I don’t mean that it is only trans, or that trans politics should be organized around this style of hopefulness. I ordinarily don’t have much tolerance for it. At the same time, transness, at minimum, is the insistence on the human capacity for once unimaginable change. Certainly, and despite my lucky suburban life, as a black, dysphoric teenager in 2005, I had to cultivate—actively cultivate—a kind of wide-eyed optimism about what the future, and the future of my own body, could entail. I had to believe that feeling, intense feeling, was not only important but also potentially life- and world-changing. That with care and time and resources, my desire for “something better” could materialize. Although we tend to think of earnestness as a kind of naïveté, naïveté is nowhere among its definitions. Instead, earnest is defined as, at once, a form of potency and a portent, as “showing sincere and intense conviction” and “a thing intended or regarded as a sign or promise of what is to come.”

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