Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride

The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland cast a profound, immersive spell on me as a boy, years before the movies existed. The raft floats past a fake Louisiana plantation, where no slaves are bought or sold but real people sit around white tablecloths in a restaurant my mother always said was too expensive. Banjo music, fireflies. Blue twilight on the bayou. A deceptive calm before the raft from the watery parish of “New Orleans Square” to some burning island in the Caribbean. The smell of chlorine.

I know more now about pirates than I did as a child: I was kidnapped and held hostage by a Somali pirate gang from early 2012 to late 2014. I’d made the mistake of traveling to Somalia to research a book. In 2005, when Somali pirates first hijacked a major vessel, they sparked a revival of an ancient crime that had lain dormant in the world, with a few exceptions, for almost two hundred years. The topic had riveted me then as a sign of historical breakdown, a fascinating old-new phenomenon.

Now, more or less recovered, back in California, I found the strange hokeyness of that Disney ride tugging at my memory. So I drove to Anaheim one recent morning and floated through the chlorine canals. We used to wait hours in that snaking line, when I was a boy, for fifteen minutes of dark fascination. But now, the wild interior world, with its animatronic drunkards and growling pirate captains, its blade-killed skeletons on piles of glittering jewels, left me empty. “Ye come seekin’ adventure and salty old pirates, eh?” said a talking skull. “Sure, you come to the proper place. But keep a weather eye open, mates—”

Read More

On the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to Gabriel García Márquez in Bogotá, Colombia, Santiago Mutis Durán, the son of Márquez’s close friend Álvaro Mutis, gathered together small author-less stories that Márquez had written down or told over the course of his lifetime. Mutis Durán’s essay was originally published in Conversaciones desde La Soledad magazine in 2001 and has been translated for The Paris Review by David Unger.  

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ IN HIS HOME IN MEXICO IN 2003. PHOTO: INDIRA RESTREPO.

We’ve all heard the kinds of stories that get passed around, author-less and persistent. I once heard Gabriel García Márquez tell the Mexican poet Adolfo Castañón one of these “unsigned” stories:

A young couple, a bit tired of city life, decided to move to the country with their two Labradors. Once settled into their little country house, they became friends with their neighbors, a couple that had fruit orchards and raised rabbits. One morning, their neighbors came over to say that they were going to town and would return the following day. The morning passed peacefully, but in the afternoon, the Labradors came into the kitchen with rabbit parts in their mouths. Shocked by this unexpected turn of events, the couple discussed what to do next. After putting the rabbits back in their cages, they returned home, decided not to say anything to their neighbors. They felt disheartened, but went through the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. The following morning their neighbors knocked on their door. Each held a dead rabbit in their hands. Before the couple even had a chance to come up with an excuse over something they had been dreading since the day before and that had kept them awake all night, their neighbors said: “We found them dead in their cages this morning; we’re in shock since yesterday we buried them in the garden.”

Read More

Thom Gunn, left, in 1960 at Hampstead-White Stone Pond. Oliver Sacks, right, with his beloved BMW motorbike at Muscle Beach. Courtesy of the Oliver Sacks Foundation. Photo taken from Sacks’s memoir On the Move.

Back in the early eighties, when I first met up with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, he was still largely unknown. Though his masterpiece Awakenings had appeared in 1973, it had gone largely unread and was actively dismissed, if read at all, by the medical community, since its layering of nineteenth-century-style case histories ran against the double-blind, quantitative-tracking, peer-reviewed conventions demanded of medical writing at the time.

Newly arrived at The New Yorker, I persuaded Sacks to let me attempt to frame him as the subject of one of the magazine’s legendary multipart profiles, and we began to spend a lot of time together. Ever so gingerly, Sacks began to broach a quite astonishing prehistory—how at age twenty, when his Orthodox Jewish mother, one of England’s first female surgeons, first learned of his homosexuality, she had torn into him with hours of “Deuteronomical cursings” (filth of the bowel, abomination, the wish that he had never been born); how a few years later, in the late fifties, having completed his initial medical training at Oxford, he bolted free of homophobic England, like a bat out of hell, racing toward California, where he undertook four years of medical residencies, first in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles, and threw himself into a leather-clad, motorcycle-straddling, bodybuilding, drug-fueled scene. His original impetus for heading to San Francisco, he told me, may have been the presence there of the poet Thom Gunn, who was openly dealing with material Sacks felt he still couldn’t. Sacks urged me to go visit Gunn to get his sense of things, which I happily did, meeting him at an espresso place in the Castro.

After I’d worked on the profile for more than four years, Sacks asked me to shelve it: still deeply closeted, and in fact entirely celibate at that point for the fifteen years since he had left California for New York, he couldn’t deal with the prospect of having his sexuality revealed—and I certainly had no intention of outing him if he did not want to be outed. Seven years before his death, after by that point thirty-five years of celibacy, he finally allowed himself to fall in love and be fallen in love with, by the superbly kind and elegant writer Bill Hayes—and indeed a few years after that, Sacks wrote about his sexuality in his late-life autobiography, On the Move. And then, on his very deathbed, Sacks urged me to return to my original intention, to write up the multipart profile I’d been planning to all those years earlier. “Now,” Sacks said. “Now, you have to do it!”

At last, the book I produced with his blessing, And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks, has been released this week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book includes my 1982 interview with Gunn, which is excerpted below.

WESCHLER

How’d you first meet Oliver?

GUNN

I met Oliver here in San Francisco in it must have been 1961, shortly after he’d arrived in California as a medical intern. He rode a motorcycle and called himself “Wolf,” which is apparently his middle name. One time he kiddingly said, “What would my maternal grandfather think if he knew the way I am using his name?” It sounded nicely ferocious. And he wrote a great deal. He wanted from very early on to be a writer, and he kept extensive notebooks. Extensive. I remember at one point there being something like a thousand typed pages of journal. One summer he decided to chronicle the trucking life, had gotten on his motorcycle, which broke down, and ended up hitching with truckers and coming back with a long account of what it was like to be a trucker. Read More

Walter Benjamin, 1928. Courtesy of the Walter Benjamin Archive at Akademie der Künste, via Wikimedia Commons.

All books should not be read in the same way. Novels, for instance, are there to be devoured. Reading them is a voluptuous act of absorption, not an act of empathy. The reader does not imagine himself in the hero’s place, but assimilates what befalls him. The vivid report of these experiences is the appetizing trimmings in which a nourishing dish comes to the table.

There is, to be sure, a raw diet of experience—just as there is a raw diet for the stomach—to wit: one’s own experiences. But the art of the novel, like the culinary arts, begins beyond the raw ingredients. Read More

Photo © Giovanni Giovannetti/Effigie

On the morning of January 12, 2010, Susan Barnett and Greg Delisle said goodbye to their three dogs, closed the door of their Cape Cod–style farmhouse in rural upstate New York, and got in their car to go to jobs twenty-five miles away in Ithaca. Susan was a copy editor at Cornell University Press, Greg was a website manager for an academic department. A big snowstorm was scheduled to arrive that afternoon and they anticipated their return might be difficult. What they didn’t know was that in the ceiling of their kitchen, faulty wiring was sparking against the rafters.

At two o’clock, a neighbor called them to say their house was on fire. Susan rushed home through the snowstorm. She was stopped by the police down the road from her house, and from that spot she could see blazing curtains fluttering out of the second-floor window. Fire crews from three towns battled the blaze late into the night.

The result, in insurance parlance, was a burnout. The next day, Greg buried the dogs, who had been trapped in the living room. He and Susan had made a mental list of items that he should try to find. A computer hard drive. Passports. Jewelry. And Dave’s letters—Susan wanted Greg to look for those, too.

Did it seem like an odd priority, I asked Greg, to want to save these letters?

“It’s not an odd priority, if you know Susan,” Greg replied.

I did know Susan. We were undergraduates together at Williams College in the late eighties. Susan was pale, blond, with chipmunk cheeks, and she’d dress in fur muffs one day, straight from Doctor Zhivago, and the next day in pigtails and a gingham dress, à la Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the next in a Boy George black wide-brimmed hat and thick eyeshadow. At the time, she seemed to be trying too hard, but now she seems like one of those low-key counterculture heroines who knew everyone, had been everywhere, influenced everything. She treated us as if we were Andy Warhol’s Factory, documenting the silly mayhem of our class with a camera, even though we made a sad version of a counterculture.

Read More

Still from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

In Los Angeles, 1968, Dennis Wilson was the beachiest of the Beach Boys, the only Boy who actually surfed. He was the cool guy with the cool car, cool shades, cool hair. When he admired his disheveled reflection in his California-shaped swimming pool, his steely blue eyes must’ve told him: Dennis, you deserve it all. True, his band’s best years were behind him. And true, his divorce tarnished his reputation; his ex had told the court how he used to beat her. But as sure as his Ferrari purred—as sure as that gold-record sun went swanning into the Pacific every evening—Wilson was going to enjoy himself. With his pals Terry Melcher (Doris Day’s son, a cool guy) and Gregg Jakobson (a total nobody, but still a cool guy), he formed a trio called the Golden Penetrators, who fancied themselves “roving cocksmen,” as his ex put it. They vowed to seduce as many women as possible.

Likely this oath was at the front of Wilson’s mind when he picked up some hitchhiking hippie girls, escorting them to his mansion for “milk and cookies.” Soon those teens, along with more teens and their leader, Charles Manson, were Wilson’s full-time guests. Having reached peak cool guy, he bragged to the press: “I LIVE WITH 17 GIRLS.” (Now this is just called living in Bushwick.) Ushering Manson, whom he called the “Wizard,” into Hollywood, Wilson and his fellow Penetrators set the stage for some of the most infamous murders in American history.

Though the Golden Penetrators, in their caricatured machismo, seem ready-made for a Quentin Tarantino film, they’re strikingly absent from his latest, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. In their place is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), the cool guy with the cool et cetera, a washed-up stunt double who functions as a Wilson stand-in. Booth, too, is a generation behind the times. He is a relic of Westerns, where Wilson was a relic of surf rock. And Booth, too, is clinging to his glory days with rakish ease, trailed by rumors of the violence that ended his marriage. But when, like Wilson, he picks up a Manson girl, Booth does something astoundingly un-Wilson: he declines her advances. Eventually, his sobering encounter with the Manson Family allows him to prevent, with vintage cool-guy, ass-whooping skills, some of the most infamous murders in American history.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is nominally a fairy tale (nominally in two senses of the word), which is why it entertains these counterfactual revisions. In a fairy tale, Cliff Booth can say no to the sex that Dennis Wilson could not wait to say yes to. Cliff Booth can dispatch, with a bit of LSD-induced chutzpah, the same killers who stabbed and shot five people, including Sharon Tate, on Cielo Drive. Critics have found these deviations appealing or appalling; to me they felt inchoate, as if Tarantino had tinkered with the past only long enough to tire of it. Even if he wanted a storybook finale with a flamethrower, he didn’t need to divest himself so completely of the era’s history. Much of the reality would have served his revisionist ends.

Read More