Homelessness is a crisis that, if you’re lucky, never happens to you. Many, however, live in a suspended state of perpetually tenuous living called houselessness. Houselessness is denoted not so much as a lack of roof over one’s head but rather looks like the problem of too many roofs. Houselessness means a vulnerable position that’s also invisible: the roof or sublet or room or couch or yeah, sure, just crash here for the weekend is a mask that keeps concern at bay. Strangers, employers, even relatives are short on empathy for those who they assume are at least meeting the physiological minimums in the famed hierarchy of needs. As a society we are bad enough to people who certainly aren’t. It isn’t a competition to be sure, for houselessness makes a poor consolation prize, more a transient condition punctuated by periods of homelessness, stability, houselessness, and back again. A delayed check, closed office, changed schedule, misread address, an administrative shutdown, an overlooked email—the frustrated reminders that slow still exists in a world where messages cross the ocean in less than a breath—might mean the difference between living or not. This is the usual.

And, then, sometimes the circumstances that tip the scale are more divinely wrought: sometimes crisis begins in fire.

On April 7, 2012, a fire broke out in an apartment complex in the Pennville neighborhood of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Though no serious injuries were reported, one woman—in whose home the fire started—was treated for smoke inhalation, and five units were damaged, displacing several families and depriving many more of electricity. KFOR-TV, an NBC affiliate, reported the story, which included a brief interview with one of the residents, Kimberly Wilkins, who ran for her life as the building burned.

On camera, the light is enough to make out the smoke-stained wall behind her, yet it’s unclear how much time separates the witness exclusive from the event witnessed. Wilkins, shot from the shoulders up, her head nearly filling the frame, appears on camera with all the warmth of a ghost (ashy, as someone less sympathetic might say). Whether washed by fear, stress, or the spotlight, it’s also hard to tell. The pixie cut mostly hidden in a neatly knotted scarf might be wrapped for bed or ready for some fifteen seconds of fame. Read More

José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Saudade (Longing) (detail), 1899, oil on canvas, 77 1/2″ x 40″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A kitchen is the best—I mean the saddest—room for tears. A bedroom is too easy, a bathroom too private, a living room too formal. If someone falls to pieces in the kitchen, in the space of work and nourishment, they must be truly coming undone. The bright lights offer no comfort, only illuminate. The floor should be vinyl and cold.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman—feminist, writer, sufferer of postpartum and other depressions—proposed in 1898 that private kitchens be abolished, as the work they demanded of women left them with no time for any other activities. “The cleaning required in each house would be much reduced,” she argues, “by the removal of the two chief elements of household dirt,—grease and ashes.” She does not mention a corresponding reduction in tears.

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Some churches have designated “crying rooms,” soundproofed spaces to which parents of wailing infants can retreat if they are concerned about bothering their fellow parishioners. Often the room will have a large window, so that its inhabitants can still look out upon the nave and chancel, as well as speakers, so they can hear the sound of the sermon and hymns. People unfamiliar with the practice—guests, for instance, at a wedding or funeral—sometimes, understandably, mistake its purpose. The poets I know who have made this mistake are without exception very taken with the idea. Read More

Here is the grandmother of the English novel, Fanny Burney:

Looks young in the picture, right? Well, that’s ’bout how young she was when her first novel came out, in 1778. She was twenty-five.

That novel (Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World) made her famous. I’m reading it right now. It’s nothing like what I thought it was gonna be. I thought it was gonna be comic; it’s realistic and intense.

She wrote only four novels: three hits and one dud, or so I’ve been told a hundred times. Very few people read any of ’em, unless you’re psycho for the history of the novel. Then you have to read all of ’em.

I think her name puts people off sometimes. It’s like her name is “Kimmy Peanut.” How can these books be any good if they were written by somebody named Kimmy Peanut.

Plus, just from that engraving, you can see how all these white-wigged literary guys (Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, et al.) would be dying to pat her on the head. Which basically gives you another excuse for skipping the books. (She must be overrated, right?)

I wasn’t gonna read her novels either. I just wanted to look at her journals and letters. I’d seen ’em quoted from time to time, and it looked to me like she had an eye for the telling detail. She was clearly witty and down to earth, and she knew everybody, including King George III.

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Chris Ofili, Jealousy (detail), from Othello, 2018. © Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Though it is not usually characterized as such, Shakespeare’s Othello is a “problem play,” one doubly so. There’s just enough carnival to render its status as tragedy troubling, despite the emphatic announcement of its full title, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. In the final chapter of his Shakespeare’s Festive World, François Laroque excavates the festivity and festivities that undergird and undermine Othello’s darkness, showing how even the lyric richness of Othello’s speech has an air of pestilent farce, just as the depth of his pain is rooted in and by Iago’s brutal comic energy. Moreover, that Othello is a moor of Venice means that the problem of the color line, which W. E. B. Du Bois locates in the twentieth century at its outset, is a problem of the centuries, whether we are talking about the seventeenth, twentieth, or twenty-first.

And it’s not so much that Shakespeare has given an early articulation of the Negro Problem; it’s that, instead, he has given Negroes a problem. There’s some shit we have to deal with in the wake of this play, a toxic atmosphere with which we must contend. The greatness of the play is not lessened by its being thus problematic; and this is because, rather than in spite, of how that greatness is bound up with the intense and gorgeous flatulence the play produces and gives off and plays with, its author slyly glancing at someone or other of us, asking, Did you cut that one? Often, as if in payment for the dis/honor of being so addressed, because look how good and how horrific it is to be addressed at all, we’ve taken responsibility for Shakespeare’s ill wind, embracing it like a sail, or riding it like a wing, in the interest of some outward or upward mobility—which is to say, nobility—that it can only seize, not send. So that the terribly beautiful, evilly compounded genius of it is that what we are constrained to do with Othello when we enact him is act like him. Read More

Vintage Russian postcard

I am often complimented on how warm my coats look: “You look so bundled up!” It is praise I accept not for myself, but on behalf of the country where I bought them: Russia. I spent a total of two winters there, in Moscow, and each time, I approached the matter of buying a coat with an almost superstitious seriousness, as if the Russian winter were a spirit that watched me as I shopped, waiting to punish me if I made the wrong choice of down, or underestimated the need for moisture-wicking fabric. I was not wrong; I swear, that first winter, the wind felt like a ghost slapping me in the face, chiding me for getting the hood that buttoned rather than zipped. Perhaps that is why, every Halloween, as ghost stories make their return, my mind often wanders to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Published in 1842, it tells the story of a vengeful ghost, who in life had his overcoat stolen and now in death haunts the city of St. Petersburg, pulling coats off the backs of innocent passersby. Gogol’s story, at its heart, is a frightening tale of poverty and social isolation. It is also a testament to the power of hauntings that take place on a larger scale, where ghosts seek to collect debts not for individual transgressions but for the failings of an entire society. Read More

Edith Wharton’s home, the Mount.

“Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it,” an English lady tells an eager American couple at the start of one of Edith Wharton’s stories.

The one, of course, is a ghost. The Americans are newly rich and thus in need of an estate. Their manor need not have either hot water or electricity. Their sole requirement is that there be a ghost in residence, and the only haunted house their hostess can offer is a country home, in Dorsetshire, whose ghostliness is as vague as a ghost itself. In “Afterward,” one is only sure of having seen a ghost, well, afterward.

The story appeared in Tales of Men and Ghosts, a collection published in 1910, while Edith was still living with her husband, Teddy, at the Mount, the estate in the Berkshires that she designed and expanded as her writing income allowed. The House of Mirth not only made her a best-selling author and celebrity when it was published in 1905, it paid for her elaborate gardens. The Mount was sold in 1911—the specter of divorce loomed—and after the Whartons moved out, the place became famous as a haunted house. An extremely haunted house, in fact, whose ghosts do not bother with ambiguity or disguises, as in the opening pages of “Afterward,” but freely roam the hills and halls at all times of day and night. I had gone to the Mount on a guided tour of the haunted grounds, hoping to overcome my fear.

What was I afraid of? Nothing specific, and everything all at once. Just as it’s the “rare bird” who sees ghosts outright, it’s unusual to know what single, precise thing haunts you. The “ghost-feeler,” according to Edith, is more common—aware of the presence of ghosts, but abstractly. What would happen if I actually saw one? I hoped that I could mumble a few words of awkward, apologetic exorcism and feel less haunted by my own anxiety, the “vague dread” I recognized in Edith’s ghost stories.

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