March 8, 2021 Melting Clocks Oh, Heaven By Eloghosa Osunde In Eloghosa Osunde’s column Melting Clocks, she takes apart the surreality of time and the senses. Naudline Pierre, Lead Me Gently Home, 2019, oil on canvas, 96 x 120″. Photo: Paul Takeuchi. When I say the name Heaven, someone I love answers me through two realms and a time machine. It doesn’t matter where our bodies are in the world, what distance separates us, or what headlines are going on about, I say that name and we appear elsewhere. When we rechristened each other recently, we gave and received three names each. They call me [redacted] or [redacted] or [redacted] and the world stops. I call them Heaven or [redacted] or [redacted] and the Earth’s core shifts. All six of our names have different emotional hefts for me, but I suppose Heaven carries a particular weight. There were borders between us when I chose the name, so they didn’t see the choice in real time, but they know my why. They cried, too, when they first heard it, because they know what this word means to me. There was a time when I was obsessed with staying saved and helping loved ones get on the road to heaven. I called that love. That level of conviction gave me something to live for, but after I released it, I realized the obsession added indelible bass to my anxiety. Sometimes, when I get still enough, I can still feel the reverb thudding through me. When people die now, though, I don’t see them facing a heated binary, standing before a white light: Heaven or Hell? Instead, I close my eyes and support their spirit in what it believed. I wish for them what they wished for themselves. And beyond that: I imagine with them what they imagined for themselves, or what their spirit would have dreamed of if they weren’t afraid. It’s been this way for years: I see dead people deciding, because a sure thing I know is that every person has a spirit—whether they are awake to it or not—and our spirits have agency, so that we can cocreate our own realities with God. But I suppose if you’re vanilla about life, the way I think and talk about death in person—openly, vocally, quasi-casually—would be considered morbid. It’s both big and small talk to me, and I do both. Even then, I (still) find myself holding back more than I would if I wasn’t scared of scaring the people I love. Now largely unplugged from religious imaginations of The Afterlife, I know what I am working toward instead. There are implications for what I see as possible beyond death, and those implications double as instructions coded onto my spirit. I accept the challenge without flailing. To get to that thing, that place—my own personal heaven—there’s work I have to do in this lifetime; there are things I have to allow to change me, because when I die, I don’t want to be wished into an eternity I did not conceive, an everlastingness I did not imagine, a heaven that cannot hold me. My loved ones know what I have agreed with God instead. I’m at peace with that. Read More
March 4, 2021 Happily ~Hope.docx By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. An illustration from Jack and the Beanstalk, Elizabeth Colborne I am cleaning my house when I receive a Facebook message from the manager of Project Safe that a volunteer has found my plague doctor, or someone who looks like my plague doctor. The baseboards are thick with dust. I spray a mix of vinegar and lavender, and run a rag across them. The plague doctor, or someone who looks like my plague doctor, has been put aside in the office for me. I write back, “Oh! oh! I hope it’s him.” The rag is black. I am on my hands and knees. “I hope it’s your doll!” writes the manager. “Fingers crossed,” I write back. “It has to be him,” I say to no one. “It just has to be.” I text my mother, “I’m cleaning the gustroom.” I notice the mistake before I hit send, but I send it anyway. She calls. I pick up. “Shouldn’t you be writing?” she asks. I should. “I can’t move,” says my mother. She received her second dose of the vaccine yesterday and now she’s having a reaction. I tell her I’m writing about hope. I tell her the reaction means the vaccine is working. “I feel like I’ve been hearing about this essay on hope for weeks,” she says. She’s impatient. “I can’t lift my arm,” she says. I tell her I’ve read every version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” I could find because I thought if I followed the hunger and the despair and the cow traded for a pocketful of magic beans and the beanstalk that grows overnight through the clouds and the boy named Jack who climbs the beanstalk and robs a giant of his harp and hen so he and his mother could live happily ever after I could make a beautiful map of hope because isn’t that what we need right now? “Isn’t what what we need right now?” “Hope,” I say again. “A map of hope,” I say again. “Hope?” says my mother, like it’s the name of a country she’d never pay money to visit. “What we need is a hell of a lot more than hope,” she says. We’re both quiet for a minute. “How’s the essay going?” asks my mother. “Terribly,” I say. “No surprise,” she says. I tell her the manager of Project Safe just messaged me that a volunteer thinks she might’ve found my plague doctor, or someone who looks like my plague doctor. “Here we go again,” says my mother, “with the plague doctor.” I lost him months ago, and now he’s coming home. “Why couldn’t she just send you a photo?” I was wondering that, too, but I don’t admit it. If it’s not my plague doctor I want to at least postpone the time in between the darkness and the figure who emerges. “There’s no way it’s your plague doctor,” says my mother. “Fee-fi-fo-fum,” I say. “What?” she says. “I said ‘feel better,’ ” I say. In some versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” each time Jack climbs the beanstalk his mother grows sicker and sicker. And in other versions, each time Jack climbs back down and shows his mother his gold and tells her he was right about the beans after all, his mother grows quieter and quieter until it’s impossible to know if she’s even there anymore. I go to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s website. I click on the IF YOU PLANT THEM OVERNIGHT BY MORNING THEY GROW RIGHT UP TO THE SKY link. I want a vaccine, but what I want even more are magic beans I can plant in my arm that will grow into a beanstalk my sons can climb if they ever run out of hope. I click on the link but it just leads me to a page on “adjusting mitigation strategies.” I try to click back, but I can’t. My computer freezes. I have to restart, and when my computer turns back on, and I return to this essay on hope, I realize it wasn’t properly saved. Most of it is lost. Only a few old notes, like branches, are scattered across the page. I start to cry, and tell my husband I’m giving up writing forever, and then I kick the air, and then I watch tutorials on recovering documents that advise me to search for “hope” with a “~” in front of it. What is that called? A tilde? It looks like a downed beanstalk. Read More
March 1, 2021 One Word One Word: Loose By Melissa Febos Melissa Febos’s essay “The Mirror Test” appears in our Winter 2020 issue, and this essay grows out of that one. “She’s tight,” they kept saying with glee about this girl or that. This was before tight meant good or mad and after it meant drunk or cheap. The boys scanned the school cafeteria for girls they deemed chaste, the ones with modest figures and monied homes. “She’s tight,” they’d agree with approval. “What about me?” Is it possible that I actually asked this? That I was once so plaintive? Of course. I was a child. “No, you’re loose as a goose.” I remember exactly what I wore that day: button-fly jeans, short-sleeved shirt with a floral pattern. It must have seemed important. The Remarkable History of Chicken Little, the 1840 tale by John Greene Chandler (adapted from a 1823 Scandinavian version), is populated by farm birds with rhyming names, including one Goose-Loose (Gaase Paase in the original), who spread their terror of the sky’s alleged falling like a bad game of telephone. Fox-Lox then lures them into his den for supposed protection, and bites off all of their heads. The moral of this story is that you ought not believe everything you’re told. In the first cut of the original film adaptation, which was requested by the U.S. government and released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1942, the fox is depicted reading Mein Kampf, and then convincing Chicken Little that the sky is falling. Read More
February 26, 2021 Re-Covered The Storyteller of Tangier By Lucy Scholes In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Like many readers, I suspect, I first came across the name Mohammed Mrabet in relation to Paul Bowles. Throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, everyone from Life magazine to Rolling Stone sent writers and photographers to Tangier—where Bowles had been living since 1947—to interview the famous American expat, author of the cult classic The Sheltering Sky. “If Paul Bowles, now seventy-four, were Japanese, he would probably be designated a Living National Treasure; if he were French, he would no doubt be besieged by television crews from the literary talk show Apostrophes,” wrote Jay McInerney in one such piece for Vanity Fair in 1985. “Given that he is American, we might expect him to be a part of the university curriculum, but his name rarely appears in a course syllabus. Perhaps because he is not representative of a particular period or school of writing, he remains something of a trade secret among writers.” This wasn’t to say that Bowles was reclusive. In fact, he kept open house for one and all, whether they be curious tourists, his famous friends—Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg among them—or the crowd of Moroccan storytellers and artists he’d befriended over the years. And of these, one man in particular stands out: Mohammed Mrabet. Bowles and Mrabet met in the early sixties, and they remained close until Bowles’s death four decades later in 1999. Mrabet worked for Bowles in various capacities: as a driver, a cook, general handyman, and sometime traveling companion. But theirs was much more intimate a relationship than that of employer and employee. They were friends—and it’s assumed, at one time or other, lovers, too—but most importantly, artistic collaborators. Throughout the sixties, Bowles increasingly turned his attention to translating. His wife, the novelist Jane Bowles, suffered a stroke in 1957, from which she never fully recovered. From then until her death in 1973, she was plagued by depression, impaired vision, seizures, and aphasia—health problems that also had a notable impact on her husband, depriving him of the “solitude and privacy” that he needed to write. “The real reason I started translating, was that Mrs. Bowles was ill and I couldn’t write, because I would only have twenty minutes and then I would be called downstairs,” he explained to McInerney. Read More
February 3, 2021 Notes on Hoops On Hustles By Hanif Abdurraqib In his column Notes on Hoops, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the golden age of basketball movies, shot by shot. Still from White Men Can’t Jump. © 20th Century Studios. I can always tell which one of my friends didn’t grow up around hustlers by how they look up and lock eyes with the person at the mall kiosk, who—by virtue of that enchanting eye contact—doesn’t even have to wave them over. They drift into the grasp of the salesperson without even being aware of it. And that’s when their money is no longer theirs. On the street in a city my pal had never been to, a woman sells her a bracelet before she even knows what’s happening. Compliments her skin tone and lays the bracelet over it. Leans in to get a good look and then stands back as if she is witnessing a gateway to the promised land creaking open right there on the sidewalk. And let me be clear: I am not opposed to hustles, and I am certainly not opposed to hustling. When I say I came up around hustlers, I mean that I know what it takes to keep the lights on and so I’ve rarely been in the dark. I have exchanged cash for some things I don’t want to know the history of. I’ve spent time on both sides of the hustling coin before and certainly will for whatever time I’ve got left on this twirling rock. A rock that, by the way, is spinning faster now than it was before. I don’t understand the science, but I know that time itself is a hustle. Spend a few days in Franklin County corrections and you might come to realize, urgently, that time is a currency. Silence is a currency. Any currency that can be interrupted can be the source of a hustle. Which brings me, again, back to intimacy—though I promise I won’t linger here too long, except to say that not all hustles are intimate, but the best ones have an undercurrent of intimacy. I’m not only talking about physical or romantic intimacy, though the tongue and the song and the tips of fingers and the voice in an ear are all mighty vessels for the hustle. What I’m getting at is how the hustle requires a type of knowing. Knowing of oneself, of course. But also a reading of an other, rapidly, before they can realize that you are acting upon that knowing. I am not the best hustler because I do not know myself as well as I want to, which leads to a series of ongoing self-hustles. Like setting my alarm for seven thirty when I’ve already crossed well beyond the midnight hour, immersed in the glow of my phone. But it’s the promise I think I’m chasing. Like my dear pal, looking at a bracelet reflecting off the sunlight, dancing on her skin. White Men Can’t Jump dissects the hustle solely as a game of optics. Billy Hoyle used to hoop in college but now makes a living hustling streetballers. He’s white, wears baggy shirts and a backward hat to the courts populated by Black players who are taller, fitter, dressed for the game. But, most importantly, he’s white. Sidney Deane is Billy’s initial, primary target. Sidney is talented, loud, boastful, approaching a caricature of a nineties streetball archetype. Depending on the viewer, one might relish in the moment when Billy beats Sidney twice in their first encounter. The second time, revealing himself, whispering, “I’ve hustled a hell of a lot better players than you” in Sidney’s ear before Sidney misses a jump shot. For all of its other moving parts, White Men Can’t Jump relies on teasing out the part of a hustle that I am most fascinated by in real life. The part that relies on looking, and how a person responds to that looking. There are many ways people tell on themselves, one of them being how they choose to react based solely off of what their eyes tell them, and how that connects to what they inherently believe. In the film, we are to understand that Billy’s hustle is effective because the Black players are incapable of seeing who he is, and by the time he has been fully rendered, it is too late. The Sidney/Billy pairing works because of this—on every court, Sidney convincing two opponents to saddle him with Billy as a teammate, Sidney sinking into the performance of begging to not have to play with the white chump who looks like he can’t make a shot, and so on. Read More
January 28, 2021 Re-Covered The Most Appalling, Appealing Psychopaths By Lucy Scholes In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Here’s a question: Can you name the debut novel, originally published in Britain in September 1965, that became a more or less immediate best seller, and the fans of which included Noël Coward, Daphne du Maurier, John Gielgud, Fay Weldon, David Storey, Margaret Drabble, and Doris Lessing? “A rare pleasure!” said Lessing. “I can’t remember another novel like it, it is so good and so original.” Coward, meanwhile, described it as “fascinating and remarkable,” admiring the author’s “strongly developed streak of genius.” Du Maurier—a writer whose own work is famously mesmerizing—declared it “compulsive reading … Endearing, exasperating, wildly funny, touching and superbly amoral.” Gielgud thought it “full of fascinating characterisation and atmosphere.” Never not in tune with the times, Weldon deemed it “a magical mystery tour of the mind,” Storey “a superb piece of confectionery,” while Drabble described it as “strange and unforgettable … Highly original and oddly haunting.” Yet despite such heaped adulation, I’m willing to bet that hardly anyone reading this will have heard of the novel in question, though some might be familiar with its author. It’s called The Sioux, and was the work of sixty-six-year-old Irene Handl, a famous British actress beloved for her roles on both stage and screen, rock ’n’ roll superfan (and member of the Elvis Presley fan club), fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, not to mention a devoted Chihuahua owner and for many years president of the British Chihuahua Club. The blurb on the British first edition describes the book as “a sustained tour-de-force, one of the most unusual and remarkable novels of recent years.” Unusual and remarkable is spot-on. “The Sioux” is the nickname the Benoir family call themselves, on account of their fierce tribalism. They’re French—their ancestors escaped Paris during the Revolution, fleeing first to Martinique then, during a slave insurrection, from there to Louisiana—feudal, and astronomically rich. Both The Sioux, and its sequel, The Gold Tip Pfitzer (1973)—which is dedicated to Noël Coward—are two of the maddest novels I’ve ever encountered. The Benoirs themselves are among the most appalling and repugnant, monstrously overprivileged, egomaniacal psychopaths ever created. To be absolutely honest, I’m not sure these books should actually be republished—the misplaced cultural appropriation of their chosen soubriquet is, if you can believe it, one of the Benoir family’s least egregious crimes—but, just like Drabble before me, now that I’ve read them, I simply haven’t been able to stop thinking about them. Read More