From a portfolio by Jacques Hérold, originally published in the Fall 1961 issue of The Paris Review.

In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Ethnographer,” a white American graduate student named Fred embeds himself into a Native American tribe. Eventually, he penetrates its “secret doctrine.” His advisor then summons him back to report on it:

He made his way to his professor’s office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it.

“Are you bound by your oath?” the professor asked.

“That’s not the reason,” Murdock replied. “I learned something out there that I can’t express.”

“The English language may not be able to communicate it,” the professor suggested.

“That’s not it, sir. Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now.”

Borges’s story plays with the view that Western and non-Western cultures are fundamentally untranslatable. Stepping into a non-Western belief system makes one fall off the edge of purportedly rational, secular knowledge.

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George Whitmore in his New York apartment, 1980. Photograph by James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

I’m going to make a man out of you yet. Parents have probably been making variations on this threat for as long as they’ve had to tolerate weird sons. All sons being weird, that adds up to many threats. But some sons are queer; what then? Two years before his death from AIDS in 1989, George Whitmore—a one-time member of the Violet Quill, the short-lived early-eighties gay-male writing group that also included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran—published his third and final novel, Nebraska, on the theme of anguished man-making. The long-out-of-print text asks what combination of forces and tactics might induce manhood in a fruity kid: isolation, kidnapping, alcoholism, neglect? Now the Song Cave has reissued the book, and, in addition to an inventory of mom-and-pop solutions for correcting aberrant masculinities, we’ve recovered a perfect expression of horniness: “There came a singing in my head.” Desire is an earworm.

Nebraska is a stubby gay bildungsroman that tracks an amputee named Craig Mullen, our narrator, from his bedridden preteens in fifties Flyoverlandia to his desperate twenties in SoCal. The novel is a stomach turner that plays sick tricks on the reader. Craig levels false accusations of sexual abuse against a closeted family member, and the results are catastrophic, as his relative undergoes a forced infantilization that runs parallel to Craig’s growing up. When Craig encounters the man again years later, genuine abuse rockets into the frame as a kind of outrageous punchline. The prospect of happiness for the gay characters of this era is rendered as a book-length joke. The novel twists its horrors into funny shapes, like balloon animals filled with poison gas. Read More

Students playing football, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

At the first footy practice she attends with her grandson, Helen Garner doesn’t know how to act. She is surprised to hear herself greeting the coach, who is twenty, with “Hey, boss.” She has never paid more than “token attention” to Amby’s athletics, but she needs something to write about, and she wants to be near her youngest grandchild. So she keeps showing up to his training and games, paying attention, seeing what happens. She is open to being amazed, or even just interested. 

In her new nonfiction book, The Season, which came out in Australia last year and will be released in America this month, Garner, the low-key doyenne of Australian letters, whose body of work includes many novels, nonfiction books, diaries, and screenplays, writes with her signature immediacy, an elegant right-there-with-her-ness: “There are no seats. Wait, there’s one.” Soon, she starts to feel like part of the team, too: “We’ve won,” she reports, when they have. 

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