October 19, 2023 On Games Real Play By Devon Brody Autumn, Sims 2. Courtesy of Lucie-Bluebird Lexington. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. I played The Sims a lot as a preteen. It was the only computer game I ever liked that didn’t involve horses, and it lived at my dad’s house, where screen time was not limited. My friend Diana had it, too, and she and I played together sometimes, in the small office connected to her parents’ bedroom. Diana liked the design element of the game, and would use cheat codes to make her Sims very rich, then build them big houses. She chose balconies with glass railings, and reupholstered her Sims’ furniture. That part was not interesting to me. My Sims were not allowed to use cheat codes. Instead, they had to succeed within the terms of my own life, or what I imagined it would be as an adult: they had to get jobs, learn skills, and build relationships. They spent time learning to cook, mostly by reading the cookbooks on their bookshelves. They paid bills that arrived in the mailbox, and redid their kitchen floors only if they made the money on their own. Everyone got a smoke detector, and I worked hard to help them keep their Need meters—Hunger, Bladder, Social, Fun, Energy, Hygiene, Comfort, Environment—in the green. If not given instructions, Sims will do their best to handle these needs themselves, electing to use the bathroom or play on the computer. But I liked to do it for them, sending them to the fridge if they were hungry, to bed if they were tired, and to another Sim if they were lonely. Read More
October 19, 2023 On Games I’m High on World of Warcraft By Patrick McGraw The city of Thunder Bluff in World of Warcraft. Screenshot from the game. It was about four in the morning when the warrior decided to leave our group. He’d started weeping, apparently, into his mic. I didn’t have a headset, but the other members of the group did, and they detailed the player’s breakdown in the chat. He couldn’t take the pressure, they said. He was sorry. He’d let us down. He was tired. He was blubbering now. He left the group and opened a portal to Stormwind, his home city. The rest of us waited a few minutes, trying to think of a way to replace the most important member of the group before giving up, surrendering the hours we’d spent working our way through Uldaman, a subterranean dungeon filled with cursed Dwarves. I stood up and took two steps away from the computer to lie down in bed and stare red-eyed at my character on the screen, which was now lit by the late-summer sun breaking through the bedsheets nailed vaguely across my windows. I think about World of Warcraft nearly every day, but considering the millions of people who play the game, I’m not alone. Launched in 2004, WoW is the most successful MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) ever. At the height of its popularity, in 2010, the game had more than twelve million active subscribers and continues to be the most played MMORPG today, almost two decades after its release. The game is so well populated that whole books have been written on the game’s sociological aspects and in-game economy. The objective of the game, if you could say there is a single objective, is to increase your character’s level. You do this by completing quests, raiding dungeons, and fighting in player-versus-player (PvP) combat, as well as engaging in the literally hundreds of other tasks and story lines the game contains, all of it taking place within the vast world of Azeroth, with each player’s character being a combination of a race (orc, troll, night elf, et cetera) and a class (shaman, mage, warrior, et cetera). Read More
October 18, 2023 In Memoriam Against Remembrance: On Louise Glück By Elisa Gonzalez COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LOUISE GLÜCK AND POETRY MAGAZINE. Before I can think how to begin, she rebukes me: “Concerning death, one might observe / that those with authority to speak remain silent …” (“Bats,” A Village Life). Flip the pages, to “Lament,” in Ararat, and once more, a reproof: Suddenly, after you die, those friends who never agreed about anything agree about your character. They’re like a houseful of singers rehearsing the same score: you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life. No harmony. No counterpoint. Except they’re not performers; real tears are shed. Luckily, you’re dead; otherwise you’d be overcome with revulsion. Those two lines—a joke that hinges on being dead—make me smile. A reflex, as I am also crying. And I think, as I often have, that Louise Glück wasn’t given enough credit for being a funny poet. She is more commonly characterized as an investigator of death. Some find her poetry too skewed toward the grave; I wonder if we are too afraid of the fact that breath is the only thing keeping us out of it. To speak of her as if her death is the culmination of the work, though, is to ignore her attention to death’s vast and fecund opposite, rife with pleasure, with suffering, dominated by silence though it produces much speech in defiance: living, in the present continuous. To live is the verb it’s easy to forget you always embody. I stand. I walk around my bedroom. I worry the cuff of my gray wool sweater. I touch the petal of an Easter lily that opened just this morning. I remember that Louise prized completeness and detail when it came to natural things, so I walk back to my desk. On my laptop, I search the Latin name, Lilium longiflorum. I smile again: my futile attempt to draw closer to her becomes a joke that hinges on death. Back to the book. My past self has drawn a line in blue ink beside this stanza: “Death cannot harm me / more than you have harmed me, / my beloved life” (“October,” Averno). Is there anything else to say? Read More
October 17, 2023 On Books What Lies Beyond the Red Earth? By Michael Salu Carle Hessay, Image of the Hollow World, 1974. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. A few years ago, I read a lecture by Chinua Achebe given in 1975, later published as an essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” While I greatly respect Achebe’s novels, his essays have often left me wanting. His voice reminded me of my grandfather’s, the intonations of a proud Nigerian man, rightly aggrieved at the dysfunctional state of his country, his continent, and its indefatigable life in the face of rampant, extractive exploitation by imperial powers. I feel that Achebe’s frustration can leave blind spots in his arguments, and the lecture in question—an outright denouncement of Conrad’s famed novel and its canonized status as “permanent literature”—was, I thought, an example of this. Achebe considered Conrad’s novel explicitly racist in its themes, in its depictions of the “natives,” and in the gaze of Marlow, Conrad’s primary protagonist, who Achebe believed wasn’t much removed from Conrad’s disposition. Achebe questions the meaning of writing to our society, or the meaning of any art for that matter, when it can be so explicitly racist and go mostly unremarked upon by fans and critics alike, regardless of how beautiful the turns of phrase or evocative the depictions of the lush, sweltering alien landscape. I have a complex relationship with Conrad’s novel and agree with some of what Achebe put forth, but his argument felt incomplete. Achebe’s disgust is understandable, but I think one can see Conrad was also getting at a lack of vocabulary for this rich, intricate world, of atmospheres and new sensory and metaphysical experiences, at times in his prose defaulting to beautifully phrased but reductive tropes, which are still embedded in the unconscious of Western society today. As Achebe railed at Conrad’s reduction of complex cultures, knowledge systems, and languages, down to a dark, flat backdrop for Marlow’s descent into the pit of despair, and lamented Conrad’s objectification of West African bodies, I became hooked on an important and maybe even existential question—who was Achebe’s lamentation aimed at? Who was the primary audience for his words, written in English? And was there a moral authority to hear his appeal, and if so, what then? Read More
October 16, 2023 On Games We’re More Ghosts Than People By Hanif Abdurraqib Screenshot from Red Dead Redemption 2. I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I did it out of a sense of duty to my living, not what might exist after my living. I can’t control my own arrival to whatever the promised land may or may not be, because I don’t have the rubric in front of me. I have sometimes been a good person who does bad things, and sometimes I’ve been a bad person who does good things. The way the afterlife is most often discussed is by way of a scale that sorts into binary categories. I grew up with Muslims who insisted that every bit of food left on their plate after a meal would be weighed against them on the day of judgment. I considered this: arriving in front of the robed choir, a few grains of rice tipping the scale toward an irreconcilable level of bad, banishing me to some fiery underworld. Read More
October 16, 2023 In Memoriam In Remembrance of Louise Glück By Srikanth Reddy Photograph by Katherine Wolkoff. Nearly thirty years ago, during my junior year of college, I took a poetry writing class with Louise Glück. I’d never read any of her books, but I was aware of some undergraduate buzz about a visiting poet who’d recently received the Pulitzer Prize for a book of talking flowers. Her last house had burned down; her father had made his money in blades; she would need someone to drive her to Star Market for groceries on weekends. (I volunteered once, waiting nervously in the parking lot until she returned with a cantaloupe and asparagus.) The person I met in the classroom was frighteningly honest about poetry, and about being a poet. She said it was okay not to write—that she herself had gone several years without writing even a single poem—so it would be perfectly fine if we didn’t share any poems of our own with her that term. When we did turn in something for workshop, she mercilessly rooted out “mannerisms” in our poems; I became terrified of this critique, which only made my writing all the more mannered. She would linger over details like “angels in homespun linen” in a poem by Czesław Miłosz; almost three decades later, I still remember her wry grin of envy at that image. More than anything else, Louise loved it when something was surprising and, in retrospect, inevitable, as it is so often in her work, and in our lives—like the ending of her poem “Happiness”: Read More