{"id":134916,"date":"2019-03-25T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T16:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134916"},"modified":"2019-03-25T13:37:53","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T17:37:53","slug":"a-tortoise-stakeout-with-patricia-lockwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/25\/a-tortoise-stakeout-with-patricia-lockwood\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tortoise Stakeout with Patricia Lockwood"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Patricia Lockwood. Photo: Grep Hoax. \u00a9 Grep Hoax.<\/p><\/div>\n

I have a mildly confessional face, which means that strangers often feel compelled to tell me things. My natural mode of small talk is inquisitive, like the good cop in an interrogation, and I attract oddballs (although not as many as I used to). These factors together mean the occasional reception of terrible secrets. Once, a man I asked for directions confessed to an unprosecuted murder (in fact, a double murder); in a bar, a woman blurted out a cancer diagnosis nobody else knew about. A confessional face can be useful for a writer, although its consequences are sometimes unwelcome.<\/p>\n

I mention this only because it means I can recognize a related quality, a much rarer one, which is the ability not just to encounter this strangeness and revelation, but to manifest it. It\u2019s the difference between being a weirdo magnet and being Weirdo Magneto. So it is not blurb-speak to call Patricia Lockwood a writer of \u201crare power\u201d: she has a confessional face, and also a self-confessional face, and emanates a humorous and apparently limitless energy that blends and blurs the reality around her. She attracts eccentrics the way hunting deities are depicted attracting beasts, and her chosen habitat of Savannah, Georgia, is teeming with them.<\/p>\n

She moved to Savannah almost on sight, because it is so beautiful and so strange, and a reader encountering her work for the first time could trip over this influence, mistaking her poetry as Southern gothic played for laughs, everything made supernaturally lush and fervent by marsh air. But she was born in the Midwest\u2014living in \u201call the worst cities of the Midwest,\u201d places such as Cincinnati, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Indiana\u2014and they honed her style like whetstones. She is also part of that first generation of writers to be shaped by the internet, from a time when it was still called the \u201cinformation superhighway.\u201d I suppose it\u2019s odd, to think about Weird Twitter and Something Awful being influential the way that Encounter<\/em> or The Criterion<\/em> once were. But without that lineage\u2014first coders, then jokers, then journalists who picked up what she calls the \u201ccrisp new style,\u201d recognizable immediately\u2014the elements in her work that might be termed \u201cinsanely online\u201d will be missed. <\/p>\n

On the way to Savannah, driving from the mystery of Saint Helena Island in South Carolina, I listened to Lockwood read the audio version of her most recent book. It is an autobiographical work (although it is really not so readily classifiable as this) called Priestdaddy<\/em>. As the semiofficial poet laureate of Twitter, she is best known for both poetry and brevity, so it was interesting to hear her for a longer spell, keeping me company in the distance between Cracker Barrel family restaurants. Length can seep the wit out of comic memoir, like a dinner guest who tells one anecdote too many, but Priestdaddy<\/em> sustains it. The imagery is so crowded, so populated with what Lockwood calls her \u201cprivate zoo of description,\u201d that together, it becomes a hyperanalogy for her life, and everyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

She also records the early advent of being online, lovingly, like a relative with a camcorder at the internet\u2019s birth, before it grew into a brute. It helped in return to birth her voice, intense and lewd and personal, the sound of someone ripping off the tastefulness that afflicts American letters, performing the literary equivalent of that tablecloth magic trick. Though we had never met, listening to the book created the uncanny sensation I had already spoken to Lockwood for ten hours and sixteen minutes, so it felt perfectly natural when she did not offer much in the way of hellos. It just \u2026 began.<\/p>\n

Her chosen meeting place was Lafayette Square, just near the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, and at first I thought the holy ground had decided the location. Much of Priestdaddy <\/em>is about Catholicism\u2014Lockwood\u2019s father found God while watching The Exorcist<\/em> on a nuclear submarine, the USS Flying Fish<\/em>. He viewed it seventy-two times that patrol, and by the end, he had a calling: first a dalliance with Lutheranism, and next stop Rome, with his family in tow. For Lockwood, this is an unordinary enough lineage to feel like destiny. Like being the seventh son of a seventh son, \u201cdaughter of a Catholic priest\u201d (especially a possibly psychopathic, guitar-shredding Catholic priest who often wears nothing but underpants) is itself a claim to uniqueness, poet or not. (\u201c\u2009\u2018What exactly do Catholics believe?\u2019 First of all, blood. BLOOD,\u201d she writes.) But that is not why we were there at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are here \u2026 on the off-chance of seeing a large tortoise called Robert,\u201d she said, \u201cand he is often in this park.\u201d That explained the diffident eye contact\u2014it wasn\u2019t shyness. She was scanning the lawns for this creature. Robert, Lockwood explained, would perambulate here, eating leaves, being petted, having his photo taken. She had a photo of him already, on her phone, and showed me. The reptile looked very large, but he was still a juvenile, and would outlive his owner by decades. When anyone asked about this, the man would only say darkly that \u201carrangements had been made.\u201d \u201cSometimes, Robert is at the bar with his owner,\u201d said Lockwood, her tone implying that we would be going to that bar soon. First, though, we would wait in the park, surrounded by oaks old enough to shade it, until we got bored or hungry. Already, two minutes in, we were not having an interview anymore. We were on a tortoise stakeout.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Lafayette Square transformed into a menagerie of other animals. It was the kind of clumsy real-life analogy\u2014an actual private zoo of descriptions\u2014that sounds like bullshit when written down, but I have the photos. There was a pig in bumblebee wings, then a chihuahua in a little fire-chief costume, and his owner, dressed as a dalmatian. It was the end of Wag-o-ween, and Lockwood cooed and asked questions of the animals and their owners, as though she were there in an official capacity, the Wag-o-ween Queen, or its patron saint. She asked their names and breeds, petting and cosseting, offering judicious compliments, taking more photos. \u201cOh, I love Wag-o-ween,\u201d she said. These sorts of events happened all the time in Savannah. There is a Pirate Day, and something called The Blessing of the Animals, which sounds sacrilegious but is just Franciscan. There was no Robert, though\u2014we were not being blessed.<\/p>\n

So instead we talked, somewhat reluctantly, about writing. Many bad descriptions of Lockwood\u2019s physical appearance have been composed, partly because this is a legal requirement of bad profile journalism, partly because lesser talents are trying to ape her style, and partly because sometimes she writes about sex, so descriptions take on a gross and horny component through interviewer transference. Curiously, none of these sketches ever mentions her voice, perhaps because it is tricky to capture, but it is central to being Patricia Lockwood. She can hit emphases as well as any stand-up comic. She can mimic or declaim. There is a video of her in a Miami bookstore, reading that section from The Corrections <\/em>where Franzen goes on and on about mixed grills, and she performs it in an accent she invented, which sounds something like Tallulah Bankhead presenting The Twilight Zone<\/em>. The woman filming it is laughing so hard, the camera shakes. It\u2019s mockery, obviously, but it is not just mockery, and it\u2019s not a parody, either. So what is it? That\u2019s the trouble with trying to pin down Lockwood\u2019s work with comparisons, because her work is not like anything else, and so people keep trying to stick precedents to her, and instead miss the point.<\/p>\n

They especially miss the point because of the jokes, which are sometimes lewd. Lockwood thinks of herself more as a British ironist than an American one, rescuing all those forbidden adverbs and exclamation points, and I can see why. \u201cI think that I was a very early Anglophile and Canadia-phile. Commonwealth literature, pretty much. A lot of times, that is where the locus of humor is\u2014just in the dialogue tag, plus adverb. And then you have Stephen King criticizing J.\u2009K. Rowling or whatever for using too many adverbs. But that\u2019s the British humorist tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is something of that tradition in her obsession with animals, too. This kind of thing is not always welcome in America, or anywhere\u2014the Private Eye<\/em> satirist Craig Brown once said that Peter Cook would have been considered the equal of Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett, had he been less funny. But so far Lockwood is proving the adage that the opposite of funny is not serious; the opposite of funny is not funny.<\/p>\n

Someone pointed out that in his fiction, Martin Amis often takes the worst possible premises (\u201cWhat if poets and screenwriters swapped?\u201d) and then makes the best possible stories out of them. That\u2019s what Lockwood does, but for whole genres. I defy you to think of a genre with worse potential than \u201ccomedy erotica.\u201d It is uncalled for, has no obvious audience, invites critical disdain, is inches away from the dirty joke and is also\u2014and this is criminally underrecognized\u2014a nightmare to write from a technical point of view.<\/p>\n

Good writers wind up as finalists for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award every year, but Lockwood is a better writer, who can somehow seize this nonsense and control it, on Twitter, to both literary and popular audiences, on purpose. \u201cYou would think at some point that people would get the idea that these aren\u2019t actually sexy, but they never, never do,\u201d she once told Hazlitt<\/em>, referring to her \u201csext\u201d tweets\u2014those people keep creating a tension between this form and her upbringing and the rest of her style, and it is a tension that doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

It helps that she is, occasionally and quietly (those are two tribute adverbs), such a good literary critic herself. She learned a lot of technique from critical essays, because when she was poor she could read them for free on the internet (this, she says, \u201cis an interesting thing about me\u201d). Sometimes, she would read essays about a book before she read the book, developing a taste or interest that is very impressionistic. \u201cI really feel my way through it, because people write with their bodies. They write the people that they are, and I think there\u2019s a gap in criticism, which has been dominated by, you know, old white dudes for so long.\u201d A gap through which a less reactive reading can enter.<\/p>\n

Here is Lockwood writing about Joan Didion for the London Review of Books<\/em>: \u201c\u2009\u2018I have figured out her rhythm,\u2019 I once told a friend in a diner in Iowa City, though I will not tell you what I ate, or what I was wearing. (A hamburger? Some sort of shirt?) \u2018Her sentences are smooth, are smooth, are smooth, and then three-quarters of the way through the landing gear drops down.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a triple parody of Didion. The scene is Didion-like, while also leaving out the Didion detail of the outfit, in an essay about Didion leaving things out. Both the \u201care smooth, are smooth, are smooth\u201d sentence and the whole little paragraph are themselves written in the \u201clanding gear\u201d style. It has the fractal sophistication common only to the finest writing, where the part mimics the whole at every ratio of scale. It also retrieves and presents the fundamental essence of Joan Didion\u2019s writing, and is funny at the same time. It does all this in three sentences.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a natural next step to aim this incision at online culture. \u201cLiterary criticism, but for the internet\u201d will be a dominant mode of essay eventually, and Lockwood\u2019s British Museum lecture \u201cThe Communal Mind,\u201d published in the London Review of Books<\/em>, is already one of its touchstones. This account of a lifelong trip into the \u201cportal,\u201d as she calls it, re-creates the psychic environment of having all the tabs open, a place where it is \u201ctropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here, and everywhere, her metaphors play the same role as DNA does in the film Annihilation<\/em>. Her mind jumps, her thoughts are flitting, she is always observing, commentating, diverting, but then she presents something whole, no matter how surreal. She can also do it live\u2014it was not until afterward, reading my transcripts, that I clocked the effect in this exchange:<\/p>\n

RC: There\u2019s obviously some religious element to your poetry, and I was wondering if it was liturgical or sacramental, if that makes sense?<\/p>\n

PL: It does make sense\u2014but it\u2019s obviously both. If you are gunning for a revelation at the end you have to go through the liturgy first, right? You have to engage in the ritual and that\u2019s when the ecstatic experience or the revelation comes. That\u2019s when the clouds open\u2014that\u2019s the idea\u2014so you have to have one in order to have the other.<\/p>\n

RC: That\u2019s very Catholic.<\/p>\n

PL: I know, right?<\/p>\n

RC: That\u2019s the hocus pocus.<\/p>\n

PL: We love the hocus pocus. I\u2019m so hungry.<\/p>\n

RC: Let\u2019s eat.<\/p>\n

PL: I really need to eat, yeah.<\/p>\n

The line taken from liturgy to sacrament to comestibles\u2014is it a diversion at all, from someone who grew up eating unconsecrated wafers like crackers?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

All of a sudden we were inside Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s childhood home. It was right by Lafayette Square, and before we knew it, we were on a tour, being led through antique furniture by a bright-faced volunteer with a mid-Atlantic accent. The sign out the front advertised the former O\u2019Connor residence in iron letters: \u201cShe grew up in this house, and in later years, referred to it simply as \u2018the house I was raised in.\u2019\u2009\u201d Fair enough.<\/p>\n

The parlor, built before air-conditioning, had the look of a room always in the shade, with small old furniture, all subclinically depressed and evoking childhood mortality. There was also a sponsored library named after Jerry Bruckheimer, the Hollywood director and producer who made Con Air <\/em>and Bad Boys<\/em>, and all the tour-goers were surprised he was a Flannery fan. Inside, there was a magnet for sale featuring an O\u2019Connor quote\u2014\u201cThere\u2019s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher\u201d\u2014and an old children\u2019s book called The Fairy Babies<\/em>, in which a young O\u2019Connor had written \u201cNot a very good book\u201d in pencil.<\/p>\n

Tin implements were laid out on the kitchen table, as though ready for surgery rather than cooking. The light had a tint to it. \u201cYou can see there the stained glass with a peacock,\u201d the guide said. \u201cFlannery loved peacocks\u2014they were something of a symbol for her\u2014although she believed that the word peacock<\/em> was vulgar, and called them peafowls instead.\u201d \u201cPeafowls,\u201d Lockwood said, with so much pleasure she went agog.<\/p>\n

Upstairs: Flannery\u2019s childhood bedroom, full of sanctified bric-a-brac, and her parents\u2019 room, with a negligee hanging on the wall (it may have belonged to Flannery\u2019s mother). Lockwood rolled this object over her mind, calling it a \u201cneglijayyyyy.\u201d Under the windowsill was a white wooden frame on wheels, about the size of a chest of drawers, with mesh along the top and sides. Calling it a crib would be a euphemism; it was a patented product called a Kiddie-Koop, really a baby cage. The room was almost too perfect as a Freudian diorama for O\u2019Connor: trapped in the baby cage, staring at the negligee. Someone had printed out an old catalogue ad for the Koop, and Lockwood read it aloud in an old-timey voice: \u201cAn over-handled baby is sickly. An indoors baby is pale and listless. And fretful is the tot whose mother unnecessarily worries.\u201d She was practically ecstatic.<\/p>\n

There is some long, indistinct line between Flannery O\u2019Connor and Patricia Lockwood. They\u2019re both Savannah writers. They both dwell on blackly comic description in a way that is atypically American, and somehow Catholic instead. When O\u2019Connor writes, in \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find,\u201d about a woman \u201cwhose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit\u2019s ears,\u201d that innocent cabbage is Lockwoodian. Their works share the sensation that timed surprises can create. O\u2019Connor did not, though, repeatedly say the word peacock<\/em> on purpose once finding out it was vulgar, nor was her \u201cthing\u201d \u201cchugging a Red Bull\u201d before a reading. Lockwood had developed an allergy to caffeine\u2014it caused heart palpitations\u2014so this signature move was canceled, and when we got a coffee, she was forced to order something boring. \u201cIt\u2019s the tragedy,\u201d she says. \u201cThe tragedy of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other tragedy of her life was the politics. She has less sympathy for her father\u2019s views since Priestdaddy<\/em> was published; she is more dispirited. He used to listen to Bill O\u2019Reilly and Rush Limbaugh simultaneously, a duet in malice, and since the election of Trump, Lockwood Senior has headed \u201cfurther down the spectrum in that extremity of view.\u201d (It is the shared experience of female friends: their fathers saying things that they did not used to.) \u201cWe assume that the arc of the moral universe always bends towards justice, but does it?\u201d she asked. \u201cWhat we\u2019re experiencing is information sickness. It is warfare against us. We cannot keep up with all these things.\u201d She could not move from bed during the Kavanaugh hearings, and because of the things she has written about, had a constant stream of contact from \u201cpeople in similar circumstances.\u201d \u201cThey would say, I need help. I need help from someone who understands.\u201d It made it seem worth it. \u201cPoets are against presidents. You have to be, you have to be against world powers.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were news stories about someone placing plastic googly eyes on a Savannah historical monument (\u201cWho did this?!\u201d the city asked on Facebook). It was not one of the many statues celebrating the confederacy, but we planned to look at it anyway, until the plan ran into the bar. The bar was called Pinkie Master\u2019s, a rehabilitated dive, meaning they had removed a massive Confederate flag from the wall, and upped the prices, and kept everything else the same. There was still a corner of the flag in a glass case, maybe as a warning. In the seventies, a boozed Jimmy Carter climbed on a table here to launch his successful presidential run, and in the 2010s, Robert would sit outside with his owner.<\/p>\n

The barman seemed pleased to see us, until we asked about the tortoise, and then the smile disappeared. \u201cThe owner is not welcome here anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cHe overstepped.\u201d What had happened? Was it a lifetime ban? \u201cHe won\u2019t be back.\u201d The crime was nameless. The profile was now so secondary to the sleuthing it felt like a cover story. But the barman wouldn\u2019t talk. We ordered a couple of awful drinks with tequila.<\/p>\n

Lockwood warmed up by interrogating me. Her style is unique\u2014clownish, manipulative, effective. Somehow the topic turned to her hanging out with the Pakistani British novelist Kamila Shamsie. Lockwood had been pouring scorn on cricket, and Shamsie had, not surprisingly, turned out to be a big cricket fan, and something in my face must have changed.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh \u2026 You\u2019re a cricket fan as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell \u2026\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cExactly why do you like it? Tell me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was about to be made fun of, but the expectancy in her face made me comply. And so I talked about cricket\u2019s duration, how it was opera, not soap opera, the difference in national styles of play, how it was one of the few sports where players (tail-end batters) were forced to do something they weren\u2019t good at, the starring role of the ball, how it was tended to \u2026 She asked question after question, and luxuriated in how absurd and boring it all was, and how stupid I was for liking it.<\/p>\n

Reeling people in on a line of gentle bullying is also a Lockwood signature. After a while, her old schoolmate Kate, a librarian, showed up, and got a similar treatment, a series of outrageous questions, provocations, and trash talk that she dealt with deftly. This was part of the reason Kate is so close. \u201cShe once told us,\u201d Kate said, \u201cthat after we were all dead, she would be remembered for her writing, and if we were remembered at all, it would be as characters in her life,\u201d and this gets another burst of laughter on the retelling. Perhaps it\u2019s only because I was primed, but watching Lockwood and Kate reminded me of cricket: a spell by a wily spinner, full of disguise and drift and deception, working the umpire, making exaggerated appeals, while a batter played watchful defense with soft hands and a dead bat, and tried not to swing at the wrong one.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy don\u2019t we all play cricket,\u201d said Lockwood. \u201cYou can show me.\u201d The tone was an insult-comic inviting an audience member on stage.<\/p>\n

We stopped by her apartment to pick up the \u201cequipment\u201d (tennis balls, a closed, rainbow-colored umbrella, and a furry hat she insisted on wearing), but I suspected we were there mainly so she could force me to try a brand of drink called Hint, water with a hint of pineapple.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s amazing,\u201d she said, \u201cHint! They have a special method for making it. They somehow force the pineapple into the water.\u201d It tasted like water left in a cupboard with a pineapple. It should have been called Taint. But I didn\u2019t want to be rude, guessing that this commitment to a mediocre product was because of the caffeine issue. As I drank the damn Hint, an orange-and-brown cat entered the room. \u201cThat\u2019s Fenriz,\u201d Lockwood said.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike the mythological wolf?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike the drummer from Darkthrone.\u201d<\/p>\n

I know this could sail very close to a hipster affectation in someone else, the way people get into theremin-playing and obscure British football clubs, and so compose a pick-and-mix personality. But it was real and deep. It came from endless roiling curiosities and compulsions. No dilettante would watch the Scandinavian black-metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us<\/em> twenty-five times in a row during a period of depression. (You will notice that this event echoes the paternal conversion story\u2014repeat viewing of satanic cinematic material during a period of artificial exclusion, trapped away from the outside world.)<\/p>\n

So the cat was responsible for a conversation about extremity in the arts, whether the occult was a good means for understanding the current American government (it is), the hidden element of \u201cblood magic\u201d in identity politics, whether or not Catholicism was the most metal denomination (this may be exactly why her guitar-playing father left the Lutherans), and which Darkthrone album was the best (agreement on A Blaze in the Northern Sky<\/em>; she owns a copy on vinyl).<\/p>\n

(This also explained why, in her audiobook, she imitates the \u201cooo ah ah ah ah\u201d sound from the Disturbed song \u201cDown with the Sickness,\u201d something I thought I must be imagining when I heard it driving across the Georgia state line. \u201cThat is a little Easter egg,\u201d she said. Deadspin<\/em> even wrote an article called \u201cNo One Can Do The \u2018OOH WAH AH AH AH\u2019 Part From That Disturbed Song,\u201d a grudging celebration of the vocal feat that begins the \u201cchode-rock anthem.\u201d This is incorrect\u2014Patricia Lockwood can do it.)<\/p>\n

She also wanted to show me a clip from a reality show called Southern Charm Savannah<\/em>, because one of the stars lived locally. The clip showed an ill-fated marriage proposal and the scene of a sunburnt douchebag on a boat, sobbing, off-camera, into a radio mic, was so perfectly awful, and struck such an atonal chord of different emotions, that for a moment this cultural brain-rot fermented into something beautiful and poetic. It was just the kind of pop-culture manure that enriches Lockwood\u2019s work, and grows unexpected things.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A tree in the park does for stumps. Her bowling action was the slinky style Americans have because they have never seen anyone doing it before. I bowled a leg break, and she hit it out of the meat of the umbrella. We tried some sledging\u2014after all, she should have been a natural at the trash talk\u2014but it only felt mean here in Georgia, away from an oval. She was panting, not with exertion but with relish, and whenever a bemused onlooker asked if we were playing cricket, she was quick to say yes.<\/p>\n

Drinks were taken at Pinkie Master\u2019s, where a Yorkshireman struck up a conversation, having seen the game. He began to tell his life story to Lockwood (there\u2019s that confessional face)\u2014the merchant navy, homelessness\u2014while I got more drinks. The barman was back to bonhomie, and talked about his time in Australia: the sun, the slang. I offered to trade my most obnoxious epithet for a story\u2014what what happened to Robert?<\/p>\n

He sighed. \u201cThe guy was out the front all the time, you know, drinking way too much, and there were questions about how he was getting home, and getting the tortoise home.\u201d So he was driving drunk? \u201cNot just that. I mean, there were questions about where all those drinks were going. I mean, he was ordering a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wait\u2014you mean Robert<\/em> may have been drunk? \u201cI dunno, man. But also, it was there in a black plastic container or whatever. Like a fucking coffin. The whole thing was just a fucking travesty, man. It shouldn\u2019t be there! It\u2019s a wild animal! It just shouldn\u2019t be outside a bar in a bin!\u201d<\/p>\n

I thanked him. (The slang is unrepeatable).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Lockwood already had the Yorkshireman\u2019s full life story, and his admiration. He paid a compliment to her specialness so effusive that she smirked at me from under her hat, and I wrote it down in my phone. But that night I drove back to the island with the static of \u201cIn the Shadow of the Horns\u201d blazing the whole way, and in the morning, when I checked my phone, the note was gone.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Richard Cooke is <\/em>The Monthly\u2019s U.S. correspondent and contributing editor. His work appears in the <\/em>New York Times, <\/em>The Best of Longform, <\/em>Best Australian Essays, the <\/em>Saturday Paper, the <\/em>Guardian, and <\/em>Australian Foreign Affairs. He is the current Mumbrella Publish Columnist of the Year and was a finalist in the 2018 Walkley\u2013Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism.<\/em><\/p>\n

This essay appears as \u201cRobert Doesn\u2019t Live Here Any More\u201d in\u00a0<\/em>Tired of Winning<\/a>, by Richard Cooke, published this week by Black Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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